Chapter 47: Goji Berries and Mint Leaves

On the first day of the National Day holiday, Cheng Jiabao, a second-grade student at Banshan Elementary School, wasn’t happy about having no school.

Early in the morning, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, she was woken up by four feet kicking her under the quilt.

Still drowsy, she closed her eyes, curled up, and tried to move closer to the edge of the bed, covering her head with the corner of the blanket. But just as she was dozing off again, a series of farts echoed in her ear, followed by an arm slapping loudly onto her forehead.

The sharp, eye-watering stench filled her nostrils. Cheng Jiabao pulled down the blanket, mimicking the way adults cursed: “Damn it, so annoying.” She angrily elbowed the direction that had disturbed her sleep.

But the twins sleeping behind her seemed to have supernatural foresight, rolling toward the foot of the bed. Her strike missed, throwing her off balance, and she tumbled off the edge of the bed.

Her knee scraped against the rough concrete floor, but Cheng Jiabao didn’t make a sound. She rubbed the injured skin with her fingers, slowly stood up, and waved her arms theatrically toward the two younger girls sharing the room.

Of course, the slap was just a feigned gesture—she wouldn’t dare hit her younger sisters when she was awake. The twins were her aunt’s children, and she and her mother were currently staying at her aunt and uncle’s cold noodle shop. She didn’t have the authority to misbehave.

Yingying Cold Noodle Shop was located at the corner of the commercial street behind Banshan Elementary School. The ground floor sold cold noodles and spicy hot pot, while the second floor had been crudely divided into three rooms using gypsum boards, serving as the temporary residence for her aunt’s family in the city.

In theory, since moving here, Cheng Jiabao’s commute to school had been drastically shortened. She no longer had to walk forty minutes with a heavy backpack; the best elementary school in Banshan City was right outside her door. Yet, she hated this place—she hated her aunt’s cold noodle shop.

It wasn’t just the shop she despised; she also loathed the room she shared with her sisters.

When they lived in the urban village, she had shared a room with her older sister. There were two beds and a desk in the room. Her sister didn’t come home often, but according to Chen Xiaofen, whenever Cheng Simin returned, Cheng Jiabao would eagerly climb into her sister’s bed to sleep with her.

Cheng Jiabao couldn’t remember many details beyond that.

But she thought that her sister must have been fragrant, smooth, and soft, which is why she felt so fond of her. It certainly wasn’t like her cousins—they went to bed without washing their feet every day, and no matter how much she cleaned, the room always smelled of dusty winds mixed with scalp oil.

Stepping carefully over the four dark, smelly socks on the floor, Cheng Jiabao tiptoed to the wall to get dressed.

Once dressed, she quietly pushed open the creaking door, walked to the balcony sink to wash her face and brush her teeth.

Ever since she discovered that her sisters had once used her toothbrush to scrape wallpaper and crush ants, she had hidden her toothbrush and cup behind the washing machine on the balcony.

After finishing her morning routine, Cheng Jiabao, sporting a bob haircut, didn’t dare turn on the light. She tiptoed past her aunt and uncle’s room and entered the living room, lifting the floral curtain that shielded her mother’s privacy.

Seeing the neatly folded blanket already placed at the head of the single wire bed, Cheng Jiabao’s heart sank. She immediately bolted downstairs in panic.

Even after knocking over a pile of old cardboard boxes used for recycling, she didn’t stop.

Fortunately, she ran fast enough to slip out of Yingying Cold Noodle Shop just before the roller shutter fully closed.

Upstairs, the man in the large bedroom who had been woken up rolled over, hugging the woman beside him with swollen limbs and cursing under his breath.

Outside, Chen Xiaofen, wearing a shiny gray cotton coat, grabbed Cheng Jiabao’s arm and shoved her back under the roller shutter.

“Why are you out if you’re not sleeping? Get back inside.”

Chen Xiaofen’s voice was gruff like a tiger’s, while Cheng Jiabao’s reply was tiny, like a mosquito’s. Using her own methods, she resisted, twisting her neck and pulling down hard on her mother’s arm.

“Mom, I can’t sleep! Let me go with you!”

“What do you mean, go with me? You think I’m going out to play? I’m going to work in the back!”

Cheng Jiabao knew exactly where she was going.

Last year, in the middle of the year, the Banshan Market Supervision Bureau launched a crackdown on unlicensed food workshops, targeting all homemade cold noodles sold without proper food processing permits.

Yingying Cold Noodle Shop had been inspected and shut down several times. To continue operating, they had no choice but to follow the SAIC regulations and order compliant cold noodles from the only large cold noodle factory in Banshan City.

The problem was this: Aunt Ying’s cold noodle shop operated on a tight budget. The rent for the storefront was exorbitant, and the reason they could still make ends meet was by cutting costs through homemade cold noodles.

Buying pre-made cold noodles meant losing the cost advantage—it was already expensive to let the food processing plant take a cut. The profits from running the shop barely covered the rent, leaving little for themselves.

So, her clever uncle came up with a cunning plan: mix their homemade cold noodles with the regulated ones and sell them together.

The compliant cold noodles were displayed prominently in the kitchen for inspections, while the homemade ones were hidden in a secret pocket beneath the cutting board, ready to be pulled out and sliced at any time.

Earlier this spring, Aunt Ying became pregnant—with twins—and now, heavily pregnant, the task of making cold noodles naturally fell to Chen Xiaofen.

To avoid drawing attention, every night after closing the shop, Chen Xiaofen would return to the warehouse, fire up the cold noodle machine, and produce hundreds of sheets of cold noodles. She’d cover them with damp cloths to cool down, sleep for a few hours, and then bring the cooled noodles, along with the day’s supply of flatbread, wide rice noodles, and vegetables, back to the shop.

The two younger sisters hadn’t started school yet—they played all day, heads down, unresponsive to their names, like deaf kids.

Cheng Jiabao was different. She was a sensitive child. Even when doing homework, her ears were always perked up, eavesdropping. She paid close attention to the casual chatter of adults, so she understood a little bit of everything.

“I’ll help you carry the cold noodles, okay? I don’t want to stay in the shop. Uncle always sits by the entrance scrolling through Douyin, and Auntie makes me clean dirty tables…”

As she spoke, Cheng Jiabao raised her arm toward her mother, on the verge of tears. “I want to wear apron sleeves, but Auntie won’t let me. She ruins my new clothes! Look, they’re covered in chili oil—it smells awful and won’t wash out!”

Upon hearing this, Chen Xiaofen frowned and brushed her daughter’s arm away. Her words didn’t relent, but her actions stopped pushing Jiabao back into the shop.

She pulled down the roller shutter and said, “Coward. Why don’t you go play with Lili and Juanjuan on the street? Your aunt is far along in her pregnancy and can’t move easily. Someone needs to help out, right? Can’t you tell her you’ll watch the kids outside?”

“They haven’t even started elementary school, and I’m already seven. I’m not playing with them.”

“They’re filthy! Their fingers are full of poop. The other day, they wrapped tin foil around a pot, lit a fire underneath, and boiled urine! They even added goji berries and mint leaves…”

“All right, all right, stop talking nonsense. Listen, you’re dressed so lightly—if you catch a cold, don’t come crying to me. We don’t have money to buy medicine.”

Chen Xiaofen straddled the electric tricycle, and Cheng Jiabao immediately climbed into the cargo bed with a grin.

A windproof blanket fell from above. She wrapped half of it around herself and bunched the other half into a pillow, lying comfortably in her makeshift sleeping bag. She crossed her legs, squinted, and watched the moon fading quickly on the horizon.

The outline of the moon grew fainter, the sky washed away its ink-like color, turning into the faded denim of her mother’s jeans—the same pair her sister once wore, but it didn’t matter. Her sister hadn’t come home in a long time.

The cargo bed jolted beneath her, and leaves occasionally drifted down from the trees above. With a crack , a brittle leaf landed in the hollow of her eye.

Cheng Jiabao yawned, closed her eyes tiredly, and when she opened them again, it was already bright. The newborn sun shone directly on her eyelids, leaving two red shadows in her pupils.

Rubbing her eyes, she sat up and noticed that her mother’s tricycle had returned to the entrance of Yingying Cold Noodle Shop.

Chen Xiaofen’s thin cotton coat hung on the handlebars. Her water-red autumn shirt sleeves were rolled up past her forearms, sweat pouring down as she carried cold noodles into the shop. Seeing this, Cheng Jiabao jumped off the tricycle, picked up a package of fennel flatbread, and ran inside to help.

Mother and daughter made several trips back and forth. Cheng Jiabao noticed that less than ten meters from the shop entrance, the silver delivery van had appeared again.

Without drawing attention, she retrieved her gaze, picked up the last bag of small oil greens from the cargo bed, and pretended to hand it to her mother. Standing on tiptoes, she whispered, “Mom, that woman is here again.”

Just as Chen Xiaofen was about to turn her head, Cheng Jiabao quickly tugged on her autumn shirt and whispered urgently, “Don’t look back! She’s by the entrance of Craving Cat Snack Shop across the street. Didn’t you say I should avoid eye contact with the driver, and then she wouldn’t follow us anymore? It didn’t work—we’ve already moved, so how is she still following me?”

“I really didn’t make eye contact with her.”

Around two years ago, when Cheng Jiabao was in the senior class of kindergarten, the delivery van with license plate ending in 4489 often parked diagonally across from their residence.

At first, the Cheng family didn’t suspect anything unusual about the van, assuming the driver was a resident of the urban village.

But as Cheng Jiabao began elementary school and became more sensitive to numbers, she noticed something strange: no matter where she went, she often saw this delivery van.

Sometimes, it would park along her route to and from school. From afar, as soon as she spotted the license plate and paused, the van would quickly start up and flee.

Terrified, Cheng Jiabao told her mother about this frightening occurrence. But instead of being alarmed, her mother fell silent for a long time and finally told her: “You must be mistaken.”

Later, when Cheng Jiabao repeatedly complained to her mother, suggesting the driver might belong to a child-stealing crime syndicate, Chen Xiaofen dismissed her concerns, saying, “As long as you don’t make eye contact or talk to the driver, you’ll be perfectly safe. No one wants a scrawny kid like you.”

Over time, Cheng Jiabao came to believe that the delivery van was harmless, much like the stray yellow dogs that always lay sprawled on the ground in the urban village. She secretly recorded the number of times she saw the van in her diary.

The last time she noted the van’s appearance was on the day of her father Cheng Wei’s funeral.

According to Banshan customs, children were forbidden from attending funerals. Cheng Jiabao only saw her father for the last time at the hospital. She had no idea how his body was transported to the mortuary, placed in the ice coffin for mourning, cremated, and buried. But she understood that she would never see her father again.

Looking at the dozens of boxes of liquor piled in the living room and the smashed television set, Cheng Jiabao thought briefly and didn’t feel particularly sad.

What troubled her most during those days was that all the adults were busy at the funeral home, leaving no one to cook for her. She scoured every shoebox under the bed but couldn’t find the secret stash of money her mother had hidden. Those days were unbearably difficult.

In the morning, she licked clean every jar of jam in the refrigerator but still felt dizzy from hunger. Just as she was about to give up, she heard a rustling sound coming from the shop’s entrance.

Terrified, Cheng Jiabao grabbed a glass bottle as a makeshift weapon and slowly crept toward the source of the noise. It wasn’t rats or cockroaches—it was someone slipping a thick white envelope through the gap beneath the shop door.

The envelope landed on the floor with a soft thud. Cheng Jiabao immediately dropped the bottle, ran over, and picked it up. Inside was a stack of red hundred-yuan bills, packed tightly.

Cheng Jiabao didn’t dare open the door. When the adults weren’t home, she was only allowed to enter and exit through the backyard. So, closing one eye, she peeked out through the gap in the curtains.

That was the last time she saw the delivery van with the license plate ending in 4489. That day, clutching a hundred-yuan bill, Cheng Jiabao went on a shopping spree at the small supermarket in the urban village, returning home with her arms full.

That night, her belly stuffed, she lay on the couch wearing headphones, listening to her sister’s old MP3 player. In her drowsy state, she faintly heard an argument between Chen Xiaofen and another woman outside the shop. But when she woke up the next morning, her mother denied everything, so she naturally assumed it had all been a dream.

But now, the van had found them again at their new residence. Cheng Jiabao couldn’t help but raise her radar.

Outside Yingying Cold Noodle Shop, Chen Xiaofen and her daughter exchanged worried whispers.

Meanwhile, Zhou Yan, who was perceived as a menacing figure, sat in her delivery van wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, dozing off. Her feet were propped up on the dashboard, and her black coat was baking under the sunlight. Suddenly, her phone vibrated. She scratched her butt and picked up the phone from its vent-mounted holder, answering it and placing it by her ear.

“Hello!” After listening for about ten seconds, Zhou Yan’s eyes snapped open beneath her sunglasses.

Without even glancing at the tracking target already visible in her rearview mirror, she scrambled upright, hastily removing her disguise. “Got it, got it! One TV, two fridges, delivered to Chixia Winery, right? No problem, I’ll head there right now to pick them up.”