At the End of the World (2)
On New Year’s Eve, the night of the thirtieth day of the twelfth lunar month, Tan Guhong, as usual, spent the evening at her grandfather Tan Zhenyan’s home.
The Tan family was lively too, just lively in a different way.
Except for her eldest uncle’s family, who were stationed overseas and unable to return, all her other uncles, whether in Beijing or elsewhere, brought their families together at Tan Zhenyan’s home. From morning to night, the house was filled with the clamour of voices, people bustling and laughing upstairs and downstairs. The men gathered to talk about work and current affairs, while the women gathered to chat about family matters and gossip. Of course, these roles were often reversed as well. What mattered was that the children could finally run wild, make a racket, and cause as much mischief as they pleased. As everyone knew, during the Chinese New Year holiday, “It’s the New Year” was a yearly get-out-of-jail-free card for little brats, its value rivalled only by “We’re already here” and “Everyone has it hard.”
Just as Tan Guhong was being forced to settle an argument between her little niece Xinxin and little nephew Jiajia over whether some Disney princess’s magic was more powerful or some Marvel superhero’s superpowers were stronger, leaving her at her wit’s end, her phone suddenly began chiming with a string of message notifications, vibrating so violently in her pocket that it felt like an earthquake.
She went out onto the quieter balcony and took out her phone to check. She found that the messages were from a stranger whose nickname was “Big Cherry.”
“Happy Chinese New Year, Miss! I’m Xu Yingtao, we went sightseeing together in Phuket last August. I’ve been so busy since I came back to China that I forgot to send you the photos. I was organizing my computer desktop just now when I found them. Miss, you and your boyfriend are seriously gorgeous. My husband barely edited the photos at all, he only adjusted the color a little. When are you two getting married? You absolutely have to share your wedding photos with us! Happy New Year again! [Kiss][Kiss][Kiss]”
What followed was a large number of photos, all taken back when they had been sightseeing around Phuket Town and Wat Chalong. The two people in them were her and Luo Jingming.
Blue skies and white clouds, brilliant sunshine, tropical scenery, vivid colors. All of it easily pulled Tan Guhong’s thoughts back to that summer six months ago.
That turbulent, breathtaking, extraordinary, unforgettable summer.
The summer she would never, for the rest of her life, be able to forget.
And yet it had been so short-lived, so dreamlike. Apart from the photos Xu Yingtao had just sent her on her phone, there was almost nothing else left that could prove that summer had ever truly existed in her life.
She had once thought that all these worldly possessions were nothing but ties that bound her. Now, as it turned out, they really had become ties.
She had never seen Luo Jingming again after that.
Everything was just as Li Zhengkai had said. No one in the Liang family knew his exact whereabouts. Oriental Cruises and his other companies under his name continued operating in an orderly fashion, and even the acquisition of the Spanish ocean-port company was proceeding according to plan without the slightest delay.
The two of them were truly just as they had agreed from the beginning. They had finished their journey around the world, disembarked from the cruise ship, and gone their separate ways, leaving each other in peace and wishing each other well.
But she could not control herself. She was always thinking about it, unable to stop herself from wondering whether he had lied to her, where exactly he was, whether he had already undergone the surgery, and what the outcome had been. At this very moment, was he somewhere in some country, undergoing arduous postoperative rehabilitation in some hospital, or had he already been placed in a three-foot-long urn and buried in some corner of some cemetery somewhere in the world?
Perhaps this was his ultimate purpose. She would never know whether he was alive or dead, forever trapped in this confusion, unable to pick it up or put it down, unable to escape it or forget it.
He was Schrödinger’s cat, hiding inside a box filled with poison gas, giving her a sly, victorious smile.
That New Year’s Eve, it snowed in Beijing.
Outside the window, the lights of countless homes shimmered crystalline-bright, while inside, the whole family was reunited, immersed in the ordinary warmth and bustle of human life.
In recent years, people were always saying that the atmosphere of the New Year had faded in the cities.
She remembered how he had once described the New Year in the Chinatown of his childhood:
“There’d be Cantonese opera stages set up in the streets, shops would start selling all kinds of New Year goods, and the streets would be covered in Spring Festival couplets and characters for good fortune. The roast-meat shops, candy shops, and pastry shops would all hand out food to children in the streets. On New Year’s Eve, the Peace Hotel would be brightly lit, fireworks would fill the sky, and they’d sing popular New Year songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan onstage, all night long...”
At the time, she had thought he was simply young and naïve, unaware of sorrow. Only later did she understand that the peaceful picture he had painted for her was merely a beautified version of the truth. Beneath all that bustle and festivity lay nothing but scorched earth and white bones, bloodshed and violence.
So she could only reluctantly comfort herself with the thought that he was a lone Asura who had crawled out of hell, carrying such a murderous aura, with a life and bones so hard that even Heaven itself would not dare take him easily.
Not long after dinner on New Year’s Eve, with the Spring Festival Gala playing unattended on the television as background noise, Tan Zhenyan called her over. He asked, in a neither-warm-nor-cold manner, about how things had been going in her life, then returned to the same old subject.
“Honghong, this translation job of yours may seem easy and well-paid, but it isn’t a long-term solution. No one knows your abilities better than your grandpa. If you really were a useless, mediocre, good-for-nothing fool, I wouldn’t bother worrying about you. But you have the ability, and you have the education. Why throw away such a promising future and run off to those poor, remote countries to waste your youth?”
“How can you call it wasting my youth? I’m just actively responding to national policy and supporting the country’s overseas development efforts!” Tan Guhong focused on the less important point.
“Don’t play word games with me! Your grandpa was arguing circles around people before you were even born!” Tan Zhenyan glowered. “You won’t listen when I speak nicely, is that it? Fine, then I’ll say it straight. This year, you are not allowed to sign any more overseas contracts. You will stay in Beijing and behave yourself. Let your Third Uncle find you a proper job!”
Tan Guhong lowered her eyes and said nothing. For a moment, the two of them were locked in a stalemate.
Her Second Aunt came over at just the right moment to break the tension. Carrying a plate of freshly washed grapes, she set it down on the coffee table and smiled as she tried to mediate.
“Calm down, both of you, calm down. Look at you two, at it again! Dad, Honghong hardly ever comes home. Why don’t you stop going on at her about this and that? It’s New Year’s!”
“Do you think I want to go on about it? Do you think I don’t know how annoying it is for an old man like me to nag all the time? But this girl really doesn’t know how to give anyone peace of mind!”
Tan Zhenyan sighed and relented. “Fine. Let’s put the matter of work aside for now. When exactly are you planning to get married? Once this New Year is over, how old are you going to be? Stop treating it as though it doesn’t matter. It’s time to think about it! Juanzi, didn’t you say last time that Old Zhao’s younger son works at your hospital? You seemed to think he was a decent fellow. Hurry up and get in touch with them. While this girl is home, have her go meet him!”
Second Aunt smiled. “Yes, I almost forgot about that. Honghong, listen to me. I don’t know if you remember Old Grandpa Zhao’s younger son. When you were little, the two of you even took a xiangqi class together at the Children’s Palace. He finished his PhD overseas last year and came back to China. Single men of his age are really hard to find these days. You need to seize the opportunity...”
Just then, Jiajia and Xinxin started arguing again, and the two of them came to their Little Aunt to settle the matter.
Tan Guhong sat on the sofa. In her left ear were Elsa, the best, Thanos, the invincible, and a whole host of fictional characters she had never heard of. In her right ear were plans for getting engaged on May Day, going on a honeymoon during National Day, getting pregnant by the end of the year, and having a second child the following year, all of which had absolutely nothing to do with her. She suddenly found it all utterly absurd, and very funny.
So she really did laugh.
As Second Aunt’s expression turned awkward and Tan Zhenyan angrily demanded, “Brat, are you even listening to me?”
She let out a soft sigh and slowly said, “Grandpa, I’m not going to get married.”
The surroundings fell silent for a moment.
Little nephew Jiajia was the first to react. He burst into tears with a loud wail. “If Little Aunt isn’t getting married, what am I supposed to do? When I grow up, I still want to marry Little Aunt!”
Little niece Xinxin immediately followed suit, wiping away her tears. “You’re not allowed to marry Little Aunt! I’m the one who’s going to marry Little Aunt!”
“You can’t marry her, and I can’t marry her either. Little Aunt isn’t getting married! Waaah!”
“Waaahhh!”
And so the two four- or five-year-old children wailed and howled, throwing themselves into a full-blown tantrum, and the situation descended into chaos.
Tan Zhenyan felt as though he had two heads and neither one was enough. Rubbing his temples, he barked, “Quick, take Jiajia and Xinxin away! And Honghong, what exactly do you mean by saying you’re not getting married?”
“I mean exactly what I said.”
Tan Guhong smiled faintly and spoke slowly, one word at a time:
“Grandpa, I know you’re doing this for my own good, but children and grandchildren have their own destinies and blessings. I hope you’ll stop worrying about and interfering with my life. And I’m going to make myself clear right here today. I’m not getting married, and I’m not changing jobs. I don’t care whether I live my life the same way everyone else in the world does. If you say one more word about it, I really won’t come back for New Year next year!”
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