Kunming
20. 昆明 — Bright Clarity
He booked the flight in the final weeks of the studio’s closing.
Not Guangzhou. Not the factory cities. Yunnan. He wasn’t sure why except that Yunnan was not a place he’d been for work, which meant it had no associations he needed to undo.
He packed two sets of clothes. His phone. The charger. His notebook, then at the last minute left the notebook on the desk. He had nothing to write yet.
He stayed in hostels.
Not to save money — the money was there, sorted, enough. He chose them for the same reason he’d chosen the floor: something about the horizontal arrangement of strangers, people whose whole context you didn’t have to hold.
He shared a room with four bunks. A Dutch couple doing Yunnan on two weeks. A Korean student whose name he didn’t catch but who made coffee every morning on a small gas burner and always made enough for whoever was in the room. A Singaporean engineer, older, who was taking a month off and didn’t want to talk about it, which David respected.
They ate breakfast together sometimes. Didn’t ask about each other’s plans. Went their separate ways by eight and reconvened or didn’t.
He walked the city without a plan. Not the scenic spots — not the lake, not the stone forest, not the parks with their organised views. He moved through the neighbourhoods that weren’t in the guides. Markets where the produce was for eating, not photographing. Streets where the shops sold things people actually needed. He moved slowly. He stopped when something caught him. He ate when he was hungry from wherever he happened to be standing.
The language was a problem and also not a problem. He had some Mandarin — enough for directions, enough for ordering, enough to make an attempt that people received with patience. Beyond that he was mostly quiet. He didn’t mind the quiet. His Mandarin in Singapore was always a reach. Here, without the looming expectation, something in his jaw loosened.
He didn’t check the news. He checked his phone for messages from his parents and from Lina and from his crew — the last ones whose redundancies were still clearing. He replied to what needed replying. He put the phone back in his pocket.
One afternoon, eight days in, the charging cable broke.
He noticed it at the hostel when he went to plug in for the night. The cable had frayed at the connector — a clean split, the wire visible, already warm to the touch. He’d had it two years. It had traveled everywhere.
He asked at the hostel desk. She directed him two streets over, third shop on the left.
The shop was narrow. A man about his father’s age stood behind a glass case. The case held cables, adapters, small tools, batteries in sizes he’d never seen labeled that way. Behind him, a wall of hooks with things hanging. The inventory of a city that fixes things rather than replaces them.
David pointed. The man found the right cable without asking. He moved efficiently. It was honest — the movement of someone who knew his own stock the way David had once known his floor plan, before he stopped going in.
He paid. The man nodded. David nodded back.
He stood outside the shop for a moment.
He was hungry. There was a place three doors down — small, plastic stools, a window where you could watch the wok. He sat down. The woman came out and he pointed at what the man next to him had. She went back inside.
The bowl arrived: noodles, pork, a broth that had been going for a long time. He ate without hurrying. The street moved around him. A child went past on a bicycle too big for her. A woman hung laundry from a second floor window, the sheets going bright in the late sun.
He looked at the cable beside his bowl.
He picked it up. Felt the weight of it. The connector. The specific give of the insulation. The ordinary fact of it — a thing made cheaply, sold cheaply, that everybody needed and almost nobody thought about until it stopped working.
He thought about the factory floor in Guangzhou. The man who paused before answering because he was calculating honestly, not to impress.
He thought about the Shenzhen markets he’d passed through once for a client and not paid attention to because he hadn’t been ready to pay attention.
He set the cable down.
He finished the broth.
He sat there a little longer.
He felt a small pull.
He wanted to sell cables.
Not cables specifically. Things that worked. Things made without apology, priced without inflation, that did what they said they did. He could find the factories. He knew already how to read the room in them — who was calculating honestly, who was performing volume. He’d learned that in Guangzhou before he’d known he was learning it.
He could start small. He would start small.
He ordered a second bowl.
He stayed three more days.
He didn’t think much about the cables. He walked. He ate. He slept in the bunk bed and listened to the Korean student’s gas burner hiss in the morning.
On the last night he sat in the hostel courtyard after dinner and looked at the sky, which was clearer than Singapore ever got. The Dutch couple were playing cards at the other table. The engineer was reading. The courtyard was lit by a single string of bulbs that someone had run along the perimeter, adequate and warm.
He thought about his old apartment with its still air. The room at his parents’ house with the key his father had set on the table. The studio being dismantled in ten months of careful managed steps.
Some of the crew had been angry. Not all of them. He’d expected it. He’d told them anyway.
He thought about Karen saying I don’t know if that’s enough.
He hadn’t known either. He still didn’t. He’d told her the truth of what he knew, which was only his part. He hadn’t promised the rest would arrive. She hadn’t waited to find out.
The engineer looked up from his book. Caught David’s eye.
David nodded back.
He went to bed at nine.
In the morning he changed his flight.
He booked Guangzhou.