She paused for a long while before finishing the thought.
“Want to give her something good.”
–
After leaving Teacher Wen’s studio, Fu Tingli strolled down Art Street, the route she’d walked countless times before.
The wind billowed her T-shirt, and sunlight spilled over her in a pale gold glow.
Bathing in that pale golden light, she picked up a call from Qiao Lipan.
Qiao Lipan’s voice drifted over from California, distorted slightly on the line. It had been ages since Fu Tingli had heard her mother’s voice in its true form.
“How was your birthday yesterday? Did you have cake?” Qiao Lipan asked.
Fu Tingli remembered then. She and her mother had agreed to talk after work, but she’d completely forgotten once her shift ended.
“I wasn’t unhappy,” Fu Tingli said. But she thought of Kong Liyuan—of her nose pressed to Fu Tingli’s collarbone, drinking in her scent.
It had been Kong Liyuan’s birthday too. Why had she been so unhappy?
“I had cake. I bought one for myself, and my friend got me one too.” Fu Tingli replied offhandedly to Qiao Lipan’s question.
“That’s a real good friend, then—going out of her way to buy you a cake?” Qiao Lipan pressed.
Fu Tingli gazed down at the bleached sunlight. “The one I told you about. The one I don’t want to hurt.”
Qiao Lipan let out an “oh.” “So you two patched things up after all.”
“We didn’t patch anything up,” Fu Tingli said, shaking her head. “We never fell out.”
We’ve been just fine all along. She’s never hurt me, so I’m working hard not to hurt her.
Qiao Lipan was unusually patient with her now. “Then, baby, want to tell your mom about this friend?”
Fu Tingli went quiet for a moment, then forced the words out. “If I said it’s Kong Liyuan…”
“Ah, Kong Liyuan!” Qiao Lipan latched onto it keenly. “So my baby’s rubbing elbows with big stars now?”
“How do you know her?”
“How could I not? Your mom’s not so ancient she can’t keep up. I’d have to be a hermit not to know a superstar like her.”
Fu Tingli’s heavy mood lightened a touch from the teasing. Still, she emphasized, “To me, she’s just Kong Liyuan.”
“Alright, alright, message received.” Qiao Lipan chuckled. “Go on, then?”
“Then… she’s a woman,” Fu Tingli said.
“Oh, she’s a woman. I know—Zhang Yu. I’ve seen her movies,” Qiao Lipan replied breezily.
“I’m a woman too,” Fu Tingli said, steeling herself.
Qiao Lipan paused. “Oh. So you’re coming out? All this time, and she’s not just a regular friend, huh?”
Fu Tingli felt a bit adrift. Was that what she meant? It seemed it was.
Qiao Lipan knew her inside out. Just from those two sentences, she grasped how loaded they were.
“If I say yes, what then?”
“If it’s really…” Qiao Lipan trailed off for a good while, as if choosing her words carefully. At last, she sighed.
“It’s no big deal. Coming out beats cheating any day.”
Qiao Lipan delivered it lightly, but Fu Tingli’s eyes suddenly welled up. They’d lived in America for so many years; she’d figured her mother wouldn’t be too closed-minded.
She just hadn’t expected Qiao Lipan to accept it this easily—the fact of having a gay daughter.
Fu Tingli clutched her phone without a word.
The line went quiet for a beat as Qiao Lipan steadied herself from the surprise. Then she let out a hearty laugh and pressed on.
“Baby, I won’t think there’s anything wrong with it just because you’re a woman who likes another woman. What storms hasn’t your mom weathered over these years? Even if you came out right now, and someone out there dared say it was wrong, I’d slap the cheap talk right out of their mouth—who asked them to run their foul mouths near my daughter?”
Qiao Lipan could be sharp as a tack over little things, but when it came to something this major, she always turned gentle.
“But…”
There was a but, as expected. “I’ve had a hard enough life myself. All I want is for you to go through yours free of sickness, disaster, want, or pain. Even coming out to me right now wouldn’t faze me much. I’m just scared my baby might end up heartbroken in this love you’ve finally found.”
Fu Tingli couldn’t muster a single word. Her throat felt clogged with nothing but sobs, and she ached for Qiao Lipan to pull her into a hug.
Like some petulant child, she wanted to wail about how everyone else in the world fell in love so simply, so wildly, so grandly.
But why had she turned so timid, so lacking in conviction—unable to love out in the open anymore? At twenty-five, she’d already cast aside her old self, leaving her heart barren and faded.
Why did her love and her lover have to be at odds? Why did it turn into a contest where one side’s fierce passion drained the strength from the other?
The pedestrians on the street blurred into indistinct shapes. The world seemed to flip time on its head in that instant, whisking her back to the bold, fearless days of her twenties, when nothing and no one could touch her.
But it wasn’t. This world wasn’t a movie.
Not some tidy edit that sliced away the mess, cutting straight to a flashback in the next scene.
Fu Tingli heard it clearly through the phone: Qiao Lipan sighing once more before speaking.
“I’ve taught you so much over the years, but somehow I skipped this one. Back when our family was doing well, I was pretty optimistic. Young people have to learn the hard way, eat a loss to gain wisdom—that’s what I figured. So I wanted you to figure it out on your own. Even if you got hurt, the lesson would stick deeper once the wound healed. After all, it takes scars to toughen you up for the next round.”
“But now you know how things have fallen apart for us, and you’re so far away. If something happens, I can’t be there to help you. As your mother, sure, I’m selfish—I want you to have a love with no grievances, no heartache. So I’ve got to give you this heads-up. The person you talked about is Kong Liyuan, right? I get why you like her.”
“And you told me before that you don’t want to drag her down, that your paths have diverged… So does that mean you think our family’s mess has left you without the confidence, like you don’t deserve her? If that’s it, then listen up. I don’t give a damn if she’s some big superstar. Our situation won’t make me tell you to hold back from loving her. You know your mom’s never backed down from a fight. Doesn’t matter who she is—even if a goddess dropped from the heavens—I say you’re more than worthy.”
“But that’s not the real problem here, worthiness or not. Even if you’re into a woman, from where I’m sitting, I’d rather you fell for someone who doesn’t wear you out like this. Of course, I’m just worried. She’s a public figure—the scrutiny on her is bound to be way bigger than we can imagine.”
“I don’t know Kong Liyuan personally. But from what I’ve gathered so far, she seems decent enough. At the very least, I trust my daughter’s judgment.”
“I’m not going to stand in your way. Hell, from this distance, I couldn’t even if I tried. I just want you to think it through. You’ve crossed paths with someone extraordinary, so if you choose this road, you’ve got to face facts: the chance of getting hurt is a hell of a lot higher than on some safe, ordinary path.”
Even from across the miles, Qiao Lipan imparted a lesson both deep and bountiful.
Fu Tingli hung up the phone. The summer breeze whispered softly past her ears, but her thoughts weighed heavy.
It was as if every lofty truth in the world needed brutal reality to hammer it home.
She glanced down. Pale golden sunlight spilled onto the strands of hair draping across her chest, turning that one wispy lock to pure gold—unalloyed, untarnished.
She stared at it in a daze. But before she could fully process Qiao Lipan’s words or make sense of the whole tangled mess…
Two girls strolled past, phones in hand, their chatter drifting faintly into Fu Tingli’s hypersensitive ears.
—“Holy crap, what a massive scandal! Kong Liyuan’s mess can’t be real, can it? There’s video out? Oh my God, oh my God—no wonder she nails those repressed psycho roles so effortlessly. Damn, it’s method acting straight from her real-life crazy!”
—“Whoa, now that you mention it, yeah. Has Kong Liyuan ever even played a normal character? They’re all kinda unhinged.”
It was those three words that made her ears prick up.
Fu Tingli parted her lips, desperate to grab a passerby’s arm and demand what the hell had happened.
But no sound escaped. Instead, she sucked in a gust of wind, choked for no reason, and dissolved into uncontrollable coughs.
By then, it already felt like a grim portent.
Worse, the coughing fit wouldn’t quit, and each hack sent agony ripping through her.
She clutched at her chest. Right—news. Check the news. For something this huge, Weibo would have it all without needing to ask.
She yanked out her phone in a hurry, but the coughs kept coming.
The Weibo load screen dragged on forever, that spinning circle an eternity. At last it finished; she jabbed to open it. The top hot search slammed into her vision.
In an instant, something plunged into her chest, twisting viciously between her ribs and lungs.
Then it yanked every sense down into roiling black water. Her organs drowned from the inside out, radiating watery pain—and with every cough, a thicker reek of blood welled up from the murk.
She fixed on that headline, her vision swimming as if she’d gone half-blind. Everything smeared into a hazy, flickering void.
But her phone buzzed sharply. She swiped at the screen several times, cold sweat slicking her fingers, before finally unlocking it.
She picked up, her cough-torn voice rasping out on reflex:
“Kong Liyuan!”
It was as if those were the only words left in her—as if she longed for no one else, even without her number, even knowing the caller couldn’t possibly be her.
Silence lingered on the line for a beat. Then Qiao Lipan’s measured voice came through.
“Didn’t check the caller ID? It’s your mom.”
Fu Tingli forced her lips into a curve, trying for a calm, sensible comeback to the joke—maybe even a normal laugh like old times, pretending nothing had happened.
But she couldn’t manage a smile.
The sunset bled gold across the sky, birds streaking like shadows. In that hazy, stuttering blankness, her coughing finally tapered off.
An invisible blade had pierced her chest; the rest of her body went rigid, numb, and icy, feeling nothing.
All she could hazily recall was that hot search hanging there:
Kong Liyuan Animal Abuse Scandal# [HOT]
Absurd. Laughable. Why go after Kong Liyuan like this?
