Chapter 23
The weekend clay pot rice sizzled on the table, the sausage fat seeping into the rice. Li Xuan was chattering about the school's cultural performance of "Butterfly Lovers" when her mother suddenly frowned: "Two men dressed as butterflies, what a mess!"
Li Ruiyuan paused as he was serving the soup.
"TV dramas are so filthy these days." The mother picked up some food for her daughter. "Yesterday's drama with two male leads, two men hugging each other..."
Li Xuan pouted: "Mom, you are so old-fashioned...
"The girls in our class also support gay couples!"
"What the hell?" Mother frowned.
"I just think it's beautiful for two boys to be in love."
"What old-fashioned!" He banged his chopsticks against the edge of the bowl. "This is perverted! It will wipe out my entire family!"
The residual heat from the casserole scalded his fingertips. Li Ruiyuan lowered his head to stir the burnt rice and heard his own dry voice: "Actually... there are also people who are born with it."
"What do you mean by innate?" the mother suddenly got excited. "He just learned bad habits! Ping's son from our factory went to Shenzhen alone and came back saying he liked men—and now? His mother is crying so hard she's almost blinded!"
Li Xuan was too frightened to speak. From the kitchen came the bubbling sound of a boiling pot of soup, like some kind of countdown.
"A Yuan, remember this." His mother stared at him, "Our Li family must not allow such evil to occur."
The school uniforms hanging outside the window swayed in the wind. Wu Ye's old Guangya school uniform was mixed in with it, and there were indelible ink stains on the cuffs.
After dinner, Lee Seo-yeon washed dishes in the kitchen. The dishwashing liquid foam filled the sink, and he stared out the window at the neon sign, lost in thought, until his mother came in and checked the refrigerator.
"Ah Yuan," my mother suddenly said, "your Aunt Wang wants to introduce you to a girlfriend..."
He turned off the tap. "I've been busy with the supermarket expansion lately."
"No matter how busy you are, you have to get married!" the mother grumbled, "Look at how good Wu Ye's child is. If it were a girl, I would have let you..."
The plastic bowl slipped from his hands, bounced on the tiles and rolled into the corner.
"My hand slipped." He bent down to pick it up and heard his mother humming a Cantonese opera tune as she walked out of the kitchen.
Half an hour later, Lin Lixin's motorcycle roared to a stop at the alley entrance. She tossed Li Ruiyuan a helmet and asked, "Are you looking for me for a drink after a breakup?"
"Get lost." He got on the back seat and said, "Go get a midnight snack with me."
The night market was bustling with people. Lin Lixin's sister, Ah Zhen, was smoking outside the tattoo parlor. She whistled when she saw them. "Brother Yuan, it's so rare for you to show up!"
Her soles rolled over the wet reflections of neon lights and stopped in front of a porridge shop with a "Ming Kee" sign. Lin Lixin kicked down her kickstand and tossed her wavy hair, which had been flattened by her helmet. "Boss! Jidi porridge with pig's blood!"
Lee Seo-yeon ripped off his helmet, sweat dripping down his jawline onto his ripped T-shirt. The clamor of the night market, shrouded in the stench of cooking, washed over him. The clashing of finger-guessing games at the next table made the plastic chairs and tables tremble slightly.
"Did Auntie scold you?" Lin Lixin scalded the bowl and chopsticks with boiling water. "Or did you miss me?" Li Ruiyuan said nothing. The bowl of scalding porridge was placed on the table with a thud. The proprietress looked at Li Ruiyuan and said, "Young man, you have a boil at the corner of your mouth."
As the spoon stirred, the pig liver and rice noodle soup rose and fell in the rice porridge. Lin Lixin suddenly said, "Uncle Xiong came to the supermarket today." The spoon handle knocked against the edge of the bowl.
"Ask you if you want to take over his son's video game console." She picked up a piece of pig blood, "He said no one plays it anyway."
The evening breeze blew through the mottled columns of the arcade, and in the distance, the cough of the old woman selling betel nuts could be heard. Li Ruiyuan poured half a plate of chili sauce into the porridge. "I give up! My mom is suggesting a blind date again today."
"Auntie Wang's niece?" Lin Li scratched her ear in a completely unrefined manner. "The photo is so photoshopped that my mother wouldn't recognize her. In person, her face is covered in acne."
The TV at the porridge shop was playing a 1990s Hong Kong film, with Tony Leung Chiu-wai embracing Maggie Cheung under the neon lights. The proprietress suddenly changed the channel to a news story: "...a youth sexual orientation rehabilitation facility is suspected of violating laws..."
"Cut the table, cut the table!" someone shouted. "This makes me sick!"
Lin Lixin dipped the fried dough sticks into the porridge: "How about I pretend to be your girlfriend?"
"And then let your mistresses come and chop me up?"
The lights of the night market looked like an overturned palette. They wandered into a second-hand music store. Lin Lixin was flipping through the vinyl records when she suddenly burst out laughing: "I'm dying of laughter!"
"A hero saves a beautiful girl." Lin Lixin pulled out a copy of "Goodbye Kiss." "This song is very appropriate for the occasion."
A wandering singer's guitar twanged from the alleyway. During the interlude of "Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies," Lee Seo-yeon suddenly asked, "Do you think... can two men last?"
The guitar strings snapped, the singer swore, and scattered applause broke out.
Lin Lixin put out her cigarette butt against the wall. "It lasts longer than a man and a woman." She pointed to the hotel across the street. "Look at how many wives Uncle Xiong has married. It's not as good as Wu Ye waiting for you for a year."
On the way back, a sudden downpour began. The motorcycle created ripples in the puddles as Lin Lixin suddenly accelerated and rushed into the tunnel. The roar echoed beneath the dome.
Rainwater trickled down his hair and into his collar. He recalled the last time Wu Ye came back, when the boy was nailing soundproofing pads to the supermarket attic, muttering "future" with each blow of the hammer.
When he got home, the lights in his mother's room were off. His torn T-shirt, with a grinning Mickey Mouse embroidered on it with fine stitching, was hanging on the balcony.
The phone screen lit up, and Wu Ye sent a video of the moonlight over the lotus pond at Tsinghua University. He dialed the video and saw the boy lip-syncing in the corner of the library:
"I love you"
The rain continues to fall, Guangzhou breathes softly in the night. And a secret, like the thread in a stitch, quietly waits for the day it will be gently pulled.
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