The Early Spring - Chapter 1
Chapter 1 - The Rainy City
That year, the rain in Beijing was heavier than usual, even heavier than in the south where Shang Zhitao had just left. The rain fell in a continuous drizzle, and faint clouds and mist lingered above the sky, making it hard to tell whether the scene was picturesque or desolate.
Shang Zhitao was wrestling with her two large suitcases—one packed entirely with books, and the other filled with clothes and shoes, with nothing else inside. Traveling all the way from Nanjing to Beijing, the twenty-two-year-old had accomplished the monumental feat of her first independent migration.
Fine beads of sweat dotted her forehead and cheeks, turning her face a flushed pink. Shang Zhitao felt as though she was about to melt. She calculated in her mind that she definitely had to go buy a fan tomorrow.
The narrow partition room felt even more cramped because of these two suitcases. She heard the girl in the next room talking on the phone: "Should I go over to your place this weekend? Someone just moved into the room next to mine, and the soundproofing is terrible."
It took Shang Zhitao a brief moment to realize what the girl was talking about. She put on her headphones to play music and then resumed unpacking, though her movements became a bit lighter. Before she set off, her senior Yao Bei had told her: To live in this city, you need to have a bit more empathy, because everywhere you look, people are suffering. Shang Zhitao vaguely began to understand what her senior meant by suffering.
She had originally planned to stay in the south after graduation, but that would have kept her too far from her parents. After much deliberation, she sent her resume to companies in Beijing. As a graduate from a lesser-known university, scoring a special offer from this company was simply thrilling. Shang Zhitao even felt immensely lucky.
When she finished arranging her belongings and looked around this tiny room, she finally realized how crude it truly was. When looking at listings online, the agent had emailed her a few photos, and she had thought it looked decent enough. But now, in this barren room, apart from the bed covered in floral prints, she could not find a single thing that passed muster. She leaned against the headboard, pulled her knees up, and seriously wrote down in her notebook what she needed to buy tomorrow. Cooking would have to wait; she only had the small electric pot she brought from school and a bowl printed with the scenery of the Night Qinhuai River. Clothes needed washing, but she didn't quite dare use the shared washing machine in the rental building. All the household chores she never had to worry about while studying came rushing back to her today. Once she started worrying about them, she realized that daily life was actually made up of such trivial, messy odds and ends.
Her notebook filled three pages, and to Shang Zhitao's eyes, the characters on those three pages all morphed into a single word: "Money." Everything required money to buy!
She did have a little money, saved up from working-study programs during her university days, and a few days ago, fearing she would suffer hardships living on her own, Old Shang had gone to the bank and wired her ten thousand yuan.
Shang Zhitao couldn't bear to spend it. She read through her list from the top again, pondering which items were urgently needed and which could wait. She added a new column to the side, labeling entries as: Buy immediately, buy upon receiving the first paycheck, and buy upon receiving the second paycheck.
As she wrote, she suddenly felt a bit ridiculous and pathetic. She tossed the notebook aside, threw herself face-down onto the bed, and giggled out loud. She had not yet shed her innocence, her movements were still clumsy, and she had not the slightest inkling of the life about to unfold before her.
Screw it!
She felt very brave, but that bravery would fade away deep into the night. She jumped off her bed, pushed her suitcases to the door, and stacked them together so they blocked the door completely. Slowly, the urge to relieve herself crept up. She fought back the urge to go outside to the restroom, keeping her eyes tightly shut as she counted sheep. The urge to pee and the wave of fear fought against her sleepiness, while bravery and cowardice played a beating drum inside her body.
The first night as a stranger in a strange land was incomparably long.
It was still raining the next day. When she opened her eyes, she remembered seeing a farmers' market near her rental place when she took the bus yesterday, and she decided to go there to buy some small essentials. She put on her raincoat, moved the suitcases aside, and pushed open her room door to see a girl washing clothes in the bathroom. The girl looked gentle and delicate, somewhat resembling a girl from the south. Shang Zhitao smiled at her and said, "Hello there, my name is Shang Zhitao."
The girl smiled back at her and said, "Hello, my name is Sun Yu." Her voice was familiar—she was the girl from the room next door. "It's still raining outside, where are you headed?"
"I want to go to the farmers' market to buy some things."
"There are a lot of pickpockets over there. You just arrived in Beijing, right? It's not convenient to go alone, I'll go with you." Sun Yu wiped her hands dry and trotted back to her room to grab an umbrella.
"Aren't you going to work today?"
"I quit." Sun Yu's expression dimmed for a moment before she walked ahead of Shang Zhitao to lead the way.
The building they lived in was quite old, with various items cluttering the dim and crowded hallway. Shang Zhitao pulled out a small flashlight, turned it on, and said to Sun Yu, "Watch your step so you don't fall."
The two of them finally made it outside, and the fine drizzle fell on Shang Zhitao's raincoat, making a rustling sound.
"Where are you from?" Sun Yu asked her.
"I'm from the Ice City. What about you?"
"I'm from Guizhou."
"Wow, Guizhou, that's so far away." Shang Zhitao let out an exclamation. She was born in the Ice City, and during her school days, she had only ever visited a few places around Nanjing. To her, Guizhou felt like it was at the edge of the world.
Hearing her exclamation and seeing Shang Zhitao's wide-open eyes, Sun Yu couldn't help laughing: "You're so cute."
Blushing unexpectedly from the compliment, Shang Zhitao gave a bashful, goofy grin. The road to the market was very muddy. With every step, the two of them sank deep into the mud and splattered their trouser legs until they finally entered the market. The market sold everything under the sun. Shang Zhitao bought bowls, chopsticks, and cookware, along with four washbasins of different sizes, a flower stand with plants, and a chamber pot. Watching Shang Zhitao blush as she tucked the chamber pot into a black plastic bag, Sun Yu softly told her, "I bought one when I first came here too. It's nothing to be embarrassed about."
"The agent said the other two rooms are occupied by two guys who just started working, but I haven't seen them and I'm a bit scared," Shang Zhitao explained.
"Keeping your guard up is right, and protecting yourself is also right." Sun Yu spoke with a regional Mandarin accent—her tone was soft yet firm, carrying a pleasant ring to it.
The two of them walked back and forth three times before they finished buying everything.
There was a beef mixed noodle shop in the market, and the fragrant aroma of the rich broth drifted through the rain. Both of them were a bit hungry, so Shang Zhitao treated Sun Yu to a bowl of flat noodles to thank her for showing the way.
Just like that, on her second day in this city, Shang Zhitao made a friend.
Sun Yu had just quit her job, and her boyfriend lived far away on the other side of the city, so she volunteered to help Shang Zhitao fix up her room. The originally crude room was given a makeover, suddenly acquiring a modest touch of artistic flair. Sun Yu stared in amazement and marveled, "Are you an art major?"
"I'm not!" Shang Zhitao sat cross-legged on the bed admiring her own masterpiece, then nodded and praised herself, "Not bad at all."
Amused by her artless and clumsy charm, Sun Yu sat down next to her.
Shang Zhitao gave off a faint, pleasant scent, and her entire person was clean and fresh, like a blank sheet of paper waiting to be written on. Sun Yu felt as though she hadn't seen a girl who looked so clean and well-behaved in a very long time.
"How old are you?" she softly asked Shang Zhitao.
"I'm twenty-two! What about you?"
"I'm twenty-five. So what brings you to Beijing?"
"I got hired by a company through campus recruitment, and I'm officially reporting for work next Monday." A smile bloomed on Shang Zhitao's face as she spoke, her eyes curving into lovely crescents. Sun Yu nodded and asked, "Is the company close to here?"
"I haven't been there yet, but my senior said it takes about eighty minutes to get there."
"That's pretty fortunate then, not too far at all."
For people working in Beijing, an eighty-minute commute was right around the average line and not considered too far. After all, this city was simply too massive. Shang Zhitao didn't think it was far either. When she was studying, she used to travel from her school to Zijin Mountain every week, a four-hour round trip. She often read books and listened to music on the bus, and time would fly by without any pain or hardship at all.
She was full of anticipation for her upcoming work and life, and full of anticipation for this city as well. Tucked under her pillow was a planner. She had filled out a page before bed last night, sticking three tiny, transparent bus tickets onto it—the bus tickets from the train station to this very place. On them, she had written: July 10th, Hello Beijing.
When night fell, she lay in bed listening to the sound of rain outside the window, feeling as though she had returned to the south. She always felt that graduation had come too fast, and those chaotic days of jumping out of bed and running to the classroom were gone and never returning.
Shang Zhitao felt a little lonely.
She sat in a daze beside the dim little bedside lamp. The surroundings were dead quiet, save for the sound of the pattering rain. Still unable to sleep, she kept her eyes open in the semi-darkness, listening to the movements outside.
She missed home a little.
She missed her school and her classmates a little.
A sudden ache pinched at Shang Zhitao's nose.