Heading for the Plains - Chapter 23

Waking up in the middle of the night was purely an accident.

It’s always best not to be overstimulated before sleep. Xia Chao felt she shouldn’t have been doing Physics problems right up until bedtime; it had left her head heavy and clouded, leading her to dream that she had forgotten to bring a pen to her entrance exam.

In reality, forgetting a pen isn’t a world-ending crisis, but in the dream, she was frantic. She rummaged through her pencil case; erasers, rulers, pencils, and compasses were pulled out one by one but that single pen remained elusive. Finally, she accidentally knocked over her water bottle. As the stationery and water spilled across the desk, the invigilator stood up and, in an icy tone, asked her to leave.

She looked up in terror, only to find that the young teacher was Ping Yuan.

Xia Chao woke up with a start.

The lingering fear sat heavy in her chest. She lay in bed dazed, unsure why a dream about an exam; no ghosts, no monsters had left her drenched in cold sweat and gasping for air.

Eventually, she wiped the sweat from her brow and realized the physiological cause: people don’t dream of water for no reason. With a slight pressure in her lower abdomen, she sighed, climbed out of bed, and felt her way through the dark in her slippers toward the bathroom.

Why did I drink so much water tonight? she grumbled to herself. She flushed the toilet and washed her hands in the dark.

As her eyes adjusted to the shadows, the room began to take shape. A small window in Ping Yuan’s bathroom was covered by Venetian blinds, allowing slivers of moonlight to leak through the slats, casting long, thin lines of light and shadow across the cold tiles.

The reflection in the mirror remained murky. Afraid of the ghost stories she’d heard as a child, she refused to look up. She simply shook the water from her hands and pulled open the bathroom door.

That was when she saw her: Ping Yuan, sitting on the sofa, staring into space.

******

Ten years later, Xia Chao would often think that destiny-defining moments usually arrive in the guise of accidents.

Like Ping Yuan that night.

If Xia Chao hadn’t been so groggy, she would have realized that Ping Yuan had likely been sitting there for a long time. She might have even been sitting there in the dark, knees pulled to her chest, silently watching as Xia Chao shuffled into the bathroom and back out again.

If Xia Chao hadn’t noticed her, this night of insomnia would have passed in silence on the sofa.

But Xia Chao did notice, and because she was still half-asleep, she stopped in her tracks and blinked stupidly until her vision finally focused. “Why are you out here?”

Ping Yuan looked up, tilting her head in confusion as if wondering why anyone would ask such a silly question. What else does someone do on a sofa in the middle of the night without even a phone for company, if not suffer from insomnia?

But Ping Yuan didn’t snap back with her usual sharp tongue. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour; weary people tend to be a beat slower. She looked at Xia Chao and said simply, “Insomnia.”

Her voice sounded a little soft and withered.  Almost as if she were struggling to bear the weight of the long night. Hearing it made something in Xia Chao’s chest quiver.

The memory of that night returned. She didn’t know why it surfaced now. Perhaps the way Ping Yuan’s brow was furrowed now mirrored the way she had looked while tucked into Xia Chao’s neck back then.

But the atmosphere tonight was different. Tonight, Ping Yuan was a solitary, chilly figure sitting alone without even a cushion to hold. Moonlight streamed through the side window, filtering through the white gauze curtains and illuminating her figure. She looked like a white begonia flower that had grown weary of blooming in the dark—slighter than a real flower, not nearly as bright. She was a hazy, pale “flower shadow” cast against a white wall by the moon.

It made Xia Chao’s heart feel very soft.

Drawn by a strange impulse, Xia Chao sat down beside her. She pulled up her legs to match Ping Yuan’s posture and hugged a fuzzy cushion to her chest. “Why can’t you sleep?” she asked softly.

She remembered Ping Yuan’s sleep quality being poor, but not total insomnia.

Ping Yuan let out a sudden laugh.

“I was angered by your exam paper,” she said, her eyes lowered, her voice a bit raspy.

Apparently, speaking had cleared her head, and her habit of being “mean” returned. She looked coldly at Xia Chao’s predicament. The girl looked embarrassed; her long lashes fluttered like a guilty butterfly for a long moment before she whispered, “I’m sorry.”

It looked like Ping Yuan was bullying her which, to be fair, was true.

Ping Yuan watched her fidget and couldn’t help a silent smile. Her comment about the exam was just displaced anger, but Xia Chao wasn’t entirely innocent. She understood Xia Chao’s surprise at her insomnia, because before this, she really didn’t suffer from it.

Her sleep had always been poor—perhaps due to the sleeping pills she was fed as a child and her nights were usually filled with grotesque, exhausting dreams. It wasn’t until she slept with Xia Chao that one night that she experienced true rest for the first time in her life.

Humans are strange creatures. If you’ve never had something good, a miserable existence is bearable. But once you’ve tasted something better, everything else becomes twice as long and twice as difficult to endure.

Like the difference between a restful sleep and a night of tossing and turning.

Ping Yuan lowered her head, her fingers twitching. She loathed the smell of smoke, yet in this moment she almost wished she knew how to smoke. At least then she could light a cigarette in the long night, watch the red ember move toward her fingers, and watch the ash fall. It would be something to do.

Anything was better than lying there, trying to recall the state of mind that led to that one perfect sleep, only to lose all chance of it.

Beyond Mount Wu, there are no clouds. The poetic sentiment didn’t quite fit, but the human experience was the same.

Xia Chao stole a look at Ping Yuan’s profile, seeing the quiet, lonely silence of her face in the dark. Suddenly, she understood why Ping Yuan’s secondary WeChat name was “Really Want to Sleep.”

Because she truly, desperately, couldn’t.

Unsure of what to do, Xia Chao fell silent and just sat there, keeping her company. It was a clumsy method, as she soon became drowsy herself. In the dark living room, she began to nod off.

Just as her head was about to tip onto Ping Yuan’s shoulder for the third time, Ping Yuan spoke.

“Xia Chao?” She said her name softly.

Xia Chao jerked awake. “Mhm? Here!”

She straightened her back instantly like a startled rabbit. When people are sleepy, their voices are soft and nasally. Ping Yuan felt her take a nervous swallow, as if she were terrified of being caught falling asleep first.

Ping Yuan smiled and didn’t call her out. “Talk to me for a bit.”

The sofa cushion behind them dipped slightly. Xia Chao didn’t need to turn to know Ping Yuan had leaned back. Her head rested against the soft curve, her back relaxed—a gesture of total surrender to the long night. Her voice floated over, lazy, weary, and a bit husky.

“I don’t think I ever asked why you’re named Xia Chao,” she said quietly. “Did Xia Ling name you?”

Without realizing it, Ping Yuan had stopped referring to Xia Ling as “your mom.”

Xia Chao thought about their hostile first meeting and smiled. “Yeah,” she said softly, leaning back to match Ping Yuan, her eyes on the ceiling. “Like I told you, it was raining the day she found me.”

“They say it was a massive storm—thunder rolling, rain pouring down. It almost drowned me. My mom said everyone was huddled under a bus stop to hide from the rain, pushing and shoving, when someone pointed at a trash can and yelled that there was a baby inside!”

“You know the rest,” she smiled at her, a practiced pause for effect. “My mom said the day she adopted me was in early May, the ‘Start of Summer’ (Li Xia). That storm was the first rain of the summer.”

She had a talent for storytelling. Ping Yuan listened and nodded seriously.

But after the nod, Ping Yuan went silent. Xia Chao froze. Isn’t this where people are supposed to ask, ‘Then why aren’t you named Xia Yu (Summer Rain)?’

Ping Yuan didn’t take the bait. The punchline was stuck in Xia Chao’s throat. She waited a few more seconds until she couldn’t take it anymore. “Why aren’t you asking me?”

Ping Yuan looked at her blankly. “Asking you what?”

“Asking… asking that!” It wasn’t fun if she had to provide the setup herself. She gestured emphatically. “You know… the rain, the water, all that!”

She was frantic, but Ping Yuan refused to play along. Seeing the girl so desperate was like watching a puppy biting its leash and spinning in circles at its owner’s feet. The door is right there, the collar is on, but the most important word “Walk!”, remained unsaid.

How cute. Ping Yuan watched her vivid features in the dark. She thought of that night in bed when she’d teased Xia Chao just as easily. She liked this feeling. Or rather, she was beginning to miss the intimacy of that night.

I’ve gone mad, she scolded herself. Can I really not sleep without someone beside me? I’ve lived like this for years; why am I being so dramatic now?

At that thought, her smile vanished. The playful mood was gone. She stared into the dark for a moment before finally giving in to the “puppy.” “Fine. Why aren’t you named Xia Yu?”

The expected question had finally arrived. But Xia Chao froze.

For some reason, Ping Yuan didn’t look happy anymore. Her features had returned to that weary, cold detachment, like a thin layer of snow had settled over her again. The snow was light; a warm finger could melt it into water, but it was snow nonetheless.

Xia Chao felt a pang of regret. She wasn’t stupid; she realized Ping Yuan had just been teasing her. But what did it matter if she was being teased, as long as Ping Yuan was happy? She was more than willing to play along.

But it had backfired. Xia Chao looked down, dejected, worrying she had been too clingy and made Ping Yuan upset. She lost her desire to be witty and answered honestly: “Because my mom felt that ‘Chao’ (Tide) had more power than ‘Yu’ (Rain).”

The small southern town lived by the river. Due to the subtropical climate, every spring and summer brought floods. The normally gentle green water would rise with the rain, turning into a churning yellow silt that crept toward the danger lines. Her old home still had the watermarks from the great flood of the nineties on the first floor.

Xia Chao used to dislike the name. As a seven-year-old, she only wanted the rain to cancel school; she didn’t want her name associated with a natural disaster. When she got older, the boys in her class would make crude, vulgar jokes about “tides” and “wetness,” and her name was always the first target.

She’d held her own, of course—sparing the rod spoiled the child—so her mental health was fine, but the name always carried a bit of a stigma.

Until the day she took a high-speed train across a thousand hills and saw a real river in its flood season from a bridge. The water was vast and endless, spreading across the plain and rushing east, the sunlight reflecting off it with a blinding intensity.

In that moment, she understood what Xia Ling had intended. Xia Chao smiled softly. “Actually… I think now that your original name might have been ‘Xia Yuan’ (Summer Plain).”

It was an abrupt shift. Ping Yuan looked at her, puzzled. “Why?”

“Because…” Xia Chao looked up, bringing her two index fingers together. “The Tide and the Plain… they just go together.”

Ping Yuan was speechless for a second. “What, like a rhyming couplet? We aren’t a legendary pair of star-crossed lovers here.”

Xia Chao laughed stupidly. “Hehe.”

Actually, that wasn’t what she meant. What she meant was: the rushing tide will eventually cross ten thousand mountains to reach the plain.

And I will eventually find you.

But saying that out loud would be far too strange. So she just sat there, biting her lip and looking at Ping Yuan with smiling eyes.

Ping Yuan felt her ears grow warm under that gaze. What is this? she wondered. A midnight census?

But speaking of census… she was curious about one thing. She nudged Xia Chao with her elbow. “Hey.”

“Since we’re doing ‘couplets’,” she said as if it were nothing. “What’s your nickname?”

To her surprise, Xia Chao suddenly became incredibly tense.

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