The first phone call

Sunlight fell into the courtyard. Nourished by the rain of the past few days, the moss that had long since dried out had turned green again...

Mottled patterns covered the blue bricks, their gray-white seams weaving through the entire courtyard. Bamboo leaves swayed, and bluestones lay nestled beneath the bamboo grove...

The green rattan chair that had accompanied generations of the Qin Family was still as good as new, gently rocking the boy lying on it...

Holding his grandfather's teapot, Qin An drank the yellow-tinged green tea and leafed through an old book, savoring the notes his grandfather had left. His eyes narrowed, and he covered his face with the pages as he grew drowsy...

"You're just like an old man. Put a jacket on you and give you a white wig, and I guarantee I'd call you Great-Uncle when I came running in..." Qin Xiaotian rushed inside. Ignoring Qin An's glare, he grabbed the teapot, stuffed the spout into his mouth, and gulped away...

Such fine oolong tea! This was the first early-spring harvest, picked little by little between the fingertips of his mother, his cousin's wife, and his female cousin, then pan-roasted, steamed dry, and sun-dried. Yet Qin Xiaotian was wasting it...

Qin An noticed that Qin Xiaotian was carrying an iron hoop and a piece of wire with its front end bent into a U...

Qin Xiaotian put down the teapot and proudly held up the hoop, showing off. "Hoop rolling. Do you know how to play? I'm pretty good at this now. With an ordinary doorstep, I just give it a little lift and it jumps right over..."

Rolling a hoop was actually much like playing with a spinning top. With a top, you kept whipping it with a cord to keep it spinning... With a hoop, you used the U-shaped end of the wire to keep pushing it forward. Getting the hoop over doorsteps, ditches, and holes took a little skill...

"Where did you get that thing?" Qin An asked. Qin Xiangshan had finally made up his mind to drag Qin Xiaotian away from the glittering world and dump him in this backwater called Qingshan Town. It had taken Qin Xiaotian only a few days to go from refusing to comply even on pain of death to accepting reality. He had even found the funeral proceedings of the past few days entertaining... He had regarded his older cousin as almost a complete stranger, and there was no point expecting a child to grieve a relative's death with inconsolable sorrow...

"I ran into that idiot Sun Pao. He said if I let him play with my Game Boy for three days, he'd give me this hoop..." Qin Xiaotian was immensely pleased with himself...

"That's a relief. I thought you'd traded your Game Boy for it..." Sun Pao sometimes wandered over to the old house when he had nothing to do. There were plenty of fun places around the Qingshan River, and he had also expressed great envy that Qin An had gone a whole week without attending school...

"I'm not stupid! This Game Boy costs a lot. You could buy at least a few dozen hoops like this with it. If he brought fifty hoops, I could consider trading..." Qin Xiaotian reckoned that was about the right price...

Qin An shook his head. Qin Xiaotian really wasn't stupid!

"Hey, do you know how to play? Watch me!"

Pushing the hoop, Qin Xiaotian ran gleefully around the courtyard, shouting the whole way for Qin An to watch him. Worried that he would wake his grandfather, Qin An looked up and saw Qin Jude standing against the second-floor railing. At last, a smile had appeared on his face. His eyes narrowed with his smile as he watched Qin Xiaotian having the time of his life...

"You call that knowing how to roll a hoop?"

Qin An got up and took the wire and hoop from Qin Xiaotian, speaking dismissively...

Reaching the wire backward between his legs, Qin An slowly walked along, pushing the hoop. "Watch closely. This is called surviving in a tight spot!"

"Now watch this one. It's called Zhang Guolao riding his donkey backward!" Qin An backed away while pushing the hoop backward too. He turned whenever he wanted and made it jump whenever he wanted, as though he had eyes in the back of his head...

"Watch this. It's called the wind-and-fire wheel!"

Qin An pushed the hoop forward, then suddenly pulled the wire away and leaped over the hoop. With a quick tap of his right foot, momentum and the added force sent the hoop whirling in place...

For his final trick, Qin An kept the wire touching the hoop and, gripping the wire in his hand, swung it around his body. It whipped through the air with a whoosh, yet the hoop stayed perfectly still against the wire, as though fastened to it...

Qin Xiaotian stared, dumbstruck, his eyes practically popping out. "You... you... you're amazing!"

"Only elementary school kids play with this stuff now... and they're all better than you. Keep working at it. I have faith in you..." Qin An patted Qin Xiaotian's shoulder. Seeing the orange-peel wrinkles of a smile on his grandfather's withered face, he felt some relief. With Qin Xiaotian here, and with himself coming over often to joke around too, they could eventually help his grandfather emerge from his grief...

When he returned home, the people from the post and telecommunications office had finally installed their telephone. Li Qin had found an iron box somewhere and locked the phone up tight...

Only a handful of households in the entire staff apartment building had telephones. Though Li Qin winced at the expense, there was still a measure of pride on her face...

Only after asking did Qin An learn that the installation fee alone was a full three thousand yuan. That was already a discounted price after his uncle Li Linjian had put in a word with the post and telecommunications office; the normal price would have been over four thousand...

Li Qin had brought over the pager issued to Li Linjian when he was director of the Qingshan Town cement factory and given it to Qin Huai...

What had happened to his cousin had badly frightened Li Qin. Although Qin Huai generally came home on time whenever nothing came up, she felt a little more at ease giving him a pager...

"Mom, if you lock it up, what am I supposed to do when I need to make a call?" Qin An did not know whether to laugh or cry. At this time, call charges plus the monthly rental were a considerable expense for an ordinary family. He understood what Li Qin was doing, but it really was too inconvenient...

"What calls could a child like you need to make? If you really need something, come to me and I'll give you the key..." Li Qin carefully put the key into her wallet...

"Give him one. He's not that young anymore. He knows how to behave..." Having heard Qin Xiangshan repeatedly praise Qin An lately, Qin Huai had become much more confident in him...

Most importantly, Qin Huai knew that Qin An was in contact with An Shui, and his publishing prospects still depended on her. When they had the phone installed, Qin Huai had paid an extra deposit to enable international calls too... Parents always took particular care over their children's affairs. Although Qin Huai felt there was little hope of getting published, when it came to spending money on his son, he had no reason to begrudge it, however much he spent...

Li Qin hesitated, but still handed Qin An a key. "Don't make calls unless you need to. This isn't a toy, understand?"

Qin An could do nothing about his mother always treating him like a little child, so he meekly agreed. Inwardly, however, he thought that Ye Zhulan's and Sun Sun's homes should both have phones. Things would be much more convenient now. He would give them his number at school tomorrow. Ye Zhulan would definitely sneak in calls to him, but he could not count on Sun Sun doing that. He would have to ask for her home number... and she would most likely get all bashful about it for a while...

"Ring... ring..."

The most monotonous of telephone rings sounded, and the family stood in the room looking at one another. They had only just had the phone installed. Who could already be calling?

"Go on, answer it!" Li Qin urged Qin Huai. Thinking that her family finally had a telephone and could make and receive calls whenever they wanted, she actually felt a little excited...