For some reason, the catastrophe crashing down around me made me start examining other aspects of my life. I began looking at my relationship with Lan Yu in a new light. I was in my midthirties at that point, ten years older than Lan Yu and well past the age when a man was expected to marry and have kids. I no longer had time for games, jealousy, or any of the bullshit that I had thrived on when I was younger. I no longer monitored Lan Yu’s every move—who he talked to, where he went. None of this was my business anymore, and, in fact, I really didn’t care what he did. All I wanted was to cherish each minute I had with him, for us to be happy in the short time fate had allotted us. I didn’t know what Lan Yu needed from me, but I was going to do my best to give it to him.
One night later that month, Lan Yu and I were in bed enjoying the kind of quiet conversation that lovers all around the world have while lying in each other’s arms after sex. At first we talked about nothing in particular, but soon the conversation shifted to heavier terrain. We began speaking of the journey of the human soul.
“Would you want to know me again in the next life?” I asked, pressing my lips against his sweaty forehead.
“No.” His reply was blunter than I would have liked.
“So you’re saying you regret knowing me in this life?”
“No,” he explained. “I don’t regret anything about this life. But I would never want to live this way again.” He smiled faintly and I wondered what he meant.
An instant later, Lan Yu’s pager beeped loudly on the nightstand next to us. He picked it up and glanced at it, but made no move to return the call. Instead, he reached farther across the nightstand to pick up a catalog. I stole a glance at the cover. It was a university brochure.
“Anyway,” he said, flipping hastily through the pages, “whatever happens in this lifetime, I don’t think MIT is going to be a part of it.” He had told me about MIT. It was a prestigious engineering school in the United States.
“Well, that’s okay!” I said cheerfully. “One day your son will go there.”
“What son?” he laughed. “Since when am I having kids?”
His pager rang a second time, so I picked up his cell phone and handed it to him. Lan Yu got out of bed and threw on pants and a T-shirt.
“I’ll be right back. I have to make a phone call,” he said. There was something awkward about his manner. “I’ll make it from downstairs, okay?”
A few minutes later he returned to the bedroom, moving as quickly and lightly as if he’d been floating in the air. There was a part of me that didn’t want to ask what it was, but the part of me that did quickly won out.
“You look like you got some good news!” I said, trying to sound chipper.
“He got in!” Lan Yu exclaimed. “He got an acceptance letter! Twenty-four thousand a year. I can’t believe it!”
“Twenty-four thousand what?” I asked.
“Twenty-four thousand dollars—a full fellowship! That’s more than enough to live on. He’s going to be able to do it!” Lan Yu jumped up and down like a kid. That’s when I put two and two together and realized he was talking about his boyfriend. He had gotten into graduate school in the US.
“Humph!” I blurted out cynically. “At his age, what’s the point?”
Lan Yu laughed. “He’s not as old as you are. He’s only twenty-eight!” This was an irritating comment, but I wasn’t going to say anything nasty in return.
“Well, then you’d better get moving so you can go with him!”
“Easier said than done.” Lan Yu sat back down on the bed and looked at me. “It’s almost impossible to get funded with architecture. I have a huge stack of acceptance letters, but no money to do it.” He scowled and looked lost in thought. “I’m thinking of taking the GRE again. My score was a measly 1980. I can’t believe I didn’t even break 2000!”
For the rest of the day, Lan Yu was moody and quiet. I thought this could only mean one thing: he was feeling down about the prospect of being separated from his boyfriend, even if it was only temporary.
A few weeks later, the bad news came. Because of my connections to the bank director who had been arrested, there was going to be an investigation into my company’s financial records. First I panicked, then I braced myself for the worst. My world was about to collapse.
I rarely visited my mother during those weeks in April. She never smiled in those days, and I was unable to look her in the eye knowing she had lost all faith in me. I had failed her as a son. She was heartbroken.
Lan Yu called me a couple times a week to get together, but consciously or not I began avoiding his calls. When he did catch me on the phone, I usually found a way to turn him down. I still saw him now and then, but had to accept that our relationship simply wasn’t enjoying the great renaissance I had hoped for. Either he was incapable of loving me, or he didn’t want to. Even if I had wanted to see him, though, it would have been hard, since most of my time was spent doing what I could to halt, or at least mitigate, the approaching catastrophe.
On one of the rare occasions when we were together, we lay in bed after a long session of lovemaking. I’d put him on his stomach with two pillows under him so his ass was up in the air and fucked him that way, slapping his ass until he came. I collapsed next to him, a sweaty, sticky mess.
“Hey, do you still have your old passport?” I asked before we’d even come down from the high.
“Huh?” he replied, still out of breath and apparently thrown off by the randomness of the question. “Why?”
“It’s probably expired,” I said. “Give it to me and I’ll get you a new one. You’re going to need a new reason for going abroad, but I should be able to get you a new passport within a week.” Leaning over the edge of the bed, I reached down to the floor and opened my briefcase. From there I pulled out an envelope with two pieces of neatly folded paper inside. “Here,” I said, handing the envelope to Lan Yu. “These are bank guarantees. One for a bank in China, one in the United States. You said you have acceptance letters, right? Just take this with you when you apply for your visa and they’ll give it to you.”
Incredulous, Lan Yu opened up the envelope and looked inside. “They won’t automatically give you a visa just because you have these.” He had done his homework.
“I know, but listen. I have a friend, a woman, who handles visas for the Ministry of Economy. She’s tight with the Chinese secretary at the US embassy and is on good terms with two of the visa officers there, too. After you get your new passport, she’ll take you there and you’ll get the visa.”
“You think that’ll work?” he asked doubtfully.
“I know it’ll work,” I reassured him. “Just get the visa, go to the United States, and worry about what to do next once you get there. I opened a bank account there with $50,000. If you get in a jam, use that money and pay me back later.”
Lan Yu stared at the piece of paper in his hand, silently fingering the corners and biting his bottom lip. I figured he must have been so moved by my kindness that he was unable to speak, but suddenly and unexpectedly he looked up at me with a cold smile.
“You don’t have to do this, Handong. I mean, it’s obvious the way you’ve been avoiding me lately. If you’re sick of me, just say so. It’s like you’re in this big hurry to ship me off.” He folded the papers back up and handed them to me. “Hold on to your money. Sooner or later I’ll get to America on my own.” He stood up from the bed to get dressed. I got up, too, and threw on a shirt, but dug around in the pocket of my trousers before putting them on.
“Here,” I said. “This is her card.” I handed him the thick rectangular paper. “When you have your passport, call her. I’ve already talked to her. She says she wants to help.” Lan Yu looked at the card skeptically, visibly reluctant to take it.
“This is your chance, Lan Yu!” I pressed. “Don’t you want to be with your boyfriend in America?” He looked up at me and I continued, “If you don’t want to do this, you may as well take the bank guarantees an
d throw them in the trash. And you can burn your acceptance letters while you’re at it.”
Lan Yu continued looking at me in silence, still not taking the business card. Why don’t you fucking say something? I felt as if a fire were burning in my belly.
“Anyway,” I said, picking up my wallet and keys, “time to say goodbye. And don’t come looking for me, either. There are plenty of guys out there who are a better fuck than I am.”
He looked devastated. I hadn’t seen him look like that in ages. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t, feel sorry for him. The only thing I felt was anger. I slammed my keys back down on the desk.
“You know what, Lan Yu? Ever since we met seven years ago and I gave you that thousand yuan, you’ve seen me as nothing but a bank account. That’s all I’ve ever been to you. Do you even remember what our first fight was about? Money! Must be pretty humiliating for you, huh?” I tossed the business card of my associate at the Ministry of Economy to the floor. “But if you think that’s humiliating for you, what about me? Imagine how I must feel knowing that in your eyes, my only role in this relationship has been to dish out a couple of fucking bills. Now, that’s humiliating!”
I stormed out of the bedroom, through the living room, and toward the front door, yelling as I went. “I’m not sleeping here tonight! I’m sick of your fucking heater being broken all the time. I’ve been freezing my ass off!” I reached the front door, then turned around abruptly. “Are you going to walk me out or not?”
Lan Yu turned his back to me. “You know the way out.”
He was right. I knew the way out.
This time it’s really over. Each day, that’s what I told myself.
Unlike the first time we had broken up, for some reason this time wasn’t especially hard for me. By that point, my heart had been broken so many times there was nothing left for me to feel. This, I imagined, was how Lan Yu must have felt three years earlier when I had left him for Lin Ping.
He called me a few times in the weeks that followed. Each time he asked if I wanted to meet for a drink, and each time I said I was too busy. “Besides,” I lied, “I’m trying to quit drinking.”
They say the human body can’t feel pain in two places at the same time. It must be the same with emotional pain, because if there was any sadness in my heart after things ended with Lan Yu, it didn’t stay there long. Less than four weeks later, one misery was replaced by another when the police walked into my office and put me in handcuffs.
There’s not much to say about the case. Just that on the day of my arrest, two plainclothes cops came into my office, showed me a warrant for my arrest, then made me sign something. I reached out my hands, and the next thing I knew I was cuffed.
It’s funny when I think about it now. I know myself well. Under normal circumstances, if something like that happened I’d be thrown into a panic. But for some reason, I was so calm, so composed, at peace even, as though nothing had been transpiring at all. Perhaps it was because I unconsciously suspected it was coming all along. The charges were big, the dangers acute, and I had done everything I could to rally support and protect myself. But when the ax came down, I found that everyone I had considered a friend wasn’t. I can’t say I blame them. They were only trying to protect themselves.
The list of offenses I was charged with was long: bribery, smuggling, illegal pooling of funds, on and on it went. It was during those days that I learned that if you really want to nab someone, it’s not that hard to come up with a reason.
I knew in my heart that whatever I had done, it was no worse than what everyone else was doing. My only disadvantage was that I lacked the right connections at the right time to bail me out. Nor did I have the backstabbing nature I would have needed to save my own ass. Maybe I’m not ruthless enough, I thought, as the warden gripped my elbow and walked me to my cell. All those years in business, and I was just as naive as the day I’d started.
Twenty-Nine
They locked me up in a local jail cell, where they made me write a confession of what had happened.
I was terrified at first. I could have received the death penalty and I knew it. But from fear there emerged some good, too, for it was precisely this confrontation with mortality that caused me to start reflecting on the person I had been for most of my thirty-four years.
I knew I had done some awful things. Again and again I told myself that if I was sentenced to death, it would be nothing more than payback for all the shitty things I had done. In that respect, I was resigned to fate.
But in other respects, I was anything but resigned. It made me angry knowing there were people out there who weren’t just lawbreakers, but were truly evil. And yet, those same people were moving around freely on the other side of the prison wall, living large like fat, blood-filled ticks. Most days I tried not to think much about them, filling my mind only with the two people in my life who mattered most: my mother and Lan Yu. Especially my mother. Each day I wondered how my death would affect her, what it would mean to her.
Lan Yu, I didn’t worry about as much. I knew he’d be fine. With him it was just a feeling of sadness and regret. He was the one true love I had had in this lifetime, yet he never fully understood it. Nor had he ever said, not even once, that he loved me, too.
Needless to say, prison life didn’t leave me much time to agonize over whether I was gay or straight. Questions like these were irrelevant in the face of death. Prison taught me that the only thing of real importance is what’s on the inside: what one gives and takes on the emotional level.
After about a week of this kind of reflection, I finally received some good news from my lawyer. A typical power struggle had erupted among high-ranking government buffoons, creating a deadlock that was likely to draw the case out for some time. To me, the news couldn’t have been more welcome. I sighed a breath of relief knowing that, at a minimum, I wasn’t going to be executed right away. But still, I knew it wasn’t over yet.
There’s an old saying: “When the city gate catches fire, even the fish in the moat get burned.” I knew in my heart that I was an innocent bystander, a small fish caught in a big fire. But I still got burned.
At first, they wouldn’t let me see anyone except my lawyer. But he was useless anyway. Whether he was impotent in the face of the arbitrary decision-making processes of administrative authorities, or just didn’t give a crap, I couldn’t say. But during my second week in jail, a miracle happened: they let me see Liu Zheng.
My childhood friend walked into the preliminary hearing and sat down at the table across from me. To my astonishment, the two officers who had escorted him into the room turned around and walked out, leaving us to talk alone. The company, I knew, would have had to drop a lot of cash for him to be able to speak with me in private.
I don’t know precisely how, but Liu Zheng had detailed information about what was going on. It turned out that not only the company assets but even my personal ones had been frozen. An audit was underway and, for the time being, the company had effectively ceased operations. All the members of upper management—those kowtowing old myrmidons once so eager to follow whatever directive I gave them—had disappeared into their various new positions like monkeys scattering when the biggest tree in the jungle falls. I knew Liu Zheng would have had to rally friends, family, and associates to pool the money required to get me out of there. He assured me he was working every angle, every connection to get me out.
“How’s Ma?” I asked when we were done discussing my case.
“She’s holding up,” he said reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Handong. She’ll be fine.”
“Please, Zheng,” I pleaded, reaching across the table to grab him by the hand. “You’re like a brother to me. You’ve got to check in on her to make sure she’s okay.” I let go of his hand then wrung my own hands together. The shame I felt when I thought of my mother was unbearable. First, I’d failed to give her the one thing she wanted most in life—to see her son married with a child—and now I had wound up in
jail.
Liu Zheng sat up straight in his seat and faced me squarely. “Listen, Handong. Don’t worry about our Ma. You know she’s like a real mother to me. No matter what happens to you, I’ll always be her son. I’ve visited her almost every day since you got arrested. If anything happens to you, I’m going to take care of her, and when the time comes, I’ll be the one who sees her off to the end.”
My eyes filled with tears. “Thanks, Zheng!”
Liu Zheng. He was a true friend. And yet, I only realized it because of Lan Yu. I thought back to the time he convinced me not to fire Liu Zheng. “You businessmen don’t know a thing about friendship,” he had said. Perhaps this was beginning to change; if so, it was something that Lan Yu had taught me.
Liu Zheng and I sat in silence for a few moments, then his eyebrows lifted as if he’d remembered something. “Oh, right!” he said. “Lan Yu wanted me to give this to you.” He pulled a thin sand-colored piece of paper from his pocket. The instant I unfolded it, I recognized Lan Yu’s handwriting. A lump formed in my throat.
We’re doing everything we can to get you out of there, Handong. You have to have faith! I don’t care how long it takes. You’re getting out of there and I’m going to be right here waiting for you. You owe me a lifetime, remember? Don’t go back on your word. You’re getting out of there! Until then—take care of yourself, Handong, take such good care! Yu.
When I saw that he had written his name simply as Yu, heavy tears rolled down my cheeks. In all the years we had known each other, neither of us had ever used this intimate, shortened form of his name. What did it mean that he was using it now?
“How does he know what happened?” I folded the note, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.
“He called me because he couldn’t get in touch with you and he was worried. He’s real upset, Handong. He’s waiting outside right now. They wouldn’t let him in with me. The agreement with the prosecutor was that I would see you alone.”
Beijing Comrades Page 26
