In the morning she had only managed a quick wash to keep herself from looking too dirty, but this time she scrubbed herself completely clean. Her hair was damp, and the rising steam made her green eyes look even clearer.
Having changed into the clean clothes provided by Mary, the young girl in the mirror was genuinely pretty, Shuxin thought as she carefully looked herself over.
Her hair was not as curly as it had been that morning, retaining just a slight wave at the tips, and the color was not a pure black either, but tinged with a yellowish hue. How should she describe it—it looked a bit malnourished.
The bridge of her nose was straight with a nice curve, but the most striking feature was those green eyes, like gemstones. She wondered if they would glow in the dark.
Still, black hair looked better.
Shuxin's fingers suddenly pressed against the glass, her hand covering her forehead in the reflection. Shuxin touched her right temple, where four black moles formed a quadrilateral when connected, the lowest one sitting close to the Yangbai acupoint.
Shuxin found this incredible, because she had those exact same four moles herself. She wouldn't say the positions were identical, but they were very similar, just lighter in color than her old ones.
Back in childhood, on International Children's Day, Shuxin's mother used to add a few strokes to draw the Big Dipper on Shuxin's face, the sparkling kind. The "Polaris" was drawn with a red beauty spot, placed in just the right spot.
Shuxin had no mood to keep looking in the mirror. She leaned back against the headboard and began to think of her mother.
A knock on the door interrupted Shuxin's melancholy.
"May I come in?" It was Mary.
Shuxin tidied her clothes and rubbed her cheeks to make herself look less wretched. After all, smiling girls had better luck, and no one liked a tearful face all the time.
"I talked with Tom that you can work here."
After coming in, Mary looked very pleased with Shuxin and pulled her over to sit by the small tea table.
"Your job is easy. When people come, you need to ask them what they want."
"Then tell me on the bar, you still have to serve, and finally you have to close the table and wash the dishes."
"Of course, Tom can do these things, too. You just help him."
"Sorry, I only understand a little."
Thank God, thank the nine-year compulsory education, and thank high school listening exams.
"When people come, I ask them what to eat and tell you."
As for where to go to tell Mary in the middle, she would just go wherever Mary was in the restaurant when the time came. Shuxin figured that wasn't a problem.
"Finally, I have to clear the table."
Shuxin desperately wanted to say, "I didn't understand the rest," but she didn't know the word for "rest" either.
Mary fell silent, unsure if her inner self was letting out marmot screams.
"Follow me." Mary felt a bit broken inside. She thought she had tried very hard just now to speak to Shuxin in simple sentences, but the girl still hadn't understood half of it.
Mary understood now: Shuxin didn't fail to understand complex sentences (though perhaps Shuxin really didn't understand complex sentences either), but rather didn't know the words—even basic, everyday words. She wondered if keeping her on was the right choice or the wrong one.
Mary handed Shuxin over to her husband, muttered something to him, and turned to leave.
Tom was also astonished. He truly hadn't expected this problem. After all, the girl had seemed to manage alright just a moment ago; how had she suddenly turned into a toddler he had to babysit in the blink of an eye?
"Baby, it's simple. You just watch me do it today, understand?"
"Yes." Of course, she still understood this simple word.
The work was indeed not difficult, following the standard routine of any ordinary restaurant: greeting the guests, asking what they wanted to eat, going to the kitchen bar to tell Mary, then serving the food, and finally clearing the tables and washing the dishes.
For now, apart from reciting the menu items, Shuxin could handle everything else. Only the dishwashing was a bit troublesome with its strict requirements—compared to how she used to wash dishes at home, tsk tsk.
The small restaurant didn't get many customers; throughout the entire evening, there were only scattered tables of people.
They closed up a little past eight in the evening. Dinner was quite hearty, featuring grilled steak, grilled bacon, sandwiches, and onion soup.
When Shuxin saw the onion soup, she was dumbfounded. The taste was terrible—an indescribable nastiness that fell far short of the tomato soup at noon.
Once the restaurant was cleaned up, it was time for "parent-child bonding."
Learning characters and memorizing vocabulary.
After Mary handed Shuxin over to Tom in the afternoon, she had gone rummaging through boxes and cabinets, finally digging out her own children's early-education primers.
Mary had figured that since she didn't know what Shuxin actually knew, she would just start from the very beginning, treating her like a grandson.
Recalling how Jason had learned things: step one, language sense, listening to nursery rhymes. Pass—she didn't think the young girl from outside would understand nursery rhymes, though they could schedule that for later.
What was step two? Memorizing words. Okay, then start with the alphabet.
"Parent-child bonding" commenced.
First book: the 26 letters. Okay, no problem. Next book.
Second book: phonetic symbols...
Shuxin tried her hardest to recall how her teachers used to teach, but alas, the heavens were uncooperative.
Shuxin could never wrap her head around why, in Hua Guo, an *o* was pronounced *o* and an *e* was *e*, while these foreign things had multiple pronunciations.
Ah, ah, ah!!!!
Shuxin's inner self was already screaming like a marmot, but since she wasn't actually a child, she studied very earnestly—at least, she thought so herself.
"Ok, let's call it a day."
In the blink of an eye, over an hour had passed. Tom stood up, closed the book, and led a dazed Mary upstairs.
Time travel apparently hadn't granted Shuxin any golden fingers, such as a photographic memory or native-level linguistic intuition.
Shuxin didn't go straight back to her room to rest either; she reopened the book she had just put down.
...
Forget it.
Shuxin picked up the third book and went into her room, intending to memorize a few words before bed as a sleeping pill substitute.
The third book contained simple basic vocabulary with illustrations. Mary had specially chosen this one because it was entirely about food, such as the *tomato* and *onion* they had eaten today.
There were other annotations in the book written in a childish hand, which Shuxin couldn't make out either.
It didn't matter if she couldn't read them; she would just commit the words to memory first.
Children's books were very thin and finished in no time. After all, she was still a child and needed to grow, and Shuxin had no habit of abusing herself. She put the book down and went to sleep.
Perhaps the "sleeping pill" really worked, for Shuxin fell asleep quickly. In her dream, she seemed to see her mother.
Her mother in the dream looked no different than usual, pulling a little cart while browsing the vegetable market with her father, seemingly having bought a fish.
What did they buy a fish for? I don't even like eating fish, Shuxin grumbled in her dream.
Shuxin suddenly jolted awake, feeling as though she had just seen her parents glance back at her.
Outside the window, the sky was just turning pale. Shuxin had no idea what time it was, but since she couldn't fall back asleep anyway, she simply got up, strolled around the small courtyard for a walk, and treated it as morning exercise.
Life rarely held dramatic twists and turns; most of it was plain and ordinary.
In the days that followed, Shuxin alternated between working in the restaurant and memorizing books—or rather, she didn't even need to alternate.
The small restaurant was an old establishment, and the customers who came were basically the boss's acquaintances. Gradually, everyone learned that the little girl in the shop was studying, and they enthusiastically quizzed her, launching sneak attacks by asking her how to spell certain words.
Some customers even brought their own children along, advising Mary that children should play with children so they could understand what each other wanted.
Yet Shuxin truly did not like these little teachers. Leaving aside the fact that they were younger than her—after all, those with knowledge are masters, so she could endure that—and enduring the punishment of having to copy lines when she spelled a word wrong...
What on earth was the deal with having to stand at the doorway and read aloud loudly if she got something wrong? Sob, sob.
Whoever came up with that idea must have made a fool of themselves in public too; why should a poor student torture another poor student?
That humiliation was finally washed away after Shuxin educated her little companions on Chinese square characters, and their relationship improved under the principle of "if you don't let me have a good time, I won't let you have a good time either."
Still, she lost more often than she won—who told Shuxin's side to be outnumbered?