sant pestering. Instead, the line went
quiet for a second. “I’ve got you,” she
said. “I know better than anyone how
much your mother needs her aide.” The
nurses were already overwhelmed on
the floor, and tougher weeks were an-
ticipated. “We want her to stay, too.”
For what seemed like the first time
that day, I drew a breath. I called a con-
cerned friend to tell him that things would
be O.K., but another call beeped in. It
was the nurse again and there was hesi-
tation in her voice. The medical director
had overridden her. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I tried phoning Weinstein, without
success, but even as I did so I felt that
there was something calculating in the
attempt to reach him, as if I were call-
ing in the debt of bread, milk, and pea-
nut butter. What was I hoping for but
some last-minute stay of execution?
Five minutes before Ying was due
to be kicked out, I was on FaceTime
with her, desperately trying to reassure
my mother, whose face was creased and
gray. It was then that I took the screen-
shots that later spread across Chinese
social media. The shame of this mo-
ment, I felt, needed to be remembered.
In the far corner of the frame, Ying
was wiping her eyes. Then I heard the
security guards.
“There’s a translator here,” Ying said,
in Chinese. “She’s saying I have to go.”
“This isn’t humane!” I shouted, in
English. I threatened legal action, bar-
tered, begged, but the people who could
hear were beyond the reach of persua-
sion. I heard Ying cry out to my mother,
“Ayi!”—Auntie!—and stayed on the line
with her as she was escorted out. By the
time she emerged at the front door, cry-
ing helplessly, I was there to meet her.
She was still wearing her slippers.
I don’t remember how many times
that night I called the nurses’ station on
my mother’s corridor. At one point, a
kind nursing aide, unable to bear the
sight of my mother crying for an eighth
straight hour, used her cell phone to fa-
cilitate a brief FaceTime conversation
between us. I also got some advice from
the head nurse: try to get in touch with
Mitchell Katz, the president of New
York City Health and Hospitals. See-
ing that he had an active Twitter ac-
count, I tweeted at him, appending one
of the screenshots that I had taken of
my mother’s distress. I knew that I was
exploiting our private trauma and mak-
ing a performance out of the kind of
emotion that my mother and I have
spent our lives hiding. But saving face
would not rescue my mother.
That night, I received a text from an
unknown number. It was not Mitchell
Katz but Yuh-Line Niou, a New York
state assemblywoman whose district in-
cludes Manhattan’s Chinatown. She had
seen the photos on Twitter and wanted to
know what she could do to help. Then I
heard from Brian Benjamin, a state sen-
ator whose district includes Harlem, and
from a prominent Twitter personality
who knew Mitchell Katz and offered to
text him for me. Early the next morning,
I got a call from Patient Relations. The
woman’s voice was newly tentative, and
she asked if I would be available for a
Zoom conference. Weinstein, the medical
director, and the head of P.R. informed
me that my mother’s aide would be al-
lowed back after all. There was no real
explanation, but my impromptu Twitter
campaign had borne fruit. And, I had to
admit, so did my association with this
magazine. Was this how power worked?
Once Ying called me from the hos-
pital, confirming that she was there with
my mother, I fell into a stonelike sleep.
When I finally woke, I could not tell if
it was night or day and was seized by an
anxiety so tight that I felt as if I werebeing held underwater. I began franti-
cally groping around my bed, and, as
fragments of a dream returned, I real-
ized that I was looking for my mother.
In the dream, she is on a stretcher, being
loaded into an ambulance—a scene I’ve
witnessed many times—but the bed they
put her on is too narrow and she tum-
bles off. As she falls, her body, so frail
that it requires multiple tubes to supply
its vital organs, becomes more fragile
still, until it turns to porcelain. She shat-
ters into a thousand shards on the ground.
It’s fine, it’s fine, I assure myself: I can
still pick her up. As long as I gather all
the pieces, I can puzzle her back together.
I do not anticipate that the pieces will
grow smaller and lighter until they float
aloft in the wind, until I am chasing a
sheet of sand. I am running now and,
inexplicably, carrying my diary. In the
end, I am able to catch only a single grain
of the sand on the tip of my finger. Mom!
I keep shouting at my finger, terror-
stricken that I will lose this last speck of
her. The only place I can think of stor-
ing it is between the pages of my diary.T
he day after Ying returned to the
hospital, I got a message on Twit-
ter from someone I didn’t know: “Dear
Jiayang, I believe you have been targeted
on Chinese social media (see pictures).
Please take those threats seriously. Keep“ You can’t just behead people every time you don’t
want to write them a thank-you note.”