Hong Tian woke before anyone else and threw her feet over the cot in the living room where she slept. She dressed quietly. She was pulling on her shoes when she felt the presence of eyes on her. She looked over to the doorway of the smaller bedroom where her granddaughter was peeking out from behind the door. “I caught you Nainai,” Lan Yue giggled. She crept out of the bedroom and joined her grandmother on the bed, tucking her skinny legs underneath the blankets. Her bangs fell over her eyes as Hong Tian kissed the top of her head.
“Why are you awake so early my love?” Hong Tian asked her.
“Uncle snores too loudly, he wakes me up.”
“You should poke him to make him stop, you have school.”
Lan Yue nodded seriously. “We have a test today Nainai, in English”
“Are you good at English?”
“Yes, but only if I don’t have to speak it. Do you speak English Nainai?”
“No, but your grandfather used to speak Russian, they were our friends.”
“Oh,” Lan Yue brought her legs up to her chest and hugged them, as if trying to shrink the limbs that had grown faster than the rest of her in the past year. She nestled her head between her knees as she considered this new, surprising, piece of information about her grandfather.
Lan Yue had never met the man whose portrait hung in their living room, a stern, thin man in a Mao suit, but collected information about him like other girls her age collected stickers and swap cards. New intel was rare. When Nainai arrived in Beijing three years ago, one month after her husband had died, she had laid on the cot in the living room silent for the first week, staring into an invisable place. Lan Yue, then only eight and with legs of a more manageable length, had crawled into bed with her and stroked her hair and sung Chu Lian, an old song she had learnt in school. Nainai had smiled and said, “Your grandfather loved that song, we used to dance to it.”