The Fat Years

by Koonchung Chan

  To live or die together

  After staying at Miaomiao’s house for a couple of days, on the weekend Lao Chen went back to his Happiness Village Number Two apartment, changed into a set of clean clothes, and went to Starbucks for a latte grande. On Sunday evening, he attended another one of Jian Lin’s old-movie screenings. In recent months only Jian Lin, He Dongsheng, and Lao Chen had been present at these monthly soirées. To tell the truth, these screenings had become events that Jian Lin organized just in order to accommodate his cousin, the Party and national leader He Dongsheng. Lao Chen was simply a guest necessary to keep He Dongsheng company. If Lao Chen didn’t go, and there were only the two cousins there, it would be rather embarrassing and hard to continue the screenings. For friendship’s sake Lao Chen felt he had a responsibility to attend. He explained patiently to Little Xi and Fang Caodi why he had to be there, and besides, he said, he had become rather addicted to hearing He Dongsheng give his long monthly lecture apropos the subject of the film.

  The film they saw that night was Setting Sun Street from 1981, and the wine they drank was more of the 1989 Château Lafite. Jian Lin had instructed a broker to buy five cases of this at auction, so, for the next few months to come, they would probably be drinking this same vintage. Of course, Lao Chen could hardly complain about drinking 1989 Château Lafite every month.

  The film had been shot in a district around the Buddhist Setting Sun Temple on Liang Guang Road on the edge of Beijing’s Second Ring Road. The film depicted the lives of a number of ordinary people at the start of the Reform and Opening era, and from it you could see the new market-economy model. One of the characters depicted was a conman pretending to be from Hong Kong, who wore a showy white suit, spoke a fake Cantonese, bragged, and extorted money and sex. Young Chen Peisi played an unemployed youth, euphemistically called “a youth waiting for work,” who raised pigeons and whose favorite phrase was “Byebye, all!”

  When the film had finished, He Dongsheng recited a poem by the Yuan dynasty poet Ma Zhiyuan:

  “Look at

  the ants crawling round and round marshaling their troops,

  the bees roiling in confused chaos brewing their honey,

  and hordes of buzzing flies fighting over the blood.”

  Then he went on: “The market economy can spur on people’s initiative and enthusiasm, but sometimes it looks chaotic, like it isn’t working. The key thing is to have a firm grasp of its regular rhythms—the government should not manage anything, but it has to manage everything. It taxed the mental capacity of two generations, with us going back and forth and round and round, working ourselves to death—even now I break out in a cold sweat dreaming about it at night.”

  Lao Chen almost laughed out loud. He was thinking that He Dongsheng would not even have gone to bed at midnight and, even if he did, he would have insomnia. How could he dream back to an earlier time? After that brief reverie, Lao Chen pretended to listen to He Dongsheng’s long-winded lecture about the many political confrontations that had occurred during the thirty-plus years of Reform and Opening. Lao Chen was really thinking about Little Xi, whom he had not seen for a mere two days.

  At the end of his speech, He Dongsheng said, “There will always be flies, but we can’t stop eating just because there are flies around.” Then he went quiet, and the three of them just drank their wine in silence as usual until midnight.

  He Dongsheng went to the toilet and then asked Lao Chen if he wanted a lift home. Lao Chen was afraid that He Dongsheng would want to cruise the streets again and keep him up too late, so he politely declined.

  He Dongsheng left and Lao Chen stayed behind. Jian Lin told him he was going to London to attend a wine auction and to buy himself a few cases of Burgundy. Lao Chen was happy to see that Jian Lin was over Wen Lan. When he took his leave, Jian Lin said “Byebye, all!” in the manner of the film actor Chen Peisi.

  It was an early summer evening, and Lao Chen was feeling particularly good—his feeling of happiness was back again. As he started to walk home he thought to himself that before he went back to Miaomiao’s house, he had to remember to pack up and take along his big bag of cholesterol-lowering oatmeal. He came out of Jian Lin’s apartment complex, turned a corner, and had just reached the street, when he was startled by a big black SUV pulling up next to him. He thought he recognized He Dongsheng’s car, but he noticed that it was Fang Caodi driving. Little Xi and Zhang Dou were in the backseat, and the three of them were shouting at him to get in.

  “Hurry!” they yelled.

  “Whose car is this?” Lao Chen asked as he opened the passenger door.

  “Just get in,” they said.

  Lao Chen hadn’t fully got his mind around what was going on before he was already in the car and it was taking off down the street.

  “Isn’t this He Dongsheng’s car?” he asked after a while. “How come … ?”

  Lao Chen looked around at the backseat and saw that Little Xi and Zhang Dou had a man pinned down on the floor under their feet. He stared at them, speechless.

  “Lao Chen, calm down,” said Little Xi. “Everything’s been arranged. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “He’s fine,” said Zhang Dou. “I used the best brand of chloroform; puppies and kittens get no side effects from it; the worst he might have is a headache for a couple of hours.”

  “He won’t wake up for at least two hours,” chimed in Fang Caodi as he drove along. “No matter how loudly we speak, he won’t be able to hear a thing. I’ve tried this chloroform myself. It puts you out completely for over two hours and it’s perfectly reliable.”

  “Have you all gone crazy?” shouted Lao Chen, glancing in terror at He Dongsheng.

  “We won’t hurt him,” said Little Xi. “We just want to ask him some questions.”

  “After that, we’ll set him free,” said Fang Caodi.

  “You really are crazy!” said Lao Chen in dismay. “We’re fucked! Really fucked!”

  “Shit!” said Fang Caodi suddenly. “Trouble up ahead!”

  Lao Chen turned back to look through the windshield. Traffic police were conducting vehicle checks. “Now we’re really fucked!” he said, paralyzed in his seat.

  “Everybody sit up straight …” said Fang Caodi. He looked like he was going to ram the roadblock.

  Just then Lao Chen saw hurrying toward them that same fat traffic cop who had stopped He Dongsheng a couple of months before. He grabbed Fang Caodi’s arm and said, “Don’t try anything stupid. Slow down.”

  As Lao Chen expected, the portly traffic cop prevented the other officers from stopping their car and just waved them through the checkpoint.

  “Okay, now drive slowly,” Lao Chen instructed Fang Caodi, “and gradually increase your speed.”

  As the SUV passed through the checkpoint, Lao Chen made eye contact with the fat cop and gave him an army salute.

  He finally relaxed and the three others heaved a sigh of relief.

  “That was close,” said Zhang Dou.

  “A miracle,” said Fang Caodi.

  Lao Chen signaled to Zhang Dou to move over a bit and then let his front seat recline at a 45-degree angle. He turned on his side and reached over to search in He Dongsheng’s pockets for the anti-surveillance device. He took it out and pressed the button; a few seconds later the three little green lights came on. “Good,” he said, “nobody is following us or listening in on us.” He handed Zhang Dou the antisurveillance device and told him to put it back in the left-inside pocket of He Dongsheng’s suit.

  Lao Chen sat back exhausted, in a sad silence.

  “Lao Chen,” said Little Xi, “you mustn’t blame us. Old Fang and I debated for a long time, and then decided that we had to question someone who has inside information. Otherwise, no matter how hard we try, we’ll never be able to figure out the truth about that lost month. There’s no way we can resign ourselves to not knowing what really happened.”

  “We figured,” continued Fang Caodi, “that in China,
where all information is controlled by the government, only a Party and national leader would have knowledge of the entire internal situation. But how could we meet a national leader? That was when we thought about this Professor He you told us about. Then we decided to find him and get him to explain things to us, but we figured he wouldn’t want to talk to us, so we had to take a few risks. Anyway, we believe that our national leaders have a responsibility to tell the common people the truth. Unless we scare them a bit, they will never talk.”

  Lao Chen remained silent.

  “Old Fang and I,” said Little Xi, “were afraid that you wouldn’t agree, so we didn’t include you in our plans. You can honestly say that you’re not a part of this grab. If you want to pull out now, we won’t try to stop you. We can let you out to take a taxi back, and it will be just like all this never happened. You won’t know anything about it.”

  Lao Chen sighed loudly.

  “Of course,” continued Fang Caodi, “we all hope that you’ll stay with us and hear Professor He’s explanations. We’ve already set everything up. We’re going to use remote video equipment in two separate rooms to tape our questions and his answers. He will never see our faces, and our voices will be electronically modified. He’ll never know who we are.”

  “Just now in the parking lot,” explained Zhang Dou, “we all wore masks. We can be quite certain that before he was unconscious, Professor He didn’t see our faces.”

  “How can you be so stupid?” Lao Chen finally spoke.

  “You have a witness,” said Fang Caodi, “that you were not in on it! When we grabbed him, you were still inside with your friend Jian Lin. We’ve thought of everything.”

  “That’s not the most important point,” said Lao Chen.

  They didn’t understand what he meant.

  “The most important point,” he continued, “is that very few people know about He Dongsheng coming to this monthly film screening; maybe only Jian Lin and I do, and the secretary—at most three people besides He Dongsheng know about it. I’m sure to be investigated; I can’t get out of it, and I’m sure to be the prime suspect. Even if they assume I wasn’t one of the actual planners, when they ask me who I’ve seen lately, I will naturally give them your names and you will be investigated. Now that you’ve let me know what you’re up to, even before they torture me, I’ll be so scared I’ll probably squeal. This time we’re totally fucked.”

  The three of them suddenly understood. They went quiet for a long time.

  “Lao Chen.” Little Xi finally broke the silence. “I’m sorry we got you into this. It was my idea to grab a national leader and ask him what has really been going on. I was so angry and now I’ve got everyone in trouble.”

  “I can’t let you take the responsibility,” said Fang Caodi. “This was all my rotten idea and I owe you all an apology.”

  “Let’s find a place to stop the car,” said Zhang Dou, “put Professor He in the driver’s seat, get out, and go home like nothing ever happened. Professor He will wake up alone in less than two hours from now.”

  “Will he be able to remember what happened before he was unconscious?” asked Lao Chen.

  “When I grabbed him,” said Zhang Dou, “and put the chloroform rag over his mouth, he only struggled for six or seven seconds before he passed out.”

  “When he wakes up,” Lao Chen said dejectedly, “he’ll have a headache and he’ll remember those six or seven seconds. Then he’ll definitely phone his secretary and activate the whole security system; they’ll check all the CCTV street-monitoring tapes, and probably call that fat traffic cop for corroboration. Then they’ll start investigating me … the result being that I’ll be scared shitless and give you all up. This time we’re definitely fucked.”

  They all went quiet again; they were probably each thinking about various possible ways out of this dilemma.

  “We could kill him …” said Fang Caodi after a while, and everybody gasped, but Fang went on. “I could never kill someone to keep him quiet. I’ll do everything myself and take all the blame. You all get out of the car. I’ll drive down south, contact the government, and ask for a big ransom to divert attention from all of you. You can all get out of the car here, okay? Zhang Dou, leave the chloroform with me.”

  “How can we do that?” asked Little Xi.

  “It’s just my one rotten life,” said Fang Caodi, “so why not? What do you say, Lao Chen?”

  “Old Fang,” said Lao Chen, “this may be disappointing for you to hear, but even if you make it down south and kill yourself before they catch you, it still won’t solve the problem that only a few people knew of He Dongsheng’s movements this evening. They’ll definitely investigate me, and I’m one hundred percent certain that I’m a coward and scared of pain. As soon as they start on me, I’ll confess everything. Even if you make your sacrifice, it won’t prevent this inevitable outcome. We’ll still be fucked.” Lao Chen turned to Zhang Dou. “What is your safest estimation of how long we have before he wakes up?”

  “The earliest he could wake up would be in ninety minutes, but I could give him some more chloroform,” answered Zhang Dou with a glance at his cell phone.

  “Now that things have gone this far,” said Lao Chen, “there’s no point hurrying. We still have some time, so let me see if I can think of something.”

  While Lao Chen was mulling over various possible escape strategies, he remembered that in his detective novel Thirteen Months there was a plot twist that he called “live or die together.” It got him thinking. When they reached Miaomiao’s house, he sat down by himself in a corner and didn’t say a word. He closed his eyes and saw his wasted life pass before him, his ruined reputation, his happiness drifting away in a mist, the impermanence of life, and himself in prison and on the execution ground. His hands were trembling and he broke out in a cold sweat, but he pulled himself back to reality and tried over and over again to calculate the possible implications of using his “live or die together” plot twist. In theory, it could just work, but in practice, he didn’t have much confidence. He kept struggling back and forth in his mind until he was exhausted. He knew time was not on his side; the moment to make a final decision was upon him, and four lives hung in the balance.

  Zhang Dou and Fang Caodi had already carried He Dongsheng into the house, tied him up in a big armchair that had been bolted to the floor in one of the two rooms. A digital camera was set up so that they could watch their prisoner from the other room to check when he woke up.

  Little Xi pulled a chair over in front of Lao Chen and took his hand in hers. Being close to her made him feel calm; he had been considering one particular element of the situation. His “live or die together” plot might not have any effect on an ordinary bureaucrat, but it might just have a chance with He Dongsheng. This was because He Dongsheng was no ordinary unimaginative bureaucratic official. He Dongsheng was intelligent enough and his mind was nimble enough to understand how to play this game. So Lao Chen came to his final decision to gamble everything on his idea.

  “Lao Chen,” said Fang Caodi, walking over with a tense expression on his face, “whatever you decide, we’ll all do what you tell us. I have a premonition that we can turn this situation to our advantage.”

  “Is he coming around?” asked Lao Chen.

  “Sure is,” answered Fang.

  “Is the camera connected properly to the computer, and ready to broadcast onto the Internet?” asked Lao Chen.

  “A digital camera, an MP3 player, a desktop computer, and a laptop are all linked together to broadband,” said Zhang Dou, settling down beside the TV monitor. “Also, three cell phones with cameras are all aimed at Professor He and are all ready to broadcast simultaneously.”

  “Perfect. You all have a lot of questions you want to ask him, right?”

  They nodded.

  “Good,” said Lao Chen. “When he comes to, don’t utter a sound; listen to what I say. When I tell you to start talking, you can ask him all the questions you can t
hink of. Okay?”

  “Okay, we’ll follow your lead.”

  “Even if I tell you to do something you don’t want to do, you must still do it. Are we agreed on that?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Now let’s go in the other room and question him,” said Lao Chen.

  “But we can question him from this room,” said Fang Caodi.

  “We can’t communicate properly that way,” said Lao Chen. “It has to be face-to-face.”

  “I’ll go in and question him for you,” offered Fang Caodi.

  “I have to do it myself,” insisted Lao Chen.

  “Then you better put on a mask.”

  “Old Fang, will it make any difference if I wear a mask or not? The moment you kidnapped He Dongsheng, I was already in on it with all of you, past the point of no return. I’m going in there now. You can all choose to remain in this room and keep well out of it, if you want.”

  Lao Chen took the lead and walked into the other room. Then Little Xi pulled off her mask and followed; Fang Caodi and Zhang Dou went in together behind her.

  He Dongsheng was an extremely analytical person. As soon as he woke up, despite a raging headache, he seemed to be considering the possibilities behind what had happened to him. He soon came to the conclusion that either his secretary, or Jian Lin, or Lao Chen had kidnapped him. He remained calm and collected, without letting on to the kidnappers what his thoughts were. Otherwise they might kill him. So when he saw Lao Chen enter the room without a mask, his reaction was not surprise but despair. The worst thing had already happened. Lao Chen had not been afraid to reveal his identity. This could only mean that these kidnappers had already decided not to let him go alive. The question he could not understand was: why?