The Boarding House

The boarding house stood at the end of a narrow alley, two streets off People's Avenue and seven hundred meters from the Municipal Government building. It had been built in the 1980s as worker housing for the nearby textile factory — long since closed — and had been subdivided, over the years, into single rooms that were rented now to clerks and university students and, lately, to migrant workers from the western counties who could not yet afford the new apartments going up east of the river.

Lin Zhaoxu's room was on the third floor. Twelve square meters. One small window that looked out onto the alley and the back wall of a noodle shop. A narrow iron bed with a thin mattress, a particle-board wardrobe, a wooden table beneath the window, a single overhead bulb, and a shared bathroom at the end of the corridor. The rent was four hundred yuan a month. His salary, before deductions, was two thousand seven hundred and fifty.

He had chosen this room over a slightly nicer one, three blocks closer, because this one had a desk that faced the window. He had decided, the day he received his assignment, that he would spend a great deal of time at a desk in the next ten years, and that he would prefer a window.

He let himself in at eight forty-three on the evening of the second day. He had eaten a bowl of beef noodles at a stall around the corner, standing up, in seven minutes. He had walked the long way home, past three different small shops, allowing himself the small luxury of not thinking about the office for the eight minutes the longer route took.

Now he closed the door, locked it, set down his satchel, and turned on the overhead bulb.

The room exactly as he had left it that morning. The thin grey blanket folded at the foot of the bed. The brush case on the desk. The single chipped teacup on its saucer beside the brush case. The kettle on the small electric ring on the wardrobe top.

He sat down at the desk, took out his notebook, and began the day's record.

He had developed the habit at university, on the advice of an old professor of public administration who had told him: *Whatever else you do, write down what happened. Memory is a politician. It revises. Paper does not.* So Lin wrote, every night, what had happened during the day. Not his feelings. Not his theories. What had happened. Names. Times. Sequences. Words spoken, where he could remember them.

Tonight he wrote for thirty-eight minutes. He filled four pages. When he was finished he closed the notebook and slid it into the false bottom of the small wooden drawer beneath the desk — a false bottom he had constructed himself, on his second night in the room, with a piece of plywood and four small screws.

He boiled water on the electric ring. He made a cup of cheap green tea — not the Tieguanyin from Lao Wei, which he was saving — and he drank it slowly, looking out the window into the alley.

His phone rang at nine-fourteen.

It was his mother.

"Xiaoxu? Are you eating?"

"Yes, Ma. I had noodles."

"Just noodles? Beef? Or only vegetables?"

"Beef."

"Is it good there? The food in Qingyuan?"

"It's good, Ma."

"Are your colleagues nice? Your director — what was his name — Director Pang?"

"They're all very kind."

He said it the way he had been saying it for two days now, the way he expected to say it for many years. His mother did not need the truth. The truth was a thing he carried for himself.

"Your father wants to talk to you."

There was a small fumbling sound, then his father's voice — flat, careful, a teacher's voice.

"Zhaoxu."

"Father."

"How was the second day?"

"Adequate."

"Mm."

There was a long silence. Lin's father had never been a man who used words easily, and never less easily than with his son. Twenty-two years of conversation between them had produced perhaps four or five real exchanges, each one remembered by both men with a kind of awkward gratitude.

"There is one thing I wanted to say," his father said at last. "I will say it once."

"Yes."

"In our family no one has ever been a government official. Your grandfather was a country teacher. I am a country teacher. Your mother is a nurse. We do not understand the world you are entering. I have read books about it. The books say one thing. The world is, perhaps, another thing. I do not know which is true."

"I understand."

"What I want to say is this. There is a thing your grandfather used to say. He said: *A man can climb a high wall, but he cannot grow taller than himself.* I do not know what it means precisely. He said it to me when I was a young man, and I have thought about it for thirty years."

"I know that saying."

"Yes. He said it to you also. I had forgotten." His father paused. "What I want you to know is that we have never expected you to climb walls. If you should choose, at any time, to come home and teach in the county high school, you will find a place at our table. There will be no shame in it."

Lin sat very still in his chair. He looked at the calligraphy brush case on the desk in front of him.

"Thank you, Father."

"That is all I wanted to say."

"Yes."

"Your mother is calling me. I have to go."

"Yes. Goodnight, Father."

His father had already passed the phone back. There was a small sound of fumbling and then his mother's voice, brisk again. "Have you been drinking enough water? In Qingyuan in August you can become dehydrated even sitting at a desk —"

He listened to her instructions about water, about ginger soup, about the importance of not eating too much fried food. He answered yes, yes, yes, and at last she let him go.

He set the phone down. He pressed both palms flat on the desk for a moment.

He did not allow himself to feel the thing he was feeling. He simply noted that it was there, the way he noted facts in his notebook, and he set it aside.

He picked up the phone again and dialed his sister.

She answered on the second ring, breathless. "Gege!" *Older brother.*

"Xiao Wan."

"I was going to call you! How was today? Did you do something important?"

"I poured tea for thirty officials."

"Ge!" she laughed. "Did anyone notice?"

"One man noticed."

"A good man or a bad man?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"Hmph. You always say that. *I haven't decided yet.* You are a politician, gege. You were a politician when you were six. You used to make me give you the bigger half of an apple by *negotiating.*"

"You were three."

"I remember it perfectly."

"You don't."

"I do."

He smiled, very slightly, looking at the wall.

"Are you eating?" she said suddenly. "Ma made me promise to ask. Twice."

"I'm eating."

"Are you sleeping?"

"Yes."

"Are you lonely?"

There was a pause.

"Are you?" she asked again, smaller.

"A little," he said, after a moment. "Not enough to mind."

"Gege."

"What?"

"I'll come visit you. After midterms. Ma can't stop me. I'll take the train myself."

"You'll get lost in Qingyuan. There are six platforms."

"I won't get lost."

"You got lost in our own county once."

"I was four."

"You got lost again at fourteen."

"I was *being polite to a tourist.*"

He let her argue with him about it for two minutes. It was an old argument. It was not really about the train station. By the end of it he had stopped looking at the wall, and his shoulders, which had been very tight all evening, had loosened.

When he hung up, the room felt smaller and warmer. He sat at the desk. He drank the rest of his tea.

He took the calligraphy brush case down from the shelf and opened it. The brush inside was old — fifty years old, perhaps, his grandfather's working brush — its wolf-hair tip slightly worn at the very point. The inkstone in its small box was black river slate. He poured a few drops of water onto it and ground a thin film of ink with the grandfather's small ink-stick, which was wrapped in the original red paper.

He took a sheet of newsprint from a stack he had bought at a stationery shop the day he arrived. He spread it on the desk. He weighed the corners with his teacup and three small stones he had picked up in a courtyard.

He dipped the brush. He held it for a moment above the paper, his wrist loose, his shoulder relaxed in the way his grandfather had taught him before he was old enough to remember being taught.

He wrote one character.

忍.

*Endure.*

He wrote it once, and then another time, and then a third. The third time was the best. He let the ink dry. He looked at it for a long while.

Then he weighted the paper to the desk with his teacup, switched off the overhead bulb, and lay down on the narrow bed in his clothes. He did not undress. He had four hours of sleep ahead of him, perhaps five, and he had learned at university not to bother with pyjamas when he had less than six.

He fell asleep with the alley sounds rising through the open window. A dog barking somewhere. A woman calling for her child. The far-off thrum of the city expressway.

Above his head, on the desk, the single character on the newsprint looked at him in the dark.

*Endure.*

He slept.

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