Haoyu had rewired half the apartments on Jiefang Road in the past decade, his hands knowing the color codes of live and neutral better than they knew the lines on his own palms. In the provincial city where he lived—one of those second-tier places swollen by logistics parks and EV-battery factories—life was ordinary and precise. Work orders arrived on a phone app; payments cleared through QR codes; outages were logged, fixed, and forgotten.
Then Yu Xuan called from the hospital.
“Your mother’s condition worsened,” she said. Her voice was steady in the way people learn to make it when they’ve already accepted the worst. “You should come now.”
Hu Tong had been admitted after a positive COVID-19 test complicated by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The Omicron waves had long since receded, replaced by booster campaigns and clinical protocols that treated COVID like influenza—except in patients like Hu Tong, older, with lungs that had carried coal dust from a childhood near a mine that no longer existed on any map. The hospital’s electronic dashboard tracked her oxygen saturation, her C-reactive protein, her D-dimer. The numbers were there; the woman behind them was not.
When Haoyu arrived, Yu Xuan stood by the bed. She shook her head before he could speak. The attending physician had already performed the final checks, entered the time of death into the system, and notified the municipal disease control office, as required. Haoyu leaned close and called his mother’s name. There was no response.
“Did my mother say anything at the end?” he asked.
“She passed away without saying a word,” Yu Xuan replied.
“I see.”
What he did not say was the question that had nagged him since childhood: when and where had Hu Tong been born? In a country where identity begins with a household registration booklet and ends in a biometric archive, his mother’s story had always been strangely thin. She had worked, raised him, complained about prices and weather, and refused to talk about the years before.
A staff member in pale blue scrubs appeared at the door. “Please wait in the office on the first floor. There’s paperwork.”
Haoyu stood as if his legs belonged to someone else. Yu Xuan gathered Hu Tong’s clothes and toiletries into a plastic bag printed with the hospital logo. Four staff members arrived with a gurney and moved the bed into a dedicated room downstairs—the one used since the pandemic began, ventilated separately, surfaces designed for rapid disinfection. The choreography was practiced, almost gentle.
In the office, a clerk slid a tablet across the desk. “We’ll need the deceased’s basic information.”
Haoyu stared at the fields: gender, date of birth, place of birth, ID number. His mind went blank. He knew his mother’s favorite soup and the way she folded towels; he did not know the numbers that would allow the system to accept her death.
Beside him, Yu Xuan clicked her ballpoint pen and began to write on the paper form that accompanied the tablet. Her handwriting was quick and neat. Date of birth. Place of birth. A county name that no longer existed after a 1990s administrative merger. A note in the margin: adopted.
Haoyu felt the room tilt. He watched the ink dry and realized he was learning, for the first time, facts that had been true all his life.
When the clerk nodded and took the forms, the system updated. Somewhere, a database reconciled Hu Tong’s death with her health insurance account; another flagged her ID for deactivation. The machine did not care that the woman had once been a child without papers.
They went down to the special room. Through the glass, Hu Tong lay as she had, only now tagged with a barcode. The funeral home would coordinate with the hospital, as mandated since 2023 to reduce delays and fraud. If they wanted, the clerk had said, they could request a posthumous DNA sample—many families did now, hoping to match with the national missing persons database that had expanded quietly in recent years, its algorithms improved by the same AI techniques Haoyu’s city used to optimize traffic lights.
At the door, he finally asked, “Why do you know so much about my mother?”
Yu Xuan didn’t look away from the glass. “I’m your wife,” she said. “So I know more about your mother than you do.”
Later, at home, after the children were asleep, she told him the rest. Years ago, when Hu Tong had been hospitalized for hypertension, Yu Xuan had helped navigate the new electronic health record system that linked clinics to civil registries. A discrepancy had surfaced—an old adoption note from the early 1960s, when famine and relocation had scattered families and local cadres had handwritten entries that were never digitized properly. Yu Xuan had followed the trail, not to uncover a secret but to ensure that, when the time came, nothing would block care or delay a death certificate.
“There was an option,” she said softly, “to submit her information for a genealogical match. But she checked ‘no.’ She said some circuits are meant to stay open, not closed.”
Haoyu thought of his work: the way current finds a path, the way safety depends on knowing where not to connect. Outside, the city hummed—charging stations glowing, delivery drones tracing invisible routes. His mother had lived through eras when records were lost and found again, when survival meant being ordinary.
In the end, what remained was not the missing data but the quiet competence of the woman who had stood beside him, filling in the fields so that life—and death—could proceed without interruption.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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