DBTHDCAR Chapter 60

Under the pursuit of the instructors, Jiangnan didn’t get far before being dragged back to the school.

In truth, Fan Xia didn’t quite understand what this guy thought he could escape to. “Sure, he might outrun the monk, but can he really run away from the temple¹Idiom meaning: You can’t escape the place that surrounds you; no matter where you run, you’re still caught. Even if you manage to get past one obstacle, you can’t escape the bigger, unavoidable situation?”

“You’re talking big now, huh? Then what were you chasing the other day? Getting yourself hurt like this isn’t enough, but you got Xiaobei hurt too.”

Zhao Jingwen shoved a peeled apple into his hand and tapped his forehead.

“Heh heh, I just… lost my head at the time. I didn’t think about anything else,” Fan Xia said with an embarrassed smile.

Even though Ning Xiaobei had acted as a human cushion, Fan Xia had landed awkwardly and his right leg was cracked. Now it was in a splint; he spent every day either sitting at home or lying down, feeling like he was slowly turning into mold.

Ning Xiaobei, meanwhile, had split his head open and cut his left arm. Together, the wounds had required over twenty stitches.

That day, after Teacher Gu called 120, the ambulance took him and Xiaobei to the town clinic.

The doctor there shrugged: they didn’t have proper equipment for any real examination and had to transfer them. So they were sent back to a top-tier hospital in the city, another long and exhausting journey all over again.

Luckily, the scans showed that Xiaobei’s precious, top-of-the-grade head was completely fine, and the arm injury was only superficial. With a couple more days of rest, it would be fully healed.

When Ning Jianguo first heard that his son had been falsely accused of theft and injured for no reason, he almost lost it and wanted to go find someone to fight. He’d never shown such rage before; Fan Xia had always thought that compared to his hot-tempered uncle, Uncle Ning was a gentle, easygoing man.

But clearly, once you hit the bottom line of a nice guy, even he could go berserk.

Even now, Ning Jianguo didn’t dare tell Grandma Ning about Xiaobei’s injuries. On top of that, he had too many other things to worry about.

The homes on Jiande Lane were slated for demolition.

After Labor Day, the demolition office officially moved into their neighborhood committee and started going house to house to discuss relocation terms.

Although Grandma Ning no longer resisted outright and let Ning Jianguo handle the compensation talks himself, whenever she saw those workers with measuring tools and safety helmets pointing at the old Ning family house, she couldn’t help silently crying, and nothing could stop her.

Summer was already half over, and her chest still felt empty. Since Old Lady Shui Xiang had passed, no one had brought her flowers anymore.

Shanghai had plenty of flower shops; there were two right at the entrance of Jiande Lane. But they only sold roses, lilies, and carnations; not the cheap five-cent or one-yuan style flowers she wanted. Even if Ning Jianguo wanted to buy some for her, he couldn’t.

Later, Xiao Mei accompanied Grandma Ning to Old Lady Shui Xiang’s old house, only to find it had already been demolished. Now it was just a big construction site.

Carved wooden doors, green-glazed jars, lintels engraved with little angels and honeysuckle flowers were tossed across the floor. After coming home, Grandma Ning grew increasingly sullen, which worried Xiao Mei terribly.

Since the last incident, Xiao Mei had completely cut off contact with her family.

Apparently, her brother and sister-in-law had another clash with the One-Eyed man in the countryside because they refused to return someone’s bride price. They insisted they had also been tricked by him, unaware that he was still married, and he even turned it around, claiming they were trying to commit bigamy. In the end, her family had to return half the bride price, while the other half was labeled as Xiao Mei’s emotional damages.

Of course, Xiao Mei herself never saw a single cent. So in the end, her brother and sister-in-law still came out ahead, financially speaking.

After that episode, Xiao Mei’s heart had completely hardened. She would never send money home again and considered that branch of her family as if it didn’t exist.

Now, in her mind, Grandma Ning was her only family. She had sworn before the Guanyin Bodhisattva statue in the Ning household shrine to serve the old lady for the rest of her life.

Her brother and sister-in-law, having received no money from Shanghai for months, began calling and writing repeatedly.

When they tried the public phone booth on Jiande Lane, the aunt at the corner store, who had witnessed them causing trouble before, simply hung up. As for the letters, Xiao Mei didn’t even glance at them; she shredded them to pieces and tossed them straight into the trash.

Over time, it seemed her family noticed something was off. Without Xiao Mei, their little cash cow, they naturally weren’t willing to let things go. But after getting burned so badly last time, almost ending up in detention, they really didn’t dare come around to cause trouble, so gradually they went silent.

To lift Grandma Ning’s spirits, a while back Ning Jianguo asked Ding Zheyang’s parents to sign her up for a Huangshan retreat, so she and Xiao Mei could escape the summer heat in the mountains.

Shanghai summers are suffocating. A trip to scenic mountains and clear waters might help her feel better.

By the time Grandma Ning returned in September, Xiao Bei’s injuries would have mostly healed. There was no rush to tell her now.

Truly, there’s nothing like a parent’s heart in this world.

Although injured, it was a blessing in disguise: Fan Xia and Ning Xiaobei didn’t have to attend military training.

These days, temperatures in Shanghai were soaring toward 39°C (102°F), and the heavens didn’t seem inclined to cool things down with rain. Even the cicadas were too hot to chirp.

The thought of Xiaobei and himself relaxing in air-conditioned rooms while Ding Zheyang and Chang Leyun stood foolishly under the blazing sun, learning to march in step like little penguins for a week, possibly getting darker than themselves, made Fan Xia delighted beyond measure.

⟦ Simple pleasures are the easiest to enjoy.⟧

— by Ning Xiaobei

“Your mom’s already at the airport; she’s flying this afternoon. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

Zhao Jingwen pulled out his phone, glanced at a text message, and said.

Fan Xia’s injury had finally drawn his mother’s attention. She’d already broken up with that Shenzhen boss and now lived primarily in Hong Kong, running a boutique store with a girl friend.

Fan Xia asked what they sold. The boss herself couldn’t explain clearly— “a bit of this, a bit of that”—but in any case, they weren’t hurting for money.

Ning Xiaobei guessed it might be a cross-border shopping or resale business, though he had no idea whether that kind of work was legal nowadays, so he just pretended not to understand.

Fan Xia’s mother had recently started dating a French man. In front of Fan Jian, she pulled a photo from her wallet to show the two boys.

The man in the photo had blue eyes like a Persian cat, blonde hair, and a dazzling smile. He was over ten years younger than her, muscular all over, a fitness coach.

“Mom, you don’t just speak Cantonese and English now, you even speak French?”

Fan Xia was amazed.

“Love doesn’t need words. We communicate with gestures and eye contact…even if I explained, you wouldn’t understand.”

Mom tapped her cheek with a finger painted bright red with lipstick, striking a girlish pose.

A woman in love always seems like a girl, after all.

“Xiao Xia, do you want a foreign daddy or not?”

Her mother teased him.

Fan Xia shrugged casually.

He didn’t really care which country his future bonus dad came from. If a mixed-race younger sibling came along to show off, that could actually be kind of fun.

Hearing a knock at the door, Zhao Jingwen went to open it.

“Xiaobei! Why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be at home resting?”

“I sleep too much during the day, can’t sleep at night. I came to play with Fan Xia.”

Ning Xiaobei’s left arm was wrapped in thick bandages, and he held a book in his right hand.

Zhao Jingwen, seeing him claim he was here to play while cradling a brand-new textbook, felt a shiver run down his spine.

“I’ll go upstairs to talk to your father. You two just chat. There are cold drinks in the fridge, and cut watermelon on the table. Help yourselves.”

Ning Jianguo’s son was terrifying. Even after hitting his head and bleeding, he insisted on studying.

Zhao Jingwen had been a slacker when he was young, and seeing a top student made him nervous, so he decided to go upstairs and avoid trouble.

“Boss… talk nicely. Put the book down.”

Fan Xia lay on the bed, bored, and hearing Ning Xiaobei’s voice, nearly leapt off the bed in excitement.

This was the first time Xiaobei had come to play with him since they got out of the hospital.

But seeing what he was holding, he expressionlessly flopped back onto the bed.

“I’m tired. I need to rest.”

Fortunately, Ning Xiaobei wasn’t cruel enough to force an injured person to study. Seeing Fan Xia roll his eyes and play dead, he laughed, tossed the book aside, pulled up a chair, and sat by his bedside. Together, they shared some potato chips.

Halfway through, he couldn’t help laughing.

He hadn’t noticed before, but now it was obvious: one with a broken arm and the other with a fractured leg, like a pair of crippled heroes straight out of a wuxia novel. It was amusing.

He told Fan Xia about the observation, and Fan Xia laughed for a long while.

“Of course! We’re brothers in misfortune, always hurt together,” Fan Xia said, his eyes glinting mischievously.

Then he frowned a little.

“Boss, that’s really unfair. How come you and Ding Zheyang set up a trap and didn’t tell me a thing?”

“You’ve got no phone. Ding Zheyang does,” Ning Xiaobei replied, half-teasing.

He said it casually, but the truth was he was worried Fan Xia might blurt something out in a moment of impulse. Compared to him, Ding Zheyang was steadier.

Ning Xiaobei’s gaze drifted to Fan Xia’s right leg, still hanging high from the ceiling. Clearly, this guy really was impulsive.

“My dad bought me a phone, a Nokia 3210 with a colored case. It’s in the drawer. See for yourself,” Fan Xia said, pointing toward his desk with a pout.

“It’s rare that you’ve got something nice and don’t show off at school,” Ning Xiaobei remarked as he pulled open the drawer. Sure enough, an old-school Nokia with a dark green casing and black-and-white screen lay inside.

He picked it up, flicking it lightly in his hand, impressed by its solid, almost walnut-cracking weight.

Ning Xiaobei remembered his own first phone. It was a Nokia too, a gift from Ning Jianguo after he got into X University.

In the years that followed, mobile phones advanced at lightning speed: from black-and-white to color, from candy-bar to flip and slider phones, to Blackberry’s full keyboards. Then Apple burst onto the scene, wiping out Nokia and its old rival Motorola.

“If I carried this thing around, my dad, my mom, and my uncle could track me anytime, anywhere. This thing’s basically a dog leash. I’m not stupid, why would I bring it?”

Fan Xia rolled his eyes.

There was a coin phone downstairs in the dorm; one yuan let you talk for three minutes.

Every night after dinner, Xiaobei would call his dad to check in. Fan Xia thought that was more than enough, besides, he didn’t even want to spend a yuan talking to his uncle…

“You’re always smart in places where you shouldn’t be,” Ning Xiaobei said.

Saying this made him involuntarily remember the terror of being remotely controlled 24/7 by a client in the real world.

“Hey, boss, how did you manage to talk and dial from your pocket at the same time that day?”

Remembering the “Hello, MOTO~~” moment on the playground made Fan Xia’s blood boil with excitement. The thrill of messing up the bad guy’s face in broad daylight was just incredible.

“That’s nothing. I’ll show you a real trick,” Ning Xiaobei said, slipping the phone into his right pocket.

Fan Xia watched him with a smile as Xiaobei’s right hand moved deftly inside the pocket.

“Watch this.”

About half a minute later, Ning Xiaobei pulled the phone out, showing the screen to Fan Xia:

“‘The incense burner in the sun gives off purple smoke…’— Whoa! How did you do that?”

Xiaobei had typed an entire poem on the phone without even looking at the screen. That was a thousand times cooler than dialing from your pocket.

“Not too shabby,” Ning Xiaobei said modestly.

Nothing to brag about, just the classic 9-key blind typing skill of the ‘80s generation.

Back in college, while teachers lectured on the phones, they’d send messages expressionlessly under the desk without anyone noticing.

At the time, China Mobile had a “M-Zone or Dynamic Zone” package; students preferred texting over calling, one message cost a dime, with monthly packages giving discounts. Ning Xiaobei remembered clearly: he had 400 free messages per month, but often exceeded the limit.

Later, when smartphones came along, compared to 90s and 00s kids who preferred full keyboards, Ning Xiaobei still preferred the 9-key input method. It was just a habit of their generation.

“How did you know that Jiang Nan stole the phone from the dorm next door, boss?”

This question had been bugging Fan Xia for days.

“I don’t know for sure, but I felt there was something weird about him. Suspicious behavior,” Ning Xiaobei replied.

Fan Xia patted the pillow beside him, signaling Xiaobei not to sit so far away. They just lay down together, easier for talking.

“Actually, before that, Ding Zheyang had lost money once. On the first day of military training, he treated us to some crispy noodles, right? When we came back from the little store, he tossed the change he found back onto the desk. Later at dinner, he told me twenty yuan was missing.”

“Twenty yuan and he noticed? This guy is way too picky,” Fan Xia said. At home, both he and Zhao Jingwen were careless with money. Their uncle always said a man shouldn’t be petty, and money’s not something to get hung up on. Only old rich men and misers like Harpagon²Harpagon is the miserly father in Molière’s 17th-century play The Miser (L’Avare). He obsesses over money, counts coins for fun, and distrusts everyone around him count coins for fun.

Fan Xia agreed wholeheartedly.

“So that night, after washing up, I marked each of our three desks with a single hair in the gaps. The next day, after training, Ding Zheyang told me someone had yanked his drawer, the one holding his phone and wallet.”

“Boss… you guys are acting like spies,” Fan Xia said, stunned. How come he had been the only one in the dorm completely clueless?

“He couldn’t get anything from us, so he moved on to the next dorms. The guy who stole the phone had been showing off his ringtone in the hallway a few days ago; that’s probably when he got noticed.”

Yesterday, Zhao Jingwen got a call from the school: Jiang Nan’s parents wanted to come apologize and asked if they could arrange a time.

Zhao Jingwen had found out that Jiang Nan came from a double laid-off family. His father repaired umbrellas at the alley entrance, and his mother ran a steamed bun stall, starting work before six in the morning, yet they still sent their only son to an elite high school. Truly a phoenix rising from the grass nest.

For such a promising child, the parents naturally fulfilled any request. Jiang Nan had no other hobbies, just gaming. After the high school entrance exams, he practically lived in the internet café.

Internet cafés cost a lot. His allowance ran out quickly, so he started stealing the money his mom made from selling buns. Once at school, he naturally targeted classmates.

Putting himself in their shoes, Ning Jianguo really couldn’t imagine what Jiang’s parents felt like when they picked their son up from school.

After hearing about the situation, the Zhao and the Ning families didn’t push for a lawsuit and accepted the police’s mediation, taking only a token amount as compensation.

As for apologies? Forget it. They had no intention of forgiving them.

Luckily, both kids were incredibly fortunate. If anything serious had happened, any claim for justice would have been fully justified.

Seeing the other side’s firm stance, Jiang’s parents didn’t insist further.

In the end, the high school went to great lengths to suppress the incident, making sure it didn’t hit the news.

Lately, though, there have been more kids like Jiang Nan, taking risks and doing stupid things just to spend time in internet cafés playing games. Fan Xia had just seen a news report about university students blowing their tuition money at net cafés, spending months online.

“Xiaobei, have you thought about what you want to do in the future?”

The two were silent for a moment. Fan Xia pulled the Walkman from the bedside table, slipped one earbud into Ning Xiaobei’s ear, and put the other in his own. He pressed play.

A slightly raspy female voice came through: 《The Sky is Dark》by  Sun Yanzi.

≈≈≈ Leaving childhood behind, starting your own life.≈≈≈

≈≈≈ Fresh songs, fresh thoughts.≈≈≈

≈≈≈ Capricious and impulsive, when you can’t control yourself ≈≈≈

“Still haven’t figured it out yet.”

Ning Xiaobei slowly shook his head.

In the real world, Ning Xiaobei was in the Finance Department at X University. But if he had the chance to choose again, honestly, he’d rather study engineering.

His six-month internship in Germany left a deep impression on him. If possible, he even wanted to study abroad, to live a completely different life.

“I want to be a police officer.”

Fan Xia turned to look at him, eyes full of hope for the future.

“I didn’t know before, either. But after everything that happened, I think I’ve made up my mind. I want to be a police officer… I want to protect you, protect everyone. I want to uphold justice and punish evil.”

There was a sparkle in the boy’s eyes, brighter than the August sun.

“Do you think I can do it, Boss?”

“You can!”

Ning Xiaobei smiled and nodded. “You definitely can!”

………………

Author’s note:

Combat power ranking in this story: NO.1 Grandma Ning, NO.2 Fan Xia’s mom, NO.3… still unknown haha

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• 1
  Idiom meaning: You can’t escape the place that surrounds you; no matter where you run, you’re still caught. Even if you manage to get past one obstacle, you can’t escape the bigger, unavoidable situation
• 2
  Harpagon is the miserly father in Molière’s 17th-century play The Miser (L’Avare). He obsesses over money, counts coins for fun, and distrusts everyone around him