In the slang of northeast China, he was my tiezi—the kind of friend you would call a brother. We did not grow up together; we met in high school. That did not stop us from becoming close.
Someone once said every adolescence comes with one fat friend. I have always thought that was true.
Friendships in boys dormitories often start in strange ways. Ours started with a bit of friction.
His family name was Chen. During the military training at the start of high school, everyone in our class turned several shades darker—except him. His skin stayed fair, only slightly pink. He picked up the nickname 'Ukrainian Big White,' borrowed from a line in our Chinese textbook about Ukrainian Big White pigs. Later he got a nickname that stuck even harder: kao (first tone), which means butt. It came from a classical Chinese text we were studying, Wolf, which has a line about a body being half inside and only its rear end showing. Given Fatty's size and his large, pale backside, the nickname fit.
How did we know about the backside? Our high school was the only one in urban Suzhou that offered boarding, and that was exactly why I applied. Boarders inevitably went to the bathhouse together. After enough visits, his celebrated rear end became common knowledge.
Fatty and I shared an eight-person dorm. On the first night, we stayed up talking, then ranked ourselves by date of birth to establish who was oldest and youngest. The permanent topic in a boys dorm is girls, so the conversation drifted toward crushes and young romance. Everyone told stories from middle school. When it was Fatty's turn, he acted shy. We coaxed him until he reluctantly gave us a girl's name.
That got us going. We pushed him to write her a letter. In the 1990s, letter writing was still common among high school students. With all of us egging him on, he actually wrote one and sent it.
Before long, she wrote back. Our curiosity exploded. We wanted to see what was inside, but Fatty guarded the letter fiercely, read it, folded it carefully, put it in his cabinet, and locked it.
Then one day he went downstairs to shower and left the key on top of the cabinet. When I found it, I did not open the cabinet right away. A few of us leaned over the balcony and watched him stroll back slowly from the bathhouse. I shouted down that he had better hurry—if he did not, we were going to take out that girl's letter and read it.
He shouted back that the letter was locked in the cabinet and I could try if I had the guts. Then he patted his pocket, realized the key was not on him, and turned into a surprisingly quick fat kid, sprinting upstairs.
He burst into the room just as we were making a mess of things, fighting over the letter after pulling it from the cabinet. We got one quick glance before he snatched it back. It was a prank, really—none of us seriously wanted to invade his privacy.
But Fatty was furious. He gritted his teeth, chewed me out, and swore he would beat me up after graduation. That threat became one of my favorite things to tease him about. 'Come on, hit me then,' I would say. He never did. Instead, we became best friends.
The innocent crush from those days faded away on its own.
By senior year, when we split into arts and sciences tracks, a girl transferred into our class. Years later, over drinks, Fatty told me he had noticed her the moment he saw her.
The three of us were born in the same year. I was the oldest, she was next, and Fatty was the youngest. In senior year, Fatty and I started commuting instead of boarding, and the three of us ended up on the same bus every day. We got to know each other. I became her big brother; she became my little sister. Fatty's feelings for her quietly grew.
That winter break included February 14 and her birthday. Fatty gritted his teeth and spent a big chunk of money on a plush toy about half a person tall. He wanted to give it to her but did not dare deliver it himself, so he dragged me along. At night I went to her building with the gift, called her name, and when she came down, handed it over and told her it was from Fatty. She smiled and asked where he was. I looked toward the mouth of the alley and saw a figure half-hidden in the dark, peeking out.
It did not work out. Some things do not. But it was not a loss—at least it left behind one of the brightest memories of those years.