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Hohhot, a city of 2.4 million, is the capital of Inner Mongolia. Like snow on a roof, Inner Mongolia lays across the entire north of China.

An incident in Hohhot keeps coming back to me. I wish I could forget it, but it nags me incessantly. I saw a woman riding a bicycle there killed by a speeding car. I was in a taxi right behind the car that hit the woman and I saw the whole incident unfolding before my eyes and it happened before I could even say “Oh no!” I want to forget it, but at odd moments and for no apparent reason, the memory floods into my thoughts until everything else is drowned out. I wish I could exorcise this demon, but after all, the experience was real, and the memory of it is real, and to deny it altogether would be a great pretense and a sham, and a denial of the truth. Perhaps it is more honest to say I simply do not want to be obsessed by this memory.

I had traveled from Beijing to Hohhot by overnight train to see an old friend who was out of the hospital now but recovering from an operation for what was thought to be breast cancer, but turned out to be something else, not malignant, which was the good news. The bad news was that the operation was necessary in any case. My friend Li Bao Ai was in the state of mind of being a beautiful woman who wakes up one morning to find she has been mutilated – yes, for the best of reasons, but in her own mind she was damaged and ruined. It was useless arguing over the telephone with her long distance that her net worth as a human being had not been diminished one iota by the loss of a breast. In any case, I thought it a bit fatuous of me, as a male who had never been through anything more traumatic than an appendectomy, and that at a very young age, to be arguing that she should be of good cheer about what happened since she was at least alive. Bao Ai was thirty-two; she had been divorced and was miserable about it; had a son about ten years old who was a torment to her, not yet reconciled to the break-up of the family; and she had just found a very handsome man her age who was not deterred by her divorce and family situation and whom she was planning to marry. Could this wonderful man also weather this one last indignity? As I understood it, Bao Ai felt both humiliated and frightened by what had happened to her. She seemed to be asking who could possibly love such a woman as herself, such thrice-damaged goods?

To see an old friend who needs a friend is perhaps the only reason to travel to Hohhot in the dead of winter. If cities in the east of China are awakening from the prolonged misery of poverty, Hohhot shows little evidence of being benefited by any trickle down. There are some new buildings, some new enterprises, some few new cars. People do want to have their own cars, even more, apparently, than they want hot water in their residences, those Stalinesque high rises of thick-walled gray cement, or decent sanitation, or better paying jobs. The streets are frequently tortuous, little lanes of endless potholes and for some reason they seem always to be littered with broken bricks and other construction detritus that must present the bicycling multitudes with constant hazard and irritation. The weather is fiercely cold, meanwhile, and it astonishes me to see that this does not deter people from cycling about. The women wrap their heads in the cashmere scarves the region is famous for – wool being one of its products. Men frequently don huge fur-lined leather hats with flaps that resemble donkey ears. Wool suits and down jackets and long underwear and thick socks are de rigeur. And yet there is no way to make moving about these knife-cold streets a pleasant experience. The bricks, the sidewalks seem to radiate a coldness that penetrates to the bone after only brief exposure. Taxis at least are plentiful, but their heaters are indifferent. Once, when we happened into a taxi with a decent heater, Bao Ai and I asked the man just to drive us around for a while so that we could thaw away the biting numbness in our feet.

And then there is the pollution. The main source of energy in the city is coal, and the winter air is thick with a yellowish smog. In the mornings, especially, you cannot see the buildings across the alley, and if you are in the streets, people become dark bundles of rags shifting about, shadows, smoky wraiths, ghosts. They seem oddly animalesque, abstract shapes of beings. When the sun is out, you will be able to see farther, but often pollution obscures the tops of the higher buildings, or even the buildings at the end of the street. Everything – every bannister, every public bench, every bus and even the flags and Buddhas in the monasteries – has a layer of grime upon it. Look at your gloves at the end of a day and you could imagine you had been digging coal. I had thought Beijing was a dirty place. But for me Hohhot set a new standard. Even frozen, the river that wanders through its heart seemed untouchable to me.

This was the world in which I saw the woman killed. It happened at night. Bao Ai, a middle school teacher, had not recovered enough to return to her regular teaching duties. She was living at home with her parents – mainly with her mother, that is, since her father apparently spends little time in his own apartment, even for sleep. Even though she was not teaching, however, Bao Ai of course needed money to live on, since her mother was retired and her father was mainly absent from their lives. Consequently, she had signed on as a tutor with another middle school teacher, and once a week held an English class in a room that she and her colleague had rented and turned into a classroom. Her students were those who wanted to get into college, and who, though they were from an inauspicious place with an indifferent educational system, believed that education promised them a way out. Perhaps education was the only conceivable way, though in fact, it had not helped Bao Ai, who had tried and tried again to find work that would take her away from Inner Mongolia and into a more modern world. But it was not to be. The jobs she did find never lasted long. The foreign men she met never took her home with them. And in the end, her work unit in Hohhot, at Middle School Number One, would not allow her to leave again.

We were on our way to her class. I was going to be the lesson, a real speaker of English, an American who would earnestly answer their earnest questions and give them the chance to listen to the voice of a native speaker. I thought it was an easy role to play, even if I felt also a bit self-conscious about the enterprise. Celebrity should not come so easily to anyone. I felt a bit like a phoney, in fact.

It was dark. Traffic was fairly heavy. Our taxi moved nevertheless swiftly down a four-lane road. Bao Ai was seated behind the driver and could not see the road ahead. I was on the passenger side. As we talked I noticed a white car swirl past us. The driver was young, with a cigarette in the center of his mouth, an insolent look on his face. As the car passed, I could see also that there were at least two passengers in the car; the one in the back seat had quite a wide head and a vigorous spray of hair. He was smoking, too. The white car passed on the right, a taxi ahead of us, then cut back into the outer lane rather recklessly. To my annoyance, our taxi driver seemed to feel it necessary to follow the lead of the driver in the white car. He accelerated and began dodging in and out of traffic in the same manner – even though Bao Ai and I were in no hurry. Then I saw the white car pull into the right lane and accelerate and at the same time I saw coming up out of a side lane a woman on a bicycle, and I knew it was a woman because I could see her in silhouette, her long hair flying, and she had stood up on the pedals and was clearly hurrying to beat the traffic across the street, and I saw all this in less time than it takes to type or say one of these words, because I could see what was going to happen, and I could not even say “oh no” before the white car did indeed full on and broadside pound into the woman.

“Oh no.”

“What is it?”

“That car. Oh my God.”

The impact had the sound of a huge balloon exploding. The white car had been stopped by its force. The taxi ahead of us paused only briefly, then sped on. Our taxi driver pulled up beside the woman. Her bicycle was a tangled mess about thirty yards beyond. The woman herself was clearly dead. Oddly, there was no sign of any blood, but her entire front half seemed buried in the road, as if she were caught just plunging into water. One leg was cocked in the position of someone walking through a door, and indeed if you had not known what had happened, she appeared to be in the act of walking calmly through the surface of the road. Beside us, the doors of the white car flew open, and the men inside ran away. I remember vividly that they kept their cigarettes in the center of their mouths.

“Where is the driver?” Bao Ai asked our cabbie, in Chinese.

“Pao le,” the cabbie said. “They ran off.”

Now he sped ahead, too. I protested, and so did Bao Ai, more effectively in Chinese. The driver had no intention of stopping. He agreed to let us out at the nearest public phone – after we paid. We saw one and ordered him over. I paid the driver as Bao Ai ran to the telephone. No one else, it transpired, had called in the accident. She asked me in English what I had seen and she translated this for the police. A white car, the terrible noise, the men in the car running off into the Hohhot crowd, into the cold, still with their cigarettes in their mouths, each one taking a different direction. I had not actually seen the men running away, but remember the driver’s words: “Pao le.” They’ve run off. Simply that. Pao le. I remember their masklike faces, their smoking, and then they disappeared. A stolen car, probably, we agreed later, as we walked to the classroom in the bitter cold. They left the car right there. Or maybe, Bao Ai said, the owner would run home and report his car stolen. We talked about nothing else as we walked to the classroom. In America, I said, our laws require you to stop if you have witnessed an accident. The driver doesn’t want such trouble, Bao Ai said. Maybe the men in the car are dangerous. Bao Ai hadn’t seen anything, really, except the woman in the road as we crawled past. It happened so fast, I said. I could see it was going to happen but I couldn’t even say “oh no” and it had already happened. Later I wondered, and I still wonder as I think about it, how so much detail could have entered my consciousness and remain in memory if the event which I have so many times now re-experienced only lasted an instant. I saw the hair streaming out behind the figure, silhouetted, knew it was a woman, saw her stand up on the pedals to speed across the road, knew at once that she did not see the white car accelerating in the right lane, knew already the driver could never stop and probably because of the passenger beside him did not see the woman approaching, knew it was not going to be this time a near miss, and the words “oh no” were forming in my mouth, but were already late, so that between the first o and the last, the calamity had already happened.

The students were so fresh and lively and curious, so alive, that for an hour it was almost possible to bury our shock and the sickness we felt, and somehow through the course of answering their questions about English words and America and myself, we did not mention the accident. The murder! We had tea with Bao Ai’s colleague, the math teacher, in a nearby apartment and met his thoroughly delightful daughter of seven or so, and snacked, and talked of the usual, comfortable things, a bit distracted, of course. The sound of the impact. Like punching a pillow, immensely amplified. A dreadful concussion. What did you say? I’m sorry, I’m a bit tired from the class. Her long hair like a flag, silhouetted in the lights of oncoming cars. A shadow puppet play. Bao Ai kept saying that the car which hit the woman was a taxi, but it was not a taxi, or at least had no taxi lights. I think it was a private car, a sign of the new order of things, and that it was stolen by the kind of people who steal things they want and do not or cannot yet own themselves; these thing-crazed people, with hearts of lead. In a darkened, smoggy city of three million people, who is going to notice three or four men smoking cigarettes running along the street? Pao le. Our taxi driver, jetting off, not wanting to be involved. Not letting us out until we paid!

Later, I called Bao Ai from Beijing. Nothing had been reported in the paper, even though someone’s daughter, someone’s mother, someone’s lover must surely have been killed. Bao Ai had even called the police. No one had heard of any investigation. A woman was killed by a car. When was that? Then why did we, Bao Ai and myself, feel so guilty and disturbed by what we had seen? I would testify in any case, I said. I saw the men, I saw the car. I saw the car hit the woman. I saw the reckless driving. I saw the men run away. Most of this I saw in the space between an oh and a no. If no one cares, then there will be no investigation. Who will complain? A woman was hit by a car. Bicycles and cars on the same streets, all the time, it cannot be unexpected, and is not unusual. Someone will be grieving, of course, but in China someone is always grieving.

Illustration by Lacey Anderson.

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