Evening Stars Chapter 32 (Part 2)
Translated by Q the Panda (ko-fi)
Chapter 32.2
The Southern Tibetan Plateau after sunset possessed the most raw and primal wildness. Winds from the northern slopes of the Himalayas crashed against everything in their path. They carried fury, as if wanting to overturn these fragile human structures, like a child angry that someone else had piled toy blocks inside his garden.
Xu Nanheng listened to the continuous bursts of wind smashing against the glass window, hitting the walls, and each impact was also slamming right into his heart.
On duty? It wasn't even his shift yet. Xu Nanheng was lying on his side, scrolling through his phone. Frankly, he had zero experience in this area. Not with men, not even with women. He'd never flirted, never played games. He barely read romance novels. His only understanding of how attraction worked came from one of his college roommates.
Back then, their dorm had four people. One became a commuter and another rented a place with his girlfriend, leaving Xu Nanheng and that roommate. The guy was a natural-born flirt. He could carry a single rose from the cafeteria all the way to Academic Building Seven, flirt with every girl along the way, and still have the rose in his hand when he arrived.
Xu Nanheng was a quick learner, but he couldn't stand anything that didn't make logical sense. Because of this, he once seriously asked his roommate why he flirted around if he wasn't looking to develop a stable relationship.
The roommate had looked even more baffled than he was. He told him, ‘Because it's fun! Why would you even ask?’
When he woke again, his whole body ached as if he'd gone through orthopedic surgery without anesthesia. It felt like a licensed carpenter was hammering at his joints with a long awl.
“Good morning.” Fang Shiyou's voice came from outside the door.
When Xu Nanheng opened it, Fang Shiyou's bright, energetic face hit him head-on. He squinted. “Morning, but I don't feel good.”
“Muscle soreness, joint fatigue, can't stand, can't walk,” Fang Shiyou summarized.
Xu Nanheng stared blankly, turned around, sat on the bed, then collapsed onto it. “I haven't prepared my lessons yet.”
“Can you walk back on your own?”
“Get me a wheelchair,” Xu Nanheng said weakly into his pillow. “Call Dolkar to push me. A teacher for a day is a father for life.”
Fang Shiyou smiled. “This time you used it right.”
Xu Nanheng echoed, “Exactly.”
“Get up and eat.” Fang Shiyou set down a steaming bowl of noodle soup and got to the point. “I have to go. There was a massive landslide forty kilometers away last night. We're heading out to assist.”
“Huh?” Xu Nanheng sat up.
Fang Shiyou picked up his waterproof backpack from the floor, packed in his laptop and a few essentials, including a portable toothbrush, toothpaste, and razor. Once he'd finished, he said, “The mountains in this area are prone to landslides, though they're usually small-scale or involve falling rocks. This time, it seems pretty serious. We just got the message and are heading over now.”
After speaking, Fang Shiyou slung his bag over his shoulder and glanced back at him.
Xu Nanheng was already sitting up, trying to process everything quickly, but his eyes were still blank. The hangover from the night before and the physical exhaustion from the previous day only allowed either his body or his brain to function properly today, not both.
He stared for a moment and managed a dull “Okay.”
Fang Shiyou smiled. “I'm off, then.”
“Wait……” Xu Nanheng stood up. “Be careful.”
“Yeah.”
Fang Shiyou opened the door and took one step, with his hand still on the doorknob.
He paused, his throat tightening, the words stuck halfway. But he couldn't afford to waste time, so from the doorway, he turned back and asked, “When I get back…… can we talk?”
Xu Nanheng didn't play dumb. There was no need to. At twenty-five, he understood perfectly well what Fang Shiyou meant between the lines. And he knew exactly what Fang Shiyou wanted to talk about.
What stood between them wasn't some thin paper window. It was the edible rice paper wrapped around a tanghulu, so delicate it would split open with a single breath of wind.
“That's quite the flag you're raising,” Xu Nanheng said with a small laugh. “Go on. We can talk anytime. Text or call when you have a free moment. Just be safe.”
With that permission granted, Fang Shiyou lowered his eyes and smiled, finally at ease. Then he added, “But there might not be any signal out there, so it's probably best to wait until I get back.”
Xu Nanheng nodded at him.
Even though Fang Shiyou knew that line sounded suspiciously like, ‘Wait for me to come back from the war and marry you,’ he was genuinely very happy as he got into the car, turned the ignition, and followed the ambulance and his colleagues' vehicles out of the hospital.
He remembered the day Yang Gao's confession had been accepted. The man had mopped the floor with unusual vigor, smiling at everything. Fang Shiyou had thought it was ridiculous at the time. And during Yang Gao's night shift, someone had taken his instant noodles with sausages from the lounge. No one knew if it had been eaten by mistake or thrown out as trash.
Given Yang Gao's temper, he should have thrown a fit, but that day, he'd just waved it off cheerfully, which Fang Shiyou had found downright terrifying.
And now, he was acutely aware that one really shouldn't be so blind to oneself. It turns out, when you're the one in that situation, you end up being even more over-the-top than anyone else. Driving behind his colleagues, Fang Shiyou felt like he could treat two hundred patients in one go, covering everything from surgery to internal medicine.
On the other side, Xu Nanheng sat there for a long while, trying to steady himself.
He really was a twenty-five-year-old adult. Maybe not the most mature, maybe a little careless with his words, but he always took things around him seriously. From the first moment he sensed Fang Shiyou's unusual attitude toward him, he had vaguely guessed that Dr. Fang might like him.
Throughout his life, Xu Nanheng had always been praised for his handsome looks, intelligence, and politeness. Yet he remained humble, always scratching his head and saying, ‘No, not really, I'm just average.’ He'd never had an inflated sense of self. Since childhood, he genuinely thought he was just an ordinary boy.
He had always believed that people should treat others with politeness and warmth. Everyone ought to be punctual, courteous, and kind, living within the rules of a civilized world. To Xu Nanheng, these were simply the basic standards of being an intelligent creature in a civilized society. So he never saw himself as particularly outstanding. He was just doing the most fundamental things.
That was why, when he realized Dr. Fang might like him, his first thought was: ‘What exactly does he like about me?’
Later, when Dr. Fang told him that he was a very good person, Xu Nanheng hadn't found the words very convincing. After all, those traits Fang Shiyou mentioned were, in his mind, just the bare minimum.
On the first night after Fang Shiyou left to assist with the landslide rescue, Xu Nanheng suddenly lifted his head from his desk.
He recalled what the Hunanese restaurant owner in the county town had once said: ‘Let your emotions get ahead of your reason.’
Liking someone, he realized, was never meant to be rational.
The moment that understanding sank in, his heart started to pound. He adjusted his posture and tried to let emotion move ahead of reason. He slowly put down the mental calculus of ‘because I am like this, I earn an extra point of liking from Fang Shiyou.’ He held his black gel pen between his fingers, gripping it tighter, attempting to experience the pure, unadulterated feeling of ‘he likes me.’
Then he put the pen down and reached for his phone.
There were no new messages from Fang Shiyou. The village affected by the landslide probably had no signal. Their chat history still stopped at the location of that bar in Shannan.
Come to think of it, the day Fang Shiyou performed open-chest surgery to remove a rebar from a patient in the small hospital's emergency room, they had agreed to have a drink together. Xu Nanheng looked at the chat, smiled faintly, then set his phone down and went back to preparing his lessons.
The next day, he called his students back for class. The seven days of National Day celebrations could be enjoyed every year, but now that they were in their final year of junior high, fun had to be cut short. Xu Nanheng brought his laptop to the classroom, had the students gather around the podium according to their height, and played them the flag-raising ceremony from Beijing on National Day.
They were too far from Beijing. The national flag fluttering near the border seemed to echo the one in Tiananmen Square, more than 3,500 kilometers away. The children watched the video of Beijing's dawn sky, feeling like they, too, were connecting with the capital.
Driving all the way from Beijing to Tibet, passing through Qinghai and Gansu and crossing the Tanggula Mountains, what Xu Nanheng saw the most was not snow-capped mountains, but national flags. Even in their small county town, the slogan ‘The Motherland in My Heart’ was visible on every street. Since arriving, his students had often asked him what Beijing was like. Thanks to Teacher Tan's reminder, he finally thought to show them the flag-raising video.
“Wow……”
The students were awestruck by the synchronized marching. Their eyes were practically popping out of their heads watching.
That day, Xu Nanheng warmed them up with a test paper he had prepared during the holiday. When the students finished, he didn't collect it. Instead, he went over the answers right away. After reviewing the test, he started the new lesson, and followed that with a review session.
Xu Nanheng started to accelerate the pace and raise the difficulty. By the next day, when he checked their homework, only Dasang Choedon had correctly solved the most challenging problem he'd given. By now, all the volunteer teachers had adopted the strategy of focusing on a core group, making sure the capable ones make it through.
Truthfully, most of Xu Nanheng's students were not very gifted. The only one he could truly champion and push forward was Dasang Choedon.
It was an unavoidable reality. Xu Nanheng didn't have the time to reteach everything from primary to junior high school. After the National Day break, all he could do was start pulling in the rope. If someone couldn't hold on and fell, there was nothing he could do about it.
He was all on his own, and he had already done everything he could.
The third day.
Xu Nanheng had already formed a habit of checking WeChat as soon as he opened his eyes. Still, there was no message from Fang Shiyou.
“Today we'll talk about using enumeration methods to find probability,” Xu Nanheng said after clearing his throat. “Let's start with what we covered before. Suppose there's a random event A. The probability, or the measure of its likelihood, of A occurring is denoted as P(A). Open your books. Here's another formula.”
He turned to the blackboard, chalk in hand, speaking as he wrote. “When there are n possible outcomes, and each one is equally likely to occur……”
In mathematics, the definition of probability depended on two key conditions:
The experiment must have a finite number of possible outcomes.
Each outcome must be equally probable.
Xu Nanheng forced himself to stay focused. The reason Fang Shiyou hadn't replied was probably just a lack of signal.
Telling himself not to worry was a lie. Telling himself not to worry was humoring himself, and Xu Nanheng had never been good at deceiving himself.
He swallowed and went on with the lesson.