Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  For us, those skyscrapers belonged to a distant place, but for Tiny they were his future.

  Tiny tried to grow his hair long, but his grandfather cut it off. He tried to use a needle to pierce his ear but ended up covered in blood, and his grandfather had to rush him to the hospital. He gave up on looking like a Hong Konger, but he kept quietly mooning over his brother’s photos.

  I tried to keep my distance from Tiny, but sometimes I would take a break from running the alley with the Flip-Flop Army to pay him a visit. He always wanted to talk about his brother. “He’s a hell of a guy,” Tiny said. “They should put him on TV—he’s the same as all those people. He’s got a motorcycle and he drag-races on it with a girl on the back. But when it’s time to go to work, he changes completely. You should see how sophisticated he looks with a suit on.”

  “My brother takes drugs,” Tiny said to me one day, out of nowhere. He passed me a cigarette, then he leaned in and said, “That’s exactly what this is.” He looked pleased with himself, as if he had found the key to everything.

  He took the cigarette back, wrapped it up in the handkerchief he had taken it from, then put the package in a metal box and slid it under his bed. I could tell he considered it his greatest treasure.

  As I looked at him, I felt more distant from him than ever. I knew there was a passion inside him, and it frightened me. He wanted to leave this town and go to the city, to Hong Kong. He wanted to live how he imagined Hong Kongers lived.

  I will admit, I had my own yearnings when I saw those skyscrapers on TV. But that city and those buildings were never truly real to me. They were too distant. Tiny was living between worlds. He was a man out of time, surrounding himself with the trappings of a city that seemed to be dozens of years ahead of our small town.

  It wasn’t completely unexpected when Tiny called me over one night and took me to his room to show me a bundle of money and ask where he could buy a motorcycle. “Like the ones on TV,” he said. “I want you to take me to get one. I want to go drag racing.”

  Back then, there wasn’t anywhere in our small town to buy a motorcycle. He would have had to make a trip forty miles into the city. “What about drugs?” he asked desperately. “Can we get some marijuana?”

  That night I went along with him to an underground arcade where he played the slot machines. I watched him sit in front of a slot machine, stack up his tokens, then quickly lose them all. I vowed again to keep my distance from Tiny.

  I could see that he was too invested in his fantasy. I was worried that I would be swallowed up by it, too.

  I sensed a similar recklessness in myself.

  It never occurred to me that Tiny and Tiny would become friends.

  Tiny stopped sending over his cousins to get me, and I no longer stopped by to check on him. But one day his aunt sent for me. She wanted me to tutor him in math. He had scored 12 percent on his last exam.

  I took the exam paper from her and went toward his room, planning to laugh in his face. He couldn’t even do the basics, like adding a half to a third!

  I went in and saw the fisherman’s son and the future son of Hong Kong—Tiny and Tiny.

  They were bent over a wooden dinosaur model.

  It was a surprise. I had never seen the fisherman’s son speak more than three sentences to a stranger, but there he was, giving an exaggerated laugh, cooing over the dinosaur. “Wow! This is so cool. It looks like it could come to life.”

  I could tell he was sucking up. I felt an indescribable revulsion and a strange sadness watching my hometown Tiny become a sycophant. I knew what he saw in his namesake: Tiny could smell the sophisticated aroma of distant Hong Kong on his playmate.

  I worked with Tiny on his math exam, showed him what he had done wrong, and got away as fast as I could.

  Tiny chased after me, asking if I wanted to play a video game he had just gotten from Hong Kong. The fisherman’s son was right behind him.

  The way Tiny the fisherman’s son smiled obsequiously over Tiny the Hong Konger’s shoulder made me sick. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine.” I turned and left.

  After that night, when Tiny’s aunt asked me to tutor him, I would make up an excuse not to go.

  I didn’t want to see the fisherman’s son. He was simple and small-minded, but he also made me realize how simple and small-minded I could be, too.

  The Tiny I had known since I was young started to change. He skipped school for three weeks straight but headed off to school each morning and came back in the evening as usual. He went off to the town’s new industrial zone to pick fights with the migrant workers, telling them to bark like a dog, then smacking them. Then one day his parents realized that he had sneaked into their room and stolen a few hundred yuan.

  Wuxi was unhappy, but she didn’t want to cry in front of her husband, so she went to see my mother.

  “Boys will be boys,” my mother said, trying to comfort her in the only way she knew how.

  I listened, not speaking. I knew that Tiny and Tiny were both sick with the same illness: Hong Kong syndrome. I ran into the fisherman’s son a few times in those days, and I noticed that even his voice had changed. He was wearing his hair in the same style as Tiny the Hong Konger. He was even copying his smile.

  Finally I couldn’t hold back. “Tell him to quit hanging out with that other Tiny,” I told Wuxi.

  She was stunned. She had been proud of her son for making friends with the sophisticated city-bound Tiny. My mother gave me a slap. “Quiet,” she said, “adults are talking.”

  But Wuxi must have listened, because the next time I saw Tiny and Tiny, one of them gave me the cold shoulder and the other wanted a fight. It was the fisherman’s son who motioned for me to square off.

  The Flip-Flop Army stuck with me, though. There was relative peace. That was the end of things. I cut all ties with Tiny and Tiny.

  I still heard rumors, though. My hometown Tiny ended up in a fight, got put in detention, then ended up being put on special monitoring. Finally he dropped out completely.

  And then I heard that Tiny was finally headed to Hong Kong. It was only a week before he would leave our town forever.

  Auntie Yue came by with the dinosaur model and a Nintendo console. Those were Tiny’s favorite toys, and he wanted me to have them.

  “I don’t know what happened between you two,” she said, “but he still likes you. You should stop by and see him if you can.”

  Tiny seemed to have been practicing for my visit. The self-satisfied expression he gave me when I walked in must have been the result of countless rehearsals.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer. I felt like we were in a movie. He sat down on the bed and took out a scrap of paper. There was an address clumsily scrawled on it.

  “You’re the only person I’m giving this to,” Tiny said. “I want you to write me if you can.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “A letter to Hong Kong, huh?” I said awkwardly, not sure exactly how to respond. “That’s airmail, right? It’ll be pretty expensive.”

  “We’re friends,” he said. “If it matters that much to you, you can come visit me in Hong Kong and I’ll pay you back.”

  I passed him the gift I had brought him. It was a thick physics textbook that I loved. I had saved up for six months to buy it.

  “Auntie Yue showed me your physics homework,” I said. “It was a mess. Do the practice exercises in here.”

  “What a crappy gift,” he said, his arrogance as potent as ever.

  He left for Hong Kong on a Saturday afternoon when I was in the city for a school event.

  He left our town like he arrived, in the backseat of a luxury sedan surrounded by curious onlookers. Everyone pointed at him excitedly as he shut the car door. It was as if he was boarding a time machine.

  When I got home that night, some neighborhood kids told me that Tiny had attempted to see me before he left. They thought that was quite a big deal. But I was sad to see him go. I sneaked down the all
ey to Auntie Yue’s house and peeked in the window of Tiny’s bedroom and found it dark.

  When I turned back toward the alley, I heard the sound of a child crying. I knew it had to be the other Tiny, the fisherman’s son. I later learned that he hadn’t been there to see off the other Tiny either.

  Tiny being picked up in the luxury car for his trip to Hong Kong was like an alien being scooped up by a flying saucer for his return to his home planet. His time in our small town had been nothing more than a dream. Tiny was an interloper from another time. I went back to being the Barefoot Immortal. It seemed like everyone forgot about Tiny’s appearance in our lives. Everything was as noisy and unsophisticated as ever.

  The only person who seemed not to have forgotten was the Tiny who was left behind, the Tiny who still lived in the house across from mine.

  He didn’t have anyone to take him to the salon, so he tried to copy the other Tiny’s Hong Kong style by himself, taking a pair of scissors to his own hair. He didn’t have anyone to show off for, but he still harassed the migrant workers when he walked down the alley. He tried to get other people to join in. They weren’t interested.

  Since he wasn’t in school anymore, there was only one fate possible for Tiny: he would become a fisherman. He tried to avoid it. He ended up getting in a fight with his father and running away from home. He showed up a month later, gaunt and hungry, and finally gave in. His only condition was that his father buy him a motorcycle. Tiny’s father thought about it for a while and agreed, happy to see his son home again and ready to take up the family business.

  Fishermen need to get up early to catch the tide. They have to head out around five or six in the morning. I heard the motorcycle roaring to life at dawn each day. He made a show of ripping down the alley at top speed, carrying his father on the back as they headed out to start spreading their nets. His two older brothers followed them, huffing and puffing on their bikes.

  They finished each day at three or four in the afternoon. Tiny had been tanned a shade darker from working out on the deck. He dumped the catch at home, then tore off again. Nobody was sure exactly where he went, but I heard rumors that he liked to ride up the coastal highway going sixty miles an hour, whooping exuberantly.

  When he went by my house, I noticed Tiny’s hair getting longer and longer. I wondered to myself if he was trying to become the man that the other Tiny had wanted to be.

  I hadn’t expected Tiny to write to me after he went to Hong Kong. It was three years after he had left and I was getting ready to take the college entrance exam when I got his letter.

  On the envelope, he had messily scrawled my name and the address of the middle school we had both gone to. Thankfully, the woman at the school in charge of receiving the mail sorted through thousands of past and present students to locate me. Maybe the Hong Kong postmark helped.

  His penmanship hadn’t improved, but I noticed that he had started using the traditional characters they used in Hong Kong:

  Dear Blackie!

  Long time no see.

  Everything is good with me in Hong Kong. It’s beautiful, lots of skyscrapers, come and see me if you have time.

  I can’t speak Cantonese, so it’s hard to make friends. Please write me when you can. I have nobody to talk to.

  I’m not living at that old address, so send it to my new one. . . .

  Despite what he said, I knew he must not be having an easy time in Hong Kong. I couldn’t help but picture him in a classroom full of kids with gleaming white teeth and crisp white shirts looking down on their classmate from a coastal backwater. I could only imagine what they must call him behind his back.

  I suddenly felt very sad for him.

  I took the letter and went to knock on the door of the house across the way. Wuxi showed me in and pointed me toward Tiny, who was bent over his guitar. Back then, the heroes in all of the Hong Kong TV series we watched played the guitar, so learning the guitar became a fad.

  I took out the letter from Hong Kong.

  Tiny looked at it for a moment. He seemed stunned. I held it out to him, but he didn’t take it.

  “He wrote you a letter?” Tiny asked.

  I realized that Tiny had not written to Tiny after he had gone to Hong Kong.

  He snatched the letter out of my hand and tossed it in the stove. That was how I ended up losing Tiny’s Hong Kong address when my local Tiny let it burn.

  I realized I had been too reckless.

  I knew that I was forever cut off from both of them: I couldn’t write back to the Tiny in Hong Kong because I had let his address get burned up by the stove, and Tiny the fisherman’s son thought I had showed him the letter to hurt him.

  As we prepared to enter college, the teachers at our school began to sound more and more like someone trying to sell a pyramid scheme.

  “Think about your future,” they would say, “and stop fooling around. The day will come when you are in the city, and you can walk out your door and be surrounded by skyscrapers—that is the time to fool around! But you aren’t there yet.” They gave us examples of former students who had gotten into schools in Beijing and settled there. They could have added “and they lived happily ever after” to the end of these fables of academic success and big city life.

  Nobody suspected that Beijing wasn’t the final stop on an express train to happiness. The entire class began to resemble an expeditionary force preparing for its final campaign. Some students moved out of their houses to live in the school dormitories so they could avoid any distraction that would keep them from throwing themselves absolutely into their studies. They studied like monks entering into a meditation state. It was as if we had all boarded a spaceship, blasting off into the unknown in search of a more enlightened galaxy.

  I was one of the students who moved into the dormitory ahead of the final academic sprint. When the exam was over, as soon as I went home, my mother told me to check on Tiny.

  While riding up the coastal highway on his bike, he had ended up crashing, being thrown off, and landing head first. It had happened two months earlier, while I was getting ready for my exam. He had been in critical condition, but by the time I saw him, he was well into a miraculous recovery.

  I went over and found him in bed. The stitches had been taken out, but I could see that his forehead still had a dent in it. He was surprised to see me at first, but he smiled and said, “You know what I’m like. I banged myself up pretty good, but I made it out alive. Once I recovered from the accident, I was in the clear. I might have a couple of scars, but that’s not going to hurt my reputation with the people I roll with.”

  Within a couple of months, I was receiving invitations from universities far from our hometown, and I made the decision to get out just like Tiny had once told me to. I went to say goodbye to him, but he had already left to go fishing. I noticed that he had left his motorcycle behind. He must have huffed and puffed out there on his bike just like his brothers used to.

  He had become what he vowed he would never be: a hometown fisherman.

  I rambled around for a while after graduating from university and ended up staying in Beijing. It was a city that could compare to the imaginary Hong Kong I still held in my head.

  I had already realized that staying in Beijing wasn’t going to be the “happily ever after” to my story. It was just the beginning.

  It was a massive city teeming with human life and driven by anxiety. Every time I descended into the crowded subway, I felt as if I had been swallowed whole by the city. I felt small and insignificant. Life back in my hometown seemed more complicated, more joyous. It was a more human place.

  I even felt envious of Tiny the fisherman’s son. I heard that he had gotten married, had a son, and had bought a piece of land to put a house on. Just like his father before him, he built what he could and left a yard in the back where he kept a dog.

  Meanwhile I was nursing a perpetually sore neck, constantly stressed out about work, and when I went home, there was simply a
void. The only consolation I had was that I was a writer working for a top international magazine, and my articles went around the world.

  When my friends back home called me, they never suspected my life wasn’t perfect. I played my role and they played theirs. But when I hung up the phone, the emptiness came rushing back in again.

  One night I was going through the comments on my blog and saw one that read, “Is this really Blackie? This is Tiny. I’m in Hong Kong still. Can you give me a call?” He left his number.

  I hesitated. I was scared to talk to him. I didn’t want to know how he was—whether it was good or bad, it made me shudder to think about.

  A few weeks went by, and I unexpectedly was sent to Hong Kong on business. I had written Tiny’s number on a slip of paper before I left, but I still wasn’t sure whether I would call him.

  One day, with all my work done, alone in my empty hotel room, I finally worked up the nerve to dial the number.

  “Hello?” a voice said, then in Cantonese, “Who’s this?”

  “Is this Tiny?” I asked.

  “Huh?” I heard him say. He seemed shocked that I had called. “Blackie? Is that you? You’re in Hong Kong? Finally we meet again, huh?”

  He still remembered my voice. I knew then how lonely he must have been in Hong Kong.

  Just like the first time Auntie Yue had invited me over, I was nervous about meeting Tiny. I was soaked in sweat as I sat in the diner waiting for him to arrive. I kept imagining what he would look like. Would he walk in with long hair blowing in the breeze? Would he be dressed as cool as ever, with an earring in his ear? He had complete freedom in Hong Kong to look and act however he wanted.

  When Tiny came in, I knew right away that it was him. His body might have changed, but his face looked the same. His hair was cut short; he didn’t have earrings in, but his ears still had piercing holes in them. He was well dressed, but the canvas sack he carried with him seemed out of place.

  He smiled when he saw me, showing off tobacco-stained teeth. He enveloped me in a hug.