Xu Zechen: Running Through Beijing

When Dunhuang arrived they were fighting. Kuang Shan was a tall, skinny man in his early thirties, with a clearly defined little mustache. The argument interrupted, Kuang Shan grinned and shook his hand, saying Xiaorong had told him Dunhuang was like a younger brother to her. How was he finding the job?

“It’s not bad,” Dunhuang answered, looking at Xiaorong sitting on the bed, having wept so hard she was hiccupping, her neck stretched forward as she tried to catch her breath. Years ago he’d seen his mother cry this way, when she and his father were getting a divorce. “Xiaorong, sis, is something wrong?”

Kuang Shan waved a hand. “She’s just making a scene. Women, right? It’s never really that big a deal.”

She slumped sideways on the bed, her sobs rising again.

“What are you doing to her?” Dunhuang’s face darkened.

“It has nothing to do with you. Take your DVDs and get out.” Kuang Shan looked sidelong at Dunhuang. “Leave our cut here.” Dunhuang didn’t move. “What?” said Kuang Shan. “You don’t want the movies?” Xiaorong stopped crying. She came over and pushed Dunhuang, trying to get him to leave. She couldn’t budge him. Kuang Shan’s face turned ugly — he didn’t know about the two of them, but he could tell something wasn’t right with Dunhuang. “I can’t have a fight with my old lady, huh?” he said.

“Who’s your old lady?” exclaimed Xiaorong. “I’m not your anything!”

“Don’t push it!” said Kuang Shan. “I’d slap you even if he was your real brother.”

Then Dunhuang’s fists were flying, and Kuang Shan bled from both nostrils. Xiaorong hadn’t expected Dunhuang to act so swiftly, and he was forced back a step as she thrust him bodily toward the door. Kuang Shan’s temper flared and he moved to strike back. “You fucking hit me! Where the fuck do you get off hitting me?” Dunhuang’s fist flew over Xiaorong’s head and landed on Kuang Shan’s left eye. “That’s right,” he said. “And there’s more where that came from!”

“Okay!” Kuang Shan sputtered. “So you sicced your beast of a brother on me! Stick around if ya got the balls!”

Dunhuang wanted to laugh — the guy even trotted out Beijing slang when he got angry. “Ya. .?” Do y’think that’s all it takes to be a Beijinger, you ass? Xiaorong shoved him out the door before he could say anything more. She said, “I’m begging you Dunhuang, don’t cause trouble for me.” Dunhuang’s fire died down a little, and he tossed the money through the door before turning and heading down the stairs. Kuang Shan was desperate to retrieve a little face, and came rushing out of the apartment to continue the fight. Xiaorong couldn’t stop him, and as Dunhuang emerged from the building he came down the stairs, cursing all the way.

“Stop right there!”

Dunhuang turned to look at him, saying “what the hell d’ya want?” He took a step forward.

Kuang Shan instinctively took a step back. “What gives you the fucking right to hit me?” he asked again.

Dunhuang looked up and saw a head peering out of a third-story window. His voice abruptly softened. “You should treat her better,” he said. “A woman like that.”

“She treats me like shit, why should I treat her well? And who sent ya to just parachute in and hit me?” Kuang Shan was yelling, waking nearby porch lights with sound-activated switches. Dunhuang could suddenly see the veins and tendons in his neck.

He was preparing to get back into it when Xiaorong called “Dunhuang!” from overhead. And Dunhuang knew he’d been beaten. It suddenly struck him as funny — no one had even arranged a match, and here he was declaring himself the challenger. What right did he have to challenge? He was nothing but an “adopted brother.” The “brother” called to the “sister” upstairs: “Don’t worry, I’ll just take my brother-in-law here for a drink or two and we’ll be fine.” He turned to Kuang Shan, “Let’s go, my treat.”

“A drink?” Kuang Shan said, struggling to keep up. “Drink what?”

The restaurant, just outside the gate of Furongli, was called The People’s Hearth. Dunhuang ordered ten bottles of beer, a few small dishes, and twenty kebabs. He wasn’t particularly in the mood to drink that night, it was just a way of handling Kuang Shan — they couldn’t have gone on slugging it out with Xiaorong watching. And anyway, there was no great harm in getting drunk.

“Five bottles each,” Dunhuang said.

“Five bottles?” Kuang Shan eyed the beer arrayed before him, muddled. He gritted his teeth and said “okay,” determined to suffer no further losses.

Dunhuang pushed the beer on him mercilessly. He didn’t want to waste too much breath on the guy — the sooner he was good and drunk the sooner the whole thing would be over. Kuang Shan could hold his alcohol, but after the first onslaught he slowed down — not because he was trying to get out of it, but because he couldn’t resist the urge to talk. Dunhuang noticed he was starting to slur, and as he slurred his gaze softened, and he took on the look of someone who’d met a childhood friend in an unexpected place. Though the drinks had reddened his face and thickened his neck, Dunhuang thought he looked a little more sincere like that, at least preferable to the way he preened his little mustache when he was sober.

“Are you really Xiaorong’s adopted brother?”

“You doubt it?”

“And that’s why you hit me?”

“You were making her unhappy.”

“I’m the fucking unhappy one! You think it’s easy, running all over the map? Even my dreams are about making money and getting rich, and making a life for myself in this damned place.”

“That’s your business. She wants to go home.”

“My ass! Is there gold and silver waiting at home? We’ve been here for five years, it’s too late to go back. We’d be broke. And things are just getting off the ground for me here, I’ve got to take care of things. I’m going to let them know that Kuang Shan is made something of himself!”

Dunhuang watched Kuang Shan, turning his beer glass and grinning. You will, will you? Hah. “Drink!”

Kuang Shan downed his beer. “Brother,” he said, leaning his head in and perching a heel on his chair. Dunhuang watched his foot tremble — a guy like this would be better off back at home. “Didn’t Xiaorong tell you? I opened a DVD shop, with a friend of course. Business is good — peddlers like you come to me to restock. How can I leave now? Running a shop’s hard. This is Beijing, not back home, where you can just set up a shack anywhere you like. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“You and your ‘sister’ are the same, don’t you see? You don’t get it. I told her I’ll be boss, and she’ll be the boss’s lady. She won’t have to run around with a sack of DVDs, she can just watch the shop while someone else makes deliveries. But she won’t do it, she wants to go home. A husband, a kid, and a hot brick bed — it’s the peasant mindset! The small-town mindset! You know small-town people? See, you’re both the same, you can’t accept new things. She thinks that once she’s caught up in the store she’ll never get out, so she won’t even go there unless she’s picking up movies. She won’t even lend a hand. Listen, Xiaorong’s great in every other way but this — she doesn’t understand me. She wouldn’t even sell DVDs if there was anything else to do. She’s drawn a line in the sand!”

“You know why she’s in a hurry to go home?”

“I told you — it’s just peasant thinking, small-town thinking.”

“You’re wrong,” said Dunhuang, wishing he could dump the whole beer bottle down Kuang Shan’s throat. “She’s a grown woman, haven’t you thought of that? Twenty-eight, on her way to thirty. She’ll be old soon. She said to me once, ‘how many thirties has a girl got?’ She wants a stable home, wants a kid, wants to stop floating, wants a place she can call her own.”