Work Text:
“We were so poor,” Wei Ying said, laughing. “Lan Zhan, we were so poor. That was when we’d just immigrated. I was the only one with a work visa, and Wen Qing was still trying to figure out how to make it so she could practice medicine again. We weren’t sure she would ever be a doctor here, not officially, not one in a hospital.” He left unspoken what other jobs they’d contemplated could be available for someone of Wen Qing’s talents and training. “I could only get jobs delivering takeout. We didn’t have a real computer to do any work on. Poor Wen Ning was still so sick. He stayed home with A’Yuan and Popo. It was terrible, they were terrible Christmases, we didn’t even know what we were doing. It’s not like we grew up here. You know, it gets celebrated differently here, we had no idea. We just tried because of A’Yuan.”
“Hmm,” Lan Zhan said meditatively. They were holding hands, out in the cold, walking toward Wei Ying’s apartment. They were wearing gloves so it wasn’t skin to skin, but the pressure was enough. Wei Ying wore a bright red scarf and bright pink earwarmers. They clashed terribly. Lan Zhan was wearing white and blue. “I’d still like to experience it.” With you, unspoken.
Their relationship was four months’ long. The intensity of his own feelings surprised Lan Zhan, who had never experienced such depth. It was even occasionally overwhelming. He hadn’t said ‘I love you,’ yet, but Lan Zhan already knew Wei Ying was it for him. There would never be another.
“All right, all right.” Wei Ying reached over and patted Lan Zhan with his other hand, the one that wasn’t being held. “Silly, but all right.”
Poor Man’s Christmas, here we go.
The first year, they had chestnuts because Popo had gathered them from the streets in October. She knew which types were ornamental and toxic, and which types were sweet and edible. She would go walking with A’Yuan and show him which ones to pick, and they’d stow them away in their pockets and folding shopping bags, then bring the bounty home to cure in their small fridge. It took up space, but it wasn’t like they could afford many groceries so there was space to give. In December, Popo and Wen Ning roasted the chestnuts in their small oven; Wei Ying and Wen Qing peeled them. A’Yuan had the most important job: he ate.
The first year, they had chestnuts Popo gathered to supplement the little they could buy. Their funds were that low. Popo gathered many things during her walks with A’Yuan, from the edible landscaping of this bustling city where so few spoke the language of home, from edible lansdcaping that no one else really seemed to realize was edible. Maybe it was only edible if you were really truly very, very, incredibly hungry. Popo was 90 and she’d survived famine. This was why she knew what you could eat and live, and what would kill you if you bit into it. Popo knew the berries, the leaves, even the roots, and she taught them to A’Yuan, and together they worked to help keep their small family fed. Really, it was just luck that chestnuts were a Christmas food too.
So at Christmas they had roast chestnuts. Now, over ten years later, they have chestnuts again. Popo is gone and A’Yuan missed the gathering window because he was so busy with exams - as it should be - so rather than foraged chestnuts, they bought from the grocery store. But Wen Ning still roasted them and Wen Qing still peeled them, and it felt the same merry warmth in the living room where they ate. They had a fireplace now, even, electric but convincingly charming. Wei Ying tipped a chestnut he’d peeled himself against Lan Zhan’s mouth, and his family groaned and yelled at them to get a room.
“All these rooms are mine,” Wei Ying declared. “I am the patriarch, bow down.” Wen Qing got him hard in the face with a pillow. Wen Ning actually, jokingly, bowed. A’Yuan laughed, bright, so bright, like all the candles in all the cathedrals that were being lit that night. A’Yuan was a hundred thousand warm lights all gathered into the very best boy, the most beloved, Wei Ying’s son.
They didn’t know much at all about western Christmas at first, just what they saw on television and a bit by looking around at their neighbours and at random houses they passed on the street. There were lights and singing, food was important, which they agreed made sense, Santa for some reason didn’t have a saxophone here, and there were presents at some point. Some of their neighbours said presents on the 24th, most said on the 25th, the Russians said New Year’s. It didn’t really matter for them because they were too poor for presents.
Lan Zhan frowned when he heard that.
It was probably the funniest thing about him, that he wasn’t mainland. He wasn’t even Hong Kong. He was full out diaspora king, yet somehow managed to out-Chinese Wei Ying, Wuhan native, by miles. He was the kind of boy all the aunties and matriarchs would want to marry in, he was just that impressive. Tall. Good skin, good hair, good bones - these would all make good children. Smart, musical. The aunties and grannies saw him and their eyes lit up, dreaming already about the babies his genes could create. Filial and moral, too. He was their ideal.
He was Wei Ying’s ideal. Wei Ying would like for him to marry in.
Silly. A silly thought. Wei Ying tucked it away.
Instead of presents, they did the store display walk.
“Baba was so mean,” A’Yuan said, but his eyes twinkled which meant he was actually smiling. “We’d go walking, and stopped in front of every toy store and stared at their window displays, and I’d point at all the things I thought looked really cool. And he’d say, ‘Yes, I agree, very cool.’ And then he’d just carry me away.”
“Every time A’Yuan started to cry, I’d distract him with the next window,” Wei Ying said, eyes also crinkled, like it was a joke instead of something cruel.
Lan Zhan had never been poor, so maybe it was something he just didn’t understand.
It wasn’t something he could understand. Wei Ying knew this. Even A’Yuan knew this, in an inarticulate, instinctual way.
When something is so sad, so depressing and heavy and terrible, you must turn it into laughter instead. It must become a joke that you can tell, years and years later, to a man who might love you, so that he doesn’t let his love turn to pity. The hard lean years are over and they laughed during them anyway, didn’t they? Wasn’t there so much laughter even when they were all tired and scared? Wasn’t there so much love, even when there didn’t seem to be much of a future? Wasn’t that something to be cherished?
Lan Zhan couldn’t understand, and none of them would want him to understand because of what that understanding would cost, but they love him for trying to.
So they, at Poor Man’s Christmas, walk the downtown core and stare at endless beautiful commercial window displays. Wen Qing and Wen Ning walk ahead of them, arm in arm, Wen Ning having grown so tall now. He had two growth spurts in his young adulthood, after he’d gotten over his mystery sickness, and shot up suddenly three years after they’d left home. It was hell keeping him deep enough in calories, but at least by then some of Wei Ying’s apps were starting to sell and they had more income. The big money didn’t come until his second small game release, and around that time, Wen Qing also finally got cleared for locum work at the clinic all the way across town. She’d had to commute two shitty hours via public transport, three days a week, but it was money.
It was money enough they could afford presents that year, and that year Wei Ying had actually intended to surprise A’Yuan by going into the first store display his child admired and buying his most favourite thing for him. It was meant to be a triumphant moment. But A’Yuan didn’t want anything. It was remarkable, it was like they’d broken him. Wei Ying experienced a profound moment of self-loathing, but then A’Yuan said, eyes wide and guileless, “They all look really nice, Baba, but the Buddha says we must eliminate desire and practice detachment from earthly possessions.” Briefly, Wei Ying knew true fear in the face of A’Yuan’s pious recitation. Then he saw the saw the twinkle in A’Yuan’s eye, the one that meant he was laughing in secret.
That was how Wei Ying knew A’Yuan was fucking with him, which made him so proud that he couldn’t stop laughing and he forgot entirely his plans to spoil his too good son.
It perturbed Lan Zhan that they didn’t do Christmas gifts, even though his family hardly did so either. But he and his brother always had. His mother had, before she died. It was a soft memory for Lan Zhan. You could be privileged and still have a past. Lan Huan had even sent presents this year, “For my future in-laws,” he’d texted. He knew Lan Zhan too well; he knew the desires of Lan Zhan’s heart. It made Lan Zhan feel shy and well-loved and furiously embarrassed.
The Poor Man’s Christmas Tree was no tree at all. To begin with, there’d been no place to put one, even if they could have afforded one. Their first place was so small. It was barely two rooms big. One of the rooms was the bathroom.
They weren’t even going to attempt something Christmas tree shaped, until A’Yuan saw the huge one by City Hall and cried because it was so pretty. “So pretty,” he’d sighed, enraptured. “So pretty.” He was their baby. They could manage a tree.
Well, Popo could manage something tree-like anyway. She’d go walking along with a pair of scissors in her pocket, dragging her shopper cart behind her that she used to collect bottles out of the recycling bins up and down their neighbourhood and the next. This was Popo’s way of supplementing their money, one nickel and dime at a time. Every time she passed an evergreen, if no one was looking, her hand would dart out with the scissors to snip off a skinny branch. The branch would get swiftly hidden in her shopper cart, the scissors would return to her pocket, and she’d resume being a kindly gnarled old granny rather than an arboreal thief.
Wen Ning and Wei Ying would take those branches and cobble together something that looked tree-like, as long as you didn’t look closely at it and covered it in tinsel and ornaments. Wen Qing folded recycled shiny paper and foil into clever shapes. They couldn’t afford lights and, even if they could, they couldn’t afford the electricity bill with Christmas lights added, but Wen Qing and Popo arranged small birthday candles in little stands in front of the tree, to illuminate the foil. They didn’t keep the candles lit for very long, but they did light them for a few minutes every night, just for how it made A’Yuan stare, big-eyed and silent and so in love with something beautiful.
Lan Zhan should draw the line at vandalism, and perhaps he would if Popo were still alive, but in her memory they all go out, surreptitious and giggling, to do a little crime.
And it’s worth it after all for how it still grips A’Yuan’s heart to see the little tree on its little stand, with the little candles lit before it, and it’s worth it for Lan Zhan to see the expression on A’Yuan’s precious face, for Lan Zhan to see the softness in Wei Ying as he stares at his son, it’s worth it for how Wei Ying’s eyes meet Lan Zhan’s knowingly, unspoken communication passing between them, Isn’t he so good? Yes, he is so good.
You couldn’t say who had it hardest out of all of them when they came over. Popo was old already, but she’d survived through everything and she knew how to do it. She was very skilled at surviving. So maybe it wasn’t hard for her, not knowing the language, when her hearing was mostly gone anyway and when her vision was too blurry to read. Or maybe it was the hardest because she’d have to know this was it, this was where she’d die. She would never see her home again. That was a different kind of hard.
Or Wen Qing, who had lost the most, professionally speaking. She was a prodigy and they knew it back home, but they didn’t know it here. She had to start lower than the bottom - she had to fight and claw and scratch her way just to get to the bottom, and then had to fight even harder to climb from there.
Or Wen Ning, who had gotten sick after they came over and who took so long to recover. Wen Qing was very good, but that meant nothing in the face of no supplies, no equipment. Wasn’t it hard for Wen Ning to feel so ill, and also like such a burden? He was a problem for his family and it made him ashamed of himself. He shouldn’t have come. They would have an easier time surviving without him. (This wasn’t true. But Wen Ning felt that it was true.)
Or Wei Ying, whose actions had seen him disowned by the only family he’d ever known. It would be six years before he heard from his sister and eight before he’d hear from his brother. He did these things knowing he’d probably never hear from his aunt and uncle again - and he wouldn’t; they’d die first. There’d be a terrible fatal accident and he’d be too poor to fly home to honor them, and he’d known it was likely that he’d lose them for good, but when it actually happened - too soon, unexpected - it felt too hard to live through. It felt like instead of living, he’d just break in half. But he didn’t break, and that was hard, too.
Or Wen Yuan, who would watch their struggles and who would be a child of two countries, and who would grow up without the rest of his family, without knowing what it would be like to have the rest of his family, the broad vast comforting network of aunties and uncles and cousins, Wen Yuan who they would all love as best they could but who could give him no more than themselves, Wen Yuan who understood the tenseness of poverty in a way he would never fully forget because it had formed the kernel of his life, because it had been his childhood, wasn’t it hard for Wen Yuan? Didn’t it affect him the most profoundly?
Or even, let me convince you, Lan Zhan. Years after all this has happened, he discovers Wei Ying. It feels like a discovery - like a succession of wondrous moments, like each smile is a revelation. Wei Ying is so brilliant and kind and joyous and smart and sharp and teasing and harsh and loving and beloved. Wei Ying is so many things and Lan Zhan cherishes all of them. And Lan Zhan cherishes Wei Ying’s family for loving him so well, and Lan Zhan wishes with all his yearning heart that he had known them when they were suffering so that he could lift that suffering from them. He wishes he had known them when Popo was still alive so that he could know her as they knew her, and so that he could honor her memory as they honor her. Lan Zhan has a tender heart that not many have touched, he hides it so well, but it bruises with each indignity and each injustice he learns they have endured. He wishes he could have changed things for Wei Ying. For all of them. He wants to move himself through time so that he could change the course of history and protect them from their hurts. It’s hard to want this and to know it will never be possible and that you must learn to live with your thwarted desire, instead.
Christmas Eve was for the peace apple, of course. It was baffling that no one seemed to really do that here, but it wouldn’t feel like Christmas without it, and even at their poorest, they could afford five apples. A’Yuan’s job as a baby had been to decorate them. Now they decorate all together. And on Christmas Day, Wei Ying cooked.
No one liked that Wei Ying cooked. Lan Zhan looked vaguely alarmed at the sight of Wei Ying in the kitchen, which was just insulting as Lan Zhan had yet to truly sample of Wei Ying’s culinary repertoire.
“It’s all the chillies you’re adding,” Wen Qing observed. “Anyone with common sense would be afraid. Though he’s dating you, so I gather his common sense is a bit impaired.”
Wei Ying fake outrage gasped, dramatic. “Lan Zhan, do you hear how she slanders you? Do you want me to avenge you?”
Lan Zhan serenely ignored their shenanigans in favour of helping A’Yuan set up his computer on the coffee table for an impending video call.
“Idiot,” Wen Qing sighed. “Obviously, more than anyone else, I was slandering you.”
“Anyway it’s Christmas, so of course the food should be red. Red is a Christmas colour. Very lucky, also. Very auspicious.” Wei Ying nodded sagely to himself.
Wen Qing gave him a dead-eye stare. “You say that at New Year’s.”
“It’s also true at New Year’s.”
Thankfully, A’Yuan’s video call goes through and they can finally distract Wei Ying out of the kitchen to go chat with Yanli and her son. It’s cute to see Wei Ying and A’Yuan sitting on the sofa and facing Yanli and Jin Ling, who mirror them an ocean away. It’s even cuter to see Lan Zhan hover behind first the computer screen and then by Wei Ying after Wei Ying waves him over. Wen Qing indulges in laughing at these ridiculous men before turning her attention to making Wei Ying’s food less lethal while his back is turned.
She loves the man; he is her brother. He has no concept of normal spice tolerance and one day they will all die, cursing his name.
The day was cozy, the night is warm, all is merry, and Lan Zhan’s heart is full.
“Did you like it?” Wei Ying murmurs. Everyone else is asleep. It’s just them, cuddling on the couch in front of the electric fireplace.
“Very much,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying snorts. “Remember when A’Yuan first met you? What did he call you?”
“Rich Brother.” It’s a fond memory.
“So rude. He’s usually not so rude.” Wei Ying sighs. “Ah, well, I birthed him from my own body, I guess he had to take after me in some ways.”
“Not rude.” Lan Zhan doesn’t touch the birthing claim. Wei Ying lives to be outrageous.
“I guess he was speaking the truth, Mr. Rich Man Lan.”
It’s true; the Lans are rich. It’s not something shameful as they haven’t gained their wealth through dishonorable acts, and because they give it away almost as fast as they make it. They are just very, very, very good at making it.
Wei Ying pokes his side. “What did you think of the poor man’s Christmas, Mr. Rich?”
“Every year.”
“Hmm?” Wei Ying lifts his head from where he’d rested it against Lan Zhan’s shoulder. He turns to look at his - well, what do they call each other? Boyfriend sounds ridiculous and also like not enough. Partner sounds stodgy. Beloved sounds… good, okay, but also sappy and even just thinking the word makes Wei Ying blush. In his heart, he knows the word he really wants is husband. He wants to call Lan Zhan his husband. But he’s not thinking about that yet; it’s too soon. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it will come. He can’t bear to look at that thought head on. It agonizes him, how much he wants it. “Every year what?”
“Like this, every year.” Lan Zhan turns his head. His eyes gleam golden. He looks so soft and contented, like a spoiled cat. He presses a kiss against Wei Ying’s forehead. “From now on.”
“Ah,” Wei Ying swallows. “Every year? Lan Zhan, what if you decide you like something else better for Christmas? We don’t have to do it like this every year. We have money now. I’m not so stingy that I won’t spend any on a good time.”
Lan Zhan shakes his head. “This is a good time. Best time. Best Christmas, with you.”
It cracks something fragile inside of Wei Ying to hear this. He’d never admit it, but it embarrassed him to show Lan Zhan how desperately poor they’d once been. But because he always treated it like a joke, because he’d tried to have a light heart, he’d also felt like he couldn’t hide their traditions and their past. That by hiding, he’d betray his embarrassment and his shame and Lan Zhan would know a part of himself that he didn’t want known. It was perhaps a signature dumbass move, to try to hide in plain sight. Hide his heart.
“It was really hard,” he finally admits. Voice low. “I didn’t think we would make it. I look at our lives now and I can’t believe it.” I have you in my life now, and I also can’t believe that.
Lan Zhan takes his hand. “You did well,” he says. He wants to say more, like, You did more than anyone else could have, and, You climbed out of a nearly impossible situation, and, I didn’t know you then but I wish I had. I wish we had had each other then. I wish I was with you for all your Christmases and all of your New Years. I’m going to be here for the rest of them.
“It was so hard, Lan Zhan. It was really…”
Lan Zhan kisses his forehead again, and then the side of his face, and then his mouth, very softly.
Wei Ying says, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m crying. Today has been so good.”
“Still good,” Lan Zhan says softly. “Always good. You’re so good. Wei Ying. Love you.”
Wei Ying laughs tearfully. “Oh, God. Really? Okay. Okay. I love you, too.” And he does; he does. He feels this love suffuse him through every limb, across the surface of all his skin.
For Lan Zhan, hearing this feels like it does when he’s finished composing and the final notes fall into place and the whole of the music pulls together into something new and alive. The same joy of creation is in his love for Wei Ying, the same resounding sense of wonder and triumph is in knowing his love is returned. “Love you,” he repeats. He says it for many reasons, but mostly because he wants to say it. Mostly because having said it once, now it’s all he wants to say.
Wei Ying kisses him, and smiles as he kisses, and says it again. “I love you. I like you, I fancy you, I whatever you. I want you always near.”
“Always near,” Lan Zhan echoes, agrees. Their fingers tangle and grip. They trade kisses and love declarations back and forth, tender and hushed, until, tired, they curl up asleep.
An hour later, Wen Ning stumbles across the living room on his way to the bathroom and sees them on the sofa, dimly illuminated by the flickering fire, one in the other’s arms and both about to fall off. Wen Ning pulls Popo’s old crocheted blanket off the back of the armchair and settles it over them to keep them warm.
“Good night, good night,” he whispers. “Sleep tight.” And then he returns to his own bed to do the same.