"Uwahhh!!!!""Hey, little darling, why are you crying? Are you lost? Where are your parents??" The woman who found the lost, frightened boy asked sweetly.
"Ahhhh… Uwwaaaahhh!!!!! Hu… Hu… Hu…" The little boy wailed as he covered his eyes with his forearms. His mouth gaped and revealed some of his milk teeth, pink little tongue, and his actively exercised tonsils.
"Mommy!" He uttered in between wails. "Uwahhh!!!!"
A lady in her early twenties rushed to the crying little boy. "Where have you been, Chen Lingtian?! We looked for you everywhere! That"s what you get for not following instructions. I bet you saw something that piqued your interest yet again!" The young lady sighed. "You always do that! You shouldn"t leave our group! See what happens when you do!" She hugged and rubbed the boy"s back soothingly.
The young lady in her twenties bowed in grat.i.tude and simultaneously apologized to the woman who found and surrendered the boy to the paging system of the mall.
That"s the place where they were at the moment – at the office of the paging system.
The boy clutched the lady"s skirt but wailed even harder. He knew he did something wrong and that he made his family worry about him.
"Kang Sola. You"re being too harsh on the kid." Xue Guangxi followed behind, carrying a tiny girl the same age as the boy. The little girl giggled when she saw the crying boy. "Hihihi! There you are! Boo! Boo! Peekaboo!!" She giggled again.
"Chen Lihua, you shouldn"t laugh at your brother"s crying face. This isn"t a game of peekaboo!" Twenty-three-year old Xue Guangxi scolded the giggling girl in his arms. Soon enough, the girl felt bad at being scolded at and started crying, too.
"Uwaaahhh!!!!"
"Oh great, Guangxi! Just great! Both of them are crying now!"
"Hey, can you please exit the paging booth? I can"t resume my work here with wailing kids around me!" The grumpy man in his mid-thirties shooed all the people around him.
The woman who found the boy commented curiously. "You must have had them young! Life with must be hard, huh? You"re both young to have kids!"
Kang Sola and Xue Guangxi exchanged timid looks and blushed. They always got that comment a lot.
A. lot.
And every single time, every d.a.m.n time, Xue Guangxi would play along, much to Kang Sola"s dismay who would always attempt to correct the nosy bystanders. Before she could, Guangxi would already have played along.
"Ahh yes, it"s the consequence of our tender love and impulsiveness. But kids are gifts from the heavens and we were gifted with two, so it"s fine even if life"s hard sometimes." He even tried to deliver his lines more dramatically as necessary.
"You"re enjoying yourself quite tremendously, I see." Kang Sola would always comment when they were out of other people"s earshot, always accompanied by such a defining furrow on her forehead.
Xue Guangxi would laugh hard. "HAHAHAHA!!!! Yes, tremendously! I get to play parenting with you! A silver lining in raising these kids!"
Kang Sola would sigh helplessly and let it go. "Enjoy it while it lasts, then."
"How long will you be staying in Beijing this time?" The lady in her early twenties asked the lanky, cheerful, young man.
"Two months tops. After that, when I return here, probably, for good, if I choose to settle here. I can choose wherever I would want to settle, you know."
"Good for you, then." The lady sighed again. "Then after two months, I would have to raise them all by myself! You"ll get away from your responsibilities!" Towards the end of her statement, Kang Sola playfully increased the volume of her voice and acted like a suffering wife.
"Hey!" Xue Guangxi protested as onlookers threw disapproving looks at his direction. They could easily be misunderstood when they come in this group – a group of four with a pair of a good-looking young lady, a dazzling young man, and two toddlers who somewhat resemble them.
At twenty-three, Kang Sola had lost her pixie-cut pinkish purplish hair. Instead and in its place was a wavy waist-long hair on a half-top bun, and dyed balayage. She usually paired it with a choker accent regardless of what she wore. It looked more like a tattoo than a choker necklace.
At twenty-three, Xue Guangxi had become quite fas.h.i.+onable with very neat suits paired with colorful tones and brave accents and tailored cuts, which one would not find too intimidating or intense but would make people draw their attention to him. His spiky hair was still there though.
It had been five years since the Chen twins were born.
Originally, everyone was made to believe that the twins were both boys. However, when they finally came out, all were bewildered that it was a set of fraternal twins – a girl and a boy!
They named the boy Chen Lingtian and the girl Chen Lihua. Both were healthy and both showed advanced learning and development curves.
At two, both started to learn how to read and count. At three, both could understand the mechanics of games and play on their own. At four, both memorized the multiplication table, some poems, and smaller pieces of literature and recited it in front of the crowd composed of doting grandfathers, grandmothers, aunties, and uncles.
At five, they were mesmerized by the universe, the formation of stars, and they"ve also memorized until the fourth row of the periodic table, with the understanding of its relation to stars. They also had the understanding of the initial formation of the earth, and its timeline, starting from way way back and touching the era of dinosaurs.
That"s why at five, their shared bedroom was decorated with myriads of glow-in-the-dark star wall stickers and lamps which showed constellations and nebulas at night before they sleep, and their toys were mostly dinosaurs whose names they knew by heart. They had wax figures of animals and they knew which kingdom they belong, and they had picture books of insects and sea creatures, and they also knew which phylum they belong. Learning became part of their play, and those two were the best playmates.