"Return Receive" by Zary Fekete

Return Receive

I live in the northern Beijing community of Tian Tong Yuan. If you are riding on the subway, you will know you are nearing Tian Tong Yuan when you see three tall apartment buildings, each with one of the three Chinese characters in the name Tian Tong Yuan or 天通苑. The characters translate into the phrase, “where sky passes into the garden,” which is an appropriate name for this bustling community which, fifteen years ago, was still all open fields. I moved with my family to Beijing eight years ago so I could teach at a local Chinese university, and, by then, Tian Tong Yuan was well on its way to becoming the largest subdivision in Asia. All told, 600,000 people live in this two-square-mile neighborhood.
In the parking lot next to my apartment building, there is a small shack with a hand-lettered sign that reads “回收”. The first of the two characters, “回,” means “to turn back” or “to return.” The two characters together form the phrase “huishou” or “return receive,” which is the Mandarin designation for a recycling center.
The person who runs our recycling center is a lady just under five-feet-tall with grey hair and perpetually twinkling eyes. She flagged me down with a cheerful holler during our first week of living in the neighborhood. I was out for a walk with my two sons. I couldn’t yet speak any Mandarin, but she quickly made it clear what she wanted as she gestured at the two empty water bottles my sons had just finished drinking. They shyly handed her the bottles, and she promptly gave them each a one mao coin. She chuckled as she saw their eyes brighten. It was their first Chinese money.
Over the course of the next few years, I learned there was nothing I couldn’t bring her for recycling. After our first month in our apartment, our bathroom required major renovation. Our landlord sent in a handyman who gutted the small room, replacing everything including the sink and the toilet. The handyman took it all away when he was finished except for the toilet, which he left on its side in the hallway outside the apartment. After awhile, I grew tired of looking at the dirty thing, and I lugged it down to the recycling center. The recycling lady saw me coming and quickly hurried over. I offered to help her carry it, but she waved me away and boosted the bowl of the toilet onto her hip. The toilet disappeared into the massive pile of other accumulated material from the neighborhood, and she pressed a wadded-up bill into my hand.
I thanked her profusely. “Bu ke qi,” she said. The phrase means “you’re welcome,” but its direct translation is, “don’t be polite.” Over the course of the next few years, I became more and more comfortable following the advice of the direct translation. My family and I quickly became friendly with her. Her name was Zhi Hua. She became one of the regular people I visited as I gradually improved in my Mandarin. I learned that she came to Beijing thirty years ago from her hometown province of Anhui. Most of her family was still back in her hometown, including her daughter, who was taking care of Zhi Hua’s aging mother. This, I would learn, was not a common situation. It is usually the younger people who leave a hometown for the big city, while their parents stay behind to care for the elderly. But Zhi Hua seemed to have the true spirit of her name in her. Zhi Hua’s name means “flowery ambition.”
This year, just after the Chinese New Year festival, I came down from my apartment with a pile of cardboard I was hoping to recycle. I was surprised to see a young man manning the station instead of Zhi Hua. He hurried over to help me and quickly sorted through the stack, giving me a handful of coins in exchange.
“Where is Zhi Hua?” I asked.
“In her home town,” he said.
“Will she be back?”
He shook his head. “Her daughter had a baby.”
When I got back to the apartment, I told my wife. We both felt sad. At the same time, this was a familiar pattern. This place is such a dense development of apartment buildings, streets, and stores that it isn’t surprising for someone to live in Tian Tong Yuan for a couple of years and then move on to other horizons.
Later, I passed the recycling center again on my way to the store and waved to the young man. I noticed the characters for the center again. 回收. “Return Receive.” As I walked away, I thought of another familiar Mandarin phrase with the same first character: 回家. It was the phrase he used when he told me about Zhi Hua. “Hui jia.” It means “Return home.”

Zary Fekete

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and has a debut chapbook of short stories out from Alien Buddha Press and a novelette, In the Beginning, out from ELJ Publications. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films.

Headshot: Zary Fekete

Photo Credit: Staff