Chapter 35

After that video call, Ji Ran added Fang Xiaomu's number.

The Gis stayed one night in the village. When the graves had been swept, Gi Changning and her parents cleaned the house through, and her uncle went to his own place and cleared the weeds in front of the door. More than one lot of visitors came, and more than one lot said that they had done well for themselves, and both households were worn out and still got together for dinner that evening.

Your old home is your old home. You do not live there any more, and coming back still settles something.

They set the incense burner out in the yard, laid out fruit and vegetables, and poured two circles of wine on the ground.

The Gi brothers sat in the old house remembering, as if they were back in the days of running about bare-bottomed playing at war.

The uncle's wife and Gi Changning's mother spread a cool mat on the roof of the single-storey part and sat cross-legged cracking melon seeds.

While they were cleaning, Gi Changning found an album nobody had looked through, full of photographs of Ji Ran, and in them she was missing her two front teeth when she smiled. Gi Changning laughed until she folded over, and photographed them and sent them, shaking.

In return she received a sticker of a cat holding a cleaver.

Early the next morning both households drove back to Pingchuan.

After the holiday Gi Changning and Meng Lai began their intensive arts training, which left only Ji Ran going in to school.

Sitting in Ji Changfeng's car, Ji Ran found it rather quiet.

Neither of them is any good at starting a conversation to keep things cheerful, and with the age gap where it is, a student and a corporate drudge have not much in common. Either they listened to the radio in silence, or he started selling his father out and trading one of the old man's embarrassments for a few lively minutes, or one of them asked and the other answered, which came out like a progress report.

When the family were all together, eating or doing something, it was easier. Their father gets freer at home all the time, and when he has finished arguing with Ji Changfeng he starts on Ji Ran, as if all the severity at the company turns into letting himself go the moment he is through the door.

At Wenyuan, Ji Ran let out a quiet breath, and before getting out she checked again. "I'm going to confirm it with my form teacher today. Once I do, none of you can change your minds."

He had one hand on the wheel and very much wanted to ruffle his sister's hair, and she was too far away, so he said regretfully, "Schoolwork matters. Never mind Dad. It's not the first time he's had an attack."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

How on earth did a man come by the habit of running his own father down at every opportunity?

She had her answer, so she let it go, said goodbye and went in through the Wenyuan gates alone.

Before Tomb Sweeping, Wenyuan had held the mid-terms for the second half of the second year, and the papers were marked over the three days of the holiday and the tables were up on every classroom wall first thing.

Ji Ran got to class one and was caught by Xiao Xiao before she could reach her seat. "Ranran."

Xiao Xiao is small and in no way weak. She took Ji Ran's arm, hauled her over to the table, pointed at Ji Ran at the very top and at her own name pressed right up under it, and held up a finger with her thumb against the tip of it. "Look. My physics isn't dragging me down any more."

Ji Ran found Xiao Xiao's physics mark, which was a very good number. "Congratulations."

Xiao Xiao is a bit lopsided across her subjects and her physics really was middling, and over the winter holiday she had a tutor, and it was starting to show.

Ji Ran put her bag down. "I'm going over to class six. Coming?"

"Yes."

The little monkeys of class six were as they always are, in twos and threes waving their arms about over what they had seen in the holiday.

The results table was on the wall by itself and nobody had been near it.

Ji Ran came to the door and the noise stopped for a second, and somebody mid-sentence nearly bit his own tongue. A sports student who gets on well with Gi Changning, all arms and legs, jumped down from between the desks to show off and came over to her in a few strides, met Xiao Xiao's eye without warning and backed up several steps to keep his distance.

The business of the Ji family's swapped daughters is no longer news. Class six has plenty of students from complicated households, and when they first heard they ran a book on how long Gi Changning's temper would hold and whether she would turn the Ji house upside down.

And instead the two of them are thick as anything, go in together and eat together, and have not fallen out at all. More than that, over the parents' evening last term the students of class six received a certain amount of attention from Gi Changning, and their parents saw the legendary Chairman Ji, who never smiles and moves like thunder, talking to Gi Changning's father on very friendly terms, and then walking him to class six before going to class one himself.

So the television dramas are all lies?

Which is why, last term, the way class six looked at Ji Ran was not only the way you look at a genius. There was respect mixed into it, and a few other things nobody could read, and the conclusion arrived at was that you do not cross her.

The sports student knows Xiao Xiao is sweet-looking and not to be trifled with, and kept his distance. "Is Ning really doing the arts exams?"

Ji Ran found Gi Changning's name on the table. The total was very respectable for class six and the position was in the upper half, and if she could hold that and push the academic subjects after the arts exams, she would generally be all right. Ji Ran, reassured, had not brought a phone, so she asked Xiao Xiao to photograph the table and send it to her, and answered him. "She is."

"When's she coming back to lessons?"

"The arts exams are in the first month. Barring surprises, she'll be back in the second term of the third year to push the academic side." Though Ji Ran was going to suggest she change class, because class six is not the right atmosphere for the run-up to an exam, and that she kept to herself. "Can I ask you a favour?"

He scratched his head. "Go on."

"Could you collect Gi Changning's mid-term papers and the answers for me? Just give them to me."

She had looked at the coaching timetable. Lessons Monday to Friday, both days of the weekend off. She had agreed with Gi Changning and Meng Lai that one day a week would go on keeping the academic subjects up. She could coach maths. The arts subjects she could do nothing about, and all she could do was have Gi Changning work through the answers and learn the question types, so that at least the whole lot would not be gone by the time she came back.

"Oh, is that all." He waved a hand. "Easy. I'll bring them over after school."

"There's no need." Ji Ran thanked him properly. "I'll come and get them. Thank you."

---

At the long morning break she went to the staff room to find her form teacher.

Sha Kesheng was revising a lesson plan, and looked up. "Something I can do?"

"Yes." Ji Ran stood in front of her. "I'd like to apply to board next year."

The accommodation at Wenyuan is very good, two to a room with a sitting room, more or less a small flat, and the price is equally impressive and is not covered by her exemption. While she was with the Gis, Ji Ran asked what it cost and decided without hesitation to live out.

But the third year matters. In the ordinary streams at Wenyuan, evening study in the third year is not only study. The teachers work late and teach through it, and Ji Ran did not want to miss that.

When she told her father and her brother she wanted to board, her brother took it reasonably. Her father took it badly, played the poor old man, called himself a lonely widower, got Ji Ran to cook dinner with her own hands, wiped his mouth at the end of it and lay down peacefully in the massage chair. There was a great deal of theatre. He never once said no.

"That's fine." Sha Kesheng stood her pen up and tapped the desk with it. "There's no rush now. Tell me again at the end of term, or at the start of the third year. On your own, or shall I find you a roommate?"

Ji Ran thought about it. "Gi Changning may be living with me in the second term of the third year. Thank you."

Sha Kesheng nodded to say she understood. "Anything else?"

"No." Ji Ran blinked. "Thank you."

---

The Ji building.

In the chairman's office, Ji Ran's father had a visitor.

The visitor's name was Qian Dajin, an old friend who had just signed with Anzhi, and with the contract done he had dropped the seriousness he had worn in the meeting room.

His name smells of money and he in fact trains hard and talks like a cultivated man. He leaned back in his chair, working a string of bodhi beads round his left hand. "With all that noise a while back I thought Anzhi was in for it, and I came prepared to be the coal in your snow. And here I am, an extra flower on a brocade that was doing perfectly well."

"You've waited a long time for me to come a cropper, you old thing." Ji Ran's father was very pleased with himself. "I have the luck. You can't envy your way into it."

Qian Dajin rolled his eyes and stopped working the beads. "Right. I come all this way to Pingchuan, you don't take me to lunch, and you crow at me as well. Let me meet this new designer of yours, if you dare."

He snorted. "Our designer is away gathering material. You don't get to meet her because you'd like to."

"Ji Xuejun." Qian Dajin used his full name with great sincerity. "How is it that the older you get, the less shame you have?"

The two of them met young, in neighbouring pitches at a market, Ji Xuejun selling skirts for young women and Qian Dajin selling trousers for old men. Later Qian Dajin gave it up and saved and went west to grow cotton, and at that time Ji Xuejun's business had just started and he had built Anzhi's first factory, and he gave his first order to a man out west growing cotton on his own and unable to sell it.

Now Qian Dajin has a cotton operation known across the country and work for a great many people out west. His name may be as common as dirt and his character is not. He will bang the table at foreigners who look down their noses at him and tell them he would not care to sell to them, and at the first news that Anzhi was in trouble he travelled a thousand miles in person to talk about working together.

Ji Xuejun could not be bothered with his old friend, checked the time and stood up. "Come on. Lunch is on me."

"Where?" Qian Dajin worked his mouth. "I'll say it now. None of your five-star hotels, where they bring out a scrap of something every two hours. Last time I ate with somebody I was hungry enough to chew the plate."

"I wouldn't take anybody else there." He put his coat on. "My daughter's dad has opened a restaurant and the food is remarkable."

Qian Dajin stared.

Your daughter's dad. Isn't that you?