Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A-Yuan was here again. That memory, where Baba still spoke.

His father never called him A-Yuan these days. Ever since they went back to Suzhou without Baba, Father would call him the name which Baba had once wistfully spoken while they were reading by the window, looking at the silver lotuses outside their window in Wuhan. 

Sizhui.

“It’s too sad,” Baba had said.

That was perhaps the only thing A-Yuan could remember Baba saying before he stopped speaking and started sleeping.

From then on, A-Yuan had another name. At school, he wrote his name the way someone — Baba, guiding his hand — had taught him to, forming the strokes in careful order: Wen Yuan. Most children, when given a nickname, have something easier to pronounce. Baba could have called him Yuanyuan when he pulled his cheeks, or even Xiao Yua r , like the Hebei shushus who came by to see him. But Baba was a complicated man, if memory served A-Yuan right. And Father loves Baba.

So while everyone else was rolling around with names like Rourou and Wanwan and Nunu, A-Yuan was Sizhui. Baba was trying to train A-Yuan from his dreams to speak more sharply and precisely than other people. Siiiii, hiss, zhui.

He didn’t see what was so sad about it. When he sat in class beside Jingyi back in Suzhou, trying to figure out just how silver its canals were as compared to Wuhan’s broad lakes where the lotuses would grow-- where Baba tread illegally through the waters with his pants rolled up and Father would really follow him into the breaking of rules — Jingyi would say his name correctly, albeit obnoxiously. Like Si-ZHUI, a sharp demand for attention, where the one time Baba had said that name, it had rolled off his tongue so sweetly. Father once said A-Yuan would grow up to speak with his Lan family’s Suzhou accent. Not Baba’s Hubei accent. A-Yuan had not understood what he had meant. He would one day. He wondered until then if he could somehow mix both his fathers’ way of speaking, so he could keep both of them with him.

That was where Jiang-gugu came in.

She was A-Yuan’s favorite, besides maybe his Bobo, Father’s older brother. Lan-bobo and Jiang-gugu were calm, gentle, and indulging, just like Father, but they had Baba’s smiles and eyes glinting with mischief.

“Everything you talk about goes back to your Baba and Father,” Jingyi had grumbled one day. “Nice. They sound cool. Can I ever meet them?”

“Father, yes,” A-Yuan said. “But you’ll have to meet my other people before you meet Baba. You should meet my Jiang-gugu and Lan-bobo. They’re very sweet, and they cook good food. You’ll have to come to Wuhan to meet Jiang-gugu, though. She’ll teach you Wuhan dialect.”

“Wuhan is too hot.” Jingyi wrinkled his nose. But then he caught the slightly crestfallen look on A-Yuan’s face, and waved his hand. “Ah, Sizhui, but y’know what? I’ll come just to know where you go every other weekend instead of playing with me.”

Once, at A-Yuan’s insistent prodding, Lan-bobo actually cracked a little bit and told him that it is tiring for adults to make the trip of seven hundred and fifty kilometers every other weekend from Suzhou to Wuhan. Especially for Father, who did it every weekend. But for A-Yuan, it was always an adventure.

Father would pick him up from school on Friday. He would be waiting outside the gates of his school where they let him out, and he would take A-Yuan by the hand; his grip would be easy and strong like Baba’s — A-Yuan’s memories always went back to Baba and always to his touch but never his voice. Father would lead him onto the bus stop, a rumbling journey that jerked around narrow corners until they reached Suzhou Station.

Suzhou. A small city of tunnels and canals.

In those days, they took the overnight train, walking on humid, smoke-trampled concrete steps down to the old chugging mechanical beasts and piling into their safe warm bellies. Father would hold his hand tight, as he led them gently through a crowd of unruly rude people who did not know how to line up. He never judged them, out loud, anyway. Once, A-Yuan bumped into a netted bag and realized that it was full of live, folded-up chickens, curled against each other like marbles squashed into a pouch.

Sometimes, Father had enough money to buy them a bed in a compartment, where they had one bunk bed among four. But A-Yuan looked forward to the open, common stall that crammed six bunks together. The compartment was probably more for Father’s sense of privacy, but A-Yuan liked being in the highest of the three bunks piled on one side, staring at people walking up and down the aisle. The random shushus liked to say hello to him, and A-Yuan liked to dangle from the handlebars and pretend he was Sun Wukong, monkeying about from his mountain. One time, a nice auntie offered him a long lollipop, the kind that was some translucent blue star or pink heart on a long, bendy stick; in the light, it looked like spun glass, looked like what A-Yuan thought seaglass was at the time.

He would dangle and wave his bendy star, trying to not hit his head on the compartment roof, while Father sat below him on one of the chairs that would unfold from the wall in the corridor, at the windows that whisked the world by.

See, the thing that set Suzhou and Wuhan apart was the scenery. Suzhou had not yet learned to grow its buildings into skyscrapers yet, but Wuhan was a faster learner. It was probably the way it watered itself with so many people and too much water and too much sunshine, which made it the Furnace of China.

And in between them was green wilderness.

Father drank chrysanthemum tea from a steel thermos, somehow making such a prosaic old-man act look elegant, and stared out while A-Yuan squealed and dangled. He would watch the gray sky gather into different clouds of clumps, the buildings and waterways of Suzhou wisp away, and then the scenery would gather up more and more green. They went past hills that looked like the coiled hair of Buddha. Past small, gentle lines of water in fields, broken only by one or two trees. Soaring into the depths of a rice paddy, before it was gone.

When they stopped at Nanjing Station, that was when A-Yuan would worry. Father would tell him to stay in his bunk while he got off the train to shop from the vendors lining the platform. In the sea of people, A-Yuan was always terrified he would lose sight of Father, that Father would be too slow, that the train would pull away and A-Yuan would have to find Jiang-gugu all by his little self and tell her how he lost Father too.

But Father always stayed in his sight. He turned around from time to time, in the midst of counting cash for the vendor, and waved the jianbing or tang hulu (“We’ll take you to Beijing one day,” Nie-shushu always promised, “and get you some real iced tang hulu”) with the beautiful smile only A-Yuan could see. He would always board with plenty of time to spare before the train pulled away, and A-Yuan would leap from his tall mountain into his arms. Father caught him every time.

They would split a baked sweet potato in the winter, tang hulu in deep winter, and jianbing throughout the year; A-Yuan would sit on the cramped coffee table with a hand on the window to stay balanced, legs dangling off the side while Father wiped hulu sugar from his cheek.

When the sun finally set, Father would hand A-Yuan his flip phone, and A-Yuan would jabber fast with Jiang-gugu, who said she was so very excited to see him. He would speak into a dark room with only the light at the head of his bunk on, a rounded rectangle of plastic orange. When Jiang-gugu asked him to hand the phone back to Father, Father’s voice would come out in deep hms that resonated throughout the thin slices of space that made up the train. He would hang up and join A-Yuan in the top bunk; A-Yuan slept on top of his chest. Father’s hands felt like a distant memory of Baba’s around him, and sleep was full of the warmth of Father’s embrace.

No one in their stall or compartment would dare tell off a child, especially a child guarded by a man like Lan Zhan, so sometimes when he woke up in the night, A-Yuan would ask questions into his father’s chest, the pale blue and white fabric soft like a whole daytime sky. He would tell him about what he had learned that day at school, reciting poems into the dark:

“床前明月光

疑是地上霜

举头望明月

低头思故乡。”

Father’s hand rubbing the skin of his scalp through the bristles of his short hair. “背得好，” he said, and A-Yuan burrowed his face into his chest, rendered silly with joy at the praise.

Father would have long been awake when A-Yuan woke in the morning, but he never moved then, only continued to breathe deep and slow, an undertow of love and comfort while A-Yuan reached out a short arm and barely lifted the curtain to see the sun spread itself — spiralling, like a perfectly-peeled crown of orange skin — over the farmland, somewhere between silhouette and reality.

The magic melted like hulu sugar on A-Yuan’s tongue as the sun climbed upwards — slowly, gently, with a savory aftertaste that left him content with the brevity of his pleasure. The train conductor would eventually come down the corridor, and Father would finally curl upwards, A-Yuan still on his lap, to hand over their tickets to be checked.

A-Yuan would learn later in life that this was how he never got bed bugs in those unhygienic trains. Father always kept him levitated away from most of the bedding.

Jiang-gugu greeted them. Sometimes it was Jiang-shushu.

Jiang-shushu...didn’t not like him. But the coldness with which he greeted Father could only be matched by Father himself.

When A-Yuan had been first informed, reliably, by both his Nie-shushus, that Father was actually a cold and frozen man, he could not believe a word of it. Father was warm, like a candle, like the lit mosquito coil that slowly emitted itself to keep him safe from the threat of bugs. Father buried him in a mountain of rabbits and let him burrow around eating radishes and lettuce, as A-Yuan rolled around and became friends with them. (Jingyi was so jealous when A-Yuan had told him that.)

Cold? Father may not have been effusive like Baba, breaking rules and trying to get caught, but he was about as distant as the bunnies that smothered him in soft fur.

A-Yuan saw how it was different when he was with Jiang-shushu. Like the onset of winter.

A-Yuan stuck closer to Father at those times. First, greet Jiang-shushu, who gave him a reluctant, gruff “A-Yuan,” and then back to safety.

He had asked Lan-bobo and Father why Jiang-shushu didn’t like him or Father. Lan-bobo had assured him that he did like A-Yuan, very much, he just had a different way of showing it. 

But why? he had asked.

Well, most people, when they like someone, are very kind to them and smile, but Jiang-shushu is different that way. He mostly scowls, and he’ll scowl harder at you if he likes you. Unless it’s Jiang-gugu, of course. Most people in our country don’t have a sibling these days, so she’s very special.

“Oh,” said A-Yuan, scratching his head. He got it, but he also didn’t. “Then he must have been very nice to Baba, right?”

Father’s eyes had hardened when A-Yuan had quipped this to him. “He cared for your Baba,” was all he said. He was angry. A-Yuan found that strange, but Father never spoke much when it came to Jiang-shushu. In fact, outside of greetings, when it came to Jiang-shushu, Father never spoke to him at all.

“Jiang Cheng,” he said.

“Lan-xiansheng.”

He would greet Jiang-gugu. “Jiang-jie.”

He never called Jiang-shushu by anything other than his name.

Wuhan stretched like a silver coin on the flat of A-Yuan’s hand. He pressed his nose to the taxicab window when they headed over to where Jiang-gugu lived. She would beam and glow and pour like that silhouetted sunrise magic, and greet him, and seat him, and fill his options with plates of snacks and fruits, and a big pot of morning soup. Wuhan would wake up on a Saturday morning, and A-Yuan would be fuzzy and content.

Jiang-gugu would fill Father and A-Yuan’s plates with food, even while they were eating; she would ply them if they weren’t eating enough from the cabbage dish, and then not enough from the fish stew. She herself ate very little, until that visit.

A-Yuan had been told he was a perceptive child. Most people, Jingyi told him wisely, would not have understood the microcosmic changes in his father’s atmosphere. “Your baba has the personality of a rock, so you have to throw it to make it explode,” he said. “Like this.” Then he had shattered a window to demonstrate his baffling point and had been held back after class, he had no regrets.

So when Jiang-gugu had opened the apartment door to them — despite Jiang-shushu’s fussy protests that she should rest — with a child on the way, Father had frozen, breath hitched, and could have sobbed with the way he put one reverent hand on Jiang-gugu’s person, and that of her unborn child’s.

“Your cousin,” Jiang-gugu said to A-Yuan, who grew excited at the prospect of a wawa to play with.

That scheduled visit to Baba after breakfast had felt heavier, like someone had taken a needle to the silver coin of Wuhan in the flat of A-Yuan’s hand and scratched it deep enough to score. The surface remained solid, but it was not the same.

Baba was unchanged.

Baba never changed.

There were times when the kids at school tried to bully him. A-Yuan seemed like such an easy target...until when they had said I bet your dad is ugly as you and A-Yuan flung himself at them, fighting dirty.

Inhuman strength doesn’t come easy to children. Jingyi, already reluctantly hanging out with him because you seem cool, I think, but I’m gonna figure out how cool you are first, okay? was still kicking and clawing at the bullies when A-Yuan escaped the fray.

He had spotted a pile of bricks lying by the school fence.

Later, when the sobbing bully clutched his bleeding head and A-Yuan and Jingyi were sharing the red chair in the corner, hands still stinging from their teacher beating them, Father’s voice emerged from down the hall.

“I apologize, Chen-taitai,” he said. “My son will be sufficiently punished.”

A pause.

“For what reason would he do such a thing?”

The jabbering Chen-taitai, mother of the bully, had responded in what could only be described as a level shriek: “Children will be children. My son just made one little comment towards him. You must understand, we have only one child, me and my husband. I’m sure you and your husband could try to understand. We must keep the bloodline going, and this one-child policy makes things so difficult.”

A-Yuan did not realize she was insulting him, until Father responded, snidely, “I only wish your royal prince of a son were smart enough to realize he had it coming.”

“I’m sorry, Chen-taitai,” said A-Yuan, only because he had to. “I’m sorry I made your son’s head bleed.”

The adults looked expectantly at Jingyi.

“He’s not really sorry,” Jingyi said, incredulously. “Why should he be sorry? Everyone’s already trying to pick on Sizhui for only having a dad. If Chen Xiaoyu didn’t want to get his head smashed in, maybe he shouldn’t have insulted Sizhui’s baba.”

A-Yuan had not dared to look at Father’s face. Until he did. The temptation to move his head that way was too strong.

Even Father was surprised.

Chen-taitai said, “How dare you. I’m going to tell your parents to raise you better.”

“They raised me to be smart,” Jingyi said proudly, “but your son obviously isn’t. Wen-xiansheng,” he said, looking at Father. “I only attacked Chen Xiaoyu with my hands, but Sizhui was smart enough to pick up a brick.”

To be beaten again alongside Jingyi for his insolence was just an option for A-Yuan — he didn’t have to, he wasn’t the one who’d been rude to a parent. But he’d chosen to take the beating.

He had done it. He had hurt another human being. Father had raised him better, and A-Yuan’s head spun with shame. He deserved a beating once they got home, too.

But Father had walked him home and said nothing.

Instead, he had picked up a photo that had been stashed away in his drawers with no X to mark the spot. “Your baba,” he’d said.

Even A-Yuan’s hands were guilty, as he accepted the photo and peered at the characters caged in the glossy paper.

The photo sharpened a memory that, even then, A-Yuan had almost forgotten. It dug up the lost treasure, the memory of Baba before he became comatose. In the photo, he stood smiling by Father’s side, digging up radishes in a field. A-Yuan, just a toddler, was clinging to his leg and eating dirt.

A-Yuan, A-Yuan! No, you can’t put a dirty hand in your mouth! You’ll get sick.

Baba, awake, buried in the map of A-Yuan’s mind. With no X to mark the spot.

“I’m sorry,” A-Yuan had whispered. It wasn’t just the shame. It was the fact that the Baba in the photo, in that treasured memory, was so radiant and full-cheeked and strong.

Father had stroked and stroked his hair. At some point, he had pulled A-Yuan onto his knee. “You know you did wrong,” he said, slowly. “But you have a good friend.”

“Jingyi?”

“Mn. Treasure someone who stays at your side, even when you do something people think is wrong.”

So he didn’t just become inseparable from Jingyi — like a sticky, brain-shaped sachima, that was meant to be eaten whole — but realized how important it was to visit Baba, even if he couldn’t yell at him about hygiene anymore.

Even if, ever since he had become comatose, he was skinny and gaunt and made of paper.

He lay there buried under rabbit ears of wires, warmed by a thin blanket, breathing, breathing, never truly still, but never animated, either.

“A-Xian,” Jiang-gugu said with a forced smile. “Your son and husband are here to see you. And your nephew too. He will be coming very soon.”

A-Yuan ran up to Baba and held his hand.

Baba must have slept with Father when he was still awake. A-Yuan did remember being cradled in a cloud that was Father and Baba both, remembered being held between them in bed. There was a time when he had not known how to sleep otherwise. Baba had been cool, cool like the springs of silver dollar water, warm just enough so lotuses could grow. Tem-per-ate, he learned in school for his vocabulary section. But now, Baba was just cold.

“Baba,” he squeaked, peaking over the side of the bed, tall enough that he did not have to tiptoe or have Jiang-gugu carry him anymore. “It’s me. It’s A-Yuan. Did you know I’m getting a cousin soon?” He fished in his pocket and found the dried grass butterfly Father had bought him on the roadside, from a man who peddled swallows with tails cut into forks and a green penguin waddling into life. “This can be your cousin too,” he told Baba importantly, nestling that gentle flutter of wing grass into Baba’s cold palm, so he could hold something when A-Yuan, Father, and even Jiang-gugu weren’t around. That was what Jingyi was to A-Yuan when he was at school, away from Father. Everyone needed a cousin, a companion, like the one that was about to be born.

When he turned around, Jiang-gugu was crying.

A-Yuan was not familiar with the idea of adults crying. When adults cried, they did it silently, and he could never see the cause of whatever had caused them pain — children gash their knee when they fall, or simply dig too much grit into their hands, and that is why they scream and cry. Adults...adults were different. It seemed heavier when they cried, like something too deep for A-Yuan to see the source of.

Jiang-gugu stood at the door with one hand on her belly, the other clutching the doorknob as she cried. Father came up to her and put a hand on her elbow, awkwardly guiding her to A-Yuan and Baba’s side. He pulled a chair for her to sit in, handling her like delicate, spun glass, like the ends of the blue stars A-Yuan flung around until they cracked open from a simple flick against the wall.

He sat in Father’s lap when Father was like this too — a lake interrupted, unhappy— and so he climbed onto Jiang-gugu’s, resting a hand on her belly, his still growing cousin.

She gathered him close in her arms, letting him listen to the mound like the peaceful earth above a grave. “A-Yuan,” she sobbed. “Oh, A-Yuan.”

Father kneeled by her, taking Baba’s hand and stroking the spare skin not looped by wires and feeds. He said Baba’s name, the only way anyone could say it. “Wei Ying.” He rumbled, low and sorrowful. Like he did every time he came here. Like he must have done every week he made the trip across cities just to see him.

Saturdays were often spent with A-Yuan staying for as long as he wanted with Baba, until Jiang-gugu took him out shopping, or to the park, or a local pit of water in the concrete where a man let them pedal swan-shaped boats and go to town, crashing into the concrete walls if they so wished.

“You’ll upend the boat and drown the kid,” Jiang-shushu said once.

“Then A-Yuan will learn to swim,” Jiang-gugu responded.

A-Yuan thought of Father this time around, when his pregnant Jiang-gugu took him by the hand after a longer time than usual to lead him to a street market, the door closing behind them on the strange and familiar vision of Father still kneeling at Baba’s bedside, sowing love into his hair. Jiang-gugu always gave the rest of the day to Father. A-Yuan did not know how he did it, but he really did spend the day — such a long stretch of time — with Baba. Like a silent Wuhan lake that would never betray the lotuses it grounds. Like a cloud beneath A-Yuan, always catching him, and never letting him drown.

Jiang-gugu took him to a street market where she bought him his favorites. She let him decide between reganmian and mianwo, and he said hello to the aunties who made them. “A-Yuan!” they said. “You’ve gotten bigger. All that journeying from Suzhou is turning you into a big nanzi han.”

A-Yuan had a propensity for making friends in all sorts of weird places, even as a child — “Just like your baba,” Jiang-gugu said — so he chattered all about his train ride here with Father. “The sun is like an orange!” he informed her. “Father says it’s actually bigger than the whole world, but it’s so far away that it looks like the size of my thumbnail.” He held up the back of his hand so she could see.

“An orange like this?” With an Auntie Smile, she pulled an orange from her pocket and held it out to him, kneeling to his level.

He reached for it, even as Jiang-gugu said, “Oh, my, you don’t have to, he’s already going to fill up with mianwo.”

“A growing nanzi han like him should eat a whole variety of tastes throughout the day,” Mianwo Auntie said, pinching his cheek even as he was peeling the orange, trying to get the skin to blossom out the way the sun’s rays did outside his train window.

“Thank you, Mianwo Auntie,” he said. He did not need Jiang-gugu to even remind him; Father had taught him to always say “thank you” and “please.”

“Yes, thank you.” Jiang-gugu softened, patting A-Yuan back to her side.

The mianwo crackled in his soft mouth, the orange sweet after the fried dough. Bits of juice and flakes drizzled the sandy sidewalk as he led Jiang-gugu through the warm rush of the market, uncles and aunties frying and boiling and peeling in a whorl of human breath.

When they returned to the apartment, which had Jiang-shushu asking where in the old man in the sky’s name have they been, and Father silently receiving A-Yuan to his side on the overstuffed sofa, A-Yuan felt loved.

Nie-dashu and Nie-xiaoshu came down from Hebei to see their darling Jiang-gugu and her husband, who came from his busy Wall Street job in Shanghai to greet his wife. He liked to call the Nie uncles, respectively, Huzi-shushu and Buzhi-shushu. Huzi-shushu had received this christening with great aplomb, roaring and tossing A-Yuan into the sky while Buzhi-shushu had shaken his head and fanned himself, pleased.

Jiang-gugu’s husband came in buttery golden clothes — Jiang-shushu said he was trying to be different from all the other filthy rich people wearing tuhao gold — and patted A-Yuan’s head awkwardly. He did not know how to interact with small friends like A-Yuan, so A-Yuan helped him by leaning into the touch like a cat, nudging his hand.

This time around, Jin-gufu patted him a little longer, responding well to A-Yuan’s animal movements. Good, good. A-Yuan nodded to himself. It was strange that all adults in the world knew absolutely everything about the world, except for Gufu. So he had to help Gufu learn; even doing it late was better than never learning.

There was something new today, though — even Wen-shushu and Wen-gugu came by, all the way from Xi’an. Dressed in red like they were attending a wedding. They were his blood family, Father had explained, unlike him and Baba.

Jiang-shushu never looked at Wen-shushu without scowling, but it was Wen-gugu who confused A-Yuan. He rarely even looked in Wen-gugu’s direction, but he didn’t seem to...hate her.

“Look how big you’ve gotten,” Wen-gugu cooed at him, coming down to his level to greet him, in a thinly disguised attempt at checking to see if Father was dressing him in clean clothes and keeping him well-fed. He was. No one was cleaner than Father — everyone knew that, the whole world knew that — but Wen-gugu liked to worry and pretend she wasn’t a big worrier.

Father was helping Jiang-gugu in the kitchen, and though A-Yuan wanted to stay around and try to figure out how it was the Buzhi-shushu was able to get this familiar cocky smirk out of Jiang-shushu that he remembered in Baba’s face, Wen-shushu wanted to help with the cooking too. Who was A-Yuan if not a small master of the house at these times? — he led Wen-shushu by the finger to the kitchen, gurgling about this or that, because Wen-shushu was almost as good a listener as Father.

Wen-shushu’s obvious reds caught the eye before the entrance to the kitchen even fully framed him; they were not like Father’s sky blues. “Ah, it’s Wen Ning! Wen Ning is here!” Jiang-gugu opened her arms for a hug, which Wen-shushu received with obvious shock. “We haven’t seen you in so long,” she scolded him lightly. “Xi’an isn’t that far away. Who told you to stay away so long, ah?”

“Jiang Cheng.” The words were out before Wen Ning could really stop himself. He clamped his lips shut, staring in wide-eyed horror as it became so that the only sounds in the kitchen were the simmering of the pots and distant screams of the Hebei uncles in the other room.

Finally, Jiang-gugu smiled apologetically while Father gave his tiny nod. A-Yuan sucked his thumb, watching them. Then he remembered that Baba had taught him not to, and stuck his thumb back in his pocket.

Father quickly picked him up. A-Yuan went with a squeal, bouncing on his hip like he was three years old again, as Father said, “Jiang-jie, you should rest. Wen Ning and I can take over from here.”

But Jiang-gugu shook her thoughts away with her head. “No one should leave the kitchen when Wen Ning is such a good cook,” she said cheerfully. “Could you man the pot while I whisk the eggs, Wen Ning? You make the best tomato and eggs.”

Father chopped the tomatoes on the board one-handed, the other hand balancing A-Yuan on his hip. A-Yuan peered at the rhythm of the chunks he turned the tomatoes into — slice, slice, slice. Every once in a while, he put the knife down, pinched a quarter of tomato in between his fingers, and fed it straight to A-Yuan. Three quarters was his hard limit. A-Yuan counted in his head.

A-Yuan was allowed to help set the table, carrying chopsticks to the table — at Father’s insistence, not Jiang-gugu’s.

“A-Yuan is still a child,” Jiang-gugu argued. “A-Yuan, you can go ahead and play with your Wen-gu.”

He had always found it pointless to not straightforwardly say what he wanted, unless, of course, he was finessing out a plot to get something he knew the adults didn’t want to give him. “I don’t want to,” he said.

“A-Zhan,” Jiang-gugu said, turning to Father. “This is my home, and you are guests. You and A-Yuan should go rest with the others.”

Father nodded, “mn,” and handed A-Yuan a handful of chopsticks to set the table with.

Once they were all set around the table — his Hebei Nie uncles, his Xi’an Wen aunt and uncle, Father, Jiang-shushu and Jiang-gugu, and the slightly slow Golden Gufu — A-Yuan was plied with rice. Sat at his father’s side, and two bowls through Jiang-gugu’s lotus root and pork rib soup, he asked, “What was my baba like?”

Wen-gugu put down her chopsticks, and folded her hands in the deepest depths of contemplation. “Loud,” she said. “Like a certain radish child when he’s supposed to be eating.”

A-Yuan pouted, shoving the end of another slice of pork into his mouth. “Baba was loud?” He recalled all those images of Baba with his pants rolled up to his thighs in the lakes, mouth wide open like sunshine. Mn. Loud noises do come out when you make that face. That was why trumpets worked the way they did.

“Eat first, then talk,” Father told him. A-Yuan nodded, swallowing before asking the question again.

“Very loud,” Golden Gufu said, with a glance at Jiang-gugu. “He once punched me in the face.”

Jiang-gugu gave a microbite of smile, like one of the pockmarks on Mianwo Auntie’s face. “He wouldn’t punch you.”

“That one time, he did,” Buzhi-shu said.

“No offense,” Huzi-shu said, “but it was awesome.”

“And you deserved it,” Buzhi-shu said. “Full offense.”

Golden Gufu looked mutinous, so he patted Jiang-gugu’s belly to calm himself down. A-Yuan hoped his cousin would come out smarter than Golden Gufu did.

“His eyes were a very light color,” Wen-shushu offered helpfully. “They were so light, they were gray instead of black.”

“Like he’s part foreigner or something,” Jiang-gugu laughed in a sigh. “But we know he isn’t.”

“And yet our mother still thought he was our father’s child.” Jiang-shushu spoke up at last. Wen-gugu gave him a look that would make even Jingyi shut up, and Jiang-shushu, horrified at the prospect of making eye contact with her, quailed under her gaze.

“Is Father a foreigner?” A-Yuan turned to Father at his side, who turned his golden eyes toward him.

“No,” Buzhi-shu said. “Sometimes Chinese people have different eye colors too, but it’s very rare.” He nodded smartly. “That’s why Wei-xiong was so head over heels for your father when they first met.”

“Stop calling him ‘Wei-xiong,’” Jiang-shushu grumbled. “You sound like a poetry book I’m forced to read at school. Also, you make me feel like I’m back in school.”

“And besides, everyone knows he fell in love with A-Zhan because they got into a fight when they first met, and they were unable to best each other,” Huzi-shushu said.

“No, it’s because they both spent all their spare time helping the beggars on the street,” Wen-gugu said. “They both have a hard-on for justice.”

“What’s ‘hard-on’?” A-Yuan asked.

“When you go really hard on something, like helping other people,” Wen-gugu said. Jiang-shushu’s entire body twitched.

Father just watched the whole exchange, sipping his dinner tea away, letting others judge for him.

“If Wei-di could, he’d hop up from the hospital bed right now and help save all those beggars from being forced out of the city,” Golden Gufu said, triggering a sad silence because he didn’t know any better. “But he can’t, of course,” he said, making it worse.

Father put down his teacup slowly, fingers much more delicate than the cheap porcelain they circled.

“Wei Ying was already traveling the countryside when we met,” he said. “I was still in university then.”

A-Yuan was not born yet, but he was about to be. I was trying to learn how to save the world and our country. Wei Ying was already on his feet, saving the world and our country.

Even at that age, A-Yuan knew what his father said without saying it. He had gotten used to reading different books — Father’s Silence, and Baba’s Silence.

“He loved my soup,” Jiang-gugu said forlornly, stirring it to summon up a happy memory of her brother. “He came often to drink it, even after...”

“After he met A-Zhan,” Huzi-shu said gruffly; he hated beating around the bush.

“I’m glad,” Jiang-gugu said, her low-volume being heard in the still room, “that A-Zhan finally got to taste this soup like A-Xian always wanted, even though he himself couldn’t see the first time you drank it. Or even now, you and A-Yuan drinking it.” Then, with fierceness, “He will see it himself.” She patted A-Yuan’s cousin again.

“Wei-xiong liked to do the impossible. He broke a window at school once,” Buzhi-shu said. “It was also awesome.”

“So much trouble.” Jiang-shushu snorted. He was the only man alive allowed to speak ill of Baba. “Always endangering the family name.”

“No.” Wen-shushu piped up, his meekness becoming something else as he gave Jiang-shushu eye contact. It did not make him squirm, but it made him...well, it made him something. Something more uncomfortable than when Wen-gugu looked Jiang-shushu in the eye, festive red clothes flaring. “He cared about his family more than anyone I knew.” Without looking away, he spooned up a clump of egg and tomato, and plopped it into A-Yuan’s bowl across the table.

Then, Father sighed.

Jiang-gugu took it up with her own, the two of them responding with breathy bird calls across the table. “A-Xian loved us.”

“He loved the world more,” Jiang-shushu sulked.

“It is not wrong to love your countryman,” Jiang-gugu chided softly. “Ba always said that, when he was running the university, and then the textile mills. ‘ Your family goes first, but you can always afford to help those society deems beneath you.’ That was why he let the poorest students go to school for free, and why he distributed free uniforms. And when it seemed like there was no way to do so — ”

“Wei Ying attempted the impossible,” Father said in tones of blue.

A-Yuan had never met his grandparents and never would, unless it was by the promise of Jiang-shushu someday taking him to that great big cemetery on the hill by a certain lotus lake.

“Yes,” Jiang-shushu said. “That’s why you’re here.” His voice was all shades of purple.

Well, Golden Gufu, for all his fluttery richness, was not going to save Father from Jiang-shushu...or the other way around. A-Yuan closed his hand over Father’s big wrist.

Huzi-shu lifted his glass, filled to the brim with Jiang-gugu’s best Scottish whi-si-key. “To Wei-di,” he said.

A-Yuan did not let go of Father’s wrist, since he was just going to drink his tea anyway, but he did raise his glass of juice. “And to my little cousin!”

He was rewarded with Jiang-gugu and Wen-gugu’s peals of laughter. Wen-shushu raised his glass, and so did the rest of them. “To A-Yuan and his new little cousin,” they echoed.

The rest of the night, A-Yuan would recall later, was Father’s agreeable “en”s, the clink of glasses and chopsticks on porcelain and amicable chatter.

“其实，” Sizhui would tell Jingyi at school the next week, “the Baba I know is just a name my father says.”

Chapter Text

Sizhui rode the train with him still, though nowadays the ride more and more often was on the wide seats of a sleek bullet train with western toilets, and the journey was three hours instead of six. (The first time, Sizhui had clung to those sleek seats, wide-eyed, and Father had stared with him.) The world whooshed by in grays and greens and blues so much faster, like Jiang-gugu had taken chopsticks to the road between Suzhou and Wuhan and whisked them around and around for scrambled eggs.

It was expensive, but Lan-bobo had come into some money and so had Golden Gufu. And Golden Gufu, who could not stomach the thought of a child having to suffer the horrors of a common train toilet, insisted that he pay for these fancy new rides.

“Will you go to Nanjing University?” Jiang-shushu had asked the last time they visited. “Or will you shoot for the stars and go to Beijing University? Qinghua is acceptable too.” He had thought he was being gentle by giving Sizhui a choice.

Father had never pressured Sizhui with this kind of talk. Sizhui spent this time crafting a careful plan to tell Jiang-shushu as preciously as he could that he did not care so long as he did well.

He could already see Jiang-shushu’s violet face as he snorted, barely stopped himself from saying, “Just like your baba,” before actually saying, “Always about doing the thing instead of what other people would think.” It was starting to sound more and more like a compliment.

“Ba.” Sizhui called Father that these days. Dad just flowed better, and, anyway, Ba was only a little different from saying Baba. That way, he still knew that he had two fathers, and that the other one was still alive and a person. “Do you think we should have gotten something for A-Ling this time around?”

“We are bringing oranges and fengzhen noodles,” Father said. In his hand, he held the bag. In Sizhui’s, plastic bottles clanked.

“Yes, yes, but I want to get A-Ling something. He’s my cousin,” Sizhui insisted. “Something special. Maybe a mango popsicle? No, but he wants something unique to Suzhou that we can’t get in Wuhan.” He lapsed into thought. Father shifted his arm slightly. Sizhui leaned away from the window and onto his side immediately, uncaring that people saw. And then. “Ba.”

“Mn?”

“I don’t think A-Ling makes friends at school. I don’t think he makes friends anywhere.” He would not have this conversation with most people, but Father was the shining definition of what confidentiality means. “When Jingyi and I are together, we spend weekends at each other’s homes. Every time Jiang-gugu calls and gives the phone to A-Ling, he’s at home. Alone.

“So I have to be a good friend, right?”

Father joined him in eyeing the Buddha’s head of a hilltop outside their window. Blink, and it was gone. “You are something unique to Suzhou that can’t be had in Wuhan,” he said finally.

Sizhui smiled despite himself, unbidden. He wasn’t sure what people meant when people said Father was cold. Father was hilarious.

The bullet train bulleted them into Wuhan in a blast of cloudy lakes and rare sunlight — and, now, a forest of skeletal beings: Tall skyscrapers being built for people to live in.

They were built to tower over them like a forest of ancient beings, like Ents from The Magic Ring. But even Sizhui was older than them, so really, how imposing could they really be?

As soon as they stepped outside, the usual mob of beggars came up to them; Father looked so well-to-do, so pale and pristine as though he worked a Shanghai skyscraper job, he certainly must have something more than bottles they could recycle for money.

But all they got were bottles. Sizhui gave them out with a smile he would indeed give a fancy man with a Shanghai skyscraper job.

And although they thanked him sweetly, some muttered, “A rich businessman like him, and he can only give us bottles? Che...”

Steering Sizhui by the wrist, Father took him through a row of roadside vendors on the way to the newer subways — the sleek light rails that rippled like water behind glass bars. He patiently waited while Sizhui picked out a grass dragonfly and butterfly, handed cash to the guffawing vendor with three teeth, and led him down to the subway just in time for the telling whistle of cold air through the glass doors, before the subway train was right in front of them. Sizhui watched the dragonfly’s ascent, and in his mind cut the world in half: The streets, so spit and smoke-slickened, and the line of the subway station, unyielding stone-white.

Once they had gotten off Line Two (Line Two! Sizhui remembered still waiting for Line One ), they circled parasol-carrying bikers trying to keep their skin fair in the steaming sun, looking for an opening to walk around them. And once they reached the right compound, the uniformed security man tipped his head towards them; he knew them on sight.

Sizhui may be just about a teenager and a badass now, but he knew to greet the old men who kept them safe. “Bao-an hao,” he said, dipping his head back.

They lugged the bag of oranges and fengzhen noodles up the narrow concrete stairs to the Jiang home and the lotus-shaped mirror at the door. Jiang-gugu opened the door, but the A-Ling got the first word in.

He was pretending not to run, hair swinging wildly as he greeted his Suzhou cousin. “A-Ling!”

When he was still learning to walk, he would fling himself into a squeal into Sizhui’s arms. Now, he...well, Sizhui knew not to initiate contact with someone who screeched to a halt in front of him, but he knew that Father sometimes hesitated when he wanted to be held too. He plucked up A-Ling and levitated him off the cool white floor for a moment before dropping him.

A-Ling shifted his eyes, shifted his hands and feet, before landing everything back on Sizhui. “Yuan-gege,” he said. He awkwardly patted Sizhui’s shoulder, as though he had not spent his whole life body-slamming into him for affection.

“Mn!” Sizhui acknowledged him with a nod and a happy hum, rummaging with a hand through his bag for the dragonfly. “I got this for you on the road.”

A-Ling snatched the little craft from his hands, eyes wide as the glassy marbles lining tiaoqi — which, Sizhui had learned at school, foreigners liked to call “Chinese checkers” even though they were made in far-off Germany — as he bounced it up and down in the air, willing it to soar over marbled clouds and under the whitewashed ceiling of heaven. Then it stuttered to a halt. “This is for little babies,” he said, chin set stubbornly in a way Jiang-gugu did it (when Sizhui had seen her argue with Father, and Father had caught him, and they had told him to go back to bed — ). Or was it from Golden Gufu? A-Ling was supposed to be a combination of his parents, after all.

Sizhui had to learn to negotiate, which was something Father did often at the market, and often won at. This was a test. He chewed his lip in thought. “Hm,” he hummed. “Is there a rule that says only little babies can play with it?”

A-Ling looked away, face pink lotuses. “No,” he said. “But...but it’s truth. These toys are just for little babies.”

“If it was just for little babies,” Sizhui pointed out, “would they sell it to me? I’m older than you. And also, my father was with me, and he’s a big person.”

A-Ling’s crumbled. “They didn’t tell you you were too old for it?” he asked hopefully.

Sizhui shook his head as fervently as he could, letting his hair swish. “Nope!”

A-Ling came to a little decision. He nodded. “Mm,” he said, puzzling his old lie out. “You’re older, and you act even older. You’re responsible. And you still like playing with dragonflies. So if I play with dragonflies, I will be like you.”

“...Exactly!” Sizhui said, only slightly as a question.

So they spent the rest of the morning like that. A-Ling taught Sizhui things this time — how to make the dragonfly buzz, and where exactly the invisible lotus pads were floating, and Sizhui taught him why dragonflies like to shimmer in the sun so much.

“Lunchtime,” Jiang-gugu called. “Don’t play anymore. You can play later.”

Sizhui gave one last buzz, long and satisfying, that landed the dragonfly on the tip of A-Ling’s earthquaking nose; A-Ling giggled to completion, and accepted Sizhui’s hand in his as he took him into the dining room.

Jiang-gugu gave them profoundly gluttonous heapings of congee today, thick and steaming white under green scallions.

“I tried to use the recipes your Nie-shushus gave me,” she said, wrinkling her nose only a little bit. “But the northern styles were too watery.”

Sizhui blew lightly on his spoonful. “All congee is good congee,” he said.

“Why do you always say such nice things?” A-Ling asked him later, as they walked ahead of their parents en route to Baba’s room.

“Like what?” Sizhui was genuinely confused.

“‘All congee is good congee,’” A-Ling pronounced, wrinkling his nose in confusion. “It’s like everything in the world is perfect to you. It’s like when adults lie about how they like the food, when they’re just being polite.”

“I’m not just being polite,” Sizhui said, after some consideration. “I just really like all congee.”

A-Ling grumped. He crossed his arms as he walked, stopping short of the curb as they waited for the light to change. Sizhui knew it was ill-advised to do so, but he traced a finger down the curbside railing, following the sharded patterns of rust.

“I just don’t understand,” said A-Ling, kicking a grain of concrete crumble from the sidewalk. “My mama always lets me do whatever I want so long as it’s not dangerous, but my baba thinks everything is dangerous. So do I do the thing or not? You only have one father, so you know how to act. Everything is butterflies and rabbits for you. The whole world is nice to you, because your father is nice to you.”

He must have seen the look on Sizhui’s face then, the thing that made them both stop.

A-Ling hesitated, said, “M-maybe that’s not right? Because you still have a baba. He just isn’t around to say things that are different from your father’s words.”

Sizhui could not argue with that, though in his mind, he thought of those distant, murmuring memories. Baba’s loudness reduced to a picture in his brain. Instead, the sound of Baba’s soft humming and gentle rasps of voice. The way he whispered to Sizhui and Father at night, while Father held them in his arms. (A-Ling was right, he was right, but it felt so wrong.) Sizhui’s throat dried on the technically, no thanks to the wet Wuhan heat.

“Sometimes,” he said, at Baba’s pitch the way he remembered it, “I think my baba helps me, even though he’s not around.”

A-Ling gave a self-conscious look around them, found only their parents, and patted Sizhui’s cheek.

The hospital, after all these weekends, had not changed. It was still the same perfect shade of white, the same glow of health. In class back in Suzhou, the English teacher had made them pronounce a word: “Hospitable.”

“Not to be confused with ‘hospital,’” she had explained, hand moving tap-tap over the chalkboard. “But you can remember it by thinking that a hospital is a safe place where you feel welcome. Hos-pi-ta-ball means being welcomed, like when your family brings you to a friend’s house. Chinese people value our mianzi more than anything — our face, how we look to the world.” She carved the English “save face” into the board, and above it: 面子。”Mianzi. It is the old word for lian, which means ‘face.’ In English, they have this idea too. ‘Save face’ means to be polite.”

Sizhui had bit his lip as Jingyi passed him the notes he had scribbled down far faster than Sizhui had. Jingyi was a roadrunner at taking notes, but Sizhui was the one who sat him down after class and quizzed him on what those notes meant; together, they were a powerhouse.

“When you enter your parents’ friend’s home, you greet them. ‘Shushu, Ayi.’ And then they invite you to sit and give you sandals to wear inside the house and give you water and fruit. That’s hospitality. And a hospital invites you in like that too.”

And another time, Jingyi had finished reading a depressing book above his level, finishing it by wailing at Sizhui, “She went to see her grandma, and she died in the hospital, and now she hates the hospital because it’s a place of death, and it has no character, and everything is so cold and cli-ni-cal — ”

Sizhui did not feel one way or the other about the hospital. It was just a passageway to Baba.

Baba’s face had not changed over the years, though Sizhui knew people did not age when you saw them often. His cheeks were still sunken, and his hair and nails had lengthened; Father and Jiang-gugu would probably cut them soon, tending to him the way they tended to a living person or a doll.

He had thought, many times now, of how movie-like it would be if Baba suddenly opened his eyes to catch his family staring at him. It could be any day now.

“A-Xian,” Jiang-gugu greeted, as she always did, fingers dancing against each other as though they were by the lake, peeling lotus seeds. “Look who’s come to see you.”

A-Ling did not know how to approach an alive man. He took steps forward and stumbled the last few to Baba’s side, Sizhui guiding him by the elbow without touching; Father had taught him, after all, that one always walked on one’s own feet, and you never forced yourself on anyone.

“Why don’t you say hi to your dajiu?” Jiang-gugu suggested.

And A-Ling had no path forward but to obey. “Dajiu,” he greeted, peering over the side. Sizhui, unbidden, picked him up by the waist to help him see better, and A-Ling went limp into his hold by habit.

A-Ling! Baba would say, any day now. Don’t frown so much! Your face is beautiful, and looks like your mother’s. His eyes would spring open, any moment now.

He breathed softly into his tubes, those words traveling through pipework.

“Baba.” Sizhui always squeaked this, even when his voice was strong. Just as this heart of a home, accessed through the valve of a hospital, had housed his baba in a time capsule for years, so too was Sizhui unchanged when he came. Sizhui was learning English, and could speak long formal sentences in proper Mandarin; but when he came to Baba’s little hearth in his heart, and stood by his warm ashes, he spoke with a little babble, and a Suzhou spring in the step of his Wuhan dialect. Jiang-gugu had made sure he lost nothing of Wei Ying, not even his words. “Look, it’s A-Ling. He’s frowning again, just like his baba. But his face is beautiful, and it looks like his mama’s.”

Jiang-gugu laughed loud enough to open a sun up in the room. “A-Xian, look how thoughtful your son is,” she said.

At that moment, Sizhui realized, Jiang-shushu had never called him Baba’s son.

“Wei Ying.”

Father came like thunder. He barely twitched a finger, and yet with a rumble and a motion he was stroking Baba’s hand again, pitting lines into his hair. “Wei Ying.”

There was something different about the way Father spoke today. When Jiang-gugu led Sizhui and A-Ling away, A-Ling whispered to him, “I wonder what he does in there all day?”

Yes...what did he do in there that could occupy a day? Sizhui asked Jiang-gugu if he could go to the bathroom, said he was a big boy now and could ask a nurse to help him. He followed the nurse — the passageway coiled, bent, unfamiliar, odd terrain. When the nurse had helped him, he assured her he could indeed find his own way back, waited for her to leave, and then looked for Baba’s room.

Like a compass pointing north, he found it, just in time to slip in after another nurse; no one ever thought to look down, and he hid behind her skirt, waiting until her legs would be hidden from Father’s view by the bed, and snuck his way behind the curtain. How he would escape could be an idea that came later.

The nurse adjusted something on Baba, then left. Finally, Sizhui was left with silence.

He was used to Father’s long silences, how they spoke endlessly and without pause, but he was not sure how long he was there until Father said, “Wei Ying. Come back to me.

“I raised Wen Yuan. He has gotten big, and he still speaks Wuhan dialect for you. He is in middle school now. He has a friend, Lan Jingyi, who acts like you when you were younger.” He paused. “Jiang Cheng cares about Wen Yuan too” — begrudgingly — “and he plays with your sister’s son. He is a generous child. Your adopted parents are gone now, but that hasn’t stopped your brother and sister from raising a loving family. They accept us. They miss you. Come back, and I promise I will never let Jiang Cheng hurt you again. I will hold your hand in the street, even if people stare. The world has changed so much. But even if it stopped changing, I would still hold your hand.”

And then, more quietly, echoing through the heart — “I have heard that my father has passed too. I will wait for you. I will wait until there is no way to keep either of us alive.”

Sizhui did the calculations in his head. His grandfather was dead? He had never met the man. He did not even know he had one.

He did not dare breathe too loudly or shift a whisker from his space behind the curtain. But as Father continued, Sizhui had to bite down on his lip to stop himself from following him suit.

For Father was crying.

“Do you know,” Father said, “that our country has hosted the Beijing Olympics? All of the world is now looking at our country. They have built huge structures in Beijing, and the world knows us for our glory, not our poverty.

“But,” he said, forlornly, bitterly, “they are forcing the poor out of the cities. Soon, there will be no beggars on the streets. Beijing and Shanghai are purging them out to look pretty for foreigners. You would not let the poor suffer like this. I will help them access Internet and healthcare in the countryside. I will help them fight in court to have space in the new apartments to live in. I will protect their old homes, too, from being bulldozed, and pay to have running water built into them. Wei Ying” — even in the deepest heart, Father tried to stifle sobs — “come back. Your family will accept you. I will not forget you.”

Sizhui took the next nurse’s visit to slip out the door, her little shadow, and when Jiang-gugu finally found him — scolding him, searching for him in the lobby with A-Ling in her hand — he did not lie, just twist the truth. “I got a little lost,” he said.

“For thirty whole minutes?” Jiang-gugu did not believe him. But all she said was, “A-Yuan, I’m afraid we’ll have to go straight home now. We can’t lose you again.”

“Nnnnnooooooooo!” A-Ling wailed. When Jiang-gugu had put them both down, he gave Sizhui a secret wink.

Sizhui did not have it in himself to talk much on the way back. He fluttered his dragonfly and buzzed at A-Ling, and pondered that no, Baba would never wake any day now.

Sizhui’s school life took up more time than home life, so there was never an opportunity to go to work with Father as he got older. This weekend, Father was going to the rice paddies surrounding Wuhan; it was as good a chance as any.

“Just us,” he said firmly, and Sizhui nodded. That meant no suggesting that they bring along A-Ling, no matter how much he wanted to.

“Besides,” Sizhui told A-Ling, “we’re going to the lake the next time I come, so we can see the lotuses before things start getting cold again.”

A-Ling pouted and put his hand on Sizhui’s cheek; something Jiang-gugu once told him about stopping people from leaving. “Bring me a sprout back?” he asked hopefully.

“Yes, but a sprout?”

“So I can make a butterfly of my own.”

Sizhui was still thinking about it as he boarded the bus with Father. He was using it to distract from his actual thoughts.

But the bus was empty, and eventually Sizhui led Father by the hand to the back so they could have privacy. Father didn’t argue; Father never argued. He merely raised an eyebrow as he followed him.

Sizhui hunkered down in the back, then decided to burrow into Father’s side. It was too hard. Thinking of A-Ling just made him think of Jiang-shushu bitching at A-Ling and Sizhui both about how, no, no they could not stop studying, think about the opportunity you have to go to a good college, and even though Jiang-gugu always let them stop when she came home, Sizhui couldn’t shake the thought of just how bitchy his beloved, hotheaded Jiang-shushu was.

“Ba,” he said, “where did you and Baba get me from?”

A sharp and sudden gust of breath. “Wen Qing and Wen Ning told you,” he said.

Sizhui shook his head, raising it so he could read Father’s face. He did not know how to feel when he saw it was as full of words as Jiang-shushu’s.

“They told me,” Sizhui said, “that I was once a Wen. That’s why I still have the name. But I’m a Lan family boy now. And they told me that when teachers ask me about my mother, that’s just because they don’t know any better.”

Sizhui was five-year-old Wen Yuan, freshly plucked from Baba’s comatose arms, when he learned the simple word: 情。The left radical is the meaning: 心, the human heart that feels. The part to the right — the 青 — gives the heart a voice: it is pronounced qing. Qing, the relationship between hearts. “Qing,” his teacher had said in a heavily-approved Mandarin accent scratched bare of dialect. “Your mother and father have qing.”

Jingyi had raised his hand. “What about Sizhui’s parents?” he said. “Sizhui has a father and a father.”

Sizhui was only now understanding that before 2001, the ensuing questions his teachers took him aside to ask, the way the family flitted to Suzhou from all corners of China for a change, was to protect Father because Baba could not — protect him, because homosexuality according to their country was a mental disorder.

He had learned a new poem there, especially spun for him into four versions by his Wen aunt and uncle, Jiang-gugu, and Lan-bobo: “Sizhui, Sizhui, our Sizhui. Our country is so beautiful. We are all one family. But even family can be wrong, and hurt you.”

It had never felt right to repeat it as a protest on the rare occasion Father forbade him from something he wanted, and surprisingly, Jingyi agreed.

“That’s too important,” five-year-old Jingyi had said, playing with him on a sunny Saturday afternoon. He nodded sagely to himself.

Sizhui understood now. He understood that the world isn’t just mothers and fathers who raise children, but it likes to pretend it is.

“They told me that I was originally from their family,” said Sizhui. “So now I’m with you and Baba.”

Father closed his eyes in that way Lan-bobo did when he was thinking deeply, trying to take a break from this world before coming back to fix it. When he opened them again, Sizhui’s fingers had circled his wrist.

If Father decided he was somehow not old enough or ready enough to hear this, or if Father didn’t want him to know, then he would tell him that they did not need to speak of this. As it was, he calculated his heart, saw the familial kind of qing between himself and his son, and said, “Your birth parents already had two children when you were born, because the one-child policy allows rural families like them to have two. They could not afford to pay the fine the government charges to acknowledge a third child. Your baba was in their community at the time, helping to teach at the local school.

“When he learned they were the distant cousins of his friends, Wen Ning and Wen Qing — your gugu and shushu — he found a solution. He did not have much of his own money.” Sizhui nodded. He had always known Baba was tragically poor. “He did not have enough to pay for the fine himself. But because they could not pay, that meant you would not have had a hukou — you would not have been documented as a Chinese citizen, and thus not acknowledged as a person. Without a hukou, you do not exist in the eye of our country. You would have not been able to go to school, or grow up with opportunities. So your birth parents offered to sell you to your baba.”

Sold. Like a radish. Sold. Like a simple meal. Sold. Like a roadside weave of grass.

If Sizhui looked carefully, he could note the squiggle in the words, read at least one sentence on Father’s face — pride. “Wei Ying took you as his own. He did not have enough money for your hukou, but he had enough to pay your parents and take you in. He had enough money left to convince the officials into registering you through your Wen aunt and uncle. It was the last of all his savings, and he emptied his bank account for it. And he found a way to give you your hukou.”

Blurry memories, of the marble floor of Wen-shushu and Wen-gugu’s home in Nanjing, Baba’s laughing bare feet. Was Sizhui making them up to fit this narrative, or had this narrative already already been holding onto them, waiting for him to remember?

“I finally moved in with your baba soon after that,” said Father. “From then on, you were our child.”

Sizhui burrowed his nose into Father’s sleeve; he had taken quite a lesson from this audiovisual narrative, and would like to rest before he did his homework.

“Thank you,” was all he could think to muffle.

“Sizhui,” said Father, “we are your fathers. There is nothing to thank.”

All in all, Wuhan was still bigger than Suzhou, no matter how much Sizhui familiarized himself with the city. Meanwhile, Suzhou shrank and shrank, because after school, Sizhui and Jingyi would walk down the same streets, thinking about pranking the new Ouyang kid.

But there was a nice place in the old city of Suzhou, where the canals still ran under curved roofs and preserved buildings — buildings Father insisted were well-preserved, but deserved to still be lived in and loved instead of being prettied up for tourism — and he could avoid the tour buses. In a moment of boldness, he had ducked himself under a well-placed bridge. No one could see him there, not even beggars, but he could see all the water surrounding him. He could imagine he was floating.

On the wide-open paddy spreading out around him, he felt the same.

“I can teach your son if you want,” laughed an old farmer in heavy Wuhan accent. After all these years, Baba still conducted his business in Mandarin, but he had no problem understanding when someone’s speech was more dialect than standard. “Give him something to do. Cede him to me for the day, our good Hanguang-jun. Maybe you’ll call out the sun today.”

Because the air pollution blowing from Beijing was particularly strong today. But everywhere Father went, despite the smog, the sun followed. It was only a matter of time. Hanguang-jun, the country people would tease him. You are our jianghu savior.

“I would like to observe how you plant the rice,” responded Sizhui in Wuhan dialect. The farmer nearly jumped out of his skin, face splitting wide like a dissected cloud.

“You speak better Wuhanese than our esteemed Hanguang-jun here!” he said jovially, a hand on his shoulder.

“Our family is part Wuhan too,” Sizhui said loyally.

“Is it, now? Then you’d better watch us plant the rice, xiao peng you.”

Sizhui looked to his father for assent; Father nodded, small as a grain of rice. And off he went with the nice farmer.

For the rest of the day, he planted. Baba had been partial to potatoes and Wen-gugu to radishes, Sizhui had been told. He imagined the dry northern soil to be nothing like the muck of Wuhan’s wetlands; but still, as he tramped through knee-deep water, digging his hands under to plant the rice paddy, he thought, This is farmer’s work. This is hard work, in the good earth, and Baba did all he could to make things grow.

It was only when his back started aching—he supposed this was how it felt to be Jiang-shushu when he started complaining about how he had to carry this whole family on my back— that Sizhui realized how unfit his soft hands were for the task.

Baba was fifteen when he met Father, right?

Sizhui had not meant to count the years, but he realized now that when he asked himself how close he was to that age, it took no mental math to think, Two. You have two years until you reach the age Baba met Father.

Two years is, objectively, a long time, he reasoned, but today he was closer to Baba’s age from back then than he ever was before.

Two years. Two hands. Sizhui did not stop planting — he felt that, if Baba had spent all his happy golden 花样年华 years doing this, then it was something noble to be taking up at such a young age — two whole years, away from the age Baba started.

“Xiao Zhui.” The farmer man was looking at him quizzically, brown skin tangled into itself like a leaf, delicately freckled by sun and age. “I’ve never seen someone your age last this long on the field without stopping,” he remarked. “You’re already a real nanzi han. Why don’t you go rest for a bit, haizi?”

Sizhui thought and thought, but the circle always came back. “No thank you,” he said politely. “I want to work.”

As he worked, the mud clung to him, the way it is supposed to to make lotuses grow. That was one of the only things Sizhui remembered from Jiang-shushu’s rants about family and responsibility and 明知不可为而为之 and work and obligation and performing the impossible, and also actually doing the impossible, and somehow he knew it was about Baba. He knew it was about how Baba swam through the muck with gusto in a smile — that Baba, the very one sleeping in a tunnel of white tubes — and how Jiang-shushu stayed in place, fighting the same current he had made himself.

Sizhui had learned in school what exactly it is about disasters that kill people. Clinically, with words on paper, and the voice of his science teacher, he had learned — when there is a fire, the invisible oxygen is sucked out of the gluttonous flames, leaving humans to die. When there is a hurricane, it is not the wind that kills, but rather the things it slams human bodies into. When there is a flood, Sizhui could swim and swim with all the strength Jiang-gugu had taught him in the public pools around Wuhan (and Father too, in the very rare clean canals left in Suzhou), but in the end, he could not outfly the current...not until it had broken him against a tree or pressed him down long enough that he could not even look for oxygen anymore.

There are always things in this world stronger than you, and Jiang-shushu had been caught in the current, been dragged by the lung down from the oxygen, stuck with no choice but to claw at water or air: Things that don’t respond.

So, it was not Jiang-shushu’s fault that he was stuck in the mud thrashing, without any purpose but an unpleasantness left over by his parents. Jiang-shushu’s parents — Baba’s adoptive aunt and uncle — must have loved Jiang-shushu very much to have kept him alive when their country was so poor. But. But.

Sizhui noticed something about his classmates. When they talked about their parents, they talked about the beatings they had doled out when they came home with bad grades, or came home with too much mud on their clothes. Father never hit him.

“It’s just the way it is,” Lan Jingyi had said with a shrug. His own parents only really beat him when he was very troublesome, but even then, it was a light slap.

And shit, Jiang-shushu always threatened to break Jin Ling’s legs, but he was about as capable of hitting a person as he was at greeting Wen-gugu without obviously spazzing out on the inside. But Jiang-shushu still had that same...anger? Sadness? That drove so many parents to do those things. Father had the sadness too, and so did Jiang-gugu, like they were friends with someone invisible who made them sad and angry and sucked the air out of their lungs when they were particularly thoughtful towards this friend. But they didn’t react to it like his classmates’ parents did. They didn’t beat their children. They...stared out the window and fed Sizhui, like Jiang-gugu. They ranted and ranted about family responsibility that, frankly, they didn’t have to uphold, except Jiang-shushu obviously did it because was mad at Baba for apparently not doing so. And Father turned it into gentleness. Into never raising a hand against Sizhui, into always opening his arms when Sizhui needed to fall backwards, into spinning that friend in dizzy circles until that angry-sad friend was the one out of breath, and put their constant contagious angry-sad to on pause. Until they collapsed in a heap of kindness.

They would always come back. But then, Father would be here, spinning his grown-up hurt into kindness again.

He never said Sizhui would be punished for wrongdoing. He merely asked him what he thought wrongdoing was.

So what did Baba do that was so wrong that Jiang-shushu was still friends with his particular angry-sad friend all these years? Was this not hard and faithful work, digging through farmer’s fields for their country? The ache had built in Sizhui’s palms, but he did not stop. Jiang-shushu never rested, never stopped, he had no fucking chill when he went to work — that was family duty, the right thing to do, according to Jiang-shushu — and this work that Baba did really was hurting Sizhui’s back non-stop, so what part of this wasn’t enough for Baba and Jiang-shushu’s shared family duty?

“Xiao Zhui,” the farmer said, surprised. He had returned like a leaf draped over his shoulder, suddenly dropped from the trees. “Your hands are shaking, haizi. Go sit down.”

Oh, so they were. Interesting. Bodies tend to change from overwork, so suppose Sizhui was one step closer to being an adult.

“Xiao Zhui, haizi,” the farmer urged. “Go take a break. Drink some water, ah?”

Sizhui hesitated. “But,” he said.

“The work will still be here when you’re back, haizi, aiya,” said the farmer. “We had to work like this when we were your age, but we didn’t want to. And you don’t have to. You should go and have your fun while you still have a body that can jump around.”

Sizhui thought of Baba, mouth open to trumpet laughs.

“Thank you,” he said to the farmer.

If Father was friends with anger and sadness, then he was a good friend indeed. Because the anger and sadness did not stop him from being safe and peaceful and kind. And Sizhui — although apparently too old to do so now — slept in the crook of his arm on the bus ride home, exhausted from his excursion in the sun.

Sizhui brought a sprout back to A-Ling. He knew lotuses — all of the Jiang children did, and that included Sizhui, Jing-gugu made sure of it — so when he uprooted that lotus stem, he took its root with him, and let the leaves hang from the mouth of his bottle while the roots sucked greedily at the water inside. A lotus leaf, plucked alone, dries out in mere minutes.

Although Sizhui was technically being punished for running off in the hospital and allegedly giving Jiang-gugu a heart attack — allegedly, as Jiang-shushu was the one who screeched about it when they got home and he hadn’t even been there — she insisted Jiang-shushu bring him and A-Ling out for one last shopping romp.

“A-Cheng trusts you to take care of the home while he’s gone,” Jiang-gugu said, smiling so sweetly across the table at Father that it must’ve given him diabetes.

Father, tired from a long day of tramping the fields, did not even look up from sagely contemplating his hot corn juice. “Mn.”

But as the door swung shut behind them, and Jiang-shushu led his two bunnies after him, Sizhui glanced back.

Slowly, Jiang-gugu shrugged her sweater back on, as though the Wuhan heat did not stifle her enough. Father’s hand twitched as though he wanted to help her, but felt he had no place to.

“Jin Zixuan, does he know — ” And the metal door swung Father’s sound away, resolved it in a clang that echoed in the stairwell.

A-Ling seemed not to notice anything. He hung onto Jiang-shushu’s hand, and Sizhui picked up the other, because while Jiang-shushu never offered, Sizhui knew it was always open for him.

“A-Ling, A-Ling,” Sizhui said, trying to lift the tension, “we’re going to take the underpass to go to the mall today. Aren’t we, Jiang-shushu?” He gave Jiang-shushu’s hand an experimental swing. Jiang-shushu’s lip twitched, impossibly fond.

“You can scream as loud as you want once you get down there,” he replied, “just don’t embarrass me.”

“That’s dumb, Jiujiu,” A-Ling said. “You’re always embarrassed by us. What’s the use of warning us?”

Jiang-shushu huffed, but then a car swerved around, and without slowing down, began to honk at them; it had every intention of running them over for being in its way. When this happened with Jiang-gugu, she did not change her pace even a little, but did push A-Ling and Sizhui ahead of her so they would not feel the full brunt of her unbothered walk. When it came to Jiang-shushu...well...

“What the FUCK,” he snapped at the car, “do you think you’re DOING?” His hand tightened around Sizhui’s, as though ready to throw him onto the safety of the curb. The car, naturally, responded by speeding up. Jiang Cheng’s pace never broke, whether into a cantor or a trot. “王八蛋，我干你娘，who raised you?!”

He was still swearing in Wuhanese when the car clipped past, just barely cutting it close at Jiang-shushu’s person. The wind exploded from Jiang-shushu’s vivid purple clothes, making him look like a particularly soft — but still angry — firework flower. The ring on his finger flashed, and so did his eyes.

“Son of a bitch, 干么事撒，” he muttered, still in dialect. Wuhan people speak with so much feeling.

“You’re quite well-tempered today, Shushu,” Sizhui complimented.

Jiang-shushu growled. Ah. There it is.

“Nevermind,” A-Ling whispered, not whispering at all. Jiang-shushu did not seem to hear. A-Ling smiled at his own slippery-footedness, skipping straight through a puddle.

“A- Ling,” Jiang-shushu snapped. “You’ll get your clothes dirty, don’t do that.”

Jiang-shushu’s admonishment streaked way past the sudden din of the crowd around them. The street was broad, but the people were many. Wuhanese is a strange dialect. It slips right by you, like silk. And when you turn around, it’s been struck by many needles that all shatter. In Suzhou — once called Gusu — Sizhui’s father and uncle conversed in gentle snaps of dialect. In Wuhan, the ebb and flow could lash straight into a fight. Sizhui imagined Jiang-shushu whipping around, the flash of his ring like purple lightning through gentle rain.

So, while the crowds closed in on them, Sizhui and A-Ling only heard Jiang-shushu, and he them.

The broad, busy streets with cars that were always speeding were more present in Wuhan than Suzhou, especially in the quiet part of Suzhou Sizhui lived in (right by the mountain, where he could see the city; all he had to do was climb). The mouth of the tunnel led them underground, where they could cross those broad roads without fear of traffic...or another angry confrontation with Jiang-shushu.

Despite the changes, there was still a substantial line of vendors and buskers that gauntleted the underground trail. The vendors were quiet, calling like old ladies — because so many of them were — with age-rough voices if they would like to buy the light-up tuoluo or dancing electric puppies. The buskers seemed to be spinning chocolate through those guitars, if chocolate were a sound — it echoed through the fabric of the underpass, as encompassing as thread.

Sizhui just could not help being drawn to those guitars; it brought a memory to him, one that he could not remember. But A-Ling was drawn to something else.

“Jiujiu, Jiujiu. Look at those poor puppies. We have to adopt them all.”

Jiang-shushu’s eyes softened: There they were. A round old lady sitting cross-legged at the wall. A blanket in front of her, placed just so. Three little puppies the size of Sizhui’s hand.

But adults always have to say no first. “That old lady may as well treat them right,” Jiang-shushu said.

Sizhui was suddenly swarmed by a vision of Jiang-shushu facing Father, and Father slowly driving him to madness just by ignoring him.

“Pleeeeeeease?” A-Ling squeaked. “We can take care of them better.”

“Yes, Jiang-shushu, please.” Sizhui looked up. Jiang-shushu’s chin was scrunched down, as though he was trying his very hardest to keep himself contained.

He was a bottle of knockoff Sprite, and Sizhui just had to help A-Ling out here. Help him shake Biang-shushu.

Jiang-shushu muttered, “Ask me for a puppy again, and I’ll take it home and turn it into dog soup.”

“The one with the flowered coat looks like she could use a good name, like ‘Princess’ or ‘Jasmine,’” Sizhui suggested. 

Jiang-shushu kneeled at the side of the old woman. “A-Po,” he asked, “how much for all three?”

She looked skeptical, but did not question it. “Nine hundred kuai,” she said.

Jiang-shushu kneeled harder. “A-Po,” he said, “I’m taking all three off your hands. Wouldn’t you do this humble child a kindness and give him a discount? Five hundred.”

The woman looked affronted. It is one thing to haggle. It is another to do so with a kind-looking old lady. “I am not overcharging you,” she said.

“Well, I could have said four hundred,” Jiang-shushu said, trying to be charming, but he just was too blunt. “I was just thinking, that’s very rude.”

Jiang-shushu’s strength was bluntness, not charisma. A-Ling made a longing noise and reached out to the puppies. The one with the flowered coat licked his finger. Its tongue was the petal off a pansy — that was how small it was.

At that moment, someone called, “POLICE.”

“POLICE, POLICE,” the call went off. A scream of a thousand voices, and then — 

Sizhui was already walking beside the a-po, but A-Ling’s eyes were spinning. A-Ling was still new to the world, after all. If Sizhui weren’t busy keeping an eye on the a-po, he would have rewound a few seconds and slowed down the scene so A-Ling could see what exactly had happened:

Street vendors were illegal. By being here, they risked fines and arrest. When the police approached, the cry went out, and these well-prepared vendors wrapped their whole lives into their arms as they walked down the tunnel like no one’s business. They would linger here, of course, before changing location again.

The a-po had immediately seized the corners of the blanket and rolled the puppies into the bundle, slinging it over her shoulder like it was full of yams.

But A-Ling sniffled. “I heard the doggy squeak,” he whispered, heartbroken.

Ah. So he had noticed.

Although the amount of people in the tunnel had not changed, a hush fell over it. The police — faceless in the face, crisped in blue paper — walked their not-march walk down the trail with nary a crinkle. Sizhui knew not to stare at the man whose fanny pack was bulging with light-up clip-on roller skates or the suitcase he knew to be full of grilled skewers; he was a lot of things, but Father and Baba didn’t raise a snitch.

The blues, blue like Father, scraped past Sizhui’s peripheral. He leaned into the a-po’s side, tugging on Jiang-shushu’s sleeve while he was at it. “Six hundred eighty,” he whispered. “Eight is a good number, Popo, and all you have to do is give us this bag.” He twitched a hand at the too-still bundle.

The woman ignored them. Pursed her lips. Had ignored them out of necessity, because a nod ensued.

As the blue police marched by with Father’s posture, Jiang-shushu — covetly, spyingly — exchanged a pink paper bundle for the heavy sack of yams.

Father lifted his head at the pace of a wrinkly tortoise, as though he knew.

“Please don’t blame me, Jie,” Jiang-shushu said tiredly. “I tried. And A-Ling is going to be responsible for them, aren’t you, A-Ling?”

“Yes, Jiujiu!” A-Ling bulleted through the apartment door, nearly tripping over his own shoes. Even if he did fall, that bundle was hugged tight to his chest. Sizhui caught him and the bundle both.

Slowly, Jiang-gugu rose from her seat. It didn’t make much difference — she took over the room either way.

A-Ling puffed his chest out like he wished it were too big for him. All of Golden Gufu’s gusto, and a little bit more fearlessness. He pranced forward like a peacock.

Sizhui stayed a step behind him as A-Ling reluctantly unburdened himself of the swaddling, presenting it to his mother and uncle with a flourish.

“Da-dada-dang!” Sizhui said, as Jin Ling pulled back the blanket the way Jiang-gugu pulled back the cover of a steamy soup pot.

Jiang-gugu gasped.

The squirming lumps huddled close, shivering.

She smiled, looked A-Ling in the eye as he babbled about the origin story of how these dogs came to be in this apartment. When he was done, she nodded, stroking the side of his head with a hand that barely stirred his hair. “Our A-Ling is compassionate and a lifesaver,” she said. “Three little dogs...that’s a lot of lives.”

A name lingered in the air. Sizhui opened his mouth, because he could taste it.

“I didn’t know if they were going to go to good homes or end up on the streets,” A-Ling admitted, in front of everyone. “We can take care of them, right?”

“Right,” Jiang-gugu said. Her eyes flashed, but not in the way Jiang-shushu’s did. His emotions came sharp, hers came soft. Like she thought a little before allowing herself to feel it. “We can’t save everyone, though, A-Ling,” she cooed softly, “so for today, you’ve done enough. And,” at Jiang-shushu, “we should consider giving two of those dogs away. Perhaps Wen Qing would like one. Taking care of a dog is like taking care of a child, A-Ling, but I promise you that the other two will find good homes.”

A-Ling protested, “Mama — !”

“Wen-ayi is competent,” Jiang-shushu said, flitting in. He scooped up an ice cream ball of fluff with one hand, examining the squirming puppy. “They’ll be happy, A-Ling.”

He pouted and blew out his cheeks, but finally, he nodded.

“We could totally take care of three more kids,” he mumbled. Jiang-gugu just focused on him.

Even Father came to kneel by them as they cuddled the three lives in their palms. Sizhui tried to think of the thoughts and emotions he was holding in his hands right now, unspoken but existent, things he would never know but existed regardless of him knowing.

“Can we take one in too, Ba?” he asked Father, thinking, He wouldn’t deny me this. I’ll just have to learn to take care of it. I’ll do my best.

Father hesitated.

Was this what no sounded like coming out of Father? Sizhui was not equipped for Father’s parted lips or the clench in his face. Like he wanted to say no, but couldn’t.

“No dogs in our home,” he whispered.

A rush overwhelmed Sizhui, as though he were swimming and his Father had let go of him, let go of him to drown. What was wrong with him? Why was this so upsetting? Sizhui listened to Father all the time. Father knew what was best, and even when Sizhui was punished, he found ways to forgive Father afterward.

“Why not?” Sizhui demanded. Beside him, A-Ling stiffened. Sizhui was conscious of how cold and solid the marble floor was against his feet. His voice had scarcely changed an iota, but he could feel his own stillness, his own reproachfulness. “Where else are they going to go?

“Ba, you took me in when I didn’t have anyone else to. Why can’t we take them in? We have space in our apartment.” His voice became less and less steady, a parkside swing slowly unscrewing itself. Isn’t it the right thing to do?

But Father just shook his head, and Sizhui — Sizhui wasn’t a spoiled child, and he didn’t do things like throw tantrums or stamp his foot, so he planted his feet more firmly and tried to figure out WHY he was so bothered by this.

Well, for one. It was because Father was bothered.

Father didn’t look disapproving, the way he did around Jiang-shushu. He just looked.

Scared.

It was Jiang-gugu who swooped in. That felt wrong, too. Jiang-gugu always solved problems. It didn’t feel right that one person should do so much of the work when all else failed. But when Sizhui searched her for something — anything — all he saw was the way she looked at Father. Always some sort of mutual understanding, a mutual grief, two sides of a crevasse staring at each other while they guarded the valley.

“A-Yuan,” she said, quietly. “I promise you, we will find these dogs good homes.”

But Sizhui still didn’t understand. If A-Ling could take one in, why couldn’t he take in another?

Father finally gave into Jiang-gugu’s gentleness. He gave Sizhui a look, called an apology.

Father stared and stared, until he became the clock in the wall. Except Sizhui wasn’t sure if it was him who was the clock or Sizhui. Jin Ling, finally, asked for a chime by tugging on Sizhui’s sleeve.

Sizhui jolted. He had been so busy tasting the air.

Father rose.

“Ba,” Sizhui whispered.

Father's gaze changed into a promise. “We will find the dogs good homes,” he said. “I will not let them onto the streets. We will not abandon them. Every life matters.”

Eventually, as he finished this sentence, he was looking over Sizhui’s shoulder. Sizhui did not need to follow to know it was at Jiang-shushu.

An attack.

“Dinner.” Jiang-gugu’s finger tapped Sizhui’s other side, the one not occupied by A-Ling.

Jiang-shushu stopped fighting Father. “Yes,” he said. “Bed.”

“Dinner,” Father corrected dryly. But Sizhui was already on his way into the room he shared with A-Ling. “Sizhui!” He did not look back. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to onlook Father’s battles anymore.

Punishment is an obligation, not a mode of suffering. Sizhui decided his particularly heinous but righteous crime deserved something different. “No dinner for me,” he told Jiang-gugu, when she called him to the table later that night.

“Whyever not? You've been out all day,” she scolded. “No neglecting dinner.”

“I — ” Jiang-gugu tilted her head. It felt wrong to refuse her, but discipline was important too. Sizhui planted a foot. “In our home in Suzhou, when we do something like speak up against an adult or break a rule, we have to do a punishment,” he said. Jiang-gugu knew that already, but it bore repeating. “Not just at school. When I don’t do homework or sneak out at a weird hour or break curfew, Father has me copy lines. So, if I did something like argue with Father today, then I should skip dinner. Some people at my school get that punishment from their parents when they don’t do well on tests. The punishment should fit the crime,” he explained.

Jiang-gugu raised an eyebrow, an elegant way to cover up that she was at a loss for words.

Then she grinned, so sharply that Sizhui opened his mouth to search for something in the air again. “Is that so?” She lowered herself to his level, a twinkle in her eye. “You didn’t seem that angry at all. Our Sizhui is so gentle, even when he’s standing up to his own father.”

He could not stand the way she perched her chin upon the bridge of her wrist. But he only planted his eyes for a millisecond on the marble floor — a sheet of snow — between them. “In our household in Suzhou,” he said, “we don’t talk very loudly or...emotionally.” Angrily, he revised.

“So you're being a good child and practicing your filial duty?”

Yes! He was glad she understood. Except she actually didn’t? Why was she laughing?

“Well,” she said. “You’re in my home, practicing the Jiang family rules. We have a long tradition all the way from Yunmeng town of taking care of our children. So, why don’t you tell your father that? I’m sure we can compromise with something.”

Compromise?

“Okay,” Sizhui said. “But Lan family rules exist outside of Gusu too.”

“You get to claim guest rights,” Jiang-gugu suggested. “I believe one of your Lan family home rules is to ‘respect all guests,’ right? So if you don’t eat well under my roof, I would be disrespecting you. And I’d feel hurt. Don’t worry your gugu like that.”

She was inviting him to play. Sizhui never turned down an invitation to play. “All right,” he agreed, “but gugu, you should maybe choose another coping mechanism. You worry a lot.”

Jiang-gugu split the air open with her laughter; it carried him by the hand back to the dining room, where A-Ling had dutifully set the table and Golden Gufu had joined them. He must have come home while Sizhui was trying to punish himself in his room.

“A-Zhan,” Jiang-gugu said. “Sizhui here is a guest of the Jiang family. Isn’t it a rule amongst your Lan family members that you never dishonor or disrespect your guests?” DisHONor, DIsresPECt, pronounced exactly that way.

Father eyed her warily. He didn’t want to admit that he liked her games. “Yes,” he said.

“Then Sizhui is not to receive any sort of punishment for being a good and kind boy,” she proclaimed with the grandness of Chairman Hu Jintao addressing his people from the Gu Gong in Beijing.

“?” said Golden Gufu's silence. Surely, he must have realized something was amiss by the papery quality of Father’s face — ? Oh right. This was Golden Gufu they were talking about.

Jiang-shushu filled him in. “Those three dogs” — he pointed at the inconspicuous pile of ill-disguised laundry A-Ling and Sizhui had built by the radiator — “Sizhui wanted to take them home to Suzhou with him.”

“?” Golden Gufu said some more.

“Into their home,” Jiang-shushu elaborated.

Golden Gufu calibrated like the loading screen of Happy Farm. And then...

“!” he seemed to say.

Sizhui did not understand.

But as it turned out, he was famished and already wondering if baby puppies could eat spicy food. He drank his soup in his seat between A-Ling and Father. Father put a spicy heaping of fish into his plate. Sizhui let his soup spoon sink through it. Cleaving fish flesh like a soft tree for timber. But it was not in half. He gave the larger bit to A-Ling.

The adults talked about how hard Golden Gufu worked while Sizhui took the dish of lotus seeds from Jiang-gugu, and began the meticulous, factory-efficient process of deshelling them.

“Here, A-Zhan,” Jiang-gugu said. “I made a serving of soup without spice, just for you.”

“Thank you, Jiang-jie.” He accepted it, conceding the victory to her.

Sizhui’s fingernail slipped. Before he knew what was happening himself, he had picked up from where he had left off — finished peeling the seeds for A-Ling, who accepted with a quiet “Thank you, Gege!” — and taken another big, hearty sip of his soup.

Mn. The name he had been tasting the air for.

Chili peppers.

After dinner, Sizhui still had not figured out the mystery. And, it just so happened, the puppies were snuffling in the living room, so he had an excuse.

Eavesdropping at the corner of the hall, he listened for their secrets. He could do lines when he got home, but so long as he was here, Wuhan’s warm nights were rife with opportunity.

“Do you not have anything to say to me?” Jiang-shushu, obviously speaking to Father.

“Wei Ying never did.”

Sizhui sucked in a breathful of that deep, spicy saltwater name, and had to stuff his fist down his throat to not make noise.

Thankfully, at that moment, Jiang-gugu’s dish clattered.

“You never did know how to move on,” Jiang-shushu taunted.

Neither have you, Father’s silence flashed back. Instead, he said, “Wen Qing is thinking about adopting a child.”

“A-Cheng.” Jiang-gugu’s voice held a new sharpness, and Sizhui visualized her waving her vegetable knife at them threateningly while smiling Lan-bobo’s smile. This was an adult conversation “A-Zhan. No matter what you think, we still all miss A-Xian, even if we have different ways of showing it.”

“I am sorry, Jiang-jie,” Father said, while Jiang-shushu gave a huff. When Sizhui listened in the darkened hallways like this — the light at the end of the tunnel gave off this brilliant duet that made him realize that Father and Jiang-shushu communicated much the same way.

A thought tickled him quickly, and then vanished. Sizhui removed his fist from his mouth, and placed that steadying palm against the wall.

“Jiang-jie,” Father said, “you should not have to do this for us.”

“The great and powerful Mr. Hanguang is right,” Jiang-shushu said, and if this were a horror film like The Grudge, the lights would be flickering on and off between red and blue before landing on a violent purple. “You shouldn’t even be here. He should be here.”

He doesn’t want us to be family. Sizhui remembered the pit of water, how much Jiang-shushu fussed over the impossibility of him drowning. No, Jiang-shushu loved him like his blood nephew. He doesn’t want Ba to be family. The thought drowned him anyway.

“I want him to come back too,” Jiang-gugu said, quietly. “A-Xuan has been working overtime, so when I’m alone, I think about how much you two worrying about each other is just like how A-Xian and A-Cheng worried about each other.”

“I didn’t — ”

A breathy, sinking sound as Jiang-gugu seated herself on a cushioned chair. “You do,” she said, as though she had woken from a sleep as long as Baba had. “You do care. But you communicate the same way. A-Cheng, A-Zhan, you both care about the wellbeing of the children and A-Xian’s legacy.”

“That legacy died the way Ma and Ba did,” Jiang-shushu crackled. “They were so disappointed. He didn’t even think of our family before he ran off with Lan-er. He couldn’t even finish college. Our family took him off the street and raised him to take advantage of the country’s new opportunities when they’d grown up unable to get anything but lotus seeds for themselves, and he ran off. He went back to explore the dark streets that Ma and Ba took him off of . He lost our face, he humiliated our Ma and Ba, just so he could run off and make everyone pity us for growing up with a mentally ill, unfilial son.” He spat the last words like venom. Sizhui felt as though it had slapped him right across the eyes. Baba didn’t have the power to do something like that. Baba was bedridden. Baba didn’t even have the power to hug his own son Wen Yuan back, how could Baba do something so heinous? This was what Jiang-shushu was so angry about?

A beast in the tunnel. A growl, so low and dark it took Sizhui too long to realize it was Father. “Jiang Cheng — ”

“What’s the point of keeping up an appearance if you can’t even protect the ones you love?” Jiang-gugu did not sound like a wounded animal, like Sizhui expected — that heartbroken shattering she sometimes seemed so close to. Her voice gentled so much more, as though it was all she had. “Ma and Ba didn’t die because of A-Xian. A-Xian isn’t in the hospital now because of A-Zhan. Look at all the friends we have now — when they tried to take A-Yuan away that year, they all came to help A-Zhan protect him. What does it matter where A-Xian chooses to go or who he brings home? Everything he has touched has been to help people, but people hurt even from kindness. We were right to take him in, even if Ma took the belt on him when he didn’t deserve it. He has only brought home family. Neither of you are to blame for A-Xian being hospitalized. And you’re so angry right now because you really care for him, but don’t you see? You can’t blame one person for happenstance.

“You both were brought up to search for answers from every calamity that comes your way, like how Ma and Ba and A-Zhan’s shufu were brought up to believe their hunger and 苦力 were for the sake of the state and their own families. But sometimes, the suffering doesn’t have a lesson. Sometimes, it’s just suffering.”

“A-Li — ” Sizhui heard hands. Golden Gufu stretching out, having sat through the argument without knowing his place in it.

But Jiang-gugu wasn’t done. “Thank heavens we have A-Yuan,” she said. “Thank heavens we have A-Ling. Thank heavens they are kind. And thank heavens that A-Xian still has a fighting chance. And even if he didn’t — ” here came the break “ — thank heavens that we still have A-Cheng, A-Zhan, and A-Xuan here to see our children grow up.”

“Jie — ” More outstretched hands, cupping Jiang-gugu’s elbows, shoulders. “Jiejie, Jiejie, please — please, let’s talk about something happier. Go to bed, you should sleep.”

Father stood. His hands played a porcelain vibrato, and he served his Jiang family tea.

“I am sorry.” Perhaps it was Jiang-gugu who was holding his hands; the mug had clattered back onto the table.

“A-Zhan,” she said, “you are our family. We don’t owe each other. The day A-Xian brought you to our home, I knew that was it for him. And that was it for me too.”

Sizhui fled.

He did it so silently, feeling as though he had stolen something precious and entitled to him, but something he had stolen nonetheless.

“Gege...?” whispered A-Ling sleepily when Sizhui accidentally roused him.

“I was just in the bathroom,” Sizhui assured him. “Go back to sleep. It’s still nighttime.”

“Up so early!” Jiang-gugu exclaimed that morning, as Sizhui shuffled alone into the kitchen. “You can sleep a little more, Sizhui.”

Sizhui shook his head. “I don’t want to,” he said stubbornly. “Did you make tea yet?”

“No.”

So he filled the electric kettle and turned it on. He stared and stared at the wawas dancing around Jiang-gugu’s mug, their little commas and primary colors bouncing.

He didn’t understand how Father carried so much grief inside of him. How much Jiang-shushu carried so much it spilled over, all the time. How Jiang-gugu managed to carry them all.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so much if she’d had Baba to share the weight with.

The kitchen filled with the sound of steam. Sizhui let a finger glide across the fog of the windows. The early red sun in Wuhan really was magical.

“A-Yuan.”

He braved to turn, though slowly. Only Jiang-gugu called him that now, and only sometimes. Jiang-gugu was soft as steam.

“My A-Yuan,” she said. “How is it that you can run so fast?”

He rocked back and forth on his heels, feeling so caught that he was subdued.

She beckoned. For a moment, he planted himself; then, he went, slamming straight into her arms.

Thank you for loving me didn’t cut it, not when Jiang-shushu wasn’t here to hear it too. He told me he’d take me to see my grandparents.

“I promise the dogs will go to good homes,” she said softly. “Your father made a vow to always make a home his family could come back to. And your Jiang-shushu — he did too. But if his family wants a dog they could come back to...if his family wants a dog now...” She drifted. Brought herself back. Did not allow herself to go anywhere Sizhui could not follow. “Then he’ll do it. Do you understand?”

He nodded against her life-giving belly, where A-Ling had once lived.

Jiang-gugu deserved to go places far away just for a little while, too.

Sizhui did not need a stool anymore. He stood on his tiptoes to pour the tea: A little tie guanyin to make Golden Gufu feel rejuvenated for work. A sprinkling of pu’er for Jiang-shushu to wake up. A healthy handful of chrysanthemum for A-Ling and Jiang-gugu to share. The good Da Hong Pao for him and Father to share.

“Sit down, sit down,” he told her airily, and she obeyed, watching him with a proud smile all the while.

They had been sipping tea for a while before the others joined them. When they did, Sizhui outstretched his arms and ensnared Father and Jiang-shushu — one on either side of him.

He left A-Ling with the lotus sprout, telling him to never, never, never, never, never, never, ever let it run out of water.

He didn’t bring it home to Jingyi, though. Heaven forbid Jingyi be allowed to keep something more dependent than a pet rock. But he did bring him a cup of Wuhan reganmian, which Jingyi appreciatively chomped down during lunch in the canteen.

“The two best foods in the world,” Jingyi declared. “Authentic Wuhan reganmian and KFC.”

But Sizhui didn’t eat his own lunch, only watched Jingyi thoughtfully. (And it wasn’t because his food was underseasoned vegetables, as A-Ling claimed.)

Jingyi humored him on this for a while before he really couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What?” he said.

“What?” said Sizhui.

“You walked to school this morning,” Jingyi said. “You haven’t even been drinking water. Aren’t you hungry? You’re not sick, are you? Is your ba making you fast or something?”

Gods forbid Father have him eat less than three square meals a day. Sizhui gently took a clump of rice onto his spoon. “Just thinking,” he said.

Jingyi watched him swallow until Sizhui found his tongue again. “How long do you think high school is?” he asked finally. “Four years?”

“Two,” said Jingyi. “No, wait — three. Three years. And four years in college too, after that.”

“My shushu says,” Sizhui said slowly, thinking of purple anger and fierce pride, “that I should work really hard to do my gaokao and make sure I get into Beida or Qinghua. Or even study overseas in America. He says that’s what all my years of school should be focused on, but what if I just want to stay here and help people in the rural communities?”

Jingyi swallowed his reganmian the wrong way, and Sizhui pounded his back as he teetered on the brink of dying from shock. “Fucking hell, Sizhui,” he said. “I mean, you’re a really giving person, but like...isn’t it the right thing to do to go to school and earn money for your family?”

“But my countrymen are my family too,” Sizhui reasoned, “and my baba and ba dedicated their lives to helping the poor, so even if I don’t make a lot of money, wouldn’t I be honoring them anyway? There’s more than one way to do the right thing.”

“But what if your ba and Lan-bobo got really old, and then couldn’t afford to take care of themselves?” Jingyi questioned. “My parents are really old, and they say that once they retire, the government will take care of them, but what if something really big happens, like, I dunno, a car accident? You’ll need money to take reeeeally good care of them. And they’ll treat you better at the hospital if they think you’re a big-status person like a businessman or something.”

Sizhui huffed a thought. “Well, my dads’ parents aren’t around anymore, so I don’t know anything about that.” The admission stung; that he didn’t really have a clear path to taking care of Father or Jiang-shushu once they got old, that he had no examples. And look at Baba, who took a different route — look where he was. Asleep, and before that, tragically poor. The greatest things that must’ve happened to him were Father and Jiang-gugu. But it wasn’t enough to keep him awake.

But it kept him alive.

There were whispers Sizhui was learning in the books he read at school. Sun Wukong was beheaded several times, and yet he was immortal, so he could live and finish the journey to the west. Zhuge Liang could have kept the Shu kingdom alive for years and years, so even when he was old and weak, he began a ceremony to give himself more years to breathe and strategize. There was even a song Jiang-shushu would hum along to sometimes on CCTV: One that said, I really do wish I could live for five hundred more years.

Asleep is still alive. Asleep isn’t dead.

In fact, Sizhui knew what dead is.

“If my baba hadn’t gone out of his way to do something different,” Sizhui said, “I wouldn’t have a hukou.”

Jingyi finished his reganmian in order to think better. “Yeah,” he wolf chomped through the grainy oil, “yeah, totally. It was nice of your ba to take you in.”

Sizhui took a moment. “What?”

“Oh,” a careless chopstick wave, “I figured that if your dads were so righteous, then they would’ve done something stupid heroic, like buy a kid. The teachers hate it when we talk about stuff like that, but we all know that stuff happens. Ouyang Zizhen said that happened in his village before he moved here. It just made sense.”

Sizhui dropped his tofu.

Jingyi dropped his KFC wing. “Seriously? You didn’t think your dad birthed you or something...did you?” He looked like he was momentarily reconsidering their entire friendship.

“I just didn’t think it was that obvious,” Sizhui mumbled. The words felt like water, like he was gumming his way through a marsh, having been dunked headfirst into it. He felt seen, but vulnerable. A spreading calm filled him, but he also felt dense.

“Yeah, ’cause people aren’t gonna be jerks to someone who smashed Chen Xiaoyu’s stupid head in with a brick,” Jingyi said.

“I did not smash his head — ”

“Yeah, but people shouldn’t bully you for your family, especially when your family is objectively great and better parents than most parents. I still can’t believe your ba never beat you his whole damn life. If you gotta make Chen Xiaoyu bleed a little bit, then fine. He’s still alive, so I don’t know why he’s still whining about it.”

Coming from a home where no one ever raised a hand — except Jiang-shushu, but it wasn’t like it ever came down or anything — Sizhui tried to find an explanation as to why he was moved to violence. Maybe he’d gotten it from a small farm outside Xi’an somewhere.

“But are the rural families really suffering?” Jingyi asked gracelessly. “I mean, our country is developing so fast all of a sudden. My family’s very au-s-tier, but now they’ve invested so much in stocks that we’re thinking about taking a trip to Paris or something. One of those really fancy European or American cities.”

Au-s-tier did not even cut it when describing Father’s austerity, but Sizhui bounded straight into the spark of excitement. He had heard that in Paris, the streets were spotlessly clean. He wondered what KFC tasted like in America. And if Father only invested in stocks...they could get the chance to taste that.

“Do you think they’ll build a subway here too?” Sizhui asked.

Jingyi stopped daydreaming. “Subway?”

“Yeah, like the ones they have in Beijing. So we don’t have to take the bus or get stuck in traffic. Like the ones you see in the movies about Hong Kong. It’s so crowded there, and yet they get through the city fast because the subway is underground.”

“Hong Kong doesn’t operate by normal rules,” Jingyi mused. “I heard people there walk really fast and all speak Cantonese, but some of them also speak English. Like, better than even Yuan-laoshi.”

“My Qinghe shushus always say they’ll take me to Beijing one day and ride the subway to Tiananmen Square,” Sizhui agreed. “And I already ride the one in Wuhan, since they’re developing really fast. It’s really cool, like you’re in a sci-fi movie. Do you think Suzhou could ever be that hi-tech and fancy?”

Jingyi glanced side-to-side before leaning in conspiratorially. “I think,” he said through chicken breath, “that if we develop more and invest in more stocks, that could make us fancy too.”

Silently, Sizhui offered him his water bottle. Jingyi took the hint, scrunching his face as he swigged.

“If we all get cool technologies and get to get shot through a tunnel like that here in Suzhou,” Jingyi said, “then we won’t even have to leave to go to Paris or Hong Kong.”

Imagine that. Getting to the train station in mere minutes to go to Wuhan. Wuhan glittering like the so-called City of Lights in France. Glittering like Central in Hong Kong. Wuhan, becoming famous like Paris and Hong Kong, glittering over lakes as good as the Seine or Victoria Harbour.

Maybe the farmers he had worked with could ride the subway and get fancy trips overseas too...

He was snapped out of his reverie by a girl passing by. “Hi Sizhui,” she called, a winsome giggle behind her smile.

Sizhui, ever polite, waved back. He had no idea who she was. “Hi.”

Jingyi muttered under his breath, probably; it was hard to hear over the onrush of becoming aware of canteen noise; his aperture widened, Sizhui opened to receive the hellos.

Another girl walked away, with a nod in her chin like she approved of Sizhui greatly.

“What?” he said, finally, with only Jingyi hearing over canteen clangs.

“Well, most boys, to girls, are icky,” Jingyi reasoned to his friend. “But you should hear what they say about you — ‘gentle Sizhui,’ ‘super duper nice Sizhui,’ ‘doesn’t-say-dumb-shit Sizhui.’ They like you. You’re not like other boys, Sizhui.”

“If you say my name like that one more time,” Sizhui said.

“Well?” Jingyi said when Sizhui did not continue, glowing with smug self-satisfaction. “Whatcha gonna do? Threaten me, Sizhui! Shove a brick at my head!”

“You’re so stupid, but you’re my best friend,” Sizhui said through Jingyi’s obnoxious laughter.

“Is that how you talk to your best friend, dumbass?” Jingyi said. Cursing was like a whole new world to them — they could do it, and no one could stop them! What were they going to do? Give them detention? All they had to do was not say it in front of the adults.

“Asshole!” Sizhui shot back, laughing.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Jingyi said, stepping back, wounded. “I think I like soft Sizhui better. Please never change.”

“Son of a bitch,” Sizhui said. It was something he had heard from watching an American television show on the Internet. Bobo had brought it home as a gift to Father, though Sizhui used it more.

“Anyway,” Jingyi said. “Can I copy your homework? I was too busy watching Naruto last night.”

“Why don’t you do your homework before you watch Naruto?” Sizhui asked. “That way, you can reward yourself for doing the work.”

“Yeah,” said Jingyi, “but I’m gonna do work anyway. So I can just slack off a little bit and do less work in the long run if I just skip some nights of homework.”

Sizhui shrugged. The homework had not been hard, anyway. “Just change some of the words around so it’s not obvious,” he said, giving Jingyi his folder. They had until the end of recess to go to the class where this homework assignment was due.

He had too much to think about on the way home, so he walked slowly till it all became a low, steady buzz. It stopped the clanging somewhat.

Father had gotten home early today. Sizhui was lightly sweating when he came home, opening the door and expecting one slim figure in the chair — either him, or Bobo. Today, he caught the subtle way Father set down his tea mug down more firmly than Bobo did — almost militaristic — and Sizhui knew the difference between the two.

“Sizhui,” Father said.

“Mn,” Sizhui hummed. Some of that vibration in his skull had to go somewhere, but it built and flattened, flattened and built as he changed out of his uniform into his home clothes, washed his hands and face, and finally folded himself back into the living room — the final ripple of a long wash, the last corner finally creased into an origami square.

Father stopped drinking his tea.

“I like a boy,” Sizhui said, finally. “But I also like this girl. So which do I choose? To like boys or girls?”

Father slowly lowered his newspaper. It was not as though he was reading it, anyway. He always paid rapt attention when Sizhui had something on his mind.

“How do you like them?” he asked, setting the newspaper aside. Sizhui needed no second bidding; he leaped onto his lap, though Father exhaled at his extra weight now that he was growing, and launched into his babble.

“There’s this A-Qing girl who’s so energetic? She’s so popular, even though the teachers don’t like her. She’s a troublemaker, and Zizhen thinks she’s really really cute. I, uh...think about you and Baba,” Sizhui admitted, out of breath. He sucked in another to scream about it. “She’s so loud, and she plays pranks, and she’s so clever, and feisty, and the other day she tricked a bun out of the cafeteria, and then she split it with me because she realized she really wasn’t that hungry. You said Baba always chose to share things with you, right? Loquats, wine, and lotus seeds. He was really fussy, like a mom, but not like the Jiang-gugu kind of mom.”

“You like her because she shares,” Father repeated back to him.

Sizhui nodded. “She’s also really funny, and she doesn’t care what other people think, even when the teachers tell her that she’s never going to do well on her gaokao if she keeps running around like that and doing whatever she wants. But if she’s so good at being clever and cheating the school system,” Sizhui realized, spelling it out for himself, “then maybe she can cheat the whole world’s system.”

Father, ever so still, became stiller.

“And the boy?” he asked.

Sizhui kicked his feet, stared straight forward, focused on the ever-lovely clock on his living room wall. “Mo Xuanyu is really pretty,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“There’s this boy,” Sizhui blurted, opening his mouth wide like a trumpet to let the sound play out on high-speed. “His name is Mo Xuanyu, and he’s very pretty.” He squirmed around like a worm on his father’s lap.

Father put hands that barely touched him on his hip and elbow, to keep him from escaping. “What is he like?” he asked.

“A bit of a dark horse.” Sizhui had learned the word in his English class. “That means no one really knows what he’s like,” he explained to Father. “So we like to imagine. He’s very quiet, and I think he got left behind in class, so he’s actually older than us.”

“So what do you like about him?” Father prompted.

“He’s quiet,” Sizhui repeated, lamely. He might as well be a lamb in a field, and Father might as well have been the hunter that shot him in the leg. Why did people like anyone? “Why do you like Baba?” he asked instead.

Father paused as though Sizhui had cut off his breathways, and he felt contrite. When Father did not speak, Sizhui stilled in his hands. He could wait here all day, all night, for Father to respond, because he needed to know.

So he did. Hours, maybe — when it came to Father, time worked differently. He was learning that he perceived time so very differently from everyone around him, especially Jingyi — and it was all because Father did not care for the pace at which the clock in their living room moved.

Like Sizhui’s lack of interest in his phone? “Fuckin’ weirdo,” Jingyi had muttered, buttoning away at the phone that he clearly was not concerned with getting confiscated in the middle of class (it was; he wasn’t as slick as he thought; no one looks down at their crotch and smiles).

“This is not a fight, Sizhui,” Father said finally. Sizhui squirmed; perhaps his idea of love was impacted by the whiff of...not-death. “If I could find words to describe Wei Ying, they would be that he was selfless and worldly. But since I married all of him, saying only that would be reductive.”

Sizhui thought of Lan Jingyi, who decided to stick with him from day one, though all he knew about Sizhui was...well, he was Sizhui, and he was in his class. Trying to figure out if he was cool — because he already knew he was cool — just, when would it show externally, so Jingyi could be entertained with it, too? Humans love without definition; they just do. But definition entertains, and humans are chronically addicted to some form of fun, even when they don’t necessarily love the person they like. But when love is defined, when a human encounters another with love and a dance or brick fight to define that love, then that. That is just another, rarer way of living. That is something Sizhui never wanted to stop living.

Why do you like him? Sizhui never knew why he loved Baba, the shadow of a body of a person, either; just that he did.

Why do you like him? Sizhui loved jumping into Father’s arms. He loved talking to Father, even when Father didn’t talk. He loved leaving Father’s side so Jiang-gugu could take him out with Jin Ling, because that just meant Father never stopped loving Baba. Even on the days Father didn’t pick him up from school, Sizhui knew food would be on the table and he could recite the newest Li Bai from class. If Sizhui could cobble together the little feelings from each of those verses into the one starburst of warm chorus that bloomed in his chest when he saw Mo Xuanyu or A-Qing, then that would be reductive of his love for Father.

Sizhui lifted his leg and kicked at the clock on the wall.

“I think Mo Xuanyu just gives me a nice feeling when I see him,” Sizhui said finally, as though that were as incisive and obvious as saying A-Qing was loud and clever as the wind. “He seems really fun, if only people would appreciate his weirdness. Oh, oh!” His own eyelashes physically fluttered against the skin beneath his eyes as he blinked, blinked, blinked. Was that why — “Is that why someone as bright as Jiang-gugu married Golden Gufu? Because he’s not that special, or obviously smart” — or for Golden Gufu, not very smart at all — “but she liked his awkward warmth?”

Father laughed hilariously, which according to Jingyi was just him letting out a puff of breath. “Solved it,” he said.

Lan-bobo came for dinner to check on them. Sizhui never knew if he and Father planned these nights in advance; Bobo just waltzed in, and it made sense. Without batting an eye, Father added another batch of chopsticks to the table.

“Bobo!” Sizhui strained a smile. “伯伯好。”

“Sizhui,” Bobo said, never strained. “You are gone for one weekend on those new quality trains, and you already grew taller. Wangji, you know how to strategize.”

“I did not plan anything in regards to Sizhui’s growth,” Father said. “He is about to hit his growth spurt.”

Bobo tsked encouragingly. “The food these days is so rich, they hit their growth spurts earlier and earlier.”

“Shufu saved eggs for us,” Father said, ever so sentimental.

Eggs aren’t a delicacy, Sizhui thought to himself, as he stared at the crawl of vegetables — and egg and tomato — in front of him. I never wanted for anything.

“I want to go to Yichang,” he said.

He seldom asked Father for anything (this may be the first). It was Bobo, not Father, who looked unsurprised at such a request, as though somewhere in his speeches he and Sizhui had had a conversation — maybe a plan for a weekend trip — somewhere.

Father breathed audibly. His lips were parted wider than a needle’s width — which meant, wow, Sizhui had been so bold.

Bobo took Sizhui by the hand. Sizhui had not been led by the hand since he was seven, but he did not protest as Bobo guided him easy as a breeze on a flying ship into his chair. “A-Zhan,” Bobo said, “you should take a seat as well.”

Sizhui knew he was not being ignored; only considered. He perched on the chair — red, brilliant hardwood, to mime the rosewood forests people like Golden Gufu ate up — and picked up his chopsticks like on any other day. He worked a thumbnail into his chopsticks where the grain formed a line — an opening — and realized he was fidgeting. He would rather not fidget.

Slowly, Father ate his first piece of tomato. He did not eat a second. “Sizhui,” he said. “What will you do when you get to Yichang?”

“See the Chang Jiang?” Sizhui answered. “Ba, what about a work trip there? We could go there during the weekend, and you could maybe reach out to the farmers there or, or...” He really hadn’t done his research about Yichang, but maybe he could make a...a conjecture. “Since it’s by the Chang Jiang, we could go into the mountains and find farmers whose way of life is being changed by tourism,” he suggested brightly. Brilliant, brilliant Sizhui, Jingyi would praise him. “Ever since we held the Beijing Olympics and our country is de-ve-lop-ing, lots of foreigners are coming in, and we have to prepare our mianzi for them, so that means pressuring people in scenic, isolated areas...”

Bobo waited for him to lapse so he did not cut him off; once, when Sizhui was very young, he had accidentally cut him off and Father was heartily displeased. “Slow down, Sizhui,” Bobo said now. “I think the better question here would be, What draws you to Yichang?”

Sizhui thought of the wormhole crawl of white. Baba’s laughter, Baba’s silent skin. It wasn’t very mianzi of him to bring up such an uncomfortable subject and make Father sad.

Baba isn’t a subject, he thought resolutely. “I — I don’t know how to say it,” he said awkwardly.

“You do not have to,” Father said.

No. No, he didn’t. But he wanted to, and that’s why he was saying it. “I just think,” haltingly, choking a dry grain of rice word by word by dry-heaved grain, “that maybe. I mean. Baba. He was there. In a memory. And Jiang-gugu mentioned it. And Jiang-shushu, I think, he always talks about taking me to see his parents in a cemetery — I just think, I want to know Baba better.”

Bobo’s face was heartbroken — 

Sizhui forced out, reverse eating his meal, “I just think, this is a big personal, emotional journey for me. Because Baba doesn’t talk to me, but maybe he can find other ways to. If I just go to the place he really liked. The place that was really important to him. Because I’m thinking about my career — ”

Father wanted to argue. Sizhui was done eating.

“I just think that maybe, because my family is important, and affects me in a lot of ways, I want to understand the other ways that Baba affects me. Because I’m going to school, and everyone wants me to have goals and go to Beida, but the only thing that feels right to me is to help people like you and Baba and then go back to school andprankpeoplewithJingyi, so I just want to understand why.”

For the first time, Father was speechless against his own volition.

It was Bobo who slowly, sluggishly poured a cup of tea, and passed the primary-colored mug to him. “Drink this,” he suggested. “Breathe.”

Sizhui glanced at the splash of xiao wawa from the Tang dynasty dancing around the mug, each granted a smiling face and a single comma of black hair by their painter. So alive, so frozen, so bright. And yet Father was alive and breathing in front of him, silent as the grave. The most warm and vibrant thing in the world, all dressed in muted blues.

Bobo too — responsible for the steam coming from behind the wawas as Sizhui took a careful sip of tea.

It distracted him from anxiously watching Father.

“Sizhui.” Bobo’s voice was soft as steam. “We knew this day would come. A-Zhan, if you are not ready, and would like me to take Sizhui instead — ”

“No need,” Father said. His eyes never left Sizhui. Sizhui understood now the heartbroken look splashed across Bobo’s face. Bobo never liked to see his little brother in pain.

Father plucked a jiucai dumpling from the middle of his table. Reached across the table — across Bobo, across their silent, heavy friend carrying all their sorrows — and set it in Sizhui’s plate. “食不言，” Father said.

Through the tension, Sizhui smiled in relief. He obeyed, delicately clenched the dumpling between his chopsticks, and began to eat. No more talking.

“We will go to the market tomorrow,” Father said, “and buy food for our weekend trip to Yichang.”

They could kick out the homeless and the beggars all they wanted. It did not do away with the trash flowing onto the streets. Nor the unsteady, grounded sway of the bus that chugged to a stop in front of Suzhou Station; it made no promises that it would stay upright, but if it tipped, well, it would deposit them well and secure onto solid ground.

Father and Sizhui alighted, their bags packed minimally, Sizhui insisting that he be the one to carry the big heavy bottles of Nongfu spring water and the baby watermelon they would shave and split on the train.

Yes — they were taking an overnight train again. It was much more filthy and slow than a bullet train, and Sizhui was realizing more and more how little he could stand the toilet on it, but it was cheaper, and they had time to spare.

“I’m okay with losing a little bit of sleep when we come back,” Sizhui had told Father earnestly. “I’ll still be at school in time.” He wanted to see the way the land unfolded — slowly, sensually, and not in a chopstick twirl.

So now they boarded a rude, rushed train in a rude, rushed crowd, ushered by rude, rushed conductors who dared not yell at Father, but screamed in the faces of everyone else.

“That’s to Beijing!” one woman scowled.

“You’re all the way in car three, hurry up!” groaned a harried man.

“Mister,” said one conductor finally, “your bag is too big.”

“It is not,” Father said.

“It is,” the conductor insisted. “How are you going to fit that in the overhead? You’ll need to leave it here, at the end of the car.”

“You are just making trouble,” Father said brusquely. “I am taking my suitcase with me, and it will fit.” He made to move around the conductor, who immediately scrambled to leap in his way.

“Listen, Mister Rich,” said the conductor, jabbing a hand in the direction of Father’s chest. Father’s scant patience dropped to coolness as his onset of pettiness overtook him. “You can sway around in your bright clean clothes all day, but you still gotta put your luggage in the right place like everyone else. Can’t just take up space.”

Father did not respond, looking straight forward; because he was much taller than this conductor, his eyes hovered inches above his shoulder.

This drove the man insane.

“Listen,” growled the conductor. “Put the suitcase in the head, or I’ll kick you off the train.”

No, Sizhui was not sure if he could really do that. No one could make Father do anything. But Father was still human. He darted forward, greeting the conductor with a smile that Jingyi said made him not like other boys and inclined his head. “Excuse me,” he said through his teeth. Father was not a wealthy man, but by the look of him, he would be better off riding the bullet train everywhere and only took the overnight train for the same reason foreigners would be filling the mountains of Yichang: To gawk at the peasants. He was well-bred, and while that meant more respect for him from strangers based on appearance alone, that also meant jealous people trampled and sickened by classism. People who would cause trouble for him, because Father’s pettiness was an easy — if unmovable — target. “We’re just trying to get to our bunk. We’re really not carrying too much, so you don’t need to worry. Look!” And before either adult could react, he had grabbed the suitcase from Father’s hand — which yielded, for him — and zipped down the aisle past the conductor, clambering to his tiptoes to strain the luggage onto the overhead bin.

It fit.

“See?” Sizhui said. “So, thank you for your concern and hard work, but you can see it won’t slide off during the ride.”

To say that the conductor was somewhere between enraged and charmed was an accurate if not very concise statement, one that Sizhui was sure that would earn him a red circle had he decided to phrase it so for a class writing project. In any case, the conductor scowled as though cut off from a good prize — another red circle for Sizhui, who was still learning to be descriptive — and turned his shoulder around, stomping back to the train door to let off his steam at other unfortunate riders.

Father did not move.

“Ba?” Sizhui asked. Oh. Oh, oh. Father was overwhelmed. They were going to Yichang, and now he was giving Sizhui that frozen look he had whenever Sizhui made him particularly proud, or did something Jiang-gugu said Baba was known for doing. “Ba,” he said again. He came back, reached for Father’s sleeve. Father followed him with his gaze, craning his neck when Sizhui pulled on his wrist. Just about a teenager, and Sizhui still found no shame in guiding his dad along by his wrist (so long it was not by the hand; it felt weird to hold your dad’s hand when you were too old for that, and for once he kind of saw the logic of it).

Once they had settled down, and the train had pulled away, and the land opened up like a green flower around them, Father drank his tea. Sizhui hung from the bars of the third bunk, letting gravity stretch his body long, his feet swinging. His toes came closer to the floor every time he did this now. When he let go, he did not need Father to catch him; the fall was not far anymore, his height accommodated it.

The world spiraled, spun into an unwind. The sun set quickly. A green bloom turned black.

Sizhui sat in the seat across Father at the small coffee table, their slice of vertical space turned horizontal. He shaved their watermelon and split that, handing Father the bigger half.

Before they slept that night — Sizhui in the top bunk, Father in the middle — Father passed him their shared flip phone from below. Sizhui reached in the dark, clasping reliable smooth plastic and the skin of Father’s hand.

He called Wen-gugu under the covers, whispering and conspiring with her: “Yes,” she assured him, “A-Ning and I will meet you in Yiling.”

Chapter Text

醒来了怎能当梦一场

Sizhui looks back on the trip to Yichang often.

Preparing a body for a funeral — that’s no different from what they would do with Baba every weekend. Or, that’s no different from what Father did every weekend. When Father couldn’t be there, it was Jiang-gugu, visiting him every morning after sending A-Ling to school, no doubt speaking to him, talking to him as though he was responding, sowing love into his hair. Golden Gufu, who melded the funds of his big sexy job in Shanghai — and eventually, an extension into Hong Kong — into Father’s inheritance, so they could continue to afford not just a hospital bed, but ensure that the longest-staying patient in Wuhan would not slip the doctors’ minds.

“It’s cruel,” Wen-gugu murmured once. “At some point, it’s crueler to make them stay.” But she checked Baba’s tubes anyway, smoothed back his covers, and sashayed on her way to give the doctors a talking-to.

It is Jiang-shushu now who stays with him to the end. He works silently across Father, trimming the hair, combing it out, performing 上头，finally approving the marriage of this man to his brother Wei Ying. Jiang-gugu has already clipped his nails. The air is suffused with the incense sticks a thoughtful doctor gifted them. Father looks Baba dead in the face as Jiang-shushu prepares him for their final wedding.

1. 上头。No one does it out of ceremony anymore. They do it out of affection, a lingering intimacy before these moments slip from their fingers into rarity. Jiang-gugu 舍不得，and became overwhelmed, leaving her beloved little brother to do it, even though as Baba’s sister, she should be the one. And ah — There she is. She has returned, fingers gripping Golden Gufu’s shoulder, at the edge of the room watching. She looks ready to slip off the boat that is her family in a hospital room, nearly out the door. She murmurs, hypnotized by her need for survival, the thing she learned from Yunmeng tradition, not from their Country:
   “A）一梳，梳到尾
   B）二梳，百年好合
   C）三梳，子孙满堂
   D）四梳，白发齐眉。”
2. Sizhui turns the page. Stops pretending to read his textbook. To hell with university. The world doesn’t care about university. The university would never have helped Sizhui and Father make it into Wuhan before the gates locked. It was the train.
3. They washed his hair earlier. A-Ling gently pats it dry. Wen Ning comes in with the new clothes Baba has never worn, such glossy reds and blacks embroidered in traditional Suzhou needlework — that ancient Gusu cloud pattern. The room unanimously turns their backs like the petals on a lotus peeling away from their center: Only Father is that bright yellow carpellary receptacle, dressing his husband of twenty years in his new clothes. He bows his goodbye. The air smells of sandalwood. Someday, its brilliant yellow will dry up and produce the pod and its seeds.
   A）一拜天地
   B）二拜高堂
   C）夫妻对拜
4. Sizhui hears — they all hear — the drop of a kiss on Baba’s lips.

Sizhui is A-Yuan again, holding Father’s hand though they stand nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. Jiang-shushu will be the one to follow Wen-gugu’s instructions.

This should be a peaceful moment, but outside, the world is raging. And it’s made its way into the hospital. There are patients in the hallway, waiting to be moved into a room, any room. It is only for the good of others that they are doing this, but that doesn’t mean they’ll do it quicker. Sizhui is ready to let go, though it will feel strange and sad. But Father will never let go. They had twenty years with Baba, but Father has only been alive for these twenty.

Jiang-gugu moves to pull the plug.

—

When they were at Yichang, Father took Sizhui on a boat down the Chang Jiang.

? typed Jingyi when Sizhui texted that detail to him.

Sizhui decided to use the last of his data to send him a photo of himself and Father, hand outstretched for the perfect selfie with a view of the blue-green water.

“Ba!” he said, raising the phone. “Say 茄子！”

“。。。。茄子，” Father asked. Click.

“That does not look like me,” Father complained as Sizhui cheered on the last of the data pushing his photo through.

“I think he’ll be able to see it,” Sizhui said. “But why did we leave Yichang? Wen-shushu always said he and Baba would roam the streets, selling radishes.”

“They sold radishes in Yichang,” Father replied. “They lived in Yiling.”

Sizhui clambered around the boat to explore as Father contemplated the valley of the Chang Jiang, content that Sizhui could be trusted to be let out of his sight.

“Excuse me, Jiejie?” he asked one woman. “Why is Yiling called Yiling?”

“Shushu, Ayi,” he greeted a couple. “Why are you going to Yiling?”

He investigated the hell out of that boat, and if he could lightly gloat about it to Jingyi right now, Jingyi would text a stream of boxes that were supposed to be congratulatory emojis. 加油加油！That’s our Sizhui!

But unfortunately, he was out of data, and the phone was back in Father’s hands.

When he could fully appreciate the mountains around them now — not just the cool gush of air and the blue-silver tides — he could look around much less superficially. He could see how the green humped spines of the valley rippled for miles, but also understand that that much greenery is not where people build cities. Unlike Father, people seldom prefer living in such isolation. It was nothing like the bustle everyone was building around Wuhan’s lakes, but rather the quiet corners of Suzhou where the Internet was harder to access and people still used dial-up.

Well...maybe some people liked being away from other people. Jingyi thrived off chattering with everyone, and Sizhui still loved talking to Mianwo Auntie, but Father avoided...civilization.

Baba loved chattering, so what was he doing in an isolated place like this, anyway? All this garnered information about the history of Yiling and where Liu Bei had yeeted himself into the water, but the core question was left unanswered.

Soon enough, the whirring beneath their feet slowed to a stop; the boat bumped elbows with the shore, whispering excitedly, I’m back, I’m back! And I brought people with me!

You always bring people with you, Sizhui imagined the dock saying in a bored tone of voice, but it must be very happy to have it back indeed, for the water to lap so invitingly on the boat, pulling it to a float.

“Sizhui,” Father greeted him as they came back together on the gangway, disembarking the boat together. On that bridge over the water, the air gradually changed around them — much more still, without the water throwing an extra chill over them. In contrast to the blue, silvery greens that made a rainy day in Yiling, there stood Wen-gugu and Wen-shushu, flaring in red.

Sizhui looked himself and Father over quickly; their own cool colors blended in well, white as though for a funeral, while Wen-gugu and Wen-shushu were always ready for a wedding. The gall it took to stand out here.

“Wen Qing, Wen Ning,” Father said pertly, practically bowing as they approached.

“And still, not a smile to be had,” Wen Qing mourned. “Shall we fight our way through the tourists? To be fair, there shouldn’t be many this time of year.”

She was a rudder cutting through the 人山人海 while Wen-shushu fell into step with Sizhui. And Sizhui already had a question lingering on his lips, but he was not quite sure how to phrase it.

Wen-gugu’s hands, which settled over her stomach like two polite gentlemen, were...how to say, clasping more than usual.

Express yourself as you wish, but take your time, Lan-bobo had told him once.

If you cannot think of the words, there is no need to say it, Father had said too.

Well, he had the whole walk to think of how to address Wen-gugu’s microscopic little change...as though she were protecting a little one...a cousin...

“Are you carrying Jiang-shushu’s child?” he burst out.

The party froze. Father looked ill. And Wen-gugu burst out laughing.

“Jiang-shushu? Jiang-shushu Jiang Cheng? Grape Jiujiu? Jiang Wangyin? That Jiang Cheng?” Oh no. Sizhui had gone his whole life (since Chen Xiaoyu) without committing a crime, and now he was not sure which victim of his double-murder to mourn for more: Wen-gugu or Jiang-shushu’s dignity.

“No,” Wen-gugu said, once she had finished crying for Jiang-shushu’s dignity, “no, but I am going to go to an...egg donor,” she finished. “And become a mother.”

Sizhui was starting to understand how babies were made (because of the Internet), but all he could picture was Wen-gugu laying a large chicken egg while Jiang-shushu reluctantly helped her — as a favor to Baba, he liked to think, because Jiang-shushu still definitely cared about Baba. But also, he was clearly infatuated with Wen-gugu.

Unconsciously, he tilted his head in question.

“Sometimes,” Wen-gugu elaborated, “women who do not want to find a man borrow their semen and inject it into themselves, which kickstarts the same process that makes children.”

“Wen Qing,” Father said.

“Who’s the doctor here, Lan Zhan,” and that was the end of that. Father stood down, but his cheek twitched as though there were a tic in it.

So they climbed. If Sizhui had any memory of Yiling, it was that it was very wet. Dank and green. Father stepped by his side, always one steady foot ahead of him. He led the way as though he had never left at all.

Another thing about Yiling — the stairs. There were so many; the town was cut into the side of the mountains, sanded down to stone, only for seeds dropped by wind and birds to leak out green infrastructure all over again. When they had passed the trees, they encountered stony market stands holed into hollows in the mountain. An old woman boiled potatoes in a metal pot. Somehow, that perfectly rock-framed image wrenched something in Sizhui.

“A-Po,” he asked, practically bowing, “could I buy a small cup of potatoes? My father and I are vegetarians. And could you add chili peppers?”

“Of course, xiao pengyou.” The a-po lifted herself with steady motions — a doll of a woman, well-versed in the ways of moving.

“...Do you all live here, in these mountains?” Sizhui asked as she spooned sauce into the plastic cup. The steam from the potatoes promised him: Yes. You will have a rainy-day, earthen heat to warm your hands. They promised to be mushy. Sizhui wanted to burn his mouth.

“Yes, of course, haizi.” And a-pos never lie.

“That’s so cool,” Sizhui said. To say the a-po brightened would be reductive: She was already bright, like a slow-burning mosquito coil. It was just that she had burned just so that there was nothing biting him in particular right now.

Her smile stuck with him as he trotted up to his family, force-feeding them each a piece of potato off a toothpick.

“Hot,” Father murmured, and swallowed the whole thing without flinching.

Sizhui was not sure how long they climbed. It felt like forever. But then again...only the mountains knew what forever was. And even more again...Sizhui knew something about waiting. So he batted at Wen-shushu’s hand through cranes and turtles and mist on water, until they reached the top of Yiling and found Jiang-shushu.

This cove of Yiling was nothing like the dead roots of his memories. Even the sky was lush.

Jiang-shushu’s face was stone-cold and stiff. Everything about this place stank to him. He then patted Sizhui’s head. His face never changed.

“Wen Qing,” he greeted. “Lan-er.” He took a glance at Sizhui that he evidently did not think Sizhui would notice. “...Wen Ning.”

“Jiang-shushu,” Sizhui greeted, extending his toothpick. “Potato?”

—

Jiang-shushu’s face grew redder and redder with each squishy bite; it was from the heat, not the peppers. He was juggling the advice from Jiang-gugu to eat well but savor each bite, while still trying to chomp through a potato piece so hot, he was blowing steam like a knocked-over chimney. Oops.

He had been chewing for maybe three whole minutes by the time Sizhui and his family had reached yet another beautiful backdrop to a video game — which is to say, this entire side of the mountain, once they hit the blues and greens and in-between grays of the water, was stunningly, seamlessly breathtaking. Sizhui’s Suzhou heart soared. A naked dog with only a lion’s head of fur left walked by. Sizhui gave it his last potato. He hoped they got lion’s head meatballs when they got home. Jingyi would be introducing him to another American game — Assassin’s Creed. And the air conditioner would be blasting.

Here was a steamy bamboo basket stacked on top of boiling water, and they were all xiaolongbao. Jiang-shushu huffed, suffering.

Wen Ning passed Sizhui a packet of tissues. Sizhui smiled, grateful. “谢谢温叔叔。”

But then Wen Qing took them through a set of stone steps that seemed to lead nowhere. And then another set. And another. Father shielded Sizhui from the density of the trees next. They were in the heart of untouched forest now. Wen Ning must have bribed security to look the other way.

Or maybe he didn’t have to. Because the air seemed to dry out around them. Old garbage filtered through the dirt from the ground up. And it was old. Nothing seemed to grow in this clearing. It seemed so out of place in this otherwise thriving biosystem that Sizhui glanced a quick look around them to make sure they were in the right place. The security guards couldn’t follow them here, because why would they want to be in such a filthy, foreboding clearing?

“Sizhui,” Father said, urgently. “The soil has microplastics in it. Do not touch it.”

Jiang-shushu chewed faster. Sizhui was pretty sure he had swallowed the potato awhile ago.

Wen Qing knelt down and touched the dirt with her bare hand.

“We used to live here,” she said to Sizhui. “Your baba did a lot of wandering, and for some reason, he always roamed back to Yiling. When he was still a wawa himself, your Jiang-shushu’s parents adopted him from the streets of Yichang. When he dropped out of college, he came up to help us in Xi’an. Eventually, he took us here. He felt that coming here where it’s more peaceful would be better on our popo and Fourth Uncle’s bones.”

Sizhui thought about the small stories Wen-gugu had told him about her family growing up. “My popo and sishu,” she had said. “ Our popo and sishu,” she said now.

Popo and Sishu had the kindest smiles, Wen-gugu would tell him. She had never heard them yell in her life, she would say.

Sizhui liked knowing they were related. And now it meant that, although Sishu was gone, he and his Popo could remember him together, knowing they were family.

“When Sishu died, we had him interred in Xi’an, but he had asked us to spread some of his ashes here,” Wen-gugu said. “He had grown attached to this place. He said they would like to explore it some more.”

“Can you explore places after you’re dead?” Sizhui asked. He meant it in a clinical, well-read way — was there a belief in their traditions from the ancient times that splitting a body meant the dead person could explore different places at once? But he was struck by how quickly afterwards he found himself considering the thought that Sishu had not seen him grow up, because his ashes were not in Suzhou or Wuhan. Even Baba had heard him grow up.

“No,” Jiang-shushu said.

“No,” Wen-shushu said, “but I’m sure it doesn’t matter. When your ba and baba took you in, they were happy to know you were going to live a life with people who cared about you as much as they did.”

“I want to visit Popo again,” Sizhui decided. “Does she know that I know that I’m adopted?”

“She will soon,” Wen-gugu said. “She moved back to Xi’an awhile ago, so she could be closer to my practice. She is surprisingly 灵 for her age. Walks around without a cane and does some of the cooking when your Wen-shushu is tired.”

That sounded like Popo. Wrinkled like mianwo, soft like dust, always cutting up peaches once she knew A-Yuan was visiting.

They lingered there for a while before moving on. Sizhui bid it goodbye; it was beautiful here, and just a simple pivot off the main road. But he didn’t think he would see it again; the people who had made it important were elsewhere.

The small houses that they lived in then were now gone, Wen-shushu explained, but they looked a lot like the ones still ringing the crags of the mountainside.

The rain came down, and the water by the banks blued and yellowed. Sizhui is from Suzhou and Wuhan; the water there is beautiful, but the water rarely turns more than one color at once.

He stands there for an hour just staring at the water, Father content to be still at his side. Jiang-shushu shuffles behind him for a while, then walks off. When he’s turned back around, Jiang-shushu is back with an ice cream in hand. Xiao Xuesheng is Sizhui’s favorite. He makes Jiang-shushu take the first bite. “I’m eating the rest anyway,” he tells him. Jiang-shushu briefly turns a horrible shade of violet at this act of random kindness, nibbles the corner of Xiao Xuesheng’s hat, and gruffly tells Sizhui to finish it.

As he obeys with a smile, he observes Jiang-shushu’s huff. He’s the most physically present person Sizhui has ever met, and Sizhui has known him his whole life.

Now that Yiling is physical around him, he thinks, it isn’t the explosion of realization that he was expecting. It does not redirect his life’s purpose. It does not somehow make it easier to understand who Baba is. It just gives him a beautiful place to put down a shadow and all its memories.

He fondly pats Jiang-shushu’s cheek. Jiang-shushu raises an eyebrow, and touches the spot, examining his hand for melted ice cream.

“What?” Jiang-shushu says.

“Thank you for the ice cream,” Sizhui giggles.

He has a lot to tell Jingyi.

—

A lotus leaf, plucked out alone, dried out in mere minutes.

红尘中会遇的是如何去量

潇潇血热刀锋量

—

Baba slept for thirteen years before Father yielded. Surprisingly, it was Jiang-gugu — Baba’s older sister, the one who holds them together, who never gives up and plants her feet like mud — who made the suggestion.

Sizhui is in his twenties, and he was poring over his books one more time for his new classes, not really reading, when Father gently shut the book. Wow, Ba, Sizhui was prepared to say with his sassiest smile, you can just say you think I’m working too hard. But when he looked up, Father’s face was white as a sheet. And Father, the strongest man in the world, who could hold up the other half of the sky, staggered.

Sizhui caught his elbows, alarmed, steering him onto the couch. “Ba. Ba,” he said.

Father looked at him then, and Sizhui realized how locked his grip was to his; they could not part, not even with a knife. “A-Yuan,” Father said. He is a reticent man, and when he is scared, he is silent. Now he was fighting for a grip, that name that would keep him safer than anything in the world. “A-Yuan.”

Sizhui felt Father’s forehead. It was cold as that laundered sheet lying for hours on a stiff autumn breeze.

None of those science books ever taught him anything that could help now. Maybe it was shock. That was the only thing he could think of that was useful. Father was scrabbling, drowning in mud, and now it was up to Sizhui to not pull him up, but gently tease away the grip of the earth.

Just this morning, Sizhui had been riding the newfangled Suzhou line number four back from a study session with other Tongji University students trying to transfer to Beida, one last thing before the streets emptied out. They were, after all, preparing for a nice cold New Year. Home! Inside the apartment with its warm white walls, like warm snow, eating a steaming plate of dumplings and drinking light broth with Father and Lan-bobo. Home! Ouyang Zizhen WeChatting him out of the blue just so his literal entire tulou can wish his family a happy mouse year over video chat. Home! Jin Ling’s little dumbstruck face when Sizhui pokes his head around Father’s shoulder, watching him take Father’s proffered red envelopes. Red, red, red! Red and gold everywhere! Jiang-gugu heaving steaming plates onto their round table, watching the fireworks from their dining room window while Wen-shushu hums a song, Wen Qing and Jiang-shushu very seriously debating the history of aesthetics that led to this year’s CCTV New Year special. Firecracker dust everywhere. Jingyi cackling while everything burns. 恭喜发财！

The year is 2020.

Sizhui had seen the news over A-Qing’s shoulder today. “Well, shit,” A-Qing had murmured. “That sounds bad, huh.” A pause. “Yeah, no. This is SARS all over again.”

The murmurs never stopped. And then they became all the chatter on the street. “You haven’t been to Wuhan recently, have you?” A-Qing whispered to him, while they were huddled on a street corner waiting for their cab. One mittened hand wrapped around her phone, Didi pulsing in the fading gray light.

“No — I mean, I was, but.” Sizhui had faded away too. This didn’t seem like meteor-crashing news, but there was something else he had to think about. “I feel like my ba is gonna be worried when I get home,” he said, the moment his WeChat pinged.

—

(“Ba,” Sizhui said. “Jingyi says WeChat is how we’re all going to talk from now on. You should get it too.”

“I will think about it,” Father said.

“It’ll be good for your work,” Sizhui said. This was the closest he ever got to nagging, so he clammed up before he could really enter that stage. Father did what he wanted, though Sizhui did think that WeChat would make work more efficient for Father; he was married to his work, just like Baba.

Father sobbed dramatically as Jiang-gugu helped him download the app from over his shoulder, which is to say he let out an exhale and dipped his chin a fraction in Sizhui’s direction. I yield!)

—

A-Qing rubbed his hand in a gesture of solidarity. “Stay at home,” she said. “Wash your hands. Boil your water. Keep studying, you funky little nerd boy. I’ll see you over WeChat, then.” And then the Didi spirited them away; when Father received Sizhui, he had reminded him to wash his hands, pushed a cup of tea in front of him, tapped the water boiler, and gone back to using the landline — the landline — to chatter with the sound of Jiang-gugu. And somehow, Sizhui knew he would not be seeing A-Qing, Jingyi, or Ouyang Zizhen in a while.

But he went through the motions of what his physical body knew while his mental state tried to come to terms with itself. The disconnect had him reading the same blah lines in his book for a long time.

Father, on the couch now, looking as cold as he felt, not the raw, bloody despair of that day Sizhui had snuck into the hospital room as a child. Like cut-open beef in the wet market.

Father was so sterilized. He said something that even Sizhui could not catch. Sizhui stayed at his side. He had to do something with his hands, so in between rubbing his Father’s in between his and wondering what Jiang-gugu had even said, he boiled water over and over again. Father had come back enough to focus his gaze on Sizhui, gentle firmness back as he gripped back and began to speak, that Lan-bobo opened their front door.

“A-Zhan. Sizhui,” he said. Father seemed to let go; he stared listlessly at his older brother.

Lan-bobo knew what to do.

“Lan-bobo — ” Sizhui began. Lan-bobo put a hand on his shoulder, it was the thing that grounded him into this minute of the clock. It was this seriousness of Lan-bobo’s that made him think, The world is truly going to change. And Everything is going to be okay.

“Pack your bags,” Lan-bobo ordered quietly. “Bring everything that you will need for another year. Your Jiang-gugu has ordered the last train going out of Shanghai. We leave in three hours.”

It wasn’t difficult! Putting his whole life into a few bags and trunks. It was the thought of Father spending the whole trip empty-eyed. The thought put a pit in his stomach that wasn’t even painful; it was uncomfortable, and that was worse.

Lan-bobo came with them. Somehow, it was strange, and it was the first time he went on a trip to Wuhan with them. He just seemed so planted into Suzhou, though Sizhui has always known that he regularly goes north.

Taking the cab through the sleek, tall streets of Suzhou, where trees have never grown — 

A streak of gold in the distance. Not even taking a subway to Shanghai, where Sizhui ironically had just come from. Golden Gufu herding them with openly worried looks into his company car; he’d paid the man extra to drive them all the way to Shanghai when he just wanted to go home and hide from the virus — 

Ah, Golden Gufu’s business acumen came out when he got on the phone, his boss demanding to know where he was. “You pay me to use the company car,” he said crisply. “This is wasting no one’s time. I am on my way back to Shanghai now, and you will see it again soon — ”

Open kindness on his face, the best a man could manage, when it started to smell like Shanghai, and the doors opened and Sizhui was bundled out while still steering Father by the elbow, Golden Gufu told Driver, “Go home, wash your hands, wear a mask, try not to go out, this should be enough — ”

The worn, beaten seats in a sleek shell, their new hi-tech bullet trains not so new now —

So many people fleeing home. Even Golden Gufu could not find seats together. Sizhui being clever — clever Sizhui, just like Baba, Father loves you shining bright — getting their tickets checked and then herding them into first-class, where they could huddle together, just the four of them — Father looking out the window, the windows pure black, Golden Gufu and Lan-bobo in respectable silence —

Sizhui missed the overnight trains terribly.

—

Jiang-shushu was their father, their leader, the guiding violet light in the night. A spider in a shiny, meshy web that seemed too normal when Sizhui greeted Wuhan again. It was quiet. Too quiet. And the air was cool. It did not smell of sickness.

Uncharacteristic silence. Gruff silence! Some normalcy! Empty streets, no cars in sight. Jiang-gugu up familiar stairs. The smell of cigarettes, real sickness. Sickness smells comforting after all.

A-Ling outgrown hugging. Helping Sizhui with his bags, pressing into his side, Xianzi the dog’s fluff on his other side; Golden Gufu ruffling his head absentmindedly, with relief that didn’t quite transfer into his son.

Jiang-gugu. Jiang-gugu, Jiang-gugu, Jiang-gugu.

—

“We have to face the reality that the hospital will need all the resources that have been keeping A-Xian alive,” Jiang-gugu said.

You’re supposed to save us, Sizhui thought.

Father said, “No.”

“This isn’t about us not believing that he’ll come back,” Golden Gufu said in a voice used for A-Ling when faced with Xianzi’s first bad sickness. “We could transport him out of the country into an alternate hospital. But we’ll just be buying time. Those hospitals will fill up too. If this is as bad as SARS, the hospital is going to be overrun.”

Father said, “No.”

“Lan Zhan,” Jiang-shushu said. “Wei Ying’s life will be given up if it means saving one more.”

He didn’t say it maliciously; far from it, Sizhui thought idly. Jiang-shushu said this more naturally than he had ever said anything. There was no anger, not even fatigue. Just...if honor were an emotion...

How many times? Sizhui realized.

How many times had Father come into a tight spot, had he had a conversation with Jiang-gugu, one about how a year had passed, three years, four years, ten years? If anyone could come back, it would be A-Xian, Jiang-gugu would probably have said. Who dared to doubt?

It’s not about whether or not he can. It’s about whether or not he wants to be held in this limbo. It’s about whether or not he would prefer death.

It’s not about whether or not he can. It’s about what it’s doing to us.

It’s not about whether or not he can. When he comes back, will the world treat him just as harshly as they did before?

It’s not about whether or not he can. If he lives, someone else will die. He would never have let that happen, he would rather be a hero in his sleep. He just needs more time. But time is out.

I never got to say goodbye.

But then again, he never got to say hello, either.

“Sizhui.” Father turned to him, his golden gaze more clear than it had been all day. “This decision is not solely on your shoulders. But you deserve a say. What do you think?”

What did Sizhui think? A lump in his throat.

Baba lives on in his memories, in the kindness in Jiang-shushu, in the fire in Jiang-gugu, in the empty space by A-Ling. He lives on in Yiling, in the quiet, lined faces of Xi’an, in the odd step in Sizhui’s speech. He lives on in goodness and grief and all the decisions Sizhui makes. He lives everywhere but that hospital room.

Sizhui slowly peeled a lotus seed for A-Ling as he thought, lest he make a hasty decision. (“A-Ling,” Jiang-gugu had said. “Why don’t you go back to your room and finish that drawing?” “This has to do with Dajiu,” A-Ling said. “I want to stay. Please, Ma. Please.” “A-Li, let him stay. He’s a grown-up nanzi han now,” Golden Gufu said. “You can sit next to Sizhui,” Jiang-gugu said.)

“I don’t know,” he said.

How disappointing.

Father let out a pained sigh. “Mn. I do not know either.”

“I want him to come back,” Sizhui admitted. “But it’s not about what we want, not really. We all want him to come back, but we also want people to live. Viruses are the most harmful to people like Mianwo Auntie, and Jiang-gugu, you’re high-risk. If I know one thing about what Baba wanted, it was only for good things for everyone and maybe a happy family for himself. But...that would mean that we should choose him first, right? Because no one else in the world is going to.”

“And when he wakes?” Golden Gufu said.

“That could be years from now,” Jiang-gugu said. “When this is all over.”

“Or not,” Jiang-shushu said. “You think he’ll wake up in a year, in two years, or even tomorrow, and thank us for choosing him over someone else who needed his oxygen tank?”

“I wish he would wake up tomorrow,” Jiang-gugu said.

Father pushed back his chair. “Are they letting people into the hospital?”

“We’re not sure,” Jiang-gugu admitted. “They weren’t picking up the phone. Take Zixuan with you.”

A pause. Then, as though by mutual permission, they cracked small, awkward snickers at each other.

—

Father spent a lot of time alone in the coming days, just him with Baba. Sizhui wasn’t allowed to go out, and neither was A-Ling. Golden Gufu only went out to tie up loose ends. By the end of the week, Wen-gugu and Wen-shushu had shown up. “My doors are always open to you,” Jiang-gugu had told them.

“You didn’t bring Paopao,” A-Ling noted with a crease in his brow.

“Paopao needs to stay home and look after Popo,” Wen-gugu said of her son. She then shut the door again so she and Wen-shushu could finish sanitizing themselves in the hallway. From then on, when Golden Gufu and Father came home, they would do the same thing — a thorough, almost ceremonial self-cleanse under Wen-gugu’s instructions.

“It’s not that bad yet, but Jiang Yanli has a weak immune system, and we don’t know how bad this thing is yet,” Wen-gugu said, sticking Father with another spray.

“You think of everything, Wen-jie,” Jiang-gugu said sweetly.

“My dear Xiao Li, reinforcements have arrived,” Wen-gugu said. They giggled girlishly, and Sizhui wondered if these aunties had been so close in college too. Had Baba brought them together? Or had they already known each other by the time Baba dropped out? Maybe there had already been something, and with time, that something had been able to grow.

Jingyi has been his friend as long as he can remember, which is a literal statement to make: Sizhui still can’t remember much from before Baba went into a coma. It’s not something he regrets. It’s just that, if anything, he wishes Baba had more time. It’s unkind to not give him at least that.

—

Jiang-gugu eventually left. Only Sizhui saw her go. Their apartment was filled to the brim, and ever since Wen-gugu caught sight of Lan-bobo, well — Sizhui was realizing more and more how many fights his family had made sure to have when he wasn’t looking, but it’s harder to hold in your scorn when you’re Wen Qing, harder to smile your way through when you’re Lan Huan and your nephew can see right through you, and much harder when no one has a room to themself anymore.

It looked more like a big, bulky shadow than the tiny, formidable woman Sizhui knew as Jiang-gugu. She had shod herself in the full white biohazard suit Wen-gugu had brought with her, a double-layered blue surgical mask inside, and gloves. Congratulations, Jiang Yanli. You’ve gone to the hospital almost every day for thirteen years. As our loyal customer, you get to finally graduate to being one of us.

Sizhui felt kind of bad for catching Jiang-gugu sneaking out at midnight. A-Ling never gets these weird sneaky-sneaks adventures just because he decided to go to the bathroom at the right time.

But anyway, it was Jiang-gugu. Wen-shushu was dead asleep on the couch, so Sizhui tiptoed extra quiet before he tapped Jiang-gugu on the shoulder.

She leapt three feet in the air silently, like a cat, before whirling around. Stopped dead when she saw Sizhui. Eyes wide — truly, responsible mother Jiang-gugu was being like a teenager after curfew, and Sizhui loved that for her — she put a finger to her mask. Shhhh.

Sizhui put his face close to Jiang-gugu’s, though he knew he did not need to really say it out loud.

“Take me with you.”

Her mask crinkled. Her eyes crinkled.

That was the first time Sizhui saw Baba during that New Year. The air was cold and bitey, and the halls were like tubes that sucked them deeper down a drainpipe swirling with black galaxies. A haunted hospital is actually quite delightful; it means they have company.

Baba was breathing softly in his sleep. He was dark as mist. It was a welcoming hug.

Jiang-gugu stripped herself of the things protecting herself from the world. Sizhui watched without worry as she slowly melted herself of such white, paper armor, shrinking down to size. She placed her petite smallness by her brother, by choice and fate instead of blood. “A-Xian. Look who’s come to see you.”

Sizhui walked up to Baba and held his hand.

“Baba,” he chided softly. “We caught the last train to see you. We’re stocking up on lotus seeds, you know. A-Ling wants to see you again. Wen-gugu has a child now — his name is Paopao, and his father isn’t Jiang-shushu. He’s very playful, hence why we call him Paopao.”

He drifted on and off, patting Baba’s hand. It happened sometimes when he and Father would come for the weekends, but he knew it was Jiang-gugu and maybe Wen-gugu who would come in during their off time and take care of Baba’s cor — body. They cut his hair, cut his nails, shaved the few hairs that grew on his face, washed him with soft wet towels. Father used to comb his hair and wash him again, just to make sure he could give him what he needed.

And like the stars of old Suzhou, Jiang-gugu talked. She sang songs from their childhood, not just 洪湖水浪打浪，but such deep, story-like songs in Sichuanese that Sizhui began to suspect she was a little rebel in the red times after all. She talked about how the taste of her 莲藕排骨汤 changed, how A-Ling and Father loved it more than anything, and how she would leave a bowl of it on his altar.

The hills and ridges of Baba’s soft face, eating itself against ground-knife bones. Sizhui turned to Jiang-gugu, and her soft round nose, her glimmering eyes and cheeks...not a tear to be seen. “Altar?” he whispered. Say that again, Jiang-gugu. Say it again so it’s a little more real.

Jiang-gugu shook her head. Her grip on her little brother’s clothes unclenched, and her hands moved to smooth away his hair, right his collar, instead.

“I’m sorry, A-Yuan.” Her voice was barely there, but it echoed in the darkness of their void. Their heart of hearts. “I’m so sorry, A-Xian. You would rest better if you knew we took every measure possible to help people. Wen Qing-jiejie left Paopao and Popo at home because she’s so worried they’ll get hurt. The world is moving on, and we’re out of time. Listen to Jiejie — we have come every day because you did good to your last breath. Yes, even when you did harm. Sometimes, you can only choose both at the same time. Jiejie doesn’t want to do this. And Jiejie finally understands why you did what you did all those years ago. Jiejie doesn’t blame you. Xianxian, listen to Jiejie — I have never blamed you.”

The gentle glow on Baba’s face, stuck in forever meditation. Maggots hollowing a skull. Baba’s face not changing, but responding.

“We could fly him out of the country,” Sizhui whispered.

“We could,” Jiejie — Jiang-gugu, Baba’s jiejie, who knew him best — said. “But for how much longer? It’s coming.”

She smoothed back Sizhui’s hair, rubbed his fists — he had clenched them tight around Baba’s hand. He immediately let go — they felt like they would shatter.

“We’re so close,” Sizhui whispered.

Jiang-gugu did not respond; because then, something peculiar happened. Baba woke up.

He sprang up, eyes wide open like a corpse reminded he could still live. Sizhui’s heart stopped; he had not seen those eyes before. They were dark and nocturnal, and as his vision adjusted to the sight, he realized that Baba’s eyes were quite light as well, a touch of gray like the stars rearranging themselves. Confused, scared, cunning as a portrait of Zhao Yun. Lips parted to draw breath from the oxygen mask, a big gasp that told them, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.

He was looking at Jiang-gugu.

“Jie.” An icicle shattering, breaking upon impact. It was a song Sizhui had forgotten.

A thin wail gone whooping down the hall. “ A-Xian!”

“Jie.” Thin from disuse, the voice of Wei Ying and body of Wei Ying caressed his loved ones. Baba followed the feeling from his hand to his son’s young face. “A-Yuan.”

Sizhui did not expect the clangor in him, a sound hitting the back of his mind from a million lightyears away. Baba’s face was planes and bright darkness against more darkness. And this time, if Sizhui said it, he could respond. “Baba.” His throat was dry.

Jiang-gugu put a hand on his cheek, and he leaned into it, but those light eyes that Father fell in love with searched his face with unbelief. “A-Yuan,” Baba repeated. “Where is Lan Zhan?”

Sizhui answered, running on nothing but filial duty. “At home. Waiting for you.”

Something in Baba’s face tore like a big bang, the universe sneezing. “Tell him,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. Thank you. Tell him, let me go.”

The hand in Sizhui’s fell limp. Sizhui could feel himself blur when Baba’s eyelids drifted again. His head lolled, and he slumped back onto his bed.

No, no, no —

Jiang-gugu ending the universe. Sizhui numb and hysterical. Baba’s eyes rolling in glints of light behind the slits of his eyelids. Going.

“ A-XIAN!”

—

Jiang-shushu respected Jiang-gugu’s adventure so much, he did not even fuss about it. He made no mention when he arrived at the hospital to Jiang-gugu still clutching Baba’s hand, Sizhui wide-eyed and listless now that he’d done the smart thing and called Jiang-shushu. Father behind him, bleary amber eyes rounding as he realized what had happened. Wen-gugu in the background, chewing out the hospital staff for trying to kick them out. “How could you do this?” she demanded, shaming their spirits out of their skins. “Can’t you see we don’t have time left with him? Are you even human?”

She proceeded to shove her way into the room. The whole family was here. If they were going down, at least they were getting quarantined together.

Golden Gufu and A-Ling rushed to their matriarch immediately. Jiang-shushu, seeing that his sister was taken care of, instead knelt at eye level with Sizhui, a hand on his shoulder. “Sizhui,” he said. “Focus for a minute. What happened when you came inside this room?”

The chaos of Jiang-shushu’s violet storm stopped, made a shape that he understood. “Gugu came out in protective gear. I came with her. Baba was the same as usual. And we talked to him like always. And then Gugu said — Gugu said — ” He would not cry. He did not have the water in him to cry. “She said we would have to pull the plug on Baba. She said she didn’t blame him, but she knew it would be better for him. But there was still time. Baba just needs a little more time, that’s all. And Baba w-o-k-e u-p.” Jiang-shushu’s breath dissipated as he stared at Sizhui, but he knew Sizhui would never lie. He glanced up at Baba’s prone body, as though his brother would spring up and beam at him, then quickly concentrated back on Sizhui. He nodded at Sizhui. Go on. “Baba — I think he heard our conversation, people in comas sometimes do. He-he saw both of us, and then he asked for...” He didn’t need to finish, because at that moment he found Father, and Father looked ready to collapse himself. “Ba,” Sizhui said. “Ba. Baba woke up. Baba woke up. He says, ‘I’m sorry. Thank you. Let me go.’”

Jiang-shushu and Lan-bobo both caught Father before his knees could hit the floor. Father looked as much conscious as Baba had, eyes never leaving the man he had been waiting for. Sizhui crawled across that floor until he found Father’s thigh, and hugged it in a gesture he had abandoned as a child.

Father jolted. Looked down. Remembered who was there, who he was.

He put a hand on Sizhui’s head, in order to remember what was good and real. And Sizhui knew no words needed to be spoken between them.

Jiang-gugu shook Baba one last time. “Xianxian,” she said. “My Xianxian. My little brother.”

She was a bloodstain on that pristine white floor. She called him over and over again, reaching out to that thing that connected them, finding it severed.

Blood indeed. She was in her wedding dress.

—

The doctors checked him and said his condition was stable. It was Wen-gugu who did the grueling task of speaking with them, asking all the hard questions the family had given her, and then came back to relay everything.

“Awakenings like that have happened before,” she said, her clinical voice sounding like an echo in mountains rather than something hollow. “It’s rare. No one knows why it does. But it’s happened to people who have been comatose as long as he has been, sometimes longer.

“In some cases, they fall back into the coma and periodically wake up again. Sometimes, they eventually wake up for good. Sometimes, they have health problems for the rest of their lives. Sometimes, they come back good as new, though they have to adjust to modern life. But other times, this one awakening is it. Or they are fully conscious — Wei Ying’s brainstem is still alive and well — but they are completely immobile and cannot interact with the world around them.”

Jiang-gugu was cradling Baba’s head in her lap, the line of the oxygen mask hooked over her shoulder. He was still breathing; the mask was fogging.

Down the hall, the sound of the hospital coming to life. It was louder than Sizhui knew it to be. Perhaps it was because he was so shaken, and the world was just white light to him.

“A-Zhan,” Jiang-gugu said, voice hoarse. “Come here.”

Her glittering reds, the gold chasings that had caught the light when she served her parents tea. What was it like at her wedding? Baba crying silent tears in happiness even as his hand crept across the table’s toward Father’s, uncaring who saw. The empty seats where Jiang-gugu’s parents would have sat if only they were still living. Golden Gufu’s mother had refused to ever meet Sizhui — this, he knew, was a conscious decision that Golden Gufu fretted over when he thought Sizhui wasn’t listening. But Golden Gufu’s father was rumored to be a hanjian, so what did that matter, anyway? Nothing did. Baba was right. Help what’s in front of you, because just that is insurmountable.

Baba was right.

Without shame, Father knelt at Jiang-gugu’s side, resting his head against Baba’s thin chest. Listening for a story he didn’t want to hear. That Baba was alive and well, and he had chosen to die.

—

A week passed as they made arrangements. Jiang-gugu spent those quiet evenings, once they were done, sitting at Baba’s side, telling stories to A-Ling, singing those same Sichuan and Hong Hu songs to him. She even sang some of Yunmeng’s favorites, things she said Baba and Jiang-shushu loved to holler drunkenly into the streets back in the day.

Jiang-shushu spoke to the Qinghe Nie uncles over the phone. Huzi-shu’s gruff voice comforting like warm thunder as he told him kind things. Buzhi-shu sighing and audibly shaking his head and fanning himself. “You’re welcome to the funeral,” Jiang-shushu said. “For old times’ sake,” laughed Buzhi-shu.

Somehow, Jiang-shushu worked best with Wen-gugu at these times. Wen-gugu cooed at Paopao over WeChat, arranging a time so he and Popo could be on to send Baba off digitally. He had, after all, been their A-Xian too.

Wen-shushu found no need to say anything, staying silently at Jiang-gugu’s side or Sizhui’s depending on the time of day. Somehow, it worked. Sizhui would sit very close to him, feeling his sparse warmth and thinking, This is it. This is how it feels. Jiang-gugu once thanked Wen-shushu profusely for being there, when Wen-shushu had not even said anything. They shared bowls of soup without a word, and it was like finding a 知己 from those ancient times.

Golden Gufu’s awkward warmth, it turned out, was a kindness no one else could replace. He kept the household running. He was the one who walked Xianzi three times a day and sanitized himself each time. He brought Sizhui’s favorite takeout foods, making special orders to Mianwo Auntie and others at the markets, picking them up through a company car. When something in the refrigerator was missing, he was the first one to get them. Sizhui only noticed one day because he had a hankering for Beijing shanzha gao, and at three in the morning found Golden Gufu shrugging on his coat. “Banana jianbing,” he said. “We need more. They’re your favorite.”

A-Ling tried to make Sizhui laugh. He reminded him to do things throughout the day that would untrap him from the apartment. “Jingyi,” A-Ling said one day. When Sizhui looked at him, confused, he said, “Call Jingyi. I bet he’s bored without you. And A-Qing too. You guys just became friends. You’re gonna let this virus kill all that progress you two made?” “Don’t forget to put scallions in the congee. Wuhan congee is the best, you’re smart enough to know that, Yuan-ge.” “My god, stop studying, we all know you’re not really studying. Who cares if you just got into Tongji? Tongji is a perfectly good school. I’ll go to Beida for you.”

And Father spent every waking moment in the room with his husband. They decided not to bring the bed home; the hospital would need it and all its trappings the moment they became available. He spent some nights there too. He only seemed to come home for Sizhui.

It was Lan-bobo’s that was a curious case. Wen-gugu would be coaxing Paopao to finish his homework and study English, and the moment she hung up, she would squint her eyes at him as though he were stealing her air.

Lan-bobo didn’t do anything. He was helpful. He was garbage at scrubbing laundry, or frankly doing anything related to laundry period. He broke a fine porcelain plate with his bare hand once, so he was exiled from the kitchen. But he ran errands like a fiend, and he came through that door so squeaky clean Wen-gugu must have swooned that one time. Then she remembered that he sucked.

Why did he suck? Sizhui’s gut said it had something to do with Baba.

You’re absolutely right, Jingyi messaged him; they had talked about it through text, or else they wouldn’t have had any privacy. All roads lead to your baba.

Sizhui’s finger lingered over A-Qing’s name — 小虾子 — as he considered opening up his deep, dark secrets to her. They were close, but were they close enough for him to tell her about the life-changing encounter he had had recently? He turned off his phone.

He left his room. A-Ling, lying on the bed doing his own thing on his own phone, did not turn around. “Hurry back soon, Yuan-ge,” he said.

“Mn,” Sizhui said. He went through the warm white hall, swerved the deserted living room and into the kitchen. There was still mianwo in the refrigerator, behind the stacks of vegetables and take-out reganmian and other starchy things. He heated up the mianwo and crunched, closing his eyes and pretending it was a particularly still day on the street, that the white marble beneath his slippers were in fact concrete blocks. He hoped Mianwo Auntie was okay. It would break his heart to see the market vendors hurt.

He bit through a cold part that hadn’t really been heated. He sighed. Well, he tried.

When he walked into the living room still wiping his mouth, Wen-gugu and Lan-bobo were standing opposite each other, one with a fiery will to rip the other apart, the other reluctantly preparing to let her do it.

They both jumped when they felt the extra heat in the room. Looking guilty, Wen-gugu said, “Sizhui.”

“Please, for the love of heaven,” Sizhui said tiredly, “go fight in the courtyard or something. Holding it in isn’t healthy.”

The two adults looked at each other, flabbergasted. Sizhui walked back into his room and shut the door. “Hey, A-Ling.”

“Hey, Yuan-ge.”

—

Bye, Baba. Jiang-gugu’s tears have washed her face, wrung out her skin, hung her out to dry. Renewed for wear, she pulls the plug. She rises to hold her brother’s hand as he breathes his last.

It’s strange. Sizhui is realizing he was born at the advent of 轮回 and modernization, otherwise known as their country’s grapple with westernization. The stories of Nezha, ancestor worship, 如来佛祖 holding the universe in his palm, were the lifeblood that held the people of the countryside together. It was taken as seriously as Christianity is in the west and South Korea. So where is Baba going? Is he going to become a new little friend, a baby Sizhui encounters in a mother’s arms and realizes has the same spirit as the man who wasn’t allowed to raise him? Or is he going to heaven or Paradise, for eternal rest? Or is he going nowhere? This is it, and it’s fine, because Baba can hear how much they love him and dies with a smile on his face.

How fitting, that this lotus unhooked from water is going, going, going to to trace a new form with his petals.

Baba is smiling. Baba is smiling. Baba is smiling.

And he is still breathing.

Jiang-gugu smiles too, as she is the one who unhooks the oxygen mask, the needles, the tubes, as she untangles the weeds and finds the one living root.

She sobs, but it’s a laugh. It activates a memory of Baba’s face. Sizhui remembers how Baba would make that same sound with the same face.

“A-Xian, ah, A-Xian,” she says. “I didn’t dare to hope.”

Wen-gugu materializes by Sizhui in what seems like...not a very long time. He’s so awestruck by the sight of Baba still breathing, nothing dying. But it’s not these medical signs that give him the answer. It’s Jiang-gugu’s little sensible smile as she taps his nose.

Even Jiang-shushu seems to deflate. Only Father seems frozen, unable to believe.

Somehow, Wen-gugu managed to cajole a busy doctor into coming in and checking on their last patient. Listen, Sizhui could hear her say, you just need to examine this one person, and no matter what, you’ll have one more much-needed bed within the hour. The world outside was no longer able to afford an inch of wasted space. What a great talking point.

The doctor checks his vital signs. At this point in what is probably going to be an endemic, she’s already too tired to be stunned. But stunned she is.

“If I dare to say it — and I mean this as a doctor taking an educated guess, but you shouldn’t take this as a diagnosis — he hasn’t needed any of this for a long time,” she says, looking up at them all. “You can take him home, and should” — she eyes the outside world pointedly — “but check his vital signs. There’s still no guarantee he will wake up again.” She hesitates, hands fidgeting as she glances again at the door.

“If there is anything else that needs to be said,” Wen-gugu begins.

Wen-shushu helpfully shuts the door. A slight smile from the doctor. “I’ll be busy,” she says briskly. “But in case you do need a medical professional, here’s my WeChat. You can swipe my code here.” She holds out her phone, and Wen-gugu wastes no time in adding her. “Emergencies only,” she warns. “But he has a fighting chance, and the last doctor before me, Yang-yisheng, spent a lot of time before he retired on Wei-xiansheng. It’d be nice if something good comes out of this. Especially now.”

The doctor is young with eyes hand-pounded from steel. Wen-gugu smiles.

And the ludicrous thing is, they decide to spare the hospital their wheelchairs and gurneys. Father tenderly takes his husband, still adorned in Gusu waves of red, into his arms, carrying him like a bride into their cab. After thirteen years, Baba gets to leave not just this room, but he gets to explore the hall safe in his husband’s arms. Going down with his funeral procession of a family down the white aisle, all with a smile on his face. He glitters in the unfeeling white light as physician’s assistants hit the floor with their feet running back and forth, yelling that another patient is going to need oxygen. 有意思有意思， Sizhui thinks.

All those years sneaking around a day that never ends, the white tubes and tunnels leading him to the tangled heart, and after a nighttime hunt, now Baba finally gets his 喜丧。

Jiang-gugu never once let go of Baba’s hand, but the moment Father stooped over to roll him into his arms, she did. She and Jiang-shushu clutch at each other’s arms in a gesture of solidarity. They can finally bring their brother home.

The clattering of engines, machinery, and gurneys harmonize in a tempo when the hospital entrance doors slide open, and Baba feels sunlight chill again. The procession is large, but they all come through at the same time. Sizhui helps Father fix his mask onto his face; there is, after all, a new crown virus on the loose. Wen-gugu steps back to take a group wedding selfie for Paopao.

Sizhui is expert; he maneuvers himself just so, says, “You first” just enough times so that it is Jiang-shushu who sits next to Father, Baba’s head pressing against the cup of his shoulder and chest. Jiang-shushu cannot stop looking; he is struck, so worried and happy that he could possibly kiss the Lan-er he has barely tolerated all these years out of ecstasy.

Father gazes at Baba, the body lain like a stray length of ribbon across him, the face in a content smile as though relieved. Nothing else exists for him. They are married.

Finally, they bear him into the modest little Jiang apartment, enough to house a small family in a cozy manner. That was always the intent, Sizhui thinks. Yunmeng tradition keeps open doors for its people, Jiang-gugu always says.

Yunmeng people came to Wuhan through the steady push of the lakes and rivers. They die in the winter, and then push through the dirtiest mud to bloom, Jiang-shushu always says. Perhaps once upon a time, before the Cultural Revolution, the Jiang family crest was a lotus.

Jiang-gugu gives A-Ling the keys; he scurries over in his lanky little frame, his head nearly at Sizhui’s shoulders, and unlocks the door. The apartment says, hush, and Father lays Baba in the bed reserved for him all those weekends he came, the one closest to the balcony door.

“Wei Ying,” Father breathes, laying his forehead against his for everyone to see. “Wei Ying.”

It wrenches Sizhui out of nowhere to realize Father is the kind of person who dotes on his husband. If he grew up with them both, they would probably be the insufferable couple that always giggles fondly at each other, the kind of couple that makes Ouyang Zizhen want to cry. Ouyang Zizhen. What a strange time to be thinking about him. Sizhui hopes he and his tulou are okay.

Jiang-gugu wipes her eyes. She tucks the heavy quilt up to Baba’s chin, smooths his hair for the millionth time, and retreats into the kitchen.

Golden Gufu watches her go, then pats A-Ling’s shoulder. “Let’s go help your mama,” he says. “It’s New Year’s.”

Year of the mouse. The first year after twelve years. The zodiac cycle resets.

—

One day, a gift arrives. It is addressed to Lan Zhan.

“Ba?” Sizhui carries the long, oddly shaped package marked “fragile.” “This came for you.”

It is Bobo who seems to understand what it is. A look passes between the brothers. Finally, Father turns to Sizhui.

“Shufu,” he says.

Father never talks about his family. He dutifully answers the questions Sizhui poses to him, but ever since that audiovisual multimedia presentation called How Sizhui Got His Hukou Because His Baba Was a Hero, he seems to have lost energy for any other dwindling tales. Perhaps now he can get more thorough, telling questions than, “He is a good man” and “Strict. He cares very much.” Oh yes, and on the question of Sizhui’s grandparents, Father’s father and mother? “Dead.”

Father hefts the strange, even weight of the package in his hands, a queer look on his face.

“Sizhui,” he says. “You should open this.”

Dutifully, Sizhui does. He follows the seams of the cardboard and those little cut ridges, the cross sections like bread. He digs his fingers in and peels the edges away with a snicking sound. Jingyi calls him, and Bobo raises an eyebrow as Sizhui turns on his camera. “Think of this as a live unboxing video,” he says to Jingyi, who nods through a mouthful of KFC.

Once the sides of the box lay on the floor, there are layers of bubble wrap to go through...pop pop...and then two styrofoam ends keeping this long thing giving wooden clunks from hitting the sides of the box...and then more bubble wrap...

It’s a guqin.

It is made from dark, rich wood, but its shape is odd, too flat to match up to what he sees in dramas.

Sizhui looks up at Father and Bobo, who seem to know as much as he does.

“Shufu did say he hoarded some things from before the revolution,” Bobo prompts. Father nods, eyes just a fraction wider than usual.

“Waitwaitwait!” shrieks Sizhui’s phone. The adults just cannot fathom what is happening as Jingyi waves his hand frantically at the screen, then says, “A-HA! Zhihu says this is an antique guqin. They used to make it in this flat style, but the wood has kept very well if it’s still this dark.”

“That is Jingyi,” Father says to Bobo.

“Oh,” Bobo says. “ That’s Jingyi.”

A series of pops on Sizhui’s phone. “I sent some pics — take a look.”

“...Thank you, Jingyi,” Bobo says.

Sizhui runs his hand over it. It catches the light; like a twinkle in an eye. The wood is dark, but shows signs of such careful wear, it looks intentional, more like a polish. The strings are lightly indented, he tells Jingyi, who proceeds to Baidu some more and find out that you can just download a tuner app on your phone and tighten the strings until they sound right.

“Can you...play?” he asks Father. He knows his family is talented. They just put all these things down in a past life, and kept what they would need to raise their children. Father shakes his head.

“I have never seen that in my life,” Father said.

“I have never seen it either,” Bobo says. “In my day, we didn’t learn a lot of instruments.”

“We had that one adventure with the accordion,” Father says dryly.

“Really? Oh.” Bobo smiles. “You’re absolutely right.”

There is an awkward silence, where the static is just background noise coming from Jingyi’s end.

“You could try playing it, if you want,” Bobo says finally. “Shufu doesn’t speak to us anymore, but — ”

“I want to know why your shufu — my great-uncle — doesn’t speak to us,” Sizhui blurts out. “Is it because of me?” A lot of things seem to be because of him or baba. He digs his fingers into the ancient wood.

Father lets out a relieved sigh, slow air escaping him. Maybe it’s because Baba is still lying prone, without any sign of waking again, and things are becoming monotonous even in the face of a world-altering endemic. But more likely, Sizhui notes, it’s because he’s in a good, hopeful mood, despite Baba lying prone in what’s probably going to be a pandemic. That’s an important distinction to make. “It is time to tell you,” he agrees, looking pointedly at Sizhui’s phone.

Jingyi reads the room before Sizhui can react. “I am so glad we as a family have managed to come this far,” he says. “Sizhui, Sizhui — I’ll talk to you later, okay? I just wanted to show you my red envelope haul. I’m gonna call A-Qing now, because she’s probably bored.”

“Yeah,” Sizhui says distractedly. “You’re right.”

“That’s what I thought. Bye, Lan-xianshengs! 新年快乐！” Jingyi hangs up.

“He has Xiao Wei’s energy,” Bobo comments cheerfully.

Father laughs. “Mn.” Now, they look expectantly at Sizhui, who waits for them to finish this moment of bonding. “Ask us anything, Sizhui,” Father says. “We will answer to the best of our ability.”

Sizhui wants to lead with his most obvious question, but somehow, he wants to slowly build up to it first. Maybe it’s the guqin resting its corner so snugly in the palm of his hand, but he wants to put some pieces together.

“What would your shufu be doing when you came back from school?” he asks.

Father and Bobo look at each other, blinking at exactly the same pace of surprise. They finish communicating telepathically, then turn back to Sizhui. “Shufu would always be waiting for us with tea,” Father says, with no shortage of fondness.

Bobo says, with a Bobo laugh, “But he’d tell us to start working on our homework immediately. He’d help us with our work, but he’d always instruct us first when we were lost, because he believed in figuring it out yourself. One time, I spent three hours trying to figure out a math problem because Shufu wouldn’t give me any hints.”

“I was playing and looking you in the eye,” Father recalls fondly.

“I was miserable,” Bobo concludes with nostalgia.

They look back at Sizhui, waiting for the next question.

Well, that was...well, Shugong obviously wanted them to do well. Father also disallowed him from watching TV several times until he’d finished his homework.

“Could Shugong cook?” Sizhui asks.

“Yes,” Father says immediately. “One time, we wanted some of the neighbor’s wuji tang, but he didn’t let us because it’s for women on periods. Not that it actually mattered; wuji tang is good.”

“He knew your ba was upset that he couldn’t eat it due to such a nonsensical rule, so he followed the recipe a neighbor had brought from Korea and made a chicken stuffed with ginseng and glutinous rice,” Bobo sighs with pleasure. “He put too much rice in it, and it was a bit soggy, but that’s because he was so scared of not boiling it long enough. Better soggy rice than hard, cold surprise rice in the center.”

“What’s Shugong’s name?” Sizhui asks, making a note to make a special request to Jiang-gugu.

“Lan Qiren,” Bobo says. “‘Qi,’ to start. ‘Ren,’ to be virtuous and humane.”

“He said we are descended from a monk,” Father says.

“Yes.” Sizhui has done it; struck the sentimentality in Bobo, so now all the memories come flooding out. “He put down a lot of our family’s history and didn’t talk about it. ‘All that matters is the state now,’ he said. He would stroke his beard and huff when we came home from our first days at school, telling him that we’d learned to say ‘Long live the communist party’ and ‘I love Chairman Mao.’”

“He was not strictly Buddhist himself,” Father says, “but he did get a Guanyin statuette eventually.”

Eventually...

“Why did he stop talking to you?” Sizhui asks softly. All these things he’s learning, and yet 其实，his shugong is just a name his Bobo says. Why all the separation in this family? Jingyi talks to his grandparents. Ouyang Zizhen spends all his time with his grandparents! Even A-Qing, an orphan with a strange name, grew up talking with her grandmother over the phone. And Mo Xuanyu — oh, actually, that’s not a fun story, nevermind.

“Wei Ying,” Father says, and falls silent.

Bobo sighs. “Your shugong lives in Xinjiang now. I still occasionally send a WeChat message to him, but he does not want to talk to your ba. A-Zhan finished his schooling, but instead of getting a job, immediately went to Xi’an to be with your baba. Shufu could understand throwing your diploma away to help our countrymen in rural areas. He could not understand why he would be with someone who dropped out of university. He could not understand why neither of them would pursue wives and start a family either.

“I suppose it goes back to our parents too. Our father was Shufu’s older brother, and everyone had high expectations for him. Our father was supposed to be the star who made it out of Suzhou and became a scholar. And he did. But he also had an arranged marriage to our mother. Eventually, they did something the family frowned on: Our mother and father divorced. I never knew if they truly liked each other. Either way, our mother passed away when we were young, shortly after the divorce, and our father disappeared after that. We eventually received a death certificate from Heilongjiang; it looks like he had been living up there all alone. Your shugong was the one who raised us. He is...scared, I think, of an unconventional marriage.”

It doesn’t make much sense to Sizhui, but the further back the generations go, the more differently the world around them is shaped. Look at his world now: Tall skyscrapers for homes, concrete as far as the eye can see. When he was younger, the buildings were shorter, more gray than white. As far as he knows, Baba has never seen a building much taller than the Yellow Crane Pagoda. And as for Shugong? Sizhui wonders why he retreated to Xinjiang if that landscape is stretching towards the sky now too.

So maybe there was something in the air. Maybe some superstition, some trusted tradition — maybe Shugong never really believed in them, but he had never broken with it either, and the one time his brother did, he left behind two orphan boys. So Shugong trusts in what has already been established.

“I have tried to reconnect you two,” Bobo sighs, looking straight at Father, who looks contrite.

“His condition is that I find another half for myself,” Father says. “I will have no one else.”

Bobo’s brow furrows into layers of rice paddies from above. “He worries that you will be alone. But he has since been reassured to know that you raised Sizhui by yourself.”

Father visibly hunkers down, caught. So Shugong knows about Sizhui, and worries about him. The warmth of the qin in his hand is now the warmth of pride.

Perhaps there is one day that Father will be able to speak with Shugong again. Even if Baba doesn’t wake up, perhaps Sizhui will be the one who learns the guqin and brings them together.

“It is no one’s role to reconnect us but Shufu’s and mine,” Father says, looking pointedly at Sizhui. Sizhui huffs through his nose. Fine, fine. But also, we’ll see about that. Sizhui smiles down at the guqin, though the smile is actually for his shugong. He loves his gift. It’s like being given a power he never needed, but now revels in.

As the days pass and Wen-gugu and Lan-bobo seem to come to some mutual understanding — not a resolution, just a stalemate that isn’t too hot and simmery — Sizhui tries to push his luck.

“You rarely come to Wuhan,” he says to Bobo one day, in the rare hour when most of the apartment is asleep and they are alone.

“A-Zhan has been waiting for your baba’s progress for years. I want to help however I can,” Bobo says.

“I hope it hasn’t been stressful,” Sizhui continues.

“Everyone is. That is why we need to hang together,” Bobo says in a big brotherly voice.

“I sure hope Wen-shushu is okay with sleeping on the couch,” Sizhui tries.

“We rotate, so I hope so.”

“He does have a reliable older sister, after all,” Sizhui presses.

“Yes, he does.”

Sizhui just out and says it. “Why are you and Wen-gugu being like this?”

Lan-bobo blinks; Sizhui does not know if he’s surprised or if he was expecting this. But since they’re already here, he might as well 趁烫打铁。

That’s when Lan-bobo sighs, and it sinks into Sizhui’s bones; he will not be mesmerized, he will not be lulled. But instead of deflecting again, Lan-bobo cuts through the bones to the quick. “Wen Qing and I have known each other for a long time. We met when your ba went to visit your baba. At that time, your baba had already moved to Yiling, and your ba followed.”

Sizhui nods; he has heard many versions from all his family and their friends, but the one sticking point is this: Lan Zhan met Wei Ying in college. Wei Ying spun Lan Zhan’s world on its head, and when he dropped out to help a small village in Xi’an, Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan never wanted to see him again.

Lan Zhan followed.

“It took a few visits, because A-Zhan was still trying to study and get his degree. Eventually, he did. Instead of getting a job — he was offered so many scholarships and positions even before he graduated — he decided to go to Xi’an and stay for good this time. He helped Xiao Wei move part of the family to Yichang and find different prospects there. Xiao Wei had been doing a lot on his own already, but he would often say that without A-Zhan pulling connections he had made in college, he wouldn’t have been able to work out such good conditions for your Wen family in Yichang. The one thing I know Xiao Wei did all on his own was get you your hukou.” Lan-bobo studies Sizhui’s face, finds no confusion, only memory. “He told you, then.”

“Yeah,” Sizhui says. “Ba told me a long time ago.”

The planes of Lan-bobo’s tired face — (Sizhui thinks, looking at him, In their day, Baba and Bobo must have caught the eye of every person on campus, even the straight men) — smooth. There are smile lines along his cheeks, the winking points of his eyes. Father, on the other hand, has a face that has moved so little, he looks younger than he actually is. And Baba is his own story. Sizhui hopes he can manage to adapt to being almost middle-aged when he wakes up.

Oh no, I am twenty-something, and obviously I’ll be the one who’s thirty next, Sizhui thinks. He smiles at Lan-bobo. Lan-bobo accepts the strange candy that the child is offering him, and they share the smile.

Lan-bobo gives a small snort of a laugh. It’s so human, Sizhui wonders why Jingyi is so impressed by his uncle. He thinks about how his shugong is desperate for Father to find another spouse. It dawns on him.

“You like Wen-gugu?” he asks incredulously.

Snort. Lan-bobo squeals like a little piglet at the thought. “What?” he croaks, now a frog. Sizhui huffs.

“Well, can you blame me? It’s like everyone wants to get with Wen-gugu,” Sizhui grumps, and is promptly horrified at how much he sounds like Father when he’s complaining about small things. Who’s the transforming farm animal now?

Lan-bobo makes an unattractive Uncle Noise, like he’s choking to death on his own whimsy. Sizhui laughs evilly in triumph.

“Your Wen-gugu is something else,” Lan-bobo finally admits. “No. It’s just that when two people are stuck in the same room for days, it gets to them. Your Wen-gugu and I were divided on the question of your baba. When A-Zhan decided to stay with Xiao Wei, I went up there myself to ask them if it was worth it. It had hurt your shugong a lot to know that he was throwing his prospects for a stable family away to go be with a college dropout, let alone for another man. I was only thinking about your shugong, but I berated Xiao Wei. I asked him if it would do any good if he was hurting so many people in our families just to save a small family in Xi’an. ‘You are not saving the country, you are just trading in one family for another,’ I said.

“Wen Qing came up to me then, and she told me, ‘Well, you try to save everyone by mediating like it’s still legalism times, and it’s not saving your shugong or your brother any grief. Try again.’”

“That sounds like Wen-gugu,” Sizhui says.

Lan-bobo laughs. The memory of words meant to shame him has now become a lesson. “That was the last time we had a good talk, and I am sure we’ve both grown by then. I still think about those words, and I have always wholeheartedly supported your parents since then. I think your Wen-gugu thinks that I still think your ba should have stayed home. I think she’s afraid I’ll treat you badly out of resentment. You do symbolize A-Zhan and Xiao Wei turning their backs on their families to save a handful of strangers.” The words are neutral, forgiving. “Sometimes I still see it that way. Because they did. But they also made difficult choices to selflessly help other people and be with their zhiji. You can see it that way too. I went up there to tell A-Zhan to stay, but in the end, the only person who stayed was me. Shufu left, A-Zhan left and came back, and I decided I would never abandon him. He’s my brother. And you’re my nephew. I don’t leave my family, and I won’t resent them for the choices they make.”

Sizhui nods along, but his chest has burst into bloom. Wen-gugu still distrusts Lan-bobo, he thinks, but they tolerate each other’s presence. 

His phone rings.

The spell broken, Lan-bobo nods in permission. Sizhui swings his legs off the couch and scurries into his room, thankfully free of A-Ling. The call is from A-Qing.

She sounds wobbly as static. “Sizhui,” she says, like she’s been furiously crying, emphasis on the furiously. “I’m going back to Shanghai. I just wanted you to know.”

“Why? What happened?” Sizhui, having flopped himself back on the pillows, bolts upright.

Between a few seething, then sniffling sounds, comes the bamboo-sturdy will with which A-Qing forces her voice to steady. “I cut my dad off.”

“Are you okay?” Sizhui says at once, before he realizes he even said it. A-Qing, who has complained about her father for years but always clearly loved him. One of his fondest memories is of the day Sizhui had finally gotten to hang out with her alone, and she had just picked up a new cane for her ba, twirling it in one hand.

“No, I’m fucking not,” she says, and the fucking isn’t aimed at him. “I told him not to — I would have stayed, but — ”

She has mentioned in brief moments of deep bonding that her father treats her and her adoptive brother well. They come from a family built by generations of adoptions. She is close to her grandmother, who had also adopted her father (Sizhui suspects that the grandmother was a Japanese war orphan, but that’s a secret they’ll never tell). But that adoptive brother of hers, she’s said, is the kind of kid who gets away with murder. Short of hurting her, he’s the kind of person who bullies others and then manages to lie his way out of it. The worst part isn’t that he lies. The worst part is that her father always believes him.

“I can’t,” A-Qing says. “Yangyang broke apart a bowl on my arm on purpose today because he said he was sick of seeing me around the apartment. And when he lied to our ba and said that he’d just been trying to help, and I said he’d clearly done it on purpose, our ba believed him.”

“Oh,” Sizhui says. He can’t say much more.

“I can’t stay here,” A-Qing says. “I can’t believe my ba won’t believe me, but I can’t do this anymore. I even punched Yangyang in his lying fuckface as soon as he’d broken the bowl, but then my ba just said we shouldn’t fight in the house and that clearly there was a misunderstanding. He said it like it was an equal thing. It wasn’t. Yangyang got a black eye. I needed stitches . My ba immediately took us to the hospital, but it was so packed full of coronavirus patients, we couldn’t get anyone to take care of it.”

“Are you just bleeding freely?” Sizhui says incredulously, expressing his concern in a way so reminiscent of Father that he’s a little upended by how hilarious the thought is in the midst of this serious situation.

“No, my ba stemmed the bleeding,” A-Qing chokes through tears. “But he still believes Yangyang, so who’s to say he won’t do it again? I can’t, Sizhui, I just — My ba is a good person, but he just blindly listens to whatever Yangyang says and never uses his brains. He just tries to be an unbiased dad, but then that ends up hurting me. It’s become a pattern.”

Sizhui remembers how she opened this conversation. “Where are you now?”

“In a cab to Shanghai. I already have all my stuff. I’m going to stay at Xuanyu’s, which is great anyway, since I can be his beard. I might get my own place after this pandemic bullshit is over, but right now, I’m just gonna sleep on his couch.”

“Oh.” Sizhui says. And then, “If you need anything, please just ask me. I know we’re on lockdown, but I’ll do whatever I can to help. Jingyi and Zizhen too.”

For the first time, A-Qing laughs wetly. It sounds calmer now. “Zizhen would probably want me to stay with his family. That’d be cool, but I already had to pull teeth to find a cab that would take me. I’m gonna call Jingyi next.”

Out of morbid curiosity, Sizhui asks, “A-Qing?”

“Mm?”

“Do you think you could talk to your dad again after this?”

“Maybe,” A-Qing hums, “but only if he gets rid of Yangyang or straightens him out. He tried to stop me from leaving, you know. My ba. He tried to talk me out of it the whole way, and at one point even tried to order me to stay. But I’d already told him a hundred times and I don’t think I can make myself clearer. My grandma was surprisingly chill about it, said I did what I have to do but I’ll have to talk to him again one day. I don’t want to do it either, but if he’s just going to let Yangyang do what he wants, then I can’t stay.”

Sizhui cannot imagine leaving his family. They’re flawed, but they try to straighten themselves out. Even now, when they fight, they try to hide it from the kids. He’s been realizing that this is something that doesn’t happen in other families. Ouyang Zizhen would tell him that in his tulou, even when the adults would fight in another room, their yells would come echoing down the hall.

“I can’t imagine never talking to your dad again,” he says, unbidden.

“Your dad sounds amazing, but that’s because he listens to you and treats you with respect like your own opinion is important,” A-Qing says. “My dad still feels like he knows best and needs to take care of me. He’s trying, though. He hasn’t even brought up marriage or boyfriends or whatever, or even my career, but he’s not trying fast enough.”

Sizhui sighs, “I get it. A-Qing, please stay safe, okay? Text me when you get to Xuanyu’s.”

“I will!” A-Qing says. “Thanks for listening to me, Sizhui. You’re a really good friend. Let’s have FaceTime hotpot together soon. Happy New Year.”

“Yeah, of course,” Sizhui says. “Happy New Year.”

The silence after hanging up deafens him. He meditates on it for the next hour, until Zizhen calls him with the news. They sit in silence for a moment before Zizhen says, “I don’t get it. A-Qing’s dad tries. My ba is still mad I haven’t found a girlfriend yet. He and my ma expect me to get married in the next two years, and I don’t know how to tell them that that’s not going to happen. A-Qing’s a girl, and her ba leaves her alone. Her ba is a unicorn. ”

“I’m surprised too,” Sizhui agrees. His WeChat blips, and he quickly follows that notification into his messages with Jingyi, where Jingyi has simply sent: “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

He sends a quick horse-duck sticker back, and goes back to his conversation with Zizhen. “Do you think it’s because he’s too lax?” he asks.

“No,” Zizhen says. “I just think that our parents think they know better no matter what. Nothing’s gonna change their minds, even when their kid is literally walking out the door and they’re legally not a runaway.”

More silence. Then, “I’m glad our dads make decisions that don’t hurt us.”

“Yeah,” Zizhen says. “I mean, not for now. My dad’s nagging about getting married is driving me up the wall, but I’m always going to have a home here even when I’m a forty-year-old spinster. And he would believe me if my sister hit me.”

They chat for a few more minutes before Zizhen’s ma starts yelling again, dialect so strong Sizhui can barely make head nor tail of it. “That’s my cue,” Zizhen says distractedly. “Wash your hands, wash your face, blahblahblah — ”

“You too,” Sizhui says.

He feels oddly lonely when he’s off the phone with his friends. When he’s back in the living room, A-Ling is sitting on the floor, watching his favorite donghua on the TV.

Sizhui decides to be with his baba. Father isn’t there, probably scolded away into having food in the kitchen. So when he’s by Baba’s bedside, the room is blissfully empty.

“Hey Baba,” he says, taking a seat. He has learned too much today, and he tells Baba so. Baba, asleep, tilts his head as though listening. “My friend cut all ties with her ba today. I don’t think I could do that in a million years. It’s funny, because he was really trying his best, and even did a lot of things better than other bas do. Growing up, you’d hear about all these dads who’d gamble and put a burden on the family, or dads who cheated on their wives and then decided to be with their second families. A-Qing’s ba never did any of that. He was the kind of ba who never nagged her about marriage. He paid for tutoring sessions for her when she wasn’t sure about her gaokao. When she showed even a little bit of interest in woodworking, he surprised her by showing her he could carve. He made her a little fox hairpin. He was never selfish. He always let her do what she wanted and watched out for her safety. He tried to be patient. Baba, I don’t know if you know this, but even though things have changed, parents still aren’t very understanding people. That much hasn’t changed.

“But he also had a weak point. He tried to treat both A-Qing and her brother fairly. Even when her brother, Yangyang, hurt her and lied about it, he believed him. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, but it got worse today. A-Qing left. And all I can think about is how confused her dad must be, and how heartbroken they both are, because they really, really tried, but he still hurt A-Qing.

“And it’s not about me, but I can’t help but think about how Jiang-shushu took me to see his parents’ graves just a few months ago, and how you tried to do the right thing Jiang-shushu’s ba always taught you to do — always look out for your countryman. But because they thought you were throwing away your future by dropping out of college, and because you lost their face, they died never speaking to you again. Did you hurt the same way A-Qing did when you found out? How many times did you and Jiang-shushu fight before you both out and said your feelings to each other? Or did you just not, and Jiang-shushu trying his best to be a good uncle to me is just him trying to show and not tell? I can’t imagine never speaking to any of you again. I can’t even imagine not speaking to you again.”

Baba shifts again, and one hand grasps Sizhui’s. Sizhui smiles, his sight stuttering as though he is viewing him from a league beneath the sea, and Baba is on the surface. Loud laughter, open trumpet flowers.

“Jiang-shushu has been treating me very well,” Sizhui tells him. “So don’t worry. Jiang-gugu too. And Wen-gugu and Lan-bobo, even though they don’t see eye to eye. And Wen-shushu and even Golden Gufu. And of course, Ba.”

Baba’s eyelashes flutter. A disembodied groan sounds around them.

“And if you come back, and even if we disagree, well. I think I have a very good attachment to everyone, and even if one of us did something very bad, I think we could take a break for a few years and come back. You’re basically taking a long break too.”

The hold on Sizhui’s fingers draws into a pinch.

“Maybe A-Qing will talk to her ba again one day, but I don’t know. She has her friends, though. You find family no matter where you go. Chen Xiaoyu once said friends will never care for you like blood family does, and he tried to bully me for having two dads because there’s no way you guys are my real family. But I smacked his stupid head with a brick, so who’s the loser here?”

“Lan Zhan.” Baba’s eyes are blissfully closed as he groans, but when he opens them — glassy — he stares straight over Sizhui’s shoulder. “What exactly have you taught our child? Who knew our Sizhui could fight people?”

Sizhui jumps around to see Father standing in the doorway from the balcony, clearly frozen in an attempt to escape into the hall. Sizhui doesn’t mind that he heard all that. He beckons, and Father kneels close at his side. When Sizhui turns back to Baba, Baba is looking at him.

“Baba?” A disembodied voice around them. It’s small. Maybe it’s four-year-old A-Qing, who just got adopted.

“A-Yuan,” Baba whispers, voice hoarse. “A-Yuan.” He threads his fingers through twenty-three year-old, sixteen-year-old, ten-year-old, three-year-old A-Yuan’s hair, chasing that yearning of a long, tunneling dream. “How you’ve grown. Lan Zhan, how did you do it? Ah, no — ” He shakes his head with difficulty, but when he rights himself, his eyes are clearer now. “You’re Lan Zhan. You’re Hanguang-jun, my husband who would hold my hand in the street, even when people stare. If anyone could raise such a strong, thoughtful child, you could.”

“Wei Ying,” Father says, sounding hoarse himself.

“Mn, Lan Zhan.” Baba pushes himself up with shaky hands, one still grasped in Sizhui’s.

“Wei Ying.”

“Lan Zhan.”

Sizhui just up and envelopes them in a hug. They were taking too long to get to the point.

—

After Wuhan opens back up, they sit around the table. Huzi-shu and Buzhi-shu have rejoined them from Qinghe. Paopao runs around the room annoying the everloving shit out of Jin Ling, who hovers protectively over a content and napping Xianzi (she isn’t allowed to leave her corner today, but she has her bone and her toy). A-Qing is over today; she somehow managed to get the tickets from Shanghai. Sizhui wants to know her ways. Jingyi couldn’t make it, but Sizhui video calls him at the dinner table. It is the year of the cow now. So while Jiang-gugu makes 莲藕排骨汤，she also tries her hand at a recipe Golden Gufu brought from Hong Kong. “Beef Wellington,” it’s called.

Outside, the view of the silver coin lake has been cropped in half by a new glittering building, but at least the ads are blaring out of the other side. The lake glows red, then green, then orange.

“Show me your punch,” Huzi-shu says, holding out his hand. A-Qing gives him a hook so hard, the sting leaves Huzi-shu’s eyes comically wide. “Wow,” is all he remembers to offer. “Do it again.”

In a wheelchair, whispering conspiratorially with Father, is Baba. He has significantly improved, looking less gaunt and haggard. He’s even recovered his laugh. Father whispers something else, and with red cheeks, Baba throws his head back. Jiang-gugu wipes her eyes at the sound. Suspicious.

“You have gained a bit of weight,” Father says, stroking the skin of Baba’s hand. “Only a little bit,” he adds hastily, as Baba’s eyes round out. “It’s good. Don’t lose it.”

“Lan Zhaaaaaan,” Baba whines a pitch higher than even Jiang-gugu’s chiding voice. “Why would you put me in this dilemma right before a meal?”

“My mistake.” Father thinks he’s being sneaky by pulling him by the wheelchair into the hall and kissing Baba there, but Sizhui thinks he could learn a few lessons about being sneaky sneaks. They wheel back in like nothing happened, we can see you, Sizhui thinks exasperatedly. But it’s sweet that they’re still so passionate and reckless.

Jiang-shushu looks ready to call them out on it. He stops short, merely rolls his eyes, and then goes back to ripping up newspaper for the tables.

Wen-gugu and Lan-bobo enter the living room together, both carrying massive platters and pots into the dining room. “Paopao!” Wen-gugu says, sternly but gently. “The food is here. Help your A-Ling-gege carry the dishes to the table.

“Nono,” Jiang-gugu says, hurrying out in her apron. “No, keep playing, Paopao. Wen Qing, let the children play.”

“They can help set up the tables,” Lan-bobo suggests. “That doesn’t take too long.” He’s holding one steaming soup pot in each hand.

The apartment has gotten too small for all its guests. This year, instead of keeping their dinner confined into someplace like the dining room, they unfold tables in the living room too, with every chair they have.

Jin Ling and Paopao set up the tables, but Sizhui sets up the chairs, and then leads Baba to a spot right by Father.

“Wen Qingggggg,” Baba sighs, beleaguered. “How much longer must I stay in this wheelchair?”

“As soon as you can get up without falling on your face.” Wen-gugu doesn’t even look at him.

Wen-shushu zips by, dodging a tackle from Paopao. “You’re doing great!” he translates for Wen-gugu. “If you keep at it, you’ll be walking with a cane by next month!”

“Oh come on,” Baba groans. Without saying much more, Father taps a few spots on his phone screen, then holds it to Baba’s mouth. “Send a message to Popo,” he suggests. Baba perks up; when he woke up for good, one of the first things he did was video chat Popo. He cried and cried, and promised to go up to see her when he could walk again. That day seems closer than before.

“Popo!” he calls into the microphone, voice sliding comfortably into dialect.

Sizhui decides to shove himself into the conversation, tilting his head so it’s pressed against Baba’s. Baba immediately leans into it, adding on, “A-Yuan is here too! A-Yuan!”

When they have finished sending their voice message, food is on the table. A-Qing sits across from him, next to Huzi-shu, who looks ready to adopt her himself.

Jiang-shushu says to Wen-gugu, “Your Paopao boisterous. But he gets along well with the dog.” There’s a lightness to his voice, such a spread of crocuses peeking gently from the dirt.

Wen-gugu’s smile crinkles her eyes. There are more lines there than there were before, but they’re happy lines. They’re fertile lands and rumpled linens and the round cuts left by waterfalls. “ Our Paopao has a good family.”

Baba raises his glass, which is half filled with alcohol — (“You still need to wait a bit before you go back to your drunken self, do you want to die?” Wen-gugu scolded) — and says, “To Paopao.”

Huzi-shu is not one to miss out on a toast, but Jiang-shushu beats him to the punch. “Yeah,” he says. “To Paopao.”

—

(“Jiang Cheng,” Wen-gugu had said coldly, “I am not Wei Ying. And I am not the reason that he left. Neither is Lan Zhan. Wei Ying left because he was in love and found a different way to take care of our country.”

Sizhui was not meant to hear it that day in Yiling. He wondered how he could fix it, and if he should.

The adults have handled it themselves, whether through a softening of the times or a compromise for their Family. Maybe it is both.)

—

And Baba does walk. He masks up and leans heavily on the cane.

You aren’t scared? Jingyi WeChats him. That after all this time, you and your baba won’t be able to get along? You’ll annoy each other? There’s going to be an awkward dissonance? Sizhui, promise me you won’t 勉强。Forcing it will make it worse.  

Sizhui WeChats back: I think I should be more scared. But I’ve made my peace with not knowing my own baba over the years, so this actually feels like a natural next step. I feel really safe around him. It’s like he never left, and I don’t really understand why.

“Oh,” Baba says faintly, slowly craning his neck. His head goes back. Back and back. “Look at the height of that monster.” He’s referring to the skyscrapers. They’re nothing new; they’re just a bit taller, and there are more now.

“The courtyard has not changed,” Father says pettishly, like he’s ready to lecture their apartment complex if it does.

Over his mask, Baba’s eyes crinkle. “Lan Zhan,” he laughs, mouth wide open though Sizhui cannot see it, “would you still take care of me if I changed?” He stumbles a bit; Father catches his arm, and Sizhui his other arm.

“Wei Ying is still Wei Ying,” Father says. “I would take care of you even if you turned into a dog.”

“That’s the worst thing you have ever said to me,” Baba wails.

“Let’s just go,” Sizhui says, dragging his dramatic parents along.

The streets are still empty, like the people of Wuhan are too shy to come out. But there are people. There are still drivers, and the ones who are out are aggressive as ever, even if their cars are fancier. A black van swerves around them with the same wanton disregard for everything around it, and Baba — hand shaking with exertion but surprisingly firm — pulls Sizhui back protectively.

That’s a lot of strength, Sizhui notes, but he’s proud. He’s proud of Baba’s thin hands.

It hurts a bit to see the cut coins of Wuhan. The way Baba turns with an excited laugh towards a lake, face falling when he’s stopped short by a new building blocking his way. When they enter the market, and Sizhui realizes that that empty stall won’t be serving him mianwo anymore. That he could never share them with Baba like he now realizes he would have liked to do. It’s the loss of Mianwo Auntie that droops his head and fills his eyes.

Baba does not understand; he was not alive the same time Mianwo Auntie was. But he understands too. He presses his clever, thoughtful hands into Sizhui’s in a soothing motion like Jiang-gugu’s. Father prepares to ask the stall owner next to Mianwo Auntie’s if she is all right.

The neighbor uncle takes one look at Sizhui’s face, recognition lighting his eyes, and says, “She has passed from the coronavirus. 节哀顺变。”

“Oh,” Father says.

A pause. Sizhui sags into Baba’s side, the faint brush of his hand running up and down his arm. He stares at the dust beneath their feet.

The uncle has not stopped staring at them, gentle. “You must be in college now,” he says.

Sizhui nods. “Yes. I’m still studying virtually, but I made it into Beida.”

The uncle shakes his head, incredulous. “Incredible.”

“Not at all,” Sizhui says, feeling embarrassment for the first time in a year. “Thank you.”

“Is your family well?” he asks.

Sizhui nods furiously, feeling like the child who stared up at Mianwo Auntie all over again. “Yes,” he says, “these are both my fathers.”

The neighbor does not quite smile. Does not quite glow. But there is such a heaving of wistful joy, such an outpouring of grace that diffuses into the air, as he says, “That’s wonderful.”

“How full do you think the cemetery is?” Baba eventually asks, as they stroll down the street, a bag of oranges in hand. Sizhui does not even need to ask which one he means. He knows which one. He knows he wants to search the graves. And he knows he wants to see the sea of lotuses that flanks it.

Father says, “Full.”

“We should go,” Sizhui says at once.

Baba squeezes his shoulder. He can’t stop touching him. He can’t stop loving his child. “Soon.”

“We can take the subway,” Sizhui says, brightly. “You have to see them. They’re so clean and fast. You’ll love them.” He’s already laughing at the thought of Baba bracing himself against a screeching halt, only to knock himself over when the train slides to a smooth stop. It’s like missing a stair.

“And then we’ll take the train back to Suzhou,” Baba says. “Those…” His eye twitches. “ Bullet trains.”

“We can take the overnight if you want,” Father says.

“Yeah,” Sizhui says. “It’s not about the speed, anyway. It’s about the journey. We can stop — ” Stop. He wonders, as he pauses, if there are even vendors in the train stations anymore.

Baba gives a loud, beleaguered sigh. “Ahhh, I slept for like twenty years, I want to go fast again. Let’s ride the bullet train. But we can take the overnight back.”

Sizhui looks forward.

“Are you sure your heart can take the bullet train?” he asks innocently.

Baba blinks rapidly. “You little brat,” he says.

Sizhui leads Baba along, but all three of them are in step. The lines around Baba’s eyes are pulled back as a store owner gives him a strange look for buying water with cash and Father whips out his WeChat pay. A woman walks by with a well-groomed dog on a leash, and Baba seems almost too confused to shy away. Despite his frail state, Baba has the energy of a child. “Let’s go home,” Father says, and Baba has to fight to ask for another hour wandering the newly-paved roads.

Sizhui can’t wait to take him to see the VR amusement park over where a pit of water had once stood. Wants to take him and Father by the hands and go to the large square that has not changed over the years. Wants to take him through the alleyways that still houses the largest gardening market he still has ever seen, but show him all the little service robots that the store owners invested in, and take him to the new restaurant with a punk theme, and rent a few bikes to see the new malls, and lead him onto the subway, the cool gush of white bringing him through pastel-bright advertisements in those black tunnels that wind into Suzhou Station.

He will meet Jingyi, Ouyang Zizhen, and Mo Xuanyu. A-Qing will be going to see her grandmother soon, and she wants them to meet her. Sizhui has already decided to play a little song on his guqin for her. He’s been practicing off 古风 Bilibili videos, and even started teaching Father a little. When he fills up the remaining spaces in their overstuffed apartment with the music, Jiang-gugu seems to float, often with her arm threaded through Baba’s.

Sizhui stops and breathes. The air in Wuhan is so still. It holds them.

“A-Yuan,” Baba and Father say, but it isn’t a call for his attention. Just a call for him to know they are there.

He doesn’t open his eyes. Will the world be the same when he does?

He grips their hands and keeps walking, blind, down the street. He does not fear tripping or stumbling. When he opens them up again, the scenery has changed.

The hands are still there.