Early 1995, Xinhua District, Jianghai City.
As one of Jianghai's old districts, this was also the most bustling stretch of the city proper. True, the city's plans had the government set on pushing the downtown area out toward the newer districts, but that was hardly the kind of thing that could be done overnight.
Everyone has a bit of nostalgia in them. Almost anyone who had lived in Jianghai more than five years would still come wandering through Xinhua District on a day out — places like the Shalankou vegetable market, filthy and chaotic but the oldest and biggest in the city; the flea market where old books and old furniture changed hands; the old street with its Jianghai flavor and its stalls selling every kind of local snack; the pontoon bridge still in use even now that the river-crossing bridge had been built. All of it was the stuff Jianghai's citizens knew best.
Streets that had been widened several times over and were still crowded and clamorous, the peddlers' hawking and the customers' haggling, the demolition racket down in the prime real estate, the roar of the construction sites, the long dragon of bicycles at rush hour — these were the first impressions Xinhua District gave a person.
Of course, if you knew the place well enough, once you left the main commercial streets behind you would also see laundry drying between the old residential buildings, old ladies dozing peacefully in bamboo chairs, a bicycle bell ringing now and then, creeper crawling over the walls, a weed-choked little flower bed behind a building, a lone fig tree. And when the distant clamor drifted faintly over, you would instead feel that this place was as peaceful as some hidden paradise.
Of course, it wasn't actually peaceful at all.
Like any city, an old district where the ancient and the prosperous coexisted like this could hardly avoid breeding a few things that lived in the dark — the city's vermin, you might call them. Prostitutes, drugs, guns, gangs: in the police files, this district's numbers for that sort of crime ran high year after year.
But if you kept your nose clean and minded your own business, you might also find that all of it was in fact very far away from you — at most, good material to chew over with your tea.
Because maybe the young man who had just done a hit of heroin would greet you with easy familiarity on his way downstairs; a kingpin sitting on half a kilo of heroin was, in your impression, only a genial neighbor you could joke with every day; the youth who had just come back from chopping someone up looked to you like nothing more than a kid who'd finished junior high and was running around looking for work... until one day they vanished for no reason at all, and the most you'd manage while chatting with someone was a careless line like, "Oh, he probably went off to Hainan Island to do business."
The world is very complicated. But actually, it's also very simple.
Xinghui High School, an old-name school with the highest advancement rate in Jianghai City, stood on one edge of this old district where dragons and snakes mingled.
Dusk, in a dead-end alley near Xinghui High School.
"Ptooey—ptooey, fuck! Let's see where you... think you can run this time..."
Sunlight slanted across the gloomy mouth of the alley. Deep inside it, five youths who looked sixteen or seventeen were pressing forward with clubs and sticks in their hands, and cornered in the alley was a short-haired girl of fourteen or fifteen, a baseball bat in her grip, limping backward step by step.
Her left leg looked badly hurt and there was blood bruised at the corner of her mouth, yet facing five of them her eyes were still stubborn and burning; if not for the obvious swell of her chest, most people would have taken her for a handsome boy.
The leader of the five was a fat boy in a Xinghui uniform. Spitting blood from his mouth, cursing as he closed in: "Liu Huaisha, weren't you so fucking tough? What happened to all that toughness now? Shit, are you going to do it yourself or do we do it for you... holy fuck—"
"You dead pig," the girl named Liu Huaisha shot back, giving up not an inch as she backed away. "If you've got the guts, come at me one on one!"
"One on one! Go die, you— is your family in the underworld or something?" the fat boy cursed. "Back up, back up, how much further do you think you can fucking back up? Let me tell you, we brought all our gear today, I even brought a camera along, and today we're going to strip you naked and take a few pictures, see if you dare act tough after that..."
Not far behind her the alley dead-ended. The girl bit down hard on her lower lip and gripped the bat tighter, ready to fight for her life. And just then, a dark figure appeared at the mouth of the alley.
People did pass by outside that dead-end alley now and then, so it was nothing strange — but when the figure stayed put, it meant someone was standing at the alley mouth watching the show. The fat boy turned his head and saw a shortish youth standing there. He himself had already gone up into high school, and this kid was plainly still in junior high, but after a few looks he recognized him.
"Shit, you're that Gu Jiaming guy, aren't you? What, you want to stick up for your buddy?"
From the day she entered the school, Liu Huaisha had gotten into fight after fight there and made a name for herself far and wide. The fat boy, though he was in the high school section, knew that she had two sworn friends: one was the pretty good girl Ye Lingjing, and the other was Gu Jiaming, mediocre to the extreme in every possible way.
Looking at him now, the kid really had nothing remarkable about him at all: ordinary looks, and at his present height he couldn't even match Liu Huaisha. He stood at the alley mouth with his schoolbag on his back, looking over — and then he shouted, "You— you've been fighting again!" In those few words he managed not to regard the other five as worth noticing at all.
"Go die, just get out of here, I don't need your help!" Liu Huaisha forced herself upright and yelled. But one of the youths beside the fat boy, the one with the iron rod, smiled and started walking toward the alley mouth. "You think you can just leave? You're coming along too."
"You bastards, if you dare touch him—"
Liu Huaisha raised her bat and shouted. The fat boy laughed. "So what if we touch him? You think this is your daddy's Sand Bamboo Gang turf? This is Xinhua District! Today we're taking pictures of the two of you naked..."
"Gu Jiaming, you idiot, run!"
As the youth with the iron rod walked toward him, Gu Jiaming looked like a man who had accepted his fate; shaking his head, he started walking in. Liu Huaisha's shout was still in the air when he suddenly shoved a small handcart — the kind used for garbage bins — out from the side and came charging in with it.
The alley was neither wide nor narrow; with the cart barreling through, dodging it was a real pain. The youth with the iron rod jumped aside, only to be left flailing as two battered garbage bins tumbled off the cart and hit him. By the time the cart had broken through the line of the fat boy and the other three, most of what had been loaded on it had fallen off too. Liu Huaisha jumped straight onto the cart, swinging her bat wildly, and Jiaming spun it around and charged out of the alley.
The youth with the iron rod had barely collected himself when Liu Huaisha swung her bat into his leg; he went down with a shriek. The four behind them came after at a run. Jiaming was, after all, only a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid pushing a cart with somebody riding on it, and in a heartbeat the four were nearly on him. The fat boy, running at the front, reached twice for his backpack and each time missed by a hair. And then the cart burst out of the alley mouth.
Turn.
The cart seemed to lose its balance in the instant of the turn: Jiaming stumbled, and his left hand, which had been on the handle, swung back behind him out of pure reflex — just as the fat boy came charging in at full speed and met it face first.
A muffled thud. The fat boy's body lifted slightly off the ground; carrying the momentum of his sprint, it seemed to hang in the air for a moment before it crashed into one of the youths chasing behind him, and the two of them went down in a heap.
The cart ran for its life — turn, turn, turn again — and a moment later it shot across a road and finally stopped on Jianghai's sea wall. Jiaming, apparently completely out of breath, crouched on the ground and gasped, "They— they're not following anymore, are they..."
"Nope. When it comes to running for your life, nobody beats you."
Liu Huaisha looked around; with no pursuers left, she clapped the boy on the shoulder and laughed. From the day she'd met Jiaming, there seemed to be only one thing about this boy she admired, and that was his running for his life.
Of course, where she couldn't see — back at the mouth of that alley — the fat boy lay with somebody pinned underneath him, still dizzy with stars bursting in his eyes, blood bubbling out of that round face of his like a fountain: spurt... spurt...
"I'm... I'm gonna... kill... kill... kill... pfft... Help!"
"Why do you always have to go picking fights, huh? They're high schoolers, you know that?"
"Then why's that fatso have to be so cocky, hogging the court and not letting anyone play? I just couldn't stand it... ow, easy, that hurts..."
"So you do know what pain feels like! Serves you right if it kills you!"
On a bench along the sea wall, Jiaming had pulled the shoe and sock off Liu Huaisha's left foot and rolled up her pant leg, giving her a bit of basic treatment: dabbing on medicated oil, then rubbing it out and massaging it in evenly. The girl smacked the boy's shoulder whenever the pain got to her, then lay back nibbling an apple and let him do as he liked with her leg. This was hardly the first time.
"Don't go thinking you're made of iron, taking on four or five high schoolers alone with a baseball bat. Your family runs with the underworld, and so do theirs. If there hadn't happened to be a garbage cart there to haul you out, I'd have been long gone, and left you there all by yourself for them to take pictures of."
Remembering what those guys had said about taking naked pictures of her, Liu Huaisha flushed with shame and anger and punched Jiaming's shoulder again. "I told you not to come over, didn't I? What, you just had to... hmph. Even if somebody did take pictures of me... it's none of your business."
"Quit squirming!" Jiaming's voice was flat; he gave the injury a light pat, which made her grimace and bare her teeth, and when she raised a hand to hit him, he shoved the bottle of medicated oil into it and snatched the apple out of her other hand. "What are you eating an apple for with a cut on your mouth? If you don't want a scar on that face of yours, wipe it on yourself." And with that he bit savagely into the apple and started eating it himself.
"Hmph, you tyrant!" With her injured left leg in his grip, circumstances were stronger than she was, and Miss Huaisha had no choice but to swallow her temper for the time being and pour out some oil to dab on her face. She'd been getting hurt since she was small and was handy enough with medicine by now, but somehow she always felt she couldn't do it as well as Jiaming; wherever his hand passed, she always felt a tingle, a numbness, as if the pain had simply vanished.
Now that's what a professional can do...
Thinking that, she laughed. "Jiaming, you should just be a bone-setter when you grow up — Mother Ye could teach you... oh, right, where's Lingjing?"
"We said we'd wait here. She should be here soon... A doctor, huh? Seems like a pretty good choice..." As he rubbed the oil in for her, the boy sank into thought, as though weighing whether that direction was worth pursuing. Looking at that musing face of his in the setting sun, which looked a little dopey and silly, the girl burst out laughing. "I'm joking."
Not long after, a cute girl with a schoolbag on her back and two little braids came down from the overpass on one side and trotted over to the two of them. Then the girl named Lingjing and the boy named Jiaming each took one side of Liu Huaisha, and in the light of the setting sun the three of them walked slowly off toward home.