Chapter 2

When we were buying our flat, Chen Shuo’s workplace was in the east of the city.

My company was in the west.

It was a forty-five-minute drive between them without traffic. An hour and a half in the morning rush.

The first time we went house-hunting, I wanted to look somewhere in the middle.

“Too expensive,” Chen Shuo said.

I agreed.

The second time, I liked a resale flat in the west. It was only four metro stops from my office, with an established hospital and shopping centre nearby. The asking price was 2.1 million yuan.

Chen Shuo spent the whole evening doing the sums, then said it wouldn’t work.

“It’s too far from my office.”

“But it’s a forty-minute drive for you,” I said. “It takes me an hour and twenty minutes to get to work from here now.”

He glanced at me. “You might not stay at your company for ever.”

I stopped for a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t you always saying consultancy work is exhausting? Once we have a child, you could move to a client-side role. Or find somewhere closer to home.”

He said it so casually.

So casually that, for a while, I thought I was reading too much into it.

“Then why can’t you change jobs?” I asked.

Chen Shuo laughed. “Give up my permanent post at a state-owned company? Why would I? It’s so secure.”

He had a point.

I could change jobs.

His job was secure.

If you considered that question on its own, the answer even seemed reasonable.

So we bought in the east.

The flat cost 1.98 million yuan.

His parents put in four hundred and fifty thousand, mine four hundred thousand. We each added our savings from the past few years to make a down payment of nine hundred thousand. We’d pay the remaining mortgage together.

Both our names went on the deed.

Perfectly fair.

On the surface, at least.

The day we signed the contract, Mum quietly pulled me aside. “What about your commute?”

“I’ll get up earlier,” I said, without thinking.

She said nothing more.

Women of her generation were very good at accepting answers like that.

During all those years when Dad took his bus out at half past four in the morning, she’d got up at four to cook his noodles, then gone to work at the pharmacy herself at half past seven.

Growing up, I’d thought that was what marriage meant.

It wasn’t until after I turned twenty-nine that I slowly began to understand it might also just mean a woman had been short of sleep for years.

When we renovated the flat, we had our first real argument.

It wasn’t about money.

It was about the study.

The flat had three bedrooms.

The main bedroom was ours.

The second, Chen Shuo said, would be for a child.

I’d planned to use the smallest as a study.

My work often meant examining drawings and calculating quantities at home. Sometimes I’d sit there for six or seven hours at a stretch.

But when the designer sent over the plans, there was a one-and-a-half-metre bed in the smallest room.

I looked at it for a long time. “Where’s the desk?”

Chen Shuo pointed to the main-bedroom plan. “Can’t it go by the window in here?”

“Weren’t we going to make that room a study?”

“Where would my parents stay?”

I said nothing.

He hurried to explain. “They wouldn’t be living here permanently. It’s just that when you have a baby, Mum will definitely come and help.”

I went on, “What about my parents, then? Your parents don’t live far away. If they want to see you, you can go home whenever you like.”

I was upset.

But it was difficult to fall out over a remark like that.

Because he’d immediately add, “We’ll move to a four-bedroom place when we can afford it.”

Because his mother really would be coming to “help.”

Because a child really would need looking after.

Because a desk really would fit in the main bedroom.

Taken one at a time, every reason was valid.

And that was how my computer desk ended up in the bedroom.

In the end, it was 1.2 metres wide.

The dressing table stood beside it; the wardrobe pressed up against its left side.

Whenever I spread out two A3 drawings, there was nowhere left for the mouse.

Once, watching me work, wedged into that little space, Chen Shuo said with real concern, “When we get a bigger place, I’ll make sure you have a huge study.”

I smiled.

For some reason, that night I suddenly remembered what he’d said while we were house-hunting.

“You might not stay at your company for ever.”

That was when I first began to dimly understand:

In the future we were planning together, Chen Shuo’s career was a load-bearing wall that could not be moved.

Mine was a partition that could be torn down.