Ecuador (8)
After Luo Jingming left, Tan Guhong lay on the bed, bored out of her mind, resting with her eyes closed. After a while, a sudden burst of arguing and commotion came from outside.
At first, Tan Guhong paid it no mind, but the noise came closer and closer, and in an instant it had reached the tent. It was several local men, cursing and shouting obscenities.
Tan Guhong sensed that something was wrong. She turned over and got out of bed, limping as she intended to go see what was happening. Suddenly, the entire tent shook violently. Several screams followed, then the sounds of heavy objects hitting the ground one after another. After that, everything around them fell silent.
Lifting the curtain, Tan Guhong looked outside. There, sprawled on the ground outside the tent, were four or five sturdy men. Some clutched their arms, others their legs, all crying out in pain. A large crowd had gathered around them, yet no one dared step forward. Everyone stared fearfully at the Asian man standing guard at the entrance of the tent.
“What happened?”
Tan Guhong asked A-Kun.
“There no enough bed space. They want snatch tent.”
A-Kun replied in less-than-standard Mandarin. Then he glanced at her, his brows drawing tightly together.
“Go back. No get out bed!”
As he spoke, he ignored Tan Guhong’s reaction, reached out and grabbed her by the arm, hauled her back into the tent, and tossed her onto the bed.
His hand clamped around her arm like an iron pincer, squeezing until it hurt. Sitting on the bed, she rubbed her shoulder and gave him a half-smile.
“You’re a little heavy-handed, aren’t you?”
Whether with her or with the people outside.
The arms and legs of the men lying on the ground were bent at varying angles. All of them were broken. She had not seen A-Kun strike, but it was easy enough to imagine that his fists and feet were brutally hard, his attacks swift and merciless.
A-Kun gave a derisive snort. He seemed about to speak, but then appeared not to know how to pronounce the Mandarin words. He frowned for a moment before finally forcing out a few words:
“They leave, still have people.”
They had left, and there were still others.
Tan Guhong understood. “Kill one to warn a hundred, to intimidate the others?”
A-Kun gave a cold laugh and neither confirmed nor denied it.
Although his attitude toward her was still terrible, Tan Guhong could not help feeling that the inexplicable hostility he had once held toward her had somehow, just as inexplicably, disappeared.
When Luo Jingming returned, Tan Guhong asked him about it. He was not surprised at all.
“Because I already told him.”
“Told him what?”
He smiled, with a hint of meaning in his eyes. “Told him that you are… someone we can trust.”
……
Tan Guhong spent two days in a tent at Kunda Hospital, after which she was transferred to Moraleja Hospital in Quito. Parts of Quito had also been affected by the earthquake, but overall the number of casualties was not high. The country lay along a tectonic plate boundary, and with major and minor earthquakes happening every few days, both the government and the people were already accustomed to them. Disaster relief proceeded at an unhurried pace, reconstruction proceeded at an unhurried pace, and everyday work and life continued.
Moraleja Hospital was one of the finest private hospitals in Quito, with good facilities and a pleasant environment. Compared with sleeping, or rather not daring to sleep soundly, in a filthy outdoor tent, it was incomparably better. But with an injury to her leg that kept her confined to bed, the long recovery period was truly hard to endure.
Especially with Luo Jingming watching her so closely, strictly forbidding her to walk, strictly forbidding her from getting the wound wet, and strictly forbidding her from eating anything spicy, stimulating, or considered harmful to a healing wound. And then there was A-Kun, stationed stubbornly at the door with a deadpan face and dead-fish eyes, never saying a word. The whole setup looked exactly like a wife and her senior maid guarding against a cheating husband. It was enough to drive anyone crazy!
Day after day, night after night, she finally made it to two weeks later.
After the doctor removed her stitches, Tan Guhong looked at the wound on her leg, not yet completely healed and still somewhat grotesque, and let out an almost imperceptible sigh.
Seeing her, Luo Jingming frowned slightly and could not help smiling. “Take good care of it. It won’t leave a scar.”
“Hard to say. I’m prone to scarring. Even if I scratch a mosquito bite, it leaves a red mark. So ever since I was little, I’ve been especially careful to avoid getting hurt and leaving scars.”
He had originally thought she was simply worried that a scar on her leg would look ugly. Only now did he slowly understand what she really meant.
The selection standards for Air Force pilots were extraordinarily strict, demanding extremely high levels of both physical and psychological ability. One of the requirements during the medical examination was that if a person had long or severe scars, or scars exposed outside the clothing when wearing short-sleeved or short-legged clothing that affected their appearance, they would very likely be eliminated, in order to prevent discomfort, or even more dangerous reactions, under conditions of depressurization at high altitude.
She had once been one of the Republic’s elite Air Force pilots, selected from among thousands, so close to the blue sky, and yet so far away from it.
“Forget it. None of it matters anymore.” She smiled faintly.
“I can leave the hospital this time, right?” she asked him, perfectly composed, with a hint of mischief.
Luo Jingming knew that being kept under such tight control these past few days had left her restless and irritable, and that she probably wished she could escape the hospital, and Ecuador, at any moment. He found it somewhat amusing.
“So eager to go home. Do you miss home?”
Tan Guhong paused, then said slowly, “Actually, I don’t want to go back to China.”
“Why?”
The reason she did not want to go back was a long story. She pondered for a moment before summing it up. “Because if I go back at this time, I can forget about going abroad again this year.”
After her parents died, she had spent her childhood alternating between her grandfather’s home and her maternal grandfather’s home. But as she grew older, she preferred staying with her maternal grandfather. It was not that her paternal grandfather’s family treated her badly. Quite the opposite, they treated her too well. Her grandfather, Tan Zhenyan, had also served in the military when he was young and had been comrades with her maternal grandfather. After the founding of the country, he went into diplomatic work, and the younger generation of the family had all been influenced by him. Her father had also worked in diplomacy. And the Tan family, from top to bottom, was full of boys: a whole crowd of uncles and male cousins, with her the only girl. Given her lonely circumstances, she was practically the darling of the entire family, showered with endless affection. Yet the Tan family was deeply traditional. They believed that a girl should behave like a girl: she should be gentle and obedient, dignified and well-mannered, and they had always opposed her attending a military academy.
After going through one setback after another and having no choice but to return to school and continue her studies, Tan Zhenyan was heartbroken, but at least he breathed a sigh of relief. After she graduated, he eagerly arranged for her to enter a certain ministry, where she could rise smoothly through the ranks if she wanted a career, or live a stable, leisurely life if she did not.
But Tan Guhong knew that her temperament was not suited to officialdom and that she would never be able to pursue a political career. Once she went in, it would be nine to five, marriage and children, with retirement visible at the end of the road. Perhaps that was simply how her whole life would turn out. But she did not want her whole life to turn out that way.
So without a second word, she turned around and ran off to spend an entire year at a China State Construction engineering project department in Equatorial Guinea, Africa. It was a remote backwater where birds did not even shit, the political situation was unstable, disease ran rampant, and there was nowhere to spend money even if you had it, unless you wanted to hand it over to bandits.
Over the course of that year, Tan Zhenyan went from flying into a rage, to fuming angrily, to putting on a hard front while secretly softening, until finally he was completely helpless and could only let her do as she pleased.
But he established one final bottom line: she had to come home for the Lunar New Year.
Overseas assignments were signed for one year at a time. It was May now, so she could only wait until the following spring to sign another one. But if she went back to China at this point, Tan Zhenyan would certainly subject her to all kinds of lectures: about her work, about marriage, about all the things she neither cared about nor wanted to hear.
So she genuinely did not want to go back.
He asked, “If you don’t want to go back to China, where do you want to go?”
“So many places…” She smiled. “The world is so big. There’s nowhere I can’t go.”
“Then how about traveling around the world?”
She thought he was joking. “I don’t want to ride in a hot-air balloon.”
“Not a hot-air balloon. I mean a round-the-world flight route.”
She froze for a moment. “You mean…”
“If you want to visit the greatest number of places in the shortest possible time, the best choice is a round-the-world cruise.”
Luo Jingming smiled and spoke slowly:
“Next Friday, the Queen Anne cruise ship will depart from New York Harbor in the United States. The voyage is expected to last ninety-nine days and cover twenty-seven thousand nautical miles, passing through five continents, three oceans, and two canals. Along the way, it will stop in Iceland, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, the Maldives, Japan, Hawaii, and Mexico, completing a circuit around the world before returning to where it first began. Along the way, you can see the Northern Lights, stroll along the Champs-Élysées, watch the sunset over the desert and the sunrise over the sea. So? Interested?”
His unhurried voice carried a hint of seduction. Without realizing it, Tan Guhong began sketching out all kinds of scenes in her mind. She was momentarily lost in thought. She opened her mouth, and only then managed to find her voice again.
“But there isn’t enough time. There are all those visa procedures…”
“The cruise company can take care of them.”
“And according to regulations, I have to fly back to China from Ecuador. The project department…”
“None of that is a problem. You’ll come back to San Francisco with me, and I’ll take care of it for you. Right now, the only thing you need to consider is whether you are willing to board this round-the-world cruise.”
He smiled and placed his phone in front of her. On the screen was the detailed itinerary for the Queen Anne from its official website, and the name of the website was none other than Orient Cruises.
Orient Cruises was the high-end cruise company under the Yaozhong Shipping Group, and the man before her, Mr. Luo, was its executive director.
Tan Guhong was half amused and half exasperated. “Boss Luo, you take your job a little too seriously.”
“Isn’t the art of doing business about never giving up on any potential customer?”
He took her right hand, bent down, and gave her a perfectly proper gentleman’s kiss on the hand, just like the British gentleman in the advertisement on the website. With a smile, he recited Orient Airlines’ advertising slogan:
“Follow me, I can take you anywhere in the world.”
Follow me, I’ll take you to the ends of the earth.
……
Three days later, at Quito International Airport, Tan Guhong and Luo Jingming were waiting in the lounge for a flight to San Francisco.
It was obvious that she had been seduced by him.
Going somewhere far away. It was an eternal subject.
The Peach Blossom Spring was far away. The Garden of Eden was far away. The Promised Land flowing with milk and honey was also far away.
Distant countries and foreign cultures could always bring unknown surprises and adventures. When economic and time conditions allowed, traveling around the world was a temptation no one could easily refuse. It was the kind of impulse that came only once in a lifetime, the yearning dreamed of by people trapped in lives of reinforced concrete and urban routine, the kind of capital one could still boast about to one’s grandchildren at seventy or eighty, even if one had lived an otherwise ordinary life.
So why should she refuse?
Just before boarding the plane, standing before the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows in the departure hall, Tan Guhong made a long-distance call back home.
After a long wait for the call to connect, the moment it did, enormous music, screams, and the laughter of men and women came roaring through the receiver, a chaotic din that was almost deafening.
Tan Guhong frowned and pulled the phone away from her ear. She was just about to roar, Huo Qiaonan, what the hell are you up to this time?!
But he spoke first, his voice filled with surprise and emotion:
“Xiao Hong, you actually remembered my birthday? You even called me specially? I’ve known you for more than twenty years, and this is the first time you’ve ever remembered my birthday!”
Tan Guhong was speechless. After hesitating for a second, she went along with it. “Yeah, I was just giving you a surprise. Happy birthday! And don’t call me Xiao Hong.”
She was three months older than him, after all.
As always, Huo Qiaonan pretended not to hear her. He laughed and said to someone on the other side, “My sweet childhood friend even called me from overseas specially to wish me a happy birthday!”
And then everyone on that side shouted together:
“Happy birthday!”
“Happy birthday!”
The noise nearly made Tan Guhong drop her phone. Unable to take it anymore, she roared, “Get yourself somewhere quiet to take the call, will you? I’ve only got one good ear!”
“Okay, okay, don’t get angry. I’ll go outside right now.”
When the voices on the other end finally grew more distant and it became quiet, Tan Guhong let out a long sigh of relief.
“I thought it was the middle of the night where you are. You still haven’t finished going crazy?”
“This is the second round. We’re only just getting started. How are things in Ecuador? Have you missed me?”
“It’s Ecuador…” Tan Guhong corrected him. “I’m about to leave. I’m not going back to China yet. I’m going on a round-the-world cruise…”
“Traveling around the world? Cool~~” Huo Qiaonan whistled.
“But I’m not planning to do the entire route. There’ll be plenty of chances to take it slowly later. There’s no need to see the whole world this time. Hmm… from New York to Shanghai. About two months or so. If my family asks, you know what to say.”
She did not plan to tell her family, but at least someone had to know where she was.
Huo Qiaonan hesitated. “I… what am I supposed to say?”
“Say my engineering project was delayed.”
Huo Qiaonan was surprised. “Aren’t you a translator? How did you end up working on an engineering project too?”
Tan Guhong deeply regretted entrusting anything whatsoever to Huo Qiaonan. “Enough, enough. Just shut up. I don’t need you to say anything.”
“No problem. This I can do.”
“Oh, right…” she asked as though it had just occurred to her, “Does Grandpa Liang’s family have a cousin named Luo Jingming?”
“That’s right. Why are you suddenly asking about him?”
“I saw some news about him online a few days ago. Are you close to him? Is Grandpa Liang really planning to groom him as his successor?” she asked half-jokingly.
It was not entirely a joke, either. A few days earlier, while she had been bored in the hospital, she had actually searched online for news about Luo Jingming. But the results had been extremely limited. The children of the shipping magnate’s family had always loved the limelight and were highly active in their social circles, with plenty of followers on their personal social media accounts. By comparison, this young master was much more low-key. Although he often represented Old Master Liang at important events, his whereabouts in private were a mystery. No gossip scandals, no detailed personal information. If it were not for the fact that the shares he held and the positions he occupied were steadily increasing, the public probably would not have noticed him at all.
“Who knows what Great-Grandpa is thinking? Even my grandpa, his own younger brother, can’t figure him out. I’m not particularly close with this cousin. I’ve only met him a few times in total. All I know is that he grew up in San Francisco, in the United States.”
“Mm. What else?”
“He studied business administration in Toronto, Canada.”
“What else?”
“When he was seven or eight, his parents, my aunt and uncle, died.”
“What else?”
“Other than that… I don’t really know.”
Tan Guhong took a deep breath. “He’s your actual cousin?”
She even knew all of this, and she had known it ten years ago, when they first met!
Huo Qiaonan was puzzled. “Then what exactly do you want to know?”
“Forget it, forget it. Pretend I never asked.” Tan Guhong was helpless. She had been the one saying she was not interested, and digging into someone’s affairs behind their back really was not very nice.
“Nothing else. Go on and keep going crazy.”
“Hey, wait! When you come back to China, remember to bring me a birthday present from Ecuador!”
“It’s Ecuador…” Tan Guhong corrected him patiently. “What do you want?”
“I want a local specialty, something you can’t get anywhere else!”
She gave a half-smile. “Ecuador’s specialty is spit-spewing alpacas. Want one?”
“Sure, sure! Alpacas are great! I want an alpaca! But how are you going to lead it through airport security…”
Tan Guhong finally lost her patience and slammed the phone down.
“Goodbye, then!”
No comments:
Post a Comment