I bought a House in Hegang for $5,000. Then I Looked Up.

When Xiao Chen pushed the door open, her suitcase was still standing by her feet and she hadn’t changed shoes. She looked up and saw the water stain on the ceiling near the window, yellowed, its edges curled, like an old newspaper that had been soaked by rain and dried again. She pulled the suitcase two steps inside. Between the third and fourth floorboards, a corner had warped upward and made a sound under her foot.

A neighbor stood at the door holding a bowl of dumplings, chive-and-egg filling, still steaming. The neighbor said, Yours leaks too, huh. Then she pointed to the same spot on her own ceiling. Xiao Chen later measured that spot: forty-seven centimeters from the window frame.

That spot was not in the agent’s video. The camera started from the middle of the sofa in the living room, panned right, cut to the bedroom doorway, then to the kitchen counter. No upward angle, no hallway, no area above the front door. The day Xiao Chen signed the power of attorney, she was wearing pajamas. Behind her were cardboard boxes she hadn’t finished unpacking in her rented room. In the notarization video she said “I agree” twice. The second time was quieter than the first.

The building was completed in 2017. Sixty square meters, a three-bedroom-plus-living-room layout converted into two bedrooms, total price thirty-eight thousand yuan. When Xiao Chen first saw the video on her phone in her rented room in Jiangsu, she had been working overtime for three weeks straight. Her average daily screen time was nine hours and forty minutes. Buying a house was something to hold onto. She had never said that to anyone. What she said to the agent was: Can you make it cheaper?

Renovation cost more than forty thousand. She laid new floors, replaced the toilet, put white square tiles on the kitchen wall. She moved in in June. Hegang’s summer was cool; she needed a thin quilt at night. The first night she couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning she got up, took down the curtains, and washed them. The washing machine was running. She sat on the living room floor eating a cucumber and thought it was crunchier than the ones in Jiangsu.

She discovered the leak on the third day. It had rained the first two days, and she thought the window hadn’t been closed tightly. On the third day the rain stopped, but the ceiling was still dripping. It dripped onto the baseboard and splashed into the seams of the floor. She dragged a chair over, stood on it, and touched the wall. The plaster gave under her thumb. It was wet underneath.

She sent the agent a WeChat message. The agent replied with a voice message: Sis, I’m pregnant and not feeling well. You should talk to the property management about this. Xiao Chen said, Then rest well. Later the agent sent a text: The house was in good condition at handover. Leaks fall under property maintenance. Xiao Chen screenshotted the message, saved it to her album, and named it “1.”

She didn’t finish the neighbor’s dumplings. Half a bowl was left, and she put it in the fridge. The next morning she heated the dumplings for breakfast and looked up the lawsuit process on her phone while eating. The Hegang court was a six-yuan taxi ride from where she lived. She went twice. The first time she didn’t bring all the paperwork. The second time she filed the complaint.

On New Year’s Eve she didn’t go to the neighbor’s for dinner. The neighbor knocked and said she’d made pickled cabbage dumplings. Xiao Chen said okay, then didn’t go. In her own kitchen she fried a plate of spring rolls and a plate of lotus-root sandwiches. She didn’t get the oil temperature right. Two spring roll wrappers broke, and batter dripped off the lotus root. The cat crouched by the stove. She put a spring roll in the cat’s bowl. The cat sniffed it and walked away. She ate six spring rolls and four lotus-root sandwiches herself. She sealed the rest with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. She didn’t turn on the Spring Festival Gala. A podcast was playing on her phone, about the restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the Northeast. She listened for twenty minutes and fell asleep.

She ate Hegang small skewers three times. The first time was the day she moved in, at a shop downstairs. Fifty cents a skewer. She ate twenty and had a bottle of local beer. The second time was the day she filed the lawsuit. She went alone and sat by the window. Four men at the next table were playing finger-guessing games, very loudly. She finished eating and left. The third time was just before she left. The neighbor called her over. She said okay and went. The neighbor insisted on paying.

Before leaving, she cleared out what was left in the fridge: half a bag of rice, a carton of eggs, two packs of pickled mustard greens, and the unfinished bowl of dumplings. She dumped the dumplings, washed the bowl, and put it back outside the neighbor’s door. She put the cat in its carrier and carried it downstairs. At the entrance she ran into someone from property management. They asked how the house matter was going. She said she was waiting for the hearing.

On the train back to Jiangsu, she opened a rental app, switched the location to Nanjing, selected all the Hegang listings she had saved, and cleared them. The cat meowed twice from the carrier. She put her finger inside. The cat licked her fingernail.

Hegang is not an empty city. Downstairs from her building there was a vendor selling soft tofu pudding, two yuan a bowl, extra gravy free. After seven in the evening there were few people on the street, but the skewer shops were still open, and delivery riders occasionally shot past the intersection. In the building next to hers lived an old couple. Every afternoon they sat outside in the sun. The old woman knitted. The old man looked at his phone. The day Xiao Chen left, the old woman asked her, Are you coming back, girl? She said, Depends.

She had met a few outsiders who stayed in Hegang. One sold mountain produce through livestreaming. A team of four, monthly turnover over thirty thousand. He’d bought a place in Hegang outright and hired an auntie to cook for two thousand a month. One was an illustrator who took overseas commissions and got paid in dollars. He rented a one-bedroom in Hegang for six hundred a month and said it was ten times cheaper than Hangzhou. Another did online customer service, two shifts, forty-five hundred a month. She said that counted as a high wage in Hegang, but winter heating and electricity cost over two thousand.

Xiao Chen’s lawsuit hadn’t gone to court yet. Her lawyer said the key to rescinding the contract was proving the agent had intentionally concealed the problem. The neighbor was willing to testify. Property management records could be obtained. The areas the video didn’t show were themselves evidence. The lawyer asked whether she wanted mediation or a judgment. She said either was fine, as long as it was fast.

She now lives in a county-level city in Jiangsu. The rent is twelve hundred a month, more expensive than Hegang, but there’s a vegetable market right downstairs, and at nine at night there are still people out. Sometimes she scrolls past posts about “new Hegangs”—Fuxin in Liaoning, Rushan in Shandong, Heshan in Guangxi—with photos of big windows, low prices, blue sky, and white clouds. She scrolls past without liking them.

The cat lies on the windowsill, its tail hanging down and swaying. She opens her computer and deletes the photos of the Hegang house from her phone. Seventeen in total. When she gets to the twelfth, she pauses. It was taken on the balcony in winter. The snow outside was thick. Someone downstairs was clearing snow, scraping out a narrow path.

She taps delete.