Chemistry

“All right, A-Yuan,” Popo said, setting down her cleaver next to a pile of chopped vegetables. Sizhui flinched, not at the soft knock of the handle against the wooden board but at the tone in her voice. “A-Qing said you were busy and not to make you help with cooking dinner, but you’ve been sitting there all afternoon and written three words, if that. What’s wrong?”

Sizhui stared down at the kitchen table, shuffling his stacks of doodled-on notepaper in a vain attempt at hiding them under his textbooks.

“I don’t know,” he said, grimacing at the whine in his voice. “I just don’t get it! Last year chemistry was fine and this year it’s all, ‘Oh, we lied to you to make it easy. This is how things really work,’ and it doesn’t make sense! I thought I understood it, but now I just feel stupid!”

“Oh, baobao,” she sighed, shuffling closer, “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

He would never snap at Popo, of course not, but Sizhui might have thrust the topmost book towards her just a little too firmly. “Take a look,” he said mulishly.

Holding up her multifocal glasses with one hand, the old woman scrutinised the page. Sizhui could see her lips moving as she worked her way through the English text around the colourful diagrams.

“Sorry, Popo,” he mumbled, “it’s all right really, I just need to try harder.”

She tutted. “Are you telling me you haven’t been trying hard already? Hm? I see what they’re trying to teach you. What do you already know about electrons?”

They sat at the old wooden table all evening, talking about electron shells, covalent and ionic bonds, and the elements. At some point, Sizhui smelled the comforting scents of hot oil and spices; without him noticing, Ning shushu had come into the kitchen and picked up dinner from where Popo had left off. By the time he was washing up after the meal, he understood more about chemistry than he ever had in class.

“It was incredible!” he said to Qing a-yi in the car later, passing through dark streets. It was the end of the weekend and she was driving him back to the Lan house. “I don’t know how Popo knew all that, but she explained it so well!”

A-yi glanced at him and back to the road, a faint smile on her lips. “So no one told you that Popo worked in an organic chemistry lab for years, before the family left China?”

“Oh!” Sizhui could see his surprised face reflected in the window. Behind it floated the big oak tree that marked the turn onto the Lan house’s street, his street. “No, I didn’t know that.”