Bro | Chapter 29

The captain gave the order, but no one moved.

There was never much going on in a small place like this. They spent all day chasing thieves and were bored out of their minds. It had not been easy to come across such a major case, and everyone who could go out in the field had swarmed over, only to run into the most fantastical scene in recorded history.

A whole group of them stared at their captain with big eyes and little eyes. Finally, a young comrade bravely asked, “Captain, which one are we taking away, and which one is the main person in charge?”

The captain pulled a long face, puffed out his chest, and put on the expression of a furious vajra, then said with complete righteous confidence, “How the fuck should I know?”

The comrades continued staring at one another. The young man from before, encouraged by the looks from his coworkers, bravely voiced the question in his heart once again. “Captain, can you tell what kind of place this is? Do you know what they’re doing?”

The captain’s face turned green, and the skin on it twitched. “How the fuck am I supposed to tell?”

The young comrade was in utter despair. “Captain, then can you tell us whether this is normal business, or some kind of unknown criminal gang?”

The captain felt his bitter misery surging like a river inside him, so all he could do was roar at the man, “What the fuck am I supposed to use to tell you that?”

This luxuriously decorated private club was deeply baffling. When they first entered the magnificently decorated lobby, driven by a vague resentment toward the rich, the captain instinctively put on a vicious expression, raised his work ID, and barked for the person in charge to come out.

A whole row of receptionists stared at them blankly. Suddenly, one man who looked like a security guard seemed to have some kind of fit. His face went deathly pale, and he turned and ran.

The captain’s first reaction was that this person was the murderer, and he bellowed, “Stop right there!”

The captain charged ahead at the front. The others had no idea what that man had done, but they could not fall behind their leader, so they all took off after him too.

This kind of panicked flight and pursuit quickly triggered a herd effect. The people who had still been relatively calm a moment ago suddenly no longer knew what kind of situation this was, and they began making a rapid strategic retreat too.

In the blink of an eye, a bunch of broad-shouldered, thick-waisted security guards all looked like respectable women who had run into hooligans, each one fleeing faster than a rabbit.

Only a row of pretty young women remained, huddling together and shrinking back, their faces twisted as if from menstrual cramps.

The person running in front just happened to run into the lobby manager patrolling the middle of the corridor. The lobby manager came from a background as a high-level enforcer. The moment he saw this hellish scene, he thought a turf fight had broken out, and he pulled a handgun from his waist. Ordinary people would never get that kind of treatment.

He had just been about to shout at the security guard who had nearly crashed into his arms when he heard the man say, as if he had seen a ghost, “Police! A whole bunch of police!”

The lobby manager said, “Impossible!”

Several more people came running right behind, shouting and yelling as if they were crying wolf. “Fuck, why are there cops here?!”

The lobby manager hesitated for two seconds, painfully wavering between “fight the cops to the end” and “retreat decisively,” then chose decisive retreat.

That chase was what led to trouble.

When all was said and done, it was all Zhao Laojiu’s fault. Zhao Laojiu was too much of a bandit at heart. He was one of Hu Siye’s top thorns in the side, the kind of man for whom there was no violation of law or discipline he would not commit. There were only things other people could not think of, not things he would not dare do.

He looked down on anyone who could stand openly in the light. The people he thought highly of mostly had criminal records. So when he saw the police, his first instinct was that something had happened.

The guests ran even faster than they did. Among the guests, they were either people of shady origin or people with status and reputation. They had all come out to have fun, and none of them wanted anything to do with the cops. Every one of them was slippery as an eel, and the moment they caught wind of trouble, they scattered on the spot.

Zhao Laojiu had the same question in his mind. Fuck, why are there cops here?

But he had to hold up the front, so he could not go leaping around in panic. Zhao Laojiu wiped away a cold sweat. He had not received any news, and after thinking it over carefully, there did not seem to have been any slipup either. He racked his brains and still could not figure out what exactly these cops had come for. Could it be that they had fallen behind on the water and electric bills?

Zhao Laojiu lowered his voice and said to one of his men, “Clear everybody out first. What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I mean clear out the fighters. The guests are all slippery old loaches, do you even need to remind me? They already ran. Don’t leave anyone behind except the female servers and the ones with clean backgrounds… Forget it, then that only leaves the female servers. Tell someone to get the business license ready. I might have to go with them for a trip later, but I’ll be back very soon. Don’t worry, nothing’ll happen. Tell them to clean up everything on the floor, especially the chips and the ‘goods.’ Tell the outside world that the people on the ring were all hired models, it was just a performance. Then notify Hu Siye immediately.”

His subordinate had been thrown into confusion by the sudden turn of events and asked in a low voice, “Then… what if something really does happen?”

Zhao Laojiu shot him a vicious glare. “Bullshit!”

The subordinate had a forehead full of cold sweat just like him. He did not dare make a sound and turned to make arrangements.

And just like that, Wei Qian was evacuated with the rest.

When the great waves washed the sand, only the tiniest floating organisms could slip out without making a sound. No one would spare them a second glance.

Wei Qian left the boxing ring and headed straight for the train station.

The moment he entered the station, Wei Zhiyuan practically knocked him over.

San Pang and Xiao Yuan had been waiting there for him the entire afternoon.

A little after noon that day, San Pang, baking under the scorching sun and drenched in sweat, had picked up Wei Zhiyuan. The moment they met, he asked in a red-faced panic, “Where’s your brother? Where is he? Huh? What kind of place is that address you sent me? What’s he doing there?”

Wei Zhiyuan said, “Fighting in illegal matches.”

San Pang’s voice shot up eight pitches. “What? Fuck your two grandpas! Can you two little bastards let me live another couple of days or not?!”

Wei Zhiyuan looked at him without saying a word.

San Pang continued roaring, “Don’t give me that pitiful act. Why aren’t you taking me over there to collect his corpse?”

Wei Zhiyuan said calmly, “My Ge won’t let you go look for him.”

San Pang opened his mouth, then reacted as well. Whether they contacted each other or called the police, everything had been done in secret. Wei Qian wanted the whole thing to look like one stupid coincidence, to muddy the waters so he could slip through them.

So as a stranger, San Pang absolutely could not appear in anyone’s line of sight. They could not arouse even the slightest suspicion. Even a tiny bit would be enough to make them suffer badly.

San Pang said, “Then where do you think we should go?”

Wei Zhiyuan raised his hand and showed San Pang the little turtle on the back of it. San Pang was so worried he reached out and rubbed the boy’s head. “Ah, looks great. It looks exactly like your brother. This brat, at a time like this, he’s still drawing turtles on his hand?”

Wei Zhiyuan pointed at the turtle shell. “My Ge drew this. San-ge, look carefully. The shell is an upside-down railway emblem. We’re going to the train station.”

And so San Pang and Wei Zhiyuan came to the train station. From the blazing sun high overhead until the sun sank in the west, they waited until the anxiety in both the big one and the little one had burned into fire. Their eyes were almost worn through from looking, when Wei Qian finally arrived at long last.

Wei Zhiyuan clung to his arm and refused to let go. At the same time, he pulled a book out from inside his clothes, where he had tucked it into the waistband of his pants. It was the old math textbook Wei Qian had brought with him, the one full of divine turtles, and the cover had already been soaked through by the child’s sweat.

Wei Qian took it in his hand and did not know what to say.

At first, San Pang was even more excited than Xiao Yuan, to the point that he could hardly contain himself. The whole man turned into an enormous spray bottle, showering Wei Qian all over the head and face with spit.

Unfortunately, this dead fatty’s tenderness only lasted a few minutes. Once the initial excitement passed, he turned hostile and refused to recognize anyone, giving Wei Qian a full demonstration of what it meant that fat people were fickle.

He dragged Wei Qian into a deserted corner and, in every way he could think of, launched into him from two directions at once, one by “presenting facts and reasoning things out,” the other by “greeting his ancestors and cursing his mother.” He switched roles naturally and skillfully, as if he were not fighting this battle alone.

In the end, after a long speech, San Pang arrived at what he believed was a highly reasonable conclusion. “Wei Qian, today I’m going to tell you about a major discovery in the scientific world. You are one giant fucking idiot.”

Wei Qian, who had been rigorously proven by science to be a fucking idiot, had nothing to say in response, so he could only take the scolding without talking back.

All three of them had come there sitting in hard seats. On the way back, they splurged a little and bought sleeper berths.

Unfortunately, sleeper berths were not much more comfortable than hard seats, because Comrade San Pang’s snoring was simply too world-shaking. Several times it nearly shook the train off the rails, yet this dead fatty remained completely unaware, sleeping very early and waking very late.

The few passengers nearby practically treated him like a class enemy. In the end, everyone, without prior agreement, lay facedown on their bunks, covered their ears, buried their heads in their pillows, and spent the long sleeping hours in a posture that looked exactly like people hiding from bombs.

Whenever Wei Qian could not fall asleep, he lay flat and calculated the family finances. This trip had barely cost him anything. Adding in what he had mailed home and the meager savings he had from before, he now had a total net worth of thirty thousand-yuan.

For their family of four, five or six hundred-yuan a month was enough to live quite comfortably. Over the course of a year, as long as no unexpected trouble cropped up, tuition and living expenses together would not exceed six thousand. If he could find work during winter and summer vacation and on holidays, there would even be another thousand or eight hundred left over to support Ma Zi’s mother mother.

For the time being, he could finally let out a breath.

Just as Wei Qian was carefully thinking through their livelihood issue, one item at a time in his head, the upper berth above him suddenly moved. Then, in the pitch-dark, a small head appeared, hanging upside down in midair as it looked at him.

Wei Qian happened to glance up, and the blazing eyes in that little head startled him. He immediately snapped, “Wei Zhiyuan, what the hell are you playing at? Go to sleep!”

Wei Zhiyuan got scolded but was not upset in the least. He even seemed happy, and pulled his head back in.

Wei Qian withdrew his thoughts. For the past several days he had been strung tight the whole time, and his energy was flagging a bit. After he got used to the noise, even with that snoring beside his ears that could shake heaven and make ghosts weep, drowsiness gradually rose in him. Just as he was about to drift off, the little head from the upper berth popped out again, sneaky as a thief.

Wei Qian half propped himself up irritably and reached up to the upper berth. “Did you eat too much and have nothing better to do? Why do you keep looking at me?”

Wei Zhiyuan immediately lay back down obediently.

Wei Qian thought the kid was excited because it was his first time riding in a sleeper berth, so he reached over and pulled the blanket up for him. His voice softened a little. “If you can’t sleep, stuff your ears. If you really can’t sleep, kick that fatty once.”

Wei Zhiyuan answered softly, but he still kept staring at him.

Wei Qian climbed back down, copied the others by plugging his ears, wrapped his head into the pillow, and closed his eyes.

After quite a while, in the darkness, Wei Qian suddenly understood. Wei Zhiyuan was not fooling around. He kept sticking his head out because he wanted to see whether Wei Qian was still there.

This little brat had really been frightened badly, Wei Qian thought. I shouldn’t have brought him out.

When the two brothers got home, as a matter of course they were met by Grandma Song’s loud yelling and endless questions. Wei Zhiyuan played dumb and kept silent, so Grandma Song turned all her firepower on Wei Qian. “Where did you get so much money? Where did you go? Did you go do something bad? Talk!”

She was like an oversized fly, buzzing nonstop in Wei Qian’s ear. Unable to endure it any longer, he ran away from home, took the remaining twenty-five thousand and opened an account to deposit it in the bank, without telling his grandmother, so she would not nag him again.

By the time he wandered around in a big circle and went back, Grandma Song was still as stern as a wrathful statue, showing not the slightest sign of letting him off. Wei Qian finally caved and said impatiently, “I sold blood. Happy now?”

Grandma Song gaped. “Sold… sold what?”

Wei Qian’s attitude became even nastier. “Sold two jin of blood and one kidney. Have you asked enough? Can you let me have some peace?”

This was an obvious load of nonsense, but Grandma Song did not see it that way. She had never studied a single day in her life. She had heard of people selling blood, but she did not know that human blood was not like apples or watermelons, something that could be weighed by the jin. Then she looked again at Wei Qian’s pale, haggard face, and immediately started spinning wild thoughts and believed him.

Wei Qian had only meant to make her stop bothering him. He had not expected it to produce this result.

Grandma Song immediately let loose with a bright, piercing voice that could carry through ten li and eight villages, crying with tremendous dramatic effect. It was exactly the prelude to beating her chest with her feet stomping and preparing to hang herself.

Xiao Bao and Xiao Yuan looked at each other, then both cast helpless looks at their big brother. Big brother’s expression stayed blank for a full half minute. Xiao Yuan thought the corner of his eye twitched once.

Wei Qian crouched down beside Grandma Song and, with the sort of care one used when preparing to touch an electric gate, stretched out a finger, poked her once, then quickly drew back. He cleared his throat. “Um… that… stop crying.”

Grandma Song’s face was a complete stew of snot and tears. “I’m useless! I’m just a countryside old woman… I can’t do anything! All I can do is make trouble! Making the children go sell blood and kidneys, is that something a human being would do? Why aren’t I dead yet… what am I even alive for…”

Wei Qian was not to the point of being at a total loss, but he was still at the end of his rope. He silently listened to the old lady’s endless strings of crying lines and found it both laughable and absurd. He thought to himself that luckily he had not told her he had gone to fight black-market boxing, or this old thing would have been scared to death on the spot.

And beneath this absurd feeling that made him want to laugh and cry at the same time, he felt a strange trace of comfort.

The words “making the children go sell blood and kidneys” struck straight into the pit of his heart. From childhood to now, very few people had ever called him a “child.”

As Wei Qian saw it, the two words “child” were not a neutral noun describing a certain age group of human beings. In his opinion, the neutral term should be “brat.” The word “child” seemed instead to represent a special sort of care, tolerance, and indulgent affection coming from adults or elders.

…That was something he had never received.

Wei Qian felt a little embarrassed. Only after the old lady’s crying had weakened somewhat did he pull a roll of toilet paper out from under the dining table and hand it to her. “Hey, stop crying. I was just talking nonsense a minute ago. I lied to you.”

Grandma Song sniffled and cursed at him. “You little bastard! Then what exactly did you go do?”

Wei Qian lied so smoothly he did not even need a draft. “A friend of mine had some connections and pulled me into a business. We transported some goods down south, made a few runs in big trucks…”

Grandma Song said, “Bullshit. Why don’t you piss and take a look at that complexion of yours?”

“I…” Wei Qian could not help being so exasperated by her that he laughed. “Do you know how many hours a day we spend on the road? Big trucks on the highway run ten-plus hours a day. Eating in the truck, sleeping in the truck, getting blown on by the wind and baked by the sun, who could possibly keep a good complexion? I’m not some immortal.”

Grandma Song looked at him suspiciously.

“It’s true.” Wei Qian spun it like it was real. “San-ge went too. If you don’t believe me, ask him. We hauled goods from factories down in Guangdong, then sold them up north and the price flipped several times over. What’s a few thousand-yuan in labor fees to me?”

Anyway, San Pang would help him cover the lie.

Only then did Grandma Song become half convinced. After a moment, she said, “Then… then lift up your clothes and let me look. People say that when somebody sells a kidney, there’s a cut across the lower back.”

As she spoke, she was already about to start pulling at Wei Qian’s clothes herself.

Wei Qian leaped up from the ground and took a big step backward. “What are you doing? Men and women shouldn’t touch each other! At your age, can you have a little shame?”

Grandma Song heard him getting more and more outrageous, so she rolled up a book in her hand and started smacking him all over the head and body. “I’ll teach you to spout nonsense, I’ll teach you not to be honest…”

After she gave him that beating, she finally forgot about pulling up his clothes. This hurdle was considered passed.

The summer vacation flew by in a flash. Song Xiaobao, that useless thing, once again started frantically borrowing from here and patching from there to make up his homework. San Pang often came by to look in on them. During the daytime, Grandma Song went out to sell things. The three boys each occupied one corner and read their own books quietly, as if their household, usually noisy as a gong and drum procession, had turned into one giant study hall full of scholarly atmosphere.

Sometimes when San Pang sat there too long, he even started to feel a little uncomfortable with it.

Wei Qian changed into a clean white T-shirt, got his hair cut neatly, and when he was fully focused and free of distractions, the gloom between his brows would fade away completely, making him look just like an ordinary middle school student.

In September, he finally returned to the campus he had been away from for more than three years and once again began the regular, full, and utterly unremarkable life of a high school student.

Every morning, he first rode his bicycle carrying Grandma Song to the place where she sold eggs. Then he fished a corn cob and an egg out of her pot and took them with him to school to eat. After finishing eight busy classes in a day, he would use the dinner break to dash out of school, ride his bike to take Grandma Song home, then casually grab something to eat from the house and hurry back to school in time for evening self-study.

Now that there was an adult in the family who could help look after the home, more than half the burden on Wei Qian’s shoulders had been lifted away, and in his heart he was grateful to his grandmother.

Actually, Wei Qian had not even finished first year of high school, but to save time, he went directly into Miss Li’s second-year class. Even though he had been studying the whole summer, his first monthly exam results were still not ideal, and he only barely squeezed into the lower-middle ranks.

But Wei Qian did not think it was any big deal. As long as he was not at the bottom, that meant he could still keep up. By the time of the midterms, he had already climbed from the lower-middle ranks to the upper-middle ranks.

He studied the same way he had once watched Le-ge’s turf and acted as a thug for him, with single-minded devotion, and the results were obvious. After all, wasn’t so-called “hard work” nothing more than getting up before dawn and staying up deep into the night, reading a little more than other people and doing a few more sets of exercises than other people?

For Wei Qian, that kind of “hardship” did not amount to anything at all.

By the time of the final exams, Wei Qian had climbed completely from the upper-middle ranks into the top ranks, turning into the kind of easygoing, taciturn, handsome honor student every school had… an identity that half a year earlier would still have been unimaginable.

Unfortunately, at home he was the absolute head of the household. Grandma Song spent her days doing small business and helping other people with odd jobs, busy from dawn to dusk, and those two little brats did not dare open their mouths and ask about his grades. Wei Qian also felt that if he brought it up himself, it would seem too much like showing off and would damage the dignity of his position as head of the family.

It nearly suffocated him.

He held it in all the way until New Year. Grandma Song handed out red envelopes and cooked the dumplings. Only at the dinner table did she suddenly remember to ask Wei Qian, “Her brother, how’s your studying? What place did you get on the exam?”

Wei Qian held the first lucky money he had ever received in his life and said awkwardly, “You sure are minding a lot of business.”

Grandma Song laughed and scolded him in high spirits. “Little bastard, speak like a human!”

So Wei Qian deliberately reported his scores and ranking in a casual tone, as if they were all chicken-feed trifles not worth mentioning at all, and he was only reluctantly saying them because she insisted on asking.

Grandma Song’s hand, stirring the boiling water in the dumpling pot, suddenly stopped. After quite a while, she asked carefully, “Then… then that’s enough to get into college, right?”

Students in a key high school never treated “getting into college” as any sort of goal. Their goal was always to get into the best university possible.

But the educated people Grandma Song had come into contact with in her life were very limited. Normally, the students and office workers who patronized her little business were all people she treated as belonging to another class, serving them with deference. She had never imagined that her own household might also produce one of that… class.

In her mind, “going to college” was a humble and distant dream beyond reach.

Wei Qian answered with an absentminded “Mm.”

Inside, Grandma Song was boiling over with excitement, too worked up to express it. Even many days later, when Wei Qian was nearly back in school and had ridden his bike to the place where she did temporary labor in the afternoons to pick her up, he could still hear her waving her hands and bragging to the people working beside her, “My eldest grandson is in a key high school. The teachers all say getting into college later won’t be any problem at all.”

Hearing this from afar, Wei Qian muttered, “Old thing, you really know how to stick gold on your own face. Who’s your eldest grandson?”

But even though he said that, when he pushed his bike over, he still said as if it were nothing, “Grandma, let’s go.”

At the end of all suffering and burdens, what awaits is the flowing passage of this mortal life, smooth as drifting clouds and running water.

You can possess nothing, so long as your spirit remains, 2013 Shanghai Jiao Tong University commencement address by the university president.

[Volume Two: Lion]