BY K-YU LIU
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
The rumor was there was a backdoor into the best running camp in the capital. To get your kid in, there’d better be something wrong with their mind.
Mother drove me to the facility with a note from Dr. Chen in her purse. For four hours, roads splintered and strayed under our wheels. Eventually we arrived at the far Northeast corner: cornfields and silent cranes, tired grey apartments, willow trees bowing their listless branches.
We turned onto a dirt road and a grey block building materialized, first as a dot, then as a growing reality. Yellow sand danced over the windshield as we closed the distance between us and my new life. Remember, Mother reminded me. I wasn’t here to be an athlete. I was here to take a break, to get better. Each year in the camp was a year lost. To be normal is to be blessed. I was not made for glory. We parked under a birch tree, its trunk mummified in white paint to stave off disease, far from the other families. Mother handed me Dr. Chen’s note, stroked my hair, pushed me along. The last thing I saw before I entered the building was her arm, which she held limply in the air as if she wanted to wave but the strength didn’t make it past her wrist, and I thought of the flag in Tiananmen Square when the August air was thick and breezeless, how high above us it hung, still and defeated.
*
The rule was if you wanted to run, if you wanted to compete for the national team and bring glory to your country, you had to accept there were no corners to cut. No secret techniques. No fancy equipment. You could smash harder with a better badminton racquet and bike faster with a lighter bike, but here, we were all just a pair of legs and lungs.
Coach Jian was everyone’s new guardian. He wore an ugly Adidas tracksuit, and this was how he welcomed us. “Let me tell you a little secret. We Chinese are weak. Have you seen the Caucasians and Africans on TV? Next time, pay attention. Notice those muscles, their power! We grow up on millet and porridge and they grow up on steak and milk. You think we can win in sports of brute strength and speed? In weightlifting or football or the hundred meter dash? No chance—that’s why Liu Xiang is a legend! But how many Liu Xiangs are in China? Now think about diving, table tennis, gymnastics, long distance running—the sports of precision and endurance, sports of the mind. We have a chance! You know why? Because Chinese people know how to suffer. 学会吃苦! Learn to eat bitter. Don’t ever tell me you’re tired. Running is supposed to be tiring. Running is supposed to hurt! If you’re going to cry because you’re tired, you can go straight home.”
The first thing we did was a time trial. We were to run five kilometers in as little time as possible.
A girl with a tiny pinched face spun her head around on a thin pale neck and whispered to me, “Do you know how long five kilometers is?”
I shook my head.
It turned out that five kilometers was so long that the course circled the entire facility twice. All along the run, the sun beat down. My sweat blinded me. My lungs were feeble fabric, clogged by the humid air, calcified inside my chest. My legs felt like lead. At home I had carried bags of rice and stacks of books, had carried sacks of flour and stomachs of fear but now I knew that the heaviest thing in life was myself. I thought of the thin line of my mother’s mouth, the grey-filmed look of her eyes. Was it from carrying me through life all these years? Was I here to learn how to carry myself better?
Coach shouted thirty something-something as I reached the finish line. I collapsed on the side of the road. Meters ahead, the other girls stood adjusting their ponytails and retying their shoelaces. The boys chucked pebbles at trees. My lungs were on fire. My sides had been stabbed. One of my shoes had come untied. I want to go home, I thought. I hate running, I want to go home!
But I remembered the sideway glances at school, the way boys dodged me in the halls. The boredom in class ever since teachers stopped calling on me. How when I looked long enough at the rest of the class from where I sat in the last row, I felt like I was slipping away, backwards, into a strange, slimy red place, like a vat of hawthorn jelly, out of which I knew I could never emerge. I thought of the thin line of Mother’s mouth, the shame and self-pity in Father’s eyes. So I stood up. I tied my shoelaces and joined the other girls across the finish line.
*
I was assigned to Dormitory 4, the most unlucky number, with three matchstick thin, straw-haired girls: Wang Xiaofan, Li Shuqiao, and Zhang Yingying. Li Shuqiao had a pinched face with a tiny nose and a small cherry-colored mouth which made her look like a bird. She trembled when she spoke and she pecked at her food with her chopsticks, so we called her Ma Que Lian, which means Sparrow Face. Sparrow Face didn’t eat egg yolks, so at breakfast she always squeezed them out and gave them to Wang Xiaofan. Wang Xiaofan popped Sparrow Face’s yolks like candy and she ate the rest of her leftovers, too. None of us had ever seen her sleep. She had an expressive face and a loud voice so we joked she came from the villages. She only ever put on meat in her face, the white mantou front of a huge and melon-like head, with limp, flossy hair that stuck to her scalp like dirty cling wrap, so we called her Mi Gua Tou—cantaloupe melon head. Zhang Yingying got to keep her name partly because she was the oldest but mostly because Yingying sounded like “win win”, and we clung to whatever hope we could. Yingying slept too much but when she was awake, was mean as a pair of spanking slippers, and frequently stole snacks and knick knacks from the boys’ dormitories.
They called me Wu Wen: “wu” meaning without, “wen” meaning knowledge or sound. As far as they knew, I rarely spoke and had no opinions.
*
Coach Jian posted the time trial results on the cafeteria wall for us all to see. The morning of the second day in the camp, the Dormitory 4 girls found ourselves squashed together at the very bottom of the list, the weight of 30 other girls on top of our heads, a huge gap between the fastest of us and the slowest of others.
Out on the track, the gap became a chasm.
“If you stretch like that, you’re going to hurt your knee,” a girl with a bob named Shasha sniped.
Everyone else had come as athletes to become better athletes. They knew the perfect way to tie their shoelaces, the optimal pump of their arms for speed; they knew that 1500 meters was three and three-quarter laps without having to do long division, and they stretched like they had vermicelli for bones.
After dinner, Melon Head complained of sore legs and Sparrow Face said her lungs felt funny. I felt a deep exhaustion, like I could sleep for twenty years.
“Is this normal? Should we go to the nurse?” Sparrow Face wheezed.
“We’re fine,” Zhang Yingying asserted. “We’re just unfit.”
“How did they know that the four of us would be the worst runners so that they put us all in one room?” Melon Head asked.
The silence was clinical as we looked at each other.
We blurted out, “Did you come with a doctor’s note?”
Zhang Yingying let out a bitter chuckle. “I knew it. They’re afraid of us contaminating the others.” Then she started laughing, and it seemed like she would not stop until morning.
*
Another rumor was that if you pushed us hard enough, our symptoms would stay at bay. The trick was to push without breaking.
“Like in ballet,” Yingying said, picking at a heel blister. “Stretch them until just before they snap.”
A month into training, Sparrow Face began receiving a huge plastic bag of bitter gourd during weekly deliveries, which she kept at the foot of her bunk. Every day at breakfast, while the rest of us wolfed down a boiled egg, a bag of milk, and two crusty industrial muffins, Sparrow Face would hold her steamed bitter gourd like a flute in front of her mouth and swallow bitter mouthful after bitter mouthful.
Melon Head sniggered that it looked like a lumpy green penis and Yingying taunted, “Have you ever even see a penis?” and Melon Head huffed and through a mouth full of soggy muffin, said, “Whatever, why else would you eat that snot-colored bitter stuff?”
Sparrow Face ignored us. Behind the gourd, her face contorted into a prune, her mouth a twisting caterpillar as her jaw moved up and down and the gourd disappeared bite by bite.
That afternoon during the time trial, I came across Yingying dragging Sparrow Face by the arm. It was a blistering September day, the last roar of summer. “I don’t want to run anymore!” Sparrow Face cried, planting her feet in the middle of the road. Three kilometers away, Coach Jian’s stopwatch ticked. “I want to go home!”
Yingying yanked her hand. Sparrow Face lurched.
“You want to go home?” Yingying panted, still hobbling forward with Sparrow Face in tow. “You go home without getting on the national team and you might as well say you spent two years in an asylum for insane people. You’re not like those other girls. Everyone will be scared of you. You’ll starve yourself until you’re nothing but a sack of bones clattering around in a skin bag. You want to pick at your fingers until your nails falls off? You want to go back there?!”
Sparrow Face hobbled a few steps, then doubled over, heaving. Even with the distance between us I saw her vomit splash onto the asphalt, green and sticky. Yingying threw up her arms and ran ahead. As I caught up to Sparrow Face, the smell of it wafted up to me, rancid like the stench of hutong garbage in the summer. “I bet you only ate bitter gourd this morning,” I panted.
She nodded, coughing. “吃苦,” she moaned, one hand clutching her side. To eat bitter, to endure hard work, to know how to suffer. “That’s what Coach said.”
“Okay, then. We’re not going home.” I held my hand out towards her. Sparrow Face wiped her mouth with her shirt hem, touched my fingers in acknowledgement, and fell into a jog beside me.
*
Summer finally faded to fall and then fall crystallized into winter and each month, another girl went home, deciding that they were not cut out for glory. Often I wondered if we would have stayed if we didn’t have something to prove. Why spend all our days pounding asphalt when we could feed geese at the park, watch Taiwanese dramas past midnight? When the whole pack was so far in front, and you’re falling further and further behind, why continue? Why continue when it hurt so much?
Dormitory 4 trained harder and longer than anyone else. We did extra laps after dinner on weekends when the others went out for ice cream. We ran until we tasted blood. We ran until pain pierced our shins and our lungs hurt for days. After Sparrow Face, we each had our own share of the race-puke experience. But the rumor was true; our symptoms improved. Sparrow Face trembled less and the exercise helped her eat. Melon Head’s moods became more consistent and we finally saw her sleeping. Yingying stole fewer things and slept less. And me—I felt more like a living person. A tired dog is a happy dog, they say.
I was happy enough to just feel better. But Yingying wouldn’t stop talking about the national team. She actually believed we had a chance. For her, glory was the only redemption.
The national team dream was only ever a tickle at the back of my mind. But as Coach Jian’s stopwatch recorded a faster time each month we passed the finish line, the tickle began to grow into a pulse. My 30:53 became 26:47 which became 22:55. Each time that number shrank, the pulse grew stronger until it began to feel like a lifeline. And so I always ran on.
*
The morning after the fifth time trial, Shasha appeared at our table at breakfast. “Here,” she said, letting a handful of White Rabbit candy fall from her hand and scatter between our trays. Melon Head and Sparrow Face’s eyes passed from the candies to Shasha, then back to the candies. Yingying drummed her boiled egg against the tray, refusing to look at her. Shasha stood there expectantly. “What do you want?” Yingying said, finally.
Shasha plopped down on the bench next to me. Her eyes shone with excitement. “So what’s your secret?” she asked hungrily.
“What secret?”
“Your secret to getting fast so quickly. Or have you forgotten that you used to be slow?”
“We’re not fast. We just finally built the foundation that you already had.”
“That’s not the real answer.” She extended her fingers, which were long and dainty, and curled them, beckoning the truth. When we remained silent, those fingers reached for a White Rabbit and pulled to untwist it, plucked the candy from its wrapper, and shook off the rice paper before placing it gingerly between two rows of perfectly straight teeth. Finally, with the softening candy bulging in her cheek, she said, “You four better be nice to me. Otherwise if any of you end up in the national team, I’ll make your life hell.” She made a scooping motion with her two forefingers in front of her eyes. “Keep the candy.” She turned on her heels and left.
*
For the Lunar New Year, everyone went home. I spent two weeks eating sumptuous meals and listening to voices from the television.
On New Year’s Day, a friend of Father paid us a visit at our home with his twin sons in tow. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Father hand them each a fat red envelope, saying that as he didn’t have any sons, these boys were like his own. I sat cross-legged, back against the coffee table, determined to ignore them as they came strolling into the living room.
“Here, we brought you some red dates,” Panpan said as they plopped down on the rug, one on each side of me.
“Our mother says you need some more blood circulation. Then maybe you can come back from your break,” cooed Pipi.
“So how’s the camp, anyway? Is your reading ability going to stay at the seventh-grade level forever?” Panpan scooted closer to me, and I could smell the sour green-brown odor of his breath.
From the other side, Pipi inched closer as well. “Why don’t you just smile a bit more—just pretend you’re normal so your parents don’t have to send you to that place?”
On-screen, two men were performing a xiangsheng in front of an enormous red and gold “fortune” character pasted on the wall. One said something, and the other responded, his face stretching into a bewildered expression, and the audience burst into laughter.
“Is it because you have a bug in your heart? That’s why you never smile. It’s sucking all your life juice to feed itself. A bug you made yourself.” Panpan smirked.
Pipi leaned in front of me and whispered to his brother behind his cupped hand, “Maybe she’s a witch.”
The two performers on the screen reddened and blurred in my vision until they were two red blobs gesturing with a blind urgency.
“Most people who go to those camps are trying to get picked for the national team, or they just want to be loser gym teachers. And out of a class of 40, how many get picked?”
“Four?”
“Five?”
“What are you going to do then? I mean—are you even any shitting fucking good at running?”
His face was soft and pudgy when my fist collided with it. His stomach flabby when I straddled it, and I could feel his ribs beneath my knee, that fragile bone cage guarding his life.
“Stop! I can’t breathe! It was a joke! Can’t you take a joke??” Panpan squealed. Behind me, Pipi squawked for mommy and daddy. I could’ve had him, too, under my knees, but I ignored him. The two sets of parents flocked over like vultures.
I inhaled through my nose and out through my mouth, like we do on long runs to maximize oxygen intake. I stood up, and Panpan ran crying to daddy.
“This—this kind of girl,” his father spat. “This kind of girl should be locked up!”
In the television, the performers bowed, framed by red. In our doorway, my father uttered apologies like a broken cuckoo clock. Mother was nowhere to be seen.
*
The next day, Mother said I was to finish the season at the camp, spend the summer catching up on schoolwork at the academy, and return to school in the fall.
I shook my head.
“We’re not seeing any improvement. You have to get your education,” she said.
I shook my head until my temples hurt.
“Why are you shaking your head? You like it there?”
I told her that it hadn’t been enough time. I told her I was getting better, that I didn’t have these problems when I was training. When I begged her on my knees she whispered at me to get up before Father saw.
I said that at school, everyone was like Pipi and and Panpan. Heartbeats elapsed. “I don’t know what to do with you,” she sighed before nodding in surrender.
The morning of my departure back to camp, my mother gave me money for a taxi and packed a duffle bag filled with pineapple cakes and glazed fried dough twists and mala spicy peanuts. I wondered if Sparrow Face’s mother was packing her bitter gourd.
“I was at Yonghe Temple with Auntie Feng last month and we saw this jade elephant.” She handed me a red silk drawstring bag. “Auntie Feng said a bunch of stuff about it, how it represents purity and perseverance and many other things. I thought, if you’re lonely at training camp, you can at least have this. Well, elephants don’t run very fast…”
The elephant was smooth and cold and heavy in my palm. Its little trunk was curled upwards, as if making a toast.
*
The four of us set out on a long run the moment we were all back. It had snowed the night before, and the world was blanketed in silence. The roads and dirt trails, usually pale grey veins coursing through an endless land of brown, were striking and almost beautiful when outlined in white. The snow crunched under our sneakers, and we ran in silence. Oxygen rushed through my lungs. I felt light as the kilometers passed under me. I tried to recall if there was any other feeling I had ever enjoyed more than this: all my body parts working in tandem like in a well-oiled machine, gliding over a trail.
We reached the end of our trail, a little outcrop of cement overlooking a clearing of trees. We stopped, taking in the untouched blanket of powdery white. I was now able to really look at the faces of the others. Sparrow Face’s cheeks were hollow. Bluish purple crescent moons hung under Melon Head’s eyes. Yingying’s knuckles were scratched raw. I knew we would never talk about what happened while we were away, just like we had never really disclosed precisely what brought us here.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if we all made the national team?” Melon Head wondered aloud, then turned to Sparrow Face. “Then you’d always have someone to eat your yolks.” Sparrow Face smiled through the silence, and the rest of us did, too. Then we ran home.
*
If the first year was hard, the second showed us why it had to be.
As the selection date for the national team approached, acrimony grew through us like weeds, and Coach Jian took any opportunity to admonish us.
“Wang Xiaofan, you’re getting fat. How can you run with all that meat?”
“Shasha, I didn’t make you head student for you to pick at your nails on duty.”
“Li Shuqiao, National Team won’t recruit someone who looks like they’ll blow away in the wind.”
In the beginning, we had shaved off four minutes in just under a month. Now, those last few seconds to break 18:00 wouldn’t budge no matter what. In our frustration, old habits crept back.
Sparrow Face pulled me aside one day in the weight room. “Jie. I think Yingying is putting something in Melon Head’s soy milk.” She pulled out of her pocket a wrinkled square packet. It featured a shirtless Caucasian man, blond hair and sparkling white teeth, his arms crossed over his bulging chest rippling with veins.
The next morning, I hung around the dorm room until Yingying awoke. Melon Head always left her thermos filled with fresh soy milk in the dormitory to cool as she did her morning laps. Through a crack in the door, I watched as Yingying pulled out a packet identical to the one Sparrow Face had showed me. She unscrewed the thermos lid and tore the packet open. I opened the door. A twitch of Yingying’s arm and neck gave away her surprise. With my palm I covered the thermos mouth, and I shook my head as I locked eyes with her.
I tried my best to tell her what I was thinking. If we didn’t make the national team, we would have nothing if we didn’t have each other.
Ultimately, Melon Head didn’t need to be sabotaged. When she saw that her time wasn’t getting better, she embarked on a strict diet, though she was hardly bigger than Yingying or myself. Soon, all we ever saw her eat was one boiled egg in the morning and a few spoonfuls of porridge with preserved vegetables at night.
If only we could’ve imagined an intervention.
The week before the national team coaches were to pay their visit, it happened.
We were on a weekly long run, a familiar dirt route that ran by the stinky creek and then wove through a nearby village on a hill that burned coal and trash and left us coughing for a kilometer.
The thirty-something of us spread out along the river below us, a long line of bobbing heads. Melon Head and Sparrow Face by my side, Yingying’s swaying ponytail visible up ahead. Melon Head had been silent the whole run, but glances left revealed a pained look on her face.
I heard it before I saw it. Sneakers sliding against dirt, the breaking of shrub branches. A small yelp. Melon Head at the bottom of the ditch, lying among the dead leaves, clutching her shin. A cloud of cottonwood fluff floated to settle over her face.
The ambulance came. Coach Jian had Shasha lead the run back to the camp. All along the dusty path back, she lectured us from the front. “You see! This is what happens to fat runners!”
In Dormitory 4, Sparrow Face and I packed up Melon Head’s things. An ankle fracture caused by the fall, caused by severe shin splints. Which meant she must’ve been feeling it for a long time. In her toiletries bag were herbal pain patches and a box of paracetamol, the blister pack punched out without rhyme or reason.
*
With Melon Head gone, Yingying seemed to mellow, but I knew it was from guilt. She took to Skype calling Melon Head every night, and we’d crowd around her, one on each side, craning out our necks to see the screen better.
“Every athlete gets injured, Melon Head. It’s a rite of passage,” Yingying yelled at the computer.
“Yingying’s right. Suck it up. Be proud. You’re a real runner now!” Sparrow Head croaked.
In the glowing rectangle of Yingying’s laptop screen, Melon Head was almost unrecognizable. Her face was flushed red and puffy, her cheeks so bloated I could barely see her eyes, which were also swollen and shiny with tears. Her neck had all but disappeared. Her hair was the only element of her that remained the same: thin and oily, plastered on her scalp.
She looked like a pig, I thought, not a runner. Immediately, shame wrapped around my limbs—a grey, heavy thing.
“Wu Wen jie. I can’t sleep,” came Melon Head’s voice, rough and frog-like. “There’s so much medication to take and I—” Her voice broke as she snorted in snot. “—and I can’t stop eating.”
“It’s okay,” Sparrow Face chirped, “if you eat more, you’ll have strength to recover!”
“That doesn’t make any sense, idiot,” Yingying snapped. “She’s just sitting there, she doesn’t need the fuel.”
In the screen, Melon Head’s face scrunched up and her mouth opened into a dark black cave. Then a wail like an ambulance siren came through the speakers, undulating and terrible. Yingying’s own face seemed to panic and then soften as the guilt ran through her. We could see the gears behind her eyes turn—how to fix the damage she had done.
“I can hear Shasha outside. She’s calling an early bedtime right now,” she lied. There was no one outside. “But we can stay on the call.”
In the screen, Melon Head wiped her tears.
“Look, your bed’s still empty. It’s still waiting for you. We’ll put you here,” Yingying said as she got up and set the laptop across from Melon Head’s bunk, propped up against Yingying’s own pillow. “You eat well, you take your medication, you recover quickly and you come back and you’ll be the next to be selected for the national team.”
Melon Head nodded with her entire miserable frame, her face glowing, blind with hope.
We settled into our beds, and Melon Head into hers. We turned off the lights. Yingying’s laptop screen glowed deep into the night, showing Melon Head’s sleeping face bathed in a pool of artificial light. I lay there, wondering if the next girl who filled her bed would also have friends who lied so she could live.
*
The selection process we had trained two years for was straightforward. Coach Jian would first forward the national team coaches our statistics and times. Then they would visit us during a time trial and make their own assessment.
Melon Head’s absence naturally meant there was one fewer person to be in competition with. Yet although no one ever said it, we all knew it: Melon Head was too inconsistent and too unstable to have made it. It made little sense for Yingying to have tried to sabotage Melon Head when she wasn’t even a threat. But I wondered if Yingying never truly intended to ruin her—if she had only needed a way to feel a bit more in control when she felt she could lose everything.
On the morning of selection day, we welcomed the national team coaches in the banquet hall. For the first time, Sparrow Face had eaten the entire breakfast: egg, muffins, and milk—all in addition to her bitter gourd.
From my seat I watched the coaches enter in a single file line. They were so small, I thought, surprised. And they walked so slowly. But what had I expected? For them to be as tall as Yao Ming? For them to barge in sprinting?
“They look so normal…” Sparrow Face mused, her eyebrows knitted.
Yes, they were normal people, I thought. They were just normal people who got to decide the trajectory of our entire lives.
“They’re not normal people, Sparrow Face,” Yingying cautioned. “Not to us. Don’t lose focus.”
*
The next morning, at the starting line for the timed five-kilometer, Yingying surprised us by holding out her pinky and saying, “We’ll stay friends? No matter what?”
Sparrow Face and I nodded, hooking our pinkies through Yingying’s as we chanted in unison, “Pinky promise hundred years, she who breaks it is a dog! Pinky promise hundred years, she who breaks it will be hanged!”
Coach Jian’s whistle sounded and we took off. That sound could’ve been my last heartbeat, and I would’ve run until the end. In the end, all running seems to be is the ability to tolerate pain. How familiar it all felt: the goring of my heart, the ripping of my lungs, the torching of my thighs. I passed the landmarks on the route I knew better than my own body: the mouth of the stinky creek, the dry grove of unidentified fruit trees, the menacing new power lines.
By the second loop, the only girl I could see in front of me was Zhang Yingying.
I heard Coach Jian shouting on the side. Pick up the pace, keep up our stride.
A television appeared at the finish line, a single pixel at first. With every step, the pixels multiplied, until I could see a TV host sitting on a red couch. When I entered the screen I could tell I had grown older. Thunderous applause of 1.3 billion people of China, their heads following me to my seat like eager schoolchildren. How did you make it, in spite of all that? the hosts asked, and I smiled because I knew I could say nothing wrong.
As I approached the finish line, the pixels began to stretch until they were transparent and I could see right through them. On the other side were all the coaches, fingers poised over stopwatches. I could hear my own ragged breathing, could feel my arms urging my legs to pump faster. Everything began to spin. People always think that long distance runners sprint the last few hundred meters. There could not be a more incorrect assumption. By the end, we have almost nothing left. That is how you are supposed to run the five-thousand-meter run.
*
We finished in expected order: Zhang Yingying came first among girls with a 17:25, I finished second with 17:31, Shasha right behind me with third place of 17:38, Tang Wei in fourth with 17:52, and Sparrow Face coming in fifth with 18:08. Nobody collapsed. The three of us from Dormitory 4 hugged, sweat mixing with sweat. The coaches congratulated Yingying and me, nodded at us approvingly, asked for our hometowns, whether we missed our parents.
Yingying refused to shower, saying that she didn’t want to part yet with this sweat that had won her her triumph. At dinner, Sparrow Face ate carrot, watercress, pork knuckle, and even watermelon. Yingying and I stole glances at each other diagonally across the table, our smiles so wide we could see the simmered beef and radish inside each others’ mouths.
That night, Yingying snuck Sparrow Face and I out to the open field next to the camp. We tiptoed arm-in-arm through the murky darkness, cheeks still sore from smiling, feeling for the first time like normal children. In the distance, scattered around a single flashlight shining up to the sky was an entire hoard of the boys, singing and wrestling and hollering. As we approached them, they beckoned to us and shoved bottles of Fanta and bags of Japanese dry crushed ramen snacks into our arms, and I wondered if I had ever seen the stars so bright in Beijing—an entire winking constellation of fortune.
*
In China, an athlete’s triumph belongs to the entire country, but an athlete’s failure is her own.
For the announcement ceremony, the staff decorated the banquet hall with artificial flowers and a long red banner that read, Congratulations to the new Distance Running National Team Members! Yingying and I stood shoulder pressed against shoulder, stiff with anticipation.
Coach Ma of the national team spoke into the mic. “By joining the national team, you are not only achieving an accomplishment of great stature for yourself, but bringing glory to our country. We know your training has been difficult, and we hope you are reinvigorated by your achievements. Now, we will begin reading the names of students who have been selected to begin training with the national team, starting with the boys.”
Coach Jian’s voice rang out in the hall with name after name of boys. I looked over at Yingying, tried to gauge whether she fancied any of the boys who would come with us to the new training center closer to the city. She gave nothing away; she was all smiles.
“Congratulations to our five new national team boys. And now we shall begin with the selected girls.”
Yingying and I clasped each other’s hands. Yingying had never been scared of anything, but now I could feel her shaking.
Names of girls we knew rolled from Coach Jian’s mouth. Wang Limei… Li Mowen… Qian Hongwei…
Yingying’s palm began to feel clammy. I wanted to pull away my hand. Tang Wei…
Where were our names? We were the fastest runners. Something cold and electric ran through my limbs.
Tian Shasha. Congratulations to our five students!
The hand clutching mine tore away. Yingying was shoving her way through our row, sprinting towards the exit, and the slam of the door reverberated through the hall.
Hands clapped and voices droned on. All around me, a wall of standing people. Above, bright blinding white lights sneered down at me, circling like vultures. I saw my life fast-forward around me. I saw the entire banquet hall purging itself of people; I saw finish lines crossed and medals conferred and banners flown and victories won, saw teammates marry, reproduce, die; I saw the walls wither and fall, the willow trees sway; I saw an entire eternity pass by me while I hugged my knees and aged in stasis, and I was sick and useless and alone.
*
The next day, Coach Jian expressed surprise when I visited his office. “You don’t talk much. You don’t ask for help, or for anything.”
“I’d like to know why I wasn’t selected for the national team when I have for two years been consistently a top runner. Head Coach Ma had already congratulated me personally after the time trial.”
Coach Jian shifted in his chair, leaned forward with his hands clasped, his fingers scratching at themselves. “Mengxiao, your mother sent you here with a doctor’s note. Your medical information is in our files, and I believe it was a good decision to have you come here. You and your friends are very exceptional; I did not expect you to become so committed and accomplished when you had started off so far behind the others.”
The air conditioner buzzed. I covered one ear with my hand.
“I sent the national team all your numbers and relayed my opinion of your capabilities as a runner. They think you would be an asset to the national training team. However, they must consider the overall well-being of the team members and coaches, and so they agree with me that with your personal history and your medical condition, you are not suited to carry such responsibility.”
Something hot and prickly flashed through me. Something simmered within my ribs. Again, the mocking fluorescent lights above.
“It’s unfortunate but I think you have really benefited from these two years. Since you began training with us, I have not seen you act out once. Your mother would be happy. Now that you’re better, you can go home. Go back to school, go get an education. If you want, you could compete for the regional team. When you grow up, you could become a gym teacher. I know you are disappointed. But here’s my suggestion: go be a normal kid.”
The room darkened like a blood-red filter was pulled over my eyes. I felt sticky and hot, and a deep trembling came from inside my chest. I left without excusing myself.
Outside of Coach’s office, bright light pierced my vision like arrows. I walked back to Dormitory 4. I took my time. The dorm building’s hallways were dark and cool. One of the boys passed me, and I thought I saw his eyes flick up. There it was, that quivering heat in my ribs. Look at me, I thought, I dare you. As I imagined my foot on his chest and his teeth littered on the ground and vomit leaking from his mouth, I dug my nails into my palms and walked straight ahead, spine and arms ruler-straight, afraid of how this bent mind, straightened for two years by discipline, might fold and break.
In Dormitory 4, I closed the door behind me, so gently that Sparrow Face, standing at the little square window, didn’t turn around. Yingying was so still under her blankets that she could be dead, and I realized I didn’t care if she was. I slipped off my shoes, climbed up to my bunk.
“Oh, hi,” said Sparrow Face.
I ignored her. From the mesh pocket on the wall I took out my white jade elephant. Its smooth flesh glinted under the ceiling light, the shades of the stone luminous, almost transparent. I pulled my arm back and smashed the elephant once, twice, and again against the wall. Out of my lungs came an ugly, piercing screech. Voices of shock sounded behind me. In went the elephant, my mother’s bestowment of harmony, over and over into its grave in the wall. The grave would be big, enormous, astronomical; it would swallow all of humanity. I drew my arm back as far as I could, arching my back to lean over the bunk rail, away from the wall. Then the room spun as I fell backwards, and for half a heartbeat, I was relieved to be swallowed by my own grave. But my tailbone smashed into the ground. Cold, hard pain erupted through me. Yingying and Sparrow Face’s faces above, decorated with panic. Against my fingers, the oily smoothness of the elephant. I held it tight and struck my head with it once, twice, again—a most terrible wail surged in the distance—until the splitting, booming pain took over me, like my mind was cracking open—what intractable aberrance would it reveal?—then hands overpowered mine and my friends’ faces came back into focus before it all turned to red.
*
Back when it was the four of us, we often watched videos of sprint events. It fascinated us. Sprinters did the same millennia-old movement, yet they were so different, with their smooth rippling quads and their bulging biceps. So unlike the sinewy, emaciated look of our own kind. The events, too, were a strange alternate world. So much training for so little time. So little time to prove themselves. So little time on which their lives will depend.
In the days towards the end, Yingying and Sparrow Face spent most of their rest time huddled side by side on the bottom bunk, the same video of a sprint event playing on loop on the laptop in front of them. I watched from my top bunk, the pain in my tailbone too great for me to move, the black circles of their heads below me as nameless as any other spectators in a stadium.
It’s the 2012 London Olympics’ first 110-meter hurdle event. Liu Xiang is in the crouch stance at the finish line with his eight competitors. He is the only Asian face in the heat. As always, he’s in all red. His nickname is Flyer of Asia. He is China’s pride and glory: proof that China is no longer the Sick Man of the East. It is eight years since he won gold at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, six since he broke the world record at the Super Grand Prix in Lausanne, and four since he withdrew due to injury from the 2008 Olympics on home turf in Beijing.
Will he make a comeback this time? the Chinese audience wonders. “Jiayou Liu Xiang!” rings out like an anthem throughout the stadium. “Add oil,” they cheer, “add oil.” Add oil to the flame. Go hard, it means. You can do it.
The cameraman zooms in on Liu Xiang’s face. He is calm; he even gives a small smile. It’s a stark contrast to his agitated comportment of visible pain in the previous Summer Olympics. The announcer says set. The runners raise their hips. The crowd is silent, anticipation quivering in the stadium. Then the gun goes off. Arms pump and legs slash through the air up to the first hurdle. Liu Xiang’s red form clears it but then he is a tangle of limbs lurching forward and then he’s on the ground. Gasps of shock and sympathy in the bleachers. On the track, the rest of the runners have left him behind. Green and white uniforms hurtle to the finish line. Another runner falls. At the finish line, arms flail as the finishers lean forward with their torsos. It’s all over in a few seconds—they’re so fast. The camera pans back to Liu Xiang at the first hurdle. He’s sitting on the track, clutching his Achilles. He is visibly in pain. He gets to hands and knees, and for a moment it seems like he’s going to stand up. But instead, he lowers his head to the ground, between his hands. No matter how many times this video played, my chest tightened at this moment. He could be hiding his face from the cameras, or letting blood flow to his head. But to me, it always looked like he was kowtowing. China was watching. He was their pride and glory. Was he thanking us for believing in him? Or was he asking for forgiveness for failure?
Eventually Liu Xiang stands up. On his left leg. The London crowd cheers. He begins to hop, his right knee bent, his foot hanging limp. He hops towards the starting line; he’s going off stage. The video cuts to a replay of his fall, showing his mistake in slow motion for dissection. His left foot just a centimeter too low to clear the hurdle. When it cuts back to the stadium, Liu Xiang has appeared by the starting line again. He is hopping towards the finish line, his left leg as powerful as his right once was, carrying him to the end in great bounds. The crowd cheers. It almost looks like he’s running. Before the final row of hurdles, he cuts across the lanes and hops to the center, to his lane. He stops in front of what should have been his last hurdle, clasps it with both hands. He bends down and kisses it. As if to say goodbye. Then he hops off the track, the crowd still cheering.
Liu Xiang will never compete again.
In Dormitory Room 4, Zhang Yingying sleeps and Sparrow Face weeps. The video plays and plays.
K-Yu Liu is a writer from Beijing. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Four Way Review, Carve Magazine, and Berkeley Fiction Review, and she was a finalist for the 2023 Narrative Magazine Short Story Contest. She holds a dual-certificate MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. She lives in New York City and on kyliu.net.
