Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [30]
I went on to the little restaurant called Five Flavors where I was due to play, and the band performed pretty well. The atmosphere was fantastic, and I made two hundred yuan. Then the guys in the band invited me to drink some beers with them, to celebrate my first live performance, they said. It was two in the morning when we finally broke up.
I thought I’d just tough it out until dawn, but I was a little sleepy because of all the beer, so I sat down against the wall of a building near the bus stop to get a little shut-eye.
I had just closed my eyes, when five or six people started beating me all over with wooden clubs. I didn’t even have time to fight back. Was it that Taiwanese guy come back for revenge? I’m pretty strong, but I really couldn’t take it. Then the gang suddenly cleared off. I couldn’t breathe, and my left arm felt like it was broken. I was lying on my right arm and I couldn’t get my asthma inhaler out of my trouser pocket. Just then someone walked by, and I moaned and gestured for him to help me get the inhaler out of my pocket, but he just didn’t understand. I knew I was going to die.
Miaomiao, at that time all I could think was, If I die who’s going to take care of you? And what will happen to our cats and dogs? Miaomiao, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been so reckless, I shouldn’t have knocked that guy’s chair. If I die now, I kept thinking, who’ll take care of you? What will happen to our cats and dogs?
Suddenly, somehow, I had my inhaler against my mouth and knew that I wasn’t going to die. I’m strong—they can beat me, but they can’t kill me.
When I woke up, I was lying in a hospital bed. I heard the nurse calling, “Hey, the boy you brought in is waking up!” Then an older man came up to my bed. I didn’t know him. “Please get my trousers,” I mustered enough strength to say. He brought them over. I asked him to take five hundred renminbi out of the pocket. Then I asked him for paper and pen and wrote down Miaomiao’s address in Huairou, the brand name of the pet food we use, and how much to buy. Also some flour and eggs, and so on, and asked him to buy them for me and take them to Miaomiao. I didn’t know whether that man would take off with my money or be willing to go to Huairou. I couldn’t even really understand why he’d stayed around at the hospital waiting for me to wake up. I couldn’t be bothered with all that. My only worry was what might happen to you if you ran out of food.
The next morning, he came back and told me he had delivered the groceries. He said a woman took them in, and when he told her I was in the hospital, she just smiled slightly and nodded. She offered him some cookies. “You have quite a collection of cats and dogs at home,” he said. I was very relieved when I heard that.
He came to see me again that afternoon. “Why are you looking after me?” I asked. He said that when he saw me lying on the ground panting for breath and fumbling for my pocket, he realized I was asthmatic. He was, too, and had been taking corticosteroids for a long time, so he took my inhaler out of my pocket.
“Since I take corticosteroids, too,” he went on, “I wanted to know what it was like for other people with asthma.”
“What do you want to know?”
“To see if you think other people are different from you.”
“Of course they’re different. They don’t have asthma!”
“Are they happy?”
When he said that, I felt like I’d received an electric shock. It’s not that I’m not happy. I haven’t been unhappy since I started living with Miaomiao a few years ago. She doesn’t talk to me now, but we’re still not unhappy. But for the last two years, I’ve felt that there is something different about the people I meet. I can’t say exactly what it is, but they seem to be unusually happy. Whatever it is, I feel like I’m different from them. Even when we’re happy, we have a different