Point of View: SHEN LUOYI
The first week of university, Luoyi has learned, operates on its own
private calendar — one that compresses the social work of months into a
handful of days and expects you to emerge from it knowing who you are
inside this particular world. There are the people who find their people
on day one, pulled together by shared provinces or shared tastes or the
simple magnetic luck of adjacent dormitory rooms, and they form their
clusters and their group chats and their dinner arrangements with the
ease of things that were always going to happen. And then there are the
people who watch all of this with calm interest and wait to understand
what the place is before they decide where inside it they belong.
Luoyi is the second kind, though she can pass convincingly as the first.
This is one of her more useful abilities.
By Wednesday she knows the layout of the campus well enough to navigate
it without thinking. By Thursday she has memorized the class schedules
of her core psychology modules, identified the professors whose office
hours are worth attending and those whose lectures she can approximate
with the textbook alone, and located three separate spots on campus
where she can sit alone without appearing to be sitting alone — a
distinction that matters more than it should, but does.
The bench behind the science building pond. The second-floor window seat
in the east wing of the library, half-hidden by a structural column. A
small table at the back of the campus café, near the window that faces
the ginkgo alley, where the afternoon light comes in at an angle that
makes everything look like it is in the middle of something beautiful.
These are the places she goes when she needs to think without
performing.
The rest of the time she is warm and present and precisely calibrated to
wherever she is — laughing with He Ziqing over breakfast, asking Wei Ran
thoughtful questions about Chengdu that make Wei Ran's homesickness
temporarily ease into pride, listening to Fang Jing explain her
color-coding system with the attentive interest of someone who finds it
genuinely fascinating rather than mildly impressive. She is good at
this. She has always been good at this.
What she is also doing, quietly, in the spaces between, is asking
questions.
✦ ✦ ✦
It begins with the architecture department.
She goes on a Tuesday afternoon, ostensibly to pick up a campus map from
the information board outside the department building — the kind of
mundane errand that requires no explanation. The department's common
area is on the ground floor, open to anyone, and she spends fifteen
minutes looking at the student project displays arranged along the
walls: scale models of structures, technical drawings pinned to boards,
photographs of buildings from across the world annotated in the careful
handwriting of people trained to see architecture as language.
She looks at each one. She is looking for his handwriting, which she
knows as well as her own — the particular way he formed the character
for light, the slight leftward lean of his strokes when he was writing
quickly.
She does not find it. The displays are from the current cohort.
She goes to the departmental office. A young administrative staff member
looks up from his computer with the practiced patience of someone
accustomed to lost freshmen.
"Can I help you?"
"I hope so," Luoyi says, and she smiles — the specific smile that says I
am slightly embarrassed to be asking this but I'm going to ask anyway,
which tends to make people want to help. "My older brother graduated
from this department. Or — he studied here, for three years. I just
started at Chenguang and I wanted to find out if there was anything of
his work still in the department archive. Student projects, that kind of
thing."
The administrator's expression shifts — a small, careful adjustment, the
kind that happens when someone receives information they weren't
expecting and needs a moment to decide how to hold it.
"What was his name?"
"Shen Minghe."
The adjustment again. Smaller this time, more controlled, but she has
been watching people's faces her whole life and she sees it.
"I'm not sure we keep individual student project archives from that far
back," he says. His tone is kind and perfectly neutral. "You might try
the department library on the third floor. They sometimes retain
exemplary student work. But I'd recommend speaking to a faculty member
if you're looking for specific materials."
"Of course," Luoyi says. "Thank you so much."
She goes to the third floor. The department library is small and quiet
and smells of drafting paper and old adhesive. She looks through the
shelved portfolios for thirty minutes. She does not find his name. She
does find an index from three years ago that lists a student project of
distinction — the names are there, alphabetical — and Shen Minghe is
listed, third from the bottom, with a notation beside it that says:
withdrawn from exhibition.
She stands in the quiet library and looks at that notation for a long
time.
Withdrawn from exhibition. Not missing. Not unavailable. Withdrawn.
Someone made that decision. Someone reached into the record of his work
and pulled it back.
She photographs the page with her phone. Then she puts the index back on
the shelf exactly as she found it, thanks the librarian at the desk with
a warm smile that reveals nothing, and walks out into the corridor.
Her hands are perfectly steady. She has trained them to be.
✦ ✦ ✦
She tries the counseling center next.
This is harder. The counseling center is in Building Nine, ground floor,
and it has the particular atmosphere of spaces designed to be welcoming
that end up feeling slightly anxious as a result — too many plants,
chairs arranged in careful clusters, a reception desk staffed by a
student volunteer who looks up with an expression of rehearsed openness.
"Hi! Are you here for a walk-in appointment?"
"Actually," Luoyi says, "I had a question about something else. More of
an administrative question." She lowers her voice slightly — not
conspiratorially, just privately, which is different and tends to make
people lean in rather than tense up. "My brother was a student here, and
I know he used the counseling services. I was wondering if there was any
way I could — not access his records, I understand that's not possible —
but speak to someone who might have known his case. Just as family. Just
to understand."
The volunteer's expression cycles through several things in quick
succession: sympathy, uncertainty, the particular discomfort of someone
who wants to help and doesn't know if they're allowed to.
"I'd have to ask the director," the volunteer says. "Can I take your
name and contact?"
"Of course," Luoyi says, and gives them. "Shen Luoyi. First year,
psychology."
She does not expect to hear back quickly. She does not, in fact, expect
to hear back at all — she has understood already that the counseling
center is not going to be where she finds what she needs. Institutions
protect themselves, and whatever happened with Minghe happened inside
institutional walls, which means the institution has already decided
what it knows and what it doesn't.
But she needed to go. She needed to go and ask and be told the careful
version of no, so that she knows what she is working around.
She walks back across campus in the afternoon warmth. The ginkgo trees
are beginning to yellow at the tips. A group of students are throwing a
frisbee on the central lawn, and someone misses the catch and it rolls
to Luoyi's feet, and she picks it up and throws it back with a clean,
accurate arc, and the student who catches it calls out thank you, and
she waves and keeps walking.
This is what she looks like from the outside. Easy. Present. Unburdened.
Inside she is making a list.
✦ ✦ ✦
The list, as it currently stands, goes like this:
One: Minghe's project was withdrawn from the department's exhibition
archive. By whom, and why, and when exactly — unknown.
Two: The administrative staff member in the architecture department
recognized his name and had a reaction he controlled very quickly. Which
means the name is not unfamiliar in that department. Which means
whatever happened was known to at least some people in the building.
Three: The counseling center will not speak to her voluntarily. Which
means if Minghe accessed those services — and she believes he did —
whatever is in his file is considered sensitive enough to protect.
Four: She needs to find the people who knew him. Not the institution.
The people. His classmates, his professors, whoever was in his orbit for
three years.
She adds a fifth item. She has been adding it for three days now and
crossing it off and adding it again.
Five: The man outside Building Seven. Dark jacket. Books held against
his side. The way he went still when he saw her — not surprised still,
not stranger-on-a-path still, but the other kind. The kind that comes
from recognition. From history.
She doesn't know his name yet. But she knows he knew something.
People who carry guilt have a very specific stillness. She has read
about it in three different psychology texts, and she has seen it up
close now, and she recognizes it the way you recognize a word in a
language you are only beginning to learn — imprecisely but unmistakably.
She is going to find out his name.
✦ ✦ ✦
She finds it by accident, which is how the most useful things tend to
arrive.
Friday morning, Introduction to Psychology, held in a medium-sized
lecture hall that fills to three-quarters capacity. Luoyi sits in the
third row — close enough to engage, far enough to see the whole room —
and the professor, a compact man named Dr. Fang who speaks with the
velocity of someone who has too much to say and not enough time to say
it, begins the lecture with a brief discussion of the department's
resources, which includes mentioning a list of senior students available
for peer mentoring.
He reads out four names. The fourth is Jiang Chengzhi. Law department,
final year, cross-departmental mentor for students interested in
psychology-law intersections.
Luoyi writes it down.
Jiang Chengzhi. She turns it over in her mind like a stone turned over
in water, feeling for its edges.
After the lecture, she approaches a girl she has seen twice in the same
classes — a girl named Zhou Mei with reading glasses pushed up on her
forehead who gives off the reliable energy of someone who knows
everything about the campus already.
"Do you know Jiang Chengzhi?" Luoyi asks. Casual. Conversational. Just
one student asking another.
Zhou Mei looks at her with the particular expression of someone who has
been asked a question with a complicated answer and is deciding how
simplified to make it.
"By reputation," Zhou Mei says. "Law department. Final year. He's — "
she pauses. "Cold. That's the word everyone uses. Brilliant, apparently,
his thesis is supposed to be exceptional, but he doesn't talk to people
much. Keeps to himself. You can try the peer mentoring program but
honestly most people who sign up end up dropping it."
"Why?"
"Because he answers exactly what you ask and nothing more. It's
technically helpful and completely alienating." Zhou Mei considers. "He
wasn't always like that, supposedly. There's some story from his first
year, something that happened — I don't know the details. People don't
really talk about it."
Something happened. Luoyi notes this.
"Which building does he live in?"
Zhou Mei gives her a look that is approximately forty percent curiosity
and sixty percent amusement.
"Building Seven, I think. Why? Are you interested in the peer mentoring
thing?"
"I'm interested in a lot of things," Luoyi says pleasantly, and changes
the subject.
✦ ✦ ✦
She sees him for the second time on Friday afternoon.
She is at her table in the campus café — the back window, ginkgo alley
light, the particular solitude she has carved out for thinking — when he
comes in. He orders coffee at the counter with the efficiency of someone
who has ordered the same thing many times: no deliberation, no
interaction beyond the functional minimum. He takes the cup and turns
and scans the room for a seat.
Their eyes meet.
He does not go still this time. He is more controlled than he was on the
path, or perhaps he was prepared for the possibility — she can't tell
which. His gaze moves off her face within two seconds, finds a table
near the window at the opposite end of the café, and he walks to it
without any adjustment in pace.
He sits with his back to her.
This, Luoyi thinks, is itself information.
People who genuinely do not register you sit wherever is convenient.
People who sit with their back to you have made a decision.
She opens her notebook and writes: Jiang Chengzhi. Building Seven. Knew
Minghe — she is not certain of this yet, but she is becoming certain.
The stillness on the path was not a stranger's stillness. She adds:
avoids eye contact. Avoids proximity. Controlled. Whatever happened, he
is still inside it.
She does not look at him again. She drinks her tea and works on her
psychology reading and lets the ginkgo light move across the page. But
she is aware of him the whole time — the particular awareness of a fixed
point in a room, something you are not looking at and cannot stop
knowing is there.
He leaves before she does. She hears his chair, hears the sound of his
cup returned to the counter, hears the door. She does not turn around.
When he is gone the café feels very slightly different — less weighted,
more ordinary. As though something that had been holding a certain
tension in the air has departed and the air has settled back into
itself.
She closes her notebook. She thinks: he was Minghe's friend. She doesn't
know this. She is almost sure of it.
She gathers her things and goes back to Building Three as the campus
lamps begin to come on, one by one, down the length of the ginkgo alley.
✦ ✦ ✦
That evening, He Ziqing finds Luoyi sitting on her bed with her notebook
open and her tea cold and the expression on her face that He Ziqing has
started to recognize over the past week — not sad exactly, not troubled
exactly, but interior. Turned inward. The face of someone standing in a
room that exists only inside themselves.
"You've been doing that a lot," He Ziqing says, not unkindly. She is at
her desk, biochemistry notes spread around her like a field of very
precise snow.
"Doing what?"
"That." She gestures vaguely at Luoyi's general expression. "Thinking
about something you're not talking about."
Luoyi looks at her. He Ziqing is watching her with the same direct,
unjudging appraisal she brought to their first meeting, which is both
comfortable and slightly unnerving — the feeling of being seen clearly
by someone who does not yet know what they are seeing.
"I'm always thinking about something I'm not talking about," Luoyi says.
"Isn't everyone?"
"Sure," He Ziqing says. "But most people manage to look like they're
not. You look like you're working on something."
A pause. Luoyi turns her cold tea mug in her hands.
"My brother went to school here," she says. It is the most she has told
anyone since she arrived. She watches He Ziqing's face to see what it
does with this.
He Ziqing's face does something careful and still with it. She does not
rush to fill the space. She just waits.
"He died," Luoyi says. "Last year. And no one will tell me why — the
real why, not the official version — so I came here to find out."
Silence. The kind that is not uncomfortable but is very full.
"Okay," He Ziqing says. Simple. Not I'm so sorry, though her expression
holds that. Not that must be so hard, though it does. Just: okay. I hear
you. What do you need.
Something in Luoyi's chest loosens, slightly, like a knot that has been
pulled in the right direction for the first time.
"I don't need anything," Luoyi says. "I just — I wanted to say it out
loud to someone. I haven't, since I got here."
"Okay," He Ziqing says again. And then: "If you figure out what you do
need, tell me."
"I will," Luoyi says.
She means it. She thinks she might actually mean it, which is more than
she can say for most things she tells people.
Later, when He Ziqing has turned back to her biochemistry notes and Wei
Ran is asleep and Fang Jing is watching something on her laptop with
headphones, Luoyi lies in her bed and looks at the ceiling and goes
through her list again.
She adds to it. Item six: find out what Jiang Chengzhi knew about her
brother. Find out what story people don't tell from his first year. Find
out who else knew Minghe, who else carries the shape of him in the way
they go still.
Item seven, which she writes and then looks at for a long time before
closing the notebook: don't let this become the only thing you are here
for. Minghe would not want that. Minghe, whatever else he was, loved
being alive in the moments when being alive was possible for him, and he
would want her to be alive here too, not just searching.
She closes the notebook. She turns off her lamp.
Outside, the campus settles into its nighttime version of itself —
quieter, softer, the pathways lit orange by the dormitory lamps, the
osmanthus trees breathing their slow sweet breath into the dark.
Somewhere on the fourth floor of Building Seven, Jiang Chengzhi is
probably doing what he does every night: reading until he can no longer
keep his eyes open, organizing tomorrow's hours into something
manageable, refusing to think about the things that are waiting for him
in the dark every time he stops.
He has seventeen days before she speaks to him directly.
Neither of them is counting. But the days are passing anyway, the way
days always do — without permission, without pause, carrying them both
forward toward the moment that has, in some sense, already been decided.
✦ ✦ ✦
On Saturday morning, Luoyi goes alone to the architecture department
building.
It is early — barely eight — and the building is quiet, most of its
studios empty except for one fourth-floor room where someone has left
the light on and the sound of quiet music drifts down the stairwell. She
does not go up. She goes to the small gallery space on the ground floor
that she noticed on her first visit, where the notice board hangs.
She stands in front of the board for a long time.
There is a photograph pinned near the top right corner. Not framed, not
official — just a photograph, printed on ordinary paper, slightly faded
at the edges. A group of students standing in front of what appears to
be a finished model — some large architectural structure, she can't tell
what kind, but it is beautiful, the kind of building that looks like it
was designed by someone who understood that a building can have a
feeling. The students are laughing. There are five of them.
She looks at each face.
And then she finds him.
He is on the left side of the group, slightly apart from the others in
the way people who are slightly apart tend not to notice about
themselves. He is not laughing as broadly as the others — his smile is
smaller, more internal, as though the joy is arriving from somewhere
deeper and taking slightly longer to reach the surface. But it is there.
It is unmistakably there.
Shen Minghe. Twenty years old in this photograph, or thereabouts. Alive.
Luoyi touches the edge of the photograph with one finger. Very gently.
The paper is cool.
She looks at the other faces in the photograph. Three she doesn't
recognize. The fourth — and here something in her stomach shifts
quietly, like a weight redistributing itself — the fourth is the boy
from the path. Taller than the others, standing just behind her brother,
one hand at his side. His expression in the photograph is different from
the expression she saw on the path: open, younger, not yet whatever he
has become.
He is laughing at something Minghe said. You can tell, from the angle of
his body, the direction of his attention — he is laughing at something
Minghe said, and Minghe is looking at the camera, and neither of them
knows this is a photograph that will one day be pinned to a notice board
for a girl who was not yet in their world to find and understand.
Luoyi steps back from the board. She breathes once, steadily.
Jiang Chengzhi was her brother's friend. She was right. She was
completely right, and now she has to figure out what to do with being
right, which is always the harder part.
She takes a photograph of the photograph. Then she leaves the building
and walks back through the early morning campus, past the stone garden,
past the ginkgo alley, past the central courtyard where the grass is
still wet with dew and no one is sitting on it yet, back to Building
Three.
He Ziqing is awake when she returns, assembling what appears to be a
very complicated breakfast from various shelf-stable items she has
organized in her desk drawer.
"You were out early," He Ziqing says.
"I went for a walk," Luoyi says.
"Find anything interesting?"
Luoyi sits on her bed and looks at the photograph on her phone. Her
brother's face. The smaller smile. The joy arriving from somewhere deep.
"Yes," she says.
✦