She suspected that her father did not love her. What he did seemed to be merely fulfilling his duties under the law. She even wondered if her father and mother's family of three would be happier without her.
In the spring of 2019, when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, I went to Wuhan and stayed in a youth hostel. This is a store that is about to close. There are very few residents. The owner was a young man with his hair disheveled, as if he had been hit by a tornado. My room had 4 beds. During this period, only 1 roommate was added, and after staying overnight, he disappeared. Fortunately, I was writing the script, quiet and cheap, so I didn't consider changing places.
Downstairs is an old alley. There is a café near the alley. There is a skylight on the second floor and there is a smoking area. As a person who can't write without smoking, there is naturally a place to write outside the balcony of the hostel.
On the first day of entering the store, behind the bar was a short-haired woman wearing overalls. I was hungry and asked her what to eat. She asked if she wanted to try the freshly baked muffins. I swallowed my saliva and went upstairs to wait. I have a DV recorder in my bag. Hearing her clanging underneath, I hid in the glass fence on the second floor and quietly took a few videos.
She brought coffee and muffins, saw the DV I had put on the table, and asked me what I had done. Casually said that it was a documentary and came to Wuhan to find materials. She seemed a little interested. She sat down to chat and suggested that I go to Wuhan University to shoot cherry blossoms.
I said, I'm more interested in people's lives. Speaking of which, an idea popped into my head – to record a "woman making muffins" day. I asked her if she wanted to be a "recorded person" and she smiled and shook her head.
In fact, I understood that she doubted my identity. Such worries are normal. The strange customer who had just met in less than two quarters of an hour should take what he said seriously.
When she left, she handed her a business card and added a WeChat friend. Her name is Akino, the owner of a small shop. Because it is the low season, she usually runs her own shop, and only hires part-time helpers on Sundays and holidays.
It turned out that she was also a smoker. I sat down and watched her finish writing on the wooden sign—"There's wine tonight, let's talk about the wind and moon." She handed me the wooden sign and asked me how I wrote it. I praised her. She hung the wooden sign on the hooks of the doors and windows and picked up the cigarette.
Looking at the cigarette butts in the pot, most of them were signs she had smoked, I asked her how long she had been smoking. She thought about it and said that it had been 10 years since she smoked her first cigarette on her 14th birthday.
I looked at her face again—a little fat, a little round, not pretty, but nice to look at. The 24-year-old speaks and behaves with the calmness and indifference of a 30-year-old woman.
She also asked me how old I smoked and I said I was as old as she was, but I was 8 years older than her. She said I didn't look like someone in their 30s. I laughed and told her I was a single father and that my kids would play football.
Her face changed slightly, and the number of times she smoked decreased, as if she had lost her mind. After a while, she asked me how old the child was, and I said, 7 years old, I'll raise him. She asked me again if I was considering remarriage, and I shook my head: "I messed up myself, I'm not fit to get married." ”
"Then you haven't thought about making changes for your children?"
"I'm not the kind of person who sacrifices his ideals for the sake of his children, it seems that he has not been greatly affected, and he is still as lively as before."
"That's what you think — do you know what kids who grew up in divorced families really feel?"
When she asked me this, I was stunned, trying to sort out the language of rebuttal, but I couldn't say anything. She wanted to say something, but she didn't speak. A regular customer came, she took a puff of her cigarette, got up to say hello, said to me, "Come back and say it again", dropped the cigarette butt and walked in.
After waiting for a while and seeing another group of guests, I left my seat.
For the next few days, I was busy discussing the script with my friend who was a producer and didn't go to the café. During this time, when I returned to the café in the evening, I could always see a young man behind the bar.
One day at noon, when he went out, he saw Qiu Ye and men eating hot dried noodles in the alley. After saying hello, she learned that I was staying at a nearby youth hostel. She introduced me to the man named Apo, a graduate of the Beijing Film and Television Department. She mentioned me to Apo and said I was working on a documentary. Apo said he had just finished his crew work and returned to Wuhan to rest. If I need help shooting here, he's happy to attend. We added WeChat.
When I returned to the alley that night, it was already midnight. The lights were still on in the café without guests, Akino was cleaning, and Ah Bao was helping. I thought, the two should be lovers, it's too late, don't go in.
Two days later, it was raining in the afternoon, and I went to the café and sat down. There was only Akino in the shop, smoking a cigarette at the table at the door. I wasn't hungry, I just ordered a cup of coffee. Listening to my mouth a little angry, she made a pot of tea and took it out, saying no money. I was happy and felt like I was treated like a friend. Asked why Apo didn't come today, she said that she went to Yunnan with her girlfriend, "You don't contact him, he goes out to play handsome." ”
Sorry, I've been busy writing scripts lately and haven't considered documentaries yet. She also said she thought Apo was her boyfriend.
Qiu Ye also did not hide, saying that the two tried dating, felt inappropriate, and explained that it was just friends: "Our relationship is more like a sister-brother relationship, he is two years younger than me, and when he was a child, he ran over every time he came back, and his girlfriend was introduced by me, little girl, beautiful and cute." ”
She poured tea, squeezed a cigarette, pointed to an empty flowerpot at the door, and said, "You see, I planted flowers for three months, and they were stolen last night." ”
I said, someone stealing flowers? She said that she had thought about adding a monitoring probe to the door before, but because the rent of the shop expired in June, the landlord planned to sell the house, and whether the café could continue to operate was still unknown.
I asked how long the café had been open. She said she came to work as a clerk in the spring of 2015. In less than half a year, the boss wanted to change hands. She sold the store with her savings and money she borrowed from her boyfriend.
I did the math about her age at the time, she was only 20 years old and had the courage to make such an investment. She said she had long dreamed of owning a coffee shop of her own. At that time, she didn't think much of it, so she was lucky. This little shop is much better now than before. Although she doesn't make much, she still has a career. It's much better to work part-time.
I praised her for being independent and better than the average man. She smiled lightly and said that she had been unattended since she was a child, not independent and self-reliant, how could she survive in this society?
"At first I borrowed money from this shop and no relatives were willing to help. My boyfriend borrowed a sum of money from the family in the name of a partner to support me. Later, his parents knew that we were in a relationship, and they were afraid of being deceived, so they came to the store and asked me to write an IOU and write down the interest. In less than a year, I paid back the interest and profits, and we shared them. He loves me very much, but I know that a person with a strong personality and low self-esteem like me has no future. ”
I asked her what she meant by "no one ever cared" when she was a kid? She said I grew up in a divorced family.
My heart moved, remembering our conversation that day, and I understood her reaction and questioning at that time.
I took a sip of tea, took her word, and asked her when her parents would divorce. She said she was 1 year younger than my child that year and she had an older brother who was 1 year older than my child.
"Do you still have a brother?"
Her eyes turned red: "Yeah, we've been apart for 17 years..."
I looked at her calm face. For a long time, she opened the conversation box and talked about the memories hidden in her heart.
Since Qiu Ye remembered, she and her eldest brother had been living in her grandparents' house, and her parents had been home for a long time.
When Akino was 6 years old, her grandmother was seriously ill and was not as healthy as before. She could no longer drive her siblings to school in three wheels. Akiba can only walk with her brother to school.
One day, a circus came to town and a large tent castle was erected. A group of children slipped in through the cracks in the tent. Qiu Ye was fascinated by a beautiful woman riding on horseback. When she recovered, her brother and friends were gone. At the end of the circus performance, she was spotted in the crowd by her grandparents and uncle. When she got home, she saw her brother buried his head in tears, while his mother on the other end of the phone was crying.
Soon, Mom returned. A few months later, my father also returned. He also brought a cute puppy to give her a birthday present. Qiu Ye asked his father if he still wanted to leave, and his father shook his head. She was very happy, sleeping between her parents every day, laughing in her dreams.
But the dream didn't last long, and was soon interrupted by a quarrel. Qiu Ye couldn't remember what his parents were arguing about, only the TV set that his father had broken and the tears on his mother's face. As parents quarreled more and more, the smiles on the faces of siblings became less and less. Sometimes when the two returned to the door and heard a quarrel in the house, her brother would take her to her grandmother. But Akino didn't like going to his grandmother's house anymore. Grandma was very ill, and the house smelled of herbs.
The siblings often wandered the streets with school bags on their backs. The puppies grew up and wandered with them. The brother liked the dog very much and always took the puppy in his arms. Qiu Ye was jealous, angry, and did not speak. Sometimes her brother would coax her, sometimes he would leave her impatiently. Akino's most common trick is crying. As long as she cried, her brother would soon be back. She never imagined that one day she would be separated from her brother.