Animals were her first love. Guinea pigs, prairie mice, salamanders with bright pink spots. Garden snakes she could curl in the palm of her hand like yarn. Even before Lin was old enough to talk, she was fascinated by how they felt. The sticky webbed feet of a salamander like cupping a sweet rice cake between her fingers. A snake’s lacquered skin: a cold cucumber before being minced into vinegar salad.
Like nearly everyone born in the year 2000, she grew up an only child. She had cousins: first cousins—the real ones—and the so-called cousin children of her mother’s friends and neighbors, a nod to the carefree, reckless procreation of generations past. But Lin shied away from them like she did from all people. She much preferred to hide behind the strong calves of her mother’s legs anytime they walked into the tailor’s or bought vegetables at the market. In middle school, she was so anxious about talking to the sunbeaten laoban—who sat with his shirt rolled up over his belly, a lit cigarette dangling from his open hand—that she sooner chose to skip a meal than dare ask to buy a jar of blue-foiled yogurt or a red package of sesame seed cookies.
Lin had a remarkable memory for words, phrases, and formulas. She made perfect grades despite hardly speaking a word in class. She walked the halls of her high school avoiding eye contact, counting the cracks in the hexagonal tiles, and waiting to hear “Fang Xue Ge” pipe in over the tinny loudspeaker to signal the end of the day. Her classmates and teachers held no interest for her. The animals she kept at home were much more than playthings: they were all she had.
*
“No more,” her mother Qi Fei said, standing inside the pet store on Wukang Road. “Don’t you own enough of these damn things already?”
It was July, the summer before Lin would start her first year of university, and broiling. A single desk fan bolted to the wall oscillated cigarette smoke and the smell of stale urine from one end of the room to the other.
“Hao kelian,” Lin mouthed. Along the shelves were rows of cages, stacked crookedly on top of one another like scaffolding for a construction tower: a three-high mound of pug-nosed mutts next to an empty fish tank, a pair of broad-shelled tortoises skating in puddle-deep water. She’d rescued dozens already, over the years, from suffering a similar fate. If she couldn’t free herself from the indifference of humans, Lin reasoned, then sparing these animals was its own minor consolation.
“You promised,” Lin whispered, not wanting to rouse the shopkeeper. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Do you think I made valedictorian just to kiss Fan laoshi’s ass?”
Since Lin first entered primary school, it had been her mother’s idea to give Lin pets as rewards for good grades. When she was six and still refused to talk to anyone, the doctors worried she was biantai, born with a personality disorder, or worse. For hours when her mother was at work at the accounting office, Lin crouched by the side of the thin stream, watching the fish. She’d made noises at them: sing-song flourishes, the sounds of shamans. It wasn’t long before their neighbor noticed she’d even befriended the choleric shar-pei he kept chained to the front gate that snarled its teeth whenever anyone but her approached.
Lin knew about her mother’s experiment, of course. She had no false conceptions about Qi Fei’s enthusiasm for purchasing living creatures, despite her refusal to so much as venture into Lin’s bedroom. Her mother thought that giving Lin a pet of her own might help to socialize her better, a temporary bridge between the animal and human worlds. If her daughter could start relating to rabbits, the logic went, it surely wouldn’t be long before she could look her first-grade teacher in the eye or not run screaming from the postman every time he knocked on their front door.
“This one,” Lin said, her voice rising from the back of the store. She’d settled on a row with calicos and tabby cats, Persians and bobtails, longhaired Turkish Angoras and short-haired Bengals. Her hand rested against one cage, where a black cat with a white smudge on the bridge of his nose stooped to drink from a dish of water.
“Absolutely not,” her mother said, shaking her head. “You know how I feel about cats.”
Lin knew that in her mother’s world, like in much of the rest of China, pets were practical. They served a purpose. Dogs were not things you took inside the house: they made sure someone didn’t go breaking into your property or walking off with part of your crop yield. A person only ever took a cat home if they were trying to scare away the mice burrowing holes in their sheetrock.
But mice or not, Qi Fei had no use for cats. Cooperation and sacrifice, she’d maintained, were the cornerstones of modern China’s success. Men and women striving together to form a better tomorrow. And more than any other animal, cats represented to her its moral antithesis: lazy, pompous, interested only in themselves. She made clear that if Lin was given the chance to care for one, it would only be a matter of time before she exhibited those qualities herself.
But Lin was undeterred. “You said anything, Ma,” she repeated, her voice the low drone of a storm cloud.
“Just look at it,” Qi Fei said. The black cat pushed his wet nose through the front of the grate, lapping his tongue against Lin’s finger. “Yan ren er mu.”
Lin rolled her eyes. Hadn’t she been the one deceiving her mother? Above all, Qi Fei hated to be wrong, so Lin took great pains to prove that her experiment was paying off. She knew what it took to sustain her mother’s generosity, even if it meant having to talk directly to the waitress when they went out for dinner or call the electrical company whenever there was a power fuse that needed resetting.
“What if—” Lin started, but her voice trailed off. What else did she have to barter? She’d already graduated first in her class. She’d passed the gaokao with aplomb. And in a month, she would start university. She didn’t know how else to appease her mother if not with high marks on a page.
“Maybe it’s not too late for me to fanhui, too,” Lin said. The cat’s tail was raised like an unanswered question, his coat glistening.
“Not possible.”
“I can unenroll from university,” Lin said. “Sell lotto tickets at the fuli caipiao instead.”
“Enough,” her mother replied. Even Lin knew it was an empty threat. Like every young person in the country, Lin had been taught to follow the masses. She would graduate from a good school, get a good job, marry a good husband. There was nothing either of them could do to change it.
“I’ll make a friend,” Lin said suddenly. “In university. A real human friend.” Before her mother had a chance to respond, she added, “And I promise this one will be my last.”
*
Lin took the black cat home. The white smudge on his nose looked like a bolt of lightning, so Lin named him Boom, after the English sound for thunder.
More than any other subject, Lin was fascinated by English. Surrounded by her animals at home, Lin watched re-runs of The Big Bang Theory, practicing the cadence of the words, the rising sound of a joke, the pacing of each phrase. Lin had already committed hundreds of words and phrases to memory. But the word “thunder” was new. The strong sound of it clapping against the clouds. The force of a gale wind that might sweep her and her animals up away from Yuci and drop them somewhere new, a world apart. A place with no other people.
*
But, despite her hopes, where Lin landed couldn’t have been more different. Her gaokao score was good enough that she could have placed into Hunan University, renowned for its veterinary sciences program, in the south of the country. Lin had never been so far away. Even during Golden Week trips with her mother, they’d always opted for local travel if they traveled at all: the Yungang Grottos in the north of the province or the barren grasslands of Inner Mongolia.
Lin and her mother lived modestly by Yuci standards: a two-bedroom walk-up with a balcony and shared courtyard in an area zoned for development. The apartment had been given to Qi Fei by the county government, along with a lump sum, as part of a settlement after Lin’s father died in a mining accident when Lin was three.
The thought of a fresh start that far from home was exhilarating. Lin had watched enough foreign shows that she would have gladly considered leaving the country, too. But as tempting as it was to go, Lin feared that her pets wouldn’t survive the journey. Nor would they be any safer in Yuci under her mother’s charge. So, she made a concession not to venture far, choosing instead to matriculate at the local agricultural university in Qixian, the next town over. The student body there numbered twenty thousand, more than twice the size of the entire town where she lived.
Lin decided she would come home every weekend, frequently enough that she could leave extra food and water on Monday morning and be back on Friday night in time to manage any potential calamity. As it was, she still brought as many of her pets with her to Qixian as she could: a cage of gerbils, two garden snakes, and Boom.
“Don’t forget about that new friend of yours,” her mother said, when it was time to go.
Qi Fei helped her with the move, each of them lugging a pet carrier and a checker-print suitcase on the back of a motor rickshaw, making the half-hour journey from Yuci to the university’s campus on move-in day in August. University will be nothing like high school, Lin thought. The American movies Lin watched treated it like a gateway to another universe, new ideas and possibilities she couldn’t yet fathom. How hard would making a friend be?
At the front gate, her mother cupped Lin’s hands in her own. She closed her eyes, whispering something under her breath.
“What is it?” Lin asked, bracing for another argument.
Qi Fei pulled a red envelope out of her pocket and thrust it into Lin’s hands.
“Pet food,” she said, and then, almost mournfully: “Let’s hope your classmates like them as much as you.”
__________________________________
From Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne. Used with permission of the publisher, Regalo Press. Copyright © 2025 by Daniel Tam-Claiborne.
