What We Were Not Allowed to Keep

Fiction by Huina Zheng

Trying to reassure herself today was ordinary, Shan parked her electric scooter at the school gate in Guangzhou and set her ten-year-old daughter Kitten’s rolling backpack on the ground. As usual, Kitten took off her helmet and placed it in the basket. Shan kissed her on the forehead.

​“See you this afternoon.” She looked at her daughter’s face with a kind of hunger, as if trying to carve every feature into memory. “Remember, Mom loves you.” If this were the last thing she ever said to her, she wanted Kitten to remember that her mother loved her, always. That was why she never allowed her husband Chou to bring Kitten to school.

Shan’s eyes stung. She blinked hard, forcing the tears back. She watched her daughter’s small figure pulling a blue backpack printed with dinosaurs, move through the cluster of parents, children, and security guards, just as she had been taught, and disappear through the school gate.

Faster. She just needed to be a little faster. Shan had told her that the school entrance was the most dangerous place. In the news, the people who wanted revenge on the world always chose spots like this. “Walk fast. Get away from there as quickly as you can.”

“Why would anyone want to hurt children?” Kitten had asked.

Shan didn’t know how to explain the darker parts of human nature. All she could say was that when Kitten was older, she would tell her. She just had to get older first.

Her daughter vanished.

Shan’s eyes fell on the four or five concrete bollards lined up outside the school. Painted yellow and black, they reminded her of wasps. She thought of the news stories, trucks driven into crowds of children at school entrances. At least she didn’t have to worry about that happening here. 

“If a bad person ever gets onto campus, you have to hide,” she had once told Kitten. “Lock the door.”

“But our classroom doors don’t lock,” Kitten said. 

“What about the bathrooms?”

“They don’t have doors.”

“Is there anywhere with a door you can lock?”

Kitten thought for a moment. “The teachers’ office.”

“Run to the teachers’ office. Lock the door. Hide in a cabinet.” What if running made her run straight into danger instead? “Just ten minutes,” Shan had said. “Fifteen at most. The police will come. You’ll be safe.”

In her mind, Shan saw Kitten trembling, a hand clamped over her mouth to keep from crying, as a man, always a man, advanced toward her with a knife. She pulled Kitten into her arms. Her small body was warm, solid, real. 

“Mom, I’m safe,” Kitten said.

“Yes,” Shan said. “You’re safe.” She again reminded herself that nothing like that had ever happened at Kitten’s elementary school.

She started the scooter and rode away.

But what if this were the last time she ever saw her?

A sudden pressure swelled in her chest, as if something were blocking her nose from the inside. She pulled over at the side of the road, electric scooters brushing past, pedestrians threading through the gaps, and closed her eyes. 

Inhale. Count to four.

Hold. Count to one.

Exhale. Count to six.

Repeat. Five times.

When she opened her eyes, the school gate was still noisy, ordinary. She merged into traffic. In the rearview mirror, the school grew smaller and smaller. 

Chou was already at work. Shan would spend the day working from home by herself, like most days.



“I know none of this is real,” Shan said later, staring at a pewter-colored scratch on the white wall as she spoke to Dr. Lin on the phone. “It’s all something my mind makes up. I imagine things, I feel them, and then my body reacts.”

“But it is interfering with your daily life,” Dr. Lin said.

“My life is still normal.”

Dr. Lin paused. “Then what about what you just mentioned, not being able to breathe?”

“That doesn’t count,” she said. “It lasted less than a minute.”

The line went quiet.

“Could you describe what you felt?”

She had already described all of this before. She knew therapy took time, and sometimes led nowhere at all, but after eight sessions, each call felt like scratching an itch through a shoe.

Shan stared at the clock on the opposite wall, watching the red second hand grind forward, one tick at a time. Only after it completed a full circle did she speak. “The same as every other time.”

“The same as when you think about your elder brother?”

“I wasn’t thinking about him.” She picked at a thread on her jeans.

“And when you do think about him, does it feel the same?”

This was what she hated about therapy. Everything had a cause, and the cause always led back to childhood. 

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I was just a little girl.”

“But you remember that he was ten when he died.”

“That’s something my mother always said.”

“For many people,” Dr. Lin said, “the difference lies in whether the body is still remembering.”

“What difference does it make?”

“Your body isn’t deceiving you. It’s repeating something it learned.”

“I started having trouble breathing back in middle school. Are you saying my body somehow knew back then that one day I would be terrified something would happen to my child at ten, and started rehearsing for it?”

“It’s not predicting the future,” Dr. Lin said. “The body only knows how to respond to danger in the ways it has learned.”

Shan almost argued back. She wanted to tell Dr. Lin that even without professional analysis, she knew where her fear came: from the two losses tied to the same age. Her brother at ten. And she lost her dog Nina at ten. Nina was not just a dog. She was family. The air seemed to drain from her lungs, while the space around her pressed in like a solid wall.

“When you feel like you can’t breathe—” Dr. Lin said.

Inhale. Count to four.

“—who is with you then?”

Hold. Count to one.

“Who is someone you can be with without having to explain too much?”

Exhale. Count to six. She got stuck at two.

Should she say it? Was she ready?

“My dog.”

“She’s with you now?”

Shan could already imagine what Dr. Lin would ask if she said she wasn’t. She didn’t want to say it. She couldn’t. She wanted to crawl under the dining table and curl into herself like a hedgehog. Breathe.

After nearly two minutes of silence, she finally spoke. “Something just came up. Thank you for your time.”

Before Dr. Lin could respond, Shan ended the call.




Shan stared at her phone’s lock screen. In the photo, she and eight-year-old Kitten stood on either side of a towering tree, arms wrapped around the trunk, laughing. Their smiles curved at the corners of their eyes in almost the same way.

Why had her vision blurred again?

She knew every diagnostic term for post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and complicated grief. She understood their causes, their mechanisms, their treatments. If she wanted to, she could write a clear, accessible piece explaining them all. Her mind understood everything. Her body refused to listen.

Sometimes being outside helped. She left the apartment. Less than ten minutes on foot brought her to one of the entrances to Baiyun Mountain. She avoided the paved road and turned onto a narrow path. Leaves cracked under her shoes. Shrubs brushed against her pant legs. The air carried a scent she could not quite name, something woody and alive. Sunlight filtered through the leaves above, scattering light and shadow across her face. It felt as if she were walking back into the world as she had once believed it should be.

Her phone vibrated. A message from Chou: Have you eaten?

I’m at Baiyun Mountain, she replied. I’ll eat when I get back.

Don’t stay too long, he wrote. It’s getting hot today.

The message felt gentle. Ever since being with him, a part of her kept rehearsing what life would be like if one day he wasn’t there anymore. She believed she could learn to live with that. But losing Kitten? She could not imagine surviving that.

Maybe she should never have married. Never had Kitten. Then this fear would not exist. But almost immediately, she remembered the weight of Kitten as a baby in her arms, the warmth that rose in her chest when she kissed her. That happiness was real. She had never known that kind of bodily memory with her own mother. Without Kitten, she would never have known that depth of happiness.

When had this fear begun? Perhaps it started the moment she gave her daughter the nickname Kitten. Since Kitten’s tenth birthday, the fear had awakened like a snake from hibernation, flicking its tongue at her. She wanted her daughter to have nine lives, like a cat. Afraid of enduring more pain again, she had learned to hold herself back from loving too much. She reminded herself again and again not to love her daughter too deeply, believing she could give just enough for healthy growth without being destroyed by it. But this maternal love, once unleashed, flooded everything.

Her eyes burned again. She blinked hard. Maybe her body had stored too many tears, and if she let herself cry all at once, they might finally drain away. The night before she realized there were only twenty-eight days left until Kitten’s 11th birthday. If that meant time she had left with her daughter was already running out, then what was the point of holding on? She had collapsed onto the bed, emptied of strength, and the tears had come. Then Kitten had pushed open the door, saying she was ready to brush her teeth and wanted a goodnight kiss. Shan closed her eyes, grateful that her loose hair hid her face, and pretended to be asleep. Kitten tucked the blanket around her, turned off the light, and closed the door.

She could not let her daughter see her crying. How could an unhappy mother raise a happy child? But had she really hidden her sadness? Children were more perceptive than adults imagined. She remembered being a child herself, waking in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, passing her mother’s room, hearing the muffled sound of crying, her mother whispering her brother’s name. 

In Shan’s memory, her mother spent most days lying in bed. The year her brother died, her mother often said she wanted to follow him. Relatives would gather around her and gesture toward her swelling belly. You have to think of the child, they told her. It will surely be a boy. That possible son was what kept her alive.

How absurd it all was. After her brother died, the world’s grief belonged to her mother. Everyone comforted her, worried about her. But had anyone ever considered that when her parents lost a son, she lost a brother? She, too, was grieving. Was a mother’s loss of a son necessarily deeper, more legitimate, than a little girl’s loss of her brother? Could grief really be measured, as if it had units?

“You were just a child back then,” Dr. Lin had once told her. Dr. Lin had neatly gathered everything Shan had done in those years, caring for her mother, monitoring her parents’ moods, learning to be sensible, pushing her own needs aside, and placed it under a formal psychological term: parentification. As if Shan did not already know.

At ten, Shan believed she was already an adult. No, long before that, after her brother died, she had begun to see herself as one. But now, in her mid-thirties, watching her own ten-year-old daughter, she suddenly understood something with painful clarity. Kitten was just a little girl. Ten-year-olds were only children. Whether it was her brother or her daughter, no life should end at the number ten.

She closed her eyes and took a slow breath.

If that day ever came, if Kitten were gone, she would follow her. When she herself had been a little girl, she had been forced to grow up too soon, to be sensible like an adult. Now, she wanted to allow herself one act of selfishness, to be a child again and think only of her own need. A ten-year-old girl needed her mother’s care. And she would choose to stay with her daughter. She would not live the rest of her life trapped the way her mother had. This time, she wanted to make her own decision.

A breeze passed through.

For a moment, she felt something brush against her leg.

Just as Nina used to, when she walked beside her.



It was finally time to pick Kitten up. Shan restlessly waited at the school gate. She always arrived ten minutes early. Electric scooters zipped past, shuttle buses linking the subway station rolled by, cars and pedestrians flowed around her. She kept her eyes on the entrance. 

Among a crowd of children in indigo track pants and white tops, she spotted Kitten. Her daughter was pulling a dark blue rolling backpack, laughing with a classmate beside her.

The moment Kitten climbed onto the back seat of the scooter, before Shan could even start the engine, she said, “Mom, my deskmate disappeared during lunch.”

“Oh?” Shan asked. “Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. I ran outside the classroom to look for him. Our lunch was getting cold. If we didn’t eat fast enough, there wouldn’t be time for nap.”

“So what did you do?” Shan stopped at a red light.

“I found him by the bathroom. He said he was in a bad mood and wouldn’t go back no matter what I said. So I ran to the office to find Teacher Chen.”

The light turned green, and Shan started the scooter again. A delivery rider in a bright yellow uniform cut across their path. “Did he listen to Teacher Chen?” she asked.

“Teacher Chen didn’t go to find him. She just said if he didn’t want to eat, he should be left alone, and we could leave the food there.”

That was not surprising. Teachers did not like to get involved if they did not have to. Unlike Shan, who had always been quiet and reserved, Kitten was open and warmhearted, the kind of friend Shan herself had wished for as a student. She felt a quiet pride in her daughter.

They stopped at the park. Shan held Kitten’s hand and pulled the backpack with the other, as they walked along the shaded path. On the grass, a young mother held a baby about a year old and pointed at pale pink bauhinia blossoms, saying, “Look, baby. Flowers. Pink, beautiful flowers.”

Shan had once done the same, taking Kitten out when she was still a baby, patiently naming everything she saw, describing colors, shapes, and sizes. She had heard it helped children develop language skills.

“Mom, whenever you see a baby, you always stare,” Kitten said, tugging at her hand.

“Because babies are cute,” Shan said. “When you were little, I thought you were the cutest in the whole world.” It felt as if it had all happened just yesterday. “When you have a cute baby one day, I’ll help you take care of them.”

“I only want one daughter.”

“If you had two, they could keep each other company and look out for one another later on.”

“But I’d still have to work and help with homework. How would I manage all that?”

On the grass to their left, an automatic sprinkler was spraying. To avoid getting wet, they moved closer to the right side of the path.

“Your dad and I would help,” Shan said.

Shan liked talking with her like that. It made it feel as though the future would truly arrive, a future her brother and Nina would never reach.

One time, when Kitten was five, Shan read her a story about a black bear. When a hunter fired his gun, the mother bear rushed forward and shielded her cub with her body, collapsing in a pool of blood.

“Then the little bear wouldn’t have a mom anymore,” Kitten said.

“All mothers would do that,” Shan said. “I would stand in front of you too.”

“I don’t want you to die.” A single tear slid down Kitten’s face.

Shan kissed her daughter’s forehead, pulled her into her arms, and patted her back. “We’re not bears,” she said. “And there are no hunters.”

The smile returned to Kitten’s face. Children’s happiness was always so simple. Shan found herself wondering whether she had once been that attached to her own mother too. Perhaps when she was very young, before she could remember, she had longed for her mother’s love. Her memories seemed to begin only when her brother fell ill. From that point on, she tried to be more sensible, careful not to upset her mother. Her childhood ended the day her brother left.




Shan’s nights always followed a familiar rhythm. After dinner, she helped Kitten with her schoolwork until ten, when her daughter brushed her teeth and went to bed. Kitten did not start sleeping in her own room until she was nine. At first, she would often push open the bedroom door in the middle of the night and climb into their bed. Shan was always awake before the door opened, already hearing her daughter’s soft footsteps. Over the years, her body had been trained into a state of heightened alertness, able to sense even the smallest movements. Each time Kitten slipped under the covers, Shan would instinctively reach out and pull her close. Her husband, Chou, would only discover their daughter in the bed after dawn, surprised every time.

The private moments she shared with Chou always came after their daughter fell asleep. They leaned against the headboard, talking loosely about their days.

“If one day I’m gone,” she said, her tone light, “and you remarry, make sure you choose a kind woman.”

“I won’t remarry,” Chou replied without hesitation, taking it as a joke.

Shan tucked her feet deeper under the blanket to keep warm. She looked at the side of his face, which she had always thought was his better angle. “Men usually remarry within a year after their wives die,” she said. “No matter how good the marriage was.”

“I won’t,” he said again, his tone firm.

She sighed. “You’ve got another white hair,” she said and opened the bedside drawer for a pair of angled pliers. “Let me pull it out for you.”

Chou sat down on the edge of the bed. Shan leaned closer and placed each white hair she pulled onto a paper tissue.

She found another white hair and pulled it free. He was no longer the shy young man he had once been, the twenty-three-year-old whose hand trembled when he pulled out a ring and proposed. Back then, she had wanted to tell him that she did not believe in marriage, or in forever. But when she looked up, she met his eyes. The look in them reminded her of Nina, waiting for her to finish the dishes so they could play. If she had been a few years older, perhaps she would have had the heart to refuse. But she had been too young then. “If we don’t work out, we part on good terms,” she had said. “But we must never grow to hate each other.” She never wanted to repeat the kind of relationship her parents had. He understood that this meant she had accepted his proposal and clumsily slipped the ring onto her finger. “We won’t,” he had said. “We’ll grow old together.”

For him, the most romantic thing was growing old side by side, white-haired, still supporting each other as they walked through a park. For a time, she had almost believed that would be their future too. Now, she rested her forehead against his back. She wanted to tell him how, over the past year, she had been tormented by imagined fears and grief. About the nights she woke at midnight and shed tears in the dark. About walking along the mountain paths, passing one tree after another that Kitten had nicknamed “big-belly trees,” until she reached a leaning tree that should have fallen but was held upright by another tree beside it, and how tears would rise to her eyes every time. She wanted to tell him all of this, to make him understand that if one day she were to follow Kitten into that other place, it would not be because she did not care about him. She did not believe in love, but she cared deeply for family. He and their daughter were the family she cherished most. So many words pressed against her chest, yet in the end, she only wrapped her arms around him from behind. Her body had long since learned to remain silent, not to become a burden to anyone.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to hold you.”

She was always acutely aware of every shift in his emotions, while he could only see what she chose to reveal. Their relationship was sustained by this delicate balance.



The next day, she forced herself to answer Dr. Lin’s call. 

“Do you know,” Shan said, propping her chin on her right hand, persuading herself to speak, “every time I tell my friends that I had a brother, that he died when he was very young, the air goes quiet? And then they start carefully steering the conversation away.”

“Do you want to talk about your brother with them?” Dr. Lin asked.

“He left too early for me to remember very much. There aren’t even any photos of him. It was as if he had never existed at all.”

Shan swallowed. 

“I’m not sure how many people in the world still remember him.”

“If you could,” Dr. Lin said, “what would you talk about when you mention him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want people to think I’m playing the victim, or trying to get attention or sympathy.”

“What if it wasn’t your friends?” Dr. Lin asked. “If it were someone who wouldn’t misunderstand you. Who would you want to know that you had a brother?”

Shan paused. “I’ve never thought about that.”

“Have you ever talked about him with your parents?”

“No. It’s taboo in our family.” She took a deep breath. “Every time one of us turned ten…” She bit her lower lip, forcing herself to go on. “My mother would say, your brother died at that age.”

“It sounds like,” Dr. Lin said, “you weren’t being told about his death. You were being reminded that you were alive.”

Shan’s throat tightened. If her siblings and she showed even the slightest hint of joy, her father would explode in anger, her mother would order them to be quiet. She had never understood her parents’ reactions before. “You’re right,” she said. “Whenever we showed even a little happiness, they got angry. Later I realized it wasn’t that we had done anything wrong. Happiness itself became a kind of betrayal in their eyes.”

Dr. Lin did not respond right away.

“When a child is taught to live like that,” she said at last, “what they learn is often not how to remember someone who has died, but how to avoid loss.”

“Avoid?”

“Avoid talking about it. Avoid happiness. Avoid anything that might happen again.”

Shan felt her hands grow cold.

“Did that way of living ever show up later, between you and your daughter?”

“I don’t understand your question.” Shan straightened. “My daughter is only ten. Are you suggesting that I should tell her how my brother died?” She hoped her voice did not sound as sharp as it felt. “She’s just a child. She only needs to be a child. I don’t need her to help me carry my pain.”

“You said you don’t need her to carry your pain,” Dr. Lin said. “So whose pain did you carry when you were growing up?”

Her mother’s. Every complaint. Every confession. Shan took it all in. She tried so hard to comfort her mother, but no matter how much she gave, her mother remained in pain. Her mother was like a black hole, draining all the life out of her.

“Does therapy really have to come back to family-of-origin determinism to work?” Shan said. “Do we have to blame someone in order to feel less pain?”

“That question itself is important,” Dr. Lin said. “If the goal of therapy were to find someone to take the blame, there would indeed be no point in continuing. We are not blaming anyone. We are trying to distinguish between what you were forced to hold, and what you are still holding on behalf of others now.”

Shan’s defenses did not fully lower, but they stopped standing on end.

“This isn’t about judging right or wrong,” Dr. Lin said evenly. “It’s about letting you stop using the same body to carry the weight of every stage of your life. Your mother experienced a tremendous loss. At the time, the only thing you could do was make yourself big enough to contain her.”

Shan closed her eyes.

“The problem is that the way you learned to survive back then is still running on its own now.”

She took another deep breath.

“You just said you don’t want your daughter to carry pain,” Dr. Lin continued. “Have you ever thought about letting her share joy?”

Shan opened her eyes.

“Joy?”

“Yes. Between you and your brother, there must have been moments of happiness too. If someone could remember one small thing about your brother, how would that feel?”

Shan had no intention of telling Dr. Lin and cancelled her appointment the following week. She needed time to digest what had been said in their last session before Kitten’s birthday next Saturday. Ten days away. Whether she would keep the past sealed, or open a small part of it to her daughter. 

When her parents brought her brother home from the hospital, they lived in the same room for the final three months of his life. Their parents no longer allowed him to go outside. Every day, she stayed in the room with him. Even when the courtyard outside was flooded with sunlight, the room was always dim. Her brother sat on a bamboo mat, drawing on a low wooden stool. When he concentrated, he would bite his lower lip, his mouth pursed. He drew pictures for Shan of all the sweets she wanted to eat. They played cards, tossed pebbles, jumped elastic bands. While everyone else was shrouded in overwhelming grief, Shan felt happiness.

That was the part she could not admit. Each time she thought of her brother, her body remembered joy, and her mind scolded her for it.

Was that memory real? 

She had finally gathered the courage to call her mother.

“You two were close. When he died, you cried until you were hysterical. You even tried to stop your father from placing him in the coffin.”

Her chest tightened until it hurt, but nothing came back to her. What the mind struggled to forget, the body clearly remembered.

That night, she went into her daughter’s room and kissed her forehead. She sat down beside the bed, thinking about how to begin. She picked up a pen and started drawing on a sheet of paper. Inside the picture was a house. A boy stood there, a black dog beside him. She wished she could have kept even one drawing her brother had made for her, but after he died she never knew where they went. Perhaps their parents had thrown them away.

“Mom, are you unhappy?” Kitten asked, watching her face.

“No. Seeing you makes me happy.” Shan kissed her forehead again. “Mom wants to take you to the world in this drawing.”

Kitten’s eyes widened. “Really? How do you go?”

Shan forced herself to keep smiling. “In that world lives Mom’s brother. He…”

“Mom, what’s wrong?” Kitten leaned closer.

Shan shook her head. Tears spilled out, and she did not wipe them away. “I just really want you to know him. Look, this is him. He is the same age as you. Ten.”

“Does he live there alone?”

“No. He lives there with Mom’s dog. This is her. Her name is Nina. She is Mom’s most important friend.”

Shan turned away to blow her nose, but the tears would not stop.

“Mom.” Kitten reached out and hugged her. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m okay,” Shan said. “I just… miss them so much.” 

She had said it. At last she had spoken the words, a truth she had never admitted before.

She would take Kitten to the world inside the drawing. She would let her daughter meet them, know them. Not tonight, not tomorrow. But the thought was no longer an imagined comfort. It had become a shore she could one day reach. They were there, remembered. And she, finally, allowed herself to speak their names.

Huina Zheng

Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her creative work has been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and other literary journals. She has received multiple honors, including nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.