The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  In other words, if a mass protest were to break out in the county, regardless of whether it were handled badly or well, County Head Yang’s chances of a provincial-level promotion would be ruined. So County Head Yang was the ideal candidate to be informed about the possibility of such a protest. How could a young and able man like him allow his official career to be put in jeopardy by the actions of a couple of corrupt township officials?

  When it was clear Gao Shengchan had completely understood what he was telling him, Liu Xing seemed to experience a pleasing sense of pride; then he stood up and staggered over to the bathroom. Gao Shengchan took immediate advantage of his absence to phone Li Tiejun and tell him to make an appointment as soon as possible with County Head Yang.

  Fang Caodi knew that Jiaozuo was an important producer of Chinese medicines such as foxglove (Rehmannia glutinosa), Doscorea opposita yams, Achyranthes bidentata root, and chrysanthemums, so he had already planned to buy some supplies, to cure Zhang Dou’s internal injuries and Miaomiao’s strange sort of idiocy. He got up at four thirty, completed his qigong exercises, and went out before dawn without disturbing Lao Chen’s sleep.

  After their long drive the day before, Lao Chen was extremely tired, but he didn’t sleep well all the same. He got up at six and had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, but he had to wait until nine before Fang Caodi finally arrived, carrying a big backpack full of herbal medicines. At that point, Lao Chen looked quite annoyed. The two of them left hurriedly and set out for the Warm Springs township.

  When they reached the center of the provincial city, Fang Caodi asked a taxi driver if he knew if there was a Christian church called the Grain Fallen on the Ground in Wen County. The taxi driver said it was only a short distance away and told Fang Caodi to follow him and he would take them right to the front door free of charge.

  “Isn’t it an underground church?” asked Lao Chen. “How come everybody knows the address and there are Christian spring couplets openly displayed on the front gate?”

  “The Henan people have not offended anybody,” said Fang Caodi, “but everybody criticizes them. Look how generous this driver is.”

  Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were in the yard preparing to leave for their meeting with County Head Yang.

  “Our fellowship has a thousand members in the Wen County area alone,” said Li Tiejun proudly. “How could the county head dare refuse to see us?”

  Gao Shengchan kept reminding Li Tiejun that when they met with the county head to leave the talking to him. He felt confident that he could persuade Yang to solve the Zhang Family Village land-rights encroachment, so he asked Li Tiejun not to interfere.

  As they were thinking and talking, the four men met at the front gate.

  “Morning, friends!” Fang Caodi spoke up, afraid that Lao Chen’s Taiwanese accent might give rise to suspicion. “Sorry to trouble you, but is this the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground?”

  “That’s right,” Li Tiejun answered somewhat warily. “Who are you looking for?”

  “We’re looking for a woman called the grain does not die,” said Fang Caodi. “Her real name is … er, what is it?”

  “Wei Xihong, Little Xi,” Lao Chen said.

  “Do you know her?” asked Fang Caodi.

  “Wei Xihong, Wei Xihong.” Li Tiejun didn’t want to lie, so he just repeated the name. “Little Xi, Little Xi …”

  “She’s from Beijing,” offered Fang Caodi.

  “From Beijing,” Li Tiejun went on repeating as though he was thinking about it, “from Beijing, come to Henan from Beijing …”

  “Who’s in charge here?” asked Fang Caodi impatiently.

  “God is in charge here,” said Li Tiejun.

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” said Fang Caodi.

  “Forget it, let’s go,” said Lao Chen, pulling Fang Caodi away.

  Li Tiejun turned around, closed the front gate very purposefully, and walked off with Gao Shengchan toward the township. The shepherd has a responsibility to protect his sheep, he thought. “Those two,” he said to Gao Shengchan, “might be Public Security informers, so I didn’t want to tell them anything, but I didn’t lie either.”

  Gao Shengchan had not said a word, but he had a different opinion of Chen and Fang. He knew where Little Xi was, and he didn’t want to help them find her. He knew that they would come back, and he felt a little uneasy about his refusal to talk to them. He had to handle things in the order of their importance, and the most important of important things he had to concentrate on now was to prevent his fellowship from being drawn into a protest.

  If Lao Chen had not received Zhang Dou’s text message he would not have known for certain that Little Xi was there and he might have had his confidence shaken by this encounter. Now that they had located the church, he knew for certain that Little Xi was there somewhere. Those two fellows were simply unwilling to tell them the truth. He told Fang Caodi to stay there at the church and watch for Little Xi to come out while he himself returned to the township center, found an Internet café, and tried to communicate with maizibusi online.

  Lao Chen and Fang Caodi didn’t know that Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were fully aware that Little Xi was at that very moment inside the church attending a Bible-reading class. She would not leave the church that day, but would eat lunch there and in the afternoon she would go on the Internet and surf the virtual world, or perhaps use her maizibusi web name to write a blog on the peasants’ rights defense movement. She might even receive an answering post accusing her of being a sonovabitch who turned the truth upside down. Dinner in the village at five p.m., participation in the fellowship witness meeting at six-thirty, and at eight a discussion with the most enthusiastic brothers and sisters of the plans for the final meeting on the Zhang Family Village land-rights protest. Little Xi felt that her life was richly rewarding.

  The population of the Warm Springs township was less than a hundred thousand, but there were quite a few Internet cafés. As Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were going into the county head’s office in the county government building on Yellow River Road, Lao Chen was entering an Internet café that had just opened for business. He was extremely excited when he found maizibusi’s blog and comments. Little Xi was so far away and yet so close, but four hours passed before Lao Chen posted his first comment.

  At first he thought he would play it cool, so he wrote a post saying that he was traveling with a friend in Henan and visiting Jiaozuo to buy Chinese medicines. He disingenuously asked her if she was still in Beijing and said he’d like to meet up with her. He probably thought that she would respond to this by saying what a coincidence that she was also in Jiaozuo, and why didn’t he meet her for dinner at the Yiwan Hotel? Fortunately he didn’t send this message. Who was he going to fool? It was too ridiculous.

  So he wrote a different message, apologizing for when Wen Lan had suddenly appeared, and saying he hoped he could see Little Xi. To such a message, however, she would probably just respond that it was no big deal, no need to apologize, never mind, see you sometime when we have the time. He still would not get to see her—given her assumptions about his relationship with Wen Lan, she probably would not want to be alone with Lao Chen again.

  He would have to tell her the honest truth—that he had come to Jiaozuo in Wen County deliberately to see her … that he wanted to see her because he wanted to be with her. He decided it was time to declare his love. If he could do so openly, everything else could be talked through in more detail later. Some twenty years earlier, he had fallen in love with Wen Lan and she had hurt him badly. For many years after that, he didn’t dare have any feelings for anyone else. To open his heart now to Little Xi would certainly take a great deal of courage. Lao Chen sat there blankly for two hours before he finally wrote a nearly five-thousand-word post titled “A letter to maizibusi from someone who is not a stranger,” in which he poured out his thoughts and feelings in fast-flowing prose.

  The first line of Chen’s letter was: “When you open t
his letter, I will be at the Modern Fuxi Internet Café on Yellow River Road in Warm Springs township, Wen County, Jiaozuo City …” Next he told her that after he’d met her at the Five Flavors restaurant in Wudaokou in the 1990s, he had always loved her. He’d never expressed himself at the time because she had so many male friends around her all the time and then later she had an English boyfriend. Still later, because he’d been hurt so badly he was afraid to ever try to have another serious relationship. Lao Chen described how he and Wen Lan had met, become engaged, how she’d dumped him, and how, twenty years later, he ran into her by chance as a French crystal chandelier.

  Most importantly, he told her how very recently he had lost his heart to another woman whom he had not seen in a long time, how he had learned to get in touch with her, how he had waited for her reply, how they had met again, how he had lost contact with her again because of Ms. Wen’s barging in, how he had looked her up on the Internet, how he had followed a possibly unreliable lead and come to Henan, and how he had put the pieces of the puzzle together and learned that she was in Warm Springs—and that woman was Little Xi. Now he only hoped that she would give him a chance, would communicate with him, would give him time, in Henan, in Beijing, or anywhere else to prove his love. He had also brought along a friend who could help restore her memory.

  Lao Chen even told Little Xi of his thoughts about death on the drive to Henan, that if he were to die in an accident, he hoped it would be while holding her hand and facing their last seconds of life together; or if he were to die a natural death, he hoped that she would be sitting at his bedside watching over him. He wanted to live out his last years with her.

  Lao Chen wanted to post the letter as a comment on Little Xi’s blog, but it was much too long. He had to divide it into several smaller sections and post each one separately while leaving a notice that he had a blog on the Sina network where the entire letter could be read as a whole.

  After Lao Chen had finished pouring his heart out, he sat very calmly in front of the computer and checked every few minutes to see if there was any answer.

  Shortly after lunch Little Xi had indeed gone online and very soon noticed Lao Chen’s post, after which she went to his Sina blog and read the entire letter. It made her whole body feel totally paralyzed. For the past two years, she had wanted so badly to find someone she could really communicate and share her feelings with, but every time she’d been disappointed. After meeting Lao Chen again, she had fantasized that he was different from other men, but in the end, or so she thought, she had become another woman. As she was despairing more and more, she discovered the church fellowship. She didn’t really believe in religion, but what she had found was a large extended family. Then when the Zhang Family Village rights-protection movement had come along, it made her feel useful. She never imagined that at this point Lao Chen would come into her life again, to declare undying love.

  Little Xi sat blankly in front of her computer for over an hour. She knew that at another computer someone else was also sitting there blankly.

  Finally, she posted an answer: “I’m no longer the Little Xi that you knew.”

  “I like the present you even more” was Lao Chen’s immediate answer.

  “I suffer from clinical depression,” she wrote.

  “I know. I’ll take care of you,” he fired back.

  “My body is decrepit beyond repair.”

  “I’m proof of your beauty.”

  “I’m not sure I want a relationship.”

  “I’ll wait patiently until you decide.”

  “I’m sure I don’t have time for a relationship,” Little Xi wrote.

  “I can wait as long as you want, in Henan or anywhere else,” Lao Chen answered.

  They went back and forth like this until after five in the afternoon, when Little Xi sent her last post: “I have to go off-line. Give me some time to think things over, then we’ll talk again.”

  Little Xi went to help the fellowship prepare dinner, and Lao Chen closed down the computer; he decided to go to the church and look for her.

  What the two of them didn’t know was that during the entire afternoon many netizens were following their posts with bated breath. After they left their computers, the netizens’ comments on their dialogue took over. Some said it was very moving, some said it was schmaltzy, some said it was cute, and some even said it was disgusting. Taiwanese netizens said they had to admire this romantic auntie and uncle, while mainland netizens said that no matter how you looked at it, it was amazing how they kept going. On the whole, though, these netizens reached a pretty unified verdict: “Stop messing around, Little Xi, make up with Lao Chen and everything will be okay!”

  At around six the brothers and sisters of the Warm Springs fellowship finished their evening meal and came to the church with their hearts full of thanksgiving to wait for the witness meeting to begin.

  Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun had also just emerged from the county-government building and decided to say a simple prayer then and there on the street to thank the Lord for His grace. That morning at the meeting with the young and able County Head Yang, Gao Shengchan had said what needed to be said as though with the Lord’s help, stating his case thoroughly and in a dignified manner. Although the county head had remained silent throughout, Gao Shengchan was confident that Yang had listened to him attentively. As for how the official would evaluate the pros and cons of this case and what the fate of the church might be, Gao Shengchan left that in God’s hands.

  When they left the morning meeting, the head’s secretary had come to find them, and advised them not to go too far and to be ready to be called back; this was a good sign. The two of them waited in a small restaurant near the government building. “Let’s say a prayer,” Gao Shengchan said, taking Li Tiejun’s hand.

  County Head Yang conferred with his advisers, and then called the township leader and the businesses’ representative to an immediate meeting. The meeting lasted until after five, then Yang summoned Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun to his office. Yang thought like a bureaucrat, but he was also pretty smart. He knew that Gao Shengchan was trying to force his hand, but he also knew that for the sake of his future career he had to back down somewhat. He informed Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun that the Zhang Family Village land-requisition program was definitely going forward as planned, but, with the good offices of the county government, every family would receive increased compensation for their land. Furthermore, due to a revision in the amount of land required, the land occupied by the homes of the church members was no longer within the scope of the plan. In this way, the business-interest group had been made to give up some of their large potential profits, and the township leaders who had failed to stop corruption had been thoroughly reprimanded; the government’s credit with the people had been maintained and an organized mass protest had been prevented.

  As County Head Yang formally escorted Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun to his office door he reflected that when promoted to provincial level he would no longer have to deal with the schemes of these church people. Gao Shengchan, aware that he had achieved his goal, offered up a few words of praise: Yang was a genuine mother and father to the people, he said. And Yang replied that it was the people who were his mother and father, and it was his duty, as a mere public servant, to serve them. In this fashion, with a mutual acknowledgment of their insincerity, they bid each other a cool good-bye.

  Walking back to the church, Gao Shengchan felt he had accomplished something very good. The rights of his parishioners had been restored, and a direct confrontation between the church and the government had been avoided. His only worry was in facing those of his flock who had been so enthusiastically preparing to mount a protest, especially Little Xi. Nevertheless, Gao Shengchan never wavered as to what was important and what was not.

  Meanwhile, Lao Chen and Fang Caodi were sitting in the chapel among the worshippers and looking all around for Little Xi. She was in the kitchen, and while helping prepare refreshments, she was
just managing to calm herself after the emotional turmoil of the afternoon—when she looked out and spotted Lao Chen among the faithful, her heart immediately started to race again. She hid behind the door, not daring to enter the chapel. Just then she heard the sound of the Canaan hymn “What Am I?” and felt deeply moved.

  Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun entered the chapel and Gao instructed Li to ask the congregation to settle down because they had something to tell them. Then Gao Shengchan announced the new decision taken by the government on the Zhang Family Village land issue. This decision in favor of the brothers and sisters of their fellowship, he said, was an example of God’s grace, and demonstrated that God had heard everyone’s prayers. Finally, he led them all in giving thanks, shouting, “Thanks be to the Lord!” Some of the faithful were moved to tears of joy. Many of them, however, were there precisely to witness such moving reactions.

  When they had settled down again, Lao Chen stood up and proclaimed in a loud voice, “Everybody, I have something I want to say to you.”

  Li Tiejun tried to stop him, but Gao Shengchan indicated to Li to let him speak. Gao Shengchan knew that such events could not be prevented by force, but had to be handed over to the Lord for His disposition.

  “Fellow countrymen,” said Lao Chen, “I am on the lookout for someone. Her name is Wei Xihong, also known as Little Xi.”

  The people stared quietly at the stranger, but did not respond.

  “I am a friend of hers,” added Lao Chen.

  Still no response.

  “If you know where she is,” Lao Chen continued, “please tell me. Please let me see her, because … because I love her very much and I can’t live without her. I hope you … hope you can tell me if she is here or not.”

  The entire fellowship of the good people of Henan looked back intently at Lao Chen.

  Lao Chen waited with rising emotion, fighting back his tears.