Chapter 13

At the start of December Pingchuan had its first snow of the year, and after that the weather could not make up its mind. Sometimes it came down in great flakes, sometimes two flakes fell and the sun came out. It went on for half a month, and the whole city went white.

On the Saturday the sun hung gold at the edge of the sky over banks of old snow. It was a good day.

Gi Changning came to the studio in snow boots, planting her feet deep at every step, and stood shivering in the warm air from the air conditioning. "I am frozen to death," she said happily.

As they say, snow is not cold. Thawing is cold.

Meng Lai handed her a towel. "Dry yourself off."

Gi Changning hung her scarf and coat on the wall, towelled the melted snow out of her hair, took off her boots and stepped onto the studio carpet, handing over the bag she was carrying. Then she sat down cross-legged with her hands in her sleeves like an old man. "There. Yours."

Meng Lai cheered, could not get the bag open fast enough, pulled the thing out and held it up against herself in the mirror. "It's lovely, it's lovely. I'll transfer you the money in a minute and you give it to your mum. No keeping it."

In the bag was a hoodie, cropped short enough that lifting your arms showed your stomach. The body was a deep ink green with the word DANCE embroidered across the front in white. The hood was bigger than a hood usually is, which gave it a loose, careless look when it was up, and when it was pushed back you saw the silhouette of a swallow across the back, pieced together out of regular shapes in brick red. The red was low enough in saturation to sit beautifully with the green. And since winter had come, Gi Changning's mother had made a soft round brooch to go with it, with two freshwater pearls of different shapes hanging from it on thin metal, which was very pretty indeed.

Gi Changning clicked her tongue and propped her chin on her hand. "My mum didn't want to charge you. But at this stage, not charging you would be standoffish."

Meng Lai could not wait to change and heard that as she came out of the changing room. She put her hands on her hips. "Of course she's charging me. Am I the sort of person who takes advantage of you?"

Then she transferred the money and said, teasing and laying it on, "New Year's nearly here. Get your mum to buy some vegetables and cut the grease out of you. You've visibly put on weight."

Gi Changning's face went serious and she immediately felt her own stomach, where two clear lines were still to be found, and relaxed. "Thank God. They're still there."

Her father's cooking was too good, that was the trouble. He could make even the cabbage she hated taste like something else, and if you are not careful you put on weight.

Years of dancing had left Gi Changning fairly relaxed about her body. Having noticed the weight, she ran two kilometres in every long break at school, and after a while the muscle in her legs firmed up nicely.

Her face was on the round side, though, and this was the season for laying down fat, so there was some softness in it. A few months with the Gis had taken ten parts of defiance down to three, and what you noticed first was one part of extra weight.

She hit back. "You've definitely put on plenty too."

Meng Lai put a guilty hand over her stomach. She did not put weight on easily, but she hated moving in winter, and school was eating and studying and sleeping, and running in the long break achieved nothing. Was a bit of padding not reasonable? Dancing burns that much, so keeping some fat for the winter is hardly outrageous. Not outrageous at all.

Gi Changning could not be bothered with her. Give Meng Lai an inch and she would be living in the mile by lunchtime. She got out her phone, opened the video app, found the account called Jinghong in her follows and opened the newest video. "Blimey. Jinghong's piece is on two million likes."

Gi Changning's mother worked fast. The costumes had gone from design to finished clothes in under a week, and would have been faster if Gi Changning had not been passing messages between the two sides.

The piece used original music, a duet on the theme of cranes, one man and one woman, both students at the dance academy, who had choreographed it together and only needed costumes, which told you neither of them was short of money.

The rest of the time went on filming.

They had not shot it from a fixed point. The background was a lakeside, the water silver-white, the land empty, and out of all that loneliness two cranes danced, like a pair who had stopped here on their way through the world, coming together and parting, beautiful and far off. The camera work was lovely and an enormous amount of effort had clearly gone into the edit, and with two dancers as good-looking and as well trained as that, it went straight onto the platform's trending list.

Fifty thousand followers in three days, which took Jinghong's account past a million.

Gi Changning and Meng Lai knew what was behind it. Lovely camera work means the dancers going again and again until it is perfect, and dancing at the water's edge in the middle of winter on top of that, keeping every movement exact while keeping your face with the music. It is very hard.

The video was not long, a minute and a half.

It told, simply, the love story of two cranes who had each lost their flock, from circling each other to settling together, and what it was about above all was beauty.

The choreography was difficult, and on top of that Jinghong had asked for costumes that were plain, that caught what a crane is without losing any of the float.

So Gi Changning's mother used tie-dye. Both costumes were white underneath. On the woman's, only the hem and the wide sleeves carried ink, which moved like smoke, and when Jinghong turned or leapt the ink opened out like a flower, and it was a painting. The man's was plainer still, the ink dyed into the bottoms of the trousers with the cuffs cut narrow. One elaborate and one simple, and each better for the other.

For the trimmings, Gi Changning's mother took a deposit of five hundred and worried over it like five thousand. She made the woman's a sash embroidered with flying birds, detachable so the client could use it as she liked. Because of the cranes she added a red hair ribbon with a small crane embroidered at each end. Allowing for the length of the man's hair, she gave him a red band for his forehead instead.

The video reached the part where the necks cross.

The camera went right in close. The two dancers brought their necks together the way cranes do, their eyes caught, and there was longing in it and something being said, and in the instant they passed each other the forehead band and the hair ribbon crossed in the air like fire. One look, and it held.

Classical dance was not Gi Changning's field, which did not mean she could not appreciate it, and with her mother's clothes in it she was not remotely impartial. "That is beautiful."

Meng Lai watched it with her and nodded along. "That's a dance I could never do in my life."

Not that she could not learn it. Anyone can learn anything by force. Meng Lai had no love for classical dance, and without love you never dance anything that moves people.

Gi Changning opened the comments, very pleased with herself. The top one was "The dance is beautiful, the dancers are beautiful, the clothes are beautiful, there's nothing here that isn't."

"Everyone's praising Jinghong, so I'll praise the costumes. They're gorgeous."

"The clothes are perfect for the theme. I can't find them anywhere, are they made to order?"

"Please give me the designer's contact, don't make me get on my knees."

Gi Changning switched to a private second account and liked every comment about the clothes.

Jinghong was presumably as surprised by all this as anyone and had not got round to replying. When she finally found a moment, she sent the balance.

Gi Changning's phone chimed. She looked at the transfer several times, did not dare accept it and wrote back at once. "Jinghong, did your hand slip and add a zero?"

Jinghong was as brisk as ever. "You are questioning a professional dancer's control of her own body."

Gi Changning had three question marks for that.

How had it got there?

Jinghong added, "There's a bonus in it, and I have to tell you I am very, very, very happy with them. They're beautiful enough to wear as ordinary clothes. My partner wants to fly straight to your house and beg your mum for another set of his own."

What Jinghong did not say was that she had opened the parcel in her room and the dress had looked like nothing much, and that it was only when her roommates made her put it on that she found how well it was cut and how comfortable the fabric was. She made them clear a space and did a run of turns and a deep bend to the floor on the spot, and it did not catch anywhere.

When she finished, the roommates came out of it like people waking up, with the look of being genuinely startled, and reached for their phones. "Don't come over, don't come over. Do it again and I'll film it for you."

Jinghong watched the skirt open out from outside herself, and in that cramped room she was a crane with its wings up, holding still.

It was perfect.

So perfect that Jinghong could not believe the person in the video was her.

Only after that did she look at the trimmings, and God knows how delighted and moved she was by the embroidery on the ribbon and the sash. Five hundred. Five hundred had found her a supplier who did not mind how many changes she asked for, and two costumes and two sets of trimmings, all handmade and hand-embroidered.

What sort of god had NN's mother come down from to do charity like this?

With the video taking off as it had, Jinghong put the balance up to four figures without hesitating.

And she had not forgotten her promise. "My roommate wants something made too. I'll pass her your contact. Take it or don't."

"Yes, yes." If the client was offering, Gi Changning was certainly taking, and once she had she said like a small shopkeeper, "Thank you for your custom, do come again."

At home she transferred the balance to her mother over dinner.

Her mother dropped her chopsticks. "Three thousand? Ningning, has she added a zero? We can't take advantage of people."

Gi Changning said nothing and showed her the whole conversation. "You've no idea how many followers that video brought her. Her advertising starts at five figures now. That balance is nothing to her."

Her mother read every line and let herself relax, and looked at the number with real care. It had never occurred to her that a skill she took for granted could bring in anything like this. With what Meng Lai had paid on top, it came to over half a month's wages.

In a few days. Her heart was going. Money had never come to her this easily. Most people hate dealing with clients, hate their ignorant and unreasonable demands. She did not mind it in the least. She liked making clothes and she liked talking to people back and forth, and she never found it tiresome.

Perhaps. Something warm came up in her. Perhaps she really could move them somewhere with heating on the strength of her own hands.

"It's nearly New Year." She put the phone down reluctantly. "We'll buy Ningning a new outfit. Old Gi, those shoes of yours are nearly five years old, let's get you another pair this year. The rest we save."

Gi Changning wheedled. "I don't want anything bought. I want something you've made. And you're buying yourself new clothes. If you've earned it yourself, why shouldn't you spend it on yourself?"

Her mother was delighted. "All right, all right. I'll buy something too."

Gi Changning was thoroughly pleased with life until she noticed the other end of the table, where her father was eating with his head down and saying nothing. "Dad," she said carefully. "Aren't you happy?"

He paused, looked up and smiled. "I am happy. How could I not be?"

He was low, that was all. For all these years his wife had held the family up alone, and now she was going to work and making clothes as well, and in the end it was his own uselessness that made her life so hard.

Under the ache of it, he was not without envy.

Casual work is nothing but uncertainty. There is no safety in it.

"If only," he got out, "if only I could earn as well."

Her mother stopped smiling, and the table went silent.

Gi Changning broke it. She took a huge mouthful of the bean sauce noodles and chewed slowly. The noodles had bite to them, smooth and all the same thickness. The sauce was judged exactly for salt and deeply savoury, the bean paste dissolved on the tongue, the diced pork had real texture to it, and the diced mushroom brought its own sweetness, and all of it coated every strand evenly and went with the crisp shredded cucumber to cut the richness. Gi Changning had eaten a great many bowls of these noodles, some of them costing thousands with every delicacy in the world in them, and none had been as comfortable to eat as this one.

Comfortable was the word. Sauce and noodles belonged to each other with no line between them, and what came out on the tongue was the plainest, truest version of the thing, the sort of fullness that brings up the best pictures in a person's head.

A mouthful of hot springy noodles went down and the question she had been sitting on came up again. "Dad. You cook this well. Why don't you apply for a chef's job? Take this bowl. I'm not exaggerating, I think it could be the house dish at a noodle shop that had been going for decades."

Her mother touched her lightly under the table and shook her head a fraction.

Her father saw it perfectly well. It was over ten years since the accident, and what the fire left had long since become ridged scars across his back and his face, and the way strangers looked at him had eaten into him and taken his old ambitions away a piece at a time. Faced with his daughter's question, he smiled bitterly. "The people interviewing took one look at me and said I'd bring bad luck in."

"Rubbish." Gi Changning brought her chopsticks down hard on the table. "Dad, they were the rude ones. You did nothing wrong."

He knew that. Under another man's roof you bow your head. In time, after enough doors, he had given hope up altogether.

Since the parents' evening he had got a little of his confidence back and had stopped stooping when he went out. To his wife that was a joy, seeing him grow surer of himself, the way he had been when they were young and she rode on the back of his old heavy bicycle while he took her round and showed her off to everyone they knew.

Watching him start to pull back into himself again, she hardened and opened the wound herself. "Your father was a chef at a hotel here in Pingchuan. A famous one, on the dough and pastry side."

All Gi Changning knew, from Ji Ran, was that he had been a chef. She had not known it was in Pingchuan.

The thing that had been nagging at her came loose.

So her mother had given birth at a hospital in Pingchuan, and happened to be there at the same time as the Jis, and that was how the babies were swapped.

After Gi Changning's grandfather died, her grandmother had raised the children alone and it was hard. The elder uncle was away driving lorries and almost never home, and Gi Changning's father, who did not like school, finished middle school and went out to work to take some of the load off his mother. Somehow he found an old master of the dough side and apprenticed himself to him and worked conscientiously. The old man was good to him, and since he worked at a hotel in Pingchuan he brought the boy along to help out. In time the apprentice learned not only his master's craft but took in what the rest of the kitchen could do as well, and when the old man retired he stepped into his place and became the hotel's name on the dough side.

Those were good years for the Gis. He worked hard, he married, he set up a household, his mother had her grandchildren to enjoy, and anyone who saw it said they envied them.

The accident happened in summer, the summer after the year he buried his mother.

The old master was having a birthday and chose the hotel he had worked in for half his life. His wife had died young, he had no children and no wish to marry again, and he had lived alone all his life with one apprentice to his name.

Gi Changning's father was grateful for everything the old man had taught him, and the old man had come to his mother's funeral to burn incense and had cooked himself for the guests who came to help.

So on the day of the birthday he cooked a whole table of dishes himself and steamed a pot of longevity peaches for his master. Then it happened. The hotel's old wiring caught fire, and the summer was dry and it went fast, and the guests ran for the doors. The old man was elderly and not quick on his feet. Gi Changning's father had already got out, and when he saw his master was not there his head went white and he turned straight back in.

They say that when the firefighters reached them, he had his master pinned underneath him, with the clothes burned off his back and the fire going at bare skin with nothing in its way.

They got there in time, thank God.

The hotel's losses were enormous, the insurance company moved slowly, and the owner sold his car and his house to compensate the guests and the staff and to cover Gi Changning's father's treatment and lost wages. The old master handed over every yuan he had saved. Medicine then was not what it is now, and Gi Changning's mother took every bit of the compensation and their savings, borrowed a great deal from the elder uncle and went from place to place looking for treatment. Health insurance was not widespread in those days and most people had no thought of buying any. From that point the Gi family's finances fell through the floor, and earning money to pay off debt became the main business of their lives.

The old master had died a couple of years ago. Gi Changning's father buried him properly and went to sweep the grave every year.

Gi Changning had been born when the Ji business was climbing, and raised by her grandmother, and had never known what it was to be short of money. But she knew what it is to stand over a hospital bed and be able to do nothing.

When his body was more or less mended and he could lift an iron wok again, he had gone out to apply for work full of confidence. A chef stays in the kitchen and does not need to be seen. He still came up against one closed door after another.

The hotels did not want to take on a liability for nothing. If something went wrong with his health they would be paying out, and where was the sense in that.

The small places had even more to worry about.

In time he grew quieter and quieter.

Her mother told it vaguely, and Gi Changning could imagine what being turned down over and over does to a person.

She could not hold it. Her chopsticks came down on the table again with a crack. "Those hotels have no eyes in their heads. I say you do it yourself, Dad. With your cooking, open anywhere. I'll push it with my million followers and it'll be the biggest name in Pingchuan."

She started out saying it in temper, and the more she said the more sense it made. "That's it. We work for ourselves and you're the boss and we don't have to put up with their rubbish. What do you think, Dad?"

The heavy air had been knocked sideways into something else. His own first dream had been a place of his own. He thought his daughter was making it sound too easy. "Opening a shop isn't simple. The licences, the right premises, suppliers you can trust. And even with all of that, where does the money to start come from?"

Gi Changning was about to say she had money, then remembered she had transferred all of it to Ji Changfeng when she left, and her pockets were empty. She blinked. "I could take a couple of advertising jobs?"

"Pupils have a pupil's job to do," her mother said, cutting the daydream off. "Eat up. The household isn't your worry."

Night came down.

In the dark, Gi Changning's mother said suddenly, "Old Gi."

He was not asleep. "Mm?"

"I think Ningning has a point." She spoke slowly, and there was something steadying in it. "We've put a good deal aside for Ranran's university. We could take some of it out. What do you think?"

There was nothing in the bedroom but breathing.

He lay with his eyes open at the ceiling and could hear his own heart going. Sense and the old dream tore at each other. He put his arms round his wife and did not answer it directly. "Let me think. Go to sleep."

---

The next day, Sunday, Gi Changning finished her homework and her phone rang.

The screen said Ranran.

She answered it, puzzled. "Ranran?"

It was noisy on Ji Ran's end, so she was out somewhere. "Mm," she said. "Ningning, are you at home?"

"I am."

"Are Mum and Dad there?"

"Dad's gone to the vegetable market. Mum's on overtime."

Ji Ran sounded relieved. "I've bought something for the house. Wait there, I'll be with you shortly."

Gi Changning had no time to ask what before the call ended. Fruit and vegetables, she assumed. Probably.

An hour later somebody knocked at the attic door.

"Coming."

Gi Changning opened it.

Ji Ran was in a plain long down coat. She stood on tiptoe to look past her into the flat, confirmed that Gi Changning really was alone, and pointed down the stairs. "I've bought an air conditioner for the house. Is it all right for them to come up and fit it?"

Gi Changning had three question marks for that.

Sorry, hang on. The wind was loud and she had not caught it.

Bought a what?