Twins

"[This] story focuses on post-Tiananmen Square political life....The brothers' relationship, their love and antagonism, is subtly and finely drawn"-Professor McAdams, English Department of Kenyon College, in her nomination for Franklin Miller Award of Kenyon College, which is granted in April 2009.

On the fifth day of the hunger strike, the hot weather in middle May enveloped Beijing. Li Xin sat among the crowds on Tiananmen Square. At the age of twenty, he was tall and thin. His squared jaw implied resolution and his hunger failed to overshadow the heated pursuit reflected through his eyes. He idled, watching people passing by and suddenly caught sight of his twin brother who was born five minutes earlier than him, Li Xiang, coming. Li Xin first thought it was an illusion from days without food. Yet his brother, who looked very much like Li Xin, approached, stopped, and bent down to pat Li Xin on his shoulders, which made him realize that his brother was actually there.

“Brother, how did you find your way here?” Li Xin asked, wondering if Li Xiang had changed his mind and decided to join the effort.

“I asked people along the way. Also your friends at the department thought I was you again, and brought me here.” Ever since birth, the two looked exactly the same, except for the scar on Li Xiang’s upper forehead. He received it at the age of seven from falling down the stairs, when he and Li Xin were chased by the old gatekeeper of the orchard nearby, where the cherries looked so delicious that the little twins sneaked in and picked as many as they could. When they were fourteen, they took a hiking trip to Mount Tai and a fortune-teller commented on his mark. “A scar on your forehead shall twist your destiny before you can wear an adult’s hat.” Overcautious and introverted as he was, Li Xiang feared it be true, while Li Xin sniffed, “Bro, that’s totally nonsense.” That marked another difference between the two: Li Xin was more confident and self-assertive. They were both bright young students and got into Peking University together at the age of eighteen.

Today Li Xiang’s outfit was very clean—not new, but nice enough to set him apart from the rest of the students on the Square. Many of them, especially those who came from other cities, had camped there ever since early May. They only had a handful of clothes to choose from, all of which smelled and had grown dirty. Had there been no one to lead him through the crowd, Li Xiang would not have made it to the group formed by students from Peking University.

Weeks of demonstrations had worn Li Xin out, making him look much sloppier than Li Xiang. Strands of hairs stuck to his forehead from weeks without showering. On seeing this, Li Xiang attempted to tidy up Li Xin’s hair. Li Xin moved his head to avoid the hand. What Li Xiang said bothered him even more: “Mom is worried about you very much. She asked me to bring you home.”

Li Xin dropped his head, looking down at his shirt, and wondered how his mother could ever understand the slogans on it, such as “Freedom” and “Equality.” “Bro, haven’t I told you that I won’t not go back? Try to explain to her what I’m doing again.”

Li Xiang smirked, “She wouldn’t take that as an answer. She worries about you, like she worried about dad then.” Their father was beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution, and the widow had made admirable efforts to bring up the twins who were then only two years old. Li Xin could even picture her sitting alone on the Soviet Union-style green-cloth-made sofa, hands on her knees, turning her body slightly just to hear the sound from the hallway, waiting for her sons to be back. For one moment, he wanted to go back with Li Xiang and walked up the stairs. She would recognize his footsteps and be relieved. Her smile when both of the twins were at home during weekends would reappear.

But if he walked away like this, what would his friends—now his “comrades”—and his girlfriend Wang Jing think of him? He was known among his peers for his determination and passion. His cassette business at Delta pond of Peking University during the summer before the college, and the Contemporary Art Club he organized were all ideas he came up with one day and put into practice the next.

It was because of this that Wang Jing had approached him. He remembered those short rides around the campus during the freshman year with the Fege bike he bought with the money made over the summer. Wang Jing sat on the back seat and chit-chatted with him. Their eyes met frequently as the talk flowed at its own pace, and her admiration for him was unhidden. A little ashamed, he felt that Wang Jing had persuaded him to go to the march and not the other way around. The furious promise Wang Jing made to Li Xin in her elegant voice, “Xin, may you be a Decembrist and I your wife!” was fresh in his mind. He stayed with her to take on some responsibilities that only real revolutionists were qualified for, while Li Xiang left for home.

“Your brother is not revolutionary,” Wang Jing had declared, meaning that Li Xiang was a coward. Recalling this, Li Xin made up his mind, “Brother, seriously, I cannot turn back. I have to do something for my country. Otherwise, what would Wang Jing think of me?”
Li Xiang got tired of standing. He moved in to sit with Li Xin, “Speaking of her, where is she at?”

Li Xin made some space for the two to stretch out their legs, “She went to Wangfujing to use the bathroom. She can’t stand the toilet on the Square.”

“Aren’t you guys in a hunger strike?” Li Xiang was confused.

Li Xin grasped what Li Xiang was referring to, but avoided the question. “She wants a clean toilet, a very clean one.”

Li Xiang let it go. They two sat shoulder by shoulder in a short period of silence before Li Xiang started talking again, “Xin, I don’t think whatever you are doing now is doing any good.”

“What do you mean?” Li Xin’s tone sharpened.

“I mean, do you really know what you want? I’m not saying that what you’re doing is wrong, I’m just saying that it seems no good to do it like this.”

“Well, we want…” Li Xin began than paused. What did they really want? Democracy? Freedom? General election and popular vote? Anti-corruption? And anti-official-rent-seeking? Those terms had been quoted and used frequently in discussions on campus. Now, after a month of blasting the government with such terms and preaching both to the nation and to his peers, Li Xin knew these terms as well as he knew the cuts and scars on his hands from wood-curving or sculpting at the Club. Yet, a weird feeling of alienation grew from the familiarity as he had experienced before with calligraphy. When he was a kid small enough to be forced to practice on some “hobbies” that he did not enjoy at all, he had to stay in every afternoon to finish three pages of handwriting practice. At the sunset when it was still too early to turn on the lights, the apartment filled with denser and denser darkness, and it required almost pure instinct to write every stroke. One of the scariest moment was when he found that he could no longer recognize the combinations of those strokes, be it a “Solemn (Zheng),” “Harmony (He),” or “Elegance (Ya).” His mind was empty then, and so was it now. He had trouble coming up with a rebuttal to his brother, as he had difficulty making sense out of these terms even to himself.

“Remember Plato’s metaphor about knowledge? We should be born with it, Because we aren't, we have to learn it just like to find an antique vase that we didn’t know what it looked like. How could we find it then? Similarly, do you know you…”

“Even so, it is far better than doing nothing and pursuing nothing.” It was a typical Li Xin reply.

“Yeah, you’re right,. But what I’m afraid of is that you break the vase reaching for it, and hurt everyone of us.”

“No!...no way… it’s not like that…” Li Xin cringed, muttering. For weeks he and his peers protested and sent messages to the government again and again. Their messages to the government were condemned as threats and thus never answered. However, some high-profile advisors to officials visited them to persuade them to cease the demonstration and go back to school. Students were assured that the government had felt their concern. But why was their call to remove the official mark of this movement as “a malicious revolt” ignored? The news from the west were all in favor of the students. In a flood of all this news, good and bad, some students left and returned, but some stayed, insisting that they would never move out of the Square unless all were solved. Even those who stayed, including him, had only a vague idea of what they were calling for. But that was not their fault. The language of democracy, freedom and equality was new and strange to them, but what else could they do? People like his brother did not dare to participate, how come they had the right to ask people like Li Xin to reconsider their decisions and hint that they would screw things up?

“Brother, stop giving me those metaphors that make no sense in real life. There are so many of us here for so many days,” Li Xin leaned forward to stand up, continuing, “We had our common will for a better future for the country; how can it mean nothing, how can it be bad and wrong, and how can we blow things up?” He tried to yell but had no strength because of his empty stomach. The world in his vision shivered and his mind felt like a fishing boat floating on the vast ocean under a storm, his favorite scene in the old man’s sail, on page 125 of the collection of Hemingway’s work. He collapsed.

When he woke up again, he was lying in Li Xiang’s embrace.

“Xin, please, for the sake of your life, go back with me. You are hurting yourself so bad,” Li Xiang begged.

Li Xin searched for Li Xiang’s left hand, held it tight, and made his resolution word by word. “Brother, I must not go under any circumstances. Once I go beyond the limits of my body, I don’t feel hungry anymore. My body is fine, but if I leave now, I will look down on myself for my whole life.” Li Xiang knew Li Xin all too well that he said nothing more. In silence, he stared at the Tiananmen, the Archaic building functioning both as a gate and a palace, behind which one ruler after another lived for centuries.

The crowd burst out in noise. Li Xiang looked around and saw the clouds filling the sky. The scorching, stringy humidity had cooled down. Blasts of cold watery winds blew through the Square. The national flags both on the Tiananmen and those on the Square, with its five golden stars on a red background standing for the sacrifice the pioneers had made, billowed in the wind of their own volition. A heavy shower spread from the south end of the Square to the north, stirring up the exclamations from the crowds.

Li Xiang took off his coat to shelter them from the rain. Judging that a coat could do nothing to keep them from getting wet, Li Xin shook up his brother’s attempt, “Stop, stop, forget about it, brother. Look at how heavy the rain is! How could we even avoid it? Just take it together.”

***

Eighteen years later, Li Xiang met with his younger brother Li Xin at the newly built Terminal 3 of Beijing International Airport. He was walking towards the exit, dragging his luggage, when he saw a man in his forties trying to get his attention. The man raised his right elbow high, and waved with enthusiasm. Li Xin yelled out, “Hello, brother!” Li Xiang waved back and picked up his paces.

It was difficult to walk fast amongst all the people. Li Xiang felt crowded the second he stepped on Chinese soil, the first time to be back since he fled for the United States through Hong Kong. Being in exile because of the Tiananmen Square protest, he had not applied for a re-entry visa to China until a year ago. To his surprise, the visa was granted after a three-month background check. Returning to his home country appeared strange to him after years of teaching philosophy in a small college. Fully accustomed and attached to the placid lifestyle at a college town, Li Xiang could not walk among the others hustling off to the exits. Li Xin stepped back and waited aside, looking at his watch with one hand resting on his waist, a pose unfamiliar to Li Xiang.

“Things have changed.” Earlier, two hours away from Beijing, Li Xiang had gone the lavatory to tidy himself up. His hairline had withdrawn from his forehead, so that his hair did not cover the scar anymore. Li Xiang had found some of his sideburns white, and wrinkles around his eyes, which made him look wise and solemn. Staring at himself in the squared mirror, he had wondered what his twin brother looked like after years.

Li Xiang drew up to Li Xin. Li Xin had a beer belly that he couldn't have hidden if he'd tried, which he hadn't. His short hair appeared black on first glance, but Li Xiang found the roots of many hairs white. Maybe Li Xin had it dyed at a salon. He wore a Crocodile polo shirt tucked into a pair of khaki pants. Dark brown Buddhist rosary beads on his right wrist complemented his Pierre Cardin shoes in color. Li Xin’s welcoming greeting, “Brother, I missed you so much!” resonated with the brotherhood hibernating inside Li Xiang’s heart for years. Li Xiang laughed and patted Li Xin’s shoulder.

Li Xin led Li Xiang to a dark-gray BMW 5 series in the parking lot and opened the trunk for him, when Li Xin’s phone rang. Li Xin stepped aside to answer the call and signaled to Li Xiang to put the luggage into the car. Li Xiang did so and sat in the passenger seat. He looked around admiring the fine finish the interior was equipped with, which made him feel more or less out of place. It reminded him of the summer after high school when Li Xin sold cassettes of Taiwanese pop music and bought a bicycle with all the money he made. He sometimes rode the bicycle around campus with his girlfriend on the back seat, which made Li Xiang feel jealous. Of course, it was not good to feel jealous of his brother, either twenty years ago or now, so he tried to push the thought from his mind.

Li Xin jumped into the driver seat and started the car, while he was speaking, “Brother, I’m sorry to keep you waiting. The municipal government just called me about a project, so it took a while. You must be tired after the trip. I have booked you a room in Ritz-Carlton in Xi Cheng District. Let’s check in there and we can go have dinner. You cool with the plan?”
“Yeah.” Li Xiang asked, “How is mom?”

“She’s fine. She misses you a lot though, because she lives by herself now. Why don’t you call her? She is expecting your call.”

Li Xiang took the phone Li Xin handed to him, selected the number from the contacts, and dialed it. It rang only once before it was answered.

Li Xiang heard an old hesitant voice, “Xiang?”. He was about to say “Mom” but his words got caught in his throat.

“Xiang, my son, it is so good to have you back. How are you doing? Did you have a good flight? Are you tired?” Mom was always talkative.

“Mom, it’s good, no worry, I’m in Beijing now, about to come home in a few hours. How about you? Have you eaten and slept well recently?” Li Xiang asked.

“Everything is fine. I couldn’t fall asleep last night knowing that you were on your way here. I thought about something, and though I wanted to tell you later, I can’t help but tell you now. I...I’m sorry, Xiang. I’m sorry that I preferred your brother to stay. I feel so...so guilty about it...I knew this was something we never really talked about, but I feel compelled to tell you this now. Xiang...mom is so...sorry.” She broke down and sobbed, which reminded Li Xiang of the time when he left Li Xin and their mother. Li Xin finally got home after the crackdown on June the 4th, 1988, with dirt, and scratches on his face and body and blood on his shirt. A sudden and severed fever struck him down and kept him in bed for days. Lan Kwan from Hong Kong, who introduced himself as Li Xin's friend from the protest, visited and offered Li Xiang and their mother to take Li Xin to US through Hong Kong as the government was hunting down the protestors. The escape could be dangerous and there was no guarantee. Li Xin was in a coma and too sick to even walk. Amazed by how much Li Xiang looked like Li Xin, Lan Kwan suggested that Li Xiang left with him and Li Xin could pretend to be the mother’s elder obedient son and stay with her. Hearing the suggestion, their mother sat there sobbing, while darting one or two looks at Li Xiang, Her pose was engrained in Li Xiang's mind. Motivated by a mixed feeling of bitter and self-sacrifice, Li Xiang left with Lan Kwan and had never returned until now.

These unpleasant memories entwined Li Xiang like snakes from Zeus hunted down Laocoon. He had no idea how to react. He muttered something like, “Mom, it’s OK, I never thought of it, it’s OK.” But he failed to calm her down and Li Xin could even hear their mother’s crying.
Li Xin reached his right arm to pat Li Xiang on his shoulder, “Brother, it’s okay. Mom was just too excited. It’s good to have you back. We will meet tonight.” He took the phone and said, “Mom, everything is fine, alright? Brother is with me and we will be at home in several hours. I’m about to get on the highway. Let’s talk when we meet tonight.” He hung up.

Li Xiang took a deep breath, sat back and looked outside the window, where cranes on the construction field caught his attention. “Wow, there are a lot of construction projects going on now.”

“Yes, the timing is quite right. Construction is surely a good business. Where there are projects, there are profits. Every single main road has been upgraded…for the Olympics” A ring interrupted his lecture. Li Xin looked at his phone screen and answered it impatiently.
“What on earth do you want this time? Didn’t I tell you not to bother me? What? Tang needs some money? Go find Accountant Zhang and wire some over. Hurry up! The bank will close soon. I need to show my brother around tonight so I won’t be home…Alright, that’s it.” He cut off the conversation even though apparently the other person had some more to ask.

“Your wife?”

“Yeah.” He sighed.

“The one who always went after you in college?” Li Xiang remembered a short-hair girl, Feng Miao, back in college and asked with a smile.

“Yes. I agreed to marry her after graduation. Her dad was an official at the city council and used his connections to get me a job.” Li Xin stuck out his right hand to find a CD of Buddhist Mantras. The rhythmic Buddhist blessings soon bounced around the car.

“And what happened with Wang Jing, have you ever seen her again?” Li Xiang recalled another girl. On many sunny spring days of the freshman year, she sat at the backseat of Li Xin’s bike with a collection of Shelley’s poetry in her hands. Her skirt waved along with the up and down of the road. And then the early summer came, and an expression of the sacred faith which inspired and burdened these young men to act for the sake of the country replaced the shy look on her face. Students started marching outside of the campus. One day when Li Xiang was about to pack up his stuff and head home, Wang Jing came to get Li Xin to do the demonstration with her. The beauty on Wang Jing’s face came from a pure passion for this nation’s future. Li Xiang knew then Li Xin would not go home with him. He left alone, always remembering her last line, “Xin, may you be a Decembrist and I your wife!” That hot summer pierced through the time and remained fresh in Li Xiang’s memory.

“Wang Jing, yeah, she is doing corporate financing in Hangzhou now. Damn it! Last time I asked her to raise some funds for the project at Hangzhou bay, and guess what? She asked me two percent more for commission! Let me tell you, those women… ”

This chunk of information flooded into Li Xiang’s ears much faster than he could pick it up. As soon as he figured out what was going on between his brother and Wang Jing, Li Xin broke it off. He lowered the window, stuck his head out and spat obnoxiously. The air on the highway flooded into the car. The loud noise dwarfed the Buddhist music sound.

“…Are so much greedier than men!” Li Xin sat back and made a final judgment on women of Wang Jing’s type. All those feelings of nostalgia about the old days were negated by this claim, and Li Xiang could do nothing but force a smile.

“Bro, don’t just ask about me. Tell me more about yourself. Remind me again how did you meet your wife?” Li Xin’s question broke the temporary silence.

“Lin Yi? She came to the US to study in 1993. And we got to know each other at school. Right then she wanted to get a status to stay. We were together first only to get her the greencard, but as time went by, the bond became real.”

“Interesting. Why didn’t you bring her and your kids back?”

“Nah, I came back first in case I faced any trouble with the customs.”

“Come on, bro. Don’t even worry about it. Nobody cares about that any more. Even if they stop you, you can just simply sign a form of disapproval to close the case. You are a US citizen; they pretty much can't touch you. And you didn’t participate anyway.”

Li Xiang found that after years of doing business, Li Xin became so eloquent with his speech that Li Xiang could not keep up. Searching for a new topic, he caught sight of the small golden Vajra hanging on the rearview mirror and asked, “You believe in Buddhism now?”

“I sure do. Nowadays in Beijing, people with money or power all believe in this. You heard about Yonghe Palace? On January the first, I went to burn the eighteenth incense of the year. Guess how much it cost? A hundred and eighty-eight grand! But it's worth it. All the projects I've been part of this year have gone so well. Bodhisattva does bless me.” Li Xin took his left hand off the wheel, closed both palms together and made a worship gesture.
Li Xiang could not stop thinking about the young Li Xin who wore a white shirt and a white headband, and who climbed up the base of the Memorial on the Square to wave a red flag. Who, when Li Xiang went to see him, fainted and fell into his embrace. Li Xin’s face had turned pale but he held Li Xiang’s hand tight. He spoke In a low and stern voice. “Once I go beyond the limits of my body, I don’t feel hungry anymore.” That was when Li Xin was thin but full of passion which only the youth of the 1980’s were entitled to. He used to only believe and value the rights men were born with, looking down on the gods and Buddha with contempt.
“I still have several Buddhist rosary beads blessed by monks. If you want, I can give some to you.” Li Xin’s cell rang for the third time. He glanced at the number, turned down the volume of the music, and cleared his throat before he spoke.

“Hey, sweetie…Of course I miss you so bad. Tonight? Yeah, I’m free. I was just about to call you to go out for dinner. My older brother just came back. My real brother, the assistant dean of Harvard University. So let’s meet at five, where I picked you up last time. Alright, I will call you when I get there…Yeah, me too…ehhh…hmmm…Bye.” Li Xin lowered his voice at the end of the conversation. After the call, for the first time he looked embarrassed.
Li Xiang was familiar with that look. In ninth grade, Li Xin wore a pair of Li Xiang’s new jeans to go to his first date without asking permission. On the way back he got into a fight with some boys and ruined the jeans. Li Xin had had the exact same look while explaining what had happened to his older brother. Thinking back to the middle school days, Li Xiang found it amusing, but he shook his head and said nothing.

Li Xin's embarrassment passed quickly and he started talking again, “Oh, bro, what are you exactly teaching at school? Tell me something about it, so I don't say something wrong about you when we meet her.”

“I teach Existentialism, and I personally do research on Sartre.”

“Sa…what? Who is that?”

“Sartre, the one who wrote books at prison camp. How could you forget about him?”

Li Xiang was surprised. Learning philosophy became very popular during their freshman year. They checked out L'Être et le néant from the library and read it together over the next two days. After finishing the reading, they went to have dinner. They were obsessed with the new way in which they perceived the world. Li Xin said something about how rice in a bowl could be interpreted as its existence—being in the dining bowl, which preceded its essence—being the food. A direct consequence of being a dinner philosopher was that they forgot the book at the hall. They had to pay the library five yuan, and they joked about how they had paid their dues to become Existentialists.

The car went off the highway and stopped at the traffic lights. Many people walked at a brisk pace across the road, while a woman pushing her bike lagged behind. She kept looking back as she was walking forward, as if she had lost something on the road.

“Hey, that was twenty years ago. We were simply fooling around back then. Speaking of being, I finally understand what it means to exist.” Li Xin blew the car horn to hurry the woman. She threw a frightened glance at Li Xin and scurried away.

“Did you see that? It is because I’m here, I toot my horn to drive her away, I therefore exist and she feels my existence. Look at those dudes hanging around the road shoulder. Who would notice them?” Li Xin stretched his arm to point at several men from the countryside who came to the city to make a living, mostly by working on the construction sites. The Buddhist rosary on his arm stuck in front of Li Xiang’s face, blocking his sight. Li Xiang lost the urge to continue the conversation as he felt an invisible wall separating him from Li Xin after eighteen years apart.

Li Xiang sat back, gazing out the window at what passed by. The car merged into the second ring road, passed the Lotus Pond and Fuxing Gate, and arrived at Muxidi Bridge. This was where the troops entered the city on June 4th. Li Xiang recalled the summer night when the entire nation drowned in the sadness. He saw beyond the modern skyscrapers the ashes of what had taken place in this now brand new business district. The gunshots, the people’s cries, the flames of the fire as it engulfed a bus and the marching troops all emerged from the shadows of his memory. At this moment, Li Xin said quietly, “Brother, thank you what you did for me.”

Li Xiang waited for Li Xin to elaborate. Even though he knew what that gratitude referred to, it wasn’t the sort of favor where he could simply say “you are welcome” in return. That was a decision he made in the night of June 5th of 1989, a single decision to put himself in exile in order to let his little brother stay with their mother. That was the boldest thing he had ever done. He felt he deserved to know more about the reality, about whether his sacrifice was worthwhile.

“Bro, I mean, you are the only one...I have never ever met people other than you, would make such a sacrifice for me. I mean, I know it, I know how much it meant to you.” Li Xin looked straight ahead, as if it were the only way he could let the genuine part of himself be exposed. “But I just couldn’t make up your loss, like you don’t really need money, I guess.”

Li Xiang’s heart twisted with those edgy feelings, jealousy, disappointment, sadness, weakness, and nostalgia, all in bits as small as the buckwheat skins inside the pillow he had at home in Beijing as a kid. At his last try, he turned his sight away from the window, stared at Li Xin, and dug deeper to uncover the answer that had been buried beneath the reality for so long. “If you had a choice, would you have fled yourself?”

“I...would. Once out, I would have gotten a green card and gone to Harvard. The economy was booming in 1990’s. I could have done much better than I’m doing now.” Li Xin holding the wheel tight with both hands, answered the question after a second of hesitation, yet without a glance at Li Xiang. That answer silenced Li Xiang for the rest of the drive.