“We were never close,” I sighed. “He was always angry about something, and when I was younger I hated it when he was at home. But just now when I was there, the house felt so empty without him.” I held Lan Yu tighter as I spoke, but gazed straight ahead as if I’d been talking to myself.
“From the time I was little, I never liked him. He was always yelling at me, and he used to beat the crap out of me too. He did get better as I grew older. There even came a point when he would try to talk to me about things going on in my life or in his life, or about current affairs or hobbies or whatever. But by then I didn’t even want to be close to him. I remember the year I got into Nanda, he was so happy that he got drunk and went door to door throughout the neighborhood. He wanted to tell everyone that, unlike all his friends’ sons, his son got into university by passing the exams, not by relying on connections.” I took a big swig of beer. “You know, I always hated the way he treated me, but now that I think about it, the old man actually helped me quite a bit when my career was getting off the ground.”
I pushed my head forward and looked down at Lan Yu, who lay quietly against my chest. His eyes were open and he was listening carefully. He was always a good listener.
“Just before he died,” I continued, “he opened his eyes and looked around at everyone sitting in the room. He knew he was about to die, I could just tell. Then, right before he closed his eyes for the very last time, he looked me straight in the eye. I was the last person he saw in this lifetime. I could tell he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t speak. I had the feeling he wanted to tell me that he really—that he really cared about me, you know? I thought maybe he wanted to tell me something, that he thought—that he thought I had turned out okay . . .”
My eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t continue. A long period of silence passed before Lan Yu spoke.
“It seems like he was in a good place when he passed,” he said. “Our Ma was there, you were there, your two little sisters. You were all there, right by his side. I bet he felt really happy.” His voice got quieter. “My mom was alone when she died. Just her and a bottle of sleeping pills.”
In a year and a half, this was only the second time he had mentioned his mother’s death. I had no idea she had killed herself. Now I knew why he never talked about it.
Lan Yu suddenly unlocked himself from my embrace and sat up on the couch. He turned to face me. The way he looked at me . . . I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. Sad, hurt, but there was also something cold and detached about the way his eyes burned into me. There was something he didn’t want to share with me, or didn’t know how to. “My family—” he started to say, then hesitated.
“Yeah?”
“Well, for as long as I can remember, we always lived in the northern part of Xinjiang, near Ürümqi, but even farther, near the border with the Soviet Union. But my parents weren’t from there originally. My mom was born in the South, in Hangzhou, and my dad is from the Northeast, from Harbin.”
I looked at Lan Yu’s thick hands and fingers, which he rubbed together anxiously as he spoke. Now I knew why he had the strong and sturdy physique of the North, but the delicate countenance of the South.
“My parents were both professors at the local polytechnic university,” he continued. “When I was a kid growing up, everything was perfect. I always had so much fun with my dad. He used to take me and my mom out all the time; he was always trying to find fun things for me to do. I had this stamp collection he helped me with. He taught me how to play the Chinese fiddle and a few other instruments. He would help me with my math homework—everything. By the time I finished primary school I had an eighth grade education. It was all from him.
“My mom didn’t talk much, but I remember she was so sweet and loving to everyone she met. She and my dad never fought. The only time I remember them ever getting in an argument was this one time when my mom accused him of being sexist because he wouldn’t help with the housework. But even then she was laughing about it the whole time. I remember her walking out of my dad’s study, yelling, ‘Fine! Don’t help! But I’m not talking to you anymore!’ She was annoyed, but she had this big smile on her face. And that was the end of the argument.” He gulped down a mouthful of beer.
“When economic reform started in the late seventies, my father was among the first group of intellectuals to dive into the business world. He did something with some kind of industrial ventilator—invented it or developed it or something—then got hired by a township enterprise to work on it. My mom continued teaching at the university, so we were still able to live in the campus apartment provided by the work unit, but my dad left campus every day to go to work. His job paid well and before long we were the most prosperous family on campus. We were the first to get a refrigerator, a color TV, stuff like that. I remember the neighbors coming over to look at my dad’s electric typewriter. Everyone on campus admired us.”
I had the vague feeling I knew where Lan Yu’s story was going. Fortunes were lost as quickly as they were made in those days.
“My father was never like you businessmen.” He looked at me with sudden reproach and I realized how much he had drunk. “He wasn’t the kind of guy who had lots of indiscriminate affairs, but it didn’t matter. It only took one affair for him to decide he loved the other woman more than my mom, and when my mom died, he remarried almost immediately.” Lan Yu paused, twisting his shirttail between his fingers and staring into space.
“I had seen that woman before,” he continued. “People always talked about her like she was some kind of beauty queen. But to me she was the ugliest woman in the world. I was only a kid and didn’t fully understand what was going on, but . . .” He interrupted his own sentence by pouring the contents of his glass down his throat and immediately poured himself another drink. “But it was the affair that caused my mom’s stroke. She was so young! I remember the doctor saying it was a tragedy, that forty was far too young for something like that to happen. I remember going to the hospital every day after school to visit her. But my dad hardly went at all.”
I didn’t want Lan Yu to get too drunk, but I didn’t want to interrupt him. He had never told me this much about himself. It was a rare opportunity to find out more about this person who was such a big part of my life, but about whom I knew so little.
“Actually,” he continued, “she was fine when she got out of the hospital. Well, sort of fine. The stroke left her partially paralyzed, but at least she was alive.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Two days later she killed herself, in part because of the paralysis, but mainly because of the affair. Before she did it, she wrote a long letter to me and my dad. She said she hated money—that money can make people cold, selfish, unfeeling. She said the truly precious things in life weren’t silver or gold, but passion, conviction. She was the kind of person who would rather die in glory than live in dishonor. That’s what she said at the end of the letter: I’d rather be a shattered vessel of jade than an intact but worthless piece of clay.”
Lan Yu buried his face in his hands and took a deep breath. I could see it was getting hard for him to tell the story. I was feeling it too; my own heart weighed heavily in my chest. I wanted to touch him, to find some way of comforting him, but he gave me no indication that he wanted me to, so I remained on my side of the couch, staring at him quietly and wondering what he was going to say next.
“She wanted me to study hard.” His speech was slurred at that point. “She wanted me to get out, to get away from that tiny campus and into a good university. She wanted me to stand on my own two feet. She wanted me to be an honorable man with”—he hit his knee with a clenched fist—“an honorable man with an invincible spirit. A man who would inspire awe in everyone he meets. That’s what she wanted me to be!”
Lan Yu suddenly fell silent and looked up at me with eyes that were, by now, completely red and swollen. For a moment I thought I saw hatred in them.
“I can’t do it!” he continued. “I can’t be the man she want
ed me to be!” He lowered his head and stared at the floor, seemingly dissociated from the conversation. He held his glass against his knee at an angle that caused beer to splash to the floor. With his other hand he fiddled with a bottle cap.
“She never would have guessed that less than a year after she died, my dad’s entire arrangement with the township enterprise would collapse.” He sat up straight and looked at me again, but more lucidly this time, as if trying to sober up. “When he lost his job he lost everything, even his own savings. But by then he was already married again, and he and that woman had a daughter, so he had to make a living somehow. He had no choice but to go back to teaching. Everywhere he went people laughed at him, saying first he drove his wife to the grave, then he became a pauper. I always felt they were laughing at me, too.
“That woman, his new wife, treated me decently for a while, but then she changed. When I was in my third year of high school, we had to do these simulated exams to prepare for the National College Entrance Examination. Each student was supposed to give the teacher a few yuan for the printing cost, but that woman argued with my father about it. She said they didn’t have the money. It was three yuan! By the time I got into Huada the following year, she could barely stand the sight of me. She said the family was facing hardship and she and my dad’s salaries were barely enough to put food on the table. My dad just stayed out of it. All he wanted to do was play chess.” Lan Yu paused and looked at me with eyes that were glazed over. “By the time I left he was an amateur level six.” He reached for the half-empty bottle at the foot of the couch.
“Hey you,” I said tenderly. “Slow down with the drinking.”
Lan Yu ignored me. “So when I got accepted to Huada, I borrowed a hundred yuan from one of my uncles in Hangzhou. Then I came to Beijing and met Liu Zheng. Then I met you.”
Lan Yu looked up at me with an abject smile. It didn’t last long. “Fuck!” he shouted, slamming his glass on the table. “Why do I have such fucking bad luck all the time?” The explosion came out of nowhere. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the bad luck he was referring to was his relationship with his father or with me.
“Stop drinking. You’re going to get drunk.” I took the glass away from him.
“I’m fine. I’m not drunk,” he said, standing up and stumbling to the bathroom. He leaned against the wall for support as he walked.
A few minutes later he came out of the bathroom and collapsed back onto the couch. He yawned loudly while reaching down to the floor to pick up his glass. He must have forgotten he was looking for it, though, because he immediately sunk back into the couch empty-handed and gazed at me with a dreamy look. “Wanna fool around?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m not in the mood.”
He closed his eyes as if he hadn’t heard what I said. “No one’s ever been this good to me since my mom died,” he muttered.
If someone had told me just a few months earlier how deeply those words would impact me, I wouldn’t have believed them. He was talking about me!
Bright morning sunshine penetrated the window curtain and shot into the bedroom. It was well past eleven the following morning. We’d just woken up.
“My head . . .,” Lan Yu groaned, clutching his skull. “I drank so much last night.”
“You seemed okay to me,” I lied.
“I picked up all that beer for you, but I was the one who drank it all,” he said sheepishly, still rubbing his head. On the nightstand a steamed bun filled with red-bean paste sat, half-eaten, on a plate of crumbs. I had bought a dozen or so at the bakery in my mother’s neighborhood. Lan Yu loved the way they made them. He had wanted one before bed, but passed out before finishing it.
I turned onto my side and looked at him, examining every inch of his face. His thick, dark eyebrows; his deep, pitch-black eyes; his long, sexy eyelashes. A speck of sleep was caked in the corner of one eye. I pretended it was a crumb from the steamed bun.
Lan Yu didn’t fail to notice the sweet and loving look I was giving him. He turned onto his side to face me and our fingers intertwined in the narrow space between us. “What?” he asked, kissing my hand.
“Nothing. Just looking at you.” I smiled.
“You’re nuts!” he laughed, sounding like a true Beijinger.
“Yes, I’m nuts. I am truly nuts!” I pulled him close to me and kissed him gently on the lips. He smiled and pushed his nose against mine.
If there was one thing about Lan Yu, it’s that he never failed to surprise me. Just as I was about to scoop him up and bombard his neck with kisses, he pulled away from me, shimmied down my body, and, without any warning whatsoever, took my flaccid dick in his mouth. It didn’t take me long to get hard. Looking down, I took him in with my eyes, stroking his face and enjoying the dizzying feeling of his tongue rolling around under my foreskin. Unexpectedly, he pulled me out of his mouth and looked up at me with a peculiar expression.
“Handong . . .,” he said quietly.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Lan Yu had seen something strange in my eyes.
“Keep going, baby,” I said nonchalantly, as I sunk the back of my head deeper into the pillow. I closed my eyes and a battle raged inside. I wanted to show him what I felt, but I myself wasn’t sure what it was.
It was rare for me to orally pleasure Lan Yu. But at that moment I wanted to, needed to. Perhaps it was the only way I knew how to express my feelings at the time. Perhaps it was because of the way he had exposed so much of himself the night before. Whatever the reason, I pulled him upward until his waist hovered above me, then I guided him into my mouth. I pulled him out just before he came and his cum splashed across my lips.
After he came, Lan Yu began traveling back down to the lower half of my body. He wanted to suck me again, but I stopped him, pulling him back up to kiss my cum-covered lips. I looked into his eyes and saw a vague air of guilt, probably because I hadn’t climaxed yet. He changed positions once more, this time getting on his knees. He was trying to tell me I could fuck him.
“I don’t have to come,” I whispered into his ear. “I just want to hold you.”
It was rare for me not to feel like having sex. But I couldn’t stop thinking about everything he’d told me the night before. Not just the stuff about his family. He also said he was afraid he was turning into a degenerate. That he couldn’t change. He said he was terrified that his professors and classmates would be able to see who or what he really was, that it was only with me that he could truly be himself. He said there was nothing that could save him now, nothing that could make him return to his old life.
Lan Yu couldn’t blame me for what was happening. If it was I who had dragged him into the water to begin with, now it was he who was pulling me in deeper. I looked down at his angelic face as he fell asleep in my arms. Pull me in! I thought. I’m the one who started this; this is what I get.
But then I thought about my dead father and grieving mother. How could I be their son and be with Lan Yu at the same time?
Ten
By May that year, social tensions were escalating. The democracy movement swept through universities and surrounding neighborhoods like wildfire, not only in Beijing, but in hundreds of cities across China. At the height of the protests, students and workers were erecting barricades to hold back People’s Liberation Army troops. The army circled the city to beat back demonstrators, who had come together to express their dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reform and quickly numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
On April 27 Lan Yu abruptly announced that he and his classmates were planning a student walkout. On May 13 he informed me that there was going to be a hunger strike. He bubbled over with excitement as he spoke.
“Are you guys out of your fucking minds?” I asked, turning a corner near Xuanwumen Station. We were in the car on the way to dinner. “Just not happy with things being okay the way they are, huh?” I looked to my right and saw Lan Yu in the passenger seat, scowling at me like a kid who’d just be
en scolded by his dad.
“You used to be a student, Handong. You of all people should appreciate the urgency of this!”
I couldn’t believe his naïveté. “Listen,” I said, suppressing my laughter. “If students are as concerned about the nation as they say they are, they should just keep studying. And us businessmen? We should just keep doing business.” I meant this and he knew it, but I deliberately adopted a blithe tone because I didn’t feel like getting into an argument.
Lan Yu raised his hands in exasperation. “People like you are parasites of the nation!” he shouted. He meant this, too, but there was also the faintest hint of irony in his voice, as if he knew he was parodying an outdated revolutionary language. Like me, he was adept at saying what he meant while softening the delivery. That’s how we avoided fights.
“Well, fortunately for me,” I replied, “this isn’t the Cultural Revolution. If we were back in those days, you’d probably ferret me out and parade me through the streets for a public denunciation. Sorry, mister, this is 1989, not 69!” I laughed.
He smiled and kissed my right hand, which he’d been holding in his lap since the beginning of the conversation. My eyes were glued to the road in front of me, but I could feel his gaze on my face.
“Listen,” he continued, suddenly sounding serious, “if this movement continues to grow, could it have a negative impact on you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, it could,” I clowned, unwilling to dignify his sober question with a sober answer. “If my company collapses because of this, I could end up a street beggar. I don’t have any other skills!”
“Don’t worry,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “If anything happens to you, I’ll take care of you!” The idea of taking care of me seemed to please him immensely.
“Hell no,” I said. “I’d rather be a beggar!”
Up until that point, Lan Yu had been a good sport and had readily gone along with my playful banter. But now he stared out the window, a worried look on his face.
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