Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

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  Throughout the cities of Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai men congregated—occupying tables for seven—in new cafés that had checkered tablecloths and wine lists priced for a clientele in search of something to show for its money.

  “We are seven,” observed an economic minister in Beijing. “Seven means lessons learned through loss. You know, the Seven Immortals of the Bamboo Grove used to say that the ruler doesn’t take action, but rather just employs ministers who manage the affairs. The ax can cut the tree in the hands of someone skilled. People can live good lives if we just make the capital available.”

  “I feel like I’ve gone through my life with a wallet on top of my shoulders, not a head,” said the head of a manufacturing conglomerate in Shanghai.

  “Your bank account is just a pile of numbers,” said the CEO of an investment bank. “Maybe that should be a slogan for something we call the New China.”

  “Better work on that,” said one of the bank CEO’s companions. “If we want words to live by we should look to people who’re in the business of writing and thinking.”

  “People who create words or music or art out of nothing, people who devote themselves to learning. If we don’t listen to them we’re nothing but savages.”

  All over China, men were uttering similar words at that moment.

  “Confucius and Socrates left us a master plan for civilization,” Han interjected one animated night. “We still have people who can show us the way—I hear songs that lift my mood, and someone wrote those songs, and someone played them. They could do a lot more if their families didn’t force them to go to business school. Why do the people who do the real thinking make so much less money than I do?”

  Chapter Eleven

  It was like directing a life-sized theater. “The theater of benevolent madness,” Zoe said, perched on the sofa next to William as they watched the premier of China on nationwide television. The premier read a classical Chinese poem about man’s inherent wish to be free, then declared that the reigning Politburo had been in power long enough. In two years’ time, general elections would be held to choose a prime minister and Parliament. “Two years,” he said, “should give political hopefuls time to prepare their campaigns, and if Politburo members wanted to run for office, they would have to answer henceforth to the populace.” The premier stated that the government had recruited a group of psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, and statisticians to work on calculating the Gross Domestic Happiness Index. He promised tax breaks to any foreign or domestic company that contributed to the happiness of its employees and that of the surrounding community.

  The CEO of a major manufacturing company proclaimed that he was going to install a spa, tennis courts, and coffee bar for his sweatshop workers; that he would cut their workweek to thirty hours, not so he could pay them less but so they’d have time to go to extension classes at the nearby university and take weekend river rafting trips.

  In the days that followed, the leaders of China’s banking industry called a news conference of their own and announced that they had devised a new system. The wealth that sat idle in bank accounts of the elite would be turned over to private sector-run offices that would disburse the funds to the poor. The elite would benefit from a return more valuable than money—they would have the privilege of adopting communities.

  All over China bulldozers demolished flimsy buildings and erected in their place glass towers and Beaux-Arts style brick edifices. The ancient hutongs that remained in urban alleyways got new plumbing and fresh coats of plaster and paint; in courtyards, landscape contractors planted willow saplings and hydrangea bushes. Crews of builders and plumbers descended upon the sod huts behind the rice paddies in Sunshine Village and the sorghum fields up north, enlisting the peasants to help rebuild their own houses. The peasants hammered and painted and earned ownership by the sweat of their brows. Over mud floors they laid mosaic tiles or lacquered pine. Exteriors bloomed into pastel stucco, and buried pipes snaked up to immaculate new bathrooms and community spas where a hard day in the fields might end with a soak in a hot tub and a half-hour of acupressure.

  Sunshine Village bore a new sign thanking its designated patron, the CEO of an investment bank that specialized in financing pharmaceutical and medical technology companies—a man known as number 2099 to Ming, Zoe, and William.

  “Technology is gradually eliminating opportunity for the working class,” said one rich banker on television. “While building projects create jobs, when the building is done, what will the workforce do? Stay home and get depressed? Lose their homes and live on the street? I’m putting my money into adult schools so that these workers can learn useful skills beyond building houses and cleaning toilets.”

  Several months into the renaissance that the world called the New China, a few billionaires thought to invite members of their adopted neighborhoods on weekend sailing trips or holidays at their villas. They hid away their fine art and covered brocade chairs with canvas, expecting a swarm with gamy, accusing eyes and swift hands. But by then the New China had become a temple to the gods of shopping. Lavender-scented boutiques sold fine clothes and cosmetics on every corner; spas and salons kept the citizenry manicured and coiffed and provided consultations on poise and comportment.

  Viewers all over the country saw television and Internet advertisements designed to help them find their places in the New China. One such video depicted a young, hard-working couple taking a night class in comparative literature, smiling at each other with perfect teeth—thanks to the services of a cosmetic dentistry center that was opening franchises across the country. The central message, across all advertising platforms and products, was that New China had invited you to its dinner party and in return you owe it to your neighbors and your patrons to be charming and astute company. Welders, peasants, and penniless writers willingly obliged; they frequented the boutiques and salons, alongside wives of CEOs and soon-to-be ex-wives of CEOs. At the cash register each customer held up their thumb to a scanner. With this biometric identification, any merchant or street vendor would be paid via the customer’s bank account commensurate with that person’s ability to pay. Every doctor and dentist’s office, every school, every of-the-moment nightclub could scan the customer’s data from a thumbprint. A pair of shoes might cost fifteen dollars to a shop assistant who earned an annual income of $30,000 while the same pair of shoes would cost five hundred dollars to the wife of a millionaire.

  Economic analysts studied the new patterns and found that nearly half a billion people bought something new every day. Fashions changed from month to month. Shopping kept the economy pumped up as if it were running an iron-man decathlon and everyone discarded last month’s trendy must-haves. But the new phenomenon, which the power brokers called universal gentrification, didn’t turn New China into a landfill of plastic and leather and porcelain. Hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs, benefitting from the stimulus of night classes in every avenue of inquiry, developed innumerable recycling stations. Old porcelain was ground back into soil and re-molded; electronic parts were melted down and reborn as wiring for thumb-scanners; silk dresses were unraveled and woven into vibrant new fashion statements.

  Sunshine Village, alive with buzz saws and bricklaying and the smells of fresh paint and lumber, boasted a new square along Market Street. By the end of Year One of the New China, artists and musicians from as far away as South America and the hip Grünerløkka district of Oslo began to hear of an enlightened little town tucked away in the green hills of Sichuan—a place where wondering souls could rise at dawn to contemplate the still river and the quiet sky. Curiously, the weather had also undergone a dramatic change. The dome of clouds just evaporated one day. Rain still arrived in bracing little showers, mostly in the night, and just enough to paint the trees and the rice fields with fragrant chlorophyll. By day, the sun would smile upon the village like a father lavishing gifts upon his only child. I
t was as if the Monkey King and Zenia had finally arrived at their happy-ever-after, the villagers told one another, shaking their heads in wonder.

  As for Ming—whether it was the devil tuning her strings or something else entirely—she was publishing stories and getting more and more followers every day. “It has to be because I have so many hours free from worry,” Ming declared. Zoe agreed. They had empirical evidence, after all. A number of mathematicians in the New China were eager to turn their particular talents to equations that would help shed light on the human condition.

  One such scientist had performed an assessment for Ming and found that by not having to worry about money, she had cleared a space in her mind of six hours, forty-seven minutes, and twenty-three and a half seconds a day on average over her actuarially-estimated lifetime. Those newly acquired hours and minutes allowed Ming more time to write; to discard and write something better, but also to read the works of greater intellectual minds. She deleted all the dirty little stories she’d thrown up on her blog just to shock her parents, or because she’d thought it was the route to fame.

  Now, dozens of online literary magazines were cropping up in New China and accepting Ming’s work. Literary sites devoted to critiquing literary sites began to post reviews of her stories, praising them as “quixotic and rambling, not unlike life itself,” and “bursting with random associations that evoke an incurable darkness just below the surface.”

  Many of Ming’s new stories revolved around Sunshine Village, describing a place where characters rose early each day and danced along the riverbank, under the cadence of a blazing sunrise; or spent their evenings drinking fine wine with men and women who guessed at the emotion behind each note in a Beethoven concerto; or sketched miniature masterpieces on cocktail napkins. Ming’s stories depicted an ideal, yet they also became a map for visitors to follow.

  Even William Kingsley Sun, as CEO of The Sunshine Group, though he still said it would have been better to operate like a Third Front secret site, found himself inadvertently becoming a tourist attraction. A reporter who was writing a story about 2099 and village sponsorship traveled to Sunshine Village, and discovered William to be so extraordinarily photogenic and articulate that he featured him in a video podcast.

  “If capital were fresh kill—a wild horse you’d speared and roasted—you could share only so much,” William said in the video. “But the world where you buy with currency and credit, it’s all just notes that designate a business’ worth. We have a division called Sunshine Finance. We provide a loan to a woman who wants to open a boutique on Main Street, which she uses to buy the space, hire carpenters, and stock up on inventory. Customers come and she earns the money back—or if customers don’t come and the store fails, she either sells her inventory to be recycled, or she finds new customers over the internet. She uses that money to try another product—perhaps a shoe boutique. If the shoes sell well, she repays Sunshine Finance. We regain our investment eventually, because we allow people to fail; that is, they keep trying until they succeed. Money is like a bamboo shoot—a hardy grass that can grow everywhere if you just let it spread.”

  Sometimes in the bunker when no numbers blinked, Zoe would catch William replaying his podcast video, and he’d asked her if she thought he should have changed his enunciation here, or looked directly into the camera there. But the video circulated, and soon a group of business leaders came to tour the company’s premises, noting the airy laboratory space, the pavilions where the staff met for gourmet lunches and yoga classes, and the weekly meetings at which CEO and janitor alike were encouraged to voice ideas. William found himself on the cover of a glossy magazine with “the newest celebrity CEO” emblazoned underneath.

  A private charter flight with seats for eight passengers—a Cessna Grand Caravan with a yellow nosecone and a logo that looked like the sun—departed from Chengdu every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon. The captain, would come out and introduce himself before takeoff. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Tom Wendall, and I’ll be flying you into the future of civilization,” he’d say. He was a doughy man but he moved lightly, as if he’d shed all that burdened him.

  Lulu Pang, the town’s director of tourism, often met visitors at the airstrip. “Welcome to Sunshine Village!” she’d say in a voice as rich as an aria. Her bouncy hairdo and even her carriage suggested a former frumpiness that was getting worked away at a gym. She’d lead the guests in a walking tour through grassy pathways, magpies whistling above. A dozen plump-cheeked children with brightly colored clothes would skip up, offering mesh bags full of peaches, bananas, plum blossoms, and lilies. At the village square, Lulu would point out the library, a hexagon of glass panes where visitors could borrow, for two weeks at a time, books and databases, jewels and fine art. The multi-millionaires of China put some of their own treasures on loan, she’d explain, because, after all, if the elite of society found beautiful things soothing to the soul, surely others would too.

  The other building, with an imperial roof and a marble entryway flanked by Chinese lions, was the casino. Here, croupiers were stationed behind every table, and visitors could press buttons on a massive board to see a list of stocks on the Chinese exchanges, or click on one and check its share price.

  In the village square, fragrant with jasmine blossoms and freshly sawed lumber, visitors and residents gathered each afternoon in the Nirvana Café, enjoying the local jasmine tea and jasmine beer while musicians played flutes and harps. Main Street bustled with renovation, but already, it was a temple to enterprise with boutiques springing up like mushrooms, courtesy of Sunshine Finance loans. Antique shops provided wares with dust enough to promise customers the sport of digging through grit to find a treasure; a Chinese apothecary sold one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old curio cabinets, and designer shoes nestled like objets d’art on black velvet in the elegant shop across the street. Up the hill, a gourmet market was growing larger by the day, selling artful arrangements of locally made rice pastries and imported dragonfruits, peaches, and lychees.

  Some of the visitors stayed, teaching the university extension classes held nightly—with free tuition for all—at the sprawling new high school campus. The new state-of-the-art hospital, with specialty units in dentistry and genetic research, drew doctors from all over the world. Chefs arrived via Tom Wendall’s Cessna, too, and worked in the village dining pavilions that made every meal a social occasion, and freed wives from the necessity of having to rush home to cook every night.

  Three hours away by car was a New China prison, a complex of buildings that looked like a community college campus, except for the electric perimeter fence. The prisoners—former policemen and the thugs who’d worked for them—were required to spend their morning hours at a recycling plant, and their afternoon hours in classrooms.

  Inevitably, the village patron, 2099, announced he was going to come and see the paradise that his money had made possible. Zoe and William met 2099 and his wife at the airstrip.

  The village patron was blessed with smooth, glossy skin and hair—as if devoted attendants scrubbed him with rare oils and coiffed his eyebrows daily. Still, there was something unsettled about his eyes and the way he gestured. He was forty-three years old, Zoe knew, and had grown up in Beijing, the son of a high-ranking government official. His wife, who was slender, wore her hair in a globe-sized bun on top of her head. It wasn’t an in-fashion hairstyle but it suited her.

  “What are the plans for construction across the river?” 2099 asked, referring to an announcement that a consortium of hotel developers had just released. He was looking pointedly at William.

  “It’s going to be an eco-resort,” Zoe chimed in. She was the one who’d signed off on the plan, after all. “Nestled in the trees with a warm spring that will feed into a natural bathing pool.”

  As if he hadn’t even heard Zoe, 2099 said to William, “There is so much traffic in this town; you will need a bigger airport.�
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  “I don’t like our patron,” Zoe told William after 2099 was gone. “He’s a fucking sexist, for one thing.”

  “Don’t worry about him. The program will bring out his better instincts over time.”

  The two of them argued that night. “Sunshine Village is like a toy for him, and someday he’ll want another toy,” Zoe said.

  “You, my darling, were born jaded. When you ran the Nirvana Admissions Committee it was such a select club that on one occasion three years went by when no one got in.”

  “I don’t remember that. But I do remember the lessons New York taught me. I had a ring of keys—a big key to the front door of our building, a little key to the mailbox, and two keys for the apartment door. We all knew how to hold the key ring after dark, with the biggest key sticking out between two fingers. Brass knuckles to keep the scoundrels at bay. We had to constantly look around and behind.”

  Even in the now-magical habitat of Sunshine Village, Zoe was still looking behind her. “I know you think this program can instill empathy and compromise, but at the bottom of it all, humans are beasts like any other, and subject to instincts that cannot ultimately be tamed,” she told William.

  Her lover disagreed; he was insistent that any dissent that might arise within New China was a great opportunity. “A vaccine that makes our systems of reason stronger,” he would say.

  And soon enough Tang Fei provided them with an opportunity to test their tolerance. Ming, Zoe, and William had agreed that sending Tang to prison for his sideline opium dealing wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of New China, so they gave him a chance to earn an honest living as a corporate sales director for the company’s nanochips. He traveled around the country with a vial of local soil and a sample chip.