Note: This article is based on my personal memories from many years ago and is written to remember my late friend, Xue Anian. Because so much time has passed, some dates, places, and details may not be completely accurate. To protect the privacy of people involved, some nonessential details have also been blurred or adapted. Much of what I know about Xue Anian’s earlier life came directly from what he told me himself, and I have no way to independently verify every part of it. I also do not currently have complete information about the exact date of his death or his official medical cause of death. So I will write down what I remember, and I will not invent what I do not know.**
I first met Xue Anian in 2016, not long after I arrived in the United States.
I had just arrived in Los Angeles. I knew almost no one, my English was poor, and I had no idea what I was going to do next.
After wandering around for a while, I ended up near the Ding Pangzi shopping plaza and saw an advertisement for a Chinese boarding house posted on a utility pole.
Twelve dollars for a bed.
Cheap.
So I stayed there.
The landlord led me past beds, suitcases, and piles of belongings until we reached a room in the back.
There were three beds inside.
On one of them lay a huge bald man with no shirt on.
My first reaction was that he looked a little frightening.
But he was friendly.
He introduced himself and told me everyone called him “Big Guy.”
That man was Xue Anian.
He was also the first friend I made after coming to America.
And he really was big.
He was about 2.06 meters tall.
At that height, there was no way to be inconspicuous. If he walked around the Ding Pangzi area, plenty of people recognized him.
After we became closer, he told me that he actually hated people staring at him.
He said some people looked at him as if they were looking at a gorilla in a circus.
I still remember that sentence.
Other people might think being more than two meters tall looked impressive.
But for him, his body may have brought him strange looks before it ever brought him admiration.
People often noticed his size before they decided whether to treat him like an ordinary human being.
—
Big Guy told me he was born in Beijing in 1966.
When he was young, he trained in the high jump and said he had even been on China’s national team.
Later, he studied English at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
He once told me that the biggest thing university gave him was the ability to “free his mind and broaden his horizons.”
These were things he told me himself.
He also said that after leaving China, he spent many years traveling around the world.
I saw two of his old passports.
They were full of immigration stamps from different countries.
How many countries had he actually visited?
I never counted.
A lot.
By the time I met him in 2016, he told me that he had already been away from China for more than twenty years and had spent several years in the United States.
That is why it would be easy to misunderstand his life if you only looked at the few years when I knew him.
If you had seen him only at that cheap Chinese boarding house near Ding Pangzi, you might have thought:
Just a middle-aged giant without much money, without a stable place to live, always trying to figure out what to do next.
But go back a few decades and he had been an athlete, a university student, a translator, and a man who had traveled through many countries with a passport in his hand.
Life is strange.
When you are young, you have no idea where you will be sleeping decades later.
—
When I knew him, money was usually tight.
He stayed in the cheapest boarding houses and did not care much about material comfort.
If there was something to do, he did it.
If there was nothing to do, he seemed perfectly content.
He would lie on the bed and read.
English novels.
Biographies.
He told me that he had once done translation work and had published two books, one about Michelangelo and another about Leonardo da Vinci.
I never independently checked that, so all I can say is that this is what he told me himself.
Sometimes I thought the image was almost absurd.
A man more than two meters tall, built like someone meant for heavy physical labor, lying on a tiny bed in a cheap boarding house reading an English biography.
And yet somehow that image was exactly him.
—
There was also a huge sack under his bed.
I remember that sack very clearly.
He did not own much that looked valuable.
But he never wanted to throw away the things inside that bag.
There were old books.
And lots of stones.
He had picked up many of those stones during the years when he was moving from place to place.
Sometimes he would pull them out and explain them to me.
This one is bloodstone.
That one might be jade.
Americans do not understand these things, he would say. This one could actually be valuable.
I knew nothing about stones.
So basically he talked and I listened.
He also told me that he had once been involved in geology-related activities and that his stepfather was very interested in collecting unusual stones.
How much were those stones actually worth?
I do not know.
Maybe some of them really were valuable.
Maybe they were just rocks.
It does not matter anymore.
What matters to me is that this man, who spent much of his life drifting from place to place, could live without a house, without furniture, without many clothes, but still dragged a sack of books and stones wherever he went.
Maybe those things were his home.
—
There was nothing particularly dramatic about how Big Guy and I became friends.
Not long after we met, he found an opportunity to go out of state and was trying to decide whether to take it.
By coincidence, I had seen some related information online and helped him find a direct contact.
It saved him a little money in agency fees.
Big Guy was delighted.
And from that moment on, he basically decided I was his friend.
So if you want to calculate the price of our friendship, it was pretty cheap.
A few dozen dollars.
Later he left the state.
I stayed in Los Angeles.
Not long after that, something bad happened to me.
The cash I had with me was stolen.
I had only recently arrived in America and barely understood how anything worked.
Suddenly I was almost completely broke.
I did not know many people.
A place to sleep cost money.
Food cost money.
I did not even know how I was going to get through the next day.
Someone at the boarding house eventually told Big Guy what had happened.
I did not expect him to help me.
He did not have much money himself.
But he called me.
He said he would lend me $500.
I asked him:
“Where did you get the money?”
He said he had found a way to get some money in advance.
Then he gave me a transfer number and told me to go to the Money Center at Walmart.
The worst part was that at the time I did not even want to spend money on the bus.
So I walked a long way to Walmart.
And finally picked up that $500.
Five hundred dollars does not sound like an extraordinary amount of money now.
But $500 from someone who has money and $500 from someone who barely has any are two completely different things.
Especially when you have only known each other for a few days.
I have remembered that ever since.
—
Later, when things were not working out for me in Los Angeles, I went to find Big Guy.
I took a Greyhound bus to Denver.
The trip lasted about a day and a night.
By the time I arrived, it was already dark.
Big Guy came to pick me up in an ancient red Chevrolet pickup truck.
Then we kept driving farther and farther away from the city.
Once we got out into the countryside, there were only narrow roads, fields, trees, streams, and darkness.
It was winter.
That was probably the first time I understood that America could also be this empty.
We stayed in a house far out in the countryside.
It had plenty of rooms.
But I was a coward.
I did not want to sleep alone in the middle of nowhere.
There were wolves out there.
So I stayed in the same room as Big Guy.
He took the bed.
I slept on the floor.
For a while, we spent a lot of time at a large yard filled with construction materials and discarded supplies.
There were piles of wood, stones, and all kinds of miscellaneous leftovers from other places.
We spent our days slowly sorting and organizing everything.
One thing I still remember clearly was the forklift.
Big Guy could barely fit inside.
It was not that he did not know how to use it.
He was simply too big.
At 2.06 meters tall, squeezing himself into that cab was not easy.
Denver winters could drop below minus ten degrees Celsius.
It kept snowing.
My health was not good.
Big Guy had high blood pressure.
Two sick men messing around in the freezing cold.
But our expectations were incredibly low at the time.
A place to sleep.
Something to eat.
A life that could keep moving forward.
That was enough.
When you really do not have many choices, the standard for happiness can become very low.
—
At night, Big Guy liked lamb dumplings.
He was actually pretty good at making them.
Rolling the wrappers, filling them, folding them.
Fast.
I was not picky.
As long as there was something to eat, I was satisfied.
One day when we were off, it was snowing outside.
We found an old metal barrel and made a fire in the yard to grill meat.
The flames were high.
Snow kept falling around us.
I took a picture of Big Guy.
Then I casually asked:
“Who are you going to send that picture to?”
He paused.
Then he said there really was not anyone to send it to.
He told me he did not have many real friends and had not properly stayed in contact with his family for years.
He lost phones all the time.
His phone numbers kept changing.
Eventually the connections just disappeared.
I said that since we were not doing anything anyway, why not see if he could still find his mother?
Fortunately, he still remembered her phone number.
We messed around with the phone for a while.
And somehow we actually reached her.
He took the phone back into the house and video-called his mother.
I stayed outside and kept grilling meat.
When he came back out later, he looked genuinely happy.
He told me what had happened in his family over the years.
He also talked about his sister.
He still complained about her.
But from the way he talked, it was obvious that he cared about her.
I barely remember what kind of meat we grilled that day.
But I still remember the way he looked after reconnecting with his family.
A man who had wandered around the world for more than twenty years finally saw his mother again through a phone screen in the snow outside Denver.
Looking back, that may have been one of the few times I genuinely helped him.
Because he helped me far more.
—
Later, there was a time when my body simply could not take it anymore.
I was shaking from the cold.
The room itself was already warm.
Big Guy could sit there shirtless.
I put on all my clothes and wrapped myself in blankets.
I was still cold.
I got scared.
I felt that I could not keep going like that.
So I told him:
“Let’s go back to Los Angeles.”
Looking back, that was not entirely fair to him.
He was doing fine there.
He was not bothered by the cold.
There was no real reason for him to leave just because I could not handle it.
But he did not argue with me.
He agreed.
A lot of other problems happened afterward, but eventually the two of us got back on another Greyhound bus and spent more than twenty hours returning to Los Angeles.
He could have let me leave by myself.
He came with me.
I remember that too.
—
In October 2017, I nearly died again.
I was hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis.
Not long after arriving at the hospital, I lost consciousness.
I was unconscious for eleven days.
Obviously, I cannot personally know everything that happened during those eleven days.
Later, I learned that Big Guy had gone to find two church pastors we knew and asked them to come to the hospital and pray for me.
At the time, I was alone in America.
My family was not there.
If I had actually died, I had no idea who would have dealt with everything afterward.
But Big Guy was still there.
Eventually, I woke up.
I am not going to say that somebody prayed and therefore I woke up.
There is no way to prove something like that.
But one thing can be said with certainty:
**When I was unconscious and could no longer do anything for myself, there was still someone who did not simply leave me there.**
That person was Xue Anian.
—
Big Guy actually had a terrible temper.
He was irritable.
Stubborn.
If he did not like someone, he would say so.
Things that could have been simple somehow became complicated around him.
And he was not the kind of person who listened just because somebody gave him advice.
So I do not want to turn him into a perfect man simply because he is dead.
Dead people do not need lies in order to deserve remembrance.
He smoked.
He drank.
He was stubborn.
He had a bad temper.
All of that was him.
But there was something else about him that I appreciate more as I get older.
He genuinely did not seem to judge people by how much money they had, where they lived, or what kind of status they held.
Later, when his health had already become very poor, friends told me he had gone through serious heart surgery and returned to Los Angeles.
By then he was no longer the Big Guy who had once worried about paying for a cheap bed.
But he still spent time with homeless people.
Drinking beer.
Sleeping on the grass.
Cooking food in an alley.
Someone told him he should stop hanging around with homeless people.
Big Guy snapped back.
The meaning was simple:
**If you look down on homeless people, then you are looking down on me, Xue Anian.**
Years ago, I probably would have thought he was just being stubborn again.
Now I understand him a little better.
He had lived through too many different versions of life.
Athlete.
University student.
Translator.
Traveler.
A man staying in cheap boarding houses.
A man living among ordinary people on the margins.
He probably understood better than most that a person’s circumstances can change very quickly.
Today people may call you teacher, athlete, boss.
Tomorrow nobody may know who you are.
Today you sleep in a house.
Tomorrow you may sleep in a car.
A person’s circumstances can fall very quickly.
But the person is still the same person.
—
There is another story that I did not personally witness.
Friends told me about it later.
There was an elderly man named Charlie, a veteran who was old and confined to a wheelchair.
Charlie wanted to write down the story of his life.
But he could not do it by himself.
When Big Guy learned about this, he volunteered to help him.
Charlie talked.
Big Guy organized everything on a computer.
They apparently worked on it for several months.
I do not know whether they ever finished it, because by then I had already left Los Angeles.
When I first heard the story, my reaction was basically:
Big Guy is meddling in other people’s business again.
Now, when I think about it, it feels completely different.
Because what I am doing today is almost exactly what he once did.
He helped an old man preserve the traces of a life.
Now Big Guy is dead.
And it is my turn to preserve his.
What happens if nobody writes about Xue Anian?
Give it another few decades.
Fewer and fewer people will remember him.
Phone numbers stop working.
Photos end up forgotten on some old hard drive.
His books disappear.
Nobody knows where those stones went.
And eventually the people who knew him grow old and die too.
At some point, maybe nobody will even say the name “Xue Anian” anymore.
That is how most ordinary people disappear from the world.
Not all at once on the day they die.
They disappear slowly afterward, as they are forgotten piece by piece.
—
Big Guy once told me about a dream he had.
It was not even a very extravagant dream.
He wanted a small sailboat.
He wanted to sail north along the California coast from Los Angeles.
All the way toward Northern California.
He wanted to find a place with forests.
Ocean.
Trees.
Then build or find a small cabin.
He imagined spending his days lying on the boat reading.
Or hanging a hammock in the woods and reading there.
The two of us actually talked seriously about this ridiculous dream.
He would travel by sea.
I would drive along the coast by road.
The car would carry food and other supplies.
We would use solar panels for electricity.
We would stay in touch by radio.
When the weather was good, we would keep moving.
If there was strong wind or heavy rain, we would stop.
There was no hurry.
Look at the ocean during the day.
Find somewhere to sleep at night.
Two men who did not have much money at the time talked about it as if we were about to leave next week.
Later, life slowly changed.
But that plan never happened.
And then one day it became something that could never happen.
Because Big Guy was gone.
—
I do not want to invent the story of how he died.
I only know part of it.
Big Guy had high blood pressure.
By the end of his life, his health had become seriously troubled.
Friends later told me that he had undergone major heart surgery.
Afterward, he returned to Los Angeles.
But I do not currently have complete records showing exactly what day he died, exactly where he died, or what the official cause of death was.
If I do not know, then I do not know.
There is no reason to invent an ending just to make a memorial story feel complete.
His life already contained enough stories.
—
Over the years, I often suddenly think about people who have died or simply disappeared from my life.
Their disappearance usually comes without ceremony.
Yesterday they were there.
Then suddenly they were not.
Big Guy was like that too.
I still think about that huge sack.
The old books and stones inside it.
The ancient red pickup truck.
The snow in Denver.
The lamb dumplings.
His 2.06-meter body barely fitting into a forklift cab.
And the $500 I received when I had just arrived in America and everything seemed to be going wrong.
Big Guy was not a perfect person.
Neither am I.
There are not many perfect people in this world anyway.
If a memorial article has to turn every dead person into someone selfless, noble, glorious, and morally flawless, then I think that almost kills the person a second time.
Because the real Xue Anian was not like that.
The real Big Guy cursed.
He drank.
He was stubborn.
He did things other people could not understand.
He also gave $500 to someone he had barely known when he did not have much money himself.
He went looking for people when his friend lay unconscious in a hospital.
He left with someone whose body could no longer keep going.
He helped an old man in a wheelchair organize the story of his life.
And he seriously dreamed about a sailboat he could not afford.
All of those things mixed together.
That is a person.
—
He once sat in front of a computer and helped another old man preserve the story of an entire life.
Maybe it never occurred to him that one day he himself would become the person who needed someone else to write his story down.
So now it is my turn.
I do not know how many people will ever read this.
Dozens.
A few.
Maybe one day I will be the only person who occasionally opens it again.
It does not matter.
At least these words will remain:
There was once a man named Xue Anian.
He was from Beijing.
He was exceptionally tall.
He loved books.
He collected stones.
He traveled through many places.
His temper was not very good.
He was not what most people would call a successful man.
But when someone he had only recently met became completely broke, he was willing to give him $500.
He once dreamed of having a small boat.
Sailing north.
Finding a place with ocean and trees.
That dream never came true.
But Xue Anian was here.
I knew him.
I remember him.
So at least for now,
he has not completely disappeared.
Leave a Reply