Dreams never explored.
Readership: All; Christians
Theme: Culture
Author’s Note: Written on 2023/4/7.
Length: 1,300 words
Reading Time: 7 minutes
The dapper young man pulled his motorbike up to the little breakfast shop on Huilai Rd. The first thing he noticed there was a young girl’s bulbous butt squeezed into skin-tight off-brand blue jeans. Her shoulders hunched over the end of a broom, her long hair pulled into a tangled dusty ponytail swinging alongside her cheeky downcast face as she puttered around the sidewalk, sweeping up fallen leaves and debris on a windy April morning.
He took his helmet off, ruffled his hair, and strolled into the shop. An elderly woman of no distinct appearance tottered and shuffled around the cooking area. Her body resembled an irregularly misshapen potato draped in a dirty brown dress decorated with a pattern of once white daisies. Her face was jaded and slightly annoyed by decades of the daily drudgery. Her matted hair, streaked cormorant grey, was even more tangled and dusty than that of the young girl’s standing out front.
He sized up the menu and decided the chicken cheese burger was probably the best item on the menu. By that time, the young girl had finished decluttering the walk. She deposited her utensils in a narrow, dark, cobwebbed space in the wall, and came up to the counter to receive his order.
At that moment, they locked eyes and he was surprised by what he saw. Her eyes were bright, intelligent, and alert, seemingly incoherent with the degraded atmosphere of the shop. He directed his choices off the menu and then stood by, casually observing her as she prepared his order.
“What a ratty place for a cute young intelligent girl to be!” he thought. “I could easily give her a much better life than what she has here.”
Before she had called his order, he approached the counter and looked at her until he had her full attention. “Leave this place and come with me. Today.”
Inside, she felt excited, but she looked at him inquisitively, unsure of his intentions. She straightened up and squared her shoulders. “What is it that you are suggesting?”
“I’m offering you the once in a lifetime chance for something better. We can be married if you wish, but no ceremony. A dinner party for your relatives is enough.”
Wary of being taken in by fraud, she flushed an objection. “You are a stranger, and you are proposing a marriage to me… and without a ceremony?”
“We will hold a ceremony of consummation every morning, just between you and I. Alone. No one else will know of the joys we will share. Only for us. Our secret.”
She sighed sharply and her arms melted, but she continued her cynical query. “What kind of life is that for me?”
“A life of honor and purpose, more than you will ever have here. Otherwise, you’ll spend the rest of your life cooking chicken and potatoes. You’ll look like your coworker in 30 years, and you’ll probably die childless and alone.”
She was speechless at his brash words.
“I will come back at noon. Be prepared to leave at that time.”
For the next hour, she felt annoyed at the stranger’s presumptiveness and forthrightness in proposing marriage to her upon first meeting. But after that first uneasy hour, an intense giddiness slowly swelled up in her soul.
Later in the morning, the older woman chided her for not sweeping the floor in the backroom. A demanding customer became angry because the edge of his toast was burned. After that, she began to dream of what kind of life she might have in the future if she ran away with the tall stranger. Soon, a struggle between her heart and her head ensued.
“I don’t know him at all.”
“He could be a gangster, or worse!”
“How do I know if he will love me or abuse me?”
“I might never see my family again!”
But as the minutes wore on and the kitchen became filled with the smoke of soybean oil, her fantasies of romantic desire and the excitement of her sensuous passions began to win the war against her doubts. Then in the space of an unforeseen moment, somewhere deep in her heart, a quiet voice whispered, “I will go with him. Whatever life he has for me, I will accept it.”
After this critical moment of decision, she continued on working, packing sandwiches into paper bags while her mind was filled with random thoughts, but her heart felt strangely at ease. She slowly grew more confident about making this decision. Twenty minutes before noon, she went into the restroom and washed her face and combed her hair. She called her father and told him that she would be going on a little trip with a friend and that she would not be home for a few days. Finally, she said a short but sincere prayer to the god of her ancestors.
“Take my life and let me be a blessing to this man. Let him lead me towards good and not evil. Let me look back on this day with thankfulness and not regret.”
At two minutes after twelve, the young man pulled up in an older BMW. She was surprised to see that he came from a family of significant means. Without saying a word to the old lady, she grabbed her purse and ran to get into his car. They drove away together, their hearts aflutter with passion and intrigue. The first place they went was to the plaza downtown. There, he bought her an elegant white dress and new shoes, among many other things. Upon returning to his family’s estate in the mountains, he introduced her to his family’s cook, housekeeper, and gardener, and gave them some instructions about how they were to work together in managing his family’s home. The rest would come later.
Back at the breakfast shop, at the moment the new couple left, the old lady looked at them in utter bewilderment. For a moment, she forgot that she was standing in a run-down breakfast shop in a polluted Asian city. She watched the BMW until it disappeared behind a distant building and then she snapped back to the present reality. In her heart, she knew this was out of the ordinary and that the girl would never come back. She wondered how she would manage the breakfast shop all by herself in the coming days.
As she was closing up the shop at the end of the morning, she remembered once, long ago when she first started working at the breakfast shop, a tall young man had approached her and had asked to see her after she finished work. She was flattered by his attentions, but she was suspicious of him and didn’t trust him. She humble-bragged about this to her coworkers for the rest of the morning and they all teased her and laughed about it. When he showed up later in the day, she hid herself in the storeroom and told her coworkers to tell him that she had already gone home for the day. She never saw him again. At the time, she felt proud of herself for avoiding the trouble of a man — always making demands and wanting sex all the time. She felt so sure of herself that she didn’t need a man, and as the years wore on, she never thought about it again…
…until today.
“That will be 180 yuan!”
The young girl handed the bag of food with the chicken cheese burger to the young man. He took it, and paid her the money. Then he donned his helmet, strode his motorcycle, and rode away, pondering some more about what might have happened if he had been so bold in proposing to the young girl with tight jeans and mangled dusty hair who was working in the breakfast shop on that windy morning.
The girl continued to labor in the dusty grime and the stench of burnt soybean oil, and she never gave him a second thought.
…until many years later.
Related
- Σ Frame: Epilogue: Counting the Cost (2022/3/30)
- Σ Frame: Complacency (2023/1/1)
- Σ Frame: The Battle Within (2023/4/10)
