The night before my fourteenth birthday, it began to snow. First came the salt-grain kind that crunched underfoot, each step like trailing a string of shattered dreams. Then it grew lighter, larger. Light slid down from the horizon the way a person slips into sleep. Snowflakes the size of roof tiles came drifting down, as if all the lightness in the world had been folded into a quilt, black and deep. The dreamscape, wrapped in cold, was warm, distant, and without a trace.
In the snow-white light, my mother brought my brother before me. He was like a person made of wind, without weight in this world, yet amid all that lightness I felt the pull of gravity. We were the two opposing poles of each other.
The first time I spoke of this brother to anyone was in the final days of being nineteen. The wind at nineteen was so fierce it might have blown straight out of a cartoon. I grabbed a girl's scarf and mentioned that I had a brother. "So how do you tell each other apart?" the girl in the yellow puffy coat asked, stamping her feet in the snow. She was exceptionally good at stamping in the snow, crunching the year 2006 to a relentless beat. I thought it was difficult. "We are largely the same person. Sometimes it's hard to tell who is who" — like right now, I feel as though I am actually my brother, and the one living in 2017, fabricating lies in the Day One app, is the other one of us.
Nothing went wrong until the day it did. The crunching girl praised me for the night before, nodding to herself as if to confirm: "Not bad!" "What night? What's not bad?" She burst into sobbing and left me. The feeling of loss for the first time was beyond words. "Someone like you will hurt me!" I said to him, quite formally.
Later, my brother handed me a Yuxi cigarette. He grinned as he smoked. "Come on, kid — it's just women. Is it really worth all this?" I couldn't say whether it was worth it. Past memories piled onto my heart like snowflakes growing ever larger. We sat on a carpet of ginkgo leaves at the ruins of Minzhong Temple. He chattered on and on; I gave off a heavy resonance. "That was one of countless mornings in my life." One of the countless mornings I knew nothing about. "I woke up right here," he said, pointing to the bench beside us. "The ground was too damp," he added, though this was self-evident. "That was 2010, see. You were still in college, kid. Your brother here was penniless, with not a soul in the world, and I slept right here." As he spoke, he blew smoke rings, and the sight filled me with rage. Smoking! And Mother just lets him get away with it — with me it would have been different. "Getting cocky, huh? Smoking!" In third grade, I picked up a cigarette butt and Mother beat my legs nearly to the breaking point, while my brother just stood there blowing smoke rings. Back then we were curious about girls yet resistant to them, understanding each other — or rather, misunderstanding each other — through fights and quarrels. And there was my brother, arms around a girl with "Min" in her name, kissing her wetly — the prettiest girl in our class. My lungs nearly exploded from rage. "When I woke up that morning, a donkey lay curled up with its head touching mine on the other end of the bench." "Was the bench really that long?" I had long since tired of his endless fabrications. "What do you know!" His anger nearly launched him onto the clouds — truly a creature of wind. "I tore a steamed bun in half, ate one piece, and gave the other to Brother Donkey. When the first ray of sunlight came from the east — that was the most unforgettable morning of my life." "The sun came out after all. The world is just unbelievably, absurdly vast!" Then my brother disappeared for a long time, a very long time, to greet his mornings that had nothing to do with me, to walk toward his life that had nothing to do with mine.
The year before last, right after National Day, my brother suddenly came to find me. He drifted in like a ghost, dancing lightly, leading our mother who just smiled and said little. I flicked ash into an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Neither of us spoke. Time flowed through my weighted life, and I felt that simply by opening my eyes I could see the donkey that once slept head-to-head with my brother.
The donkey said: Don't go imagining I'll strip off my clothes-mask and out pops Guo Donglin — this is the only face I've got. "Our joys and sorrows carry no weight against the morning that is bound to come." The donkey offered this much more. Though he had slept with my woman, I still miss him terribly. On this birthday I want to wish him well. I want to say hello. "Hello there," just like at the end of Killing Me Softly, my brother and I meet on an escalator — I going down, he going up. I'm the one who waves first. "Hello there," I say. "The other me in this world."