Wang Feng sat at the very back of the noodle shop, a midsummer’s evening drenched in
Wang lined his table with twenty pearl white shot glasses. Ten a row, two by two. They had already been impatiently filled with maotai, a playful, or rather, painful local hard liquor distilled from sorghum. He called the waiter for some peanuts. He looked at the clock then at the wall. Between two cheaply printed bamboo scrolls depicting flocks of herons in a waterfall scene, hung a calendar that displayed a large plump ‘4’ under a smaller ‘June’ across the top.
“A curse of a birthday.” He mumbled to himself as he lit a cigarette and sighed through the smoke.
Li Yi appeared from the front of the shop, in a fading white shirt almost breaking at the seams, tucked into his usual black trousers. He was younger looking than Wang, his high cheekbones and thin jaw line hung like mountains that dipped into sea on his pale face. Thin, lanky and looking ever so unnecessarily surly, he drifted past the rows of tables and tapped Wang lightly on the shoulders.
Wang almost jumped when he felt Li’s cold hands on his neck, but soon turned on a smile.
“Brother!” Wang cried as he stood up to greet his friend, shaking his hands keenly. “On time yet again! Happy birthday Brother!”
“Yes Brother, happy birthday to you too. Forty today. A big round number.” Li returned with a faint smile.
“Ah yes forty. What an age. Except you look like you haven’t aged a day and I’ve got this plump tummy to keep my fortunes!” Wang bellowed and laughed. “Sorry about the weather Brother. Suppose you’ve eaten…”
“Yes Brother, you know I only come for the birthday baijiu.”
Li settled himself opposite Wang, the shot glasses lined like soldiers on a chessboard between them. Wang handed Li a glass and held one up himself with both hands.
“Happy our birthday, and to twenty years of friendship!”
“Yes! To twenty years!” Li beamed, finally looking a little more energetic, and the glasses clinked crisply in the air.
“2009,” said Li. “And two fourty year-old men. Tell me about your year, Brother.”
“Well,” began Wang. “I managed. Better than the last. Ming Ming got into a good high school and Rong can’t stop bragging about us going to watch the Games at the Bird Nest to the neighbours...”
“So you went back to the Jing?”
“First time for, what, eighteen years, yeah. Couldn’t recognise it. Just couldn’t. Some times I wished I’d stayed there, would have been loaded by now.”
“You are loaded Brother. And the Square? Did you go?”
“No Brother.” Wang said, after a short thoughtful pause. “Rong went. She got a framed photograph with the Chairman in front of the
“I thought as much.” Li shot Wang a look.
He handed Wang another glass. “2008!”, and then another, “2007!”.
The men knocked back.
“…and 2006. That year you finally bought out the entire garment business from your uncle, Brother, what more could you want?”
“I’m not a coward you know, Li.”
“No one said you were.”
“I’m just trying to move on. Move on from my stinking past, Brother.”
“2005.” Li continued, ignoring Wang’s desperate attempt to explain. “We met in Haerbin that year remember? Not much of a summer there for a birthday party but the damn vodka there was quite something.” He slammed the shot glass on the table.
“Twenty years, you track me down every time, no matter where I went.” Sniggered Wang with a bitterness in his voice, as he licked his lips.
“Friends are important Wang, and so are birthdays. Say, how often is it that you meet someone born on exactly the same day as you, Brother? We’re connected by fate.” Li said, tapping his nose cheekily. Wang let out a little sigh.
“2003. Tiento.”
“Don’t get started on that one, please.”
“What the hell were you doing there at the first place?”
“I went to apologise to Miss Ma’s family in person, and, of course…”
“Give them a handsome dosh so they’d not speak? Good one, CEO.”
“Could have spent the same amount on some proper safety latches and pressure gauges but Zhang told me they had just been replaced, but in actual fact he just pocketed the money himself. But to be honest she was just so clumsy.”
“After working for 60 hours a week in a factory line and seeing no more than an hour of day light a day, who wouldn’t be? And now she’s blind and her entire family’s stuck out there gleaning the rice paddy, they can’t even marry her out, and you’re still drinking here with me.”
“I told you I was sorry. Drop it will you? ”
Wang examined Li’s scathing face. Li’s self-righteousness irritated Wang, but he could never find words to prove him wrong.
Li sniggered, and reached for another glass. “2001. You know, my successors at Beida have completely no idea what happened that summer at that Square. Some journo from
“They’re kids, old as we were, how are they supposed to know? Or care, for that matter?”
“Ignorance is a bliss, Wang. Isn’t that what you say to yourself all the time? That’s why you’re out there in Ninghan running your boxed up sweatshop instead of climbing that lucrative ladder in the PLA?”
“PL fucking A indeed.” Wang spat. “That army ate me inside out I tell you. Now what? Downsized, modernised, revolutionised. They have the fattest, most brainwashed preppy boys in
“No Brother, that would be stupid. Escapism is more cowardly than your ‘moving-on’ business. Besides, who would I drink with? And 2000… ha, good appetite we have tonight huh?” Li was growing more boisterous with the alcohol.
Wang refilled each of the shot glasses and called for more peanuts. The waiter yawned as he brought over the plate, impatiently returning to his late night television by the counter. The rain outside had finally stopped, and the other customers left as quickly as they finished their meal.
“Year of the Dragon, the beginning of our century.” Li quipped, sarcastically.
“I can’t believe you came and met me in
“Neither did I. What a nice trip though. That melancholic erhu played by the old man on the corner of the street in Hanoi, that slow calm eerie sound amongst the screams of the fanatical motorcycle wheels, reminded me so much of my old Grandfather… He played a wonderful erhu... He cried himself to death after he found out what happened on the Square. You know, his father, as in, my Great-grandfather, was a fighter in the Boxer Uprising.”
“Yes you mentioned,” replied Wang, starring into the distance. “Beheaded by the Japanese in 1900. Almost the same spot us two met. It makes me sick just thinking about it.”
“He didn’t know there was an unborn baby in his wife’s belly.”
Caught in their own thoughts, they took another shot.
“You know what its like to never know your own father or mother?” said Li. “Its like not knowing where you come from - no one to explain to you why you have a round nose or double layered eye lids, why your name rhymes with the rain. No one to tell you who planted the big tall tree in the yard, why you are good at maths and not so good at science, why you prefer bok-choi over gai-lan. No pride about who you are, because you can’t see your past. To not know your past is to not know who you are. Like a leaf without a branch, a kite that broke its string.” Li said, as if reciting poetry. He looked right into Wang’s eyes, the pupils now wandering more and more as the maotai wore in, but he was determined to look straight back.
“You’re right. I need to be a better father to Ming. I’m hardly there.” Wang finally said, breaking the short silence. “I may as well have been beheaded to him. What are we up to?”
“1997.” Li replied.
“Xiaobi had a little girl that year, in
“Wang, your memory is getting better as you get drunker, I am impressed.”
“You still see her?”
“When I can, yes. As friends, of course. Every August if I try.”
“She thinks that, you’re friends?”
“I know she does.”
“You’re a freak, Li. I can never imagine you as a romantic.”
“Part of her daughter’s name is actually mine, you know? Her husband has no idea. But he’s French, so as if he’d care.”
“She’s as much of a freak as you are.”
“Double Major in Film and Arabic, she’s quite something. It was 1989 after all.” Li grew very quiet, and Wang observed a little mist in Li’s dark sank in eyes.
They drank in silence until they reached 1994.
“The year you became father.” Li said.
“I was so lucky that it was a boy.”
“Would you have kept it if it was a girl?”
“I’m the only son, you know that.”
“So am I.” Li shot back. “But instead I chose eternal bachelorhood. It broke my parent’s heart, but what are they going to do? Besides, no more wasting time on those stupid games that women play. If there’s any women left in this country, that is!”
“What ever! its cos you’re butt-ugly Brother!” Wang added irreverently. At this, the men laughed hysterically together. The waiters observed their fits of laughter with some concern, but decided to leave them to it.
“1991!” Li took another shot. Wang paused at this. Looking deep into his shot glass, he felt his eyes finally welling up.
“The year you left the Army, Lao Wang.” Li said in a quiet voice. Wang finally took the shot, and fondled the glass in his hands, no longer smiling.
“Don’t be upset Brother, you’re not the only quitter. I would have gotten my Bachelor’s degree the same year too. But what would I have done with it? Write books that I couldn’t publish and swallow words I couldn’t say? Or follow every one else into a MacEmpire and watch my own soul rot trying to please every dog and his man in the bloody Party? Would have been a waste of time anyway. Damned first class education from Beida.” Li sighed and shook his head, taking one of Wang’s cigarettes and lighting it up.
Wang remembered getting off in an empty bus station in Jujiako, his home town, after he was finally dismissed by the army. He walked home in the dry dust along an empty street lined with old crumbling brick houses. His parents couldn’t bare the shame of their son coming home in disgrace, giving up a comfortably salaried future in the military. But really, they were glad to have him home. At least they knew he was alive, and an extra pair of hands at home, and they talked his uncle into offering him a management apprenticeship in his small garment business, which was just taking off. Not bad for a 22 year old, really. But he was more than 22. He saw more than he needed to and he couldn’t unload what he carried with him. It seemed like he no longer knew anyone at home. His friends all just seemed like such little kids to him, and his parents wanted to treat him like one too. Li caught him weeping on their birthday at the back of an old warehouse by the bank of the river. It was the first time he cried since he was a grown man. Not even in the army, where the physical pain of training and the hard abuse of the officers wore deep into his pride, not even after he washed the blood splatters off his face with a flannel at the dormitory that quiet morning after they took the human out of him, and no one in his regiment had said a single word to each other. Li knew him like no body else, his words reached him in the darkest places, and in the strangest way Wang was more and more glad to see him. Li and Wang sat together at the back of the warehouse watching sparrows flitter in the evening sun, against the green tips of the rice. Blades of the grass waved in the wind, like ripples in a storm. They skipped stones into the river, and drank gaoliang that year. Sweet, sweet gaoliang.
Li interrupted Wang’s thoughts with 1990.
“The first year we celebrated our shared birthday together. Baijiu was hard to come by on that anniversary day, but we got there. One shot each. You and I. One shot was good enough that day. Just one shot.” Li smiled, and Wang rolled back deep into his own memory.
All leave were cancelled that evening in the barracks, the Army being on full alert. It seemed like they were always on alert that year, and time after time they began to relax more and more on evenings like those, almost like in the story of The Boy that Cried Wolf. And so Wang and his mates sneaked in some baijiu for some late night birthday drinks, inside his boots. He was by himself in the dormitory trying to find a good place to hide it, when Li appeared out of no where, almost spooking him out. He asked to drink with Wang, explaining that it was his birthday too. Later on, Wang’s friends found him passed out on the floor late into the evening, but Li had already gone.
1989. They took the last filled glasses left on the table.
The day Wang turned 20 was an awful day. All week he’d been sitting at the back of the truck in the nauseating heat, rubbing his sub-machine gun, sweat and black oil running all over it, and inside the intricate crevasses of the sophisticated weapon. The crowd out in the Square had lost their optimistic party atmosphere of a few weeks ago, replaced by an anxious, tense, and slow grinding smell of fear. When things finally cracked late that evening he had no idea where he was firing or running to, his entire uniformed body was over taken by chaos and entropy. He was blinded by flashes of gun fire and leaned against a lamp post at the edge of the square to regain his posture. And there Li was. His white shirt and white banner around his head drenched in blood, dragging an incapacitated student from a collapsed tent. “Don’t die! Don’t die! I’m getting you out!” He hollered hysterically. He dragged his friend on his skinny shoulders and staggered towards the edge of the square, and when he saw Wang he was just as startled and frightened as he was. They both hesitated. Wang’s gun was slung behind him and he hadn’t had time to hold it up before Li did the most unthinkable thing. He let go of his friend and grabbed Wang’s shoulders and shook him. “Take us to the hospital, I beg you, I beg you! You are my Brother, like he is! Within four seas, all men are brothers! You hear me? Please Brother, please!” He screamed desperately, his face against Wang’s, tears, sweat, saliva, blood all running from his face. Wang tried to speak, but his tongue froze. Then Li let go of him. Wailing now, he went back to his friend. A moment later, Wang heard two shots, and Li slumped onto the concrete. A massive hole gaping at the back of his head, it broke the banner that was tied around it. Blood spilt out like a waterfall. A third bullet finished off his dying friend.
The entire bottle of maotai had gone, and Wang fell sleep on the table that was scattered with empty shot glasses and flakes of peanut shells. The waiter noticed an icy shudder of wind against his face that surged towards the door, and looked to the back of the shop, only to find Wang passed out. One waiter took Wang by the feet, and the other took him by the arms. They dragged the pot bellied drunken man to the foot path outside and settled him against the wall next to crates of empty beer bottles.
“He’s been drinking by himself and mumbling and yelling into thin air all evening. Gee - that maotai certainly did his head in.”
They returned to the television set that was playing a Sci-Fi movie.
“To not know your past is to not know who you are…” They heard Wang mumble in his troubled sleep. He was ignored.
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