by Wendy Lee
Improving on the previous generation, Harold had gone to Tai Da, or Taiwan National University, the best school in Taiwan. After college and finishing his compulsory military service, he went to work for his father’s business, an electronics exporter that benefited greatly from moving production in the mid-2000s to China. Around that time, his old classmate Charlie Lin introduced him to his friend, who happened to be Vicki.
In the beginning, Harold had been intimidated by Vicki and her accomplishments, as well as those of her family. They still had ties to the government, and Vicki herself had studied abroad at Oxford; traveled throughout Europe; and seen the finest art in the Louvre and the Prado. Not to mention, she was the most beautiful girl who had ever agreed to go out with him. He was afraid that she would look down on him because the source of his family’s wealth was so different from her own, but she seemed to take him on as her special project. She introduced him to the right people, told him what clothes to wear, where to get the proper haircut, which foreign car to drive. The president of Taiwan had been invited to their wedding.
On schedule, two years after they were married, they had Adrian. Harold thought finally Vicki would be satisfied, but she often talked wistfully about having another child.
“You’re an only child,” she said. “Weren’t you lonely?”
Harold thought of his mother’s attention, the neighborhood children whom he had played with, and shook his head. “I believe in the one-child policy,” he tried to joke, before realizing it was the worst possible response he could have given.
“Like a mainlander!” Vicki spat. “Now that you have a son who can carry your name and inherit your precious business, that’s all you care about.”
Harold let her think that. He couldn’t tell her that he didn’t think having another child would make her happy. She was increasingly restless, seemingly bored with the regimen of shopping, entertaining, and keeping the process of aging at bay. She was so educated and had seen so much of the world, Harold often thought she should start her own business. But someone from Vicki’s background did not work, or even take care of her own children. Her mother, the wife of a judge, had led a similar kind of existence.
In revenge for his one-child-policy stance, Vicki drew away from him. They still slept in the same bed, but nothing other than sleep had gone on in that bed for months. She got up after he’d left for work, allowing the nanny to feed and dress Adrian, and went to bed before he returned. He was away frequently enough on business trips to the mainland and abroad that they could go for weeks without spending a waking hour together. When Harold told her he was planning to return to New York in a month’s time, he thought she looked relieved. He let her assume it was for business, whereas that was when he had been told the Andrew Cantrell painting would be restored and ready for purchase. He imagined unveiling the painting to Vicki and how surprised—maybe even impressed—she would be at how much he’d paid for it.
Before going to New York again, Harold had another trip planned, a legitimate one, visiting a factory on the mainland. There he would meet up with Charlie Lin, who over the years had evolved from classmate to colleague. Charlie’s wife, Serena, was one of Vicki’s best friends, and they had a daughter around Adrian’s age. It was a well-known fact, both among their friends and their wives, that Charlie had a mistress in Shanghai whom he saw whenever he spent time on the mainland, which was as much as six months a year. A “little third,” this mistress was called, referring to the third leg in a love triangle. Back when they still had conversations with each other, Harold and Vicki used to laugh at how short, square-faced Charlie had a “little third.”
A week after he returned from New York, Harold took the two-hour-long flight from Taipei to Shanghai, and Charlie met him with a private car that delivered them to the Qingpu Industrial Zone on the city’s outskirts, where many of the manufacturers were located. Often, migrant workers from the surrounding provinces stopped here to find jobs instead of venturing into the city itself, and there was an endless supply of them. A whole makeshift city appeared to have cropped up around the factory grounds, with flimsy stalls selling plastic slippers, batteries, and likely knockoffs of the products being manufactured inside.
Harold and Charlie were greeted outside the factory by a representative, a young woman who went by Miss Hao. She wore a cheap-looking skirt and suit set, but her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed a little when Charlie remarked on how capable she looked.
After a preliminary meeting with some of the factory higher-ups, Miss Hao took them onto the work floor, where hundreds of young people, clad in white dusters and caps, blue masks shielding their noses and mouths, assembled electronics. Most of them were young women; Miss Hao, Harold thought, was probably the luckiest one out of all of them. He half-listened as she talked about workers’ conditions, their twelve-hour days with paid overtime, their ninety-minute rest periods, and instead swept his eyes over the scene before him, each person a pixel on a screen. Then his eyes settled on one worker who had nodded off, her cap askew.
“Is there anything else you’d like to know?” Miss Hao asked.
Charlie said, “After the ‘unfortunate incident’ last year, have there been any further disturbances?” The unfortunate incident was that a female worker at the factory had died from taking rat poison, supposedly after discovering she’d been dumped by her boyfriend.
Miss Hao looked flustered. “None at all. We have a hotline set up if workers feel like they need to talk to someone. If they get too stressed, there are a lot of places here for them to relax. We have our own movie theater, basketball court, hair salon, Internet café where they can play computer games . . .”
“What about their dormitories?” Harold asked.
“Excuse me?”
Harold ignored the questioning, slightly annoyed look Charlie shot him. “We’d like to see their dormitories, too.”
“I will have to speak to my bosses,” Miss Hao hedged.
“We’d like to see them now.”
Uncertainly, Miss Hao looked toward Charlie, who looked heavenward as if for patience and then nodded. So she took them outside past what appeared to be the basketball court, a scrubby, poorly paved piece of land with a single hoop set up, and to another building. This appeared to be a women’s dorm, judging by the nature of the toiletries in the rooms; the plush animals on the metal bunk beds, eight to a room; and the floral-patterned clothes drying on the balconies. Very few people were inside during the day, only those who appeared to be sick. The youth of the women and their possessions made Harold think of a boarding school, only these girls would never graduate to a better job.
He nodded at Miss Hao, satisfied, and with visible relief she led them out onto the campus.
“Well, that was depressing,” Charlie said when they were back in their car and speeding toward Shanghai. “I think we need to do something tonight to cheer ourselves up. I’ll call Jenny and have her find a restaurant. Maybe she can bring a friend for you.”
“You know what my answer is to that.” Every time they were in Shanghai, Charlie made Harold the same offer.
Charlie laughed and clapped him on the knee. “My incorruptible friend, Harold Yu! Someday we’ll find out what he truly wants.”
Harold had met Jenny, Charlie’s mistress, before, and she had also insinuated that she could find Harold a “little third.” She lived in an upscale neighborhood called Shanghai Villas and had a personal driver, all paid for by Charlie. Unlike most women in her profession, Jenny was older, well into her thirties, and had no desire for anything more from Charlie, such as children or a divorce from his wife. Charlie had confided in Harold that Jenny had grown up in a rural part of Jiangsu Province. She’d had a disastrous early marriage that resulted in a child, who lived with her parents. Five years ago she had come to Shanghai to start over and found work in a nightclub, which was where she had met Charlie. This was around the time Charlie’s daughter had been born.
Jenny was not an
unattractive woman, Harold thought, when she met them at a Mongolian hot pot restaurant along with two of Charlie’s friends. She was, however, overdressed, in a silver sequined dress that showed off her legs. With her hair cut in a shiny bob that grazed her elegant jawline, she looked as polished as any one of Vicki’s friends. Although Vicki would have seen right through her to her Jiangsu village origins.
Charlie introduced Harold to his friends, Jay and Yan, and then the food began to flow: thinly sliced beef, abalone, cubes of congealed duck blood, fish balls, lotus root, chrysanthemum leaves, all cooked in a steaming metal pot and washed down with cheap beer.
Harold didn’t pay much attention to the conversation, until Jay mentioned something about purchasing a piece of what he thought was Ming dynasty porcelain at an auction.
“Turns out it was made by a factory in Jingdezhen,” Jay said. “Three years ago! They have these places that turn out so-called ancient artifacts, just like they were shoes or phones. The workers actually look at auction catalogs and copy them. There’s no honor in what they do.”
“That’s the problem with the Chinese art market,” Yan remarked, and Harold remembered that he worked for some kind of anti-corruption board. “No oversight. Not like what we have in place for our factories.”
“What made you decide to invest in porcelain?” Harold asked Jay.
“Easy. Have you looked at the Chinese stock market lately? Completely unreliable. And Chinese property value has slowed down. People are so dissatisfied that they’re starting to buy outside the country, in London and New York. In China, art is the only thing that lasts.”
“Would you ever think of investing in a piece of American art? They’ve got to have more oversight.”
Jay waved that away. “I don’t know the difference between a Picasso and Matisse”—he pronounced the names as “Bi jia suo” and “Ma di si”—“and if I try to resell here, a Chinese investor won’t know, either. Best stick to the artists whose names are known.”
“Like who?”
“Qi Baishi. Xu Beihong. Zhang Daqian. You sell one of Qi Baishi’s shrimp paintings, and you’re set for life.”
Charlie gazed at Harold over the rim of his beer glass. “I didn’t know you were interested in art, Chinese or American.”
“I’m not,” Harold said. “Just looking for something dependable to invest in, like the rest of you.”
Charlie gave a shout of laughter and drained his glass. “This is the most dependable investment I have,” he declared, sliding his arm around Jenny’s waist, and she smiled in a way that hid her teeth.
After dinner, Jenny suggested they go to a karaoke bar. She knew just the place, where the xiaojie were particularly pretty and obliging. But the one she took them to appeared to be crawling with foreigners, which made Harold doubt her taste. She and the four men settled themselves into a small, dim room illuminated by the blue screen of a flat-screen TV, where they flipped through laminated notebooks, smoked Zhonghua cigarettes, snacked on boiled peanuts, and drank watered-down whiskey.
At one point, a knock came at the door and three young women entered. They were dressed not unlike Jenny, who acted like their big sister and introduced them. Each girl was assigned to one of the men; Harold’s was a waifish-looking one with big eyes, who for some reason reminded him of Miss Hao. The way she kept looking at Jenny for guidance made him think she hadn’t been doing this job for very long.
Harold glanced at the watch on his wrist, a Patek Philippe that had been a gift from Vicki for his last birthday.
“You shouldn’t have,” he’d said when she’d presented him with it. “I can go to the night market and get a knockoff that works just as well.”
Vicki’s face had crumpled, and it had taken her a few days to forgive him, even after he’d repeatedly apologized.
The time was past midnight, too late to call Vicki, although he doubted she would care. In front of the room, Yan was swaying before the screen, slurring the words to a Taiwanese pop song. Everyone else watched him with seemingly rapt attention, although Jay’s hand had slid down the cleavage of his girl’s dress, and the girl who’d been assigned to Yan was sitting on Charlie’s lap. Jenny, who sat next to Charlie, didn’t seem to mind.
Harold felt a slight pressure on his thigh and looked down to see the hand of his girl lying upon it, as timid as a slug. Not wanting to offend her, he shifted so that her hand fell into the crack between them. In a moment, her hand had crept back. He grabbed her wrist and she looked up at him, confused and frightened.
He stood up. “We’re going outside for a bit,” he announced to the others. Charlie raised his whiskey glass to Harold with a knowing grin.
With his hand against her back, Harold hustled the girl down the hallway. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked him, and he shook his head.
At the entrance to the bar, she balked. “I’m not allowed to leave the bar.”
He glanced at her impatiently. “You’re being paid for your time, aren’t you?”
“I guess.” She indicated her short dress. “I can’t go out like this.”
“Can you change?” Some of the other patrons, including the foreigners, were staring at them now, and he was afraid he would get her in trouble.
She nodded.
“Meet me outside in five minutes.”
When the girl arrived, she was wearing jeans and a fitted shirt, her long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. She’d scrubbed most of her makeup off, and in the streetlight she looked to be in her early twenties.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Where do you usually go?”
“I don’t really go with customers—”
He sighed. “I mean, where do you go when you’re off work? With your friends?”
“The night market, I guess.”
“Then let’s go there.”
Harold followed the girl down a warren of side streets, newly brushed black by the rain, until they emerged into a splash of lights and color, raucous vendors and diners and sizzling food. It reminded him of the Taiwanese night markets he used to go to as a child with his parents, then as a college student and a young man, where almost everything one could ever want to eat was on display, as well as things one didn’t want to eat, such as snakes. They walked by stalls displaying skewers strung with pieces of seasoned lamb and chicken hearts, plates of fresh clams on ice, piles of boiled and salted crayfish with their living counterparts scrambling in buckets behind them. Smoke from braziers hovered between the stalls and the night sky.
“What do you want to eat?” the girl asked Harold.
He thought back to his childhood, of walking down a night market street littered with refuse, each hand held by a parent. They stopped in front of a stall, and he watched as the vendor poured a circle of batter on a hot griddle, cracked an egg into it, and added a handful of oysters. His mother handed him the warm, eggy packet and he toddled down the street nibbling on the savory oyster omelet.
“Do you have o-a-chian?” he asked the girl.
“What? Oh, you mean muli jian. We have that here, too.”
Harold purchased one for each of them, and they sat at a low plastic table with the other diners.
“What’s your name again?” he asked her.
She thought for a moment as if trying to remember. “Tina.”
“Your real name.”
“Xiu Xing. Everyone calls me Xiao Xiu.” Little Xiu.
“I’m Harold.”
She laughed. “Where did you get such a funny English name?”
“My father chose it for me.” His father couldn’t even pronounce it properly. “Are you in school?” he asked her.
She laughed again. “What, you think I’m some college student working as a KTV girl on the side? That’s a businessman’s fantasy. This is my only job.”
Little Xiu went on to tell Harold that she was from a small village in the neighboring Shandong Province. She’d dropped out of school at sixteen to work in a
factory that made wedding dresses, but after six years got tired of the low wages and long hours.
“I was miserable,” she said. “I couldn’t stay awake on the floor so I took pills, and that made me anxious and jittery. I couldn’t concentrate and made mistakes in my stitching and was penalized for shoddy work.”
Harold thought of the factory he had visited earlier that day. “Didn’t you have time off? Places you could relax in?”
“You mean like the Internet cafés?” she scoffed. “People go there to play on computers that are poor versions of the ones they just spent all day putting together. I wouldn’t be caught dead there.”
On a trip to Shanghai, Little Xiu found out through a friend that she could make more money in a KTV bar while only working nights. As Harold had suspected, she’d only started this job a month ago. Her parents, whom she visited every Spring Festival, thought she still worked at the factory.
Little Xiu asked Harold where he was from, and when he said Taiwan, she said, “I knew it! You don’t seem like you’re from the mainland. But not one of those huaqiao, either, from overseas. You’re from Taiwan and you don’t have a girlfriend on the mainland?”
Although he wasn’t sure how true it was anymore, Harold replied stiffly, “I’m very happily married to my wife. She was first runner-up to Miss—” He stopped himself from echoing Vicki; this girl wouldn’t care.
“All of them are happily married,” Little Xiu said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t want to share their happiness with another woman.”
“And how do you think their wives feel?”
Little Xiu shrugged. “I heard a story somewhere, that a wife found out about her husband’s mistress and threatened her. The mistress ended up poisoning herself. The husband was so upset that he divorced the wife, who lost her social status. You know who ended up with the best life?”
“The husband,” Harold guessed.
“Yes, but at least the mistress had fun while she could. She lived a full life.”
“Is that what you want out of life?” Harold asked. “To become someone’s mistress?”
