Shanghai Fools: A Novel

by Vann Chow

  "Not really."

  "But you've found Mr. Qi. Did you not use my clue? Did you even realize that I was the one who wrote all the posts?"

  There was no doubt now after all the Jack Ma quotes that Marvey was the owner of my fan account. I couldn't help but wondered if Marvey was so obsessed with me that she had set up a Weibo account with my name, like I named all my online gaming accounts based on Ninja Turtle characters when I was young. Needless to say, I highly welcomed any hypothesis that involved her lingering affection towards me, despite all the unhappiness that I caused her unwittingly lately.

  "Mr. Qi and Marsha — one rich from under-dealings, the other from her fame. They are a match made in heaven. You were surely trying to get me to think of Mr. Qi's relationship with Marsha Ling." Marsha had offered me a cup of coffee from the Kissa machine on the day the sale of ThriftyEP occurred. That was why I remembered its presence on the yacht. Sometimes the ability of the human mind to make connections between random events really amazed me.

  "No, that was not why I wanted you to think of Marsha," Marvey grunted. She showed me a video clip of Mr. Qi and Marsha Ling being arrested on their luxury yacht by the Shanghai Water Security police officers on her cell phone. The headline said, 'Police found evidence of multiple intellectual property frauds worldwide connected to Marsha Ling's boyfriend.'

  "I guess from now on I am not the only 'famous person' that nobody knew the name of." Widely known as 'The guy who dated Li Kun's daughter', I chuckled at Mr. Qi's and my faith that we would forever be known as the men associated with some famous female persons by the public.

  "You still don't see it?" Marvey was getting annoyed.

  "What?"

  "Mr. Qi did not even look at Marsha when she got arrested. Even now, three days later, he did not issue any statement to clear his girlfriend's name!"

  "So?"

  "He's not in love with her."

  "Oh," I laughed at the anti-climax. That I knew for a fact already the first time I met them. Mr. Qi was at least twenty years older than Marsha Ling, and he was too much of a player to be loyal to one woman. ''Only women can't see through these things. Always so blind when it comes to love."

  "He used Marsha!"

  "He orchestrated the whole kidnapping of his own girlfriend," I said. "And when he needed money to pay the ransom, he called Marsha's agent to prepare the money, instead of his own bank. He's definitely using Marsha and her agency to launder his money." Celebrities tended to have rather messy ledgers due to privacy reasons. And that was what Mr. Qi saw — the low risk of audit on her financial, and he took advantages of it.

  "Men are soooo stupid," Marvey took a big gulp of iced cola to quench her anger. "He has Marsha Ling as his girlfriend. What more does he want? How can he do this to her. She's looking at five years in jail at least, as an accomplice for fraud and money laundering. Her career is totally ruined because of this scumbag! I wonder what she saw in him."

  "The moral of the story is, let's be very careful the next time we fall in love."

  "Of course, you fool!" Marvey burrowed her head into my chest. Without thinking twice, I wrapped my arms around her, did not want to let go of her ever again.

  "When did you start to read about Jack Ma?" The question had been bothering me since the first clue appeared.

  "Hmm..." Marvey hesitated to give me a straight answer. "He's a successful businessman, a worthy subject of study."

  "From a psychology point of view," I added.

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "It's because the newspaper said he might be autistic, just like me, isn't it?"

  At my question, Marvey stopped her squirming and looked up at me without speaking. I squeezed her tighter in my arms.

  "I'm a thousand times more attractive than he is," I said, "but I'm nonetheless happy to learn that you think there is more similarity between me and one of the most successful and smartest men in China."

  Marvey burrowed her head in my chest again, trying to control her giggles.

  "Rich people becomes loving couple." I recited part of Jack Ma's quote again. "The quote was supposed to be sarcastic. I think you misinterpreted him, Marv." Jack highlighted an undying pattern in China where rich people were supposedly infinitely happier than the rest, even when it came to romantic relationships. In practice, this was not always the case. "I'm penniless and you are still smiling. It proves that being rich has nothing to do with how lucky one could be when it comes to the matter of the hearts."

  "My Chinese is not that good yet to understand the subtlety."

  "I can help you."

  I felt Marvey's nods on my beating chest.

  Then I suddenly remembered something. I had a gift for Marvey, a necklace with a heart-shaped pendant.

  "Wow, that's a very big pendant..."

  "That's my heart. It's filled with my love for you, that's why it is like this." I had to say something to distract her from the suspiciously large size of the pendant, because it contained a GPS signal transmitter, already the smallest I could find in the market. "Will you please keep our hearts close together all the time?"

  Marvey face was tinted with a hint of red from hearing my words. "I'll consider it," she joked and toyed with the pendant in her fingers. "It's not a diamond, after all."

  "Hey, don't pick up on the worst of Chinese habits," I said and we laughed together.

  "Don't you ever, ever run away from me again. Although if you do, I will find you, no matter where you are." Thanks to the smart necklace I just gave her. "You know, Marv, you can always tell me all your problems, everything that's bothering you."

  "Mmm...I felt so stupid," Marvey said. "I can't believe I fell for Mr. Qi's lie. I made the company lose two million! Two million!" She covered her face with her hands in shame.

  "Nobody's asking you to pay for it," I said, in half chuckle.

  "And I made you lose your job. I'm so sorry! I totally dragged you into this. I should never have gotten you into Bilious in the first place!"

  "Marv," I pulled her away from me so I could take out an envelope from my pocket. "I've gotten a letter in English, can you read it for me?"

  "What?" She frowned. "You can read English, too."

  "Well, those Toastie meetings you forced me to go do not train my reading skills."

  "You're still so bitter about them," Marvey laughed. She pulled the letter out of the white envelope and read its content.

  "You've been offered the job of Head of Innovation...and Cyber Security, reporting directly to Mr. Olaf, the new CEO of Bilious Norwegian Bank. That's Mr. Qi's old title, isn't it?"

  I smiled at her and said, "And a bit more."

  "Oh my gosh!!! You've read it already, haven't you? Jong, you're so bad! You knew you're getting a new job!" She gave me a very, very big hug. Being in the more conservative part of the country, everyone who passed by stared at us. For once, I didn't care if we looked like two total fools in love.

  Envy us.

  Epilogue

  "Please, tell me, have you seen this woman and this boy around here?"

  Holding a crumpled photograph of Paula, Jessie and I taken at the McDonald's, I begged the pedestrians passing by Jianghan Road, the busiest street in the center of Wuhan — to take a look at the photograph. This was the fourth city we have visited, after Wuxi, Nanjing, Yichan, with our 'Missing Children Truck' that belonged to the non-profit group 'Bao Bei Hui Jia' (Baby, Come home), covered in pictures and slogans of children that had been kidnapped from Shanghai. On the left side of the truck, the giant photograph of Andy Lau was printed on it. I sighed at Andy, Jessie's favorite actor, for the lack of compassion from the people in big cities.

  I had went on tour with the 'Bao Bei Hui Jia' group when it had occurred to me that Paula was never going to bring Jessie back to me again.

  From the officials in Lizhou, Sichuan, we confirmed that all of Paula's personal identification presented at the time of our marriage registration at the Civic Service
Bureau were falsified documents.

  They put out a warrant for Paula, who they later identified as a serial so-called 'lonely-heart' scammer called 'Xu Xie Xian' — someone with an unforgettable name that was unfit for any kind of criminal, really, for its memorable quality.

  According to the online news archived of the national library, 'Xu Xie Xian' had been swindling large sums of money from men and skipping from town to town using different identities to avoid getting caught. She had always acted alone, it seemed, from the lack of mentioning of any accomplice or organized crime group associated with her acts.

  Similar 'Sweet heart' scams like mine, reported by victims from various provinces across China to different local authorities, were unsolved for many years, until these victims spotted Paula's photograph on the national news' coverage of Marsha Ling's abduction from our wedding banquet. Suddenly, local polices were overwhelmed with information from victims on these cold cases. A detective in Lizhou strung all of these events together and solved the crimes at once. I read on the news that he was promoted to inspector and became the poster-child for great police work in third-tier city.

  The police came around to our apartment a couple of times, taking something and asking different questions every time. While they could identify the true identity of Paula, they were unable to confirm Jessie's real identity: there was no record of Paula's enrollment — regardless of which known pseudo-name she used — in any hospital in China. Since there were a lot of illegal clinics and unregistered practices opened by midwives, there was really no way to know whether Paula gave birth to Jessie or not. After all, according to statistics from non-governmental source, more than ten thousand children were being kidnapped every year in China, and a similar number were being abandoned due to unwanted pregnancy, inability to provide, or any number of other reasons, by their parents. Whether the police would ever find out who and where Jessie was, was an uncertainty. In the least, I knew for certain that as long as Jessie was by Paula's side, he would be provided for — perhaps without a father by his side, without the friendships he had built with children from the 'black school', without a stable home now his adopted-mother became a fugitive, but he would have the company of his most treasured action figures and the memories of us playing games and watching television together, of our eventful trip to America, and of my love for him. I would never give up finding him, regardless of where he was and how much time had passed.

  Still, whenever I had time, I would accompany the heart-broken parents of other lost children and drive our 'Missing Children Truck' around the country trying to search for them, while raising awareness to the general public on the prevalence of crime against children.

  Looking back, I wasn't entirely sure if I was really a victim of just another one of Paula's scams. Whenever I thought of our interactions, I had a feeling that instead of constantly searching for an easy-victim, she was searching for a safe habour, a shelter from the storm, in a lifetime of instability.

  Everyone said that I was out of my mind. Kelvin even asked me to read an inch-thick book about 'Stockholm syndrome', in which victims of crimes felt affection and empathy towards the malefactors.

  "You're letting her hi-jack your life," Kelvin once argued.

  Despite what their opinions were about Paula, I felt ambivalent towards Paula.

  Sometimes you just knew in your gut whether someone was being genuinely nice to you or not. You could say that I was trying to rationalize, or even romanticize, the whole thing to make myself feel better, but you could also say that I believed in the good nature of humanity — an old Confucius belief that most people nowadays dismissed casually.

  I took Paula's stubborn, but superficial refusal to be nice to me as a way of protecting me from major emotional loss, although it kind of backfired, because I did miss her, not as my wife or girlfriend, but as family. And I felt that I was indebted to her more than she was to me.

  Somehow, somewhere, I had neglected all the signs of her cries for help. Things might be very different if I had talked to her more often, and tried to understand her better. It seemed that I might be an expert in digital forensic, but I was helpless when it came to the human hearts.

  "I've never seen someone so stubborn in my life," Axe said with a smirk, and went back to chewing a piece of gum he had in his mouth that in fact did not exist — they might have cigarettes in prison, but not gums. I visited him from time to time at the Chuannan prison in Yibin city, a transformed coal mine that now housed five thousand inmates, hoping to get from him some clues as to where Paula and Jessie might be from our conversations. He had always refused to tell me anything, until one day, he suddenly said to me, "I can tell you," he leaned closer towards me from across the table and continued, "if you help me get out of this hellhole."

  I swallowed hard and looked at the prison guard, who ignored us. He either did not hear it or did not really care about Axe's preposterous but understandable proposal. Prisoners in this rumored-to-be the most strenuous prison of all of Sichuan where prisoners had to work in the mines to produce a certain quantity of coal as part of their daily 'recreational and rehabilitation' program, were often heard complaining and voicing their wishes to leave in the open.

  "Think about it, son," Axe, who had once been my father-in-law, smiled at me benevolently. His smile and his indecent proposal etched themselves in the prefrontal cortex my brain. "Think about it."s

  End of Book II.

  Thank You!

  We have come to the end of Shanghai Fools, Book II of the Master Shanghai series.

  You have been an incredible reader! It is only because of your love and support that the book can be completed.

  If you wish to get a digital copy of Vann's next book for free, please write an email to Vann at Vannchow@gmail.com and explain that you have read Shanghai Fools until the last page. Vann would very much love to hear from you.

  About the Author

  Vann Chow is Chinese and was born in Hong Kong. She started writing stories in English when she was 19, and through them she hoped to share the amazing, multi-faceted Asian history and cultures with the wider world. Her stories are often lighthearted, humorous but full of meaning. Oscar Wilde, William Somerset Maugham and Alain De Botton are some of her favorite authors.

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