by Qiu Xiaolong
In short, he had lived up to his ideal of a loyal Party member all those years. In his opinion, there was only one exception: he agreed to accept monetary compensation for his loss during the Cultural Revolution. He took the money to purchase a plane ticket for his son, who, in the mid-eighties, wanted to go to a language school in Japan. Comrade Kang didn’t like the idea, but his son said he had lost the opportunity to go to school here—because Comrade Kang had been labeled a “capitalist roader” in the seventies.
The father had felt guilty about what had happened to the son. What really upset Comrade Kang, however, was the change in his son after the young man’s return from Japan.
The son turned out to be totally different from his father. In Japan, instead of taking the required classes, he worked at any kind of odd job he could find, saving his money like an old miser. While many people were leaving China in the late eighties, he came back to China with a small amount of capital, declaring that he saw great opportunities there for his business.
“In Japan, their business regulations are firmly established, with no large loopholes that allow one to maneuver. But things are quite different here, with opportunities for men with money to invest,” he said. “The Chinese government is now encouraging private business as a supplement to the state economy. Everything is new.” So he started his business, a huge seafood restaurant in the Qibao suburb. In those years, there weren’t many restaurants in the city, and the state-run restaurants hadn’t changed their menus for over twenty years. He introduced a new service.
In his restaurant, live seafood was displayed in glass cages like in a market—fishes, shrimps, lobsters, crabs—and the customers could choose for themselves. Their choices would be weighed, prepared, and cooked in accordance to their specific requests. This gave the customers the impression that they were getting seafood of better quality and, overall, a better bargain. Practical Shanghainese started to swarm his restaurant, and soon they had to take a number and wait in line to be seated.
“Come to my restaurant. Fifty percent discount,” Big Buck Kang offered expansively one night during the evening talk in front of the lane.
“But then how could you make money?”
“I don’t need to make money off of you, my old neighbors. Now it’s the age of ‘socialist business expense.’ It is fashionable and politically correct for Party cadres to spend their company’s money dining and entertaining in the name of socialist business expense—and all for their personal benefit. Since it is not their own money, they can afford to throw it away like water. They are the customers that are my gold mines. I have quite a few private rooms set aside for socialist business expense customers.” He added, “Good, honest people like my father are becoming fewer and fewer. He has dedicated his life to the Party, but for what? Well, don’t say anything to the old man—about socialist business expense or anything else.”
We didn’t. We later learned that, for his socialist business expense customers, Big Buck Kang had special receipts in addition to special rooms. For an eight hundred yuan meal, they could get a receipt adding up to three thousand. So his restaurant customers continued to snowball. How much he was really making, we had no clue. Soon he moved to a fancy apartment in the Upper Corner of the city. He tried to talk his father into moving with him, but the old man said no.
When other private restaurants with similar practices began opening, Big Buck Kang, to the surprise of the lane, shifted to the karaoke business.
“Karaoke is a very popular entertainment in Japan,” he explained. “You sing along to the music with captions for the words running on the TV screen.”
“Come on, Big Buck Kang. Do you really think Shanghainese will pay to sing a song?” one of his former neighbors asked. “We can sing to our hearts’ content at home or in the evening at the front of the lane, without having to pay a penny.”
“For one thing, whether Japanese or Chinese, Asian people don’t let go of their inhibitions so easily. Karaoke provides a sort of social convention, allowing them to do whatever they are normally too inhibited to do.” Big Buck Kang added with a mysterious smile, “Besides, a karaoke club may meet the needs of people in a number of ways.”
People didn’t believe in his theory, but he believed in himself. He lost no time converting an old building into a karaoke hall with a number of private rooms. It proved to be another huge hit. Evidently, Chinese people were no longer satisfied simply with a meal, no matter how expensive or fabulous. As a Confucian sage said two thousand years ago, “When you are well fed and clad, your mind goes astray.” Karaoke became a trend, a “must” in the city, especially for those who had “become rich first,” as Comrade Deng Xiaoping phrased it.
Customers went there not just for karaoke, but for something else under the cover of karaoke. Hotels still required a marriage certificate for a couple to check in together, so the private karaoke rooms with their locked doors met the understood yet unstated needs of the city. Soon, “karaoke girls” appeared, supposedly to sing for the customers. When the door was locked, however, whatever other services they might provide could be easily imagined.
Inevitably, stories about those karaoke girls reached the lane—and Comrade Kang flew into a rage.
“Don’t worry about it, Father,” the son said. “Our business is law-abiding. The Jin’an Police Station is located only five minutes away. If we allowed anything improper, they would come rushing over.”
But that was only partially true. The police chief of Jin’an district was a regular of the karaoke club. To be fair to Big Buck Kang, he was a filial son, trying hard to appease the old man. He said to us in the lane, “What’s the point in arguing with your father? It’s like arguing with history.”
Another reason for him not to argue with his father was that the old man’s health was declining. The reform of the state medical insurance didn’t help. In the past, retirees of state-run companies had enjoyed full medical coverage; now the coverage had been drastically cut. His annual coverage now was capped at eight hundred yuan, which barely covered his heart medicine for three months. Instead of accepting the money offered by his son, he tried to cut down his medical expense.
Because of his extraordinary karaoke business, Big Buck Kang couldn’t come back to the lane as often as he would have liked. So he asked us for our help in taking care of the old man. To show his appreciation, he invited some of us to his club, where we were treated like princes, with the karaoke girls singing and dancing to our hearts’ content. At the hourly price of three hundred yuan for an evening in a high-class private room, plus all the food and drink, the bill would normally have been staggering. People in the lane calculated that bill and talked about that evening for days. Since most of the clients there were upstart entrepreneurs or government cadres, they could be liberal in their spending, and the club’s nightly revenue could be as high as six figures. That was even without including all the other gray money—such as the percentage those karaoke girls kicked back from their “private service fee.”
As China’s economic reform progressed, Big Buck Kang made another business decision that confounded all of us in the lane, except for Comrade Kang, who was now in the hospital. The decision was about the very textile factory for which the old man had worked for more than thirty years.
The factory had been in terrible shape for a long time. In the old state-economy system, the factory simply manufactured whatever was required in accordance to the government orders, regardless of any profit or loss. Now the factory had to compete for survival in the open market and was fully responsible for the workers’ pay and benefits. Director Fei, the director after Comrade Kang, turned out to be clueless as to handling the problems now besieging the factory. Their products were substandard and were no longer marketable, let alone profitable. The workers, having been “iron rice bowl holders” for so many years, could do little to help. The large number of pensioners on their books became an increasingly unbearable burden. Fei was becoming as des
perate as an ant crawling on a hot wok.
But Fei wasn’t alone in facing these problems. Throughout the country, more than half of the state-run factories were in deep trouble, some nearing bankruptcy. According to the People’s Daily, this was “inevitable in the historic transition from the state economy to the market economy.” Whatever the official interpretations, the government had given up subsidizing those factories. A new policy was generated instead: a state-run company could apply for bankruptcy and its employees could be sent home with a onetime compensation. Interested entrepreneurs were encouraged to buy such companies and were offered a huge discount if they retained some of the employees for at least two years.
That special clause reduced the government compensation for factories, it was argued, but contributed to political stability by reducing unemployment numbers.
When Comrade Kang’s factory was put on the list of factories for sale, the buyer turned out to be none other than Big Buck Kang. After he agreed to keep about two hundred employees, he got the factory for only a “symbolic sum.” In the logic of the new age, this kind of transaction was a good thing. The state would stop losing money, and some of the now ex–state employees would hold onto their rice bowl—at least for a couple of years more.
There was one concession that Big Buck Kang refused to make in the negotiations. It was about the pensions and benefits of the retired employees, none of which he would take on. The only exception was the former executives. As for Comrade Kang, Big Buck Kang included him in the executive severance package, which meant that, as an ex-executive, the old man would still enjoy his pension and benefits as before.
What astonished us was his secret business plan, which was revealed after the conclusion of the deal. He mortgaged the factory for five or six times more than what he’d paid for it. Then he unveiled plans to raze the factory to make way for housing construction. It turned out to be close to a planned subway route, so his proposal attracted a large number of investors. Also, he reached an agreement of joint development with a real estate contractor, through which he was able to keep his part of the original deal with the government by retaining those two hundred employees as temporary construction workers. At the end of construction, he would own one third of the whole apartment complex.
It was one arrow that killed several birds. It helped the state by getting rid of a financial burden, kept two hundred workers’ pots boiling—at least for the next couple of years—and would help meet the housing needs of the city.
Not to mention the unbelievable profits it would generate for Big Buck Kang.
Questions arose in the lane like bees swarming out of an upset hive.
“It’s like catching a white fox with one’s bare hands,” Old Hunchback Fang commented in indignation. “He hasn’t paid a single penny out of his pocket.”
“Why was it impossible for Fei to have done that?” Four-Eyed Liu joined in. “At least then the workers could have shared some of the profits. And later perhaps some of the housing too.”
But Big Buck Kang wasn’t willing to discuss the deal with us, saying that he had to see his father, who had just come home from the hospital. He was a good son and was trying to keep the old man in the dark.
But Comrade Kang wasn’t going to have a peaceful evening, examining the pictures of his son in childhood. A retired worker from his factory came stumbling into the lane. She wanted to air her grievances to the “Comrade Director Kang” without knowing anything about his illness. Emotionally distraught, she started sobbing and complaining to him in front of the whole lane.
“Oh Comrade Director Kang, you should have never retired. Do you know what Fei has done to our factory? That bastard has squandered away state property for his personal benefit. His severance package for selling the factory came to six figures.”
“Selling the factory!” Comrade Kang was stunned.
“What’s more, he got a fat red envelope under the table—a certificate for a three-bedroom apartment when the construction project on the site of our good old factory is done. It’s really a changed world, Comrade Kang. It’s just like going back to the old society over one night. The black-hearted, big-buck capitalist, who bought our good old factory for nothing, is wallowing in money, and we workers are suffering—it’s like we’re in an abyss of scorching fire and freezing water. Alas, Chairman Mao’s dead, and you’re retired, who is going to take care of poor retired workers like us?”
Comrade Kang, having been in and out of the hospital of late, was totally oblivious of what had happened to the factory. Listening to her, he broke out in a cold sweat, slipped from the bamboo chair, and passed out on the curb in front of the lane.
That evening, after we rushed Comrade Kang back to the hospital, we prayed for his recovery. But then we worried about his reaction when he woke up and learned all the details about the destruction of “the good old factory,” particularly the role Big Buck Kang had played in it.
Little Hao, a young member of the evening talk of Red Dust Lane, was less pessimistic. “What’s the big deal? If the factory was once the father’s, it’s now the son’s—at least, all the value of it.”
Confucius and Crab
(2001)
This is the last issue of Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter for the year 2001. It was another year of great achievements for the Chinese people. In spite of a diplomatic standoff over the detention of an American spy plane and crew after a midair collision with a Chinese fighter jet earlier in the year, China made huge progress in its international relations. In June, leaders of China, Russia, and four Central Asian states launched the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and signed an agreement to promote trade and investment. In July, Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games, which spoke eloquently for the enhanced status of China in today’s world. In November, after years of negotiation, China joined the World Trade Organization.
It was crab season again. Aiguo, a retired middle school teacher who lived in Red Dust Lane, couldn’t help casting another glance toward the neighborhood seafood market in the afternoon sunlight. There was no point stopping in for a look at the live crabs crawling in cages, since he couldn’t afford to buy even one in the new millennium. Indeed, Confucius says: time flows away like water. Memories rise to the top like algae in a pond.
Five or six years before the economic reform started in the eighties, Aiguo was so disappointed with the banishment of Confucius from the classroom that he began to develop a crab complex. He made a point of enjoying the Yangchen river crabs three or four times during each crab season. His wife had passed away, and his son had just started working in a state-run steel plant and was dating a young girl, so Aiguo justified his one and only passion by referencing well-known writers like Su Dongpo, a Song dynasty poet, who declared a crab feast the most blissful moment of his life—“O that I could have crabs without a wine supervisor sitting beside me”—or like Li Yu, a Ming dynasty scholar, who confessed that he wrote for the purpose of earning “crab money”—his “life-saving money.” As an intellectual immersed in what “Confucius says,” Aiguo had to restrain himself from lecturing about the sage in public in those days, but he used the sage’s ritualistic rules for crab-eating at home.
“Do not eat when the food is rotten; do not eat when it looks off-color; do not eat when it smells bad; do not eat when it is not properly cooked; do not eat when it is off season; do no eat when it is not cut right; do not eat when it is not served with the appropriate sauce . . . Do not throw away the ginger . . . Be serious and solemn when one offers a sacrifice meal to his ancestors . . .’” Aiguo would quote from the Analects by Confucius over a platter of steaming hot crab, adding, “It’s about the live Yangcheng crabs, really, about all the necessary requirements for them, including a piece of ginger.”
“All are but excuses for his crab craziness. Confucius says,” his son commented to the neighbors with a resigned shrug. “You don’t have to listen to him.”
Indeed, Aiguo suffered from a ch
aracteristic crab syndrome: as soon as the western wind rose in November, it was as if his heart were being pinched and scratched by crab claws. He had to conquer the craving with “a couple of the Yangcheng River crabs, a cup of yellow wine,” before he was able to work hard for another year, full of energy for whatever “Confucius says,” until the next crab season.
Aiguo retired just as the economic reform was picking up steam in the nineties, when the price of crab started to rocket. A pound of large crabs would cost three hundred yuan, which was more than half of his monthly pension. Crabs became a luxury affordable only by the newly rich in this society in transition. For the majority of the Shanghai crab eaters like Aiguo, crab season became almost a torture.
In the same shikumen house lived Gengbao, a former student of Aiguo’s. Gengbao hardly acknowledged Aiguo as his teacher, since he had flunked out of school, having gotten a number of D’s and F’s from Aiguo. As it is said in Tao Te Ching, “In misfortune comes fortune.” Because he failed at school, Gengbao started a cricket business and made a small fortune. In Shanghai, people gambled on cricket fights, so a ferocious cricket could sell for thousands of yuan. Gengbao was able to catch the fiercest crickets from a “secret cemetery,” a place from where the crickets, having absorbed the infernal spirits, fought like devils. It proved to be a lucrative niche market. Even after making a fortune, he chose not to move away from his attic room in Red Dust Lane, since he believed its feng shui had brought his fortune. So he stayed on, living next door to Aiguo, despite having bought a new apartment somewhere else in the city. In the old building, he shared the common kitchen, as well as a common passion, with Aiguo: the crab. Gengbao enjoyed crabs to his heart’s content and made a big show of it, parading crabs through the kitchen, nailing crab shells like monster masks on the wall above the coal briquette stove. Aiguo suffered through all of this, sighing and quoting from a Confucian classic, “It’s the teacher’s fault to have not taught a student properly.”
