The Alley Was Always This Long – Chapter 32
by Little PandaThe Tooth Cavity
Cheng Xiang burst into tears.
「The missing tooth cavity1 is saying I love you.
My full stomach is saying I love you.」
When Tao Tianran walked into her office, her expression was no different than usual.
Her assistant came to inform her, “Teacher Tao, the Big Boss is looking for you.”
Tao Tianran walked into Yi Yu’s office, pulled out the swivel chair across from the desk, and sat down.
“Well, you certainly make yourself at home.” Yi Yu had to laugh. “Do you know why I spoil you?”
“Because I won the Spectrum Award.”
“Nonono~” Yi Yu wagged a finger. “It’s because you’re a beauty.”
As she spoke, she grinned wickedly and hooked Tao Tianran’s ankle with her high heel under the desk.
Tao Tianran sat there, impassive.
“Hey.” Yi Yu wiggled the tip of her shoe, dissatisfied. “How can you be so unapproachable? Not a single reaction. Just tell me, is there anyone left in this world who’s close to you?”
Tao Tianran was silent for a moment, her lips parting slightly. “There’s no one left.”
She glanced at the radiator against the wall.
“What’s wrong?”
“I feel like the radiator in your office isn’t warm enough.”
“Really?” Yi Yu’s brow furrowed. “I think it’s plenty warm. So warm it’s given me a canker sore these past few days. A huge one.”
Tao Tianran never mentioned Cheng Xiang’s death again.
She just sat in Yi Yu’s sweltering office, felt a chill run through her body, and asked if the heat was on high enough.
“The main reason I called you in was to ask if you’re settling in okay after returning to the country,” Yi Yu said. “Work, life, all that.”
She began to playfully toss a diamond she’d been testing for clarity. “Go on, tell me. I can’t promise I’ll solve your problems, but it might cheer me up to hear them.”
Tao Tianran rescued the diamond from between her fingers. “Everything’s fine.”
After breaking up with Cheng Xiang, Tao Tianran had gone to Europe for advanced studies and had only recently returned.
Yi Yu nodded. “Alright then. Didn’t I stuff Yu Yusheng off to some foreign country, too? Once she finishes her studies and comes back, my left and right protectors2 will be assembled.”
“But she’s still inexperienced. When she gets back, you’ll have to take her under your wing.”
“That’s a long way off.” Tao Tianran stood up. “If there’s nothing else important, I’m leaving.”
Yi Yu was exasperated. “Can’t you humor me for just five more minutes?”
A chill crept up Tao Tianran’s spine, so cold it made her tremble. On the way back to her office, she passed through the main workspace.
Yu Yusheng’s desk was empty, a vacant spot in a sea of occupied workstations.
Tao Tianran stopped dead.
Her assistant was right behind her. “What is it, Teacher Tao?”
Tao Tianran shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
It was just that she’d remembered something.
She was in her last year of high school then, having moved to Beicheng just over a year before.
She remembered that summer was unnaturally hot. Cicadas clung to the branches, their songs a chaotic racket.
She rarely got sick, but in that early summer, she came down with a long-lasting summer cold and had to take a week off from school.
The weather was truly sweltering, and the gardener wasn’t coming by very often. She rarely went out, just stood by the window watching the cogongrass in the garden grow calf-high, a vast, fluffy expanse.
The doorbell rang.
Tao Tianran couldn’t be bothered to answer it.
But it rang again, the sound wavering and faint.
Tao Tianran crossed the garden to open the gate. The sea of cogongrass brushed against her ankles, making them itch.
Outside the black cast-iron gate stood Cheng Xiang. She was hugging her schoolbag, her gaze fixed on a bird perched on a branch outside.
“What are you doing here?” Tao Tianran asked.
Cheng Xiang pressed her lips together, slowly drawing her gaze back to land on Tao Tianran’s face before it abruptly darted away again.
She fiddled with the schoolbag in her arms. “Oh, it’s nothing. I just thought, you’ve missed so many days of class, I’d bring you your practice exams… Haha, that’s hilarious. If I were home sick and a classmate showed up specially to bring me homework, I’d probably hate them for it!”
Cheng Xiang grinned, but tears suddenly streamed down from her thick lashes.
She panicked, hastily raising a hand to wipe them away.
Tao Tianran’s brow furrowed slightly.
She heard Cheng Xiang wail, “I had a tooth pulled, Tao Tianran!”
Tao Tianran: …?
She stepped aside to let Cheng Xiang in. Cheng Xiang followed her through the overgrown garden, but when they reached the villa’s entrance, she waved her hands and refused to go any further. “I’m allergic to the rich.”
Tao Tianran: …
Cheng Xiang’s grin was back, and she said in a tiny voice, “Actually, it’s just… I’m too shy. Meeting the parents and all that, hehe.”
“My parents aren’t home.”
Cheng Xiang’s two thin eyebrows shot up. “You’re all alone in this huge house?”
“Well, then,” she kicked at a small pebble that had rolled to her feet, “that makes me even shyer, hehe.”
So Tao Tianran had her sit on the steps in front of the door.
It was an Italian-style villa with old-fashioned, vintage red bricks paving the entrance. When Tao Tianran came back out with a bandage, Cheng Xiang was sitting there, her two pale, slender legs sticking out from under her school uniform skirt.
She was gazing at the treetops swaying in the wind, lost in thought.
Tao Tianran walked over and crouched in front of her.
Cheng Xiang flinched. “Hey, hey, hey, I can do it myself…”
Tao Tianran stopped and handed the bandage to her.
“Hey,” Cheng Xiang’s hand, which had moved to block her, froze awkwardly in mid-air. “You’re really going to make me do it myself? You know, when we Chinese people say that, it’s usually just to be polite. Like when someone gives me a red envelope for New Year’s, and I say ‘I couldn’t possibly, I couldn’t possibly…’”
“Hiss!” Cheng Xiang bit her tongue.
Because while she was rambling, Tao Tianran had already torn open the bandage and gently applied it to her scraped knee.
The pads of Tao Tianran’s fingers were always so cool. Brushing against skin in the height of summer, they felt like cool dewdrops.
Cheng Xiang’s face flushed. “Hehehe.”
Tao Tianran stood up, looking down at her. “How did you fall?”
After a moment of giggling to herself, Cheng Xiang confessed, “Actually, I didn’t ask the teacher for leave. I climbed over the wall to get out and took a little tumble. See, the skin’s broken. I’m pretty delicate, right?”
“You have no idea how much has happened at school while you’ve been gone.” Cheng Xiang was a perpetual chatterbox, her little nose wrinkling like a chipmunk’s. “Did you know Zhou Man is dating the sports rep from the class next door? Hey, speaking of which, we’ve been in the same class for over a year, do you even know who Zhou Man is?”
“And can you believe the math teacher got a new gold tooth? Who gets a gold tooth these days…”
Tao Tianran wasn’t really interested in any of it.
Cheng Xiang’s chattering voice blended with the late summer evening breeze, becoming a kind of white noise. Tao Tianran crossed her arms and leaned against a wood-grained pillar.
She remembered the wind was gentle that day, and the summer was perfect.
Cheng Xiang suddenly stopped talking. “Tao Tianran, are you cold?”
“?” Tao Tianran shook her head.
“Oh. I was just thinking, maybe you shouldn’t be out in the wind with a cold.” Cheng Xiang gently scraped the tip of her shoe against the ground.
Tao Tianran glanced down at her. “Lift your head.”
Cheng Xiang kept her head down.
After about half a minute, she raised her small face. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
“I went to get a tooth pulled today, Tao Tianran,” she said, her voice choked with sobs.
“Did it hurt?”
“It’s not that it hurt.” Cheng Xiang shook her head frantically. “No, wait, it did hurt, a lot. But…”
With that, Cheng Xiang burst into a full-blown wail. “After I got it pulled, I went back to the classroom, and I kept probing the hole in my gum with my tongue, and then I saw your seat, empty for so long… it was just like the hole in my gum!”
“And I suddenly felt so sad!” she cried, gasping for breath.
Tao Tianran didn’t understand why getting a tooth pulled would make someone so sad. Her brow furrowed, and she forgot to go inside to get Cheng Xiang a tissue.
The girl’s impossibly thick lashes were soaked with tears, like the white cogongrass that was currently brushing against Tao Tianran’s calf.
Tao Tianran couldn’t say why she suddenly reached out a hand.
Cheng Xiang’s breath hitched, and she let out a loud hiccup.
It was the second time.
Tao Tianran’s hand reached out and touched Cheng Xiang’s eyelashes. The tears she cried soaked into the lines of Tao Tianran’s palm, like a sodden summer.
Cheng Xiang’s hiccups wouldn’t stop. “I just wanted to tell you, it’s summer already, why aren’t you back at school yet…”
“I just wanted to tell you that summer is here.”
Tao Tianran nodded, unsure why she found herself saying, “Yes, summer is here. I’ll go back to school.”
Tao Tianran did not go to Cheng Xiang’s funeral. She couldn’t imagine that girl, whose nose always wrinkled when she smiled, confined to a black-and-white photograph.
She never mentioned to anyone that her ex-girlfriend had died.
For the next week, Tao Tianran ate a lot.
She didn’t order liangpi again, and she didn’t let herself throw up again.
But a week later, her right jaw began to swell, and a throbbing pain shot through her gums.
She made an appointment and went to the dental clinic after work.
She didn’t actually like the dentist. Lying back in the chair under the glare of the light always made her feel like she was at someone’s mercy.
The dentist finished his examination. “It’s just inflamed. No need to pull it.”
“No need?”
“It’s a good thing you have a habit of regular teeth cleaning,” the dentist said with a smile. “Otherwise, a tooth extraction is a nasty business. A sudden empty hole in your gum is more worrying than problems in other parts of your body.”
“Why is that?” Tao Tianran asked.
“Well, think about it,” the dentist explained. “An empty gum socket is the only kind of hole you can repeatedly probe with your tongue, right? Every time you touch it, it’s a reminder that you’ve suddenly lost a tooth.”
Tao Tianran lay quietly in the chair and said no more.
A few months later, the initial drafts for their collaboration with the ceramic artist were finalized.
Tao Tianran took the designs to visit the artist. As she and her assistant walked out of the alley, the assistant fanned herself by her ear while opening the car door. “Summer’s here. The weather’s turned hot all of a sudden.”
They drove past the market near Cheng Xiang’s home.
The assistant suddenly said, “Did you know, Teacher Tao? There was a car accident here in the winter. The person who died was a very young girl.”
Tao Tianran stared at the countdown on the red light ahead.
Three seconds.
Two seconds.
One second.
“Teacher Tao, the light’s green.”
Tao Tianran’s foot tapped the accelerator. Long after they had driven away, she said, “I know.”
The voice was right beside her own ear, yet it sounded so very far away.
“You saw the news too, huh? Tsk, tsk, what a shame.”
Tao Tianran unconsciously ran her tongue over her right gum, only to remember that she hadn’t had the tooth pulled. There was no missing cavity there. She reached up to touch the back of her neck and cracked the car window open.
Fluffy dandelion seeds drifted in.
Tao Tianran glanced in the rearview mirror at the rapidly receding market.
The wind was gentle today, and the summer was perfect.
But a young woman was lying forever in the heavy snow of last winter, and she would never again be able to say to her: “Summer is here.”
Yi Yu clung to Tao Tianran’s arm for dear life.
Tao Tianran frowned. “Let go.”
“I won’t. The second I do, you’ll run off,” Yi Yu said, holding on even tighter. “You’re going to this party tonight whether you want to or not. I need you there to back me up, or all the other second-generation rich kids will think I’m a failure.”
“Tell me what you like about me, and I’ll change it.”
“I like your face!”
“Then I’ll make a mask for you. You can wear it.”
“…Huh?” Yi Yu’s mouth formed an exaggerated ‘O’. “Are you joking with me, Tao Tianran?”
In the end, Tao Tianran went.
When she was home by herself, she could never sit still.
The bar exuded an air of decadent indulgence. Money smelled of alcohol, and alcohol smelled of money. Soaked in it, one could get drunk without even taking a sip.
Yi Yu slung an arm around Tao Tianran’s shoulders. “This is my company’s living-breathing billboard, Teacher Tao. You’ve all seen the news about her winning the Spectrum Award, right? I told you I run a legitimate company, why didn’t you believe me!”
Tao Tianran shoved her off.
“Give me some face,” Yi Yu hissed beside her. “Thirty thousand.”
Thirty thousand what.
Tao Tianran really wasn’t used to physical contact with people.
The only person she had ever been intimate with was Cheng Xiang. Cheng Xiang looked slender-limbed, but her whole body was surprisingly soft, especially her soft little stomach. Sometimes, when Tao Tianran would rest her head on it, Cheng Xiang would fret. “Why do I have a little belly? It doesn’t look good in clothes.”
Then she would deliberately puff out her stomach. “Hey, Tao Tianran, what’s my stomach saying to you?”
Tao Tianran wouldn’t speak, her eyelashes drooping lazily.
Cheng Xiang would lean down, her lips close to Tao Tianran’s ear. “It’s saying it loves you, of course, Tao Tianran!”
“My stomach is saying I love you.”
“My intestines are saying I love you.”
“My gallbladder is saying I love you.”
“My pancreas is saying I love you.”
“Xiao Xiang.”
“Hm?”
“If you get cholecystitis, they have to remove your gallbladder.”
Cheng Xiang froze. “Really? Then I wouldn’t have any gall.”
She leaned down lower, her soft lips brushing against the shell of Tao Tianran’s ear. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Just like my missing tooth cavity is also saying I love you.”
Sitting in the bar, Tao Tianran hadn’t had much to drink, but she felt drunk.
She got up to go to the restroom.
“Don’t even think about sneaking out early!” Yi Yu called after her.
Coming out of the restroom, she ran into a young woman who greeted her. “Hi.”
Tao Tianran’s slender lashes were lowered.
She was so tall that she usually looked down when speaking to other women.
“I was sitting across from you just now,” the woman said.
Tao Tianran nodded. “Were you.”
“My name is Chen Chuxia.”
Tao Tianran paused. “What did you say your name was?”
The light in the bar was always dim and strange, and it was deliberately kept even darker near the restrooms to create a decadent, ambiguous atmosphere. Chen Chuxia was surprised to find that a woman like Tao Tianran wore perfume.
She had imagined Tao Tianran would smell of clean, cold mountain springs, but up close, she caught a faint scent of musk.
Chen Chuxia had never seen a woman like Tao Tianran. She was too cold, even her eyelids seemed thin, as if casually shielding her ink-black pupils. Her face was serene, but the two small moles at the corners of her eyes and brows came alive with the surrounding scent of alcohol.
She wore such a proper, crisp white shirt, and her waist was so slender. The cuffs were rolled up, revealing snow-white wrists, with a plain black hair tie looped around one.
“Chen Chuxia. My name is Chen Chuxia.”
“Oh.” Tao Tianran nodded.
Behind her was an industrial loft-style red brick wall. She leaned against it, slightly drunk, her cool, thin eyelids drooping, faintly flushed from the alcohol.
She suddenly asked Chen Chuxia, “Is summer nice?”
“What?” It was out of the blue. Chen Chuxia didn’t understand what she meant.
“Nothing.”
“You seem to have had a bit too much to drink,” Chen Chuxia said, mustering her courage. “Want to go outside for some air?”
When Tao Tianran returned to their table and told Yi Yu she was leaving with Chen Chuxia, Yi Yu’s jaw nearly hit the floor.
“What are you doing, Tao Tianran?” Yi Yu stared at her. “Are you serious?”
Tao Tianran didn’t say much, just grabbed her bag and left.
“I’ll take you somewhere,” Chen Chuxia told Tao Tianran.
“Mm.” They hailed a cab together. The window was cracked open, and the early summer night breeze rushed in, feeling like it was softly brushing against one’s lashes.
Tao Tianran leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Chen Chuxia watched her quietly from the side. The neon lights flowed over her pale face, as if stories were flowing toward her, only to abandon her again.
When they got out of the car, Tao Tianran found that Chen Chuxia had brought her to a cultural and creative district.
At this hour, nearly all the shops were closed. Under the dim streetlights, the long alley paved with flagstones looked like something out of Harry Potter.
Tao Tianran walked with Chen Chuxia, her heels clicking.
Chen Chuxia blinked. “I know a place that’s still open. It’s perfect for sobering up.”
It was an Italian gelato shop.
The owner pitched a flavor to them. “Why not try the Sichuan peppercorn pistachio? It’s a new product we developed this summer.”
Chen Chuxia asked Tao Tianran if she wanted some. Tao Tianran thought it would be too sweet and shook her head.
Chen Chuxia bought one for herself, and they continued walking.
When they reached an arched stone doorway, Chen Chuxia suggested, “Let’s stop for a moment.”
Facing the wall of the archway, she let out a soft “ah,” and the sound seemed to echo off the bricks.
Tao Tianran felt she might really be drunk. She took a step back, leaning against the wall. At this time of night, the flagstones were cool with dew, and it seeped through her white shirt.
Her eyelids were heavy, drooping softly, making her look as though she were missing someone.
Chen Chuxia stood a few steps away, eating her ice cream and watching her intently. “Did you just go through a breakup?” she asked softly.
“Hm?” Tao Tianran’s mind felt hazy. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” Chen Chuxia said. “I thought you seemed like someone who wouldn’t let anyone get close. But the look on your face just now… maybe I was mistaken.”
She smiled, then changed the subject. “Why did you agree to come out for a walk with me?”
“Because your name is Chuxia.” Early Summer.
Chen Chuxia smiled again.
Tao Tianran’s lashes were lowered, her gaze fixed on the high heels Chen Chuxia was wearing.
Perhaps because she was a jewelry designer, Tao Tianran never looked at people as a whole, only in parts.
Like with Cheng Xiang, she had loved looking at her impossibly thick and fluffy eyelashes.
One day, Cheng Xiang had thrown a strange tantrum. “Am I not attractive to you?”
Tao Tianran: ?
“It’s because I can’t wear high heels,” Cheng Xiang said with a sigh. “Sigh, I spend every day in a t-shirt and shorts in an office building that smells of green pepper and shredded pork. I’ve been graduated for so long and I still can’t wear high heels.”
When she squinted, the little silkworms3 under her eyes would always bunch up. “I’m not sexy anymore.”
That year for her birthday, Tao Tianran bought Cheng Xiang a pair of black red-bottom high heels.
When Cheng Xiang opened the box, she pressed her lips together.
“You don’t like them?”
Cheng Xiang shook her head, and the lips she’d been pressing together popped open. “Tao Tianran, these are so expensive.”
Cheng Xiang smiled and tried them on, shuffling to the full-length mirror while holding onto the back of a chair. “I look like a kid who stole her mom’s shoes. None of my clothes match.”
In the end, Cheng Xiang never wore those high heels.
They were carefully put away in the depths of her closet.
Tao Tianran later wondered many times: that birthday, was a pair of high heels what Cheng Xiang had really wanted?
Now, Chen Chuxia stood opposite her, asking softly, “What are you thinking about again?”
“It’s really… nothing.” Tao Tianran let out a long breath, and the air tasted of alcohol.
Chen Chuxia took a step closer, her voice trembling slightly. “Actually, I’m very attracted to you.”
Tao Tianran’s lashes were lowered as she continued to look at the high heels on the other woman’s feet.
Chen Chuxia took another step closer, still holding the ice cream cone. “Just being with you like this, I’m so nervous.”
“By the way, why do you wear a pinky ring on your right hand?” She reached out a hand, as if to distract herself, wanting to touch it.
Tao Tianran had been standing quietly against the wall.
But now she suddenly stood up straight, yanking her right hand away from Chen Chuxia. “I can’t accept this.”
She grabbed her bag, turned, and walked away.
She strode quickly over the quiet flagstones, back to the gelato shop from before. Now even it was about to close. “What is it, miss? Is there something else you want to buy?” the owner asked.
“The Sichuan peppercorn pistachio flavor, is it new this summer?”
“That’s right.”
“It wasn’t available in previous summers?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll have one.”
Tao Tianran paid and took her cone. The little red truck-shaped gelato stand was closing up, leaving only a single British-style cast-iron lamp post in the distance.
The light shimmered down, and the uneven road gleamed like a river.
Tao Tianran was dressed like a boss today—white shirt, black trousers, stiletto heels—but now she was sitting on the curb, licking an ice cream cone, her ridiculously expensive Hermès bag tossed carelessly to one side.
She ate too slowly, and the cream melted onto her slender fingers.
She licked it with the tip of her tongue.
In that instant, she thought: in all the summers that Cheng Xiang was alive, Sichuan peppercorn pistachio ice cream did not exist in the world.
She took out her phone and scrolled to the very bottom of her chat list.
The conversation had stopped the day before Cheng Xiang broke up with her.
She silently typed a message, then deleted it. Typed another line, and deleted that, too. Finally, she locked the screen and shoved the phone back into her pocket.
How long had this habit been going on?
She’d forgotten.
But she could no longer pretend there was someone on the other end, someone who would reply with a torrent of chattering words and emoji.
The first thing the next morning at work, Yi Yu called Tao Tianran into her office.
“What was that about, Teacher Tao? Did something happen last night?”
“You want to talk about this during work hours?”
Yi Yu raised her enameled antique watch, nearly shoving it in Tao Tianran’s face. “Look, three minutes to spare. I even came in early today just for this!”
“Nothing happened.”
Yi Yu stared into her eyes for a long time, and confirming she wasn’t lying, let out a sigh of relief. “I knew it… You scared me. I thought the iceberg was suddenly going to melt. The whole world would have drowned.”
“I know what you’re like. A person like you would never fall for anyone, right?”
Tao Tianran paused for two seconds. “I won’t.”
Was it a vow, or a statement of fact?
Tao Tianran left Yi Yu’s office.
Why was it that after hearing of Cheng Xiang’s death, she had not shed a single tear?
She just, in countless tiny moments, endlessly, remembered Cheng Xiang.
Footnotes
- A core metaphor used throughout the chapter: when a tooth is pulled, you cannot help but constantly seek out and probe the empty cavity with your tongue, serving as a persistent reminder of what you have lost. (yuánwén: 牙洞 yádòng)
- A standard wuxia/cultivation trope referring to the two top enforcers or deputies of a sect leader; playfully used by Yi Yu to refer to her two top designers (Tao Tianran and Yu Yusheng). (yuánwén: 左右护法 zuǒyòu hùfǎ)
- 'Lying silkworms' (卧蚕 wòcán) is a term in East Asian beauty standards for the small, puffy pouches of flesh directly under the eyes, considered a sign of youth and charm.
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