Preface
My father was born in a poor village in rural China. I learned what had happened there not from any public account but from overhearing my parents talk. My father would mention, in the plain tone of someone recounting what everyone already knew, that a certain family's infant daughter had been "renamed" and had reappeared in another village. That another family had had a newborn girl, but a few months later the child was simply no longer there. He listed these cases without drama, one after another, as facts belonging to a world he had grown up inside. My mother listened, and at last sighed: she hoped those people would have enough conscience to burn incense and pray, so that the children might have a better next life. That sentence did not name what had been done. It did not need to. And to the child listening from the next room, it was not yet a moral proposition. It was a sound — the sound of adults who knew something unbearable and had no way to make it bearable.
Every year or so we returned to the village. The relatives and neighbors who received us were generous in the way that rural poverty permits generosity: with food that had been prepared since morning, with warmth that did not need to perform itself, with a kind of attention to guests that I did not understand then and still find difficult to name. The hands that had set out the dishes, the faces that smiled at a child they saw once a year — these were the same hands, the same faces, the same human world in which those other acts had taken place. I knew this before I had any language for it. What I felt was not yet moral judgment. It was closer to terror: a reality had entered that was too large for anything inside me to hold.
As I grew older, the terror no longer broke the surface each time. I could return, sit at the table, receive the warmth, carry the knowledge, and not shatter. But neither could I make the two things cohere. The warmth was real. The drownings were real. The same hands held both, and nothing I could think resolved that fact into a stable picture. The question that stayed was not the familiar one — how can good people do terrible things — but something more unsettling: how does warmth remain warmth, once you know what the same hands have touched?
Only much later did pity become possible. With time I came to see what I could not see as a child: the depth of the poverty, the force of patriarchal inheritance, the narrowing of moral life under conditions of scarcity so extreme that survival itself consumed nearly all available form. I began to see those villagers not as moral types — the kind who do such things — but as persons formed under pressures that deformed what they could perceive, what they could bear, and who could become real to them. That seeing changed something. It did not change everything. For the girls who were drowned were not abstractions either. They were not collateral damage to be accounted for by the correct theoretical framework. They were concrete, particular, irreplaceable persons whose lives were ended before those lives could begin. I could see, by then, the conditions that had formed the villagers. I could not unsee the girls those conditions had killed. This sequence of essays begins from that irreconciliation — an experience in which terror remained, pity became possible, and the unforgivable did not cease to be unforgivable. The essays work inside it. Pity became possible. Forgiveness did not.