Walking was a problem with an obvious solution, which was: fall repeatedly until falling stops being the main outcome.
Wei Liang approached this at fourteen months with the methodology of someone who found the problem genuinely interesting. He would pull himself upright against the table leg, assess the distance between his current position and the next available handhold, release the table leg with the confidence of a person who has significantly overestimated his own balance, travel a short distance in a generally forward direction, and arrive on the floor.
He would then look at what he had tripped on or failed to account for. He would examine it. Sometimes he would try to pick it up and examine it more closely. Then he would pull himself upright and try again from a slightly different angle.
He did not cry when he fell. This was the thing everyone noticed. Chen Mei had watched two babies learn to walk and both of them had treated each fall as an outrage, a personal affront delivered by an indifferent universe. Wei Liang treated each fall as data.
"He doesn't cry," Wei Dong told his father one evening, with the slightly scandalized air of someone reporting a violation of the natural order.
Wei Jian looked up from the net he was repairing. "Good."
"But what if he's broken?"
"Then he would cry," Wei Jian said, and went back to the net.
Wei Dong watched his youngest brother pull himself upright against the wall, wobble, and begin the slow negotiation toward the doorway, which was approximately four feet away and might as well have been four li for the structural challenges it presented.
"He's going to fall again," Wei Dong said.
"Yes," said Wei Jian.
Wei Liang fell. He landed on his hands and one knee. He looked at his hands. He looked at the floor. He appeared to reach some conclusion about the floor's character. He got up.
Wei Dong watched this for another minute.
"He's strange," he said.
"He's thorough," his father said.
This was the beginning of a disagreement about Wei Liang's nature that would continue, in various forms, for the rest of their lives. Wei Dong's position was that Wei Liang was strange. Wei Jian's position was that Wei Liang was thorough. Both of them were right. These were not mutually exclusive positions, though it would take Wei Liang himself some years to understand that being both could be an advantage.
By sixteen months he had solved the doorway. By eighteen months he had mapped the entire house with the systematic attention of a surveyor, knowing every surface, every edge, every place where the floor was reliable and every place where it was not. He moved through the house differently from how his brothers moved — not faster, but more deliberately, as if he was taking notes.
The market was another problem entirely.
Chen Mei began bringing him to market at around two years old, carried on her back in a cloth sling, which he tolerated with great patience. He could see the market from this height in a way that interested him enormously. The stalls, the movement of people between them, the system of exchange — the handing over of things for other things. The market was very loud and very full of smells and he absorbed all of it with the expression that Mrs. Guo had identified and that his mother had begun to think of privately as his working face: eyes slightly wider than usual, head tilted the smallest degree, completely still.
He started wanting to be put down at around two and a half. Chen Mei, whose back had strong opinions about this development, was relieved. She put him down and kept one hand on his collar and watched him discover, with total attention, the concept of the stall — the display, the vendor, the goods, the prices called out, the negotiation.
He tried to pick up a turnip at Old Yan's stall.
"Don't touch what you're not buying," Old Yan said, not unkindly. He said it to the child the way you say things to very small children — expecting nothing, but maintaining the principle.
Wei Liang put the turnip down. He looked at Old Yan. He looked at the turnip. He looked at his mother.
"Buying," he said. It was one of his words by then. He had several. He used them carefully and only when they were necessary, which was another thing people noticed about him.
Old Yan laughed. Chen Mei paid for the turnip. It cost two coins and was not strictly necessary, but there was something in the transaction that she felt was worth the two coins — some principle being recognized.
Wei Liang carried the turnip home with both hands. He examined it periodically along the way. When they got home he put it on the table and looked at it for another few minutes and then went to find something else to be interested in.
The turnip was made into soup. He ate it with great seriousness.
He was always falling and always getting up, and between those two events he was always watching, and the watching was the part that nobody quite knew what to do with, but that everybody was beginning to understand was simply the way he was made.