The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  I also started to suspect that the antidepressants the hospital had given me were having serious side effects.

  Now I go on the Internet all day and argue with people under several different names.

  I discovered that the nationalistic “angry youth” on the Internet are actually not all youths. Some of them are in their fifties and sixties. They grew up during the Cultural Revolution and heeded Old Mao’s call for young people to engage with important national affairs. None of them went to college. They work at the most menial jobs in society and haven’t had the benefits of the Reform and Opening policies. Now they are laid-off or retired and they have learned how to go on the Internet, where they can find like-minded people and a place to vent their anger and dissatisfaction. Their language is the language of the Cultural Revolution, they especially revere Mao Zedong, are especially nationalistic, anti-American, and bellicose. The cultural enlightenment movement of the 1980s and the ideological polemics of the 1990s have had no influence on them. Their mode of thinking remains an unreconstructed Maoist Chinese Communist Party mode of thinking. I love to contact them, to join their patriotic forums, old-classmates’ Web sites, and argue with them. I present the strict facts and employ reasoned arguments, and I argue exclusively from the point of view of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. This infuriates them, and they all attack me.

  I know only that in doing this I am reminding everyone that they should never forget that the Chinese Communist Party is not the great, glorious, always correct party of their propaganda.

  Of course I am also telling myself never to forget this lesson.

  Naturally my postings are very quickly deleted by the Internet police; sometimes they block me completely and I cannot even post them. But their posts are never ever deleted.

  Wei Guo must have found out about my Internet activities and turned me in to the authorities. That’s why I’m being watched.

  I feel very lonely. I don’t trust anyone except my mother. A while ago, I ran into the writer Lao Chen, at the Sanlian Bookstore. He used to come to the old restaurant quite often to talk, and the impression he gave me was that he was one of us. He’s also Taiwanese, so I latched on to him and jabbered on for quite a while before I realized that I hadn’t seen him in ten years, and he might not be the person he was back then. The Taiwanese and Hong Kong people of today are not like the Taiwanese and Hong Kong people back then. How could he be the same? Eventually I found some excuse and left. I didn’t think that he would look up my mother’s new restaurant, and then get my e-mail address from her. My mother must still be hoping that I’ll find a man and stop doing what she believes are crazy things. She still has another mistaken idea: she thinks I cannot get along with mainland-Chinese men, so she is always introducing me to Taiwanese and Hong Kong men. What can I tell her? I’m such a bad daughter, still relying on her to support me at my age.

  My poor mother, she has to deal with Wei Guo every day and take care of him for me. Even when she wants to send me an e-mail, she doesn’t dare use our home computer. She has to walk a long way over to an Internet café for fear that Wei Guo will find out where I am. She never gives up on anyone—if I have inherited any good traits, they all come from her.

  Should I take a gamble and answer Lao Chen’s e-mail? I’m really longing for someone whom I can talk to face-to-face, but everyone I’ve met in these last two years has disappointed me. We have nothing in common anymore. Could Lao Chen be an exception?

  Zhang Dou’s autobiography

  I’m Zhang Dou, twenty-two years old.

  I’m taping this video now in Miaomiao’s house in the rural Huairou district just outside Beijing.

  I’m from Henan Province, where my parents were peasants. I’ve had asthma since I was a child, but I’m quite tall—at thirteen, I looked like I was sixteen. It was then that I was abducted at the railway station and taken to do slave labor in an illegal brick kiln in Shanxi Province. I made bricks for building houses for about three years, and I almost died from several asthma attacks. Once I tried to run away and was rescued by some strangers who took me to the local Labor Bureau, but the Labor Bureau sold me again to another illegal brick kiln. Six or seven years ago the illegal brick kilns in that area were exposed by the national media. Many of them were closed down and many child laborers were saved. Most of them were of the same age and background as me—all of them were missing persons. I met a number of reporters then, and one of them was Miaomiao from a Guangzhou paper. We hit it off especially well, and she told me I should write an article describing what had happened to me. I didn’t write anything very good, but Miaomiao really liked it and wanted to help me get it published. Then I was sent back to school. My mother died quite young and my father went south to work. I went back to school to do the first year of middle school over again.

  A year or so later, I got a letter from Miaomiao. She said the media had all been told that they were not to publish any more news about the illegal brick kilns because it would damage the nation’s image. My piece couldn’t be published; it could only be posted on the popular liberal Internet Web site Tianya. I received quite a few comments until it was “harmonized” off the net by the web police.

  Miaomiao gave me her e-mail address, and when I went into town I sent her an e-mail to tell her I didn’t want to go to school anymore. There was nobody with me at home, and I wanted to go and find a job. Miaomiao wrote back and told me to come to Beijing and stay with her. She’d quit her job on the paper in Guangzhou and moved back to Beijing. She said the office world was too horrible and the pressure was too great. She would rather be a freelance writer and work from home.

  Just after my seventeenth birthday, I went to Huairou district outside Beijing to find Miaomiao. She now lived in the countryside.

  She taught me how to make love and how to play the guitar. I discovered that she was an excellent cook and baked cakes and cookies, too. She had three cats and three dogs, all strays that she’d brought home with her. She said that before the Beijing Olympics there were so many demolitions and relocations that many people left their dogs and cats behind, and so Beijing was full of stray dogs and cats. Even valuable golden retrievers became dog meat and were sold for only seven yuan a pound in the farmers’ market. I was also a stray that she had taken in, and now I didn’t have to worry when my asthma flared up.

  She wrote articles and television scripts to provide for us. Sometimes I would work at a nearby pet clinic, and I became very chummy with the clinic staff because I was always bringing cats and dogs in for treatment. Miaomiao had bought a small house from some peasants. It had three north-facing rooms, a separate kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower. We lived there very happily with all the cats and dogs for a year and three months, until Miaomiao turned thirty-two.

  Then we heard that the whole country was in chaos, and people in Beijing were very frightened. The first thing we worried about was running out of food, both for ourselves and for our dogs and cats. When another crackdown was announced, things settled down, but Miaomiao would not let me go outside for fear I might be arrested. I stayed indoors for a whole month. Food supplies were very short then, and many more people abandoned their pets on the streets again. Every time Miaomiao came home, she brought more dogs and cats with her. Some of them were sick or injured. So we had over a dozen dogs and cats living with us, and I learned how to take care of them.

  Winter passed, and people suddenly became more prosperous and everyone started smiling. But then something hard to understand happened to Miaomiao. She suddenly didn’t recognize me, didn’t recognize anyone. Whenever she met anyone, she just nodded and smiled but didn’t say a word. She only took care of her dogs and cats, baking some sugar-free cookies for them every couple of days. She no longer wrote articles or played the guitar. When she felt the need, we would make love, but she no longer discussed anything with me.

  I always knew that all the time I was in Beijing she was taking some sort of drug when she thou
ght I wasn’t looking. Then she would be completely spaced out for a while and would not recognize anyone. This usually lasted for only about half an hour, but this time she didn’t recover.

  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.”