Chapter Text
In the spring of his twenty-first year, Hua Cheng packs up his life into a duffel bag and buys a one-way train ticket out of Shanghai.
He watches the looming skyscrapers make way for fields and hills, splashed across the train window like an oil painting. He runs his hand over the glass as if he’s smearing the countryside, leaving an impression on the verdant trees and glossy rivers. A way for the world to remember him.
“You should be going back to college and getting a degree like your brothers, not hiding away with your sketchbook! An artist, indeed. You’ll be lucky to draw those ridiculous cartoons for the paper!”
His stepmother’s words snap like a stray dog at Hua Cheng’s heels as he disembarks the train to a mostly empty platform, bag slung over his shoulder and city fog on his back as he scans the road for an available taxi.
There’s one, so he strides over and gets inside, the sign on the roof clicking off with a tired grunt from the driver. He reeks of cigarettes and cheap cologne. Hua Cheng gives him an address and sits back, his one eye ever-fixed on the scenery outside, which hasn’t changed in the years since Hua Cheng last visited. The low fences and tidy hedges of 70s and 80s-style houses blur together, and the local shops with peeling road signs are still stacked altogether on one street. Buy a large coffee, get a bun for free!
It’s a nostalgic sight; an entire work of art squeezed out of a single tube of paint.
Hua Cheng’s aunt’s house is tucked away behind a forest of maple trees, over the river at the top of a hill. Hua Cheng remembers running through those trees as a child during the long, blurry summers he spent there, stray leaves catching his hair with butterfly kisses. He’d run all the way to the cliff’s edge and look down at the town below, counting how many lights would turn on before the sun set.
But it’s been years, and he’s all but forgotten that little boy.
The taxi takes Hua Cheng up the winding dirt lane to the house. It’s old and worn out, traditional made half-heartedly modern, the shingles green and fuzzy with moss. The mailbox at the end of the lane stands crooked on its stake, sticking out a tongue of letters. Hua Cheng pays the driver and gets out with his bag, tugging the letters out as he creaks open the gate.
The front door swings wide before he even makes it to the porch, Li Ayi tumbling out, her bangles clinking. At her feet, a moody-looking black cat slinks into the sun, stretching luxuriously. Like Hua Cheng, it only has one eye, which it blinks curiously at him as he approaches. But Hua Cheng pays the cat no mind as Li Ayi arrests him into a hug. She’s a full foot shorter than him now, but she still does her best to heave him up into the air like she did when he was young.
“My Xiao Hua! Look how tall you are! And this hair! I don’t see you for a few years and this is what happens?” She wriggles her arms around him affectionately when she fails to lift him even an inch off the ground, boots firmly planted on the tired decking. “Still wearing that eyepatch, huh? Did you eat yet?”
“Hi, Ayi,” Hua Cheng says, smiling down at her.
She looks like his mother, if his mother was still around for anyone to resemble her; short black hair and kind, sparkling eyes. Wrinkles are starting to form at the corners, creased from years of laughter. She has the appearance of someone who is younger than she really is. Hua Cheng didn’t realise how much he’s missed her; how much he needed what was left of his mother’s side of the family in his life.
It rained the day Hua Cheng’s mother died; wet and loud, hammering against his umbrella while he waited outside the hospital for his father to collect him so he could say goodbye to her. But his father had taken too long. By the time he arrived downstairs, Hua Cheng’s mother was already gone.
Hua Cheng feels like the rain sometimes; heavy and unwanted, regarded only with resentment or displeasure. Even Li Ayi cried when she saw her nephew for the first time after her sister died. No one likes it when it rains.
He leaves the letters on the table by the door and Li Ayi shows Hua Cheng upstairs to his room as if he hasn’t been here before; as if all the childhood memories have been coated over with primer, ready for a fresh layer of paint. She doesn’t hover, leaving Hua Cheng to settle in with a fond pat on his arm.
He enters what was once his second bedroom, with its westward facing window and sheer red curtains. It’s since been converted into a guest room, the ugly, flowery wallpaper stripped back and painted over with a creamy brown.
Some of Hua Cheng’s old things have been kept, despite the fact that he hasn’t been back here in eight years. An ancient cassette player sits on the desk by the window with a few books, stacked neatly on the corner like they’ve been waiting for him all this time.
You’re back, you’re back! Hua Cheng can’t recall what songs are on the cassettes, or what the books are about.
Approaching the desk, he peers out of the window to the backyard, the tall grass a tumbling sea of green. The edges of the property are framed with flowers, and a vegetable patch hugs the kitchen window near the porch, which Hua Cheng can see if he angles his neck just right. Li Ayi is kneeling there with her spade, her face hidden beneath a wide straw hat.
Hua Cheng dumps his bag on the bed without unpacking and goes outside to stand on the porch.
His feelings about coming here are mixed, as they’ve always been. Summers with his aunt were a very happy time, but after his mother died, there was also bitter anger at being deserted by his parents.
It lingers in his heart even now. Happy boy, angry heart. Or was it the other way around? Hua Cheng still isn’t sure.
He walks over to his aunt where she’s crouched by the vegetable patch. It’s three times bigger since Hua Cheng last saw it, but that’s no surprise. Li Ayi loves her garden, and she’s spent many years nurturing it.
She jabs her spade into the soil and triumphantly tugs out a carrot. Next to her, the black cat pounces among the cabbages near the wall, its tail flicking madly.
“You’re just in time for the first veggies of the season. I’m making soup for dinner, but there’s plenty of food in the fridge for now.”
“Can I walk around while I eat?” Hua Cheng asks.
“Of course. I’ll fix you a sandwich, yeah?”
She stands up and leaves first. Hua Cheng starts to follow her, but something in the garden catches his eye; the black cat has moved to the tomato stalks, appearing to be stalking something. Hua Cheng could have sworn he saw something shift behind one of the low-hanging leaves, but when he looks back, it’s only the wind jostling the stems.
“What is it?”
Hua Cheng switches his gaze to his aunt, who didn’t go further than the porch step when she noticed Hua Cheng hesitate.
“What?” he returns.
She squints at him. “Did you see something?”
“I thought so, but it was the wind,” he explains. Then, he smirks. “Or maybe it was one of the Little People.”
It’s a joke, the bones of it exhumed from the stories Li Ayi would tell Hua Cheng at bedtime, the mosquito coil burning low in the open window of his room. To this day, he doesn’t know if she was educating him, or warning him about the Little People who lived in the walls, stealing food and supplies in the night when everyone slept. Hua Cheng found the tales amusing, but never truly believed. Li Ayi was always a bit on the eccentric side, so there was never a need to take her words too seriously. They were just stories.
Despite this, she pouts at Hua Cheng’s comment and cranes her neck to the vegetables, as if double-checking for something she’s missed. Hua Cheng raises an eyebrow inquiringly, mouth upturned.
“Never mind,” she says, not meeting his gaze. “Come on. I’m about to get a papercut just looking at you.”
The kitchen is the same as ever; small, and hung with herbs and dried flowers on the walls. A witch’s apothecary of cooking ingredients. Hua Cheng inhales the familiar smell of pumpkin soup in its early stages simmering on the stove, and the crisp bite of mint leaves in a recycled jam jar by the sink. Every smell has a memory, and every memory tugs at his heart.
Li Ayi chops up the carrot and tosses it into the soup before offering Hua Cheng a sandwich with fresh-baked bread and spicy chicken. He takes it outside to explore, picking through the garden for new things, and old things; forgotten things, just like him.
The black cat trails after him, its tail winding through the tall grass.
The tool shed out the back is somehow more weather-beaten and cobwebbed than ever, the windows thick with grime and dirt. Drooping over its tin roof is a sick plum tree begging to be put out of its misery, and there’s a bicycle by the door that needs its creaks worked out.
Projects to keep him busy, Hua Cheng thinks. He hasn’t decided for how long he’ll be staying, but figures he ought to be useful to his aunt while he’s around.
He does his best to make himself at home, but it’s difficult when Hua Cheng doesn’t really consider it as such. The house where he lives with his parents isn’t home, but the place where he once spent his lonely summers isn’t either.
What even is a home, he wonders? A place where you keep your things? A place where people love you? His mother had loved him, perhaps, but he wasn’t old enough to remember how it felt.
He supposes Li Ayi’s house is a near enough thing to a home. It has to be, for now.
That evening, he puts away his paints and sketchbooks and hangs his clothes in the wardrobe. His empty duffel bag gets kicked under the bed with the dust, and the room feels a bit less empty. A bit more like it did before.
Hua Cheng yanks his hair out of its scrunchie and brings his sketchbook to bed with him, propping it up on his knees with the nightstand lamp pulled all the way to the corner. He chews on the end of his pencil for a moment before starting a rough sketch of the garden, trying to capture its organised mess; its weeds and overgrown shrubs and wildflowers. Hua Cheng is bored of the sharp lines and rectangle windows of the city. The garden outside, however simple, brings a welcome change to his fingers.
It’s only when his eye begins to itch that he concedes defeat to exhaustion, the lengthy train journey prodding his upper back in the form of bad posture. Hua Cheng stretches, holding out his sketchbook to criticise his work. It’s rough, but not bad. He puts the book aside on the bed with a light thump on the quilt.
He looks up to the other nightstand where the clock is to check the time and sees something that, in the weird semi-haze of the late-night, makes him wonder if he fell asleep without realising.
There’s... a little person on the nightstand.
He’s got two hands wrapped around Hua Cheng’s discarded scrunchie, and two eyes firmly fixed on Hua Cheng in absolute horror. He looks at Hua Cheng as if, somehow, he’s the one who’s not supposed to be there.
Hua Cheng stares, not even daring to move and pinch himself to see if he’s awake. The person must be about six or seven inches tall, with long hair and fair, pale features. He’s rooted to the spot with fear, clinging to Hua Cheng’s scrunchie as if letting go of it might break some kind of spell.
Hua Cheng wants to say something reassuring, but he’s still having a hard time believing what he’s seeing.
When he finally blinks, the Little Person is gone, his plight for the scrunchie aborted.
“It’s okay,” Hua Cheng says quietly, though he feels a bit foolish. “I won’t hurt you.”
He doesn’t get a response. Not that he was expecting one.
Hua Cheng frowns, scanning the nightstand. It’s cluttered with the clock and another lamp, providing perfect cover all the way to the wall. When he shifts over and looks around, there’s no evidence that there was anyone there.
Confused, but deciding that he is indeed awake, Hua Cheng darkens the room and goes to sleep, the crease between his eyebrows not quite leaving his dreams.
He sleeps late, fuzzy and tired, forgetting for a moment where he is. When he rolls over to check the time, Hua Cheng sees his scrunchie on the nightstand, a red halo against the laminated oak.
He gets up and retrieves it along with his eyepatch, pondering the room as he fidgets with it.
He wants to leave it somewhere accessible, but isn’t able to determine where the Little Person came from – if, for arguments’ sake, he had come at all. There’s still a fraction of reason in the back of Hua Cheng’s mind telling him he’d been dreaming.
But, then, there was never anything to suggest that Li Ayi’s stories were dreams.
Hua Cheng can’t see a good place to leave the scrunchie, so he snaps it around his wrist for the time being, tying his hair back with a plain elastic instead.
Downstairs, there’s breakfast waiting for him, Li Ayi having already left for work.
The black cat is on the scrubbed wooden table, cleaning its face. When it hears Hua Cheng enter the kitchen, it stops, watching him grab a helping of food with a sharp, inquisitive eye; it only has the right one, where Hua Cheng has the left. Different, but the same. At least, that had been Li Ayi’s insinuation when she brought the poor animal home from the shelter all those years ago.
“No one else wanted him, so it must be fate! Oh, and what a good name for him too!”
If Hua Cheng is honest, he doesn’t like E’Ming all that much. He’s a good cat – very playful, even in his older age – but Hua Cheng can’t help but harbour a certain amount of disdain for him. Perhaps because he reminds Hua Cheng too much of himself; damaged and discarded.
“Ayi, aren’t black cats supposed to be bad luck?”
He briefly considers giving E’Ming a scratch behind the ears, but decides against it, opening the back door and going outside.
Hua Cheng wanders around the yard again without shoes. The grass is soft and cool between his toes, the late morning sun warm on the back of his neck. The maple trees sing a hushed, rustling song, their leaves out of tune. Hua Cheng remembers the way he sang along with them, dirty knees and missing teeth, a boy abandoned on the fringes of summer.
He makes his way to the back of the property where the weary shed lives, the bicycle he found the previous day leaning sadly against a stack of firewood. Hua Cheng tests it on the dirt, but one of the wheels is stuck, so he picks it up and carries it to the porch before exploring the laundry room for tools.
It takes him the rest of the morning to get the bike fixed up, chasing away the spiders loitering in its nooks and crannies. It squeaks when the breaks pull and, no matter what Hua Cheng does, he can’t get the handlebars to line perfectly straight. But it’s good. It’s sturdy. It’ll get him around town when Li Ayi leaves with her car.
As he’s eating lunch, Hua Cheng pokes around the house some more.
It’s stupid, but he can’t shake the thought that the stories Li Ayi told him when he was a boy are real; that last night hadn’t been his imagination, or a dream. Hua Cheng is fully awake now, and he can recall that Little Person precisely; parted lips, almond eyes, and a gentle, handsome face.
Two rounds of the entire house, and Hua Cheng eventually gives up on finding somewhere to leave the scrunchie. He goes upstairs instead and opens his sketchbook at the desk, sharpening his pencil. He does a quick, but detailed sketch of the Little Person, preserving his expression on the paper. He’d been wearing a white jumper, long hair caught in the weaves of the fabric, black against white in the yellow lamplight.
Hua Cheng lays his pencil down and lifts up the sketch, tilting his head. It’s accurate, but the more he looks at it, the more it feels like the Little Person had been some kind of lucid dream. He’s only graphite and paper now, staring at Hua Cheng in astonishment. He wishes he could see him again.
Screeching through the silence of his room, Hua Cheng gets a phone call, his Nokia vibrating so intensely it slides across the table.
“You remember Zhu Ayi, right?” his aunt says without greeting, her voice crackling through the receiver. “She owns the bakery in town?”
“Uh, vaguely,” Hua Cheng answers. Zhu Ayi was a short, dumpy woman who gave him free nuomici when he and Li Ayi would buy bread on the way home from the park.
“She needs an extra pair of hands to run deliveries during the week,” Li Ayi continues, her mouth full of food. She must be on break. “Did you fix up that bike yet? If you come into town, she’ll probably give you the job. She always liked you.”
Hua Cheng almost laughs. “She liked me when I was ten, maybe.”
“A-Cheng, don’t be like that. She’s nice. She’ll pay well.”
It’s worth more than a mere consideration, and Hua Cheng recognises it for the hint that it is. It’s not his intention to freeload off his aunt, and he’s kidding himself if he thinks his parents are going to keep paying his allowance now that he’s out of the house.
Not that he’s left for good, but the separation feels somewhat final. A fight, a duffel bag, a ticket. Hua Cheng isn’t afraid to admit he doesn’t want to go back, or acknowledge that he will not be welcomed if he does.
“Alright. I’ll head over now,” he agrees.
He hangs up and, setting the drawing up against the cassette player, Hua Cheng stuffs his feet into his boots and locks up the house with the spare set of keys Li Ayi gave him. The bicycle handles well despite its janky frame, so he streamlines it down the hill into town, the scrunchie on his wrist flapping in the wind.
🦋
Hua Cheng gets the job, but only after he’s subjected to several cheek-pinches and comments about his height, and hair, and weight.
“Still wearing that ridiculous eyepatch, eh?” Zhu Ayi remarks, giving Hua Cheng a once-over with her sharp eyes. It feels like he’s being x-rayed, his bones laid bare for her to see all the hairline fractures of his teen years, never quite healed. “Some things never change. Your Ayi isn’t feeding you enough, I see.”
“He got here yesterday!” Li Ayi says indignantly. “Besides, look at how he’s shot up. It’d be like trying to feed an army.”
Hua Cheng feels exposed, standing there like a nail waiting to be hammered into the floor. His ponytail sticks to the back of his neck in the swinging shop fan.
People in town know who he is, which is unfortunate. He didn’t live here, but grew up here, in a way. Summer memories, wherever you are, always burn brighter than other seasons. Formative splashes of colour on a blank canvas.
“Are you just here for the summer?” Zhu Ayi is bug-eyed behind her glasses, craning her neck up at Hua Cheng. He doesn’t remember her being this short, but supposes she doesn’t remember him being this tall, either.
“I don’t know,” he says honestly, sliding a glance over to his aunt. She smiles reassuringly at him.
“You aren’t going back to college? Don’t tell me you’re taking a break. Worst mistake you’ll ever make.”
Hua Cheng cringes. Never mind taking a break from college, he has no intention of ever going back and wasting his time there again. But, his family scolding him about that is more than enough; there’s no need for strangers to do it as well.
“It’s my mistake to make,” he says simply, smiling as politely as he can.
The delivery gig is Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 5am, with the furthest address only four li away. Hua Cheng thanks Zhu Ayi at least a dozen times before agreeing to see her the following morning with his bicycle.
“You best watch what you say around Zhu Ayi,” Li Ayi says later that evening over dinner. Leftover pumpkin soup and free end-of-day bread from the bakery. “She’s become such a gossip over the years. No doubt everyone knows by now that you’re here.”
Hua Cheng smirks. “As if I talk to anyone. What would I even say to her?”
They eat in silence, slurping through the flutter of moths at the kitchen window, banging desperately against the netting to touch the light inside.
Hua Cheng got along well with his aunt when he was young. She had been his favourite person. A stand-in for his mother, in many ways, kind and laughing, making him flower crowns and buying him new pencils.
But they drifted apart when Hua Cheng’s parents stopped leaving him at her house for the holidays. Thirteen, bruised knees, on the cusp of his first fight. He had no longer been angry about being dumped on Li Ayi’s doorstep like a bag of rice. In fact, he’d been looking forward to it all year; catching butterflies, and Zhu Ayi’s nuomici, coconut shavings falling into the front pocket of his overalls.
Then his father and stepmother told him he’d be staying home that summer, and every summer after.
It had rained that day. It always rained on bad days.
Hua Cheng is a different person now, but his aunt is the same. She doesn’t know him anymore, and it’s amplified in the silence between the scraping of their spoons. Hua Cheng feels like one of those moths outside, killing itself trying to get in.
“Your stepmom called today, by the way,” Li Ayi says offhandedly, as if the very mention of that woman doesn’t set Hua Cheng’s teeth on edge.
The scrape of his spoon comes to a stop, the last mouthful of soup spilling over the edges.
He appreciates that Li Ayi at least has the grace to make the distinction of step mother. Replacement mother. Not the real thing.
It’s especially rude, coming from her. She would never say it in front of anyone except Hua Cheng, and he tries not to think too much about what it must mean for her to know her sister’s son has been raised by someone else; by someone who doesn’t love him the way she does, or the way her sister did.
“She wanted to know if you got here safely. You didn’t call her?”
“I don’t have any credit,” Hua Cheng says.
If Li Ayi knows he’s lying, she doesn’t say so, and Hua Cheng is grateful. She understands his situation better than most, even though she tries to pretend otherwise. Hua Cheng almost admires her determination to stay in touch with a family who don’t talk to her unless they have to, as if it’s bad luck to associate with someone who hasn’t moved on from grief.
He supposes that’s why she wants him to be filial; so that he doesn’t end up like her.
With the last mouthful of soup, Hua Cheng fights down the squirm of guilt at giving her trouble, but doesn’t explain himself further, knowing he doesn’t need to.
He returns to his room at the chime of the old clock in the sitting room, five minutes later than the actual hour, as it’s always been. Hua Cheng fiddles absently with the scrunchie as he walks upstairs, brushing the soft cotton between his fingers. It’s left a pink, wrinkled mark around his wrist from keeping it there the entire day.
At the top of the stairs, he opens the bedroom door and switches on the light.
There, on his desk, his eye catches the sight of something moving near to where the drawing sits against the cassette player. Having evidently not heard Hua Cheng come up the stairs, the Little Person seems startled by his arrival; he whips around, hair hooping over his jumper like a spiderweb as he stumbles over a stray pencil.
It’s the most movement Hua Cheng has seen him do, all arms and legs and tiny, uncoordinated body.
Rebalancing himself, the Little Person wastes no time in blitzing across the desk and ducking under the gap in the window that Hua Cheng had left ajar.
“Wait!”
Hua Cheng navigates the room in three strides, but the Little Person is gone. He lends his ear to the window as he drops down at the desk, listening for a sign that the person might still be there. Hua Cheng hears the rustle of ivy against the outer wall of the second story, but can’t determine whether or not it’s the wind.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Hua Cheng says into the dusk. “Please come back.”
The ivy provides no indication that it heard him, settling quietly and resolutely against the wall.
🦋
The next day, Hua Cheng rises early and pedals through the cold, blurry town with a box of deliveries strapped to the back of his bicycle and a map stuffed into the collar of his shirt.
The town is small, but he never learned the street names. Being a kid meant only wondering if the playground was around the next corner, or the next, or the next.
It’s strange now to realise that there are other people here, with addresses and homes and gardens growing wild with daffodils and dandelions. Lives that kept going after Hua Cheng didn’t come back the following summer. Corners that don’t remember him, but people who do.
True to Li Ayi’s warning, every delivery that morning comes with confirmation of Zhu Ayi’s big fat mouth spreading word of Hua Cheng’s return. Most of the locals don’t actually know who he is, but those who do have divulged what information they have to one another, and everyone’s interest alone is piqued by hearing that Hua Cheng hasn’t been around for a few years, and now he’s tall and handsome and single.
Hua Cheng bears it all with no small degree of amusement. If they knew what he was really like, they probably wouldn’t be so eager to give him their grandnieces’ phone numbers. But, for now, he accepts their praise and promise of contact with whatever poor female relative they deem worthy of his affections. He delivers the bread and baked goods and leaves as quickly as possible.
Truth be told, Hua Cheng doesn’t get along well with others.
That’s what his school report cards always said, anyway. Unsociable, rude, disturbs the class, as if the classes themselves weren’t disturbing. His parents tried to condition him to be well-mannered and accommodating, which resulted in schoolyard fights and skinned elbows because Hua Cheng’s politeness was always taken for sarcasm. Which, to be fair, it had been exactly that.
Hua Cheng thought time with his aunt in the country would help him forget all that; the split knuckles and burning hatred of a youth that he can’t quite get away from. But his misdeeds are blown apart in the remnants of a childhood that lingers on those street corners, reminding him that he can’t ever be that little boy again.
Hua Cheng’s scrunchie is a red flag on his wrist in the uphill battle back to Li Ayi’s house. He snatches the letters from the mailbox, wiping his brow on the shoulder of his t-shirt, the scrunchie sticking uncomfortably to his skin.
He’s determined to find somewhere to leave it today, so Hua Cheng scours the house and the yard for evidence. Li Ayi had said Little People lived under buildings and inside walls, but if they are able to come out to take things they need, then there must be access points all over the place.
Hua Cheng thinks back to his arrival, and the flicker of a shadow in the vegetable garden. E’Ming had been playing with something there, head low to the ground as if he was prowling.
Hua Cheng navigates back around the house and picks through the budding cabbages, minding not to tread on anything delicate.
In the brick underlay, he finds a small grate that leads into the house’s foundation, broken pottery and stones buried in the dirt by its entrance. Hua Cheng gets on his hands and knees and peers inside, but his head blocks the sun from going through and he can only make out an echoing, cavernous darkness; a mystery of dust and hair-raising dreams.
Frowning, Hua Cheng goes to the laundry room and finds a flashlight, giving it a smack against his hand when it doesn’t turn on the first time. He shines it through the grate, knees buried in the damp soil of the vegetable patch.
To his amazement, he finds a string of very tiny laundry hanging up to dry between the grate and a wooden beam in what would be a stream of sunshine, if Hua Cheng’s head wasn’t in the way. The clothes flutter on the thread in the calm breeze, mostly white, simple and well-made. A few drops of water splash down to the concrete underneath. It had all been hung up recently.
Hardly aware of the grin on his face, Hua Cheng tugs the scrunchie from his wrist and shoves it into one of the slots of the grate, safe from any dirt or rain. He clicks off the flashlight and stands up, feeling unusually proud of himself; like a kid with a secret that the adults aren’t allowed to know about.