October 10th, Friday, 5:40 in the afternoon. Nancheng, Dongguan — third floor of Dingcheng Vocational Skills Training School, the admissions office. The Gree air conditioner set to twenty-four degrees, the printer had just spat out the September performance sheet, the paper still hot.
Admissions Group One, Lin Shan, 58 enrollments, 364,000 collected, first place. Group Two, Zhang Lei, 61 enrollments, 318,000 collected.
Zhang Lei came past my desk with a Mixue lemon water, chewing the straw until it creaked. “Shanshan, congratulations.” “Congratulations for what.” “Group leader. The school affairs committee passed it yesterday afternoon, my cousin typed the minutes in the office, Ding Admin Document No. 17. Ranked by September receipts. You’re first. All-staff announcement Monday.”
“By receipts?” “By receipts, not one word more. Your three hundred sixty-four thousand is all paid-in-full and installment contracts. Out of my sixty-one, three are a group sign-up from my cousin’s factory, deposits only, can’t be counted.” She tapped the sheet on my desk with her straw. “In that spot of yours nobody can slip anyone in and nobody can block you.”
“Then I’ll buy you milk tea.” “Milk tea nothing, you’re buying me Haidilao.” She carried her lemon water back to her desk. “Group leader, huh. Two thousand more a month.”
My name is Lin Shan, twenty-seven, two years a course consultant at Dingcheng. The school runs junior accounting, HR manager certification, electrician’s licence, plus adult degree upgrades. The people who sign up work in factories, run online shops, want a certificate to bump their pay. Youngest twenty-three, oldest fifty-one.
Course consultant means selling courses, plain and simple. Base pay forty-five hundred, commission three percent of what you collect. A group leader’s base is sixty-five hundred, two thousand more, plus another point off the whole group’s commission. The old group leader Liu Mei jumped to Sunlands next door at the end of August and the seat had been empty over a month.
I had punched those two thousand into my phone calculator more than twenty times. Twenty-four thousand a year, plus the extra point, call it thirty. The down-payment account He Jun and I keep is at a hundred fourteen thousand two hundred right now. A seventy-square-metre second-hand flat in Nancheng needs three hundred thousand down.
He Jun is my husband, twenty-nine, married a year and two months. He runs a ZTO courier station in Nancheng that doubles as a Cainiao pickup point, rolls the shutter up at seven in the morning and down at ten at night, hands smelling of packing tape all year round.
One of us sells courses, one of us takes in parcels, together a bit over fourteen thousand a month. Take off rent twenty-eight hundred, five thousand for his station, my mother’s medicine money, and everything left goes into that account. He calls it stacking bricks.
At six sharp I shut down my computer. Tonight I had a studio booked.
I found it on the local classifieds in August. Huansheng Recording Studio, billed by the hour, eighty-eight an hour, eight-eighty for ten hours, one hour free. Address Yunhe East Road One, Guancheng. I paid with my own CMB card, didn’t ask for a receipt, the school doesn’t reimburse this and shouldn’t.
The reason for renting a studio is very practical. I botched that Douyin livestream over National Day. I had the script down cold and the second I opened my mouth it floated, by the second minute the air ran out, one sentence broke into three pieces, viewers dropped from a hundred twenty to thirty-seven.
Can’t practise at home. He Jun gets in at ten thirty, there are people above us and below us, and recording with the phone against my mouth picks up nothing but the electric fan and the stairwell. I needed a quiet place with a mic, with playback, somewhere I could hear exactly where I break.
The building went up in ’86. The stair rail has been painted three times and you can still feel the rust underneath. At the end of the third-floor corridor an iron door with an acrylic plate on it: Huansheng Recording Studio, billed by the hour.
Forty-odd square metres inside, split in two. The small inner room is hung with acoustic foam, close the door and it goes dead silent. The outer one is the control room, a mixing desk, two floor mic stands, a Panasonic cassette deck, a pair of monitors, a green-painted sheet-metal cabinet in the corner.
The floor used to be a dance-fitness studio. A whole wall of mirror that can’t be torn out, he stuck acoustic foam over half of it, the other half still shows you yourself.
Chen Huansheng, fifty-seven. Thirty years as a recording engineer at the audiovisual centre of the municipal radio and TV university, retired January 2023. Grey knit cardigan, shirt underneath buttoned to the second button. Talks slowly, every syllable clean, every word landing solid.
“Let’s be clear first,” he said while he powered things up. “I don’t run classes here, I don’t teach. The machines are mine, the mouth is yours. You practise your own thing, however many hours you use is what you pay for.”
“And if I can’t get it right.” “Then you can’t get it right.” He slipped the windscreen onto the mic. “Not my business.”
I went into the inner room and stood in front of the large-diaphragm mic. He shut the door from outside, half his body showing in the glass. His voice came through the headphones, very close. “Do it your own way. Red light on means it’s recording.”
I read my opening script. Three minutes, pre-exam sprint for the electrician’s licence. Steady through the first minute, in the second I started chasing it, and chasing it I got to “all three review sessions after enrolment are free” and the air gave out halfway, the back half stuck in my throat and wouldn’t come.
I pulled off the headphones and came out. “Delete it.”
He didn’t take that up. He kept his eyes on the meters. “You clipped the mic twice just now. Don’t lunge at it, the second you get worked up you lean in, ten centimetres turns into three.”
“So what do I do.” “Different mic.” He fished a lavalier out of the metal cabinet, no bigger than a fingernail, trailing a thin cable to a transmitter the size of a cigarette pack. “Wear this one, then you can move however you like and you can’t lunge at it.”
“I’ll do it myself.” I reached for it. “You can’t clip it on yourself,” he said. “The cable has to come up from underneath, the clip goes between the second and third buttons, straight at your mouth. Clip it outside a sweater and all you get is fabric rubbing.”
“You do it, then.” I took off my jacket and hung it over the back of the swivel chair. I still had on the consultant’s outfit the school issues, hadn’t changed all day, and with the navy blazer off there was nothing left but a white blouse.
The blouse is an L and the buttons still pull. Between the second and third a gap opens and a bit of the lace edge of my bra shows.
“Don’t move,” he said. The transmitter went onto the waistband of my skirt first, a hard block against the small of my back. Then the cable went up under the hem of my blouse, along my belly, climbing.
His hand came up with the cable, through the blouse, the back of it against the underside of my left ribs. Wide hand, calluses on the pads. He didn’t cop one extra feel, he was finding the spot, and when he found it he stopped.
“Breathe in.” “Why.” “To see if the clip knocks your chin.”
I breathed in. The back of his hand was pushed out a little under my ribs, my ribs spread outward, spread against the back of his hand. He clipped it in place and stepped back half a pace. “Done.”
How long had it been since anyone touched me that properly. He Jun touching me is groping, is a hand reaching over, is those two rubs when he’s too sleepy to keep his eyes open. This hand wasn’t groping, it was working. A working hand is worse for you, because it isn’t in any hurry at all.
I went back in and recorded another take. No clipping this time, but I still broke at two minutes and a few seconds.
I came out and leaned over the mixing desk to watch the playback. That green level bar, the second I breathe in it shoots into the red squares, then further on it gets lower and lower, and after the second minute it just crawls along the bottom.
“What’s the red one.” “Overload,” he said. “Green is the scale, red is past it. Don’t watch your mouth, watch the meter. The meter doesn’t lie.”
“So all my air is up top,” I said. He didn’t answer, just pulled the fader back two notches.
“Aren’t you going to tell me anything,” I asked. “Where exactly am I no good.”
“I don’t judge that,” he said. “I don’t hand out marks here. You listen to the playback yourself, you know where you broke.”
That line stayed with me a long time after. Nobody else in that whole building had ever talked to me that way. At school everyone marks me, He Jun marks me, and I mark myself every single day.
Nine forty, I had two clean takes. He hung the headphones back on the rack. “Two hours today, a hundred seventy-six. Want to open the ten-hour card.”
“Open it.” I handed over my CMB card. “Eight-eighty.”
He tore off a receipt and wrote in ballpoint: Huansheng Recording Studio, received from Lin Shan studio-time fee, eight hundred eighty yuan even, ten hours, eight remaining. Signed Chen Huansheng.
I folded the receipt into my bag, and on my way out he was behind me pulling the battery out of that lavalier.
Downstairs, the iron door closing behind me, the sound-activated light on one landing had gone out, I stamped once and it came back on. Rode the Yadea back to Nancheng, wind pouring in at my collar, and that patch under my ribs was still hot.
Eleven twenty He Jun got home. Showered, lay down, gave my tits two squeezes, hand going lower and stalling halfway into a yawn. “Babe, shutter’s up at six thirty tomorrow, my back hurts today. Another time.”
Three minutes later he was snoring. I turned my screen brightness all the way down and opened the CMB app to look at the down-payment account: 114,200.00.
I got up and went to the bathroom, undid two buttons of my blouse, found the spot two inches under that gap and put my own hand on it. My hand is cold, and it isn’t wide. I breathed in. Nothing spread.
I pulled up the payment record and looked at it: eight hundred eighty yuan, payee Chen Huansheng. It’s the only spending this year I haven’t mentioned to He Jun.
Eleven fifty-two, I messaged him on WeChat. “Master Chen, is the studio open tomorrow afternoon? I want to practise a couple of hours on my own.”
Three minutes later he replied. “I’m in from three tomorrow afternoon. Weekends, mine is the only room on that floor with the door open.”