The Healing Sunshine - Chapter 20 Part 1
There is a saying: Time will heal everything. But does it? There are some things that we choose to bury into the recesses of our heart, and there they remain untouched by time. What happens when they are pulled back out into the light?
BOOK III Chapter 20.1 The Goodbye that I Owe You (1)
This story was translated with the express permission of the author forhui3r[dot]wordpress[dot]com. All forms of reproduction, redistribution, or reposting are not authorized.If you are not reading this fromhui3r[dot]wordpress[dot]com, the copy is unauthorized and has been taken without consent of the translator.
Four years later.
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“Professional ethics and one’s personal convictions,” he stated.
“Professional ethics and one’s personal convictions.” The person beside him repeated these words, musing on them.
The man who spoke had a pair of sharp, clear eyes. He was garbed entirely in black casualwear, and perched on his nose was a pair of black, metal-framed glasses. “Some female reporters have their own family and children, too. You cannot judge them using the eyes of the world. If they rush to the front lines of artillery and gunfire, are you going to criticize them for abandoning their husband and children? Criticze them for not caring about their own children, their own flesh and blood who are fast asleep thousands of miles away?”
The person to whom this office belonged, Shen Yu, gazed at this old friend of his who was before him now.
That man stretched out his legs and leaned back into his chair.
“Everyone hopes that someone will have the courage to make sacrifices, but also hopes that that someone will not be his own kin or loved one.”
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In that meeting room, there was also a foreigner woman with brown hair and noticeable wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her right arm below the elbow was amputated, and only a metal hook was installed in place of the real hand. With that hook, she was holding down a document folder with ease as her left hand leafed through the information. “Oh, you two gentleman, please stop making war correspondents out to be saints. We have high salaries and vacation time. The stuff we do brings in a paycheque for us. We need to send our kids to school and buy homes, too. Lately, I’ve been looking for a house under my agent’s lead. Rent is honestly so very expensive. From what I can see, I just might go back to Iraq and settle there.”
Her spoken Chinese was very good. It was just that some of her word choices were bizarre.
For example, her agent’s “lead.”
They laughed.
The foreigner woman also laughed, her head aching over China’s high housing prices. She could not understand why the price of housing here was so high. The cost of buying two or three rooms here was enough for her to buy a standalone house with a yard in her own country.
While she was still speaking, she had already received another phone call from her agent.
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“Chengyang.” Turning to the side, Shen Yu used the most normal, yet most cautious tone to ask this former high school classmate of his a question that he urgently wanted to learn the answer to. “These few years in Iraq, how did you get through them?”
“Me?” Without very much emotion, he gazed very unperturbedly at the other party. “I didn’t do anything really useful. After I was abducted, in August 2003, a good brother and friend of mine died. The one and only thing that is worth rejoicing about is that I have come back alive.”
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In the winter break of 2007, J Yi got her first job.
While concurrently preparing her master’s degree graduation thesis, every week, there were three days where she would cram herself in with the great working force and make it on time to the office to clock in. She was very fortunate to have found work prior to graduation, given that the employment situation for foreign language master’s degree students was becoming worse and worse. Xinhua News Agency and FLTRP [Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press] seemed increasingly partial to undergraduate students.
In order to stay in Beijing, many people had chosen to become English teachers in higher education institutions.
“J Yi, you’re so much more blessed to be from Beijing. And you don’t need to worry about being unable to find a job. After graduating, you can just live at home and look slowly for one, and you’ll be fine.” This was the comment she heard most often.
In the face of this sort of envy, she would merely maintain a manner of silent admission.
A year and a half ago, after completing fourth-year undergraduate studies and graduating and prior to beginning graduate studies in another university, she had already cut off contact with everyone from her past. When she was young, she had always felt that the city of Beijing is very large. Now, in this last year and more, she finally had a concept of what “the city of Beijing is very large” truly meant. It was so large that you would not run into those people you had known in the previous twenty-one years of your life.
Standing at the cashier counter of a Yon Ho restauraunt, J Yi tilted her head up to look at the prices on the menu.
“Ah! Oh no. I forgot to bring my wallet.” The expression on the face of the young girl with her suddenly shifted, and with great embarrassment, she looked at J Yi. “What am I going to do? Teacher[1] J I was too rushed when I came out and left my wallet on my desk.”
“It’s okay.” J Yi was extremely embarrassed as well from being called “teacher” by her. “I brought mine. I’ll treat you.”
The young girl had just gotten her undergraduate degree and started working at a public relations company. Constantly keeping in mind that she should maintain a respectful manner with all these teachers in the media and journalism field, she apologized profusely to J Yi. As they sat beside a window and began to eat, she was still feeling terrible and said, “My company lets us expense costs for treating clients. I really should not have let you treat me. Teacher J, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”
“It’s honestly okay. I can expense it, too.” J Yi could only continue comforting the young girl.
When she smiled, her little canine tooth would show, and it made her seem especially approachable and kind.
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In actual fact, since she was only a student intern, meal costs for her were only subsidized and not fully reimbursed.
The two set meals in this one lunch had eaten away an entire week’s worth of her food budget. On the way back to the newspaper agency, she was forced to recalculate how this week’s budget for food and meals would be allocated. When she was walking from the bus stop to the downstairs of the newspaper agency’s office, she by chance ran into her co-worker, He Feifei, who was just hopping out of a taxi. Catching sight of her, He Feifei could not hold back her grumbles. “Yet again, why didn’t you get a taxi? You can expense it when you go out for work stuff.”
“Expense accounts take one month to process.” J Yi had no choice but to pull down her scarf a little and expose the lower half of her face. “I don’t have much cash on hand. If I really did wait for the expense to get reimbursed I’m guessing I’d starve to death.”
“It’s like that for student interns,” He Feifei agreed sighingly. “Last year when I was doing my internship, it was the same. I felt that things were so miserable for me. You still need to go out and do work just like actual journalists, but you need to pay for all the travel and food costs yourself first. The living expense money I got from my family really wasn’t enough.”
The two squeezed together into the elevator and stood crammed against other people, so it was not appropriate for them to chat.
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This was an ordinary afternoon.
It was so ordinary that it was the same as all the afternoons of every week that she had come here to work.
She would occasionally need to step out to run some errands or do some tasks, or she would sit inside the office in meetings, helping out the veteran journalists.
What was not ordinary was, when she stepped out of the elevator, she could see that those extremely busy seniors and veterans in this field, who would normally each be doing his or her own business, were all quietly discussing something. J Yi set her purse onto a black office swivel chair. Right after she pressed the power button on her computer tower, she heard the student intern at the adjacent desk to hers say that the new managing editor was finally in place, and he was absolutely a captivating man. Supposedly, he was currently going around and talking to people, one by one.
“Is he married?” He Feifei’s question sure was simple and straight to the point.
“Don’t know, Big Sister Feifei. The ones who’ve been requested to go have a talk are all key journalists and editors. Student interns like us probably won’t get that kind of opportunity, right? We still don’t even know if we’ll end up getting to stay on here in the future.”
Their colleagues said that this person had come out of nowhere to get this position. Other than the editor-in-chief, no one knew the details of his curriculum vitae, but many older journalists had recognized this person and said that back then, he had been a very well-known journalist in the field.
This was, after all, the position of managing editor, second only to the editor-in-chief. This person could not be a pure newcomer.
“He once was a war correspondent and experienced the Iraq War. In the Beijing journalism circle, he’s quite famous Our direct boss is in there now providing chatting service”
J Yi had already sat down and was about to open up her inbox to check emails, but when she heard these words, her fingers on the keyboard gradually came to a halt. Wild speculations surged through her mind and pulled out, a little at a tie, those feelings of yearning that she had felt for a person from where they had been forcibly buried at the bottom of her heart all this lengthy time,
Her co-workers had not even finished talking when they saw J Yi leave her little cubicle and head with large strides towards the conference room. On the way, someone tried to pull her over to have her help organize some information and materials, but to that person’s surprise, she walked straight past and kept going.
Until she was standing in front of the conference room.
There, she finally ceased her steps.
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The sound of conversing men’s voices drifted out from that conference room that was segregated from the rest of the office by a white wall. The door was four, five centimetres thick and filtered out the actual content of the conversation. It could only be discerned that it was a few men talking.
Every now and then, there was also a woman’s voice, which seemed to be speaking English.
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All along, she had told herself, none of it was true. Something bad must have happened to J Chengyang. But yet, she did not dare delve too deeply into this type of thinking. It was as if she had sealed her heart and frozen it, unwilling to let herself touch this matter.
If he were the one inside, she would be scared.
Scared that all those things were the truth, that several years ago, there truly had been a romantic wedding ceremony held in the war zone.
If he were not the one inside, she would be even more scared.
Several years had passed, and more and more, she was terrified that she would hear true, grievous news
She would even hope that he was in some place, continuing on with his life. She did not want him to truly lose his life, did not want this world to have J Chengyang in it no longer.
J Yi pulled in a deep breath. There was a dull ache in her chest. Her heart was continually jumping up, then plummeting back down.
She remained still, not daring to move.
When she pushed open the door, if he was not inside she would say that she was coming here to ask the head of her department for time off to go back to her school
If he really was the one inside Would there really be such a coincidence?
Someone walked by her and gave her a strange look. “You’re looking for your boss? He’s inside.”
She gave an “mm-hmm.” Curling her fingers in, she finally knocked on the door.
And then, she pushed it open.
Inside this conference room, there were four or five people. There was her direct supervisor as well as the editor-in-chief and two people whom she did not know. But after her gaze landed on that man sitting in the black swivel chair, his eyes closed as he rested and his side profile facing the doorway, all sounds and images seemed to cease to exist.
In her gaze, there remained only that man.
He was still so tall and striking. Despite, at this very moment, the evident look of illness about him and his sitting posture that was somewhat informal and not too at ease, he still appeared much taller than the several men around him.
“J Yi?” Her supervisor was somewhat surprised. “Is something the matter?”
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The sound of these words startled J Chengyang back to awareness. His eyes opened, searching for the one to whom that name belonged.
With his hand supporting himself on that white conference table, he slowly rose from the black swivel chair, able now to have a clear look at the girl who was standing in the doorway of the meeting room and whose eyes were fixed on him as well. Her short, black locks curled slightly by her ear, framing her facethe one that was graven into his heart and mind, that tugged at his soul, and that he would see even in his dreamssuch that it was so very clear and beautiful. In those eyes of his, which all along had been still as stagnant ponds, there at last arose great waves and intense billows of emotions.
If he were to identify, amongst the piles of dead bodies, before the corpse of his friend, amid the inhuman tortures and cruelties inflicted on him, what had sustained him to live, to continue living until he could crawl out of that living hell and stand again, to live until this day, there would only be one reason.
She was the only reason.
<>Copyright of Fanatical, hui3r[dot]wordpress[dot]com. Translated with the express permission of the author for hui3r[dot]wordpress[dot]com only.
[1] When people reach a certain status or experience in a field, they are often referred to as ? “teacher” by layman or those less experienced in that field, for they have knowledge that they can impart. J Yi is very young and new, too, but she has much more knowledge in news media compared with this girl, who is in public relations and hence is a layman to journalism.
This story was translated with the express permission of the author forhui3r[dot]wordpress[dot]com. All forms of reproduction, redistribution, or reposting are not authorized.If you are not reading this fromhui3r[dot]wordpress[dot]com, the copy is unauthorized and has been taken without consent of the translator.
Completed:
48 of 69 Chapter segments
0 of 1 Epilogue
