I made a bowl of tomato egg noodles, adding an imitation crab stick and four pieces of fried tofu.
Yang Wan came out after her shower and sat in the living room, listening to the radio on my phone. Communications hadn’t been restored yet, and the radio information was limited, repeatedly broadcasting the earthquake’s epicenter and magnitude. I brought the noodles to the coffee table and handed her the chopsticks. As soon as she lowered her head, her wet hair fell forward. I got up to get a towel, and when I returned, I saw her eating the noodles.
“Can I… help dry your hair?”
“Mm.”
With noodles still in her mouth, she mumbled a response, then simply moved from the sofa to sit on the carpet.
I gathered her hair with the towel, testing the pressure as I rubbed it dry, kneeling on one knee to avoid pulling her hair from my height. She was using my shampoo, a men’s brand with a subtle fragrance, but her long hair somehow amplified that faint scent.
Wan-wan lifted the bowl to drink some soup, then said while holding it, “This is my first time spending the night at a man’s house.”
I looked down at her ear, “Wan-wan, I won’t do anything.”
Wan-wan laughed, “How do you know I was talking about that?”
Indeed, how did I know she meant that?
Perhaps I was still too presumptuous, thinking I was the person who had lived with her for decades as soon as I saw her.
In the past, when I made mistakes, I could expose my humble identity as self-punishment, but not now. I need to face myself properly, just as my father told me, to protect her rather than retreat behind her again, letting her lead me. So, instead of deliberately apologizing, I bent down and said to her, “If I’ve offended you in any way, you need to tell me.”
Wan-wan shook her head, using her chopsticks to tear apart the crab stick. “As you’ve seen, my brother is overprotective. When my parents were young, they were very busy with work. In elementary school, he would drop me off first, then rush to his school. In middle school, when I had evening classes, my mother worried about me going home alone, so she specifically bought him a bicycle to pick me up after class. Some boys wanted to walk me home then, but they all backed off when they saw him. He was my guardian deity, but also my romance blocker, though neither he nor my mother realized this, always thinking I was too cold when it came to relationships.”
She continued eating the crab stick as she spoke.
“It’s not that I’m cold, I just don’t know how to start a relationship.”
“You’re so smart, do you also find dating difficult?”
“Yes. You know I study history, I’m used to dialectical thinking, and believe in materialism, but ended up focusing on biographical history. My evaluation of ‘people’ often remains detached, I’m used to being an observer. The biggest problem with being an observer is arrogance. Because in the observation system, I exist as a subjective and unidirectional presence. I don’t need to discover my problems, only need to analyze the problems of the observed object, but in intimate relationships, the most important thing should be mutual communication. Regrettably, I’ve never understood this. And I understand that no one must teach someone like me who’s gone astray.”
“I won’t teach you, Wan-wan.”
I sat down on the sofa behind her, “But you can start by examining me.”
Wan-wan held her chopsticks without speaking.
The candle flame flickered as the rain stopped and the wind picked up outside. But since no one dared to sleep, there was a bustle of people coming and going outside the window.
Wan-wan looked up toward the window. “When you say that, it’s like you owed me in a past life and came to repay the debt in this one. What’s good about being examined? I’ll look at both your good and bad sides objectively, your privacy, the sides you don’t want others to see won’t be hidden. Deng Ying, don’t be foolish.”
I shook my head as I looked at her, “I don’t want to hide, I’m willing to let you know all my privacy. Because I’m not good with words, I can only let you slowly understand what kind of person I am, then wait for you to decide if I can live with you.”
Wan-wan withdrew her gaze and turned to face me.
In the past, I might have avoided her gaze, but this time I didn’t.
I quietly looked back at her, waiting for her to speak to me.
“I don’t know why…”
She smiled at me, “It feels like I’ve been with you for a long time, even wearing pajamas at your place doesn’t feel scary.”
I gently patted Wan-wan’s head, and she didn’t dodge, instead looking up at my palm.
I put my hand back on my knee and said softly to her, “Me too, it feels like I’ve known you for a very, very long time, but you’ve forgotten me.”
Wan-wan leaned back against my leg. “Now that you mention it, it does feel that way.”
She closed her eyes as she spoke. “Do you think there might be parallel worlds where we have known each other for many years, even experienced many things together? That’s why when you came to find me, I felt you were so familiar. Is there any way I could remember you?”
“I hope Wan-wan never remembers.”
“Why?”
“It would be exhausting, Wan-wan.”
Wan-wan shook her head, “It wouldn’t be exhausting. If heaven gave me a chance to return to the Ming Dynasty and have a life there, I would want to keep my current memories and observe that era and its people again. I know it would be very tiring and bitter, but I think I wouldn’t be afraid. Although I’m quite timid, I want to become a brave woman. I want to research abandoned subjects, find that abandoned person.”
She wasn’t wrong.
I was a person abandoned by both time and history.
Even though I now have a complete body, I still have deep memories of being “incomplete.”
The existing historical records describe my execution at Nanhaizi. Just reading them awakens all the experiences during the punishment and all the details of life afterward. Everything I did in the Ming Dynasty has been characterized in Ming History, just as I expected back then. In those writings, I finally became someone worse than pigs and dogs.
Now, ages have passed.
Having such a “me” before her is quite embarrassing.
But just like back then in the execution chamber, she’s still that girl who hasn’t given up on me. She wants to know about that period of history concerning me. Although I can’t break the rules of time or affect the procedures and laws of academic research, I can tell her about myself as a “person.”
“Wan-wan.”
“Hmm?”
“If you could return to the Ming Dynasty, what would you want to ask that person?”
Wan-wan hugged her knees and sat up straight, “That would depend on how many questions I could ask, what kind of questions I could ask.”
“You can ask anything.”
Wan-wan turned to me, still hugging her knees, and shook her head, “You studied engineering, you don’t understand. When tracing history, you can’t be too rash. Even if I wanted to know what happened during the Zhenning years, if I were actually beside him, facing him as a living person, I couldn’t disregard his feelings at the time just to satisfy my own need for verification. So…”
She tucked her hair behind her ear, “So, if I really could be by his side, I would definitely tell him that the injury on his leg can’t be ignored, it needs proper treatment and care, like when you had your car accident, lying still without moving. As for… what questions I would ask him…”