◎ Washing Hair ◎

Luo Sijing had just finished saying goodbye when Gu Qiao grabbed the receiver she had been about to set down: “Cousin, tell him not to worry. At most within half a month I’ll have a room booked at a foreign-affairs hotel, and I’ll handle the money myself. Once I’m at the hotel, I can dial international long-distance directly without having to run to the telecommunications bureau. Everything will get better and better!” All of this, Gu Qiao had wanted to tell Luo Peiyin herself. Although there was nothing particularly private about it, having it relayed through a third party felt a little awkward — but now, for the sake of easing his worry, she had no choice but to ask someone to pass it along on her behalf.

At the beginning of that year, ordinary households, even those that had installed landline telephones, had no way to dial international long-distance directly. Making such a call required a trip to the telecommunications bureau. Mobile phones, due to their domestic signal limitations, also could not place international calls. But at a foreign-affairs hotel, a single telephone could dial abroad directly.

Going to a foreign-affairs hotel to rent a room for business was, of course, not solely for the purpose of keeping in touch with her younger brother — yet at that moment, Luo Sijing felt certain that somewhere within Gu Qiao’s vision of the future, there was definitely a part that included chatting with him.

She had once thought her younger brother was simply a clever person who had made a foolish mistake. It turned out there was someone else involved. Having grown to her own age, she had come to feel that having one hand always within reach mattered more than anything. No matter how dazzling a person might be, what use was it if, in moments of sorrow, they could not even hold each other’s hands? The words “being in a relationship” became almost absurd when applied to these two. Not only did they lack even the most basic companionship — they could barely even manage the “being” part of it, since right now, separated by the Pacific Ocean, there wasn’t even an international phone call to be had.

The second hand made half a turn — long enough that Gu Qiao thought the other end had hung up — before she heard the voice through the receiver again: “Congratulations.” Luo Sijing thought back to the first time she had met Gu Qiao, when Gu Qiao had still been running a street stall, going on and on about the economics of street vending. Before long, she would be booking a room at a hotel to conduct her business.

“Thank you!”

“Is there anything else you’d like me to pass along?”

“Be sure to tell him I’m doing well, and that within half a month it’ll be much easier for me to reach him.”

Coming out of the telecommunications bureau, Gu Qiao ran toward the hospital. If she had only been making a domestic long-distance call, she wouldn’t have needed to come all this way. In Hohhot, international long-distance could only be placed at the telecommunications bureau. After waiting so long, she hadn’t heard Luo Peiyin say a single word, and more than ten yuan had already been spent. The notion that “being in a relationship costs money” was made very concrete indeed for her.

Gu Qiao didn’t sit idle at the hospital either. While scheming about her future business, she peeled tangerines for Lou Deyu.

“I can peel it myself,” said Lou Deyu. The phrase he had said most often these past few days was: *I can do it myself*, *I can eat it myself*, *I can wash it myself*. He had never felt it was Gu Qiao’s obligation to take care of a half-old man like him.

“Don’t be so polite. If you hadn’t come with me, you wouldn’t have been hurt this badly.”

“Wasn’t that the right thing to do? If I’d blocked it with my hand in time, it wouldn’t have turned out like this. I even ruined your birthday. Tomorrow, don’t bother with me — go out and have a proper meal, buy a big cake to eat.”

Gu Qiao handed the peeled tangerine segments to Lou Deyu. “Dad, eat up.”

Lou Deyu ate a segment, then turned his back to her. Gu Qiao saw his shoulders heaving up and down rhythmically, and assumed it was because his wound was hurting.

“Dad, should I call the doctor?”

Lou Deyu wiped his eyes with his arm: “It’s nothing. I’m really fine.” He thought about how truly clueless he had been before, spending all his time squabbling jealously with a young girl. Thinking about it now, he genuinely wanted to slap himself across the face.

There were still wounds on his face, and rubbing it like that actually aggravated them. Gu Qiao hurried to call the doctor over.

The patient in the adjacent bed looked at Lou Deyu with envy: “What a good daughter you have! You’re truly blessed!”

“I am blessed!”

Lou Deyu lay in his hospital bed, listening as Gu Qiao talked to him about her business. At first it was all very grounded — how to do business with Mongolian and Russian merchants. But gradually she let her imagination run free, and she said to Lou Deyu: “One day I want to take my business all the way to America.”

“My daughter has real ambition!” Lou Deyu exclaimed, and then suddenly thought of the person in America. Even so, he said to Gu Qiao: “Wherever you want to take it, you can.”

Luo Peiyin only learned of his sister’s phone call from his roommate early in the morning, just as he had returned from outside. He had just finished debugging the system he had built for a Chinatown community bank and was waiting to collect his fee — he would be returning to China the day after tomorrow. A smaller bank had also approached him about doing business, but he had declined.

By then it was already evening back in China. Luo Peiyin ended his call with his sister, changed his clothes directly, and went for a run. His roommate — a devoted enthusiast of high-risk sports — couldn’t help but find this East Asian man’s stamina genuinely alarming.

In the month since returning from China, Luo Peiyin had given up all exercise except running. He had said he would bring money for Gu Qiao’s birthday; the money was still in someone else’s pocket. If it had been in his account earlier, he would have wired it to her directly rather than making her wait this long. Someone who wants to earn money badly enough cannot afford to wait too long.

For most of that month, Luo Peiyin had been upgrading the system for a Chinatown community bank, handling everything from the hardware in the server room to the software. The software side posed no great challenge to him. Although his background was in physics, he had been programming for a number of years — after all, anyone who works in physics invariably needs to know some coding. He had cracked commercial accounting software before; building a functional system for a community bank was not particularly difficult. His original plan had been to finish the whole system within two weeks at the most. From a financial standpoint, the fee the bank’s owner was paying him was only worth roughly two weeks of his time — beyond that, it simply wasn’t worth it.

He had started out just trying to make quick money, but then his perfectionism surfaced again, and he grew unsatisfied with building something that merely worked. With the pay remaining unchanged, his time kept sinking in, little by little.

Back in China, Luo Peiyin had been able to drink freshly ground coffee. In America, he drank nothing but instant. He drank six packets of instant coffee a day, five cents a packet. Instant coffee paired with a sandwich. He went to bed at one in the morning and got up at five, then ran early. Sometimes, when exhaustion had moved past its peak, he wasn’t sleepy at one o’clock — but he forced himself to lie down. He knew that if he sat in front of the computer, he could sit there until dawn, and everything scheduled for the next day would be ruined. He had to maintain a sustainable internal clock.

Even a sleepless night did nothing to interrupt Luo Peiyin’s morning run. While jogging, he turned over what his sister had told him in his mind. He had mastered the rhythm of running in the morning after a night without sleep: start slow enough — slow enough to match his own breathing — and by then he would grow alert, a dual clarity of body and mind. In that clarity, he felt his own command over himself.

Before returning to China, Luo Peiyin had bought himself a mobile phone — on installment. Ambitious people are never in short supply anywhere. The drivers at the departures zone of the domestic airport all wanted to land a big fare. A Toyota Crown pulled up in front of Luo Peiyin; to the driver’s eyes, this young man looked like someone who wouldn’t haggle over price. But appearances can be deceiving — the young man stubbornly squeezed himself into a compact Fiat.

The Fiat stopped at the drop-off zone outside the train station, and Luo Peiyin went inside to buy a ticket. It was the off-season that month, so getting a seat ticket wasn’t too difficult. Once the departure time was confirmed, Luo Peiyin walked briskly to a public payphone booth.

Gu Qiao’s pager lit up with a message from a number she didn’t recognize. The message read: *I want to see you.* As if worried she might not know who it was, he had added his name at the end.

Gu Qiao came out of the ward. Rather than running to the public phone booth outside — too far away, and there might be a line — she walked straight to the attending physicians’ office and asked the doctor: “May I use your phone for a moment? Just one minute. I can pay for the call.”

Once she had permission, Gu Qiao immediately dialed the number. The first thing Luo Peiyin said to her was: “I arrive at Hohhot train station at seven-ten tonight. Where are you now? I’ll come find you.”

The words were almost out of Gu Qiao’s mouth before she’d thought them through: “I’m at Hohhot Hospital.” She quickly added: “My dad had a small accident, but he’s alright now. I’m here looking after him. Don’t worry.” She waited for Luo Peiyin to ask why she hadn’t had her cousin pass that piece of news along — but Luo Peiyin only asked: “What’s the ward number?”

“310.”

“Wait for me. I’ll come to you.”

When Gu Qiao told Lou Deyu that Luo Peiyin was coming to visit him, he nearly sat up in bed: “What’s he doing here?” Then it occurred to him — Gu Qiao’s birthday was coming up. The young man had probably come to celebrate with her. He was likely cursing himself in his heart for wasting so much of the two of them together.

This time Lou Deyu swallowed whatever dampening remark he’d been about to make: “I’m more or less recovered. You’ve been stuck eating hospital food with me for days — you must be thoroughly sick of it. Tomorrow, go out with him and have a proper meal, wander around the city a bit. Don’t stay out too late though. Be back before dark.” For the past two days Lou Deyu had been urging Gu Qiao to sleep at a hotel rather than laying out a bedroll on the ward floor.

At eight o’clock that evening, Gu Qiao stood at the window looking out. She sensed, vaguely, a gaze being cast in her direction. She turned and met a pair of very sharp eyes — eyes that seemed to be searching her face for some secret not yet spoken aloud.

The door to Ward 310 stood open. A young man dressed entirely in black stood at the entrance, his height making one wonder whether his head might graze the doorframe at any moment.

Gu Qiao walked toward that gaze and reached the doorway: “I’ll come out and talk to you.”

The corridor of the inpatient ward was heavy with the smell of Lysol. Nurses pushed medication carts past at intervals; patients strolled through, stretching their arms. Gu Qiao walked with her head slightly down, leading Luo Peiyin to the stairwell landing.

Gu Qiao kept her voice low, but it was enough for Luo Peiyin to hear. She recounted her close call on the way back from doing business in Erlian in simple terms.

She waited for him to speak, but he only stood there watching her. Gu Qiao didn’t look away — she held his gaze. But he was taller than her, and she had to tilt her head back slightly.

Luo Peiyin’s fingers were cool. He lightly swept them across Gu Qiao’s forehead, tracing down past her ear and sliding to the ends of her hair. Her ends were short and cropped, the tips pricking a pleasant itch into his fingers.

Gu Qiao waited for Luo Peiyin to say something, but what she got instead was: “Did you wash your hair specially, just to see me?”

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