“Sheng Lang, the most notorious lunatic in the South District,” Sun Mingzhu told Lin Zhixia. “He’s mentally unstable, incredibly crazy, and fights like a madman. If you ever run into him on the street, make sure to avoid him and never mess with him.”
“Is he really that easy to mess with?” Lin Zhixia asked sarcastically.
“Someone just glanced at him and he beat them up,” Sun Mingzhu said seriously. “He’s only a year older than us, and he’ll only be in the first year of junior high this year. I heard that minors can kill without being prosecuted. That’s why Zhang Xiaotian likes to use him for fights. His dad runs a small hotel and doesn’t really care about him.”
“I thought he was a high school student.”
Sun Mingzhu said, “You couldn’t see him clearly from a distance. He’s actually mixed race; his dad is a foreigner, so he’s a head taller than everyone else and incredibly strong.”
“A foreigner runs a hotel in our community?” He hadn’t expected Yong’an, this run-down place, to be so international.
“No way!” Sun Mingzhu chuckled. “Sheng Lang is a bastard. His mother had him with a foreigner while working in the city. His father isn’t his biological father. His mother ran off with another man, and his father likes to beat him when he’s drunk. Sheng Lang gets upset and then beats other kids. In short, his whole family is weird.”
Sun Mingzhu suddenly remembered something and gasped as if she had a toothache: “Wait… Sheng Lang is going to No. 9 Middle School too!”
Lin Zhixia was surprised: “Is his academic performance good?”
“Passing is good enough.” Sun Mingzhu rolled her eyes. “But he’s exceptionally good at sports. He’s on the provincial junior swimming team and has won several gold medals. So No. 9 Middle School specially admitted him. Sigh, if you see him at school, remember to stay far away.”
Summer vacation had just begun, and school was still a long way off. Lin Zhixia didn’t worry about things that far ahead.
Lin Zhixia received a large sum of money for study materials from her teacher at No. 9 Middle School. Every day, besides taking his father to and from get off work, he spent his time at home doing practice tests. He’s too young; it won’t be easy for him to find a summer job.
Sun Mingzhu had extensive connections; through one of her great-aunts-by-marriage, she secured a job for Lin Zhixia delivering milk for a local station.
Every morning, just as the first light of dawn broke, Lin Zhixia would pedal a small tricycle loaded with fresh milk, weaving through the labyrinthine streets and alleys of the Yong’an community.
The neighborhood’s layout was a maze; unauthorized structures had created numerous dead-end streets.
After just two days on the job, Lin Zhixia mapped out his own optimal route. Although slightly longer than the one suggested by the station staff, it miraculously saved him half an hour of travel time.
After finishing his deliveries, Lin Zhixia would buy hot soy milk and freshly fried dough sticks from a stall at the alley entrance, then head home to share breakfast with Lin Anwen.
The residents of Yong’an soon grew familiar with the handsome young man. Rain or shine, he was always punctual, and his milk bottles were kept spotlessly clean.
The summer heat intensified day by day, yet the morning breeze still carried a cool, refreshing quality.
Lin Zhixia pedaled hard, deftly steering around potholes in the concrete road. The milk bottles rattled in the cargo bed while English listening exercises played through his earphones.
It was precisely this audio that caused him to miss the sounds of a chase and shouting nearby.
He was startled into awareness only when a boy dressed in black suddenly darted out from the side.
But by then, it was too late to react.
The boy in black leaped over the small tricycle blocking the path, kicked off the edge of the cargo bed, and shot forward with incredible speed.
He had used the vehicle for leverage, but his kick overturned the tricycle, sending the milk bottles crashing to the ground in a chaotic clatter.
Lin Zhixia tumbled to the ground along with it, left completely dumbfounded.
“Holy shit! Are you fucking crazy?”
Being a good student didn’t mean he couldn’t curse. Lin Zhixia was furious enough to let out a string of expletives.
The boy in black glanced back. He had sharp, defined brows, a high nose bridge, and a bruised cheekbone, but his most striking feature was a pair of emerald-green eyes. Yet, his sinister expression made them look less like gems and more like ghostly flames flickering in broad daylight. Lin Zhixia’s pupils dilated slightly.
“There he is!” Several young thugs came chasing out of the alley.
The boy in black took off running and vanished in the blink of an eye.
As the pursuers caught up, they found Lin Zhixia’s small tricycle blocking the path; annoyed, they kicked it aside.
The milk bottles on the cart that hadn’t yet tipped over finally met the same fate as the shattered ones already on the ground.
There had been around two hundred bottles on the cart; Lin Zhixia had only delivered half, so almost all the rest had ended up soaking into the earth.
Upon settling the account at the milk station, the total value of the fresh milk and the bottles came to just over four hundred yuan. Lin Zhixia’s eyes instantly welled up with tears, and he bit his lip, unable to speak.
He was just a young boy—with a fair, handsome face and tear-filled eyes—looking utterly pitiful.
The woman running the station felt a surge of maternal sympathy; she decided to waive the odd change and didn’t make Lin Zhixia pay immediately, agreeing instead to deduct the cost from his end-of-month wages.
“Don’t cry.” She even took a bottle of yogurt from the cooler for him. “It was just bad luck running into those punks from the South District; even if we went to their doorsteps, they wouldn’t have the money to pay anyway. I’ll tell the station manager later to have a word with the South District crowd. They can’t go around bullying honest folks like us…”
Lin Zhixia slurped his cold yogurt and wiped the corners of his eyes; while a look of grievance still lingered on his face, deep down, he was already cursing Sheng Lang’s ancestors back eighteen generations.
The shattered glass bottles were piled up in the station’s courtyard. Lin Zhixia stared at the large crate of broken glass for a long while, his gaze sharper than the shards themselves.
The next day, Lin Zhixia set out to deliver milk as usual.
Every household that hadn’t received their milk the day before got an extra bottle today. What’s more, a small sticky note was attached to each bottle.
“Dear Sir/Madam: I am terribly sorry that I failed to deliver your milk yesterday; someone kicked over my delivery cart. I promise such a mistake won’t happen again. Wishing you a wonderful day. —Xiao Lin.”
The note featured elegant, neat fountain-pen handwriting and polite phrasing that carried a fresh, scholarly air.
This small slip of paper caused quite a stir in Yong’an.
Fewer than a third of Yong’an’s residents had completed the full nine years of compulsory schooling; over ninety percent scraped a living in the city relying on some modest trade or skill. Anyone with real ability had long since left, while those who remained had been toughened—and coarsened—by the grind of daily survival.
Apologies were a rare sight in Yong’an.
Residents were accustomed to settling disputes—and fighting over trivial gains or living space—with brawls. Whoever had the thickest skin came out on top.
For the people of Yong’an, such a refined note of apology was a rarity, the sort of thing one might see only once a decade.
After deciphering the note—partly by reading, partly by guessing—the local housewives felt a surge of maternal instinct, developing a strong fondness for this “Xiao Lin” who wrote so beautifully.
“He’s a good student from No. 9 Middle School, after all—so sensible and capable!”
“I hear he only has a blind father at home, so he works part-time during the holidays. I wonder which punks had such itchy hands—bullying a kid like that.”
After voicing their sentiments, the housewives would turn around and grab their own children by the ear, unleashing a torrent of scolding.
“Look at Xiao Lin—good at his studies and a hard worker. His parents must have done some serious good deeds in a past life to be blessed with such a fine son! You, on the other hand—all you do during the holidays is run wild; you don’t do a lick of useful work. You’re more of a mess than the mud in Jinhe River…”
News of Xiao Lin—the milk delivery boy—being bullied and having his cart kicked over spread from one end of Yong’an to the other in just a day or two, carried by the housewives’ gossip. Lin Zhixia pedaled his tricycle through the winding streets and alleys; he was drenched in sweat and his cheeks were flushed a rosy pink, yet he remained so well-mannered—anyone who saw him couldn’t help but feel both a pang of sympathy and a sense of fondness.
Lin Zhixia quickly became a local celebrity in Yong’an. Although he indirectly incurred the jealousy and resentment of quite a few children, he also won the hearts of the neighborhood aunties.
By the fourth day, deeming the moment ripe, Lin Zhixia hauled that large basket of broken milk bottles—clattering noisily all the way—to the Sheng family’s doorstep.