He sewed five thousand yuan into my old suitcase

In the summer of 2011 I was leaving for university in the provincial capital, and my family could not put together the tuition.

I still remember that summer. My father sat on the doorstep smoking all afternoon. My mother went through the rice bin three times. The student loan could only be arranged after term started, and travel plus the first month's living costs still left a large gap. I even considered not going.

The night before I left, my childhood friend Da Jun came over. We had been in the same class from first grade through the end of middle school. He was never much of a student and had gone early to apprentice at a repair shop in town. He did not sit down. He put an old suitcase in my room and said, "Take this one. You won't need it in the city." It was the case his father had used for hauling freight, green, all four corners worn bald.

I said it was too old. He said old ones survive being dropped. He sat a while longer and left.

When I got to the provincial capital, checked in and started unpacking, I found a compartment in the base of the case. Inside, wrapped in three layers of plastic bag, was a stack of money. Five thousand yuan. Under it was a note in Da Jun's crooked handwriting: "I know you won't ask. Take it. Fixing cars pays better than studying, for me. Don't tell your aunt and uncle."

I crouched on the dorm balcony and read that note a dozen times.

Five thousand yuan. I worked it out later: at the wages he was on at the repair shop, that was most of a year's savings, earned by turning several hundred screws and crouching under several hundred chassis. He told nobody, including his own parents. He hid it in the case because he was afraid I would refuse it. He told me not to say anything because he was afraid my parents would be embarrassed.

Through four years of university I spent that five thousand carefully, the way you carry a brazier. And I never "told" him I had found it. Every time we spoke he said, "If that case is too old, throw it out," and I said yes, yes, yes. I had a separate plan. I was going to pay it back in a way he could not refuse.

After graduating I joined a machinery plant in the city and my salary improved year by year. In the third year Da Jun got married and I gave a gift. In the fifth year his daughter was born and I gave another. In the seventh year he wanted to turn the repair shop into a proper store, was short of money, and asked me — the first time in his life he had ever borrowed from me. I transferred the money before he finished the sentence, double what he asked for. There was a long silence on the line, and then he said, "So you knew."

I said, "Knew what? I knew that a fool once sewed most of a year's wages into a beaten-up suitcase and then worried I would think the suitcase was too old."

He laughed, and then the laughing stopped and he said nothing.

Last year his repair business became a chain, every branch under his own name. He insisted on making me a nominal shareholder: "That suitcase counts as your stake." I told him that was nonsense, it was his own work. He got agitated. "Without your five thousand I could not have taken on the first shop."

Neither of us convinced the other. In the end the new store got its name: Old Suitcase Auto Repair. He only told me the joke on opening day — the "suitcase" in the name is that green case. He said, "As long as the shop is there, nobody forgets about the suitcase."

The deepest feeling between friends often has no words in it at all. It is in a lining sewn shut, in "don't tell your aunt and uncle," in a signboard that reads "Old Suitcase."

Last month I went home and saw the green case still on the most visible shelf in his shop, holding his daughter's toys. His daughter asked me, "Uncle, the case is so old, why do you keep it?" I said, "Because it's the family heirloom."