By YUNHAN FANG
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By the summer of 2009, I found I was thinking less and less about the Wenchuan earthquake the year prior, in which 87,000 people had died, my father among them. That year, on the day of Xiazhi, I met a girl called Thirteen. We spent the night together, having sex and talking until the sky turned the color of moonstone.
The week before Xiazhi, I’d moved into a new flat that Mum bought for me, a four-bed on the fortieth floor of a luxury block in Chengdu. Profits at her building materials company had tripled in the year after the earthquake because of the demand for steel and concrete for reconstruction in the disaster zone.
The work on my building had just finished. My new rooms stank of paint. I left orange peel everywhere to get rid of the smell, which somehow only made it worse. In the fall, I would be flying to Britain to start my master’s degree. I had little to do while waiting. I spent most of the time in the apartment alone, feeling fragile after my breakup with a girl with short hair and large breasts. To hide them, she wrapped her chest tight with a rubber band, which caused her a lot of discomfort and made her irritable. She had often snapped at me for trivial things: checking my phone on a date, forgetting our half-year anniversary. Whilst angry, she often told me I was selfish to a narcissistic degree, which was why I had no friends. But she couldn’t stop weeping when we finally broke up. She claimed she’d love no one else.
During the quietest hours in my new home, her voice echoed in my head, recounting all my terrible qualities. To prove her wrong, I started to visit my Granddad, who had late-stage cancer, in his hospital more often. Caring for a bedridden old man was an act of kindness, that was for sure.
On the day I met Thirteen, I was supposed to see Granddad, but the stuffy heat made the idea of a hospital visit too miserable. The dense, grey clouds prophesied heavy rain. I was desperate to do something different, so I put on my pink tulle dress, sprayed myself with a perfume that smelled of gardenia, and got a taxi to have a drink at Rilke, the bar Dad had taken me to before Mum divorced him.
Back then, Rilke was on the ground floor of a 300-year-old house, one of many in the old part of town, its black roof tiles always shining like fish scales after it rained. Now, street by street, they were being knocked down. Rilke had moved to one of their replacements, a kitsch new build that pretended to be old.
Mum told me that maintaining old buildings was more costly than building new ones. She talked enthusiastically about her company’s bids for these projects, ignoring Dad’s fury. He said it was as criminal as burning the hand script of Lan Ting Ji Xu and replacing it with a copy downloaded from the Internet, just because the paper had turned yellow. Mum said of course he had such opinions as he had never made a single penny – he could happily survive on consuming novels and films, watching his daughter starve.
Dad was indeed useless. He had never held a job for longer than six months. He called himself a writer even though all he’d published were a few poems in a local newspaper. He had spent more time browsing and buying pirated DVDs to fill our TV cabinet than he had spent writing. When I was twelve, he played me his favorite film by Nagisa Oshima – Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – and was disappointed by my inability to appreciate its passion and humanity. After the divorce, he was teaching at a primary school in Yingxiu, which collapsed when the earthquake hit. I got myself a volunteer pass and searched for him in the debris. One night, I dreamed of his body buried in sand from the neck down, his head sticking above the ground, enduring a long and painful death like the Major in the movie, played by David Bowie.
When I got to Rilke, I ordered an iced tea and sat at a table next to the window. A young woman in denim shorts was hiding in the corner and writing something on a large notepad; her face was covered by her shoulder-length hair. She had small elbows and ankles that looked delicate with her honey-colored skin.
When the waitress walked over to top up her tea, I finally saw the girl’s face. Nothing stood out apart from the solemnity in her eyes, which gave the impression that she cared too much about everything.
As dinner time approached, the bar became noisy. She closed her notepad and put away her pen. Staring at the book in my hand, I kicked myself for missing the opportunity to chat with her. But when I looked up, she was standing in front of me.
“What are you reading?” she asked, her raspy voice contrasting with her childish face.
I flipped the Salinger story collection over to show her the cover, nearly dropping it out of nervousness.
She told me her name was Thirteen. She worked as a part-time journalist for a local cultural magazine, and sometimes she’d come here to produce meaningless text after interviewing well-known writers, poets, and photographers, mostly middle-aged men who made her endure their dodgy bantering or touching.
I forget who suggested dinner. In a restaurant two blocks away, we ordered a grass carp roasted in chili and Sichuan pepper sauce and drank the house plum wine until we lost count of how many glasses we’d finished. Walking out of the restaurant, I felt the kind of dizziness one feels after a rollercoaster ride. Thirteen asked me what I’d like to do. I said, Let’s walk until we can’t feel our feet.
The expected rain didn’t come. We ambled along the Jin River amongst the buzzing of cicadas, sharing our memories of the farms and villages that had been swallowed by this ever-expanding city, and debating things that didn’t matter, such as whether fish mint was delicious or disgusting. The dewy night wind left goosebumps on our bare skin.
Thirteen dragged me underneath a banyan tree, and we kissed. I was nervous because I had never kissed a girl on the street. But soon, my self-consciousness disappeared in Thirteen’s breaths, which smelled like warm lemon tea.
“What were you doing after the earthquake?” Thirteen asked as we walked past a bus stop. In the lit-up advertising display, a little girl in a crimson dress stood on tiptoes, her arm raised, struggling to drop the banknote in her hand into a donation box taller than her. “Blood is thicker than water,” the text read.
“I looked for someone for a week.”
“Did you find them?”
“I’ve not seen him since it happened.”
“My ex’s little brother also disappeared because of the earthquake – his school building fell apart,” Thirteen said. “He had just turned eight that month. My ex broke up with me because she had decided to marry a man someday. She couldn’t stand the thought of bringing her parents any more pain.”
For a moment, memories from last year flashed in my head. On a playground, piles of children’s bodies lying under white sheets, covered from head to toe. The air oozing with the stench of corpses rotting under the sun. The memory brought up a wave of nausea, which twisted the shapes of the cars driving past, the gingko trees alongside the road, and even Thirteen’s profile. Cold sweat rolled down my chest.
“That’s where I live!” Thirteen said, pointing to the other side of a bridge. The excitement in her voice brought me back to reality. We ran across the bridge. Golden foils of yellow light rocked on the dark river. We stopped in front of an old residential block. A friend of hers owned a flat here and was letting her stay in the extra room for free. Annoyingly, her white female tabby cat had been impregnated by his ginger cat.
“This place is about to fall down. My friend’s family is hoping a developer will buy the land and demolish the building, so that there’s a chance to get some money,” Thirteen explained. “There is only half of the bathroom door left. You have to shout before going in. And you can never tell whether the shower will be lukewarm or cold.”
Then she paused. “We can go in if you don’t mind,” she finally suggested.
“Or we can go to mine. I live on my own,” I said. We jumped into a taxi.
I woke up at nine the next morning. On my phone, two messages from Mum were waiting for me, one saying she was on her way home from a week-long business trip, and that we’d visit Granddad together – as always, it didn’t occur to her to ask about my plans. The other informed me that she’d pick me up around ten.
Thirteen frowned in her sleep. With my thumb, I caressed the muscles between her eyebrows. Her eyes opened.
“Are you going to work today?” I asked, sitting up on the bed, feeling her fingertips brushing my waist. I resisted the urge to lie back down and bury my face in her neck.
“I have an interview at 10:30,” she said. “What’s your plan?”
“Try not to have an explosive argument with my mum when we visit my granddad. He’s dying from cancer,” I said.
After walking Thirteen to the lift, I stood on the terrace, leaning against the steel fence and staring down.
Thirteen exited the building. From the fortieth floor, she looked as small as a Lego minifigure. I watched her walk towards the front gate, hoping she would pause, turn back, and look up—maybe even wave to me. But just then, a white car drove past her, heading towards the entrance of our underground garage. My phone rang, and Mum’s name appeared on the screen.
I sat in the passenger seat of Mum’s car, drowning in her moaning about the business dinners she had suffered in the last week. She had to maintain relationships with officials from the local government in the disaster zone. Otherwise, she’d be kicked off their supplier lists.
The air-conditioning covered my arms in goosebumps. The thought of stepping out into the heat felt surreal. I closed my eyes and imagined her voice floating like soap bubbles, bursting as they hit the car ceiling.
“How’s Granddad doing?” Mum asked. Traffic clumped together. She checked her face in the front mirror. The thick and cakey makeup betrayed her exhaustion.
“He’s not getting any better,” I said. “We should tell him the truth.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Mum gave me a stern stare. “It will only make him despair and reduce his chances.”
I wanted to tell Mum that any chance of him getting better didn’t exist, but I kept my mouth shut, knowing the truth didn’t always matter to Mum, especially when it came to people and things that she cared about.
When we arrived, Granddad was asleep in his single VIP hospital room. Filled with ascitic fluid, his abdomen rose like a round hill, his face a layer of thin, stretched skin taut around the protrusions and indentations of his skeleton.
I smelled a strange sweetness in the room, the odor of rotting fruit exposed in heat. I asked Mum whether she noticed it. She told me I was out of my mind, before sitting down on a chair next to Granddad’s bed and watching him intensely. After a minute, she stood up, pacing back and forth, frustrated by his fast deterioration.
Granddad smacked his dry lips. His eyes opened. Mum dashed to him. “Pa, how do you feel?” She leaned forward, whispering in his ears as if talking to a baby. She was puzzled by his inaudible response.
I pressed a button on the side of Granddad’s bed so he could sit up. Then I put a straw in a glass of water and raised it to his mouth. When Mum last visited, he’d still been able to drink on his own. It was only a week ago.
“You look much better, Pa,” Mum said. “Let me have a chat with Dr. Liu.” She left the room. I suspected it was her excuse to hide and cry in the bathroom.
I sat down on the chair. Granddad looked at me, struggling to curve his lips. I smiled back.
He was an echo of the chubby old man of my memory, a retired senior official in the provincial government. Many people had found him intimidating, but I remembered him as being fun. He enjoyed showing off after his work trips to Europe in the 80s, telling me how dogs had pooped all over the streets of Paris. He used to give me pocket money behind Mum’s back. I also admired him for his integrity. Apart from his salary, he had refused to accept bribes of money or gifts, even at the peak of his power. As a result, his small savings could now barely cover his treatment costs. He was a Communist party member who had lived by a quote from Mao – “Seek truth from the facts.”
From a glass bottle hanging above Granddad’s bed, a transparent liquid dripped into his veins. It was human immunoglobulin. Each bottle contained the blood of more than a thousand healthy human bodies. Mum told him it was a “nutrition liquid” because she knew he’d refuse to sustain his life by consuming other people’s blood.
To distract myself from the guilt of being complicit in Mum’s lies, I grabbed the newspaper on Granddad’s bedside table and read him the news.
Migrant workers who took part in the reconstruction work after the Wenchuan earthquake are entitled to employment training vouchers, which can be used at any of the 221 training organizations in Chengdu. The 240 training programs cover skills including housekeeping, IT, cooking, plumbing, and entrepreneurship…
These days, he always closed his eyes when he listened, letting my voice fill the silent room. I wondered whether he still cared about whatever was happening outside of this room and whether he could still understand the words and sentences. But I’d still read to him, even if it was merely a performance – what else could I do for a dying old man?
Mum came back when I’d finished reading the front page.
“Pa, Dr. Liu said you are doing great,” she said. “This nutrition liquid is working magic. I’ve just chased down Xiao Jiang. He’s sending more tomorrow.”
Grandpa turned his face towards the window. Outside, a heavy piece of cloud was floating right above the crown of an old banyan. The longing in his eyes urged me to reveal the truth. I would have taken him to do whatever he wanted, even if it was just to smoke one last cigarette.
Instead, I stood and listened to Mum begging him to fight for her, claiming that she had no one else she could trust in this world.
Twice every week, Thirteen would visit me at the end of the day. We always took off each other’s clothes before I could lock the door. Covered in sweat, the skin on her back tasted salty and metallic, like seawater and blood.
On one sweltering day in July, we showered together, after which I let Thirteen choose clothes from my wardrobe. Like every time she’d done this in the past, she checked the brand tags, skipping anything that would be unaffordable to her, until she found a T-shirt from Uniqlo and a pair of shorts from Adidas from the back corner of my drawer.
I wanted to take her to a noodle eatery near my primary school. Thirteen suggested walking rather than taking a taxi. On the way, she hooked my little finger with hers. An elderly woman smiled at us adoringly, as if we were two schoolgirls going to the toilet together.
This part of the town had become a giant maze of blue steel fences, behind which old narrow alleys were turning into four-lane roads. As old places became unrecognizable, my memories of growing up here were slipping away like sand through an hourglass. Sometimes it felt like we had moved to another city without realizing it.
We finally saw my primary school gate after an hour. Opposite the gate was the red sign of the restaurant, “Huang’s Eatery.”
The place was always empty before dinnertime. By the counter, a middle-aged woman watched the small TV on the wall.
“Auntie Huang,” I called. She turned around, her face brightening as she saw me.
“I haven’t seen you for months! I thought you’d left for Britain without saying goodbye,” she said, standing up. Then she noticed Thirteen. “Is this your friend? She’s as cute as you.” Her enthusiasm made us blush.
She led us to seats by the fan. Then she took out a glass jar from the fridge and poured two glasses of soy milk.
“It’s too hot today – this is going to cool you down. The drink is on the house!”
Thirteen ordered dry noodles with sour and spicy chicken giblets, while I opted for a spicy beef mince noodle salad. Auntie Huang rushed to the kitchen.
“This happens when you come to the same restaurant for fifteen years,” I whispered to Thirteen.
Devouring the delicious food, we forgot about talking. The icy soy milk cooled our bodies, which were sweating from the heat of the chili sauce. We ate and drank in the background noise of the news on TV.
By June 1, investment in traffic infrastructure reconstruction after the earthquake has reached 30 billion Yuan, which is 42.8% of the total earthquake reconstruction goal…
Thirteen put down her chopsticks and looked up at the screen. After the news finished, she stared at her bowl, as if she had lost all her appetite.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“I wonder how people who lost everything in the earthquake feel about this,” she said. “Destroyed buildings will be rebuilt in a heartbeat. But will their hometowns be remotely the same?”
“Probably not,” I said. “But what’s the alternative?”
“People stole from the budget for those school buildings. That’s why they were crumbling. If those criminals were profiting from the reconstruction once again, it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“They’re doing an inquiry, so hopefully, those people will be punished,” I said. “Have you finished eating?”
“Do you know who your mum sells her building materials to?”
“It’s none of my business,” I said. “I try to ignore her most of the time.”
“But you spend her money, don’t you?”
“I didn’t get to choose my parents. You might be surprised to know.”
Thirteen looked at me as if I was a stranger, her eyes solemn as on the day we’d met. In her gaze, I felt a scolding heat rise from my stomach and cling to my throat, which forced me into silence.
After a million years, Thirteen lowered her gaze and sighed.
“My cat’s due date is near. I can’t stay out for too long,” she said. “I should have kept an eye on that male cat.”
“Maybe your cat enjoyed it. You never know,” I said, attempting to relax the atmosphere.
“All heterosexual sex in the animal world is rape,” Thirteen said firmly, as if this was an undebatable fact. She paid for the dinner and stepped out. I thanked Auntie Huang and ran to chase her, ignoring the shock on the woman’s face.
We waited in silence at the bus stop.
“I’ve never seen newborn kittens.” As her bus approached, I had finally found something to say.
“I’ll message when she’s due,” Thirteen said, jumping on the bus.
After the argument, I did not hear from Thirteen for days. I spent most of my time lying on the granite tiles of my living room, staring at the chandelier until exhaustion defeated me. I drifted in and out of sleep, regardless of whether it was day or night.
One afternoon, Mum’s call woke me up.
“Your granddad stopped breathing. Get to the hospital now!” she said, her voice trembling. “I’m on my way, but it will take another hour.”
When I arrived, Dr. Liu and a couple of nurses were withdrawing. To save him, they had pressed Granddad’s chest hard enough to break three ribs. His heart monitor beeped incessantly. I clasped his hand, the back of which was covered in blue and purple bruises.
“Granddad, I need to tell you something,” I said. “You have…”
I paused. The word “cancer” stuck in my throat. Then I saw his eyes close. In silence, the decaying sweetness of his body swaddled me as if I was a newborn.
Granddad died four days later. On the third day, he sunk into a deep coma and never regained consciousness.
Mum stayed with him the whole time. On the last day, I saw her looking over him, whispering. She finally told him about his illness. Tears seeped from the corners of his tightly shut eyes. This was the first and last time I saw him cry.
Granddad’s vigil lasted three days and three nights. Using a bucket of fire, Mum and I burned incense paper, stack after stack.
“Granddad doesn’t need this much money,” I said. “He never cared about it. If he wanted to, he would have been rich.”
“Yes, for sure,” Mum said, “which was why he couldn’t afford to treat your grandma’s leukemia. She died at the age of forty-three, and I had to take care of her. Why do you think I didn’t go to university?”
“Do you still blame him?”
“What’s the point of blaming? He was stubborn with his old-fashioned principles, for sure, but when he realized your dad would never give you a good life, he introduced me to the right people. Otherwise, my business would never have been this successful.”
I threw a piece of incense paper into the fire. A golden rim formed on its edges as it shrank. In seconds, it turned into small black moths, dancing before disappearing into the red waves in the bucket.
“Dad would say life isn’t all about money,” I muttered.
“It was easy for him to say,” Mum said. “I was the one who had to work hard. The men in my life were so selfish. I wish you better luck.”
After the funeral, I slept for a whole day, as if I had fallen into quicksand. At dusk, I opened my eyes. Thirteen had called me three times and sent me six messages, telling me that the kittens seemed to be on their way. I grabbed a random dress on the floor, pulled it over my head, and rushed into the lift.
After twenty minutes, I knocked on Thirteen’s door.
“Hey, are you OK? Your eyes are puffy. Did you cry?” she asked.
Her question brought back the memory of Granddad’s funeral, and I was hit by the irreversibility of his death. After the pianist’s last note was played, all that was left was stillness. I burst into tears.
Thirteen wrapped me in her arms, stroking my hair as I cried. She embraced me as if I was an old friend, which filled me with warmth and sorrow.
This was the first time I had seen her place. Its condition was worse than I had imagined. The living room smelled of sewage; even the half-door to the toilet had gone. Thirteen’s room had nothing but a few storage boxes, a mattress, and a delivery chamber for the cat – an instant noodle cardboard box with a large hole on the side, padded at the bottom with a towel. Thirteen’s white tabby cat paced around outside the chamber, lying down one second and standing up the next, her round, giant belly nearly touching the ground. We watched her every movement. Occasionally, she’d crawl into the carton, but she always crawled out after a moment. Her panting became increasingly heavy.
Thirteen apologized for being judgemental the other day.
“You were right anyway,” I said. “I just wanted to make it easy for myself.”
When it was nearly midnight, the cat entered the carton one last time and lay down on her side. Then she raised a leg to let water pour from her body. We held our breaths, forgetting to blink.
The first kitten slipped out from between her back legs, its eyes tightly shut, its body soaked in amniotic fluid. With squealing cries, it protested the abruptness of its new reality, knowing it had forever lost its way back.
Yunhan Fang grew up in Chengdu, China. She now lives in London with her partner, a white tabby cat, and a black standard poodle.
