The house had three rooms and a problem with damp.
The damp came from the river, which was fifteen feet from the eastern wall at low water and closer than that when the season turned wet. The family had lived with it so long that they no longer noticed it except in winter, when the walls sweated and the blankets felt slightly heavier than they should, and Chen Mei would move everything away from the eastern wall with the brisk efficiency of someone executing a plan that had been executed many times before.
The house was not miserable. This is important to say clearly, because a house with three rooms and a damp problem and a fisherman's income sounds, described in those terms, like a place where people are resigned. It was not. It was a place where people were specific — specific about what they had, specific about how to use it, specific about what mattered and what could be let go.
Chen Mei was the one who managed this. She would not have called it managing. She would have called it knowing how things worked, which was true, and she would have said it in a way that suggested the knowledge was obvious and available to anyone who paid attention. She had an understanding of money that had nothing to do with having much of it — she knew, without writing it down, what everything cost, what everything was worth, what could be stretched and what could not. She could take three copper coins and produce four days of meals that were not exciting but were complete, and she did this the way skilled people do things: without appearing to try.
Wei Jian was not unaware of this. He was aware of it in the way that people who benefit greatly from competence they cannot fully see are aware of it — imperfectly, with gratitude that came out sideways, as labour rather than words. He brought fish home. He repaired things without being asked. He rubbed Chen Mei's shoulders on the evenings when she'd been bent over the salting work all day, without ceremony and without expecting comment. This was love expressed as maintenance. It worked.
Wei Dong was seven when Wei Liang arrived, serious in the way of oldest children who have absorbed their parents' worries without being given the vocabulary for them. He helped. He always helped. He did it with a slight air of duty that was not resentment — he was not a resentful child — but was the expression of a boy who had decided, somewhere along the way, that being useful was the best available strategy for an uncertain world. He carried things. He was careful. He watched Wei Liang with protective anxiety from the beginning, as if the baby were a boat in uncertain weather.
Wei Shan was five and had not yet developed the older brother's responsible anxiety. He was interested in Wei Liang the way he was interested in most things — briefly, intensely, and then moving on to the next interesting thing, returning periodically to check whether the original thing had become interesting again. He poked Wei Liang twice in the first week to see what would happen, was firmly corrected both times, and then shifted to a policy of standing very close and watching, which was less poke-able and also more informative.
What Wei Liang did, in those first weeks, was mostly: exist. Eat. Examine the middle distance. Be handed between people who looked at him with expressions ranging from cautious hope to frank curiosity.
He was, everyone agreed, alert in a way that was either impressive or vaguely unnerving, depending on the observer. Mrs. Guo, coming back to check on Chen Mei a week in, held him for a moment and said: "He watches." She said it neutrally, as a fact.
"All babies watch," Chen Mei said.
"Not like this," Mrs. Guo said, and handed him back.
The damp came and went with the season. The house produced its particular sounds — the creak of the eastern wall when the wind shifted, the way the third floorboard from the door gave under certain weights and not others, the sound of the river at night, which changed with the season and the rain and the hour, and which Wei Liang would spend years learning to interpret without knowing he was learning it.
The house taught by repetition. By the cold floor in winter and the specific smell of the salt-box in the corner and the sound of his father's steps on the dock before dawn. By the way his mother hummed when she was concentrating and stopped when she was worried and started again when the worry had passed. By the river, always the river, outside the window, running south.
He could not have said what he was learning. He was too young to say anything. But he was learning it anyway, the way you learn a language when you are very small — not as information, but as the shape of the world.