Bro | Chapter 8

From the day he dropped out of school to that fight where he took on many by himself, for an entire year Wei Qian had lived a mechanical, repetitive life. That kind of life was like a piece of rough sandpaper, grinding away the bits of youthful liveliness on him like dead skin.

The door to his future slowly closed in front of him, and time drove him onward until he was exhausted from running for his life. Wei Qian had originally thought days like that would be painful, but later he discovered that once a person is actually inside “painful days,” they become less sensitive to pain instead. He could still find a few amusements and talk about them with relish for a long time, and just like that, a year passed quickly.

One of those incidents had been caused by Wei Zhiyuan.

Xiao Yuan was not like Xiao Bao. Whatever Wei Qian said, he would usually listen, and generally Wei Qian did not have to waste many words on him. Who would have thought that when it came to school, this brat would actually learn how to struggle?

Wei Zhiyuan would rather die than go to school. His living environment had been rather warped, so he knew an unusually large amount about things related to survival, yet had a shockingly severe lack of the common knowledge a normal child ought to have. He had no concept of school whatsoever. Xiao Bao told him that school meant sitting in a classroom learning characters and arithmetic. Wei Zhiyuan thought about it and decided he had no interest in characters or arithmetic either.

The little boy stubbornly believed that going to school meant doing nothing at all and loafing around every day while living off big brother.

That made him afraid of school. Even though by that autumn, Wei Zhiyuan had already been picked up by Wei Qian for a full year, had become completely familiar with Xiao Bao, and even often fought noisily with her, he still lived with a fear that he might be abandoned at any moment.

Wei Zhiyuan treated contributing to this family as a way of easing that fear. Doing housework and collecting bottles to sell for a little change were the ways he contributed. When he was “deprived” of the chance to contribute, Wei Zhiyuan subconsciously felt that this was a sign that he was about to be abandoned, and so he began his fierce resistance.

Wei Qian was busy as a dog every day, and of course he was not going to notice the twisted little thoughts of children. On the morning school started, he simply and brutally hauled Wei Zhiyuan and Song Xiaobao out of the house, ignored Wei Zhiyuan’s flailing, locked the door behind them with a reverse turn of the key, then dragged and tugged both of them all the way to school.

Along the way, Wei Zhiyuan behaved like a cat with its fur standing on end. Wei Qian was carrying him together with his schoolbag, his feet not touching the ground, hanging in midair, and in a dog-paddle posture he used every trick he had, scratching and biting, drawing stares from passersby every now and then.

They happened to run into San Pang after going out. The second San Pang saw them, he burst out laughing. “Yo, Qian’er, where are you off to? He’s struggling so hard, have you finally decided to butcher the two of them and eat the meat?”

Wei Qian smacked Wei Zhiyuan hard on the butt. “Did you hear that? You disgraceful little thing. Even a pig waiting to be slaughtered faces death more calmly than you do.”

Wei Zhiyuan announced red-faced and thick-necked, “I’m not going to school!”

Song Xiaobao, eager to fan the flames, bounced along beside them and gleefully parroted, “Then I’m not going to school either!”

Just as Wei Qian was about to speak, another declaration of freedom suddenly exploded nearby, also carrying a crying tone. Another little boy had also been forcibly dragged to school by his father. He had been crying all the way there as if his heart and guts were being torn apart, and in utter heartbreak he wailed, “I don’t want to go to school!”

The boy’s mother followed close behind in tiny, quick steps, babbling on beside him with ideological education for that little brat. Wei Qian listened for a while and realized she had gone from becoming a scientist to making lots of money, and from a grand future vision to buying soy-braised pork hock that night. Astronomy, geography, the full five thousand years of history, there was nothing she did not cover.

As the elder brother, Wei Qian could not identify with this sort of cumbersome educational method. He preferred the concise route. He immediately let out a cold laugh, turned his head and swept those two little brats with a lofty, glamorous glance, then said in a cold and merciless voice, “Did I ask for the opinions of you two? Is it your turn to say no?”

Once those words were out, they landed with a solid thud. Wei Zhiyuan instantly fell silent. Song Xiaobao had only been blindly following the lead anyway, so she immediately took the opportunity to stop making trouble. Even the little brat nearby who could not be soothed at all hiccuped once and, for no clear reason, no longer dared to cry.

At the school gate, Wei Qian set Wei Zhiyuan down, tipped his chin toward the elementary school, and in the tone of someone granting amnesty to the whole world said, “Go on in.”

Song Xiaobao walked a couple of steps, then turned around for a look. Seeing that Wei Zhiyuan was still standing in place, she hesitated and stopped too.

Wei Qian’s patience ran out completely. He darkened his face and looked at Xiao Yuan. “So you’ve turned rebellious now? What exactly do you want?”

Wei Zhiyuan stiffened his neck and said nothing. Wei Qian gave a cold laugh. “Go or don’t go, who do you think is begging you? If you’ve got the guts, then get lost.”

Wei Zhiyuan instinctively took a step back. He was not afraid of big brother losing his temper. What he feared was this kind of utterly heartless cold mockery.

Wei Qian could not be bothered indulging his bad habits, and turned around to leave.

Wei Zhiyuan felt terribly wronged. All along, he had worked hard to get a little closer to this person, to do a little more for him, but no matter what he did, the other side seemed completely unmoved. Big brother was like someone he could never please, always giving him that back as he turned away and left, even his smiles so rare.

Suddenly, Wei Zhiyuan lunged forward and bit down on Wei Qian’s wrist.

Wei Qian instinctively yanked his hand back and twisted his wrist aside, and the teenager’s abrupt, hard wrist bone knocked against the boy’s front tooth. Wei Zhiyuan suddenly let go. When Wei Qian lowered his head, he saw that the child had spat out the first baby tooth he had ever lost.

Wei Zhiyuan’s expression at that moment was complete blank shock. No one had ever told him about losing teeth. If a tooth had been knocked out or beaten loose, he could understand that, but for it to fall out on its own was something he simply could not understand no matter how he thought about it.

In Wei Zhiyuan’s understanding of the world, arms and legs could be chopped off, and even then you would not die. But would they fall off on their own for no reason?

Wei Zhiyuan stood there all bleak and desolate, staring stupidly at his fallen front tooth, his face showing the kind of shocked terror people in television dramas wore when they had just been told they had a terminal illness.

Wei Qian was successfully entertained by his bizarre expression. His gloomy face nearly failed to hold. He quickly turned away and left laughing, even forgetting to hold it against the little dog for biting him.

Wei Zhiyuan was in turmoil to begin with, and on top of that there was of course someone who loved chaos and feared the world was too peaceful. This comrade Song Xiaobao, completely useless when it came to success and outstanding only at ruining things, saw what happened and immediately cried out in exaggerated alarm, “Oh no, your tooth fell out. You must be deeply poisoned, with little time left to live!”

Wei Qian had spent five-yuan buying an old discarded television someone else did not want, and after repairing it at home, Song Xiaobao had been watching wuxia dramas these past few days and had picked up a mouthful of complete nonsense lines.

The speaker had no intention, but the listener took it seriously. After hearing her words, Wei Zhiyuan’s face turned deathly pale. He instinctively raised his eyes to look for Wei Qian, only to find that he had already left. For a moment, an immense bleakness surged through Wei Zhiyuan’s heart. He lost his soul, dazed and muddleheaded as Song Xiaobao dragged him into the school, and thought blankly, I’m about to die.

Wei Zhiyuan stopped struggling with Wei Qian over school. He was about to die, and all struggle had become meaningless.

During that period, Wei Zhiyuan often woke in the middle of the night and sat up in darkness, feeling the increasing looseness of several of his other teeth, convinced that his time was nearly up. Inside, he suffered the torment and stabbing pain of parting by life and death, and he greedily looked at Wei Qian’s peaceful sleeping face, as if he wanted to imprint big brother into his mind and carry him into the next world.

A month later, Wei Zhiyuan had lost three teeth. Even when he talked, air leaked out, so he simply stopped talking and put on a silent posture of waiting for death.

During this time, while the other children had not even gotten pinyin down properly yet, Wei Zhiyuan, relying on his abnormal learning ability and his unusual motivation, had already taught himself the common characters at the back of the textbook. His motivation was this: before he died, he wanted to leave behind a suicide note.

For the sake of this suicide note, Wei Zhiyuan specifically asked his teacher how to use a dictionary. Every recess and every time that should have been spent playing, he desperately pored over the old dictionary the teacher had lent him, forcing himself to recognize characters.

As a result, Wei Zhiyuan remained wholly single-minded. He believed that a person on the verge of death had no need to make friends with classmates, so he was indifferent to everyone. Naturally, he also failed to notice that there were groups of little gap-toothed children in his class, all talking with air leaking through their teeth just like him.

Finally, when midterms were approaching, Wei Zhiyuan, with the perseverance of a dying man, had learned more than a hundred Chinese characters. Along the way, he also happened to score full marks in Chinese.

With “neither favor nor disgrace moving him,” he paid absolutely no attention to the teacher’s praise, and before all his teeth could fall out, he completed his masterpiece, a suicide note.

That day, Ma Zi and San Pang happened to be eating at Wei Qian’s house. Wei Zhiyuan solemnly handed the suicide note over to Wei Qian.

San Pang, as off-kilter as ever, asked, “Yo, little brother, you’ve only been in school for two months and you already know how to write your da-ge1 a love letter?”

With chopsticks in his mouth, Wei Qian took it, tore it open in a couple of quick motions, and began reading with great interest. Wei Zhiyuan glanced at him, lowered his head in deep sorrow, and said, “It’s a suicide note.”

San Pang had not heard clearly. “It’s a what?”

Like a soldier about to sacrifice himself, Wei Zhiyuan said calmly, “It’s a suicide note. I’m about to die.”

Everyone looked at him with strange expressions.

After a long moment, Ma Zi asked, “Y-you… h-how, how did you decide y-you’re about to die?”

Wei Zhiyuan felt as though his throat had been blocked up. It made his voice sound like a thread on the verge of breaking. “I’ve already lost several teeth, and several more are loose too.”

The thick flesh on San Pang’s face twitched a little. Cautiously, he asked, “Then didn’t you… notice that where the old teeth fell out, new teeth were already growing in?”

At last, Wei Zhiyuan could not stop himself from choking up. “Isn’t that just a final flash before death?”

Everyone went silent for two seconds. Then San Pang and Wei Qian exchanged a look and burst out laughing at the same time. Only Ma Zi was decent enough to try to suppress it with effort. “B-bi… don’t, don’t laugh. Y-you guys d-don’t make fun of him. H-he… he’s still small…”

Wei Qian choked on his own saliva and rolled onto the sofa, coughing without stopping, laughing and coughing until tears came out.

At home, big brother always put on such a dignified act, carrying himself like a stern parent and never smiling casually. He had never laughed so recklessly in front of them before. Wei Zhiyuan was almost stunned. For a moment, he even forgot about life and death.

He had never expected that big brother, who ignored all his attempts to please him, would be amused to the point of doubling over by one ridiculous mistaken suicide note.

So later on, for reasons even he did not understand, Wei Zhiyuan secretly kept that “suicide note” carefully hidden away as a treasure.

Later, by the time Wei Qian became famous in a single fight at Le-ge’s nightclub, Xiao Bao and Xiao Yuan had already advanced smoothly and safely into second grade.

It was said that many people had been shocked into submission by Wei Qian on the spot that day. And as it happened, a southern bigshot named SiyeHu was in town then and thought very highly of him. He secretly sent someone to pass him a calling card, trying to poach him away. Unfortunately, Wei Qian had a family to support and could not leave, so he had no choice but to decline SiyeHu’s good intentions.

From then on, “Xiao Wei” became “Xiao Wei-ge.”

Wei Qian’s arm was indeed broken. It was set and fixed at the hospital. After that, Le-ge’s attitude toward him made another complete reversal. With great attentiveness, he personally drove Wei Qian home, then phoned Ma Zi over and told him to take good care of Wei Qian. He would not need to come to work for the time being, but his wages would still be paid as usual.

In order to support the family, Ma Zi also worked under Le-ge. Ma Zi’s responsibility was cleaning the nightclub every morning at dawn.

He cleaned diligently and conscientiously, but unfortunately he had no real prospects. If not for Wei Qian, Le-ge might not even have remembered him. San Pang, on the other hand, grew more and more distant from Le-ge’s crowd as he got older. Even if there were still lingering ties that had not quite been severed, it was only because of brotherly loyalty, so that when something came up once in a while, he could still lend a hand.

San Pang seemed to have far more enthusiasm for the family trade of slaughtering pigs and selling meat.

When Wei Qian came home dragging one broken arm behind him to rest, the two little brats had just come back from school.

Wei Zhiyuan threw himself over before he had even set down his schoolbag. “Ge!”

Ma Zi hurriedly stopped him with one grab. “C-can’t… c-can’t throw yourself at him. H-his arm…”

Wei Zhiyuan frowned hard. “What happened to his arm?”

Wei Qian had a cigarette hanging from his mouth and spoke vaguely around it. “A dog took a bite.”

Song Xiaobao, carefree as ever, said, “If a dog bit you once, why is it wrapped up like a rice dumpling?”

Wei Zhiyuan’s little face tightened. He still wanted to keep asking, but Wei Qian already clearly did not want to talk about it. He put on a stern expression. “Go do your homework. Why all the nonsense? Adult matters are none of your business.”

And just like that, without allowing any argument, he sent the two children off.

Ma Zi looked at the unwilling Wei Zhiyuan, rubbed his hands, then turned and said to Wei Qian, “T-tonight Sa-San-ge will c-cook for you. I… I still h-have to g-go…”

Although Le-ge had generously given him leave, Ma Zi did not dare take it seriously.

A little embarrassed, Ma Zi looked at Wei Qian and stammered while trying to explain. Ma Zi was that kind of utterly straightforward person. He simply had no idea how to loaf or cut corners even if he wanted to. Wei Qian had not known him only since yesterday, so he waved a hand. “Alright, I know. Go on, you.”

With great effort, Ma Zi reminded him, “D-don’t let it t-touch water. Be… careful…”

Wei Qian said, “Yeah, yeah. Please do me a kindness and say a little less, alright? You save your energy, and I might live two extra years.”

Ma Zi left. San Pang was cooking in the kitchen. Wei Qian was bored out of his mind, so he casually picked up one of Xiao Bao and Xiao Yuan’s extracurricular reading books and started flipping through it.

The reading material had been distributed by the school for second graders. Usually it was made up of inspirational stories about heroic figures and the like. After reading them, the students were supposed to write reading reports. Sometimes the parents would even be asked to supervise and sign the homework.

After reading a few of the stories, Wei Qian suddenly felt that he was pretty damn pathetic. In the stories, people were either shedding their heads and blood for the motherland at a very young age, or physically disabled yet strong in spirit, overcoming every hardship while still studying hard and improving every day. It seemed as if everyone else’s difficulties were greater than his, yet they could still become role models all the same.

1) 大哥 Big brother