WF | Chapter 2

Shen Lian first met Zheng Tingyu in 2009.

That year, she was 18 years old, fresh out of high school. With nowhere left to turn, she had thrown caution to the wind and gone to Japan, where she studied at a language school and prepared to take the EJU exam the following November.

Aside from the agency fee needed to go to Japan, the tuition for the language school, and the dormitory fees, her parents had no intention of spending another cent on her. They wanted her to beg for mercy, to admit she was wrong, to keep her head down and behave, to live out the rest of her life in obscurity and mediocrity. She refused. If she wanted to survive, she had to find, as quickly as possible, a part-time job that could barely support her, even if that meant sneaking around the Ministry of Justice’s limits on foreign students’ working hours and secretly taking two jobs.

She had relatives in Japan, but no one was willing to offend her parents and stick their neck out for her for nothing. Fortunately, there were many Chinese people in Japan, especially from the city H where Shen Lian came from. Everyone was drifting far from home. As people in the same boat, they liked to cluster together for warmth, and anyone with a little resource to spare was willing to help a fellow townsman if they could.

After Shen Lian entered language school, her classmates from the same intake quickly pulled her into one hometown group after another. In the group chats, everyone would occasionally share recent part-time job postings they had come across.

Because Shen Lian had not been formally studying Japanese for long and her speaking ability was weak, many jobs were out of reach for her, so she could only barely settle on one convenience store clerk opening a little farther away but with decent hourly pay, and two kitchen jobs at restaurants with middling hourly pay.

As expected, the convenience store job, which demanded stronger spoken Japanese, turned her down on the spot. She stammered so badly that without typing on her phone, she could not even communicate properly with the manager.

Like a mute.

And a joke, too.

Red-faced, Shen Lian apologized as she walked out of the convenience store. She stood for a long time at the intersection where Tokyo Tower could be seen in the distance, and only then did she take a deep breath, lower her head, unlock her phone, and find the second backup job, a text message from the manager of UGA Barbecue Restaurant, to confirm the interview time.

Before that, she had already exchanged brief messages with the barbecue restaurant manager on MSN.

She knew that the manager of this locally run barbecue restaurant founded by Japanese people, Ms. Zheng Tingyu, was Chinese. Based on her position, Shen Lian guessed that she must have been in Japan for many years, probably a middle-aged woman in her thirties or older. But she had not expected that the next morning, when she pushed open the dining hall door of UGA Barbecue Restaurant, the person who greeted her would be a woman who looked young and refined to an excessive degree.

Perhaps because it was not yet the restaurant’s official opening time, the woman had not changed out of her casual clothes. She wore a very Japanese-looking mustard yellow knit long cardigan, paired with a khaki plaid skirt that fell below the knees. She stood tall and graceful, her head lowered as she checked something beside a dining table.

Shen Lian could not make out her face clearly. She only saw her side profile, half hidden beneath her jet-black shoulder-length curls, white and delicate beyond measure.

She hesitated over whether to greet her in Japanese or Chinese, when the woman suddenly turned sideways, lifted her head, and met her gaze head-on.

Something like surprise flashed across the woman’s eyes, and then she curved her lips and gave Shen Lian a bright smile. Her smiling eyes were crescent-shaped, warm and luminous, sweeping away the winter chill.

Like cherry blossoms blooming on a branch in a season when they should not have been.

“Hello, are you here for an interview today?” the woman asked with a smile.

Her features were so gentle, and her temperament so clean and unblemished, that with just that one smile, Shen Lian could not guess her identity at all. She was too young, looking at most two or three years older than her. A manager could not possibly be that age.

But she had used Chinese, and seemed utterly unsurprised by her arrival, as though she already knew. It was not impossible.

Shen Lian came back to herself and answered, “Yes.”

The woman then walked closer with a smile. As she moved, a faint floral scent drifted through the air, a little sweet, but very fresh, not cloying at all.

She gestured for Shen Lian to sit at a table near the cash register and sat down opposite her across the table. “I’m the manager of this place, Zheng Tingyu. We’ve been in contact on MSN before, and I’ll be the interviewer today.”

Unexpected, yet perfectly reasonable.

Shen Lian did not show any surprise and replied, “Hello, my name is Shen Lian. I already explained my situation to you on MSN before.”

Unlike the first impression given by her overly beautiful face, Shen Lian had been raised to be proper and self-controlled. She had never been good at using a smile to win better social relations. Right now, she was a little tense, and the lack of expression on her face made her already deep, sharp features seem even colder.

Zheng Tingyu did not mind. She simply repeated her name, “Shen Lian,” then suddenly extended a hand, palm open on the tabletop, and asked, “Which liàn?”

Shen Lian froze for a moment. Once she understood what she meant, she hesitated slightly before reaching out with her fingertip and lightly touching the center of Zheng Tingyu’s palm.

Zheng Tingyu did not pull her hand away. She sat there unhurriedly. So Shen Lian followed her cue and used her index finger to write the character for liàn, stroke by stroke, in Zheng Tingyu’s palm.

“This one.” She withdrew her hand and curled her fingers inward, a little awkwardly.

She was not used to physical contact with people she was not familiar with.

But Zheng Tingyu was calm. She nodded and said with feeling, “I’ve learned another new character.” Her voice carried delight.

Shen Lian could not help looking up at her.

Zheng Tingyu’s smiling eyes were soft and bright as she looked back at her and asked, “The wood radical, does it mean a tree?”

For some reason, Shen Lian’s voice felt a little dry as she answered, “Yes, it’s the liàn in the soapberry tree.”

Without showing it, she thought to herself that some people’s eyes really could turn into crescents when they smiled.

So smiles really could be infectious, making other people’s moods improve without their realizing it.

But she really did not look thirty, and even twenty-five seemed a little generous. Shen Lian guessed inwardly.

Still, at the time, she did not truly care. How old the manager was had nothing to do with her, and it was not an important issue either. She did not have that much curiosity or drive to investigate. What mattered more to her was whether she could successfully get this job and do it well.

Before the issue of survival, everything else seemed superfluous and ridiculous. She had neither the mind nor the energy to indulge in idle speculation.

For that young and beautiful manager, who smiled too beautifully, all she could hope was that she was a friendly and easy person to deal with, that she would hire her, and that her first job would get off to a smooth start.

It was not until some casual conversation not long after she had started working that she learned Zheng Tingyu really was not thirty. She was seven years older than her, and at that time she was about to turn twenty-six.