THE POWER PLANT our factory was building was originally projected to cost a billion yuan, but at the point my story begins, 1.5 billion had already been invested, and no one seemed to think there’d be much change out of at least another several hundred million before the whole thing was done. One reason for the runaway budget was that the basic setup for the plant had been bought from Russia before 1991; only about half the goods had found their way over the border into China when the Soviet Union collapsed. The problem now, though, was too much, not too little money: as the whole thing was a national showcase engineering project, cash was always coming in from somewhere. Because it was so easy to get investment, the more money the government hurled at it, the more creative the management got at asking for more. Once the plant started working, their reasoning went, any debts would be cleared by the profits from the electricity generated.
The only task left to us, the workers and future masters of this power plant, was to complete our technical training. Our factory manager told us 3 million had been set aside for this in the original budget, but 5 had already been spent, and probably another 3 or 4 were still needed. Peanuts, admittedly, compared to the 1.5 billion thrown into the plant itself, but it was a lot of money for a glorified boiler serviceman and his colleagues to think about. By this point, we’d already been training for 4 years at various thermal power plants—it was like graduating from college, then being told, Hey, have another 4 years to piss away. The only problem was, having nothing to do was finally starting to get boring. A colleague of mine, a computer programmer, decided he’d had enough and resigned. Xie Weigang was his name: we graduated the same year, from the same university, just from different departments. Now you may find this surprising, but computers are different from boilers. Every day, in computers, someone, somewhere does something new; they’re never static, they’re always twitching and responding, like some kind of deranged, hypersensitized nerve system. So I suppose that if you work with computers, it helps to be a deranged neurotic yourself; by that logic, Xie Weigang was a born code monkey. Designing computer software is a young man’s game; having stagnated for 4 years after graduating, Xie could see his prime hurtling past him—he wanted out before the factory used him all up.
But for some reason, the factory bosses took his resignation as a personal insult and refused point-blank to accept it. The head of the personnel department had something wrong with his spine that meant when he stood up, he was always leaning to one side. He looked fairly normal sitting down, but the moment he got up and started walking, you noticed it—he listed along like an exhausted glider. But somehow, the minute he saw Xie approach from any direction, at any distance, he managed to take off. Xie’s only remaining hope was to get advice from the Municipal Human Resources Exchange Center. But they told him they couldn’t do a thing, because it was government policy to protect national showcase projects, to prevent the outflow of human resources. Xie tried to get around them all by pulling a huge, extended sickie. Luckily for him, he had a pretext in that he really did have something wrong with his liver, something to do with his transanimase index being abnormally high—or so he said. Although the factory was apparently disastrous for his liver, it seemed to thrive in the Taiwanese computer company where Xie started working on the side. The factory very soon got wind of his new job and ordered Xie Weigang back to the factory hospital for some more examinations. I felt quite sorry for him, having to have all those blood tests. The few times I saw him, he was always at the food stall by the factory gate, face down in a bowl of noodles and an enormous oily plate of sliced pig’s head—someone had told him intensive lard consumption was a surefire way to wreck your liver performance. I was worried about him—things must have been tough: endless grease, lies and blood tests at the factory, then long hours working at the new job. He was not what you’d call an impressive physical specimen in the first place: stick-thin, mouth full of skewed fangs, Adam’s apple sticking out a mile, glasses that had one earpiece stuck on with first-aid tape, cunning glint to his eyes, filthy fingernails—pretty much your standard computer-genius-on-the-brink look.
Everyone around the factory called him Xiao Xie, xiao being a Chinese diminutive, meaning little or young, that you tucked in front of a surname, in an affectionate kind of way. I don’t know how it started, but somehow we all reached a spontaneous consensus that this was the name for him. It slipped beautifully easily out of the mouth: the x like a sh with extra hiss, iao like yow, ie like yeh—ssh-yow ssh-yeh—you just let the jaw hang and the job was done. Say it and enjoy it: Xiao-xie, Xiao-xie, ssh-yow ssh-yeh, ssh-yow ssh-yeh. And somehow the sibilant wispiness of these sounds meshed peculiarly perfectly with Xie Weigang’s physical appearance and personality. Some people are just born to be called Xiao Xie. His real name, Xie Weigang—Xie the mighty and indomitable—was nothing like him at all; it was too big, too pompous. To the best of my knowledge, Xie Weigang also answered to three other names: Weigang, Liver, and Se-ba-C-ba. The first two, being his given name and his problematic organ, are fairly self-explanatory. The third probably needs a quick glossing, being the phonetic Chinese transliteration of the Russian word for thank you, spasibo, which in turn was the Russian translation of xie (“thank you” in Chinese). Though it was a bit harder to say, being foreign, it enjoyed a brief currency, together with the other two. But in the end, Xiao Xie beat them all in the popularity stakes.
I had another colleague, called Wang Yalin, who, now I think about it, also graduated from the same university as me, though he’d taken his degree at evening classes. I had nothing much against him and his big white moon face, only that he tended to keep you talking just a bit longer than was interesting. He’d gotten his job here through personal connections: whenever one of the factory management saw him, they’d bow, ever so slightly. I never worked out what the nature of these precious connections was, but they must have been fucking amazing. Not long after they began excavating Xiao Xie’s liver, Wang suddenly left to start another job: no warning, he just said he was going and off he went. Almost everyone I knew wanted out: because we were still being trained, because our nonexistent power plant wasn’t generating any profits, and because our salaries had been squashed as low as was humanly possible—most of us were getting several hundred yuan less per month than our contemporaries who’d graduated at exactly the same time but who had jobs elsewhere. For those trying to scrape together the money to get married, our salaries were a serious problem. It was a clash of calculating cultures: the municipal government thought in hundred millions, the factory manager in millions, while we ordinary workers measured our profits and losses in paltry hundreds. Soon enough, the entire factory workforce was a seething mass of discontent. And another thing: if building work had kept to the original schedule, the power plant would have become the nation’s very first supercritical unit, an accolade that might have kept the alpha males among us quiet, but what with everything getting so behind, we’d been beaten by plants in Shanghai and Hebei, both fitted out with heavy industrial products made by top Japanese and Swiss manufacturers. When we went to visit them, we all thought we’d died and gone to thermal energy heaven. Our shaky self-esteem just about held together after the first trip: okay, our plant was behind schedule, okay, it was slow and heavy and brutish, but it had a certain safe, nostalgic appeal as a Soviet period piece. But on the way back from the second visit, group morale started to collapse: we felt like we were caught in an industrial time warp, back where the West had been in the early 1950s, left behind in the dust years before we’d even generated a single spark of electricity. What was the point? Why go on? The whole venture had obviously been one big mistake from the very beginning, and now we were all stuck. When Xiao Xie heard about Wang Yalin leaving, he rushed back to the factory from wherever he’d been, to have another try at persuading the factory bosses to accept his resignation. A lot of people encouraged him to really go for it, giving him all the gossip there was about the factory manager, in case, presumably, it came to blackmail. One rumor, for example, had it that the manager was a repressed homosexual, that he’d promote anyone who buggered him. This, I suppose you could say, was one possible route through, or up, the back door. I admit the manager did have a bit of a, you know, look about him, but I still couldn’t quite believe he was that way inclined. Xiao Xie, however, made careful mental note, as though it were gospel truth, and formulated his plan of attack accordingly. The route to the manager was through the director of office staff, but the moment he saw Xie Weigang approach, quick as a flash he’d say the manager was away on business. So Xiao Xie implemented Plan B: for three whole days he draped himself over the men’s toilets across the corridor from the manager’s office, until the manager, and an opportunity, finally presented themselves. The moment he got his belt undone, Xiao Xie lunged with such precipitation, it was reported, that the manager screamed out in terror. The whole thing did Xiao Xie no good at all; in fact, that very day, the factory canceled his sick leave, told him to come back and report for work, and issued a serious disciplining order. Things being now as they were, we all reckoned Xiao Xie should just go AWOL and force the factory to fire him. Instead, bizarrely, Xiao Xie obeyed and docilely went back to training with the rest of us, albeit with a martyred look on his face. Xiao Xie, we all agreed, had made his own bed.
After work, I spent most of my time in my room, pottering about or sleeping. Like most things our factory tried to build, the unmarried accommodations hadn’t been finished, so for people like me the management had rented some extra rooms in the dormitory block belonging to a chemical engineering company. We were supposed to be two to a room, but because I came out of the ballot as a single lot, I ended up being put with a guy who worked as a designer in the chemical engineering company, stuck on the fourth floor while all my co-workers were on the third. My roommate’s name was Hao Qiang: delicate almond-shaped eyes, high-bridged nose, tall, slim, fond of the ladies, always out dancing (at which, incidentally, he was very averagely talented). Basically, he was one of those people who discovers the joys of dancing quite late in life but becomes unstoppable once he has. All this meant he spent very little time at home, in the room. I couldn’t believe my luck, having a roommate like him: girls often came looking for him when he wasn’t there, and if I was in a good mood, I’d let them in, just to give them the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discover how much more charismatic I was than my roommate. This used to save me no end of time, and made me appreciate the virtues of staying in even more than I had in the first place. Of course, sometimes Hao Qiang would bring a girl back with him, which meant I had to go kick around the streets for a while. But it didn’t happen that often, so he must have had other places besides our room he could use. After a while, I started to feel a little uneasy about the type of women who came knocking on our door—all of them young, married, and in heat. Sooner or later, I worried, Hao Qiang’s taste in women was going to get him into trouble.
Xiao Xie was prickly as hell after the toilet debacle, and seemed to be continually falling out with people around him. His roommate, Xia Yuqing, who was from Wuhan but graduated from Xi’an Communications College in the northwest, in the same subject as me, was always sniping at Xiao Xie about chickening out of the whole resignation thing: no self-respecting dog, he said, goes back to its own vomit. Another favorite pastime of his was joking about Xiao Xie’s name. Now, Chinese has a great many ideograms but not that many sounds, so one phonetic combination can be written in several different ways and mean several different things; aural understanding depends on context. The sound xie, apart from the rich comic possibilities offered by the pun on “thank you,” had almost 40 other, alternative meanings, the most negative and derogatory of which Xia Yuqing delighted in seizing upon. Your surname, Xie, he’d ask, now would that be the xie meaning shriveled and limp, or the xie meaning premature ejaculation? Either way, guess it explains why you’re such a loser. Pretty soon, Xiao Xie was ready to put Xia Yuqing to a slow, painful death, if only he’d dared: his roommate—who lifted weights—was approximately 99 percent muscle. To avoid any fatalities, I instead offered to swap rooms with him, a suggestion Xiao Xie gratefully accepted. The evening of the day after the move, Xiao Xie had fetched himself a Thermos of hot water for a bowl of instant noodles and a foot bath and was about to settle down with an English-language computer magazine when suddenly two men entered the room. Is that your shirt on the ground outside the building? they asked. Xiao Xie stepped into his slippers and went over to the window to look. Where’d you say it was? he asked, squinting out into the dusk. Without any further elaboration, the two of them lifted Xiao Xie up and threw him deftly out of the window.
I could never persuade myself to feel much affection for Xia Yuqing. From the moment we first met, I knew there was something not quite right about him, that he was the kind of person I’d never take to. But after I’d roomed with him for a while, we did manage to get along, and eventually, I suppose, we got more or less to be friends. Though I hadn’t been at college with Xia Yuqing, I could tell what he’d been like around campus, what his family background was. The only exceptional thing about him was, I hazarded, that he’d been a Communist Party member as a student, but when I asked him about it, he denied it, eyes flashing. I did get accepted, he went on, a note of regret in his voice, in my fourth year, but the formal admission got held up because of the student protests, so all my application materials and references got transferred to the factory. ’Course, in the normal run of things, I would’ve been let in a year or two after starting here, but what with building the new plant, nothing’s gotten done, so it’s still in the pipeline. Because lately Xia Yuqing had lost interest in weight lifting, the quality of his physique was in visible decline, and his (once gloriously) bulging pectorals began to look more like plump, slack silicone implants than muscles. Unfortunately for me and other casual observers, however, he was still very attached to an old white vest of his, one with a low, baggy neck that left practically nothing of his chest area to the imagination. I must say, seeing him sashay about the room in that state of undress was very detrimental to my psychic tranquility. Please, I had to beg him, very seriously, please wear something else. Xia Yuqing glanced down at himself, smiled, and squeezed his two breasts together to produce a deep, still ravine of cleavage. That night, I couldn’t sleep. When, finally, after tossing and turning for hours, I dropped off at dawn, I started having these bizarre dreams. I dreamed I was buggering Xia Yuqing really hard, when I suddenly realized it wasn’t Xia Yuqing, it was someone else. Get up, I said, slapping the mystery man’s ass a couple of times, get up and show me who the fuck you are. The man turned his face toward me and gave me the most melting smile. But I still couldn’t think who he was. After wiping from his forehead the beads of sweat neatly lined up like snake spawn, he groped for a pair of glasses lying by his side. It was only then that I recognized our revered manager. After he’d gotten dressed, when he was about to leave, he left his name card on the table. Anything you need, anything at all, he said, just call me. I felt sick for several days afterward.
Any young man who wants to get ahead in a new factory has to have something about him, or he’ll never find an opening. Xia Yuqing’s chosen route to promotion was gambling and booze. Thanks to his love of mahjong and baijiu—the 55 percent liquor beloved of those who have no further use for their livers—Xia Yuqing quickly set about networking his way out of our peer group, all of us university graduates with similar qualifications and experience. There were a few differences between Wuhan and Nanjing mahjong, but this didn’t hold him up for long. Anyone with a weakness for mahjong loved Xia Yuqing, because apparently he was a fantastic player. Actually, someone else told me he was useless, but that was quite possible, too—sometimes, the longer you’d been playing, the sloppier you got. Baijiu was another great way to make friends and influence people: get two cups sloshing around someone’s stomach, and in no time at all they’ll practically be offering to donate you their kidneys. Xia Yuqing drank his way through just about everyone of any importance in the factory. The day he invited them for a drink, Xia Yuqing would always buy a pack of quality cigarettes, and carefully tear a perfectly square, regular hole in the silver paper underneath the lid. He would then lay the pack on the drinking table with one cigarette poking out of the opening, offer it to whichever figure in authority had become his latest drinking victim, then in a single, deft movement sweep up the lighter, tightly cradle the flame with his cupped hand, and solicitously light the cigarette for his esteemed drinking partner as if they were standing in a force-ten gale. Baijiu, before it does other, less sociable things to your insides, tends to open people up conversationally, and Xia Yuqing’s powerful guests all opened up wide: on and on, endlessly promising him a promotion. Unfortunately, it was all so much alcoholic hot air; in our factory, the only word that counted for anything was our manager’s. And he was a pretty strange sort. This is how the factory management career ladder seemed to work. One, appoint your manager when he’s close to retirement, to guarantee he goes intensely and thoroughly power-mad during the few years of absolute rule left to him. Two, he starts sacking and reappointing the entire middle-level management to annihilate the ancien regime and ensure absolute personal loyalty to him. Next, he turns into this industrial man of mystery: no one knows where to find him, or the most basic personal details about him, such as where he lives, whether he likes spicy food, whether he has a wife and children, even whether he likes karaoke. But as soon as someone from a senior administrative department comes on an inspection or there’s some ceremony to mark the completion of a building, or an anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, or National Day, up he pops, out of nowhere, surrounded by his retinue, shaking hands like he wants to dislocate everyone’s wrists, mouthing platitudes like they’re God’s own truth. The people who worked in the factory’s TV station must have been the best in the business, because their industrial propaganda flicks somehow managed to make the manager look more like the chairman of the Communist Party than the head of a small provincial factory employing no more than a few hundred people. So mahjong and baijiu with the management small fry were never going to get you anywhere; it was the manager’s ear you wanted. Xia Yuqing told himself to be patient, that Rome wasn’t built in a day. But in his more introspective moments, he began to think that after four years Rome was no nearer to getting built than our electricity generator, and he couldn’t keep this up much longer. He started to grumble. He got bitter.
One day, I returned to our room to discover that the mess of objects usually piled up on our table had been cleared away to make room for a few plates of food and a bottle of baijiu, and Xia Yuqing was lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, exhaling smoke rings. My bile instantly began to rise: nothing irritated me more than when he brought his dinner parties back to our room. Astonishingly, however, today the wine and food on the table were for me, the single, honored guest. I really didn’t want to seem ungracious, but two little details niggled their way into my consciousness, impeding my enjoyment of this convivial gesture: the first was that the bottle of Yang River liquor was only a little more than half full, obviously left over from his previous banquet; the second was that although the seal on the pack of cigarettes on the table had been meticulously ripped back, just as usual, it was not the premium brand Xia Yuqing bought for his more esteemed guests. He divided the just-over-half bottle of baijiu equally between two tooth mugs, and passed one to me. Well, then, he said to me, like the relaxed, generous representative of the upper-level management that he wasn’t, isn’t this nice? Must be months since we . . . in fact, have we ever sat down and had a drink together? This time he wasn’t wearing that low-necked white vest, thank God, the one that gave me nightmares. Instead, he had on a tight black vest that I found equally traumatizing. Look here, I said, I’m happy to sit down and have a drink with you, but I insist you put something else on. Xia Yuqing wasn’t exactly overjoyed, but he capitulated in the end and yanked a shirt over his head. Problem was, the shirt neck was still wide open, so the black vest underneath started to look like a bra, giving his breasts even more definition and uplift. Sorry, I had to tell him, you’ve got to button it up properly. To the neck. Xia Yuqing slammed his glass down on the table, his eyes narrowing into angry triangles. Just when it looked like he was going to get really angry, he shook his head. Fuck, what’s wrong with you? he complained. It’s roasting today! Well, if you really think there’s something wrong with me, I could have answered, you ought to humor a sick man.
Furious at being made to button his shirt, Xia Yuqing sat there for ages refusing even to look at me, until finally he went off to cool down in the toilets. I don’t know what he did there, but when he came back he was clearly feeling much better. He raised his mug and clinked mine, took a swig, picked up a fried goose leg from one of the plates, and started to chew on it. I’d just gotten the mug to my mouth when I suddenly got this massive whiff of some sickeningly sweet, Chinese brand of toothpaste. I wrinkled my nose and set the cup down. This, for Xia Yuqing, was the last straw. He pounded the table and stuck his finger about a quarter inch from my nose: This time you’ve gone too fucking far! he started yelling. There’s me, trying to be nice, offering you a drink, licking your ass, and that’s the fucking thanks I get! Did I say you could lick my ass? I countered mildly. D’you think a cup of minty baijiu is all it takes? Only momentarily wrongfooted, Xia Yuqing shoved the table between us to one side, then clenched his fists, ready to fight. Though his eyes were flashing like Christmas lights, I kept my cool. None of this was surprising to me: I’d always expected we’d end up having a fight—to some interpersonal problems, violence is the only answer. Bring it on, I thought. I don’t like fighting, but once I’ve started I fight dirty. In the end, though, Xia Yuqing chickened out, pulled the table back into place, then sat down and drank, hard. Not because he was afraid of me; he was just worried that if it got around, a fight with a colleague would make him look bad in front of the management and sabotage his chances of promotion. I’ve got proof, too, because I saw him fight someone else later on, and that time there was no holding back: one punch and three of his opponent’s incisors were off with the tooth fairy. (Hao Qiang, my old pretty-boy roommate, was the man suddenly in urgent need of a dentist.) But back to the evening in question: Xia Yuqing ripped open all the buttons on his shirt and settled down to a private domestic bender. Preferring to leave him to it, I went off wandering the streets until about midnight, by which time I figured that Xia Yuqing would either be out playing mahjong or playing by himself under his blanket. But there he was still, sitting all quiet and peaceful by the table, as if waiting for me. What the hell was he doing there? This time he really had me worried, worried that he was waiting for me to fall asleep before murdering me in my bed. Xia Yuqing languidly lifted a pair of misty, drunken eyes in my direction, then picked up the pack of cigarettes and tried to pluck one out. After the last of several badly coordinated attempts finally succeeded, he promptly dropped his prize on the floor. He bent over, with signs of enormous effort, picked the cigarette up, then suddenly passed it to me. I don’t remember too well what we talked about that night, and I’d guess he doesn’t either; he was slurring his words so much he had to repeat every sentence two or three times. He had himself draped over my shoulder like a dead camel, going on about how neither of us were locals, we were far from our families, our homes, how hard life was for us, how we had to look out for each other, help each other out. I immediately took my cue to help him as fast as I could onto his bed, an act of charity that strained my back and left me walking at a 30-degree tilt for the next week. The lesson being: helping other people seriously damaged my health, and I wasn’t cut out for it.
After getting Xia Yuqing settled, I staggered off to the washroom to brush my teeth. This was not a particularly joyful event, because my tooth mug still reeked of booze. Smells matter; they need to harmonize. That principle holds for human relationships too: if someone doesn’t smell compatible, I say stay well away. Rice and dung I could smell together without flinching, but booze and toothpaste was just one of those combinations I couldn’t handle. When I went back to the room, I was just about to lie down when Xia Yuqing suddenly shot up in bed like a sleepwalker, grinning like an idiot. He said he wanted to ask me something. His voice had this confidential tone to it, as if he was about to tell me about some treasure map and he was worried the walls had ears. To cut a potentially agonizingly long story short, I immediately told him the map was old news, everyone in the factory had a copy, and we should get some sleep. But no: he had decided now was the moment to talk about our factory manager’s ass, about whether therein really lay the passage to promotion. D’you think it’s true? Xia Yuqing asked me, with deadly seriousness. Of course it is, I replied, my patience wearing thin. After chewing this over for a while, Xia Yuqing felt an inner compulsion to ask me something else. Wouldn’t—wouldn’t it be a bit unhygienic? What? I said. Xia Yuqing looked a bit embarrassed. Wouldn’t there be, you know, shit? I don’t know, I said, but a bit of shit wouldn’t put anyone off who was really desperate for a promotion. Xia Yuqing was still giving the whole matter serious thought. Another thing, right, he asked, adding an illuminating gesture, how d’you, like, jam the thing in? Just can’t see how it could be done. By this point, I’d had enough of the whole exchange. Look, I said, I’m sure so many people have been down that passage by now, there’s probably room for two in there. Just do it, Xia Yuqing, I said. Make things easy on yourself, get your promotion and be happy. I immediately regretted these incautious words of advice: he’d have to be really drunk not to realize how offensive I was being and beat the shit out of me. But he clearly was exactly that: eyes half shut, he sank into deep, peaceable contemplation. What the hell, I’d really gotten him thinking. After a good long pause, Xia Yuqing shook his head: Nah, wouldn’t work, he said to himself. What d’you mean, wouldn’t work? I asked. Xia Yuqing’s face went blank, then broke into a grin. Without another word, he lay back down. The moment his head hit the pillow, he was snoring like a train whistle.
His fall only briefly interrupted by a clothes rack suspended from a second-floor window, Xie Weigang slipped through its slats onto the bags of garbage left outside the dormitory building and fainted. (I suspect he’d already fainted from fright by the time he reached the ground. A minor point.) As this unconventional descent occurred on a weekend, hardly anyone in the unmarried block was around, and no one who was in his room noticed this botched murder attempt. There Xie Weigang lay, under the watchful guardianship of thousands of rats, before he woke up sometime in the middle of the night. Consciousness, and the slightest movement, he soon discovered, were pure agony, so, abandoning any pretense at quiet dignity, he bawled his head off. After he was taken to the hospital, the results of the checkup reported little short of a miracle: apart from a bit of soft tissue damage, he was right as rain. The factory authorities took a very serious view of the whole affair and gave the local police station every assistance in their inquiries. But the verdict of the investigation was extremely bad news for Xie Weigang. Because there was no trace of any struggle in the room and the door had been locked, everyone put two and two together—that Xie Weigang had been under severe psychological pressure, and that he was a bit flaky at the best of times—and concluded it was attempted suicide, not murder. To avoid putting any further strain on Xie Weigang’s nerves—which had already been proved fragile—the management spread the word that the subject was not to be discussed around the factory. The head of office staff was deputed to visit Xie Weigang at the hospital and to communicate the manager’s latest views on the question of his resignation: viz., that this path called life is very long, its tapestry is very rich, et cetera, so if you’re still determined to go, how about you revise and resubmit your resignation? Xiao Xie, hypersensitive and paranoid at the best of times, immediately sensed what was being implied, went into an enormous huff, and refused to leave the hospital. Feeling a bit responsible because of the room swap, I decided to ask Hao Qiang a few questions of my own; I was convinced he had to know something. But Hao Qiang told me to get lost, he didn’t know a fucking thing. A couple of days later, he was seeing things differently. Point of fact, he wasn’t seeing very much at all, as his head had been smashed in with a steel angle joint. Only when Hao Qiang, his head a bloody mess, went into the hospital would Xiao Xie agree to come out. Soon as he was out, he handed in another letter of resignation to the factory bosses. By then, he was telling everyone he met that he was on the verge of collapse, that there was no way he could stay on, and that he didn’t know what he might do if he was forced to. Most of the management, apart from the manager himself, were on Xiao Xie’s side, and after a special meeting called to discuss the matter, they finally gave him a straight answer. They’d let him go, but only after he’d reimbursed them for the costs of training him all these years; the accounting department would do the math. For the rest of us workers, the idea that we were all one big, bad debt was very damaging to our sense of self-esteem: we suddenly realized that, in the eyes of our state employers, we were little better than indentured laborers, or prostitutes. When we left, we had to buy back our freedom, like slaves. Xiao Xie argued back that the factory should compensate him for the loss of his youth. Figuring that Xiao Xie, released into the free-market world, was never going to make it big and reflect glory back onto his old employers, the manager stuck to his original ruling. A personnel crisis resulted.
A group of four computer programmers resigned in protest against the leadership and just walked, without waiting for a response. In the end, they were all officially fired by the factory for going AWOL beyond the accepted time limit. As all four of them were code monkeys, they didn’t need to worry about finding another job. Our factory had only had eight computer programmers to begin with; now it’d lost half of them, and with Xie Weigang also determined to go, the department as good as collapsed. Well and truly outmaneuvered, the factory bosses frantically started firing off requests to the head office for new staff, while desperately trying to woo back the absentees. Of course, they still didn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone else, because they knew they didn’t have to. Take me, for example: what’s a graduate in thermal energy to do except waste his life in a doomed, sub-Soviet electricity plant? Even if I wanted to leave, where would I go? The factory soon became obsessed with what the four escapees went on to do. Almost no one wished them well: what everyone most wanted was to see the four of them run into brick walls, hard, then crawl back like concussed dogs. But things never work out the way you want them to, and as soon as it became clear they were all doing very nicely, everyone lost interest. This is about the sum total of what I know. The ringleader, Jin Zhiyang, got a job at a big Hong Kong computer firm. He was quickly promoted, put in charge of about 100 people, began earning more than 10,000 a year, and acquired a Hong Kong accent. Li Minghao started up a computer company with a few friends on Zhujiang Road, but after some management difficulties he left to work for a credit company run by the provincial government, where things went so well for him he got a contract to set up an Internet system for a negotiable securities firm. He got rich, bought a house and a car. Apparently, his connections in the provincial government were so good our deputy manager used to go begging him for help. Yu Jiang, the one I knew best out of the four, soon abandoned computing altogether and began messing around in stocks and shares, buying and selling all sorts of stuff—VCDs, stove parts, rice, plastic bags—and running a restaurant. Everyone said he’d done the best out of them all, but how well, no one really knew. I passed him on the street earlier this year, but he stared straight ahead, over my shoulder; we didn’t say hello. The last, Hu Jinbiao, went back to his hometown in Jiangxi and got a job in a petrochemicals company: another iron rice bowl, just someplace else.
But Xie Weigang still insisted on resigning formally, however pointless his computing confreres had made that look. He was like someone who was always saying good-bye but never actually left; it got plain irritating. Fortunately, because he’d been going on about it for so long, it was now possible pretty much to ignore him, let him get on with digging his own hole. Exhausted by the whole performance, the management just wanted Xie Weigang to hand over the cash and be gone. In their finest creative hour, the accounting department calculated the sum total of the repayment to be 50,000 yuan, minus the statutory 10,000 yuan legally owed to employees as severance pay. So anyone who wanted to ransom their freedom had to scrape up 40,000 yuan from nowhere. When Xiao Xie was told, he almost fainted dead away from fright. After a certain amount of bargaining, the factory offered to halve the ransom; that, they said, was as far as they were prepared to go. But even 20,000 was still out of the question. How was he going to make that kind of money, and fast? Everybody gathered around to offer suggestions, which Xiao Xie carefully recorded, one by one, in a special notebook, pressing for further details as he made his notes.
While Xie Weigang was wavering among these various schemes, the factory took another surprising step backward. Xiao Xie could resign, effective immediately, and leave the 20,000 yuan outstanding. When he’d repaid it, he’d get his personal work files back. Someone in management, who felt sorry for Xiao Xie, even hinted there was no need to worry about owing money to the state, it wasn’t like a private debt. If he left it long enough, everyone would probably forget all about it. I rejoiced for Xiao Xie: he didn’t need to waste his time here anymore, he could leave and get a decent job. Okay, so he was never going to be China’s Bill Gates, but he might do all right for himself as a software designer somewhere else.
But Xiao Xie refused to either exit along this olive branch or give any kind of explanation for his schizophrenic behavior. Everyone felt snubbed. The manager immediately dropped the conciliatory act: This isn’t a hotel, he told Xiao Xie. You wanted to leave and now we’re letting you leave, so leave! In the blink of an eye, the deadlock had done a 180-degree turn, with Xiao Xie insisting on staying and the manager insisting on kicking him out. After this latest bizarre twist in the saga, Xiao Xie struck an even more pathetic figure around the factory. Because there were so few computer programmers, they’d all been put under the direction of the electrical department. Following instructions from the factory manager, the head of department stopped allocating work to Xie Weigang, and even gave his desk away to someone else. The personnel department cut off his salary, and even his monthly toilet paper/soap/shampoo/et cetera ration. Xie Weigang responded by showing up for and leaving work perfectly on time, spending the intervening hours sitting in a corner of the office, like a rather unusually shaped cactus. Unable just to stand by and watch this happen, colleagues walked over to offer yet more advice about what he should do next; soon, Xie Weigang had a whole sheet of suggestions. He tried submitting a personal pledge of good faith to the factory manager, a blown-up copy of which he stuck on the ground floor of the office building, acclaiming the manager as “our brilliant, great, kind leader.” When I read it, I almost vomited. Surprisingly enough, the manager didn’t like it either, and ordered Xie Weigang to tear the poster down immediately. This is a public office area, he said. You can’t stick posters and pictures up wherever you like. Xie Weigang and his pledge then disappeared altogether from public view. But he was still there, collapsed in his room after suffering a complete physical breakdown. Soon afterward, the parents of our wayward computer genius hurried in from out of town: both plain, simple country people, perfectly normal on every count, tearfully begging anyone they thought looked vaguely powerful for help with Xiao Xie’s case. Finally, the manager managed to generate a bit of human sympathy and agreed to let Xiao Xie stay. Even after he was allowed back, though, most of the time Xiao Xie seemed barely there at all.
If Xiao Xie were obviously mentally ill, his abnormal behavior would have been very easy to explain. But the truth of the matter was, a lot of the time he didn’t seem all that different from the rest of us. So why did he suddenly refuse to leave? There were, in summary, three different general opinions on the matter. First, the majority view of the factory workers was that after seeing his fellow computer programmers go, Xie Weigang figured if he stayed, he could get to be the head of the computer section, then if the computer section later became a department in its own right, he’d get to be the head of the department. Promotion jackpot. Second, as Hao Qiang later remembered, it was at about this time that Xie Weigang first set eyes, in their room, on Yin Hongxia. Plump, fair, generally radiant, Yin Hongxia was indisputably the most attractive thing ever to come out of the phosphate fertilizer factory—a subsidiary of the chemical engineering company—where she worked as an operator. When Xiao Xie saw her, he practically started drooling on the spot. Although Yin Hongxia ignored him almost completely, Hao Qiang agreed to try to set Xiao Xie up with her. In other words, Xiao Xie decided to stay for love, an interpretation that has a heart-warming kind of appeal to it. The third explanation came from Xie Weigang himself, told to me in confidence, long after the events in question. He said that just as he was getting his bag ready to go, he discovered blood in his shit. It broke his nerve. Assuming it was a delayed-reaction consequence of his three-story fall, Xiao Xie started to see his life flash before his eyes. The bleeding went on for another ten or so days, increasing in volume with his anxiety. Though too scared to tell anyone, much less go for a checkup, he instinctively felt that quite soon he might need a state health insurance program very badly indeed. Even now, Xiao Xie often shits blood for a few days in every month, though he doesn’t lose sleep over it anymore. But the first time, Xiao Xie explained to me, he went out of his mind, like a girl getting her first period. I nodded silently, keeping my doubts to myself.
It was round about this time Xia Yuqing developed a new, psycho-sexual-linguistic theory about what was wrong with Xiao Xie: Xie Weigang, he surmised, had been destroyed by his surname and its homonyms (premature ejaculation, shriveled, limp, etc.), by hearing it fifty times a day, day in, day out. It must have undermined him, on a deep psychological level—it would have worn down better, stronger, truer men. Everybody thought Xia Yuqing had a certain point, and for a while “Xiao Xie” became a multipurpose colloquialism around the factory. Sometimes it meant premature ejaculation, sometimes it meant impotence, sometimes it meant neither, just the routine goings-on of married life. For example, if a married colleague showed up for work one morning with a sour look on his face, someone would ask him, Have a Xiao Xie last night with the wife, did you? Sometimes it was used in its original sense, sometimes it was used as a metaphor, extended by various degrees. After a while, it came to mean practically anything you wanted it to, until it got focused back in on a sense of unfinished, aborted, failed, the most typical and obvious example being: if things go on like this, the electricity generator’s going to turn into one big Xiao Xie. Here’s the phrase at work in a sample conversation:
Did you watch the game last night?
Only the first half. Fuck, the Chinese are completely Xiao Xie at soccer.
I don’t know, they’re all right.
They’re crap, all of ’em, every one’s a Xiao Xie. They’re a fucking disgrace.
Come on now, the last match, okay, it was Xiao Xie in the end, but they almost won.
What do you mean, almost? So near and yet so fucking far. As I say, pure Xiao Xie.
Okay, sometimes they’re Xiao Xie, but sometimes they’re not bad.
D’you want to bet on the next one? A hundred yuan?
Nah.
Xiao Xie-ing on me, hey?
Usually, it was impossible to grasp the precise implications of a “Xiao Xie” outside its immediate oral context. Occasionally, however, it was the other way around: the deeper you got into a context, the less you understood what “Xiao Xie” really meant. Once, on night shift, a colleague standing next to me stared up at the stars and sighed, “Ah, Xiao Xie.” Maybe, I thought, he meant something along the lines of “Ah, life.” Or maybe I’ll never know.
After about a month, the expression began to fall out of use, as if everyone were responding to a secret signal to drop it. The phrase “Xiao Xie” dissolved away into nothing, like a grain of salt on the tongue. If it happened to flicker back through your head, it was like the memory of a faint, saline aftertaste returning long after the original particle had been washed away.
In order to stabilize plummeting staff morale, the factory decided to put us to work immediately on the power plant building site itself. The whole project had been contracted out to two electricity companies, one local and one from the northeast. These two companies then subcontracted the work out to a series of smaller outfits, who had very little idea what on earth they were doing on such a big job. At the same time, a work team from the Provincial Institute of Electrical Experimentation was beginning some preliminary testing, picking its way around a vast, ever-present cohort of dust- and earth-covered peasant labor, settled over the work site like a black cloud. So we were part of a pretty miscellaneous bunch on site. Our task was to familiarize ourselves with the facilities, identify any faults, check on deliveries for the next stage of work, and prepare for the plant’s first dry run, together with a dozen or so engineering experts from the Ukraine, who had come over to assist us. They were very serious about their work, running around the site all day, constantly grumbling about the quality of installation work carried out by the Chinese electricity companies. But the Chinese either ignored their complaints, like they were so much wind past the ears, or openly laughed at them. I suppose when a nation’s slipped down the hierarchy of world powers, when politically and economically it’s on the skids, it gets easy to start treating all its citizens, however well qualified they are, like disenfranchised refugees. Although the Ukrainians got the regulation, foreign expert red carpet treatment, earning great shovelfuls of dollars, they lived very thriftily, only buying the cheapest goods that no one else would buy at the market, so even the local stall holders treated them like cheapskate crap.
We were divided into four teams, working three-shift rotations with the electricity companies. Even when there was nothing to do, we had to stay on the work site, because we were supposed to put in regular work hours and our attendance was being monitored. Having finally achieved his life’s goal—being made a team leader—Xia Yuqing became obsessed with sacrificing his own comfort to the collective, especially on the long night shifts. He’d man the staff room on his own and tell the rest of us to go and find somewhere to sleep. When the weather was warm, you just lay down on any bit of flat ground, but from November onward, sleeping options were much more limited. There was a bed in the electricity company’s staff room, but unfortunately there was always someone in it. So the rest of us had no choice but to gather in our own staff room and nap on the tables. Someone brought in a semiconductor so we could pick up radio broadcasts, and a local call-in program called “Bridge at Midnight to Your Hearts” became the soundtrack to our long night shifts. Pretty soon, I hated it with all my body and soul. Only two types ever seemed to phone in to expose their gnarled psyches to the presenter: people experiencing marital problems and people suffering from impotence. In the latter case, the caller’s opening gambit was always: “I have a friend. . . .” There was a phone in the staff room, and when we were bored and had nothing to do (in other words, almost all the time) we’d take turns calling the radio station, pretending to be impotent, to enjoy a bit of sympathy from the presenter and his audience. So that we didn’t make the caller laugh, we left whoever was doing the phoning on his own in the staff room, while the rest of us went outside and huddled around the semiconductor to listen. In the end, after an exhaustive process of comparing and contrasting, everyone agreed that Xia Yuqing was the champion impotent impersonator, that he’d gotten the jerky, quick-slow, coy-desperate delivery that marked the genuine article. He was so good that some of us began to suspect he might secretly have problems in that department himself. Soon we were demanding a show from our star performer on every long night shift; if he refused, we’d go on strike. Finally, something snapped in him: we were all listening to him talking away when suddenly, out of nowhere, he screamed Fuck you! at the presenter. Though we were pretty shaken, the presenter kept his cool perfectly. Don’t adjust your sets, he said, we’re just experiencing a technical difficulty, we’ve reconnected, next caller. . . . Hello, caller. . . .
About four or five o’clock that morning, I went out for a piss. Afterward, I wandered around in the cold, trying to shake off my persistent fatigue. When you were on a three-shift rotation, the second long night shift was usually the hardest. Passing by the electricity company’s staff room, I peered through the window in the door and saw, to my amazement, that the bed was empty, and the room completely deserted. Without a moment’s hesitation, I opened the door and lay down fully dressed. The quilt was thin and the bed rock-hard, but at that moment, I felt like I was in paradise. After snuggling down, I discovered, to my slight unease, the quilt was perceptibly warm. A few instants later, the door was kicked open and a young man with curly hair rushed in, swearing about the cold. He’d gotten as far as the bed when he spotted me. Who the fuck are you? he shouted. Bloody hell, I go out for a shit and somebody’s taken the bed! He spoke in a very strong northeastern accent and had a big mole on his chin; I knew him by sight from around the work site. Embarrassed, but too tired to explain, I climbed out of the bed and surrendered it back to him. Don’t worry, the young man said, rubbing his knees, move over, there’s room for two. After a moment’s hesitation, I agreed and edged over to one side. He then lifted up the quilt at the other end and lay down. After a bit of shifting and fidgeting, both of us found fairly comfortable positions, and lay still. S’not bad, I heard him say, just now it was a bit cold in here, much warmer like this. I tucked the quilt tightly around my shoulders, trying to hermetically seal his smelly feet inside. In a short while, he went to sleep, his heart beating steadily into the soles of my feet pressed along his spine. I didn’t sleep a wink myself, but I was happy enough just being able to lie down. I stayed there more or less until breakfast time, when I quietly climbed out and went back to my own staff room. Looking around at my team’s faces, waxy with exhaustion, I felt I’d not done too badly for myself.
After two long night shifts we had a day off, then a short night shift. I quite liked short night shifts, because I never knew what to do with myself anyway between four o’clock in the afternoon and midnight; having to work at least kept me out of trouble. As an added bonus, at six o’clock the factory canteen sent over some dinner and at eleven o’clock they sent over a bedtime snack. Though the food was pretty poor, if you were an unmarried man like me, it was better than having to fend for yourself. That evening, I’d just gotten back to the staff room and was about to take off my safety helmet when I heard that the day before yesterday someone from one of the electricity companies had been killed after falling off the temporary elevator on the work site. Although the door opened, the elevator itself had failed to come up, and the poor guy had stepped into nothingness. I immediately thought of my bed partner, the one with curly hair, but said nothing, much less made any further inquiries, afraid of having my fears confirmed. Everyone else was spreading this around like it was a piece of good news. If you don’t spill a bit of blood on a big build, if you don’t have a few people die, the old workers used to say, it doesn’t get finished. So this meant there was still hope for the plant and everyone working on it. While we were waiting for dinner to arrive, everyone was comparing this accident with Xiao Xie’s: both had fallen from about the same height, so how come one of them was dead before they got to the hospital, while the other could take himself there and walk out again? Of course, by the end of this seemingly endless discussion, everyone had agreed there was only one possible, plausible explanation for the complex medical mystery: fate. After dinner the head of the electricity generating department came and announced that two representatives would be sent to attend the memorial service and cremation tomorrow morning, and that he was looking for volunteers. Whoever went could go home early tonight, and have a half day off tomorrow. Everyone, naturally, wanted to go, because a cremation had to be better than watching their own time go up in smoke at work. The department head put Xia Yuqing in charge of selecting a volunteer, then told him to contact the engineering department, because they were also sending someone and he needed to discuss with them things like whether to go halves on a big wreath or to buy a smaller wreath himself, et cetera. As soon as he had gone, everyone crowded around Xia Yuqing, begging for the remaining place. Reveling in his new power and popularity, Xia Yuqing dragged his decision out like a master playing with his slaves. Finally, he pointed at his empty food box on the table: I’ll take whoever washes that up, he said. Though some balked at this precondition, others stampeded over to the table. As I happened to be sitting just next to it, I snatched it up and took it out to the sink. Like everyone else, I wanted the half day off. After I’d washed the box, I went back home to my room, as I’d been told I could. Xia Yuqing came back much later, at eleven o’clock, lugging a huge wreath with him, which took up most of the available space in the room. This would make things a bit simpler tomorrow morning, he said, when the engineering department car arrived for us. Hanging on either side of the wreath were two blank strips of paper, where the elegiac couplet to the deceased—as yet unwritten because no one knew what the dead man had been called—was supposed to go. Xia Yuqing said I had to remind him the next morning to find out the name as soon as we got to the ceremony, so he could scribble it in. He’d just lain down in bed when he heard the sound of mahjong being played on the other side of the wall. He put his trousers back on and rushed out again in a state of obvious excitement.
I slept incredibly badly that night. The wind was whistling in through a gap in the window frame, making the paper strips on the wreath flutter and rustle in the draft. I sat up in bed, turned on the lamp, and opened, then reclosed the window. Finally, at two, or maybe three o’clock, I got to sleep. But it seemed I’d hardly been asleep two minutes when I felt someone pushing at my shoulder. It was Xia Yuqing, presumably just back in from his game. The fluorescent lamp overhead was so bright that I could barely open my eyes. What? I said. Who filled the couplet in? he asked in a low voice. I leaped out of bed, all desire to sleep gone. I walked over to the wreath, pulled the paper toward me, and there, in pompously large, regular script, were the words: We’ll never forget you, Comrade Xie Weigang! All this time, Xia Yuqing was hovering behind me, sending shivers up my spine. Fucking stand in front of me, I told him. Xia Yuqing unwillingly inched forward and ran his finger over the ink marks. Just been written, he said, examining his finger. After I went out, did anyone come in? No, I said, after a quick think, the door was locked, who could get in? The more we thought about it, the more confused and uneasy we felt. Xia Yuqing lit a cigarette. You don’t think, he started saying, Xiao Xie would have. . . . I told him I thought we should go upstairs to look for him. Xia Yuqing ripped the strips of paper off, scrunched them into a ball, and chucked them into a corner of the room. Nah, he said, forget it. Let’s go to sleep, we’ve got to be up early tomorrow.
But I wouldn’t let it go, and forced Xia Yuqing to follow me upstairs. We went all the way along the corridor to the room at the very end, then knocked lightly a couple of times. No answer. I then knocked twice again, this time more heavily, but still no one answered. Xia Yuqing called out Xiao Xie’s name a couple of times, then Hao Qiang’s a couple of times, but there was no response. I then remembered that I still had a key to this room, but it was downstairs. I told Xia Yuqing to wait at the door while I went to get it. By the time I’d gotten it and gone back up, I discovered the door was already open a crack, and a sleepy-eyed Hao Qiang had poked his head and naked torso out. What the fuck? he asked, yawning away. It’s the middle of the night, what the hell is it? I’m really sorry, I said, but is Xiao Xie in? Hao Qiang was nonplussed. Xiao Xie? he said. Who’s she? You know, I said, Xiao Xie! Xie Weigang. Your roommate. He’s not here, Hao Qiang said, haven’t seen him for days. Why didn’t you tell us? Xia Yuqing barked at him. What’s it got to do with me? Hao Qiang replied impatiently. I do my job, you do yours, how should I know what’s going on with him? You share a room with him, ’course you should know! Xia Yuqing shot back. For God’s sake, Hao Qiang said, you used to share a room with him, did you give a shit? Stop arguing, I interrupted, look, is Xiao Xie there or not? No, Hao Qiang said, shaking his head. Why would I lie to you? We want to go in and have a look, Xia Yuqing said. You can’t, said Hao Qiang, who seemed rather alarmed by this idea. While we were talking, Hao Qiang had taken care to wedge himself firmly in the doorway, to block our further progress into the room. With one hand, Xia Yuqing shoved the door open, almost knocking Hao Qiang over backward. I groped for the light pull and gave it such a violent tug the cord broke. The fluorescent lamp flickered a few times, then came on. See for yourselves! Hao Qiang shouted furiously, pointing around the room. Where is he? Where is he then? He was right: no Xiao Xie. His bed was empty, piled with a quilt and a chaotic mess of clothes and books. A plump, fair woman sat up in Hao Qiang’s bed, covering her chest with a blanket.
Feeling guilty, I put my hand on Hao Qiang’s shoulder and tried to apologize. Hao Qiang pushed it away. We’ll leave as soon as we’ve had a quick look to see whether Xiao Xie’s left anything, I said, just a couple of minutes. Xia Yuqing and I started whipping through Xiao Xie’s bed, desk, and cupboard, with no idea what we were looking for. After a while, the woman in the bed interrupted our search. I think I can see a piece of paper under his pillow, she said. We pulled out a note written on printing paper, the kind that has holes down the side. A few random sentences, a kind of last will and testament, I suppose, were scrawled on it: I wanted to resign from my job. Now I resign from life. Screw you all. As Xia Yuqing and I read it, we started to feel very bad indeed. I passed the paper over to Hao Qiang. By this point, Hao Qiang had cooled down enough to comfort us. Don’t worry, he said, Xiao Xie’s never stuck to a decision in his life, he’s probably just fine. Just as we were trooping out the door, I thought I ought to apologize also to the woman in the bed. But when I took another look at her over Hao Qiang’s shoulder, I couldn’t believe my eyes: it was the ravishing Yin Hongxia. I yanked Hao Qiang over to one side: Didn’t you agree to set Xiao Xie up with Yin Hongxia? I muttered. Yup, replied Hao Qiang, completely unconcerned. What the fuck d’you mean, yup? I asked with growing agitation. You’re sleeping with the person you were supposed to set Xiao Xie up with! Look, Hao Qiang said, here’s the situation. Way before I made that agreement with Xiao Xie, I’d already slept with her. I don’t care about that, I said, you shouldn’t be sleeping with her now! After a quick glance back at Yin Hongxia, Hao Qiang pulled me outside the room and put the door on the latch. Just leave it, all right, he said. Whether you sleep with a woman once or a thousand times, it’s still the same thing! I’ve already slept with her once, so what’s the harm in sleeping with her again? No! Xia Yuqing added his own, unusually animated view. Sleeping with her now is completely different! Hao Qiang unceremoniously elbowed Xia Yuqing out of the way: Mind your own business! I scowled and said nothing. No one said anything for a while. The cold air of the corridor started to make Hao Qiang, who was still wearing nothing on his top half, keener to make peace and get back into the warm. Okay, he conceded in a gentler voice, it’s not ideal, I admit, but ever since my head got smashed in, I’ve had to be very careful about who I sleep with. All those married women out of bounds. So Yin Hongxia was . . . Look, I had to sleep with someone. Forces beyond my control. There: that’s my last word on the matter. He then made as if to return to his room. My own anger was vaporizing. We had no good reason, I felt, to blame everything on Hao Qiang and his libido. Xia Yuqing, however, saw things differently. You fucking bastard! he screamed. We don’t know whether Xiao Xie’s dead or alive, and you want to go and screw his girlfriend! You’re too fucking much! By the end of this little announcement, Hao Qiang was lying face up on the floor of the room. After scraping himself up, he turned his head left, right, then bent forward and spat out three front teeth into the palm of his hand. Somehow, without front teeth, Hao Qiang looked like he was laughing, laughing as he gurgled blood.
Early on the morning of the following day, we carried the wreath downstairs to wait for our transportation. I was wearing the dark blue factory uniform that I hated so much, as this was the most formal item of clothing I had. The crowds of people rushing in to work stared at us like we were flower-bearing aliens. Xiao Xie was among them, running downstairs with his bag under his arm. Where are you off to, then? he asked. Before I’d thought how to reply, he’d swung his leg over his bicycle and pedaled away at top speed.
The engineering department said the car would come at eight o’clock, so of course it didn’t come till quarter past; a bad start, as the service and cremation were due to begin at nine and we were miles from the funeral home. From the moment the car arrived, our troubles multiplied. The engineering department had sent a hatchback car that was far too small to cram the wreath into. But they said yesterday they were going to send a van, Xia Yuqing complained. No one told me anything about it, said the guy sitting in the front seat, shrugging. Xia Yuqing started to get wound up. What do you mean they didn’t tell you? he said. I okayed it with your boss. Nah, no one told me anything, the guy still insisted. We hated the engineering department more than any other department in the entire factory, partly because they had this massive superiority complex: they thought that they were the only ones doing any work, that everyone else was a bunch of useless no-hopers. But their major failing, the fatal flaw that guaranteed universal revulsion for the factory’s engineers, was the fact that their bonuses were always much higher than any other department’s. After a long and fraught negotiation, the car drove off, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Spitting obscenities, Xia Yuqing told me to wait where I was while he went off and made a phone call. Don’t worry, he said confidently, I’ll get head office to send another car. Ten minutes later, Xia Yuqing came chugging back in a wheezy old minicab. Unfortunately, he said, all his very good friends in head office were in a very important meeting. As time was running out, we squeezed into the back, each of us holding onto one of the wooden props, completely smothered by the wreath. As soon as the minicab cranked up and crawled off, we knew we were never going to get there on time. Xia Yuqing was still whining about the useless bastards in the engineering department, probably thinking he’d lost face. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less, particularly as, now that we had all but disappeared under the wreath, neither of us actually had any face to speak of. When the taxi began limping uphill, he suddenly turned to me and said, Of course, I could have phoned the manager, but I was a bit embarrassed, you know, to bother him over such a small thing. In case I didn’t believe him, Xia Yuqing gripped the wreath support between his knees, groped around in his pocket, and produced a business card, which he passed over to me. I glanced at it: it was the manager’s card, all right, a rash of personal titles printed above the name. For some reason, it looked vaguely familiar. By 9:30, when we’d gotten about halfway there, I suggested we give it up. Forget it, I said to Xia Yuqing, by the time we get there, he’ll be toast. Let’s just find a place to chuck the wreath, then go home. Xia Yuqing hesitated, uneasy about how he’d explain this back at the factory. But I won in the end. We got out; Xia Yuqing paid the fare and asked for a receipt. Forget it, the driver said, I don’t do receipts. Meanwhile, I was looking, unsuccessfully, for an inconspicuous place to ditch the flowers. It’s amazing how hard it is to dump an outsized funeral wreath when you actually try. Everyone stared at us, as Xia Yuqing, the wreath, and I staggered off through the streets, searching all the while for somewhere to abandon it.