by Te-Ping Chen
From deeper within the village, a group of uniformed men emerged and began hurrying toward the crowd, batons swinging from their hips. A few in the crowd shrieked. At their sight, the woman in the straw hat caught Zhu Feng’s eye and rushed over, trying to thrust a sheaf of paper into his hands. “Handsome brother,” she said. “You’re a young person. Young people must have a conscience.”
Zhu Feng hesitated. Up close, the woman was older than he’d realized; he could count the coarse individual hairs above her upper lip. He felt himself weaken, and the woman sensed it. “Help us, please, you are a powerful person, the powerful have a duty.” She grabbed his arm, a surprisingly strong tug on his jacket’s sleeve. He recoiled.
“Let go of me,” he said sharply, and she did. The group of officials swept away, and he followed them into the village’s party hall without looking back. By the time they left a few hours later, the clouds had lifted and the protesters were gone.
As they drove away, the local forestry bureau head tried to explain. The villagers in the area were like that, always making trouble, he said. They were being compensated for their farmland and given the chance to be among the first to buy into the new development, which would be state-of-the-art: open-plan kitchens, a flower garden, even an on-site kindergarten. “Life will be better,” he said. “They’ll get used to it, they’ll see.”
Zhu Feng wasn’t listening. Now that they were back on the road, he opened his phone back up and kept compulsively hitting refresh, until he got a wisp of signal at last and saw that the market had dropped 6 percent.
His heart pounded disbelievingly. The day before, as well, stocks had fallen, and the day before that. This was the third day of declines, and they’d already more than wiped out his gains for the past two quarters. It didn’t make sense. He stared blankly out the window.
The thing was, he told himself, of course the market was up and down, of course he knew that—he wasn’t stupid. But the government would never let the market drop. It had happened before, three years ago, and people still talked about it. The market had dropped by more than 40 percent and people were panicking and rushing for exits, but then the government had ordered the country’s top hundred companies to buy up shares, push, push, push, make the line hold, and it had. No way the market would be allowed to fail. The government was not very good at a lot of things but it was very, very good at ensuring profits.
The problem was time. There were just two more weeks before the books would be tallied at the end of the quarter by Old Lou, who was drunk most afternoons and deficient at the job, but even he would notice if 100,000 yuan was missing. Two more weeks and four of those days were the weekend—okay, ten more days.
Zhu Feng went to the hotel early that evening, telling his coworkers he would miss dinner—he wasn’t feeling well, he said. He fell asleep with the lights on and woke at dawn with a pounding head.
In the morning, he and his colleagues attended a government seminar on soil remediation, held in a drafty conference room with dozens of other officials and trays of dry buns stuffed with red-bean paste, along with cups of faintly metallic tea. The water wasn’t hot enough and the leaves were still floating and caught in his teeth. Every few minutes, Zhu Feng checked his phone: the market, he saw, had fallen another 5 percent.
He texted Li. Are you seeing this?
At least you don’t have much to lose, Li wrote. My dad is freaking out, ha ha.
What’s happening?
Dunno, Li wrote.
It didn’t make sense, Zhu Feng thought desperately. It wasn’t possible. He didn’t know how it had happened exactly; it was like a horse, plodding and tractable, had abruptly reared up with spike-armed hooves and bared a mouthful of sharp yellow teeth: I’m coming for you.
Zhu Feng’s phone lit up again a half hour later. It was a message from Li, this time saying a friend of his father’s had heard that the market crash was temporary, that the government was going to step in any day now.
So what are you saying?
Sit tight, Li replied. Don’t worry.
A great feeling of relief flooded him, one that lingered for only a few minutes before anxiety began to nibble. Even if the market recovered, he thought to himself mutinously, he still likely wouldn’t make any money. After all this time, months of risk and hope, what a shame. As an official droned on at the front of the room, Zhu Feng saw, the man sitting in front of him had put his head down on the table and was sleeping. Another woman a few seats over was vigorously picking her nose.
Then another thought occurred to Zhu Feng. He got up and left the room and called his friend from the corridor bathroom. “If the government’s going to step in, then it’s a good buying opportunity,” he said, pleased with his insight.
“Maybe,” Li said. He sounded barely awake. Zhu Feng figured he’d been up late working on his app.
“I want in,” Zhu Feng said decisively. “Lend me some money, brother, will you?”
Li’s voice came, a familiar drawl. “Again? How much?”
“Fifteen thousand,” Zhu Feng said boldly, holding his breath.
Li snorted.
“Come on,” Zhu Feng said. Li wasn’t happy, but Zhu Feng, for once, was insistent. Weren’t they good friends? Hadn’t he paid him back last time? Give a friend a break, just this one favor. Ten thousand, then. He’d pay him back soon. “Not everyone is lucky enough to have a rich dad,” he said.
The bitterness that flooded his tone was impossible to mask, and immediately he regretted it. “I’ll pay you back,” he said.
“Whatever,” Li said.
Back in the conference room, his phone half concealed under the table, Zhu Feng waited a few minutes until Li’s transfer came through before clicking buy, buy, buy. Watching the new stock codes appear on his ticker, he tried to put the conversation with Li out of his mind.
* * *
All during the train ride back, Zhu Feng expectantly refreshed his phone, waiting for the market to rebound, but it kept falling. The next day, he ate beef noodle soup for lunch and dinner at the sticky-tabled stall around the corner from his office: beef for cows, beef for bulls, for a bull market. He wore the same pair of lucky red underwear all week and waited for the government to intervene, but every time he opened his app, the market had refused to go back up; it stayed stubbornly low and even fell further.
He’d texted Li, letting him know he was back in town, but received no reply. A few times he began writing a message that read I thought your dad’s friend said, but stopped himself. He was lonely. At home, his father’s pet bird cawed at all hours. Zhu Feng kept to his room with his headphones on.
Around the country, investors were furious, but what could they do? The government papers stopped cheerleading the market, and instead reported its decline with clipped precision on their inside pages. A few ran editorials about overly greedy investors who’d helped drive up prices: irrational behavior, market rumormongering, they said, needs correction.
For Zhu Feng, time had narrowed to just one point, the small square of calendar that showed the end of the quarter, when the government’s books would be tallied. No matter what he did, the days were moving swiftly, inexorably ahead. If the market dropped further, he knew, the sensible thing to do was probably sell, but then what? If he sold, he’d lose any chance at all of recovering his losses, and he was now more than 150,000 yuan down.
He started borrowing small sums of money from people at work, not much, but every penny counted. He’d even tried taking some of his recently purchased clothes back to stores to return, but the shopkeepers just gave him funny looks and shook their heads.
With seven days to go, the market went up slightly, but stumbled again the day after. The morning after that (five days to go), following another sleepless night, he knew it was time to bury his pride. I’m really sorry, brother, he wrote Li. I’m in trouble. Are you there?
After sending the message, he felt the knot in his stomach relax. Li would be shocked when
he confessed what he’d done, was probably still angry after their last exchange, but he’d do his best; he was that kind of friend. It was possible, he told himself, that Li would even approve of the sheer audacity of his scheme. Once, when they were six, they’d stolen 100 yuan out of Li’s mother’s purse and used it to buy themselves sodas every day for a year, to the envy of their classmates; the memory made Zhu Feng smile.
He lay in bed for another hour, listening to the cheesy sound of slapstick coming through the wall and waiting for Li’s reply. It was Saturday and he didn’t have to work. He called Li’s phone, once, twice, three times, each time getting a swarm of hip-hop in his ear, a ringtone he remembered the two of them buying together the previous summer.
But when Li finally replied, he sounded distracted: he was at the airport with his girlfriend, about to leave for a week’s holiday abroad. Talk to you when I’m back, he wrote, and that was all.
Zhu Feng’s heart dropped. He tried calling again, but Li’s phone was powered off. He got out of bed, limbs feeling like those of a condemned man. He made himself undress and went to take a shower. Standing under its spray, he was flooded with a feeling akin to homesickness and he sat down, letting the water pelt his head.
He was still sitting there, head cradled on his knees, when Junling rapped at the door. “Are you okay?” she called.
“I’m okay.”
“I have to go to work,” she said.
He turned off the water and dried himself and exited in a cloud of hot steam. His mother was standing there in her scrubs, wincing a little, the way she did in the mornings when her back was especially bad. She pushed her way inside and closed the door.
After Junling left, he decided to go for a walk, anything to get out of the apartment. Outside, he passed the park where his father took his bird; a few of the other men were out already, peering over a chessboard, birdcages hanging in the trees. He passed the old drugstore that had been there since his childhood, with a new sign now, under new ownership. He passed a vegetable stand where retirees were sifting through discounted piles of wilted greens.
He would tell his parents that night, he decided. He would explain what he’d been doing and how he’d lost the government’s money, and see what help they could offer. They were his parents, after all.
Every few minutes, he felt the urge to refresh his phone and check on the market, before remembering with relief that it was Saturday, and the markets were closed. He kept walking.
He passed the bus station, a few high-rises, some hairdressing salons, a pet store. He squared his shoulders and continued south. An hour and a half later he hit the downtown, and at first he meant to stop, maybe browse in some of the shops, but instead he pressed on—there was something exhilarating about it; he could walk forever, he felt, his feet barely aware of their exertions. To the west, he could see the white towers of the neighborhood where Li’s family now lived, but he kept going straight, cutting across the city toward the hills.
He returned home only after dark. Boyang was in the living room, watching the television as an advertisement for expensive alcohol came on. The bottle was blue and bathed in an eerie light and revolved onscreen as a man’s deep voice intoned, “Time-honored quality, Chinese quality.”
From the kitchen, Zhu Feng could hear the sound of oil hissing in a pan. His mother was stir-frying slivered potatoes with vinegar on the stove. She was still wearing her scrubs from the hospital, white with yellow trim. It was unusual for her, so much so that Zhu Feng asked if something was wrong.
“Nothing,” she said, annoyed. “I was pressed for time tonight. We had people lining up for hours today. We cycled them through in two-minute slots.”
Zhu Feng took the garlic without being asked and began peeling. For a nurse his mother had clumsy fingers, and her eyesight had begun to fail; he’d found that if he didn’t handle the garlic, bits of the papery scales would wind up in the cooking.
She brushed past him to pick up two pieces of fish that sat on the counter, which she dredged in a plateful of flour. “I didn’t know you were eating here tonight,” she said, looking down at their limp bodies distastefully, by way of explanation. “You and your father can eat it.”
Junling slid the fish into the hot oil of a pan, where they began to sizzle. As he watched, Zhu Feng could see a smudge on one of his mother’s sleeves. It looked like some kind of bodily fluid. He shuddered. From the living room, the television blared.
“Did Dad go out today?” he said.
She added a few flecks of red chili to the pan and a sprinkling of ginger and chopped scallions. “Don’t know.”
“Bet he stayed home.”
Her lips tightened as she flipped the fish. “Business is poor,” she said. “It was better when he used to drive the taxi.”
“He drove a taxi? I don’t remember that.” For as long as Zhu Feng could recall, his father had been driving the same scooter, “Modi, modi.”
“Before you were born.”
“Why did he stop?”
She was silent. “It was after the incident,” she said at last, extracting the fish and laying them in a shallow bowl.
“What incident?” he said.
Junling pretended not to hear him; it was like he was ten all over again, wondering why his father was lying in bed with the shades drawn in the middle of the day.
“Just tell me,” he said, exasperated. “What’s the big deal, anyway?”
“It was so long ago.”
He waited.
“At the time a lot of students were protesting.” She began chopping the cabbage, but slowly, as though her mind were elsewhere.
Zhu Feng frowned; it was not what he had expected. “What kind of protests?” He pictured the villagers that previous week: their feeble banner, their stacks of papers, the men with their batons.
The protests were happening all over the country, Junling said. Thousands of students were taking to the streets, talking about democracy, corruption, political reform. A number of taxi drivers joined them, and other workers, too. “A lot of grievances,” she said. “Too many rotten government officials.”
Zhu Feng remembered he’d heard of something like that happening, long ago; he dimly recalled one history professor alluding to it during class before changing the subject. He strained to remember any other details. “This was in the city?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, ferrying pale handfuls of cabbage to the pan. “It was chaotic. They flipped two police cars. It went on for days; there must have been thousands of protesters.”
It was hard to imagine; he’d never seen a protest like that in his life. He wished he could’ve seen it.
“Dad was involved?”
“He was different then,” she said. For a moment she almost smiled. “It was a different era. People were very idealistic. Not like today.”
“And then what happened?”
His mother threw the garlic into the pan and added salt. She didn’t answer, and he repeated his question. “Ma, I’m not small anymore,” he said, and she nodded, as though he’d made a good point.
There were newspaper reports that protesters were armed with knives and explosives. Others said it was just fireworks being set off—the police were mistaken. The crowds kept multiplying: peaceful, but they were bearing all kinds of banners, calling for the vote, for a free press, the crowds fed upon themselves, and soon the police were firing. Boyang had clambered atop one of the tipped-over cars and was brandishing a megaphone at the time. He was hit in the thigh.
Zhu Feng thought he’d heard incorrectly. His father, who spent his days fussing over his pet bird? His father, defeated scooter driver, atop a patrol car, with a megaphone?
“The police said they were warning shots, but three people got hit anyway,” Junling said, stirring the cabbage with a spoon. “They said it was an accident.”
“Hit?”
“One of them killed.”
Zhu Feng didn’t know what to say. “So he stopp
ed driving a taxi?”
“They wouldn’t license him,” she said matter-of-factly. “It took him years to get back on his feet again.”
“Anyway, it was a long time ago,” she said. Outside the television was playing a commercial for luxury men’s cologne.
She extinguished the flame below the pan. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
They ate without speaking, the sound of the television noisy in the background. His mother stared at her plate. Boyang, out of the corner of his eye, watched a martial arts fight happening on the screen, heavily stylized, men flying backward in the sky, their crouches and kicks rewound and shown in reverse, knives going backward and landing neatly back in their holsters. A woman clad in gray with her hair in a topknot stood making hysterical noises as they flew around, calling, “Wei-yuan! Wei-yuan!” Zhu Feng knew the show, it was called Time Clock, and its central plot involved the fact that, periodically, time moved backward at random intervals, confusing all the characters. It was a stupid show.
He looked uneasily at his father. “Dad,” he said, trying to recall his resolve from earlier that afternoon, “I wondered if I could maybe borrow some money.”
His father grunted. “What for?”
Zhu Feng didn’t meet his eyes. “It’s complicated,” he said. He thought of what his mother had said in the kitchen—too many rotten officials—and felt something twist in his chest. Maybe they didn’t need to hear the whole story.
“I owe money to a friend,” he said.
“Don’t you have a job?”
“This was from before,” he said.
“What friend?”
“Li Xueshi.”
“You shouldn’t borrow money from friends. Don’t you know how it looks, to have you going around like a beggar?”
“Right, I know I shouldn’t have,” he said, unable to bear the suspense, wanting to get it over with. “So could you—”
His father interrupted him. “How much?”
