The Apartment

Eloise Chen had purchased the apartment five years ago, shortly after her mother died, and was coming to live in it for the first time. The place was in one of the northern boroughs of Shanghai near Lu Xun Park and a metro stop, a pleasant enough location. When she bought the two-room, fifty-square-meter space on the third floor, it had been one of the most upscale available in the city, but since then, skyrise apartments and penthouses had been erected everywhere to house the city's newly rich. Still, her apartment was a good bargain: she estimated that its value had increased threefold in the last five years and would continue to increase at a most profitable rate in the foreseeable future.

Because she lived and worked in America, she had lent the place to her cousin Peipei, a Shanghai native, who lived there with his wife and their six-year-old daughter. Eloise hadn't asked for rent, but it was understood that Peipei would see to the apartment's upkeep.

Eloise was thirty-four, a professor of post-Colonial literature at Carleton College in Minnesota, where she'd secured tenure the year before. She was on sabbatical and had decided to come to Shanghai to live, as she always knew she would.

She'd written six months earlier informing her cousin that she would be arriving in June, but when she got to the apartment at 596 Quyang Road and let herself in, she found Peipei, his wife, and their daughter seated in the living room that also served as a dining room; their elbows on the table, bowls lifted to their lips, the three of them were shoveling their dinner in.

"Cousin!" Peipei said in genuine surprise. He set his half-empty bowl of rice on the table and stood up.

With his sinewy muscles beginning to sag, his tangle of greasy and badly-cut hair, her cousin looked like many other Shanghainese on the brink of middle age. He hadn't changed much in the past five years except that his hair had more gray in it. The only indication of the adorable boy he'd once been was the habit he still had of pursing his lips into a pout whenever he wasn't going to get his way.

"I didn't know you were coming today," Peipei said, slapping his thighs. "That letter you wrote, so long ago, I forget!"

Peipei spoke remarkably good English for having never in his life traveled beyond a hundred kilometers from Shanghai.

"Where are your luggages?" Peipei asked, looking past her to the unfinished cement hallway behind.

"I was going to rest a minute and then go get my things." Although she'd packed light - only two suitcases containing her clothes and all the books she considered essential, twenty-nine of them - after having arrived from halfway around the world, she had been unable to face the immediate prospect of carrying her suitcases up two flights of stairs.

"Come inside, I get for you!" Peipei said, and before she could protest, he rolled up his shirtsleeves and was out the door.

When Eloise got a closer look, she was horrified to see that, although the place was in good condition, clutter filled the outer room from floor to ceiling: Against the far wall, under the double windows, Peipei had set up a folding metal bed for his daughter; stacks of newspapers sat under it and in a corner. There were bottles of medicines and creams on a little table next to the bed, stuffed animals and dolls and little wooden playthings, baskets hanging from hooks on the wall, plastic washtubs stacked underneath the dining table, three brooms behind the door, books and papers spilled across the desk against the far wall, wooden stools as high as her waist and as low as her ankles, old knick-knacks crammed onto one cabinet shelf, a VCD player attached to a television that must have been at least two decades old, piles of blankets on top of the rickety cabinets, wicker armchairs, tea mugs and odd metal cups, rolled...