◎ Setting Up a Stall ◎

By the time they had finished all the other attractions, the queue for the Ferris wheel had thinned out considerably. Since the Ferris wheel in this amusement park charged a separate admission fee, Luo Peiyin bought tickets again — four people, six tickets. This time, without any strangers sharing the gondola, there was no need to witness anyone else kissing.

Gu Qiao watched the sunset from the Ferris wheel. As she sat with her back to Luo Peiyin, gazing at the sunset, her trouser cuffs had already dried, and she unrolled them back to their original length.

After they returned from the roast duck restaurant, Luo Peiyin went to his sister’s place to return the car.

“Thank you for helping me remember to give our cousin a gift — I had completely overlooked her.” Luo Peiyin’s wife had called specifically to thank him for the watch. Luo Sijing had not actually prepared a gift for Gu Qiao. She still operated on the old set of social customs and hadn’t gotten around to updating them — she’d forgotten to add this new cousin to the list. But hearing that her brother had passed a gift along on her behalf, she didn’t deny it. Her brother, of course, would not lie without reason.

“No need to rush returning the car — keep it for now. I rarely drive it anyway.” This car had been a wedding gift to Luo Sijing from Madam Liao. The gift was so extravagant that her father had flown into a rage over it, feeling it was far too conspicuous: “You’re someone on a fixed television-station salary — if you suddenly show up driving a car like this, people will think I’ve been abusing my position to benefit my family.” Of course, the old man’s anger had other components as well. Madam Liao had foreseen this in advance and told her stepdaughter: “I give a gift to my own child, and the old man thinks I’m flaunting things at him. Your father is just that petty. If he says anything, don’t bother with him.”

Luo Sijing had never quite understood why Madam Liao was in some ways more generous to her, a stepdaughter, than to her only biological son. Madam Liao’s explanation was that a boy living too far above the people around him would come to a bad end. Of course Luo Sijing didn’t believe that was the whole reason. Luo Sijing’s mother had died when she was very young. After her father remarried Madam Liao, she had quite naturally started calling Madam Liao “Mom.” But Madam Liao stopped her, saying: apart from the woman who gave birth to you, no one has the right to be your mother. You must always remember your real mother. Madam Liao had even had the photo of Luo Sijing and her birth mother enlarged and placed in Luo Sijing’s bedroom.

Later, when her parents divorced, no one in the family was surprised — not even her very traditional grandmother. What looked from the outside like a perfectly matched couple turned into nothing but fighting once they were home. Each accused the other of failing to understand or support their career; that kind of quarrel inevitably devolved into attacks on the other’s competence, suggesting the other was only fit for housework, with grievances traceable all the way back to a mispronounced French word in some past conversation or even smaller details than that. Because they quarreled every time they were together, they gradually stopped being together. Most of the time the household consisted of only three people: her, her younger brother, and Grandmother Lian.

This former couple’s resentment of one another had not dissolved with the divorce. When Madam Liao mentioned her ex-husband in front of her stepdaughter, it was always with a dash of mockery. There had been one exception, when she said: “Is the old man still putting on his gentleman act outside and then picking everything apart once he gets home?” Yet it seemed that with the decline of hormones, the ex-husband had transformed into a gentle husband and father. Madam Liao fell silent when she heard this. She had assumed that after such a failed marriage, both of them would come away with a permanent despair about matrimony — that if her ex-husband remarried, he would only repeat the same mistakes. But in the end, it turned out she alone had been left despairing; the old man had started a new family life and was doing perfectly well.

Luo Sijing ventured to ask her brother: “You and our cousin get along quite well?”

“She gets along well with everyone.”

Luo Sijing didn’t ask further. Perhaps their cousin got along well with everyone — but her brother was certainly not someone who got along well with everyone.

After that, Luo Peiyin began coming home a little more often each week — from occasionally once a week to two or three times. Every morning he came home, Gu Qiao would prepare an extra portion of food for him to take back with him. On weekends, he would take his younger siblings and Gu Qiao out for meals.

Northern autumn is fleeting. Near the end of autumn, Gu Qiao told her aunt that she had signed up for an English tutoring class in the evenings and wouldn’t be home for dinner.

Gu Qiao had not expected to run into Luo Peiyin on the bar street. Had she known she would, she would have bundled herself up more thoroughly. What she had told the family about studying English wasn’t entirely a lie — she occasionally used simple conversational English to communicate with the foreigners she encountered. The autumn wind swept across Gu Qiao’s face, but she paid it no mind, continuing to promote her jeans to the stylish men and women passing by. Beside her was a large photograph: a foreign couple wearing the same style of jeans she was selling.

This batch of jeans had originally been ordered by a vendor at the wholesale market who had sourced them from Guangzhou. The vendor had reasoned that since slim-cut jeans had been fashionable for so many years, it must be time for looser styles to take over. He’d ordered a large stock — only to have it all sit unsold. After all these years, people’s taste simply hadn’t evolved in that direction, and the merchandise had buried him.

Gu Qiao had originally gone to the wholesale market looking for a part-time job on Sundays. In the days she had spent wandering the market near the embassy district, she had noticed that foreigners loved to buy silk — and in large quantities — while the silk vendors sourced their goods from the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region. Her current capital, however, was not enough to import much at a time. With only one day off per week, finding the time and excuse to make a trip out of the city wasn’t easy — she would need to save up more funds before going, in order to bring back a larger stock in a single trip. So she thought she would take on selling clothes at a stall on Sundays as a side job alongside her regular work.

She explained her advantages to the vendor: she could conduct simple communication in English… and besides, she said, she wanted no wages — for every item she sold, she would take a commission.

The moment she finished, the vendor burst out laughing at her: “Little sister, you think you can get something for nothing? And take a commission on top of that? You think selling goods is all about having a smooth tongue? You’ve got it all wrong! It’s about having an eye for goods! Pick the right merchandise, and you can sell out the whole lot without even knowing how to say ‘hello’ — just use a calculator. Even if you manage to sell my goods, it’s because of my eye for merchandise, not yours…” At this point, Gu Qiao countered: do you have goods you can’t sell? The vendor actually laughed at that. If you can really help me move these jeans, I’ll actually give you a commission — thirty-five yuan a pair, and I’ll give you five.

Gu Qiao didn’t agree to that proposal. She recalled that the cover of a VCD she’d seen at the video rental shop showed someone wearing exactly this style of trousers. She took all her savings and bought the jeans from the vendor at eighteen yuan per pair, then went to the video shop to find discs whose covers featured the same style of trousers. Having bought the discs, she went to a photo shop, had the cover images photographed and enlarged.

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