Work Text:
1.
Wu Lihua picks up the name Emma, and she moves to a new city. It remakes her, and it doesn’t.
2.
A metropolitan city eats its inhabitants inside-out, takes the flesh off in strips and sucks out the marrow from their bones.
There are other ways to frame it: she had known the work would be difficult in the sense that difficult is an aspiration, a virtue. The exhaustion boring through the core of a body can feel almost-good, subsisting on it long enough— the submersion into something-bigger-than-oneself can carry a person like the knife-stroke rapids of a river, for a time. It becomes forgetting want in favor of holding your mouth and nose pinched closed underwater, forgetting what clean air tastes like in favor of burning lungs. Learning to take hollow satisfaction in what it feels like to hold your breath.
She thinks of it as: Emma tells her mother, exasperated and something too distant from herself to hold the ache of it, don’t worry so much. Soaks in the concern, anyway. Sends paychecks home; listens to her parents bicker over the phone with their easy, rambuctious warmth, listens to the way her mother pulls visiting aunts and uncles and cousins into a conversation to show off her hard-working daughter, the pride blooming into her voice. Doesn’t manage to go far enough from home that the tinges of affection leaking out like light over phone lines can’t follow her, that it doesn’t throw the clean and cold corporate world around her into contrast. Feels the tether of the expectations binding her like a weight: heavy, tangible.
She works late into the nights and pretends she doesn’t see the avaricious way that Zhu Ye looks at her and keeps herself polished to the company standards, takes the polish off into something worn into fatigue-and-bones for the nights. Orders in cheap takeout to chew without tasting it. Bicycles home, legs burning, feet stumbling with pointed heels against the pedals. Sleeps in dreamless, aching darkness; wakes to the rings of her alarms. Faces mornings as a cruelty, reassembles herself into the tired structure of professionalism and a language that doesn't feel like home. Bites her tongue, again and again, matches what she’s told to do.
Emma likes the city. She likes what it means for her, she likes it as though she’s spent her whole life aiming for it (arrow to a target, point stuck in the splintered wood) and there’s nothing else left to take from it, and she likes the way it brims over with a faceless kind of life. It’s empty and impersonal, and it takes a hold of her innards to twist them up, wrench her open like a carcass in a butchershop. It transforms her. It doesn’t. She doesn’t fit in it, and she makes herself a space in it.
She comes back to her apartment when the sky is a half-lit black to sink into unconsciousness and avoids her parent’s messages, lives the same day again and again. She works till it kills her, then further. A kind of disillusionment. A kind of being the same person in a different life, still all soft flesh, still woundable— the city offers a promise. Assistant to the CFO of Quede Games, Emma can’t decide whether it fulfills it. Wu Lihua can’t decide whether the name fits her. Whether she wants the deal anymore, all balanced books and tradeoffs.
Her home is an open door behind her. She thinks it would kill her to walk through it, that she closed it long ago, and she wants to turn back anyway.
3.
Can I go back to the start—
Zhu Ye looks at Emma as if he wants something from her: covetous, dark-eyed. It’s something she almost succumbs to, once or twice; his desire a kind of fish-hook luring her in when she’s left stripped of connection and unable to refuse all his petty whims, anyway. She’s smarter than that, except when she’s not. She tells her friends (acquaintances, half-friends, too far away from what feels like her real life) not to pay it any mind, then says, half-laughing to play it off, it’s just my boss. He’s kind of… pushy, to the sound of concern. Dismisses the worry. She goes home and shoves herself into a shower immediately, sometimes, rough on her own skin to strip off the feeling of the way he’d looked at her. Still feeling unclean.
At the start, Emma takes the books. Says, these accounts are wrong. Uncertain. Unsure. New to this, but: she knows what she’s doing, and she knows the numbers are arranged in the wrong orders.
Zhu Ye laughs. Calls her naive.
He tells her, she doesn’t know how things work yet.
It’s not true, exactly. She’ll think later that it is— she doesn’t understand, then, exactly, the costs of climbing ranks in a company like Quede Games. The way the corporation is a dispassionate, cruel machine; the way the city eats a person and their morals alive. She wasn’t built for it, and she slots herself into it. Endures. Closes her eyes when she’s told to, puts her head down in submission. Becomes a part of the machinery and swallows her own heart.
At the end, it’s everything she’d worked for on the ground, wrecked around her like a felled city of its own. It’s her face wet and the night sky cold around her, the way her feet keep working at the pedals of a bicycle. Still in the impractical shoes she’d wanted, long ago; still with the echoes of the child who had wanted what she’d got and hadn’t known the realities of it.
Wu Lihua goes home to the apartment she rents, and she recognizes the plate of steaming eggrolls on her table.
She makes her way to the train station.
Ways to frame it: Liu Min’s hands on her, savage, pinning her down and choking her. The car and the crash of it, stumbling out. Herself on the side of a bridge; the desperation that comes with: what do you do, when there’s nothing left? What do you do, when you have to start from scratch? What does it mean, when some part of you wants that reset? The boy she doesn’t recognize, the half-hope, the way she shudders and touches the nebulous and half-formed mass of her own want—
0.
She doesn’t jump by herself. She wakes up in the freefall.