Pei Yan actually was not drunk. He knew his own tolerance, and nobody had ever managed to get him drunk at the table.
He had not gone short on meat either. Zhuang Xiao might have stolen all the stir-fried pork, but Pei Yan had eaten plenty of chopped-pepper fish head and crispy duck. He was quick at stripping meat from bone. When had Master Pei ever let himself come out at a loss?
They drank until everyone was thoroughly enjoying themselves. One by one, the brothers’ eyes turned red, they wiped their mouths, slung arms over each other’s shoulders, and started spouting nonsense. Even Sa Risheng had gotten talkative. That was about enough chaos for one night.
While drinking, Sa Risheng suddenly remarked, “Back where I’m from, stuff that tastes like this is called horse piss.”
Pei Yan said, “Fuck, how many horses’ worth of piss have the two of us drunk tonight? Why don’t you estimate it for us?”
Sa Risheng actually laughed. He was no longer acting so aloof…
Everyone at the table was carrying on as though they had been poisoned by the alcohol, relaxing enough for their real selves to come out.
The only one who could keep completely steady was the man who had not touched a drop.
Zhuang Xiao probably was not the sort to hook arms with someone and trade dirty jokes and drunken nonsense. Pei Yan figured that even if a man like Zhuang Xiao did drink, he could get thoroughly drunk and still remain steady on his feet without babbling.
Zhuang Xiao took several calls during dinner. A few sounded like women.
Pei Yan sat beside him and kept eating, and kept eating… Who were they? He could not make it out.
Then another call came in, this time a man’s irritable voice. The volume suddenly shot up. Zhuang Xiao abruptly left the table and went elsewhere to take it.
Pei Yan truly was not drunk. He still had plenty of capacity left and was perfectly clearheaded.
He got up and went to the restroom alone, accurately locating the men’s room tucked into the deepest corner of the restaurant, and relieved himself.
When he came out, someone was blocking the corridor.
At the back of the restaurant, beside the kitchen and rear door, the floor was greasy and almost black. There was no point being picky about hygiene in a Chinatown Chinese restaurant. A narrow passage led from the restroom toward the bright, noisy dining hall out front.
Zhuang Xiao sat on a chair in that passage, talking over video call. His two legs were stretched straight out, completely blocking the narrow way like a barricade. Pei Yan immediately turned around and pretended nothing was happening, studying several very ugly decorative paintings on the wall to kill time.
He did not want to interrupt Zhuang Xiao’s private call. He genuinely was not trying to eavesdrop.
His peripheral vision kept spilling toward Zhuang Xiao’s shoulders and face anyway. In the dim light, Zhuang Xiao’s profile was extremely handsome, his nose straight, his braid meticulously combed. A gloomy sheen lay beneath his eyes, as though shadow seeped out of them and spread through the entire corridor. His face seemed covered by a thin veil meant to conceal something.
“I’m already fucking like this and you still don’t give a shit about me, you heartless little bastard, I’m telling you…”
“You little shit are over there in America eating and drinking well while I’m stuck in this hellhole eating shit, and you fucking don’t care about me?!… I didn’t take your money. Everyone outside says I spend your money. Did I take your money, you tell me? I smoke one cigarette from you, drink a little of your liquor, and now I owe you for that too?!… Son of a bitch, motherfucker! You’re just as heartless as that bitch! Last time someone asked me, I told people everything. Reporters asked and I told them everything! Who the fuck knows what you’re doing hiding in America because you don’t dare come back? Kung-fu star, my ass. What decent movie have you ever made? Do you know what the words ‘kung-fu star’ meant in my day?! Making some damned kung-fu movie with foreigners, what, are you over there playing with foreign dicks? Who knows whether you’re making movies or selling your ass to some Black bastard!…”
The voice came through the video call’s speaker. The signal was bad and kept breaking up. What came after that was nearly impossible to listen to. It was too ugly.
Pei Yan wondered whether he had heard wrong. Maybe tearing his ear really had affected his hearing. Surely nobody could talk that viciously.
He turned around and considered going back into the restroom.
Maybe he could take another piss and waste some time? Except he did not have anything left to piss out.
The men’s room was tiny and there was still someone inside. The moment that man finally came out, Pei Yan hurried back in… shook himself uselessly one more time, washed his hands again, and dawdled before coming out.
He came out and Zhuang Xiao was still sitting in the corridor, perfectly motionless. Even his hair seemed not to have moved.
There was really nothing to say.
And Pei Yan thought he could guess who the man on the other end, cursing Zhuang Xiao without restraint, was. Even an outsider like him knew the gossip.
Zhuang Xiao lifted the phone and spoke quietly toward the screen. “I transferred the money to you. Did you forget the password again…? The password is the distribution number for the movie you won the award for.
“You’ve drunk your brain stupid. Your brains are turning into tofu dregs. Keep drinking and you’ll drink yourself dead.
“Do you ever think before you say this shit? Can you say less?
“What movie I’m shooting over here, who I sell it to, how I sell it, none of that has anything to do with you. Stop worrying about what I’m doing. It’s not like I need you to support me. Take care of yourself.”
*
Zhuang Xiao finally ended the call and sat leaning against the wall for a little while. His gaze landed aimlessly on the opposite wall. His face was cold.
Zhuang Xiao lifted his eyes. It was as though he had not seen Pei Yan, even though he very clearly had and there was nowhere for either of them to hide. It was as if a film covered his eyes, holding the person in front of him at a great distance. He was simply cold.
The moment Zhuang Xiao walked away, Pei Yan immediately made a call. “Uncle Wu, drive over and pick me up. I drank.”
Johnny Wu was baffled. Pei Yan had just called earlier saying someone had a car to take him back, that Mr. Zhuang himself would drive him. What had happened now? Had he drunk himself flat, or had Zhuang Xiao’s younger brothers beaten him up and ganged up on him?
The kid could really drink and was not easy to put down. It had to be that he had gotten into another conflict with the Zhuang Stunt Team and ended up bruised or bleeding again. Johnny Wu brought two assistants and rushed over like a rescue squad…
He was an extremely conscientious and responsible agent who managed his artist properly from head to toe, providing one-stop service for both career and daily life. Every time Pei Yan went out to meet friends on his own, he could expect a barrage of life-or-death reminder calls: eat less fried and fatty food, maintain your figure, take it easy with the alcohol, don’t rely on your high tolerance, absolutely do not get drunk, if you do get drunk don’t let anyone film you, never drive after drinking, after drinking absolutely do not touch girls, don’t let paparazzi photograph you with actresses, be home before midnight… In Pei Yan’s own words: Uncle, you follow me around all day nagging me. Other female agents act like their artists’ godmothers and manage every little thing, so I deliberately signed with a man, and somehow you turned into an old godfather anyway. You’re clingy as hell!
When dinner broke up, a large crowd of people with alcohol-reddened eyes stood outside the restaurant loudly saying their goodbyes.
The dark mass of heads under the streetlights drew attention, and the scale of the gathering was impressive. Anyone who did not know better might have thought some Chinese gang was holding a meeting in Chinatown and preparing to make trouble.
In front of everyone, Zhuang Xiao had returned completely to normal. Nothing had happened.
Pei Yan nodded to Zhuang Xiao and shook his hand. Nothing had happened. What could possibly have happened? He even bumped fists with Sa Risheng, whose face was red from drinking. The two of them had drunk enough horse piss for an entire cavalry formation. How could they not make peace after that?
He got into his agent’s car and rolled down the window to look outside. Zhuang Xiao opened an arm and pulled Sa Risheng close, seeming to catch him by the ear and say something. Sa Risheng’s eyes were red, and he lowered his head to whisper back to Zhuang Xiao.
Zhuang Xiao was saying to Sa Risheng, “Come on. I’ll take you home.”
Sa Risheng said, “I’ll take the bus back with them.”
Zhuang Xiao hooked an arm around Xiao-Sa’s shoulders with easy intimacy. “Ride with me. I’ll take you. I’m not responsible for the rest of them.”
*
Pei Yan rode back to the hotel in Johnny Wu’s car, listening to the forty-year-old man fuss over him the entire way. Old Pei, I told you already, drink less. You know drinking gives you headaches when you sleep, right? You start tomorrow, and if the director puts you on wires and you’re limp as a soft-legged shrimp, it’ll affect filming. Young people don’t understand maintenance, don’t know how to preserve their health. Everyone knows you have the biggest alcohol tolerance!
Pei Yan snorted, unimpressed.
Simple lecturing had no effect, so Johnny Wu unleashed a vicious move. “Too much alcohol affects that thing men do in bed, you know. It affects sexual performance. You can’t make babies, and if you do they’ll be deformed. I keep telling you to drink less.”
Pei Yan cursed. “Fuck, is that actually true?”
Johnny Wu said, “It’s true. Uncle is doing this for your own good, and I’m also afraid reporters will photograph you always…”
Pei Yan grinned lazily. “Photograph me doing what? Photograph my sexual performance failing, or photograph me being unable to make babies?”
Johnny Wu said, “Photograph you always going out drinking with people!”
Uncle Johnny’s painstaking lecture went to waste again. Teaching him never worked. Everyone knew Pei Yan did not take this kind of thing seriously.
At heart he was still a kid, raised in a wealthy family, everything smooth since childhood. He had never suffered and never encountered a real setback. Fame or no fame, being popular or not, he did not seem to care much. He was not short of money anyway. That made him different from the poor kids in the industry who fought desperately to climb upward. He carried a shining, cocky pride all his own.
On the highway, surrounded by a sea of cars and blurred lights, Pei Yan changed the subject. “I’ve seen some gossip online before. Zhuang Xiao’s father… didn’t he have some kind of scandal?”
Assistant A said, “His father? You’re asking about his father? It isn’t that he ‘had some kind of scandal.’ Doesn’t he stir up some new disaster every few days?”
Assistant B said, “You don’t get to choose your biological father.”
Assistant A said, “Without that biological father, he might not have entered this circle or become a star either. The kung-fu world cares even more about lineage and background than entertainment does. What school are you from? Which master trained you? Whose son are you?”
Assistant B said, “You think Zhuang Xiao made it because of his father? Fuck, with a father like that, if it were me I’d pay the bastard to disappear, hurry up and publish a notice cutting ties. He does nothing but drag him down.”
Assistant A said, “It’s not like he relied on his dad… but his dad was at least somebody with a name in the kung-fu world. Otherwise, could he have gotten into a club to fight? Could a Hong Kong director and producer have noticed him? Could he have won Best Actor at Cannes? He was what, ten? Eleven? The moment people heard he was Zhuang Wenlong’s son, the director’s attitude changed… Martial arts still cares about bloodline and pedigree.”
“Eleven,” Pei Yan interjected, listening intently to the gossip in the car. “What happened to Zhuang Wenlong later?”
Assistant B said, “Fighting in a club, you think that was something good? Zhuang Xiao was basically sold by his father for money back then, wasn’t he?”
Johnny Wu shook his head and clicked his tongue. “If it were my child, I could never bear to let him do that work. No amount of money.”
Assistant A answered Pei Yan. “What happened later? He became useless. Useless, supported by his son, and still causing trouble every damn day, spraying nonsense in front of reporters… Anyway, he gives away a house and his son buys him another. He visits prostitutes and refuses to pay, and his son has to cover the bill…”
Pei Yan looked out the car window. The river of lights along the road ahead swept rapidly past his eyes…
His assistant delivered the final verdict. “Leaving the country was the right move for him. There’s a lot less trouble once he’s out. Otherwise, back home it would be scandals and bloody family drama every day, piles of dirt for the tabloids.”
Pei Yan had seen some of it too and had heard plenty of old stories and jianghu gossip. Zhuang Xiao’s parents had both been stunt performers in the industry and had some reputation back then, but their marriage failed and they divorced. There was nothing especially novel about that.
A child from a divorced family with no mother was basically as good as having no father either. According to rumor, Zhuang Xiao had been sent by his father, under what amounted to a contract selling him away, to a club in the suburbs of the capital.
The movie Purple Blood was about mountain orphans recruited by a fight club and reduced to tools for the club to make money and spectacles for audiences seeking thrills. Shaky camerawork portrayed brutally realistic fights in the ring, painting a cruel aesthetic of violence across the boy’s thin body. Purple-black blood saturated the images, blooming wounds and extinguished lives forming a silent accusation.
The film won awards. That year it competed as a Hong Kong-Taiwan co-production and defeated another mainland entry in the voting. The other movie starred a veteran actor famous for playing emperors, a tragic story about an ordinary urban man in the 1970s that was also aiming squarely at Best Actor, only to lose to an eleven-year-old child.
When the veteran emperor-role specialist came out of the awards ceremony and met reporters, he made a few rather sour remarks: He was a child and I am an adult. He was not formally trained, while I graduated from a proper acting program. Put us side by side and I’m the one at a disadvantage, of course I can’t beat him. An eleven-year-old child, what does he know about acting? What is acting skill?
Did Zhuang Xiao know how to act then? What was “acting”? He did not know.
Critics in the industry said the boy had never possessed acting skill in the first place, and did not need it. He seemed simply to be playing himself. At that age, his still-young face had already lost the innocence and simplicity a child should have. When he looked up at grown men several heads taller than him, his eyes were weathered and empty, carrying an indifference born from despair, terribly cold. Every drop of blood on the boy’s body and around his eyes seemed real, as though it had flowed directly from his own heart.
So even after all these years, whenever some bloody family scandal erupted, the media would lovingly revisit Zhuang Xiao’s childhood performance in Purple Blood, cutting the old wound again and sprinkling another handful of salt into it. See? He had simply played himself. A natural performance.
The neon colors of Los Angeles Boulevard reflected across Pei Yan’s face. His expression was impossible to read.
Everyone’s experiences and circumstances over the years were so different, the sweetness and bitterness known only to themselves. Life was like a play. Sometimes acting was simply life.
*
The next day, Pei Yan joined the production.