“IN THE SOUTH I heard about this new World Wide Web thing, very cool. We should connect our computer to the Internet,” Xiao Yi suggested to me one day.
So one slow afternoon, we went to China Telecom and registered for an account. The same day, a technician came to our apartment. He typed in “www.yahoo.com” and immediately text and pictures of all kinds popped up on the screen. “This is a very popular search site, created by a Chinese guy who went to Stanford. You girls should look at it.”
Xiao Yi and I inspected the Web site from top to bottom, as if getting a load of a new neighbor. We had no idea what to do next. Xiao Yi tried moving around the mouse while clicking the button, and, boom, suddenly a new page came up with a big flashing headline: Yahoo! Personals.
“Look, you can post a personal ad here and become friends with the people in America,” Xiao Yi said excitedly.
“Really?” I moved closer.
I ran my eyes over the words and pictures on the screen. “I would love to have an American friend to practice my English with,” I told Xiao Yi. “My English professor in college told us that America is very rich, like a paradise. Even the moon in America is rounder than the one in China, and it’s so clean there that you can walk for three days and your boots will still be so shiny that you can lick them with your tongue.”
Enraptured by this new mysterious world we had just discovered, Xiao Yi and I crammed together in front of the screen for hours. We stayed up late at night to compose our personal ads. When Xiao Yi had finished hers, I took over the keyboard, and after rubbing my sleepy eyes and hitting the backspace key hundreds of times, I was finally satisfied with mine. After hitting the send key, I sat back, thinking of what I had come up with:
Hi, my name is Caroline, a twenty-three-year-old Chinese girl living in Xiamen, China. What am I looking for? I don’t know. My birth animal is tiger in China, so I am a fierce tiger most time, but once a while I am a rabbit, only with the right person. I am active, optimistic, energetic and healthy. I used to be a teacher, now I am a translator in this beautiful seaside city, and if you ever have a chance to come here I would be glad to take you around. Thanks, looking forward to knowing you.
It had been surprisingly difficult to choose an English name for myself. As life had become more stable in Xiamen, I had started to read again, particularly books in English. Drawing inspiration from these books, I had contemplated the name Violetta for a while, as in Violetta in La Traviata, but in the end I had settled on Caroline, the name of the governess in Mary Martha Sherwood’s novel Caroline Mordaunt. I told myself, I shouldn’t think of myself as a prostitute like Violetta any more. From then on, I would be a normal, decent girl, like a governess.
The next morning, after eating my usual bowl of congee, I sat at the computer and clicked open my mailbox. I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Dear Caroline, you have 57 messages,” it said. Xiao Yi and I were astonished. Yesterday we had just been two ordinary girls known by practically nobody, but today we were connected with dozens of people living in the faraway land of America.
“What should we do now?” Xiao Yi sounded excited.
“We should reply to everyone. Otherwise people would be disappointed.” I felt like every single person who had replied to my ad had already become a friend who I ought to be as nice to as I could. But soon my head started to swim from the continuous responding, and the screen become blurry.
Two weeks later, my fingers ached from the typing, but the mail kept pouring into my inbox. The number of messages had reached 381. I pushed the keyboard away and turned to Xiao Yi. “I am dead. I can’t write to everyone. I have to be selective.”
She nodded feebly. “Yeah. Who knows if these people are sincere and expecting us to write back? Some of them might write to everyone on Yahoo.”
I agreed and rested my head on my shoulder. Yet the smile on my face just wouldn’t go away. I decided to share my secret with Xiao Yi.
I looked around the room, made sure Old Two wasn’t nearby, and whispered, “I think I’m in love with this guy Steven.”
Xiao Yi leaned in. “Who is he?”
With a face glowing with joy, I shyly told her about my new love. “He’s a consultant living in California, an MBA. He’s so sweet. He writes long letters to me every day. God, nobody has ever said such sweet words to me. When I read his letters and poems, I feel so sweet and lucky. And he’s so handsome. He has a personal Web site, and I saw his picture. Blond hair, blue eyes. He looks so different from Chinese men, so noble, like the aristocrats in English novels.”
Xiao Yi frowned. “You’ve only known him for two weeks. How could you be in love with him already?”
“I don’t know. His long, sweet letters, his romantic poems, they make my heart beat faster. He’s told me everything, his life, his children. In today’s letter he even asked whether I thought getting married was a good idea. I know this sounds crazy, but why would he spend so much time writing such long letters—just to impress me? I’m just an ordinary, ugly girl half a world away.”
“Get married? This sounds like a movie. He doesn’t even know you.” Xiao Yi rolled her eyes.
“He said he would come see me,” I insisted. “He’s leaving for a vacation in Singapore next month, and he said he would try to come to China.”
“Are you serious?” Xiao Yi asked. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’m very attracted to him, I think.”
“God, you’re crazy. How old is he?”
“Uh . . . a little old. Forty-three. Divorced, with three daughters and a mean ex-wife. He said he had never met a girl as nice as me.” I watched Xiao Yi intently, worried that she would shake her head and tell me that he was too old for me.
Xiao Yi just blinked her small eyes and looked at me as if I was from another planet. “I think you should be careful about him.”
“His ex-wife cheated on him and then took away their daughters. He’s innocent.”
“How do you know he’s telling the truth?”
“I believe him. He called me yesterday, from America! I can tell from his voice that he is a truthful person. It sounds so sincere, so soulful.” Steven’s deep, tender voice came to my mind as if he was still murmuring to me on the phone. “Oh, dear Caroline, I wish you were here right now. Then we could hold each other in front of the fireplace,” he had whispered to me affectionately, and his words had coursed through me like a stream of hard liquor. American men were so bold in expressing their emotions. I found myself longing for a different kind of love, now that my life was different than it had been in the past.
The New Year of 1998 soon arrived. Winter in Xiamen was warm, with the temperature in the sixties almost every day. While enjoying the pleasant weather and my new life, I anxiously awaited Steven’s arrival in China. He called me from the Sheraton Hotel in Singapore. “I wish you were here, lying by the pool in the sun with me. It would be so nice,” he whispered gently. “Dear Caroline, I think I am in love with you.” I thrilled at the sound of his crisp, virile voice. I imagined this dashing MBA graduate, who made so much money every year, standing right in front of me, his masculine body dripping with water from the pool, promising to take me to America and love me forever.
I had never met Steven, but I felt drunk with love for him. Steven made my dream of America grow wildly. Every Chinese wanted to go to America, a land of dreams where there were more opportunities and everyone could own his own car. So many Chinese had gone to America to study and never returned. So many Chinese girls worked in every possible way to get to America. If others could do it, I could too, I thought.
But Steven wasn’t my knight in shining armor, as I bitterly concluded a week later when he called me from the Singapore airport and told me he couldn’t find an opportunity to come to China. Listening to him explaining apologetically, I began to see reality. “But dear Caroline, please don’t be disappointed. I am planning a trip to Xiamen in March, and I want to take you with me. Could you please find out if you can come to America with me, my darling?” His voice was as enticing as ever, but it didn’t work its usual magic. I took the Trésor perfume he had sent me from its translucent Lancôme box, drew the brown triangular bottle to my nose, and sniffled greedily. It smelled like vanilla and chocolate. I didn’t understand why he would send such a beautiful gift all the way from America if he was just playing with me. Despite having gone through so many men in my life, I still felt like an impotent child when dealing with them and their inexplicable behavior.
With the daily exchange of E-mails with Steven, the days went by quickly, and soon it was February, the time for the Lunar Spring Festival, the Chinese Christmas when every family gathers together for lavish dinners and fireworks for days. Xiao Yi and I were granted a six-day vacation by Song, but we weren’t allowed to leave until the day before the Lunar New Year since it was not a holiday for our foreign suppliers.
Since the company had been founded, we had purchased hundreds of machines from overseas, yet Xiao Yi and I had never seen them with our own eyes and had no idea whether or not they had actually been sold. Frustrated and anxious, we remained distant and cold with Song and Old Two.
Song showed up in the apartment two days before Xiao Yi and I were leaving for our own home towns. He sat in his leather chair, rubbed his stomach, and sighed deeply. “It’s so difficult to make a living nowadays. The market is down right now. God damn it, I haven’t made much money at all selling those machines.” Xiao Yi and I didn’t buy a word he was saying. Song continued, “Xiao Yi, Ah-Juan, to be honest, I am not even sure if we can continue this business next year. Old Two and I will see how it is going once the holiday is over, and then we will call you and let you know whether you should come back.”
I saw Xiao Yi’s face become taut. She raised her head high and hissed, “Boss Song, you cannot just fire us like this. I gave up my good job in Zhongsan to come here.”
Song took out two stacks of money from his bag and handed them to us. “I said we don’t know yet. Possibly we will have you back. Here is ten thousand for each of you, as an end-ofthe-year bonus.”
Xiao Yi and I took the stacks and then retreated to our room.
“Don’t worry, Xiao Yi. Song is lying. He’s definitely made some money. We’ll fight.” Feeling responsible for Xiao Yi, who I had talked into coming here, I forced a brave smile and tried to comfort her, but it was just a show. I was deeply worried about our futures.
In the evening, while Xiao Yi was lounging in our bedroom, I went to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Old Two saw me and gestured for me to come with him to his room. Puzzled, I followed him. He closed the door behind us.
“Ah-Juan, listen to me. We haven’t been on good terms since we started to work together, and I know you see me as an uneducated bad man, but that’s all in the past,” he whispered, trying to appear as honest as he could, but I still looked at his baggy eyes suspiciously.
“I know that you treat Xiao Yi like your own sister, but there are lots of things that you don’t know about her. Over the past several months, someone from this office has been secretly talking to one of Song’s biggest competitors, and we just found out that it was Xiao Yi.”
His words hit me hard. I couldn’t believe it. Xiao Yi was my best friend. We had shared the same room, same bed, and same computer for the past five months. We went shopping, ate fried tofu that we bought from street vendors, and went to the KK disco together. I had trusted her. I felt as if I had been bitten by a spider. “How did you find out it was her talking to Song’s competitor?” I asked Old Two furiously.
“Song’s home town is small, and it’s hard to keep secrets. We know this guy is trying every possible way to import machines himself too, and I am sure he is willing to pay big bucks for information. Xiao Yi has been talking to him ever since she came to Xiamen. We checked phone records.” Old Two lowered his voice. “Song and I decided to get rid of her and keep you. She is a snake. Besides, there is no need for two people to do one person’s job. Song is not crazy like the Zhous who wanted you to work 24/7.”
I stared at his wrinkled face, speechless, unable to accept the fact that Xiao Yi, my shadow, my best friend for the past several months, was going to be fired and gone from my life.
“Ah-Juan, Xiao Yi is much slimier than you think. Think about it. She didn’t come until one month after the company was started. By that time, everything was running well, and we didn’t need her. She didn’t do anything. You did everything,” Old Two said indignantly. I knew that what he was saying was true, but Xiao Yi was my only friend, and I had taken her from her job in Zhongsan. I had fought for her, and she had betrayed me.
“Ah-Juan, this world is not as simple as it looks from the outside. You need to protect yourself. I didn’t have much schooling, but I know Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory. I am letting you know Song’s decision now so that you won’t worry about this over the holiday, but don’t tell Xiao Yi that she’s not coming back.”
I nodded, feeling like a wilted flower, and left his room.
On New Year’s Eve I returned to the Shen Hamlet, distraught by the news about Xiao Yi. It was my first time going back to the hamlet since I had left for the South the second time. After I had settled down in Xiamen, I had called my mother and told her that I was making five thousand yuan a month. She simply didn’t believe me.
Now on the plane from Xiamen to Shanghai, I touched my handbag, where I had thirty thousand yuan in stacks. It immediately cheered me up, and I smiled to myself. Finally I was returning to the hamlet with victory instead of lice, with joy instead of sorrow.
Instead of the crowded bus, I took a taxi from the Shanghai airport, and it pulled up to the curb in front of the house just in time for dinner. The cacophony of fireworks rising and exploding filled the air. My mother came to the passenger-side door. “You stupid girl, why take a taxi?” she said. “Instead of twenty yuan for the bus, you pay 360 yuan for the taxi.”
I patted my handbag. “Mama, don’t worry,” I said proudly. “Look, I have money now.”
Seeing her huge happy smile made me forget my troubles with Song and Xiao Yi. I was delighted to make Mama proud. Watching her from behind as we walked to the house, I vowed to try to forget the past and enjoy life in the Shen Hamlet. Here, now, this was what I had—my aging mother on New Year’s Eve, who was finally happy to see my return. She ran around busily, getting me rice and chopsticks. It didn’t matter, I told myself, that my father was icy-cold or that Spring acted as if I had just come back from running to the store for a bottle of soy sauce. I should just be appreciative that I was home and no longer a pauper.
I sat down at the table, on which there were so many dishes that they had to be stacked on top of each other. I saw all the familiar dishes that I used to long for year-round because they were only served on New Year’s Eve. My parents always prepared them, no matter how little money we had, because a lavish dinner on New Year’s Eve was symbolic of good luck and a good beginning to a new year. A whole young chicken, soaked in a creamy broth and stuffed with marinated sticky rice, lay in a big aluminum bowl with a few pieces of winter mushroom floating around it. In the middle of the table, a big smoked pork shoulder was steaming in a ceramic bowl. I knew it would be delicious, as my father always soaked it in soy sauce for at least a month before taking it out and drying it in the sunshine for another month.
I looked across the table at my father. I wanted to say something to him like, Dad, how are you? How is the end of the year treating you? Do you know that I made money in Xiamen? But my tongue flinched when my eyes met his, as cold as the frost outside. I watched him sip rice wine silently, and I shivered. Winter in the unheated house in the Shen Hamlet was as cold as it was in my memory.