Hao Jin was, by the technical standards of Qinghe's children, the town bully. This was a title with modest requirements — it meant he was the largest boy in his age group, which was true, and that he occasionally used this fact to establish dominance in disputes over river-snails, good spots on the dock, and other contested resources of childhood, which was also true.
What it did not mean — though this took Wei Liang approximately five minutes of direct observation to understand — was that Hao Jin was cruel. He was large and he had learned that being large settled certain arguments, and he had not yet met anyone who offered him a more interesting way to proceed. This was a situational condition. It was not his character.
Wei Liang met him on the south dock mud-bank in mid-spring, when Wei Liang was seven and Hao Jin was eight and the mud-bank was temporarily dry enough to be worth arguing about. The specific argument was never clear to Wei Liang afterward. It had something to do with who had arrived first and whether prior claim applied to a location you had vacated for lunch. Hao Jin's position was that he had claimed the mud-bank in the morning and lunch did not constitute abandonment. Several other children held competing positions. The dispute had reached a stalemate that Hao Jin resolved by sitting on the most vocal objector, which was an effective if unsubtle approach.
Wei Liang arrived in the middle of this. He assessed the situation with the attention he applied to most situations.
He sat down near — but not on — the mud-bank and waited.
Hao Jin sat on the objector for thirty seconds, established the relevant point, and stood. He looked at Wei Liang. "What do you want?"
"Nothing specific," Wei Liang said. "I'm waiting to see what happens next."
Hao Jin stared at him. Most people, when Hao Jin had recently sat on someone to establish a point, did not describe themselves as waiting to see what happened next. They described themselves as leaving.
"What happens next is I sit on the mud-bank," Hao Jin said.
"I know," Wei Liang said. "I meant after that."
Another pause. Hao Jin was eight years old and not accustomed to conversations that moved this direction. "After that nothing. I sit on the mud-bank."
"For how long?"
"Until I don't want to anymore."
Wei Liang looked at the mud-bank. He looked at the river. He looked at Hao Jin.
"Do you want to do something interesting," he said, "or are you going to sit on the mud-bank all afternoon?"
This was the question that nobody had ever asked Hao Jin. He had been asked to stop sitting on people, to share the mud-bank, to be reasonable, to think about how other people felt. He had never been asked if he wanted to do something interesting instead. It assumed the option was available. It assumed he might prefer it.
He thought about this with the seriousness it apparently deserved.
"What?" he said.
"I want to see if you can catch a fish with your hands," Wei Liang said. "In the shallows at the south end. The fish there aren't very fast. I've been watching them."
Hao Jin looked at the river. He looked at the mud-bank. He looked at Wei Liang, who was smaller than him and had not flinched when he'd been looking at him, which was unusual.
"That's impossible," Hao Jin said.
"Probably," Wei Liang agreed. "But we won't know unless we try."
They tried. They failed completely. They were soaked to the shoulder within twenty minutes and had achieved nothing except a detailed education in the spatial awareness of river fish and a shared understanding that "not very fast" was relative to other fish, not to children's hands.
Wei Liang found this very funny. After a moment, Hao Jin found this very funny. They sat in the shallows in the afternoon and laughed at themselves, which was new for Hao Jin and not unusual for Wei Liang, and by the time they pulled themselves out of the water they had agreed on two things: that tomorrow they would try with a net, and that finding a net was a problem for tomorrow.
Hao Jin did not sit on anyone for the rest of that day. He did not consciously decide not to. He simply did not think of it.
The net was never acquired. What was acquired, through successive afternoons of equally unlikely projects — the raft that sank, the message-in-a-bottle that they found themselves worrying about when they threw it in (what if someone finds it and thinks we're in trouble), the attempt to establish whether the heron on the far bank could be communicated with through a system of stick-waving — was a friendship.
It was not the kind of friendship that announces itself. It was the kind that builds from the accumulated evidence of afternoons, from the specific way one person laughs at a thing and the other person finds that laugh worth producing, from the gradual understanding that this person is interested in you in particular and not just in having someone to talk at.
By the end of that summer, Wei Liang and Hao Jin were the kind of friends that the town accepted as a given — the way the south dock was a given and the river running south was a given. The pairing was slightly unlikely in the way that most true things are slightly unlikely. It was also, as these things tend to be, quietly permanent.