When Annie told me about her experiences on those two rooftops, we assumed that these were all bygones, pieces of the past that were already over. Actually, we were wrong. The past left behind a series of things that continued to occur; we simply didn’t realize it at the time. I even ignorantly told Annie, “Your story is super cool, you could make it into a movie!” Afterward I told her that: there’s this kid in my school named Weng Jiaping. Jiaping is always writing stories in class; all the teachers tell him, “Hey, Weng Jiaping! Can’t you wait till you grow up to become a novelist?” He wrote a story about a pheasant that caused a great upheaval at Science City, and a full-length novel about how a detective with a frog’s head discovered a ancient Incan buried treasure of gold coins beneath an abandoned train station. Our whole class used to pass it around to read. If Annie were to tell her story to Weng Jiaping, he could probably make it into a great novel, and who knows, maybe in the future they’d even turn it into a motion picture.
“Only a little devil like you would think my story was entertaining,” said Annie.
“If the part about the gang leader was a little more developed, it would be even more interesting. Hey, didn’t that gang leader have a bunch of brothers? What happened to them? Didn’t they avenge their boss?”
Annie shook her head.
“If the boss got taken out, the gang brothers should have avenged him!” I protested.
“And since when does that happen?” Annie continued to shake her head, saying, “I think they ended up scattered all over the place. It’s unclear what happened to a few of them, then there was another handful who in no time at all got picked up by the cops. And then there’s some who’ll have to squeeze by somehow; they will probably look for a new boss. It’s just like going to work: when a company goes under, don’t the employees have to apply elsewhere?”
This was the first time I heard a real-life gang story; pretty stimulating, huh? But I was really disappointed with the actions of the gang leader’s brothers. I felt that if they were the guy’s brothers then they ought to have taken it upon themselves to avenge his death. The way they turned the boat around as soon as the current changed is not what you’d expect from a true gang brother.