The Fat Years (5 page)

Just as I expected,
The Chinese EQ
was on the Kingstone bestseller list for six weeks in a row, peaking at number two. To see my work displayed in the place of honor every day in bookstores made me feel great.

By that time I was a celebrated journalist, a novelist, an expert on mainland China, and a self-improvement specialist. I was also a bestselling author, and this status gave real meaning to everything else I wrote. Most people had never read my books and had no idea what I’d written; they just knew that I was a bestselling author. In the 1990s Taiwanese society still had a certain amount of respect for bestselling authors.

My luck held. After the millennium year of 2000, my books were published on the mainland one after another.

Then in 2004, Chen Shuibian was reelected as president. I received a retirement package from the
United Daily
and moved to Beijing.

When I first arrived, I had a feeling of urgency and started to write very industriously. I wrote about Taiwan and Hong Kong culture for the mainland, and about Beijing and Shanghai for Taiwan and Hong Kong. The most important thing I did was to bring out my
Comprehensive Cultural Guide to Beijing
well before the Beijing Olympics. I was interviewed on a China Central TV books program, and thus you could say that I had received Chinese government approval.

At that point there was only one thing that I wanted to do, write my
Ulysses
or
In Search of Lost Time—
my literary masterpiece. In an age when there are no first-rate writers, I still wanted to prove that I was the best of all the second-rate writers. I refused all further requests to write journalism and started to concentrate solely on my novel.

Since then, I have not written a single word.

I have to confess that I don’t have to worry about meeting my living expenses. Western philosophers say that happiness consists in being moderately famous and moderately well-off, but not too famous and not too well-off. I don’t depend on royalties to get by; they don’t amount to much, anyway. The thing is, back in the early 1990s, when I was still working in Hong Kong and planning to get married, I bought a ninety-square-meter apartment on Hong Kong island, in Taikoo Shin. After my girlfriend went to Germany and married a German, I handed the apartment over to an estate agent to rent out for me and returned to Taiwan. Every year after that when we negotiated a new rental agreement, both the rent and the value of the property had soared. When I sold it just before Hong Kong’s 1997 retrocession to China, it was worth almost ten times what I had paid for it. In all my working life I could never have made enough money to buy such an apartment at a later date. When the Asian financial meltdown hit, the Taiwanese dollar depreciated, but fortunately all my money was safely in Hong Kong dollars with the HSBC. In 2004, when I moved to Beijing, I bought three apartments in Happiness Village Number Two, just ahead of the government prohibition on foreigners, including people from Taiwan and Hong Kong, purchasing more than one residence. I lived in one apartment and rented out the other two. I converted all my money to Chinese renminbi and it appreciated in value. As the world economy continued to be hit by wave after wave of crises, only China continued to flourish, and my small earnings were enough to live on quite well.

I’ve worked very hard on my writing, but I have lost all inspiration. It disappeared exactly two years ago, just as official Chinese discourse announced that the global economy had entered a period of crisis while China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy had begun. From that time on, I began to see that everyone in Beijing, and everywhere in China, was living well. I felt so spiritually and materially satisfied that I began to experience an overwhelming feeling of good fortune such as I never had before.

For more than a year, except for the New Year and other holidays, I’d been going to Jian Lin’s firm’s restaurant on the first Sunday of every month to have dinner, drink red wine, and watch old movies. Jian Lin is the owner of the Capital BOBO Properties Corporation. He is a member of the “old three classes”—the three secondary school classes of 1967, 1968, and 1969 that never graduated due to the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, when the college entrance examinations were reinstated, he went to university. He later became an official and often associated with artists and writers. Then he plunged into business in Hainan and somehow made it big in real estate, but he still has an air of culture about him and regards himself as “a scholar and a merchant.” He likes to discuss national affairs, and every year at Chinese New Year he writes a few traditional-style poems and sends them off to his friends and customers.

Jian Lin is a workaholic, but two years ago he started a new custom. He began to have dinner with his friends and family and afterward show an old movie—on the first Sunday of every month. At first his movie evenings were very popular, but gradually his relatives cried off, and then his friends wanted to choose the films they liked before they would show up. By the start of winter, Jian Lin and I were often the only ones there.

After the first time a friend took me along, I became a regular. I had a lot of spare time, I lived fairly nearby and
I loved to watch those post-1949 Chinese films. I hadn’t got to see them in Hong Kong and Taiwan, so it was a new experience for me.

I was the only one who never missed a screening. Jian and I didn’t have any connections on any other level—I didn’t want anything from him and, because I wasn’t especially important, he didn’t have to be on his guard with me; I was the best sort of person for him to have a friendly social relationship with. In the winter, when there was just the two of us, Jian would bring out a bottle of red wine—always the finest-vintage ’82, ’85, or ’89 Bordeaux. Sometimes we’d go through two bottles in one evening. The Taiwanese had started drinking high-quality red wines fifteen years before the mainlanders got in on the act, so I could join him in appreciating his wines, and I would willingly listen to him showing off the enological knowledge he had picked up in books. He had found an ideal wine-drinking partner. But whenever a crowd turned up, I noticed he was pretty parsimonious—for them, he brought out a few bottles of only ordinary vintage. This, to me, indicated our greater friendship.

The only thing that concerned me was that I couldn’t pay him back. That made me feel like a freeloading literary type. Jian Lin always served Bordeaux, never Burgundy. After looking up Burgundy on the net, I told him about it; he seemed curious and wanted to know more. I hit on a plan. When I want back to Taiwan for the Lunar New Year, I looked up my secondary school classmate Ah Yuan.

Ah Yuan is the largest collector of Burgundy in Taiwan. When the global economy hit the skids, Ah Yuan’s wealth shrunk, but his Burgundy collection was still intact. I had never asked Ah Yuan for anything before, but this time I asked him to give me two bottles of good Burgundy. He gladly told me to take a few more bottles, but I declined because of customs duties. I took just two bottles, one white wine and one red.

I sent Jian Lin a short message asking him what was showing the following Sunday. I told him I was bringing a Bâtard-Montrachet 1989 and a Romanée-Conti 1999.

When I took the two bottles over to the restaurant, there weren’t any other guests, just me and Jian Lin. He carefully examined them, exclaiming, “Great wine, great wine … Let’s open it and let it breathe.”

“What’s on tonight?” I asked while he gently poured the red wine into a crystal decanter.

It was the 1964 film
Never Forget Class Struggle,
directed by Xie Tieli. “Have you ever seen it?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? If I’d seen it, Chiang Kai-shek would have had me shot.”

“Those were good times, 1964,” Jian Lin said.
“The Three Years Natural Disaster was over, people’s living conditions were beginning to recover, and the Cultural Revolution had not yet started. But in 1959 Old Mao was unhappy. He had nothing to do after resigning his post as National Chairman, so he put out the slogan ‘Never forget the class struggle.’ And this film responded to his call to remind the masses never to forget that there were still class enemies concealed among the people. It was advance notice of the coming Four Cleanups Movement to cleanse politics, the economy, Party organization, and ideology. It was also a prelude to the Cultural Revolution.”

“I’ve invited my cousin to watch the film and taste your wine,” Jian later said as we were eating.

I didn’t remember ever meeting his cousin and I wasn’t particularly happy about sharing my expensive wine with someone I didn’t know.

Just then a rather stern and pale-faced man with sparse hair came in and greeted Jian Lin as “Elder Brother.”

“This is my cousin, Dongsheng. This is my good friend from Taiwan, Lao Chen.”

“He Dongsheng, we’ve met before,” I said as we shook hands. “It was at the Macao session of the Prosperous China Conference in 1992; you were the representative from Fudan University.”

“Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng said softly.

Jian Lin looked puzzled. “Do you two know each other?”

“Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng repeated.

We all felt a little awkward. “We met twenty years ago,” I said.

A wealthy Taiwanese named Shui Xinghua—meaning “prosperous China”—had set up a foundation that held four Xinghua, or Prosperous China, conferences in the early 1990s. The idea was to invite a dozen or so promising young people from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to get together and exchange ideas and experiences. In Macao in 1992, He Dongsheng was a mainland delegate and I was a Taiwanese delegate. He Dongsheng was just a young scholar at that time and didn’t give us the impression that he was particularly outstanding, but then later he became a high-ranking official in the Communist Party.

We all raised our glasses to each other, and after that we watched the film. Nobody said a word throughout the entire thing except once when Jian Lin commented, “The woman playing the mother-in-law of the counterrevolutionary was really very young at the time. You can still see her quite often these days on TV.”

During the screening, I took a look at He Dongsheng. He seemed to have fallen asleep. Jian Lin was very conscientiously watching the film—he really did love those old Red Classics.

Never Forget Class Struggle
was about an electrical-machinery factory in the Northeast. The workers were all striving to improve production, but then one young worker married a woman with a petit bourgeois family background. She urged her husband to buy himself a suit made of extremely expensive material, costing about 148 renminbi. The young worker’s mother-in-law also urged him to hunt wild ducks during his free time and sell them at a profit on the black market. He took so much time off that his absence from work almost caused a major accident and harmed the national interest. All this was because of a loss of revolutionary vigilance—they had forgotten about the class struggle. At the end of the film, five big, blood-red words filled the screen:
NEVER FORGET THE CLASS STRUGGLE!

“Pretty good,” I said, “interesting, but when young people see it now they probably won’t understand it. They’ll need someone to interpret it for them.”

Suddenly He Dongsheng spoke up. “It’s easy to make them work for eight hours, but it’s hard to control them after those eight hours. Old Mao never solved that problem.”

I was rather surprised that He Dongsheng would come right out and call Mao Zedong “Old Mao.”

“Did you know, after Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Openness’ started,” he continued, “there was a magazine in Tianjin called
After Work
? Eight hours was work time and after eight hours—
after work
—was leisure time, but nobody knew then what to do with leisure time. Socialism had totally transformed work time, but was unable to handle after-work time, the time
after
those eight hours of work …”

“After they work eight hours, let capitalism take care of them,” Jian Lin quipped.

“Yes, definitely,” He Dongsheng continued—the alcohol had loosened him up. “Your Old Mao cannot ask people to grasp revolution and increase production twenty-four hours a day. You have to let people go home and have something tasty to eat, buy some nice clothes, and indulge in some petit bourgeois fun. The people want all this and you can’t deny them it. If you don’t let them enjoy themselves, who’s going to work for you? Just having a good life is not too much to ask.”

Most officials, when they open their mouths, seem to come out only with conventional bureaucratic patter, but what He Dongsheng was saying sounded quite normal.

He began to grow on me.

After expressing his opinions, he gloomily sipped his wine.

“This is very good wine, very good wine,” Jian Lin said again after a while. “It’s better now than it was before. The flavor has completely opened out. We’ve been mixing white and red, and it still tastes great.”

We all fell silent again. I thought He Dongsheng would leave after the film ended, but he just sat there with us. He didn’t speak anymore and he didn’t touch the huge assortment of snacks that Jian served with the wine. He just kept on slowly sipping his wine. Jian brought out some big cigars, but we didn’t want any, so he was too embarrassed to smoke alone.

After the bottles and our glasses were all empty, Jian served up some famous Wuyi Dahongpao tea. He Dongsheng didn’t touch it. He didn’t seem to need even any water. It was just about midnight when He Dongsheng stood up and went to the toilet.

“He suffers from insomnia,” Jian Lin whispered. “He doesn’t need any sleep, and I was afraid he’d stay here forever. I can’t stay up all night; these days I go to bed early and get up early.”

“I go to bed early, too—I hate staying up all night.” I recalled that He Dongsheng had dozed off during the film.

“How about I give you a ride home?” said He Dongsheng when he got back.

“There’s no need,” I replied, “I live nearby. I’ll walk home.” Then, without thinking, I asked, “Is your driver still here?” Of course, as a high official, his driver would always be there.