Bro | Chapter 2

When Xiao Bao was eleven months old, she was still a little chubby ball in split-crotch pants. She had only just learned to wobble along for a couple of steps with her arms outstretched when her dad died.

The way he died was quite brutal, a traffic accident. He had just finished a night shift and was walking home in pitch darkness. On the way, figuring he could take a shortcut while no one was around, he pedaled his two-wheeled bicycle onto the motor lane. The moment he got on, he was hit by a truck and flung several meters away.

Both man and bicycle were flattened together, and never puffed back out again.

So Wei Qian’s family was reduced once more to a widow-and-orphans household.

Actually, that in itself was nothing. There were so many widow-and-orphans families in the world, like Ma Zi’s family, who sold youtiao every morning.

Other people wiped away their tears, straightened their backs, and still went on living like proper human beings.

But Wei Qian quickly discovered in horror that his beautiful, kind “mother” had overnight turned back into that damned vicious woman again.

Amid her grief, she seemed to have decided that her life was more bitter than bitter greens, that she no longer wanted to go on living, so she began throwing her life away with even greater abandon. In that regard, she was extraordinarily gifted and highly experienced, truly a master at courting death.

Wei Qian lived every day like a man who saw a bow reflected in a cup and mistook it for a snake. He had to go to school, had to find ways to get money, had to take care of his little sister who could not even talk yet, and had to guard against that woman, a lunatic who could explode at any moment.

Later on, Wei Qian did not even dare leave Song Xiaobao home alone.

Every day when he went to school, he would take Xiao Bao either upstairs to San Pang’s place or to Ma Zi’s family, who ran a small restaurant, and ask San Pang’s mother or Ma Zi’s mother to watch her for the day. Then in the evening after school, he would pick Xiao Bao up and bring her back.

Wei Qian lived with his nerves and spirit worn to exhaustion. The crushing weight of life suddenly bore down on him so hard that he could barely lift his head. Even an adult might not have been able to endure it, much less a child like him.

For a period of time, Wei Qian secretly kept a small knife hidden away. Every night when he slept, he would grip the knife in one hand and hold Xiao Bao in the other. Whenever he looked at the knife, he wanted to rush out and butcher his mother. Whenever he looked at Xiao Bao, he could only pull himself together again, lie back down, gently pat the little thing’s back, and lull her back to sleep when she started fussing and was about to wake up.

He still had a little sister. She was a living creature, a person, just as ill-fated as he was, born into a family like this. He was the big brother. No matter what, he had to raise her.

Hamlet agonized over the long question, “To be or not to be.” Wei Qian also spent his childhood agonizing over an even longer question, “Should I butcher my mother, or shouldn’t I?”

He lived like a dog, yet he still had the leisure to agonize over such a philosophical question. Perhaps he really was destined to become somebody in the future.

During this time, San Pang’s mother and Ma Zi’s mother both helped him quite a lot.

San Pang and Ma Zi were both his childhood friends. San Pang’s family were all worldly, calculating, and crude. Ma Zi and his mother were both cowards who could not be kicked into producing a single fart. There were no social elites living in a place like their neighborhood. And yet, those worldly and crude neighbors were warmhearted and loyal, while those timid, silent little people were willing to help him as long as he asked.

Unlike Ma Zi’s mother, who was angry but did not dare speak out, San Pang’s mother sometimes could not stand it. She would get so indignant she practically wanted to spit in Wei Qian’s mother’s face, yet in the end she never actually did it.

That was nothing. Wei Qian knew she did not dare, because although San Pang’s mother was a poor woman with a fierce manner, she was still, in the end, a respectable married woman. Respectable women did not lightly provoke whores, just as decent people did not lightly provoke hooligans and street punks.

Later on, Wei Qian’s mother finally lived up to expectations and died.

Wei Qian accepted this fact calmly. He knew that she had actually stopped wanting to live a long time ago.

Wei Qian’s mother had been clubbed awake out of the happiest period of her life, and the bitterness inside her heart was something no one else could understand. No matter how hard she tried, she could not work through it, could not adjust to it, so naturally she fell again, returned to her old trade, and later got even worse. She started taking drugs.

At first, she would smoke heroin with her clients, then after smoking she would drift with them in a haze and have a quick lay. If the clients were pleased, they would stuff tips into her bra and underwear. She too used those brief moments of passing time to escape the reality she had no power to resist.

Later, her addiction escalated uncontrollably, and she began trembling as she gave herself intramuscular injections.

During that period, there were a lot of needles in Wei Qian’s home. Afraid Xiao Bao might see them and stuff them into her mouth, Wei Qian had to clean the house three or four times a day, and every time he found a needle, he would collect it and destroy it.

After his mother died, Wei Qian burned all of her things in one fire. In the end, she died of AIDS, infected through a needle.

If you run with the wolves, sooner or later you have to pay it back.

That was a maxim the little hoodlums used to show off, and it was also the final thing that woman left behind for Wei Qian and his little sister.

When Wei Qian’s mother was dying, she looked exactly like some kind of monster. She had wasted away into a bag of bones. Most of her hair had fallen out too. Her face had become badly deformed, and her eyes, already larger than other people’s to begin with, bulged out of her face. Large patches of her skin had ulcerated and rotted away. There was not the slightest trace left of the youthful beauty she once had. She looked exactly like a dirty, stinking toad.

As the saying goes, when a person is about to die, their words are kind. Looking like a toad, she cast an almost gentle look at her two children and said calmly, “Ah, if you run with the wolves, sooner or later you have to pay it back. I always knew a day like this would come.”

Wei Qian let out a contemptuous laugh and thought she was full of shit. If she had known a day like this would come, then back then she should not have gone out fooling around, should not have taken drugs, and even less should she have dressed herself up like some kind of demon and gone to work in a nightclub for a few lousy bucks and a bit of thrill-seeking.

She should have been like one of those countless crane-like girls, wearing a school uniform that maybe did not fit all that well, with a row of silly blunt bangs across her forehead, sitting primly upright in a classroom listening to the teacher lecture on analytic geometry. Then she could have gotten into college, gotten a job, gotten married or stayed single. No matter what, she should have lived like a proper person.

Even if she was especially stupid and could not learn anything properly, at the very least she still could have gone to work as somebody’s nanny, done odd jobs, sold breakfast…

That way, maybe she would have gone on living until she was ninety and gotten to see her grandchildren marry and have children.

But she refused. She chose instead to be an idle, pleasure-loving madwoman. That flower-like beauty of hers had gone completely to waste.

When Wei Qian realized that he had finally gotten rid of this madwoman, that he really would never see her again, an uncontrollable grief rose inside him. It was as if he could see great swathes of life and time racing past before him at lightning speed, and he had not even had time to catch so much as one whiff of exhaust before everything had already vanished into thin air.

But he did not want to show any emotion at all. He believed that he ought to hate this woman, that any feeling he had for her was weak and shameful. So Wei Qian forced himself to think this, she deserved it.

Wei Qian ordered himself to remember the hellish life he had endured for the past five years, and with the deepest coldness he could muster, he asked her, “Bitch, why did you give birth to us in the first place?”

The woman wore a confused expression and thought about it for a long time before answering, “Who knows?”

Wei Qian flew into a fury at once. If not for her “who knows,” maybe in this life he would have been reincarnated as some rich second-generation heir or some official’s son. Maybe by now he could also have been living all polished and respectable!

So he gave her shoulder a light shove and cursed, “Fuck you.”

It really was only a light shove. Who knew that the very next second, she would be done for.

Her whole body went into convulsions, her eyes opened as wide as ping-pong balls, and then she spent a full five minutes gasping backward for breath. Her breathing sounded like a withered bellows. Only after enduring one last round of bloody suffering did she finally croak.

That year, Wei Qian was not yet thirteen. He was still a green young boy, only just in the second year of middle school, with a little sister at his side dragging two lines of snot under her nose. Xiao Bao was five and did not understand a damn thing. She only stood there blankly watching her big brother and her mother.

Wei Qian ended up letting the woman’s corpse lie on display at home for two full days, until it had even started to stink, and still he had not figured out how to deal with it.

A place for a dead person to sleep costs even more than a place for a living person. Even if he sold both himself and his little sister, the two of them still could not have afforded a burial plot. What was more, Wei Qian did not even intend to pay the money to send her to the crematorium. His mother was already dead, and however the dead made do, they could always make do. But he had to stay alive, he had to pay tuition, and he still had to feed his little sister.

In the end, Wei Qian decided to pick some so-called auspicious day and simply wrap the corpse in a torn, broken bamboo sleeping mat and toss it straight into the trash heap, letting it decompose on its own and return to nature.

But before he could carry it out, several of Wei Qian’s mother’s sisters from the trade found their way to their home, proving by fact that even Qin Hui had a few friends and allies.

Together they pooled money and took care of her funeral arrangements, which counted as sending her off. One of the women told Wei Qian that she had not come into the world in any respectable way, so at the very least she should not die in such an undignified way either.

The little bit of money left over after handling the funeral, they left for Wei Qian and his younger sister, Xiao Bao. Then Wei Qian rummaged through boxes and cabinets and sold off some of the jewelry the woman had left behind. Those things used to be her life. No, they had been even more precious to her than life.

Her precious son had long found them an eyesore. The moment she shut her eyes, he immediately shook them out and sold them.

With that tiny bit of meager savings, Wei Qian began living the life of someone raising a little tagalong. He struggled on for more than a year, and then he graduated from middle school.

The three days of the high school entrance examination ended. On the last day, Wei Qian handed in his paper and rode his bike home.

He studied as if he really had something going for him. Working odd jobs and running around with hoodlums had not affected his grades, because school was his only connection to words like “future,” “hope,” and “a decent life.” He wanted desperately, with all his might, to grab hold of it.

On the way, Wei Qian bought a few mantou, parked his bicycle in a crude bike shed built beside a big cluster of dormitory blocks, and started walking home carrying the food. That was when he saw the little brat.

The little brat was all thin limbs and skin and bones, which only made his head look huge. He was a little taller than Xiao Bao, but not by much. Maybe he was about the same age as her.

He was wearing an adult’s sleeveless undershirt with wide straps, and nothing underneath. He had no shoes either. The undershirt was covered in drips and stains of every kind. It looked like a glorious riot of color, a whole magnificent sweep of the motherland’s rivers and mountains. He was crouched beside a trash pile in a narrow alley, digging through garbage and eating it.

It was hard to know how such a tiny little thing had managed to stay alive. Even wild dogs bullied him. When Wei Qian passed by, the little brat was in a standoff with a dog in the alley, fighting over half a can of beef someone had thrown away.

The wild dog was skinny, but it was not small. Its eyes glowed red, and who knew whether it had rabies. But since it had managed to stay alive during a citywide anti-dog campaign that was in full swing, it was probably some kind of hero among dogs too.

Originally, Wei Qian had not planned to pay any attention. A little brat like this was the sort you could always spot one of every month or so, born by accident, surviving by accident, without the luck to have both parents, and after a while they would probably die more or less the same accidental death. But just when Wei Qian glanced over in that direction, the little brat who was currently locked in unresolved feelings with a dog happened to lift his head and look at him too.

In that brief instant, the wild dog seized its chance. The moment it saw its opponent distracted, it lunged. The little brat had probably spent a long time being chased down and cornered by people, so his reactions were extremely quick. He threw himself to the side and dodged it. As a result, that damned dog ended up pouncing right at young Wei Qian’s feet.

The beast had red-rimmed eyes and was snorting hard through its nostrils, as if maddened with desperation, unable to tell friend from foe. It barked furiously at this innocent passerby who was only here to buy soy sauce, baring a full mouth of big yellow teeth.

Wei Qian was busy calculating how he was supposed to solve his tuition problem if he did get into high school, and he had no intention of dealing with it. He lifted his leg to walk on, but for some reason, the damned beast lowered its head and took a bite at his ankle.

Wei Qian hurriedly jerked his leg back. It missed.

At the time, Wei Qian was thirteen or fourteen years old. His father was dead, his mother was dead, and he still had a little sister who did nothing but run a snotty nose. Even though he had done brilliantly on the exam, getting in did not necessarily mean he would be able to attend. A child who grew up in circumstances this miserable, if he did not become cynical and resentful of the world, that would not really be normal, because that would mean he was too good at acting, and in the future he would probably turn into some high-IQ antisocial criminal.

So this chuunibyou teenager, already full of worries, blew up on the spot. He raised his leg and kicked the wild dog. He had grown up with hoodlums from childhood and was used to fighting, so that kick was not light. It sent the big dog flying straight into the wall. Even then, the wild dog still would not let it go and bit down on Wei Qian’s shoe again. Fortunately, this pair of shoes was a scavenged pair of plastic shoes. They were stiff and did not breathe, but at least they were sturdy, so the dog did not bite through them.

Wei Qian shook his foot, but seeing that he could not shake the damn dog loose, he planted his foot hard on the dog’s belly, then picked up a brick from the side and brought it down viciously on the head of this hero among dogs. One smash, and the hero let go. Two smashes, and the hero’s head was split open and bleeding. It had completely become a ghostly hero.

People, and dogs, at a time like this and in a place like this, were actually all the same. For example, some people wore suits and leather shoes and had good houses and good cars, while some dogs got groomed regularly and had sleek, glossy fur. And then there were other people and dogs who were doomed to tear at each other, stake their lives, bleed and sweat on a trash-filled alley like this, all for reasons that were laughable and pathetic.

Different people had different fates, and different dogs had different fates too.