Читать книгу: «A Sheltered Woman»
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2015
First published in the United States in 2014 by The New Yorker
Copyright © Yiyun Li 2014
Yiyun Li asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
Cover illustration © Gracia Lam
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008153670
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008153694
Version: 2015-06-11
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Sheltered Woman
About the Author
Also by Yiyun Li
About the Publisher
A Sheltered Woman
The new mother, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summoned. Perhaps she never would, Auntie Mei thought. On the place mat sat a bowl of soybean-and-pig’s-foot soup that Auntie Mei had cooked, as she had for many new mothers before this one. Many, however, was not exact. In her interviews with potential employers, Auntie Mei always gave the precise number of families she had worked for: 126 when she interviewed with her current employer, 131 babies altogether. The families’ contact information, the dates she had worked for them, their babies’ names and birthdays – these she had recorded in a palm-size notebook, which had twice fallen apart and been taped back together. Years ago, Auntie Mei had bought it at a garage sale in Moline, Illinois. She had liked the picture of flowers on the cover, purple and yellow, unmelted snow surrounding the chaste petals. She had liked the price of the notebook, too: five cents. When she handed a dime to the child with the cash box on his lap, she asked if there was another notebook she could buy, so that he would not have to give her any change; the boy looked perplexed and said no. It was greed that had made her ask, but when the memory came back – it often did when she took the notebook out of her suitcase for another interview – Auntie Mei would laugh at herself: why on earth had she wanted two notebooks, when there’s not enough life to fill one?
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