The Five Brothers' Dream

When Guo Xiaoquan learned of it, he neither opposed nor warmly approved. He merely met Ma Rende once in the study of his home on Xinhepu Road in Dongshan. It was an older two-story red house across from the provincial committee compound. The study held many books: Zizhi Tongjian, the Selected Works of Mao, Urban Planning, and A History of Lingnan Architecture all mixed together. On the wall hung a calligraphy scroll:
Knowing where to stop brings stability.
Guo Xiaoquan personally poured tea for him. The teacup was small, of thin white porcelain.
“Rende,” he did not call him Little Ma, and his tone was calm, “Jiawen is strong-willed. From childhood, she has not suffered too much hardship. She has talent, and she also has temper. Sometimes she sees things too quickly, and that can make her shallow.”
Ma Rende listened carefully.
Guo Xiaoquan continued, “I have heard a little about your family history. A family that has risen and fallen knows that days are not easy. You are a doctor. What passes through your hands is life and death. You are steadier than ordinary young men. I do not ask that you attach yourself to the Guo family, and I do not want you to fear the Guo family. I ask only one thing: do you treat Jiawen with true sincerity?”
Ma Rende set down the teacup and answered slowly.
“I am not very good at beautiful words. But if I have chosen a person, I will not change lightly.”
Guo Xiaoquan looked at him for a moment, then suddenly smiled.
“Good. Not knowing how to speak beautiful words is sometimes a good thing. There are too many people in officialdom who know how to speak beautifully. Our family does not lack them.”
And so this love grew slowly amid the smell of hospital disinfectant, the lights of the television station, the dust of urban redevelopment, and the evening wind along the river.
Years later, when Ma Yide lived at his elder brother’s home after his illness, he often saw Guo Jiawen enter carrying fruit and newspapers. Only then did he understand that this carefully dressed woman with sharp speech and a slightly proud smile was not merely the daughter of a deputy mayor, nor merely a television reporter. After a great fire, she had seen Ma Rende standing exhausted at the entrance of the ward. She had seen how he treated the wounded, and had seen the thing in a person most difficult to counterfeit—conscience.
And Ma Rende, in Guo Jiawen, also saw another kind of world.
That world had news cameras, urban power, literary refinement, and also a little vanity and sharpness. But beyond these, there was a young woman’s ambition and sincerity: she refused to be merely an official’s daughter, refused to live only in her father’s shadow.
One of them looked at human birth and death from within the hospital ward. The other looked at urban transformation through the camera lens. Two roads that had once been entirely different came, because of a single great fire, to meet quietly in the white corridor of the burn unit at the Provincial People’s Hospital.
Before Guo Jiawen met Ma Rende, she had once had a brief romance.
The man’s name was Feng Xiaomu. He was an English-language news anchor at the television station.
He was very good-looking: tall and slender, with clear brows and refined eyes. His hair was always neatly combed, and when he wore a white shirt, he had a cleanliness almost like that of a film actor. His English was fluent, his voice low and pleasing. Every time he sat before the broadcast desk and the lights came on, his whole person seemed to be lifted out of ordinary life and transformed into another kind of existence—brighter, more respectable, and somehow less touched by worldly smoke and fire.
Guo Jiawen first noticed him on the top floor of the television station.
The city television building was not new. By day, people came and went through it; by night, however, it seemed empty and mysterious. On the top floor was a flat level divided into five or six small rooms, used by night-shift anchors and editors for temporary rest. At the end of the corridor was an old aluminum-framed window. When pushed open, it revealed half the city’s lights. In the distance, the river surface lay dark and shining; buildings stood like silent blocks, and now and then the lights of passing cars slid along the roads like slender fish moving through the night.
When Guo Jiawen worked the early morning news shift, she usually arrived at the station around ten at night.
First she went to the news department to collect scripts, revise headlines, check the broadcast order, and then carry a stack of papers up to the top floor. Her little room was very small: a narrow bed, a desk, a desk lamp, and a thermos in the corner. She often lay down after eleven, but never slept soundly. When the alarm rang at four-thirty in the morning, she would get up, wash her face, comb her hair again, put on a little lipstick, and go over the scripts once more before the six o’clock news began.
Feng Xiaomu often worked that shift too.
At first, they merely nodded to one another in the corridor.
“Early shift again?” he asked.
“News waits for no one,” she answered.
“English news waits for no one either,” he said with a smile.
His smile carried a little youthful brightness, and also the slight frivolity of someone who knew he was handsome. At that time, Guo Jiawen did not dislike this frivolity. She was young, proud, and fond of all things bright. Feng Xiaomu was like a somewhat unreal beam of light in the night-shift corridor, warming the heart faintly as it passed.
Later, they began drinking coffee together in the pantry at four in the morning.
There was an old electric stove in the pantry, and it boiled water very slowly. The two of them would stand by the window waiting for the water to heat. Outside, the sky had not yet brightened and the city was still asleep, but the television station had already awakened. People moved in the control room; the lights in the studio gradually came on; from downstairs came the low hum of machinery.
Holding an enamel cup, Feng Xiaomu looked out the window and said, “Jiawen, do you ever feel as if we are standing here before the city wakes?”
Guo Jiawen smiled. “You speak like prose poetry.”
“English news is too proper. One has to find somewhere to say something improper.”
She lowered her head to turn through the scripts, but her heart stirred slightly.
At that time, she liked his cleverness. She liked how he made an ordinary night shift sound like a secret rendezvous. She liked the low voice in which he read English poems. From childhood, she had lived in an official compound and had seen too much steadiness, propriety, and measured conduct. The floating romance in Feng Xiaomu, by contrast, seemed like an untamed wind.
Their closeness happened little by little.
One rainy night, a minor technical fault delayed the broadcast. The corridor on the top floor was dimly yellow beneath the lights, and outside the window the rain fell steadily. Guo Jiawen finished revising her scripts and came out rubbing her brow. Feng Xiaomu was leaning by the window, holding an English poetry collection.
“Tired?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Then listen to a poem?”
He read a short passage, his voice light as rain.
Guo Jiawen did not fully hear the words. She only remembered that rainwater was sliding down the glass, the city lights had been scattered by rain, and the top floor seemed suspended in midair. Suddenly, she felt that she was no longer the daughter of a deputy mayor, no longer a television reporter, but simply a young woman being looked at tenderly in the depths of night.
Feng Xiaomu moved closer and asked in a low voice, “Jiawen, may I kiss you?”
She did not answer.
Silence became the answer.
That was her first kiss.
It was light and brief, carrying the scent of coffee and a rainy night. After the kiss, Guo Jiawen’s heart beat very fast, but she did not regret it. She only felt that the moment had been beautiful in an unreal way, like the light one second before the dawn news began—bright at exactly the right time, and brief at exactly the right time.
Yet beautiful things do not necessarily have roots.
As they spent more time together, Guo Jiawen gradually saw Feng Xiaomu clearly.
He was clever, eloquent, romantic, and knew how to make a woman feel admired. But his heart was unsettled, like a bird that could never stay perched. Today he said he wanted to go to Hong Kong to develop his career; tomorrow he said he wanted to sit examinations to go abroad; the day after that he said the television station had buried his talent. He envied the outside world, applause, and larger stages, but rarely truly settled himself for any one thing.
Once, Guo Jiawen asked him, “Xiaomu, what exactly do you want?”
Leaning beside the top-floor window, Feng Xiaomu smiled and said, “Freedom.”
“And after freedom?”
He froze for a moment, then smiled again. “After freedom, of course, more freedom.”
Guo Jiawen said nothing more.
Looking at his handsome profile, she suddenly felt a faint weariness. She had once thought his drifting quality was a form of talent. Later she understood that it might also be a form of evasion. If a person always loves only faraway places, it is difficult for him to cherish what is before his eyes. If a person always speaks only of freedom, it is difficult for him to bear the weight of a relationship.
She was the one who ended that love.
It was still on the top floor, still after a night shift. Outside the window, dawn was near, and the east had begun to pale like the belly of a fish. Feng Xiaomu held two cups of coffee. After listening to her finish, the smile he usually wore slowly faded from his face.
“Is it because I am not good enough?” he asked.
Guo Jiawen shook her head. “You are very good. Only your goodness is like cloud.”
Feng Xiaomu smiled bitterly. “Is cloud not good?”
“Beautiful,” she said softly. “But I cannot stand forever on the rooftop waiting for cloud to fall.”
At that moment, both of them were silent.
Feng Xiaomu did not entangle her. He was proud, after all, and proud people, even when hurt, must preserve dignity. Before leaving, he said, “Jiawen, in the future you will find someone very steady.”
She lowered her head and smiled. “Perhaps.”
“But will you not find that boring?”
Guo Jiawen looked toward the city gradually brightening beyond the window. After a long while, she answered, “If a person is truly steady, perhaps he is not necessarily boring. Perhaps that is something I still do not understand.”
Later, she still saw Feng Xiaomu at the television station.
They nodded politely, like all those who had once been close and then retreated back into the crowd. The top-floor corridor remained the same, the little rooms remained the same, and the alarm clock at four-thirty in the morning still rang as before. Only when Guo Jiawen passed that old aluminum window again, she would sometimes think of that kiss on a rainy night. Her heart no longer hurt. It was only like turning to a dried flower pressed inside an old book—knowing it had once bloomed, and knowing also that it could no longer give fragrance.
Until later, when she met Ma Rende in the burn unit of the Provincial People’s Hospital.
He was a completely different kind of person.
Ma Rende had none of Feng Xiaomu’s beautiful speech, nor that charming frivolity that moved the heart. He was often tired, silent, with medicine stains on the cuffs of his white coat, and he often missed mealtimes. He did not turn night into poetry, nor life into a distant horizon. He merely held the hand of the wounded when they trembled from pain, explained the condition again and again to helpless family members, and stood there steadily when everyone else was in panic.
At first, Guo Jiawen thought he was too plain, even somewhat clumsy.
But gradually, she discovered that within that clumsiness there was something truly rare: reliability.
Feng Xiaomu had been like a gust of wind on the top floor during the night shift. He had stirred her young heart and taught her that feeling moved could be beautiful and brief. But Ma Rende was like a lamp at the end of a hospital corridor—not dazzling, yet always lit.
At last, she understood that she had once liked clouds, liked wind, liked that floating romance above the city before dawn. But a person cannot spend an entire life living upon clouds.
What she needed was someone who could let her heart come down to earth.
And Ma Rende, precisely, gave her for the first time a sense of homecoming.
Ma Rende had loved literature since youth.
At first, this love was not flamboyant. The campus of Southwest Medical University was built against the mountains. In spring there were cherry blossoms; on summer nights, many insects sang; in autumn, ginkgo leaves covered the small path leading to the library. Medical students bore an extremely heavy burden of coursework: anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology—one course after another pressed down like thick slabs of stone, leaving a person barely able to breathe. Yet late at night beneath the lamp, Ma Rende could always reserve for himself a little clean ground.
That clean ground was poetry.
His university classmate, Qian Zigang, shared a bunk with him. Zigang slept above, Rende below. The two men, one from the south and one from the Central Plains—Zigang from Zhumadian—were not so far apart geographically, yet their temperaments differed greatly. One was quick-tempered; the other quiet. One spoke as fast as beans pouring from a bamboo tube; the other read slowly, like stream water winding around stones. When the others in the dormitory played cards, chess, or discussed the dining hall food, the two of them often sat beneath the lamp translating poetry.
At that time, they loved Tagore most.
One copy of Zheng Zhenduo’s translation of Stray Birds had been thumbed until its edges curled. Another edition of The Gardener, translated by someone else, had yellowed pages and margins filled densely with pencil notes. After lights-out, they still discussed in low voices by the dim yellow light leaking in from the corridor.
Qian Zigang would hang his head down from the upper bunk. “Rende, look at this line. Zheng’s translation wins in elegance; it is like a small ink painting. The other version is too direct and loses three-tenths of its flavor.”
Leaning against his pillow, Ma Rende still held the book in his hand and said softly, “Mr. Zheng’s sentences have the foundation of old learning. The words are not heavy, yet they leave aftertaste. But sometimes they are too much like Chinese poetry, and instead cover up Tagore’s fervor.”
“You are fair-minded.” Qian Zigang laughed. “No wonder you will become a doctor. Even under the knife, you will know proportion.”
Ma Rende closed the book, looked up at the top of the mosquito net, and slowly said, “Poetry and medicine are both afraid of excessive force. If the brush is too heavy, the poem dies; if the knife is too heavy, the patient suffers.”
Qian Zigang froze for a moment on the upper bunk, then sighed. “Ma Rende, it is truly a pity that you do not write essays.”
Ma Rende smiled. “If I wrote essays, perhaps no one would read them. If I study medicine, at least someone will need me.”
In those years, the nights on campus were long. In the distance, the mountain shadows lay dark and heavy. Wind passed through the parasol leaves outside the dormitory window with a soft rustling. Under a dim lamp, Ma Rende and Qian Zigang talked of Tagore, love, death, and how a person might preserve the cleanness of the soul amid dust and worldliness. The hidden concerns of youth were never spoken plainly, but they all lay folded between pages of poetry.
Years later, Qian Zigang wrote him a letter. In it, he said, “Brother, do you still remember those days when the upper bunk discussed poetry, the lower bunk discussed medicine, rain fell outside the window, and Heaven’s light lived in the heart?”
Ma Rende naturally remembered.
Only after entering the hospital, life no longer allowed him often to sink into poetry. There was no poetry in the wards of the burn unit—only pain, the smell of char, gauze, medicine, groans, and long recovery. Yet books read in youth do not disappear. They are like sparks buried deep in the heart, silent in ordinary days, until one meets someone who also understands fire, and then they shine again.
Guo Jiawen was such a person.
When the two first began spending time together, they mostly discussed the hospital, news, and urban construction. She asked him how patients passed through the danger period; he asked her how news scripts balanced truth and proportion. Then one day, Guo Jiawen saw an old copy of Resurrection on his desk. The cover was worn pale, and the spine had been repaired with tape.
She picked it up, her eyes brightening slightly. “You read Tolstoy too?”
Ma Rende was pouring tea. Hearing this, he lifted his head. “I read him in university. Later I became busy, so I only turn through him occasionally.”
Guo Jiawen opened to the beginning and softly paraphrased a few lines, then paused and sighed. “The opening of Resurrection is truly good. Spring comes, grass grows out from between stones, and even prison walls cannot stop life. Tolstoy is not writing scenery. He is writing judgment.”
Ma Rende handed her the tea. “Yes. That is precisely the power of that passage. Nature resurrects, but people may not. Flowers and grasses do not ask about guilt, but people carry guilt.”
Guo Jiawen looked at him and suddenly smiled. “Dr. Ma, so you do not only know how to talk about medical charts.”
Ma Rende smiled too. “Reporter Guo, so you do not only know how to revise leads.”
After this laughter, it was as though a window had suddenly opened between them.
They began talking about literature.
Guo Jiawen liked the vastness and suffering in Soviet literature. She spoke of And Quiet Flows the Don, of how human lives in Sholokhov seemed to flow through history like river water; of the overly bright, almost scorching faith in How the Steel Was Tempered; and also of Chekhov, saying his short stories were like an old lamp, illuminating the finest dust in the human heart.
Ma Rende, by contrast, favored Tolstoy. He said Tolstoy never hurried to judge people, yet caused them to walk by themselves to the judgment seat. He also read Dostoevsky, though with difficulty. He often said those books were not books, but underground rivers—dark and swift, yet one could hear the soul striking against stone.
When Guo Jiawen listened to him speak this way, she often fell silent for a moment, then asked softly, “Do you look at patients this way too?”
“How?”
“Not only at the wound, but also at the river inside the person’s heart.”
Ma Rende thought for a moment. “For burn patients, the skin is damaged, and what one fears most is infection. But some people’s hearts are also like something that has been burned. A doctor can bind the outer wound. The wound inside must slowly grow back by itself.”
Guo Jiawen lowered her head and looked at the teacup, and something in her heart suddenly stirred. She had once liked Feng Xiaomu’s light poetic quality, like a gust of wind on the rooftop at night. But Ma Rende’s poetry was different. It was not drifting cloud; it was grass growing out of suffering—rooted, earthy, and carrying a green refusal to yield.
They also discussed the great writers of Britain and France.
One rainy night, after work, Guo Jiawen came to Rende’s little apartment. Outside the window, the kapok leaves shone wet beneath the rain. Inside, one desk lamp was lit, and on the table lay Jane Eyre and a translated history of French literature. Guo Jiawen said that when she read Jane Eyre as a girl, what she loved most was Jane’s meaning that souls are equal. She said that if a woman’s whole life were defined only by birth, appearance, and her father’s official position, it would be too great a pity.
Ma Rende listened quietly, then suddenly said, “So you do not want merely to be Deputy Mayor Guo’s daughter.”
Guo Jiawen lifted her head and looked at him, her gaze softening. “You saw that?”
“When you speak, it always seems as though you are trying to walk out from under some shadow.”
This sentence nearly touched the most hidden place in her heart.
She asked quietly, “Then have I walked out?”
Ma Rende did not answer immediately. He looked at her, the lamplight falling upon her brows and eyes. She was dressed with care; her pearl earrings were small and bright, her lipstick color proper. She still carried her usual respectability and a little pride. But at this moment, she was not merely respectable. She was like a white orchid placed in a glass bottle: the fragrance was clear, and the bottle transparent enough that one could see the roots in water.
“You are walking,” he said.
Guo Jiawen smiled, but her eyes reddened.
Another time, they spoke of French literature. Guo Jiawen liked Hugo, saying his writing was like a cathedral—solemn, passionate, with light and shadow interwoven. Ma Rende said he feared Flaubert more, for that kind of calmness was like a surgical knife, cutting open human vanity with terrifying accuracy.
Guo Jiawen laughed. “You truly are a doctor. Even reading novels, you look for knives.”
“And you?” Ma Rende asked.
“I am a reporter. I also look for knives,” she said. “Only mine is often dulled by the editing desk.”
They looked at one another and smiled.
Slowly, literature became the gentlest secret language between them. What others saw was a doctor and a reporter, the hospital and the television station, the daughter of Deputy Mayor Guo and a young attending physician. But they themselves knew that on those unknown nights, they had also walked side by side through Tolstoy’s spring, listened to Tagore’s wind, passed the manor houses of the English moors, and stood beneath the dim streetlamps of French novels.
Once, Guo Jiawen asked him, “Rende, when you read Tagore in university, which idea did you believe in most?”
Ma Rende thought for a long time before saying, “Perhaps that love is not possession, but allowing life to become freer through mutual illumination.”
Guo Jiawen smiled softly. “That does not sound like something a doctor would say.”
“Then what does it sound like?”
“Like the young literary man who once slept on the lower bunk.”
Ma Rende smiled too. “He is still here. He only later put on a white coat.”
That night, the moonlight outside the window was very beautiful. Downstairs from the hospital staff building, there was a small stall selling wontons, steam rising in wisps, and from far away came the slow sound of a night bus. Guo Jiawen sat by the table and suddenly felt that some place inside her had grown quiet. She had once thought love was a kiss on a rainy night on the top floor, light, poetry, heartbeat, and fleeting romance. But after being with Ma Rende, she understood that love could also be two people reading one book beneath one lamp; it could be when one sentence was not yet finished and the other already understood; it could be speaking of life and death without heaviness, of ideals without vanity, of worldly hardship and still being willing to believe in kindness.
She looked at Ma Rende and said softly, “In the future, if you are too busy to have time to read, I will read to you.”
Ma Rende lifted his eyes, his expression gentle. “And if I am so tired that I fall asleep?”
“Then I will read more softly,” she smiled. “Letting you fall asleep between Tolstoy and Tagore would not be unworthy of literature.”
Looking at her, Ma Rende suddenly felt an unspeakable tenderness rise in his heart. He did not say any moving words of love. He only reached out and gently pressed the page flat for her.
At that moment, Guo Jiawen knew that their feeling was no longer merely liking.
To like a person can be ignited by appearance, talent, and atmosphere. But true attachment comes from recognition deep within the soul. She had finally met someone who could speak with her of the beauty of literature and accompany her in looking at the suffering of the human world; someone who was neither frightened away by her sharpness nor confused by her family background.
And Ma Rende, in her bright, proud, and sensitive heart, rediscovered the literary lamp of his university days.
That lamp was not noisy, yet it shone upon the road of two people, drawing them closer and closer.
During the month Ma Yide lived in his elder brother Ma Rende’s home, the days suddenly slowed down.
The hiring procedures for the Provincial Chemical Construction Import and Export Company had already been settled; he only had to wait a little more than a month before formally starting work. The debt was still there, like a heavy stone pressing at the bottom of his heart. But he had only just recovered from illness, and Rende would not allow him to run around again. And so each day, he listened to his elder brother and Guo Jiawen talk of literature: of Tolstoy, Tagore, the fog in English novels and the lamplight in French ones.
Ma Yide sat to the side and often found no place to interrupt.
He also read, but what he read was mostly economics: Modern Enterprise Management, International Trade Practice, An Introduction to Market Economics. He studied these more seriously than any novel. Hearing Rende say, “What Tolstoy writes is the resurrection of the soul,” he could not help thinking: when a person has lost fifty thousand yuan, what counts as economic resurrection?
Guo Jiawen saw that his heart was elsewhere and smiled. “Yide, do you think what we are saying is too empty?”
Ma Yide smiled too. “Not empty. Only now, whenever I hear the word ‘resurrection,’ the first thing I think of is how my capital can resurrect.”
Rende did not scold him. After dinner, he merely slipped a little money to him.
“Go out and walk.”
Ma Yide was startled. “Where?”
“Anywhere. Do not spend all day trapped indoors calculating debt. If a person only stares at one loss, his vision will narrow.”
“Brother, I still owe money.”
“Precisely because you owe money, you must nourish your heart back.” Rende looked at him. “Money can be repaid slowly. But if the heart goes bad, even repayment becomes punishment.”
Guo Jiawen nodded softly beside them. “Go see mountains. Great mountains are best at teaching people what it means for temporary gain and loss to be no more than passing cloud.”