Chapter 3: Sifted Clean by the Times

The prison was located in Tianbin, wedged at the border between Shuishan City and the neighboring city. There was little human activity nearby—you had to drive a stretch of national highway before reaching the expressway, and then about half an hour on the expressway to get back to the city proper.

A section of the national highway was under repair. Big wheels rolled through billowing dust. Lei Wu rested his elbow on the window, watching the light and shadows retreating endlessly outside. The kicked-up yellow sand seemed to pour from a shattered hourglass, and ten years of light and shadow flashed scene by scene through the dust—blurry and indistinct.

The prison gate had long since disappeared from the rearview mirror, but Lei Wu’s gaze kept drifting back there involuntarily.

Xu Chaolong had never been much of a talker. Back when he worked at Lei Wu’s garage, he was the quietest of the bunch of helpers. Sometimes when Lei Wu and his rich young friends were flirting with pretty girls and telling dirty jokes, he’d blush and turn away.

Later, when he opened his own auto repair shop and often had to socialize with customers, he’d opened up a bit more.

Now Lei Wu sat quietly in the passenger seat, staring out the window, and Xu Chaolong felt a bit awkward. He was always afraid his mouth would fail him—that he’d say the wrong thing, bring up something he shouldn’t, and end up saying something the other man didn’t want to hear.

It was Lei Wu who first pulled himself out of his obscure, hard-to-read emotions. He quickly noticed Xu Chaolong’s nervousness and turned his head, saying lightly: “Haven’t seen you in so many years, and you’re still the same as before—like a sealed gourd. Also, stop calling me ‘Brother’ all the time. You’re only one year younger than me. And these years, thanks to your… help, I was able to settle down inside and accept reform.”

Xu Chaolong seemed not to have noticed the one-second, barely perceptible pause in Lei Wu’s words. He flashed a mouthful of white teeth and smiled: “I knew you’d bring this up again. I said it before when you called me—I’ll definitely call you Brother for the rest of my life. You’ve helped me so many times. What I did was just within my power. Don’t think anything of it.”

Fifteen years ago, Xu Chaolong and Lei Wu had only been employer and employee, their statuses worlds apart. Xu Chaolong didn’t call him “Brother Wu” like now—he called him “Young Master Lei” along with everyone else. The young master of a wealthy family naturally had an arrogant, domineering temper, and when Xu Chaolong first joined the garage, he’d taken plenty of inexplicable scoldings.

The garage received mostly young masters and young ladies, and the cars they modified were either BMWs or Audis. Shuishan City wasn’t big—the connections inside wound around and around among that same group of people. Besides learning to recognize cars, Xu Chaolong also had to learn to recognize people. The slightest negligence would earn him disdainful looks, mockery, and deliberate trouble.

He kept telling himself: work more, talk less. Offending any one of these young masters or ladies would be enough to make his life miserable.

In the end, he didn’t offend any young master or lady—his own sister, Xu Feiyan, did.

That was his second year at the garage. Xu Feiyan had graduated from middle school and was attending vocational high school in Shuishan City. She boarded during the week and would come find him on weekends to eat better.

One day his sister bounced into the garage carrying a lunchbox of fried chive dumplings. She wasn’t watching where she was going and stepped on a wrench on the floor. She pitched forward, and the oily chive dumplings and the chili sauce poured on top of them smeared all over the handbag of a rich girl in front of her.

Xu Chaolong had been around long enough to know that bag cost several years of his wages. He also knew that some leather bags in this world were delicate things that couldn’t touch water.

But his sister didn’t know that. She casually grabbed a towel they used for wiping cars and started wiping the bag, doubling the area of the oil stain and chili sauce.

The rich girl—he forgot whether her surname was Chen or Lin—was Lei Wu’s official girlfriend at the time, the youngest daughter of a locally famous industrial company’s boss, and a hot-tempered one at that. Seeing her platinum bag in this horrible state, her eyes reddened, and she picked up the wrench, about to strike Xu Feiyan’s arm.

Before Xu Chaolong could shout, the wrench was caught mid-air.

Lei Wu took the wrench from his companion’s hand and casually tossed it aside with a loud clang. Xu Chaolong came back to his senses and rushed to his sister’s side, hurriedly apologizing to the rich girl and Young Master Lei, saying he hadn’t taught his sister properly, that he would definitely pay for the bag, no welching.

But Lei Wu didn’t make him pay. He only told him to mop the floor clean, then pulled the bristling rich girl out of the shop, stuffing her into a red Lamborghini. The exhaust roar still lingered as the car vanished.

Later, he heard Lei Wu had taken the rich girl to Hong Kong for a few days. When they returned, she was carrying a new bag of the same style but a different color, strutting around the garage like a proud peacock displaying its feathers.

Xu Chaolong was nervous for a long time. It wasn’t until he received his full wages the following month that he breathed a sigh of relief. From that time on, he felt that Young Master Lei wasn’t as hateful as outsiders said.

What truly made Xu Chaolong follow him loyally happened about half a year before Lei Wu’s accident.

It was the peak of summer. Xu’s father suddenly collapsed while working in the fields. The siblings were about to rush home when their mother stopped them, saying the county hospital wouldn’t take him—the ambulance was already on its way to Shuishan City Central Hospital.

Xu’s father was sent straight to the ICU. Xu Chaolong gave all his meager savings to his mother. Xu Feiyan had just graduated and found a job, and could only hold her mother and wait red-eyed outside the ICU.

Money flowed like water in the ICU. Within days, their own money and borrowed money were all gone. Xu Chaolong swallowed his pride and went to Lei Wu to ask for an advance on his wages. Afraid Lei Wu wouldn’t trust him, he even prepared an IOU, saying that as long as the garage existed, he would keep working there.

Unexpectedly, Lei Wu just tossed him a card. He didn’t even make him press a red fingerprint on the IOU. He waved his hand, cigarette between his teeth, and said the password was six zeros, told him to hurry back to the hospital and come back to work after he’d dealt with family matters.

The zeros on that card left the siblings dumbstruck. They were that old and had never seen so much money.

He didn’t spend it recklessly. Xu Feiyan was even more careful—she kept every hospital receipt properly, and she even took a little notebook and recorded where every sum of money went, densely packed.

Unfortunately, in the end, there was nothing to be done. Mother and children cried and discussed with their heads together for a long time, and finally had the hospital remove the breathing tube.

The funeral was held back in the village. It rained for days and nights. The three of them knelt in coarse mourning clothes in the simple funeral hall. Suddenly they heard a familiar exhaust roar coming from the entrance, approaching from afar. He and his sister looked at each other, wondering—why would he come here?

Although the village had paved roads, they weren’t very flat. The Ferrari with its low chassis bumped and scraped along. The originally shiny black body was splattered with yellow mud. The car door rose slowly, and Lei Wu stepped out in a formal suit. The debonair hooligan air was rarely gone from his brows, his lips pressed seriously into a line. He bowed and offered incense before the black-and-white photo on the wall.

Relatives in the house whispered to each other, asking who this big shot was. Only the siblings cried like two fools, bowing in return through their tears.

…

“Ah, back then I had nothing but stinking money. If it were today, I wouldn’t be able to help you,” Lei Wu mocked himself.

By now the car had reached the expressway entrance. Lei Wu saw Xu Chaolong pull into a lane and slow down slightly. Soon the electronic display beside the lane flashed the vehicle information, the barrier ahead lifted, and the car passed through.

“Oh, so this is ETC.” Lei Wu tilted his head up slightly, watching the small card-inserted device stuck to the inside of the windshield with great interest.

Xu Chaolong was a bit surprised: “Whoa, you even know about ETC?”

Lei Wu nodded, knowing what he was thinking, and smiled: “You really think it’s too closed off in there? It’s not an uninhabited island. Not to mention the news broadcast keeps up with the times, and we can subscribe to magazines and books. Some kind-hearted officers even organize movie screenings for us. And people are always coming and going in my cell. Every time someone new arrives, we make them talk about what’s happening in society—scan-code payments, shared bikes, designated drivers, Douyin influencers, livestream selling… oh, and the recent online grocery shopping. I know all about it.”

The livestream selling was explained by that youngest one who cried like Lin Daiyu. He’d started some influencer company and had been raking it in these past two years, riding the wave.

It was just that Lei Wu found the name unpleasant to the ear—”incubation base” sounded like a chicken or duck farm.

The second year after Lei Wu went in, WeChat started becoming popular. A few years later, the new arrivals were already explaining to them how high the daily usage rate of scan-code payment was. Lei Wu adapted to new things quickly, but a few of the older uncles couldn’t accept it.

Most of the older uncles had gone in during the nineties. Forget smartphones—they’d barely touched a computer. They were unwilling to accept that the lifestyle they were used to had already been sifted clean by the times, like sand washed away by the tide.

While the newcomers rattled on, the old uncles would scoff and curse—of course money only felt real when you held it in your hand. But Lei Wu noticed that despite their disdain, there would still be a flickering light in their eyes.

Lei Wu couldn’t imagine—if his sentence hadn’t been ten years, but twenty or thirty, would he still be able to hold onto this hope for the outside world?