The best legacy a restaurant that has closed for good can leave to a shopping mall is its wide assortment of tables and chairs. The vacated stalls can’t find new tenants right away, so they become temporary leisure areas. On this hot summer day, in an air-conditioned mall, as long as there are enough seats, there will be enough customers coming to escape the heat.
The grandpas and grandmas, brothers and sisters who come to enjoy the cool, bring their cell phones and occupy every empty seat. If a bench hidden behind a barricade is wide enough, lying down for an hour or two is also a fine option. A small personal bag for a pillow, and you have a perfect afternoon.
The “HotMaxx” discount store on the second floor has iced Assam milk tea. At 3.6 yuan a bottle, it’s still a bit cheaper than delivery. The hydrogenated vegetable oil mixed with a rich, creamy artificial flavoring has that same old familiar taste; you can down a whole bottle in one go.
Brother Jia doesn’t like air conditioning, neither in the scorching summer nor the frigid winter. For a native of Wuhan, getting through these two difficult seasons in comfort is indeed tough. The retired old drivers, however, have chosen to go to the mountains more than 500 kilometers to the west to escape the heat. They set off at 8 a.m., under a blazing sun the whole way, arriving at the highest slope just as the sun is about to set. They stay for a full month, only returning when Wuhan’s summer heat has completely dissipated.
Linsong draws the thick curtains before going to sleep at night. When each morning arrives, the curtains completely block out the rising eastern sun. This way, “the sun can never scorch your butt,” a nagging phrase Linsong hasn’t heard from his mother in a very long time. Besides the curtains diligently performing their summer duties, the air conditioner at home has also learned to work non-stop, twenty-four hours a day. Having passed the test of several summers, the hard-working unit has never once broken down when it was needed most. It has earned Linsong’s trust.
In the two weeks between the “Minor Heat” and “Major Heat” solar terms, urged by the grid officer from the power company, Linsong paid an electricity bill of 147 yuan. An expense of this level felt more worthwhile to him than eating a chilled “Jade Qilin” watermelon from the “Farmer’s Fresh” market. Even as Linsong lay on his recliner, pondering the fact that the coolness he enjoyed was just the false affection of a condenser coil, he was still perfectly content. Linsong could no longer remember how he survived every cruel summer of his childhood, nor did he intend to waste his thoughts trying to recall how he escaped from the “alchemist’s furnace” of a Wuhan summer.
In a Wuhan summer, you turn on the air conditioning—is there even anything to think about? You just keep it on, until the heat is gone for good. Why bother getting hung up on the fact that you’re bathing in “simulated coolness”? In truth, most of the time, we are already immersed in a life of pretense.
The simulated roar of an electric car—does it sound like a pretense? Do you turn off the low growl it makes when you gently press the pedal? Fermented-flavor yogurt, beer sealed in aluminum cans, AI-generated videos—don’t we just accept them all without question?
During the time he should have been napping, Linsong ran out to print a copy of a jazz score called the Real Book. Back when it was first photocopied by the hundreds by two students from Berklee College of Music, it was indeed a standard-issue illegal publication. Piling 460 pages of A4-printed sheet music on a shelf seems rather anachronistic, much like how DC Comics is still trying to reinvent Superman for the big screen.
In Linsong’s view, today’s Superman is the least important superhero in the comic book world. He stubbornly makes a comeback in this ordinary, unremarkable summer, yet he fails to escape his old stereotype, remaining the same perfect good guy from the 1978 movie. Except, the world has long since changed beyond recognition. The old fear that a population explosion would overwhelm the Earth has now given way to the reality of population decline. By the time the hippies who questioned the sincerity of love have grown old, the Gen Z kids who have grown up are no longer talking about love.
While the Avengers and the Justice League are still competing over who can better save the world, plans for Mars colonization are already on the to-do lists of the newly rich. No one is still worrying about whether Superman can return to his home planet of Krypton. Yet Superman himself persists, always appearing whenever a human crisis arises.
Just like his first appearance on the big screen in 1978, the first thing Superman does is look for a telephone booth to change in. But the telephone booths in the city have long since become “a deaf man’s ear”—a useless decoration. Since telephone booths are no longer reliable, today’s Superman doesn’t even need any cover. In a millisecond, Clark Kent, like a superstar influencer on TikTok, can instantly transform from an ordinary person into Superman.
Nowadays, everything is dazzlingly bright. So much so that even on the clearest summer night, if you look up at the sky, you can no longer see the stars.