Under Red Skies by Karoline Kan

Author:Karoline Kan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2019-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

PART II

Third Generation

Chapter Eight

Chunting Gets a Boyfriend

Chunting and I were lying in bed, tossing and turning on a hot summer’s night. We were older now—teenagers—and often restless about different matters than our five-year-old selves. Struggling to fall asleep, we decided to chat, which only made us more awake.

“I’m in love,” said Chunting in the darkness.

I jumped up and turned on the desk lamp. At sixteen, Chunting’s confession was big news—epic.

“I’m your favorite cousin,” I said. “You must tell me everything—all the details.”

I dragged her to the chairs at the window.

“Fine, fine!” Chunting readily gave in.

The boy’s name was Jiaming. Fair-skinned and with long hair, he was the quietest in her class. He was not tall but had a sweet smile. One day, she found a letter on blue paper with neat handwriting in her desk. It had been folded into a heart shape. It was from Jiaming, asking Chunting to be his girlfriend.

“Wow!” I almost screamed before I realized how late it was. “And then you said yes?”

“I did!”

“What does it feel like to be in love?”

She shrugged and blushed a little. “I don’t know.”

“Your school allows dating? If my teachers found out any of us were dating, we’d be in so much trouble.”

“Well, it’s not really allowed, but you know, no one sticks to the rules in my high school. It’s a vocational high, and nine out of ten have boyfriends or girlfriends,” said Chunting in a tone that made me feel I was out of touch with reality. “You’ve never had a boyfriend at school?”

“No.”

The bright moon outside cast shadows of tree branches waving gently over Chunting’s face as I poured out question after question that night: “How do you date? How does it feel to have a boyfriend in your class? When you hold hands, does it feel like what we read in novels: like a little deer roaming in your stomach?”

I was three months older than Chunting and had always been a bit more advanced than she was—from learning to speak to using chopsticks first. But this time, on love, Chunting had won.

My mom said Chunting and I were so close we could communicate before either of us could talk. We babbled on and on, and laughed at things only the two of us could understand. She was the prettiest girl in our family, with big black eyes and long eyelashes. Her lips were cherry red, and her curved eyebrows looked like two half-moons on her round face. With her bob haircut, she looked like a Japanese doll. Everyone always complimented her parents on her beauty in contrast to how they reacted to me. People would say: “Look how pretty your cousin is. Are you adopted?” I could not tell if they were joking or serious, but I’d go along with it and tell them Chunting was a white swan and I was an ugly duckling.

Things changed when we went to school. Family friends and relatives still said how much prettier Chunting was, but they cared more about how well I was doing academically.

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