By summer, the crew had moved to the great grasslands, camping and filming along the border between Inner and Outer Mongolia, among high mountains, meadows, and lakes.
That summer was beautiful. The grassland held scenery like paradise, along with youthful memories that belonged to every one of them.
Early one morning, the film convoy traveled along a road through the grasslands. A cluster of yurts seemed to float in the clouds above the tips of the grass… A familiar tall figure emerged from the entrance of a yurt, with his long hair loose, his robe partly open, a toothbrush between his lips, and an enamel mug in his hand.
Pei Yan spotted him from the vehicle, shouted a greeting, and waved with a smile. “Hey!”
The man at the yurt waved back from afar, his smile bright and open. The clouds were reflected in his eyes, and golden morning light lay across his shoulders. He looked wonderful.
Pei Yan turned to Zhuang Xiao. “Your Highness, our young prince has arrived.”
“I’m a fake prince,” Zhuang Xiao said, smiling. “He’s the real one.”
“Hey…” Pei Yan leaned toward Zhuang Xiao’s ear. “I think our young prince is getting more handsome every year. In my opinion… one day he’ll be better-looking than you. He won’t be able to work as your stunt double anymore.”
In your opinion? Zhuang Xiao said nothing. He reached out and caught the back of Mr. Pei’s neck, gradually tightening his grip until it closed around his throat, making Pei Yan gasp with laughter. “Ouch!” “I’m just saying it! I don’t have any ideas!” “That flavor’s too gamey for me anyway. I couldn’t stomach it!”
Xiao-Sa was still brushing his teeth, his mouth full of foam. He mumbled something, spat the toothpaste out, then scooped up a mugful of still-warm fresh milk from a bucket beside his feet and used it to rinse his mouth with gusto.
Then he fastened his robe, tidied his braid, pulled on his tall boots, and swung himself into the saddle.
The first task of the young prince’s morning was to exercise his horse.
The animal raced across the endless plain, circled a nearby flock of sheep, and ran around the lake. The young prince leaned sideways and reached down to stroke the grass, hauled himself back up, dropped beneath the horse’s belly and climbed up again, swung a leg across into a different riding position, stood upright on the back of the galloping horse to admire the distant scenery, and sat down again…
The travelers in the convoy watched from afar, openmouthed.
Pei Yan shouted, “Holy fuck! Is that kid doing his morning exercises?!”
Zhuang Xiao laughed too. “He’s doing his morning exercises.”
“I don’t think that horse can take it!” Pei Yan laughed. “It’s panting so hard he’s going to make it dizzy!”
“Know what year I first met Xiao-Sa?” Zhuang Xiao asked.
“When?” Pei Yan replied.
“Fifteen years ago. I went to the grassland with a film crew looking for locations, and happened to meet him there. He was only about ten when I met him, still just a little kid. Every morning he’d get up and exercise the family’s horses, taking a whole herd out. He’d leap from one horse’s back to another. We’d watch him put the poor horses through their paces every single morning. He was doing all this when he was ten!”
“He must have been pretty light at ten.” Pei Yan wiped his face, laughing. “I don’t think the horse can stand it now!”
But to Comrade Xiao-Sa, this was ordinary morning practice, no different from Pei Yan and Brother Xiao performing the 108 Wing Chun forms on the back deck of their home every morning. It was a perfectly ordinary morning on the grassland.
Sa Risheng exercised for a while, dismounted, and embraced the horse’s sweaty neck, rubbing against it and whispering a few secrets. Then he took the reins and strolled back slowly. The horse grazed beside the lake while the young prince squatted at the water’s edge to smoke a cigarette…
The film needed a shot in which someone mounted a horse drunk, galloped away, and fell. Both leading actors required horseback stunt doubles for long shots and shots filmed from behind. Naturally, Sa Risheng was the man for the job.
Whenever they weren’t shooting, Pei Yan would find the young prince and challenge him to horse races. Every time he lost several packs of good cigarettes.
One evening, the red sun hung low over the horizon, sinking slowly toward the grass while water vapor shimmered along the distant sky.
Holding his reins, Pei Yan went to find Sa Risheng. “Hey, come on. Want to race a few laps?”
Xiao-Sa was dozing by the lake. He opened his eyes a crack beneath the brim of his hat. “How many?”
“Three laps!” Pei Yan said.
Xiao-Sa held out a hand. “Three packs of cigarettes.”
“You’ve learned bad habits too, kid!” Pei Yan protested. “You think I’m definitely going to lose?”
“Out here, I’m the boss,” Xiao-Sa replied.
“You… fuck…” Laughing, Pei Yan aimed a sneaky kick at him. Xiao-Sa rolled away, dodged it, and swung straight into the saddle.
Before Pei Yan could catch him again, the horse was already charging right toward him. Pei Yan turned tail and fled. Sa Risheng deliberately galloped past with barely any space between them, and Pei Yan cursed in frustrated fury. The horse sped toward the setting red sun, leaving a cloud of dust behind. The grassland rang with shouts and laughter…
Several of them smoked and chatted by the lakeside as the sunset covered them once more in rosy light.
Sa Risheng wasn’t talkative among a crowd. He paid little attention to the others, staring down at his phone and apparently whispering secrets to somebody through messages. He still wasn’t good at typing, and keeping up the conversation made his hands feel terribly busy.
The signal was poor, so very little would load. He couldn’t view pictures and could only send messages intermittently.
Pei Yan suddenly leaned over, grabbed his shoulder, and shamelessly tried to look at the screen. Sa Risheng instantly covered it. “Get lost.”
“I saw it,” Pei Yan drawled. “Ba-by!”
Zhuang Xiao smiled around his cigarette but said nothing.
“Who is it?” Pei Yan persisted, unable to keep his mouth shut. “Which Baby? … Who’s whose Baby, exactly?”
Xiao-Sa didn’t answer, but a smile slowly broke through his tightly pressed lips. He still blushed when he smiled, and even his ears turned red.
“Come on. Who’s your Baby? Tell your elder honestly,” Pei Yan demanded.
“No,” Sa Risheng said. “I’m his Baby.”
“Ah!”
The whole group fell backward onto the grass.
They’d just been force-fed so much affection they were choking on it. The conversation might as well end now. There was nothing left for these rough, grown men to talk about.
“How sappy!” Pei Yan snorted. “Young people in love really are different. Old married couples don’t get that kind of treatment.”
Zhuang Xiao was silent.
“Why doesn’t anybody call me Baby?” Pei Yan complained loudly, sounding like a resentful spouse. “Am I not cute? … I’m fucking adorable too, you know!”
Sa Risheng was too busy grinning to remember to blush.
Zhuang Xiao kept a stern expression and bit down on the cigarette butt, chewing it.
There were two awkward seconds of silence. Pei Yan turned to glare at Zhuang Xiao, deliberately provoking him. Then a male lion suddenly sprang out of the crowd, flipped him onto his back, and pinned him down.
Pei Yan cried “Ah!” and instinctively tried to break free. Zhuang Xiao’s face was only inches away, hot breath washing over his skin. The man’s weight bore down on him. Heat surged through Pei Yan’s whole body! All around him came a chorus of howling cheers.
In front of everybody, Zhuang Xiao held him down, caressed his chest, turned his face, and declared, “So what if we’re an old married couple?” Then he bit down on Pei Yan’s mouth…
Sa Risheng was standing close by. Unable to bear such a heated spectacle, he got up and left. Everyone else whistled like mad.
The young men gathered there that day had seen something new.
Although everyone privately knew the two were “together,” this was the first time Zhuang Xiao had openly acknowledged their romantic relationship in front of the whole group by “biting” Mr. Pei.
He seemed to be venting something too, biting him several times, hard enough to split Pei Yan’s lip.
* * *
That night, staying in a local herder’s yurt, they huddled beneath thick, warm felt blankets and relived memories of the past. The feeling was indescribably wonderful.
The lamb got eaten by the lion once more, nearly torn apart… Half-kneeling beneath Zhuang Xiao, Pei Yan panted, feeling as though his soul were about to leave his body and he might be split in two…
Afterward they wrapped themselves in the felt and talked. The subject turned first to Xiao-Sa, then to Xing Rong. Pei Yan asked Zhuang Xiao how the two of them were doing now.
“They’re much the same,” Zhuang Xiao answered. “They’ve been like that for years.”
After that great scandal, Xing Rong had lain low for a while, then quietly left the country. He went to a performing-arts academy in Britain to study drama. Leaving at the height of his popularity meant he’d deliberately given up trying to stay famous. He let himself disappear from the public eye, willing to be forgotten.
So when Xing Rong’s parents arrived in Beijing dragging suitcases, intending to live off their famous son in comfort during their old age, they searched all the way to Jiahuang’s headquarters and still couldn’t find him. People in the building even mocked them: their son no longer had a management contract, his team had been dissolved, and did they at least have enough money for the train home?
There was never any shortage of new pretty young idols to replace the old ones. The waves at the back of the Yangtze pushed the ones before them onto the sand. Some performers managed to crawl up again and painfully transform their careers. Others never got back on their feet, disappearing from sight almost overnight.
When Xing Rong came back at thirty, he returned as an actor.
By then all the scandals and trouble he’d once attracted had passed. Nobody brought them up anymore. Jiahuang’s power had declined. Baiguixing and Zhiyuan Media had restructured and changed direction. The jianghu was no longer the same. Even Princess Xu Ran, who’d been popular over the past two years, had already changed wealthy backers twice. Money was tight everywhere now, and quick, easy profits were increasingly difficult to find. While you were young, you had to change jobs often rather than hang yourself from one tree.
Xing Rong starred in two Republican-era television dramas in succession. His beautiful appearance and melancholy manner suited the genre. In one, he played a short-lived young master who squandered his family’s fortune on opium, a tragic second male lead who loved the heroine and was obviously destined to be sacrificed. He easily brought enormous numbers of viewers to tears.
When Xing Rong saw Xiao-Sa off at the airport that year, he never imagined Xiao-Sa would come back, much less come back single.
But winter gave way to spring, and Sa Risheng returned to Beijing to work on a film crew. He came looking for Brother Rong again.
Xiao-Sa was still single. He hadn’t married a woman in his hometown.
Every winter after that, Xing Rong took him to the airport, his luggage filled with food, clothes, and daily necessities, and said goodbye. Every spring, as the weather warmed and the flowers blossomed, the young prince returned from home, and every time he returned single.
The man before him still had the same pure eyes as when they’d first met. No matter how often he returned, he seemed forever young…
Later, Xiao-Sa reopened his Weibo account. Now that he was playing supporting roles in a number of costume dramas and war films, he’d acquired his own fan base. He often posted landscape photographs, lonely smoke rising from the great desert, the sun setting over a long river. They were beautiful.
Xing Rong also updated his Weibo regularly. Occasionally he posted photographs of poplar trees in the Xinjiang Gobi, a heated earthen bed in a northeastern snow village, fishing boats on Lake Baikal, or bonfires on the grassland beyond the frontier… Fans couldn’t understand why Brother Xing always chose such remote, desolate places for his holidays.
He seemed to be moving farther and farther away from his audience’s gaze. He no longer cared about follower counts or hollow fame, letting himself wander across the widest and emptiest places in the world, genuinely enjoying the life he wanted…
Not being quite so famous had its advantages. There was far less trouble and gossip. Without an army of online detectives tracking every clue about their relationship, nobody noticed that the string of bright-red chili peppers blurred in the background of Xiao-Sa’s snowy landscape photo looked remarkably like the peppers hanging outside the mud-brick house Xing Rong had photographed up close. Nor did they realize that the embroidered saddle with its beautiful jewels and golden tassels in one of Xing Rong’s horseback photographs looked identical to the saddle in Xiao-Sa’s post captioned “The saddle Mama embroidered for me”…
That summer, Sa Risheng made a friendly guest appearance on the set of The Life of Dong Haichuan, acting as the horseback stunt double for a particularly handsome riding scene. After a little over a week, his work was done. He went home to rest while he was in the area.
Unexpectedly, the matter he’d managed to evade during the New Year returned that summer, and this time there would be no escaping it.
The young prince was already twenty-six. Twenty-six was no longer a child’s age. It was time to get married.
Every year he fled his hometown for Beijing on one excuse or another. This time he couldn’t simply run off again.
Relatives and friends came to propose matches so frequently they almost wore out the threshold. The young prince was an extraordinarily desirable bachelor on the grassland, rich, handsome, and sparkling with jewels.
When shown photographs of eligible girls, Xiao-Sa didn’t like any of them. “None of them are that good-looking,” he said.
When they dragged him to visit a relative and meet a prospective bride, he sat in the house for a little while, drank a bowl of milk tea, and ran outside to ride horses. “I didn’t especially like that girl inside,” he explained.
His mother grew anxious. Then what sort of girl did he like?
Xiao-Sa answered with complete honesty. “Somebody really beautiful… with pale skin, long eyelashes, and eyes that hold the stars and moon.”
“Don’t ask for something so impossible!” his mother complained. “There are girls with long eyelashes. But you want pale skin and shining eyes full of stars and moon? There aren’t any girls like that. You’re describing a fairy! I’ve never seen one!”
“There is one,” Xiao-Sa said, looking down. “I’ve seen one.”
His mother fell silent.
“You’ve seen someone like that?” she asked hurriedly. “Where? Is there somebody you like?”
Xiao-Sa nodded. “There is someone I like… I’ve known that person for a very, very long time.”
How long had he known this person?
Were they already together?
Was this somebody he intended to marry and bring home?
Xiao-Sa sat cross-legged on the heated brick bed, lowering his head to count on his fingers. After considering the question very seriously, he confessed, “We’ve already slept under the same quilt. If you’ve slept with somebody, you’re supposed to marry them and bring them home as your wife, right?”
“Ah!”
This time his father, mother, grandmother, and uncles must all have fainted on that bed. The entire family was knocked flat.
After telling his family the truth, Xiao-Sa couldn’t imagine what would happen next. He didn’t know whether he could marry Rongrong. But in his simple heart, if you had slept with someone, you were supposed to marry that person and take them home.
Sleeping with somebody and refusing to marry them was a betrayal of trust and a failure to keep your word. How could he do something so cruel to Rongrong?
Rongrong was the most beautiful person he’d ever met, and he treated Xiao-Sa so well. He’d never pestered or pressured him, never demanded a confession or marriage. But how could Xiao-Sa disappoint him?
His mother was beside herself. They’d slept together? What were they to do? They must hurry to the other family to discuss marriage. Was it too late to arrange an engagement?
Had he gotten that person pregnant?
Xiao-Sa thought earnestly about this and replied, “I don’t think so… I haven’t gotten anyone pregnant.”
Whenever they weren’t filming, the two men arranged to go traveling together. They went into the wilderness, into the mountains and across the grasslands, sleeping in herders’ homes or camping tents.
Before every meeting, Xiao-Sa thought about how much he wanted to hold Rongrong’s hand. Just holding that hand would have made him happy.
But every time they met, desire and affection caught fire again. They could never be satisfied with a little hand-holding or a kiss. Every time they slept beneath the same quilt and did the things that made them feel both “so shy” and “so happy.”
As they embraced and kissed, gently catching each other’s lips and undoing the buttons of each other’s clothing, even their fingers trembled… The feeling was simply too wonderful, so overwhelmingly pleasurable they couldn’t bear to separate…
The young prince’s horse still stood near the great lake at Huitengxile. It had the good sense to graze quietly. A long robe and a Mongolian saber hung from its saddle. But now the people secretly bathing at the lakeside came in a pair.
Xiao-Sa suddenly caught Xing Rong around the waist from behind. Xing Rong cried, “Cold! Cold! Cold! I don’t want to bathe! I hate the cold! You get in by yourself!” Then a huge hand reached toward Xing Rong’s waistband, caught both his hands, and began undoing his clothes and trousers.
Xiao-Sa said, “You peeked at me bathing last time. I want to see you too.”
Xing Rong protested, “How can you be such a naughty Baby?!”
“My butt isn’t pretty! I’m not showing you. Go look at your own!”
Hot breath brushed Xing Rong’s earlobe. Pressed close behind him, Xiao-Sa wrapped his arms around him and said, “Your butt is pretty.”
They tussled until they tumbled into the grass together, laughing uncontrollably…
The young prince lay on his back beside the lake. Above him was the deep blue, immense sky. His hair blew across his lips and tangled with Rongrong’s.
His princess consort rested his head against the young prince’s chest. In his eyes was a whole lake, and in that lake the stars and moon were reflected. When Xing Rong lowered his face, all the stars in the heavens seemed to spill downward with the water, beautiful enough to intoxicate anyone. He pressed the shape of his lips against Xiao-Sa’s.
* * *