LATDA CH 2.2: The Reason

Translator: Deyonna

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Admittedly, Li Chishu’s frame was remarkably striking in a crowd. Even without consciously searching for him, Shen Baoshan’s eyes were quickly drawn to his silhouette.

Or perhaps it was because he stood alone outside the shop, so utterly out of place with the surrounding crowd that he was particularly conspicuous.

In any case, Shen Baoshan saw him, noticing how he lingered before the display window, gazing intently at a scent inside for a long time.

He stayed for so long that a shop assistant stepped outside to ask if he'd like to come in and sample it, but Li Chishu shook his head and declined.

He turned toward the nearby bus stop, only to catch sight of Shen Baoshan's car the moment he stepped forward. It was the very one he had watched drive away twenty minutes ago.

Then came the moment their eyes met across the windshield.

Li Chishu's gaze seemed never to linger long on Shen Baoshan. Even though he was acutely aware that Shen Baoshan was looking openly at him at that moment, he still let his eyes drift away and walked toward the station as if nothing had happened.

When the bus pulled up, Li Chishu paused for a fraction of a second inside the empty vehicle before choosing a window seat closest to Shen Baoshan’s car.

He sat down and tilted his head slightly, his peripheral vision once again catching Shen Baoshan through the car's windshield.

Shen Baoshan sat back in his car, staring intently at all of Li Chishu's movements: walking to the stop, waiting for the bus, boarding when it arrived, casting what seemed like an offhand glance before departing with the engine's roar.

Li Chishu clearly knew that all he had to do was ask Shen Baoshan for a ride, and he would have gotten an affirmative answer. Yet he chose not to.

He didn't even have the intention to explain his perfunctory refusal of brushing off Shen Baoshan's offer to drive him back to the dorms. Not even one sentence, despite Shen Baoshan's car sitting right there, despite the person inside having already seen through his lie.

How interesting.

Shen Baoshan let out a dry chuckle. Li Chishu’s attitude toward him could almost be described as deliberate aloofness.

He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, pondering when on earth he had ever offended this Li Chishu.

Could Li Chishu still hold a grudge over losing first place to him in the first mock exam of their senior year?

Nobody could possibly be that petty.

This meeting, which couldn't be called pleasant and was even a bit disastrous, was where Shen Baoshan's memories of Li Chishu began. But it was the other person's mysterious, vacillating attitude that ignited all of his curiosity and desire to understand.

Watching Li Chishu leave by bus, Shen Baoshan did not drive away. Instead, he parked nearby and walked into the fragrance boutique, spending a full twenty minutes listening to the clerk explain all the items in the outer window that Li Chishu had stopped to look at—a collection of gardenia-scented products about to be discontinued.

-

Ten Years of Lost Dreams: Part One

Li Chishu has always had a small habit of collecting perfume.

As for where this habit came from, it traced back to the summer he turned eighteen, right after the college entrance exams.

Back then, in an effort to earn more for his tuition and living expenses, he had taken a job, only to be cheated out of his wages.

I had known about this for a long time, but he had never told me the details.

It wasn't until we were discussing this very dinner from our first encounter that, under my repeated questioning, he finally laid out the whole story.

As background, he was very vague when describing his feelings and thoughts regarding that summer job. I think it wasn't intentional, but rather his body’s instinctive way of helping him forget the most painful parts of the ordeal.

As a result, I learned quite a bit about the boss who had exploited and deceived him instead.

He was a middle-aged man in his early forties, genial in appearance. When recruiting summer workers, he had specifically asked about Li Chishu’s age and family background.

At first, Li Chishu had maintained a normal level of wariness. Facing the man’s inquiries, he kept everything outside of the most essential details rather vague.

"But he was really nice to me back then," Li Chishu added as he recalled. "At least, to who I was at the time, he was very nice."

Even though that man had made him stand outside an ice cream shop distributing flyers for an entire afternoon in thirty-eight-degree heat; even though, when Li Chishu felt unwell and nearly suffered heatstroke, the man granted him half a day off only to lecture him earnestly while docking the corresponding pay.

When speaking of the specific ways the man had been good to him, Li Chishu pondered for a long time.

"He... would buy me water," Li Chishu said, seemingly reluctant to deny the past version of himself who had genuinely believed the man was kind. "And he would ask me every day if I had eaten. And..."

He also kept praising Li Chishu for his willingness to work hard. And he made it a point to promise, again and again, that whenever he needed summer work in the future, he would contact Li Chishu first, offering to introduce him to tutoring gigs and more comfortable part-time work.

Nothing but verbal pleasantries and empty, intangible promises.

The man’s words were all lies, but an eighteen-year-old Li Chishu had taken them to heart and believed them.

So he slowly came to see that person as a caring elder. And through the other person's persistent, probing small talk, he revealed his circumstances: orphaned young, alone, with no one to depend on. He had made it to eighteen through years of scrimping and saving, supplemented by various forms of assistance from school and social programs."

Ultimately, this information became the very leverage the man used to bully him.

As the summer drew to a close and it was time to settle wages, the boss whom he had treated as a kindly elder turned hostile. Using all manner of excuses and pretext to docked his pay. Capitalizing on the lack of a legal labor contract and the fact that Li Chishu had no one to stand up for him, he even blocked Li Chishu's contact information, withholding the heavily docked wages that rightfully belonged to him.

Li Chishu truly had nowhere to turn for help; the only person who could help him was himself.

Silently, he staked out the man’s shop from dawn to dusk. Unskilled in arguing, he handwrote dozens of wage-claim notices and plastered them over the man’s door. Every time the man tore them down, he pasted new ones.

Later, the man closed the shop, determined to wait until Li Chishu went to college before reopening. So, Li Chishu kept watch outside the man’s home, silently putting up his handwritten notices one by one.

He could no longer recall the countless insults and curses hurled at him during that time. The only thing he remembered for years afterward were the two sentences the man spat in a fit of rage after throwing the money onto the ground.

"People like you—I can smell the poverty-stricken stench from half a street away.”

"Why are you even alive?"

Numb inside, his face devoid of emotion, he picked up the money and walked away. Yet the whole way back, he kept wondering what kind of poverty could possibly reek from half a street away.

That question kept emerging in many subsequent moments, haunting every decision Li Chishu made thereafter. Like the night he came to our arranged dinner, when he received my WeChat invitation, when puddle water splashed on him on the way yet I extended my hand to take his wet jacket, when we finished the dinner he thought he'd handled poorly yet I still invited him into my passenger seat.

Because of that elusive "poverty-stricken stench," he had taken a second shower, dodged my hand when I tried to take his jacket, and refused to get into the passenger seat beside me.

And in the end, he had lingered before the display window of that fragrance shop.

When he asked what impression I had held of those moments, I realized how starkly different our memories of our first encounter were.

I told him that the imprint those moments left in my mind was crystal clear: when I guided him to the seat beside me, what I smelled was the unmistakable, clean fragrance of him, fresh from a shower. I was grateful the rain hadn't fallen on his way there, which preserved the scent so richly. I disagreed the dinner had gone poorly—Li Chishu spoke very little, responding to others only with nods and shakes of his head. I was the only one who could get him to speak.

I remembered the warm yellow lighting in the private room that day, casting a glow over everyone's faces, while only the tips of Li Chishu's ears remained faintly red throughout.

It was very endearing.

Lying in my arms, Li Chishu was dazed for a long time after hearing my response, finally offering a faint smile. "If only I had known earlier."

Had he known earlier, perhaps he wouldn't have felt so much regret.

A regret so deep that he had repeatedly replayed the moment the puddle had splashed him.

As for that man’s other question from all those years ago, it wouldn't be until many years later that it would suddenly awaken like a long-dormant beast in Li Chishu’s heart, trapping his future and his life entirely beneath the fangs of its contemplation.

"Actually, I rarely wore that white hoodie back then," Li Chishu continued as he lay in my arms. "White isn't practical for hot pot, and it's a pain to wash."

"But when I was little..." He paused. "My mom told me I looked best in white."

Because he was going to see me, he wore it anyway.

He'd only had it on for less than thirty minutes when he encountered that spray of water.

For a long time, he had believed that splash was a warning from the heavens, an omen trying to stop him from moving forward.

Yet when it came to the direction I was in, he was always headstrong.

After being drenched by water splashed from the roadside, he didn't slow down for a moment, looking for the address I'd sent. Though on that rain-soaked walk, he'd thought of turning back more times than he could count.

And it was on that very night, passing by the window of that fragrance boutique, that the thought of buying perfume first entered his mind.

Li Chishu’s savings during his student years had never been negligible; he was simply too cautious. During a youth when he lacked the ability to earn money, his future seemed uncertain. The only thing he could firmly grasp was that short row of numbers in his bankbook.

He stood for a long time in front of that storefront window, looking at those scents and perfumes. In the end, he left, because at that moment, he believed he wouldn't cross paths with Shen Baoshan again for a very long time.

As he grew older and his financial situation became quite stable, I happened to notice an entire wall of perfumes in his walk-in closet.

Before that, I only knew he had a habit of blending his own perfumes.

Li Chishu was enamored with the scent of gardenias, but most perfumes with that fragrance were too sweet. So he slowly began experimenting, mixing neutral fragrances with gardenia notes to craft a more balanced composition.

Once, on a whim, I asked him to create a bottle of perfume for me based on his feelings for me. Without any hesitation, he took out a green bottle from the closet. When I received it, I realized the perfume had never been opened, treasured in that closet all along. He had never intended to use it. It had been meant for me from the beginning.

I asked him the name of the fragrance, and he told me it was called Green Citrus Spring.

The scent wasn't sweet at all. In fact, it was distinctly bitter at first whiff, carrying the sharp astringency of unripe green tangerines.

At the time, I didn't understand why he would give me such a bitter perfume. It wasn't until later that I figured it out. This was how I smelled to him during those three years. This was me, in his high school.

Now, whenever I use it, I can't help but imagine—imagining how many times we must have brushed past each other during those two years when I didn't even know he existed.

What expression would Li Chishu have worn each time we brushed past each other? What was he feeling in that moment when my gaze swept over him?

How many moments had to accumulate before such emotion could be distilled into a specific scent, allowing me to clearly perceive how his unrequited love existed in the years gone by?

Time flows like water.

I gather the fallen blossoms at dusk¹, knowing nothing.

¹A reference to Lu Xun's Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk (朝花夕拾), a collection of autobiographical essays exploring memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievability of the past. The title's literal meaning: gathering flowers (youth/past) in the dusk (middle age)

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