Shanghai Fools: A Novel

by Vann Chow

  "I came from Qinghai, but I am ethnically Mongolian," she clarified. "A lot of people thought I came from Mongolia though. Mongolians, like the Hans, are spread everywhere in China because of war and the subsequent migrations." She shrugged, something that she couldn't help. "Moreover, my ancestors were nomads after all." She smiled at me as she said that, as if she was talking to a child in kindergarten.

  "Yes, of course. I do know that," I said, not wanting to sound like a total idiot. "Are you Marvey's only friend in the Southwest?"

  "Daaaa..." Bolormaa had a habit of making this funny noise when she was thinking, I noticed.

  "Who? Did you think of someone?"

  "She once asked me to connect her to a professor in Qinghai University, my Alma Matar where I did my bachelor's degree. She wanted to get on his project on solar thermal power plant when she graduates."

  Qinghai. This was a good lead. I asked Bolarmaa to give me the professor's name and address, then I asked for permission to go into Marvey's room.

  "Well, I don't have the authority to give anyone permission to her room, but if the door is not locked, then you can go in there, I guess."

  I thanked her profusely, for she had been quite helpful, and went sniffing inside Marvey's bedroom. It was a very clean and modern space, decorated by lots of Polaroid pictures. She was not in any of them, funny enough, so I supposed they belonged to the ex-occupants of the room, knowing how this kind of student apartments change hands fairly frequently. Other than the pictures, there were lots of books lying on her desk. There was a half-drunken glass of water, opened pack of chocolates that made me smile, since she was always obsessed with her diet in front of me while at home she was apparently nibbling chocolates all day, and a couple tubes of hand creams and face creams that were typical of a woman's desk. There was no computer nor other electronics around, but their chargers were plugged in to the power strip. I went over to turn off the power — you never know with these things. A fire could break out if you're not careful with electronics — and hit my head on an overhead bookshelf that was on the wall. Funny I didn't see it earlier.

  On the shelf, there was a row of books. All of them were English language business books and biographies of Chinese business leaders, fitting reading collections for Marvey's ambition. One of them was missing, leaving a gaping hole in the otherwise neatly organized row.

  "Bolormaa!" I enlisted her help, "do you know which book this was?"

  She poked her head into the room and looked at the empty space where a book used to sit. "Daaaa....I don't know. Do you think Marvey took it with her to the trip?"

  "That was what I was thinking indeed."

  "I didn't watch her pack when she left," she said, "but if you look carefully, these are all books about recent high-tech startups and startup founders that are Chinese. — Eric Xu (Baidu), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Peggy Yu (Dang Dang), Li Qiangdong (JD), Lei Jun (Xiaomi), Steve Chen (Youtube) and Ma Huateng (Tencent)..."

  "Jack Ma's missing!" we made the observation at the same time.

  Chapter 48

  I guess Zhuangzi (a great Taoist philosopher) was right. The more you sought something, the more you wouldn't get it, and unfortunately for me, the opposite was true when it came to attention. The more I did not want attention, the more I got it. My phone had been buzzing all morning from text messages and calls from my family and friends.

  Opposite attracts. Was that not the same idea as Plato's law of affinity? Both Zhuangzi and Plato were hanging around their respective communities philosophizing at 3rd century BC at the two ends of the world. Since we were talking about 3rd century BC, the chance that the Greek philosopher had heard of the Chinese wandering thinker or vice versa was minimal. Did that mean both great minds from the East and the West figured out the same idea at approximately the same time? Was that not the biggest coincidence in the history of philosophy ever? I surely could not be the first person to realize this.

  Just when I was deep in thought contemplating the significance of my discovery on my way back home, I was stopped by the commotion that broke out in front of me.

  When I was a block away from Paula's apartment, a group of police officers poured out of a van in full-gears and rushed up towards the front gate. After a failed attempt to get a response from its inhabitant to open up — since I was obviously standing outside — one of them picked the lock to the metal gate and another kicked my door down. They raided the place as if they expect to find tons of cocaine stored inside my closet.

  "There's nobody in the house!" One of the officers shouted as if his discovery could rival mine. I recognized this man. He was one of the police officers that worked under Brother Fei. However, Brother Fei was not around, possibly removed from the assignment due to his personal connection to me and by extension Paula, the suspect of a kidnapping case still at large.

  "Look through every nook and corner! Take everything suspicious with you," the new commander asked of his team. "We need to bring him to justice!"

  'Him', the commander said. Did the bank report me to the police? If that was the case, 'Justice' in the bank's opinion, was probably 71 billion dollars and at least a couple of years in the unpleasant discomfort of a Chinese jail. Was this the 'crueler tomorrow' that Marvey talked about? Was I Mr. Qi's fall-guy?

  Not only was the police looking for me, the rest on the world also joined in on the manhunt. The internet exploded with conspiracy theories dreamt up by netizens with too much time on their hands about the affairs that transpired in the last couple of days.

  So much time and brain power were wasted on trying to string my ruined wedding, Jenny's intrusion, the kidnapping of Marsha Ling and my company's billion-dollar lawsuit together, that I couldn't help wondering to myself what amazing thing could have happened if all these Chinese people jump at the same time. Who knew? We might actually get earth out of its regular orbit around the sun. Now that would be a triumph of collective human will and physical power.

  My mind wandered again. I hid around the corner out of sight from anyone who might recognize me, and tried to come up with a plan to extricate myself from the whole bitter affair that Mr. Qi left behind for me to take the blame for. I needed to find Mr. Qi and sort out the facts. Better yet, I needed to get him to explain to the police that I had nothing to do with the transaction of the ThriftyEP. I was just a mere engineer, a cog in the wheel. A nobody in this whole event, and so was Marvey.

  Wait a minute.

  Marvey, an intern, with almost no working experience, was made responsible for Project Dragon One, a project so big it could get 40 million Euro funding. And I, someone who was consistently fired in almost every job I held (not an indication of my ability, I must add), was hired within 30 minutes of meeting Mr. Qi.

  Something's not right here.

  How could I not have seen all the warning sighs? Did Mr. Qi planned this all along? Were Marvey and I the scapegoats he planted in Project Dragon One to take all the blame in case his plans to make money off of company properties go South?

  Shit. I bit my lips.

  "Let's go. He's probably hiding somewhere else," I heard the commander said to his staff. "Let me get the digital team to track his location from his cell phone."

  The commander was right. If I were him, that was what I would do, too.

  The day had come when I finally had a good reason to vanish, not just because it was a fun exercise for an tech-savvy person, but that I was actually being pursued by law enforcement. To my disappointment, it was way less interesting as I had thought the life of a fugitive would be.

  I turned off my cellular network, switched to wifi on the streets, turned on VPN and used an IP from Egypt to mask my current location. I made sure to either deleted or disabled all unnecessary applications that might expose my whereabouts on my phone as well as precautions.

  Last but not least, I logged out of Weibo — something that I kept checking ever since I had an account and had no way to stop getting pulled in by it because of its endles
s amount of variety of notifications of accounts I subscribed to, messages by fans who managed to find my new, authentic account, friends recommendations and breaking news that the company decided I should know about in order to keep in touch with human society — and browsed my fan page anonymously. I was happy to see that all its posts were public and viewable still even when I did not log in. There was another new post with a generic landscape of some generic-looking bodies of water flowing somewhere in China. Accompanying it was another quote.

  "If you want to win, you need friends. And if you want to win big, you need enemies."

  I had an eerie feeling that I knew precisely whose twisted, counter-intuitive words those were, but I looked it up online anyway. The quote was attributed to Jack Ma by multiple websites.

  Not everything listed on the internet could be trusted these days. The way I saw it, however, if multiple sources all said the same thing, given how people worshiped the words etched onto the internet like Moses' Ten Commandments, then a lie was almost as good as the truth online.

  What was Marvey trying to tell me with this new quote?

  Suddenly, a switch flipped somewhere in my head and I had an A-HA moment. Marvey first Jack Ma quote indicated that she knew something went wrong with Project Dragon One. Her reluctance to let anyone, except her parents and I, knew her whereabouts was now obviously a move to avoid being taken under investigation for a crime she had no part in, being the Project Manager and all.

  Since I was with her most of the time during the cruise trip up until my unfortunate banquet started, it meant that she had gathered new information after we separated. And guess what, she was with Axe and his gang.

  Any new information she got could only come from Axe and the gang.

  Did that mean Axe and Mr. Qi were somehow connected?

  As implausible as it sounded, it was the only hypothesis I had so far that could explain everything. Really, everything.

  My mind was totally blown.

  The meme of Jackie Chan scratching his head in utter confusion that decorated the internet came to mind.

  Chapter 49

  Just when I was trying to absorb the new insight I deducted from Marvey's quote on the street: if Mr. Qi wants to win big, he needs an enemy, and Axe fills that role to the T. Axe kidnapped Marsha Ling, Mr. Qi's girlfriend, and demanded a ransom of 3 million dollars. Axe did not go along to pick up the money, because the 3 million was supposed to be transferred back to Mr. Qi somehow, in ways that could not be traced by the police. It meant the whole kidnapping was probably orchestrated by Mr. Qi — someone tapped my shoulder.

  "Hello, are you John He?"

  It was an Indian man. He was wearing a suit, and he had a turban on his head.

  "No, you're mistaken." I pulled down my all-purpose baseball cap and walked away as calmly as possible. I was not exactly telling a lie. My Chinese name was 'He Yuan Zhong', my English name was 'Jong'. So 'John He' was really not my name, no matter how easily it could be spelt or memorized by non-Chinese that all of my Western friends called me that. Just when I was still debating with my conscience on lying about my name, he hit me in the head with a wooden short staff marked with white chalk.

  "Ouch!" I braced myself in pain. "Was that Kalaripayattu?" Kalaripayattu was the so-called oldest form of martial art in the world, originated in India. I had only seen it on the internet, like a million other things I had seen.

  The man shook his head and said yes. "So don't try to run away again."

  Well, that was a very confusing 'yes'. But I didn't have time to linger on the thought of our countries' vast cultural difference elicited from the simple gesture, because he already grabbed me by my elbow and threw me into a van standing next to the curb with an out of the country license plate and tinted windows. Since I had no experience fighting a Kalaripayattu practitioner, and I needed a place to stay now that I couldn't go home, I sat quietly on the back on the van, trying to brush up my Hindi listening skills as I eavesdropped on the man who captured me as he spoke to his Indian driver friend.

  When we arrived at our destination after what felt like forever, I really thought we were somewhere in India. Everywhere I looked, there were only Indian-looking people. Very quickly, however, I saw the sign: TATA South East Asia.

  The TATA Shanghai office was thirty minutes away from where I lived. Turned out, we were not very far from the place I was picked up. I guess the driver was not very familiar with Shanghai city and must have spent a lot of time driving in circles, coming from out out town and all.

  "Why am I here at TATA?" I asked the man, who was shoving me into the direction of an office building.

  "Look!" He pointed at a smaller sign right below TATA's. It said Yakshit Bank.

  "Seriously? Yak...shit?" I tried to refrain myself from laughing.

  "It meant 'forever' in Hindi, okay?!" The loyal Yakshit bank employee was teased more often by the name of his workplace. "Have respect when you meet our CEO."

  "Your CEO?" Looked like it was my lucky day. I was meeting one CEO to the next in back-to-back meetings with private door-to-door transportation since this morning. Too bad I didn't have time to fix my hair.

  "Mr. John He, how do you do? My name is Harikiran." The man who identified himself as Yakshit bank's CEO came out to pick me up at the entrance and gave me a hug — no, I did not feel a dagger stabbed through my kidney from the back, in case you were worrying. "How great it is to finally meet you!"

  This was a totally different kind of reception I got from the first CEO I met today. "You're pleased to see me? I understood that everybody in this planet thought I made you lose money."

  "Nooooo, on the contrary, you've made my customers seven million dollars since we deployed the app. They love it!"

  "They do?"

  "The idea of ThriftyEP was absolutely fabulous. Matching a fund investment whenever their spending exceeded a pre-defined limit. How did you come up with it?"

  "My supervisor and the engineer who worked at Bilious before I joined came up with it." This was probably the first time today Mr. Qi was mentioned in positive light.

  "Wonderful! So let me apologize for bringing you in in such a rush. I am an engineer myself, and I've found a minor bug on the notification function of the application but I couldn't figure out where the source code for that bug sits. I thought you could help me with it..."

  "So you didn't 'invite' me here to pass me along to the police?" Or beat the crap out of me — I did not say that second part in case he got any ideas from it.

  "Noooo, why should I?" Then he said, "can you just sit down for a second next to me," he pointed at the desk with three computer screens on which the source code of ThriftyEP was displayed, "and find the bug for me? I am anxious to have it fixed. There was no mention of it on the user manual..."

  Did he just say user manual?

  "Show me the user manual!" I urged Mr. Harikiran.

  "Shouldn't we be looking at the codes instead?"

  "No, the manual, please," I begged. As soon as he opened the file that was the manual, which was a seventy-page long document, I spotted the place where we explained that the user needed to adjust the input parameters. I pointed at it. "Did you read and follow the instructions and changed all the parameters?"

  "Well, yes, of course." Mr. Harikiran said. "Of course we read all the documentations that came with the application and tested all the parameters carefully before deploying ThriftyEP to the market. That's standard practice."

  "What did you change?" I pressed on.

  "Oh, a lot. We changed a lot of things from the color of the color scheme to adding the terms of agreement. But most importantly we changed the fund-matching threshold and the mutual funds our customers could invest it. You know, the offerings from Bilious in the pre-sets were not very attractive, given the bearish pressure on European market because of Brexit, we changed all the options to funds consisted of mostly BRIC country high-tech company stocks. I also added a feature to..."

&nbs
p; It was my turn to give Mr. Harikiran a hug! He just saved the day.

  "I need to go, Mr. Harikiran. I'm very sorry," I said to him. "I'll come back personally to solve the notification bug for you!"

  "Wait!" Mr. Harikiran tried to stop me from getting up from my seat. "Vikram, get the cheque book!"

  Vikram, the man who knew Kalaripayattu, held out, instead of a short staff to hit me again, his boss's cheque book from Yakshit bank. Mr. Harikiran scribbled something on a check and tore it off.

  "This is for you."

  "For me?"

  The check said six hundred thousand Yuan.

  "Yes, take it back and share it with your team." Then he whispered with a hand covering one side of his mouth, "don't let the big boss know!" He continued in his normal volume, "You guys deserve it. ThriftyEP is an excellent piece of software. I have a bad feeling that I underpaid for it when Mr. Seymour sold it to me for three hundred thousand Yuan. Being an engineer myself, I understand how much work this kind of thing took, and I really would hate to see fellow engineers get swindled."

  I did not speak, because my jaw just dropped to the floor.

  "Just take it."

  "It's a lot of money, Mr. Harikiran." And precisely six hundred thousand again, the ominous amount that haunted me everywhere I went.

  "We charge 1.5% commission for every trade, and in just a few days of deploying ThriftyEP, we made more than ten times the amount I wrote on the cheque for you. Just take it and do something meaningful with it." He folded the cheque and slipped in into the pocket of my shirt. "Take it as personal gift."

  "No, please don't give me any 'personal gift'. I don't want any 'personal gift'." I pulled out the cheque and tore it in half.

  I caught Vikram's lips twitching in the corner of my eye.

  "If you really want to thank me, please write the cheque to Bilious Norwegian Bank."

  "Well, if you insist," Mr. Harikiran picked up his pen again and wrote a new cheque for me.