Chapter 11

Ji Ran had not expected the world to fold back on itself quite like this.

She had tutored a child who had just started his third year of primary school. The mother in that house was a doctor, and when she heard that Ji Ran was thinking about medicine she helped her a good deal. The copies of The Lancet on her shelf and the introductory medical books beside them had all been given or recommended by her.

And now that woman was standing in front of her calling herself her aunt.

Ji Ran's head swam. Two lines had crossed and gone further apart with every year, and some force nobody could see had bent them back into each other.

The woman had a round, full face and was a little plump, and her smile was mild. She pushed her son out of the way and took Ji Ran's hand warmly in both of hers. "Don't listen to your father. I did go home first. Then I brought Shuo and your uncle over to scrounge a meal."

Her husband was a solid, quiet sort. He shifted along to make room for his wife and the two children, and swapped the teacups round as he went, all of it so practised that not a drop went over the side.

Once they were sitting, Liang Cheng held Ji Ran's hand and looked straight at the side of her face. The afternoon light was not harsh. It came through the clean glass and lay across her in light and shadow, which sharpened the line of it, and Liang Cheng touched her own cheek without meaning to. For that moment she could not tell now from then. She was small again, and her sister was sitting quietly beside her, the two of them watching the last of the sun go down beside a derelict factory.

The wind came through the rotting steel and timber of the place with a sound like crying. The leaves rattled, the sparrows chattered, and her sister danced to all of it.

The scene then was too beautiful. Under the sunset and the memory it was like an old film with frames missing, smeared over with a thick filter, and she could no longer hear the wind or make out her sister's face. In the end the wind dropped, the birds went, the factory came down and her sister went away. Liang Cheng felt exactly how strong time is. She seemed to have forgotten what her sister looked like.

Time runs like water, and it devours.

She wiped her cheeks roughly, picked up her tea and drank to cover it. "I've been away at conferences for two weeks. There's something I keep forgetting to tell Ranran."

Ji Ran had the sense not to ask what the woman had been seeing in her, and followed the subject instead. "What is it?"

Liang Cheng glanced at her son. "Liang Shuo came third in the midterms. Show your sister what your teacher gave you."

Liang Shuo had a small satchel with him and took out a brand new notebook very happily. He was wearing checked dungarees and a shirt, like a small gentleman, and he held his delight down and opened the first page with dignity. His form teacher had written Keep it up, you're brilliant, with a rabbit drawn beside it in a few lines.

Ji Ran put a hand on his head. "Shuo, that's very good."

He put the notebook away carefully, with a tongue like honey. "It's because my teacher taught me well."

Liang Cheng was a doctor and her husband a research scientist, and between them the overtime never ended, so the child had to be left with his grandparents, who were in no position to help with his homework. Liang Shuo's results had always sat in the middle, and Liang Cheng, afraid of losing the years when the foundations go in, decided to hire a tutor. The first tutor she ever hired turned out to be Ji Ran.

Probably because his parents were so rarely there, Liang Shuo was wildly active and never still for a moment. Liang Cheng and her husband came home exhausted and could not help being short with him, and the shorter they were the more he charged about and would not stop. And yet this same Liang Shuo went quiet in front of Ji Ran and sat there doing his homework and asking questions and never once wandering off.

Liang Cheng and Comrade Gou Jiawen found this extraordinary and asked the child why.

Liang Shuo did not have to think about it. "Because my teacher looks like Mum."

Then he turned his face sideways and gestured at it. "Like this. This is the most like."

That one sentence went into Liang Cheng like lightning out of a clear sky. She studied her own profile in a mirror over and over, got out a photograph of her sister to compare, thought about Ji Ran and Gi Changning, and an impossible idea arrived in her head.

She could not stop herself asking her husband, "Jiawen. Is it possible a hospital could be careless enough to hand out the wrong babies?"

Gou Jiawen pushed his glasses up. "We can check."

So Liang Cheng went.

After dinner Liang Shuo fell asleep on the sofa under a blanket. The Ji men and their brother-in-law stayed in the sitting room with their tea, and Liang Cheng picked up her bag and came to Ji Ran's room.

Past the familiar door, she could not help glancing back at the one behind her. That was the room Gi Changning had slept in.

Ji Ran seemed to see the question. "There are plenty of rooms," she said.

Liang Cheng's eyes went soft at once.

Ji Ran had no sense of territory at all. She looked like someone who settles wherever she is put, and she thought further ahead than anybody. There were plenty of rooms here and no reason for it to be that one, and if Gi Changning ever came back she would be glad to find her old room kept exactly as it was.

Liang Cheng took a photograph album out of her bag. It had some years on it. The white card cover had yellowed, the picture on it was faded and uneven in colour, and the edges had been rubbed back to the material underneath, which said plainly enough how often the owner took it out to look.

She had not come straight to the Jis on getting back to Pingchuan, because she had gone home to fetch this album.

The first page was a performance photograph.

Under the lights, a girl in classical costume with her hair built up over a piece, apparently caught just after taking her makeup off and hauled in front of a camera. She had turned her head, winked her right eye straight at the lens, and been stopped there.

Ji Ran stared. The girl in the photograph was young, and her eyes were full of light. Behind her was the chaos of backstage, a crowd of performers in the same costume taking off their makeup and talking. In all that noise she was the only quiet thing.

Something was leading Ji Ran, and a tear came down before she knew it and landed on the girl's cheek. She wiped her face quickly, found a tissue and lifted the water off the photograph gently, and looked at a face she knew. "Is this Mum?"

Mum.

So that was what she looked like.

When Ningning saw this photograph, had she felt the same thing?

The shock, then the astonishment, then the grief coming up underneath.

"My sister was three years older than me. Her name was Liang Zhi, the zhi from gardenia. She was seventeen in that one, her first proper performance. It was a group piece, and I watched the whole thing and genuinely couldn't pick her out of the crowd." Liang Cheng ran her thumb over the girl's cheek. "You really are very alike."

Ji Ran was good-looking, pale-skinned and neatly made. Her brows had an edge to them untouched. Her eyes looked long when she looked down and sharp when she looked up. On anybody else a face like that would read as haughty and cold, and under Ji Ran's quiet, soft manner it became unusually easy to be near.

Liang Zhi's face was the same. In the photograph she was at her youngest, with the particular quality dance gives a person, and when she smiled the little creases came up under her eyes and you could only say that the girl had air in her.

At first glance Ji Ran and Liang Zhi were not alike anywhere. Look again, and there was nowhere they were not.

"I thought I'd remember her always." Liang Cheng smiled bitterly. "If Shuo hadn't suddenly said your profile looked like mine, it would never have crossed my mind that the babies could have been swapped."

She had thought she would remember. Time works like a rubber, going over a memory again and again and taking a layer off each time. She looked in the mirror and her chin had got rounder and there were lines when she smiled, and under all those small erosions she could no longer find the angle where she looked like her sister.

Until Liang Shuo said his teacher looked like his mother. The profile most of all.

Liang Zhi had been dead nearly fifteen years. Fifteen years is long enough for a girl to grow up tall, long enough for Liang Cheng to become a mother and put on a little weight, long enough for a clear memory to go yellow.

Long enough that dancer, sister, wife and mother, all the words that had marked her out, were only words.

Liang Cheng talked about before.

A girl who loved dancing got into an arts school. Her parents died one after the other, and she picked up the family on her own shoulders and earned the money to put her sister through medical school. On a tour, by chance, she met a young man who was starting a business.

His surname was Ji. He was an honest sort with no sweet words in him, and whenever she performed in Pingchuan he drove a second-hand Volkswagen through any weather to collect her after work, with a rose always lying on the passenger seat. He kept at it for three years, and then they married.

"Everyone thought my sister had married beneath her." Liang Cheng turned a page. Liang Zhi stood at the centre of a stage in an elaborate costume with a flower in one hand, like something stepping over water, and the dancers behind her had become her setting. "What could anyone do? She liked him. Anything she liked, she went and got."

Ji Ran listened. She could imagine how brightly her mother had burned, which was why the family had come apart from the inside when she went out. "Auntie," she said, "will you tell me about Ningning when she was small?"

---

Jinghong: NN, can I ask. Does your mum take commissions for performance costumes? Money isn't an issue.

For the first time since coming to the Gis, Gi Changning ate without tasting a thing. Money isn't an issue kept going round in her head, and so did the conversation with Meng Lai.

Her first reply to Jinghong had been disbelieving. "Jinghong, if you want to run a charity for me you don't have to work this hard at it."

Jinghong came back. "Who's running a charity. I'm casting a wide net. I'm putting together an original piece, a duet on the theme of cranes, and the tailor opposite our school is booked into next year. I could see perfectly well that hoodie of yours is excellent. If it comes out badly, never mind, you can't run away from me. And if it comes out well, I'll give your mum my ordinary clothes as well as the costumes. Don't argue. Your big sister has money and the last thing she's afraid of is it going wrong."

And then simply sent five hundred as a deposit.

Gi Changning nearly knelt to her.

She sat questioning her life for a while, then poked Meng Lai. "Lai. If I were selling this hoodie, what do you think it should go for?"

Meng Lai had no idea where that came from. She leaned in, felt the cloth and looked for loose threads. It was winter weight, thick, and the stitching was even and the cut was right, and there was not a thread out of place. To her eye the valuable part was the colour and the design, which were bold and current. She rubbed her chin. "If it's all this quality, two hundred is perfectly reasonable."

Gi Changning knew the cloth had not been expensive. To avoid waste her mother had used a remnant thrown in with the fabric she bought, so the rest of it was labour.

Meng Lai took the silence for having been found out. She bumped her head against Gi Changning's shoulder. "All right, I do want one. Two hundred might be a bit low, given that the international labels will sell you a plastic woven sack for a thousand. If you're selling, three hundred is absolutely fine. But for me, at two hundred, you're not losing out, are you?"

Gi Changning came back to herself and moved her shoulder, which nearly put Meng Lai's head on the floor. "You said it yourself, those are international labels. I'm an unbranded nobody. I'm not even a white-label."

She said that, and a great many thoughts went into her head. The main business under the Ji group was clothing, and growing up in it she knew exactly what good design is worth. She had been slow to catch up, and now that she had, she saw it was an opportunity.

An opportunity to get the Gis out of where they were.

The first thing to do was to make Jinghong's costume properly.

Gi Changning's eyes went hard with it.