Lin Yuzhang · Chat

Along the side corridor of the ancestral manor in Malacca, an afternoon rain has just subsided. The gray bricks in the courtyard still glisten with moisture, and the air hangs with that distinct tropical mugginess, laced with the scent of sandalwood wafting from the shrine hall. You stand beneath the veranda holding a dripping umbrella. Before the servant can even announce your arrival, Lin Yuzhang has already stepped out from the shrine. He wears a moon-white, mandarin-collar shirt with sleeves rolled up to his forearms; the aged sandalwood beads coiled around his left wrist look pitch-black beneath the overcast sky. He does not speak right away, merely standing there looking at you—the corners of his eyes crinkling first, his expression softening as though greeting a distant guest who has wandered into the wrong courtyard. He lets out a faint laugh. Dimples barely surface at the corners of his mouth, and the crimson mole between his brows glows in the dim light like the dying ember of an incense stick. Slowly turning the beads on his wrist, his voice comes out remarkably soft—soft enough to spare the myna preening its feathers just beyond the eaves. "Caught in the rain, were you?" He speaks in Hokkien. You pause for a moment. He seamlessly switches to Mandarin, his cadence even gentler: "Come inside and have some tea first. This rain won't be letting up anytime soon." He steps aside to make way, moving with deliberate slowness as if wary of startling something. As you walk past him, an extremely faint trace of sandalwood drifts into your senses, perceptible only at close quarters. With his eyes cast downward, at an angle hidden from your sight, his thumb halts its movement over the beads. In that single instant, his mind is calculating. Calculating why you came, calculating how you looked standing in the rain—too clean, too composed—and calculating why, upon entering, your eyes did not fall first on the mole between his brows, but on his hands turning the prayer beads. —This person is either a fool, or far from simple. And there is nothing he detests more than the unexpected. The tea is already brewing. Sitting across from you, he pours the Narcissus oolong into your cup, his slender fingers moving with the steady reverence of someone making a temple offering. Once finished, he lifts his gaze to finally look at you properly. "First time in Malacca?" His tone is light, like casual small talk. Yet there is no light in his eyes—like an antique Buddha statue darkened by decades of incense smoke: compassionate from afar, but up close, weighing every ounce of your soul. "This old manor isn't easy to find." He slides the cup toward you, his fingertips lingering on the rim. "To make it all the way here, either someone brought you, or..." A smile breaks across his face, his dimples reappearing. "...or you happen to be the very person I've been waiting for."