The heavy, greasy, musty odor of the green-skin train mixed with the aroma of instant noodles wafted into Lin Ting’s nasal cavity. He was choked into coughing several times before snapping awake, feeling dazed for a moment.
Who am I?
Where am I?
Oh right, today is the day I move to my new home.
Tch, home?
Looks like I slept out of my mind.
“Hey buddy, is your stop coming up?” An uncle in his fifties across from him wiped his nose, just about to smear a shiny substance on his hand onto the seat cushion. Noticing Lin Ting’s gaze, he paused, circled his hand around, and finally rubbed it twice on a plastic bucket at his feet stamped with cement-based. “I saw it written on your ticket.”
“Oh, yeah, thank you.” Lin Ting looked out the window—Shencheng. It was a place he had never been to before, yet it didn’t feel any different from the city where he had lived for nearly twenty years.
As long as it was the same sun and the same moon, Lin Ting felt it wasn’t a big deal.
If even the sun and moon were swapped, well, that wouldn’t be anything for him to worry about anyway.
“Young people nowadays care so much about being polite, even saying thank you,” the uncle said. “Not many young folks are willing to take these green-skin trains anymore; they all rush off to take high-speed rails and airplanes. If you ask me, it’s just that they have it too good nowadays and have forgotten how hard the older generation worked to struggle and build everything up. But I think you’re pretty good, you know how to be thrifty…”
Indeed, aside from himself, the only young people in the entire reserved seating carriage were a grandmother and a small child.
Everyone else looked at least thirty-five or older.
Lin Ting stretched his body, which felt as though every bone had been knocked out of place, and began packing up his things. “You said it. Watching female livestreamers dance all the way here is so exhausting. I’ll be getting off at this stop, you keep on struggling.”
With that, Lin Ting slung a bulging black canvas backpack over his shoulders, listened to the station broadcast, and walked toward the back of the carriage, bypassing several people lying flat on the floor sleeping soundly on their bedrolls.
The people lying on the ground seemed quite displeased that Lin Ting was walking back and forth and disturbing their sleep. They rolled their eyes toward the ceiling, twisted their bodies, and went right back to sleep, their mouths remaining wide open and emitting loud snores.
Lin Ting leaned against the wall near the train door, casting a sideways glance to see if the cigarette butt trembling slightly on the train’s vibration right above that wide-open mouth would happen to drop a clump of ash.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get to see it by the time he got off.
Instead, he ended up waiting for a stream of curses from the uncle, which was instantly cut off by the surrounding heat rushing in from outside the train.
Lin Ting let out a breath. His reaction time calculation had been pretty accurate this time—he hadn’t been pinned to the ground and beaten up. His luck was stellar.
Lin Ting wanted to take out his phone to send a text message to his mom, but after glancing at his rather barren message list, he closed WeChat instead and raised his hand to flag down a taxi.
As the saying goes, relying on others is not as good as relying on oneself.
The taxi driver, sporting a crew cut, figured Lin Ting wasn’t a local and drove him through a maze of winding alleys until they finally reached the entrance of a residential lane. “Young man, cars can’t go any further inside. Just walk straight in and you’ll be there. The total is sixty-eight yuan and fifty cents, I’ll just charge you sixty-eight.”
Lin Ting raised his hand, scanned thirty-eight yuan and seventy cents to the crew-cut driver, and turned to leave.
“Hey, hey, hey!” The crew-cut driver unbuckled his seatbelt and hurriedly chased after him, grabbing Lin Ting’s arm with a thick, dark palm. Lin Ting paused his step and nearly tumbled over.
“What is your deal? Can’t you understand plain speech? Sixty-eight yuan and you’re trying to stiff me?” The driver’s tone was somewhat rough, and judging by his accent, he wasn’t a local either.
Lin Ting forced out a polite smile, pulled his arm out of the man’s grip, took out his phone to pull up the map, and held it out to him: “The most direct route from the train station here without any traffic jams is this one, a total length of about twelve kilometers. Your taxi company has a uniform starting fare of ten yuan for the first three kilometers, followed by two yuan and thirty cents for each subsequent kilometer. That comes out to about thirty yuan and seventy cents. The extra eight yuan I transferred you is to wish you prosperity—no need to thank me, you can keep the receipt. If we keep exchanging pleasantries over a few bucks, I’m going to start feeling embarrassed.”
With that, Lin Ting sped up his pace and walked away.
Behind him came another string of cursing, but thankfully, rather than chasing him down to beat him up, the driver was probably more afraid of a passing traffic police officer slapping a ticket on his car.
Actually, Lin Ting wasn’t someone who liked to stir up trouble. Back before this, he probably would have just swallowed the loss or told the driver halfway through that he was wasted and would definitely throw up all over the car if they took another detour. It was just that right now, he was in a really bad mood.
Even though he didn’t like provoking people casually, he couldn’t help it when people kept provoking him.
At least he didn’t get beaten up. Stellar luck.
Lin Ting walked through the winding alleys and finally found home according to the house number.
The residential area here didn’t have the gate guards typical of ordinary neighborhoods. Looking around, the small western-style villas all varied in architectural style, sitting snugly and gracefully against the slopes of a small hill. One courtyard featured a Chinese-style garden with flowers and fish ponds, while another boasted an European-style small building with a lawn and a swing, each minding its own business. Far off in the distance, one house even wafted a heavy, pungent scent of sandalwood, all smoky and blazing—that it hadn’t been reported for a noise or fire hazard was quite unexpected. The only commonality was that every courtyard went to great lengths to display refined elegance and high-end attention to detail. If someone were caught leaving a patch of moss uncleaned in a corner, they would probably be laughed at by the people here for an entire year.
This really was a geomantically auspicious spot. The upside was that even the manhole covers looked like custom items from a luxury boutique; the downside was that it gave off an inherent aura of lofty condescension disguised as approachability.
Just like the man standing right in front of him.
“You must be Lin Ting, right? Quite an interesting name.”
Though the man in front of him was in his early forties, he was so well-maintained that people would easily believe he was in his thirties. Dressed in a dark green casual suit, complete with a matching tie clip and cufflinks, he was currently looking at Lin Ting with a smile curved as perfectly as if drawn with a protractor.
“I’m Gu Jiang. Come on in.”
“Thank you,” Lin Ting replied as he followed the man into the modern minimalist courtyard that matched the man’s refined persona.
As soon as he stepped through the courtyard gate, Lin Ting saw his mom lying on a rattan lounge chair in the middle of the yard. One hand held a book, while the other leisurely felt around the side tea table for a small teacup. Her gaze remained fixed on the book without any rush, relying purely on muscle memory to pinch the cup, take a few gentle sips, and put it back down.
Only after this entire sequence of motions concluded did Su Li realize Lin Ting had arrived. “Why didn’t you ask me to pick you up?” Though she said that, she remained lying on the rattan lounge chair; neither the angle of her waist and back nor the tilt of the book relative to her face had shifted by even a fraction of a millimeter.
“I managed to get here on my own,” Lin Ting said as he walked closer.
Not until this boy—whom she had raised from a toddler into someone standing a full meter eighty tall—stood right before her did Su Li put down her book, straighten her torso, and stand up. “Your transfer paperwork is already done. You’ll report to school once the holiday ends, so make sure you keep your mind on it.”
With that, she looked Lin Ting up and down, her gaze lingering on the somewhat dated large black canvas backpack. The features on her palm-sized face gradually scrunched together: “Tomorrow I’ll take you out to buy some clothes, and as for this bag… throw it away immediately.”
“Alright, my beaten-up bag really doesn’t live up to your luxury mansion,” Lin Ting agreed readily.
Saving money was one thing, but who would turn down free stuff?
Su Li was choked speechless by his tone. Her slender, pale fingertips pointed at Lin Ting for a long time, but she couldn’t manage to squeeze out a single word. Seeing this, Gu Jiang quickly stepped in to smooth things over: “The child is still young, he’ll quickly break the bad habits he picked up from those places…”
Lin Ting felt that his mom’s taste in men had remained consistent for a decade—she liked good-looking ones.
However, having presumably learned her lesson from Lin Ting’s biological father, she had now added another requirement to her mate-selection criteria: someone who looked mild-mannered and wouldn’t stir up trouble.
To prevent his mom from passing out from anger, Lin Ting slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned to walk inside the house. Gu Jiang was exceedingly polite, showing no signs of offense whatsoever: “Lin Ting, let me have Auntie show you to your room. It’s on the second floor, on the same floor as Gu Yi’s room. If you have any questions, just ask Auntie…”
Gu Yi… Lin Ting had wanted to complain about this for a long time. Was his stepbrother’s name chosen on purpose like that?
The interior and exterior decoration styles of the small villa were consistent, exactly as expected—you could tell a professional designer had handled it. Ordinary rural villas could never achieve this effect.
Lin Ting stepped up the pale pastel-yellow marble stairs. The round, friendly-looking auntie led Lin Ting all the way to a bedroom door.
“Young Master Lin, this is your room. Everything was tidied up yesterday. Let me know if you need anything else. If there’s nothing else for now, I’ll head back downstairs to start dinner.”
For the first time in his life, Lin Ting heard a three-dimensional, living human being use the word young master, and it was directed at him. He was so startled his jaw practically dropped to the floor.
This was retribution—retribution for the mouth he had been running all day.
“Auntie, just call me Lin Ting. I’m not really used to that young master stuff…” Lin Ting said as he pushed open the bedroom door. Well, it was precisely the modern minimalist black-and-white design he had expected, looking like a five-star hotel—though he had never actually stayed in one.
The auntie, who looked a decade or two older than his mother, wore a troubled expression, her eyes darting away. “But…”
Lin Ting tossed his large backpack casually onto the floor—the floor was cleaner than the table at his grandfather’s house.
“It’s fine. In front of them, just follow their rules and call me whatever. Between the two of us, you can just call me Lin Ting or Xiao Lin.”
The moment those words left his mouth, Lin Ting regretted them. Because at that moment, on the auntie’s perfectly round face, which looked as though it had been drawn with a compass, her internal logic was visibly compiling:
if (only Lin Ting is present)
printf(“Call him Lin Ting or Xiao Lin”)
else
printf(“Call him Young Master Lin”)
Before Auntie came upstairs to knock on the door and call everyone for dinner, Lin Ting had a brief window of time to himself. He pulled out the few textbooks he owned as a straight-A student and arranged them neatly on the empty bookshelf, then changed his mind, took them back down, and placed them on the desk instead. He also took out a pair of heavily faded jeans that he had washed countless times—which his grandfather had bought on a whim from a roadside stall while eating breakfast about two years ago—along with two black t-shirts and several pairs of socks with holes that he had mended stitch by stitch. He placed them one by one into the wardrobe.
Never did he imagine that a sparrow could fly up to the heavens and turn into a phoenix one day. Lin Ting couldn’t even tell if this counted as being lucky.
Yet he couldn’t smile. He still missed Old Lin—the Old Lin who would throw open his window at five in the morning to sing at the top of his lungs, prompting neighbors to scream, “Old Lin, shut your mouth! If you make another peep, I’m going to kidnap your grandson and make him my son-in-law!” He missed Old Lin, who would stand in line to collect free eggs and then run over excitedly to brag to Lin Ting and fish for compliments. He missed Old Lin, who during the dead of night would suddenly remark, “I didn’t turn out a good son, but I’ve got a damn good grandson.” He missed Old Lin, who every time Lin Ting’s exam scores came out, would grab a bottle of liquor and go door-to-door bragging until Lin Ting got so exasperated he would get into a shouting match with him in the narrow alley, leaving passing neighbors to sigh, “Those two had their mouths carved by the exact same craftsman.”
Old Lin didn’t have much while he was alive, and nothing left behind after he passed. Lin Ting had originally wanted to keep something as a keepsake, but after lying dazed and muddled in the house for several days, he vaguely dreamed of Old Lin telling him, “Throw it all away. People have to move forward; where is there ever a living person tied down by dead objects?”
On that very same day, somehow finding out about his grandfather’s passing, his mother had fallen silent on the other end of the phone before finally saying, “Then take care of yourself, and let me know if you run into any trouble.” Lin Ting hadn’t been surprised by those words. What did surprise him was that the very next day, she suddenly called and told Lin Ting to move to Shencheng to live with her.
Like a programmed robot, Lin Ting silently handled Lin He’s funeral arrangements—Lin Ting always felt Old Lin’s name hadn’t been chosen well, or else he wouldn’t have ridden the crane to the western paradise so early. Then, in a fit of determination, he sold off the old, dilapidated house and traveled alone to this freezing, auspicious piece of land.
It felt as though fate had shoved him forward by several giant strides; otherwise, Lin Ting couldn’t explain how he had left behind everything as if his soul had been hijacked, suddenly materializing right here. Exhausted, he collapsed onto the sofa inside the room, his body sinking deeply into the cushions.