Xu Zechen - Running Through Beijing

“That’s what I said! The small-town mindset!” Kuang Shan took a contemptuous swig. “What am I trying to make all this money for if not to give her a home? Someplace that’s hers, where she can have a kid?”

The last ten skewers arrived. Fragrant, cumin-smelling lamb.

“You’re doing it for yourself,” Dunhuang said. “Do you deny it?”

“I swear to heaven and earth. . ” Kuang Shan trailed off, picking up a skewer. The meat thickened his voice. “Sure, I’m doing it for me, but if you’re a man, you’ve got to do something, that’s all. Don’t you want to be successful? Don’t you want to make something of yourself in this damned place? Sure, I’ve got my own plans, but you can’t say the work and the money don’t benefit her.” Sulking, he ate three skewers in a row, then, feeling better, continued. “Tell me the truth, brother. If you were me, would you go back home or not?”

“I’m not you.”

“But if you were, what would you do?”

“If I was single, of course I wouldn’t go back. If I had Xiaorong. . ” He hesitated. Kuang Shan stared at him while he finished his glass. “I don’t know.”

Kuang Shan started laughing. “You too, you see? Men are all the fucking same, it’s just pots and kettles.”

Kuang Shan pissed Dunhuang off, but now they’d somehow become pots and kettles. That nasty little mustache was still bothering him — he wished he could reach over and yank it off. He tamped down his anger. “Drink up.”

The mustache was quivering in satisfaction. “I will! I would have anyway!” He was drinking in celebration, Dunhuang was drinking in mourning. He was disappointed in himself. Even if he had Xiaorong, he would just be another fucking Kuang Shan, and not the Dunhuang he was in his imagination.

In the end, Dunhuang only succeeded in getting himself drunk. As soon as he was out the door he vomited violently, a stream of beer, meat, bile, snot, and tears. Kuang Shan asked if he should take him home but Dunhuang shook his head, telling him to go on ahead. Before he left, Kuang Shan told him that if he ever needed DVDs he should come straight to the store to get them.

Dunhuang sat by the Wanquan river until after midnight, then went back to his basement room. The three graduate students were asleep and the room was filled with the sounds of snores and grinding teeth. He washed briefly, and slept until ten thirty the next morning. When he woke the philosophy student was looking through the bag of movies he’d tossed on the table the night before. He had pulled out a porn, and was slavering over the tits and ass on the cover.

“Like it?” asked Dunhuang, sitting up in bed. “You can have it.”

The student nearly had a heart attack, and tossed the movie back in the bag as if it had burned him. He laughed awkwardly. “I don’t like that stuff,” he said, then followed that up with a bitter: “I’ve got nowhere to watch it, anyway.”

It was true, thought Dunhuang, he didn’t have a DVD player. The student asked about Dunhuang’s bag of DVDs, so he explained, “I know someone who sells movies, this belongs to him. I’m helping him sell a few.”

“You mean, you sell pirated DVDs?” The whites of his eyes were showing.

“More or less,” Dunhuang answered. He didn’t think that idiotic expression augured well for the guy’s academic career. He decided to ignore him and hopped off the bed to go wash, his head still big from the night before. He left the apartment, bought a corn-on-the-cob outside the gate of Chengzeyuan, and ate as he walked, heading to Peking University to deliver Der Himmel über Berlin to the student named Huang.

You couldn’t get into the dorm building without a card, so Huang came downstairs and swiped him in. His roommates wanted to see what other DVDs he had. The dorm was full of graduate students from the Chinese and art departments, and they came to Dunhuang with cash in hand. It was a good day, he thought — everywhere he went, students crowded around his bag. He liked the willingness of real graduate students to spend money. Nearly everyone had their own computer to watch movies on, and they bought stacks of them — porn too. One guy was supposedly writing a novel with some sex scenes in it, but didn’t have a girlfriend, so he picked out porn featuring every different race and nationality and bought one of each. For research purposes. In addition to the pre-order of thirty DVDs, Dunhuang sold forty-five more in the space of two hours. It wasn’t until someone said an administrator was coming for an inspection that he packed up and left. Huang came down to swipe him out and Dunhuang gave him two popular Hollywood movies for free, arranging to come back the next week.

That kind of bulk sale was pure windfall, though, so Dunhuang kept up his usual rounds.

The basement lodging may have been gritty, but it was cheap, and water and electricity were free. Dunhuang couldn’t be bothered to move and decided he’d stay until he’d earned enough money to rent his own place, and buy a TV and DVD player, too. He had a lot of movies to watch. After reading a couple more film books he’d developed an interest in art films. At the end of the week he paid another week’s rent, and continued selling DVDs, leaving early and coming back late, exchanging the occasional chat with one of the nerds, enjoying the game of pretending to be an art student. He went as far as to shave his head, one fine morning beside the Wanquan river.

He’d left the basement at mid-morning and taken the path along the river in the park. In a patch of riverside sunlight, four barbers had set up chairs. Practitioners of that ancient craft could set up shop anywhere, all it took was a high-backed wooden chair, basin and basin-stand, cold water in a bucket and hot water in a thermos, manual clippers, a shiny strop, and an old guy in glasses and a white coat, but you didn’t even see them in the countryside anymore. Dunhuang had a sudden urge to get his head shaved. When he was young his father had cut his hair for him, with clippers — either a bowl-cut or a flat-top. When he got older, he protested — his father never learned anything but those two dorky styles. He started going to barbershops and hair salons where gentle girls washed his hair. It was no longer a haircut, it was “getting my hair done.” Now, standing in the sunlight, he wanted his head shaved. He said to one of the old men, “Need it shaved.”

The man craned his neck to look at him, and when he was finally sure he’d heard him correctly, he laughed. It was one of those laughs of deep satisfaction, as though the head were already shaved. Dunhuang threw himself into a chair the likes of which he hadn’t touched in years; the three other chairs beside him were all occupied by old men. Old men shaving old men. His barber turned on the radio, first tuning it to Peking Opera, then to a pop station. Dunhuang heard Zhang Huimei’s voice straining at the top of her register as she wailed on some mountaintop.

“Flat-top?” the barber asked.

“No top.”

“All off?”

“All off.”

He closed his eyes while the man worked, and the radio played one pop song after another. The old barber wasn’t listening, and hummed a bit of Peking opera to himself, something from Su San Sent Out Under Guard . The warm sunlight was like hands caressing his increasingly exposed scalp, and Dunhuang’s thoughts grew turbid and vague, as if he was dreaming, as if he was traveling back to when he was small. Having his father cut his hair in the summer dusk, and afterwards washing in the river, wearing some old long johns of his father’s that hung below his knees, and not even underpants underneath. He’d plunge straight in, and when he came up his head would be clean.