Today I was returning home from running errands when I got drawn into a reading of Yiyun Li’s “Extra,” an excerpt from “A Thousand Year of Good Prayers” read by Lois Smith on NPR/PRI Selected Shorts episode “Lessons in Parenting” (this week’s episode, podcast updated Monday 9pm). It  about an old spinster woman who briefly served as the surrogate, second wife of an ailing Chinese Party member before ill fate beset her. Her husband, already dying, has an accident for which she is blamed by his family, and she found herself lucky to be employed at a school for children of the wealthy and unable to afford the luxury of considering her own loss. In this position she again steps in as surrogate for a sad six year old boy who’s own mother has been replaced in his father’s home. They are both ‘extra’ … in the way, not quite fitting with the rest, best gotten rid of.

This story captivated me for many reasons; I could find myself relating to granny as she tries to move her way gratefully through life alone. However, it was her charge, Tang…and his stealing and hiding of girls socks in his pillowcase that sullied the entire arrangement for them both, and kept me sitting in my car in the driveway until the story was done. Granny had no knowledge of or care for understanding why Tang had been feretting away the girls soiled socks, balled up neatly inside of his pillowcase. She thought about quietly taking them when she found them. But she loved her boy and couldn’t bear the thought of him reaching to find something so obviously precious to him, for reasons she did not understand, to find nothing; and instead undertook the task of finding replacement socks so that no one would know.

“…this must be what falling in love is like” … she thinks to herself. Of course she was unsuccessful in hiding Tang’s secret. One night Tang was discovered under his mosquito netted bed covers, a soiled girls sock- the kind printed with flowers- on each hand, rubbing them over his face. He was shamed and punished- the sick little boy who steals girls socks and … DOES things with them. She tries to comfort him, a humiliated six year old who misses his mother and who -even taking up so little space in the world- is ‘extra’ and unwanted even when ‘away’ at school. Dismissed shortly after this attempt fails, she walks away with only her lunch bucket, severance, and several packages of printed girls socks, a memento of the brief love and long pain.

It made me think about so many things. Poor little boy. Missing his mommy and sating himself with soiled socks; too young to have come to his fetish for prurient reasons. Poor granny, who didn’t want to understand but did all the same know that this one thing sustained poor little Tang. His mother, herself banished- she promised to come for Tang but one knows she never could or would. Oedipus. Id and super-ego and how much they operate outside of the knowledge of the every day ego which is so bound by their actions. How small socks, thin and printed and slightly worn, might feel mesmerizing to rub repeatedly, autistic-trance-style, over one’s cheeks in the dark of night.

If you have ten minutes or so to listen to a bittersweet story that isn’t dirty or really foot-fetish related but will make you think, I highly suggest it.