Chapter 35

That night, the two of them lay in bed to sleep.

Fei Bolin's bed was against the wall, with Wen Fu sleeping on the inside.

There was a windowsill on the wall. Tonight, the window wasn't shut tight, and the evening breeze seeped in through the crack, strand by strand. Wen Fu slept on a warm electric blanket, covered by two layers of bedding, his neck tucked in snugly by Fei Bolin with the quilt corner.

So he could lie quietly on his pillow, watching that bit of cold wind—not enough to make him get up and close the window—blow the curtain open again and again.

Wen Fu felt dazed. In just a week's time, that life of having no fixed place, sleeping in moldy, damp old houses, seemed like something from a long, long time ago.

He turned over, facing outward, and just happened to see Fei Bolin's sleeping face.

Fei Bolin slept in a proper, quiet manner, breathing evenly, lying flat with his head centered on the pillow, even his hands under the blanket neatly folded on his body—as if he'd been trained to be well-mannered since childhood.

Wen Fu watched for a while, then turned over again. This time, he lay flat on his stomach inside the quilt, his arms stretched out on the pillow, head propped up, observing Fei Bolin without blinking.

Fei Bolin had been woken up by his movements long ago.

When Wen Fu turned over the first time, he didn't make a sound, just intended to fall back asleep.

Just as he was about to drift off, Wen Fu rustled and turned over a second time.

Fei Bolin let out a soft sigh. He was just about to ask why the other wasn't sleeping when he suddenly heard Wen Fu call out, 'Fei Bolin gege.'

Fei Bolin: !!!

He opened his eyes and lifted his head as if startled: 'What?!'

Before Wen Fu could speak, he asked with exaggerated seriousness, 'Why are you calling me that?'

As if he'd received the shock of his life.

Wen Fu looked at Fei Bolin with an impassive face, a trace of confusion beneath his calm gaze. 'Didn't you tell me to call you that?'

Fei Bolin felt a lump in his throat.

He *had* told him to call him 'ge'...

But not like *this*.

Fei Bolin gave up resisting, moved back onto his pillow, calmed his emotions, and asked, 'Why'd you call me all of a sudden?'

Wen Fu's gaze traveled down from his face to his chest. After staring at that spot for a long moment, he tentatively asked, 'That Buddha Talisman... is it yours?'

'This?'

Hearing this, Fei Bolin touched the spot on his chest, rubbing the missing corner of the talisman through his pajamas, his tone dropping. 'It's my mom's... keepsake.'

It was the last thing his mother had left him before she died.

Fei Bolin's mother's maiden name was Lin, and her name was Lin Yuanyi.

When he was thirteen, Lin Yuanyi, exhausted from overwork, lost weight rapidly in a short time and was later diagnosed with leukemia at the hospital.

After more than a year of treatment in the hospital, Lin Yuanyi had wasted away to less than 30 kilograms.

Fei Bolin used the last hundred thousand or so she'd saved for his education to transfer her to the best hospital in the provincial capital. ICU treatment alone cost over a hundred thousand a day. When he was at his wits' end and wanted to ask his father for a loan, Lin Yuanyi wouldn't let him.

Fei Bolin's father and mother had started a business together when they were young, beginning with a small family-run restaurant in the provincial capital and slowly building it into the province's largest catering brand.

Later, the company switched to food processing, and Lin Yuanyi happened to be pregnant, so she moved from the front stage to behind the scenes and withdrew from the Fei Family Estate.

She was a proud woman all her life. When Fei Bolin was four, she discovered his father's infidelity and resolutely took the child, left with nothing, and returned to her hometown in Rongzhou, even changing Fei Bolin's name to the one he had now.

With the ambition of her youth gone, Lin Yuanyi opened a Lin's Convenience Store to support her son's schooling and living expenses.

Even though it was just a convenience store, hers was the best-run one in the area. She worked from dawn till dusk, never letting food or warmth become an issue for mother and son.

Then, just as Fei Bolin was in his second year of junior high, she contracted this serious illness.

Fei Bolin had no choice. He sold everything in the house that could be sold—the TV, the air conditioner, the refrigerator... During the poorest stretch, the house was left with just four white walls, a mattress, and a few old quilts.

Aunt Wu downstairs couldn't bear to watch. She used her saved-up hundred thousand in retirement pay to buy the convenience store from Fei Bolin's family, telling him to use the money for his mother's treatment.

Even so, this bit of treatment money was a drop in the bucket.

As for this cinnabar Buddha Talisman, it was on some night when Lin Yuanyi was hospitalized—perhaps she already realized then that her time was near—that she took it off and put it on Fei Bolin herself. In her few moments of lucidity, she would look at the talisman with its missing corner around Fei Bolin's neck, chanting 'Amitabha,' praying to the gods to watch over her child in the days after she was gone.

Fei Bolin just choked up and joked with her, 'The talisman's missing a corner, it's not effective. You'd better stick around a few more days and watch over me yourself.'

Lin Yuanyi said, 'Buddha won't mind that.'

After that day, she fell into a long, deep sleep.

While Lin Yuanyi was unconscious, Fei Bolin went and knelt in front of his father's company for days, begging them to lend a hand and save his mother.

His father was far away in Europe at the time. The company headquarters in Jin City was basically handed over to the Xu family, his father's new wife's relatives, to manage. They agreed to transfer Lin Yuanyi to the best treatment facility abroad, but less than half a year later, news of Lin Yuanyi's death still made its way back to Rongzhou. All Fei Bolin received was a box of ashes delivered by the Xu family, sent along with a delivery van.

When Lin Yuanyi died, Fei Bolin was less than two months away from his high school entrance exams.

That summer, he had no heart to sprint for the exams. The expensive medical bills had robbed this place that wasn't much of a home of everything. Fei Bolin was so poor that even eating became a problem.

His mother was proud, and so was he. Even when he was starving, his ribs sticking to his back, Fei Bolin never thought of knocking on a neighbor's door to ask for a bowl of rice, even though he knew that anyone around him, if they just stepped inside and saw his house with only four walls, would definitely do their utmost to make sure he was fed and warm.

In the end, it was Aunt Wu who gave up that convenience store.

She sourced the goods herself, added shelves and a house full of scattered merchandise, and let Fei Bolin run the store himself. The money he made from running it would go toward his schooling and food, and any extra profit would slowly pay back the hundred thousand he owed her.

The first night Aunt Wu handed the store over to Fei Bolin, he hid behind the shelves and frantically stuffed all the bread in the store into his mouth. He ate until his stomach lost all feeling, until he couldn't stop vomiting, and only then did he stop—before that, even Fei Bolin himself couldn't remember how long he'd been starving.

The store's profits were quite good. In two years, Fei Bolin had paid back most of Aunt Wu's hundred thousand. The house acquired many necessary secondhand furnishings. Failing the high school entrance exams wasn't the end for Fei Bolin; even in the lowest-tier General Department, he was still a top-ranking student in his grade.

That rainy night, the first time he saw Wen Fu, he remembered himself from two years ago, like a wandering ghost.

During the hardest times, passing by all sorts of restaurants and supermarkets, Fei Bolin had also entertained thoughts of stealing and robbing.

For someone who couldn't even afford food, the loss of morality was just a thought away.

How young was he that year? He'd only been in junior high for a year. His mother's illness was sudden and severe. Both mother and son were stubborn to the bone, gritting their teeth without a word. No one taught him to apply for poverty assistance, no one taught him to seek community help. The family's money flowed like water to the hospital. He stubbornly endured everything at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

So he was also curious which dead end Wen Fu, who robbed money on the street, had come from. Those never-quite-clean sweatshirts, the milk he never drank a sip of, the instant noodles he only occasionally splurged on—they were all the same quagmire that had once trapped him.

He coaxed Wen Fu into taking him to the place he was staying temporarily. In the kitchen with peeling paint, he stood behind Wen Fu, like a stranger standing behind his former self, and told him, 'If you want to drink milk, come find me.'

He didn't ask about Wen Fu's origins, didn't ask about Wen Fu's father or mother. Everyone has their own hell they don't want to bring up.

He just saw the person outside the door that weekend night, covered in wounds, and brought Wen Fu inside.

It seems human instinct is to dilute past suffering. No matter how dire it was back then, now, sleeping in a room with a gentle evening breeze, it's just a memory lightly brushed past in a few sentences.

Sometimes Fei Bolin thought, his mother didn't love his father anymore, but she must still have cared—hate is also a form of caring, whether toward his father or toward her own dignity as Lin Yuanyi. Otherwise, she wouldn't have given her son a name like this.

Fei Bolin—even his name carried her condemnation and hatred for him.

Wen Fu said, 'Can I look at it?'

'Sure.'

Fei Bolin took the Buddha Talisman out from his collar.

The pendant's cord was long enough to hang around Fei Bolin's neck and let Wen Fu hold it in his hand to look.

Even so, Wen Fu leaned in very close, so close his breath stirred just above Fei Bolin's collarbone, making Fei Bolin lower his eyes and see his lightly trembling eyelashes.

Wen Fu asked softly, 'Your mom... did she ever go to Yunnan Province?'

'Huh?'

'A long time ago.'

This stirred Fei Bolin's memory.

Over a decade ago, Lin Yuanyi did go to Yunnan Province once, apparently to source goods. There was a very famous sour jujube cake over there that kids loved. At the time, Rongzhou had run out of stock, and it was in high demand on the market. Since Rongzhou was relatively close to Yunnan Province, Lin Yuanyi took a long-distance bus there.

And it was after that sourcing trip that Lin Yuanyi came back wearing this Buddha Talisman pendant.

From Fei Bolin's earliest memories, this talisman had been missing a corner.

Wen Fu held the talisman and suddenly said quietly, 'This is mine.'

He paused, looked up, and met Fei Bolin's eyes. 'I gave it to her.'

-

Wen Fu's birthplace was a small county town in Yunnan Province called Yanjin County.

Although he was a year younger than Fei Bolin, as if destined by fate, like Fei Bolin, the upheaval in his life also came when he was four years old.

In his already blurred memories, his mother was a well-known music teacher in the county. Among the few remaining fragments of her in Wen Fu's mind, it seemed his mother had held him and wept about her misfortune.

A violin prodigy with rare talent in the 1980s, she'd traveled to the provincial capital and the capital for various competitions in her teens. She should have had a brilliant, far-reaching future, but her family arranged for her to marry a good-for-nothing young man from the town who could scrape together eight thousand in bride price but hadn't even finished elementary school. Then she took a job at an elementary school as a dispensable supplementary-subject teacher. Her family wasn't badly off, but they were afraid she'd go too far and later refuse to acknowledge her relatives, so they hastily decided her lifelong fate.

So she named her child 'Fu.'

To submit to arrangements, to bow to fate.

The moment he was born was the end of all his mother's resistance.

His mother didn't smile much. To Wen Fu, she was like the winter sun—gloomy yet warm. Only when teaching him to sing, play the violin, learn notes and the staff over and over would a spark light up in her eyes.

There was no doubt Wen Fu inherited her talent. In his childish but perfect performances, his mother would constantly instill in him, as if carving this admonition into his soul: 'Study hard, you must study hard. Education is the only way out. You must go to bigger places to sing. If you can leave, don't come back.'

His father drank and gambled. In the early part of Wen Fu's childhood spent in that home, whenever the man called 'father' appeared, there was never any peace.

One summer when he was four, during a drunken argument, his father smashed his mother's Violin and the crystal Trophy that had been kept on a high shelf for years.

Wen Fu hid behind the door. His father's back and his mother's desperate gaze were like a black-and-white silent film frozen in that year's memories.

Not long after, his mother committed suicide.

On the afternoon before she killed herself, she put this Buddha Talisman on Wen Fu and told him once again: 'No matter what, you must study hard.'

Then she disappeared down the road outside. Wen Fu didn't know where she went, only that she didn't come home all night, and the next day people on the street said a woman's body had been pulled from the river.

Apart from that figure sitting by the window at dusk, playing the violin, these were all Wen Fu's impressions of his mother.

His father couldn't even be bothered to handle the funeral. He hastily notified her maternal family and left his mother's body on the riverbank where it had been recovered.

The day his mother's coffin was carried up the mountain, his father wasn't there.

Wen Fu seized the chance to run out of the house, trying to find the funeral procession from his mother's family, to follow and see where her tombstone was placed.

It was the chaotic era just after the turn of the century in a border town, a time when human traffickers ran rampant.

And so Wen Fu lost himself on an unnamed roadside.

At first, the traffickers sold him to a family in the countryside, but he was restless. The first night he arrived, he climbed out the window and over the wall and ran.

In an unfamiliar village, he ran out one moment and bumped into the sellers who were resting elsewhere the next.

Wen Fu was beaten up. The buyers didn't want him anymore, so the traffickers had to refund the money and take him somewhere else.

Every place they went, Wen Fu caused trouble. Every new home he made a mess of, slowly the traffickers stopped trying to sell him. But they couldn't bear to let him go either, so they just kept him with them, raising him cheaply, always looking for a chance to sell him off.

Life with the traffickers wasn't good. By age five, when he should have been in school, Wen Fu was still wandering around with them all day, surviving on a bit of leftover rice and pickles each day, eating whatever scraps were left after the trafficker ate.

The other party wasn't worried he'd run away—if Wen Fu ran, he wouldn't even have those two mouthfuls of unsatisfying food and pickled vegetables.

Once, the trafficker was playing cards by the roadside. Wen Fu was starving. He looked left and right, then climbed through the back wall into a restaurant's kitchen, reaching into their cupboard to steal food.

His grimy hand had just touched the food when the owner came in from the front. Seeing him stealing, without a word he swung the stainless steel food bowl in his hand at Wen Fu's head.

Wen Fu was hit until his ears rang. Before he could clear his head, his body reacted first. He dashed and jumped onto the window, escaping outside. Running while seeing stars, he hadn't gone two steps before he was caught. The cooks in the shop slapped him left and right, making his nose bleed profusely, and the shopkeeper told him to get lost.

The trafficker, who'd hurried over at the noise, saw this scene and gave him another beating when they got home, but an idea popped into his head.

A few days later, the trafficker and he were on the same household register, becoming his adoptive father.

Wen Fu began to be sent to all sorts of places to steal things.

At first, it was to steal valuable items from supermarkets, then to steal batteries from electric scooters in certain unit garages.

He was a kid, quick to react and fast. If he was discovered stealing, he could just find a hole to crawl through and escape. Even if he was caught, it was just a beating—no skin off his adoptive father's back.

Most importantly, even if Wen Fu was hauled to the police station, he'd just get a verbal scolding because of his young age and be taken back by his adoptive father.

Wen Fu was small. He could crawl through all kinds of wall holes. To keep him from growing too fast, his adoptive father fed him less and less.

At six years old, Wen Fu was still as tall as a four- or five-year-old. He didn't go to school, still climbing through windows and holes everywhere, trained into a specialized pickpocket.

But getting caught stealing wasn't pleasant. The things Wen Fu was sent to steal ranged from a few hundred to over a thousand. If he was caught, there were generally three outcomes: if the victim was a woman, most of the time he'd just get a lecture. If he met a kind-hearted one, as long as he returned the item, seeing how pitiful he was, they might even give him some money. But if he met a man, he could never escape a few slaps to the face first.

Over time, he actually preferred being sent to the police station. At least the police were civilized and didn't hit people.

But his adoptive father wasn't happy about it.

Whoever had been a trafficker wouldn't want to see the police all the time.

Every time Wen Fu was sent to the police station and his adoptive father brought him back, he'd get a beating and go hungry for a day.

That time, Wen Fu was starving beyond endurance. His adoptive father wanted him to go steal batteries from some unit again, declaring that if he got caught this time, he could just wait to die.

Wen Fu went out, his vision white from hunger, and suddenly realized this time he only had death waiting for him.

He couldn't run. If he went to steal, he'd definitely be caught. Once he went to the police station, his adoptive father would know and it'd be another beating.

It started to rain.

Wen Fu passed by the river and saw a gap between a pillar under the bridge and the bridge bottom.

He slowly walked over. No one was strolling along the riverbank in the afternoon. Wen Fu climbed over the railing, crawled into that broken space, curled himself into a ball, hugging his knees under the bridge.

The rain grew heavier.

Someone passing by the river spotted him.

When Wen Fu came to from the last wave of hunger, he realized the river was rising with the tide, almost reaching his feet.

If he didn't get out soon, he'd drown here.

Then he tried to crawl out the same way he'd gotten in, but he got stuck.

His head was against the bridge bottom, his throat right above his knees, his whole spine hunched at an unchangeable angle. Only his hands could still move.

The river water lapped and wet his feet. Wen Fu realized he'd been down there too long; his body had gone numb.

And having been gone so long without returning, his adoptive father would definitely come looking for him, and if he found him, he'd beat him to death.

Wen Fu strained to stretch his hand out, grabbing the edge of the bridge bottom above his head, trying to leverage some space to push himself outward.

His scalp rubbed against the rough concrete surface. Wen Fu grimaced in pain, almost thinking the skin on his entire scalp had been scraped off.

With a 'plop,' he struggled out of that space and fell into the river.

Six-year-old Wen Fu hadn't learned to swim yet.

He thrashed frantically in the water, trying to cry out, but the moment he opened his mouth, countless river water poured into his throat.

The long Buddha Talisman around his neck floated out. Amid Wen Fu's movements, it hit something and lost a corner.

I'm going to die, he thought, looking at the talisman.

This time I'm really going to die.

The overwhelming sense of drowning washed over him. Wen Fu gradually stopped struggling. Just as the river water was about to flood his nostrils, a force encircled his waist and lifted him up.

Wen Fu bobbed up and down in a narrow, thin, yet warm embrace, vaguely spitting out a lot of water.

When he opened his eyes again, he first took a sharp breath, then saw a woman.

'Awake?' Her hair was dripping wet, drops falling one by one onto his face.

Wen Fu smelled a faint fragrance on her. He stared blankly at her and called out, 'Mom.'

'I'm not your mom.' The woman smiled, helping him sit up. 'Don't run to such dangerous places next time—where are your parents?'

Wen Fu didn't speak.

The woman sighed, picked up the coat she'd taken off before going into the river from beside her feet, and took fifty yuan from her bag. 'Go change into some new clothes.'

She was about to leave. Before going, she asked Wen Fu, 'Should I call your parents for you?'

Wen Fu still didn't speak.

The woman shook her head. Just as she was about to stand up, the corner of her clothes was pulled by Wen Fu.

She squatted down again. 'What is it? Something to say?'

Wen Fu moved his lips, really wanting to ask if she could take him back with her. But lowering his eyes, he saw the worn-through socks on her ankles and fell silent again.

He raised his hand, took off the Buddha Talisman missing a corner from around his neck, held it up before the woman's eyes, and gestured for her to lower her head so he could put it on her.

'For me?' The woman smiled. 'Won't your mom and dad scold you?'

Wen Fu shook his head.

'Alright then.'

The woman lowered her neck and let Wen Fu put that talisman on her.

Many years later, Wen Fu remembered: the faint fragrance he was fixated on from Fei Bolin, he first smelled it on her.

So even though that person was gone, she'd left a guide.