DBTHDCAR Chapter 69

Back at school, Ning Xiaobei and Fan Xia went straight to the infirmary to treat their injuries.

Fan Xia only had scrapes, which were easily cleaned and bandaged. Ning Xiaobei, however, began swelling again after the allergy medicine wore off. Seeing him in such a pitiful state, the infirmary teacher panicked and called 120, sending him to the town hospital for an IV.

At that time, Gu Kaige was still at the botanical garden with a group of students, singing and eating luncheon meat, carefree and happy, until the duty head teacher called to scold him furiously, ordering him to immediately go to the hospital and stay with the student.

The head teacher had wanted to call Ning Jianguo as well, but Ning Xiaobei stopped him, saying he didn’t want his family to worry. After the IV, he was already feeling much better, so the teacher gave up.

Mostly, the teacher thought it was better to let things be than to make trouble.

“Next Monday, when the principal and your grade leader are here, you can explain this to them yourselves. Teacher Gu is unreliable enough as it is; but you too… Teacher Peng, how could you go along with his nonsense? Luckily the kids are fine. If something had happened, how would our school explain this to their families?”

Gu Kaige and Peng Yue stood in the hospital corridor, both grown men with their heads lowered, looking exactly like two problem students being scolded by their homeroom teacher; there wasn’t a trace of a teacher’s dignity about them.

The town hospital wasn’t big, but there were quite a lot of patients on the weekend. A circle of local villagers watched the scene with great interest. A woman holding a child pointed at the two of them and laughed, as if she were just one step away from pulling out melon seeds and settling in to enjoy the show.

Only after the director finished venting his anger — hands clasped behind his back, slippers slapping loudly as he hurried off in his haste — did the two finally let out a breath at the same time.

“Gu Kaige, stay away from me from now on. You’re annoying.”

Teacher Peng slung his sketch board over his back and spoke coldly before walking off without a second glance.

“Ah…”

Gu Kaige let out a long sigh, then crouched at the door of the injection room, clutching his head.

“Ah…”

Ning Xiaobei lay on a recliner, an IV drip hanging from his left hand. He could hear everything outside clearly.

So Teacher Gu and Teacher Peng… this was the kind of relationship they had?

So this whole big, high-profile spring outing today was actually to cover for the two of them going on a date? Or was it just Kaige being a burden carried on one shoulder—all one-sided enthusiasm?

He wrinkled his nose and shook his head.

Forget it. The situation in his own family hadn’t even been resolved yet; he had no energy left to worry about other people’s affairs.

“…Homosexuality…”

After coming back from the botanical garden, Fan Xia didn’t even eat dinner. He plunged straight into an internet café near the school and started searching up information about this. The more he read, the tighter his brows furrowed; his already dark expression grew even more alarming.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know the term, but like words such as sissy or hermaphrodite, he had always lumped it together with insults. To him, its impact was only a notch above swearing like damn it.

Thinking of those three words, he couldn’t help recalling 《The Smiling, Proud Wanderer》 . In it, after castrating himself, Dongfang Bubai became obsessed with Brother Lian, abandoning a whole harem of beautiful wives, and despite clearly being an old eunuch, still dressed in women’s clothing.

The version he had watched was the 1996 TVB production starring Jackie Lui Chung-yin as Linghu Chong. The actor playing Dongfang Bubai wasn’t the stunning and elegant Brigitte Lin from the film version, but Lo Chun-shun, who played him as a rather shabby old man.

That old man batting his eyelashes at Linghu Chong had left a deeply unpleasant mark on Fan Xia’s young mind, and even just thinking about it now still made his skin crawl.

He couldn’t understand it. His uncle was tall and handsome, and although Uncle Ning seemed gentle, when it came to fighting he was actually even tougher than his uncle. Both of them were proper, upright men—not the least bit effeminate—so how had they become homosexual?

These days, you could find anything online. Fan Xia simply registered an account on a gay dating site. After browsing for a few minutes, he expressionlessly closed the browser.

He felt a little dizzy and needed time to process it all.

His stomach growled. Only then did he remember he hadn’t eaten dinner, and the wound on his leg was starting to throb faintly. He bought a cup of instant noodles and a cola from the internet café manager. While waiting for the noodles to soak, he held a plastic fork in his mouth and began thinking back over the past few years.

No wonder his uncle had never married all these years. People had always thought that the Fei Xiang of the Third Shoe Factory had so many girlfriends they could line up from Nanjing Road to Shiliupu Wharf; but in reality, he had never once brought a girlfriend home.

With his mother as a precedent, his grandparents had always hoped his uncle would find someone and settle down, yet that wish was never fulfilled. Whenever he visited their house and the topic of marriage came up, his uncle would joke around and steer the conversation away. Over the years, his grandmother’s requirements for a future daughter-in-law had gone from young, pretty, and capable… to simply as long as she’s a woman, even someone divorced with kids would do.

Thinking back, he had once believed his uncle might end up with Auntie Wang. Back then, when he heard Xiaobei wanted Auntie Wang to be his mother, he’d even felt uneasy, wondering how he would face his best friend if his uncle snatched her away.

And now, well, this was something else entirely. His uncle had actually gotten together with Xiaobei’s father. And who knew how long it had been going on…

In the past, his uncle had said that after graduating from middle school, he had caught the last wave of the sent-down youth movement and gone to Yunnan to be assigned to the countryside, leaving the job quota at a major Shanghai factory to his only younger sister, Fan Xia’s mother.

In 1980, when policies began to loosen, his uncle was finally able to return to Shanghai. But without a suitable job, he nearly ended up as a blind drifter¹Blind drifter (盲流): A term used for unemployed migrants drifting between cities without stable work or residence. In 1982, after his grandfather passed away, his uncle took over his grandfather’s position and entered the shoe factory, becoming a salesperson in the sales department.

Uncle Ning was a year older than his uncle and had joined the factory many years earlier.

If they had already gotten together back then… Fan Xia hadn’t even been born yet; his parents weren’t even married at the time!

Fan Xia sucked in his noodles in shock, almost inhaling them into his nose.

Wait, that’s not right. He’d seen the student handbook. Xiaobei was born in 1985, and his birthday was easy to remember: February 14th, Valentine’s Day for foreigners.

But for Chinese people, that date was just an ordinary day during the New Year period. Because it often coincided with the Spring Festival or Lantern Festival, it usually got lumped together with those celebrations.

Besides, the Ning family had a tradition from Grandma Ning’s side of not celebrating birthdays. She believed that having survived the War of Resistance Against Japan and the Civil War all the way into the founding of New China meant she was living on time borrowed from Heaven. If she made a big fuss celebrating her longevity, what if Heaven noticed and decided to take that time back?

So when it came to milestone birthdays, those ending in zero, the family might at most gather for a meal and eat a bowl of longevity noodles. For ordinary birthdays, they simply didn’t mention them at all, deliberately avoiding longevity.

Especially Ning Xiaobei. Grandma Ning said his health was poor, so they had to keep things low-key. He wasn’t allowed to celebrate birthdays at all before the age of twenty, for fear of tempting fate.

Fan Xia, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. As if to make up for growing up without both parents around, he celebrated his birthday in a big way every year. His uncle would take him out to eat and buy him gifts, and he’d demand double the allowance from both sides of the family before he was satisfied.

In his first year of high school, he even treated his entire class to a meal at a small restaurant in town. They ate and sang together; it was lively and bustling.

In any case, unlike his uncle, Uncle Ning had been married and had his own child. So at least at the beginning, he couldn’t have been homosexual.

Could it be that his uncle seduced him… forced him… threatened him?

The more Fan Xia thought about it, the more plausible it seemed.

His uncle was practically a tyrant, the kind who let his fists do the talking and had no shame whatsoever.

Back when Fan Xia was little and his parents hadn’t divorced yet, they argued more than twenty days out of every month. Eventually, arguments would turn into physical fights.

His dad, Fan Jian, was a jerk; but his mom wasn’t weak either. Slaps and biting; before long, it turned into a full-on brawl between the two of them.

At times like that, his mom would call his uncle for backup. Without a word, his uncle would hop on his bicycle and race over to the Fan house, and the scene would turn into a two-on-one fight.

Fan Xia remembered that every time his uncle showed up, he carried a different weapon.

From broom handles to rolling pins, and once, he even dismantled his dad’s bicycle downstairs and used the frame to hit him.

When things escalated too far, neighbors would call the police to have the two of them taken to the station. But then his great mother would refuse to let it happen, crying and making a scene until the police were forced to let them go.

From Fan Xia’s home to his maternal grandmother’s place, everyone in the neighborhood knew that Zhao Jingwen was a real bully-type, and no one dared to provoke him.

As his grandmother put it, it was lucky he was born in the new society, with the state and organizations keeping him in check. If this had been in the old days, then during those two years when his uncle returned from Xishuangbanna to Shanghai and was unemployed, he probably would’ve ended up in Tilanqiao Prison.

If that hooligan uncle of his had taken a fancy to Xiaobei’s father and forced something… Xiaobei’s dad was so mild-tempered, thin-skinned just like his son. Maybe Zhao really had gotten his way.

The more Fan Xia thought about it, the angrier he became. He cursed under his breath, jabbed his fork into the lid of the instant noodle cup, and wiped the chili oil from his mouth with the back of his hand.

He stood up, intending to head back to school, but then felt too ashamed to face Ning Xiaobei, so he awkwardly sat back down.

Xiaobei probably didn’t know anything yet. Before this, he’d even been hoping Ning Jianguo would find him a new mom.

Xiaobei treated him so well, yet his own uncle had gone and stolen someone else’s father.

“Damn it, Zhao Jingwen…”

Fan Xia’s thoughts were in a mess. Cursing under his breath, he opened a browser and casually clicked into an online movies page.

Looking at the dense list of titles, he found a film starring Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung under the [Nonsense Hong Kong Comedy] category.

A few days ago, he had watched another old movie starring the two of them, called 《The Eagle Shooting Heroes》. It was his favorite kind of comedic wuxia film, packed with absurd humor, great fight scenes, and Wang Zuxian being unbelievably cute when she scolded people. He and Ning Xiaobei had laughed themselves silly watching it.

So he assumed this one, 《Happy Together》, would be a similar kind of comedy. Without thinking much, he hit play…

An hour and a half later, Fan Xia walked out of the internet café with two swollen, puffy eyes.

“Who the hell… put this movie under the nonsense category?”

On the chilly spring night, he stood in the small town street filled with the mixed smells of fried noodles, barbecue, white-cut mutton, and hotpot. He took a deep breath, clenched his fists, and stood in the middle of the road like a Wrathful Vajra statue, completely motionless; as if someone had struck his pressure point.

“Are you nuts?! Kid, move it!”

Cars, tractors, and electric bikes honked nonstop as they passed. Finally, a passerby couldn’t stand it anymore and walked over, pulling Fan Xia to the side of the road.

“Hey now, student, why take things so hard? It’s normal to mess up a test once or twice. If you do something like this, what will your parents do? Hurry back to school.”

The old man thought Fan Xia was upset over bad grades and about to take his own life. After offering a few words of comfort, he left.

“Back to school… back to school…”

Fan Xia turned his head and looked toward the direction of the Affiliated High School in the west, muttering to himself, his mind in complete turmoil.

The dim, swaying yellow light from the movie… the dazed, entangled gazes of the two men when they were together… the heat of their sweat and the ambiguous music — all of it slowly resurfaced in his mind.

Especially that intimate scene right at the beginning, it had hit him so hard he’d almost fallen out of his seat in the internet café. Now it kept replaying in his head like a revolving lantern, flashing over and over again.

The only question was, between his Uncle and Uncle Ning, which one would be Lai Yiu-fai, and which one would be Ho Po-wing?

Fan Xia felt utterly miserable. Even the night before his high school entrance exams, when he couldn’t sleep, hadn’t been this unbearable.

He had always been straightforward; he said what he thought and asked what he wanted to ask. But with this matter, who could he even talk to? And who could he possibly ask?

After four years, Fan Xia made a major decision — he was going to run away from home again!

………………

Author’s Note:

A funny story: When I first watched 《Lan Yu》, I thought it was a sci-fi film… like something about a blue universe²Lan Yu (蓝宇): A same-sex love story about a wealthy businessman and a struggling student who form a complicated, deeply emotional relationship that grows beyond its transactional beginnings; the literal meaning of the title is Blue Universe, leading to the misunderstanding that it’s sci-fi.

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• 1
  Blind drifter (盲流): A term used for unemployed migrants drifting between cities without stable work or residence
• 2
  Lan Yu (蓝宇): A same-sex love story about a wealthy businessman and a struggling student who form a complicated, deeply emotional relationship that grows beyond its transactional beginnings; the literal meaning of the title is Blue Universe, leading to the misunderstanding that it’s sci-fi