The month Wei Dong turned fifteen, he stopped going to school.
There was not a conversation about this. It was understood. The family's finances had a shape and Wei Dong fit into it in a particular way and the shape required that he move from student to earner, and Wei Dong understood this with the same quiet competence with which he understood most practical things. He packed away his school materials, borrowed his father's spare waterproofs, and began showing up at the docks before dawn.
Wei Liang watched this happen over the course of a month.
He watched the way his brother's face changed, not drastically but definitely — the way a path changes when it stops going in multiple directions and commits to one. Wei Dong did not become unhappy. He was not a person who permitted himself unhappiness about things he had decided were necessary. But his face narrowed, the way faces narrow when they are carrying weight that cannot be put down, and Wei Liang, who watched faces the way his father watched the water's colour, saw it.
He did not say anything about this. He was eight years old and there was nothing useful to say and he knew it. He knew it the way he knew most things that the adults around him hadn't told him — by watching and waiting until the shape of the thing was clear.
What he did instead: in the evenings before dinner, he made sure his brother's sandals were at the door before Wei Dong came in, because taking off your sandals when your feet hurt was harder and smaller when someone had already thought of it. He started waking up earlier in the mornings to pack the lunch, because the first hour before dawn was the coldest and his brother was already moving through it in ways that cost him something. Once, when Wei Dong came home and sat down at the table with the posture of someone who was not going to say he was tired because saying it would have made it realer, Wei Liang sat down across from him and told a story about a fish he had watched that afternoon — not a true story, not entirely, embroidered for length and incident — until his brother's posture changed and he said something in response and the tiredness had somewhere to go.
None of this was spoken. Wei Dong never said: thank you for the sandals. He never said: I appreciate the lunch. He said nothing, the way some expressions of gratitude are nothing and everything simultaneously.
Wei Liang asked his mother once, in a roundabout way, whether Wei Dong was alright.
"He's doing what needs doing," his mother said. She was salting fish. Her hands moved automatically, efficiently, without waste. "Doing what needs doing isn't the same as being alright. But it is its own kind of strength."
"Will it always be like this?" Wei Liang asked.
"No," she said. "Things change. Things always change. The question is what kind of change, and when." She looked at him. "Why are you asking me this?"
"I'm trying to understand it," he said.
She nodded. She salted another fish. "That's all any of us are doing," she said. "The ones who pretend otherwise are the ones you want to be careful of."
Wei Liang wrote this in the section of his memory where he kept things his mother said, which was nearly as large as the section for Master Bao, though differently organized.
He carried Wei Dong's tackle to the dock for three years, until the day Wei Dong got up early enough to carry it himself and Wei Liang recognized this as the information it was: that his brother had found a kind of footing, something that held. He stopped carrying it without ceremony. Wei Dong did not mention this either.
Some things are understood more clearly when they are not said.