Chapter Extra - Lin Qinhe's Letter (Part 1)
Chapter Extra - Lin Qinhe's Letter (Part 1)
Lin Qinhe still remembered clearly the first time he met his mother, Luo Zhengyin.
After giving birth to him, Luo Zhengyin suffered from depression, so he had been living in his eldest uncle’s house and almost never saw Luo Zhengyin. And his father, Lin Zeshi, only came to see him intermittently due to his busy work.
Perhaps because of his natural closeness to his mother in his blood, he did not love watching cartoons like other children, but liked to watch music videos, watching the woman who was said to be his mother playing the piano.
At that time, all Lin Qinhe knew was that his mother was sick and he could not see her until she was well. He started learning piano at a very young age, thinking that if he could play the piano as well as his mother, she would be happy, get well, and she would be willing to see him.
The night before he went to his mother’s house, Lin Qinhe practiced the piano piece he had practiced for a long time a few more times. The next day he was led by his eldest uncle by the hand through the garden planted with white roses and met the beautiful and elegant woman he had seen countless times in the video tape.
Luo Zhengyin did not pick him up as he thought she would, or as his eldest uncle and aunt did.
She was holding a boy about his age in her arms and her hand gently patting the boy’s back. The boy turned his head and stared at him curiously, as if he had seen a strange guest in his home.
Lin Qinhe called his mother ‘mom’ for the first time and the woman in front of him smiled and nodded to him, then carefully put down the boy in her arms. Holding the two children’s little hands together, she said tenderly to him:
“Qinhe, this is your younger brother, Lele. You have to take good care of him, together with mom in the future.”
Lin Qinhe didn’t notice his eldest uncle’s ugly face as he agreed to his mother without thinking and gave the boy a friendly smile and said hello to his brother.
From that day on, he spent most of his time living with Luo Zhengyin and Yang Duole. Then, shortly afterwards they moved to the Wenhua University professor’s building where Fang and Luo families had once lived, and then they moved back to the villa because of a fire.
It was also from that day that Lin Qinhe slowly understood many things.
He understood who the white roses in the garden were planted for, who the countless paintings on the walls of the villa were in memory of, and which child was good for his mother’s health and wellbeing.
He also understood why his mother named him Qinhe.1Qinhe’s Qin (钦) means admire while He (禾) is from Fang Sui’s Sui (穗. Fang Sui’s Sui 穗 is made up of 禾 and 惠)
And what was his role in this family.
Lin Qinhe began to try to play the role his mother wanted him to play, a role to help his mother take care of his ‘brother’ and to ‘atone’ for her sins.
His eldest uncle and grandfather wanted him to return to the Lin family, but he refused. Probably because Lin Qinhe always felt that his birth was meaningless to his parents, so accompanying Yang Duole in the process of growing up might be meaningful to his mother.
In the process, he also learned and got used to many things; learning to disguise the things he cared about most as something he didn’t care about at all, and getting used to no longer having emotional demands on others, even his own parents.
Lin Qinhe occasionally felt that he was too indifferent; he was like a sober bystander watching a drama, watching coldly as Luo Zhengyin and the Fang family spoiled Yang Duole to the point of no return, spoiling him into a person with no sense of responsibility or accountability, while he inadvertently condoned and aggravating this ‘spoiling’.
He thought he was used to everything, but he would still occasionally wake up in the middle of the night, dreaming of the fire in his sleep. In the suffocating smoke, he saw his mother hug Yang Duole and an oil painting away.
He would still see the huge portrait painting in the living room of the villa, and when he saw the pale and beautiful face, he couldn’t help but frown because of the discomfort in his heart, and then hurriedly walked by without stopping.
For Fang Sui, a woman he had never seen before, Lin Qinhe was scared at first when he was young.
A person who had long gone but had a presence that couldn’t be ignored everywhere in this empty villa, like a ghost that never dissipated, enveloping his life, and even his name was branded with her.
Lin Qinhe often saw Luo Zhengyin standing in the middle of the living room, looking up at the portrait in silence, with an undisguised look of sadness and infatuation on her face, sometimes all afternoon.
He had to rush Yang Duole to Luo Zhengyin’s side and asked the son of the woman in the painting to coax Luo Zhengyin to leave.
Despite knowing that everything was due to his mother’s morbid wishful thinking, after the initial fear, Lin Qinhe couldn’t help but feel disgusted with Fang Sui.
He used to think indifferently that if this woman hadn’t been spoiled by the Fang family and Luo Zhengyin to the point of being too capricious and fragile, so capricious that she was willing to abandon everything for a worthless love, so fragile that she couldn’t even control her own destiny, maybe everything wouldn’t have been the way it was later.
Maybe he would have had a normal family just like everyone else.
Growing up, Lin Qinhe only had pity for the woman who died so young.
He watched the grievances of the previous generation. Luo Zhengyin, Yang Zhengming, and even his father Lin Zeshi, who had always been rational and restrained; all of them indulged in meaningless obsessions, and Fang Sui was just a victim of these people’s obsessions.
So when Lin Qinhe learned that his father, Lin Zeshi, was going to start a high school remote live broadcast project in Qingshui County, he understood Lin Zeshi’s real intention almost instantly—— just like him, for the sake of Luo Zhengyin’s ‘redemption’.
But Lin Qinhe had no idea that this insignificant project would bring some insignificant ripples to his life.
And in a way he never expected, it swept through his life and changed his life completely.
At least at first, Lin Qinhe did not care about the letters that were sent to Wenhua No.1 High School from the southwest mountainous area thousands of miles away, that was because of the live broadcast project.
He saw that occasionally the other boys in the class received the letters, and they fought over them, reading the words out loud, followed by laughter, as if they were reading a joke.
Lin Qinhe had always just put the letters in his bag and then thrown them away.
This went on for a month or two. Perhaps because the students of Wenhua No.1 High School hardly answered their letters, but the number of letters sent here gradually became fewer and fewer.
Lin Qinhe had forgotten exactly when he started noticing the overly distinctive letter.
It was just that every time he dealt with those letters, he would find that one person’s letter was never absent, and occasionally there were even two or three of them.
At that time, he thought, this girl was talking too much, and he was not a bosom mailbox.
Lin Qinhe threw away all the letters equally, but at most he only gave one more glance to the fancy and thick letter.
Perhaps it was because of this extra glance, out of some subtle thought that he himself did not know, he later began to pick out the fancy letter and bring it home.
He just took it back but didn’t open it. He threw it into a document storage at will. Gradually, there were more and more letters in the storage; pink, light blue, pale yellow and fluorescent white…Lin Qinhe knew for the first time that the original envelope could have so many colors.
It turned out that once a person became even the slightest curious about something, he could relate to it in ways that he himself couldn’t imagine.
One day Yang Duole was in his room looking through his letter storage and was caught by him. He unexpectedly became furious with Yang Duole, and Yang Duole, who was used to being coquettish, was so frightened that he even alerted Luo Zhengyin. She rushed over to protect Yang Duole behind her and looked at him with a condemning gaze, just as she did when he fought with Yang Duole when he was very young.
Lin Qinhe quickly calmed down and sent the pair, who were not mother and son but were better than mother and son, out of the room.
He knew that the reason for his anger was not because he cared about the letters, but that in this villa, those letters were perhaps the only thing that existed only because of him and did not need to be shared.
He spent the whole afternoon alone in his room, opening dozens of letters and reading them from beginning to end, only to frown deeply most of the time, because it took him a lot of patience to put up with the letters in a font more incomprehensible than cuneiform.
A girl with terrible taste, but unexpectedly good at writing. Each letter was a diary-like report on studies and life, with greetings and wishes for him, and the report letter ended with the word ‘peach’,2桃 (Tao) is peach. Tao Xi’s Tao is not this 桃 but 陶 with a sketch peach flower.
Even though he never replied to the letter, there was no complaint or dissatisfaction in the letter, as if either he replied or not, these letters would be like the sun rising on time in the morning, delivered to him on time.
Lin Qinhe didn’t know the name of the girl who wrote the letter, what she looked like, and didn’t care in the least. He locked all the letters into a wooden box and began to pay attention to the letters that the postman sent to the guard’s room without realizing it.
After receiving the latest letter, Lin Qinhe would always review its contents with a calm and self-possessed gaze, as if checking his homework, before folding it again into the envelope and locking it in the wooden box.
He had to admit that it was a wonderful feeling that he could know and master the life of a person thousands of miles away without moving, just accepting it quietly and without giving anything.
And the slightest change in himself could bring out obvious emotional fluctuations in the other party, such as being slightly late for a while, or being deliberately punished to do a problem at the podium to keep himself on the screen of the remote live broadcast for a little longer. Then, he would unsurprisingly see the other party’s delight in the next letter delivered.
This kind of control gave him occasional pleasure, but he did not know at that time that people who were used to control would eventually be controlled by this habit.
Lin Qinhe never thought he had any extra attention or emotion for this trivial matter, until two weeks later, when he did not receive a letter. He realized from his absent-mindedness that he had given too much attention to this matter.
Lin Qinhe was able to wean himself off the psychological dependency he had inadvertently developed, even if this dependency was very slight and rare.
Soon, Lin Qinhe thought he had completely forgotten about it until, in a Chinese Language class, he saw at a glance that some of the words in the model essay of Qingshui No.1 High School, entitled ‘The Man Who Chased the Moon’, were written in the same way as those in the letter.
One’s handwriting couldn’t be completely concealed.
It was then that Lin Qinhe realized that the person who wrote the letter was a boy, and a boy whose writing skills were so strong that even if he made up the death of his parents in the essay, he could still trick readers into tears.
Lin Qinhe couldn’t tell how he felt. At first he found it funny; he was so smart that he was sent so many letters by a boy who pretended to be a girl, and that he had made a fool of himself from the beginning to the end, thinking that this girl admired him as much as the other girls who wrote the letters.
But soon he doubted, doubting whether the letters sent to him by such a person who would make up and disguise his gender were real or not? Was he teasing him or not?
This doubt made him unconsciously angry.
He even couldn’t help but to maliciously guess that if he couldn’t resist writing a reply to the other side, would they gleefully laugh at his self-righteousness? Like some of the people in Wenhua No.1 High School, would they show off his letter to the whole class and loudly proclaim his stupidity?
That day, Lin Qinhe specially took a leave of absence for the evening self-study. After returning, he carefully checked the letter with the model essay, and confirmed it again that it was from the same person.
The next day Lin Qinhe found his father’s secretary, Su Yun and asked her to help him check the author of the model essay. Su Yun, who had been in charge of the remote live broadcast project, quickly passed on the results to him.
The file of the male student named Tao Xi contained the date of birth, household registration, place of residence, family members, test scores and awards from elementary to high school…Even the records of government scholarships received were all detailed in the book.
Just looking at this file, this boy named Tao Xi was obviously a good student from a poor family and with excellent academic performance, which was not different from the content of his letter.
Su Yun asked Lin Qinhe if he needed a picture of this person, and Lin Qinhe refused.
He still didn’t care about who the person was and what he looked like. He thought he was just confirming and accounting for the attention he had paid.
It was only when Su Yun talked to him about the remote live broadcast project in Qingshui County that Lin Qinhe couldn’t resist proposing a sudden idea, a suggestion that could change the fate of this poor student.
Lin Qinhe could no longer tell whether he was acting out of so-called kindness and compassion or, as before when he being deliberately late just to test something that was insignificant to him.
He just did not expect that this suggestion would not only change the fate of that poor student, but also completely change the trajectory of his life.
T/N: Finally an extra! This was posted by the author in May I think? but I was a bit busy before this and just had to time to translate this. Anyway, the raw is 8k words long so I separated in two parts. The next part will be posted very soon!
Also, the published version got 10k words long extra in parallel universe but I couldn’t find it anywhere TT Need to buy the published version soon!
Anyway, enjoy the long-awaited extra everyone
