Hills

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1

It had looked like it was going to rain when the day began. Large, slow-moving clouds had been gathering since early morning in the southeastern sky, blocking the rising sun. But as she came out of the daycare center after dropping off her five-year-old son and closed the red wooden door behind her, she noticed the clouds were beginning to break; a ray of sunlight slipped out from behind them.

The day was going to be fine after all.

The alley leading up to the hills behind the town, where the middle school stood, ran between the daycare walls on one side and the high walls of the Temple of Confucius on the other. In the courtyard of the daycare, a grove of rosebushes had grown over the top of the wall; their intertwined branches, heavy with crimson flowers, drooped into the street.

She had been taking this alley almost every day lately. It climbed gently at first, then more steeply, paved with long granite slabs along the sides and small, irregular stones set between them. Years of footsteps had worn the stones smooth.

On a regular school day at this hour the alley would be filled with noisy middle school students on their way to class. Now it was quiet. The forty-day summer break had begun a few days ago, and since then the alley had turned desolate, used only by teachers who remained on campus.

The beginning of summer had always felt the same to her. Every year, as the break approached and her husband—who was the principal of the middle school and a very busy man, even in summer—prepared for his business trips and policy-study seminars, a nameless longing and a strange excitement would fill her. With a slightly lightheaded, yet curiously agreeable anxiety stirring within, she looked forward to the days ahead and imagined the things she might do.

The high hopes of those first days of summer, however, rarely came to anything. There was always something that stood in the way—a call for help from the school’s performance group, visits from former students home from college, current students preparing for the next year’s examinations, and, in recent years, trips taken with her husband to show their child to his overly indulgent grandparents.

And as was so often the case with things of this sort, by the time everything had been taken care of and one was finally able to sit down, thinking that the long-awaited quiet day—one’s own, free of interruption—had at last arrived, one discovered that the feeling itself was no longer there. Then, before one knew it, the opening of school was approaching, summer already drawing to a close, and one could only look back with regret at the days that had slipped by to no use.

This time, however, she could take some comfort in the fact that she had been relieved of her duties as supervising teacher. There would also be some easing of the burden of childcare. Against her husband’s wishes, she had decided to put their son in daycare for at least the first half of the summer. With a semester’s teaching done and the college entrance examinations over, it seemed that she would finally have the time she needed.

She had been thinking about enrolling in a correspondence course. There had been many advertisements in the literary journals lately, courses offered by universities in the big northern cities. She had long wanted to take something related to writing, but had never managed to do so, except for a short course in poetry that she had once enjoyed very much. Perhaps this year she would.

The stone path rose more sharply as it reached the foot of the hill, where the town’s residences came to an end. As she reached the last stretch, she paused to catch her breath. At thirty-five she could hardly be called old, but this incline would have made even a younger man slow down. For a moment she stood still, feeling the faint pounding in her chest, the warmth rising to her face.

After a moment, she adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder and continued up toward the school.

2

With the child now at kindergarten and her husband away at a seminar in the provincial city, the three-room apartment was quiet, almost to the point of feeling empty. The building itself, set among groves of old cypress trees overlooking the town, was also still, as many of the residents had left for the summer. From a tall cypress just outside the window came the intermittent, drawn-out calls of a solitary chickadee, which only seemed to deepen the silence.

Under ordinary circumstances, all this would have told her that the long-awaited summer break had finally arrived. But that morning she could not settle into it. A letter from the daughter of a close aunt had come a few days earlier, saying that she and her boyfriend—a recent college graduate—would be passing through the town on their way to a tourist resort further west. They planned to stop for a day or two before continuing on.

She was not used to having to adjust herself to such visits. The thought of their arrival had left her faintly uneasy. After returning home, she found it hard to focus. As she moved from room to room, picking up the things her son had left behind before being taken to kindergarten, her mind kept drifting back to the two visitors.

She knew almost nothing about the boyfriend; until the letter, she had not even known there was one. As for her cousin, she had once known her well—but that had been years ago, when the girl was still a child. She could not quite imagine what it would be like to meet her now, as a young woman in her twenties.

When she herself graduated from college—fifteen years earlier, in the late years of the Cultural Revolution—the cousin had still been in elementary school, going about with a Young Pioneer’s red scarf around her neck. At that time she had spent about a week at her aunt’s apartment in the provincial city, waiting for news of her job assignment.

It was a tense period for most people. The assignment determined where one would be sent, and many faced it with apprehension. She had felt it differently. With her studies finished and nothing yet set before her, she had fallen, for the first time in her life, into a kind of quiet reflection. During the day, when the apartment was empty, she would pace the rooms on the third floor, letting her thoughts drift, as if she had been set loose.

Then the assignment came, and with it an end to those days. She had been glad at the time. Only later, after a few years of teaching, did she begin to miss that brief, unanchored period at her aunt’s home.

She was assigned to the middle school where she still worked. In her state of mind then, she would have accepted any posting just as readily—a school in the Northwest, even Tibet. A few days later, on a midsummer morning, she packed her things and went to the long-distance bus station.

She had been here ever since that journey, fifteen years ago.

3

In the afternoon she went to the town’s bus station to meet the two visitors. She had not seen much of her cousin lately; the last time was a year earlier, at a New Year’s gathering at the girl’s parents’ home. Back then, the girl had just begun working as a teller at a commercial bank in the city.

She was taken by surprise when she saw her step off the bus. The roughness and awkwardness of adolescence had all but disappeared; in their place was the ease of a young woman shaped by city life.

“Sister!” the girl called, waving as she made her way toward her, the young man following a step behind.

As soon as they met, the girl slipped her arm through hers and turned slightly.

“This is Ku,” she said.

“How do you do,” she replied, glancing briefly in his direction without quite meeting his eyes.

“How do you do,” said the young man easily. He was in his mid to late twenties, sturdily built, and stood a little taller than those around them.

She had always been shy, and strangers made her uneasy; even after fifteen years of teaching, this had not changed much. After the greetings, unsure what to say, she asked whether they would like to go back to her place to rest, or perhaps see something in town first.

“I’m not tired at all,” the young man said.

“Ku is interested in religion,” the girl added. “He wrote his thesis on Western missionaries in the province. Is there anything here he might want to see?”

“There is,” she said. “An old church, in the older part of town.”

“Is that so?” the young man said, his interest clearly stirred. “Is it Jesuit?”

She was not sure.

“Most churches in this province were built by the Jesuits,” he went on. “So if there’s one here, it likely is.”

They set off at an unhurried pace toward the older quarter. The two women walked arm in arm, listening as he spoke about the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus.

The church stood on the eastern side of a narrow street, looking down over a cluster of much lower, older Chinese houses. It was built entirely of granite blocks. The windows had flat, square sills and fan-shaped tops.

The place had not been well maintained. Much of the paint on the window frames had peeled away; dark patches of mold spread across the stone, and the walls showed signs of long weathering.

They walked up and down the short stretch of street several times, taking in the building.

“It used to house the town’s women and children’s health center,” she said, offering what she thought might be useful information. But she was not sure he heard her. He had already stepped up to the central door and was peering through the narrow gap.

“It doesn’t seem to be locked,” he muttered. “I’ll have a look inside.”

The two women stayed outside. As soon as he disappeared through the door, the girl pulled her gently aside and asked in a low voice:

“What do you think of him, sister?”

“You know me,” she said. “I’m not good at these things…”

“Oh, come on,” the girl said, giving her arm a light tug. “That’s just like you. He’s great, isn’t he?”

“If you say so…” she said.

“He just graduated from X University last summer,” the girl went on, her voice brightening. “I met him at a friend’s party earlier this year. We’ve been seeing each other ever since…”

“Where does he work?”

“In the municipal government,” the girl said. “It’s a good position. But he doesn’t seem happy there. He wants to go to graduate school next year. I don’t know whether I should support him or try to talk him out of it. What do you think?”

“It sounds like something you’ll need to consider carefully,” she said. “You’ll have to—”

“There he is,” the girl said.

The young man stepped out of the doorway. They walked toward him.

“What is it like inside?” the girl asked.

“It’s not bad,” he said, glancing back at the building. “I’ve seen a few churches like this. This one is actually quite well preserved.”

For a moment the three of them stood in the middle of the quiet street, unsure of what to do next.

“What else is there to see in your town, sister?” the girl asked.

“There’s a temple of the Jade Emperor,” she said. “It’s on top of the hills behind the town. You can see part of the roof from here. People say the scenery around it is quite nice.”

They followed the direction of her hand. In the afternoon light, the yellow and green tiles of the temple roof glimmered faintly above the trees, while the rest of the structure lay hidden in the dense, dark foliage of old cypress.

The idea appealed to them. They decided to go up to the temple later that afternoon.

4

All three were breathing hard as they reached the temple. The small open ground before the entrance was enclosed on three sides by cypress trees. Many of the trees that had seemed impossibly tall from below now revealed their thick, spreading branches at eye level, dense and shadowed.

The temple itself was simple—a single courtyard with a two-story main hall and side wings. Yet the main hall, set on slightly elevated ground, was built in an elaborate style and carried an air of quiet elegance among the green.

There was also a garden within the grounds, carefully kept and filled with a variety of unusual plants and flowers. The discovery delighted the girl, whose father had always been fond of gardening. She went off at once to look more closely.

The young man and she remained behind and sat down on a bench in a pavilion just outside the enclosure, where the ground fell away and opened onto a broad view of the plain below.

After they had sat down, the young man asked her a few questions—where she had gone to college, how long she had been teaching. When she answered, he listened, then said little more.

“Your cousin mentioned that you were thinking of going to graduate school,” she said after a while.

“Did she?” he said lightly. “Yes, I’ve thought about it. Since I started working last year, I’ve spent most of my time copying personnel files by hand. Ordinary office work.”

The place was very quiet. The cypress trees muffled the air, and only a soft, continuous rustling could be heard as the wind moved through their branches. Through an opening beside the pavilion, the old town could be seen spread out at the foot of the hill.

“Is that the church we just visited?” he asked, pointing toward a cluster of low roofs.

“No,” she said. “It should be somewhere in that direction… Do you see that roof? That is the church.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

After a pause, he spoke again.

“Have you ever found it strange? Those Western missionaries who came here. To leave everything familiar behind, travel this far, and build a place like that… They must have had something that people here did not. But what was it? The chapel itself is cold, empty. To stay in it for an hour is already long enough—imagine spending a whole life there.”

She did not answer.

Their conversation ended there, as the girl returned.

“Look what I got,” she said, her voice bright. “A gardener gave me these seeds. He knows everything about plants—he even showed me some rare flowers.”

She had heard of the man before; some of her colleagues had gone to him for help with their orchids.

“This will make your father very happy,” the young man said, taking the packet from her.

For the way down, they chose the southern slope, longer but less steep, shaded by thick trees. Along the slope ran the remains of the old city wall—a hardened earthen ridge, now overgrown with grass—stretching all the way down beside the moat.

“I say we run down along the wall,” the young man said, climbing up onto it.

“I’m coming!” the girl said, letting him help her up. “Are you coming with us, sister?”

“Perhaps not,” she said. “I think I’m too old for that.”

“That’s not a good excuse,” the girl laughed.

“You could go along the bottom,” the young man suggested, pointing to the grassy strip between the wall and the ditch.

“Please,” the girl said. “Come with us.”

She agreed, and for a short distance she tried to run. But before long her breath grew short, and a sharp warmth rose in her chest. She slowed, then stopped altogether, watching as the two of them ran on ahead along the top of the wall.

Soon they disappeared from sight.

It was late in the afternoon. Thin clouds in the far western sky burned faintly above the line of mountains. The woods on both sides of the moat were very still. As she walked alone beside the broken wall, past patches of wild pomegranate, she found herself sinking into a quiet, indistinct train of thought.

That night she and her cousin shared the bedroom, while the young man slept in her son’s room. After some scattered conversation in the dark, the girl fell asleep. The young man, however, remained awake for a long time. From the next room she could hear the soft sounds of movement—the pouring of tea, the shifting of books, the turning of pages.

Eventually even those sounds ceased.

The apartment fell completely silent.

Lying in the dark with her eyes open, she thought she could hear her own heartbeat. It seemed unusually loud. Yet for a long time sleep would not come, and her mind remained empty, like the clear, depthless darkness before her eyes.

5

The two visitors went to the lake the next day and did not return until well past the evening meal.

“Oh, sister,” the girl said as soon as she came through the door, her voice bright with excitement. “You have no idea what a good time we had!”

Their faces were flushed a deep red from the unrelenting highland sun. They looked tired, but in high spirits.

“Were you able to swim?” she asked.

“No,” the girl said. “There was too much seaweed. We walked along the shore instead—it was even better.”

“We started from the wharf and went southeast for about a kilometer,” the young man added. “There was nothing along the way—just rice paddies on one side and the shallow lake on the other. We came across a line of tall scholar trees along the pebbled shore…”

From his description she thought she knew the place. Years ago the school had organized outings there in early summer, in memory of Chairman Mao’s swim across the Yangtze. It had been more than a decade since those events stopped, yet she could still see the tall trees standing against the empty water, even with her eyes closed.

Over dinner they spoke more about the trip.

“A man drowned this afternoon,” the girl said.

She did not know what to say except, “Oh.”

“It happened near the wharf,” the girl went on. “There was quite a crowd. Ku thinks we may have passed him earlier.”

“That’s right,” the young man said. “He was standing near one of the docks in the morning when we were heading out.”

“I heard he had mental problems,” the girl added. “Before that, they say, he worked at the local hospital.”

The subject was not brought up again.

After dinner she asked if they would like to watch television. They declined. After a day outdoors, the living room felt too enclosed; the balcony seemed a better place to spend the evening.

When the tea was ready, she set a small table outside and lit a coil of incense beside the pot of Chinese flowering crabapple. The three of them sat there, talking lightly over jasmine tea. It was a clear night. Across the plain, the full moon was rising slowly in the eastern sky.

After a while the child came to find his aunt, and the two of them went back inside, leaving her and the young man alone on the balcony.

“Do you happen to have any liquor?” he asked.

“I’ll have to see,” she said.

She did not drink, but her husband kept a small bottle and there might still be some left. She went to the kitchen and returned with it, along with a small cup. He poured himself a measure and took a sip.

“It’s strange,” he said after a moment. “How quickly a person’s life can end.”

“It is,” she said.

He took another sip.

“Have you ever thought about it?” he asked. “If you could choose—how you would want to die?”

She had never thought about such a thing.

“I have,” he said. “Would you like to hear?”

She nodded.

“I grew up in this province,” he said. “But my parents are from Manchuria. They never took me back there when I was a child. So before I graduated from college, I went on my own—to see where they came from.”

He paused, took another sip, and set the cup down beside his chair.

“Some of my uncles still live there,” he went on. “They treated me well. But what I liked most were the woods. They’re different from the woods here—the lines are simpler, more open. There’s little undergrowth, nothing tangled. No snakes, no insects.”

He fell silent for a moment.

“I sometimes thought,” he said slowly, “that the best way to die would be to go deep into one of those woods, dig a hole on a slope facing the autumn trees, pile the earth beside it… and then, when the time came, lie down in it and pull the earth over yourself.”

As he spoke, he looked straight ahead into the moonlit distance, his eyes slightly narrowed.

The image his words conjured was vivid in her mind—a quiet mountain slope, autumn light, something almost serene. Yet it stirred little feeling in her.

Instead, she found herself thinking again of the lakeshore he had described. The line of tall scholar trees, standing alone against the empty water, returned to her mind once more. The image came with a faint pull, drawing her inward, as if toward something half-forgotten.

6

She was in the kitchen preparing breakfast the next morning when the young man came in.

“Morning,” he said, taking a seat. “You have a very nice place here. The hills are so quiet at night—I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well.”

She smiled and nodded, but said nothing.

“I looked through some of your books last night,” he went on. “You have quite a few nineteenth-century writers. I didn’t see many recent ones.”

“I suppose I do have a lot of old books,” she said, smiling faintly. “My husband likes to joke about how out of date they are.”

“Oh,” he said, a little taken aback, then quickly added, “Some of the newer translations are quite good, though. I could send you a few books when I get back to the city, if you like.”

“I don’t think I could ever keep up with everything that’s being written now,” she said. “But perhaps you’re right—I should read something more recent. Still, there’s no need to send them. I can get them myself.”

“In that case, I’ll make you a list,” he said.

“That would be good.”

He wrote down a few titles, then hesitated.

“This is a bit embarrassing,” he said. “I came across some of your manuscripts while I was looking through the bookcase. I didn’t mean to…”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” she said quickly. “I write things down from time to time and forget to put them away. No one pays much attention to them anyway. My husband used to read them, before we were married. Now my son is the only one who finds them useful—he folds them into paper airplanes.”

“Have you ever thought of sending them out?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s just something I do. An old habit.”

The conversation ended there.

Later that morning, the two visitors packed their things and prepared to leave, as planned. She had thought of walking them to the bus station, but they would not allow it, saying they had already troubled her enough over the past two days.

“I’ll come see you again when I have time, sister,” the girl said, giving her a quick embrace. Before leaving, she bent down and hugged the child.

7

Her summer quickly sank back into its familiar routine in the days after the visitors left, and before long it became clear that it would be no different from the summers before.

Twice a day she went to the kindergarten. In the afternoons, after picking up the child, she took him to the middle school’s music room for his piano lessons. On days when her husband was home, they spoke about their planned visit to his parents, and she listened as he talked about his study seminars in the provincial city and his recruitment trips around the county. As always, former students came by to visit during their summer break.

There were also occasional matters connected to the school. Not long ago, two officials from the county tax bureau came, accompanied by a school administrator. They were in the process of filling an ethnic hiring quota and were considering one of her former students. They asked questions, smoked, drank the tea she had prepared, and thanked her repeatedly before leaving.

And yet, in the midst of all this, she could not rid herself of a faint sense of loss. In the days following the visitors’ departure, a quiet, persistent mood had taken hold of her. Everything seemed to move more slowly. The things she did each day—watching over the child, speaking with visitors, listening to her husband—no longer held quite the same weight. At times it felt as though something within her were loosening, drifting away, and settling elsewhere, in a place she could not quite name.

In the first few days, whenever she stepped out onto the balcony, she would think of them. Watering the plants, she would recall the visit to the church, the conversation that night under the moon. Her eyes would linger on the empty corner where they had sat. For a moment, it sometimes felt as though they might reappear at any time, stepping out from the living room.

But she knew that was only a passing illusion. What she was feeling did not come from them alone. It had been there for a long time; only now had it begun to take shape.

Days went by, and the feeling did not lift. She had not forgotten her plan to enroll in correspondence courses—she had even filled out the forms. But the eagerness she once felt was gone. The completed applications were sealed but never mailed. They lay on the bookcase beside a stack of unopened renewal notices for her husband’s literary journals.

From time to time she would take out the list of books the young man had written for her on the morning of their departure. He had slipped it into one of her books. The handwriting was light, almost drifting. None of the titles were familiar to her.

There was a bookstore in town, not far from the old church. She knew she could find some of the books there, perhaps on one of her daily trips. Yet whenever the thought arose, it faded just as quickly, and she never went.

The wooden building where the music room was located was one of the older structures on campus. It stood beside a remaining stretch of the old city wall. The school had long planned to replace it with a new building, but until then, the music classes continued there.

Each afternoon, she would sit beside the child as he practiced. She arranged the sheets, corrected his hands when necessary, and listened as he worked through his exercises. The piano, old and poorly tuned, gave off a dull, softened sound that echoed faintly against the wooden walls.

The child showed some quickness, but no particular interest. Her husband believed the lessons were important.

The school itself had changed over the years. The old earthen wall had mostly disappeared, the moat had been filled in, and new buildings now stood in their place. There was a soccer field, a new apartment block for teachers. Yet none of this seemed to matter much to her.

Little of what she did now appeared to touch what she felt within. And she could not see how anything ahead would change it.

At some point the piano had stopped, though she had not noticed when. The child had finished his exercises and was waiting for her to turn the page. She did so, then fell again into her thoughts.

She still thought, from time to time, of the two visitors, and wondered where they might be. They must have reached their destination by now, she would think. But as the days passed, even those thoughts grew faint.

What remained was the quiet, unbroken stretch of the life she had returned to.

8

It was now nearing the end of July. The summer sun grew stronger by the day; in the wind there was the familiar smell of lake water, of seaweed left too long in the shallow warmth. Only the rosebush in the kindergarten courtyard seemed to be nearing its end. Each morning, as she walked her child there, she saw more fallen petals scattered along the base of the wall, still damp with the night’s dew.

Still, she had done nothing. She had missed the deadlines for the correspondence courses, and the trip to the bookstore had yet to be made.

At times she wished she had not declined so quickly her colleagues’ invitations to travel. That year they had planned a trip to several places in eastern China. By now, she thought, they were probably somewhere in the mountains of Anhui.

She herself had traveled the previous summer with three other teachers. Beijing had been the final stop. It had been an unusually hot season—at least that was how she remembered it. And yet, for the four of them, those three days in the city had been the height of the trip. During the day they moved from one site to another, trying to see everything on their list. In the evenings, back at the hotel, they would sit together eating ripe watermelons they had bought on the street.

More than once, as she moved through the city in that heat, she thought of the correspondence course in creative writing she had taken the year before. It had been a quiet pleasure. Each week she mailed in her assignments; in return, the instructor sent them back, marked with comments and suggestions. The best pieces, they were told, might be published in literary journals. None of hers were. Still, she remembered the instructor’s words.

“I particularly liked this one,” he had written in the margin of one piece. “There is something in it that is distinctly yours—something that runs through all the work you have sent so far.”

It was the first time anyone had said such a thing about her writing.

In the early years of her marriage, she had shown her work to her husband. But over time he had changed—whether from the demands of his position or for other reasons, she could not say—and poetry had become something he no longer cared to read.

On that hot day in Beijing, the instructor’s words returned to her again and again. She found herself wondering what kind of person he might be. He must be someone of sensitivity, she thought, someone capable of noticing what others overlooked. Perhaps he was a writer himself—one with a quiet depth of feeling. How else could he have recognized, in the simple lines of someone he had never met, something that felt so entirely her own?

She did not know who he was, or where he lived, or what she would say if she were ever to meet him. And yet, as she moved through the city with her companions that day, a faint longing rose in her—an unexpected wish to meet him. It stayed with her, steady and calm, like a thin stream of clear water running somewhere deep within.

9

One afternoon in August she was late in going to pick up her son at the kindergarten. As they came out, the child asked whether they still had to go to the music room that day.

She looked at him and paused for a moment.

“I have an idea,” she said. “I think we ought to cancel today’s lessons.”

A smile appeared on the child’s face.

“Then can we go for a walk in the hills?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “You lead the way.”

She had reason to be in good spirits that day. In the past few days she had begun to notice certain changes in herself. For part of the day, at least, she was able to attend to simple things—playing with the child, reading a book—without drifting off into her own thoughts. She had also regained some of the decisiveness needed for the small tasks of daily life.

The low hill just south of the school compound rose gently for some distance before dropping away. Its northern slopes were a place she and the child sometimes walked. There were no large trees here; the ground was covered in thick summer growth, and along the path one often came across wild strawberry plants bearing small white fruit.

She sat down beside a small chestnut tree. Watching the child move about awkwardly as he picked the thorn berries, she let her eyes wander over the summer scene and drew in a long breath. For the first time in a while, she could clearly sense the strong, slightly oily smell of the sun-warmed vegetation.

Before long, the school term would begin. She would return to work, and the days would once again become full.

When that time came, even if she wished to remain in the frame of mind she had been in that summer, she would not be able to.

And yet the thought of returning to work brought with it a faint warmth. Although she could not be sure that what had been with her over the past weeks would not return, for the moment she felt that a day filled with the steady occupation of teaching was, in fact, what she had wanted.

With this curious mixture of anticipation and relief, she found herself looking forward to the opening day of the new school year.

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