How “The Coat on the Rack” Found Its Shape: A Craft Essay by Huina Zheng
“The Coat on the Rack” is not entirely fictional; it grew out of my real life.
My daughter is a devoted Harry Potter fan. She not only read the entire series but also watched every movie again and again. When she was five years old, after watching the films, especially the scenes with the Dementors, she became too frightened to sleep at night.
At that time, we hadn’t yet started sleeping in separate beds. In China, children usually sleep with their parents until they begin primary school. But my husband and I didn’t stay with her at night; she would fall asleep alone in our big bed. She often asked me to stay beside her. Later, she told me she felt scared in our room. When I asked what frightened her, she said, “The Dementor,” and pointed toward the standing coat rack near the bed.
I sat down beside her and tried, for the first time, to see the room through her eyes. Hanging on the rack was my black overcoat. In the dim light filtering through the window, it did look like a Dementor, its folds swaying slightly in the night breeze. Our apartment faced a street where modified motorcycles often sped by, their engines tearing through the silence with a shrill roar. In that still night, those sounds indeed felt haunting. I finally understood her fear.
Just as in my flash story, that moment brought back my own childhood memories.
My mother and I were never close. I have three siblings, and in our rural hometown, sons were valued far more than daughters. To escape the one-child policy, my parents once lived deep in the mountains, farming the land until my younger brother was born.
For as long as I can remember, I shared a bed with my older sister. I have no memory of ever sleeping beside my mother. With my sister there, I wasn’t afraid of the dark. But when we moved to a small town when I was in fourth grade, things changed.
That summer, I began waking up every night to the feeling of something crawling on me. My sister slept by the edge, and I slept against the wall, which, I would later realize, was the perfect route for cockroaches to find me. I didn’t know how they always managed to reach our bed, squeezing through the gap between the wall and the frame. I could even feel their tiny legs brushing my skin. We slept under a mosquito net, and every time I chased them away, I would double-check the corners and tuck the net tightly under the mattress. Yet somehow, they always came back. Eventually, I would grab a slipper, kill one, lie down again, and wake to another a few hours later. This happened night after night, through the entire summer.
Once, I told my mother about it. She dismissed me, thinking I was making a fuss or trying to cause trouble. So I stopped telling her. But that experience left a mark: I’ve struggled with insomnia ever since.
My mother and I remained distant, something I still regret. After I had my daughter, I promised myself I would be a different kind of mother.
So, like the mother in my story, I used imagination and “spells” to protect my daughter from fear. I told her that the coat was a magic cloak, that when monsters came, it would transform into an eagle and sweep all the bad things into the Pearl River. Of course, later I moved the coat to another room.
That’s how “The Coat on the Rack” was born.
That night, when we invented our little “spell,” I wasn’t just comforting her. I was also healing the frightened child I once was, the one who was never truly comforted. My daughter has always been one of my greatest sources of inspiration. Because of her, I’ve learned to see the world from new perspectives. Through writing, I can love that small, unseen version of myself again.
