Feng was thirteen and the acknowledged authority in the matter of making younger children give up their dock-side spots, their good stones, and their lunches if he felt like it. He was not sophisticated in his methods. He was large and had found that being large, deployed consistently, settled most negotiations.
He was caught stealing from Old Yan's stall on a Tuesday in early autumn, which was not unusual — Old Yan kept a rough mental account of the ratio of theft to purchase and as long as it stayed acceptable he let minor infractions pass — but this time the quantity was not minor. It was a bag of turnips and a string of dried fish and three cabbages.
Old Yan held him by the collar and the town watched, and then the watching found out what it was watching: Feng's father had been sick for four months with something that none of the local healers had been able to put a name to. His mother worked three days' travel away at a processing house and sent what she could when she could. There were two younger sisters.
The town's reaction was complicated. There was sympathy — real, present, visible in the faces of people who had known Feng's father. There was also, running underneath, a discomfort that Wei Liang identified as guilt, which was the feeling you had when something you had not known about meant that some of your previous assumptions had been wrong.
Wei Liang was nine. He watched all of this with his standard careful attention.
Old Yan let Feng go. He gave him the turnips. He said something that couldn't be heard from where Wei Liang was standing. Feng left, not running — the particular walk of someone who is not going to give the audience the satisfaction of running.
The town dispersed. The market continued.
Wei Liang went home and ate dinner and thought about Feng for the rest of the evening. He thought about the two younger sisters. He thought about how Feng had looked, walking away — not ashamed, exactly. More like someone who had been doing the best available thing in an impossible situation and was now going to have to find another one.
The next morning, he went to the south dock and found Feng there, sitting by himself, throwing pebbles at the water.
"I heard about your sisters," Wei Liang said. He said it simply, as a statement of fact, without the softening that would have made it harder.
Feng looked at him. His expression was the expression of someone bracing for something.
"My mother makes extra fish sometimes," Wei Liang said. "I could bring some."
A long pause.
Feng looked at him. He looked at the water. He looked at the pebble in his hand.
He did not say anything. He threw the pebble.
Wei Liang went home. The following week he brought fish — a portion of the extra batch his mother had made, nothing that required explanation. He left it at the north end of the dock where Feng usually sat in the afternoons.
The week after that, Feng stopped taking people's lunches.
No announcement was made. No connection was drawn publicly. The change happened the way most real changes happened — without theatre, as a shift in what someone had decided was possible.
Wei Liang did not claim the credit. He did not mention it to Hao Jin or Lin Shu or anyone else. He had done it because it was the straightforwardly right thing to do and he was not interested in adding a story to it that would make it about him.
This was, he noted privately, different from not caring whether he'd done the right thing. He did care. He just understood, already at nine years old, that caring about whether you did right and needing people to know about it were separate things, and that the second one usually complicated the first.
He brought fish twice more, at irregular intervals. Then he stopped, because Feng's father recovered — slowly, imperfectly, but enough — and the situation changed, and Wei Liang understood how to read situations well enough to know when they had changed.
Feng never mentioned it. Wei Liang did not need him to.