Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  What business insiders didn’t know was that an immortal man had pulled a hair from his head, shouted, “Change!” and produced three copies of himself. For five months, three identical men in hardhats spent their nights digging deep underground, eighteen feet below the forest floor. Above this subterranean cavity, they built a spacious house with cedar siding and picture windows facing north, south, east, and west.

  A man from some faraway place beyond Beijing—from the distant land known as the global economy, the land where everyone spoke the language of money—came to live in the house. This man closely supervised Tang Fei’s day-to-day tasks, and the villagers knew that more would soon come in his wake.

  Zoe and Ming arrived in mid-summer, and lived in the guest quarters of the new house—for Zoe it wasn’t so much a matter of keeping up appearances as that William Sun was so busy he was rarely at home. The house had a fine library, and among the books was a leather-bound edition of the Mahayana Sutras. Behind the book of sutras was a button that transformed one wall panel into an open door. Through the door, thirty steep steps led to an inclined walkway—also accessible via a secret trapdoor in the woods. The incline terminated at a metal door that had a keypad, and it took a highly classified code of seven numbers to open.

  On the other side of the door was a climate-controlled room with a wall of thirty-one computer screens, one for each province and administrative region on mainland China. Brightly colored numbers from 0001 to digits in the hundreds of thousands, scrolled in a continuous loop across the screens. Occasionally, a number blinked, which required a vigilant attendant to zap that number with a remote dose of the New China program. The nanochip was programmed to detect brain waves with particular patterns, patterns of thoughts such as: But wait, I’m the top dog, and my money is more fun if I know the masses envy it. With a click of the mouse, the New China program could infiltrate the brain with a very different message. The program wasn’t active yet, but the three conspirators were almost ready.

  To ensure the safety of Sunshine Village, Ming, William, and Zoe had to get rid of the thugs and thwart the industry that had been their livelihood—opium. The forest on the far side of the Tuo River hid acres and acres of poppies and kept the thugs, the police, and even the former directors of the Sunshine Village Silicon Works in working capital. A man of seventy-two transformations could, as a bird, inspect the farms and forest, and watch transactions behind old cement walls.

  “Opium was initially used as a mild sedative,” Zoe said.

  “And then it turned people into vegetable brains.” William pounded the table with his fist, his eyes molten gold. “Peasants accepted their plight, and emperors ignored everything while they lolled about indulging their appetites. No drugs in the New China.”

  “I used to like to smoke weed with Jeff in college,” Zoe admitted.

  “My love, I hope you’ve given up your childish inclinations. In New China we get high on knowledge, on contemplating the questions and knowing there are no answers. Do you recall the time we spent in the first palace built in the clouds? It reached to infinity itself. We visited, you and I, along with our friend Confucius. The owner offered us white powder from crystal bowls, fragrant little bricks from jade pipes, and the pièce de résistance, A Billion Heavens, a nectar shot from a syringe. We floated in a state of happy delirium from one day to the next. But then the owner informed us that we owed rent for the time we had occupied his house, and it turned out that fifty years had gone by. We started working, with part of our proceeds paying off our debt, forever after. But poor Confucius took to begging to obtain his next fix.”

  Zoe half-remembered a dream she’d had of a wise old sage, in beard and sackcloth, wandering through a world that seemed to have no floor. “Nonny nonpareil, ai ai ai…” the sage had muttered. He’d squatted down and poked his ass, then rubbed his face with yellow shit. This is what happens to philosophers who can’t pay their rent, Zoe had reflected in her dream.

  “We need clear minds and drugs filter everything through a sense of self-absorption,” William went on. “You can fixate on a pretty flower garden but not the people who weed and water them. You might hear musical notes you didn’t know existed before, but you don’t see the lady at the piano pouring her heartbreak into the tune.”

  

  Phase One of the program was scheduled to roll out in November. That month, on a Thursday, as the sun rose above the lead horizon of Beijing, Han Cheng woke up with a hammer pounding his head and a strange sense that his bedroom belonged to someone else. He was wearing the silk pajamas he’d put on the night before and sleeping beneath his satin duvet. His thermostat was set to frigid, as always—he liked the elegance of an indoor chill. All seemed to be as it should. But he’d had a bizarre dream. A doctor had stuck an otoscope in his ear, and Han had said, “I have a new parquet floor but below it is sludge.”

  His wife, Wu Xia, had already fluffed her pillow, and he could smell gunpowder tea brewing. Han stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Wu Xia for a moment. She was dressed, her blouse buttoned to her throat. She used to have long hair, he recalled; she had chopped it off two days after their wedding. She had a fine neck, though, as supple as young bamboo. He started to reach over and kiss her neck.

  “It’s McDonald’s day,” Wu Xia said, and glided just out of his grasp.

  My wife doesn’t like me. The thought blew into Han’s mind and lodged itself like a tumor.

  Every Tuesday and Thursday Han would take his son to McDonald’s on the way to school. That morning Han sat, as usual, in a plastic chair and watched Bo Fu sink his plump little face into breakfast, his world a warm gooey Mount Everest of dough, melted cheese, ham, and eggs. Han tossed a ball of Egg McMuffin wrapping from one hand to another. The hammer beat upon his head again—the lights, that had to be it, fluorescent pinpricks that seemed designed for an inquisition.

  “Can we buy my new bike this weekend?” asked the boy, his lips glistening with oil. “I’ll have my own money.”

  The first grade entrepreneurial fair was tomorrow, and Bo Fu was sure he was going to sell the model airplane he’d made.

  Han’s heart always grew a little larger when he sat in the car and watched his son stride into the schoolyard, his Mickey Mouse backpack swaying side-to-side. Today four boys began jumping around him and they ran off in a flock of five. The other children saw his son as a boy worth playing with. And why not—the child arrived at school in his father’s shiny new Lexus, the one Han had bought after the Sunshine deal. A gleaming champagne exterior with ivory leather seats. Han reached to turn on the fan and hit the emergency light instead. Where was that button he used every day?

  As usual, he arrived in the office before anyone else. The two assistants usually arrived around a quarter to nine, scurrying to their desks in the knowledge that Han was watching. Tom would likely stumble in after nine-thirty looking like he’d barely had time to rinse the red from his eyes, and he’d say, “Oh, what a beautiful morning!” in English to the assistants and make them laugh. Fanny and Tian liked Tom and were afraid of Han. Han was aware of how they ceased their chatter and sat rigid like soldiers whenever he appeared in the front office.

  Fanny was going to be late today. Han knew from experience that she might not arrive until lunchtime, with a million excuses about taking her child to the clinic again. Her little girl had Down syndrome; the photo on her desk of the defective toddler couldn’t possibly be good for the company image, but Han knew everyone would think less of him if he said anything. Fanny kept the photo in a most unprofessional looking pink-and-white porcelain frame with a heart in the upper left-hand corner. Han had been looking for an excuse to let Fanny go just so that he wouldn’t have to look at the awful picture, but she still owed them money from advances on her paycheck, approved by Tom. People who couldn’t afford to take care of life’s curveballs should think twice before having children, though Han knew better than t
o say that aloud too.

  He knew from Harvard Business School that the market was an elegant machine, the way it could self-correct over-valued companies and goods and labor. And Han had earned his right to elegant things. The old planned economy had nearly starved him to death, but the free market didn’t hold people back just because their parents had once been assigned to a forgotten village. The market would forgive Fanny too, if she tried a little; if her labors were worth more than her paycheck, the market would find her and plunk her into a job that paid accordingly.

  Fanny’s desk and the bothersome photograph were right in Han’s line of vision. He thought of getting up and moving the picture a few inches, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He’d read a magazine article recently about an equation that didn’t fit; Nobel prize winning minds had studied it and found there was no answer, 2 plus 2 to the power of 800 divided by xyz and something else was plagued by a random N-cubed that canceled out any solution that the mathematical geniuses of the world came up with. Han’s life had always added up, but this morning he had a strange sensation that if anyone asked him the simplest question—“where is your car parked?” for instance—a million answers would tumble through his head, and not one would be correct. He knew, though it seemed like a disconnected piece of knowledge, that the car was in the usual place, and the keys were in his jacket pocket—one brass key, one steel, shiny little instruments of torture. Why had he just thought that? Han felt his forehead and figured he must be coming down with the flu.

  His computer hit him with yellow lights. In the other hemisphere the Nasdaq had been down at the closing bell, which was less than helpful when he was in the midst of taking several of his companies to their initial public offering. He noticed Fanny arriving, carrying her stockiness like a burden. She sighed with the effort of heaving herself into her chair and rummaged through her cheap canvas handbag. Pulling out a small mirror, Fanny applied lipstick. She wanted to look good for Tom, Han realized, and had a sudden hollow feeling, not unlike he’d experienced in his childhood when he had little more than a cup of thrice-boiled rice to sustain him from morning to dusk. He watched Fanny put away her lipstick. Then her finger traced her daughter’s head in that offending photograph. Good heavens, she wore lipstick for a man who was married and she loved a child who would grow up to be more of an ungainly pet than a daughter.

  Han stared at the photos on his office wall and wondered how it felt to look at a fragment of the world and frame it with your eye, capturing the depth, shadows, and texture. My wife doesn’t like me. My sister and my office assistants don’t like me. Han was composing a mental list of others who didn’t like him when a rat-tat-tat at his door interrupted his dismal litany. Tom appeared in a rumpled sweater, khaki pants, and moccasins. His face was flushed and sweaty and he hadn’t bothered to shave.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what time it is,” said Tom. “I’m hung-over and feeling too good to crunch numbers. I thought about renting a paddleboat, or walking under those dirty willow trees, even though the pollution is yellow today. Then, would you believe, I missed you. You’re a competitive son of a bitch but you’re my whole world five days a week and sometimes six or seven. And Tian and Fanny. And Fanny’s developmentally disabled child that we don’t care one hoot about because her mother is for all practical purposes our servant. So, I thought it a fine day to come and tell you all that we shouldn’t be sitting at our desks like automatons. Let’s take the girls out to a lavish lunch and keep the wine flowing and talk about the meaning of life.”

  With a feral glint in his eye, Tom called to Fanny, “Make a lunch reservation. For four.”

  Han found his knees shaking at the thought. “The girls will have more fun with you,” he told Tom. “I’m not feeling well.”

  After everyone else bounded out, Han found himself still unable to concentrate and decided a walk would do him well. The raucous cacophony of pile drivers, drills, and sirens seemed a plot intended to drive him mad. Before, every thud of hammer had sung with the promise of fifty percent growth, a reminder of capital he had invested in companies that would inhabit those buildings.

  Han passed the noodle stand his office assistants frequented for lunch. Steam rose from a giant cauldron in the window, and a tired line of people waited inside for their watery bowls. The place smelled like poverty.

  Han wondered if Fanny had ever imagined owning her own company or writing a book or doing much of anything besides earning her paycheck. He thought it unlikely—why would she bother? People were like goldfish, growing only as big as the waters they inhabited. A few weeks before he had heard Tian confiding in Fanny; she had had to use her lunch money to cover a cab fare to the hospital to visit her sick mother, and was resigned, therefore, to going hungry that day. Han had slammed his door shut. He had been afraid of her hunger, he realized now.

  Han sat on a park bench beside a stagnant pond. By the time he rose to his feet again, an evening mist had begun to fall. He walked to his parked car and somehow found his way to his building and his apartment on the twenty-seventh floor—an extra expense and a highly coveted location, with two and seven signifying “double heaven.” Inside, the apartment was dark and airless. He listened for the sound of Bo Fu, giggling and shouting and happy to see him. But there was only silence.

  

  “Call it Zeitgeist. You know, we ought to have a free-trading World Untranslatable Words Association.” William Sun was excited and a bit out of breath, having just sprinted through the door of the underground bunker. He seated himself before the wall of thirty-one computer screens.

  “Don’t digress,” Zoe chided. “What about Han?”

  “Han is having an existential crisis. It’s an epidemic. Men in suits sitting around on park benches. After Han left for work Wu Xia called an old school friend and asked if she could come stay awhile, so she could ‘find herself.’ Bo Fu is with your parents, Ming.”

  “Maybe it was too much to start,” said Ming, frowning.

  William gave her an “I’m innocent” look. “Hey, I didn’t give the wives chips. I just whispered to them in the night—things like, ‘You know you can’t stand your husband; if the money didn’t matter, would you stay?’ The rest is up to them. I’d say Phase One has been a great success. Tomorrow morning, we zap again.”

  

  Three mornings later, Han awoke in the same chair where he’d fallen asleep to television chatter every night since his wife had left him. Wiping sleep from his eyes, Han watched a Cantonese-speaking reporter from Hong Kong satellite television, with Chinese character sub-titles for Mandarin speakers. The reporter—declaring he was “on the trail of strange goings-on in China”—was interviewing the CEO of a manufacturing company. “My company’s balance sheet is a pack of lies,” the CEO declared. “We get our stock to artificially rise based on how much we think we should be making and I earn a fortune by laying people off to keep our cash reserves up. I’m laying myself off. I’d like to spend some time fishing if I can find a lake that my company hasn’t destroyed with chemical spills.”

  A shockwave hit Han and he jerked upright. Something was missing and he realized it was his headache. For the first time in four days his head wasn’t pounding. He tried to remember what he usually did at this hour. Of course, his office, his work. I work because in business school I learned to recognize where the soil was conducive to making money grow. And that was all he knew how to do, Han realized—make money grow.

  Something else was pounding through his head. He must, he thought, find a café. The kind of place that barely existed in Beijing, where he could sit for hours and ask other people—the waiters, passersby, anyone—what they thought. Thought about what? Life, presumably. Strangely enough, he found a Parisian-style café two blocks away, with sidewalk tables and a wall of wine bottles. He sat down and noticed a man with an expensive haircut, like his own, sitting idly at the next table. The man turned to him. />
  “What do you think?” the man asked.

  “Everything is finite,” Han heard himself saying. “Except knowledge. But what is knowledge?” Something fluttered in his heart, like a caterpillar sprouting wings. “Who am I? Who are you? Is there an ‘us’ and a ‘them’?” The more questions he pondered, the freer he felt.

  The other man nodded, and moved to seat himself at Han’s table. “I trade oil and, in the process, drive up prices so that many people can’t afford to heat their homes. What if I put my money into some kind of collective account that poor people can tap into in order to mitigate their heating costs?” The two of them sat in animated conversation until the sun dipped low in a polluted orange sky.

  The next day Han decided he might actually enjoy some time in the office. Tian and Fanny told him that Tom had been absent for several days, but he’d left a note: My wife has left me. She said I bore her. And you know, I really am boring. It’s because I’m bored. I’m going to get my commercial pilot’s license. Pilots make starvation wages but so be it. New Icarus Capital is all yours, my friend. I’m going to fly to Sunshine Village and visit Ming—don’t shoot me! We tried to hide it but we’re fond of each other. Don’t worry. Tom.

  Han slumped on the edge of Fanny’s desk. “Let’s go shopping,” he said, suddenly. “I saw a silver frame that would look great with your daughter’s portrait. My gift.”

  That evening Han went back to the Parisian café, where he sat with a group of six new friends. Four of them had wives who had walked out. One such wife had left a note: I married you just for your money. But I can’t even stand the smell of you. Another had told her husband, “You beat me down. Every time I say something, you act like I’m stupid.” The men acknowledged that they hadn’t been perfect husbands, looked embarrassed, and began talking of business.

  “What if stores charged a sliding rate for their goods?” Han asked his companions. “What if wealthy customers paid more for whatever they needed, and people who made less paid less? Nobody would have to buy cheap crap and nobody would have to go without lunch.”