HEART

Before 2015, I'd never been to Beijing, which is quite odd-an adult who's been working a few years ought to have visited the capital for a meeting or a classmate's wedding or simply to view the corpses of great men. For some reason, anyway. But I never did-a training session in Shenzhen, a business trip to Sichuan, but never Beijing. I never even got as far as Hebei.

- SHUANG XUETAO

In 2013, I left my job at an advertising firm and started writing fiction. I wrote more than thirty short stories, a few of which were published in the local city journal, which was perpetually on the verge of folding. Then, on the sixth of November, 2015, my dad had a sudden heart attack, the result of a hereditary disease that had already claimed five or six people in my family, the first of them at the end of the Qing dynasty, my great-great-great-uncle, a superb woodworker who could make anything from a coffin to a comb. When he was fifty-five, his heart exploded and he died on a pile of lumber. It happened so abruptly, leaving him bleeding from every orifice, that his family thought he'd been poisoned. They cut him open, and discovered that his heart was full of tiny wood shavings, enough to build a foot-high pagoda.

Ever since then, my family has suffered from heart disease, about three in every ten of us, men and women, though it's not as serious now that times have changed-none of us are woodworkers anymore, and surgery can save us. The procedure in question involves fitting a tiny engine into one of the heart's chambers, to make up for the weakness caused by the organ's abnormal fissures, and placing something like the filter of a water dispenser into the aorta, to prevent impurities from entering the heart. This operation wasn't available in my city, L, at least not anywhere I trusted, mainly because of the difficulty of fitting the filter membrane, which in L------- would be placed by hand, with something like the muscle memory of a carpenter, unlike in Beijing or America, where robots were used. Our health insurance wouldn't be accepted in America, so when my father had his attack I arranged for an ambulance to take us from the local hospital to Beijing.