The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  “Get up, Big Sister, get up,” Lao Chen said, helping her to her feet.

  Big Sister Song started to cry, and Lao Chen began to tear up, too, so he took out a white handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes.

  “Lao Chen, I know you’ll save Little Xi,” Big Sister Song said. “You’re a good man, Lao Chen, you’ll save her.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Lao Chen said. “I’ll do everything I can.”

  When he got home, Lao Chen sat down in front of his computer and stared blankly at that note: mai zi bu si. With the previous message, he had immediately seen that feichengwuraook meant “If you’re not sincere, don’t bother, okay?” But what did this mai zi bu si mean? “Sell appearance cloth thread?” “Bury letter enrich posterity?” He tried out some characters, but the problem with Chinese Romanization is that it does not indicate the tone, so each sound can stand for many different characters.

  Lao Chen remembered that when he was a child living in Tiu Keng Leng, his mother worked as a cook in a Protestant church. On Sunday mornings she would take him to the church service because afterward they were given a bag of white flour donated by the people of the United States. His mother would usually doze through the service, but he liked to listen to the pastor’s sermon. Once the pastor quoted from what Jesus had said about a single grain of wheat: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will be alone, but if it dies, it will bring forth much fruit.” In other words, a grain of wheat that falls into the ground does not really die—mai zi bu si. Had Little Xi changed her Internet name to maizibusi, “The grain does not die”? And yet he couldn’t remember her ever being remotely religious.

  Lao Chen looked up the four characters mai zi bu si on the net and several literary and religious links came up. For example, a book on Zhang Ailing and her banal “boudoir realism” titled The Grain Fallen on the Ground Does Not Die by a Harvard professor, Wang Dewei, and a Chinese translation, Maizi busi, of André Gide’s 1924 autobiographical novel Si le grain ne meurt. Lao Chen looked at a dozen or so Web sites, but didn’t find any that appeared to be by Little Xi. He didn’t have the patience to look at any more. His promise to Big Sister Song that he would try to save Little Xi was beginning to weigh on his shoulders like Jesus’s cross. Then again, no matter how heavyhearted he felt, life must go on—so he went out in search of his customary Starbucks Lychee Black Dragon Latte.

  What Lao Chen didn’t expect was that Fang Caodi, who once used to be Fang Lijun, had been waiting for him on Xindong Road for almost two hours. Fang Caodi had run into him there before, taken his card, and sent him an e-mail, but Lao Chen had not responded. This time, Fang decided to wait for him at the same spot and feign another chance encounter.

  By now, Fang Caodi could almost tell by a person’s appearance whether he or she was a “nonforgetter,” like he and Zhang Dou were. The last time he’d met Lao Chen, his leisurely, contented expression certainly didn’t put him in their camp. But Fang Caodi had always thought that Lao Chen was an intelligent guy, and Fang hardly ever changed his opinion of anyone. He was especially happy today to see Lao Chen coming out of the Happiness Village Number Two compound with a frown and an extremely worried look on his face.

  “Master Chen,” Fang called as he took off his baseball cap and began walking toward him. “It’s me, Fang Caodi.” He patted his bald head as if to refresh Lao Chen’s memory.

  “Master Chen, you look great today,” Fang said.

  “Old Fang, I’m not really in the mood for talking today,” said Lao Chen.

  “Not feeling good today, Lao Chen?” said Fang. “That’s okay. How could you feel good? A whole month is missing.”

  “I really have things to do, Old Fang,” said Lao Chen. “I’ll talk to you some other time.”

  “Where’re you going, Master Chen?”

  Lao Chen thought for a minute. He couldn’t say he was off for coffee at Starbucks. “I’m going to the Sanlian Bookstore.”

  “I’ll drive you, Master Chen,” Fang Caodi immediately offered. He opened the passenger door of his Jeep Cherokee as if to say, “Get in.”

  “That’s okay, there’s really no need.” Lao Chen was still trying to avoid him. “I’ll take a taxi. You must have things to do.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Fang. “I came especially to talk to you, Master Chen.”

  Lao Chen got into the car resignedly.

  “Master Chen …” Fang Caodi started as he drove off.

  “Stop calling me Master Chen!” Lao Chen interrupted, irritated. “The Bible says that when the world is full of masters, then the end of our days is in sight.”

  “That’s not a laughing matter,” said Fang seriously. “If I can’t call you Master Chen, then I’ll just call you Lao Chen, okay?”

  “What did you want to talk about, anyway?” Lao Chen said, exasperated. “Come on, out with it!”

  “A whole month is missing, Lao Chen,” said Fang, “and what are we going to do about it? We have to get it back.”

  “If it’s missing, it’s missing.” Lao Chen was getting really annoyed with this theme. “What’s it to you anyway? Surely nobody gives a damn about one month.”

  But as Fang Caodi went on talking, a few bells rang in Lao Chen’s mind and he began to pay closer attention.

  “It’s very strange for a month to go missing, Lao Chen. Haven’t you noticed that everybody around you has changed in the last couple of years?”

  This sounded just like what Little Xi and Little Dong had told him.

  “Before and after that month, all China changed and so did the Chinese people,” Fang said.

  Lao Chen always believed that Fang Caodi greatly exaggerated things.

  “China is now divided into two types of people,” Fang continued. “One type forms the great majority, and the other type is a very small minority.”

  “How many people are in this very small minority?” asked Lao Chen.

  “I only know about two people up to now,” answered Fang. “Myself and Zhang Dou, my sworn brother—but we’re confident there are others. We’re hoping that you’re one of us, too.”

  “Why do you think I’m one of your minority group?”

  “Because you’re not happy, you look terrible, wet, and bedraggled like a drowned cat.”

  “Just because I’m not feeling good—does that make me a member of your minority?”

  “That’s only an outward indication,” Fang said. “The key element is whether or not you remember the events of that missing month.”

  Lao Chen decided to sound Fang Caodi out. “Old Fang, have you been using some kind of drug for a long time, like maybe—”

  “So you are one of us!” exclaimed Fang in surprise.

  “Don’t get so excited. Answer my question first,” said Lao Chen.

  “Zhang Dou and I both have chronic asthma, and we’ve been taking corticosteroids for many years.”

  “Aha!” exclaimed Lao Chen.

  “Don’t say ‘aha’ yet,” said Fang. “I did a survey and found that the great majority of people who take corticosteroids for their asthma don’t fit in our small minority. To this day, I only know of myself and Zhang Dou.”

  “Perhaps taking some other kind of drug might yield the same result?” Lao Chen suggested.

  “What do you mean, Lao Chen?”

  “Corticosteroids, antidepressants, painkillers, other analgesics,” Lao Chen went on speculating. “Taking illegal drugs or some other type of medicine … maybe they all have this same effect. But not everyone who takes drugs or medicine for a long time will turn out this way. It’s just that taking drugs or pills may increase the probability. And then we have to look at other variables—for example, what drug someone takes, or what someone’s normal diet is, or personality, or just luck. All these things could influence whether or not a person turns out that way. And so what if you do? If you are that way, firstly, you’ll feel everyone around you has changed; secondly, that so-called change will be that everyone aroun
d you has become happy and may even experience a constant small-small high; and, thirdly, at least one part of the condition is that you will remember things that everyone else seems to have forgotten.” Lao Chen was thinking about how Little Dong remembered so much, while Little Xi did not.

  “That’s it exactly,” agreed Fang Caodi. “We really are just like that. We can actually remember many things that other people have forgotten, especially the events of that lost month.”

  “That lost month?” Lao Chen finally got it. “So what you’ve been saying is that a whole month has disappeared and been completely forgotten?”

  “Exactly. It’s a case of collective amnesia.”

  “Which month, exactly?” asked Lao Chen, narrowing his eyes.

  “It’s precisely the month when the world economy went into crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began,” said Fang. “Strictly speaking, it was in fact twenty-eight days.”

  Lao Chen’s mind wandered a bit as he recalled the detective novel Thirteen Months that he had written at that time. Then, regaining his composure, he asked, “But didn’t those two events occur at the same time, not one after the other, with no gap in between?”

  “Lao Chen, you’re really funny,” said Fang, laughing.

  Lao Chen fell silent while he racked his brains trying to remember that period, but his memory was a complete blur. This whole thing might just be the result of Fang Caodi’s overactive imagination—there might never have been any such lost twenty-eight days.

  It seemed Fang Caodi had finally realized that Lao Chen was not joking. “Lao Chen, you mean you really don’t remember? But just now I actually thought you really were one of us.”

  Fang Caodi, Zhang Dou, Little Xi, and Little Dong—they are probably all members of that club, thought Lao Chen.

  “Well then, I’m sorry to have bothered you,” said Fang disappointedly.

  “No, no, no,” Lao Chen countered, “I’m definitely not one of you, but listen … It’s like this: you’re aliens from outer space who have accidentally landed on earth and can’t go home, and I’m an earthling who’s able to communicate with you. I’m your friend on this earth. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  “I get it,” Fang said. “You’re a traitor among earth people.”

  Lao Chen didn’t feel like arguing any further. “I know some people, more than one, who might be members of your club.”

  “That’s terrific,” said Fang. “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know where they are. I’m looking for one of them right now.”

  “Really? I’ll help you. We can search together.”

  Lao Chen looked at Fang Caodi, trying to decide whether to let him tag along, and whether if he did it would cause him any trouble.

  “I’m a specialist,” Fang said. “For the past couple of years I’ve been working on this, looking for that lost month, looking for people like me, for evidence. Let me help you, Lao Chen.”

  “I’ll think about it, Old Fang.”

  Fang Caodi fell silent for a while, but just as they were reaching the Sanlian Bookstore he said, “Lao Chen, there’s nothing worth reading in the bookstores these days. I’ve been all over the country, and it’s the same everywhere; all they have are officially doctored books. Don’t imagine you are going to find anything about the true state of things. If you don’t believe me, take a look yourself. Not only are there no books that mention that lost month, there are definitely no books about the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. There aren’t even any decent books about the Anti-Rightist Campaign or the Cultural Revolution. They’re all a pack of lies.”

  Lao Chen didn’t respond. Fang Caodi was beginning to irritate the hell out of him. Do I need him to give me directions on how to browse in a bookstore? he thought. The Sanlian has thousands of books. Has Fang Caodi read them all? Even the memoirs of famous living people would fill up several rows of shelves. I used to come here every week, and have come here every couple of months for the past two years. Am I not a lot better than him at finding books? I’m the expert here. Old Fang has always been such a pain in the ass.

  When Lao Chen leapt out of the car as if to make his escape, Fang Caodi immediately dialed his number. Lao Chen answered his ringing phone.

  “Now you’ve got my cell number. Ring me anytime, twenty-four seven. I’ll be expecting your call.” And just before driving off, Fang leaned his head out the window. “Lao Chen, I’ll bet you they don’t even sell books by someone as famous as Yang Jiang in there, and especially not her Cultural Revolution memoir.”

  With that he drove off. Lao Chen carried on ruminating. Besides those banned books published only in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and books printed illegally on the mainland by underground presses, many controversial books that were once legally published in China are definitely unavailable now, he thought to himself. Books like Little Shu’s collection of CCP members’ writings from 1941 to 1946, Harbingers of History, and Zhang Yihe’s celebrated memoir of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, The Past Is Not a Fog. Yang Xianhui’s 2003 report on the death by starvation of about three thousand Rightists in Gansu, What Happened at Jiabiangou, and Wu Si’s Unwritten Rules, an exposé of official corruption, might or might not be available … But bestsellers like Yang Jiang’s The Shower, Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder,” and Reaching the Border of Human Life surely must be available. The Three of Us is even published by the Sanlian. How could they possibly not sell it?

  As soon as Lao Chen entered the bookstore, he asked the sales assistant to look up Yang Jiang’s works on the computer. Searching the screen, the assistant said, “There aren’t any.”

  The young people of today really aren’t very familiar with books, thought Lao Chen. “Are they out of stock?”

  “There are no references here, it looks like we’ve never had them in.”

  “Maybe you had them in a while ago?”

  “There’s no record of our ever having them.”

  “But Baptism is a Sanlian publication!”

  “I don’t know about that, but there’s certainly no record on the computer.”

  “Where’s the manager?”

  “Try the coffee shop on the second floor.”

  Lao Chen was a fairly analytical person, and so he began to reflect on the fact that in the last two years he hadn’t read any eyewitness accounts of the history of the Chinese Communist Party, or of the People’s Republic. He hadn’t even touched any memoirs of the Anti-Rightist Campaign or the Cultural Revolution. He’d read only the classic Chinese novels, celebrated works in Chinese classical studies. For a while now, he’d been paying no attention to what nonfiction books and memoirs the Sanlian had on its shelves. He decided to go downstairs and take a good look.

  The basement had been redesigned. The section right by the stairs that had once held the Sanlian’s own publications had been replaced by the fiction section, and next to it were sections on Chinese classical studies, religion, entertainment, and popular media. Today there were still plenty of customers in these areas, but their numbers didn’t compare to the customers for bestsellers and business, self-improvement, and travel books on the ground floor. Around the corner of the L-shaped basement, the customers thinned out even further. This was the philosophy, history, and politics section where Lao Chen had felt so suffocated after the New Year reception. Now his head ached like it was going to explode. So he quickly gave up his task and raced back up the stairs, where the pounding gradually let up. He was looking for somewhere to sit down and hurried up to the second-floor coffee shop.

  Lao Chen was thinking only of finding a nice secluded seat deep inside the coffee shop, when he was surprised to hear someone call out, “Little Chen!” He turned his head and saw Zhuang Zizhong, the venerable founder of the Reading Journal, sitting there with the Sanlian manager, a couple of vaguely familiar members of the cultural set, and a young woman. At the Reading reception, Lao Chen hadn’t greeted Zhuang Zizhong because of the number of people around him
, but this time he couldn’t escape. He felt particularly guilty as he shook Zhuang’s hand enthusiastically and said, “Master Zhuang! I’m so happy to see you here.”

  Zhuang Zizhong pointed to the young woman. “This is my wife—my present leadership,” he said jokingly. “You’ve probably not met before.”

  “Mrs. Zhuang.” Lao Chen gently shook her hand. “Call me Little Chen.”

  “Do you all know each other?” Zhuang Zizhong asked his other companions, to which they all nodded.

  “I still have the clipping,” Zhuang went on, “of when Little Chen interviewed me for Mingbao. That was a quarter of a century ago.”

  Everyone seemed pretty impressed.

  “Sit down, Little Chen,” said Zhuang. “I have something I want to ask you. How did Mingbao report this time on the Central Party leader’s visit to my home?”

  The Mingbao Web site was blocked on the mainland, and Lao Chen had not seen the report, but he said anyway, “Oh, about the same as the report in the Beijing News, quite a big spread.”

  Master Zhuang beamed.

  Lao Chen could not help asking a question that had been playing on his mind. “Master Zhuang, is it true that intellectuals today are genuinely willing to be reconciled with the Communist Party?”

  He immediately felt he’d been too frank.

  “What do you mean,” Zhuang said, showing no adverse reaction to the question, “are intellectuals willing to be reconciled with the Communist Party? The question should be, is the Party willing to be reconciled with the intellectuals?”

  Just then someone else came over to greet Zhuang Zizhong, and Lao Chen took the opportunity to ask the Sanlian manager, “Why don’t you stock any of Yang Jiang’s books?”

  “Which Yang Jiang?” asked the manager.

  “Qian Zhongshu’s wife, Yang Jiang.”

  “Oh,” the manager said, as if he’d suddenly remembered, “you mean that Yang Jiang. Probably because nobody was buying her books.”