楼下（上）

English (for the teacher)

On Yuan’s very first day at his grandma’s, he ruined the thing that mattered most to her.

It was July. He had flown for more than ten hours, then ridden a bus for another four, before he finally reached this little town on a river. When he got off, the heat hit him; it was nothing like a Canadian summer. Grandma was standing right at the station door: not tall, her hair already grey, a big umbrella in her hand.

“Yuan!” The moment she saw him, she smiled.

Yuan smiled too. On the way, he had got one sentence ready: “Grandma, I’ve missed you so much.” But when it reached his lips, only two words came out: “Grandma… hi.”

He had grown up in Canada. Mum hardly ever spoke Chinese at home, so he had taught himself his Chinese, bit by bit. He could speak it, but slowly; every sentence had to walk through his head once first.

“Hi, hi.” Grandma looked at him for a long time. “Look how tall you’ve got. You must be tired. Come on, let’s go home.”

Grandma lived on the third floor of an old building by the river. It wasn’t big: two rooms, one table, one small TV. The flat was very clean, and there wasn’t much in it. From the room you could see the river, and the boats on it, moving very, very slowly. There was always noise from downstairs: someone on the phone, someone selling things, children running, and someone calling, “Dinner’s ready!”

Yuan stood there and listened for a while. He couldn’t understand much of it, but he liked those sounds. In Canada, it was always quiet outside his front door.

After dinner, Grandma brought a notebook out of her room. It was blue and very old; you could tell it had been used for many years.

“What’s this?” Yuan asked.

“My old friend.” Grandma smiled. “I worked on the trains for forty years. Whenever the train reached a place, I’d get off for a little walk and listen to how people there talked. When I heard a good word, I wrote it down.”

She opened the notebook. At the top of every page was a little drawing: a small shop, a fish, a station, a bowl of noodles, and lots of mountains. Under each drawing was one word, written carefully in blue ink.

“Twenty pages in all, twenty places.” Grandma said.

“Can I have a look?”

“Take it. Look at it slowly.”

Yuan took the notebook downstairs. There were a few long benches by the river; he wanted to sit there, watching the river and reading the notebook. He read very slowly. Some characters he knew, some he didn’t. He thought: when my Chinese is good, I’m going to understand every page.

Just then, the sky suddenly changed. The wind picked up and the rain came, and not a light rain either, but a huge, heavy downpour.

Yuan tucked the notebook inside his shirt and ran for home. The street was all water. At the door of the building his foot slipped, he landed sitting on the ground, and the notebook flew out of his shirt, straight into the puddle by the door.

He snatched it up at once. But it was already too late.

The blue words slowly spread in the water, like tears. He opened the first page, the second, the third… Every page was the same. Twenty words, and not one could be read any more.

Only the little drawings were still there.

Yuan stood in the rain and didn’t move for a long time.

Back home, he put the notebook on the table and didn’t look at Grandma. “Grandma, I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. I…” He wanted to say so much, but he couldn’t get a single sentence out.

Grandma picked up the notebook and looked through it page by page. She looked for a long time. Yuan waited for her to be angry.

But Grandma wasn’t angry. She handed him a dry shirt and said, “Go and have a shower first, don’t get ill.”

When he came out of the shower, the notebook was already by the TV, lying open page by page. Grandma sat at the table drinking tea.

“Grandma, those words… they’re all gone.”

“No, they’re not.” Grandma said, “The words aren’t in the notebook.”

“Then where are they?”

Grandma looked out at the rain and said, “In people’s mouths.” She thought for a moment, then added, “I went to those places and heard them. You can go and listen too. Once you hear them, you’ve found them again.”

Yuan didn’t quite understand. But as he looked at Grandma’s face, he felt she wasn’t only trying to stop him feeling bad. She meant it.