The Pothos Climbs to the Twelfth Floor

The summer she turned twenty-two, Su Wan made a decision that brought tears to her mother’s eyes. She turned down a “safe and steady” substitute teaching job in the county town and gave up on taking the civil service exam again. Dragging a suitcase with a wobbly wheel, she boarded a train alone for twelve hours to Bincheng, 1,200 kilometers away, to apply for a job at a little bookstore in an old alley. The bookstore was called Evening Lamp. It stood deep in Huai Shu Lane, with a small storefront and a north-facing second floor that never got any sunlight, all year round. She lived nearby on the sixth floor of an old apartment building, paying six hundred yuan a month. Her window faced north, too. She wrapped books for customers, gave them the wrong change, and accidentally sold a regular’s reserved out-of-print picture book to someone else. She picked out the cheapest noodles in the supermarket’s discount section. When her fever hit 39.2 degrees, she gritted her teeth and dragged herself up to pour a glass of water. But it was also on that north-facing second-floor windowsill that she tended a nearly dead pothos, cutting away its yellow leaves and soaking the soil. Slowly, it put out new leaves, then stretched inch by inch toward the window. Her father never once said, “I miss you.” He just slipped two thousand yuan into the inside pocket of her coat, along with a note on newspaper that read, “Spend what you need. Don’t skimp.” This isn’t a story about becoming famous overnight. It’s the story of an ordinary girl in a city where no one was there to hold an umbrella over her, learning to put down roots and grow toward the sky on her own.