As evening drew near, the villagers and children finally exhausted their curiosity about the foreign visitors and drifted away in twos and threes, carefully cradling their tin basins or water pouches without a single glance back.

The world does run cold — that same little dark-skinned boy had all but glued himself to Wei Lai’s back not long ago, and now he was heading home for dinner without so much as a shout of farewell.

Wei Lai stood up with a self-deprecating half-smile, brushed the sand off himself, and got started on filtering the water.

He unscrewed the mouth of the water pouch and poured a little into his palm to examine. The water swirled cloudy and yellow. He brought it close to smell — no unusual odor.

If the villagers had long depended on water like this, the long-term harm ought to be manageable. The filtration process was relatively simple; water purification tablets could handle it.

He weighed the water pouch in his hand, dropped a few purification tablets into the borrowed iron pail, stretched a clean cotton T-shirt tight over the opening, then poured the water from the pouch through it.

Cen Jin came over to watch. Fine sand and impurities collected on the stretched fabric; the water dripped through into the bottom of the pail, drizzling steadily.

Wei Lai smiled: “Now that we have purification tablets, it’s much simpler. In the field before, I used to build sand filtration layers, or shave wood and filter the water through wood fibers — quite a bother. I’ll boil it again in a bit. Drinking it will be fine — though you should still stick to the bottled water. Safer.”

Cen Jin asked: “How did you know I’d want a wash again today?”

Out in the desert, people weren’t always so particular — some went ten days to half a month without washing.

“It’s this hot, sweat sticks to your skin, you can’t feel right without a proper wash. And with the car window broken, you must have swallowed sand all night? Besides, the negotiation is tomorrow — won’t you want to clean up completely, top to bottom? People in ancient times would bathe and burn incense before any major undertaking.”

Cen Jin looked at him: “Your Chinese is very good.”

“So is yours.”

She sat down on the sand: “Mine is different. My adoptive parents were university professors — researchers in the humanities. In a sense, I was also their research subject: a preschool-age child surviving in a country with a completely different cultural environment — how would her original culture be preserved, how would the foreign culture be integrated?”

Wei Lai stared at her in surprise.

Cen Jin could guess what he was thinking: “Don’t overthink it. They never treated me like a test subject. They were very good to me — as you said, a person can act with more than one purpose.”

“I had a Chinese teacher, took regular lessons. My adoptive parents often invited Chinese international students home to converse with me. My later boyfriend, Jiang Min, was also Chinese.”

“You’re different. You were brought to Europe illegally as a small child, and your life has been turbulent ever since — yet when you speak of home, you’re not unfamiliar with it at all.”

He’d emptied one water pouch. He stacked stones into a makeshift stove, pulled out a stick from the shack — the shack leaned a bit more, as though it had never expected that in addition to wind and goats, it would suffer this today — broke it into a few pieces, lit a fire, and propped the iron pail over it.

Wei Lai said: “Miss, there is a street in this world called Chinatown. You believe me when I say I even know how to play mahjong, right?”

All walks of life, hidden dragons and crouching tigers, every face imaginable, every kind of ambition — you couldn’t say that looking from one end of a Chinatown street to the other, you’d see five thousand years of history, but you’d see the full range of human life, no question.

“After I was rescued from the factory by a humanitarian organization, I was placed in foster care — but I wasn’t as lucky as you. I went from sewing clothes on an assembly line to sweeping floors, wiping windows, scrubbing toilets… Out of sheer defiance, I ran away.”

“I mixed around in Chinatown, trading work for meals. It was still labor, but free — if someone treated me badly, I’d switch to another family. I could even sneak over and smash their window, and they’d never know who did it.”

“There was an old man — back in China he’d been a teacher. He wore round black-framed glasses, like an old-fashioned bookkeeper. After going through all kinds of hardship to get abroad, his family hadn’t been able to get approved to follow — he couldn’t do his original work, so he did odd jobs, washed floors, scrubbed plates. He was probably very lonely. After we became familiar, he said: ‘Wei Lai, let me teach you to read.'”

“I said: ‘Get lost. I’m busy.'”

Cen Jin laughed out loud.

Wei Lai looked at her for a moment. He hadn’t been lying — he genuinely loved to see her smile, especially when she smiled at him, because her eyes held him.

“Later he said: ‘How about this — I cook at home in the evenings, and you can come eat. But while you eat, you have to sit through my lessons. Deal?'”

He looked at Cen Jin: “He was going to feed me a meal, you understand? Is there anyone who’d say no to that? I would have called him father if he asked.”

Whoever feeds you is your mother; whoever gives you a hot meal is your father — far more reliable than the parents who’d actually brought him into the world.

So every evening he’d go for dinner. Sometimes he hadn’t eaten at midday either — he’d go hungry and hold out, push through till evening, eat enough to beggar the foolish old man.

The old man would murmur away beside him, had even prepared a little blackboard and chalk, writing things out word by word.

At first Wei Lai didn’t listen. Then he started half-listening for entertainment, eating while he listened, occasionally arguing back: “I’ll accept that the interior angles of this small triangle add up to 180 degrees — but this triangle here, it’s as big as my head, those angles must add up to at least 200.”

Cen Jin almost laughed till tears came: “You were so foolish.”

Wei Lai lowered his head, the corners of his lips curving.

You think I didn’t know interior angles always sum to 180 degrees? I was making you laugh, little girl.

The water in the iron pail began to bubble, water beads forming and bursting at the surface.

The water was almost boiling.

Wei Lai’s thoughts suddenly drifted.

He remembered one time — the old man was teaching, he was eating, and the old man had suddenly rapped the blackboard and said: “Class, I’ve gone over this problem many times — who can answer it? I’ll tell you, the less you raise your hand, the more I’ll call on you…”

Wei Lai had nearly spat rice: “There’s only me! ‘Class’! Are you sleepwalking?”

The old man had gone still, looked at the cramped little room as though waking from a great dream, then sat down, gripping the chalk. After a moment he took off his glasses — Wei Lai couldn’t quite remember now: was he wiping the lenses, or wiping his eyes?

Cen Jin said softly: “The water’s boiling.”

Wei Lai came back to himself, let out a long breath, stepped forward and lifted the pail: “A whole pail — enough to wash with, isn’t it?”

Cen Jin thought about it, then shook her head.

“Boil a little more.”

“One pail is plenty — it’s already more than you used yesterday. Boiling more would be wasteful…”

“Boil a little more.”

Fine, you’re in charge — you say more, then more it is. Wei Lai didn’t want to argue with her. He went to the nearest household, made himself understood through gestures, and borrowed another pail.

Night fell.

Cen Jin went into the tent to bathe. Wei Lai stood guard again — though the shack had no door, just a frame to pass through, and the villagers didn’t seem accustomed to having doors anyway; most homes had just a piece of cloth strung across the opening. With only a few dozen households and everyone having known each other for years, everyone connected by blood or marriage, and everyone equally poor — no one was guarding against anyone.

Wei Lai’s main duty was to chase away goats.

The goats roamed free here and came out at dusk to stroll and graze and wander into doorways, only to be chased out — apparently a nightly ritual. In just a short while, there had already been several outbursts of shouting from the neighboring houses, and each time Wei Lai stuck his head out, he could see a goat ambling unhurriedly out of someone’s doorway.

He shooed two or three of them away. As darkness thickened, he turned and snapped two glow sticks and set them high for light, then turned back around — and there was another one, just in the process of pushing its way inside.

Wei Lai pressed his hand flat against its forehead and shoved it back out.

He told it: “Someone’s bathing in there. Have you no shame?”

The words had barely left his mouth when the tent flap rustled open behind him. Cen Jin came out, wrapped in a light silk robe, toweling her hair.

She said: “I’m not done. There’s more than half a pail left.”

He had said all along there was more than enough — Wei Lai’s face wore an expression of I knew this would happen.

There was a bed in the corner — sticks laid over flat stones, uneven and bumpy. Cen Jin went over and sat down, fanning herself idly with the loose edge of her robe: “Go and wash. Don’t let it go to waste.”

Wei Lai said: “I can wash just fine with just a quick wipe…”

He caught himself in time: Cen Jin’s expression had suddenly gone dark — almost fiercely so.

Really — it was only because water had been scarce in the desert. If there’d been enough, who wouldn’t want a proper wash? He’d eaten sand all night, come out of the sea coated in salt, then spent the day pitching tents and tending fires — he’d very much like a good, thorough wash as well.

He ducked into the tent.

The glow sticks inside gave a dim light. By its glow sat two iron pails. The water in one of them was barely touched.

He’d said one pail was enough. She’d insisted on him boiling more…

Wei Lai began to strip off his shirt, halfway through, when something stirred in his chest.

He slowly sat down on the ground and stared at that pail of water — he knew he was smiling.

Really…

Cen Jin sat on the bed, toweling her hair slower and slower, holding very still to listen to the sounds from inside the tent.

Just go ahead and wash — don’t tell me you’ve gone in there to sleep? Don’t tell me you’re drinking the water?

“Cen Jin?”

The sound of water finally began — splashing and rushing.

“Mm?”

“Tomorrow the pirates will come… What kind of people are they?”

“That’s hard to explain simply.”

“Just give me a rough idea. Before we meet them face to face, you ought to know what kind of opponents they are. Are they like the pirates of the Caribbean? Or the Vikings? Will they fly a pirate flag? The kind with a skull and two crossed leg bones?”

Cen Jin laughed: “Nonsense… Most pirates are fishermen. Very poor fishermen.”

She considered how to explain this clearly.

In the beginning, life for the Somali fishermen hadn’t been so bad — the country’s coastline stretched over 3,000 kilometers, and fish stocks were abundant.

But then came the 1990s: the old government was overthrown and the country entered a decade of civil war. Warlords divided the territory among themselves, and the collapse of the national order brought a cascade of problems.

First came currency devaluation — the Somali shilling became one of the most worthless currencies in the world. At its worst, 2,000 Somali shillings were worth roughly… not comparable in euros — the euro was too strong for the comparison — a few yuan in Chinese currency.

Second came the arrival of Western fishing fleets. With the warlords fighting each other, the coastline lay wide open. European and American fishing boats seized the opportunity and swept in, implementing an extractive fishing policy in Somali waters and even driving local fishermen away.

Their own sea — and they couldn’t fish in it. The government couldn’t enforce anything, because there was no government. And the fishermen, unable to fish, had no means of livelihood.

Third came…

Oh!

A goat had come in.

Cen Jin stared at the goat.

The goat stared back at Cen Jin, its face the picture of innocence.

Cen Jin slowly drew her legs up onto the bed.

She thought silently: Don’t come over. I just bathed.

The goat didn’t seem especially interested in her either. After a moment it turned its head and fixed a curious gaze on the tent flap.

The sound of water carried through.

Women are made of water — in this moment, Cen Jin thought she was made of bad water.

She coughed, using her own voice to spread the appearance of complete normalcy.

Inside she said: Go on. Good. Go in.

And the goat went in, slow and unhurried, without the slightest twinge of conscience — probably thinking that, just like every other time it had wandered through a doorway, this was simply one more languid and unremarkable evening.

Wei Lai’s roar came from inside:

“Have you no shame?! You scoundrel!”