Chapter 41

Once the video of the show went online, it set off a small wave in the trade.

Nothing complicated about why. The range of styles was too wide.

Shanqing is a designer who made her name on Chinese street style, and in that small show she used a gift she had never shown anybody. Everyday clothes or evening dress, formal or casual, all of it held the eye, and everybody was sorry the show had not been open.

What actually took it beyond the trade was a different topic, called Other People's Mothers. Under it a marketing account reposted the video, and the envy was not hidden at all.

The day after the coming-of-age, a professional team finished the edit and blurred Gi Changning and Ji Ran out on purpose, and the account Shanqing posted it with the line happy eighteenth birthday to my daughters.

Most of the people who follow her are designers in the trade, or people who liked Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun, and at first the comments were calm, mostly views on the clothes and a birthday wish in passing. Until the marketing account reposted it.

"So this is what other people's mothers are like. I'm in love."

"I nearly cried at the end. I remembered my own eighteenth. I bought a steamed bun in the school canteen and stuck a toothpick in it for a candle. If I ever have a child, they're getting a proper one."

"There's no need for any of that. Rich families can do the ceremony thing. The rest of us can't afford it."

"If you can't afford it, say happy birthday to your child properly. You've no money. Have you no mouth either?"

And slowly the uglier voices started coming up.

"The last outfit looked familiar. I did a comparison to see whether it's the costume from Monster."

"It is. I overlaid them. Identical. So one of the birthday girls is NN?"

"The build is right for NN. She said on a livestream that her mum makes clothes. Hang on. NN's mum is a designer at Anzhi?"

"Then who's the other one? Same birthday. They can't be twins, surely?"

"They're not. Take it from somebody who knows, those two families are complicated. The other one is this year's top science scorer in our province. How complicated? Well. Have you heard of babies being swapped at birth?"

---

At the company, their mother glared at her phone, annoyed with herself. "How did I forget to cut the last one as well?"

Monster was the piece that genuinely took Gi Changning and Meng Lai beyond the dance world. Hard, with a strong idea behind it, technically full and performed perfectly, and not in the least like something people under eighteen could have built. The programme did well and went out on the provincial channel, and a lot of well known dance companies covered it, and Monster went off properly. If the two of them had not had to go away and train for the arts exams and let the heat die down, it might have gone further still.

Which meant that the moment the last costume came out, it was as good as taking the mask off.

Gi Changning found it entertaining. "It's all right that you didn't cut it. It's not as if I'm in hiding. Ranran, Ranran. Somebody wants you to livestream your study method."

After Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun succeeded, their mother was given her own studio and project team at the company, and the three of them were sitting in the rest room.

Ji Ran was going through a book on art. She may need some drawing technique behind her later, and had been wondering whether to take a short crash course. She looked up. "Me? You know perfectly well how dull my studying is."

Gi Changning put her phone down and looked at her. "Teacher Ji. Please don't do yourself down."

Teacher Ji's own study method really is dull. It is explaining something to somebody else that brings her alive. She said it smiling. "Why don't you share how you got from three hundred to five hundred in six months?"

Gi Changning's hand went to her stomach before she could stop it, and the bitter taste of medicine came back into her mouth. "No thank you. Everything I suffered in that last push was me paying the bill for my rebellious phase."

Their mother listened to two girls talking as if the gossip online did not touch them, and sighed. "The pair of you."

"Don't worry, Mum." Gi Changning said it like somebody who has been there. "You won't even need a week. Three days and nobody will remember any of it."

As if their mother did not know the internet remembers things for about three seconds. What hurt was her children being pointed at in that gossiping tone. It could do them no real harm and it still sat badly with her.

Gi Changning gave Ji Ran a discreet look.

Ji Ran understood, closed the book, went over to their mother and laid a hand flat across her screen.

Their mother looked up.

Ji Ran smiled obediently. "Our fathers should be ready by now. Shall we all go and look at the foundation?"

She was on her feet at once, ringing Gi Changning's father to ask what time they were leaving.

Ji Ran turned round and winked at Gi Changning.

Gi Changning could not help asking quietly, "I'm older than you. Why does Mum only listen to you and never to me?"

Ji Ran answered placidly. "My mental age is probably higher."

Gi Changning had no answer to that at all.

---

Besides the show their mother put on, Ji Ran and Gi Changning had one more coming-of-age present, from both fathers and their brother together.

On the day, once the party was over and all the classmates had gone, Ji Changfeng produced a document with great seriousness and set it in front of them. "Father, Uncle Gi and I have set up a charitable foundation for burns recovery in the two of your names. It doesn't take outside donations. The foundation runs it, and anybody who meets the conditions can apply to it for help."

Gi Changning's father touched the deep-set scars on his face without meaning to. It took him far too long to get out from under it. Now he can face the looks and the remarks, whether they are there or not, whether they are kindly or unkind or contemptuous, and not care at all. The bosses he deals with call him Mr Gi and treat the scars as though they were not there. But a great many people have not been as lucky as he has, and he wanted to do something.

Their mother had had a little to drink, and perhaps that was it, because her nose and her cheeks were slightly flushed and something bright moved in her eyes. She reached for Liang Cheng's hand beside her, and her voice went out with her breath. "How good. If only."

If only there had been something like this back then.

Ji Ran and Gi Changning took that document, with everything it carried, almost reverently.

Gi Changning's father smiled gently beside them and said nothing at all, and put out one broad hand and patted his daughters twice on the shoulder.

Light as a feather. Heavier than anything there is.

The foundation's head office is in Pingchuan and it had been running half a year.

Coming out of the lift you see the sign. The Ningran Burns Recovery Foundation.

The two names in order of birth.

Ji Changfeng had taken a whole floor of an office building for it. The fit-out is clean and there is care in every corner of it, the staff are in proper suits, and as people move about there is a seriousness to the place that nobody has had to state.

Near midday the staff were ordering in or going down to eat, and while they were waiting for the lift it brought up a man who looked somewhere in his sixties or seventies.

His T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. He came out of the lift with a slip of paper pinched between his fingers, at a loss.

One of the staff caught on, waved the others off to their lunch, and asked him, "Hello. Are you looking for the Ningran Burns Recovery Foundation?"

He licked his lips. He looked at her suit and rubbed his palms on his clothes without thinking before he handed the slip over, and said, in standard Chinese with his dialect through it, "That's right. Dr Liang at the People's Hospital sent me. She said I could apply here for help."

As he talked he wiped his eyes, and could not keep it out of his voice. "There's nothing else I can do. My granddaughter is only seven. We've used everything we'd saved and borrowed everything there was to borrow. Kind people have given us money and it's still not enough. There's nothing else I can do."

The woman sat him down and poured him a glass of water. "Please don't worry."

Gi Changning had been on her way out to lunch. She stopped where she was, took Ji Ran's hand without thinking, and looked at the old man's bent back, and said quietly, "I've never really felt it before."

Until now.

She thought about it. "It's like a weight coming down on my shoulders. And it hasn't frightened me. It's made me want to get on with it."

On the way out Ji Ran photographed the sign and kept it on her phone. She understood what responsibility was when she was very small. This time she was going forward not only for her family but for a great many people who are still to come.

That is probably what growing up really is.