Bro | Chapter 46

“No,” Wei Qian said, somewhat uncertainly. “Xiong-ge, you… slow down a little, what do you mean? Can you not use this to scare people for no reason?”

Lao Xiong did not respond. He only stood up, took the project proposal, and set it squarely in front of Wei Qian. “Take this back and read it. This is the material going to the meeting tomorrow.”

Wei Qian had never once successfully read Lao Xiong’s eyes. Of course, aside from the fact that Lao Xiong was a fairly deep and guarded person, it was also because his eyes were too small, if you were not right up close, you could not even tell where his pupils were.

But Lao Xiong had always been cheerful and easy to get along with. Businessmen generally traveled all over the place, and aside from people like President Zhang, who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, there were not many with particularly strange temperaments.

Yet at this moment, for the first time, Wei Qian sensed that feeling of refusal from him, so strong it seemed about to spread through the air itself. Lao Xiong sat back down on the sofa cushion on the floor, folded his legs with some difficulty, and drew a cross toward the wall covered in Buddhist scriptures.

He seemed to be trying to make himself look unreasonable, trying to make himself look a little crazy.

Sometimes, maybe it was better if a person really did go crazy.

Wei Qian hesitated for a moment, said nothing more, picked up the proposal, stood up, and left.

The business proposal was full of gimmicks and probably very persuasive, but it could not persuade Wei Qian.

Because in their early years, when they did not have enough manpower on several projects, San Pang’s education was not up to par and his writing was clumsy, while Lao Xiong had to handle both financing and negotiations, so work like proposals and feasibility reports had, nine times out of ten, come from Wei Qian’s own hand.

He knew perfectly well how every one of these smoke-and-mirrors things had been blown up.

But stripping away the gimmicks, this was really just an ordinary villa project, and Wei Qian truly could not say exactly what was bad about it.

On the way back, he held that project proposal in his hand and thought the whole way. In Wei Qian’s mind, the scene still kept surfacing from that day when the three of them had followed President Zhang up the little hillside and looked down over the economic forest below.

What exactly was wrong with that scene? Wei Qian turned it over in his mind several times, but still could not come up with anything.

He was still young, after all. His experience was too limited.

In the end, there was only a faint shadow left in his heart. He could not say where that shadow was falling, only that there was some resistance inside him. He felt that if this project could be avoided, then it was best not to do it.

But Lao Xiong’s side…

Before heading out the next morning, Wei Qian finally managed to corner San Pang, and San Pang got into his car so they could go to the company together.

“Ugh, do not even bring it up.” San Pang waved his hand miserably. Every fold of fat on him seemed filled with misery.

“You were in such a hurry to leave then, you just tossed out one sentence telling me to stop him, but you did not explain clearly how I was supposed to stop him. I usually do not get involved much with the business side. You were real something, just bang, throwing everything down and leaving me with a task this huge. It nearly smashed me stupid. Yeah, I tried to stop him, but when Xiong-ge asked me about it, I could not explain the whys and hows, so there was no way I could stop him. At the time I thought, no, this won’t do, so I came up with a crooked move. I called saozi. I had been thinking, wouldn’t that have the same effect as going all the way to the Western Heaven to invite the Tathagata Buddha? But the moment the call connected, as soon as I had just finished explaining the whole thing from beginning to end, she started crying.”

Wei Qian said, “Who? Saozi cried?”

San Pang nodded with a grimace. “Exactly. Our Chen Lu-jie, who is a grandmaster of the Tathagata Palm. But then she cried. The moment I heard that, I thought, doesn’t that mean the sky’s falling? It scared the hell out of me. I asked what was going on, and in the end… sigh, it really was…”

Wei Qian stopped the car at a red light and asked slowly, “What illness does she have?”

“So you already know?”

Wei Qian said, “I heard a bit of it. Lao Xiong didn’t explain it clearly.”

San Pang sighed. “They’ve been married for so many years and still never had a child. It is not that they did not want one, saozi just could never get pregnant. She may have been born that way. Starting from when she was pretty young, she had tumors growing inside her belly, in the place where women have babies, you know? She had surgery two or three times before and after, but it kept coming back. The safest thing, of course, would have been to take it out, but she herself would not agree. She still wanted a child.”

No wonder…

“Didn’t saozi used to dance? Their line of work looks easy enough, but actually it drains the body badly, and she had that kind of sharp, competitive personality. Her body really could not hold up anymore, so she had no choice but to resign. Back then Xiong-ge said, so what if our line ends with us, it is no big deal, let her get it removed. She refused. In the end the two of them agreed to try for two more years. If they could have a child, then that would be best. If not, then that was just the fate of the two of them as husband and wife, and they would stop trying and let her have the surgery. But when they went to the hospital for a check up before the New Year, the doctor said they were done for, it might already have turned cancerous.”

The light turned green, and the car behind them honked impatiently. Only then did Wei Qian come back to himself and drive forward. “Has it been confirmed?”

“It has, otherwise why would Lao Xiong have cried like a real bear that day?” San Pang’s voice dropped. He paused for a long while before continuing. “With this illness, some people get it and do not die for twenty or thirty years, it is like not having the disease at all. Some people, though, it may spread in just one or two months. Chen Lu belongs to the kind that… had comparatively bad luck. Qian’er, anyway, that is how it is. The project is going before the meeting in a bit, so what do you say? Are you signing or not?”

Wei Qian knew that he no longer had any reason not to sign.

To lose a father in youth, to lose a wife in middle age, to lose a son in old age, these were the three great sorrows. Wei Qian himself had run into one, Ma Zi’s mother had run into one, and now it looked as if Lao Xiong might very soon run into another.

Was it that living was simply not easy, or were their fates just especially bitter? Wei Qian truly did not want to know the answer.

When he was little, he had thought, you cannot live without parents. If even that bit of emotional support is gone, then you may as well die.

A few years later, he thought, you cannot live without money. If even the most basic security in life is gone, then you may as well die.

Later still, he thought, you cannot live without dignity. If everyone looks down on you, then you may as well die.

Yet he had lost those things one by one. Some of them, he later got back. Some of them, he would never recover. And still, he had gone on living.

Maybe the atmosphere in the car was too oppressive. San Pang glanced at him and tried to lighten the mood. “A couple days ago, I heard President Zhang, that big bullshitter, chatting pseudoscience with me. He said there is this rumor floating around out there, that people with low body temperature are prone to cancer, while people with high body temperature are prone to cardiovascular disease. The two great killers of humanity, sooner or later we are all going to throw ourselves into the embrace of one or the other. When I heard it, I thought, from a principles standpoint, that rumor does not hold water anywhere, but in terms of common sense it really does seem to work out that way. So if we are alive and healthy, we had better learn to take things easier while we can. Your old lady at home is okay now, right?”

Wei Qian did not answer. After quite a while, he said something unrelated instead. “If I ever get to that day too, I’ll go somewhere no one can find me and just wait there to die on my own. I won’t get treatment.”

San Pang did not take it seriously. He laughed out loud. “That’s what you say now, sure.”

“It’ll be the same in the future.” Wei Qian smoothly slid his car into the company garage. “Those two kids will be grown by then. When the time comes, they should get married if they’re going to get married, work if they’re going to work. Why should I make myself something people resent? Let the hard things all end with my generation.”

San Pang turned to look at him. In the dim, dull garage, he felt that there was a kind of deep self-mockery on Wei Qian’s face.

Wei Qian parked the car, turned off the engine, and sighed. “But that is for later. Right now I still have to go earn money for them.”

Suddenly, San Pang felt there was something off about that. Wei Qian had considered his younger brother and sister eventually forming families of their own, yet he alone had left himself out of it, placed himself in a detached, solitary position, as if in his subconscious he had never imagined that he himself would marry a wife or have a child.

“Qian’er,” San Pang could not help saying, “shouldn’t you start thinking about settling down too, or at least finding a girlfriend?”

Wei Qian froze.

“You can’t stay single forever. Xiao Bao and Xiao Yuan are obviously both growing up now. You do not really have much burden anymore, so isn’t this exactly when you should find someone? Besides, with your family’s old lady like that, in the future she is also going to need one more person helping you look after her.”

Wei Qian frowned quickly. Psychologically, he still felt some resistance, but then he thought, that was true too.

A person had to have a home, right?

A home could not just have one person in it, right?

That day’s meeting went very smoothly. Wei Qian’s silent indulgence cleared away the final obstacle for Lao Xiong, and Lao Xiong’s proposal was soon approved.

Lao Xiong pushed it forward with tremendous force. Within half a month, he had signed both the framework agreement and the cooperation agreement with President Zhang one after the other. A month later, the project company and its operating management team were formally established, and all the early-stage work, surveying, planning, land acquisition, and so on, was launched in an orderly way.

Things became busy over in C City. There were too many places in the project’s early stage that needed someone stationed there. In terms of the general operational side of things, San Pang did not intervene much. It was mostly Lao Xiong and Wei Qian running around. At present neither of them was better off than the other, with one sick person in each of their homes, so they could only take turns shuttling chaotically between the two places.

On Lao Xiong’s side, luckily saozi was willing to use a nanny. On Wei Qian’s side, luckily there was still Wei Zhiyuan.

The day Grandma Song was discharged from the hospital, Wei Qian rushed back after finishing a meeting and happened to see a taxi stopped downstairs. Xiao Yuan had Grandma Song on his back, while Xiao Bao followed behind carrying things and opening the elevator door for them.

From a distance, each of them looked like an adult already.

Even Xiao Bao had done exactly what she said she would. She had truly started trying to take care of Grandma Song. Even though she had been clumsy at first, over time she slowly became more experienced.

And Xiao Yuan?

Xiao Yuan seemed as though he always had endless energy. Wei Qian did not know whether he was getting enough sleep, or whether school was being affected, but to an outside observer, the family’s affairs, the outside affairs, Wei Zhiyuan’s studies, and the whole family’s daily life all seemed to be balanced in his two hands. At least in Wei Qian’s eyes, Wei Zhiyuan handled everything with ease.

After another long negotiation and tug-of-war with the local government, Wei Qian returned home after more than two months away on a business trip.

The two kids seemed to have gone to school, and Grandma Song was dozing inside the house.

Seeing that it was nearly noon, Wei Qian tossed his suitcase by the door and began washing vegetables and cooking. He had not even finished chopping when Wei Zhiyuan came back.

He came in and said, “Ge, I’ll do it.”

Wei Qian said, “It’s fine, let me do it. I just got back today, you take a day off too.”

Wei Zhiyuan did not argue with him. He stood behind him for a while, then found an opening and, without warning, reached out from behind, pinned his elbow, grabbed the spine of the kitchen knife, and snatched it away.

Wei Qian: “…”

Pressing close by his ear, Wei Zhiyuan complained in a low voice, “I already said I’d do it.”

Maybe because he was standing too close, that voice kept drilling straight into Wei Qian’s ears. He could not help shivering a little, and quickly turned his head aside to avoid him, suddenly feeling rather uncomfortable.

Wei Qian wandered around nearby for a few turns, then compromised. “Fine, if you want to do it, do it. Are there still eggs? I’ll make some egg soup to drink… hey, fuck, Wei Zhiyuan, are you planning a rebellion?”

Wei Zhiyuan suddenly wrapped his arms around him from behind and, swaying a little, lifted both his feet off the ground. Using the posture one would use to move a large piece of furniture, he forcibly carried him straight out of the kitchen.

“I was just about to force the palace and seize the throne.” Wei Zhiyuan set him down and said rather smugly, “I’ll start with the imperial kitchen.”

That did not sound like Wei Zhiyuan’s usual tone at all. Wei Qian was startled and leaned against the doorway to size him up.

After coming back from this business trip, Wei Qian felt that some indescribable change had taken place in Wei Zhiyuan. He discovered that during the time he had been away from home, this kid, who by rights ought to have been exhausted like a dog, seemed instead to have come alive with some kind of vitality.

He was not like before, where he always seemed to have something weighing on his mind. Even though Wei Zhiyuan’s face showed that he was not getting enough sleep, his spirits were good, and he had even become somewhat brighter and more cheerful.

“I think if nothing else we should hire an hourly worker. Just do not let Grandma see. Have someone come every day just to cook for you two and tidy up a bit.” Wei Qian paused, then asked, “How about school, busy?”

“It’s okay.” Wei Zhiyuan sounded in a good mood. “Our club has been making some commonly used small tools recently. Last week, we got sponsorship.”

“Sponsorship?” Wei Qian froze. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Wei Zhiyuan looked back at him. “So I could hold out my hand and ask you for money?”

Wei Qian thought he had put it far too bluntly, so he coughed lightly and said with feigned reserve, “That is not necessarily the point. I would still have to see whether what you made had any investment value.”

Wei Zhiyuan dumped the chopped vegetables into the wok, and amid the sizzling of hot oil, he said, “No matter how capable you are, I can’t keep relying on you forever. A man has to go out and make his own way sooner or later.”

Otherwise, what would I use to take care of you later?

Of course, Wei Zhiyuan swallowed the second half of that sentence back down.

“Give me a break, brat. Say one flattering thing and you start panting.” Wei Qian laughed. “Tell your brother, how did you find the sponsorship?”

Wei Zhiyuan cheerfully told him, “At first we tried putting out ads, but later we realized advertising cost too much and did not do much, so we stopped. Then we tracked down potential investors’ contact information online and sent our ads straight to their email inboxes, and for a while we even made cold calls. Too bad the emails often got filtered out, and most of the cold calls got cut off by the reception desks before they ever reached the people. That still did not work, so in the end we just went door to door.”

Wei Qian could not laugh anymore. A bunch of college students showing up at people’s doors out of the blue, pitching their team and asking for sponsorship, how many cold looks must they have gotten?

Forget those big bosses. Even he himself, if he ran into something like that, would probably not even bother lifting his head and would just tell someone to block them and send them away.

“It is pretty hard asking people for help.” Wei Zhiyuan reported only the good news and not the bad. “But at least the result was good. We finally did manage to get some.”

As for everything that had happened in the middle, Wei Zhiyuan treated it as something light and easy, and did not describe how he had felt. He had always been an exceptionally outstanding top student. Maybe his IQ was very high, but his resilience in the face of setbacks had always been poor. He was much smarter and steadier than others his age, yet his ability to endure frustration did not match the rest of that at all. In that regard, he was even worse than Xiao Bao, who had grown up being scolded by their big brother.

Wei Zhiyuan hated that feeling of helplessness to the extreme. Those long days of going from door to door with the same materials, wearing his lips thin as he sold himself and sought investment, had almost dragged back out of the depths of his memory those wandering years of his childhood.

He was isolated and helpless, but he had not told anyone. He had just plunged into it like a headless fly for nearly a whole year. During that time, because of all kinds of difficulties, their club activities had had to come to a halt, and many people had left one after another. Wei Zhiyuan had borne the pressure alone, and at the same time there was still Grandma Song at home, a sick person who needed taking care of.

And he had to be careful not to let his big brother notice anything. The moment he opened his mouth, Wei Qian would definitely have given him the sponsorship. Wei Zhiyuan knew that perfectly well.

But what meaning would that have had?

When all the negative emotions were stirred up and piled heavily together in his heart, Wei Zhiyuan had more than once wanted to give up. For the first time, he realized that enduring in this posture that seemed so weak was no easier than anything else.

But had brother not been enduring like that all those years?

During those days, Wei Zhiyuan had almost managed to hold on only because of that yellowed old photo in his wallet, a photo of Wei Qian in his youth.

Wei Qian felt a pain in his heart that he could not put into words, the same kind of pain as when he had first seen Xiao Bao washing out Grandma Song’s piss pot.

But he could not express it. After staying silent for a long while, all he could do was praise Wei Zhiyuan with the same total lack of originality he had once used to praise Xiao Bao, only in an especially obscure and hard-to-decipher way. “You… if you were willing to bring home a girlfriend, your brother could close his eyes in peace right now.”

Wei Zhiyuan said calmly, “That’s impossible.”

“Not even a little possibility?” Wei Qian looked at him with something close to hope.

Wei Zhiyuan avoided his gaze, adding salt and seasoning, but his tone was firm. “Mm. Not even a little possibility.”

“For the sake of that male fox…” Wei Qian paused, then awkwardly changed course at the last minute. “Male… sweetheart? Do not think that just because getting sponsorship is hard right now, if you really go down this road, it will be much harder than your sponsorship hunt.”

Wei Zhiyuan seemed to find the phrase “male sweetheart” rather interesting. Thinking of something, the corner of his mouth lifted slightly in spite of himself. “I know. This is only the beginning.”

Wei Qian paused, then changed angles. “Then is the other person willing to accept you?”

Wei Zhiyuan looked at him and said with some hesitation, “I still don’t know. Maybe… maybe he can’t accept it.”

Wei Qian seemed to find a breakthrough at once. He softened his tone and put on the air of patiently trying to talk him around. “When men reach a certain age, they all want to marry a woman for a wife. Even if you do not want to, other people will. You’re still young now, you are not thinking that far ahead. If the person you like gets married in the future, what are you going to do?”

Wei Zhiyuan stopped all movement. After a tense pause, he said in a low, desolate voice, “Ge, can you not dig out my heart?”

Wei Qian looked helplessly at this Wei Zhiyuan who would not take in any oil or salt, and in his heart he thought of a line Lao Xiong had once used about him, this was a bastard swallowing a scale weight, his heart was set like iron.

He could not help thinking of saozi. Two months earlier, Wei Qian had found an opportunity to take Xiao Bao to visit her once.

Saozi refused chemotherapy. Somehow she had persuaded Lao Xiong, and Lao Xiong had simply let her have her way in silence.

Saozi had finally been satisfied when she heard Xiao Bao call her “godmother.” Whenever she looked at Xiao Bao, she could not help imagining that if she had a child of her own, if she could live a few more years, maybe she too might have seen her own child grow as big as Xiao Bao.

Just looking at this silly, heedless little girl, she could not help imagining that hazy, unreachable future of her own.

When they were leaving, saozi had said to Wei Qian, “Some children are born loving beauty, while some are born not caring about it at all. That is all natural disposition. It is like cats eat fish and dogs eat meat. Just because of your own preferences, forcing a child who loves beauty to cut her hair is the same as forcing a child who does not care about beauty to get up an extra hour early every day to put on makeup. It is all the same thing, strangling someone else’s nature. You think you are right, but do you know how cruel you are?”

Wei Qian knew these were words from the bottom of her heart.

Chen Lu, she too had naturally loved beauty, naturally loved art, loved her work, loved family and children, and loved life. Yet halfway through, everything had been forcibly cut off and marked with a rest.

When she had said this to Wei Qian, her eyes had clearly been red.

Then with Xiao Yuan being like this, loving a man with this same headlong stubbornness, refusing to turn back even after hitting a wall, did that count as natural disposition too?

Wei Qian did not know. Yet after his emotions rose and fell several times, in the end he once again retreated one more step past his own bottom line in utter humiliation.

He discovered sadly that his bottom line was like a pair of pants, sooner or later these little bastards were going to strip him down until not even the underpants were left.

Wei Qian said, “Do whatever you want, I’m not going to bother with you anymore. I’ve said everything I needed to say. Don’t regret it later. That… that person of yours, well, that person. You know what I mean. I don’t even know whether he’s good or bad. If there’s a chance, let me meet him.”

Wei Zhiyuan immediately understood what his concession meant. But hearing the second half, for a moment he did not know whether he should be happy or what. After struggling with it for a long time, he finally answered, “…Okay.”

Wei Qian still wanted to say more, but at that moment their conversation was interrupted by knocking from outside.

Wei Qian answered and opened the door, only to see a strange middle-aged woman standing outside. She had a head of scorched yellow little curls, like a walking chicken nest perched on top of her head. Her eyes were cloudy, and fine lines spread from the corners, showing that she was already getting on in years. She wore a floral blouse that did not quite suit her age and looked somewhat gaudy, and she was carrying a counterfeit designer bag you could see anywhere.

Wei Qian asked, “Who are you looking for?”

When the woman saw him, she also froze for a moment, then immediately said, “Oh… maybe I knocked on the wrong door. Um, does Wang Xiuhong live in this building?”

“Wang Xiuhong” was Ma Zi’s mother’s name. Wei Qian frowned. “What do you want with her?”