Excerpt from Little Gods by Meng Jin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The nurse cares for infants in a way that she cannot their grown counterparts. Perhaps it is because they are so helpless: nothing more than potential. She cares for them with the hope that they will grow not into humans but rather become something entirely new.

Did you hear—her colleague asks—last night a car ran over some students?

The question comes bursting out as if the girl has been holding it in all night.

No license plate, nothing, she continues. And they say they found guns and helmets inside. Already there is bloodshed! What will it come to?

Her colleague is a slim girl who wears her hair in a pert ponytail and just finished school the year before. The nurse finds her overly excitable. She hangs up her purse and changes into her frock.

I guess you'd better go check the delivery unit, her colleague says, and the nurse exits through the swinging doors.

The delivery unit is at the opposite end of the building, adjacent to the operating rooms. To reach it the nurse must walk through the maternity ward. Here, at seven fifteen in the morning, a handful of pregnant women are waiting with their families at the check-in windows for their numbers to be called. The nurse walks quickly, fixing her gaze ahead. But before she can reach the door at the end of the hall, her path is blocked by a face.

It is a small face, with small, plain features, so plain, in fact, that the face resembles a blank paper, on which anything can be drawn. The mouth on the face moves, dots of sweat filming the edge where lip meets skin. For a long moment the nurse does not understand that the face belongs to a person—a woman, pregnant, nearly full term. The woman's voice is soft and pleading and the nurse does not hear what it's saying. She cannot stop looking at the woman's blank face, at the mouth moving—the lips shaping, the wet tongue swelling, the slivers of teeth emerging and disappearing. Finally she steps back, blinking, and hears:

Ahyi, my name is Su Lan, please help me. Here is my husband—the woman pulls forward a man—we are not from Beijing, we arrived just last week—

The nurse pushes past. A shudder moves up her neck. It is not that she has never been accosted for help in the halls of this hospital before. No, something disturbing cuts through this woman's voice, a desperation so bare it's indecent. The nurse does not take a good look at the couple, but she has the impression that they are handsome and well-dressed. City people, even if they aren't from Beijing—not, in any case, the type of people who should beg.


Six of ten beds in the predelivery suite are empty, along with the delivery room itself. In the operating rooms the first cesarean has begun. The nurse slips in and waits, preparing identification tags and linens as blood-soaked cloths line the floor. Then the baby is out, a boy, and he is in the nurse's arms on his way to the nursery before the surgeon's needle has begun to mend his mother's wound.

In the nursery there is just one window, a small rectangle carved high in the wall. Some mornings the sun reaches through on its way to noon and fills the room with light. The faces of the newborns become so bright that the nurse can't stand to look at them. The sun passes quickly, but in the minutes before the room returns to bare fluorescence, everything inside insists so baldly on its life that she must look at her shoes in embarrassment.

This day is cloudy. Light presses on a sheet of gray. The nurse looks into the glow and tries to replace the images in her mind with that same static colorlessness. But one persists: the blank-faced woman, her moving lips. Ahyi, my name is Su Lan, please help me. In a flash she sees the husband pulled forward, his pupils narrowed, his lips thin. The nurse shakes her head. Briefly she wonders why the couple came to Beijing, if they were drawn by the same excitement as the other young people flooding the city. She picks up a boy who has begun to howl. She prepares to return him to his mother.

Excerpted from Little Gods by Meng Jin. Copyright © 2020 by Meng Jin. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.