XR CH66
Chapter 66: P. A Dream of Huai’an
The December weather was miserable, but Su Hui’s heart was warm, because he had one small goal: to make a birthday gift for Ning Yixiao.
Everything he had ever made before was rooted in his own perception of the world. This was the first time he was pouring himself into something entirely for another person.
On the train back to the capital, moving through one car after another, each identical to the last, he drifted between them. Every time he stepped through a new door it felt like a reset, a return to zero — and in this endless loop of time, he was always with Ning Yixiao. They never parted.
He spent ten-odd minutes sketching a draft on a napkin. After returning to the capital, every day after work he carved out time to gather and haul materials to his secret workshop — designing, assembling, hoping to finish by December 24th so he could give it to Ning Yixiao.
For the first time, Su Hui felt like time wasn’t enough. It was as if a tiny countdown chip had been planted in his chest, and he could feel time flowing away with perfect clarity, like sand through an hourglass.
He only learned later that what couldn’t be controlled was far more than just the passage of time.
His grandmother had put fifty thousand yuan on a card for him. Knowing he was in a manic episode and couldn’t restrain his spending, yet unwilling to watch him scramble for money, she had pressed a large sum of pocket money into his hands.
But Su Hui had given it all in one go to the debt collectors.
He hadn’t told Ning Yixiao. He pretended the whole thing had never happened — but the collectors came after him anyway. Once, twice, calling the number he had used to contact them, even showing up outside his tutoring center, shouting filth in front of a group of children.
The first time, Su Hui tried to reason with them. The second time, he was scared enough to call the police. But they hadn’t caused any real harm, so the most that came of it was a mediation session.
And after he filed that police report, they escalated. They appeared every day, like ghosts he couldn’t shake.
One evening Ning Yixiao got off work early and bought ice cream Su Hui liked, coming to pick him up — only to walk directly into the group staking out the building. He watched them surround Su Hui as he came downstairs, and immediately stepped in to pull him away.
“What’s this? Soft spot for your little rich boy?”
“Drop the act. He obviously found himself a moneyed friend — paid back fifty thousand just like that. Have the sugar daddy cover the remaining two hundred thousand too while you’re at it!”
Hearing their mockery, Ning Yixiao’s brow tightened. He looked at Su Hui, disbelief crossing his face.
Su Hui had no way to argue. “Let me explain when we get home, all right? Let’s go home first.”
The biggest one blocked their path, chin lifted in provocation. “Who said you’re going home?”
Ning Yixiao’s expression went cold. “Move.”
“And if I don’t?”
A fight broke out before anyone could blink. Su Hui tried several times to pull them apart and failed, ending up hit in the crossfire himself. It only stopped when someone on the street called the police, and they were taken to the station again.
By the time statements were given and they walked out, it was night. Su Hui followed behind Ning Yixiao, watching him say nothing, not daring to speak first.
They walked until they reached a busy road — the capital’s most dazzling commercial district, buildings that cost small fortunes — and it was only then that Ning Yixiao seemed to surface from somewhere far away, and finally spoke.
“I don’t need you doing things like this. What is this supposed to be?”
His voice was low, a little hoarse, emotions pressed down beneath it. “I don’t want your money.”
“I know. I know.” Su Hui moved forward and carefully took his hand. “Ning Yixiao, I just didn’t want them going after you. I thought if I covered that amount, they’d quiet down for a while and leave you alone…”
Ning Yixiao’s face was marked with bruises, the corner of his mouth purplish. His expression was blank. He looked at Su Hui, and a thread of helpless resignation surfaced in his eyes.
“Su Hui, I don’t want your pity.”
Su Hui’s eyes reddened. “I’m not pitying you. I want to help you. I don’t want to be dead weight.”
He had never worried about money growing up. It was only after leaving home that he understood how hard it was to earn, that he had to conceal his illness just to land a part-time job teaching children to draw, that his medication cost this much, that an hour of therapy cost this much.
Every new thing Su Hui learned added another layer of dread about the future. He was terrified Ning Yixiao would find being with him exhausting.
Ning Yixiao crossed the distance between them and pulled him close.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten angry. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s my fault.”
Su Hui shook his head against his chest. After a long time, the emotion produced its physical response — as if a thousand fine, freezing needles were pressing into his face all at once, sparing nothing.
“I really am not pitying you.”
“I know. You wouldn’t.” Ning Yixiao held his hand. “I’m sorry.”
Su Hui didn’t want to hear any more apologies. He pulled Ning Yixiao onto a bus home. The car was packed, and he reached for his hand again and again, but the press of bodies kept pushing them apart, no matter how he tried.
So he stood in the crush and recited things silently to himself, to blunt the pain and burn off the excess energy churning inside him. Then he noticed that what he was reciting, without deciding to, was the Diamond Sutra — the texts his grandfather had forced him to memorize. The things he had resisted had carved themselves into him anyway.
At home, Su Hui carefully tended to Ning Yixiao’s injuries, then lay beside him, stroking his back gently, letting himself be held.
Ning Yixiao spoke at length. Things he kept close to his chest. Things he had never said aloud.
“My mother followed my father all the way to his hometown to find him. She was pregnant and caring for my grandmother, who was already sick by then. But my grandmother died within a few years.”
“After that it was just the two of us. The village kids called me a bastard. They stuffed rotting fish and shrimp into my mouth. They beat me. So from the time I was small, all I wanted was to get out. My mother worked all kinds of jobs to keep us alive and put me through school, so I studied as hard as I could and tested into the middle school in town.”
“But enrollment required a household registration, so she had to marry a man she didn’t love. Things went badly. He became addicted to gambling. Beat her every day. I wanted to help her, so he’d turn on me instead, and my mother would throw herself between us — and she’d end up taking the blows anyway. I told myself, if I just grew up faster, I could give her a good life.”
“You know what happened after. They left together. I tested into the best high school in the county — I thought I’d finally escaped. But then the collectors showed up. They couldn’t find my stepfather and my mother, so they came to the school instead, every day. I couldn’t let anyone get close to me back then. Anyone who did got on their radar.”
Ning Yixiao paused and let out a short, quiet laugh. “Honestly, I didn’t want friends anyway. Someone like me — the way I befriended people was simple: whoever was useful, I moved toward. Maybe that’s just karma.”
Su Hui didn’t like hearing him talk about himself that way. He pulled him in tighter. “That’s not who you are.”
Ning Yixiao didn’t respond. He knew what he was. Only with Su Hui did his calculating instincts go quiet. That was the exception. It didn’t mean anything.
“Right before the college entrance exam, they showed up again. Cornered me in the alley behind the school and beat me up. My homeroom teacher happened to walk by, gave them two thousand yuan, and bought me enough peace to sit the exam. I was in pain the whole time — my thumb was injured, writing was agony — but I still did all right. Fourth in the province. I suppose even heaven felt a little sorry for me.”
“I thought once I got into university and made it to the capital, things would finally be easier. They weren’t.”
Listening to Ning Yixiao say all of this in his most even voice, Su Hui felt something inside him come apart.
He held Ning Yixiao tightly and cried quietly into the dark.
“Su Hui, I’m so tired.” Ning Yixiao’s voice finally cracked, just slightly. “I feel like I’m in a swimming race that never ends. I can’t stop, not even for a second. If I stop, I’ll be swallowed whole.”
“That won’t happen.” Su Hui rubbed slow circles on his back. “It’s going to be different soon. The finish line is almost here.”
Ning Yixiao lay against him, voice low but certain, as if every word had been soaked in the twenty-one years of hardship behind it.
“I have to leave this behind. I can’t live like this forever.”
Su Hui held the mania at bay and answered in his gentlest voice.
“You will. You’re extraordinary. Whatever you set your mind to, you’ll do.”
He spoke softly about their future, painting it like a dream — Ning Yixiao receiving a fully-funded scholarship, getting into S University, the school he wanted most; Su Hui heading to California for art school; a home of their own, a house with a little garden, a dog they’d adore.
That night, Su Hui truly did dream it — though the dream was strange, past and present and future woven together without logic.
He dreamed his father, long dead, tending to their dog in the garden. He dreamed a childhood version of Ning Yixiao, small and curled in a corner like a stray, gathered into his arms.
Then later in the dream they were much older, walking together along a shore. The sea wind made his bones ache, and he told Ning Yixiao he wanted his ashes scattered into the ocean when he was gone.
A strange, hallucinatory dream.
When he woke, he thought of a film they had watched together — Kaili Blues — that dream-logic of fractured time.
In a spare moment between work, he wrote down the poem that appears in the film:
Without a razor, language is sealed away Without a heart, nine years were lived①
At that moment, Su Hui had no sense that these words were a prophecy.
The next day, Ning Yixiao still came to walk Su Hui home from work. On the way, he said he hoped Su Hui would quit the tutoring center.
“I don’t want you supporting me. I can earn my own way.”
“They can find you anywhere at any time. I’m afraid something will happen — that you’ll suddenly hit a wall you can’t come back from. You’re not like other people…”
Su Hui blinked at him, confused. “How am I not like other people?”
Ning Yixiao froze, as if hearing himself for the first time. He apologized quickly.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Su Hui shook his head. He hated arguing, especially on the way home, so with a childlike stubbornness he said: “Then take it back. I’ll pretend I never heard it.”
Ning Yixiao obliged immediately. “I take it back. I’m sorry.”
“Okay.” Su Hui smiled and stretched up to kiss him on the cheek.
Even so, he did as Ning Yixiao asked and resigned from the tutoring center. He didn’t want Ning Yixiao worrying about him while he was at work.
The center paid out his last month’s wages — a little over a thousand yuan. Su Hui took the money and bought ingredients, planning to cook a meal at home.
At first it went normally enough. He stood in that narrow kitchen, phone propped open to a recipe, trying earnestly to learn. But he was hopelessly inexperienced. Nothing went right. The eggs burned. The rice came out undercooked. Two hours of effort produced something that barely qualified as food.
But Ning Yixiao came home and ate with visible happiness, praising every dish, saying how much better they were getting, how good everything tasted — coaxing him along like you would a child.
Watching him eat, Su Hui thought: I need to learn to cook properly. If they really did get married someday, living together, he couldn’t feed Ning Yixiao meals like this forever.
The next day Su Hui brought Ning Yixiao to the hospital where he used to see his own therapist, for a scheduled appointment. He waited outside as he always had, unable to sit still, and ended up circling the waiting area in slow loops.
Somewhere in those loops, he spotted Lili — the girl from the couple he always seemed to run into when he came here. He remembered her name.
Lili didn’t look well. She’d been crying. Her eyelids were swollen and red, her whole face worn down. Su Hui made his way over and sat beside her.
“Lili, what’s wrong?”
She responded slowly, turning to look at him several seconds later.
Looking at her, Su Hui felt like he was looking at himself during a depressive episode.
She wouldn’t speak. Tears began to fall. Su Hui immediately produced the tissue he always kept on him and held it out. “Don’t cry. Don’t be sad.”
The moment he said it, he felt the absurdity of it. He of all people knew better — that at moments like this, you simply couldn’t stop yourself. And yet there he was, telling her not to be sad.
“Where’s Xiao Jie? Didn’t he come with you?”
At the name, the tears came harder.
“Xiao Jie… we broke up.”
Through her halting sobs, Su Hui pieced together what had happened. Their relationship hadn’t been as easy as it looked from outside. Lili’s manic episodes were more severe than his, and she would break out in fits of screaming at Xiao Jie — it was unavoidable whenever she was unwell. At first they both believed they could get through it, but over time Xiao Jie had been pulled into the emotional undertow himself. He too had started needing help from a therapist.
“I don’t want to hurt him. But I can’t help it.” Lili wept, face buried in her hands. “He went back home. His mother said she wants to find him a healthy girl to marry…”
A sharp pain moved through Su Hui’s chest.
His mind conjured the image of the two of them when he had first seen them in the autumn — how sweet they were, Lili bright with excitement as she described their plans to travel and marry wherever the road took them, to photograph everything, to wander the whole country.
Everything had changed so fast, like leafing through an old book, and the dust that flew up made his eyes water.
When Ning Yixiao came out of his appointment and walked over, Lili wiped her eyes, looked up, and smiled faintly.
“I really envy you.”
A sudden fear moved through Su Hui.
He was different from most people, but he was the same as Lili — they were people who were sick, who had no way to stop themselves from causing harm.
Ning Yixiao noticed him standing still and staring, and looped an arm around his. “What’s the matter?”
Su Hui surfaced. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
He didn’t tell Ning Yixiao about Lili and Xiao Jie. That shattered relationship felt like drawing the worst possible lot — a bad omen. Better to keep it hidden.
What Su Hui hadn’t anticipated was that hiding it made no difference. The misfortune arrived earlier anyway.
He was in the middle of a class when his mother began calling repeatedly, then texting in a flurry, demanding he come home at once.
Some instinct told him it was bad news. He thought about ignoring it, but the next message left him nowhere to retreat.
Mom: Su Hui, your grandfather found out about you and Ning Yixiao. He collapsed from the shock. He’s in emergency surgery right now. If you have even a shred of filial feeling left, get to the hospital immediately.
This destroyed every plan he’d made.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about how he would tell his family. His ideal version involved him and Ning Yixiao leaving for the States first, letting enough time pass that the family’s expectations had loosened, and only then broaching the subject gently.
Instead, everything had caved in. Su Hui sat in the cab, his mind a blank.
He was almost at the hospital before he remembered Ning Yixiao was waiting for him to get out of class so they could have dinner together. He sent a quick message explaining that his grandfather had been hospitalized and he was going to see him.
He didn’t dare say anything about what had come out. He was afraid of what any of this might do to Ning Yixiao.
Ning Yixiao: Don’t rush. If you can’t make it back tonight, let me know. Take care of yourself. Don’t forget to drink water.
Only after reading that did Su Hui feel settled enough to enter the hospital. He stepped off the elevator at the right floor and found the family housekeeper waiting.
“Is Grandfather awake?”
“Just woke up.”
She guided him down the hall and added a quiet warning: “Miss said to be careful what you say.”
Su Hui didn’t know how careful was careful enough. He didn’t even know what he was allowed to say.
Outside the private room, he drew a long slow breath, raised his hand, and knocked three times.
The muffled sound of heels crossed the floor. The door opened. Su Hui found himself looking at Ji Ya’nan’s face, and realized for the first time that his mother had truly aged — a weariness that even her carefully done makeup couldn’t conceal.
She frowned, exhaled, and stepped aside to let him in without a word.
Her silence piled onto the guilt already pressing in Su Hui’s chest. He walked into that quiet room feeling like a condemned man, neck already bowed beneath a weight he’d put there himself.
At first everyone held their tempers and waited for Su Hui to speak. But the moment he said I truly love him, Ji Tailü snatched the teacup off the bedside table and hurled it to the floor at Su Hui’s feet.
The porcelain shattered. Fragments hit the back of Su Hui’s hand, leaving red marks.
“Love? What do you know about love? You’re playing house, and you think it’s real?” Ji Tailü spat out the words, then erupted into coughing, one hand gripping the bed rail.
His grandmother rushed to his side, rubbing his back, crying as she tried to calm him. “Stop working yourself up like this. Can’t you speak to the child properly?”
“Would he listen if I spoke properly?”
Ji Tailü fixed his gaze on Su Hui. A short silence passed. Then he reached for the photograph on the bedside table and flung it toward Su Hui.
Several photos. Every single one: Su Hui and Ning Yixiao embracing. Kissing.
They had truly believed they were two ants lost in the vastness of the world, too small to catch anyone’s eye.
Only now did Su Hui understand: he had never had freedom. Not once.
Ji Tailü’s voice dropped heavy as stone. “You’ve wanted for nothing your entire life. Every door has been opened for you, every comfort provided, nothing for you to worry about. But have you stopped to think? Su Hui — if I sent you out right now to suffer what ordinary people suffer, with your fragile mind, your condition, your weakness — would you survive?”
The words fell on him like hail. Remorseless.
“I know. But I can’t leave him, Grandfather.” Su Hui was calmer than he would have imagined, as if desperately wanting to be acknowledged, willing to do almost anything to earn it.
He walked forward and, without quite deciding to, sank to his knees at the bedside. He took his grandfather’s hand. His voice was close to pleading.
“Grandfather, I’ll manage my illness properly. I’ll do whatever you say. I’ll write you a letter of commitment — I’ll promise to be a grandson you’ll never have to be ashamed of, anything you ask, but please. I cannot leave him.”
“Look at yourself! Kneeling before a man. Su Hui, how did I raise you to be like this? Look at what you’ve become. Disgusting.”
Ji Tailü’s coughing worsened. He sank back against the pillow, voice gone thin. “…You said you wouldn’t embarrass me. You have a mental illness. Now this. Which one of those things doesn’t embarrass me?”
Something in Su Hui cleared.
They didn’t actually care how good Ning Yixiao was. He could enumerate every last virtue and it would change nothing. Because his own existence was the error. That was the part that could not be corrected.
The choice had never been in his hands.
Still, he listed Ning Yixiao’s qualities with something close to obsession. “You don’t know him. He’s truly exceptional — better than any of the people in your circles you might hold up as examples. He’s intelligent, driven. He’s the most —”
“Enough.”
Ji Tailü cut him off.
“You’ve lost your mind. You’ve been away from your doctors too long. Take him home.” He turned to Xu Zhi, dismissing the conversation. “Tomorrow, take him to see Dr. Zhang. Have him properly assessed.”
Xu Zhi stepped forward to take hold of Su Hui’s arm. Su Hui shoved him off.
He held his ground the only way he could. “I won’t go. I’m not going back.”
Ji Tailü’s gaze turned dark. Something hard surfaced on that aged face.
“Su Hui, I’ll give you one last chance. One week. Think it over carefully. Otherwise, I’ll find ways to make sure it doesn’t last between you.”
Su Hui was all but dragged out.
Before he left, Ji Tailü said one final thing. His voice was quieter now, but it drove in like a blade.
“Do you honestly think someone like you — a person with a psychiatric condition — can hold up through hard days alongside a man with no connections and no prospects? Even if you can, do you think he can?”
Su Hui was brought back to the residence he had always despised, his phone taken from him. He lay through one night, then another — day becoming dark becoming day again. Two full days without a drop of water or a bite of food. The meals the housekeepers left at his door came and went untouched.
At first Ji Ya’nan couldn’t stand it and came to reason with him, said many things about how it was all for his own good. Su Hui heard none of it.
He became a machine. Nothing reached him. The only time he moved was late at night, when he rose, as he always had, to sit at his desk and write in his journal.
The sicker he was, the more compulsively he wrote — but the letters turned strange, as if written by someone else, the shadow-self that lived in his hallucinations. A double.
He locked all of it in the cabinet drawer.
By the third day, the sky was the color of ash. It made Su Hui think of the day he’d gone with Ning Yixiao to collect the ashes, that bleak, empty stretch of sea.
Half of December was already gone. He wanted desperately to leave. Ning Yixiao’s birthday gift wasn’t finished.
Su Hui had come to understand that pain, too, has gradations. The version of himself that had been at the mercy of his illness used to feel that life had no meaning — that he wanted to disappear, to be erased. But this was different. He wanted to stay. He wanted to be with Ning Yixiao. Such a small wish. And still out of reach.
No number of sutras could change that.
At noon, his bedroom door opened again. Su Hui was lying on the floor and assumed it was the housekeeper with another meal, so he didn’t stir — but then he saw his mother’s shoes, and before he could think, heard himself say: “I’m not breaking up with him.”
Ji Ya’nan exhaled slowly. Her eyes were bright with tears she hadn’t let fall. She turned away for a moment, composed herself, then told him quietly: “Your uncle is gone. In the early hours of this morning, he… on his own…”
She couldn’t finish. She stopped, held herself still, forced the words to come. “They couldn’t save him.”
Su Hui’s mind moved slowly. The first thing that surfaced was his uncle’s face, smiling, his hand leading a small Su Hui through gallery after gallery, the two of them wandering together through art museums.
Five minutes passed.
He sat up and looked at his mother directly. “You’re lying.”
Ji Ya’nan looked at him the way someone looks when they’ve run completely out of options. A tear slipped free. “Tomorrow morning, eight o’clock. Come with me to the funeral. I’ve had Zhang Ayi prepare your clothes.”
She turned and left. At the doorway her footsteps slowed, and she added one last thing.
“Try to eat something. You’ll need the strength to say goodbye to your uncle.”
① Lines quoted from a poem written by director Bi Gan for the film Kaili Blues. Only two lines are excerpted here.
