Chai Rui and her daughter's mother-daughter relationship

Chai Rui and her daughter's mother-daughter relationship is defined in the novel by both a practical act of care and a profound absence of certainty: Chai Rui arranged childcare for her toddler while she worked, but after she left Shanghai for Beijing, the child’s whereabouts were unknown. That unanswered question turns a fragment of personal history into a measure of what the investigation cannot restore, and helps Margaret Campbell recognize that the victims’ lives cannot be reduced to anonymous remains.

A mother’s life in fragments

The investigators learn about Chai Rui’s daughter indirectly, from a woman who knew Chai Rui but had never been admitted to the private parts of her life. Chai Rui, whom people called Cherry, was twenty-two. She had worked as a hostess at a club until the club dismissed her after discovering that she used drugs. The acquaintance says that Chai Rui tried to stop, but could not find work; about a year before their conversation, she heard of an opportunity in Beijing and left to try her luck. The acquaintance never saw her again.

Even this account offers only a narrow view of Chai Rui’s circumstances. She had lived in an expensive apartment on Zhaojiabang Road, and the acquaintance did not know how she could afford it. She also paid a babysitter to look after her little girl while she worked. The arrangement establishes that Chai Rui had a child and made provision for the child’s care, but it does not explain how she supported herself, what their daily life was like, or what she felt about leaving. The novel keeps those private facts out of reach rather than supplying an imagined family history.

Childcare, departure, and uncertainty

When Li Yan hears that Chai Rui had a daughter only a couple of years old, he immediately asks whether she took the child to Beijing. The acquaintance cannot answer. Nervous about being seen talking to the police, she glances behind her, says that Chai Rui had been private about her family and friends, and hurries back through the crowd. Her hurried departure closes off the investigators’ only personal lead at that moment; it does not resolve the child’s fate.

That gap remains important when Chai Rui is identified through dental records. Li tells Margaret Campbell that Chai Rui had a little girl and that nobody knew what had become of her. The details make the identity more than a name attached to a victim: the child was alive somewhere in the world, but the investigation had no reliable account of who was caring for her or whether she had gone to Beijing. Neither the babysitter’s continued involvement nor a reunion with Chai Rui is established. The relationship is therefore presented through a concrete act of childcare and an unresolved separation, not through scenes between mother and daughter.

From family fact to investigative insight

The daughter’s existence also changes how Margaret Campbell understands the evidence. Before learning about the child, she has examined Chai Rui’s remains as part of a larger series of murders. Once Li tells her that Chai Rui had given birth, the personal fact catches her attention and sends her back to the autopsy evidence. She realizes that she had not been looking for a connection that was already present in the material before her. The child does not by herself explain the case, but the knowledge that Chai Rui was a mother redirects Margaret’s attention toward a shared feature of the victims’ lives.

Margaret’s response is emotional as well as analytical. She reflects that it is easier to examine victims when they have no known name or loved ones, then finds that Chai Rui’s child makes such distance impossible to maintain. Her awareness of a specific person who may still be looking for, or depending on, care gives the dead a living connection beyond the mortuary. In this way, the mother-daughter relationship becomes part of the novel’s account of investigative attention: a family detail first encountered as biography helps disclose what the case’s accumulated information had obscured.

An unresolved echo in Li’s concerns

Chai Rui’s unknown child also stays with Li Yan. Looking through the records, he wonders what happened to the girl and considers the contradiction between Chai Rui’s apparent circumstances and her ability to afford an expensive apartment, dental work, and childcare. Her parents had been killed in a car crash, and after leaving school she had disappeared from official records into what the authorities called The Floating Population. These facts explain neither her resources nor the daughter’s present situation; instead, they underscore how little the paperwork can recover about a person’s life.

The unanswered question leads Li to think about Xinxin and her own future. He worries that she should not have to grow up moved between hotels and kindergartens without a stable sense of home or who will be there at night. The parallel is not an assertion that the two children have the same circumstances: Xinxin’s care is Li’s responsibility, while Chai Rui’s daughter remains beyond the investigators’ knowledge. It is the uncertainty itself that connects them. Chai Rui’s story leaves open whether her daughter was taken to Beijing and who cared for her; for Li, that absence becomes a reminder that a case’s consequences extend beyond the victims whose identities the police can establish.