Mrs. Cheng's silence

There is a neighborhood called Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Here is a four-story red brick building on the East River. Mrs. Cheng lived on second floor.  Mrs. Cheng has a husband and three daughters, but the daughters didn't live but came occasionally.

When she came across me, she hugged me and said hello. Sometimes she passed by as if she was a stranger. Will I be able to quickly identify her feelings from a distance and say hi? Or do I have to pretend that I do not know her? There is a hassle in having to prepare in advance.

One day Mrs. Cheng suddenly began to howl. It was loud enough to made the building ring. She repeated screaming and stopping. Then a month goes by, and at the earliest, a full 15 days later she screamed again. At first, I thought she was fighting with her husband, so I took the position that I should call the police in case of an emergency. But her husband's voice was not audible.

Mrs. Cheng only screamed, but she normally quiet and shy. She came from the Southern Caribbean and mixed ethnicity between Chinese and Indian and. She's so depressed that she lived in isolation with her children and went to therapy. I belatedly found out that she had moved from one house to another in this neighborhood.

People in this building had become accustomed to her symptoms. When she started screaming, everyone waited for the end. I wanted someone to report to the police, but no one took action. 'It's starting again!' began to be accepted as a routine in the building. After screaming, I felt that she could not lift her head and avoided me.

She put a long pad of noise-resistant cotton on the floor of the door.

She went to work at the local shipping Company at seven in the morning and returned at four in the evening. Her slender figure was getting fatter. She wore more clothes than before on her bloated body. Her appearance in a thick hat was dreadful as if the bear had come down from the mountain. I could feel the hot fever from her and I guessed the symptoms were getting worse.

One day, she never came back from work. She was run over by a truck at the shipping Company where she worked and died suddenly. She was 58 years old. No one in the building reacted at all to hear of her death. As if we thought she stopped yelling. Like waiting for her cry rather than accepting her death.