Face
Hardly had we checked into the Qingtian Hotel near Yichang Railway Station when my iPad vibrated. A WeChat message: Kang Jian was gone.
He had once been my closest friend—the only one I still called “lifelong”—back when we were boys in the countryside. Later, in high school, he was the one who dragged me away from math competitions and into poetry. I stared at the screen for a long time, feeling less grief than shock, as if the news had arrived years too late.
I forwarded the message to Za, our mutual friend living in Holland. She called that night. “It must have been his stinginess,” she said. “You know how he was. Always taking, never giving.”
“You’re not wrong,” I said. Only recently had Cao—my old zhiqing comrade—and I begun to see Kang clearly. He loved gatherings but never paid his share. He expected gifts and knew exactly how to apply enough pressure to get expensive ones. Gratitude was something he received, never something he practiced.
Last year, after I returned from Vancouver to visit my mother in Jingzhou, I invited Kang to dinner—at his place. The apartment shocked us. It was large, on the third floor, but it felt abandoned. The floor was slick with oil and scratched as if furniture had been dragged endlessly across it. Dust filmed the windows; the walls had faded to a dull, sickly brown.
Living alone, Kang made his neighbors do his shopping and take out his trash. He refused to hire help, despite a generous pension from his years as a mid-ranking official. Polio had paralyzed his right leg in infancy, and a recent injury had left him barely mobile. Still, he would rather impose on others than spend a cent of his own.
Seeing his poor living condition, Cao and I suggested, carefully, that he might consider companionship. We brought up Fangzhi, a divorced zhiqing woman from our youth station whom Kang himself had praised as beautiful on several occasions. But he waved us off.
“I’m too old to fuck her,” he said flatly. “Or anyone else.”
It was the kind of remark he relished—brutal, defensive, designed to end the conversation. What he didn't say was clearer: he didn’t want to share his apartment, his pension, or the carefully guarded image of himself he had tried hard to maintain all his life.
After that visit, I finally understood his reality. Alone. Eating instant noodles every day. Smoking constantly. Letting his body decay as if it were someone else’s responsibility. Little wonder he was gone nine days after his cancer was diagnosed.
Hua believed the cause was bad yiyuan—medical karma. Years earlier, a doctor had missed the lung cancer, focusing instead on his kidneys. Hua told me how, during her own routine checkup in 2022, a doctor noticed a small abnormality in her lungs. It was cancerous but caught early. She survived.
“It was just bad luck with doctors,” she said. “Nothing more.”
Gang disagreed. A retired official and an obsessive reader of health literature, he had warned Kang repeatedly to get his lungs checked. Kang always refused. Tests cost money.
Haunted by his death, I kept circling the question of “why.” Some friends blamed his wife, Yu. Everyone knew their marriage had been a transaction: her family gained urban residency and jobs through Kang’s father—the “local emperor” of Songzi County—and in return, she became the wife of a disabled, awkward man.
She endured him for decades for the sake of their son. When the boy moved to Wuhan with his own family, she finally began to live for herself—plaza dancing and late evenings out. She tried to divorce Kang four times, and each time she was persuaded back to “save face.” It was only three years ago that they finally separated, quietly. Few people knew she had eventually taken a lover.
In the eyes of others, I was still Kang’s closest friend, but in truth, we had been estranged for nearly a decade. I didn’t attend his funeral on October 17th. I told myself I didn’t want to interrupt my annual secret getaway with Hua. Besides, I knew Kang wouldn't have wanted me there.
He had lived his life as if on a stage. His first short story was published in a nationally famous magazine when he was eighteen. He rose from a factory drafter-apprentice to a government official. He taught himself to swim, to play tennis, to drive—often better than able-bodied men. He could not bear sympathy from anyone, let alone his old friends.
When he lost both his mobility and his wife, the stage collapsed. To be pitied—as a cripple or a cuckold—was worse than death. To live without face was, for him, unlivable.
“He cared too much about face,” I said to Hua. “He should have just stepped off the stage.”
She looked at me. “But isn’t face more important than life itself here?”
I didn’t answer right away. Outside, the traffic of Yichang moved steadily, indifferent to us both.
“To hell with face,” I said at last. “I’d rather live.”
She smiled. “Classic you.”
~
Author's note: This short story is written in memory of my oldest friend, Kang Jian (康健).