Lin Wansheng was stunned by her sudden movement.
“What’s wrong?”
She raised her head and looked at Lin Wansheng. “You call this one dollar?”
“What else would it be?”
Kate took a deep breath. The exaggerated shock on her face slowly faded, turning into an expression somewhere between amusement and disbelief.
“My God… Don’t tell me I’ve run into some hidden rich guy experiencing life among the common people?”
She nudged Lin Wansheng lightly with her elbow. “Paying for tacos with an 1885 Morgan silver dollar.”
“Jimmy, that’s way too generous.”
“Morgan silver dollar?” Lin Wansheng had no idea what that term meant.
Kate placed the money back in Lin Wansheng’s palm.
“You don’t even know what kind of money you’re using!”
“This is a Morgan silver dollar! And judging from the condition, a conservative estimate would put it at at least two thousand bucks.”
Lin Wansheng lowered his head and looked at the eight dollars in his palm, a little dazed.
At that moment, the food truck owner’s face turned ashen.
Clearly, he had also recognized the silver coin’s origins.
Only, unlike Kate,
he had taken one glance at Lin Wansheng’s Target T-shirt just now
and decided this kid had no clue what he had. He had thought he could make a neat little profit without anyone noticing.
He hadn’t expected this nosy woman beside him to ruin it.
He irritably took the twenty-dollar bill Lin Wansheng handed over again.
In a tone like he was shooing away a fly, he asked, “Do you want the remaining two bucks dropped into the tip jar?”
Before Lin Wansheng could answer, someone in line behind them urged impatiently, “Hey, move it! Some of us have to work!”
Lin Wansheng shook his head.
Bro, you’re just a food truck. Why would I tip you?
The two of them took their food and sat down on a slightly cleaner set of steps by the roadside.
As Lin Wansheng absentmindedly bit into his taco, he kept turning the silver coin over and over in his palm.
“Look here.” Kate leaned closer and pointed at two tiny letters near the bottom of the coin’s reverse side. “See this CC mark? That means it was minted by the Carson City Mint…”
Watching her go on and on, Lin Wansheng couldn’t help but laugh.
“I didn’t expect you to be such a nerd. You even know about this stuff.”
“Hey!” Kate thumped him on the arm in annoyance.
“You’re Chinese, and you have the nerve to call me a nerd?”
She took a big bite of her taco and explained indistinctly,
“My stepdad. After he retired from the NFL, his biggest hobby became collecting old coins.”
“At our dinner table every day, after grace, the regular program”
“is listening to him brag about what nice-condition treasure he picked up that day.”
“I’ve heard it so much my ears are practically callused.”
“Not sure if you can understand, but after all, I still need him to help pay my tuition.”
“I don’t want to take on student loans that’ll take me more than ten years to pay off just to go to school.”
“So I still have to listen very carefully.”
At this point, her eyes suddenly lit up.
She had already found this Chinese guy named Jimmy very interesting.
A Chinese guy who played football—that was far too rare. She had been worrying about not having a chance to get to know him better.
Now, this coin was simply the perfect excuse sent by God.
“Oh, right! Next time, you can come to my house and let Hank help you see exactly how much this is worth,” she said excitedly.
“He has a lot of friends who like collecting coins. Let him connect you.”
“It’ll definitely be way more reliable than taking it to an antique shop yourself. Those antique dealers love scamming clueless newbies like you!”
Lin Wansheng hadn’t expected that the few thousand dollars for the school deep-dive tour he had been worrying about
would be solved so easily because of these eight dollars rewarded by the system.
Seeing that he was still standing there in a daze, Kate smiled and took out her phone.
“All right, stop standing there like an idiot. Hurry up, let’s follow each other on Instagram.”
The two took out their phones, brought their screens together, and quickly exchanged contact information.
“I’ll be waiting for your message, rare specimen.” Kate winked at him.
They had gotten so caught up in chatting that Lin Wansheng completely forgot the time. It wasn’t until he inadvertently glanced at his phone screen that he realized it was almost two in the afternoon.
Thinking of Teacher Li’s face, his heart jolted, and he no longer had the leisure to keep talking.
“Crap, I have to go!”
He didn’t have time to say a proper goodbye, so he could only wave hurriedly at Kate, turn around, and run in the direction of Jingxin Zhai.
—
The children at Jingxin Zhai were practically a different species from the football players at Maobili Preparatory Elementary.
Parents who, in this day and age, still insisted on sending their children to learn Chinese
all had at least some obsession with their cultural roots.
Their greatest fear was probably that after their children grew up, they would walk into a Chinese restaurant
and yet need exaggerated hand gestures and the intonation of a variety show host just to barely order a dish of “cold↑ tossed↓ jellyfish skin~~~.”
So even without the buff of verbal inspiration, these children were much easier to manage than those little monkeys outside.
Not to mention, this ability had now become one of his permanent skills.
Lin Wansheng looked at the group of children before him, each seriously tracing characters stroke by stroke, while his mind was pondering something else.
Why was it that this powerful persuasion buff of his seemed to have no effect at all when he faced his own parents?
…
…
With his freshly received wages in hand, Lin Wansheng walked back to his family’s small supermarket.
At the dinner table, the atmosphere was somewhat gloomy.
Mother Lin was still nagging about her son having taken two part-time jobs, while Lin Wansheng absentmindedly picked at the rice in his bowl.
His gaze drifted from time to time toward Qian Dawei sitting across the table, his brows drawing tighter and tighter together.
Qian Dawei’s eating habits were truly awful. Not only did the sound of his lip-smacking echo through the entire room, he also spat bones directly onto the table every now and then.
Before the meal was even over, he was already leaning back in his chair, picking his teeth as if no one else were present.
At the thought of having to share a room with the snores of such a person again tonight, Lin Wansheng became visibly irritated.
Father Lin (Lin Qiaosheng) seemed to see what was on his son’s mind. He put down his bowl and chopsticks, stubbed out the cigarette in his hand, and stood up.
“Wansheng, take a walk with me?”
Father and son walked one after the other through Chinatown at night.
In the end, Lin Wansheng still couldn’t hold back and told him that he wanted to go to university out of state, that he wanted to leave New York.
After Lin Qiaosheng listened, the expression on his face became complicated.
“It’s good to have ambition. Wanting to go to a good university out of state is a good thing.” Lin Qiaosheng sighed and pressed his cigarette butt out on the ground. “But Wansheng, out of state is so far away. You’d be all alone in an unfamiliar place. How could we feel at ease?”
“Besides, isn’t it good to stay in New York? Columbia, NYU—which one isn’t better than those schools out in the sticks? You’d be close to home, you could save a huge amount on food and housing, and we’d be able to look after you.”
His tone shifted, becoming earnest and heavy with meaning.
“Wansheng, Dad knows there are some habits of your second uncle’s that you can’t stand, but I hope you’ll treat him a little better.”
“His mother, your Aunt Qin, was the doctor who delivered you back then.”
“She was a woman working day and night at the hospital. She simply didn’t have time to discipline her child, and that’s how he ended up with all these bad habits.”
Lin Qiaosheng sank into his memories. “When you were just born, you were as small as a cat and in poor health. As soon as you were born, you were sent into intensive care.”
“During that period, it was thanks to your Aunt Qin practically living in the hospital, watching over you without sleep or rest, that you were pulled back from the gates of hell.”
“One time, your condition suddenly became very bad. Your mother was in the ward, so anxious that she called me. At the time, I had gone to get the CT scans.”
Lin Qiaosheng’s steps slowed, and his voice grew a little hoarse.
“In that instant, I was holding your CT scans and listening to your mother crying over the phone. I…”
“was afraid I’d walk too fast.”
“But I was also afraid I’d walk too slowly.”