She kept writing.
"The practical matter is this. My schooling is finishing soon. The question of what comes next is one I am thinking about carefully. You know the current situation regarding countryside assignments. The compound provides some consideration but Mum doesn't think it will last and I am inclined to agree with her assessment.
She suggested I write to you. Dad said to listen to Mum.
So here I am.
I would value your thoughts when you have time to give them. There is no urgency — or rather there is some urgency but not the kind that requires you to drop everything. You will know what I mean by that.
Take care of yourself.
Yushu"
She read it through once.
It said what it needed to say. Not too much. Not too little. She had always written to her elder brother this way — giving him the facts and trusting him to understand what the facts meant without her having to explain them. It had worked for five years. She saw no reason to change the approach now.
She folded the letter. Three folds. Slid it into an envelope and wrote his regiment address on the front in her clearest hand. Set it on the corner of the desk where she would see it in the morning and remember to take it to the courier post point on her way to school.
Then she sat back and looked at it.
The sealed envelope sitting there on the corner of her desk. Something about the finality of a sealed envelope — the way it committed you to having said what you said, made it real in a way the writing itself hadn't quite managed.
She thought about her elder brother opening it. Reading it in that way he had — still, completely present, giving the page his full attention before he gave it anything else. He had always read things properly. Even as a boy he had been like that — whatever he was doing he was doing it, not half somewhere else at the same time. She had spent a long time trying to figure out whether that was something you were born with or something you learned and she still wasn't certain.
Growing up he had been — not easy exactly. That wasn't quite the right word. Steady. That was closer. He had been nine years older than her which in the early years had felt like an uncrossable distance — he was already a person, fully formed and going about his life, by the time she was old enough to understand what a person was. But somewhere around the time she was eight or nine the distance had begun to close. Not because he changed. Because she caught up enough to start seeing him clearly.
What she had seen was this — a person who took things seriously without being heavy about it. Who said what he meant without making a performance of meaning it. Who noticed things — small things, the kind of things most people walked past — and acted on what he noticed without announcing that he had noticed it.
She remembered one afternoon — she must have been nine, possibly ten — when she had been sitting in the courtyard of Number Fourteen working through a mathematics problem that had been resisting her for the better part of an hour. She had not been in a good mood about it. The problem was not difficult — she knew it wasn't difficult — which made the fact that she couldn't crack it more frustrating than it would have been otherwise.
Her elder brother had come out into the courtyard and sat down on the low wall near the elm tree without saying anything. He had watched her for a moment. Then he had said — not unkindly, just as an observation — "You're trying to force it."
She had looked up. "What?"
"The problem. You're trying to force it to give you the answer. That's why it won't."
She had wanted to argue. He was right and she knew he was right and the combination of those two things had made arguing feel both necessary and pointless. She had looked back at the page and tried to do what he had suggested — stop pushing — and within five minutes the problem had resolved itself with the particular clarity of something that had been obvious all along.
She had not thanked him. He had not waited to be thanked. He had gone back inside and that had been the end of it.
That was what he was like. He gave you the thing you needed and then he moved on and didn't make anything of it.
When he left for the army she had understood intellectually that it was the right thing — the natural progression of a life that had always been moving in that direction. The Lin family served. Her elder brother was a Lin. The logic was clean and she had no argument with it.
What she hadn't been prepared for was how different Number Fourteen would feel with him gone.
Her parents had always been behind their checkpoints — that absence was one she had been born into, had grown up shaped by, had learned to carry so early that it had become simply the texture of things rather than a loss you felt freshly. But her elder brother's absence was different. He had been present. Fully, genuinely present in the way their parents with all their love and intention had never quite managed to be. And then he wasn't.
She had been twelve and she had handled it the way she handled most things — by not making a fuss and getting on with it. But the getting on with it had required more from her than she had expected.
The letters had come within the month. She had been relieved in a way she hadn't admitted to anyone including herself. His handwriting on an envelope in the pile of compound correspondence that Wang Guihua brought in — that had been enough. More than enough. It meant the thread was still there even if its form had changed.
His early letters were short. Practical. A few lines about where he was, what the regiment was like, the particular quality of winter in a region she had never visited. She had read them many times each — not because they were long but because they were his and because reading them a second time always surfaced something she had missed the first time. A small observation tucked into an otherwise informational sentence. A single line about something he had seen that told her more about how he was doing than anything he would have said directly.
She had written back immediately every time. Pages to his paragraphs. She had worried initially that the imbalance would feel like too much — that she was giving him more than he had asked for. But he had never once suggested she scale back. He simply responded to whatever she had written, addressed it properly, and sent his reply. The correspondence found its own rhythm after a while and they had maintained that rhythm across postings and seasons and the general movement of five years passing.
She knew things about his life from those letters that she suspected he hadn't told anyone else. Not dramatic things. Small ones. The way a place looked at a particular hour. What he thought about something he had read. An observation about a person in the regiment that was so precise and so quietly funny that she had laughed out loud alone in her room and then felt slightly odd about it.
He knew things about her too. More than her parents did — not because her parents didn't care but because the letters had created a space where things got said that the busyness and the distance and the checkpoints had made difficult to say any other way.
She looked at the sealed envelope on the corner of her desk.
Whatever he wrote back she would work with. That was not resignation — it was just the truth. Her elder brother would read the situation and think about it and respond to it and whatever he saw that she hadn't seen she would take seriously. She always had.
She pulled her Russian primer toward her and opened it where she had left off. Read for a while in the small circle of the lamp's light — quietly, translating sentences in her head, making a note when something didn't resolve the way she expected. The compound was fully quiet now. The night had settled completely around the house.
At some point she became aware that she was tired.
She closed the primer. Looked once more at the envelope on the corner of the desk. Turned off the lamp.
In the dark the room was just a room — the familiar shapes of her things, the window with its square of slightly lighter dark where the compound's night lights reached, the sound of the house settling around her.
She had done what she could do tonight.
The rest would come when it came.
She went to bed.