The Moon Festival Cousin Switch novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Place Cards
At the Mid-Autumn dinner Anqi finds her card beside Mengyao's and keeps her chair when a suitor tries to take it. On the roof under the moon, Mengyao says her mother has set an engagement for twenty-four days away.
The place cards were already on the table when Zhou Anqi walked in with the mooncakes.
They sat in a ring around the big round dinner table on the twenty-first floor, each one written in thick black brush pen.
Her sister's flat smelled of steamed crab, ginger and osmanthus wine.
Anning waved a spoon from the kitchen. "Find your seat! The card is on the plate!"
Anqi set down the box and found her name.
It said Zhou Anqi in neat black strokes, and she was twenty-six and the oldest unmarried guest in a family that kept count.
Her card sat in the chair beside Xu Mengyao's.
Anqi stopped with her hand on the chair back.
She had met Mengyao exactly once, two years ago at her sister's wedding.
They had talked for ten minutes beside the cake table.
Anqi still remembered the dimples and a loud laugh that Mengyao covered with both hands.
Since then they had traded greetings on every festival and nothing more.
Mengyao was Haoran's cousin, and Haoran was Anning's husband.
That made Mengyao Anqi's cousin by marriage, as the grandmother liked to announce, and the grandmother liked to announce it now.
"Cousins!" the old woman called from the head of the table. "Two cousins side by side! Good!"
"We aren't blood cousins, Nainai," Anqi said. "We aren't any kind of relation at all."
"You're relations by dinner," the grandmother said. "Sit."
Anqi sat, and slid the card into the pocket of her grey jacket, because she kept anything with her name spelled right.
The door opened again, and Mengyao came in carrying a basket of pomelos.
She wore a red knit cardigan and had chestnut hair cut to her chin with curtain bangs.
Behind her came her mother, Fang Shuhua, in a plum jacket, and a man in a navy suit with a gift box under his arm.
"Gao Chenyu," the mother said brightly, as if introducing a prize. "Chenyu, sit by Mengyao."
The man smiled at the table and walked straight to Anqi's chair.
He looked at the card, then at Anqi.
"I think there's a mistake," he said. His voice was soft and polite. "This is my seat."
"The card says Zhou Anqi," Anqi said.
"It must have been put out wrong."
"Then it was put out wrong for me too, because I was told to sit where my name is."
Mengyao's mother came around the table quickly. "Miss Zhou, it's only a seat. You can sit at the end by the children."
"I'm comfortable here, thank you."
Anqi kept her hands folded and did not get up.
She had spent a long career being polite in two languages, and she knew exactly how long to hold still.
Across the table, Mengyao stared at her with her mouth slightly open.
Then Mengyao set down the pomelos, sat in her own chair, and pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.
Gao Chenyu's smile stayed exactly where it was.
He was moved to a chair at the far end beside the television, and he sat there with the gift box on his knees.
For the next twenty minutes the table argued about the cards.
"Who touched the seating?" Mengyao's mother demanded. "I gave Anning the list myself."
"I laid them out as Haoran left them," Anning said.
"Nainai?"
"I never touch a card on Mid-Autumn," the grandmother said. "It is bad luck. I only look."
Haoran came out of the kitchen with a plate of crab.
He set it on the lazy Susan, looked at the ceiling lamp, and asked brightly who wanted tea.
"I do," said three people.
Nobody asked him again.
By the second round of wine, the talk had turned to Mengyao.
Her mother told the table that a girl of twenty-four should not spend her days among tree roots.
The grandmother said a girl of twenty-four should do what she pleased.
Two aunts said it was time, and Gao Chenyu's name came up four times in a minute.
Mengyao stopped eating.
Anqi saw her fingers go white around her chopsticks.
Without looking up, Anqi leaned an inch to the left.
"The moon is up," she said, quietly. "Want to see it?"
Mengyao's head came around.
Her eyes were wet and angry and very bright.
"Yes," she said.
Anqi picked up a plate of mooncakes, and the two of them walked out of the argument.
The stairs to the roof terrace were narrow and lit by one bare bulb.
At the top, the night opened wide.
The whole river lay below them in strings of gold lights, and above the apartment towers the full moon hung low and enormous.
Somebody had left two folding chairs and a string of paper lanterns by the water tank.
Mengyao dropped into one chair and put her face in both hands.
"Thank you," she said through her fingers. "I thought I was going to throw a pomelo."
"You'd have been aiming for the end of the table."
Mengyao laughed, wetly, and lowered her hands.
"Do you know where that chair was meant to be?" she said. "Yours. My mother's list put him next to me. Someone moved the cards."
"Someone who looked at the ceiling very hard," Anqi said.
"You noticed that too."
"Haoran is my brother-in-law. I'm trained to read people who don't want to answer."
Mengyao picked up half a mooncake and held it without eating.
Her voice dropped.
"Anqi. My mother told me in the kitchen tonight."
"Told you what?"
"His family sent gifts to our house last month. She took them. The engagement banquet is the Double Ninth, in twenty-four days."
The moon sat huge and quiet over the river.
"She didn't ask me," Mengyao said. "She just set the date."
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