Evening Stars Chapter 1
Translated by Q the Panda (ko-fi)
Chapter 1
Xu Nanheng was still a thousand kilometers away from Lhasa.
For the eight-hundredth time, he curbed the impulse to turn back and return to Beijing.
In the suffocating fog that hung like miasma, he turned from the Beijing-Tibet Expressway onto the National Highway 109. The heavy mist made the night road, where visibility was already poor, even harder to navigate.
He had left Beijing four days ago, covering more than three thousand kilometers. By his calculations, Lhasa should have been right in front of him by now.
However, after arriving in Golmud yesterday, he suddenly developed a fever. He had taken some medicine and rested at the hotel, sleeping nearly twenty hours straight. He only woke up in the evening, frightening the hotel staff who almost sounded the alarm.
Fortunately, he had a good constitution. Once awake, his temperature had returned to normal. After a shower and a meal, he continued on his journey.
Feeling quite energized from his rest, he decided not to delay any longer and drove through the night toward Lhasa. It was ten o'clock in the evening, and the fog was still thick. Xu Nanheng kept both fog lights and hazard lights on.
He was driving a Mercedes-Benz G63. Normally, he would never take the three-million-yuan vehicle to school, preferring instead to ride the electric scooter his grandfather used for grocery shopping.
His grandfather would return from buying groceries at 6:30 AM, and he would promptly set off for school on the same scooter at exactly 6:30 AM. That single electric scooter served both grandfather and grandson, rather like an old butler who had faithfully served a wealthy household his entire life.
But just after he passed the volunteer teaching assessment, a colleague happened to discover that—
Teacher Xu lived with his grandparents and parents not in a cramped, shabby apartment people had imagined, but in a goddamn siheyuan. Digging further, they uncovered his family’s extraordinary background. It turned out that his family had been wealthy since his maternal grandfather's generation.
So, in the ambiguous timeframe right after Xu Nanheng passed the volunteer teaching assessment, rumors began to spread at the school. Ah, the young master from the capital. Of course he'd pass that assessment. What could be more convenient than sending the young master to some picturesque rural post for a year of volunteer teaching, then letting him return in glory with a shiny new line on his resume?
All the way from Beijing, Xu Nanheng had been so annoyed that his head felt like it was smoking.
He imagined drilling a hole in the crown of his head, turning himself into another exhaust pipe for the car. He wanted so badly to turn back, grab those snide colleagues by the collar, and beat them up one by one.
But that was only in his imagination.
A few fellow intern teachers half-jokingly blamed him for not being honest, while his supervisor comforted him, saying, ‘In Beijing, if you threw a brick into a crowd on the street, you'd hit at least three young masters. You shouldn't take it to heart.’
Xu Nanheng could only smile bitterly. It wasn't that he had meant to hide anything. He had simply wanted to keep a low profile, coexist peacefully with his colleagues, and focus on doing his job well.
On the National Highway 109, large freight trucks roared past him one after another. Their drivers, all familiar with the route, blared their horns as they sped by.
After two and a half hours of driving, he pulled over for a cigarette.
Past midnight, a handful of roadside vendors were still open for business. Their stalls, lit by bare bulbs strung from tractors, offered snacks and drinks to the few passersby. Xu Nanheng walked over to ask if they had a lighter. The Tibetan man shook his head and said in Mandarin, “If you had come in the daytime, you definitely could've bought one. There are more people then.”
Xu Nanheng nodded in acknowledgment. From the man's stall, he bought a bottle of Coke and a can of Red Bull.
He walked back toward his car, cigarette unlit between his teeth. He was so frustrated that he was about to kick the tire when—
Click.
A man struck a flint, and a flame leapt out, held up to the tip of his cigarette.
The orange flame flickered gently, the only splash of color in a world of black and gray.
Xu Nanheng realized that the fog had cleared at some point, or perhaps he had driven out of the foggy area. Lhasa was still eight hundred kilometers away.
The crisp, high-altitude air made the night sky exceptionally clear. Underneath the starlight, Xu Nanheng looked upon the first face he had found pleasing in months.
He kept the cigarette clenched between his teeth, his gaze fixed on the man's eyes as he lowered the cigarette to the flame.
Once the cigarette was lit, he took a deep puff and felt much calmer.
Xu Nanheng lowered the cigarette and waited for the other man to speak first.
Vehicles continuously roared past at high speed, their engines vrooming. The wind they stirred up whipped Xu Nanheng's coat and rustled through his hair.
“Are you going to Lhasa? Could you give me a ride? My car broke down here.” The man snapped shut his windproof lighter and pointed toward the roadside. There was a small, unremarkable repair shop, with a pickup truck parked outside.
The man pulled out two documents and handed them over. “I don't have my ID card with me, but here are my driver's license and vehicle registration.”
Xu Nanheng bit down on his cigarette again, lowered his gaze, and flipped open the documents.
Fang Shiyou.
The ‘you’ from shengsi you guan.
(T/N: this idom means ‘of critical importance; a matter of life and death’)
His vehicle registration showed a Beijing license plate, same as Xu Nanheng's. Xu Nanheng glanced up at him and asked, “From Beijing?”
“Mm.” Fang Shiyou nodded.
Xu Nanheng asked again, “You came to me because you saw that my car had a Beijing license plate too, right?”
Only then did Xu Nanheng notice that Fang Shiyou was carrying a small box marked with a red cross.
“Yes,” Fang Shiyou answered, “I'm a medical aid worker in Tibet. This cooler box contains Alirocumab, a subcutaneous injection. The refrigerated shipping to Lhasa usually takes two and a half days, but my patient can't wait that long. So I called the hospital in Golmud and picked it up first thing this morning.”
Fang Shiyou named a hospital in Beijing. Xu Nanheng glanced at him. It was one of the city's Grade A tertiary hospitals, the same one where his grandmother had once been treated for hypertension.
Lowering his eyes, Xu Nanheng held Fang Shiyou's license in one hand while pulling out his phone with the other to search the hospital's official website for the name ‘Fang Shiyou.’ Soon, the hospital's annual medical aid programs for Tibet and Xinjiang appeared, with Fang Shiyou prominently listed among them.
He raised his eyes, then lowered them, comparing the man in front of him with the photo on his phone screen. After that, he handed back the driver's license and registration.
Fang Shiyou tucked the documents away and said, “I'll pay for the ride. Take me part of the way, please? Name your price.”
With the cigarette between his lips, Xu Nanheng narrowed his eyes. “Five hundred.”
“You're quite a warm-hearted person,” Fang Shiyou said with a smile.
……Damn, he should've asked for more.
Biting down on the cigarette in frustration, Xu Nanheng muttered, “Get in.”
He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray beneath the center console, switched on the turn signal, and pulled back onto the highway.
Xu Nanheng didn't ask Fang Shiyou to open the cooler and prove what was inside. He was too irritated to care. If Fang Shiyou pulled out a gun from the cooler box and shot him, he'd probably only sigh and think, ‘Fine, you win.’
Instead, Fang Shiyou simply set the box down on the floor of the back seat, then settled in to enjoy the elevated view from the Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon, while making small talk with Xu Nanheng.
Fang Shiyou: “You drove all the way from Beijing?”
Xu Nanheng: “Mm.”
Fang Shiyou: “I forgot to thank you. Sure enough, he drives a G-Wagon one-handed, a man of loyalty and compassion.”
(T/N: it's from a viral douyin (chinese tiktok) song, though the car mentioned in the lyrics is a Ferrari)
Xu Nanheng let out a quiet laugh.
The Mercedes-Benz G63, though notoriously cramped in the back, was built as a hardcore off-roader, designed for the thrill of driving. Its window sill sat at just the right height to casually rest an elbow on.
Xu Nanheng was driving just like that: one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the window sill. With his ridiculously handsome face in the mix, it made Fang Shiyou's gaze linger on his profile for more than two seconds before looking away.
Both windows were rolled down, letting the night wind blow straight through the cab between the driver and passenger.
Fang Shiyou was a well-mannered man. He didn't pry into Xu Nanheng's personal life, never asked what he did for a living or whether he was in Tibet for sightseeing.
Up ahead, the wind began to kick up sand. Xu Nanheng rolled up the windows, making the car cabin completely enclosed.
The navigation screen in the center of the dash was lit up. They were still 770 kilometers from Lhasa. The altitude had already risen above 4,000 meters, but neither had shown signs of altitude sickness.
The night wrapped around Highway 109, where only inbound and outbound freight trucks cut through the desolate stretch. One had entered a stranger's car, and the other had let a stranger into his own car.
There was something absurdly reckless about it.
“If you get tired, I can drive,” Fang Shiyou offered.
Xu Nanheng shook his head. “I'm fine. I slept through the day.”
Then he added, “You should probably get some sleep, though.”
Xu Nanheng thought the doctor seemed like a fairly chatty person. His voice was pleasant too, without a strong Beijing accent, but with the characteristic lazy drawl of someone from the city.
Dr. Fang said, “I'm fine. Back in med school we had a mandatory course called Pulling All-nighters Without Dying.”
Xu Nanheng chuckled. “Such a practical course should be made mandatory everywhere.”
Driving long distances at night, with only the road illuminated by one's own headlights, made it easy to zone out. It really helped to have someone to talk to.
“That's impossible,” Fang Shiyou continued joking along. “If you really collapse from pulling all-nighters, at least you've got professors who can save you in med school. The risks would be way too high at other universities.”
Xu Nanheng smiled faintly and said nothing. He found Fang Shiyou to be a little wisecracker, with that innate, bantering wit often found in northerners, delivered with a light, humorous touch.
Actually, Xu Nanheng could be a wisecracker himself, but he'd been too annoyed lately.
“Mm.” He gave a noncommittal reply.
When he had glanced at Fang Shiyou's license earlier, he had seen his date of birth. Xu Nanheng was 25 this year, and Fang Shiyou was four years older. They were close in age, both striking and attractive. Perhaps because the journey was long and the rotten issues had been left far behind in Beijing, Xu Nanheng's deep frustration gradually subsided, and he became willing to chat with Fang Shiyou.
Fang Shiyou must have thought his ‘mm’ sounded listless. Unable to discern whether he was actually tired, he swiftly searched for another topic.
“Oh, right. I saw a meme online the other day,” Fang Shiyou said. “It went like this: ‘If I'm in the passenger seat on a long drive, I won't let myself doze off for a second. I stay completely focused on the road.’”
“And then?” Xu Nanheng was growing impatient.
Fang Shiyou said, “It's only when the steering wheel is in my own hands that I can finally relax and catch some sleep.”
Xu Nanheng burst out laughing, and Fang Shiyou joined in. The atmosphere in the car grew harmonious and lighthearted, as if they had truly settled into the cheerful rhythm of tackling the journey to Lhasa together.
But almost at once, Xu Nanheng reined in his expression and asked coolly, “Was that funny?”
“Sorry,” Dr. Fang admitted readily.
Xu Nanheng really wasn't sleepy. He was in great shape. But stressing this point was like a drunk person constantly insisting they weren't drunk. He understood this, so he didn't seriously argue with him.
The drive from Golmud to Lhasa stretched over a thousand kilometers, with the navigation showing an estimated eighteen hours on the road.
If they drove straight through without stopping, they would reach Lhasa around five in the afternoon. At four in the morning, Xu Nanheng's Apple Watch buzzed, reminding him to stand and move around. He steered the car off the highway onto the dirt road, parked, and got out to smoke.
“Light,” Xu Nanheng said, tilting his head toward Fang Shiyou.
Fang Shiyou walked over, pulled out his lighter, and handed it to him. At the same time, Xu Nanheng offered him a cigarette. Tilting his head back, Xu Nanheng exhaled a plume of smoke that scattered and faded against the ink-black night.
For the first time in his life, Xu Nanheng saw so many, such clear stars. It turned out that the stars and moon could indeed illuminate a place. Being at high altitude really did make one feel closer to the sky.
But Fang Shiyou was different. He had been on a medical aid mission to Tibet for nearly a year and was quite accustomed to it.
So instead of looking at the stars, his gaze settled on Xu Nanheng. He suddenly asked, “May I ask your name?”
Xu Nanheng pinched out his cigarette, drew his eyes back from the starry sky, and looked at Fang Shiyou. “My surname's Xu. Xu Nanheng.”
“Mr. Xu.”
“Dr. Fang.” Xu Nanheng curved his lips in a faint smile and bit the cigarette back between his teeth.
He was smiling because being called ‘Mr. Xu’ felt strange. Normally, he was called ‘Teacher Xu.’
After finishing their smoke and using the restroom, they walked back toward the car. As they got close, Fang Shiyou suddenly said, “A lot of people come to Tibet with a story.”
Xu Nanheng walked around the front of the car to the driver's side. He casually slapped the engine hood and flashed a dazzlingly handsome smile. “Others bring their stories. I brought a Mercedes-Benz.”
Fang Shiyou was stunned for a moment, then laughed along. “True enough. We really can't do without this Mercedes-Benz.”
“Without this Mercedes-Benz, you'd be hitchhiking back to Lhasa on a plateau wolf. That ride wouldn't cost you five hundred, more like fifty-five pounds of your own flesh.” Xu Nanheng pulled open the driver's door. “Get in, Dr. Fang.”