Chapter Two
The Swallows Return After a Thousand Years (2)
At three in the morning, her mother first had to take her older sister to the airport to catch an early flight.
She went along to see her off at the main gate. Four cars were parked there, all filled with children who were half asleep from exhaustion, following the adults to the airport. They were the first batch of the Shen family to leave. The two grandsons of Master Shen were staying up tonight to take turns seeing guests off, and this time, it happened to be Shen Jiaheng's turn.
As they watched the guests leave, Shen Jiaheng put an arm around her shoulders and led her back inside. "Want a late-night snack?"
Her stomach obligingly growled a few times in response.
It was still the same courtyard.
There had been many people during the first half of the night, especially children, all playing outdoors. By the second half of the night, only a few remained, so everyone had simply moved into the waterside pavilion.
Only after entering did she realize she was the sole girl there. Everyone else was an older male cousin.
Shen Jiaming and Shen Jiaheng had duties seeing guests off, so they had changed into shirts and trousers. The others were still wearing what they had on during the first half of the night, clearly having never left.
The young men had gathered together. Without the need to observe proper etiquette in front of their elders or maintain their composure around the little children, they sat about in relaxed disarray. None of them had expected their little sister to show up. The moment Shen Zhaozhao stepped through the door, one of them immediately stubbed out the cigarette in his hand.
"The twins are here. Which Zhaozhao is this again?"
"One of the Shen girls," Shen Jiaheng replied. Then he instructed the girl waiting outside, "Get something hot for her. Something a little girl would eat."
The men gathered around a square rosewood table with four immortals carved into it were playing pai gow.
The moment Shen Zhaozhao entered the room, she spotted Shen Ce, sitting in the dealer's seat.
Because of his seniority, although the twins addressed him as "gege" he was ultimately different from the other older cousins. Everyone currently qualified to sit at the table and play alongside him was a grandson of Master Shen himself.
When Shen Zhaozhao entered, he was leisurely arranging the domino-like tiles, stacking them in pairs and laying them out one pile at a time across the table. The dice cup and dice were both jade green as well.
"Let's continue." Shen Jiaheng took an empty seat. Everyone at the table had been waiting for him.
"Do you know how to play?" Shen Jiaming asked with a smile, pulling Shen Zhaozhao over to him.
She nodded at first, then thought about it and shook her head. "Just a little."
Very few of the Shen children didn't know how to play. Their elders enjoyed it, so the younger generation had followed suit and learned, and the children themselves enjoyed gathering together to play as well. She knew these older cousins were all experts at it, so it was better to be modest.
"I'll teach you." Shen Jiaheng immediately perked up.
"Is it your turn to teach her?" Shen Jiaming glanced at his younger brother.
"Exactly. Who asked you to teach her?" someone else chimed in with a laugh. "By seniority, you're not even qualified, are you?"
"If we're really going by seniority, the dealer has the highest standing." Someone brought Shen Ce into the argument.
There was little room for dispute on that point.
Whether it had been offering incense and presenting chrysanthemums earlier that day or the family banquet, Shen Ce had spent the entire time with men in their forties and fifties, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing. When the younger generation went to pay their respects to Master Shen, they had to stand properly in the front hall and answer his questions. Shen Ce alone had been allowed to sit off to the side. In terms of seniority, no one would challenge Shen Ce.
Shen Ce happened to have finished arranging the tiles. He beckoned to her.
Shen Zhaozhao had been standing beside Shen Jiaming, directly opposite Shen Ce. She had to walk around one of her older cousins before reaching him. Someone immediately brought over a chair and placed it beside Shen Ce.
The young man's hand set the dice cup down right in front of her.
"Shake it however you like."
However she liked? What exactly did that mean?
She wrapped both hands around the dice cup, feeling rather uneasy. She looked at the three older cousins sitting across from her, then at him. This time, she beckoned him over instead. Shen Ce understood that she wanted to speak to him privately and leaned closer.
"If I don't shake well, will you lose?" she whispered. "How good are you at this? Are you better than my older cousins?"
Shen Ce seemed to have heard a joke. He stared at her earnest little face for a long moment before answering, "I'm pretty good. Shake it however you like. Even if I lose, I can afford it."
The little sister Shen Jiaheng had tricked into coming had ended up siding with Shen Ce.
As a result, Shen Jiaheng was subjected to another round of teasing from his own brothers. It was all in good fun, though. The Shen family placed particular importance on the growth of the family, and these brothers were close enough to freely put one another down.
Shen Zhaozhao had been eager to play for a while already. Now that Shen Ce had reassured her, she no longer hesitated. She held the dice cup in both hands and shook it vigorously. The crisp clattering echoed through the waterside pavilion, almost making it possible to picture the two dice tumbling and colliding inside.
"Shake well, little Zhaozhao," Shen Jiaheng said with a laugh. "Whether your older cousins are driving or walking tomorrow is all in your hands."
His words only made her shake it even more thoroughly. After a long while, she finally put down the dice cup, opened it, and dealt the tiles.
The dealer swept the table. Shen Ce won against all three opponents by himself.
Shen Jiaheng let out a sigh. "Our little cousin has turned her elbow outward!"
From that round onward, Shen Ce never lost again, whether he was the dealer or a player.
Master Shen had instructed everyone to make sure Shen Ce, who had come from Macau, enjoyed himself. It didn't matter how much they lost. The money was to be treated as a welcoming gift from the Shen family. So it was hard to tell whether Shen Zhaozhao and Shen Ce, the impromptu partners, were simply lucky or whether everyone else was deliberately going easy on them. One by one, they lost every last bit of their money.
In the end, Shen Jiaheng even teased him with a smile. "No wonder they say a little blood brings good luck. That fresh wound of yours came at just the right time."
Shen Jiaming, more like a proper older brother, followed up with a question of his own. "How did you hurt the bridge of your nose? It wasn't there this morning."
Shen Ce had completely forgotten about the fresh cut on his nose. He ran the back of his index finger along the bridge of his nose and said, "I scraped it this afternoon. I went out to buy something and didn't see the thing hanging from a tree. Walked right into it."
It must have happened in the back courtyard of the flower cake shop.
That was what Shen Zhaozhao guessed. When she had seen it that afternoon, the mark had still been bright red. Now it was darker, a sign that a scab was beginning to form.
"I have a scar-removing serum. It can help fade scars. Do you want to put some on?"
Her mother had given her the serum because she was prone to scarring. Even when mosquitoes bit her, she had to be careful to apply some afterward. Otherwise, marks would be left all over her body.
Shen Ce had been looking at Shen Jiaming as he spoke. He turned to look at her, seeming unfamiliar with the term serum. After a two-second silence, he said, "Forget it. I don't need that kind of thing."
He wasn't the only one who laughed. All the older cousins in the waterside pavilion burst into laughter too.
But a scar would look so ugly.
The young men's conversation shifted to Macau's upcoming opening of gambling concessions, and they began discussing the region's economic situation over the two years since its return to China. She had no further opportunity to bring up something as trivial as this.
By four o'clock, all the chips had piled up on Shen Ce's right.
He claimed he was getting sleepy and had someone divide all the chips equally among everyone. Everyone in the waterside pavilion got a share. However they had won them, they all gave them away until none were left. Naturally, Shen Zhaozhao received a portion too.
At five in the morning, someone came to deliver a message to Shen Ce. His family had called to say that an elder was in poor health, and he had to return immediately. Apparently, he had originally planned to stay a few more days, accompanying his maternal great-granduncle to entertain guests aboard a cruise ship in international waters. They would disembark in Macau when the ship passed through on its return journey. But with this unexpected development at home, he had no choice but to change his plans.
Before leaving, he took the two dice out of the dice cup and held one up to show her the side with four dots.
"What color is this?"
The question caught her off guard. "Red."
He nodded and looked at the die pinched between his fingers. "Do you know why the four dots on a die are red?"
She really didn't.
"I'll tell you next time." He placed both dice in her palm. "They're yours."
After he left, her older cousins told her that Shen Ce had brought those dice with him.
This older brother was a master among masters. He even brought his own dice. And here she had been asking him whether he was any good at the game.
She couldn't wait until their next meeting to learn the answer, so the following day, while having breakfast with her maternal great-granduncle, she asked him directly.
Her great-granduncle told her a story whose truth was uncertain. It supposedly dated back to an occasion when Emperor Xuanzong of Tang and Yang Guifei were playing dice for amusement. To win that round, Emperor Xuanzong had to roll double fours. As the dice spun, he kept calling out, "Double four!" In the end, he actually rolled it. The emperor took this as an auspicious sign and ordered the four dots to be painted red. The one dot opposite the four was also colored red. From then on, the practice spread among the common people and continued to this day.
Because of the dice, her maternal great-granduncle also spent a little longer talking with her mother about the gambling business.
The following year, the third year after Macau's return to China, the gambling concessions, which had long been monopolized, were finally opened up to competition. This was considered one of the major benefits of the handover. As a result, her mother began dealing frequently with the Macau Shen family. At first, their interactions concerned business, but personal matters gradually became intertwined with them as well.
Because her mother was so busy with her career, she attended a girls' boarding school throughout high school. Little by little, she noticed that a certain Uncle Shen was being mentioned more and more often in her mother's conversations, so often that she began to sense an impending change in their family.
In the summer after she graduated from high school, her mother was pouring her a glass of milk in the living room when she suddenly announced, "Mom is getting married."
"Is it that Uncle Shen from Macau?" She picked up the glass and took a big gulp. Her eyes were like a deer's, with pupils larger than most people's, making them brighter than ordinary eyes. "Right? I guessed correctly, didn't I?"
Her mother was smiling.
She leaned against the bar counter, bit the rim of her glass, and gave her mother a knowing wink.
In those one or two seconds of silence, it felt as though a year or two had passed, or perhaps even longer. It was clearly happy news, yet she was suddenly overcome by a timid urge to escape. She even found herself hoping she had guessed wrong.
But how could a mother and daughter, connected heart to heart, be wrong about such a thing?
"Yes, it's that Uncle Shen. From now on, you'll really have to call him Shen Ce-gege," her mother finally said.
After five years without seeing each other, the older brother who had been a hundred thousand miles away had become her real brother.
In her mind, he was still the young man from the waterside pavilion, resting one hand on the edge of the square rosewood table carved with the four immortals. She tried to imagine what he looked like now. Her heart was like a little stone skipping across a lake, leaving a string of ripples in its wake as it flew toward the opposite shore.
To accommodate the two daughters' holiday schedules, the wedding banquet was arranged for this vacation.
As the bride, her mother naturally had to set off early. Three days later, she would take a flight to Hong Kong first, meet up with her older sister, and travel together to Macau.
After the long flight, the moment she landed, she received two consecutive updates about changes to the arrangements.
The airport where her older sister was supposed to board had been urgently closed, forcing her to change her ticket. She would fly directly to Macau instead and arrive the following day. Two days after that, two older female cousins would arrive in Hong Kong. Since she was part of the family hosting the wedding banquet, she would have to wait for them before they could take a ferry to Macau together.
The changes had caught her completely off guard. She hadn't even booked a hotel here.
She collected her luggage and, after clearing customs, threaded her way past the crowd of people holding up signs, breaking through the throng. Just as she was about to call and book a hotel, a hand reached over and grasped the silver handle of her luggage cart beside hers.
Startled, she turned around.
An unfamiliar face. No, a familiar one.
Beneath those dark, thick eyebrows and eyelashes were the same eyes she remembered from back then. She had since learned that these were called phoenix eyes, and that people with such eyes were stubborn to the point of obsession and often destined for wealth and good fortune. He was much taller than he had been five years ago. Back then, he had been sixteen, still built like a boy. Now he was a young man in the prime of his life.
Shen Ce rested his hand on the handle of her luggage cart.
"Don't recognize me anymore?"
Shen Zhaozhao's lips parted slightly. She wanted to say something but had no idea what, so she ended up smiling first.
"I was wondering what I should call you." Embarrassed by her own reaction, she lowered her head and began lifting her suitcases. He took them from her, one in each hand, and arranged them in the luggage cart. "Should I call you ge, or gege? Or Shen Ce-ge? Or... do you have a specific rank in the family?"
What was wrong with her? Why was she nervous just from seeing him?
"My father has only one biological son. That's me." His voice had also changed considerably since his boyhood. It was low, but not particularly deep or rough, and there was something about it that could easily capture a person's heart.
"Oh, right. My mother told me."
In their new family, they were the only two who could truly call each other brother and sister.
Faced with him so suddenly, she had completely forgotten that.
Once they had finished arranging the suitcases, the two happened to meet each other's eyes again.
"Where are we going?" She looked away and glanced at the several exits around them.
"Do you want to stay here for two nights, or cross the water?" He gave her two options. "We can go straight to Macau."
In Shen Ce's family, only the eldest son and eldest grandson were required to live in Macau. Everyone else lived here in Hong Kong, so his family owned a building on this side as well. But since the wedding banquet was being held across the water, hotels in Macau had already been booked for the guests.
They could stay on either side.
Shen Zhaozhao shook her head. "I don't want to cross the water anymore. Let's stay in Hong Kong tonight."
She had only just gotten off the plane and didn't want to go through any more trouble.
Shen Ce had no objections. He pushed the luggage cart toward the parking lot.
Shen Zhaozhao followed him, her hands clasped behind her back. The silver chain strap of her bag tapped against her legs in rhythm with her steps. At the airport's busiest exit, travelers hurried past in every direction beneath the ever-present white lights, luggage carts scattered all around them. She tried to distract herself from paying so much attention to him by focusing on the chaotic scene around her.
"I know why the four dots are red now," she suddenly said.
He glanced at her. "You still remember?"
"The moment you left that day, I asked my great-granduncle." She spoke earnestly.
He nodded, seeming to think of something, and smiled.
...What was so funny about that?
"I didn't expect you to remember," he said. "I forgot to leave you my number. You should have just come and asked me directly."
"We'll all be family from now on. It'll be much easier to keep in touch," she said, following his lead.
"That's right." Shen Ce repeated her words. "We'll be family from now on."
No comments:
Post a Comment