Chapter 8: A Two-Square-Meter Yang-Style Tai Chi
I worked at the express sorting station until 8 PM and at the construction site until 5 PM, eating two steamed buns and drinking a thermos of water in between. On my way back by bicycle, my right leg cramped up, and I almost rode my bike into the flower bed. When I got downstairs, the sun had just set behind the tenement building to the west, and the afterglow shone on the clothes hanging on the fifth-floor balcony, making them look colorful.
Wait a minute. So colorful?
I squinted and looked up for a long time. There were several more clothes hanging on the clothesline on the balcony. Besides my few gray and black T-shirts, there were two bright red and emerald green cotton-linen shirts, a pair of floral pants, and two faded old-fashioned cotton underwear. I glanced at the underwear sizes again; the cups formed an exaggerated semicircle on the clothesline.
The shape was clearly visible even from the fifth floor. I quickly looked away, pedaled my bike, and locked myself into the building.
I climbed to the fifth floor and opened the door. The air was filled with the mixed smell of leftover pickled vegetables, goji berries, and red dates.
”You’re back?” My mother’s voice came from the kitchen, the tap running. “Wash your hands and eat. I made two dishes today.”
I glanced towards the balcony first. Besides the clothes hanging out to dry, there was a pair of old-fashioned cloth shoes on the balcony floor, with a small wet patch next to them.
I changed my shoes and went to my desk. On the desk lay an open high school math textbook, its cover curled at the edges. The page I was on was about adding and subtracting fractions. Next to it were a pencil and several sheets of scratch paper. On the scratch paper were several scribbled calculation problems, the answers crossed out and rewritten two or three times. The last problem, two-thirds plus three-quarters equals five-sevenths, had a large question mark next to it.
Five-sevenths.
I took a deep breath.
My mother came out of the kitchen carrying two dishes: a plate of stir-fried shredded potatoes and a plate of cucumber salad, which she placed on the folding dining table. Today she was wearing that bright red cotton-linen shirt, loose gray cotton trousers, and rubber slippers. Her hair was tied up casually, with stray strands sticking to her forehead, and her cheeks were slightly flushed, probably from being in the kitchen for too long and being exposed to the fumes.
A bright red cotton-linen shirt. She’d been wearing this shirt for at least five years. Back then, it was already considered dowdy enough for a forty-year-old middle-aged woman, but now, with her twenty-year-old face on it, the effect… how to describe it? Like a juicy peach wrapped in a red burlap sack.
”mom.”
”Um?”
”Did you practice Tai Chi on the balcony today?”
Her expression paused for a moment: “How did you know?”
”There are watermarks on the balcony floor.” It’s from sweat dripping onto the floor.
”Oh, right.” She sat down nonchalantly and picked up a piece of shredded potato with her chopsticks. “She got up at six in the morning. After you left, Mom was on the balcony for forty minutes. That balcony is too small. She almost knocked over the clothes rack with one of her cloud-hand moves.”
I tried to imagine her practicing Yang-style Tai Chi on a two-square-meter balcony. Two square meters. If she stretched out her arms and legs and turned around, she would touch three walls, and she also had to avoid the clothes rack, the bamboo poles for drying clothes, and the flower pots on the windowsill.
”Don’t fight on the balcony, there’s an open space in the stairwell downstairs.”
”There are people coming and going in the hallway,” she mumbled, chewing on shredded potatoes. “Besides, Mom doesn’t like people watching her when she’s doing Tai Chi.”
A twenty-year-old girl wearing a bright red cotton-linen shirt practicing Tai Chi in the stairwell of an old residential building is really inappropriate. Just thinking about it gives me a headache.
”Then be careful not to break anything.” I sat down and started eating. The shredded potatoes were too salty, and the cucumber was cut unevenly, but everything tasted good after being hungry all day.
After taking a couple of bites, he remembered his important task: “Have you done your math?”
Her chopsticks paused for a moment.
”I did it.”
”I checked. Two-thirds plus three-quarters equals five-sevenths?”
silence.
”…Mom hasn’t touched this stuff in twenty years.” Her voice lowered, and her movements as she picked up food seemed a little guilty. “You have to find a common denominator for fraction addition, right? Mom remembers, I just couldn’t recall it for a moment…”
”You’ve forgotten all about finding common denominators, what kind of high school are you attending?” I pulled a red pen and a few blank draft papers from my bag and slapped them on the table. “I’ll teach you after dinner. We’ll start with finding common denominators.”
Her eyebrows furrowed into a knot. Her mouth opened and closed, probably wanting to say something like “Mom doesn’t need you to teach her,” but remembering that she couldn’t even do two-thirds plus three-quarters correctly, she swallowed the stubborn words that were on the tip of her tongue.
After I finished eating, I washed the dishes, and she waited for me at her desk. Under the lamplight, she sat very upright, knees together, back straight, like a primary school student waiting to be scolded. But the expression on her face was that of a defiant middle-aged woman.
”Try this problem first.” I wrote a very basic common denominator problem on the scratch paper and pushed it in front of her.
She picked up a pencil, biting the shaft and frowning for a long time. The pencil poked her lips, pressing a small indentation into them. As she wrote, the collar of her bright red cotton-linen shirt slipped forward slightly, revealing a large expanse of white skin beneath, visible from my angle. She seemed completely oblivious, focused intently on writing down the process of finding common denominators on her draft paper. After half a minute, she stopped, looked up at me, and said…
Is two-thirds a common denominator four-sixths?
My gaze snapped back from inside her collar and landed on the draft paper. “Yes. Continue.”
She continued writing with her head down. After another minute, the pencil hissed as it scratched across the paper.
”Equals…seventeen-twelfths?”
I picked up a red pen and drew a big X on her answer.
”…”
”Seventeen-twelfths is clearly wrong. You don’t even understand how to compare fractions. Don’t you see a problem with seventeen-twelfths being greater than one?”
She stared at the red cross for three seconds, her expression shifting from resentment to embarrassment, then from embarrassment to exasperation. The pencil crunched loudly in her hand.
”You think everyone’s as smart as you?! Mom hasn’t calculated this kind of thing in twenty years!”
”This is fifth-grade material.”
”you!”
The pencil flew towards me. I dodged it, and it bounced off the wall and fell to the floor. She stood up, bracing herself on the table with both hands. Her chest heaved violently with each deep breath, and the fabric of her bright red cotton-linen shirt creaked as it stretched.
I bent down, picked up the pencil, and placed it in front of her: “Sit down. Do it again.”
She was so angry her face turned red, but she still plopped back down. Her hand was trembling when she picked up the pencil, not from tiredness, but from anger. I wrote out the correct steps for finding a common denominator next to her and pushed it over to show her.
Ten minutes later, she finally got the question right. Next to the answer, she wrote in tiny pencil: “Mom is forty years old and still doing elementary school problems, how embarrassing.”
I pretended not to see it. I drew a checkmark next to the correct answer in red pen.
”Do five problems tomorrow. Ten problems the day after. Finish junior high math before September.”
She stared at me, her lips pressed into a thin line. In the end, she didn’t say anything, folded up the draft paper, and tucked it into the textbook.