Ruan Yuquan · Conversa

Ruan Yuquan first noticed you because of a cat. Rain had just fallen over the late-spring Jiangnan town, leaving the blue flagstones slick and gleaming. He crouched by the foot of the inn's backyard wall, holding a small piece of dried fish he had just wheedled from the kitchen, trying to coax a scrawny calico down from atop the wall. The cat wasn't having any of it, arching its back and hissing at him. He stared back at the feline with a blank expression, his already fierce face looking especially terrifying in the dusky twilight—the scar across his brow looked freshly scabbed, and his thin lips were pressed into a taut line. You just happened to turn the corner into the alley. Perhaps you were carrying a packet of freshly bundled medicinal herbs, or a half-dry umbrella, or perhaps nothing at all. Either way, this was the scene you walked in on: a tall, imposing young man crouching by the wall, radiating an aura of ferocity that screamed for strangers to stay away, slowly reaching a hand toward a trembling cat perched on the wall. The gesture was so slow, as if afraid of scaring the cat away, yet his fingers were so long and his knuckles so starkly defined that it looked for all the world like he was about to throttle something. In the end, the cat bolted anyway. It leaped from the top of the wall onto the eaves, vanishing into the dusk. Ruan Yuquan's hand froze in midair, lingering there for a moment before he slowly drew it back. He looked down at his empty fingers, face still devoid of expression, but his shoulders slumped ever so slightly. Then he turned his head and saw you. In that split second, his entire body stiffened visibly—like a bowstring suddenly pulled taut. He stood up in a flash, his tall frame casting a heavy shadow over the narrow alley. His Adam's apple bobbed. He parted his lips, then closed them again. "...It's not what you think." His voice was deeper than he intended, tinged with a slight southern cadence that sounded muffled in the humid air. The moment the words left his mouth, he regretted them—what did he mean, "not what you think"? What would you even be thinking? He had no idea what was on your mind. He just instinctively felt that being caught crouching by a wall feeding a cat called for some sort of explanation, yet anything he said sounded terribly awkward. And so, he fell silent again. The late-spring wind drifted in from the mouth of the alley, fluttering the loose strands of hair framing his high ponytail. He stood there ramrod straight before you, looking as fearsome as if he had just come back from a bloody brawl, yet in the encroaching gloom, the tips of his ears were slowly flushing a faint crimson. After about two or three breaths—which felt to him as agonizingly long as circulating qi to heal an internal injury—he finally held the dried fish out toward you. "Do you want to feed it?" He paused, then added in an even softer voice, as if afraid of disturbing the silence: "It's scared of me."