A Flower’s Shade by Ye Zhaoyan

wait for him, he's no big deal, let him fart around if he wants to." In humiliation, she clenched her teeth and pinched Huaifu's arm so hard that he grimaced.

6
    T wo days after the death of Old Master Zhen, Xiaoyun had returned to the Zhen Estate on the sly. He had never thought that he would return to this decaying mansion, but he had taken the bull by the horns and come back to the haunts of his youth. Ten years earlier, when he had resolved to leave this place behind, he had been only just sixteen years old. In the past ten years, he had studied in various locations, taken odd jobs in bookstores, taught elementary school, had even wasted a few months at one of the newspaper offices in the provincial capital. His haughty personality and his incompatibility with life in the real world had caused his stay everywhere to be short. Wherever he went, he fought with people, and had even been beaten black and blue on more than one occasion.
    From the moment he set foot in the Zhen Estate, Xiaoyun was gripped by profound regret. He knew he shouldn't have returned, that he shouldn't once again make himself a burden to his sister Suqin. The confused atmosphere of the Estate during the period of mourning had diluted his memories of the past. Ten years had passed, and now it seemed as though everything had become strange. People seemed to have forgotten who he was. Everyone was busy with their own affairs, and even Suqin seemed preoccupied with her own thoughts, and never had time to exchange a few words with him in private.
    Besides returning to the Zhen Estate to eat and sleep, Xiaoyun whiled away most of his time in the world outside. He called on the so-called "new people" in the little town, seeking to befriend them, but soon left off, finding that from the looks of it, the "new people" in that little town were at least as irritating as the old conservatives. A madam in one of the brothels had once explained the difference between the old-fashioned and the new people in this unique way: they both liked to visit the girls, but the old-fashioned ones liked to come at dusk and spend the night at the brothel, while the new people liked to come openly and in broad daylight to sleep with the girls they fancied.
    The nifty new gimmicks that Xiaoyun had brought to the new town soon lost their swank and charm. The first time he had put on his dark glasses and ridden his bike through the streets, a pack of children had followed him around like mad.
    Because he had returned from the provincial capital, the little town's middle school principal, who had the reputation of never rejecting the new currents of thought, had paid a courteous visit to Suqin, asking her please to convince Xiaoyun to give a talk at the school. The principal was a laughable old curio, his head chock full of pedantic old ideas, but he liked to flaunt his penchant for the new, to show his enlightenment.
    The result was that the predominant reaction to Xiaoyun's talk had been pure astonishment, with the exception of a few school radicals who made the occasional approving comment. In the several hours of his talk, Xiaoyun had pulled out all the stops, blustering of violent revolution, of the popular anarchist movement. While condemning the warlords, he himself seemed to have the unparalleled arrogance of a warlord, with millions at his command. His speech was incoherent, and not to put too fine a point on it, it was little more than a collection of popular slogans strung together. The excessive fierceness of this speech, if it were known, might incur the displeasure of the local authorities. The somewhat frightened headmaster had been forced to this pretense of a cough, attempting time and again to interrupt Xiaoyun's speech.
    His talk had pleased some of the girls, and when he had to interrupt his speech, several of the girl students had erupted in loud applause. After the talk, the headmaster had stared on as the girls had flocked around Xiaoyun like so many birds. They