Chapter 50

Wang Jing examined the unlabelled bottle with considerable doubt. She'd eaten a great deal of black sesame and used an anti-hair-loss shampoo, and neither had done the slightest good.

Still, it was a present Li Lan had brought from Beijing, and developed by a professor at Peking, so presumably it did something. Half convinced, she wrote: All right, I'll try it. How do I use it?

Li Lan: Simple. Wash your hair, draw up one dropper, put it on your hands and massage your scalp for five minutes. A month and I guarantee your hair will be thick and black.

Which made it sound more like a swindle than ever — what serum does that? But Li Lan looked so confident that Wang Jing hadn't the heart to say so. Really? I'll try it tonight after I wash my hair.

She was genuinely torn. Should she use an unlabelled product Lanlan had given her? Lanlan seemed so sure — she hadn't been taken in by somebody, had she? Though she did say her own professor developed it.

Her hair couldn't take much more. Possibly it was the pressure of the second year and a fast class, but since term began it had been coming out in handfuls. The sight of the basin after washing was frightening; all the black sesame and changing shampoos had achieved nothing, and tied up now her hair came to about the thickness of three fingers together. Pitiful.

Well. It could hardly make her bald. Wang Jing arrived at a difficult decision: for friendship's sake, the hair could be sacrificed. Lanlan wouldn't deceive her.

Er — perhaps twice to begin with. Gradually.

She couldn't help looking at Li Lan's thick black hair and felt thoroughly sorry for herself. Li Lan had been under enormous pressure with her studying and hadn't lost any. Why was she the miserable one, shedding hair through the second year — half bald by the third at this rate?

She hadn't inherited her father's genes, had she? Thinking of his gleaming forehead, Wang Jing felt she'd located the cause of losing her hair so young.

While all this was going through her head, Li Lan had complete confidence in what she'd handed over. It was true that she was working with her professor on a hair-loss product — but that was a half-finished thing at present and not something to hand out.

Making a shampoo is easy. Making something the state recognises, with genuine medicinal value, is not — and ordinarily a medicinal product is a long way from the laboratory to trials, let alone production. Dr Wang at the Shanghai garden had got a doctorate out of one anti-hair-loss preparation.

What Wang Jing was holding had cost Li Lan a thousand L1 points before she came, converted at ten to one into an L3 heshouwu product, and with the method as well the whole thing had come to two thousand — a thousand more than her sister's calendula toner. A considerable outlay, now handed over under cover of a story.

Wang Jing being a high-schooler, unaware of any of these complications, believed her.

She put the unlabelled bottle away carefully and wrote, curious: You're doing pharmacy or something, aren't you? Do you study this?

She couldn't remember the exact subject — something obscure.

Li Lan: Natural medicinal chemistry. Hair loss is a condition, so of course there's research on it.

She had in fact chosen natural medicinal chemistry within Peking University's medical division. She'd wavered between chemistry and life sciences, and reading the department's description had felt it was the right fit: natural medicinal substances and their preparations, studied under modern pharmacological theory.

The field is confined to medicinal plants — but with the shop she was a vast resource library in her own right, entirely able to develop each plant's properties to their limit. And as the shop's own catalogue made clear, the medicinal applications were the important ones.

Though, thinking about the calendula toner and the heshouwu serum, she suspected she'd need chemistry as a second subject as well.

The qualification exams were the day after she got back. She'd meant to stay on a few days and travel home with Li Cheng after Yu No. 1 broke up, and her parents were unhappy about her being in Yu city alone and came to fetch her themselves.

With no dormitory place kept for her she'd been staying at a hotel — not strictly alone, since Li Cheng had been staying with her in the evenings, though two girls plainly did not constitute adequate security in their parents' view, and once the exams were done they wouldn't hear of her staying on.

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In the car home she noticed Li Jingyu wasn't with them and asked, and her mother sighed enormously. "We've got him a tutor. He's having a lesson at home."

And then couldn't help unloading. "How does your brother end up with marks like that? Half as good as either of you would do."

It depressed her. If it were heredity you could blame heredity — but both girls did well and needed no chasing, and for some reason he simply couldn't learn it. Had he been idle and careless she wouldn't have minded so much; the trouble was that he did work, which left her nobody to be angry with.

Shout at him, and he plainly did listen in class; she'd talked to him earnestly a number of times. Presumably the studying nerve had never lit, so whatever he learned went straight out again.

He liked his games, but he only played after his homework, and with the notes Li Lan had put together he'd scraped a respectable mark for middle school entrance, and she and Li Quan had paid to get him into a boarding middle school in the city.

She had hoped that middle school material, being different from primary, might bring his marks up. The first monthly exam dealt with that: not improved but worse — third from bottom in the class, two marks off second from bottom.

In the exams that followed he never broke into the top five. From the bottom.

The end-of-term result before the holiday was slightly better — fifth from bottom, and Chen Ying had never expected to be pleased about a fifth from bottom.

Having reached the end of her patience, she'd engaged a teacher from the town middle school as soon as he broke up. Never mind how much he improved by next term — anything to stop him circling in the bottom five. She hardly knew how to face his teachers at parents' evenings.

His marks worried her. As things stood he might scrape into high school and would struggle to reach university, and without university what was he to do? She and Li Quan ran a small supermarket and had no particular influence; they could only take it as it came. At worst they'd earn more and bring him home into the business — hard work, but better than going out as a labourer.

Li Lan listened to all this with no sympathy whatever and laughed privately. His marks were identical to last time round. Seeing her mother genuinely troubled, though, she offered comfort. "Don't worry, Mum. He's only in his first year. He might come to it in a couple of years, like I did."

Before Chen Ying could answer, Li Quan smiled from the driver's seat. "Like you might be difficult."

Her mother took it up. "Quite. Never mind like you — I'd be perfectly content if he passed every subject. All I want is for the three of you to get to university and find something steady, so you're not worn out every day like your father and me."

Getting the three of them to university was her great fixation. With Li Lan already sitting in at Peking, effectively half a university student, and Li Cheng in a fast class and thus one foot through the door, only Li Jingyu was left — and first year of middle school or not, she couldn't help fretting.

Li Lan saw an opening. "Mum, if he can't manage the marks he could go in as an arts student. The mark requirements are much lower — two or three hundred will get you a place."

Both girls having done well, this was the first Chen Ying had heard of it. "Two or three hundred? What do arts students do?"

"Singing, painting, sport, that sort of thing." There were rather more categories than that, but most schools and tutoring outfits in the province only offered those two; the rest were hard to study locally.

Chen Ying was disappointed. "It can't be easy finding work afterwards, though."

Li Lan shrugged. "That depends whether you want your son at university or in work."

Her mother thought about it. She wanted him at university; without a qualification you got nowhere in this world. Get the degree and worry afterwards. "With his marks it'd have to be that. Singing or art, do you think?"

Having talked it through, she felt a thread of hope about him and turned round eagerly to discuss it.

Neither of her parents had perhaps noticed that since the competitions, Li Lan's word carried steadily more weight at home, and both of them now liked to consult her first about anything.

Seeing her mother in better spirits, Li Lan smiled. "It's no use us deciding. You'd have to ask him." Though she expected he'd pick singing.

Her mother saw the sense of it. "We'll ask when we're home. Oh — Lanlan, if he's going in as an arts student, is it better to start early?"

Li Lan nodded. With marks like his, starting early was obviously better than beginning in high school — and it would spare him doing what he'd done last time, deciding in the second year, losing half a year of ordinary subjects to art, and then failing to reach two hundred marks in the entrance exam.

"If he agrees, he could start after term begins. It needn't be often — once or twice a week is enough to lay the groundwork."

Chen Ying nodded thoughtfully. It looked like the only route to university he had.