“How long has it been since you’ve seen your son?” the reporter asked.
“Six, no, seven years,” his father said. “I haven’t seen him for seven years. We don’t have the money to travel to see him. Even when my wife got sick, we didn’t tell him.”
Watching his father’s face break up with grief on-screen, Taoyu knew right then that something too terrible for words had already happened. When he thought about it, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had heard his mother’s voice.
In the springtime, his village went wild with willows. One flurry at a time, he liked to catch the pollen expertly between his thumb and forefinger. His mother used to say that it was the girl willows sending love letters to the boy willows. That they were blowing kisses.
Taoyu would happily follow her around the garden as she collected eggs and picked green onions still warm from the sun. In those days she was all his. Then at dusk when his father returned from work, he’d always ask, “What have you two been up to all afternoon?”
“Nothing special,” Taoyu would reply and smile at his mom. Even though it was the truth, it would sound like a lie.
The willow seeds seemed to guide his path from the train station toward his house. Former neighbors ran up to him on the street and crowded him, their dialect loud and familiar as they shouted their congratulations. As he neared his house, their voices fell away.
In the years that he’d been gone, Taoyu had grown taller than his father, but the familiar unease of his childhood never left him.
“Your mother got sick while you were abroad and I didn’t see the use in worrying you,” his father said.
There was a new television on their dining room table. Taoyu did not dare to touch it.
“It was a sudden thing. In the beginning, nobody could say what it was. I didn’t want it to interfere with your training.” His father placed a hand on Taoyu’s shoulder. “Then she ran a fever and stopped recognizing anybody. By then it was too late for you to come home. She wouldn’t have even known it was you.”
Taoyu looked at his father’s face. “You should have told me.”
“Even if you had made it back here, it wouldn’t have made any difference,” his father said, standing up straighter as if he thought the neighbors could see. “You wouldn’t have won that medal.”
“Just tell me the truth, did she ask for me to come back?” he asked.
“It was too late for you to come back,” his father said.
Even if that had been the truth, it sounded like a lie, spoken without love or apology. As Taoyu stood there in the courtyard of his house and listened to his father talk and eventually weep, he was trying to forget him. Forget the particulars of his face, his voice; forget that village that had made him and all the roads that had led him back to this place.
On the train back to Beijing, he felt that his despair was threatening to unhinge him, that if he wasn’t careful, he would be lost. It was the longest time he’d been separated from Hai. Taoyu could think only of the muscle that slid from above Hai’s heart to meet his neck. The joker smile forever nestled into the corners of his mouth, his waist twisting in the air. Every muscle, each hair he knew and adored. Taoyu wanted to collapse his own body into Hai’s, to be held within him.
Taoyu sent Hai’s name echoing in the halls of the dormitory. His teammates told him Hai was out bike riding at Peking University, and he ran there to him at full speed. He needed something that only Hai could give him. He knew it was love. Only Hai could replace his wasted heart with his own.
It was dark when he saw Hai through the trees with Ning on the back of his bike, her light blue skirt fluttering behind them like a dragon’s tail. Taoyu sprinted after them, crying out, but even though they saw him they didn’t stop. Instead they laughed in his direction and Hai pedaled faster. Taoyu stubbornly chased their voices, his breath growing louder than his footsteps.
“Stop! Please,” he gasped.
“Not now!” Ning called back, giggling, her ponytail whipping around her moonlit face in the dark.
Taoyu could make out Ning’s thin white legs against the spinning wheels, the bike making circles around the trunks of willow trees. Her slender arm was around Hai’s waist, and as they passed under the streetlamps, Taoyu saw her bare skin in the dimmed lights. Pale thighs and a gleam of stomach, the curve of a bare white shoulder. He stopped, and when they passed by him again, he saw they were making a joke out of him. Taoyu charged after them, kicking up leaves and dirt.
“See, I told you he wouldn’t leave if you told him to, he wants to watch,” Ning said, shrieking with laughter, buttoning her shirt together.
“We can talk later, right?” asked Hai. “Can’t you see we’re kind of busy?”
“Please don’t leave!” Taoyu yelled, but Hai turned on his bike and shot Taoyu a weary, annoyed look that sent him running.
“I’m so sorry, brother,” Hai said to him later that night, as he moved his hand up and down Taoyu’s back. “Death is a part of life, you know. Everyone’s parents will pass away. You can’t let it break you.”
Taoyu put his head down on Hai’s lap and wrapped his arms around his waist and sobbed louder. Hai hugged him and Taoyu tucked his legs into his chest. His arms traveled to the soft hairs on the back of Hai’s neck, and Hai wiped the tears from his cheeks with his thumb.
“It’s going to be okay.” Hai repeated it over and over again as if he were using it to keep time. “The coaches were so worried about you. I’m so glad you came back.”
They held each other like that for a long while, and for a moment Taoyu dared to think that they were not holding each other as friends, but as lovers. He leaned his teary cheek against Hai’s chest and then, reaching up, he lifted his lips to Hai’s mouth. With tenderness, Hai kissed him back. Opening his mouth to take in Taoyu’s tongue, tasting the tears still flowing down his cheeks. The real and imagined were coming together. It was just like it was in Taoyu’s dreams.
Then, abruptly, Hai pushed him away and reached out to look at his wristwatch. “Hey. Don’t you think we should sleep now? It’s so late and you’ve missed a lot of practice,” Hai asked. Taoyu’s body was gasping, his face still red and eager but his partner was perfectly composed.
It wasn’t really a question, Taoyu realized. He and Hai, they weren’t really the same at all, no matter the beat of their hearts.
Divers have notoriously poor eyesight. It is a hidden cost of the sport and many experienced divers, even with the most advanced eye care, suffer from blurred vision. Yet for the first time in his life, Taoyu saw things for exactly what they were. What an ingenuous and foolish place he had ended up in, he thought.
During the first day of the Olympic qualifier, a televised event filmed in the newly constructed water cube, Taoyu knew that he could no longer do what was expected of him. The press section clamored to get photos of the duo, and there was never more praise from the coaches. It had taken him months to make sense of all that had happened to him, but it was while facing all those cameras that Taoyu saw a road out. He didn’t know it until he stood up there at the edge of the board, when he realized he finally had a choice. Right then, on the world’s biggest stage, he could finally choose. He could become a completely new person.
His choice allowed a younger boy to take his place on the team, but Taoyu wouldn’t be watching to see who it was. The games would follow in London, then Rio de Janeiro, each with gold medals that had nothing to do with him. By then Taoyu would be living alone for the first time in his life, in a two-bedroom apartment with an ocean view, after changing his name to that of the first cabdriver he had in the new city.
In many ways he had been prepared for Hai to beg him on his knees to stay, following him as he packed, saying, “How can you leave? I’m nothing without you.” It was what Taoyu wanted, to disappear from Hai’s life completely, to leave a wound that would ache. That was the
only way they could be equals.
“Who am I to you?” Taoyu asked.
“You’re my best friend!” cried Hai.
How willfully innocent that cruel reaction was, Taoyu thought.
A few years later, Ning would somehow track Taoyu down at his apartment. She stood there, more striking than ever, knocking on his door until he finally opened it. She had driven all day and night to see him.
“Were you in love with me? I have to know before I get married. Is it because of me that you cut Hai out of your life?”
“No,” he replied, and did not explain further, because he didn’t owe her an explanation. He wondered if she’d paid the same visit to Hai, who he was told had gotten married and was named Henan’s regional sports official in charge of junior soccer teams.
Taoyu would always remember that last jump. “Three, two, one,” he could still hear his words echoing from the past. He bent his knees and raised his arms alongside Hai, and realized that they were not going to be together, not beyond that water, not in this life.
He stood still on the edge of the platform, and when the moment came, he did not jump, and traded one life for another. He left all the expectations of his future up there on the board. Instead he watched Hai’s body flail underwater, searching for his own. From above, it looked like an elaborate wave goodbye.
The Strawberry Years
All of this happened at an otherwise unremarkable period in Yang’s life. As often happens when one is learning a new language, in trying not to make an ass out of himself, he was becoming a man of few words. The change suited him fine. He owned just two pairs of shoes and often ate from a bag of expired bread his roommate brought back from bartending. Freelance gigs paid his rent and allowed him to live in a manner that he found comfortable. The only thing worth noting, that stood out at all, was that the woman started appearing in his dreams again.
Stirred by the touch of long, smooth hair against his face, heavy and soft to its ends, he’d open his eyes to see the nape of her slender white neck. From the depth of his sleep, she slowly drew him out by climbing on top of him. He’d gently kiss her palms, her warm throat, but he was never able to quite make out her face. In those moments she could be any girl, an ex-girlfriend even. Facing her in the dark, he’d float his hands to touch her pale breasts and belly.
Soon he would discover, each and every time, that she had two belly buttons. Each a hand’s width from the other. He would know right then that it was the same woman and the same dream he’d been having since he was a young boy. He would come right then, like a wounded animal, shuddering onto his thigh, and it would be over.
By the time he’d woken up and tapped open his WeChat, her plane was probably already up in the air, heading in his direction. The short voice messages were coming from a magazine editor for whom Yang had shot some promotional work a few months before. The editor said that there was a famous actress coming from Beijing. It was her first visit to the United States and the girl was alone. Would Yang mind meeting her at the airport and lending a hand to get her where she needed to go? As a small favor to the editor? Her English wasn’t great and she didn’t have any friends in the city.
Yang could think of nothing he’d rather do less than take the subway to JFK on a freezing January morning. Once you leave China, they say every Chinese person feels like a friend, and the more friends you make, the more roads open up in front of you. But since he moved to New York from Beijing the year prior, way too many people had used him as a volunteer tour guide and translator. Before the editor, it had been his college roommate’s nephew, whom he picked up and put on a train to his boarding school. Before that it was his uncle’s neighbor’s family of three, whom his mother had insisted he treat to a big meal. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to say no, and he hated himself for it.
Of all the people walking unsteadily out of the international terminal, blinking into the rows of expectant faces, she was the only one wearing a really big hat. That person, Yang somehow knew right away, was The Actress. The hat was burgundy, with a wide stiff rim, and it fluttered like the wings of a stingray as the person underneath it glided over to him, practically shoving the other passengers out of her way. Though they had never met before, she gave off the impression that they were old friends. Reaching him, she dropped her things and threw her arms around his neck, muffling Yang’s face in her citrusy scent. The hat was even bigger up close. Where did she store it on the plane? Yang wondered. Did she have to keep it on for all fifteen hours?
Yang picked up her two suitcases, stacked one on top of the other, and rolled them in front of him. He liked her to begin with; she was pretty in that extraterrestrial catlike way that was in style in Chinese entertainment circles. She had large sparkly eyes, and a small, heart-shaped face with a mouthful of tiny sharp teeth.
“What’s the name of your hotel?” he asked as they were walking. “I will take you there before I go to work.”
“I didn’t book a hotel,” she said casually, tucking her arm into his.
“Where are you staying then?” he asked. “Is it like an Airbnb or something?”
“Oh no. I didn’t book anything,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Was I supposed to pick out a place to stay all the way from China? I’ve never done something like that before. Everyone only uses WeChat. I don’t even have a credit card anymore.”
In response to this, he stopped walking, so the actress did, too. He couldn’t believe how she could be this calm. What would have happened to her if nobody had come to meet her? They were facing each other in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts line, between the taxi stand and the escalators, which led aboveground to the AirTrain. The cold air from beyond the sliding doors blew in Yang’s face so that he had to squint to maintain eye contact. Who was this woman? What was he supposed to do with her?
Why had he listened to his messages, why? The editor would have probably found someone else to bother if Yang hadn’t replied and none of this would have been his problem.
The actress suddenly laughed heartily even though he hadn’t said anything and nothing was funny.
“All right,” he said, after taking a deep breath. “I guess you can come to my apartment, use the Internet on my computer, and book yourself a hotel room nearby.”
“That sounds perfect,” she said, clapping her hands. “How do we get there?”
She dug around in her purse and whipped out her phone, tapping open the video camera and recording herself talking.
“My first train ride in New York City,” she said. “So cool! Yeah!”
After he paid for her ticket with his credit card and lifted the actress’s luggage onto the train, Yang wondered, Was it him? Was it just that he was so easy to walk all over?
It was a long ride to Greenpoint. With her phone held aloft in one hand, the actress made a continuous video while chattering on without taking a breath, her physical excitement turning the blank stares of their fellow passengers into a captivated live audience. He could not look away as she talked.
What a dream come true it was to finally be here, considering she’d watched the television series Beijingers in New York in the nineties, and each detail on the subway reminded her of a specific scene from the show. Those artists who leave their crummy lives behind to become really poor New Yorkers who go from playing cellos in subway stations to starting enterprising and profitable business ventures. Yet at the conclusion of the series, even though all of the characters ended up wealthy, they were broken and compromised, toasting with champagne in a white stretch limo and one of them standing out of the sunroof with a stupid-looking ponytail flapping in the wind. “What is the point of that?” The actress asked. “So they didn’t learn any refinement and ended up as tu, as vulgar, as ever?”
She was exhibiting the typical entitlement of those “of-the-moment” Chinese, Yang decided. She casually picked lint out of his hair and blew it off the tip of h
er finger.
She listed every movie she’d been in and though he recognized quite a few of the names, he could not recall a single scene he’d seen with her in it. “Traditional film industry is over now anyway,” she said, brushing off his questions. Now she was pivoting her career to Livestreaming, which she assured him had more viewers and generated more capital than the entire mainland and Hong Kong film industries combined.
“I don’t need to wait around for some director to write me into their dumb script,” she said, “I am presenting a version of myself that is entertaining by being genuine and intimate. I have all the power, you know? What I am making is new art.”
Judging from her cultural references, they were probably around the same age. Objectively speaking, she was an attractive woman, probably in her late twenties, but in the film industry, at her age she was probably considered some kind of leftover, which couldn’t quite explain the hat but did make him feel a tinge of sympathy for her.
When they finally got to his place, a converted furniture store five long blocks away from the Nassau Avenue stop that he’d shared with half a dozen roommates from Craigslist, he handed her the key to his room and gave her the instructions for getting on the Internet. “Nice meetin’ ya,” he said. “Good luck with everything. Let’s keep in touch. Just leave the key in the room when you head out.”
Yang was already late for work. One of his roommates inside would have to get her luggage up and down the stairs. She should be able to explain the situation to them. He didn’t have time to think what else to do with her.
Work that day turned into a three-day shoot. He was hired to photograph the look book for a wedding dress manufacturer. Not the sort of thing he would ever have taken on in Beijing, but without a work permit, he took any job in New York as long as he was paid under the table, in cash.
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