[BL] Kiss My Sweet Ash

***

The last thing his mother said to him at the airport was not be careful or call me when you land or even I love you, though she said all of those too, in the right order, with her hands cupped around his face the way she’d done since he was small. The last thing she said, after all of that, after his father’s long wordless hug that meant everything his father rarely said aloud, was this:

“Pay attention.”

Asher Chen had been paying attention his entire life. He wasn’t sure his mother knew that. He wasn’t sure he knew how to stop.

***

He had a layover in Shanghai.

He’d been awake for nineteen hours by the time the connecting flight touched down in Chengdu, and the city rose up through the plane window like something he’d been trying to remember. Hazy and sprawling and green at the edges, cut through with rivers he didn’t know the names of yet. He pressed his face close to the glass in a way that would have embarrassed him if anyone had been watching.

Nobody was watching. The man in the next seat was asleep. The woman across the aisle was watching a drama on her phone, earbuds in, completely elsewhere.

Asher watched Chengdu appear.

His parents had talked about this city his entire life. Not constantly, not with the specific weight of people who were grieving something — more the way you’d reference a book you loved so much you assumed everyone had read it. In Chengdu, the tea houses stay open all night. In Chengdu, the hot pot broth takes hours. Your grandmother had a way of making tangyuan that nobody has been able to replicate since. Chengdu existed in his house the way certain smells exist in old buildings: layered into the structure itself, present even when nobody mentioned it.

He had grown up shaped by a city he had never seen.

The plane descended. The seatbelt sign chimed on. Asher sat back and thought about the fact that in less than an hour, he would be standing inside the story he’d always been told secondhand.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had spent a lot of his life not being sure how he felt about things. He’d found that if he paid enough attention, the feeling usually clarified on its own.

***

Chengdu Tianfu International Airport was enormous and efficient and smelled, faintly, of something fried and savory from a food stall somewhere beyond the arrivals corridor. Asher navigated baggage claim with the focused calm of someone who had been anxious about this moment for months and had therefore over-prepared for it: he had the address of his apartment building saved in three places, his aunt’s phone number memorized as a backup, and enough cash in his wallet to cover any taxi scenario he could imagine.

He had also, because he was Asher, written down three things he noticed during the flight that he wanted to remember later. The way the flight attendant’s smile had changed when she realized he understood Mandarin. The particular blue of the sky through the scratched oval window. The child two rows ahead who had spent forty minutes building something out of an airsickness bag and a set of plastic stirrers and then fallen asleep on top of it.

He had not written down how nervous he was. Some things didn’t need documentation. Some things were just true.

The arrivals hall opened around him in a wash of sound — announcements in Mandarin, the rolling clatter of luggage wheels on polished floor, families pressing forward toward the barriers, names called out in voices stretched thin with waiting. He emerged into it and immediately spotted Chen Lifen.

He spotted her because she was holding a sign.

The sign read, in large characters he could read from twenty feet away: 陈亚瑟 — WELCOME HOME, BABY.

Asher stopped walking. The man behind him nearly walked into his back.

His aunt was fifty years old and had a laugh, he would later understand, that arrived several seconds before the rest of her. He could hear it from where he stood — bright and carrying, aimed at someone beside her who was already shaking his head. She was wearing a red blouse and sensible shoes and her hair was cut in a neat practical bob, and she was holding that sign like it was perfectly normal, like she had not just displayed his Chinese name and a greeting in English to the entire arrivals hall of an international airport.

She looked so much like his mother that his chest did something complicated.

Not exactly like her. Older. Different around the eyes. Her smile had a different angle to it. But there was something in the line of her jaw, the way she held her shoulders, that made Asher feel for one disorienting moment like he was looking at a version of his mother who had taken a different road and kept going.

He walked toward her.

She saw him. The sign went down. Her face did something that was not quite a smile and not quite crying and was somehow both at once, and then she opened her arms and he walked into them, and she was warm and she smelled like someone’s kitchen, and she said into the top of his head, in Mandarin: “You look exactly like your mother. Oh, I’m going to kill her for not coming herself.”

Asher laughed, surprised. It came out a little unsteady.

“Hi, Auntie Lifen,” he said.

“Auntie Lifen.” She pulled back and looked at him properly, hands on his shoulders, the sign tucked under her arm. Her eyes were bright and assessing and amused. “So formal. Your mother raised you with manners. I’ll forgive her. Come.” She turned. “Wei Ming! He’s here. Stop pretending you aren’t emotional, nobody believes you.”

***

Wei Ming was twenty-seven and built like someone who had been practical his entire life — solid and contained, with a handshake that meant business and eyes that were kind underneath the composure. He carried Asher’s largest suitcase without being asked and did not make a production of it. This, Asher would come to understand, was simply how Wei Ming operated: he identified what needed doing and did it, quietly, without requiring acknowledgment.

“Welcome to Chengdu,” Wei Ming said, in English that was careful and deliberate and clearly assembled for the occasion. Then, in Mandarin: “Your flight was good?”

“Long,” Asher said. “But good.”

Wei Ming nodded, satisfied. He seemed like someone who appreciated direct answers.

Wei Lan appeared from wherever she’d been — she had, it turned out, been in the bathroom — and she was twenty-three and immediately, visibly assessing him in the way of someone who had been curious about a person for years and was now finally running the comparison between the imagined version and the real one. She had her mother’s sharp eyes and her father’s patience, and she looked at Asher for about four seconds before she said, in Mandarin: “Okay. You’re taller than I thought. Also, your Mandarin is actually good, I wasn’t sure it would be.”

“Wei Lan,” her mother said.

“That was a compliment,” Wei Lan said, unapologetic. Then, to Asher: “I’m going to be honest with you because I think it will make us better friends faster. I’ve been curious about you for years. I have many questions. I’ll pace myself.”

“I appreciate the warning,” Asher said.

She grinned. He liked her immediately.

Wei Jun, the youngest, was eighteen and vibrating at a frequency that suggested he had been awake since before dawn out of excitement. He was just starting university in the fall, and he had about him the particular energy of someone standing at the exact beginning of everything. He shook Asher’s hand with great seriousness and then said, in English: “I have been studying. My English is becoming very strong.” He paused. “Is that sentence correct?”

“It’s perfect,” Asher said, and Wei Jun beamed.

They had known about him his entire life, he realized, riding in the back of Wei Ming’s car while Chengdu scrolled past the windows. All of them. Auntie Lifen had seen the photos his mother sent every year — school pictures, holiday pictures, the one from his high school graduation where he’d looked deeply uncertain about the whole proceedings. Wei Lan had apparently asked, at some point years ago, whether she could write him a letter, and Asher’s mother had meant to make that happen and somehow never had, and Asher had not known until this moment that it was something Wei Lan had wanted.

He knew almost nothing about them.

The asymmetry of it settled over him, not unpleasantly — more like the first awareness of a gap he hadn’t known was there. A space that had existed all along without him realizing it needed filling.

Outside the window, Chengdu moved.

He paid attention.

***

His apartment was on the ninth floor of a mid-rise building that had been constructed sometime in the last fifteen years and showed it in the clean lines of the lobby, the reliable elevator, the way the hallway smelled faintly of new materials and other people’s dinners. It was not luxurious. It was not run-down. It was the kind of building that simply worked, that housed people who had places to be and got on with doing so, and there was something reassuring about that.

The apartment itself was small — one bedroom, a kitchen and living area that shared the same room, a narrow bathroom, a balcony just wide enough to stand on. The furniture had been arranged by the school’s housing coordinator, he’d been told, and it showed: everything was functional and slightly impersonal, like a room that was waiting to find out what kind of person would inhabit it.

The windows were large. That was the thing he noticed first. Large windows, and the late afternoon light coming through them was the particular gold of a spring evening when the day doesn’t quite know how to end.

Auntie Lifen, who had insisted on accompanying him up despite his insistence that he was fine and just needed sleep, stood in the middle of the living room with her hands on her hips and looked around with the expression of someone preparing to have opinions.

“It’s small,” she announced.

“It’s fine,” Asher said.

“It’s small,” she said again, as if he had disagreed. “But the light is good. And it’s close to a good market, I made sure of that. Come to dinner on Sunday. Don’t say you’re tired, you’ll have had time to sleep by Sunday.”

“Okay,” Asher said. “Sunday.”

She kissed his cheek and left him with two containers of food she had somehow produced from a bag he hadn’t noticed her carrying — char siu bao, still warm, smelling of his entire childhood — and the sudden ringing quiet of an apartment that belonged to him now.

He sat on the edge of the bed.

He’d done it. He was here.

He wasn’t sure what here meant yet.

***

He ate the bao standing at the kitchen window, watching the street below. The neighborhood was residential and unhurried — trees along the pavement, a fruit vendor packing up his cart for the evening, a couple walking a small dog with a plaid jacket and very serious ambitions about a particular patch of grass. An older man sat on a folding stool outside the building across the street, doing nothing in particular with the practiced ease of someone who had earned the right to do nothing in particular.

Asher had grown up in Bluestem, Iowa, population nine thousand and change, in a house with a yard and a neighbor who grew the best tomatoes he’d ever eaten and another neighbor who played classic rock on Friday nights with the garage door open. He had been, by any measure, from somewhere. He had a from. He just had never been entirely sure what to do with it.

In Bluestem, people knew him. People liked him. He had friends, real ones, people he’d grown up alongside and would probably keep in some form for the rest of his life. But there had always been something — not loneliness, not exactly — more like the sensation of being a word in a language that didn’t quite have a matching word in another language. Present and meaningful and just slightly untranslatable.

He had hoped, coming here, to find the translation.

He wasn’t naive enough to think Chengdu would simply hand it to him. He’d read enough, thought enough about it, to know that this city would be no more his by default than Iowa had been alien. Heritage wasn’t geography. Identity wasn’t a destination you arrived at and unpacked your suitcase.

But he had wanted — needed, maybe — to be somewhere that held the beginning of his family’s story. To stand in the same air his parents had breathed when they were young. To understand, from the inside, what they had left behind when they built a life somewhere else.

He finished the bao. Folded the container. Put it on the counter.

Then he went out to the balcony.

***

Chengdu in the evening was something he didn’t have a reference for.

He’d read about it. He’d seen photos and videos, had consumed enough of his parents‘ secondhand descriptions to have assembled a composite image in his head. But the composite was a sketch, and the reality was the painting, and the painting had textures the sketch hadn’t accounted for. The particular quality of the air, faintly humid, carrying something green and something fried and something faintly floral he couldn’t place. The layered sound of it — traffic and voices and, from somewhere a few streets over, music. The way the buildings held the last of the light at their upper floors while the street below had already moved into the soft blue hour that came before full dark.

It was enormous. Bluestem could have fit inside this neighborhood and still had room left over.

And yet.

He stood at the railing with his arms folded, looking out over the rooftops and the swaying tops of trees and the lit windows that meant other people’s evenings, other people’s ordinary Tuesdays, and something that had been wound tight in his chest — wound tight for months, maybe, or longer — began, very slightly, to ease.

His parents had stood somewhere in this city. Young and with their whole lives unwritten in front of them. They had looked at this same sky, or something close to it. They had walked streets that were maybe still here, maybe not, maybe paved over with something that hadn’t existed when they were young. They had made choices, good ones, hard ones, and those choices had eventually produced him — standing on a balcony in a city he was only just beginning to know, at twenty years old, with no clear idea of what came next.

He found he didn’t mind not knowing. That was new.

Or maybe it wasn’t new. Maybe he had always been more comfortable with uncertainty than he gave himself credit for. Maybe the problem was never that he couldn’t see the path forward — it was that he could see too many of them, all of them lit, all of them interesting, and he had been standing at the crossroads for two years trying to figure out which story he wanted to tell.

Chengdu didn’t answer that question. He hadn’t expected it to.

But it was, he thought, the right place to keep asking.

Below, a scooter buzzed past. Somewhere in the building, a door closed. The man on the folding stool had gone inside. The fruit vendor had finished loading his cart and was pushing it slowly down the street, heading home.

Asher watched until the cart turned the corner.

I don’t know what I’m looking for, he thought. But I think I’m in the right place to look.

He stayed on the balcony until the sky went fully dark and the city rearranged itself into a different version of itself — lit and buzzing and very much alive — and then he went inside, lay down on a bed that would take a few nights to feel familiar, and fell asleep before he finished the thought he was having.

He slept better than he had in months.

***

End of Chapter One