Together Forever
The Love At the Time (1)
That evening, when they returned to the hospital, another of the patients in the room was already asleep, and for reasons unknown, she had no family or other people staying to take care of her. The family member of the patient nearest the window had pulled the bed curtains shut and was quietly conversing with the patient.
Opening her notebook, Tong Yan began reading over a stack of copied class notes that had been printed out.
In order to express that she had toiled away with great difficulty to take down these notes, Shen Yao had every so often written some words enclosed in parenthesis between the lines of the actual notes. For instance, there was “(The boy in the desk next to me is looking at me)” or “(Goddess of Nightmares’s clothes are so tacky today)”, or similar, and from these, Tong Yan was always able to imagine what sort of state Shen Yao was in when she was in class … She read for a little while, then sent a text message to Shen Yao: Gu Pingsheng is back.
In less than a minute, Shen Yao called her on the phone.
“He’s back? He’s really back?!” Shen Yao was clearly more excited than her. “Let me tell you, you need to give him a good schooling. Such a huge thing happened, and he didn’t come back until now … But, oh well, forget it. Men always have a lot of excuses. As long as they’re acceptable, then it’s fine.”
Tong Yan was about to die laughing listening to her, and holding her phone, she stepped out of the room.
“Did he gather you into his arms, give you fierce, hard kiss, and say, ‘Wifey, it’s been hard for you. Thank you.”
“…… You could say he did.”
Shen Yao laughed gleefully. “You’re at home? Or at his home? Or at the hospital?”
“The hospital.” She stood in front of the hospital room, watching as two nurses walked by. “It’s the final course of chemo. Grandmother will probably be discharged from the hospital in July or so. It’ll be perfect timing, and I can go back to take my final exams.”
Shen Yao was now alone in the dormitory all day long and had long since been going mad with loneliness, so hearing her say this, she immediately cheered jubilantly and quickly stated, “In any case, he’s back now, so make him help you keep watch over Grandmother through the night. It’s in times like these that men should come forward and help. You can put ’em to the test.”
Tong Yan brushed over this with a couple of vague sentences, and then picking up her notebook, she began to ask about the places in the notes where the handwriting was illegible. Shen Yao was terrible in physics as well, and for most of the notes, she had basically taken them down and then forgotten about them. She did not even know what she had written, but clinging on to face and pride, she answered with a bunch of nonsense that caused Tong Yan to grow even more confused after listening to her.
Eventually, she decided instead to ask Gu Pingsheng the next day.
When she hung up the call, she happened to hear the conversation of several personnel who were on night shift.
Within the abundant amount of gossip that was being exchanged, she faintly caught the words, “Doctor Gu.” Subconsciously feeling it might have to do with him, she pretended to lower her head and send text messages while she listened carefully to the details of the dialogue. Gradually, though, she discovered that there was something not right, and listening further, she realized that by “Doctor Gu,” they were actually referring to his mother, Gu Tongke.
There were many comments and opinions and all of them were good ones, such as, “Doctor Gu was so nice to people and even nicer to patients, and she took such good care of the graduate students that she mentored. No matter how busy she was, she would still go to cities in other provinces to perform surgeries, too.”
As she mechanically pressed the keyboard on her mobile phone, she imagined what type of person his mother might have been … Based on what he had said in the past, his mother was someone who was always very calm, having even taught him as a child how to gain control of his own emotions.
“I’ve always heard that Associate Chief Physician Gu was very good-natured and stuff. The ones nowadays are too arrogant and look down on people. The other day, I even saw the three associate chiefs of cardiology get in an actual fight.” The young nurse’s lips curled into a sneer. “Two men and one woman having a war of words. What a lively and exciting sight.”
The young nurse’s face was animated as she recounted this.
Tong Yan had heard about enough and was just about to turn around and go back when she heard some dialogue regarding him.
“Actually, Doctor Gu’s son’s temperament was not good. He was always so cold and unfriendly.” A nurse who appeared to be approaching thirty years old suddenly mentioned him. Though she had not specifically stated any names, Tong Yan could guess that she was referring to him. “But these doctors all have such weird temperaments. He’d actually be considered pretty normal, just that he didn’t really like talking to people.”
Bad temperament. Didn’t like talking to people.
That did seem like the feeling she had gotten the very, very first time she saw him.
“And then afterwards, during the SARS outbreak, he changed a lot. This afternoon when he was here, he was like a completely different person from before.” The nurse gave a sigh and added, “I heard that he saw Doctor Gu commit suicide. It was at home … No wonder his personality has changed so drastically. It had to have had some sort of effect on him …”
While her heart was palpitating from listening to this, from the corner of her eye, she saw Gu Pingsheng walking over from the elevators.
After a brief moment of surprise, she quickly adjusted the expression on her face and turned her head to smile at him, acting as if she had not heard anything.
The resting area for nurses did not have a view of the entire hallway, and as a result, those nurses continued their discussion and did not notice at all that the person who was central to their conversation topic was actually here. Only when he drew near did the nurse who knew Gu Pingsheng suddenly shut her mouth in realization, but then, remembering that he was actually deaf, her expression relaxed again.
Gu Pingsheng glanced in their direction and gave a polite smile.
Those nurses greeted him rather awkwardly, “Doctor Gu? You’re here so late?”
Out of habit, they still addressed him as “doctor.”
“I came to see my wife.” He pointed at Tong Yan. “I was worried she wouldn’t be able to handle everything alone.”
When he spoke, his eyes were on her.
With his words, the nurses followed his gaze toward her. Tong Yan’s cheeks reddened slightly. This was the first time she felt that eavesdropping on people’s gossip was even more shameful than gossiping about people.
Inside the hospital room, the patient and her family member who had been chatting earlier on were now asleep. Worried that she would disturb the other people, Tong Yan pulled him into the stairwell. The breeze that blew in through the window carried the feeling of a busy city core and blended with the heavy smell of disinfectant from the hallway, causing a person to feel slightly dazed. She raised her arm and glanced at her watch. It was past eleven o’clock already.
Three hours. The two of them had been apart for only three hours, and now he was here again and so late at night, too.
“I’m probably still adjusting to jet lag. I laid down and read for a bit but still could not fall asleep, so I came here to see you.”
He explained it in this way, but unfortunately, those eyes of his had already clearly stated the true reason. He missed her.
“I can’t sleep either.” Echoing in Tong Yan’s mind were still those nurses’ words, but concerned that he might perceive something, she raised the stack of notes in her hands instead. “Since you can’t sleep too, how about doing some physics problems with me?”
As this sentence slipped from her lips, she ended up laughing at herself first. Oh, dear Lord, what kind of lame excuse was that? …
“Sure.” He also could not hold back a smile. As he took the notes from her hand, he happened to see Shen Yao’s comments that were written in parenthesis. “Shen Yao is truly a rather fun student.”
“Don’t say the word, ‘student.’” She snatched the top sheet of notes back from him. “She is Mrs. Gu’s best friend. When you say she’s your ‘student,’ it makes me feel really weird and awkward.”
“ ‘Covering your eyes while stealing a bell[1]’ [only deceiving yourself].” After he had smilingly made his critique, he carried on looking at the other sheets of notes that had been below the previous one. “Go grab a newspaper.”
Tong Yan gave him a puzzled look.
“To spread on the windowsill. It’ll be easier to work and solve problems that way.”
She happily accepted this assigned task.
And so, with an air of earnestness, the two of them truly began to do physics problems in the stairwell. He was very focused and serious as he explained things to her but Tong Yan’s mind would frequently wander, and by some time past three o’clock in the morning, she could no longer keep herself from drifting off. With her elbow propped on the newspaper-covered windowsill, she sleepily closed her eyes. Very soon, she felt a warm touch against her lips, and her eyes flew open.
“Go back in to sleep.” He had already straightened himself back up, and putting the cap on the pen, he said, “It’s almost four o’clock.”
“You’re still not sleepy?” She had no real experience with jet lag, and only now, after seeing that his dark eyes were still bright, did she at last have a bit of a sense of what it was. “No wonder you looked like you were always really tired during the day. And here I was all worried for no reason.”
“It will gradually get better. It’s only because I just got back and haven’t adjusted yet.”
“I’ll keep you company for a little bit longer. Just this night.” Her eyes swept over their quiet surroundings. “How about you tell me a ghost story? I’m really easily scared. Once you’ve finished telling it, I’ll immediately lose all my sleepiness.”
“Ghost story?” Gu Pingsheng was silent for a moment. “I really can’t think of any.”
“You said before that people who studied medicine are the best at telling ghost stories.” She reminded him, “It was during that first time we went to the Upper Building. I told you a ghost story but you weren’t scared at all. Didn’t you tell me at the time that medical schools are the birthplace of ghost stories? That the classrooms, laundry rooms, shower rooms, washrooms, cafeterias, and even every dormitory room and every bed have a ghost story that can be told about them?”
Gu Pingsheng had a very innocent smile on his face. “I really said that?”
“Of course. If medical schools already have so many ghost stories, then hospitals should definitely have even more.” Tong Yan seemed to suddenly think of something. “Alright, ‘fess up. Did you ever tell ghost stories to female nurses or other girls and then take that chance to get touchy with them?”
“I honestly don’t know how to tell ghost stories.” His smile grew even more innocent. “But I do remember, before, when the students from the medical college came here to pick up the bodies that had been donated for medical study, it was through this stairwell here that they left. Out of respect for the deceased, the people who were moving the cadavers would not carry out any conversation, and so over time, anyone from the hospital who passed through this place would also keep their silence.”
Instantly, her hands and feet turned to ice, and her heart hammered so heavily her chest hurt. So that meant, tonight, they had violated the taboo … The night wind at four o’clock was a little chilly and even more so made the skin crawl. And yet, there he was laughing.
“Really?” She did not dare turn to look out the window. Clinging tightly to his hand, she still felt as if her hairs were standing on end, and she slipped herself in close to his chest.
Too scary. In the middle of the night, simple sentences like those could definitely cause people to make all sorts of mental associations.
“No, it’s fake.” He pulled her into his embrace. “How is that possible? This place is just the oncology department.”
But as a result of his little untruth, Tong Yan truly did not dare stand there anymore. After he had left and she was lying alone on the foldable bed, her imagination was still running wild. Unable to endure this, she pulled out her mobile phone and sent a text to condemn the main culprit of her situation: Oh no, I cannot sleep at all. You have to take full responsibility for this.
She rolled over and sprawled on top of the small pillow, staring blankly at her phone.
Since the hospital was carrying out a trial to implement “zero accompanying persons,” the standard of nursing care had actually improved quite significantly. With this, plus Auntie Liu’s extra attention to ensure that they were being well taken care of, the entire time, Grandmother had actually had fixed nurses who cared for her as well as nurse’s aides to help. In truth, these last few months had not been too exhausting for Tong Yan.
A newspaper, her books, her mobile phone, her laptop computer, and a folding bed were adequate enough for her to be able to get through every night.
During all those nights, she had often worked on practice problems into the middle of the night. Part of the reason was because she knew that Grandmother was in great pain from the chemotherapy and could not sleep, so she used this as a way to keep her company. The other part of the reason, however, was because she was always thinking about him and could not help speculating what he might be doing during the daytime over there.
Yet who would have thought that, though he had now returned safe and sound, she would still be unable to sleep?
He had left the hospital, come back, and left again. Going back and forth in the span of just several hours, on the surface, appeared to be rather overdramatic and did not at all seem to be something he would do. However, it was precisely because it was not like him to do this that she even more so felt that in the 117 days they had been apart, there must have been many, many things that she could not even begin to imagine or comprehend. It was just like the many burdens she had shouldered alone here but did not want him to know about either.
He loved his mother very much. She had sensed this from their very first encounter, when he had sat slumped over brokenly against the wall, as well as later, when he had, partly out of needing a place to redirect his anger, lectured her in a berating voice. Even a very simple power outage had been able to create such anxiousness in him … At the time, he had said, if he had just been a bit more aware, a bit more attentive and if had truly listened carefully to the sounds coming from her room, his mother would not have left the world so early.
Her mobile phone unexpectedly lit up. Her eyes were unable to adjust to this sudden brightness, and squinting them, she read his text message: Rest assured. Mr. Gu is someone who takes responsibility for his actions. He’ll keep you company until you fall asleep. TK
April 6, 2016 by hoju 15 Comments
No matter how far he travelled, he still ended up coming back here … back to her.
In the end, the person who was adjusting to jet lag thoroughly outlasted the person who was overly excited.
Over the following dozen or so days of chemotherapy treatments, during the daytime, he would be there, and then at night, he would keep her company using this same way. His excuse was always that he was still jet-lagged. Eventually, not wanting him to exhaust himself, she would tell him the entire time that she was going to sleep, that she honestly needed to sleep. Only after repeating this many times would she finally be able to end their lengthy exchange of text messages.
By the time Grandmother was discharged from the hospital, both of them had noticeably lost quite a bit of weight.
Upon seeing this, Grandmother’s eyes reddened from heartache. The way she treated him was even obviously better than her own granddaughter.
“This grandson-in-law of mine is truly quite wonderful.” Grandmother repeated this over and over again to Auntie Liu. “Truly wonderful.”
Auntie Liu was very clear about Gu Pingsheng’s health situation but never did she reveal any of it to Grandmother. Privately to Tong Yan, however, she had said many things. The general themes were that life was not easy for anyone, and that for calamities created by Heaven or man, she should accept them and then look to the best.
In a half-serious tone, Tong Yan had answered, “Auntie Liu, my biggest strength is that I am good at looking to the best.”
When all the things at the hospital finally came to an end, he had also settled on which school he would be teaching at.
It turned out to be the one she had frequently gone to play at and hang out in when she was growing up.
With an inner sense of pride and self-satisfaction, she insisted on taking him to walk through the campus.
These two people, who at the moment neither needed to go to class nor work, went one weekday after lunch to that university. Prior to heading there, Tong Yan selected for him an outfit that was very student-like in style, including a white, short-sleeved shirt to deliberately expose his very intimidating tattoo.
The effect was very apparent. All along the way, regardless of whether it was from male or female students, the rate of head turns they received was astonishing.
When they were sitting in the stands of the university stadium, watching the two teams of students in the sun kicking the ball on the field below, he finally heaved a meaningful sigh. “Never have I regretted like I have today being young and rash at the time and adding this drawing onto my body.”
Tong Yan was wearing the dress he bought for her. In the sunlight, its light blue colour offset the paleness of her complexion that was a result of this long period of, night after night, staying up into the late hours.
“Do you ever feel like you really look like a student?” Tong Yan leaned back against a railing, gazing at Gu Pingsheng, who was sitting on the concrete steps. “Actually, when you think about it, you really are a student. You haven’t worked out in the real world for more than a year, so the vast majority of your time was still spent in school. The only difference between us is that I’m in my undergrad while you’re a PhD, that’s all.”
“And so?” He leaned back on one elbow and smilingly looked at her. “What are you trying to say?”
“No real special meaning.” She turned her head to the side. “It was just an offhanded thought, so I said it out just as offhandedly. But I suddenly thought, don’t we seem particularly like one of those couples on a school campus? We don’t seem at all … like we’re already …”
Wait. That wasn’t right either. They actually weren’t really married yet …
He stretched out his hand to her. “Come here. Sit next to me.”
Tong Yan walked over and sat down snug against him.
“What should a married couple be like?”
Tong Yan mulled over this briefly. “You eat together, take walks together, calculate out the cost of living for the elderly folks and children in the family, calculate out the cost of all the daily necessities.” Those were what came to mind initially, but when she seriously pondered further over this, she truly did not have a real concept of what it should be like. “I don’t know. I don’t have any experience with that …”
“I don’t have any experience either.” Gu Pingsheng watched her amusedly. “But you seem to have forgotten something.”
“What?”
The next morning, she woke up relatively late. While she was looking at the mirror and brushing her teeth, she heard Grandmother and Gu Pingsheng conversing in the living room. The soundproofing in this home was very good, and despite pricking up her ears for a long time and trying to listen, she still could not catch the essence of the conversation. When she stepped out, she saw him on the balcony, his arms propped against the railing as he gazed at the scenery outside.
He had donned a soft, exquisite-looking white dress shirt and a pair of chinos, and his sleeves were rolled up. Walking over to him, she patted him on the back, and as he turned around, she discovered that he was actually wearing a tie as well … It was seldom that he dressed so formally.
Narrowing her eyes, she made a show of admiring this look of his.
“You’re going to the school today?”
“Going to get married,” he stated.
“Huh?” Tong Yan stared uncomprehendingly for a moment. “Married?”
“Today is a business day, and moreover,” he said in a low voice as he loosened his tie slightly, “your grandmother has agreed to it.”
With an “oh” in response, Tong Yan looked first at his eyes, then allowed her gaze to travel its way down until she saw the ring on his finger. Her mind inexplicably went blank for some time. Then all of a sudden, she gave a cry of “I’m going to take a shower!” and hurriedly dashed back into the bathroom.
This was a perfectly proper matter, but it threw her into disarray for the entire morning. Simply selecting her clothing alone took a full hour as she tried on different outfits. Her bedroom did not have a large enough mirror, so she could only haul a huge pile of clothes into the bathroom to try on. However, dissatisfied with all of them, she brought them back out and continued on to carry another batch into the bathroom. At last, even Gu Pingsheng found her actions funny. Pushing open the door, he stepped in and assigned to her a light pink dress to wear.
She also thought it was good, so she slipped it on.
But when they were sitting in the taxi, Tong Yan looked down at the dress she was wearing and suddenly felt it was unsuitable. “Is it too pinky and immature? Not formal and dignified enough?”
Gu Pingsheng looked her over carefully. “No, it’s very nice. Mrs. Gu looks very pretty.”
She smiled, then after a while, felt something was peculiar. “How come you’re not nervous?”
“I am. I’m nervous, too.” With a very attractive smile, he quickly added, “It’s true.”
Tong Yan gave a lopsided smirk in an expression that showed she did not believe him.
“Do you believe me now?” His voice was solemn and his manner was serious.
She nodded, not pulling her hand back and merely turning her head away instead to face the window with a ceaseless smile.
In her past twenty years of awareness, Tong Yan had never believed that a person could smile for such a long time. How good did a person’s mood have to be to smile like a starry-eyed girl who did not care at all about her image? But when she stood in front of the door to the Marriage Registration Centre of the Civil Affairs Bureau and discovered that her lips were still spread in a grin, she finally believed that a person truly could be so happy that she could smile nonstop.
The sunshine of early summer felt warm and tickled the skin as it shone down on the people below.
Perhaps because it was a working day, there were not many people inside. There looked to be eleven or twelve couples, some of them sitting in front of the counter, filling in forms, and others consulting with the staff. When they walked in, an older woman at the door was rather keenly helpful and instantly directed them to take a premarital medical examination.
Tong Yan paused in surprise and automatically glanced toward Gu Pingsheng.
He had stepped in later and had not seen what this staff member had said, and only after seeing that Tong Yan was looking at him did he ask, “What’s the matter?”
“Little lass, a premarital medical exam is a must.” This auntie-figure noticed that Tong Yan did not look willing and very patiently advised, “This is very important. You kids all don’t understand this.”
“We’re not doing it,” Tong Yan swiftly declined. “What’s the next step?”
“Auntie still advises you that you should do it.” This staff member was very dedicated and kindly counseled, “Last month, there was a young couple that came and registered their marriage, but they didn’t do the premarital medical exam. This month, the girl’s parents came and said the man has fertility problems. The girl is regretting her decision, and they were yelling at us, saying we weren’t taking responsibility for the issue. But these days, premarital medical examinations are optional. What can we do about it?”
With a shake of her head, Tong Yan grabbed his hand and continued walking further in, deciding simply to find and read the sign that had instructions on the entire process.
That older woman truly was only speaking out of good intentions, but Tong Yan was most clear on what the condition of his health was. Even though she did not know exactly what a premarital medical examination entailed, she did not want to affect today’s good mood.
Behind them, that woman seemed to be lamenting to someone that nowadays, young girls were just not being realistic by choosing not to do such an important medical check-up. Pretending not to hear, Tong Yan lifted her head and carefully read through the process. She discovered that it really was very simple. They only needed to take a photograph together and then they could head directly to the counter to do the registration. She tilted her head sideways to look at him. “We’ll go to the room next door to take a photo and then come back here to the counter to register.”
He answered her with an “alright,” seeming not to have been affected by the staff member a moment ago.
They paid the photography fee, and while they were standing in line waiting to have their photograph taken, Tong Yan watched the young couple in front of them smile as if they had just won five million yuan. The elderly man taking the photographs kept telling them, “Smile a little less widely. Even less. Your teeth are all showing …” Those two looked and laughed at each other for a long while before they finally re-adjusted their smiles. Though they were a little stiff and nervous, they managed to put together a proper pose for the photograph.
When the photo was printed and they were walking past Tong Yan, the girl even deliberately said sorry to them for such a long delay. Tong Yan hurriedly shook her head. “No worries.”
Once the subjects of the photograph became her and Gu Pingsheng, she finally understood that the photographer was definitely the one who created the stiffness and nervousness.
“The one on the right, bring that lip up higher. I’m talking to the girl.” The old photographer meticulously directed them, “Don’t let your mouth smile too wide … No, no. Now your smile is too fake … “ It was evident that she was dazed from all these instructions.
After the photograph was placed in their hands, she saw that in it, against the red background, his smile was neither overstated nor too subtle, just simply perfect. Her own expression, on the other hand, was very bizarre … You could not say whether she was trying to cry or smile.
“Look at your husband and how natural his smile is.” The old photographer even did not forget to throw in his own comment as he took advantage of this moment when there was nobody else waiting in line.
Putting on an unperturbed front, she took a pair of scissors and cut apart the four photographs. Carefully, she tucked two away into her wallet while she held the remaining two in her hand in preparation for attaching them to the marriage certificate later.
The entire time, Gu Pingsheng merely watched until, with a serious manner, she had readied everything. Then, he at last slipped his arm around her shoulder and suggested, “When you’ve come back after your finals, we’ll go and take a real set of wedding photos.”
With her lips turned out in a pout, she very sullenly stuffed the photographs over to him. “Some people were just born with a ‘waigua’ [a ‘cheating tool’ to make things easier in life][1]. Makes people so darn jealous.”
“Waigua?” He copied the shape of her lips and repeated this term.
“It’s basically a plugin or tool in online gaming that makes you invincible under the gaming heavens.”
“A programming bug?”
“No, not really a programming bug.”
And hence, while the two of them were in line waiting to register their marriage, they began a serious discussion on the difference between a waigua and a programming bug. When it was their turn, they still had not arrived at a definite conclusion yet, but Tong Yan and Gu Pingsheng sat down and decided to first take care of their proper business.
Gu Pingsheng took the pen and form and had soon filled in his own information. For some reason, when Tong Yan brought her pen to the paper, her heart began beating rapidly and she wrote each word very slowly. For many basic pieces of information, she had to think for a long time before she knew what she should write.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that he had already completed filling in his and seemed now to be looking at her. In an instant of anxiousness, on the place where she was supposed to sign her signature, she ended up writing in her birthday …
The middle-aged woman behind the counter burst out in a chuckle. “Little lass, you really are nervous. Not at all like when you were talking about gaming just a little while ago.”
TongYan smiled embarrassedly. Crossing out her birthday, she hurriedly signed her name.
“Your hukou [household register and declaration of permanent residence] booklet and identity card.” The middle-aged woman smiled and took the forms back from them.
Gu Pingsheng pulled out his passport and Tong Yan’s hukou booklet, and Tong Yan also handed her identity card over. The woman casually flipped through them before very puzzledly asking Tong Yan, “Little lass, this hukou account doesn’t have you registered in there.”
Tong Yan gave an “ah” and stared blankly at Gu Pingsheng. Gu Pingsheng looked as if he did not understand what was going on either.
“Did you transfer your hukou [registered permanent residence] to somewhere else[2]?”
She seemed to suddenly realize something. “I think when I first got accepted into university, I transferred it over to the school …”
“You’re still a student?” The woman was rather taken aback. Although university students had long since been allowed to marry, it was still only a small number that actually did.[3]
“So, I need to transfer my hukou out from the university?” Tong Yan seemed as if she could not quite catch the direction of the discussion. “My identity card won’t work?”
“In these last two years, they have basically stopped attaching a student’s hukou to his or her educational institution.” The middle-aged woman patiently explained, “But a few years ago, all students would be registered in their school’s collective hukou account. That is a little more troublesome because you need your school to provide a verification. Is your school here?”
“No, it’s in Shanghai.”
“Then you need to obtain a proof of residency, and you need to do that in Shanghai.”
After the entire discussion came to an end, she realized that the whole time, she had been facing that staff member and Gu Pingsheng could not see the conversation in its entirety. When she was about to explain the situation to him, he had already smilingly squeezed her hand. “We’ll take it slowly. We can resolve this one step at a time.” She nodded and took all their items back from the staff member’s hand.
Joyfully, the two of them had come here, but it had turned out to be a fruitless effort.
As she gazed vacantly out at the endless streams of traffic outside the main entrance, she was extremely dejected. He, on the other hand, did not seem overly affected emotionally and asked her whether she wanted to go back home or go pick up Grandmother to go out for dinner.
She absentmindedly answered him. Then after a little while, she tentatively turned the conversation topic back again. “If I go back to the university and ask them for a verification, would it be a lot of trouble?”
No matter what, they had met in the university and their relationship had been teacher and student. Even though he had now already decided to change to a different university to teach, the gossip and rumours that were being spread privately as well as the attitudes and stances of the fellow students of her class would more or less still reach Administration. If she had not had these as the basis of the situation, she could simply have thickened her skin and still gone to ask for a verification of her hukou …
“Doing that could very likely affect you so that you won’t be able to graduate normally. We can just wait until you’ve graduated and make up the official marriage registration then,” he said in solemnity.
She nodded and stretched out her hand to take his right hand. “Let’s go home to eat?”
With a “sure,” he held her hand in his and waved down a taxi, going home the same route they had come.
When they arrived at the door to their home, they realized they had not bought groceries to make dinner, so they went to a restaurant near their community compound and bought a couple dishes of takeout. Once they were back home, though, they discovered to their astonishment that an entire table of food had been laid out, the meal so sumptuous it left them dumbstruck. Tong Yan was a little stupefied and clearly did not know how to react to the dinner Grandmother had prepared. Fortunately, he was there and was always able to give a good and apt reason to explain unexpected disappointments.
After she returned to her own bedroom that night, a rare bout of insomnia caused her to lay awake until past one o’clock in the morning. Eventually, truly unable to fall asleep, she got off the bed and in her bare feet, quietly opened her room door. Their home had two normal bedrooms and one master bedroom. As the master bedroom had its own individual bathroom, needless to say, it was given to the elderly one of the house. Therefore, their two bedrooms were actually adjacent to one another.
When she turned the doorknob and stepped inside, Gu Pingsheng was still leaning back against the head of the bed, reading a book. To her surprise, he had on an attractive pair of glasses and was still wearing the white dress shirt from the daytime.
Seeing Tong Yan walk in, he set his book down beside him and opened his arms to her. Tong Yan hopped onto the bed and burrowed herself against his chest. After holding him for a little while, she tilted her face up to ask, “Why haven’t you showered yet?”
“I’m going to be depressed and disappointed for several days because we could not obtain our legally recognized papers,” he replied in a half-joking tone. Lowering his head and nuzzling it against her cheek, he asked her, “Why are you in here so late at night instead of sleeping?”
His face was pressed against hers, so naturally, he would not be able to see the shape of her lips when she spoke. Tong Yan cuddled a little while longer with him before lifting up the light blanket and nestling herself under it. At last, she looked at his eyes. “I’m here to go to sleep with you. When did you start wearing glasses?”
“Sometimes I need them, but in the future, I may be inseparable from them.” His elbow was resting on his pillow as he propped his head on his hand and gazed at her. “Side effect number one: vision will gradually deteriorate. But good thing, once I put on glasses, it’s not much of a hindrance.”
Before he had even opened his mouth to speak, Tong Yan had had a suspicion that this was the case. Now, she merely stretched her hand forward and placed it at a distance very close to her eyes as a demonstration to him. “Once something is past this point, I can’t see it very clearly. Super nearsightedness. A prescription of minus five. Normally I wear contact lenses so you can’t tell. Do you know what the biggest advantage of being nearsighted is?”
Gu Pingsheng gave a silent smile and did not reply.
“If you take off your glasses, the entire street is filled with pretty girls and handsome guys.” She slipped his glasses off for him. “Do you see a very, very, very beautiful girl lying on your bed and smiling at you?”
“I think there really is.” His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Do you know what the biggest advantage of being nearsighted is? If you take off your glasses, the entire street is filled with pretty girls and handsome guys. Do you see a very, very, very … beautiful girl smiling at you?”
“I have a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time.”
“Go ahead, ask.”
“Can you truly not hear anything? Can you wear a hearing aid?” She reached her arms out and, with only that thin dress shirt separating them, hugged his waist.
“I can, except I just don’t want to. At least, up to the present, I do not want to.”
So it turned out, it actually was not so irreversible and hopeless.
Tong Yan’s mood immediately improved, and she swung her legs on top of his. Lying on his side, he hooked his arm under her legs and pulled them up onto his waist. It was a simple action, but it tickled the heart and made it restless. And on top of that, he was unconsciously drumming his fingers on her bare calves as he pondered on something.
“Eat together, take walks together. If you continue along with that train of thought”—he gazed at her with a musing look—“do you also need to ‘sleep together’?”
……
“Gu Pingsheng, you’re behaving inappropriately for your older age!”
“Strictly speaking, I have not even reached the age of thirty.” Gu Pingsheng continued correcting her words, “I’m not considered too old yet. And plus, I did not only spend my time on a campus of some sort. Since high school, my vacation time was used to do volunteer work. When I went to university, in my first year, it was the school’s volunteer project and I went to Ghana. At the time, I was around your age and taught children, who were around ten years old or so, math and English and even had to step in to teach religion and French.”
Tong Yan was absorbed with interest as she listened to him, and looking at him intently, she asked, “You can speak French?”
“No. Back then, I honestly did not know how to, and now I seem to have forgotten it all as well.” Gu Pingsheng finally admitted to another weakness. “The education standards in Ghana aren’t high, so at the time, I basically taught myself from scratch and then went to go teach a class … But now that I think about it, that was in a school setting, too.”
Tong Yan interrupted him, “Do you feel like we’ve always been in completely different worlds from each other? It seems like our lives have never intersected in any way.”
“Mrs. Gu, are you being overly humble?” Gu Pingsheng laughed, carefully examining her features and then placing his hands beside her face to measure off a size. “When you were thirteen years old, your face was only this big …”
He stopped for a moment, searching around on the step behind him and picking up a small stone.
Then, under her puzzled gaze, he drew on the ground a rough sketch of a world map. Tapping the location where Beijing was on the map, he told her, “When you were thirteen, we bumped into each other here. Then,” he continued, all the while drawing circles around place after place on the map until there were so many it could make people jealous, “I went to these places. But in the end, I saw you again, here.”
He circled back to where China was located and wrote, “Shanghai.”
“And now, we’ve returned once again to the starting place.”
Gu Pingsheng tossed away the stone. “Did you realize that, no matter how far the roads I’ve traveled have taken me, I still ended up coming back?”
As he spoke, he brought his face very close to hers so that she could even smell the scent of his breath.
Their noses touched, tip to tip. She lightly exhaled a breath. “Dearest Teacher Gu, you are going to be teaching here in the future. You need to make sure you exercise a bit of restraint.”
With a slight smile, he told her, “Sometimes, when a man says some touching words, his intent is actually very clear. He did it because he wants a little reward.”
Tong Yan was thoroughly tickled by this and laughed, “I’ll sing a song for you then, as your reward.”
It was Sailing, a song sung by a British rock singer. She had learned it a long time ago but had never before seriously reflected upon the lyrics until one night, two months ago, she had been arbitrarily humming this tune and suddenly thought of him.
“I am sailing, I am sailing,
Home again, ‘cross the sea.
……
Can you hear me, can you hear me …”
As Gu Pingsheng gazed at her, he seemed to understand the meaning behind what she was singing.
Eventually, she could not contain herself any longer, and looking at him, she griped, “You should at least show some sort of indication that you were touched by this, you know?”
He gave an “mm” and replied, “I need to go home and have a good think, a serious think about how I should express that I was touched.”
Tong Yan heard the implied meaning in those words. Even though, from the first day of his return, he had pulled out the property deed and used the two names written side-by-side on it as proof that he would indeed formally marry her, she was still a student, and there were some things that they simply could not blatantly do. Hence, all this time since Grandmother’s discharge from the hospital, they had been sleeping in separate bedrooms …
Along the way, they bought some groceries for dinner that night, and when they arrived at home, it was not even 3:30 p.m.
She placed all of the items into the refrigerator before quietly pushing open the door to Grandmother’s bedroom, where she saw Grandmother leaning back in a recliner and, with her glasses on, reading a book.
“We’re back,” she interrupted Grandmother’s reading with a smile. “We’ll have ‘fried sauce’ noodles[1] for dinner tonight, how about that? I’ve bought all the ingredients, and I’ll start making it at 5:30. We’ll have dinner at 6:00?”
Grandmother pulled off her reading glasses and smilingly nodded. “You’re done having fun outside? Go have a nap or maybe watch some TV or something. You don’t need to worry about me.” With that, she quickly slipped her glasses back on and carried on with reading her book.
Shutting the door, Tong Yan wanted to head into her own bedroom to change, but her hand had only just touched the door lever before he had already come up behind her and enclosed her in his embrace. Tong Yan turned her head back to him, and sticking out her tongue impishly, she silently mouthed, “Let me go change first.”
He gave a slight smile and then, with one hand on her bedroom door, he brought his face down and covered her lips with his own. The tip of his tongue felt cold. He should have just finished drinking some chilled purified water. Her hands slid from his waist to his back, and as she rested herself against the wall, she was constantly trying in nervousness to evade his actions. Finally, unable to escape him, she grabbed ahold of two of his fingers and wagged them. “Mr. Gu, ‘bai zhou xuan yin’ [engaging in lascivious acts in broad daylight][2] is strictly prohibited, eh.”
Gu Pingsheng seemed not to understand. Pushing down the door lever, he entered her bedroom.
“What is ‘bai zhou xuan yin’?”
Tong Yan, therefore, had no choice but to describe how each of the four characters was written and explain what the meaning was when they were strung together. In the end, she deliberately nuzzled her cheek against his chin, and lifting her head, she summed up, “Anyway, it means that doing naughty things during the daytime is very, very bad.”
He laughed, his dimple clearly visible.
“It would seem that Mr. Gu has been adjusting to jet lag all this time and is still unable to differentiate whether it is nighttime or daytime right now …”
After speaking these words that carried such a justified and righteous air, he lowered his head and began brushing kisses over her lips and cheek, all the while steadily advancing his steps forward. Tong Yan followed his pace, stepping backwards again and again.
Chapter 15: CH 14
That evening, when they returned to the hospital, another of the patients in the room was already asleep, and for reasons unknown, she had no family or other people staying to take care of her. The family member of the patient nearest the window had pulled the bed curtains shut and was quietly conversing with the patient.
Opening her notebook, Tong Yan began reading over a stack of copied class notes that had been printed out.
In order to express that she had toiled away with great difficulty to take down these notes, Shen Yao had every so often written some words enclosed in parenthesis between the lines of the actual notes. For instance, there was “(The boy in the desk next to me is looking at me)” or “(Goddess of Nightmares’s clothes are so tacky today)”, or similar, and from these, Tong Yan was always able to imagine what sort of state Shen Yao was in when she was in class … She read for a little while, then sent a text message to Shen Yao: Gu Pingsheng is back.
In less than a minute, Shen Yao called her on the phone.
“He’s back? He’s really back?!” Shen Yao was clearly more excited than her. “Let me tell you, you need to give him a good schooling. Such a huge thing happened, and he didn’t come back until now … But, oh well, forget it. Men always have a lot of excuses. As long as they’re acceptable, then it’s fine.”
Tong Yan was about to die laughing listening to her, and holding her phone, she stepped out of the room.
“Did he gather you into his arms, give you fierce, hard kiss, and say, ‘Wifey, it’s been hard for you. Thank you.”
“…… You could say he did.”
Shen Yao laughed gleefully. “You’re at home? Or at his home? Or at the hospital?”
“The hospital.” She stood in front of the hospital room, watching as two nurses walked by. “It’s the final course of chemo. Grandmother will probably be discharged from the hospital in July or so. It’ll be perfect timing, and I can go back to take my final exams.”
Shen Yao was now alone in the dormitory all day long and had long since been going mad with loneliness, so hearing her say this, she immediately cheered jubilantly and quickly stated, “In any case, he’s back now, so make him help you keep watch over Grandmother through the night. It’s in times like these that men should come forward and help. You can put ’em to the test.”
Tong Yan brushed over this with a couple of vague sentences, and then picking up her notebook, she began to ask about the places in the notes where the handwriting was illegible. Shen Yao was terrible in physics as well, and for most of the notes, she had basically taken them down and then forgotten about them. She did not even know what she had written, but clinging on to face and pride, she answered with a bunch of nonsense that caused Tong Yan to grow even more confused after listening to her.
Eventually, she decided instead to ask Gu Pingsheng the next day.
When she hung up the call, she happened to hear the conversation of several personnel who were on night shift.
Within the abundant amount of gossip that was being exchanged, she faintly caught the words, “Doctor Gu.” Subconsciously feeling it might have to do with him, she pretended to lower her head and send text messages while she listened carefully to the details of the dialogue. Gradually, though, she discovered that there was something not right, and listening further, she realized that by “Doctor Gu,” they were actually referring to his mother, Gu Tongke.
There were many comments and opinions and all of them were good ones, such as, “Doctor Gu was so nice to people and even nicer to patients, and she took such good care of the graduate students that she mentored. No matter how busy she was, she would still go to cities in other provinces to perform surgeries, too.”
As she mechanically pressed the keyboard on her mobile phone, she imagined what type of person his mother might have been … Based on what he had said in the past, his mother was someone who was always very calm, having even taught him as a child how to gain control of his own emotions.
“I’ve always heard that Associate Chief Physician Gu was very good-natured and stuff. The ones nowadays are too arrogant and look down on people. The other day, I even saw the three associate chiefs of cardiology get in an actual fight.” The young nurse’s lips curled into a sneer. “Two men and one woman having a war of words. What a lively and exciting sight.”
The young nurse’s face was animated as she recounted this.
“Actually, Doctor Gu’s son’s temperament was not good. He was always so cold and unfriendly.” A nurse who appeared to be approaching thirty years old suddenly mentioned him. Though she had not specifically stated any names, Tong Yan could guess that she was referring to him. “But these doctors all have such weird temperaments. He’d actually be considered pretty normal, just that he didn’t really like talking to people.”
Bad temperament. Didn’t like talking to people.
That did seem like the feeling she had gotten the very, very first time she saw him.
“And then afterwards, during the SARS outbreak, he changed a lot. This afternoon when he was here, he was like a completely different person from before.” The nurse gave a sigh and added, “I heard that he saw Doctor Gu commit suicide. It was at home … No wonder his personality has changed so drastically. It had to have had some sort of effect on him …”
While her heart was palpitating from listening to this, from the corner of her eye, she saw Gu Pingsheng walking over from the elevators.
After a brief moment of surprise, she quickly adjusted the expression on her face and turned her head to smile at him, acting as if she had not heard anything.
The resting area for nurses did not have a view of the entire hallway, and as a result, those nurses continued their discussion and did not notice at all that the person who was central to their conversation topic was actually here. Only when he drew near did the nurse who knew Gu Pingsheng suddenly shut her mouth in realization, but then, remembering that he was actually deaf, her expression relaxed again.
Gu Pingsheng glanced in their direction and gave a polite smile.
Those nurses greeted him rather awkwardly, “Doctor Gu? You’re here so late?”
Out of habit, they still addressed him as “doctor.”
“I came to see my wife.” He pointed at Tong Yan. “I was worried she wouldn’t be able to handle everything alone.”
When he spoke, his eyes were on her.
With his words, the nurses followed his gaze toward her. Tong Yan’s cheeks reddened slightly. This was the first time she felt that eavesdropping on people’s gossip was even more shameful than gossiping about people.
Inside the hospital room, the patient and her family member who had been chatting earlier on were now asleep. Worried that she would disturb the other people, Tong Yan pulled him into the stairwell. The breeze that blew in through the window carried the feeling of a busy city core and blended with the heavy smell of disinfectant from the hallway, causing a person to feel slightly dazed. She raised her arm and glanced at her watch. It was past eleven o’clock already.
Three hours. The two of them had been apart for only three hours, and now he was here again and so late at night, too.
“I’m probably still adjusting to jet lag. I laid down and read for a bit but still could not fall asleep, so I came here to see you.”
He explained it in this way, but unfortunately, those eyes of his had already clearly stated the true reason. He missed her.
“I can’t sleep either.” Echoing in Tong Yan’s mind were still those nurses’ words, but concerned that he might perceive something, she raised the stack of notes in her hands instead. “Since you can’t sleep too, how about doing some physics problems with me?”
As this sentence slipped from her lips, she ended up laughing at herself first. Oh, dear Lord, what kind of lame excuse was that? …
“Don’t say the word, ‘student.’” She snatched the top sheet of notes back from him. “She is Mrs. Gu’s best friend. When you say she’s your ‘student,’ it makes me feel really weird and awkward.”
“ ‘Covering your eyes while stealing a bell[1]’ [only deceiving yourself].” After he had smilingly made his critique, he carried on looking at the other sheets of notes that had been below the previous one. “Go grab a newspaper.”
Tong Yan gave him a puzzled look.
“To spread on the windowsill. It’ll be easier to work and solve problems that way.”
She happily accepted this assigned task.
And so, with an air of earnestness, the two of them truly began to do physics problems in the stairwell. He was very focused and serious as he explained things to her but Tong Yan’s mind would frequently wander, and by some time past three o’clock in the morning, she could no longer keep herself from drifting off. With her elbow propped on the newspaper-covered windowsill, she sleepily closed her eyes. Very soon, she felt a warm touch against her lips, and her eyes flew open.
“Go back in to sleep.” He had already straightened himself back up, and putting the cap on the pen, he said, “It’s almost four o’clock.”
“You’re still not sleepy?” She had no real experience with jet lag, and only now, after seeing that his dark eyes were still bright, did she at last have a bit of a sense of what it was. “No wonder you looked like you were always really tired during the day. And here I was all worried for no reason.”
“It will gradually get better. It’s only because I just got back and haven’t adjusted yet.”
“I’ll keep you company for a little bit longer. Just this night.” Her eyes swept over their quiet surroundings. “How about you tell me a ghost story? I’m really easily scared. Once you’ve finished telling it, I’ll immediately lose all my sleepiness.”
“Ghost story?” Gu Pingsheng was silent for a moment. “I really can’t think of any.”
“You said before that people who studied medicine are the best at telling ghost stories.” She reminded him, “It was during that first time we went to the Upper Building. I told you a ghost story but you weren’t scared at all. Didn’t you tell me at the time that medical schools are the birthplace of ghost stories? That the classrooms, laundry rooms, shower rooms, washrooms, cafeterias, and even every dormitory room and every bed have a ghost story that can be told about them?”
Gu Pingsheng had a very innocent smile on his face. “I really said that?”
“Of course. If medical schools already have so many ghost stories, then hospitals should definitely have even more.” Tong Yan seemed to suddenly think of something. “Alright, ‘fess up. Did you ever tell ghost stories to female nurses or other girls and then take that chance to get touchy with them?”
“I honestly don’t know how to tell ghost stories.” His smile grew even more innocent. “But I do remember, before, when the students from the medical college came here to pick up the bodies that had been donated for medical study, it was through this stairwell here that they left. Out of respect for the deceased, the people who were moving the cadavers would not carry out any conversation, and so over time, anyone from the hospital who passed through this place would also keep their silence.”
Instantly, her hands and feet turned to ice, and her heart hammered so heavily her chest hurt. So that meant, tonight, they had violated the taboo … The night wind at four o’clock was a little chilly and even more so made the skin crawl. And yet, there he was laughing.
“Really?” She did not dare turn to look out the window. Clinging tightly to his hand, she still felt as if her hairs were standing on end, and she slipped herself in close to his chest.
Too scary. In the middle of the night, simple sentences like those could definitely cause people to make all sorts of mental associations.
“No, it’s fake.” He pulled her into his embrace. “How is that possible? This place is just the oncology department.”
She rolled over and sprawled on top of the small pillow, staring blankly at her phone.
Since the hospital was carrying out a trial to implement “zero accompanying persons,” the standard of nursing care had actually improved quite significantly. With this, plus Auntie Liu’s extra attention to ensure that they were being well taken care of, the entire time, Grandmother had actually had fixed nurses who cared for her as well as nurse’s aides to help. In truth, these last few months had not been too exhausting for Tong Yan.
A newspaper, her books, her mobile phone, her laptop computer, and a folding bed were adequate enough for her to be able to get through every night.
During all those nights, she had often worked on practice problems into the middle of the night. Part of the reason was because she knew that Grandmother was in great pain from the chemotherapy and could not sleep, so she used this as a way to keep her company. The other part of the reason, however, was because she was always thinking about him and could not help speculating what he might be doing during the daytime over there.
Yet who would have thought that, though he had now returned safe and sound, she would still be unable to sleep?
He had left the hospital, come back, and left again. Going back and forth in the span of just several hours, on the surface, appeared to be rather overdramatic and did not at all seem to be something he would do. However, it was precisely because it was not like him to do this that she even more so felt that in the 117 days they had been apart, there must have been many, many things that she could not even begin to imagine or comprehend. It was just like the many burdens she had shouldered alone here but did not want him to know about either.
He loved his mother very much. She had sensed this from their very first encounter, when he had sat slumped over brokenly against the wall, as well as later, when he had, partly out of needing a place to redirect his anger, lectured her in a berating voice. Even a very simple power outage had been able to create such anxiousness in him … At the time, he had said, if he had just been a bit more aware, a bit more attentive and if had truly listened carefully to the sounds coming from her room, his mother would not have left the world so early.
Her mobile phone unexpectedly lit up. Her eyes were unable to adjust to this sudden brightness, and squinting them, she read his text message: Rest assured. Mr. Gu is someone who takes responsibility for his actions. He’ll keep you company until you fall asleep. TK
April 6, 2016 by hoju 15 Comments
No matter how far he travelled, he still ended up coming back here … back to her.
In the end, the person who was adjusting to jet lag thoroughly outlasted the person who was overly excited.
Over the following dozen or so days of chemotherapy treatments, during the daytime, he would be there, and then at night, he would keep her company using this same way. His excuse was always that he was still jet-lagged. Eventually, not wanting him to exhaust himself, she would tell him the entire time that she was going to sleep, that she honestly needed to sleep. Only after repeating this many times would she finally be able to end their lengthy exchange of text messages.
By the time Grandmother was discharged from the hospital, both of them had noticeably lost quite a bit of weight.
Upon seeing this, Grandmother’s eyes reddened from heartache. The way she treated him was even obviously better than her own granddaughter.
“This grandson-in-law of mine is truly quite wonderful.” Grandmother repeated this over and over again to Auntie Liu. “Truly wonderful.”
Auntie Liu was very clear about Gu Pingsheng’s health situation but never did she reveal any of it to Grandmother. Privately to Tong Yan, however, she had said many things. The general themes were that life was not easy for anyone, and that for calamities created by Heaven or man, she should accept them and then look to the best.
In a half-serious tone, Tong Yan had answered, “Auntie Liu, my biggest strength is that I am good at looking to the best.”
When all the things at the hospital finally came to an end, he had also settled on which school he would be teaching at.
It turned out to be the one she had frequently gone to play at and hang out in when she was growing up.
These two people, who at the moment neither needed to go to class nor work, went one weekday after lunch to that university. Prior to heading there, Tong Yan selected for him an outfit that was very student-like in style, including a white, short-sleeved shirt to deliberately expose his very intimidating tattoo.
The effect was very apparent. All along the way, regardless of whether it was from male or female students, the rate of head turns they received was astonishing.
When they were sitting in the stands of the university stadium, watching the two teams of students in the sun kicking the ball on the field below, he finally heaved a meaningful sigh. “Never have I regretted like I have today being young and rash at the time and adding this drawing onto my body.”
Tong Yan was wearing the dress he bought for her. In the sunlight, its light blue colour offset the paleness of her complexion that was a result of this long period of, night after night, staying up into the late hours.
“Do you ever feel like you really look like a student?” Tong Yan leaned back against a railing, gazing at Gu Pingsheng, who was sitting on the concrete steps. “Actually, when you think about it, you really are a student. You haven’t worked out in the real world for more than a year, so the vast majority of your time was still spent in school. The only difference between us is that I’m in my undergrad while you’re a PhD, that’s all.”
“And so?” He leaned back on one elbow and smilingly looked at her. “What are you trying to say?”
“No real special meaning.” She turned her head to the side. “It was just an offhanded thought, so I said it out just as offhandedly. But I suddenly thought, don’t we seem particularly like one of those couples on a school campus? We don’t seem at all … like we’re already …”
Wait. That wasn’t right either. They actually weren’t really married yet …
He stretched out his hand to her. “Come here. Sit next to me.”
Tong Yan walked over and sat down snug against him.
“What should a married couple be like?”
Tong Yan mulled over this briefly. “You eat together, take walks together, calculate out the cost of living for the elderly folks and children in the family, calculate out the cost of all the daily necessities.” Those were what came to mind initially, but when she seriously pondered further over this, she truly did not have a real concept of what it should be like. “I don’t know. I don’t have any experience with that …”
“I don’t have any experience either.” Gu Pingsheng watched her amusedly. “But you seem to have forgotten something.”
“What?”
The next morning, she woke up relatively late. While she was looking at the mirror and brushing her teeth, she heard Grandmother and Gu Pingsheng conversing in the living room. The soundproofing in this home was very good, and despite pricking up her ears for a long time and trying to listen, she still could not catch the essence of the conversation. When she stepped out, she saw him on the balcony, his arms propped against the railing as he gazed at the scenery outside.
He had donned a soft, exquisite-looking white dress shirt and a pair of chinos, and his sleeves were rolled up. Walking over to him, she patted him on the back, and as he turned around, she discovered that he was actually wearing a tie as well … It was seldom that he dressed so formally.
Narrowing her eyes, she made a show of admiring this look of his.
“You’re going to the school today?”
“Going to get married,” he stated.
“Today is a business day, and moreover,” he said in a low voice as he loosened his tie slightly, “your grandmother has agreed to it.”
With an “oh” in response, Tong Yan looked first at his eyes, then allowed her gaze to travel its way down until she saw the ring on his finger. Her mind inexplicably went blank for some time. Then all of a sudden, she gave a cry of “I’m going to take a shower!” and hurriedly dashed back into the bathroom.
This was a perfectly proper matter, but it threw her into disarray for the entire morning. Simply selecting her clothing alone took a full hour as she tried on different outfits. Her bedroom did not have a large enough mirror, so she could only haul a huge pile of clothes into the bathroom to try on. However, dissatisfied with all of them, she brought them back out and continued on to carry another batch into the bathroom. At last, even Gu Pingsheng found her actions funny. Pushing open the door, he stepped in and assigned to her a light pink dress to wear.
She also thought it was good, so she slipped it on.
But when they were sitting in the taxi, Tong Yan looked down at the dress she was wearing and suddenly felt it was unsuitable. “Is it too pinky and immature? Not formal and dignified enough?”
Gu Pingsheng looked her over carefully. “No, it’s very nice. Mrs. Gu looks very pretty.”
She smiled, then after a while, felt something was peculiar. “How come you’re not nervous?”
“I am. I’m nervous, too.” With a very attractive smile, he quickly added, “It’s true.”
Tong Yan gave a lopsided smirk in an expression that showed she did not believe him.
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Gu Pingsheng placed his hand forward and motioned to her to give her hand to him. Although Tong Yan did not understand, she still did as he instructed and set her hand on his palm. And then, she could feel that there was actually a slight dampness to that hand that was holding hers.“Do you believe me now?” His voice was solemn and his manner was serious.
She nodded, not pulling her hand back and merely turning her head away instead to face the window with a ceaseless smile.
In her past twenty years of awareness, Tong Yan had never believed that a person could smile for such a long time. How good did a person’s mood have to be to smile like a starry-eyed girl who did not care at all about her image? But when she stood in front of the door to the Marriage Registration Centre of the Civil Affairs Bureau and discovered that her lips were still spread in a grin, she finally believed that a person truly could be so happy that she could smile nonstop.
The sunshine of early summer felt warm and tickled the skin as it shone down on the people below.
Perhaps because it was a working day, there were not many people inside. There looked to be eleven or twelve couples, some of them sitting in front of the counter, filling in forms, and others consulting with the staff. When they walked in, an older woman at the door was rather keenly helpful and instantly directed them to take a premarital medical examination.
Tong Yan paused in surprise and automatically glanced toward Gu Pingsheng.
He had stepped in later and had not seen what this staff member had said, and only after seeing that Tong Yan was looking at him did he ask, “What’s the matter?”
“Little lass, a premarital medical exam is a must.” This auntie-figure noticed that Tong Yan did not look willing and very patiently advised, “This is very important. You kids all don’t understand this.”
“We’re not doing it,” Tong Yan swiftly declined. “What’s the next step?”
With a shake of her head, Tong Yan grabbed his hand and continued walking further in, deciding simply to find and read the sign that had instructions on the entire process.
That older woman truly was only speaking out of good intentions, but Tong Yan was most clear on what the condition of his health was. Even though she did not know exactly what a premarital medical examination entailed, she did not want to affect today’s good mood.
Behind them, that woman seemed to be lamenting to someone that nowadays, young girls were just not being realistic by choosing not to do such an important medical check-up. Pretending not to hear, Tong Yan lifted her head and carefully read through the process. She discovered that it really was very simple. They only needed to take a photograph together and then they could head directly to the counter to do the registration. She tilted her head sideways to look at him. “We’ll go to the room next door to take a photo and then come back here to the counter to register.”
He answered her with an “alright,” seeming not to have been affected by the staff member a moment ago.
They paid the photography fee, and while they were standing in line waiting to have their photograph taken, Tong Yan watched the young couple in front of them smile as if they had just won five million yuan. The elderly man taking the photographs kept telling them, “Smile a little less widely. Even less. Your teeth are all showing …” Those two looked and laughed at each other for a long while before they finally re-adjusted their smiles. Though they were a little stiff and nervous, they managed to put together a proper pose for the photograph.
When the photo was printed and they were walking past Tong Yan, the girl even deliberately said sorry to them for such a long delay. Tong Yan hurriedly shook her head. “No worries.”
Once the subjects of the photograph became her and Gu Pingsheng, she finally understood that the photographer was definitely the one who created the stiffness and nervousness.
“The one on the right, bring that lip up higher. I’m talking to the girl.” The old photographer meticulously directed them, “Don’t let your mouth smile too wide … No, no. Now your smile is too fake … “ It was evident that she was dazed from all these instructions.
After the photograph was placed in their hands, she saw that in it, against the red background, his smile was neither overstated nor too subtle, just simply perfect. Her own expression, on the other hand, was very bizarre … You could not say whether she was trying to cry or smile.
“Look at your husband and how natural his smile is.” The old photographer even did not forget to throw in his own comment as he took advantage of this moment when there was nobody else waiting in line.
Putting on an unperturbed front, she took a pair of scissors and cut apart the four photographs. Carefully, she tucked two away into her wallet while she held the remaining two in her hand in preparation for attaching them to the marriage certificate later.
The entire time, Gu Pingsheng merely watched until, with a serious manner, she had readied everything. Then, he at last slipped his arm around her shoulder and suggested, “When you’ve come back after your finals, we’ll go and take a real set of wedding photos.”
With her lips turned out in a pout, she very sullenly stuffed the photographs over to him. “Some people were just born with a ‘waigua’ [a ‘cheating tool’ to make things easier in life][1]. Makes people so darn jealous.”
“Waigua?” He copied the shape of her lips and repeated this term.
“It’s basically a plugin or tool in online gaming that makes you invincible under the gaming heavens.”
“A programming bug?”
“No, not really a programming bug.”
And hence, while the two of them were in line waiting to register their marriage, they began a serious discussion on the difference between a waigua and a programming bug. When it was their turn, they still had not arrived at a definite conclusion yet, but Tong Yan and Gu Pingsheng sat down and decided to first take care of their proper business.
Gu Pingsheng took the pen and form and had soon filled in his own information. For some reason, when Tong Yan brought her pen to the paper, her heart began beating rapidly and she wrote each word very slowly. For many basic pieces of information, she had to think for a long time before she knew what she should write.
The middle-aged woman behind the counter burst out in a chuckle. “Little lass, you really are nervous. Not at all like when you were talking about gaming just a little while ago.”
TongYan smiled embarrassedly. Crossing out her birthday, she hurriedly signed her name.
“Your hukou [household register and declaration of permanent residence] booklet and identity card.” The middle-aged woman smiled and took the forms back from them.
Gu Pingsheng pulled out his passport and Tong Yan’s hukou booklet, and Tong Yan also handed her identity card over. The woman casually flipped through them before very puzzledly asking Tong Yan, “Little lass, this hukou account doesn’t have you registered in there.”
Tong Yan gave an “ah” and stared blankly at Gu Pingsheng. Gu Pingsheng looked as if he did not understand what was going on either.
“Did you transfer your hukou [registered permanent residence] to somewhere else[2]?”
She seemed to suddenly realize something. “I think when I first got accepted into university, I transferred it over to the school …”
“You’re still a student?” The woman was rather taken aback. Although university students had long since been allowed to marry, it was still only a small number that actually did.[3]
“So, I need to transfer my hukou out from the university?” Tong Yan seemed as if she could not quite catch the direction of the discussion. “My identity card won’t work?”
“In these last two years, they have basically stopped attaching a student’s hukou to his or her educational institution.” The middle-aged woman patiently explained, “But a few years ago, all students would be registered in their school’s collective hukou account. That is a little more troublesome because you need your school to provide a verification. Is your school here?”
“No, it’s in Shanghai.”
“Then you need to obtain a proof of residency, and you need to do that in Shanghai.”
After the entire discussion came to an end, she realized that the whole time, she had been facing that staff member and Gu Pingsheng could not see the conversation in its entirety. When she was about to explain the situation to him, he had already smilingly squeezed her hand. “We’ll take it slowly. We can resolve this one step at a time.” She nodded and took all their items back from the staff member’s hand.
Joyfully, the two of them had come here, but it had turned out to be a fruitless effort.
As she gazed vacantly out at the endless streams of traffic outside the main entrance, she was extremely dejected. He, on the other hand, did not seem overly affected emotionally and asked her whether she wanted to go back home or go pick up Grandmother to go out for dinner.
She absentmindedly answered him. Then after a little while, she tentatively turned the conversation topic back again. “If I go back to the university and ask them for a verification, would it be a lot of trouble?”
No matter what, they had met in the university and their relationship had been teacher and student. Even though he had now already decided to change to a different university to teach, the gossip and rumours that were being spread privately as well as the attitudes and stances of the fellow students of her class would more or less still reach Administration. If she had not had these as the basis of the situation, she could simply have thickened her skin and still gone to ask for a verification of her hukou …
“Doing that could very likely affect you so that you won’t be able to graduate normally. We can just wait until you’ve graduated and make up the official marriage registration then,” he said in solemnity.
She nodded and stretched out her hand to take his right hand. “Let’s go home to eat?”
When they arrived at the door to their home, they realized they had not bought groceries to make dinner, so they went to a restaurant near their community compound and bought a couple dishes of takeout. Once they were back home, though, they discovered to their astonishment that an entire table of food had been laid out, the meal so sumptuous it left them dumbstruck. Tong Yan was a little stupefied and clearly did not know how to react to the dinner Grandmother had prepared. Fortunately, he was there and was always able to give a good and apt reason to explain unexpected disappointments.
After she returned to her own bedroom that night, a rare bout of insomnia caused her to lay awake until past one o’clock in the morning. Eventually, truly unable to fall asleep, she got off the bed and in her bare feet, quietly opened her room door. Their home had two normal bedrooms and one master bedroom. As the master bedroom had its own individual bathroom, needless to say, it was given to the elderly one of the house. Therefore, their two bedrooms were actually adjacent to one another.
When she turned the doorknob and stepped inside, Gu Pingsheng was still leaning back against the head of the bed, reading a book. To her surprise, he had on an attractive pair of glasses and was still wearing the white dress shirt from the daytime.
Seeing Tong Yan walk in, he set his book down beside him and opened his arms to her. Tong Yan hopped onto the bed and burrowed herself against his chest. After holding him for a little while, she tilted her face up to ask, “Why haven’t you showered yet?”
“I’m going to be depressed and disappointed for several days because we could not obtain our legally recognized papers,” he replied in a half-joking tone. Lowering his head and nuzzling it against her cheek, he asked her, “Why are you in here so late at night instead of sleeping?”
His face was pressed against hers, so naturally, he would not be able to see the shape of her lips when she spoke. Tong Yan cuddled a little while longer with him before lifting up the light blanket and nestling herself under it. At last, she looked at his eyes. “I’m here to go to sleep with you. When did you start wearing glasses?”
“Sometimes I need them, but in the future, I may be inseparable from them.” His elbow was resting on his pillow as he propped his head on his hand and gazed at her. “Side effect number one: vision will gradually deteriorate. But good thing, once I put on glasses, it’s not much of a hindrance.”
Before he had even opened his mouth to speak, Tong Yan had had a suspicion that this was the case. Now, she merely stretched her hand forward and placed it at a distance very close to her eyes as a demonstration to him. “Once something is past this point, I can’t see it very clearly. Super nearsightedness. A prescription of minus five. Normally I wear contact lenses so you can’t tell. Do you know what the biggest advantage of being nearsighted is?”
Gu Pingsheng gave a silent smile and did not reply.
“If you take off your glasses, the entire street is filled with pretty girls and handsome guys.” She slipped his glasses off for him. “Do you see a very, very, very beautiful girl lying on your bed and smiling at you?”
“I think there really is.” His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Do you know what the biggest advantage of being nearsighted is? If you take off your glasses, the entire street is filled with pretty girls and handsome guys. Do you see a very, very, very … beautiful girl smiling at you?”
“I have a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time.”
“Go ahead, ask.”
“Can you truly not hear anything? Can you wear a hearing aid?” She reached her arms out and, with only that thin dress shirt separating them, hugged his waist.
“I can, except I just don’t want to. At least, up to the present, I do not want to.”
So it turned out, it actually was not so irreversible and hopeless.
Tong Yan’s mood immediately improved, and she swung her legs on top of his. Lying on his side, he hooked his arm under her legs and pulled them up onto his waist. It was a simple action, but it tickled the heart and made it restless. And on top of that, he was unconsciously drumming his fingers on her bare calves as he pondered on something.
……
“Gu Pingsheng, you’re behaving inappropriately for your older age!”
“Strictly speaking, I have not even reached the age of thirty.” Gu Pingsheng continued correcting her words, “I’m not considered too old yet. And plus, I did not only spend my time on a campus of some sort. Since high school, my vacation time was used to do volunteer work. When I went to university, in my first year, it was the school’s volunteer project and I went to Ghana. At the time, I was around your age and taught children, who were around ten years old or so, math and English and even had to step in to teach religion and French.”
Tong Yan was absorbed with interest as she listened to him, and looking at him intently, she asked, “You can speak French?”
“No. Back then, I honestly did not know how to, and now I seem to have forgotten it all as well.” Gu Pingsheng finally admitted to another weakness. “The education standards in Ghana aren’t high, so at the time, I basically taught myself from scratch and then went to go teach a class … But now that I think about it, that was in a school setting, too.”
Tong Yan interrupted him, “Do you feel like we’ve always been in completely different worlds from each other? It seems like our lives have never intersected in any way.”
“Mrs. Gu, are you being overly humble?” Gu Pingsheng laughed, carefully examining her features and then placing his hands beside her face to measure off a size. “When you were thirteen years old, your face was only this big …”
He stopped for a moment, searching around on the step behind him and picking up a small stone.
Then, under her puzzled gaze, he drew on the ground a rough sketch of a world map. Tapping the location where Beijing was on the map, he told her, “When you were thirteen, we bumped into each other here. Then,” he continued, all the while drawing circles around place after place on the map until there were so many it could make people jealous, “I went to these places. But in the end, I saw you again, here.”
He circled back to where China was located and wrote, “Shanghai.”
“And now, we’ve returned once again to the starting place.”
Gu Pingsheng tossed away the stone. “Did you realize that, no matter how far the roads I’ve traveled have taken me, I still ended up coming back?”
As he spoke, he brought his face very close to hers so that she could even smell the scent of his breath.
Their noses touched, tip to tip. She lightly exhaled a breath. “Dearest Teacher Gu, you are going to be teaching here in the future. You need to make sure you exercise a bit of restraint.”
With a slight smile, he told her, “Sometimes, when a man says some touching words, his intent is actually very clear. He did it because he wants a little reward.”
Tong Yan was thoroughly tickled by this and laughed, “I’ll sing a song for you then, as your reward.”
It was Sailing, a song sung by a British rock singer. She had learned it a long time ago but had never before seriously reflected upon the lyrics until one night, two months ago, she had been arbitrarily humming this tune and suddenly thought of him.
“I am sailing, I am sailing,
……
Can you hear me, can you hear me …”
As Gu Pingsheng gazed at her, he seemed to understand the meaning behind what she was singing.
Eventually, she could not contain herself any longer, and looking at him, she griped, “You should at least show some sort of indication that you were touched by this, you know?”
He gave an “mm” and replied, “I need to go home and have a good think, a serious think about how I should express that I was touched.”
Tong Yan heard the implied meaning in those words. Even though, from the first day of his return, he had pulled out the property deed and used the two names written side-by-side on it as proof that he would indeed formally marry her, she was still a student, and there were some things that they simply could not blatantly do. Hence, all this time since Grandmother’s discharge from the hospital, they had been sleeping in separate bedrooms …
Along the way, they bought some groceries for dinner that night, and when they arrived at home, it was not even 3:30 p.m.
She placed all of the items into the refrigerator before quietly pushing open the door to Grandmother’s bedroom, where she saw Grandmother leaning back in a recliner and, with her glasses on, reading a book.
“We’re back,” she interrupted Grandmother’s reading with a smile. “We’ll have ‘fried sauce’ noodles[1] for dinner tonight, how about that? I’ve bought all the ingredients, and I’ll start making it at 5:30. We’ll have dinner at 6:00?”
Grandmother pulled off her reading glasses and smilingly nodded. “You’re done having fun outside? Go have a nap or maybe watch some TV or something. You don’t need to worry about me.” With that, she quickly slipped her glasses back on and carried on with reading her book.
Shutting the door, Tong Yan wanted to head into her own bedroom to change, but her hand had only just touched the door lever before he had already come up behind her and enclosed her in his embrace. Tong Yan turned her head back to him, and sticking out her tongue impishly, she silently mouthed, “Let me go change first.”
He gave a slight smile and then, with one hand on her bedroom door, he brought his face down and covered her lips with his own. The tip of his tongue felt cold. He should have just finished drinking some chilled purified water. Her hands slid from his waist to his back, and as she rested herself against the wall, she was constantly trying in nervousness to evade his actions. Finally, unable to escape him, she grabbed ahold of two of his fingers and wagged them. “Mr. Gu, ‘bai zhou xuan yin’ [engaging in lascivious acts in broad daylight][2] is strictly prohibited, eh.”
Gu Pingsheng seemed not to understand. Pushing down the door lever, he entered her bedroom.
“What is ‘bai zhou xuan yin’?”
Tong Yan, therefore, had no choice but to describe how each of the four characters was written and explain what the meaning was when they were strung together. In the end, she deliberately nuzzled her cheek against his chin, and lifting her head, she summed up, “Anyway, it means that doing naughty things during the daytime is very, very bad.”
He laughed, his dimple clearly visible.
“It would seem that Mr. Gu has been adjusting to jet lag all this time and is still unable to differentiate whether it is nighttime or daytime right now …”
After speaking these words that carried such a justified and righteous air, he lowered his head and began brushing kisses over her lips and cheek, all the while steadily advancing his steps forward. Tong Yan followed his pace, stepping backwards again and again.
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