What Are They Doing? Chapter 4

(1) Qingming

Qingming (1) had passed, so I temporarily set aside the matters in Beijing. After a round of tomb sweeping, I noticed that there were several new tombs that hadn’t been there last year if my memory was serving me correctly.

I had been muddling through recently. I couldn’t remember clearly which of my employees were still alive and which of them were gone.

Grandma was still sprightly. She had been saying she wouldn’t dare hope to live as long as Er Ye had (2), but she was gradually approaching it. She had a heart attack earlier this year and thought she wouldn’t live past Qingming, but now she could stand up and walk around again.

The elders in my family had all quit smoking, including me. I was trying my best to control myself, so it was only when I went to visit Grandma that I would take the cigarette she handed to me. My parents didn’t dare speak up, so I would smoke that cigarette silently.

Another year, another Qingming rain had passed as we were surrounded by smoke and fog.

(2) Wang Meng

When we were eating, Wang Meng was on a blind date at the table behind us.

We were all anxious when we heard him talking, the three of us silent as we listened to him talking nonsense to the girl.

When the girl went to the restroom, Fatty and I flipped over the booth seat and began teaching him a lesson. Little Brother stayed where he was and looked out the window

When we returned to our table, Little Brother pointed outside, silently telling us that the girl had just left by herself.

(3) Liu Sang

Liu Sang looked at the pictures on the computer one by one. They had all been taken with a Canon camera.

He had been eating at the booth in Lou Wai Lou (3) for more than ten days. He positioned himself by the window, waiting for that opportunity that would only last a few seconds.

Over the past half month, the person he wanted to photograph seldom went out and stayed indoors most of the time. As a result, the photos were very blurry and captured a lot of miscellaneous objects.

He sighed and went over to stand in front of the mirror. He pulled out a knife in a reverse grip and practiced swinging it back and forth a few times.

“I’ll get there one day!” He said to himself.

(4) Ah Tou

Ba Ge Cave, Banai, Guangxi.

I saw the girl who put Uncle Three’s mask on me back then. She had lived here for a year and said she was looking for a dye.

“Tattoos are a declaration of the sovereignty of one’s body. They indicate that the body belongs to no one, only to themselves,” the slender girl said to me. I saw that the number of tattoos on her body had increased.

She was using gauze to filter the black grass sap as the contents of several pots boiled nearby. They were all emitting the smell of Chinese medicine. When these liquids were finally mixed together, they formed a blackish-blue dye that slowly became transparent and turned into something like grease.

Fatty was sitting shirtless next to us and asked, “Is your ancient method reliable? Will tattoos made with this dye really appear when the body temperature rises?”

The girl dabbed a little bit of dye on her fingers and then slid them across Fatty’s chest. The grease slowly returned to that blackish-blue color.

“Your heart is hot,” the girl said.

<What Are They Doing? Chapter 3><Table of Contents><What Are They Doing? Chapter 5 – Pan Zi>

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TN Notes

(1) Qingming falls on the first day of the fifth solar term of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar. It falls on 4, 5 or 6 of April in a given year. During Qingming, Chinese families visit the tombs of their ancestors to clean the gravesites, pray to their ancestors and make ritual offerings, which is also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day. Wiki link.

(2) Er Yuehong (aka Er Ye), passed away when he was 102.

(3) Lou Wai Lou is a famous restaurant in Hangzhou, located in the middle of the West Lake. It was once mentioned that Wu Xie’s shop was actually near Lou Wai Lou. Basically, Liu Sang was being a stalker lol.

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Tiffany’s Notes: Poor Wang Meng is even bullied by his boss when he goes on a blind date lol.

Merebear Notes: If you haven’t gotten to them yet, Liu Sang is a character that first appears in “Reboot“. Ah Tou is the main character of “A Thousand Faces“

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Translated by: Tiffany X
Edited by: merebear226