" Travelling with parents with the obligation to entertain them is absolutely a heavy physical labour!", Uki emerged from the bubble bath and complained theatrically, “Luckly, I assumed your name to install this extra-sized bathtub in your apartment without no permission, totally against my mum’s wish, otherwise how we can get rid of such an overall tiredness?!”
Nana ignored her. She knew that Uki was just playing melodramatic. She sat slowly along the other side of the bathtab, slowly raised the cup, closed eyes, sniffed deeply - like a caress, lavender brought a shimmer of heat to her skin. She took a small sip. The deep, rich, malty falvor of Assam, mixed with the delicate scent of Italian Buddha's hand citron, danced on her tongue, and then spread to the whole mouth. How refreshing! She smiled. Talking about the tea, Uki is picky as usual. If she hadn’t been indoctrinated consistently with these fancy lifestyle concepts for years, she wouldn’t have known the words “Assam” and “Buddha's hand citron”, not to mention taking bubble bath with sea salts and essence oils.
“Didn’t you say that you’d spent the Chinese New Year in the United States”, she asked.
“Eh, it was only because that my speech had been scheduled today. I took them to the States for you. If I weren’t here, you spend the New Year holidays with them by yourself?! Haha, you couldn’t even last for two minutes just now!”
“That’s true.”
“You didn’t know, these two old folks, their honeymoon with the US lasted less than 3 days! When the novelty wore off, they started to whine about everything, all the time! When they knew that I had been able to anticipate my speech, they badgered me at once to change our return tickets. Poor me, I had to make a hasty exit from the conference and battle my way to the airport. Fortunately, the whole trip turned out to be blessed. We managed to be back with you for the New Year Eve.”
Uki reached for Nana’s feet next to her head, didn’t mind at all, laid her head right on them and said, “they were just missing you…”
“I know…”, Nana replied. For a moment, the bathroom fell silent. It has been always like this for twenty years between them: one was in charge of talking and the other in charge of listening.
“What a serenity of soul! One can even hear the sighs of snow landing.”, Uki said, pensively.
“Stop being sentimental. You have to thank the new regulations for forbidding fireworks in the city center.” Nana didn’t bat an eyelid and reached out to tickling Uki’s feet with her fingertips and said, “It’s very late. You’ve been here for half hour. Now hurry up and come to wash my hair so I can go to sleep.”
“No wonder I felt that something was missing this year.”
Uki flinched, kicking her legs in the water and giggling. After a while, dawdling in the bubbles, she finally came and pick up the tap.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
For the first Chinese New Year Eve that Nana spent with Uki’s family, Uki’s helping to wash Nana’s hair has become their tradition.
Uki’s mum is a strong believer of one ancient Spring Festival tradition – “sweeping out the old in preparation for the new”, therefore she was always committed to sweep all the “bad lucks”, “misfortunes” in the home. The ”Spring Cleaning” was never as simple as just sweeping the floors or dusting. Mum would have kicked off the cleaning at least one week before the New Year’s Eve. She would remove and wash all the bed sheets and curtains, clean all the kitchen wear, polish all the furnitures, rid spider nets in every corner, … a hardcore cleansing. Naturally, in her mind, all the family members were tainted by the dirt of the body, part of the “old” that definitely needed to get off. Thus the last big “matter” of the New Year’s Eve would always be personal hygiene.
In those days, they were still living in the old house, where they had to share the kitchen with the neighbours. Having their own private bathroom and water heater was more like a remote dream. That wouldn’t baffled Mum though. In the corner of their tiny living room, she prepared three buckets of cold water, three thermoses filled with hot water, two neatly folded big towers, two small basins, one big basin, and the Rejoice 2 in 1 shampoo. At the time, the brand Rejoice had just entered the Chinese market. It hadn’t been easy for Mum to decide on this extra spending, and she finally gone through with it by making the excuse about New Year’s gift to Nana. However, when she asked Nana to strip her clothes and to dip her head under the water, she encounted a huge, unexpected resistance. Nana dodged, struggled, refused to let Mum touch her head and damp her hair. Until Uki held her hands and persuaded her for quite a while, in the end Nana relunctantly lowered her head in front of the basin. Following Mum’s guide, 4-year-old Uki helped Nana to drench, rumple, rinse and dry her hair and successfully completed the whole hair wash by herself. That’s why every time when Mum complained about Uki’s low salary, she would say that Uki would have been better off working in a hair salon.
For twenty years, Uki handled almost everything else like a small piece of cake. But to help Nana wash her hair is “the” exception. She took it very seriously every time as if she was performing a rite.
The hairdryer stopped to rumble. Uki triumphantly checked out her results, there was a small white hair and she yanked it slyly. “Great, all done!”, she said in satisfaction, tapping Nana’s shoulder, “get up, get up, it’s my turn now. Here comes the Evil Queen!” Then she turned up the hairdryer to the maximum, blowing straightly to herself. Her long hair ruffled, and this too was one of her traditions.
Nana shook her head thinking that Uki could go on with her self-entertaining game till she’s fifty. Nana got up and said, “Rush up, otherwise I’ll fall sleep under your duvet while warming it up.”
Uki‘s smile suddenly disappeared, she switched of the hairdryer, whispered, “Hold on a minute, Nana, we need to get down to business. My trying to come back earlier was not only for you.
“Oh…”, Nana stayed silient, returning to her seat and waiting quietly.
Uki grabbed her mobile from the table, played a few clicks and handed it to her. A photo of a piece of ancient paper appeared on the screen. On top of the paper, there was a poem in traditional Chinese:
On a beautiful Akhal-teke horse thee left for the West lands
Southen red beans had been sent to tell thee my lovesickness
Little swallow riding on the East wind brought good news
Heros came back home celebrating their success from the North.
“Zoom and look closer at the icon on the bottom right corner!”, Uki reminded her.
“Is that true?! Where did you get it?” This time, even the forever-placid Nana couldn’t help to checking carefully the photo again: it was the same icon with which they couldn’t be more familiar – the “Twin-Dragon Seal”.