She is surprised that in China this type of fitting room still exists, with its mirrors on all sides so one can see four endless queues of selves. When she was little she called it “magic room” but now she finds it strange. She came here to hide—her family are urging her to take Chinese medicine and antibiotics since she caught a cold soon after arriving. She checked the ingredients of the Chinese medicine they gave her and realized that the different throat lozenges are all mints plus several Chinese herbs and the cold medicine with a classical Chinese name is basically paracetamol. And her family’s antibiotic abuse worries her. She tried to explain to them the harm of it, but they wouldn’t listen. She thought they would have listened if the same thing had been said by her ex, who is a man and has a PhD. She left him and came back to China, after 10 years, to stand on familiar ground again. She is standing on it now, but she feels weightless and dizzy: She has been drinking a cocktail of emotions as everything feels at once familiar and foreign—the affected voices on TV saying absurd things, the expectation that she should call an annoying acquaintance “uncle,” the vague threat she feels of being “found out” that she is holding a British passport … The crescendo of all these came when a cousin on hearing about her cold asked, “Did she take antibiotics?” and her mother replied, “She refused” in the tone of saying, “She refused to believe the earth is round.” At that moment she had the strong feeling that she was dealing with a cult. She knows it is horrible to compare her family to a cult and they mean well and every culture is a cult from a certain perspective, but it still upsets her. She thinks it is because she had hoped for something she would never hope for in Britain. But she only finds herself hiding in a fitting room, with infinite selves surrounding her, getting closer and closer, increasing like entropy in this small box of growing block universe. She wants to disappear, but there is nowhere to disappear, and they are waiting for her.
Jie Wang, writer, loves words and animals, has been published in Best Small Fictions 2024 among others.