Saqibawansa
Harbin, November. Minus twenty-two and getting colder.
She hadn't answered since Thursday, so I went over with a bag of tangerines because I didn't want to eat alone. I had a key. The lock always took three tries.
I'm not going to tell you what I found. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
What I can tell you is that when the paramedics came, I stood in her apartment and explained to them - calmly, reasonably, the way you'd argue with a bank - that she couldn't be dead, because she had work on Monday and she had never once taken a day off in three years.
I was wrong about that. I was wrong about almost everything.
I Don't Want to Eat Alone is a novel about grief, distance, and the things that get lost in translation between two people who loved each other in a language neither of them spoke well. It's about a foreigner with no standing - not family, not next of kin, just the man who found her - trying to piece together why, from three thousand kilometres away, in a country whose paperwork has no box for what he was to her.
It's about her mother, who flew in from Fuqing and asked me one question in a doorway that I answered too fast.
It's about a city built by people who left, that is very, very good at continuing.
And it's about what was done to her online, in a language I can't read, by people whose names I will never know.
She was learning English. She had an exam booked. There was a date circled in red pen.
I never got to see it.