Yu Yao had many questions to ask. After forty years, almost everything around her had changed. But because she had so many questions to ask, she didn’t know how to start. She wondered where her best friend Yang Yun was now. For a moment, she almost asked Jiang Zhonglin about it. But then she thought that Yang Yun and Jiang Zhonglin were not familiar with each other. She was the only connection between them. If she was gone, and another forty years had passed, Jiang Zhonglin might not have contacted Yang Yun for a long time.
Thinking of this, she hesitated, but she didn’t expect that Jiang Zhonglin had already contacted Yang Yun silently, and this long-lost friend actually remembered her and rushed back to see her so quickly.
Yu Yao sat on the bed and chatted with Yang Yun for a long time. Almost all of them were Yang Yun, talking about her life over the years. Yu Yao listened and occasionally interrupted with a few words. The two of them laughed and changed the topic and almost forgot the time.
Yu Yao felt hungry, so she stopped talking temporarily, brushed her teeth and washed her face, and prepared to go downstairs to fill her stomach.
When Yu Yao was washing her face in the bathroom, Yang Yun was still chattering to her at the door about her precious granddaughter, “Look at her photo, isn’t she cute? She is thirteen years old, can dance, and plays the piano well. And this is my little grandson, only three years old, chubby...”
Yu Yao thought to herself that her good friend had become a grandmother, and she felt indescribably sad.
When they went downstairs, Yu Yao saw a fat old man sitting next to Jiang Zhonglin. She turned to Yang Yun and asked in a low voice, “Is that your old man?”
“Yes.” Yang Yun immediately understood the hidden meaning of her words and whispered with her mouth covered, “Don’t look at his current tonnage. In fact, he gets fat after middle age. He was a handsome guy when he was young and had a good figure.”
Yu Yao: No wonder, with Yang Yun’s narcissistic personality, if she wants to get married, she will definitely find a handsome guy.
The chubby, old, handsome man was very friendly. He greeted Yu Yao and said with a smile, “I’ve heard about you from Ah Yun a long time ago. I’m lucky to meet you today. My last name is Xu, and my name is Xu Xian.”
Yu Yao: “Pfft.” I understand. It seems that he was a smooth talker when he was young; otherwise, how could he deceive Yang Yun?
When she was eating breakfast, Yang Yun sat next to her and showed her the photos he saved that year, mainly the wedding photos. “You were not there when I got married, which is the most regrettable thing in my life. Now I have to show you the photos.” Yang Yun said so, pointing out the photos one by one for her to see. Grandpa Xu Xian stood beside his wife and occasionally inserted a few words into her description. It can be seen that the two have a good relationship.
Yu Yao looked at her good friend in a wedding dress in the photo and listened to her chattering. As she listened, she was a little distracted and couldn’t help but glance at Jiang Zhonglin next to her. He was also listening quietly, without interrupting, and no one knew what he was thinking.
“We have been in love for several years, but Ah Yun refused to hold a wedding until she was 35 years old. I thought there was something wrong with me that made her unhappy, so she refused to marry me. Later, I found out that she wanted to wait until she found you before holding the wedding, saying that the wedding would be regrettable without her best friend.” Mr. Xu Xian said with a sigh.
Yang Yun’s eyes reddened. “I promised you that you would be my bridesmaid when I got married. Since you were not here, I didn’t have a bridesmaid at my wedding, and the position was vacant for you.”
Yu Yao didn’t want her to cry anymore, fearing that something bad would happen to her, so she could only hold back the moisture in her eyes and asked Mr. Xu Xian with a smile, “Then how did you trick our Ah Yun into getting married?”
Xu Xian smiled and said, “She was pregnant with a son, and my mother-in-law said that if her belly got bigger, she wouldn’t be able to wear a nice wedding dress, so Ah Yun got married.”
Yu Yao laughed, “It’s really our beautiful Ah Yun.” There is another reason that no one said, but Yu Yao knew it very well. She and Yang Yun are the same age. When Yang Yun was 35 years old, she had disappeared for seven years. A person disappeared for seven years, and there was no news at all. They probably all assumed that she was dead.
“Yaoyao, can you go out with me today?” Yang Yun asked.
Yu Yao didn’t even think about it and said, “Okay.”
At Yang Yun’s request, the two old men, Xu Xian and Jiang Zhonglin, stayed at home, and only the two of them went out. Xu Xian was very worried and told Yang Yun, “Be careful, you know your own body, don’t get too excited, don’t eat sweets, and keep your medicine with you.”
Jiang Zhonglin glanced at Yu Yao and said gently, “If there is anything you don’t know, just call me; don’t be afraid.”
With the two people’s instructions, Yang Yun took Yu Yao out of the door. Yu Yao thought Yang Yun was going to take her somewhere, but she ended up in a movie theater.
“Watch a movie?” Yu Yao was very surprised, but thinking about it, she hadn’t seen a movie in forty years, so she agreed. As a result, Yang Yun just pulled her to sit at the table by the window outside the movie theater and had no intention of buying a ticket to watch a movie.
Yang Yun glanced at the street outside the window, winked at Yu Yao, and said, “Do you know where this is?”
Yu Yao felt that everything around her was unfamiliar, shook her head, and said, “I don’t know, where is this? Was it your home before?”
Yang Yun sighed and said, “This is the old site of our high school. More than ten years ago, the 16th Middle School moved to the school district, and this place was demolished... It can’t be seen at all what it used to be. When the school was demolished, our high school classmates gathered here once. Everyone came; only you didn’t come... In fact, I haven’t been here for a long time, and it’s different from what I saw last time.”
Yu Yao really didn’t expect that this would be the 16th Middle School in her memory. She also turned her head to look at the road and pedestrians outside, her eyes a little empty.
When she was in school, especially during junior high and high school, she was almost in a rebellious period. To her at that time, school was no different from prison. She hated everything related to school at that time. So she often skipped classes, fought, went to Internet cafes, smoked, drank, and dyed her hair a cool red—she did these things mostly to anger her father. Anyway, at that time, she did whatever she could to make her father angry enough. From her teenage years to her 22-year-old college years, she was always committed to one thing, that is, to make her father angry to death.
Until later, she found that her father was in good health and was not hurt at all after being angry with her for so many years. In addition, her hatred for him faded a lot as she got older, and her rebellious period was over. She stopped doing those stupid things and ignored the man instead.
The past was vivid in her mind, and it didn’t take long for her to be apart.
“Has the Mingde private school near the 16th Middle School moved away too?” Yu Yao suddenly asked.
Yang Yun said, “Yes, it has also moved to the school district, but it is far away from the new 16th Middle School.”
The 16th Middle School, where Yu Yao attended high school, was an 18th-tier high school with a mix of good and bad students. Most of the students in it were rebellious boys and girls who could turn the world upside down. In the words of their class teacher, they were a pot of rat shit, and they would become social parasites when they entered society in the future. At that time, Yu Yao did not choose the second middle school that her father had arranged for her but went to the 16th Middle School. Her father beat her, and her leg was lame for half a month.
Unlike the 16th Middle School she attended, Mingde Private School, which was separated from the 16th Middle School by a wall, was a place where top students gathered. It was a private school with very expensive tuition and few students.
It was probably during the first semester of her senior year that Yu Yao often climbed over the wall to go to Mingde Private School. Because the scenery in the 16th Middle School was really bad, she couldn’t find a quiet place to take a nap at noon. Mingde Private School was different. The teaching quality of this school was high, and the environment was much better than that of the school next door. So whether Yu Yao wanted to skip classes to avoid the quiet or find a place to think about life, she would climb over the high wall and run to Mingde Private School.
One day, she skipped classes as usual and climbed over to Mingde Private School. As a result, when she walked near a toilet, she heard a rustling sound coming from inside.
She walked over curiously with a cigarette in her mouth and saw two boys holding a thin boy down to sit in the corner of the urinal. One boy scooped water from a plastic cleaning bucket and poured it on the thin boy’s head, soaking the boy. The bullies stripped the thin boy’s pants, and he huddled in the corner with his bare legs, silently enduring their abuse.
The two boys humiliated him and said, “It’s not a big deal to do well in the exam… So what if you got first place? Do you dare to tell the teacher, huh?”
Yu Yao leaned against the door of the toilet, thinking, "This school is full of good boys. Is there bullying here?" She thought that this kind of thing only happened in her rubbish school. Thinking so, she pinched the cigarette in her mouth and said with a smile, “You good students also bully others?”
She was sloppily leaning against the door of the men’s toilet, shaking her legs. Her school uniform was very unruly, her hair color was very complicated, and she had a cigarette in her hand. In the eyes of the two boys, who were at most in junior high school, she was a living "social person". They were very brave when bullying their classmates, but they were frightened when they saw Yu Yao wearing the uniform of the 16th Middle School.
Maybe it was because they had heard of the great reputation of the 16th Middle School students next door, so they were so scared that they didn’t dare to look at Yu Yao and threw down the bucket and ran away, leaving Yu Yao and the wet and thin boy in the corner of the toilet.
The boy looked much younger than her, wearing glasses and a silly bowl-cut haircut, and he shrank there as if he was scared. His skin was very white. Yu Yao stood there and looked at the boy’s bare legs for a while, thinking that he was indeed a junior high school student. In their school, when humiliating people, they would strip naked, unlike them, who only stripped half.
“Why don’t you put on your pants first?” Yu Yao raised her chin and said to the boy.
The boy came back to his senses, and his whole body turned red. He covered his small underwear with his hands and picked up the pants next to him and put them on. He lowered his head and dared not speak. He was trembling like a little chicken.
Yu Yao thought that he might be afraid that she, the pest next door, would beat him up.
She felt bored and turned around and left. The most amazing thing about this incident was that the poor boy who was quickly forgotten by her was Jiang Zhonglin, who was in the second grade of junior high school in Mingde at that time. Yu Yao learned about this from Jiang Zhonglin after getting married.
If Jiang Zhonglin hadn’t told her, she really never would have thought that the little boy who was bullied by others and whom she had only met once back then was Jiang Zhonglin. If Jiang Zhonglin hadn’t said it, she wouldn’t even remember that there was such a thing.
After all, she couldn’t connect the gentle and shy young man in adulthood with the pitiful and rustic little boy back then.
“I thought you were like a fairy, very beautiful.” Jiang Zhonglin was embarrassed when he told her about this. Yu Yao, who had already become a decent wife, was stunned. She felt that her husband’s eyesight was not very good when he was young. Even the image of the second-stage shamatte that she herself could not bear to recall was not related to a fairy.
Translator Note :
Shamatte : Chinese subculture of young urban migrants, usually of low education, with exaggerated hairstyles, heavy make-up, flamboyant costumes, piercings, etc.
***
Yu Yao was in a daze and suddenly heard Yang Yun sigh and say, “Yaoyao, you are back. I am so happy for Jiang Zhonglin.”
Yu Yao suddenly came back to her senses from the past. “What?”
*****
What should I do if my lover became an old man after traveling to fourty years later? Chapter List:
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