Our usual supermarket didn’t have the things I needed to make the next round of soup and the special cream, so I decided to venture further down into the more local areas of the Walled City.
It’s hard to describe exactly what was different about this area - was it the old n with little birds in cages who sat by the side of the road shouting at each other, or the traditional music that wafted around the area? Or maybe it was the way that all the stores only had labels in handwritten Chinese and most people seed to do their shopping by talking directly to the shop keeper.
On the one hand, I liked the atmosphere, it felt hoy in a way I’d never quite felt before, but on the other, how on earth was I going to find these ingredients?!
So, I decided to do the most logical thing: pick a shop at random and see how far I can get tourist-style.
The shop looked mostly like the others with a little god of business out the front with a fresh offering of mandarins, and rows upon rows of open topped bags with all kinds of dry... things inside. I suppose they were probably all different kinds of edible herbs and plants or sothing, but they were so nurous and my knowledge so narrow at that point in ti that I couldn’t honestly say either way.
Between two of the rows was a skinny woman refilling one of the bags. I figured soone younger would probably have better English since they probably graduated school not too long ago, so I walked toward and got out my notebook. It was a little red thing that you said I could use.
"Hi," I said, "Do you have this?"
I turned the open book to show her the words you’d written in it.
She looked at , looked at the book, then looked at again, then waved a hand. The answer was ’no’.
"Alright, thank you," I said with a smile and walked to the next shop.
Four shops later, I ca to the conclusion that either these shops were just as limited in their selection as the ones upstairs or there was sothing wrong with how I was going about this. Surely it shouldn’t be this hard, right?
Then in the fifth store, I discovered the reason.
The old man gave a raucous shout. After a minute or two, a boy with an impressive bird’s nest on his head ca down the stairs behind the counter.
He said sothing to the old man that was probably ’What? I was sleeping,’ except probably more rude because the old man waved his walking stick at him threateningly. In fact, he was so enthusiastic about this threatening that I started to wonder if he even needed the stick to walk or just had it so that he could brandish it at whoever he wanted.
"What are you looking for?" the boy asked with a half-asleep glare.
I was surprised to suddenly hear English and so took a mont to react. Too slow. The old man pulled my notebook from my hands and shoved it at the boy who I assud was his grandson.
"Ohh," the grandson exclaid with a laugh. He took the book and gave it back to , then said sothing to the old man before turning around and heading back upstairs.
The old man shouted sothing after him then turned to . "I work day and night to send him to school," he said in a perfect Pretan accent. He pointed at my notebook. "Worth every penny."
Without waiting for a reply, he bounced up from his stool (yeah, I think that walking stick is more ’decorative’ than dicinal) and headed to the other side of the shop. I quickly followed after him.
"Do you have what I’m looking for?" I asked.
"Of course! You wrote it in Simplified, so no one can understand it."
Ah, I had heard about the differing scripts from my language teacher back in Pretan but couldn’t spot the difference myself. "I, uh, didn’t write this list," I eventually said.
"Ah, your grandmother must be from the mainland then. No matter, no matter," he said, grabbing a bunch of dried leaves from one cannister on the crowded table. He set it on an old-fashioned scale that hung from the ceiling, threw a few leaves back where they ca from, then bagged the rest.
I decided to let it go and pay what I owed. I had a feeling, as I walked away with that light bag in my hand, that I’d been overcharged for how little I managed to get. Guess I’ll just take it as the fee to learn sothing new.
I weighed up in my mind if I should head back now to get you to rewrite the list in Traditional or keep trying the different shops and get what I could. As I did, I dropped by our little Wishing Box to see what new jobs there were and found a respectable pile of ashes.
As I emptied it out into a bag, I heard quick footsteps behind and rose to find lody. Talk about dejavu.
"Hi Misha!"
"Hey lody." I tied the mouth of the bag and put it into my big rucksack. lody looked leagues better than the last ti I’d seen her, both in the flesh and in the dream-Coil. "How’s Coral?" I asked.
lody smiled. "She’s almost completely better. She woke up just as her parents arrived this morning."
"That’s good to hear!" I’d been a little worried about what kind of mischief those purple crystals could get up to. I also couldn’t help wondering if lody recalled the bit where her best friend kissed her, though there was no way I was going to ask about that.
"Actually lody, can you do a favour?"
"What kind of favour?"
I got out my notebook and flipped to the shopping list. "Could you rewrite these in Traditional Chinese?"
lody took my notebook and looked down the list. "Your handwriting’s pretty good!"
"I didn’t write it. Bran did."
"He did? Wow. I’ve never seen a foreigner write Chinese so well."
The comnt struck as odd sohow. "Bran’s half Chinese and he grew up here," I said.
"Ohh, no wonder." She pulled out her phone and started keying in the words into a search engine to find the Traditional equivalents.
I think I figured out the strangeness. On the one hand, there was complete shock that an outsider could have a grasp of the language, and on the other, the blanket assumption a mont later that you must be absolutely fluent. Such wildly different expectations and I wondered if this attitude was common among the people you t.
If it was, it would explain your insecurity.
Language is one of those vitally important yet almost completely invisible things that binds our world together. I’ve seen how so of my older relatives in Pretan struggle because they were never able to really grasp English. For them, they’re able to get by because my family’s quite large and they have a whole community of similar people to be like, but with you... did you have sothing like that?
It took a while for lody to track down each character - there were a lot of real obscure things in there - but she eventually did, and I gave her a pen to write them all down.
"Thanks!" I said when I suddenly realised she’d finished. I’d been too carried away thinking about you, but what’s new?
"No problem," said lody. "You helped and Coral already."
After saying goodbye and going off in different directions (I headed back to the market to finish off the shopping list), I pondered lody’s last words to . They were true, but they reminded that while we’d, hopefully, helped Coral with her anxiety, we hadn’t figured out the original question of how she got caught up in that spell to look for the book in the first place.
If she didn’t co across it organically, like how I imagine soone might if they were into the occult or sothing similar, then soone must have targeted her.
Or perhaps...
The mory of Coral’s little apartnt flooded back to my mind. There were things all over the place but no space to set down a textbook or notebook to get so studying done. A lot can be done digitally these days, but for really serious students, and lody made think that Coral was likely that sort, pen and paper is really the only way.
If I was right, then where had Coral been doing her studying?
I hit the corner at a jog. The library wasn’t far from here, nowhere was really all that far from anywhere else in the Walled City, so it didn’t take long to get there.
Unfortunately, luck was not with . The library was closed.
I swore under my breath.
But perhaps it was for the best. It would be foolish of to do too much digging right now with you still out of commission, especially if my suspicions about that handso librarian were correct.
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