Home Remedies

by Xuan Juliana Wang

  “Well, they chose me for diving, too,” Taoyu said.

  “They did? Boy!” Hai said, and his eyes opened up wide. “What are the chances!” He got up on his seat and yelled triumphantly, “Look here! Taoyu here is a diver, too! What are the chances of two divers sitting together?”

  An older boy threw a wrapper at his head. They were all there for diving.

  It did not seem like an obvious pairing, but as with many simple things that happen at that age, their sitting next to each other on the bus made them best friends. Together they were lined up, measured, weighed, stripped down, and reorganized into individual teams, packs, and disciplines.

  Painted in large red letters on the walls was the message they could not yet read: be positive, work hard, climb the high mountain, win glory for the country. As their bus drove through the green iron gates of the regional aquatics compound, the boys folded their hands on the windows, the first view of their new life.

  With his face pressed against the glass, how could Taoyu have known that his future was shaping itself without his permission, that his genius was ingrained deep in his muscles and bones? How could he have known that the scout was absolutely right about him? That without meaning to, he’d demonstrated something special, and that even though he hadn’t asked for it, that very thing was now his responsibility.

  Peng Hai had the tendency to find amusement and mischief in the most monotonous routines. If there was a room full of chairs, he would make sure to sit on the table. During study hall, he kept crickets in an empty can and conducted tournament battles under his desk.

  Unlike Hai, Taoyu feared for the souls of all the birds that broke their necks flying into the windows of the gym. During the midday rest he worried about the kittens that might be abandoned under the steps of their dorms. For as long as he could remember he was punished for these preoccupations, for his tendency to drift off. In those first weeks he had trouble sleeping. There, in the dark, he was afraid to close his eyes, waiting for some unwanted surprise, and in those moments he wanted nothing more than to call out for his mother.

  His mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. As a boy Taoyu was always amazed that when strangers passed her on the street, spoke to her in the market, their mouths didn’t hang open with wonder at the sight of her. Anytime his mother called his name, he would go sprinting into her arms, her face cool as a watermelon against his hot little palms. Just being in her presence gave him an immense sense of well-being and he hated leaving her side, even for a moment. Even though he was angry with her now, he missed her.

  But without her, there was Hai. Taoyu liked to listen to Hai’s ridiculous laugh, which was always the first noise he heard in the morning. He liked to stretch Hai out, always gentle enough not to hurt him. He liked to organize Hai’s desk for him and fold his clothes. He even liked just sitting quietly next to him during class before Hai inevitably was scolded for bursting into unstoppable giggles.

  Perhaps owing to their fast friendship, Taoyu did not become an outcast. He grew to enjoy the training. He liked the precision of the routine movements as well as the gracefulness of the spins and leaps.

  Their world was an incredibly small one; each bit of mischief was hard to come by. In the mornings the boys drilled on the floor mats, first with stretches, then with flips off a stationary board. Then they practiced gymnastics—tumbling, parallel bars, balance beam, and tied to bungee cords diving into trampolines. Two hours of study hall followed by training in the pool until it was bedtime. Much competition was involved in getting a pat of approval from Head Coach Fong, who, as it turned out, had told nearly every boy that he was a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.

  Yet when the other boys went home for holidays, Hai and Taoyu were requested to stay behind with their coaches to train and to preserve their concentration. There were not enough hours for boys who showed the most promise.

  Once they were assigned as each other’s partner in synchronized diving, every moment of their lives was the same. They ate together, picking up their porcelain mugs at the same time. They read together, holding the words to the light with the same tilt of their heads and the matching spread of their fingers. While they lay side by side in their beds, Hai often reached for Taoyu’s hand and held it in his own. With their eyes closed they discovered that, hand in hand, even their heartbeats harmonized into a single steady drum.

  At first they were afraid of the board altogether, but soon they learned difficult combinations and perfected them during competitions. Initially they felt insecure about the takeoff. Then they couldn’t wait to be in the air.

  Within the walls of that complex, the days ran by uncounted. Birthdays passed and their adolescent bodies were faithless to their boyhoods. Hai and Taoyu went from perfect boys to elongated ape-men, with angry pimpled foreheads, thick thighs, concave chests, and the raccoon tans of goggles on their faces.

  All the boys slept in a single large room with bunk beds so close they could secretly leap from one to the other without the monitors noticing. They fought with one another constantly. They wrestled in teams, pinning one another’s throats with their elbows, throwing opponents on their backs and demanding to be called uncle. Sometimes it was savage and that felt good. The room exploded with their musk, surging off their bodies as they explored their strength. By morning, it was not unusual for the sheets to be irreparably stained by a few bloody noses, but nobody ever told. They played horse with socks and a wastebasket. They played catch with marbles or balled-up shorts. Some nights they jerked off. Whoever came last was the loser. No cheating.

  The girls slept in another dormitory on the other side of campus. They might as well have been on another planet and they might as well have been goddesses. During the first years it was as if nobody noticed the girls at all, but then the girls became their collective obsession. Every stolen glance was retold, every physical attribute diagrammed, a rare touch on the tumbling mat could become legend. Peng Hai declared his love for Yi Yi, a rower from Jilin, not because she had big pretty eyes, but because she had real breasts and wore contraband nail polish.

  Howls rang out after a hand-copied booklet, entitled The Young Woman’s Awakening, circulated into the boys’ dorm. It contained strictly forbidden material. Everyone fought for a chance to peer at the pages filled with medical descriptions of body parts. When it finally made it to Taoyu’s bunk, he and Hai dove under their bedspreads to study the booklet under a sliver of moonlight. Taoyu watched Hai’s face flush and gasp as he read. Later that night he dreamed about that face, as he often did. Dreams so real he felt shy the whole day after. Sometimes in bed he waited with half-closed eyes until Hai’s breath slowed into a murmur, then he reached to feel the hot warmth of Hai’s mouth against his palm and pressed it against his own cheek.

  There were nights when Taoyu inched close to Hai on their parallel beds. All he knew was that he would have given anything to have Peng Hai as his partner forever. Sometimes he was close enough to make out each of Hai’s eyelashes in the dark, close enough to touch noses, mouths. There was nothing forbidden about what he was doing, but it hurt, like pressing his fingers on a sprained wrist. On any given night they might be on one side of a bed, just to recount in whispers their day scene by scene. They slept like kittens. Mouth to neck, back to stomach. Knee to bended knee. Mouth to forehead, head to chest. One breath followed by the echo of another. And who’s to say if one boy’s heart was beating too fast when their hands touched. Or one person was trembling while the other slept. Or maybe in a nightmare, they wrapped their arms around each other, their eyes closed, turning and struggling until the struggling ceased.

  His secret desires were perplexing and Taoyu knew only that what he was feeling was wrong. This knowledge overpowered him like a hand to his throat. How long could he hide it from his best friend?

  One night, Peng Hai’s eyes opened. “Why aren’t you asleep? And why are you all the way on my side? What’s t
he matter with you?” he asked sleepily.

  Shame and misery took turns with Taoyu. “I’m afraid,” he blurted out.

  Hai yawned, then adjusted the pillow under his head. “What are you afraid of this time, little bro?”

  Taoyu rubbed hard at his eyes to hide his tears. In almost a whimper, he finally said, “I think I’m sick. I’m a pervert.”

  “Oh,” Hai said after a long pause, “oh, I know what’s going on.” He leaned in to whisper, “Did you…did you just wet yourself?” He laughed. “Brother, it’s natural! It’s just our man engines, gearing up to go.”

  After Hai fell asleep, Taoyu made a promise to have only chaste thoughts. He wanted Hai to be right. That in some hours, days, or weeks, his engine would catch up with Hai’s and they would be the same again.

  Before a diver learns how to jump, he must learn how to swim. The ladder will always come before the heights; the fear comes before the water. Before he realized how far he’d come, Taoyu woke up a young man. Fifteen, lean, with broad shoulders and an easy stride, dimensions that made him uncannily perfect for his profession. He and Peng Hai were rising star divers gaining buzz in the athletics community. Competitors from other countries always commented on their consistency. “They’re fantastic machines, those Chinese boys. They’re just pumping them out year after year. It must be how they’re bred.”

  Taoyu always counted down.

  “Ready?” Hai would ask.

  “Ready,” Taoyu would echo. “Three, two, one.”

  When walking to the showers, Taoyu stopped looking up at the scoreboard. He didn’t have to. The sound of awe followed by the orchestra of applause would always come first.

  They qualified for the China national team and the pair was transferred north, to the best sports complex in Beijing.

  There, in that new city, Taoyu and Hai blossomed into young men, with rows of hard abs, broad shoulders, and defined jaws. Advertisers began using their images to sell sports drinks, laundry detergent, and motivational CDs.

  Together they traveled to Spain, South Korea, and Germany, winning medals all the way. Each time the Chinese national anthem came over the loudspeakers, Taoyu could feel Hai’s entire body break out into goose pimples as if they were his own.

  Time outside of their fifty-hour training weeks, they could spend any way they wished. The boys’ team played cards and drank beer smuggled from the supermarket with the girls from gymnastics. Letters from Ning started arriving underneath their bunk beds. A well-known beauty on campus, she was a star on the balance beam with full heart-shaped lips that she secretly used to smoke cigarettes. Soon Taoyu began helping Hai sneak out of their dorm room after each new letter. He stayed awake until Hai would stumble into bed hours later, dazed and euphoric.

  It wasn’t long before Taoyu was invited along.

  “Ning says she has a roommate that you’d like,” said Hai with a shove. “I’m not saying I’m expecting a present, but I’m sure you can figure out a way to thank me for this.”

  Taoyu didn’t think it would be right to miss out on any of Hai’s adventures. When Hai held Ning’s hand, Taoyu obediently put his arm around Ning’s roommate Huan Huan. When the other couple began to kiss, Taoyu did the same, keeping an eye on Hai to make sure he kept up. Then Taoyu would squeeze his eyes shut, tuning out Huan Huan’s voice, her toes like cold beans against his legs.

  That year a shoulder injury forced Taoyu into a long mandatory rest period. For the first time he was left alone in the dorm room without any drills, and though he was a free man in the capital, he didn’t have the slightest clue as to where to go and what to do when he got there. So he wandered around the dormitory in a somber mood, looking for a way to make himself useful.

  “Come on, Taoyu,” Assistant Coach Yi said on a Friday, “let’s get out of here.” Yi was dressed in street clothes, with his hair gelled into a point at the front of his head. “Can’t just have you walking around trying to sneak into practice.”

  After sundown Yi drove them to Houhai, the city’s oldest party district. Tree-shaded roads wound around still water. With the music turned up, neither of them had to make conversation as Yi’s car wove up and down the streets around both sides of the man-made lake. After a while, Yi turned off the sound and asked if Taoyu had ever snuck out to a party before and Taoyu lied, saying yes, perhaps too defensively because Yi laughed.

  “Maybe they went without telling me,” Taoyu admitted.

  “Hey, it’s okay because you’re going now.”

  It was the first Taoyu had seen of this neon maze and he thought he’d never be able to find his way out of it. He watched in awe as Yi expertly maneuvered the steering wheel, the ease with which he reached a bill out the window with two fingers and returned with a pack of cigarettes in his hand. He looked so cool.

  “Do you know what Coach Rong is doing now?” Yi asked casually.

  “The guys were saying he is an actor?” Taoyu replied. Coach Rong, a former silver medal Olympian, had departed from the training complex the previous summer.

  “Is that what he told you guys?” Yi said, watching Taoyu as if to gauge his reaction, which Taoyu tried to keep neutral. “He dances as a woman in a bar. I’ve seen his act; he’s more woman than any real woman. Can you believe that?”

  Taoyu nodded at Yi and then sat frozen in his seat. He was afraid to ask a stupid question.

  “Men do that, you know,” Yi said, winking into the rearview mirror. Then he reached over and placed his arm behind Taoyu’s backrest. “Men like you and me. When they get fed up with hiding.”

  Taoyu stiffened but wondered if not responding would make him complicit. He felt Yi’s fingers on his back and the hair on his neck stood on end. A lure was right there in front of him, but he felt in taking it he would be betraying Hai. At the same time, he wondered if Hai snuck out to places like this.

  Yi’s car came to a stop in front of a two-story-tall tea club. He could hear the sound of mahjong tiles being shuffled. Just beside the tea club, there sat a low brick building under a neon streak of light, on the far side of the street, shaded by trees. Music was playing inside, the same kind of music that Yi had been playing in the car.

  “Is that where we’re going?” Taoyu asked, suddenly nervous, as he watched men disappear into a low brick building. Ying turned off the engine.

  “It’s all right, kid,” Yi said, leaving long pauses in between words. “Nobody will know it’s you. It’s dark.”

  The first disco made a lasting impression on him even though all night Taoyu stood with his back to the wall. There was not a single woman inside. Coach Yi introduced him to his friends, and these strangers pinched his cheeks and took turns complimenting him. But what Taoyu remembered was their confidence, the ease with which they laughed. They wore thin-soled shoes, jeans, and dress shirts and drank from colorful glasses. Taoyu had his first whiskey, a second, a third.

  Before stumbling out of Yi’s car, Taoyu asked, “Have you ever taken anyone else to that place?”

  Yi leaned over across the front seat so he could see Taoyu’s face. “You’re so naive, it’s adorable,” he said with a laugh. “You should watch out for that partner of yours.”

  “What? What did Hai do?” Taoyu put his hand on the door.

  “He’s smarter than you, Taoyu. A true snake that one,” Yi said. “Let’s just say he’ll do anything to get ahead.”

  Taoyu waited, his heart pounding, outside the dorm until morning, when he could slip in unnoticed. A few hours later when he saw Yi, the assistant coach barely nodded at him. The next day Taoyu received a handwritten note tucked inside his locker. It was addressed to “Fresh Meat” and said that the meat was not to his taste but maybe in a few years would ripen and be full-flavored. About a week after Taoyu recovered from his injuries, Yi abruptly left the campus without saying goodbye. They said he moved back to his hometown to get married.

&
nbsp; Then it was 2007, a year before China’s first-ever hosting of the Olympic games. Something big was about to happen—it had been going on for some time and everyone appeared to be in on it. Ice melted into neat rings. Colors of clothes were more saturated. A plastic sculpture of Mao Zedong in a dress was sold for ten million at an auction. In every kitchen housewives marveled at how plump their rice was cooking. Public displays of excitement were widespread and reactions to one another deadpan. “Let’s make an Olympic baby,” whispered ten thousand newlywed couples entwined on ten thousand beds.

  Apartment complexes, schools, banks, and office buildings were closed up, torn down, and rebuilt into structures that were far more fantastic, more Olympic. Enormous digital clocks popped up on the sides of new skyscrapers, on billboards, and on public fountains. Each clock counted down, second by second, to the luckiest numerical configuration in Chinese culture: 888888. The symmetry and promised prosperity of those numbers were in heavy rotation.

  It was within the glare of all these epic changes, under these particular falling numbers, that Zhao Taoyu and his partner, Peng Hai, became China’s newest Olympic gold hopefuls in 10-meter synchronized diving. Newscasters introduced them on-air to the world as the next legends in springboard diving. Their teenage-boy bodies forever captured on camera, suspended in midair, frozen in graceful gravity-defying postures. If they made it to the podium, people from all around the world would know their impish faces as symbols of youth, physical harmony, and glory.

  Before the trials, CCTV aired a special segment featuring the parents of athletes and the sacrifices they’ve had to make. Walking by a street of small restaurants, Taoyu heard his own name being broadcasted. As he hurried into the noodle shop and up to the television, he recognized the face on the screen as his father’s.