Jian wipes the last of the chocolate frosting off the table with a napkin, but his mind is already somewhere else. Somewhere fifteen years ago and eight thousand miles away.
He remembers the apartment in Beijing's Haidian District, the one his family kept even after his father's promotion. It was small, efficient, the kind of place where every object had a purpose and every purpose was understood. His mother had made it warm in the way that mothers do, with soup on the stove and blankets that smelled like the sun.
But his father was rarely there.
When Jian was young, he thought his dad worked in an office like other fathers. The kind of office where you wore a uniform and saluted people and filed reports about budgets or logistics or whatever adults did to keep the world spinning. He knew his father was in the PLA, but that meant nothing to him. Every father in China was something official. The details blurred together.
What he noticed was the travel.