by Ge Fei
For instance, there’s a handful of professors who love to warn me every time we meet that a society like China’s could collapse at any moment. I’ve never once brought the subject up myself, yet they still seize every opportunity to sit at their dining tables and guide my understanding. I end up having nightmares. They’ve been repeating the same thing for a good ten or twenty years now. One year passed; five years, twenty years have passed; and the sun’s still hanging right up there in the sky! China continues on, as fine as can be; nothing cataclysmic has happened.
Then there’s another handful who take the exact opposite position. They believe China is right at the zenith of her history, and that the whole world is gazing up at us in admiration. Everywhere else, the world is in crisis and people look desperately to China for salvation, while we’re rolling in so many billions of shiny dollar bills, we don’t know who to save first—should it be Iceland or Greece, Italy or America? I’m not sure what the actual situation really is. I’d rather leave it to the politicians and the academics. Anyway, it doesn’t take them long to confuse me.
My other groups of clients, of course, are business owners of varying degrees of wealth. At first glance, you’d think men like these, with their fat wallets and empty souls, would be the last to have any connection to real classical music. The fact that they’ve become steady sources of income for me has been made possible solely through Jiang Songping’s recommendations and introductions. Songping calls it “fishing,” and his strategy never changes.
Whenever Songping hosts a party or a private get-together at his house, it frequently involves bringing his partners, board members, or whoever else is present on a mandatory tour of his basement, which boasts a nearly sixty-square-meter home theater. The sound system it uses is both brilliantly functional and aesthetically beautiful: Amati Anniversario speakers by the Italian company Sonus Faber, their wood lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine; a McIntosh 50th anniversary commemorative edition amplifier, with green and blue lights that flicker on the face when you turn it on; a Nagra CD console, as carefully designed as a Swiss watch, with a first-class Clearaudio LP turntable sitting on top. In terms of sound quality, the system pays attention to detail and differentiation.
At one point during the tour (usually after ten o’clock at night, as Songping almost never listens to music before ten; he claims that only at night is there stable enough voltage and a clean enough current to create beautiful music), Songping will put a finger to his lips and hush everyone softly, then turn on the blue wall lighting. The walls of the basement have all been lined with a special egg-crate soundproofing material. He will draw down a heavy cashmere curtain, don a pair of white gloves, and tiptoe into the maze of boxes and electrical cables. He will take a CD from the pile on the coffee table, a disc we call the “Nursery Record,” spritz its underside with a cleaning agent, and wipe it dry with mirror cloth. The whole ordeal seems more like leading his guests in a ritual performance rather than simply playing them music.
Although the dust in Beijing can get a little severe, I still caution him against using chemical cleaners on his CDs. There’s always a chance the agent in the fluid will erode the plastic surface of the disc and interfere with the tracking. Frankly, the best cleaner you can use is pure water. Songping never listens. He always gives me the same irrational answer: “Are you kidding? This is no ordinary cleaner. You know I buy this stuff specially imported from England? You know how many pounds a bottle this size costs? Take a fucking guess. Use water? You’re kidding me.”
So I shut my mouth again.
As the music from the Nursery Record unrolls like bolts of silk, some of the well-fed executives whose brains are as full as their bellies will lean into the leather couch and begin to snore. But that’s no problem—there are always a few among them who take the bait. They succumb to the charm of the Nursery Record. Looks of amazement appear on their faces, like they can’t believe their own ears. Their eyes glow green with envy, and they nod repeatedly, as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.
More often than not, before the end of the first movement, someone stands up and announces decisively, “No wonder Songping is so obsessed with music he doesn’t even grab girls’ asses any more. I see the light! Songping, get me one exactly like yours, quick! I want it now!”
One such announcement is enough to keep me busy for months, and five or six of these “victims” a year is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along. I buy the speaker boxes, cables, and CD players from the secondhand markets or off eBay, and then I secretly install my own custom amplifiers into the system. I only charge for the amplifiers. Of course, the systems I build for them can’t possibly be exactly like Jiang Songping’s. But you can bet the Nursery Record that hooked them in the first place is a mandatory freebie.
I might as well say a bit more about the Nursery Record.
It’s a very well-known recording, originally cut as an LP by Decca in 1962, then remastered for CD in 1993. The music was composed by a Frenchman named Hérold, born at the end of the eighteenth century. It was originally written as the score for an opera about a group of young women during the French Revolution, and their longing for independence. The title was originally translated as something like “The Wayward Girl.” Later, the music was arranged for orchestra by a man named Lanchbery, who conducted it himself in a performance by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. As for the original composer, Hérold, he may well be a complete nobody, someone you could flip through every musical dictionary looking for and never find. But to a lot of newcomers to classical music, this recording of his work has worked like a drug. Its tone color, sense of space, and orchestral richness evoke a kind of yin-yang beauty of strength and softness working in concert with each other. I don’t even like the tune very much, but I still must admit that it sets a truly unsurpassable standard for performance and recording. If you had never heard any classical music before in your life, it would only take five or six minutes of patient listening to this album before you gave in completely to its allure. You’d think you had fallen in love with “classical music.” It’s all a delusion, of course. It’s because this record has brought so many people over the threshold of classical music that it earned the title of the “Nursery Record.”
Pretty much every one of the hi-fi enthusiasts I knew owned a copy. And escorting friends into his basement to listen to it became Jiang Songping’s prestige performance. He didn’t do it just to help me “fish” for clients, either. He played the violin in college, listened to Jascha Heifetz and Leonid Kogan, and enjoyed showing off his highbrow tastes to his friends.
In addition to Songping’s endless flow of friends and guests, his wife had a whole battery of relations on her side who loved to gather at their house. I don’t remember the place ever being quiet. “Seats always filled, cups never empty,” as the saying goes. Like having dinner would be impossible with fewer than seventeen or eighteen guests present. Their home was one constant holiday party.
And this day, too, would be no exception.
•
The post-luncheon living room had recovered its original tidy state, but the air was still heavy with the scents of grain alcohol, peppercorn, and Sichuan sausage. A group of women sat attentively among the couches, listening to an eight- or nine-year-old girl play the violin. I didn’t recognize a single one of them. Still seated at the table were two withered, expressionless old women, both so decrepit that it was all they could do to keep breathing. One of them was Jiang Songping’s aunt, the other his mother-in-law. They sat in silence, casting occasional blank glances in our direction.
The little girl played Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” and after being pressed by the crowd, played “Spring in Xinjiang.” She was awful, I must say. After a while I had a hard time feigning interest, so I got up and went down to the basement.
I couldn’t find Songping there either. I could make out the forms of a few people in th
e darkness watching Pirates of the Caribbean with 3D glasses on. The maid, coming down with a plate of fruit, told me that Songping was upstairs in his study.
He wasn’t alone. A middle-aged man in a coffee-colored traditional Chinese jacket sat across from him at his desk. Too much alcohol had turned him beet red from his neck all the way up to his veiny forehead. Songping introduced him to me as Master Hang, a renowned geomancer. He was planning to build a new clothing factory in the suburbs of Daxing and had invited Master Hang to look at the land for him. It was rumored that this multitalented adept could read fortunes as well as landscapes. Songping pressed him to tell my fortune; I wasn’t in a position to refuse. Master Hang forced his bleary eyes open and shook his head violently back and forth as if to tear himself from a stupor. Then he turned to me with an ingratiating smile and asked what aspect of my fortune I would like to know about. He slipped Songping an inebriated look, mumbling, “No, wait . . . I think I’m going to hurl.”
“Look at his love life for him,” Songping offered. “My buddy doesn’t have any vices, he just worries all the time about getting married.”
Master Hang reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out three bronze coins, the imperial-era kind with the hole in the middle, already worn lustrous from use. He put the coins into my hand and told me to make the toss. I threw them six times onto the carpet as he instructed. The Master dry-heaved a few times, then asked Songping for pen and paper. He drew a couple lines, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he proclaimed, “Already been married.”
Then the Master closed his oracular mouth and fell into a mystical silence. This particular fortune had apparently come to a close. In a quiet voice, I asked if he could explain what he meant by “already been married.” The Master paid no attention to me, instead turning to stare at Songping with a look of uncertainty in his drunken eyes.
“No . . . definitely gonna hurl.”
With his hands on the desk, he pushed himself un-steadily to his feet and let out two long, squealing farts. Disgust spread across Songping’s face, probably motivated by anxiety over the Master staining his carpet. He motioned him downstairs, and the Master hurried off with one hand over his mouth.
I said to Songping, “His utterance just now: ‘already been married.’ I don’t understand it.”
“He means you’re done,” Songping replied. “Sounds like you should just forget about getting married in this lifetime. So now why not stop worrying about that lowlife bitch Rayray—”
Here he was cut off by the sound of vomiting rising out from his flower garden. The Master retched with such volume and force that even Songping couldn’t keep from grimacing.
The “Rayray” Songping mentioned was Zhu Ruirui, a former cashier at his company. After my divorce, Songping started setting me up on dates. But the women he found for me were either pudgy servers from the worker’s cafeteria or thick-skinned cleaning ladies from the janitor’s office. Not one I could even begin to like. Songping assumed the job of finding me a woman as a personal responsibility. The two of us grew up together, and we knew each other well. Besides him, I can’t really think of anyone I could really call a “friend.” Whenever he complained that I was too picky, I would solemnly remind him that just because I was poor didn’t mean I couldn’t have standards. Rayray the cashier caught my eye, though; she had a cute, giggly laugh, and her eyes reminded me of Yufen’s. Once, when Songping and I were drunk, I indirectly expressed my intentions to him. He reacted with fright, gave an equivocating laugh, and asked, “What do you see in her?”
I told him what my mother said to me on her deathbed, about every man on earth having a wife somewhere, hiding in a corner of the world, and when the time was right she would appear right in front of him, that as soon as you saw her, you’d know this was the woman heaven and earth had appointed for you. The first time I saw Zhou Ruirui, I said, that was exactly how I felt.
Songping considered this for a moment, then said definitively, “No way. You can choose anyone else in the factory except for her.”
Not many days later, Jiang Songping helped Zhu Ruirui move to Ottawa and gain Canadian citizenship. She even bore him a son. You can imagine why I felt angry, and a little dirty, whenever I saw Songping after that. To make it worse, in conversations with me he started to refer to her as “your cousin.” I felt so betrayed that I even swore I’d never talk to him again. But fate comforted me eventually. Less than two years after she got to Canada, Zhu Ruirui ran off with a drummer. Songping couldn’t even get visitation rights. Gradually, we could talk about her openly, as if talking about a stranger.
The Master didn’t come back upstairs after his vomiting fits. Songping plucked a cigar from a wooden box. He put it in his mouth and gently positioned the other end over the flame of his torch lighter.
“There’s something important I want to talk to you about. I’ve recently made a new friend. What he does, where’s he’s from, I have no idea. Seriously, I don’t know much about him. But when you meet him in person, he gives you this—how do I put it—there’s just something eerie about him. I don’t know why; he looks totally ordinary. But there’s something about the expression on his face that’s fucking terrifying. I’m not going to lie to you—in the circles where the real money moves, I’m a nobody. You know that. But I asked around, and nobody could tell me who he is, where he’s from. His name is weird, too: Ding Caichen. Hey, did you ever see that old horror flick Her Lost Soul? Well, anyway. . . this guy, this Mr. Ding, we became acquainted a few days ago through a mutual friend. He told me I absolutely had to help him acquire the highest-quality sound system in the world. The more extravagant the better. Obviously money isn’t an issue. Not a bad deal, right? OK. The first person I thought of was you.”
“Does he listen to hi-fi?”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” Songping’s expression shifted slightly—talking about this man put fear in his eyes. “He’s a big fish, that’s for sure, but you need to be careful. If you try to stick it to him, don’t go overboard. In situations like these, it’s always better to leave yourself a little wiggle room. My gut tells me this guy’s not entirely on the level.”
“Will he pay in advance?”
“You can work that out with him. Here’s his card. Just give him an account number and have him wire you the deposit. But you need to watch your back when you’re dealing with the likes of him. I don’t know what it is, but when he looks at you his gaze is like ice, like there’s nothing behind his eyes. He’s one of those people that makes chills go down your spine from the moment you see him.”
For Songping to have met this guy only once and still be so horrified by him probably seems a little hard to believe, even to you, right? And right then, while I might have been a little curious about this new client, I didn’t dwell on the possibility.
I had skipped lunch and trekked to Songping’s place because I had another problem on my mind.
My sister, Cui Lihua, had given me an ultimatum: move out of her apartment at once. I had just gotten off the phone with her, giving in to her demand. As she pushed me to my emotional limit, the image of Songping’s well-fed face floated into view. It gave me security. So I gritted my teeth and agreed. I thought how, after forty-eight years of fighting on this earth, I was finally about to become homeless; an uncontrollable pang of hopelessness and fatigue pierced my chest.
I asked Songping if he could make some space for me somewhere in the clothing factory, just so I could have a place to lay my head for a while. It didn’t matter where it was: a garage, a warehouse, wherever. Songping looked at me with surprise, then he picked up his cell phone from the charger on his desk and started rifling through texts, one by one. He pulled one corner of his mouth into an unnatural smile.
“I still don’t understand. I thought you were doing fine over there in Shijingshan. What makes you so eager to move?”
“The apartment’s my sister’s. She’s pretty hard up herself. She plans to rent it out.”
“If I remember correctly, there’s a huge hole in the north wall of that old apartment, wind howling in and so on. How could she possibly rent it?”
“My sister and brother-in-law want to move back to Shijingshan themselves and rent out the old courtyard home on Mahogany Street. Some executive from a securities firm approached them, says he wants to turn the place into a bar.”
“And how’s your mother’s health?” Songping suddenly asked.
“She passed away five, no, six years ago now.” It was my turn to look surprised.
“That’s right, you told me before. Look at me, my brain’s like a sieve these days. When your memory goes, it goes all at once. I was in Canada when your mother passed away, and not being able to make it to the funeral makes it feel like she’s still alive. I remember back when we were little, living there on Mahogany Street, I’d get hungry and she’d give me some of her fried sticky-rice cakes. So flaky and crisp. Your house was right down the street, yeah, with a courtyard, too? Open a bar in a location like that and you’d never lack business.”
A pause. Songping sighed gently, and went on: “I don’t have any free space for you here. You know what business has been like at the factory these last couple years. We make brand-name shirts and sell them overseas, and we barely get enough back to cover labor expenses. The economy is bad everywhere, Europe and America, and I’m sitting on a huge stockpile of product. And the workers today are constantly hungry for more; salaries go up, benefits go up, I can’t absorb it all.”
