The Fat Years (8 page)

I knew it was now time for me to take care of her, but I couldn’t support us on part-time work alone. So I did something that I hoped Miaomiao would forgive me for—I secretly began to sell off our cats and dogs, beginning with the new kittens and puppies. Of course, I didn’t sell them to the dog-meat dealers. Because the economy was good, many people had started to keep household cats and dogs again. I was already very good at breeding and raising them. I would raise a few and sell off a few. We always had cats and dogs in the house, and Miaomiao would feed whichever ones she saw because she loved them all equally.

I still practiced my guitar for three hours a day. Some nights, I would tell Miaomiao I was going out to listen to music, but she wouldn’t respond. I took a long bus trip to Wudaokou and went to some places Miaomiao used to take me where I could see live performances. I felt pretty bad if I didn’t get to listen to live music. I would always meet some vaguely remembered people there and played a few numbers with them. They often told me how much they liked my Spanish guitar and if they needed a guitarist for one of their gigs they would ask me to join them. Then I went home and practiced even harder—mastering all the chords and techniques you taught me, Miaomiao—and waiting to go to Wudaokou to perform.

I never imagined that something would happen to me the first night I went on stage.

When I got a call asking me to perform, I prepared dinner for you and our cats and dogs at five o’clock, then said good-bye and took off for Wudaokou. As usual the performance would end too late for me to get home, so afterward I was going to find a place to take a nap and wait for the first bus back in the morning. This time when I went into town, I went first to a small restaurant in Lanqiying to have something to eat. The place was small and crowded, with little room between the tables. There was a man and a woman at the next table and the man was talking nonstop in an accent just like that Taiwanese variety-show host. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about, but suddenly the woman started talking in a Beijing accent. Then I realized that she was actually cursing the government.

Ever since China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began two years ago, I’ve noticed that everyone was getting pretty strange—everyone I met was extremely happy and you would hardly ever hear anyone say anything unpleasant. I couldn’t figure out why everyone was so weird, so I just pretended to be happy, too. So I had a very unusual feeling when I heard this auntie cursing the government. But I never imagined that the Taiwanese guy would actually start having a go at her. “Your government is wonderful,” he said, “they take such good care of you. You mainlanders don’t know how to be grateful. You think it’s an easy thing to feed 1.3 billion people? What right do you have to criticize the government? What do you women know anyway? …” Maybe it was because he kept saying “you” and “we” that it made me feel uncomfortable. When I’d paid my bill and was about to leave, I noticed that his ass was only half on his chair, and so I deliberately bumped into his chair on the way out. He fell on the floor, and I just walked on out the door without even looking back. I didn’t see anyone rushing out after me either.

I went on to the little restaurant called Five Flavors where I was due to play, and the band performed pretty well. The atmosphere was fantastic, and I made two hundred yuan. Then the guys in the band invited me to drink some beers with them, to celebrate my first live performance, they said. It was two in the morning when we finally broke up.

I thought I’d just tough it out until dawn, but I was a little sleepy because of all the beer, so I sat down against the wall of a building near the bus stop to get a little shut-eye.

I had just closed my eyes, when five or six people started beating me all over with wooden clubs. I didn’t even have time to fight back. Was it that Taiwanese guy come back for revenge? I’m pretty strong, but I really couldn’t take it. Then the gang suddenly cleared off. I couldn’t breathe, and my left arm felt like it was broken. I was lying on my right arm and I couldn’t get my asthma inhaler out of my trouser pocket. Just then someone walked by, and I moaned and gestured for him to help me get the inhaler out of my pocket, but he just didn’t understand. I knew I was going to die.

Miaomiao, at that time all I could think was, If I die who’s going to take care of you? And what will happen to our cats and dogs? Miaomiao, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been so reckless, I shouldn’t have knocked that guy’s chair. If I die now, I kept thinking, who’ll take care of you? What will happen to our cats and dogs?

Suddenly, somehow, I had my inhaler against my mouth and knew that I wasn’t going to die. I’m strong—they can beat me, but they can’t kill me.

When I woke up, I was lying in a hospital bed. I heard the nurse calling, “Hey, the boy you brought in is waking up!” Then an older man came up to my bed. I didn’t know him. “Please get my trousers,” I mustered enough strength to say. He brought them over. I asked him to take five hundred renminbi out of the pocket. Then I asked him for paper and pen and wrote down Miaomiao’s address in Huairou, the brand name of the pet food we use, and how much to buy. Also some flour and eggs, and so on, and asked him to buy them for me and take them to Miaomiao. I didn’t know whether that man would take off with my money or be willing to go to Huairou. I couldn’t even really understand why he’d stayed around at the hospital waiting for me to wake up. I couldn’t be bothered with all that. My only worry was what might happen to you if you ran out of food.

The next morning, he came back and told me he had delivered the groceries. He said a woman took them in, and when he told her I was in the hospital, she just smiled slightly and nodded. She offered him some cookies. “You have quite a collection of cats and dogs at home,” he said. I was very relieved when I heard that.

He came to see me again that afternoon. “Why are you looking after me?” I asked. He said that when he saw me lying on the ground panting for breath and fumbling for my pocket, he realized I was asthmatic. He was, too, and had been taking corticosteroids for a long time, so he took my inhaler out of my pocket.

“Since I take corticosteroids, too,” he went on, “I wanted to know what it was like for other people with asthma.”

“What do you want to know?”

“To see if you think other people are different from you.”

“Of course they’re different. They don’t have asthma!”

“Are they happy?”

When he said that, I felt like I’d received an electric shock. It’s not that I’m not happy. I haven’t been unhappy since I started living with Miaomiao a few years ago. She doesn’t talk to me now, but we’re still not unhappy. But for the last two years, I’ve felt that there is something different about the people I meet. I can’t say exactly what it is, but they seem to be unusually happy. Whatever it is, I feel like I’m different from them. Even when we’re happy, we have a different sort of happiness.

He watched me intently, waiting for my answer, so I nodded.

He looked as excited as if he’d just hit the jackpot, then he glanced around like he was afraid someone was spying on us.

“I’ve finally found the answer,” he said. “It’s only those of us who are on asthma medication who are not high. This is our secret.”

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

“Have the people around you all forgotten that month?” he asked.

“What month?”

“The month when the world economy went into crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began.”

I didn’t understand.

“Doesn’t everybody say that the two events—the world economy going into crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially starting—happened simultaneously with no time at all in between?” he asked. “But there was actually a one-month gap between those two events, or, more precisely, there were twenty-eight days, counting from the first working day after the spring holidays.”

He continued: “Do you find that when you talk about the whole country being in turmoil, the panic buying of food, the army entering the city, the Public Security forces cracking down, and the entire population receiving the bird flu vaccine, nobody remembers these things?” I guess he said all this because I was slow to respond.

I started thinking how true it was that nobody talked about these things anymore. It certainly was like they thought such things had never taken place, but I didn’t know if they really had forgotten.

“Then I guess you’ve forgotten, too,” he said as he sat down and hung his head. “I was wrong. It was so much wishful thinking.”

“Uncle,” I said, “I remember.”

“You remember?” His face lit up.

“Yes. I remember everything that happened that year.”

He still looked at me skeptically.

“I remember running around all over buying up pet food, and I remember being afraid to go outside during the security crackdown.”

“That’s wonderful, wonderful. Thank God I’ve finally found somebody who remembers!” he exclaimed. “What’s your name, little brother?”

“Zhang Dou.”

“Little brother Zhang Dou, I’m Fang Caodi, but you can call me Old Fang. From now on, you’re my good brother, a brother closer than a flesh-and-blood brother—because you’re the only brother of mine who remembers what happened that month. You absolutely must not forget the things you remember now. We’ve got to find that lost month.”

I would do whatever he said because he’d saved me and Miaomiao and our cats and dogs. I also said to myself, “You must never forget that you are a stray that Miaomiao took in, and Miaomiao treats you better than anybody else.”

I’m Wei Guo, twenty-four years old.

I have not kept a diary for a long time, but today this diary has to be written down as a historical record.

Today, I made a great stride toward my life goal because today I became an official member of
the SS Study Group. I feel so proud, because I am its youngest member. The SS Study Group brings together political and business circles. Its formal members include government officials of vice-ministerial rank, army officers of major-general rank, directors of major state-owned enterprises, chairmen of sovereign funds, and leaders of China’s top-100 private businesses, as well as a few professors and institutional heads from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and key universities. In fact, our network of connections extends all the way up to the Heavenly Court.

We are not ivory-tower bookworms. We study political and legal thought and scholarship concerning statecraft, and how to assist the state in governing the nation. Our motto is “perfect wisdom and courage”—we promote a martial spirit, heroism, and the robust qualities of manliness. We constitute a new generation of superior men with a sense of mission. In this age of mediocrity without any sense of honor, we courageously affirm that we are the genuine spiritual aristocracy of China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.

Of course, not all our members come from revolutionary families—some of our academic members are from commoner or intellectual families—but most do. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a judge of the Republic and I grew up in a big courtyard full of people from political and legal circles. Still, I could be regarded as the one with the least illustrious background in the Group.

Perhaps I should be thankful to Professors X, Y, & Z—especially to Professor X—because they were the ones who nominated me to be a member-in-waiting a year or so ago. Thus, I was finally able to become an official member today. Professor X brags that he’s the one who spotted me first. I let him think so, but in actual fact when I was studying first-year law, I investigated all my professors to see which one had the best future prospects, and which one would go the furthest in the shortest period of time. And
I
chose Professor X.

I made the right choice, too. Professors X, Y, & Z are the founders of the SS Study Group. Their position is that ideas and power should be united in order to make China stronger. Because they had already mastered the Western and Chinese classics, they were able to attract to the Group those government officials, army officers, and business executives interested in political thinking. X, Y, & Z want to become
state tutors, and they believe that within ten years their ideas will control the fate of the nation. All this is in perfect accord with my own ten-year plan.

Of the three, X controls an important scholarly journal, has the widest circle of connections, and is the most popular with the media. He has the biggest mouth, too, and is rumored in the academic world to have a national security background. Y has the highest academic standing, is the leader in his field, serves as dean of a newly established faculty in a key university in the south, and is quite well-known in overseas academic circles. Z lectures to a research class on national security strategy at the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University in Beijing. This research class is made up of civil and military leaders and includes provincial officials as well as high-ranking officers.

Z is the more profound individual, farsighted in his views, and he is the one who understands me best. There were two particular initiatives of mine that I reported only to him, and when he didn’t respond at first, I was afraid that I had been mistaken about him and regretted being too impetuous. It was Z, however, who argued in the Selection Committee that they should ignore their rules and allow me to become an official member of the Group even though I hadn’t finished my studies. X also claimed credit for this, telling me that he and Z argued together on my behalf, otherwise I would have had to remain a member-in-waiting for another three to five years.

Youth is too valuable a commodity, so how could I allow myself to be so easily held back by them? I intend to actively accelerate the achievement of my goals. I discovered that Z was the key to my success, because he has a secret relationship with the one person whom every member of the Group calls big brother, Ban Cuntou. Ban Cuntou is a genuine Red aristocrat. On the surface, he is supposed to be an investor in overseas projects, but in point of fact he is intimately connected with all the legitimate and illegitimate activities of the Party, the government, and the military establishment. He is, as we say, able to “communicate with Heaven itself,” and I believe that he will eventually become one of our nation’s heads of state. Everyone in the Group is well connected, but they all exhibit reverence and fear when talking to big brother Ban Cuntou. Big brother Ban Cuntou and Z are the real souls of the Group—although I don’t believe in the soul. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get close to Ban Cuntou, and so far I have not figured out any way to attract his attention. So I’ll just keep working on Z for the time being.