◎ A Letter of Thanks to Luo Peiyin, Warmhearted Citizen ◎

Gu Qiao’s little room had only one small window; even left open, barely a breath of air came through. There was no electric fan, and with the door shut it became oppressively warm. She sat at the desk, letting the beak of the tiny bird on the brooch tap one finger after another — from the little finger, working her way across — imitating the way a bird pecks at worms. And somewhere in all that tapping, she became suddenly happy, like a little bird that had eaten its fill of worms, smiling at the white wall.

Then a knock at the door. She heard her aunt’s voice: “Gu Qiao, are you resting?”

Gu Qiao hastily put the bird brooch back in its box and went to open the door.

The moment Mrs. Luo stepped inside, the small room felt smaller and hotter still. Mrs. Luo said: “Why is it so warm in here? Go buy an electric fan tomorrow.”

“It’s fine. Summer is nearly over.” Gu Qiao brought up the matter of finding work on her own initiative: “Once summer is over, I should go to work regardless of anything else. With my current level of education and experience, not finding an ideal job right away is perfectly normal. You can’t eat a whole meal in one bite — I’m still young, and there’ll be plenty of opportunities to improve. I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t be picky anymore. As long as I can find work, I’ll take it, build up some experience, and then more opportunities will follow.” She didn’t mention that she was the one who’d done no picking — it had been her aunt all along. But since her aunt was acting out of genuine concern, it was easier for both of them if Gu Qiao took the responsibility onto herself.

“Are you unhappy staying here?”

“Auntie has been very kind to me. But given my family’s situation — you know it as well as I do — the sooner I start working, the better it is for me and for my family.”

“The way things stand for you now, you cannot afford a single misstep. I said I would sort out your employment, and I will. Don’t rush — I’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you, Auntie.” Gu Qiao added: “But if it’s too much trouble, please don’t strain yourself on my account. I’m eighteen now — I can take responsibility for myself.”

*As though eighteen is such a grand age*, Mrs. Luo thought — and for a moment felt a pang of sadness on Gu Qiao’s behalf. Her peers were still preparing to sit the university entrance exam.

Mrs. Luo seemed to remember something and asked: “Do you know who Zhou Zan is?”

“Is he the notable figure? He published a collection of essays last year that became quite popular?”

“It’s him? How do you know about him?” From Gu Qiao’s remark, Mrs. Luo gathered that her sister had probably never spoken much about Zhou Zan to her.

“My old Chinese teacher was a great admirer of his and always mentioned him in class.” Last year for her birthday, a friend had given her Zhou Zan’s essay collection as a gift. She had taken the book home and put it in the display cabinet in the living room. The next time she came home, the book was gone — and it was also on that visit that her mother told her that Lou Deyu had gone off to “unfreeze ethnic minority assets.” At the time, all her thoughts had been fixed on whether her father had been swindled, and she’d had no time to wonder where the book had disappeared to.

“Zhou Zan’s family is coming for dinner tomorrow. I’ll need you to prepare two extra dishes for the evening.”

Mrs. Luo opened her wallet and produced ten ten-yuan notes. “Here is money for groceries over the next few days.”

“You gave me some last time and there’s still some left. I’ve recorded every single expense — would you like to see the ledger?” Gu Qiao moved to fetch it.

“If there’s anything left over, keep it as pocket money.” Mrs. Luo had noticed that money seemed to stretch further in Gu Qiao’s hands.

Before leaving, Mrs. Luo noticed the velvet box on Gu Qiao’s desk. The fourth Luo child had already reported to her that second brother had given their cousin a brooch. Of course, for someone like Luo Peiyin, giving a small gift to a family member was nothing remarkable. But he hadn’t known Gu Qiao at all before today. Could it be that he’d originally intended the gift for someone else and given it to her on a whim?

As if mentioning it in passing, Mrs. Luo said to Gu Qiao: “Zhou Zan’s daughter will be coming too — she’s a friend of your older cousin’s. That girl is quite fond of your cousin; she’s been calling constantly lately to ask when he’d be back. She’s only one year below your cousin in school, but your cousin sat the university entrance exam in his second year of senior high on a whim — and of all things, scored well enough to go straight to university. She’s actually a little older than you; she’s in her second year of university now. The two of them are close, and we’re pleased to see it develop.”

When Mrs. Luo was nearly finished with university, she had run into Zhou Zan again, and upon learning his daughter’s age, her first reaction had been anger — it meant Zhou Zan had been involved with another woman while he was still with her sister. Later she learned that Zhou Zan’s wife had a congenital heart condition; doctors had advised against pregnancy, and they had adopted a daughter after marrying. Unlike many families in similar situations, they were entirely open about it. As for why Zhou Zan had rushed to end things with her sister and then married a woman who could not bear children — she found it difficult to believe it was simply out of love.

Mrs. Luo’s anger at Zhou Zan hadn’t lasted long. When she was finishing university and her work assignment was being decided, there was a very real chance she would not be allowed to remain in the capital. She went to see Zhou Zan with a single thread of hope to hold onto. At that time, Zhou Zan’s father had been restored to his former position and was serving as the principal of a prestigious middle school. She was still a penniless student then, with no connections and nothing to bring — except she remembered the long white woolen scarf her sister had knitted, the kind that could be worn by either a man or a woman. She took that scarf to Zhou Zan and told him it was a gift from her sister, and that her sister had asked her to come seek his help. She hadn’t expected much; by then, her sister had long since married Lou Deyu. But Zhou Zan helped her in the end. She was able to remain in the city as a middle school teacher, and as fate would have it, Luo Bo’an’s eldest daughter was in her class. That was all very long ago — since Luo Bo’an’s rank had risen steadily higher, she had increasingly more to occupy her attention and had long since moved away from the front line of teaching to a less demanding post.

Gu Qiao hadn’t read anything into her aunt’s words at all, assuming they had simply drifted onto the topic in the course of casual conversation. Her older cousin had been perfectly nice to her, but even if he were a real cousin, whoever he liked had nothing to do with her. That was entirely up to him — not even his parents could dictate that, let alone her. What did catch her attention was the part about her cousin having sat the university entrance exam in his second year of senior high. She couldn’t help asking: “Which university is older cousin at?”

Mrs. Luo hadn’t expected that to be where Gu Qiao’s interest landed: “Z University.”

Gu Qiao gave a small sound of recognition. Z University — the same as Chen Hui. She’d spent two days at the Chen family home, and even though it was the summer holidays, Chen Hui always wore his university badge, visibly proud of his school’s reputation. But she’d never once seen her older cousin wearing his.

“It’s getting late. You should rest.” Mrs. Luo felt she had made her point clearly enough — Gu Qiao was perceptive; she would understand.

After her aunt left, Gu Qiao took out the brooch again and held it up against the front of her blouse. Then she pulled out every blouse she owned and tried the brooch against each one. The brooch was lovely — but none of the clothes seemed quite right for it.

*Ah well.* Buying new clothes was out of the question for now.

Gu Qiao settled at the desk and went through the day’s newspapers. The Luo household received a generous number of papers each day, and she always retrieved them in the evenings after everyone else had finished reading, and brought them to her room.

She read the papers every day, poring over them so thoroughly she practically read the spaces between lines. She was looking for any reader letters she had submitted. As of today, not a single one had appeared.

She truly hoped the papers would publish her letters — and yet dreaded that the one they might publish was the piece entitled *A Letter of Thanks to Luo Peiyin, Warmhearted Citizen.* She had written that letter before knowing that Luo Peiyin was her cousin.

Gu Qiao had followed her aunt’s instruction and said nothing to any of the Luo household about her father. But she had already sent reader submissions to several newspapers. They all had one purpose: to reach Lou Deyu’s eyes, make him realize his responsibilities, stir his conscience, and bring him home. Gu Qiao’s reasoning was that to rebuild his fortune, her father would almost certainly not give up his habit of scanning the papers for leads on getting rich. And since paid advertising was beyond her means, reader submissions were the only free option. Not knowing which paper her father might read, she had sent letters to every major newspaper in the city with a large circulation. To maximize her chances of publication, she had varied the format and topic with each one — some calling her father home, others warning readers about fraud. She had even written *A Letter of Thanks to Luo Peiyin, Warmhearted Citizen.*

That piece was perhaps a touch exaggerated, but having studied many other reader letters, Gu Qiao felt this style had a better chance of being printed. The letter was broadly faithful to the facts — just with some rearrangement of events and a rather overabundant outpouring of emotion in certain passages. In it, Gu Qiao described how she had come alone to this unfamiliar city in search of her father, feeling extremely anxious, trepidatious, and timid, convinced that the city would never accept an outsider like herself — only to unexpectedly encounter Luo Peiyin, a genuinely good person who not only gave up his seat on the bus but, disregarding all personal risk, intervened to ward off the threat of a ruffian, and then, despite a busy schedule, absolutely insisted on riding her all the way to her destination just to point the way. Gu Qiao wrote that encountering such a good person had warmed her heart to a temperature hotter than even this scorching summer.

At the end of the letter, she elevated the piece to a higher plane: she believed Luo Peiyin embodied the spirit of this city’s citizens, and that good people were to be found everywhere. With China’s first Asian Games approaching, the warmth and spirit of model citizens like this would inspire more and more people. Of course, the true purpose of the letter was still to locate Lou Deyu, so she had worked in his key identifying information at every available opportunity.

Gu Qiao felt a twinge of worry — if that letter of thanks were published, the Luo family would likely find out about her father’s situation. She didn’t mind for herself, but she knew her aunt would be unhappy to see it in print. Her aunt not only despised Lou Deyu; she had no desire for others to know that Lou Deyu was any relation to her at all. In her aunt’s presence, Gu Qiao had made little effort to defend him — and even if she said he wasn’t that bad, her aunt would only conclude that Gu Qiao had let her filial sentiments cloud her judgment. The only way Lou Deyu could redeem himself in anyone’s eyes was to come home and face his responsibilities of his own accord — any other explanation was worthless.

Unlike her aunt, Gu Qiao still believed, even now, that Lou Deyu coming home was infinitely better than not coming home. If he could acknowledge his mistakes and return, even if they had to start from scratch, her mother’s burden would be so much lighter, and she herself would have far less to worry about. To be fair about it — before all of this happened, Gu Qiao had felt that Lou Deyu did serve a function in the family. He might have only barely met the average standard as a father to her, but toward her two younger sisters, he could genuinely be called a good father.

—

By the standards of her peers in the village, one could not say that Lou Deyu had treated Gu Qiao badly. He had never struck her even once; she was never lacking in food or drink; and in the years when he had money, he had been generous enough with her. The ways in which Lou Deyu had hurt her feelings were mostly small things — he held the stubborn and rather extreme view that her mother favored Gu Qiao, and so in the name of fairness, Lou Deyu had decided to pour all his paternal affection into her younger sisters.

Gu Qiao had once owned a very beautiful pair of gloves, which she had worn for several years. When her second sister took a great liking to them, she had given the gloves to her out of love — only for Lou Deyu to see her little sister wearing the old gloves and get very annoyed, tossing them aside and telling her: “Why are you treating this old thing like a treasure? Let Dad take you to buy new ones!” His manner was as if Gu Qiao had passed off something she no longer wanted as a gift, and she had an argument with him over it. Of course their mother, hearing what happened, took her side. Lou Deyu had been clearly in the wrong, yet he acted as if he’d suffered a tremendous injustice, telling her second sister resentfully: “Don’t go picking up things other people are throwing away — Dad will buy you new ones.” Their mother, who rarely lost her temper, did so that day, and in the end it was Lou Deyu who apologized. After that, his favoritism became somewhat less blatant.

Gu Qiao folded the newspapers into a neat stack. Before sleep, she looked at the brooch one last time and said to it: *Don’t worry. Sooner or later, I’ll have a blouse that does you justice.*

—