Chapter Ninety-Five: The Past Need Not Be Recalled

"I still remember Uncle Song." The words were barely out before Dong Yanyan’s tears burst free and would not stop. They were tears of joy after a long separation. Before this moment, she had never felt so lonely and helpless. And then, all at once, she discovered that he was here too, and she completely broke down.

"I need to calm down for a bit!" She wiped at her eyes and hurried out of the classroom. Song Mingcheng ran after her.

"You ran out with me in front of the whole class of girls. They’re going to skin me alive," Dong Yanyan said with a laugh. One look at the expressions on Liu Ying and Yu Xia was enough to tell her that she was in for a miserable time.

"Seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls, and you can’t handle them? You’ve got more than ten extra years on them for nothing," Song Mingcheng said. "I think we should find some place where no one can disturb us and catch up properly. I’ve got the key to the fourth-floor lab. Let’s go up there."

"Is that a good idea? I hear the fourth floor is haunted," Dong Yanyan said, laughing.

Song Mingcheng turned to look at her with a cool, eerie gaze and asked in a low voice, "Then what do you suppose we are?"

At that, Dong Yanyan couldn’t help shivering.

"You’re so silly, you even scare yourself. When did you get back?" Song Mingcheng glanced around to make sure no one was there, opened the lab door, and the two of them crept inside. He closed it behind them.

"Don’t even ask. At Liu Qiang’s wedding, I somehow got sent back here for no reason at all," Dong Yanyan said with a laugh. In this sealed, quiet space, she finally felt safe, as though she could speak freely at last.

Song Mingcheng smiled. "Same here. I came back before I even made it to the hotel. I suppose we’re both in the same boat."

Their hands clasped tightly.

"Comrade!"

"Fellow traveler!"

"Family!"

Dong Yanyan suddenly felt like crying again. Before she could, Song Mingcheng pulled her into a fierce embrace and broke down in sobs. She could feel tears soaking through her hair, hot against her scalp.

"Yanyan, only today did I realize how lonely and helpless I’ve been these past six months. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be. I didn’t even know whether this world was real. Sometimes I wished it was all just a dream. But everything here feels so real, and I was the only one who didn’t know whether I truly existed in it. And now I’ve met you. At least, at least I’m not alone anymore. From now on, there’s someone to talk to, someone to share the load with. Yanyan, is it really you?" he asked through tears.

Dong Yanyan nodded hard. "It’s me. It really is me. I was the same way. I wanted to change my fate, wanted to enjoy everything this place had to offer, but I kept doubting my own existence. I didn’t know whether all of this was just my imagination. Thank goodness you came too. I don’t have to be so alone and afraid anymore. At least now, someone can protect me. From now on, I won’t be walking this road by myself."

The two of them clung to each other and cried their hearts out. After a while, the absurdity of it all made them laugh. They stood there grinning foolishly for a long time, then each leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the moon in silence.

"You’ve been hiding it really well. I sat next to you for half a year and never noticed. Hey, apart from the two of us, do you think anyone else got sent back too? From what I can tell, it doesn’t seem likely. I’ve been paying attention all this time," Dong Yanyan said with a smile. "But you’ve seriously made me question my intelligence."

"From what I can tell, it’s only us two. I’ve spent the whole half-year studying this," Song Mingcheng said with a smile. "Everyone at our school, along with our relatives and friends, I’ve thought over them all. Actually, I noticed you a long time ago. Especially that time you got drunk and went all over the place looking for your phone. That’s when I started to suspect you. But I thought that if you really came back from fifteen years later, the first thing you’d do would be to find Xu Cheng, since the two of you had always been so close. I never expected you’d still be so obsessed with Lin Feng that you wouldn’t even look at Xu Cheng twice. So I began to doubt my own judgment, because I found that many things were different from back then. I was afraid that if I identified the wrong person, I wouldn’t just fail to find a fellow traveler, I’d expose myself instead. So I could only test things little by little. It wasn’t until that night, when I saw you holding Xu Cheng’s hand and crying in the classroom, that I realized you still cared about him. You just never show it in front of others."

"That was only a momentary loss of control. In truth, from the moment I came back, I had already made up my mind. Even for the child’s sake, I can’t be with him anymore. We’ve suffered together, endured for so many years together. I really don’t have the courage, or the need, to go through it all again," Dong Yanyan said with a bitter smile.

Song Mingcheng froze for a moment, then laughed. "I thought you’d still be thinking about all those years you and Xu Cheng shared, and drag him along to fight for a future with you."

"If you hadn’t seen me crying while holding his hand last time, were you planning to stay hidden forever, silently looking down on me without ever admitting who you were? If I had known, I would have cried earlier," Dong Yanyan said with a bitter shake of her head. "Better to forget each other at the ends of the earth than to cling to each other in misery. I’m not staying with him because I want to give us both a chance. Two people starting over separately is better than dragging each other down again. All of you only saw how well Xu Cheng treated me, how loving and devoted we were for ten straight years, but you didn’t know how good I was to him, or how much we sacrificed just to be together. When we first graduated, we had nothing. He took me home with him, and his parents never gave me a friendly look. We cried over breaking up more times than I can count, but we still couldn’t bear to part. In this city, we had no roots, no support. We lived in rented places and had to watch the landlord’s face. One winter, we argued with the landlord and got thrown out. In the dead of winter, we pushed our bicycles back and forth, making trip after trip to move our things into the new place. We spent an entire day moving. In our haste, the new apartment was a shabby ruin with nothing in it. The window looked straight onto a wall, and in broad daylight you couldn’t see anything unless the lights were on. I’ve always been timid, never dared to stay home alone, but he often had to work overtime all night. Whenever he worked late, I had to go everywhere looking for somewhere to sleep. On my birthday that year, he had promised to spend it with me, but not long after he came home, he got a call saying he had to work overtime. He had no choice and left immediately. I was left alone in that empty apartment, growing more and more frightened. In the middle of the night I ran downstairs and cried beneath the streetlamp. Really, you can’t imagine how wronged, how scared, how desperate I felt then. If Zhang Lei and the others hadn’t later called my pager to say they wanted to celebrate my birthday with me, I don’t know how I would have made it through that night. In those first two years, he had to repay the debt his family had taken on to send him to school. More than half of his salary went home every month, and the two of us had to live frugally. Sometimes, the moment his paycheck arrived, his mother would take it back to pay the debts. Even so, his parents never stopped making trouble. If not for all that, how could I have flown into a rage and insisted on marrying him? We held our wedding separately in our own families, each side keeping its own gifts. After we were married, his parents would occasionally stir things up in front of my parents. You know my parents. They only know how to say their own child is bad; they never say that of anyone else. My mother often made me cry until I felt chilled to the bone. What kind of parents don’t protect their own child? Xu Cheng never defended me in front of her, never said a single word against his parents. He would only cry with me. At the time, I thought I hadn’t done anything wrong. So why was everyone blaming me? Later I realized it wasn’t that I was bad. It was that once people decided I was bad, nothing I did would ever be good enough. I had to be tougher, fiercer than they were if I didn’t want to be bullied. But what kind of woman has to be that tough just to face the burdens and trivialities of life with any calm? When I was pregnant with Lulu, there were times I couldn’t even come up with two hundred yuan for an examination, so I had to borrow money from a coworker. Back then we felt that buying a house had already spent so much of my family’s money that we couldn’t ask them for any more. Xu Cheng was proud too. He didn’t want to owe anyone anything. But what did we actually have? We had nothing! When I was recovering after giving birth, I didn’t even have anyone to take care of me. My mother didn’t bother with me at all. I had to look after the child by myself, and Lulu was so difficult when she was little. I was almost crying every single day while holding the baby. I never ate enough or slept enough. Sometimes I was so exhausted that my head felt like it would explode, and I would slam my own head with all my strength. It really felt like I couldn’t endure another moment. But you saw it too. I did endure. I got through those ten years like that. What should have been the best decade of a woman’s life, I spent running myself ragged just to survive. I lived in disgrace and exhaustion, and before I knew it, I had become a worn-out, yellow-faced woman. Life did get better later, but only in the sense that we were no longer in debt. Yet Lulu is about to start primary school, and to get into a good school, the fee alone is tens of thousands. Where am I supposed to find that kind of money? Sometimes when I think about it, I feel so pitiful. I’m in my thirties and still can’t scrape together a few ten-thousand yuan. The child also has tutoring classes to attend and talents to learn. I don’t want her to feel inferior. I don’t want her to be worse than other children. I wanted to start a business of my own, but I didn’t even have the capital, not even anyone to lend a hand. I thought about going out to work, but then who would take care of the child?"

"Xu Cheng was good to me, but even if I could change him, I could never change his family. I never understood how important a man’s family was, but now I do. It determines what social class I’ll have to fight in for the rest of my life, and it also determines my child’s starting point. For people like us, who have struggled so hard to get where we are, we can bear hardship. But I cannot let my child pay for the incompetence of the generation before her. Just look at now. If Lulu’s grandparents had even a little education, a little ability, a little sense of responsibility, a little decency as parents, I wouldn’t be so worried. Lulu is a child without a mother now. If I’m not there, how is she supposed to live her life? Her father still has to work. If she goes to live with her grandparents, then her whole life will be ruined..."

Dong Yanyan rambled on in a jumble, and as she spoke, grief welled up again. She covered her face and cried so hard she could no longer breathe.

She had never said any of this to anyone before. Back then she was too proud, too concerned with saving face, and she also wanted to preserve Xu Cheng’s dignity. She did not want to lay open her wounds for others to inspect. Whether other people’s eyes held pity or schadenfreude, she could no longer bear them. In this world, how many people were not simply forcing themselves onward? Some appeared glorious on the outside and weathered within; others looked weathered on the outside and were even more worn within.

But now it was different. Everything had been shuffled and dealt again. In front of him, someone who had fallen into the same lonely fate as she had, she no longer needed to hide or keep up a brave front.

That feeling of setting everything down at last was wonderful.