This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Trisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Duping Chen read her story Lulu from the April

8th, 2019 issue of the magazine. Chen is a writer and journalist based in Philadelphia.

She's working on her first collection of stories. Now here's Duping Chen.

Lulu. The hour of our birth had been carefully forecast,

a winter's day caesarian timed to coincide with Dr. Fung's lunch break.

The doctor pulled me out first, indignant and squalling,

like a hotel guest roused and tossed before checkout.

Lulu came next and was so perfectly quiet that at first they thought

she wasn't breathing at all. Then they thwacked her on the back, and her cries joined mine,

and they laid a side-by-side, boy and girl, two underwater creatures suddenly forced to fill

our lungs with cold, dry air.

Dr. Fung had operated on our mother as a favor to her uncle, his old classmate.

Otherwise, we would have been born in the hospital down the street, where a woman had bled to death after a botched caesarian the previous year.

The family had been in the waiting room for

hours, and at last the father to be pounded on the doors of the operating room. When no one responded,

the family pushed them open to find the lifeless woman on the table, blood pulling on the ground.

She was alone. The staff had stripped the medical certificates that

bore their names from the wall, and fled as soon as the surgery went wrong. From the start,

we were lucky, not least because we had each other. As twins, we'd been spared the reach of the

government's family planning policies. For the first few weeks of our life,

...