The main character lives in the end, and he's able to have a relationship with the one he loves after decades-- yet when I first read it, I cried out of genuine pain.

Brother is about an older brother who fell in love with a mentally challenged younger brother who only had eyes for him. It's not a novel that fetishizes incest: Xu Ping's guilt and conflicting emotions over his feelings is lifelong and will never go away. Here is a boy, a teen, a man entrusted with a younger brother who simply lives in a very different world-- a bearer of such heavy responsibility, yet uncontrollable emotions bring an entirely different level of weight onto young shoulders. He struggles with these feelings, and its reciprocal doesn't bring simplistic joy-- there's taboo and he holds the moral responsibility for two. It's a reciprocated love, but it's a love so heavy for one person to bear alone.

Brother, Didi, is about an older brother trying to live and carrying his younger brother through life while at it. Set in the 80's and early 2000's, there's a deliberate dated feel to it, an old-movie faint sepia tint and color grading. But that marked time intentionally adds weight onto the readers: set in years that actually happened, we know that homosexuality was even more not accepted, much less incest. We know that it was a heavier shame. We know it was a time where children raising other children was more common, where adulthood can set in so early despite the young minds drowning aren't yet biologically developed well enough for it. Xu Ping could still be out there, ground down to the bones, still taking care of Xu Zheng.

There's a passage in the novel that to me spoke the core of it all:

Each of us loses the naivety in our hearts as we grow up, some earlier than others. Some are like lemons being grated for zest, slowly being ground into the shape of an adult's by the forces of life. Others are like porcelain shattering on the floor into a gazillion pieces. They have to crawl back up and try their best to piece themselves back together, and in this process it's not unusual to lose a piece here or gain a piece there. By the end of it all, each will have become a brand new person.

Our protagonist, Xu Ping, was now only eighteen years old, thirty three days away from the nation-wide post-secondary entrance examination. He was presently racing through the city street in the dark of night.

So many years later, it still feels like Xu Ping is presently racing through the city street in the dark of night. Perhaps racing with him now is Xu Zheng. Whether the journey in this dark night is less painful with such company, only one can answer for themselves.