Chapter 17

The winter holiday came, and with it the New Year.

Gi Hongcheng had settled on the shop. The rent was reasonable and the position was good, on the street beside the vegetable market. The last tenants were the old couple who fried dough sticks, who had been there years and were going to the capital at their son's invitation, to retire and see the grandchild. The place looked clean and in fact carried a lot of old grease, and since what he meant to sell was different anyway, he spent the run-up to New Year stripping it out and doing it up. Years of casual work had taught him a fair amount of carpentry and bricklaying, and knocking about on his own he made a decent job of it.

Then there were the licences, the trading permit and the health certificates, and a fire inspection before he could open. After the holiday, his own small shop could open its doors.

The mill where his wife worked ran an eight-hour day, and she had been doing twelve for years because overtime paid double. Since Gi Changning opened up the dressmaking commissions she had applied to go back to eight, so she could get home early and sew, and she earned more than the overtime had paid. She had a good temper and a good eye, she could meet whatever strange thing a client asked for, and when something defeated her she bought books on design and studied them. Every piece got her full attention and every piece was worth more than it cost.

It was going to be a year worth looking forward to.

On New Year's Eve, Gi Changning carried a pot of paste about and went at the door couplets with her mother at full tilt, to put her restless energy somewhere, and ran into her cousin on the landing, back not long ago from his university in another province.

Gi Zhao had a roll of tape in his teeth and nothing on his feet but slippers. He and his father banged up the couplets and the luck papers in no time, and then looked up to find Gi Changning craning down at him. He took the tape out of his mouth and folded a corner over. "Want a hand?"

Gi Changning nodded without hesitating. "Yes."

Since the move to Pingchuan, the Gis' New Year's Eve dinner was generally cooked by her father with her mother assisting, while the uncle's family supplied a share of the ingredients. At that moment her father was hard at it in the kitchen.

Her cousin was over a metre eighty by the look of him, quick with his hands, thoroughly practised with a paste brush. When the couplets and the top strips and the luck papers were up, he went round with Gi Changning and put a strip over every door frame in the flat, and pretty paper cuttings on the windows, all of it red and festive.

By the end both of them had the red dye off the couplets all over their hands.

Her mother was thoroughly pleased, pushed two big red apples into their arms, thanked Gi Zhao and praised him at some length, and took herself off to help in the kitchen.

Which left Gi Changning faintly put out.

With nobody else in the room, Gi Zhao beckoned her over and asked, like a man arranging a drop, "Dried persimmon?"

She came closer and pointed out, with a straight face, "You've been stealing the persimmons again."

He produced a clear plastic bag from his pocket with two in it. "Mind your language. The persimmons insisted on coming to me. Don't go blackening an innocent man."

She pulled a face. Eating a man's food does soften the mouth, so she let it go.

Gi Zhao read agriculture. Before coming home he had been out in the fields with his supervisor on poverty relief work. The soil and the climate in that area suited persimmon trees, and the fruit came out sweet without going sour on you, except that the place was remote and the roads were bad and soft persimmons do not keep, so there was no getting them out by road. The two of them had an idea and tried drying them. The fruit was good to begin with, and dried it carried a particular freshness, sweeter and softer with some chew to it. They sold well, people came back for more, and they had become one of the local specialities. Gi Zhao had bought a case to bring home for the holiday.

His father had thought nothing of them at first and handed a good many round to the stallholders he knew at the market, and the stallholders ate them and thought they were the finest thing going and started asking where they came from, at which point the uncle realised what he had and stopped giving them away.

After which Gi Zhao found himself, in the middle of the New Year holiday, taking a pile of orders for dried persimmons, and starting to consider whether there was a future in leaving agriculture for trade.

What astonished Gi Zhao most, though, was the business of the swapped daughters in his uncle's family. Months had gone by and he only found out when he came home for the holiday, because not one person had told him. Arriving and seeing that familiar face on Gi Changning, in the flash of a second, the first thing he said was, "Oh. Can I have your autograph?"

Yes. Gi Zhao followed Can't Tell N from L, and liked every video they put out.

Gi Changning bit into her persimmon. "Hey," she said round it.

He came back to himself. "What?"

She pointed at the phone he had dropped on the coffee table. "Ranran's phone is the same as yours."

That did not surprise him. "She's still using it?"

Truthfully, Gi Zhao and Ji Ran were not close. Their parents had never lived in the same place, and the two of them only met at festivals, right up until his uncle's family moved to Pingchuan. Then he overheard some of what had happened to her. Ji Ran at that point hardly spoke, and there was something about how quiet she was that got to him, and for the first time Gi Zhao felt like somebody's older brother and privately decided he had better look after her.

The one time she ever asked him for anything was the summer between her first and second year, when she wanted some introductory computing textbooks. He had a friend doing computing, so he got hold of the first and second year books and posted them. And that was when Gi Zhao noticed that the phone Ji Ran used was a model they had stopped making.

Old enough to pass for an antique.

He did casual work and had nothing to spend money on beyond food. His own phone was three months old, and he reset it to factory settings, invented a reason and gave it to her, because he knew a brand new phone was the one thing she would never accept.

Afterwards her mother made him a trench coat to say thank you, which was still in his wardrobe, smart and comfortable and built to last.

And now that quiet girl who never pushed for anything was the daughter of the famous Ji family of Pingchuan. Fate turns itself over. What Gi Zhao wondered was whether, with a gap like that opening between them, two girls could really be free of resentment.

With all of it churning around in his head, something moved him to ask, "Are you and Ranran close?"

"Why wouldn't we be?" There were still papers in Gi Changning's bag that Ji Ran had set her, stacked in order, and it was those papers that had got her end-of-term results to something she could show people.

She glanced at him. She could hear a man enjoying himself at the prospect of trouble with a single strand of hair, and Gi Zhao had not bothered to hide it, so she came straight back at him. "Do you think it would only be normal if we went on fighting like something off the television?"

Gi Zhao felt the accusation land on his head like a dropped pan, scratched hard at his newly cropped hair and waved both hands to say he had truly not meant that, then offered up the last persimmon in the bag with both hands. "I'm innocent. I honestly didn't mean that."

Gi Changning accepted it happily. "Since you're so sincere about it, I forgive you."

Gi Zhao had nothing to say.

He saw it now. The girl had simply been working him for a persimmon. "Thank you so much," he said flatly.

She was gracious. "Not at all."

Behind them in the kitchen the chopping and the simmering went on without a break. Outside, fireworks and bangers put together a noisy, untidy chapter of their own.

Gi Changning put the last of the persimmon away in one bite and pulled out a wet wipe for the white bloom on her fingers, and for a moment the wipe became a blue checked handkerchief, folded into a neat square, and a round and lovely old woman was opening it out and taking a dried persimmon and a lump of rock sugar from inside, and saying in that slow way the old have, "Sugar and a persimmon and then it's New Year. Our Ningning is a year older."

Yes. New Year's Eve had come round. Happy New Year.

---

That evening, Liang Cheng and her family came to the Jis for New Year for the first time.

In the big kitchen Liang Cheng had three men making food and folding dumplings. The Ji pair hardly need describing. Getting something dumpling-shaped that did not burst in the pot counted as a success. What was surprising was her husband, whose fingers were remarkably deft and who could turn out a beautiful fat-bellied dumpling in a few movements.

Beside her was a small china bowl of sterilised coins, ten of them, for the sake of ten out of ten, and whoever got one would have luck all year.

Liang Shuo was spending New Year in somebody else's house for the first time and was not shy about it. He was up and down and everywhere. A minute ago he had been on the rug with his Lego, and now he was at his mother's elbow with a small hand out, trying to steal a dumpling with a coin in it.

She slapped it away without ceremony. "Can't you see your sister's busy? Go and help her and stop getting under my feet."

He was used to having his hand slapped at home and was not offended. He ran off giggling to Ji Ran, and in front of her the mischief went out of him and he asked nicely, "Will you come and play with me?"

Ji Ran was setting sweets and nibbles out in little dishes. "What would you like to play?"

He was up at once, taking her hand and towing her out. "Let's make a snowman."

The villa had a garden front and back. The back one was large and had once had planting in it, and the Ji men never hired anyone to look after it, so there was more weed than flower. Eventually it looked such a mess, and neither of them being men for detail, they simply had the lot dug out, leaving bare ground. What anyone else thought of it did not trouble them. They took the view that standing is something you earn and not something a house gives you. The front had been cleared, a path swept down the middle and the snow banked on both sides, and the last of the sun lay on it in a wide wash of gold going into red.

Liang Shuo did not feel the cold. He gathered a handful and rolled a big ball along the ground in proper style, except that the shape of it was poor, round at one end and pointed at the other, like a cone.

Ji Ran crouched beside him and helped round the snowman's belly off, then made a smaller ball for on top.

He found two bare twigs and planted them carefully at the sides for arms, and then came up against the eyes. "What do we use for the eyes?"

Ji Ran thought, went to the kitchen and came back with a carrot and two grapes. "How about these?"

"Yes!" He put the eyes and the nose on, decided it was still not enough, went back to the sitting room for his own hat and put it on the snowman's head.

The hat was black with a five-pointed star on the point of it, trembling softly in the air.

One snowman finished, the large one and the small one were both worn out, and their hands burned from the cold. Ji Ran looked at it, and her eyes seemed to travel a long way back. She had been a nuisance herself once, pulling her mother and father out by the hand because she wanted to build a snowman.

Time had got on, though. It really had been a long while since she played in snow.

Liang Shuo tugged her sleeve and looked up at her with his eyes shining. "You look nice when you smile."

Ji Ran started, and only then noticed that her mouth had not come down the whole time. "Shall we do another one?"

He was overjoyed, and counted on his fingers. "Yes. I want to make Mum, and Dad, and Granny and Grandad, and Uncle, and my brother, and my two sisters, and then one of me."

Both his parents worked long hours, so Liang Shuo was mostly with his grandparents and rarely came to the Jis, which meant he had rarely met Gi Changning. But he knew he had two sisters. One of them could teach him extremely cool street dance, and the other got him praise from his teacher.

Both of them very, very good sisters.

The sun went down and the fireworks came up.

A row of snowmen large and small stood in front of the villa, and the red lanterns under the eaves swung in the wind.

Inside that black, white and grey house, the window cuttings were bright red, cushions in every colour had been thrown about the sofa, and the dining table carried every kind of home cooking. Over the New Year gala announcing itself on the television, Liang Cheng called out, "Ranran, dinner!"

Ji Ran lit incense for her mother and her grandmother. The thin smoke drifted and seemed to carry what she was thinking somewhere far off. There were already a few sticks in the burner, going light and dark, and the one Ji Ran lit was lit for Gi Changning.

The bell went. Midnight.

As Ji Ran sent out her happy New Year, Gi Changning's happy New Year arrived.

And after that, the Gis got a message from Ji Ran, and the Ji men got Gi Changning's awkward enquiry after their health.

It really was a good year. Wasn't it?