◎ What a Kind Soul ◎

Zhao Yue was so startled he forgot to watch the road ahead. By the time he noticed the car in front, he was nearly upon it and slammed on the brakes. Fortunately everyone had their seatbelts on, so no one was hurt.

From Zhao Yue’s tone, Gu Qiao’s heart sank. Surely Zhao Yue had already read the letter in the newspaper. She didn’t particularly mind for herself, but she guessed Luo Peiyin wouldn’t be pleased if Zhao Yue brought it up.

Zhao Yue laughed: “Cousin Gu, aren’t you the one who — ?”

Luo Peiyin cut him off: “If you can’t concentrate on driving, we can switch.”

Zhao Yue smiled: “You’re treating me today — I couldn’t very well make you drive on top of that. Though I’m really just tagging along thanks to Cousin Gu. You only invited me as an afterthought.”

Before Luo Peiyin could respond, Gu Qiao rushed to correct Zhao Yue: “That doesn’t match the facts at all. I’m the one who’s tagging along. My cousin was going to treat you — I should be thanking you as well as my cousin. So don’t be modest. Being excessively humble just makes people think you’re being insincere.”

She didn’t think Luo Peiyin had made a special plan to invite her, but her cousin had been thoughtful enough to bring her along so she wouldn’t be left out, and she was genuinely touched.

She did feel, though, that her cousin’s kind gesture had been misread by his friend.

Back in high school, there had always been boys who, the moment they saw a male and female together, would start pairing them off as a joke. She had found it extremely irritating. Once she’d gone to stand up for a slight, frail classmate who was being bullied, and somehow it got around that she and the boy were dating and that she had helped him out of romantic devotion. When she heard this rumor she was disgusted, and went straight to the person spreading it and gave them a thorough scolding.

Though Zhao Yue’s words weren’t overtly suggestive, Gu Qiao somehow sensed the same implication. She had a feeling Zhao Yue was teasing her and Luo Peiyin. Of course she had to push back.

Luo Peiyin said nothing, which Gu Qiao took as silent agreement that she was right. To stop Zhao Yue from steering the conversation back to her and Luo Peiyin, she took the initiative: “Zhao Yue, you’re very stylishly dressed today.”

Back home in Gu Qiao’s county, there had been a few young men who led local fashion trends, but out of a country girl’s prejudice against fashionable young men, she’d always given them a wide berth whenever she encountered them. Zhao Yue today was wearing jeans with a printed shirt; his trousers, shirt, leather shoes, and even the sunglasses he wore were all from Hong Kong. Though the brands were bigger and more expensive, Zhao Yue easily reminded Gu Qiao of the fashionable young men back in her county. She still preferred her cousin’s understated look — though she was now telling herself that since she was in a new place, her outlook should be broader and more open, and she should learn to appreciate everything around her.

Zhao Yue hadn’t expected Gu Qiao to suddenly turn the spotlight on him, and her compliment rather blocked him from saying anything else. Returning the favor, he complimented Gu Qiao on her hairstyle. Luo the Fourth immediately chimed in that his mother had taken Gu Qiao to the Fujing salon to have her hair done, and that he also liked the hairdressers there. Luo the Fourth then asked Zhao Yue what new films were showing at the cinema — aside from school-organized group outings, he hadn’t been to the cinema in a long time. In recent years, cinemas had taken a hit. At a video hall, for the price of a single movie ticket you could watch several films with far more to choose from; cinemas had fallen out of favor as a result.

The three of them kept up an easy back-and-forth, with only Luo Peiyin remaining silent. Luo Peiyin revised his impression of Gu Qiao slightly — this person was this warm and easy with everyone.

Luo the Fourth complained about his mother’s all-encompassing control over his life: she wouldn’t let him play video games, wouldn’t let him read martial arts novels, and even limited his fried chicken to a certain number of servings per week.

Zhao Yue laughed: “Your second brother used to have quite a stash of games and novels in private, but he gave them all away long ago.” He himself had been one of the beneficiaries.

Luo the Fourth said with unconcealed envy: “Those must have been bought for him by his mother.”

Luo Peiyin didn’t respond to this. If Madam Liao had been Luo the Fourth’s mother and knew he loved fried chicken, she wouldn’t have forbidden it — she would have served it to him three times a day until he was sick of it. That was Madam Liao’s method: if she disapproved of something her son wanted, she didn’t stop him, she indulged him to an excess of two hundred percent until he was thoroughly bored with it. For a period when Luo Peiyin had been into video games, Madam Liao had gathered every game available at the time, and that summer Luo Peiyin had worked his way through them all until he was completely immune. Of course, because Madam Liao did not want her son to grow indifferent to money — she wanted him to remain hungry for it — she was never very generous with cash.

Luo the Fourth quietly envied his second brother in his heart: his mother was far away, they saw each other only a few times a year, she never interfered in his life and even sent him many gifts. But this envy wasn’t something he could express aloud, so he could only sigh.

The Western restaurant was on the twentieth floor — the highest Gu Qiao had ever been in a building.

“Another Japanese tour group. The Japanese have been buying up American companies everywhere these past few years. The Americans must be furious. Tokyo real estate prices have already reached —” Zhao Yue held up his fingers to indicate the number. “In Tokyo’s prime areas, a tiny bathroom could buy you an entire large courtyard house here. We’ll be moving to commodity housing before long too. My brother’s friend just went to Hainan to get into real estate.” Ever since Hainan had been designated a special economic zone the previous year, there had been constant predictions that it would become the next Shenzhen, and many people had gone there to seek their fortunes. Zhao Yue didn’t pursue the topic further, as there were others besides Luo Peiyin present, so he left it at that.

—

Once they were seated, as Gu Qiao was the only woman at the table, Zhao Yue handed the menu directly to her and let her order first.

Zhao Yue said to Gu Qiao: “Just order in Chinese, it’s fine. Unlike the first time your cousin and I came here, years ago — the only Chinese sentence the staff addressed us with was ‘payment must be made in foreign exchange certificates,’ and it was delivered as if it were coming out of someone’s nose rather than their mouth.”

Back then they were still middle school students. He had led the charge and tapped Luo Peiyin for the bill to take everyone out for a Western meal. They’d come straight from swimming and were dressed very casually. They had originally intended to go along with the local custom — though they found it a bit odd that everyone was clearly from the same country, yet they were expected to order in a foreign language, they figured those were the rules and went along with them. But then the waiter, after delivering that one Chinese line about payment, started rattling off English. Their tempers flared, and they deliberately insisted on ordering in Chinese. What followed was a somewhat surreal standoff: the waiter seemed unable to understand their Mandarin, and they seemed equally unable to understand the waiter’s English. Both sides asked the other to repeat themselves multiple times, and after a prolonged negotiation, they finally managed to order their food.

Before the starters even arrived, the waiter brought out the soup and dessert together, set the bowls down on the table with a thud, and walked off without a word. Coming on top of the unpleasantness during the ordering, Zhao Yue had been ready to lose his temper then and there — though it wasn’t really about the courses being served out of order. His family was better off than most, but the general environment at the time was what it was; making a fuss over the sequence of courses would have made him look like some returned overseas Chinese who’d been eating Western food for years, which would have seemed rather put-on. Honestly, as long as there was food to eat, he didn’t care — he was a teenager and this sort of thing genuinely didn’t bother him. But having someone tilt their chin in the air and plonk a plate in front of him without a single word before striding away — that he was not going to accept. He hadn’t come to eat just to be treated with contempt.

When the waiter came back with the next course wearing the same haughty attitude, Zhao Yue was all set to raise his voice — but Luo Peiyin silenced him with a look. Luo Peiyin then began speaking to the waiter in English, calmly asking why the courses had come in the wrong order. When the waiter offered an explanation, Luo Peiyin began correcting his pronunciation, one word at a time. He said in English that if you’re going to insist on speaking English, you ought to speak it clearly enough to be understood. Finally, Luo Peiyin suggested that if the waiter wished to continue communicating in English, for the sake of effective communication, he ought to go and get some proper training in his spoken English. The waiter’s face grew redder and redder — nearly the color of red wine — while Luo Peiyin smiled throughout.

After that experience, Zhao Yue had felt that Luo Peiyin was more formidable than himself. The reason he normally seemed perfectly agreeable was simply that no one had ever deliberately gotten on his wrong side. Push him, though, and he was not someone to be trifled with.

Gu Qiao pushed the menu away from herself, directed a small smile at the air: “It’s my first time here, I’m not very familiar with it — you all order.”

Luo Peiyin didn’t demur. He asked about Gu Qiao and Luo the Fourth’s preferences and made the decision for the table. He only asked Gu Qiao’s opinion when it came to desserts and drinks. Dessert was ordered only for Gu Qiao and Luo the Fourth. Zhao Yue wasn’t one for sweets, but he wanted a glass of wine.

Luo Peiyin refused: “Have water.”

“We can put it on my brother’s room account — he has a private room here.” Zhao Yue knew Luo Peiyin wasn’t being deliberately stingy. Although his mother’s business ventures were extensive, it seemed he never had much more spending money on hand than Zhao Yue himself. Zhao Yue had recently been benefiting from his older brother’s generosity and was actually a little better off than Luo Peiyin at the moment.

“I said I’m treating.”

Zhao Yue said no more, and turned to Gu Qiao instead: “Your cousin really looks after you — he was so thoughtful just now ordering for you. I’m almost jealous.”

Gu Qiao promptly offered a small correction: “That’s just because my cousin is a good person. If it were your first time here and you weren’t familiar with the menu, he’d do the same for you.”

Zhao Yue let out a soft sound of amusement, too quiet for Gu Qiao to catch. He followed it up: “Your cousin is very popular with girls at school, but he’s —”

Before Zhao Yue could finish the sentence, Gu Qiao said: “I think so too. He’s this kind-hearted — of course people like him.”

“You think people like him because he’s kind-hearted?” Zhao Yue nearly burst out laughing. What on earth was going on in this girl’s head? Setting aside whether kindness was even one of Luo Peiyin’s defining qualities to begin with — when it came to being well-liked, wasn’t his family background, his looks, and his academic record each more relevant than whether or not he was kind? You could even argue that his time as a keyboard player in a band had drawn more girls to him than any supposed kindness.

This was certainly the kind of person capable of writing that thank-you letter.

—