It is freezing outside but warm in the Beijing airport, where we are waiting to fly home. Two of us are silently boiling. My father is angry at something his children might or might not have done and my aunt, at something her husband and child might or might not have done. The boys – Bak, Y, Fei and my uncle – look like they cannot be bothered. My mother is annoyed that it has not snowed in Beijing. (The snowstorms would start after we went home.) I have been PMSing for a few days now. I have yelled at my mother and even my brother Fei, whom I have not raised my voice at for about a decade. We have been noisily travelling together for a week – nattering, nagging, nattering and gratuitously swearing – and here we are now, slouching in silence in what might be the calm before a couple of family storms. And yet. And yet. My mother and I are, for once, on the same secret happy wavelength.
“The next time we go anywhere as a family, it isn’t going to be just us,” she says.
“I know.”
Our Fei will marry P next month: We won’t be monopolising him on the next trip.
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