That year Beijing saw more rain than usual, more even than the south Shang Zhitao had just left behind. Rain dripped steadily from a sky heavy with strange, low-hanging clouds, and it was hard to say whether the scene looked like a watercolor painting or simply looked cold.
Shang Zhitao was wrestling with her two suitcases, one packed with books, the other with clothes and shoes and nothing else. She had come from Nanjing to Beijing. At twenty-two, this was the first time in her life she had moved anywhere entirely on her own.
Sweat beaded on her forehead and cheeks, and her face flushed pink with the heat. She felt like she might melt on the spot. She'd need to buy a fan tomorrow, she noted to herself.
The narrow room felt even more cramped with both suitcases crowded into it. Through the wall she could hear the girl next door on the phone. "I'll come to your place this weekend, okay? The room next to mine just had someone move in and the walls aren't soundproofed at all."
It took Shang Zhitao a moment to realize the girl was talking about her. She put on her headphones, turned on some music, and kept unpacking, moving more quietly now. Before she'd left, her senior classmate Yao Bei had told her: living in this city, you have to be considerate of others, because everyone here is struggling in their own way. Shang Zhitao hadn't fully understood what she meant by struggling. Now she thought she was beginning to.
She'd originally planned to stay in the south after graduation, but that would have put too much distance between her and her parents. After a long time weighing it over, she sent her resume to every company she could find in Beijing. As a graduate of a college nobody had heard of, landing a special offer from her current company felt like something close to a miracle. She still couldn't quite believe her luck.
Once she'd arranged her things and looked around the small room, she saw how bare it really was. When she'd first viewed the listing online, the agent had sent her a handful of photos, and from those photos it had looked fine. But standing here now in the shabby little room, there was nowhere to sit except the bed, which was covered in a faded floral quilt. She leaned back against the headboard, stretched her legs out, and pulled out a notebook to write down everything she'd need to buy tomorrow. For dinner she had only the small electric cooker she'd brought from school and a bowl printed with a scene of the Qinhuai River. She didn't dare use the shared washing machine in the building, so she'd have to wash her clothes by hand. All the worries she'd never had to carry while she was still a student had landed on her at once today. It struck her, suddenly, how messy this day had turned out to be.
Three pages of her notebook filled up, and in Shang Zhitao's eyes every line on those pages boiled down to the same word: money. Everything needed money.
She did have some savings, money she'd earned from part-time jobs while she was still in school. A few days ago, worried she might struggle once she got here, she'd gone to the bank and withdrawn ten thousand yuan.
She hated spending it. Item by item, she thought through what counted as urgent and what could wait, sorting everything into columns: buy now, buy after the first paycheck, buy after the second.
Partway through writing, she suddenly felt a little ridiculous, a little embarrassed. She tossed the notebook onto the bed and laughed to herself. She hadn't lost that softness yet, that lack of caution in her movements, that blindness to the life that was about to start closing in on her.
Whatever. She'd figure it out.
The courage lasted until late into the night. She got up, pushed her two suitcases against the door and stacked them together, sealing it shut. Then, slowly, she felt the need to use the bathroom creeping up on her. She held it in rather than go out into the hallway, closed her eyes, and started counting sheep instead. The pressure in her bladder and the fear of stepping outside pulled against her exhaustion in equal measure, courage and cowardice tangled together somewhere in her chest.
Her first night alone in an unfamiliar city stretched on forever.
It was still raining the next morning. When she opened her eyes she remembered a farmers market near her building, one she'd spotted from the bus the day before, and decided to head there for a few things. She put on her raincoat, shoved her suitcases out of the way, and pushed open her door. A girl stood in the bathroom doing laundry, slight and soft-looking, with the kind of gentleness Shang Zhitao associated with southern girls. She smiled at her. "Hi, I'm Shang Zhitao."
The girl smiled back. "Hi, I'm Sun Yu." The voice was familiar. It was the girl from next door. "It's still raining out. Where are you headed?"
"I want to go to the farmers market to pick up a few things."
"There are a lot of pickpockets over there. You just got to Beijing, right? It's not safe to go alone, I'll come with you." Sun Yu dried her hands, jogged back to her room, and grabbed an umbrella.
"Don't you have work today?"
"I quit." Something dimmed briefly in Sun Yu's expression before she stepped ahead to lead the way.
The building they lived in was old, its hallways cluttered with junk, dim and cramped. Shang Zhitao pulled out a small flashlight and switched it on. "Watch your step," she told Sun Yu.
They finally made it outside, and a light drizzle pattered against Shang Zhitao's raincoat.
"So who are you?" Sun Yu asked.
"I'm from Ice City. What about you?"
"Guizhou."
"Wow, Guizhou. That's so far." Shang Zhitao had been born in Harbin and had barely traveled beyond the area around Nanjing while she was in school. Guizhou might as well have been on the other side of the world to her.
Sun Yu heard the wonder in her voice, saw how wide her eyes had gone, and couldn't help smiling. "You're pretty cute, you know that?"
Caught off guard by the compliment, Shang Zhitao flushed and let out an awkward little laugh. The road to the market had turned to mud, and the two of them picked their way through it, one foot sinking deep and the other shallow, until they finally reached the stalls. The market had everything. Shang Zhitao bought bowls, chopsticks, pots, four basins in different sizes, a small flower stand with flowers, and a chamber pot. Sun Yu watched her drop the chamber pot into a black plastic bag, her face reddening, and murmured, "I bought one too, when I first moved here. Nothing to be embarrassed about."
"The agent told me two guys had just moved into the other two rooms, but I haven't seen them yet and it makes me a little nervous," Shang Zhitao explained.
"It's smart to be careful. You should always look out for yourself." Sun Yu's accent, when she spoke of home, carried a softness that made the words land gently.
It took them three trips back and forth to carry everything home.
There was a beef noodle stall in the market, the smell of rich broth rising through the rain, and by then both of them were hungry. Shang Zhitao invited Sun Yu to share a bowl of noodles, a small thank you for showing her the way.
So it was that on her second day in the city, Shang Zhitao made her first friend.
Sun Yu, freshly unemployed with a boyfriend living clear across town, offered to help Shang Zhitao fix up her room. What had been a bare, plain space slowly gained a bit of character under their hands. Sun Yu looked around, impressed. "Are you studying art or something?"
"No, not at all." Shang Zhitao sat cross-legged on the bed, admiring their work, then nodded to herself with satisfaction. "This actually looks really good."
Sun Yu laughed at her earnestness and settled down beside her.
There was a faint clean scent about Shang Zhitao, an untouched quality, like a blank page no one had written on yet. Sun Yu realized she hadn't come across a girl this unspoiled and well-mannered in a long time.
"How old are you?" she asked quietly.
"Twenty-two. You?"
"Twenty-five. So what will you actually be doing here in Beijing?"
"My school placed me with a company. I start officially next Monday." Shang Zhitao said it with a smile, her eyes curving into crescents, genuinely lovely in that moment. Sun Yu nodded. "Is the office close by?"
"I haven't been yet, but my senior said it's about eighty minutes."
"That's not bad. Not too far at all."
For people working in Beijing, an eighty-minute commute was nothing unusual. The city was simply too vast. Shang Zhitao didn't think it sounded far either. Back in school she'd made the trip from campus to Purple Mountain every week, four hours round trip, usually spent reading or listening to music, the time slipping by painlessly.
She found herself looking forward to the work ahead, to this new life, to the city itself. Tucked under her pillow was a notebook where she'd written a new entry the night before, three thin, nearly transparent bus tickets taped beside the words: July 10th. Hello, Beijing.
That night she lay listening to the rain outside her window and felt, briefly, as though she'd been carried back south. Graduation had come faster than she'd expected, and those mornings of scrambling out of bed to make it to class felt impossibly far away now, gone for good.
A small loneliness settled over her.
She stared blankly at the dim little lamp beside the bed. Everything around her had gone quiet except for the steady patter of rain. Sleep wouldn't come. She lay there with her eyes open in the low light, listening to the sounds outside.
She missed home, just a little.
She missed school, and her classmates, just a little.
Her nose stung, and she blinked against it.
Author's Note:
This story won't be a short one. Work keeps me busy these days, so I can only promise two to three hours of writing a week, so go in with that in mind.
Neither the male nor female lead comes into this story unattached (he's had a past relationship, and she had a meaningful one in college), so this isn't for readers who need spotless romantic histories.
This isn't really a romance at its core, it's about a few ordinary girls finding their footing in a massive city. There will be plenty of workplace storylines, so if you're here for pure sweetness or heavy romance, proceed with that in mind.
I'll add more notes as I think of them.