Do not talk about teenage love

Author: Chang Yan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: That youthful and naive affection, after being purified by time and weathered, can extend to when? Her once innocent feelings, with the passage of time, have yet to develop into the love she desires. Childhood love is ultimately just a longing for something one has not yet grown up to be. Thus, she casts aside the past and no longer waits.
Content Highlights:
1. On a snowy day, she met him.
The small alley was uneven, with deep and shallow ruts in the road. If the temperature hadn’t dropped to zero degrees Celsius, the ground would have been frozen solid, and she might have been stepping in mud with both feet. In mid-October, fine snow began to fall from the sky. Looking up, the sky was a vast expanse of gray and white, with countless tiny snowflakes swirling about. It wasn’t particularly beautiful—just a dull, grayish hue, like scattered paper scraps across the sky. Only when they landed on the ground did they reveal a touch of snow’s white and sparkling clarity.
She had already walked for five minutes down the long alley, still not at the end. Xu Ying looked ahead at the boy leading the way and couldn’t help but ask, “How much farther is it?” The boy turned and smiled, “Almost there. It’s just ahead.” He was seventeen or eighteen, with a kind smile. Xu Ying quietly thought to herself, Running all this way to find odd work, making several phone calls to confirm the location, and now I’ve entered the alley, but haven’t seen a single decent establishment after a hundred meters. I’ll have to go back to the grocery store to call again.
The person who answered the phone at the job hiring place had changed. It wasn’t the loud-voiced man anymore but a younger boy’s voice, clearly not much older than her. Before she even found the place, he had readily agreed to come out to meet her. She wondered if he was the boy now leading her, stepping along the ruts in the road.
After passing an intersection, she still had to go further. Xu Ying looked ahead again and couldn’t help but wonder if one day’s newspaper would carry a headline like, “A recent college graduate working odd jobs alone was tragically misled to a remote location and murdered; her body was discovered several days later.” Ah, I don’t have much money, but I still have over a hundred in my drawer. I’ll leave it for my little brother. Some of those comics, novels, and tapes can be divided among my two best friends, and a little something for my brother as a keepsake. Why isn’t my brother a girl? If he were, I’d cherish those treasures of hers so dearly.
Her parents might break down in tears the moment they saw her clothes in the future. It might be better to burn them all and be done with it. Her brother would then become the only son in the family, able to move into her room from the south wing. It would probably become a messy pigsty.
“See? That big oil tank over there is where it is.” The boy turned and smiled again. Xu Ying snapped back from her thoughts and looked ahead. Wow! She thought. The job hiring place was supposed to be a yard with oil tanks, but she hadn’t expected them to be the large oil tanks from a train. Standing proudly in a yard, they were quite conspicuous. Unfortunately, she had lost her nerve halfway through the alley and hadn’t gone any further, so she hadn’t seen them at all.
Entering the small yard, Xu Ying followed the boy, looking around as they walked into a single-story house. The room was crowded with people, a group of migrant workers sitting on a heated kang (traditional bed). They were eating, and the table was steaming hot, lively and warm. Xu Ying couldn’t help but feel like touching her own flat stomach.
It was freezing out, and she had only eaten a dry bread for lunch. She was cold all over, inside and out. Would these people, so simple and warm-hearted, invite her to sit on the kang and have a bowl of hot soup?
“Uncle, the worker is here.” The boy smiled and squeezed into the corner of the small room. There, against the windowsill, stood three or four boys her age, and one much younger, about seven or eight—probably a neighbor’s child playing over. Xu Ying stood at the doorway, peering inside. A burly, rough-looking man with a fierce face got off the kang and came out to look at her.
“Just you?”
“Mm.” She nodded and tried to raise her voice, “I was referred by the 12th window at the labor market. They said there’s a job handing out flyers, paid by the hour.”
“It’s paid by the day, not the hour.” The man cut her off. She paused. “But they said it was by the hour—two hours a day, twenty yuan.” That’s why she was attending an accounting class in the morning and looking for an afternoon part-time job.
“My place is paid by the day. Half-day seven yuan, full-day fifteen. If you finish early, you can go home.” Xu Ying quickly calculated. She had to attend ten days of accounting classes, which included two weekends, making four full days in total. It seemed doable, so she nodded. “Okay.”
The man went back into the room and took a stack of narrow paper slips from an old cabinet in the corner. He returned and said, “Check it. You need to hand out six hundred in half a day.” Xu Ying hesitantly took them and looked. “Is this for gas ads?” she asked. The intermediary had said it was for medicine ads—was this a scam?
“Yes, to the residential buildings on the east side. You can see them from outside. Start with that area today.”
“Oh.” Xu Ying replied, thinking it was unfamiliar territory. Which way was north? And east? She’d figure it out later.
“Can you handle this?” the man asked. “You need to slide it into the security doors at a quarter past the paper’s edge so I can check. Otherwise, how will I know if you’ve handed them out or just thrown them away?” The man demonstrated from under his door. This employer must have been tricked! Xu Ying thought, and replied, “Oh.”
“I had a few others working here, but you arrived late, so they all left in the afternoon. Come early tomorrow, and I’ll take you around the various residential areas.” She nodded again. “Mm.”
“Do you know how to ride a bike?”
“Yes.” She hesitated. “But I don’t have one.”
“Let’s talk about that later.” The employer clearly wanted to go eat. “You can start with these in the afternoon. Come back tomorrow.”
“Do I come back to pay after I’m done?” The man grew impatient. “It’s paid every three days. Why are you in such a hurry?”
Xu Ying was taken aback. “But, but the window said it’s paid daily when I came.”
“It’s three days here.” The employer emphasized. “Everyone who comes here is paid every three days. Don’t worry, I won’t cheat you.”
“Ah.” She glanced around the room again. A man on the kang smiled. “Don’t worry, you won’t owe anything. Go ahead and hand them out. It’s snowing outside, so go home early once you’re done.”
Her heart warmed, and Xu Ying smiled too. “Okay, I’ll come back tomorrow.”
The employer said, “Alright, first, pay twenty yuan as a deposit.”
Huh?