Kindhearted Mrs. Yan, who had learned to endure hardship with quiet strength, naturally did not go home and organize a family lottery to decide whom they should drown.
She had simply taken one look at the stray boy whose face was caked with dirt and red, chapped skin, who was thin as kindling yet at least had strong bones, four sound limbs, and enough fight left in him to wrestle dogs for food, and decided she wanted him. Perhaps she was unconsciously trying to compensate for having a disabled child of her own by bringing someone whole into the family; perhaps she needed a healthy pair of hands and feet who could grow into a strong laborer; or perhaps she had already foreseen how difficult old age would be for poor villagers, how crushing the burden would become when medical and social insurance could not be relied upon, and thought ahead to having one able-bodied son who could support her in old age and see her to her grave.
Yan Xiaodao, an orphan of unknown origin with neither father nor mother, became a new member of a family that was already ruined and desperately poor. There was not even another bed to give him. At every meal, all they could spare were some sweet potatoes and potatoes. There was never enough rice or flour, while vegetables and meat were basically reserved for the bedridden sick. Mrs. Yan and her second husband slept on the big bed with their disabled son, who could not care for himself. On the other side of a curtain lay her equally helpless first husband, whom Mrs. Yan frequently had to wake during the night to help eat, drink, relieve himself, and manage every other bodily need. Yan Xiaodao slept beside the door, while outside the crumbling wall the family’s two pigs rooted around. He became the older brother and had to help care for a younger brother only one year below him in age.
Bringing her sick former husband with her when she remarried had been one of Mrs. Yan’s conditions for accepting her second husband. In northern rural areas where some men had great difficulty finding wives, arrangements like this were not particularly uncommon. The older a man became and the poorer his circumstances, the fewer choices there were. Some women even brought their former parents-in-law into the new household, worsening lives that were already so impoverished there was barely anything left to stretch.
But Mrs. Yan could not accept the supposedly well-meaning suggestions people whispered around her, telling her simply to abandon her former husband by the roadside and let him die. Her conscience would not allow it.
The one comfort was that the Yan Xiaodao they had picked up really was hardworking and capable. He always did more work than talking, never wasted words, never ate for free, and never allowed the people raising him to feel they had wasted the food they gave him. He had been like that since childhood.
Once his hair had been cut and he had scrubbed himself clean in the pond, Yan Xiaodao turned out to be an unexpectedly handsome boy, with striking, masculine features that made the Yan family stare for a moment and feel as though they had gotten lucky. Mrs. Yan felt comforted and even began imagining that once this diligent, able-bodied eldest son grew up looking respectable and learned a trade, they could find him a capable, virtuous wife and perhaps the household would finally have something to hope for.
The family’s best period lasted only a year or two. Mrs. Yan’s husband regularly took temporary jobs in nearby villages and towns, going wherever extra hands were urgently needed. The pay was comparatively high, and he could still return home often enough to help with the family.
Then, in the third year, one blow after another struck the household. Mrs. Yan’s husband was called by a fellow villager to take a temporary job on a water-tower project contracted by a well-known provincial construction company. With the Spring Festival approaching, the schedule had been compressed to rush the project to completion, and workplace safety measures became little more than decoration. If nothing happened, they saved time and money. Once something did happen, everything was over. The scaffolding collapsed from the top of the water tower, and in an instant the hopes of more than a dozen impoverished families waiting for their loved ones to come home with their wages before the holiday shattered into a nightmare….
Crueler than the accident itself was the fact that Mrs. Yan’s husband did not die. He was crushed into a state of near-total unconsciousness instead.
The workers who died outright were given priority for compensation. Before those left half alive could receive what they were owed, the person responsible for the construction company fled. The local officials who bore joint responsibility for safety supervision were temporarily removed from their posts, while the wealthy parent company, deeply entrenched and untouchable, simply abandoned the unfinished project and walked away. Ordinary families already ground into the mud by poverty had neither the standing nor the ability to fight a lawsuit against them.
Mrs. Yan’s husband lingered in bed for two years, passing in and out of major hospitals. His treatment consumed every cent the family possessed and left them owing hundreds of thousands. They borrowed until relatives and neighbors near and far no longer wanted to see this unlucky family approaching their doors. Until the day he died in despair, the man could never understand why his luck had been so bad back then—why the collapse had not simply killed him outright so he could at least have left the woman and children some money.
What remained for Mrs. Yan now were invalids and a mountain of debt. The only person she had left to depend on was Xiaodao.
Yan Xiaodao used the same broken flatbed cart that had once carried him home to haul the man’s body up the mountain for burial.
Then came wave after wave of debt collectors, including powerful rural loan-sharking gangs. Their usual business model was to con villagers into pooling money through fraudulent investment schemes, then lend that same money back out at extortionate rates—creating wealth from nothing and ruining two sets of people with a single scam.
The Yan family frequently woke at dawn to find an axe embedded in their front door. Their door was so rotten by then that it could barely hold the axe anymore.
Yan Xiaodao took every kind of job he could find in the surrounding villages and earned money to pay down the family’s debts. There hardly seemed to be any kind of work anyone could name that he had not done.
It was around that time that Yan Xiaodao met the man who would become his godfather: a small-time vendor selling shoes and women’s clothing from a stall in the town’s agricultural market. Qi Baoshan was only in his early twenties back then, fair-skinned and pleasant-looking, loyal by nature and strangely compatible with Yan Xiaodao. He began calling him “godson” of his own accord, bought him steamed buns whenever they met, and slipped him a little spending money. Unfortunately, this godfather was not making much from his own stall either. Every night he carried his entire livelihood from one street market to another while street thugs, local bullies, and urban-management officers chased him around. He too was a penniless bachelor with nothing to his name.
Back when Master Qi was still young enough to be more like Uncle Qi, he liked teasing him half seriously. “Sonny, know why I picked you and nobody else? I once met a fortune-teller here in Huima Town who was frighteningly accurate. He read my fortune! Said I’d meet an orphan whose parents and origins were unknown, and that kid would be the lucky star and great benefactor who’d bring me promotion, wealth, and one hell of a run of fortune in this lifetime…. Sonny, you believe that?”
Eventually the loan sharks came smashing their way to the house. There was not a single thing of value left for them to take, so they demanded that the family provide a laborer to work off the debt in the coal mines. It was also a very convenient way for the mine owners nearby to coerce and exploit cheap labor.
Mrs. Yan said, “My husband’s dead. My previous husband is still paralyzed in the bed inside. There’s nobody else in this house.”
The men pointed at ten-year-old Yan Xiaodao feeding the pigs outside. “Bullshit! Isn’t there obviously still a man right there?”
And so they took Yan Xiaodao to the coal mine. Mrs. Yan had no strength to stop them and no means to get her son back. She collapsed to the ground and wept.
Or perhaps it was not entirely accurate to say Yan Xiaodao had been forcibly kidnapped. He told his foster mother that he would only be going underground to mine coal for a few years before coming back. It was nothing serious. He could pay off the family’s debts.
Over those years, Mrs. Yan saw her son only a handful of times. Every meeting felt like waiting in hope until the final instant before despair. People quietly died beneath those coal hills all the time, their deaths concealed whenever possible. Every few months some kind of accident would happen, and several suffocated, blackened bodies would be dragged out of the shafts. The mine would hand over a little funeral money and cheaply dispose of lives that had always been considered worthless. No one pitied them. Mrs. Yan carried the constant premonition that one morning she would receive news from the mine that would crush the last remaining hope in her life.
But before bad news about Xiaodao ever arrived, the burdens remaining at home let go first.
On a rainy night, Mrs. Yan’s former husband managed to reach a strip of cloth and a sock hanging from the curtain. He tied them together into a loop and spent half the night inching himself into position until he finally managed to slip his head into the makeshift noose at the head of the bed. Lying there with his neck twisted awkwardly, he struggled until he hanged himself. Several days before he died, the man had left Mrs. Yan something almost like a final message: “Haven’t been able to take care of you properly for so many years. I want to do one good thing for you.”
Yan Xiaodao took half a day’s leave from the mine, brought money home for his foster mother to put toward the debts, then used the flatbed cart to haul her first husband up the mountain. He buried him beside the husband who had come after him. The two men had lived humbly enough while alive; they might as well keep each other company in death.
Several months later, the other burden in the household let go as well, perhaps unable to endure a human life without joy or dignity. Yan Xiaodao’s disabled, intellectually impaired younger brother was home alone one day and began playing with matches. He set some old cotton batting alight. The bed caught fire, then the house, then the pigsty. The flames easily leveled the poor family’s makeshift shelter. For the first time in his life, that foolish younger brother seemed to take control of his own fate. He died in the fire.
Yan Xiaodao hauled his younger brother up the mountain too and buried him beside the two men.
On the ridge after a snowfall, mother and son looked at those three small burial mounds with faces hard as stone. Neither could shed a tear.
Mrs. Yan quietly asked Xiaodao, “Do you think the two of us have lives that are too hard? Did we bring bad luck on the whole family…?”
And so the mother and son with lives harder than anyone else’s were finally left with only each other in this world.
Yan Xiaodao had never understood what tears were supposed to accomplish, and he did not believe in fate. No disaster in life could be solved by crying for sympathy, sighing in sorrow, or turning inward to pity yourself. He would simply have to be harder than his fate. All his life, he had taken fate into his mouth and chewed it until it cracked between his teeth.
…
…
The man telling the story remained calm and occasionally even faintly humorous. Yan Xiaodao rested his head on his left arm and gazed at the stars, quietly pleased that there was finally someone beside him whom he actually wanted to tell these stories he had never cared to share with outsiders. So many years had passed that he could speak about them cheerfully and peacefully, almost as though they were stories about somebody else.
The man listening to the story, however, was anything but calm. Ling He’s face shifted in and out of the starlight. At first there was focused sympathy and pain, then emotion and admiration. But at some turning point in the story, the weather changed violently across his expression. His face abruptly darkened, sinking into gloom, and his entire body seemed to go cold.
Only then did Yan Xiaodao notice that the bed had suddenly gotten chilly. It had been warm a moment ago. Had Ling He’s entire body changed seasons without warning? The Chinese toon trees had already sent out new shoots, the hillsides were about to burst into rapeseed flowers, and Mr. Ling had somehow traveled from spring straight back into winter again?
Yan Xiaodao reached across and squeezed Ling He gently through the quilt. “Cold?
“Need another blanket?
“Coming down with something?”
When dealing with someone he respected and cherished, Yan Xiaodao was willing to obey the rule that emotion should stop where propriety began. Even when he touched Ling He, he did it through the blanket. When he wanted to check the man’s forehead for fever, he lightly used the back of his hand instead, thinking the skin there was finer than his palm and would not feel so rough.
“I understand now.” Beneath the scattered starlight, Ling He’s lips lifted in a smile full of sadness. “Then your godfather, Qi Baoshan, came back. He saved your fate. He paid off the debt you and your mother could never have cleared even if you’d sold your bodies and your lives to it forever. He gave you everything you have today.”
“…Yes.” Yan Xiaodao often found himself admiring Ling He’s mind. Talking openly with someone like this was remarkably comfortable. Ling He understood people, could infer ten things from one, and could hear the beginning of a story and immediately guess the ending of the entire drama. He had been born to direct the great theater of human life. Yan Xiaodao hated talking to idiots who never caught on and had to be walked through everything word by tedious word.
Ling He released a long breath, his face cold and clear. “Please continue, Mr. Yan. I’d like to hear exactly how Master Qi performed his heroic act of chivalry in front of you back then.”
The following spring, on an utterly ordinary day when nobody had expected anything, Qi Baoshan suddenly returned home from the south.
When he had left, there had not even been two hundred yuan in his pocket. He had supposedly gone south to “jump into the sea” and make money in business. When he returned, he wore a beautifully made pale-gray cashmere coat and carried himself with commanding confidence. Qi Baoshan arrived in a black luxury sedan with a driver and bodyguards, several more vehicles following behind, and drove directly into the village looking for someone.
The person Qi Baoshan was looking for was Yan Xiaodao. When he discovered that the original Yan home had been reduced to ruins, he immediately found Mrs. Yan living temporarily in a neighbor’s broken-tiled house.
Once Qi Baoshan learned where Yan Xiaodao was, he drove straight to the coal mine without pausing.
According to Mrs. Yan afterward, the godfather Xiaodao had recognized back then truly remembered old affection and truly possessed loyalty. Qi Baoshan’s luxury car climbed all the way to the foot of the coal hill. He stepped out and ordered his bodyguards to drag over whoever was responsible for the mining area, then asked directly, “Where’s that boy from the Yan family? Bring him out. I’m taking him with me right now.”
From the style and bearing of the man standing before him, the mine owner could no longer see any trace of the shoe peddler who had once run a street stall. Even so, he still protested that the miners here were bound by contracts. You could not simply show up and take one away. The boy had not finished working off what he owed.
Qi Baoshan cursed him. “Contract my fucking ass. You lock a twelve- or thirteen-year-old kid in this death pit and use him as forced labor. One day you’ll work him to death and dump him into an abandoned shaft, seal the shaft, and keep using every one who survives until they die too! You think I don’t know what kind of business you wolves run, eating people and drinking their blood without blinking? You think I don’t know how mine owners like you make your money?”
The small-time owner could tell this man had become somebody he should not offend and could only say that the Yan family owed loan-shark money. They could not simply walk away while the debt remained unpaid.
Qi Baoshan asked, “How much?”
The owner held up five fingers.
Qi Baoshan asked, “Fifty thousand?”
The owner sneered. “Five hundred thousand! Compound interest on a loan shark’s debt. That’s the price. Their family could spend a lifetime paying it.”
Qi Baoshan glanced behind him. One of his bodyguards went to the trunk and hauled out a red-and-blue woven sack. Bundle after bundle of cash was counted out until five hundred thousand yuan lay in a great pile across the coal-black, oily ground.
Only then did the mine owner realize something was wrong. Five hundred thousand in cash was no trivial amount. He hurriedly ordered his men to find Yan Xiaodao—where was he, which shaft was he in, hurry up and bring that kid to the surface.
Qi Baoshan rolled two polished walnuts slowly in one hand and said without hurry, “If my godson comes out with both arms, both legs, and his life intact, I take him away and this sack of money is yours. If he’s missing anything—or if he’s dead, heh…. Let’s count how many individual bills make up this five hundred thousand. I’ll carve the lot of you into exactly that many slices of meat.”
When Yan Xiaodao finally came up from underground, his black hair had been cut into short spikes. Coal dust and grease had soaked so deeply into his face that he was barely recognizable, yet the poor, battered shell could not hide the heroic line of his brows or the open clarity in his eyes. Even as a child, there had been something hard in his bones that refused to bow or concede defeat, together with a natural bearing that seemed to belong to someone far above his circumstances. Qi Baoshan liked Xiaodao from the beginning. He admired him from the bone outward and took pride in his own eye for people. If a person was worthy of respect, why should it matter that he was still only a yellow-toothed child barely into adolescence?
…
Ling He smiled then. “What a righteous, loyal Master Qi. His affection for you is deeper than the sea, and the debt of gratitude you owe him weighs more than a mountain! Mr. Yan, in the future you absolutely must never wrong him. You must never betray him.”
There was something bleak and almost tragic in that smile, as though Ling He’s gaze had already traveled through spring after spring and summer after summer into the latter half of their lives. As he spoke, his own chest ached, worse than if an entire syringe of nicotine had been emptied into him. His whole body sank into a cold tide of disappointment.
He had let himself go too far. Only after allowing his heart to move could he hurt like this. Today, he finally knew he was finished.
All the brief, beautiful closeness they had shared before this night, all those secret traces of sweetness neither dared acknowledge, now seemed like nothing more than a dream left behind in the mortal world. Both of them had fallen back into the realm of ghosts again. These had always been two parallel worlds. Now the dream had ended.
Yan Xiaodao could also tell that Ling He’s mood was wrong.
Every time their conversation touched Master Qi, Ling He’s expression changed. That was perfectly natural and unavoidable. After all, their two families supposedly had “a blood feud.”
Yan Xiaodao deliberately tried to soften the atmosphere and laughed at himself. “Maybe my life just wasn’t meant to end there. Or maybe Master Qi misjudged me and happened to take a liking to me. He was simply superstitious enough to believe that fortune-teller in town, who told him I’d turn his fate around and bring him prosperity. The Daoist passed away a couple of years ago. Master Qi specially brought me back to pay respects. He set up an altar, had scriptures chanted, and even arranged a soul-summoning rite for him. Went to quite a bit of trouble.”
Ling He smiled as well. “Master Qi is loyal and sentimental, with all the bearing of a man of the jianghu. I didn’t understand him before. I underestimated him badly.”
The two of them seemed to recover their easy, conversational mood. Ling He looked at Yan Xiaodao. “Mr. Yan, I forgot to ask. How venerable are you this year?”
Yan Xiaodao said, “Twenty-eight.”
He naturally followed up, probing in return. “You?”
Ling He rolled his beautiful eyes. “Already told you. I’m taking the college entrance exam this year.”
Yan Xiaodao’s laughter rumbled beneath the quilt. “You ever take the college entrance exam, foreign student? You sat the American imperialist version, didn’t you?”
Ling He’s laugh carried his innate pride and self-confidence. Then he abruptly changed the subject again. “So, Mr. Yan, your godfather went south around fifteen years ago, suddenly made a fortune, came home carrying bags of cash, and from then on enjoyed one prosperous year after another until he became one of the richest men in the region. He started from nothing. What kind of business did he do back then that made him rich overnight?”
Yan Xiaodao paused slightly, then answered honestly. “I was young. I heard that laws and regulations weren’t complete in those days and he traded smuggled clothes, appliances, motorcycles, things like that. It’s been so many years that I never asked for details.”
Ling He let the question go with surprising ease. He smiled faintly, though the motion made the quilt over both of them tremble.
Suddenly Ling He rolled his entire body toward Yan Xiaodao and came close enough that the tips of their noses nearly touched. Opening his long, elegant eyes wide, he murmured something like a secret shared between pillows. “What a legendary life. Every rise and fall, every joy and sorrow in it is impossible to reproduce. Think about it carefully, Mr. Yan. Which sounds more reasonable to you—that a lowly shoe peddler suddenly became rich overnight more than ten years ago, or that my wealthy Ling family saw its great house collapse in a single cold gust, going from chests full of gold and silver to prisoners and beggars anyone on the street could slander?”
Yan Xiaodao immediately fell silent, unable to answer.
If he was being truthful, neither made much sense. Master Qi was undoubtedly hiding something, and there could easily have been another story behind the conflict with the Ling family. But those questions belonged to a time before Yan Xiaodao was old enough, experienced enough, or important enough to know anything. What right did he have to make careless claims now?
He looked into Ling He’s eloquent phoenix eyes.
Ling He’s expression softened. He did not want to force Yan with sharp words, so he simply pulled the quilt over himself. “Mr. Yan, go to sleep.”
Among the shallow sounds of breathing, Yan Xiaodao vaguely heard someone snuffle beneath the quilt and mutter, “You’re way too old, Mr. Yan. I’m twenty-three. Go be jealous….”
…
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