Chapter 22

At the Mengs' flat, Meng Lai was sprawled over her desk with nothing to do. The holiday homework under her was crushed out of shape, the scrap paper was covered in aimless lines, and the answer booklet lay to one side. She could not even be bothered to copy from it.

It was a working day and both her parents were out. Before they left they had told her to get on with her homework and not leave the lot to a sleepless night before term started.

A moment ago, still at work, her mother had sent her a message. "You remember Auntie Zhao? She's recommended a coaching school to me. Her boy goes there. The teaching's supposed to be very good. Shall I put you down for it?"

Auntie Zhao was a colleague of her mother's and came to the flat often. Her son was the same age as Meng Lai, though they were not at the same school. He was at a key school.

Meng Lai did not want to answer.

A few minutes later another message came. "Lailai, I've asked around. That school is especially good at bringing maths marks up. Your maths is middling, so there's a lot of room there. And I'll put you down for geography too. And I remember you keep wandering off the point in your essays, so we'll add an essay class. What do you think?"

Meng Lai was like Gi Changning in being no good at maths, except that thanks to her brilliant sister her foundations were sound, and a good deal better than Gi Changning's. Her trouble was that she had a poor sense of space. Geometry made her head swim, and that dragged her geography down with it.

Her mother looked as though she were asking, and had in fact already decided. Meng Lai read the words on the screen and could have told you with her toes that her mother was regretting how few days of the holiday were left, and what good coaching time had been wasted.

She turned the phone face down on the desk, out of sight. She had nothing against coaching schools. What she hated was the feeling of being pushed along.

As the younger child, Meng Lai had a happy childhood. Her parents kept the wind and rain off her from in front and her sister covered for her from behind, and every wrong turn her parents had taken with the elder girl they made up for on the younger.

Meng Lai never had a rebellious phase. While other children were smoking and drinking and perming and dyeing their hair and skipping lessons, she danced and was happy, with the odd harmless bit of mischief. Which, oddly enough, left her as free as a weed.

So when a stronger push came along to change what she wanted, Meng Lai found herself feeling exactly like a rebellious teenager.

You want me to go to coaching. Well, I won't. I just won't.

Her phone buzzed.

She was lying over the desk arguing it out with herself when the buzz went off next to her ear. She thought her mother had probably decided two subjects were not enough and was adding a third, and then she saw it was from Gi Changning.

Ning: Meng Lai, have you ever thought about the arts exams?

The arts exams?

The arts exams.

Meng Lai slowly sat up, with no thought for the homework she had crumpled, and read those three words over and over like an infant who has just learned to read. Her fingers moved, and in the end what she sent back was, "What?"

---

Gi Changning had gone downstairs to see Ji Ran off, and was walking home. Since the New Year the temperature had been creeping up, and the snow heaped at the roadside had melted into water and frozen again into a thin skin that popped under your feet like beads.

The edges of her snow boots were going dark with water, and she did not appear to notice. She was humming a tune, and if you listened it was Good Luck Is Coming.

She had no gloves. Half of each hand was pulled up inside her sleeve, leaving only the fingertips out to type. She scrolled through what the internet had to say about the arts exams, tapped an advert by accident, and a robot popped up to greet her. "Hello there. Add the teacher's contact and get this year's new arts exam rules."

Meng Lai's reply arrived.

Lai: What?

Gi Changning backed out of the page, went to her messages, and her red frozen fingers flew over the keypad. "The arts exams. Don't you know about the arts exams?"

She did not wait for an answer. In her head she was already enrolled at the Capital Dance Academy, and she sold it to Meng Lai like an old hand at the market. "Neither of us has good marks. We could work ourselves sick and never get near the front step of a top national university. The arts exams are different. They want lower academic marks, so we push hard in the last term of our third year and that's enough. And we've both got the training. The road ahead is wide open."

Possibly Gi Changning had stunned her, because Meng Lai was two full minutes answering.

Lai: Ning, love. Are you being just a bit optimistic?

Honestly. A girl heading for a diploma telling a girl heading for a second-tier place that the arts exams will get them to the gates of the best universities in the country. Was she serious?

Gi Changning, thoroughly delighted with herself, switched to humming Good Days and entirely missed the polite warning buried in Meng Lai's line. She walked into the stairwell, the cold wind shut outside, and typed at her leisure. "It's not optimism. It's absolute confidence in my own abilities."

---

Meng Lai was rather frightened by Gi Changning's confidence.

But when Gi Changning said the words, it came back to her all at once that there is more than one road to university. Her own school had arts classes, on the floor above the ordinary ones. In the first term of her second year she had seen a coach pull up at the school gate, and the art students had filed onto it one by one with their boards and their paints, off to a stretch of residential training.

She tried hard to remember what their faces had looked like.

Delighted? Nervous? Hopeful?

She could not recall. What she could recall was the girl next to her muttering away, half envying them for not having lessons and half marvelling at the pressure they were under. The arts exams are full of things you cannot control. You can paint for three years and still have a bad day, fail the provincial exam, fail the school's own exam, and then be stuck deciding whether to go round again or go back to the ordinary classes and be sensible.

The arts exams ask for an enormous amount. Your energy, your place in the academic syllabus, and fees on the high side.

Meng Lai was not worried about the money. Her family was reasonably comfortable, and she had her own share of the advertising fees she and Gi Changning split from the videos. Money was the last of it. What she was afraid of was not being able to pay the price of failing.

If she sat the ordinary exam, she would put dancing down for now, go to the coaching school, and pour the whole of the next year and a half into work. She might get an ordinary first-tier place, and at worst a private third-tier one. Then, as her family wanted, she would pick a safe all-purpose subject, go through university like anybody else, and sit the civil service exams.

If she took the arts route, at her level she would certainly, certainly fall behind in her academic subjects, and her marks were poor enough already. After that there were two roads. One was a place at a dance academy she actually wanted. The other was failing and repeating the year.

She was not Gi Changning. She could not put everything down and gamble, and throw away what she already had.

And yet somewhere low down a spark had landed in dry grass, and everything round it was slowly catching.

The phone buzzed again and brought her out of her stare. She unlocked it. Not Gi Changning. Her mother, chasing her. "Why haven't you answered me?"

Meng Lai looked at it, put a hand against her forehead and, for no reason she could name, began to laugh.

What had she just been doing?

She asked herself.

She had been silently refusing to be sent to a coaching school, and then one question from Gi Changning about the arts exams and she was seriously weighing up whether she could give up dancing.

"Well. Turns out you don't love dancing as much as you thought, Meng Lai."

She said it to herself, and opened her mother's messages and typed. "Mum, don't sign me up yet. There's something I want to talk to you about when you're home."

That evening her mother came back from work with a few cold dishes and some cakes, and called for help the moment she was through the door. "Lailai, get two plates and put these out. The layer cake's for you. I'll make some porridge in a minute and we won't cook tonight. Rice porridge or red bean?"

Meng Lai took the bags from her. "Rice. Red bean sits badly with you in the evening, doesn't it?"

"Your dad likes red bean." Her mother changed her shoes and went to wash the rice, then put her head back round the door as if she had remembered something. "Don't eat too much of that cake or you won't want your dinner."

"I know."

Meng Lai looks very like her mother and is nothing like her in temperament. Her mother does everything at a gallop, is sometimes unreasonable and sometimes has more reasons than anybody alive, and when she gets going on a telling-off nobody can get a word in edgeways.

Even Meng Lai's brilliant sister could not out-argue her mother.

The Mengs eat early. Her father can generally sit straight down as he comes in, and afterwards the two of them go down to the garden to walk or do a round of taiji. The evening is laid out neatly.

The television was on the Pingchuan channel, just in time for the forecast, and when that short item had finished the local news came on.

Nobody in that house keeps quiet at the table. Her father ate and shook his head over it. "Is it really that hard on children in middle school now?"

On the news, a boy from a middle school had gone down to the sea and been pulled back by somebody who saw him. On camera his parents could not speak for crying, and off camera the reporter was gently trying to comfort them.

Nobody answered him. Something was wrong. He looked at his wife and his daughter and the awkwardness on both their faces. "What's going on with you two?"

"Nothing." Meng Lai put her chopsticks down and looked at her mother's blank face. "Can I not go to the coaching school?"

Her mother did not get angry. She had known perfectly well her daughter did not want to go, and she had wanted to make the case, because the exams were a year and a half off and a year and a half of hard work for a smooth life afterwards is a very good bargain. She asked seriously, "Why not?"

Meng Lai sat up straight. "I want to try the arts exams."

"The arts exams?" Her mother put down her bowl and frowned. She had expected her daughter to defend her right to dance after school, and had several arguments ready. Where had the arts exams come from?

Meng Lai nodded weakly. "Mm."

Her mother knew about the arts exams, of course. Colleagues of hers had children who went that way, and of course the ones who got in boasted about it all over the office and the ones who did not said nothing. In the end it is less dependable than the ordinary route.

The table had gone cold again, and her father stepped in quickly. "Lailai, will you tell your dad what the arts exams are?"

Meng Lai stole a look at her mother, and explained the shape of it briefly.

When she had finished, her father said, "That sounds grand. Our Lailai's a lovely dancer, and she's won prizes. She'd sail through it."

Her mother rolled her eyes. "Do you know how many arts candidates there are across the country? Do you know how many of them have danced since they were small? Do you know what's in the provincial exam, or how hard it is? Do you know how many subjects there are to choose from? You don't know the first thing about it."

Her father had nothing to say.

He had never claimed to know.

Having got that out, her mother felt a good deal calmer. She ignored her husband, who was still trying to smooth things over, and asked Meng Lai, "Do you really want to sit the arts exams?"

Meng Lai said, "I do."

"And if it doesn't end the way you want?"

"Then I'll repeat the year and do exactly as you say. A safe all-purpose subject, and the civil service afterwards."

"You won't regret it?"

Meng Lai's heart was going like a drum. "I won't regret it."

"All right." Her mother picked up her chopsticks and tapped the porridge Meng Lai had not finished, perfectly calm about it. "I agree. Eat your dinner."

Meng Lai had nothing to say.

She blinked stupidly. "What?"

Agreed? Agreed? She had been braced to argue every point and have a blazing row, and her mother had agreed as easily as that?

She ate the rest of her dinner in a daze, and drifted into the kitchen like a sleepwalker.

Her mother was washing up, and seeing the state of her pushed the clean bowls along. "What are you standing there for? Put them back in the cupboard. No more use than your father."

Her father, working hard at tidying the living room, objected strongly. "What do you mean, no use?"

Putting the bowls away woke Meng Lai up. She went up on her toes and sidled over to her mother like a cat, and said stickily, "Mum."

Her mother dried her hands and took off her apron, ready to go down and do taiji with her husband. She put a hand on Meng Lai's head and pushed her aside. "That's enough of that. You'll be an adult on your next birthday and you're still wheedling. And I've got one condition about these arts exams. Fail it and you go to the coaching school anyway."

Meng Lai hugged her round the middle, delighted. "Go on, go on."

"There's a test when you go back after the holiday, isn't there?" her mother said. "Right. In that test you get a hundred or more in maths. If you don't, don't blame your mother for being hard."

Meng Lai's maths hovered around eighty. There was a week left before term. She shut her eyes and threw her heart over. "Fine."

Her mother looked at the face of a girl marching nobly to her death, and could not help laughing. "Go and do your homework and stop holding up our exercise."

Meng Lai gave a couple of foolish giggles, turned on her heel and shot into her room like a happy bird.

Her parents went out. Her father had the rubbish in one hand, and while they waited for the lift he had to ask. "You'd already decided to let her do it. Why be so stern about it?"

The lift pinged.

Her mother leaned over to his ear. "Don't you think Lailai's lovely when she rebels?"

Everybody else's children had a rebellious phase. Her elder daughter was as calm as a robot and had her life mapped out more clearly than her father's hairline, which left her parents nothing whatever to do. Never mind rebelling, from the third year of primary school there was not one wheedle out of her. Her younger daughter trotted about behind the elder one looking cheerful and vacant, and probably could not have spelled rebellion.

The lift went down.

The exams matter. Choosing a subject matters. A steady job matters. It all matters. And does what the child wants matter?

Her mother thought she would rather give her children room to get it wrong than have one of them, years from now, regret the choice made tonight.

The small worries of being somebody's parent.

---

At the Gis', Gi Changning finished her dinner and sat in her room redoing the paper Ji Ran had set her.

The paper itself was covered in working, so she had to use a notebook and copy the answers across. You do not know until you go back over it. Going back over it, she wanted to travel into the past and ask herself what exactly she had been reading.

Asked for the union, gave the intersection. Asked for the mean, misread the decimal point. Asked for the length of CE, worked out CB.

Shameful. Shameful. Shameful. How had she had the nerve to hand that to Ranran?

Her phone buzzed twice.

Meng Lai.

Lai: Ning! Just now! My mum said yes to the arts exams!

Lai: She says she'll go and talk to my form teacher after term starts, and she'll find me a coaching place. There's nobody like your mother.

Lai: Ning, are your family all right with it?

Gi Changning had put the idea to her parents over dinner. The two of them knew nothing about the arts exams and were still only half clear after asking some questions, but they said they backed her. And when they heard the idea had come from Ji Ran, they went firmer still, and what little doubt there was went out of them.

It went through so easily you could hardly believe it, which tells you what Ji Ran's name is worth.

The shop was doing well and her mother's orders ran to the end of the first month. The pair of them waved a hand and told her not to worry about money, and to be sure she found a coaching school she could trust.

Her parents backing her with no conditions on it made Gi Changning's throat ache. They would not spend money on an air conditioner for the flat, and they did not so much as blink at arts exam fees, and they paid up without one word of complaint.

Could she be worth that much trust, she asked herself.

Gi Changning, who had never respected a rule in her life, doubted it for one second and then settled.

Yes. She could.

Her parents were holding up the sky with everything they had so that a dream was within reach. What reason did she have not to?

She read Meng Lai's messages and could hear how excited she was through the words. "Congratulations. Of course my family said yes. I'm their little treasure."

Lai: Wow, you are so pleased with yourself.

Lai: I'm jealous. Mum says I have to get a hundred or more in maths in the test after the holiday, and then she'll talk to my form teacher about the arts exams. If I don't, it's coaching school morning and night.

Lai: Except I've never had a hundred in maths since I started high school. Never mind a hundred, I've never had ninety. Weeping.

Gi Changning teased her. "The test after a holiday can't be hard, surely? I don't think your mum's gone easy on you. I think she's opened the floodgates."

Lai: It is not easy.

As a fellow sufferer in maths, Gi Changning felt it in her bones. Then she had an idea. "Ranran's coaching me in maths right now. Shall I ask if you can come too?"

Meng Lai knew that Ranran was the other half of the swapped daughters, and from what Gi Changning had told her, that she was a genuine prodigy, who had hauled a dunce who scored twenty in maths all the way up to seventy. Meng Lai bowed down before that.

Lai: Honestly, I'm tempted.

Lai: Quietly, though. Would it be all right?

Meng Lai looks careless and as if nothing touches her, and is in fact very considerate. She had never met Ji Ran, and she was afraid that with Gi Changning in the middle, Ji Ran would have to say yes whether she wanted to or not, which would do no good at all to the two of them.

Gi Changning shook her head and wrote back. "That's a small mind judging a great one. How dare you underestimate our Ranran."

And with that she messaged Ji Ran and set the whole thing out from beginning to end in a few short lines.

---

Jinhua Gardens.

Ji Ran found a cushion and sat cross-legged in the living room with her laptop on the coffee table, going through everything online about the dance arts exams, copying as she went into a document and sorting it under headings.

What is online is a mess, with advertising mixed in among the information, and that got badly in the way of collecting anything useful.

To be sure she had missed nothing, she had gone to her form teacher, Sha Kesheng, as well.

Behind her in the kitchen her father and her elder brother were clearing up and talking now and then about the company. Not loudly, not quietly. It gave that very large living room something human.

Ji Ran picked up the papers at her elbow and clipped them together by subject. On top were the brightly coloured leaflets, with a few A4 sheets underneath. The leaflets were well designed. They said what was good about each place briefly and made you want to know more, and even Ji Ran, who is not easily moved, found herself tempted after one read.

These were the best regarded arts coaching schools in Pingchuan, which she had asked her elder brother to gather. Mostly places dedicated to dance students, with a few of the big general ones that also cover broadcasting, directing, music and acting.

Her brother is thoroughly reliable. He had not only got the leaflets, he had assessed each place overall on facilities, how many of their students got in, what the students said, what the parents said, how good the teachers were and what the fees came to, and laid the numbers out in clear rows and columns.

Taking that solid stack of paper from him, Ji Ran thought her brother had not earned his reputation for nothing.

Sha Kesheng had channels of her own. She is direct, and Ji Ran is her own student, so she wasted no words and told her everything she knew about every school, including which one talked the biggest, which had the worst accommodation and which had the weakest teaching staff. She was not gentle about any of it.

Set against her brother's material, Ji Ran could check and sort very fast, and a proper document was taking shape.

Her brother came past, finished in the kitchen. "Want a hand?"

"Yes." Ji Ran gathered the useful pages into one pile. She would scan them upstairs later and save herself the typing. Several months in, she was not shy with them any more. "Could you find me the arts exam rules from previous years?"

He pushed up his sleeves and sat down on the carpet without a thought for what it might do to a very expensive pair of trousers, found the file and handed it over. "There."

"Thank you."

The rules change every year, each province's joint exam covers different things, and every institution wants something different. Arts candidates have to keep up with it, which is why a coaching school you can trust matters so much.

"We had one leaf in front of our eyes," her brother said. "None of us thought of the arts exams, and they suit Ningning down to the ground."

"Ningning's got the training behind her." Ji Ran put the sheets in order. "The style may be different, but with her gift she'll learn twice as fast for half the work."

Their father came over too and helped gather the leaflets and loose A4 sheets scattered about the room. He did not join in. He read the stirring words on a leaflet and said nothing.

The arts exams. Why had it never occurred to him?

For years he could not get out from under his wife's death, and he pressed what he wanted onto Gi Changning. By the time he had learned a few things, what he wanted was for her to concentrate on her schoolwork.

He had planned to donate a building to a university. Did Ningning actually want to go there? Had he ever asked her what she wanted?

And since Ranran came home, after all that thinking about what he had got wrong, had he given her enough to feel safe on?

No.

He was old. There was no getting round it.

He sat down on the sofa and watched his daughter, busy and bright with it, and his elder son listening with his eyes lowered, and bent his head to hide the relief at the corner of his mouth.

The villa at Jinhua Gardens used to be a building he slept in. Only after Ji Ran came did it slowly turn into a home.

He did not believe he would ever be the one to lead this family anywhere. But he could just about be the harbour they came into out of the weather.

His phone chimed twice.

Ji Ran dug it out of the paper, saw it was from Gi Changning, read the whole thing through and understood at once. She typed, "That's fine, though I can't promise her marks will go up."

She thought about it and added, "If she's coming, the two of you might have to come to Jinhua Gardens. Is that all right?"