Point of View: SHEN LUOYI
The taxi smells like pine air freshener and old leather, and Shen Luoyi
has her forehead pressed to the window the way she used to do as a child
on long car rides, when the world outside was always more interesting
than the one inside.
Nanjing in September is the color of things that haven't decided whether
to stay green or begin to let go. The plane trees lining Hanzhong Road
are still full, their bark peeling in pale patches like something in the
process of becoming. Luoyi watches them pass one by one and thinks about
how her mother packed her bags for her. How her mother folded every
shirt with the sleeves aligned perfectly, tucked socks into small neat
rolls, placed a bag of dried longan in the front zipper pocket because
Luoyi mentioned once — once, four years ago — that she liked them on the
train.
She thinks about how her mother did all of this without once saying her
brother's name.
Minghe. Shen Minghe. Her brother who studied architecture at Chenguang
University in Nanjing for three years, who called her every Sunday at
eight in the evening without fail, who sent her photos of buildings he
loved with long voice messages explaining what made them beautiful, who
died fourteen months ago on a Tuesday night in March and whose death was
ruled a suicide and whose name has not been spoken in the Shen household
since the funeral, as though language itself might bring him back, or
worse — as though it might make him more gone.
The taxi driver asks if she's a student. She says yes. He says which
school. She says Chenguang. He says ah, good school, very competitive,
you must be smart. She smiles and says thank you and turns back to the
window, and the plane trees keep passing, keep peeling, keep being in
the middle of something.
✦ ✦ ✦
Chenguang University's east gate is older than the rest of the campus —
a stone archway with the school's name carved into it in characters that
have been weathered into softness by decades of Nanjing summers. Luoyi
stands beneath it with two suitcases and a backpack and looks up at
those characters and thinks: you were here. You walked through this gate
for three years. Your feet touched this exact ground.
She picks up her suitcases and walks through.
The campus opens gradually, the way good things often do — first a
narrow road lined with ginkgo trees, then a wider path that curves
around a small stone garden, then suddenly the full expanse of the
central courtyard with its old library on one side and the newer
administrative building on the other and in between a stretch of grass
where students are sitting in clusters, talking, laughing, eating
takeout from plastic containers, living their ordinary September lives
with the ease of people who have never had to think about what it means
to be alive.
Luoyi has always been good at reading the temperature of a place. It is
one of the things people like about her — she walks into a room and
immediately understands its mood, adjusts herself to it, finds the
thread that connects her to whoever needs connecting. Her mother calls
it emotional intelligence. Her best friend from high school called it
her superpower. Luoyi has never told anyone that sometimes it feels less
like a gift and more like an obligation — as though her own interior
weather is only allowable when it matches the room's.
The courtyard today is warm and easy and buzzing with first-day energy.
Luoyi adjusts herself to it. She smiles. She looks around for the sign
that will direct her to the freshman registration desk.
That is when she sees the building.
It is across the courtyard, half-hidden behind a stand of osmanthus
trees whose flowers are just beginning to open, their scent drifting
faintly even from this distance. Dormitory Building Seven. She knows the
number because she looked it up. She knows the room number too — 407 —
because she found it in a document her parents thought they'd deleted
from the family computer, a university administrative notice she was
never supposed to see, filed under a folder labeled simply with his
name.
Shen Minghe. Room 407, Dormitory Seven. Chenguang University.
She looks at the building for a moment. Just one moment, just long
enough for the knowing to settle through her like water finding the
lowest point of a vessel.
Then she picks up her suitcases and goes to find the registration desk.
✦ ✦ ✦
The freshman dormitory is Building Three, which is newer and on the
opposite side of campus from Building Seven, and Luoyi decides
immediately that this is fine. That the distance is fine. That she did
not come here to stand outside her dead brother's dormitory room — she
came here to study, to finish her degree, to find answers through
legitimate means, through the people who knew him and the professors who
taught him and the records that must exist somewhere in this campus's
institutional memory.
She is very good at telling herself things and believing them, at least
temporarily.
Room 318 is on the third floor. She takes the stairs because the
elevator is crowded with other freshmen and their parents and their
enormous quantities of luggage, and she navigates the three flights
alone, suitcase wheel catching on the lip of each landing, backpack
heavy on her shoulders. By the time she reaches the door she is slightly
out of breath, which is the closest she has come to feeling anything
purely physical in several weeks.
She pushes the door open.
The room is not large. Four beds in an L-shape, two desks under the
window, a wardrobe for each person, a small bathroom off to the left.
Standard university housing. Two of the beds are already claimed — there
are blankets and pillows arranged on them with the particular
inexpertness of people who have never made a bed in a dormitory before,
which means their mothers did it, which means they arrived with family.
Luoyi's mother did not come. Luoyi's mother stood at the front door of
their Nanjing apartment this morning and held Luoyi's face in both hands
and said: call me every day. Luoyi said: every day is a lot, Mom. Her
mother said: then every other day. Then she pressed her lips together
very tightly and let go, and Luoyi took her suitcases down in the
elevator alone.
She picks the bed nearest the window. Not because she has a preference
but because it is the unclaimed one that gives her the best angle of the
room — she likes to see everything from wherever she sits. She lifts her
suitcase onto the bed and unzips it and begins to unpack with the
methodical calm of someone who has been doing things alone for a long
time.
She is halfway through when the door opens.
✦ ✦ ✦
The girl who enters is carrying a bag of instant noodles in one hand and
a potted cactus in the other, and she has the look of someone who has
been awake since five in the morning and is deeply unimpressed by this
fact. She is wearing a white shirt that says something in English that
Luoyi can't quite read from this angle, and her hair is in a bun that is
threatening to collapse.
She sees Luoyi and stops. Looks at the bed. Looks at Luoyi's
half-unpacked suitcase.
"You got the window bed," she says. Not an accusation. Just an
observation delivered in a tone that suggests she has processed and
released her disappointment in under two seconds.
"I can move," Luoyi says, and she means it.
"No, it's fine. I'm pre-med, I'll be in the library until midnight
anyway. I don't need to see the sky." She sets the cactus on the desk
closest to the door and drops her bag of instant noodles on the
remaining bed. "He Ziqing," she says, extending her right hand.
"Biochemistry. Technically pre-med but we don't say that out loud until
second year or the senior students make your life terrible."
"Shen Luoyi," Luoyi says, shaking her hand. "Psychology."
He Ziqing sits down on her bed and looks at Luoyi with the direct,
unsentimental appraisal of someone who has decided very quickly whether
a person is worth knowing and is currently delivering her verdict.
"Psychology," she repeats. "So you're going to spend the next four years
analyzing everyone."
"I'm going to spend the next four years being analyzed by everyone who
finds out my major," Luoyi says. "It's different."
Something shifts in He Ziqing's expression — the faintest upward
adjustment at the corner of her mouth, barely qualifying as a smile but
unmistakably one.
"Fair," she says. "Do you want some instant noodles? I brought six packs
because I don't trust university cafeteria food until I've personally
evaluated it."
"I'd love some," Luoyi says.
This is how it begins between them — not with warmth exactly, not yet,
but with the particular comfort of two people who have independently
decided that performance is exhausting and they would rather not bother
with it. They eat instant noodles sitting cross-legged on their
respective beds and He Ziqing tells Luoyi about the biochemistry program
with the blunt efficiency of someone reading a weather report, and Luoyi
listens and asks questions and laughs at the right moments, and by the
time the other two roommates arrive — a girl from Chengdu named Wei Ran
who cries quietly into her phone for twenty minutes after her parents
leave, and a girl named Fang Jing who immediately begins color-coding
her class schedule — the room has already sorted itself into the
particular ecosystem that dormitory rooms develop in their first hours:
who takes up space, who retreats, who mediates, who observes.
Luoyi is the mediator. She always has been.
She helps Wei Ran find a tissue. She compliments Fang Jing's
color-coding system. She keeps the conversation moving with the easy
grace of someone for whom social navigation is as natural as breathing.
She does not think about Building Seven once the whole evening.
✦ ✦ ✦
At eleven-fifteen, after Wei Ran and Fang Jing have gone to sleep and He
Ziqing is reading a biochemistry textbook with a highlighter in each
hand like she is defusing something, Luoyi lies on her bed and looks at
the ceiling and allows herself to think about it.
She is here. She is in the same city, the same campus, the same
September air. Whatever Minghe breathed for three years, she is now
breathing. Whatever paths he walked to class, she will walk to class.
Whatever this place meant to him — whatever it failed to be for him —
she is inside of it now, and she is going to understand it, and she is
going to understand him, in the way that she couldn't when he was alive
and she was a high school student in a different city calling him every
Sunday and saying the wrong things without knowing they were wrong.
She turns onto her side. Through the window, the campus is quiet. The
courtyard lights are on, casting orange pools on the stone paths.
Somewhere across the campus, beyond the osmanthus trees, Building Seven
stands with its windows dark.
She closes her eyes.
✦ fragment
His voice on the phone, last October. A Sunday, eight o'clock exactly,
as always.
She had been complaining about an exam. Something about organic
chemistry, which she was taking as an elective because she thought she
should have some science in her life. She remembers talking for a long
time — maybe fifteen minutes about the exam, then another ten about a
friend's drama, then something about a television show.
He listened. He always listened. He asked questions in the right
places.
She asked, eventually: how are you? The way you ask when you already
know the answer will be fine.
He said: fine.
She said: good. Then she said she had to go study, and she said she
loved him, and she hung up.
She didn't know it would be the last time she heard his voice. You
never know. That is the particular cruelty of last times — they are
disguised as ordinary ones, and by the time you recognize them, they
are already over.
Luoyi opens her eyes. The ceiling is white and unremarkable. He Ziqing's
highlighter makes a soft squeaking sound against the page.
She is fine, she tells herself. She is here, and she is going to figure
this out, and she is fine.
She believes this. She has always been very good at believing the things
she tells herself.
✦ ✦ ✦
The next morning arrives the way September mornings do in Nanjing — with
more warmth than you expect, the air still carrying the remnant of
summer's weight even as the light has started to thin into something
more autumnal. Luoyi wakes at six-forty-five to the sound of He Ziqing's
alarm, which He Ziqing silences in under three seconds with the
precision of someone who has been doing this for years.
"There's an orientation session at nine," He Ziqing says, already
sitting up. "Registration runs from eight. Food hall opens at seven. The
line will be long by seven-thirty."
"How do you know all this already?"
"I read the university handbook," He Ziqing says, in a tone that
suggests this is obvious. "On the train here."
Luoyi looks at her for a moment. Then she gets up.
They go to breakfast together — not because they planned it, but because
they are both ready at the same time and neither suggests otherwise. The
food hall is large and smells of congee and soy milk and that particular
institutional warmth that Luoyi associates with her middle school
cafeteria. She gets a bowl of congee and a fried dough stick and a
hard-boiled egg and He Ziqing gets the same thing and they sit at the
end of a long table and eat without feeling the need to fill the
silence, which Luoyi notices and quietly appreciates.
✦ ✦ ✦
Orientation is held in the main lecture hall. The psychology
department's representative is a woman in her early fifties with
silver-streaked hair pulled back simply, who speaks about the department
with the particular quality of someone who has said these words many
times but has not yet stopped meaning them. Her name, according to the
program, is Professor Wan Shuli.
Luoyi writes her name down. She is not sure why. She just does.
The orientation lasts two hours. At one point the speaker mentions the
university's counseling center — Building Nine, ground floor, open
Monday through Friday, walk-in appointments welcome. Luoyi writes this
down too. She writes it down and then looks at what she has written and
thinks about her brother seeking help and thinks about what help he
found or did not find, and she closes her notebook.
✦ ✦ ✦
The afternoon is free. Luoyi walks without a map, taking paths that feel
natural, letting the campus reveal itself at her own pace. She finds the
architecture department building in the western part of campus — older
than the others, with large windows designed to flood the interior
studios with light. She stands outside it for a moment. There is a
notice board near the door with student project announcements. She reads
the poster without taking anything in.
And then, because she knew she would eventually, she finds her way to
the courtyard with the osmanthus trees. Building Seven is exactly as it
appeared yesterday — a standard dormitory building, six stories, nothing
remarkable about it from the outside except for the knowledge she
carries about it, which makes it feel enormous. She stops on the path.
She is not going inside. She just needed to stand here. She just needed
to be in the same physical space as the building and let that mean
whatever it means.
She stands there for perhaps three minutes.
And then she hears footsteps behind her.
✦ ✦ ✦
She turns, expecting a passing student, and instead finds a man who has
clearly not expected to find anyone standing in the middle of the
dormitory path and has stopped walking as a result.
He is tall. Dark jacket. A stack of books held against his side with one
arm. And then, with a small adjustment of focus, his face — which is the
particular kind of still that is different from calm. Not serene. Not
relaxed. Still the way ice is still, because everything moving
underneath has been stopped.
He is looking at her. And then he is looking at Building Seven, and then
back at her, and something happens in his expression that she cannot
interpret — not quite recognition, not quite surprise, something more
complicated than either, something that comes from a deeper place than
surface emotion. His jaw tightens fractionally. That is all. That is the
only outward sign.
"Sorry, am I in the way?" Luoyi says.
He says nothing for a moment. His eyes move to the building once more —
a brief, involuntary motion, as though he cannot help it — and then he
steps off the path to go around her, adjusting the books against his
side, and walks past without speaking. He pushes the building's entrance
door open with his free hand and disappears inside.
Luoyi stands in the path for another moment. She doesn't know his name.
She doesn't know why he looked at her like that — not with anything she
could call an emotion, but with the weight of one, the outline of one,
as though someone had drawn the shape of a feeling and then erased the
color from inside it.
She turns and walks back toward Building Three. She does not stop
thinking about his face for the rest of the afternoon.
✦ ✦ ✦
JIANG CHENGZHI | 江承志
He makes it to the fourth floor before he has to stop.
He sets the books down on the hallway windowsill and puts one hand on
the wall and breathes. Just breathes. In through the nose, four counts;
out through the mouth, four counts. The technique his university
counselor taught him in second year, before he stopped going to the
counselor, before he decided that sitting in a room twice a week and
being asked how he was feeling was less sustainable than simply
restructuring his life so that feeling things was less available as an
option.
Four counts in. Four counts out. The hallway smells like floor cleaner
and the memory of other people's dinners. Through the window beside him
he can see the path below, but she is gone — wherever she came from, she
is gone, and the path is empty, and it doesn't matter.
Except that it does, which is the problem.
He picks up the books and goes to his room.
✦ ✦ ✦
Jiang Chengzhi's room is on the fourth floor of Building Seven. Room
409. He has lived in it for three years. He requested it specifically
for his second year, after they moved him out of his original placement
following what the university called a difficult semester. He requested
Building Seven because Minghe had been in Building Seven. Because if he
was going to spend the rest of his university years carrying something,
he was going to carry it in the right place.
He puts the books on his desk. Law volumes — Civil Procedure,
Constitutional Theory, an annotated collection of landmark cases. His
final year. He intends to spend it the way he has spent every year since
second semester of first year: with total concentration on the work, no
deviation, no exceptions.
He sits in his desk chair and opens Civil Procedure to the page where
his bookmark sits and reads the same paragraph three times without
absorbing it.
She had Minghe's way of standing.
He closes the book. This is not a thought he is going to entertain. He
has a system — not complicated, not therapeutic, just practical — for
thoughts like this one. You identify the thought. You note that it is
not useful. You return to the task at hand.
He opens the book again. The paragraph is about jurisdictional hierarchy
in civil disputes. He reads it a fourth time. A fifth. He does not know
her name. He does not need to know her name.
He reads until midnight. Then he turns off the light and lies in the
dark and does not sleep for a long time. The osmanthus trees breathe
outside the window. He lies in the dark and the night gets later and
eventually his body gives in and pulls him under, into the kind of sleep
that does not rest you — the sleep of someone who has been holding
something heavy for a very long time and has simply become too tired to
hold it while also remaining conscious.
In Building Three, on the opposite side of campus, Shen Luoyi falls
asleep at the same hour.
Neither of them knows this. Neither of them knows, yet, how much they
have in common — not just the grief, not just the name they share
between them like a wound held on both sides, but the mechanism: the
performance of fine, the architecture of coping, the specific loneliness
of people who are very good at making sure everyone around them is taken
care of and have never once thought to ask who is taking care of them.
September settles over Chenguang University. The osmanthus trees release
their scent into the dark. The story has begun.
✦