The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  I left my suitcase open and half-packed. Everything seemed to be rushing forward in me at once. I found the edge of the bed, sat down, and my chest got all tight. I could see myself rocking back and forth in the reflection of the window and I heard the drums of the dragon boats down in the lake, like their oars reached all the way down my throat into the center of me. Don’t, I told myself. Think about windows. How did they get the windows so fucking clean on the outside? Pull it together. But then I started crying. A part of me said, Alex, you’re overtired, and that voice also told me that the hotel must have guys belay down off the roof, dangling on ropes, to wash the windows, and then this other part of me said simply, Don’t listen to him. Let go.

  * * *

  The next day at the factory, I was only settled at my desk for ten minutes when the phone rang. “Fedor,” said the voice, a Chinese man, and I told him no, sorry, it was Alex, and I was about to transfer the call, but I recognized the voice from somewhere.

  “This is Gang,” he said.

  It took a moment to settle in me. Gang. The mayor. Party secretary of Foshan.

  I raised my voice a few octaves to sound gracious and asked him a few bullshitty questions about how things were going and then I told him I’d send him over to Dad.

  But he said, “It’s you.”

  And this surprised me.

  “What’s me?” I said.

  I heard him laugh on the other line. “I want to talk with you,” he said. “Not your father. I want to invite you for tea.”

  My throat went dry when he said this. Even a gweilo knew that a tea invitation from a party member was never good.

  Gang was one of the princelings. The inner circle. His father, chummy with Jiang Zemin, had risen to minister of finance and handed Gang a plum job. Inside track to deputy county party boss in Foshan. Then mayor. Then party secretary. This was the kind of guy who made people disappear.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Excellent,” he said. “At my office. Today you can? Now?”

  “Should I invite Dad?”

  “Unnecessary.”

  He gave me a curt goodbye, and I was left wondering what just happened. Why did Gang want to see me? It couldn’t be about the factory. He was a part owner, sure, but he didn’t have any input on the business. We paid him a cut for operating on his turf. He was a Brooklyn mob boss in Mao jacket and togs. But no, he was more than that. The CCP loved him. For turning 13 percent annual growth. For turning a backwater industrial shithole into a thriving megalopolis. He was on his way up.

  So was it about Ivy? If he knew about that, I was fucked, but it couldn’t be that. If he knew about Ivy she’d be long gone. This guy made people disappear with a nod of the head. Maybe he was keeping her around on purpose. And he wanted me to get names out of her. All the names of the Democratic Revolutionary Party. He knew I’d been up to Beijing, maybe, and he wanted me to turn them in. What was I going to say? It was simple. I was fucked. Going up to Beijing seemed like a big mistake right now.

  I walked down the hall to Dad’s office to let him know, but he was tied up on the phone, yelling at customs for holding one of our shipments in dry dock, so I left without telling him anything.

  * * *

  A taxi brought me to the seat of government over in Chancheng District. I stepped out into the humid air and found myself standing for the first time in front of the gate to the Foshan People’s Government, a boxy gray eight-floor building with a flat roof and two long wings. From the outside, it wasn’t all that ornate, nothing like what I’d seen in Tiananmen.

  Over by the Chinese national flag, a female guard was sitting under an umbrella. As I approached her, she rose. She led me into her security office and called the main building. Then she hung up the phone and drew a chunky, heavy-looking Magnum from her belt holster and turned on the red laser sight and nonchalantly, as if she were folding clothes, whistling a tune to herself, lifted the gun with two hands and aimed it at my forehead.

  My hand groped back for the doorknob and I took a small step back, catching it right on top of my ass bone, and I winced.

  She said, “Stop. Can’t shoot if moving.”

  She squeezed the trigger and I closed my eyes.

  No sound. Nothing. I slowly opened my eyes. She was reading a number on the digital screen on the back of the gun. Thirty-seven.

  “No fever,” she said. It was a temperature gun. If such a thing really existed. I nodded and wiped my mouth with my hand.

  “Move,” she said and flicked the snout of the gun toward the door.

  We trooped through the parking lot of unmarked black Audis and up a flight of terrazzo stairs under a columned portico, through a set of sliding doors. At the elevator she said, “Roof.” I assumed she meant the top floor, so I pressed the number eight as the doors closed.

  While riding up, I remembered how a friend of Dad’s, this American guy, tried to move his joint-venture cement factory up north and Gang accused him of embezzlement, sent underage hookers to his hotel. Ruined him. Gang then nationalized the company, which meant he owned it all. That happened here. If you stepped out of line.

  At Gang’s office a secretary rose from her seat, nodded to me and made a big show out of flinging open the quartered oak doors.

  I stepped inside. In deep shit again. Always.

  From the other side of the room, behind a long wood desk flanked by potted ginkgo trees, Gang rose. He still wore that old military-style cloth Mao suit, stooped like he was coming back from the Long March.

  We walked toward each other. Gang pulled at the hem of his tunic and stuck out his hand.

  I gave him a faint smile and wiped my palms on the side of my pants. Gang scared me shitless.

  We shook. His hand was rough as the wool brush we used to burnish cheap leather.

  Then, as if he read what I was thinking, he released his tight grip and held up his calloused palms.

  “Tea picking,” he said. “As a boy. During the Cultural Revolution. I was a sent-down youth. Ruined my hands. My wife soak them in hibiscus, ginseng, fish eggs—to soften me. You know women.”

  I shrugged.

  He nodded at the cane-back chair in front of his desk. I sat down. While he walked around to his side of the desk, I quickly took note of the exits in the room—a habit inherited from Dad—the oak doors I’d come through and a servant’s access door between two inlaid bookcases, floor to ceiling.

  I’d heard Gang had a switch at his desk that controlled the color of the water fountains all over the city, and another one that piped different music into the streets. But all I saw was his laptop, stapler, printer, little tubs of miscellaneous office supplies. No switches that I could see.

  “Trouble finding me?” he asked.

  “No trouble,” I said.

  A waitress brisked in from the servant’s door with a tray of tea. Gang nodded thank you and she scurried away.

  “Oolong,” he said, and half smiled, like he wasn’t all that accustomed to smiling. It was almost a wince.

  “This is what I picked in the country. I only drink oolong. Helps me remember where I am from.”

  Gang took a sip and leaned back in his chair. His face was stoic and weary, but when he held it a certain way he looked almost young.

  “I pick slow,” he said. “With two hands. Bad technique. My heart in another place. A lazy bastard I was. Five yuan a day. For the ignorant and poor. But everyone has his place. Right?”

  “Right,” I said in a reedy voice. It was obvious that he knew. Everything about me. Ivy. Zhang. My right leg started jittering.

  He leaned forward in his chair and reached for the top drawer of his desk, this terror clawing in my chest—my mind reeling off gangster movie clichés: he was going to pull Ivy’s decapitated head out of his drawer, or draw a knife to cut off my fingers one by one until I confessed
.

  But Gang pulled out a bottle of Maotai and set it down hard on the desk.

  “Too early?” he asked, taking out two small pinming cups as well.

  I took a deep breath. “Never too early,” I said.

  He poured the liquor into the cups, and without a ceremonial gambei, a bad sign, he shot it down. Then he pointed with his chin to my cup. I drank. The liquor burned down my throat.

  “Helps loosen your tongue,” he said, and then suddenly he pushed his chair back, the legs scraping against the tiles, a noise that straightened my back.

  “I am interested in you,” he said.

  “That’s good,” I said moronically.

  He dipped his chin slightly. “Tell me, did you go to a university to learn shoes?”

  I said, “No, I picked it up from my father and grandfather. Learned along the way.”

  “Self-made man,” he said, patting his knee. “I respect this. This is beautiful thing about America. If you work hard enough.”

  “I always loved shoes,” I said. “It’s in my blood.”

  He smiled. “Everyone has their place,” he said again.

  This time it felt like he breathed it on the back of my neck. My skin prickled. Why didn’t he just come out and say that he knew?

  “I understand the importance of blood,” he intoned. “Family. Understanding who you serve. My daughter doesn’t like to hear this message. This is her.”

  Gang pointed to the closest frame in a row of photos lined up on his desk facing me. Then he leaned over to look.

  “No, wait, this is not my daughter. This is Steve Jobs. This is my daughter over here.”

  He pointed three photos down, past the one of him and Steve Jobs posing in front of Foxconn and past whom I guessed was Gang’s wife.

  “But everyone must serve. You serve your father. I serve China.”

  He reached across the desk and refilled my cup.

  “Good for conversation,” he said, now refilling his own.

  We threw back the liquor. But the alcohol only heightened my fear. That was it. Real fear down deep to the spaces between my bones. Like when you see an old man remove his dentures, see the sickening pink gums—and think, What part of himself is he going to take off next?

  Gang gave me a slight grin that tightened my throat. He reached for a round plastic tub on his desk of paper clips, pens, thumbtacks, miscellaneous desk crap, and he drew out a long, shiny sheet-metal screw.

  “A human,” he said, spinning the head of the screw in his hand, “has enough iron in his blood to produce one nail. Did you know this? One strong productive nail. China is a nation of a billion nails. Someone must decide what to do with them. What would the people do with one nail?”

  “Maybe hang their hats on the door with it,” I said.

  He shook his head. “It does not help China to make hat post. They need to build together. Each one is a nail that builds the nation strong. Of course, we must acknowledge, not every nail goes in clean. Some are crooked.”

  He ran his thumb over the threads of the screw. A rush of heat came swimming up my neck. I felt my heart beating against my wrist.

  “We’ve been humiliated by the West for centuries,” Gang went on. “There is a hole inside people now. A void in the spirit. Which breeds...”

  His voice trailed off.

  My mouth opened.

  “Reactionaries, Alex. Stinking rebels.”

  He paused to let it sink in. Forgive me, I thought. I’m a dumb shit who went off the rails. I can get straight again, everything can go back to the way it was, everything will be just fine, don’t worry. I fell in with the wrong girl. Ivy’s the wrong girl. I can change, I swear.

  “Bourgeois Western extremists,” he said. “Who forgot our revolutionary roots.”

  He didn’t take his cold gaze off me. Between the lines he was really saying: it is you. You’re one of these crooked nails. I remembered Ivy saying how her journalist friend talked a little shit about Gang in the paper, and the next day he was scribbling help-me notes in blood on cockroach wings up in Jiangsu labor camp. Vacation-style therapy was what they told the journalist’s mother.

  Now it was my turn. So what if Gang was friends with my father? Didn’t mean shit. I betrayed Gang, I was a troublemaker and I had to go.

  Gang smoothed his hand over the desk. “Burma teak,” he said. “From a protected rain forest. Six billion dollars of teak smuggled out of Burma last year. Most to China.”

  “If there’s a market, anything can be sold,” I said.

  “Correct,” he said. “You can’t stop desire. Ask any Buddhist who ran off to Tibet to hide from it. Not us. We control it. You want something, there’s a price. The good thing, Alex, is that China is mostly a country of light sleepers. The problem is that the reactionaries want to wake them up and whisper lies. My purpose is to tell you what maybe you already know. Something important to your business.”

  He paused again for a beat.

  “I possess internal information,” he said, punctuating each word with a tap of the screw, “that there are crooked nails in your factory.”

  He tilted his head to see if I was following.

  “Radicals,” he continued, “who want to undermine you. Me. Want to overthrow the Chinese government. You know anything about this sort of thing? These plotters?”

  I shook my head. No. And sat in solemn terror.

  Gang’s face remained stoic and calm. He started cleaning under his fingernails with the point of the screw. Then he lifted his head.

  “You would tell me if you had.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Of course you would,” he intoned. “A loyal son like you. I trust people close to me. It is the others. Out there hiding.”

  He turned his head in the direction of a stand of willows outside the window. Squinted like he could see the stinking troublemakers roosting in the long, rich branches.

  I waited. A damp chill spreading down my back.

  Then he turned back from the window and leaned toward me.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  My mouth was dry. I had to swallow a few times before getting the words out.

  “With what?” I asked.

  “Finding them.”

  “The organizers?” I asked.

  “They do a good job hiding if my people fail to find them. But my people aren’t inside your factory.”

  I nodded. Knuckled my glasses up on the bridge of my nose.

  “I chose not to tell your father,” Gang continued. “He is my old friend. This would embarrass him. Cause him to lose face. He would blame himself. Feel he did something to bring the radicals inside his plant. So I think of you. Soon you take over for him. You are younger. Stronger. You can help me find the bad elements. Probably a handful of rootless young people with very low IQs. Your generation causing problems again. I let it go at the Honda plant last month—a strike—to show support for the migrant class. But we can’t have copycats. This is my purpose with you.”

  I stared at him. Trying to compute all of this. He was enlisting me. It was easy enough for him to make a problem disappear, so he must really not have the names.

  His expression stayed hard and steady. Maybe that was what frightened me. He didn’t seem panicked about not having the names. And this feeling—this bright gas flame of a feeling that Gang put in me with his eyes, telling me I was nothing in the big scheme, a single nail—and so was he, his look said that too—and it didn’t make a bit of difference whose side I took or anybody took because the government, this colossal China machine, rolled on invulnerably and couldn’t be stopped.

  But he didn’t have the names. I leaned back in my chair and reminded myself of this fact. The establishment didn’t have everything.

  “I protect public harmony. You protect your pla
nt,” he said. “These radicals operate in shadow. Lost youth. Created by Western television. False revolutionaries desiring celebrity and fame. For endangering the public, they deserve their tongues cut off.”

  Gang made a fist and set it on the desk. His eyes narrowed. “Find one. A ringleader. Bring me the name of a suspect.”

  I sat up in my chair, my breath coming fast.

  “You will do this?” Gang asked in his government voice. Telling me to do it. I had to agree. It wouldn’t make sense to say anything else.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll put my ear to the ground and help. Best I can.”

  “Good,” he said. “I will handle the troublemaker. A simple case of killing a chicken to scare the monkeys.”

  I ground my teeth. He was going to make an example out of someone. And here I was lying to the secretary’s face. My shirt felt soaked. I’d sweated through the damn thing. Did he take it for anxiety over the factory? I wasn’t worried about the factory. Gang didn’t understand the Democratic Revolutionary Party, but maybe I didn’t either. Maybe Gang knew something I didn’t, something Ivy and Zhang hadn’t told me, and now I didn’t know who was telling the truth.

  “Be delicate,” Gang said. “I let things go at Honda plant last month. But I can’t let trouble happen twice. The world watches us. Beijing watches me. Foshan makes 90 percent of the world’s computers. Sixty-four percent of the shoes. Everything is done quiet, yes? Seek truth from facts.”

  “Right,” I said. What the fuck did that mean? Truth from facts?

  “I understand completely,” I said.

  He rose from his chair and reached across the table. He patted me on the head.

  “Be good,” he said. The hand was gone. He was sitting again. “And who knows,” he continued, “maybe this unfortunate event is a sign to bring us together. Our partnership. I believe I can trust you.”

  “Me too,” I said, which didn’t make any sense. I stood up and told him I was going back to the factory.

  “One of my drivers will take you.”