Shanghai Fools: A Novel

by Vann Chow

  "Why didn't you tell grandpa about me?" I asked Jessie, who, like his grandpa, was at the moment glued to the television and didn't respond.

  "Dad!" Even Paula wanted to know. "Why didn't you ask Jessie to tell you what he was doing alone on the streets?"

  The old man who was sitting on the couch watching television with one of his legs on the seat simply shook his head. I was not sure whether he was disappointed in us or in the race horse he gambled on that was falling behind the crowd on the television. Paula turned her anger towards me again, seeing how I was the only one who would entertain her.

  "Grandpa, I want to watch the morning cartoons!"

  "No." I thought Grandpa would yield to his demand, like most grandpas in China would, since male offsprings were so important to the propagation of the family. But Grandpa did not yield. "Go eat your breakfast with your mom and dad and stop bothering me."

  "What's your dad doing here, actually?" I had to ask. "How long is he staying?"

  I had obviously hit the right spot with that question. Paula pulled out a chair and plopped down on it like a dough on a kneading board, exasperated. "He knew," she mouthed the words to me without making a sound.

  "What does he know?" I mouthed my question back at her.

  "Our marriage."

  "Yes, of course," recalling the awkward introduction yesterday evening between the two of us.

  "No, you don't understand," she started hissing instead of just mouthing. The topic obviously stressed her out. "He has come here to see us get married. Banquet and stuff. The full shebang."

  "Oh, shoot." Now I got her concerns.

  Chapter 14

  Sichuan wedding...Sichuan wedding. It sounded idiosyncratic but here I was, Googling — well, we don't have Google in China — I was Baidu-ing what it could mean most of the morning at work after Paula's dad's intention of being in Shanghai was made clear. Customs in different parts of China could vary a great deal from place to place. I never dreamt of marrying a girl from outside of Shanghai so I never bothered learning. It seemed like, however, it was now the time to give the intercultural marriage a bit of attention. If I had to do it anyway to keep us from being exposed, I wished to do it right so I could minimize the amount of emotional stress I would otherwise suffer later down the road. I still had to spend at least a year or two with Paula and her family after all, and social pressure, can be a scary thing.

  I ran into Marvey at the canteen on the 3rd floor of the building we worked in at lunch.

  You know, nobody could make me feel so much like an idiot like she could, just by being around. If I had known she would come back to Shanghai, I would never have proposed to marry Paula to solve her immigration problems.

  After the last time, I was sort of embarrassed to be seen by her, but then sitting alone with my cellphone in hand, as always, I could hardly say that I was in the middle of a lunch meeting, so I invited her to sit down next to me. She was very much interested in what I was Baidu-ing so intently that I almost forgot to eat, so she, without asking, snatched my phone from me and started to read the content out loud.

  "Hmm...something...something...customs." She tried to read the Chinese characters. Her speaking of the language was superb, but reading was far from elementary. I was quite impressed already that she could at least read the word 'customs', possibly because it was a subject in her Chinese studies when she did her exchange program here last year. There were of course always better ways to know what I was reading up about. All she needed to do was to tap the Image Search button and that was exactly what she did. Instantly, she understood the topic.

  Annoyed, I grabbed my phone back and locked the screen.

  "Why are you with Kelvin?" In an attempt to distract her from the topic of my wedding, I asked her. Also perhaps because I really, really wanted to know.

  "We're just seeing each other."

  I asked her what she meant by the word 'just'.

  "I am still observing, and making up my mind. You can think of it as the probation period."

  "So you haven't made up your mind yet whether you want to be his girlfriend?" A ray of hope seemed to have sliced through the dark clouds that loomed over my head for the last couple of days.

  "One of the most important factors in this is your happiness," she said. "I don't want you to be unhappy. That's more important to me than everything else."

  Her comment really got my hopes up. "What if I tell you that I am honestly very unhappy about it?"

  Marvey smiled. "But as it turns out you are now married. We have all moved on with our lives, haven't we?"

  "No."

  "Stop joking around," she said. "You're planning your wedding with Paula, aren't you? I saw what you were reading."

  "Please wait for me."

  "For what?"

  "Don't ask," I said. "Because I cannot tell you." My voice trailed off.

  Marvey shook her head. "You're just making some stuff up to distract me because you don't want me to be with Kelvin 'cause he is your best friend, and you think he hooked up with me behind your back. If I am seeing someone else, you wouldn't have cared. Trust me."

  She picked up her chopsticks and started picking up noodles with them from the bowl like a pro.

  My face turned red. How could she not have known my true feelings for her?

  "Kelvin's not good enough for you."

  "I will be the judge of that," she said, ignoring my advice.

  "He was the one who taught me how to flirt with girls, which pick-up lines to say, and where to take them for one-night-stands. You don't understand. He's a jerk."

  "You are not that much better, Jong."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's none of my business but I heard from Kelvin that you slept with...well, dated a lot of girls online. Don't get me wrong — I'm not against online dating and exploring your options when you are still young. I just feel like one shouldn't be too quick to judge others."

  "That bastard!" I hissed at the thought of Kelvin. Did he really tell her everything about me?

  "He values you very much as a friend. So just respect each other's decisions, okay?"

  "He's really not right for you."

  "Then who is?" She said. "You? Or do you mean Zhi? Because even he was taken. He is going to marry Kelvin's cousin, and I am invited by extension as Kelvin's plus-one! The irony!"

  "No way!" We all thought that a relationship born out of trickery and deceit would not last, but us skeptics always ended up being disappointed.

  "I am not exactly young anymore and I have never been particularly — how do you say that — interesting. I can't afford to be so picky. I am lucky that Kelvin wants to be with me...do you know how many girls..."

  "Marvey!" I cut her off. "You're going there again." Her self-pitying had never stopped. Sometimes I wished that she could see herself through my eyes. "No one is the same. You're unique and beautiful in your own way."

  "Exactly, just in my own fat and uninteresting way."

  "It's so stupid to say something like that about yourself." As soon as I called her 'stupid' I crapped myself. Chinese people call each other 'stupid' all the time without having any feelings hurt. Foreigners are more touchy about their intelligence. Luckily, a Harvard student like Marvey was so full of confidence in her intellect she did not even notice it.

  "Do you know what they say about white girls dating Asian guys? They say that we are sub-prime goods, abandoned by our own men, which is why we have to date outside of our community."

  "And you listen to that nonsense?!"

  "I used to," she explained. "But now I don't, because Kelvin really treats me like a princess. He..."

  I honestly did not want to hear Marvey count off all the merits of Mr. Perfect, when I could assure her no one would ever cherish her more than I do. I even once climbed the Chinese firewall for her, just to be her Facebook friend. This, among many things I did for her, she would never know.

  I looked at my watch and found an excuse
to interrupt her dream-talking, "Just start eating your lunch. We've got five minutes left to the lunch hour."

  She grunted and elbowed me playfully. "You will see in time."

  No, I won't. I thought to myself. Not unless a Chinese actor plays in Star Wars.

  Chapter 15

  When I got back to my floor, I saw my manager standing over my desk. His expression turned from disbelief to exasperation when he saw me walking leisurely towards my desk with an ice-cream pie stuck in my mouth.

  "You're five minutes late from lunch," he said to me. "And this morning you came in late as well."

  I didn't know my new manager could be such a micro-manager. Now I felt like a dick for being so critical of my last boss. At least he never bothered me about the time I arrived at the office.

  "Do you know that five minutes here and five minutes there, that's an hour gone every day."

  While five plus five is nowhere near sixty minutes, I simply nodded at his bad math. Resistance is futile in Chinese office anyway.

  "What's with that attitude?"

  The ice-cream pie refused to melt even though I had been sucking it as hard as I could. I tried to mumble a sorry to my manager but it might have come across as something offensive, because he tried to pull the wooden stick out of my mouth in anger.

  "Hey!" I could finally enunciate my word clearly now that he helped me with my ice-cream pie problem.

  "Don't you 'hey' me, big celebrity. What have you been doing all day?" He spun my desktop screen around, so that the whole floor could see.

  It appeared that, according to what was on the screen, I had been looking at a video feed of naked women from the North dancing the whole morning.

  What the...

  All the women in the office screamed and the more mentally-fragile ones covered their eyes with their hands almost immediately.

  "I was reading some articles on Baidu, about wedding customs before I left! Not this!" I didn't know why I still tried to defend myself, because it was apparent that no one would believe me.

  "Do you really think we hired you just so you could come here and browse the internet all day, huh? Superstar?"

  The 'superstar' came out of nowhere. I did appear on national television, but superstardom was still quite far away. I hate people who exaggerates.

  "Well, I logged out at 1 PM, you can check the cache what time this shit popped up. It was probably an ad or something."

  "I don't care if it is an ad or a malware," he hissed. "Where is the application Elizabeth told you to fix last week?"

  "She asked me on Tuesday, when I was leaving."

  "So what? It's now Friday. You had four days."

  "Psst..." I hate people who could not count even more. "I was off yesterday. You've approved it."

  "That doesn't mean you can be behind on your sprint. Everyone else delivered their stuff for this week."

  I looked at the other developers in the room with a frown. That sudden efficiency on the week when I had one day off was really uncalled for.

  "Most of the functionalities are done."

  "But it doesn't look at all like what I want!"

  "What you want is just some font size changes and some adjustment to the front-end. All the functionalities are done!" I reiterated. "You can get an intern to update the interface for you in five minutes."

  "Well, you know what? I am going to get an intern to do your job for you." He pulled out his cellphone and started typing the number of the receptionist into it. "You're fired!"

  "For what?!" I did not see that one coming, really, since I had literally just started working here. It seemed like I had outdone myself once again in terms of the speed of making somebody totally disappointed in me.

  "Cherry, I need you to get the security to escort Mr. He Yuan Zhong out of the premise with all his belongings in fifteen minutes! He has been fired for breaching company policies."

  Chapter 16

  On the first Saturday after Paula's dad's arrival in Shanghai, I had lost my job. It came in time though, because Paula's dad insisted that we needed to go visit his son-in-law's parents as custom demanded, to arrange matters of our wedding.

  Chinese values every step and every detail of wedding very highly. After all, most of us would only do this once in our lives. From the proposal (not from the man himself but from his family to the family of the partner), the horoscope-matching, to the negotiation (also between the elders of the families, not the wedding couples themselves), the betrothal (gift-giving from the man's family to the woman's family as a sign of good will) — all these could take weeks if not months, until the wedding actually occurs. And simply getting married by the civic officer was just not enough. One ought to invite the whole village (well, these days it would just be the close family and friends since the cost of a wedding can be quite horrific) to announce the marital union properly in front of the two clans, before the marriage was recognized.

  I did not mind so much as I thought I would that Paula's dad wanted us to follow the traditions — despite the outcome was already defined — because if someone who knew what he was doing wanted to take matters in his hands, that's less work for me. So on Saturday, we made the trip together back to my hometown in Feng Cheng village early in the morning to see my parents.

  Yes, I knew we agreed not to tell anyone about our marriage. The problem with secrets was that secrets were like viruses. They were highly resilient and contagious. They spread in a close community like an uncontrollable wildfire as soon as the first human host was hit, and now from Shanghai to Lizhou, where Paula came from, there was no friend and relative that did not know about us being together.

  When we arrived back in town, even my old neighbors, some of those who also got an apartment in the Feng Cheng Tower as a compensation from the Sun of China group, came outside of their homes to welcome me. They dropped everything they were doing and spread out on two sides of the main road leading up to the Feng Cheng Tower to shake my Father-in-law's hand, and to give candies to Jessie. Some of them remembered Jessie, since my mother had passed him off as a distant relative's son previously. We quickened our pace when they tried to call out to him since our lives were built upon layer over layer of lies, albeit just mindless white lies, and we did not feel like explaining to anyone our pathetic existences.

  My mom rushed towards me and gave me a hug when we were close. My dad, composed as always, stood like a strong tree rooted at the entrance with his hands behind his back. He only relaxed when Paula's dad, Mr. Zhu went up to shake my dad's hand. However, reluctant he was to have him as in-law, it did not show.

  Instead, as soon as they shook hands, the polite-talk started immediately. "Don't mind me, I am a farmer, and I had nothing good to offer you but this package of Long Yan Su (Dragon Eye Biscuits). I brought it all the way from the West. It's Sichuan's most famous treat."

  "How generous of you! I am so ashamed that my son did not tell me about his intention to marry earlier. I would have come to the West to visit you!" My dad said courteously in reply. I had to hide my laughter because he would never make the trip to what he considered to be 'hot and barren' place where only Pandas slept 24 hours a day. "Please come into our humble abode. It is nothing compared to our old home, but it is a shelter for our heads." He spoke of the luxury apartment that even a city person like me would be green-eye in jealousy, as if it was just a decrepit house made out of scrap tin plates.

  "Come, daughter!" Mr. Zhu called out to Paula. "Come greet your mother and father-in-law."

  She obliged, since there were so many people watching. "Popo, Gongong."

  "Good girl!" My dad said.

  "Nice child," my mom said, holding Paula's hand in hers, straining her facial muscles to put up her best smile.

  Their happy expressions quickly turned sour when Mr. Zhu made his demands. He wanted a hundred eighty thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight Yuan as betrothal gift for his daughter.

  If you seriously believe that 'betrothal gift' is rea
lly a gift, then you totally learned these words wrong. In Chinese, 'betrothal gift' was a large sum of money extorted out of the groom, to compensate the bride's family for their troubles of raising their daughter until she was at marriage age and having to 'give her away' to the groom's family. Sometimes, the calculation was based on the bride's future ability to make money — hence the opportunity cost to her birth-parents since their daughter would no longer contribute her earnings to her side of the family. But most of the time, it was just an arbitrary and sufficiently large, satisfying numbers that the bride's family came up with. The bride's family only made themselves feel better by calling this extortion money a 'gift'.

  "Your daughter is not worth a hundred and eighty thousand! No way we will pay that much!" My dad started haggling with Mr. Zhu. "She had a child with another man before she met my son!"

  "But your son loves my grandson, doesn't he? And he wouldn't marry Paula without him, am I right?" He turned around to try to get my agreement. Being stuck in the middle, I chose to remain quiet. Mr. Zhu continued anyway, "So he's getting a very good deal. A seven-year-old boy without any effort, skipping all the years of headaches that come with a newborn. A hundred and eighty thousand is a fair price for two."

  Yes, you heard right. If this is not in China, I am afraid both of them would be arrested for human trafficking right then and there. But because we were in China, the negotiation continued on.

  "This is just supposed to be a show of goodwill as far as I know," my dad said, with my mom sitting by his side listening intently, ready to jump in at any moment when necessary. "I will give you eight hundred and eighty-eight, for luck. That's all."

  "Eight hundred?!" On hearing the hugely discounted number, Mr. Zhu felt insulted. "I could not even buy a cow to plow my land with that!"

  "This is a fair price. My son and your daughter are technically already married. I thought we are only doing this to respect the tradition."

  "Say something," Paula poked me in the ribs with her elbow. I shrugged. I just got fired and I didn't even know if I had eight hundred Yuan in my account. Therefore I had to side with my dad, and kept quiet.