‘Shengqiang, it’s you!’ Uncle greeted him, getting up from the sofa. His mother stood up too, just as if Shengqiang hardly ever honoured her with his presence.

  ‘Shengqiang, look at all the presents Zhiming’s brought for me and you, and Anqin too!’ Gran pointed to the dining table which was heaped with packages of all sizes.

  ‘You’re too kind, brother,’ said Dad with a smile. ‘And, look, on my way over, I picked up something for you.’ He airily handed over the two bags of Sichuan peppers.

  ‘Ai-ya! You didn’t need to buy me anything! What is it?’ Uncle came over and took them with his right hand. He was dressed in beige slacks and a white shirt, topped with a grey-blue linen jacket, which gave him an air of casual elegance. He put the bags on the table and sat down again. ‘What kind of tea would you like?’ asked Gran from the kitchen. ‘Hua Mao Peak,’ he said. Less politely, he thought: Now what bee have you got in your bonnet?! When did you ever in a million years ask me what tea I wanted? ‘Mother,’ said his brother, ‘give Shengqiang some of that Pu’er. It’s good one, especially for someone who drinks so much alcohol. He should drink more Pu’er tea.’

  ‘No, no, no!’ said Dad with a protesting wave. ‘I’ve got a ton of Pu’er tea at home, my friends are always giving it to me, I can’t get through it all, it smells mouldy! Just give me the Hua Mao Peak.’ But Gran said: ‘Ai-ya! You just listen to your brother. I’ve done you some Pu’er.’ Why are you so quick off the mark today! thought Dad, as Gran emerged from the kitchen with a cup of Pu’er tea in her hands.

  ‘Shengquang, listen to what your brother has to say. He’s just come back from a trip to Europe.’ ‘Only to a conference, Mother, nothing worth talking about,’ said Uncle with a smile, taking a sip from his teacup. ‘Anyway, why should Shengqiang be interested? It’s not as if he’s never been abroad.’

  Dad said nothing. Uncle didn’t know, though Gran knew perfectly well, that the furthest Dad had ever been was a single trip to Hong Kong. In four days there, he had only been able to enjoy a bit of sightseeing on the first day. He had eaten seafood, bought a leather belt and a pair of shoes, and then killed time in the hotel, going up and down between the fifth floor and the ninth floor to have his hair washed and his feet massaged, while Mum went out shopping. The worst of it was there was no Sichuan pepper or chilli peppers. ‘The food was so bland I might as well have been in hospital!’ he grumbled when, thankfully, he was back in Pingle Town and went out for a hotpot with Zhong and a bunch of their bros. ‘I’m not going there again. Why spend money on punishing yourself?’

  ‘That’s what travel’s all about,’ Zhong had told him. ‘Spending money on punishing yourself ... and taking pictures. You did take some pictures?’

  ‘No I didn’t!’ Dad had waved dismissively. ‘I just took a bunch of Anqin.’

  ‘Well, that’s taking photos!’ Zhong had been friends with Dad for so many years, he knew just how to humour him. With his chopsticks, he had extracted a large morsel of eel from the hotpot, and placed it in Dad’s saucer.

  Dad stared blankly at Gran, as she put the cup of tea down in front of him, waiting to see if she would rat on him. But there’s flesh on both side of the hand, as they say. She simply went back to her chair without speaking and regarded the brothers with a beaming smile.

  ‘Ai-ya! Did anyone have such a fine pair of sons, so successful!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I can’t hold a candle to Shengqiang,’ said Uncle. ‘He’s a big businessman nowadays, I’m just an impoverished teacher.’

  Creep! You talk more baloney than a bargirl! Dad only managed to suppress the urge to swear by digging his hands in his trouser pockets and bringing out a pack of cigarettes. He stood up, laughed and addressed his brother as ‘Prof!’ and went out on the balcony to fetch the ashtray reposing by the potted orchid. That had been Granddad’s orchid, and was many years old. Granddad had always kept his ashtray there because Gran wouldn’t let him smoke indoors. So Granddad would eat his dinner, then go and sit on the balcony, look at his orchid, light up a Tianxiaxiu, and puff away.

  ‘Dad, have one of my cigarettes,’ Dad used to say. He always wanted Granddad to accept one from him. He had started on Hong Ta Shan, then went on to Yunyan brand and then, in 2000, when the chilli bean paste factory opened a shop in Yong’An City, Dad progressed to China brand, the sort that came in soft packs.

  But Granddad always refused: ‘I’m sticking to Tianxiaxiu. I know what I like, and that’s that!’ Sometimes Dad smoked Tianxiaxiu too, and the two of them would puff away together on the balcony. Gran would call from inside: ‘You’re a pair of junkies! You’re polluting the atmosphere!’

  ‘Just this one!’ Granddad would protest, turning his back on her so he could puff the smoke out over the railings.

  ‘Shengqiang!’ Dad heard Gran’s shout from inside. ‘Can’t you stop smoking for a minute? Your brother’s come to see us!’

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I’ve finished this cigarette,’ said Dad. He had just lit up and nothing was going to make him abandon it now. He sat outside in Granddad’s chair, the old man’s ashtray in his hand, and watched his mother sipping her Pu’er tea and chatting happily away to Uncle. Son-of-a-bitch, he thought, and took another puff.

  Dad decided to smoke his cigarette right down until the stub burned his fingers before he went back inside.

  Even though he wasn’t a university professor like Uncle, Dad was no fool. He knew exactly what he was doing when he bought those two packets of Sichuan pepper and gave them to his brother.

  To explain what this was all about, we have to say a bit about Uncle’s hand. There was something else: Dad was convinced his current position as the family’s doormat had a lot to do with Uncle’s hand.

  Of course, only Gran could confirm that, and trying to get her to spill the beans was extremely difficult. Dad, however, had plenty to say on the topic. Ever since he could remember, his mother was always on at him: ‘Shengqiang, give some of that food to your brother,’ or ‘Shengqiang, can’t you see how heavy that is? Carry it for your brother.’ Or it would be the neighbours: ‘Come here, kid. How’s your brother’s withered hand getting on?’ Dad was two years younger than Uncle and ever since he could remember, Uncle’s withered hand had been the subject of gossip in our small town. At first, Gran was distraught, then she burned joss sticks at all the temples in town, and took him around all the doctors. Finally, she sat down with Uncle, took his left hand in hers and looked at it: ‘It’s not too bad to look at, just very small. It’s perfectly nifty, and it doesn’t matter that it’s a bit weak. Lucky it’s the left hand and not the right.’

  Of course, Dad did not know all the ins and outs of it, but Uncle’s hand had not only made him into the family doormat, it also nearly made his parents divorce. Gran sometimes beat her chest and lamented what a fool she had been not to grab her chance! She was fed up to the back teeth with living with Granddad ... and she’d missed that one opportunity. Anyway, Gran took the line that Granddad had caused the injury to Uncle’s hand (and now that Granddad was dead there was no one to contradict her). The three children used to hear her shout at him: ‘He was just a little baby, and you wrenched his hand so hard, all I asked you to do was change his nappy. You had no reason to be so angry with him.’ Every argument between Gran and Granddad always ended up being about Uncle’s hand. He and Uncle and Aunt Coral would sit silently in the courtyard while this was going on. Uncle played with the abacus which Gran had bought him so he could exercise his hand, sometimes messing around and playing it as if it was a pipa. Aunt Coral was in fifth or sixth grade of primary, or maybe first year of middle school, and that allowed her to take over the chess table to do her homework on. Only Dad had nothing to do and no toys to play with. But he wasn’t giving up. He invented a new game, sitting in the flowerbeds, carefully clawing through the black dirt with his fingers so that every fingernail was packed underneath with black dirt.

  Dad would never forget one particular day as long as he lived. I’ve always known that Zhiming was a devious creep! That was the day I found out! Gran and Granddad fought themselves into a corner while, in the courtyard, the three children gazed up at the darkening sky. Aunt Coral had long since finished her homework and was sharpening her pencil to a sharp point. Uncle had had enough of his abacus, and Dad had made each one of his fingernails evenly black. He looked at his sister, then at his brother, and said: ‘I’m hungry! When are we going to eat?’

  But no one could answer that question. Uncle thought for a while, then got to his feet and went into the house. Dad, and perhaps Aunt Coral too, stared after him in alarm. But to their surprise, they heard Uncle’s quiet voice: ‘Mother, don’t blame Dad. There’s nothing the matter with me, I’ve just got one big and one small hand. You never know, maybe that makes me lucky.’ My fucking brother was only five or six years old! And he was that mealy-mouthed even then!

  That night, thanks to Uncle’s good luck, the family finally got something to eat, under the stars. Gran was still weepy. ‘Dong Zhiming’s such a mature child,’ she sighed. ‘He’s had such a hard time and he never complains.’ She kept picking out food with her chopsticks to fill Uncle’s bowl. They were lucky enough to have two slices of meat that night for dinner, and he got both of those too. Dad didn’t know how Aunt Coral felt, but personally he would have done anything to have a withered hand, a tiny eye, a bit less flesh, even one leg less. He couldn’t have cared less ... He just wanted not to be starving hungry every day. He would have given an arm and a leg to get one fucking mouthful of meat!

  In any case, all that was back in the 1960s, either 68 or 69. But Uncle’s hand brought him good luck again much later, though it took Dad a very long time to figure it all out. It happened in 1990, Dad was very sure of the date this time because he remembered the Asian Games were being held in Beijing. China came out top and in every snooker hall in town, they were singing the Games’ anthem, including the girl who wanted to screw him, who had pouty lips like Wei Wei, the singer. Dad had only been married to Mum for a bit over two years so as far as other women were concerned, he’d gone back to being a virgin again. But Dad still remembered perfectly clearly Zhong sitting by the snooker table in the South Gate snooker hall, and digging him in the ribs with his elbow. ‘Shengqiang, look at that! That girl’s making eyes at us!’ Was Zhong married then? No, he didn’t get married till the end of the year.

  She was too. Miss Pouty Lips definitely smiled at them, before she turned away to the boys and girls at her own table. ‘She looks a bit like Wei Wei,’ Zhong whispered into Dad’s ear, ‘So what?’ Dad shot him a scornful look.

  ‘So nothing, just now…. Let’s wait and see!’ Zhong’s eyes were glued to the next table and he kept missing the ball.

  ‘And what about Gao Yang?’ Dad tut-tutted. Zhong and Gao had been going out for nearly two years, and said they were getting married at the end of the year.

  ‘What about her?’ said Zhong dismissively. And that evening, whether it was because Dad had put down six shots of liquor, or there was too much singing of the Games anthem, but one thing led to another, and what Dad remembered quite clearly (though he didn’t remember much else) was that his bros from both snooker tables all went off together for a hot and spicy ma-la hot pot, washed down with two bottles of baijiu liquor, and, wait a second, yes, now he remembered, just he and Pouty Lips were left in the guest-house. Dad still remembered where she came from, she worked in 372 Factory, and spoke standard mandarin too, like Aunt Coral. They had spent so long kissing that Dad got a numb tongue. (This girl has an engine in her mouth! he thought to himself.) But the truth was (though of course he would not admit it) that Dad was starting to get the shakes. If you added the time he’d been going out with Mum to the years they’d been married, that made three years since he last slept with another woman. He was well out of practice, and his pecker was a bit leery.

  But that girl was something else. She grabbed Dad’s hand and pushed it under her skirt. Dad’s fingers were freezing cold and slippery with sweat as he felt her ... suddenly an image of the bubbling vats of chilli bean paste came into his mind. After three or four hours under the fierce glare of the sun, it gave off a moan as you stirred it and the chilli was so strong you couldn’t open your eyes. Dad gulped, and in an instant made up his mind. One way or another, he was going to screw this girl today, and not only that, he was going to screw many, many more women in his lifetime.

  In that instant, Dad felt a jolt as if someone had touched his funny bone: he saw in a flash how the rest of his life was going to pan out, and he also understood Duan Zhiming’s secret.

  Nothing had been said, but he knew in his heart, all the same. He traced it back to one day sometime in 1983, when Duan Ziming, dressed in an enviably fashionable matelot T-shirt, took Dad off to meet the girls and his bros in Pingle Town. There were nods and winks, and comments about Duan Zhiming’s ‘hand skills’ (‘out of this world!’) that he couldn’t make head or tail of. And he, Xue Shengqiang, was so fucking stupid, it had taken him till he was twenty-five or twenty-six before the penny finally dropped!

  So it was true what Uncle had said: that withered hand of his really did bring him life-long luck.

  But Dad never had that kind of luck. When he was a kid, he never got any meat to eat, and he was seventeen before he ever caught a glimpse of a girl’s arse. All he could do was tag along after Uncle. Even with Baby Girl, he remembered hearing: ‘That fucking Duan Zhiming certainly has a nifty hand! Baby Girl only took four yuan 50 off him!’ The youths and bums of Pingle Town took this kind of thing seriously. That fifty cents he’d saved made Duan Zhiming legendary.

  In 1983, Duan Zhiming was in the third year of upper middle school. He got good marks, he could play snooker and he could pull the girls, even the likes of Zhou Xiaoqin and Liu Yufen, who hung around with the lads. They were as close as Pingle Town got to stars like Teresa Teng and Barbara Yung. Uncle was coolest dude in Pingle Town. Dad had to admit that being able to hang around with the West Street crowd and having Duan Zhiming as his older brother made him pretty big-headed. I was such an arsehole back then! was how he explained it to himself afterwards.

  Qin started to show her bump in May. Her dad went off to the chilli bean paste factory, his carrying pole over his shoulder, to sort them out. In a situation like this, Gran was probably the only person in town capable of keeping the lid on it. In any case, no one quite knew how it happened but, very strangely, the Zhou family took the money and shut up and, even more strangely, Gran whipped Dad’s bum until she drew blood and, stranger still, Dad found himself learning the ropes with old Chen in the fermentation yard and—hey presto!—that creep Duan Zhiming suddenly flitted off to university!

  Dad, even now, had still not worked out what really happened but, as he said to himself: What the hell, I never did like studying. In any case, here he was twenty or so years later, happy as larry: he was running his own chilli bean paste factory in Pingle Town, screwing the women he wanted, playing the mahjong he wanted, eating the ma-la hot pots he wanted. He was living la dolce vita. As for Qin, she married a man who sold Sichuan pepper. Sichuan pepper and chilli bean paste were kith and kin and although the business was small, it gave the couple a decent livelihood.

  In all seriousness, Dad had given careful consideration to those two bags of Sichuan pepper.

  Anyway, there was Dad, sitting smoking his cigarette on Gran’s balcony.

  He sat in Granddad’s chair, watching Gran and Uncle chatting away indoors. He had no idea what Uncle was saying to Gran but she laughed, leaned forward and nodded, resting both hands on her knees, and nodded again. He looked at Uncle, sprawling comfortably on the sofa, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other hand tapping his thigh, as he always did. It was two years since they had last met and Dad finally could not repress his curiosity, and stared intently at Uncle’s face, trying to work out whether he looked older. But he was still as weird as ever, with his ashen pallor, prominent nose and those hazy, always speculative eyes ... All those people who say I look like my brother must be stupid, said Dad to himself.

  He stared abstractly at mother and son, heedless of whether he had taken one, or two, or possibly even three cigarettes, out of the packet to light, until finally they stopped their endless chat and seemed to remember he was there too. Uncle turned and looked at him through the French window, then looked again, and Gran looked at him too.

  ‘Damn, they’re talking about me smoking again!’ Dad stubbed out his cigarette, jumped to his feet, pushed open the door, and came into the sitting room.

  Dad had not even had time to sit down on the sofa before he heard Uncle say: ‘Shengqiang, I just told mother that I’ll take charge of her birthday celebrations, you don’t need to bother.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’ve done everything, I even got my driver to go and book the room! It’s the Prince’s Mansion Hotel, it’s a really classy place and the food’s good too,’ said Dad, looking from Uncle to Gran.

  Gran ignored Dad. She was looking at Uncle.

  He’s like the prodigal son who can’t put a foot wrong. I’ve never missed my weekly visits in all this time. Dad couldn’t help feeling aggrieved. Uncle was still babbling on: ‘Ai-ya, Shengqiang! Mother’s not like any old eighty-year-old, and this birthday is a bit special. The Duan-Xue family’s not like the neighbours either. We’ve got to do this really well, it’s got to be out of the ordinary, really special. You get on with your own work, you’ve got the factory to run, and you haven’t been well recently either. This trip back, I’m going to stay around for a few days and organize Mother’s eightieth birthday. Besides, you and I haven’t seen each other in a long time either, we ought to get together, go out for a few drinks.’

  Dad wanted another smoke. He felt a surge of anger. But he finally sat where he was, thinking to himself: Duan Zhiming, you creep, you think you can keep up with me? I can drink you under the table or my name’s not Xue!

 

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