“Aren’t you coming too, Auntie?” Xiao Lin asked.
Wang Qiyao thought for a moment. It occurred to her that, though Hangzhou is so close to Shanghai, she had never been. She decided to go with them. Shortly before their departure, she called Xiao Lin over while Weiwei was at work and gave him a gold bar to exchange for cash at the Bank of China. Weiwei was not to know. She had more faith in Xiao Lin than in her own daughter; he was the one she went to when she had important matters to discuss or when she was looking for advice. As for Xiao Lin, he went to Wang Qiyao for everything and turned only to Weiwei when he wanted to horse around and have a good time. But whenever he was down, he always shared his innermost thoughts with Wang Qiyao: only she could comfort him. To him she was more his friend than his future mother-in-law. She in turn regarded him at least partially as a friend; she would sometimes forget his age and tell him personal things about herself. She hesitated for a moment as she handed him the gold bar, wondering if she should tell him the story of its origin. But that was a huge secret. How many secrets had she accumulated over the decades! She listened to Xiao Lin’s footsteps as he went out the downstairs door. Around noontime he returned and handed her a stack of bills. She felt that she was cashing out her hidden past. Perhaps it was best not to bring it up after all. Xiao Lin didn’t pry. How people accumulated their wealth was one of this city’s unverifiable secrets: an old Shanghai native like Xiao Lin knew this all too well. Wang Qiyao kept him for lunch before sending him home.
During their three days in Hangzhou Wang Qiyao did her best to make herself scarce. In the mornings she would wake up before them and go out for a walk around the hotel. Their hotel was right on Inner West Lake, and she would walk along its banks all the way to Bai Causeway. The sunlight lit up the surface of the lake and she worked up a light sweat before heading back. On the way she would run into Weiwei and Xiao Lin, who were also going for a morning stroll.
“See you at breakfast,” she would say before going back inside the hotel. By this time the hot water would be have been turned on and she would take a shower, change clothes, and go down to wait for them in the hotel dining room. They would show up about fifteen minutes later. Whatever activities they had planned for the day, Wang Qiyao made sure to stay behind part of the time, as well as giving them rein to spend the evenings as they wished. Weiwei didn’t come back to the room until midnight; Wang Qiyao would close her eyes and pretend to be asleep as soon as she heard the door opening. She would listen to Weiwei bump into things as she showered and brushed her teeth, turned the light on and then off again, and finally got into bed. It was not until she heard her daughter quietly snoring that Wang Qiyao felt it was safe to turn over and open her eyes, which had grown tired from being kept closed so long. The room was actually quite bright and everything was clearly visible; the light fluctuated slightly as it reflected off the surface of the lake. Wang Qiyao thought about the Nine Creeks and Eighteen Gullies they had visited earlier that day; a Zen-inspired place of nature and solitude, and wondered what it would be like to live there as a hermit. How wonderful it would be not to be bothered by the annoyances of the world! It would be nice to live in an isolated place where a century is like one day and there is no past or future. But then it was a bit late for her to become a hermit. She had already paid a heavy price during the first half of her life; was it all to have been for nothing? Were there to be no harvest to be reaped from all that she had been through? Wouldn’t she be losing out by giving up halfway? When she went back to ponder what that harvest might be, her mind began to drift and she couldn’t focus any more; gradually, she fell asleep.
On the third morning she woke up to find the room bathed in sunlight and Weiwei gone without a trace. She realized that she had overslept, but she wasn’t anxious. Instead she decided to take it easy. She rested her eyes a bit longer before getting out of bed to comb her hair and head down to the hotel dining room to wait for her daughter and Xiao Lin. She waited for quite some time, and it wasn’t until the dining room was about to close that she quickly nibbled a few bites. She went to wait for them in the reception area, but they still didn’t show up. Finally she went outside to wait for them. It was already muggy on the lake; all along the Bai Causeway and the Su Causeway, tourists were out strolling, their reflections shimmering on the lake. A few wispy clouds floated overhead, but soon disappeared. The sound of cicadas rang out, but there was still no trace of those two.
That morning Weiwei and Xiao Lin had gone for tea at Park Number Six, then directly from there to rent a boat on the lake. They didn’t get back to the hotel until noon. They thought they would run into Wang Qiyao when they got back, but when they didn’t they simply had lunch and went upstairs to grab a few things before going out again. Xiao Lin, who was sharing a room with someone else, went to put his belongings in the women’s room. Opening the door, they were startled to see Wang Qiyao sitting up in bed reading a comic book, a whole pile of comics stacked up beside her.
“Did you have something to eat, Auntie?” Xiao Lin asked after taking a moment to compose himself.
Wang Qiyao, however, responded with silence, pretending not to hear him. She kept her eyes on the comic book and turned the pages with a smile on her face. Weiwei grabbed some clothing and went into the bathroom to change as Xiao Lin said, “This afternoon we’re going to see the bamboo groves at Yellow Dragon Cave. Why don’t you come along!”
“I’m not going!” Wang Qiyao replied, the smile on her face suddenly vanishing.
Xiao Lin paused a moment before he tried to explain. “This morning Weiwei and I went for a walk along Su Causeway. We ended up pretty far out and that’s why we didn’t make it back for breakfast.”
Wang Qiyao could no longer contain the bitterness welling up inside her. Her eyes turned red and she struggled before responding, “Well, I also went out for a walk.”
As soon as the words came out of her mouth she got angry at herself for showing her weakness. “You need not report to me,” she added.
At that point Weiwei emerged from the bathroom and asked, “Are we going or not?”
She directed her question at Xiao Lin and didn’t even look at Wang Qiyao, as if there was no such person in the room.
Looking up from her comic book, Wang Qiyao demanded, “Who are you talking to?”
Weiwei was taken off guard. She rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
Wang Qiyao flashed a cold smile. “If you’re not talking to me, then just who are you talking to? What makes you think that just because you have a man you can ignore everyone else? You think men are reliable? Just you wait, one day they’ll step all over you and you’ll come running back to me. Maybe you don’t believe what I’m telling you, but just you wait!”
Her comments, which seemed to come totally out of the blue, caused Weiwei to panic. “Who’s got a man?” she retorted. “And who’s the one ignoring everyone else? Today I’m going to set the record straight! And I’m not going to Yellow Dragon Cave either!”
With that, she sat down on the other bed, folded her legs, and stared at Wang Qiyao, affecting the posture of one ready to settle scores. The two of them always treated each other as equals, rather than as mother and daughter; the fact that Wang Qiyao looked so young was not the only reason people took them for sisters. They quarreled frequently, so that even an outsider like Xiao Lin had witnessed their bickering on more than one occasion. But today the scene was something out of the ordinary. It seemed to have come out of nowhere, and even when there was nothing left to argue about they were both determined to carry on. In fact, trouble had been brewing for some time, and Xiao Lin, conscious of the great embarrassment a full-blown eruption would cause all three of them, went over to pull Weiwei away. But she knocked his hands aside.