Un-edited so please don’t kill me if you find anything wrong, please gently commenting so I can fix it. Thank you.
“Going to the sea?” Fang Daichuan’s face changed, and his body reflexively trembled. He remembered how he felt when he jumped into the sea last night, the experience was so profound that he would never forget it.
Li Sinian saw it and comforted him: “You can just wait for me on the shore. I want to go back to that cave and take a look. Even if there is nothing else… I want to bring out the rest of his remains.”
“I’ll go with you.” Fang Daichuan took a deep breath and said with resoluteness.
Instead, Li Sinian hesitated for a moment: “Your swimming… Forget it, let’s wait until we are safe. Anyway, after so many years, waiting for one or two more days is ok. Otherwise, let’s go to the cemetery to see him first?”
Fang Daichuan was surprised: “Ah, okay.”
Li Heng’s skeleton was brought out by Li Sinian. In the morning, they rushed to check in, so they could only temporarily bury the skeleton by the sea. Fang Daichuan couldn’t even imagine what Li Sinian was feeling at that moment.
The villa was quiet and they gently closed the door.
The darkness fell slowly, the rain became a drizzle, the dark clouds that were hanging on the sky spread out a little bit and the feeling of suffocation slightly lightened. A little further in the sky, a few sporadic stars can be seen.
Li Sinian had a fever for a whole day. He hasn’t eaten anything yet. He holds a piece of bread in his hand and eats it while walking. His step is light.
Fang Daichuan followed behind him, staring down at the curly hair on the back of his head. Looking at him, he suddenly realised that Li Sinian seemed to have a very unique character.
You can’t tell the background of this person. He walks very smoothly, with no unique postures that are inadvertently exposed. He is a foreigner but he speaks Mandarin very well and has no special preference for food, he can eat raw or cold food and Fang Daichuan already saw him eat sweet or spicy food. In the luxuriously decorated villa, he skilfully use knife and fork to eat the stew, he eats smoothly, just like a noble man that belong there; in the cold rain, he plunges into the sea to fish for oysters, crouches on the seaside reef and eats it, look so out of place. The only thing he seems to like so far is wine, but he doesn’t seem to be picky about it. He drinks whatever wine that the boss hides, he doesn’t seem to have any brands that he doesn’t like to drink.
When we first met, our interaction was limited, and the first impression is that this person was aloof. After a short stay on the island, we became familiar, he would chat with a smile, touch your head and we seemed to get along very well. These days they become a lot closer. In fact, Fang Daichuan has some other thoughts in his heart, some small suspicions about a delicate feeling hidden deep inside, but Li Sinian seems to have cooled down and he has never made any small gestures or touched him. ——Did this man suddenly have sage time? Fang Daichuan complained in his heart.
(T/N : … Alright so, sage time[ 贤者时间 ;Xián zhě shíjiān ] here, when I Baidu, apparently it is a slang from Japanese, link for more information.)
In short, this person seems to be a two-dimensional enigma, with an unpredictable personality and an ethereal persona, like a cold symbol or a mural hanging on a wall, standing there without touch or warmth.
“A penny for your thoughts?”
Fang Daichuan stopped abruptly and saw Li Sinian looking back at him suspiciously. They had reached the seaside, the waves made a long and short movement.
Fang Daichuan shook his head: “Just thinking of something.”
Li Sinian wears two rings on his hands, his father’s wedding ring is on his index finger, and his mother’s is on his pinky finger. The two rings are very close but they would never touch each other.
Li Sinian sat on the side of the small sandbag, Fang Daichuan thought about it, stood behind him and rubbed his curly hair. He wanted to give him some comfort, but he wondered if the other party would understand his gesture.
“I actually hated him when I was a child,” Li Sinian said softly, touching the bones under the yellow sand, “he always went on business trips and left me with neighbours for a long time. When I was a child, I looked more like my mother. Light coloured hair and pupils, I always called by the children in the hutong* as little foreign devils, little monsters. He thought I was young and didn’t understand these things, but I remember it very clearly.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutong
Fang Daichuan felt his heart slightly sour when he heard it: “How old were you then?”
Li Sinian looked up at the stars: “Three or five years old, I haven’t gone to school yet.”
At that time, it was not very popular to go to kindergarten, all the children played happily at hutong until they were old enough to be in the first grade.
“Then you can remember things from a young age,” Fang Daichuan tried to lighten the topic. “My earliest memories are from the second grade of elementary school. My memory when I was younger, there were only sporadic clips, and I couldn’t remember anything else.”
Li Sinian turned around and smiled, but did not answer.
“Are all older kids bullying you?” Fang Daichuan asked again.
“Not all. There is a child who treats me very well. I don’t like candy. At that time, the alleys sold sour tricolour candy*. The adults gave it to me and I gave it to him. He was bribed by me and those big kids called him ‘lapdog’.” Li Sinian said and laughed, Fang Daichuan unsure whether he was laughing at the childishness of the older kids or the silly lapdog in his memory.
[酸三色, Suān sān sè]
Fang Daichuan recalled some fragmented memories about his childhood. All he could remember was the old yard, the narrow hutong, the older children stuck at the hutong’s entrance, an old man who pushed a cart to sell sundries. The orange-yellow sugar that looks a lot like orange petals, lying in a glass jar with white sugar as icing; the sour tricolour candy is wrapped in transparent thin plastic. But when you try to, you can’t remember the taste.
It seems that every child’s childhood is similar. His childhood was happier than that of Li Sinian, so his impression is not very deep.
He asked, “Do you still hate him now?”
Li Sinian was silent for a long time, staring at the fuzzy lighthouse in the distance, before finally saying, “It doesn’t matter whether I hate him or not, what I need is just an answer. I don’t know what I should do except to find this so-called answer.”
“You don’t know what to do?” Fang Daichuan was a little surprised, he never expected he could hear such words from Li Sinian’s mouth, “Have you finished college?”
Li Sinian smiled: “BA degree from the University of Southern California, majoring in film.”
“Oh! We are associates!” Fang Daichuan was surprised, “I thought you would learn weapon, finance, management, etc., but it turned out to be art!”
Li Sinian propped himself up on the ground and bowed to his father’s remains before getting up and walking away, his voice and step a little weary but not heavy: “When you run out of job in the future, beg me, maybe one day I’ll go back to China and ask you to be the leading actor.”
“Then you should be more optimistic,” Fang Daichuan persuaded from a distance behind him. “How can you say that you don’t know what to do with a big shot like me? Let’s go to Qingdao for seafood when we get back and I’ll introduce you to Deng-ge and the head of the Huo Long Guo, so we can discuss making a film together. I think you’re quite rich, aren’t you? Your mother is rich, you must have money to invest in a film! Let me tell you about the domestic movie situation, you will not lose money investing in a martial arts drama, if you don’t know anything about martial arts, you can always do an action movie …………”
Fang Daichuan kept up with him, chattering endlessly in his ear. Li Sinian picked out his ears in annoyance, but didn’t tell him to shut up.
(T/N : Alright so Chuan’er is not that dense…I means, he clearly feels something for Sinian otherwise we won’t have that sage time complain *cough*. And yes, the kid who protects young Sinian is Chuan’er don’t worry Chuan’er will finally remember.)