The Fat Years (15 page)

Being with this foreign boyfriend, I thought, has definitely given her a different perspective.

“My boyfriend also takes drugs,” she continued. “Once we got high and had a big discussion about Jane Austen. It was fantastic. After that we became very close. You remember that year when there was a big crackdown? When I was living in Wangjing district? I knew someone might report me to the police, so I hid in my boyfriend’s place in the diplomatic quarter. I didn’t dare go out for several weeks—otherwise, who knows if I’d still be alive today. You see, you probably don’t remember?”

“My memory of that period is very hazy …” I said.

“Today, a normal person doesn’t remember,” she said, “those of us who remember are the abnormal ones. This is why my boyfriend and I can’t stand it. For the past two years in Beijing, it’s been harder and harder finding the gear we need. It’s like there are fewer and fewer dealers. Early this year, we went to a mountainous region of Yunnan to see if things might be a little better there. We discovered that the people there were a little more like us. Of course we ran into a lot of junkies and some of them were really evil, but there were some nice ones as well. And then there were the mountain people—none of them had that small-small form of high that the plains people have. My boyfriend calls that small-small high ‘high lite-lite.’ Sometimes he exaggerates and says that everybody now looks like those happy revolutionary workers or soldiers and peasants in those Cultural Revolution posters. Living among them, you probably don’t notice it. It’s not like that just in Beijing, but everywhere we went all over the country, everybody is high lite-lite, except in those mountainous areas or far off in the Northwest. My boyfriend and I talked it over for a long time and finally decided to move to Yunnan near National Highway 320, along the border with Myanmar.” She went silent and waited for me to react.

“I know someone who feels the same as you two do,” I said. “She can’t stand high lite-lite either.”

“Really?”

“She takes antidepressants.”

“Maybe antidepressants have the same effect,” Little Dong said thoughtfully.

“Maybe so,” I said. “She is that second road I’ve just asked the tarot cards about.”

T
he Age of Satisfaction!”—Zhuang Zizhong, one of the venerable founding editors of the
Reading Journal,
often pondered this term. He heartily congratulated himself on having lived long enough to see this day, on having survived China’s various Ages of Trouble to bear witness to this Age of Happiness—China’s Golden Age of Prosperity and Satisfaction. He often told himself the most important thing in life was to live for as long as possible. All the other founding editors of the
Reading Journal
were dead and gone, and he was one of the few remaining greats. All the glory belonged to him now.

During the spring festival, the Politburo member in charge of cultural propaganda visited him at home and even brought along a CCTV reporter. Although this could not compare with earlier times when the celebrated Ji Xianlin received visits from the president, it was still a great event in the cultural and publishing world. Zhuang Zizhong was neither a great classical scholar nor a prize-winning novelist. A few years earlier, if you had heard that a Politburo member was going to visit the home of the aged founder of a scholarly journal, you would have said it was a joke. From this event, we could see how much importance this current Politburo attached to intellectuals and thinkers; this was something we had not seen since the end of the 1980s.

At the beginning of the
Reading Journal
New Year reception, Zhuang Zizhong modestly told everyone that all the honor was due to the
Reading Journal
itself. All the efforts of successive editors over more than thirty years had not been in vain, and the
Reading Journal
had finally received positive recognition from the leaders of Party Central. He recalled how the Party had for some time misunderstood the journal and censured it for its tone and direction, and later when they had patched things up with the Party, the latter still didn’t genuinely trust the journal. All that had changed in the last two years. First off, all the previous chief editors and assistant editors had miraculously and harmoniously been cooperating with one another. Then all the journal’s writers, who previously had held a variety of positions on how the nation should be ruled, suddenly reached a unified consensus. After the new joint editors organized a wide-ranging discussion seminar on “China’s New Prosperity” two years earlier, the
Reading Journal
again regained its briefly lost place as the leading scholarly journal of the nation’s cultural and intellectual world. It also came to be seen by the Party leadership as extremely important.

Zhuang Zizhong had made ten national policy suggestions concerning China’s New Era of Prosperity:

All these positions, now firmly established principles, seemed like perfectly unexceptional common sense. But why did the
Reading Journal
have to argue them for so many years before reaching a favorable consensus? No matter what, Zhuang Zizhong believed,
Reading
had now received positive recognition from the Party, which meant he had the Party’s affirmation of his own devotion to the Party and the Nation. Zhuang Zizhong felt that to be the greatest achievement of his later years.

Now he was sitting in his wheelchair as his new young wife wheeled him toward his new car. Ever since the Politburo member had visited him during the Lunar New Year festival, it had been decided that he should be provided with an official car and driver. One of the official duties of this chauffeur is to drive Zhuang Zizhong every Saturday afternoon to browse around the Sanlian Bookstore.

As Zhuang Zizhong came out of his house, Lao Chen, the Taiwanese writer long resident in Beijing, had just walked out of the Happiness Village Number Two compound and begun his daily afternoon stroll to one of the three nearby Starbucks coffee shops. Since it was Saturday, the Sanlitun Swire Village and the Dongzhi Menwai Ginza Starbucks would definitely be too crowded; his only choice was the Starbucks in the PCCW Tower Mall of Plenty on Gongti North Road. He could only hope that all those white-collar yuppies would be in the gym and not at Starbucks occupying all the comfy chairs and surfing the net, using up all the wireless connection points.

The only unusual thing that day was that, in contrast to the previous two years, Lao Chen was not very happy as he left his house. His feeling of happiness had deserted him. You could even say that as Lao Chen came out the door, he was feeling pretty miserable.

Ever since Little Xi had left his Happiness Village apartment, Lao Chen had not felt good. And Little Dong’s departure from Beijing had only made him feel worse.

A few days after Little Xi had left, Lao Chen went to Wudaokou to visit Big Sister Song. He carefully chose ten o’clock in the morning, when the talented young Wei Guo would probably be in school. He wanted to ask her if she’d heard anything from Little Xi. Lao Chen approached the back door of the Five Flavors restaurant and skulked around, trying to avoid being noticed until Big Sister Song came to open up. He was wearing a beige trench coat of the sort worn by the Hong Kong comic actor Ng Man Tat when playing a private detective, or Law Kar-ying in the role of a sexual deviant, a flasher. Obviously, Lao Chen was not at all thinking of himself in this light. In his mind, when he put on his trench coat he looked more like Hollywood tough guy Humphrey Bogart or the author Graham Greene. Because of this misperception, when Lao Chen nervously showed himself to greet Big Sister Song, she screamed in fright.

After calming her down, Lao Chen asked if she knew any way to contact Little Xi. Big Sister Song pulled a note out of her coat pocket. “I just knew you would come by. A while back when I could still send her e-mails, Little Xi asked me if she should see you, and I told her she should. After that, she didn’t tell me whether she’d seen you or not. Two days ago, I got this text message. I don’t know where it was sent from, but I copied it down because I had this feeling you’d turn up here.”

“What do these letters mean?” Lao Chen said, looking at the note with four Romanized Chinese words—
mai zi bu si.

“I don’t know,” said Big Sister Song.

“Did Little Xi send this to you?”

“Definitely, she must have.”

Lao Chen was only half convinced by Big Sister Song until she took his hands in hers, bent her knees in a half bow, and implored, “Lao Chen, you have to save Little Xi, you have to save her.”

“Get up, Big Sister, get up,” Lao Chen said, helping her to her feet.

Big Sister Song started to cry, and Lao Chen began to tear up, too, so he took out a white handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes.

“Lao Chen, I know you’ll save Little Xi,” Big Sister Song said. “You’re a good man, Lao Chen, you’ll save her.”

“I’ll do my best,” Lao Chen said. “I’ll do everything I can.”

When he got home, Lao Chen sat down in front of his computer and stared blankly at that note:
mai zi bu si.
With the previous message, he had immediately seen that
feichengwuraook
meant “If you’re not sincere, don’t bother, okay?” But what did this
mai zi bu si
mean? “Sell appearance cloth thread?” “Bury letter enrich posterity?” He tried out some characters, but the problem with Chinese Romanization is that it does not indicate the tone, so each sound can stand for many different characters.

Lao Chen remembered that when he was a child living in Tiu Keng Leng, his mother worked as a cook in a Protestant church. On Sunday mornings she would take him to the church service because afterward they were given a bag of white flour donated by the people of the United States. His mother would usually doze through the service, but he liked to listen to the pastor’s sermon. Once the pastor quoted from what Jesus had said about a single grain of wheat: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will be alone, but if it dies, it will bring forth much fruit.” In other words, a grain of wheat that falls into the ground does not really die—
mai zi bu si.
Had Little Xi changed her Internet name to
maizibusi,
“The grain does not die”? And yet he couldn’t remember her ever being remotely religious.

Lao Chen looked up the four characters
mai zi bu si
on the net and several literary and religious links came up. For example, a book on Zhang Ailing and her banal “boudoir realism” titled
The Grain Fallen on the Ground Does Not Die
by a Harvard professor, Wang Dewei, and a Chinese translation,
Maizi busi,
of André Gide’s 1924 autobiographical novel
Si le grain ne meurt.
Lao Chen looked at a dozen or so Web sites, but didn’t find any that appeared to be by Little Xi. He didn’t have the patience to look at any more. His promise to Big Sister Song that he would try to save Little Xi was beginning to weigh on his shoulders like Jesus’s cross. Then again, no matter how heavyhearted he felt, life must go on—so he went out in search of his customary Starbucks Lychee Black Dragon Latte.

What Lao Chen didn’t expect was that Fang Caodi, who once used to be Fang Lijun, had been waiting for him on Xindong Road for almost two hours. Fang Caodi had run into him there before, taken his card, and sent him an e-mail, but Lao Chen had not responded. This time, Fang decided to wait for him at the same spot and feign another chance encounter.

By now, Fang Caodi could almost tell by a person’s appearance whether he or she was a “nonforgetter,” like he and Zhang Dou were. The last time he’d met Lao Chen, his leisurely, contented expression certainly didn’t put him in their camp. But Fang Caodi had always thought that Lao Chen was an intelligent guy, and Fang hardly ever changed his opinion of anyone. He was especially happy today to see Lao Chen coming out of the Happiness Village Number Two compound with a frown and an extremely worried look on his face.

“Master Chen,” Fang called as he took off his baseball cap and began walking toward him. “It’s me, Fang Caodi.” He patted his bald head as if to refresh Lao Chen’s memory.

“Master Chen, you look great today,” Fang said.

“Old Fang, I’m not really in the mood for talking today,” said Lao Chen.

“Not feeling good today, Lao Chen?” said Fang. “That’s okay. How could you feel good? A whole month is missing.”

“I really have things to do, Old Fang,” said Lao Chen. “I’ll talk to you some other time.”

“Where’re you going, Master Chen?”