Evening Stars Chapter 22 (Part 1)
Translated by Q the Panda (ko-fi)
Chapter 22.1
Xu Nanheng breathed in, then out.
It was fine, he told himself. It was just a moment of eye contact between two people, like the awkwardness of accidentally locking eyes with a stranger on the street.
Then why the hell was he standing there watching him! Xu Nanheng bit his teeth and thought irritably, ‘Why did it feel like I was reluctant to part with a lover?’
He wasn't a very sensitive person, but even someone less sensitive could feel that something was definitely different just now. Xu Nanheng had never experienced anything like this before. Those inexplicable emotions felt so foreign, almost frightening.
And as a people's teacher, one of the core modules in Teacher Xu's professional development courses after joining the main school in Beijing had been on early romantic relationships.
At that moment, he couldn't help recalling that ppt slide titled ‘How to Spot Early Dating Among Students,’ listing all the subtle details that could give them away…… The instructor had even made a short animated film featuring two cartoon characters. One of them was leaning over the corridor of the teaching building, waving downward, while the other looked up with a smile and waved back.
He paused for a moment, sat back down, and poured himself a cup of coffee.
The man sitting in the car wasn't doing much better. Fang Shiyou closed the door, had to press the ignition button twice before the engine finally started, and drove off as if fleeing the scene.
He was supposed to head straight to Shannan for a meeting, but he knew he needed to sit down and collect himself first. There was no way he could focus right now.
Fang Shiyou drove into the small hospital, went up to the first floor, and asked the nurse station for a cup of cold water. He chugged it down in one go…… but it didn't help.
He was a cardiothoracic surgeon, and he clearly understood the cause of his own rapid heartbeat. He wasn't panicking, hadn't been startled, hadn't done any physical exertion, yet his heart was pounding fast.
To be honest, it took Fang Shiyou a good ten or more seconds to convince himself of this reality. For someone like him who was used to facing himself head-on, that was quite a long time. People often said one should open their heart and recognize their true feelings.
Fang Shiyou had opened quite a few hearts, albeit in a physical sense. But he knew that the racing in his chest wasn't from a medical condition. It was from attraction.
He took a deep breath, left the hospital, got back into his car, fastened his seatbelt, and drove toward Shannan.
It was Monday. Xu Nanheng's class was scheduled for the third period that morning.
He entered the classroom holding homework and textbooks. Everyone had already been notified that Saturday remedial classes were canceled. Judging by the assignments submitted today, it was clear that in just over a month, a significant gap in the students' performance had already formed within the class.
The good ones stood out, and so did the weak ones, especially in math. There was almost no middle group. Math was like that. Either you understood it or you didn't. There was no such thing as ‘almost understood.’
Xu Nanheng liked this subject because, under normal circumstances, it offered relatively certain answers. Math was wonderful that way. If you didn't know how to solve something, you just left it blank. No point forcing it. There was a certain peace in that.
The homework reflected that same pattern. The ones who couldn't do it simply left it empty. Blank after blank, until the pages turned into a field of white.
“Really now……” Xu Nanheng smiled at his students. “You guys are trying to lighten my workload, aren't you?”
As he spoke, the group leaders came up to hand out the homework. Xu Nanheng was smiling, his tone light, and the students below laughed along with him.
As usual, he went over the wrong answers, reinforced old knowledge points, and started the new lesson. Xu Nanheng had chosen to compromise. He thought Fang Shiyou had been right about one thing.
One had to ‘stay alive’ first before they could ‘live well.’
Xu Nanheng had let go of his stubbornness. After thinking it through, he realized it wasn't compromise. It was respect.
The day Fang Shiyou saved that injured worker had actually given him courage, or perhaps it had made him brave enough to accept the current situation of the impoverished villages in the Southern Tibetan Plateau. That was the reality. He was small, and what he could do was limited.
Of course, it was only his own abilities that were limited……
On Monday evening, Fang Shiyou sent him a WeChat message. Xu Nanheng didn't reply. Fang Shiyou tried calling, but the line was busy the whole time.
That was because…… the teacher in question was relentlessly persuading his father to consider investing in road and bridge construction in the Southern Tibetan Plateau.
It turned out that the scariest thing wasn't a second-generation rich kid starting a business, but a second-generation rich kid giving engineering advice to their first-generation rich parent.
Xu Nanheng's father found the idea utterly preposterous.
Over the phone……
“Dad, building roads in Tibet is a way of accumulating good karma! Aren't you, as a businessman, the one who believes in these things the most?”
“I run a local industrial company in Beijing, and you want me to go to Tibet to build roads? Xu Nanheng, what on earth are you plotting against your old man?”
“Dad, just hear me out.” Xu Nanheng picked up his glass for a sip of water.
On the other end, the call was cut off.
“Dad?” Xu Nanheng froze. “Hey, Dad!”
He quickly called back, but the call was declined. He tried his mother's number instead, but the one who answered was still his father. “Stop calling home! I think your volunteer teaching has made you crazy! If you like it there so much, why don't you just convert to Buddhism out there? Just video call us on holidays!”
“No, Dad! I'm not asking you to do it yourself! You just need to invest! There are road construction teams here. You just need to…… Dad?!”
On the other end, Xu Nanheng's father nearly threw the phone into the backyard pond.
Xu Nanheng knew it wasn't an easy sell. It sounded absurd, after all. High altitude, low air pressure, specialized machinery for mountain roads, narrow paths, unstable terrain…… it was one difficulty after another.
He knew all that. But still, he wanted to try his luck. When his phone finally went quiet, he saw Fang Shiyou's unread WeChat message and several missed calls. Exhaling softly, he called him back.
“Dr. Fang……” Because Xu Nanheng had just been shut down by his father, his tone was a little deflated, carrying a faint trace of petulance. He even unconsciously drew out the character ‘Fang.’
Fang Shiyou heard it clearly. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly as he asked, “What's wrong?”
“I tried to convince my dad to build a road for our village. Didn't work out.”
On the other end, Fang Shiyou silently opened his mouth for a second. “……Something as big as road construction isn't exactly something you can explain over the phone.”
“I know. I was just giving him some advice on which direction to take.”
“……” Fang Shiyou paused, thinking, ‘That's your father, not one of your subordinates.’
“Uh, by the way, I bought the Polaroid for you. Got two packs of film too. But I've been suddenly scheduled for a surgery tomorrow and can't go back on Wednesday either. There's a professor from Zhongshan, Guangdong coming to give a lecture.”
Xu Nanheng raised his wrist to check the time and said, “No problem. We're taking the students to the county school tomorrow afternoon for some lab experiments. I'll just swing by and pick it up from you then.”
Hearing that he was coming over, Fang Shiyou subconsciously tried to steady himself. He gripped the railing in the hospital corridor tightly, forcing his tone to stay even.
“Oh, alright then. I'll text you after the surgery.”
“Just call me,” Xu Nanheng said, taking another sip of water. “I might not see your message right away. You know how terrible iPhone reception is here.”
The next day, the students were set to borrow the county school's labs. The school arranged for two large buses, each capable of carrying 49 people, to pick them up and drop them off. The plan was to leave tomorrow morning. Since buses moved slowly on mountain roads, they'd arrive by afternoon.
On Tuesday, over sixty students and all the teachers boarded the buses.
They were going to the county school for physics and chemistry experiments, led by Teacher Sonam and Teacher Tsering. When they arrived, Dawa Gyatso came to meet them, waving enthusiastically when he saw Xu Nanheng.
Xu Nanheng considered himself an easygoing person. He knew how to let things go and not get stuck in dead ends. A saying his grandfather often repeated, which Xu Nanheng still found very useful today, was: life is bitterly short.
So when it came to Fang Shiyou and those unnameable feelings he had toward him, Xu Nanheng decided to set them aside for now. That, too, was something math had taught him: if you couldn't solve a problem, leave it blank, move on, don't waste time. What applied to equations also applied to life.
After all, most things in this world didn't come with formulas, didn't have a single right answer, and offered no reference solutions. Standing at the foot of the county school building, he watched the students follow their teachers upstairs, then looked up at the bright, piercing blue sky above the Southern Tibetan Plateau, which felt close enough to touch.
It reminded him of when he first arrived in Lhasa and forgot to ask Fang Shiyou for his contact information. At the time, he didn't feel much regret. There were countless missed connections in this world. Most people were nameless passersby, and those missed encounters never turned into stories. Those chance encounters were like a gust of wind by the side of the road, beneath the snowy mountains, leaving no trace.
He inhaled, exhaled, and steadied himself.
After all, at the end of the day, he didn't even know if Fang Shiyou was single, let alone his orientation.
“Teacher Xu!” Dawa Gyatso greeted him with a smile. “How have you been lately?”
Xu Nanheng snapped out of his thoughts, smiled, and shook his hand. “Pretty good. How about you?”
“I'm great, I'm great. Come sit in my office for a bit?” Dawa Gyatso said. “They've got two periods of physics and two of chemistry, so it'll take all afternoon.”
Xu Nanheng looked up at the sky and said, “I'll pass. I'm heading to the market to buy a couple of quilts. Dr. Fang said the temperature's dropping in a few days.”
Actually, it was already cold now. Xu Nanheng was wearing a navy blue crewneck sweater under a windproof coat. Having just stepped off the bus, he felt a little warm, so he left his coat open.
Dawa Gyatso nodded. “Yes, it usually starts snowing here in October.”
Just as he said that, a gust of wind blew past.
Teacher Xu was tall, refined, and handsome. The gust of wind perfectly billowed his open windproof coat. All his clothing was bought by his mother, who had impeccable taste. His jeans, neither loose nor tight, showed off his long, straight legs. After all, he was still young, only twenty-five, so his mother had paired the outfit with a pair of canvas shoes.
The bell rang right after. Dawa Gyatso hastily said, “I have to go teach,” and disappeared in a rush. Xu Nanheng had the day off. The county junior high school wasn't large. There were only two teaching buildings and one dormitory. After wandering around a bit, he decided to take a taxi to the market.