Shanghai Fools

by Vann Chow

  A week? So I was not an impulse-hire after all.

  "Th...thanks...!" I stuttered, still expecting to be exposed as a fraud anytime soon, because those apps he mentioned that he was so impressed with were just a few days of work each. To me, they were nothing extraordinary, almost elementary.

  "Give yourself a bit of credit!" Mr. Qi stood up and advised me. "You will be a valuable member of our team."

  Chapter 20

  It was a no-brainer for me to take the job. For one, I loved coding. And secondly, I could see Marvey every day at work. What more did I want in a job? Nothing, really, as long as I get paid.

  When the secretary finally sent me an email with the contract that would be automatically renewed every year on rolling basis unless I screwed up majorly — like when I cleared out their accounts by accident with some unsuspiciously malicious codes I wrote — I jumped for joy and tripped ridiculously over the wires of my newly purchased Samsung Virtual Reality glasses connected to my laptop at home. I had bought it as a celebratory gift with my nearly maxed out credit card before I got the contract. It was a difficult decision — or should I say temptation? — but I made a gamble, and won.

  I had nothing to worry about now, because with a salary of thirty thousand a month, I could pay back my credit card debt in no time. Apart from the more standard employee benefits, I also had a pension fund, vacation bonus, disability and life insurance coverage. This was better than winning the China Welfare Lottery.

  "Honey!" I shouted when Paula came home. "We are going to Norway for our honeymoon after the wedding!" I decided just now because I had already 'conquered' America. The next stop should be Europe.

  "What?!" Tired, Paula was in no mood to hear what she thought was my sleep-talk.

  "Do you know how much a seven-day holiday to Norway costs?"

  "A lot?!" She threw her high heels into the pile of shoes that formed a small hill next to the entrance.

  "Yes! And it doesn't matter because the Norwegians are paying for it!" Grabbing her by the waist, I twirled her around in the living room, ignoring her screams of protest.

  "Are you stupid?" She said when I finally stopped. "You haven't even started the job yet, you're already looking at holidays!"

  "It's not just any holiday," I said, "it's our honeymoon! We're going to have so many impressive pictures to show all of our relatives when we come back they won't have anything bad to say about our relationships if they ever get interviewed by the authority."

  I thought I saw a flicker of joy from Paula's countenance, before she resumed her usual rant about my reckless spending habits and unsalvageable stupidity.

  "Wifey," I called out to her endearingly. "I'm in the mood tonight. Do you want to...?"

  "Want to what?" She snapped.

  "You know what I mean," I said and leaned over to kiss her lips. She looked particularly attractive tonight for some reason.

  "What're you doing?" She turned away, averting my kiss.

  With my left hand, I softly reared her head back towards me and said, "we have yet to consummate our marriage, wifey."

  "That's because we are not real husband and wife."

  "Have pity on me, girl. I haven't had sex in a very long time, not since my injury at least." I did not know I could beg for sex like a dog, but apparently I could go very low.

  "You can go fuck yourself." She pushed me away, went into her room and banged the door shut. I thought I heard her locking the door of the bedroom, a bedroom that I was permanently denied entry to.

  We have got to move into a bigger apartment soon, with three bedrooms, one for each of the occupants. I thought to myself as I climbed on top of the old tick-infested sofa bed.

  "Marv," I texted my angel when I was finally alone. "I got my contract today. The remuneration was impressive, to say the least. This is what one would get working in a start-up in America. I only have you to thank for my good fortune. Let me buy you lunch on Monday."

  It was late. Marvey sent me the most generic smiley back and nothing more. I knew, I had every reason to thank her and absolutely no reason to expect anything more, so I left the chat at that and smiled myself to sleep.

  Okay, I lied.

  In the darkness of the living room, I unplugged my cellphone from the charger, fired up the VPN app to 'climb the Great Firewall of China' and pulled up Marvey's profile on Facebook.

  She had been updating regularly since she arrived in Shanghai. It was odd how her activities online had increased many folds now that she was in a country where it was banned.

  There were a lot of pictures of things happening in and around Lu Jia Zhu, where the bank was, and only a few selfies of hers taken from odd angles to try to make her face looked slimmer and more V-shaped, after the heart-shaped face of Fan Bing Bing (a huge Chinese actress) that won the hearts of millions.

  It was funny how often women deluded themselves into thinking that if their pictures looked a certain way, people would think they looked a certain way as well. Maybe it worked for people without a life sitting at home all day admiring pictures of slim-face women all day. It was hard to appreciate their efforts of distorting their faces in photos if you were a person like me who had at least some basic level of regular interactions with real, flesh-and-bone human women.

  In real life, I had yet to see women with such big, out-of-portion doll-eyes and V-shaped chin yet. At least none of my immediate friends had done any cosmetic surgery yet to make themselves look like the alien that apparently fit the ideals of Chinese beauty these days.

  Despite all that ranting, Marvey was still the most beautiful girl I had ever set eyes on, beautiful in a way that was beyond just exterior beauty, and it did not matter whether the pictures of herself were taken in odd angles or in bad lighting. I still loved them. I downloaded all of her selfies to my phone, careful not to give her any like by accident in the process so she would not know that I had been secretly keeping copies and admiring her pictures in the middle of the night whenever I felt lonely, like tonight.

  To fight off those lonely feelings that crept up on me a lot ever since I breathed my first breath, I always tried to look back on the better times of my life. It used to be when I could play with a new toy or win a soccer match. Nowadays, many of these happy memories involved Marvey. Whenever I thought of her, inevitably a wave of nostalgia would come over me about our times together in America, like that time when we listened to Adele together while trying to wait out the storm, or when she slept subsequently the whole night on my shoulder in the basement of her parent's house during the tornado.

  Adele was coming at the end of the year to Shanghai to give a concert. The first thing I wanted to do when I heard the news was to take Marvey out to the concert. But I knew I couldn't at the moment, at least not without Kelvin, or without Kelvin punching me in the face.

  I needed someone to talk to and give me some advice about life like Kelvin used to do for me. Who should I talk to now instead?

  Chapter 21

  I was a bit nervous about how to conduct myself properly in such a prestigious foreign bank where only elites like Marvey would tread the floors on their expensive leather heels — man and women a like — despite of how highly Mr. Qi viewed me.

  It was not that I had a lot of difficult technical challenges. On the contrary, I could find solutions to all the technical problems with the work that was left half-done by my predecessor. What I found extremely difficult to handle was the amount of long, unproductive conference meetings that I had to attend and speak in, because it was apparently part of the job of a Chief Software Engineer, to entertain the Marketing officers sitting in Europe whose jobs were solely to dream up nice experimental applications which they thought were better than the last (always), and to justify the demands for these products by making up demands by consumers through trend and usage research. And the responsibility had fallen on to me, to bring them down to earth

  God knew I was not a "people person" and as soon as I had to speak, let
alone to speak in English, I could go from hero to zero pretty quickly. All these brilliant sarcastic remarks I made in my head about what the non-technical project team members wanted me to do would turn into a pitiful 'Yes, I can do this' as soon as I had to say them out loud.

  And I must say I really hated myself for it.

  Chinese would understand that when one says 'yes' or 'maybe', there is still plenty room for unforseenable circumstances which could lead to things not being done or done on time. For non-Chinese, however, the subtleties were lost in translation. 'Yes' was a 'definitely' and 'maybe' was 'it's very likely'. I once read that in big multi-nationals in America, they asked their employees to run 'how-to' classes on working with other cultures. I had dismissed it as a show previously, but now it seemed like an excellent idea for Bilious.

  Marvey took a keen interest in my frustration.

  "Have you ever heard of Forrest Gump?" Marvey asked me over lunch.

  "Who hasn't?" I shoved some noodles down my throat.

  "Wanna watch it together?"

  "I’ve watched it ten times," I said, exaggerating a bit. "The bit about John Lennon was funny, but mean." According to the scriptwriter of the movie, China was the inspiration for John Lennon's Imagine, because its people had been misunderstood to have no possession, from poverty, and no religion, considered heathens by the West. Not true. Beautiful song though, I must say.

  "What a coincidence," Marvey said to herself.

  "What’s a coincidence?" I asked. Marvey was reading some texts on her cell phone. I stole a glance at her screen to find that she was reading an interview of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.

  "Forrest Gump is his favorite movie. He said that every time he gets frustrated, he watches that movie, to remind him that no matter what happened, he just needs to be himself."

  "Inspirational," I said casually, finishing the last bit of my noodle, "eat up. It's almost time."

  Marvey pouted at me for ignoring her, so I said, "We can watch the movie together at my place tonight if you like. I've never watched it in English anyway."

  That put a smile on her face.

  I wondered if she honestly thought that watching a motivational movie was going to have any effect on my social-ineptitude. The effort was laudable at least.

  Chapter 22

  One evening after work, Marvey took me to something called the "Toasties meeting". It was some sort of speech training for losers like me, despite Marvey insisting otherwise.

  I did not mind the idea of giving improv presentations in these Toasties meetings to a bunch of other losers as much as I thought I would, because suddenly I was presented with a chance to have regular dates with Marvey twice a week, without the distraction and stress of the working environment — and obviously also without Kelvin.

  My agreement to join these meetings made Marvey very happy. In her head, I needed them like plants needed water. I did not mind. If suffering from a few more hours in front of some strangers, who would not give a damn about me, could give me the chance to be with Marvey, I gladly accept the ordeal.

  Of course, as usual, I had underestimated the undertaking.

  I thought I was sufficiently intimidated by the North Europeans I had conference calls with that spoke heavily accented English I could barely understand. Here, at the Toasties meeting, I was terrified.

  Instead of nerds with self-confidence issues, these people at the Toasties were all self-promotion maniacs, speech-delivery machines.

  It only dawned on me why Marvey would go with me even though, to me, she did not need any help with public speaking training and could easily have been someone's speech coach herself. Even a native speaker like her could not compete with those monsters of linguistics, coming here to the meetings every time as if they were here to fight in the rink of verbal boxing. The way how they relished winning a speech or debate contest of the day was, to me, disgusting. I felt like I would much rather be in a DOTA contest than a Toastie meeting after giving it a go for a few times for Marvey's sake and eventually had to give up.

  "You can't give up so easily!" She spoke to me as if she was my kindergarten teacher and I was her student who was failing abstract, crayon art.

  "Half of the time I don't understand what they were saying and the other half, the other half just wasn't interesting to me." I complained finally.

  "You promised to help me with Project Dragon One!"

  "Exactly!" I rebuffed. "This is not Dragon One! As much as I love hanging out with you, I am falling asleep everywhere I go because I am doing fifteen hours days for the project and I am coming here to get really stressed out by all the competitive nutjobs talking about boring stuff twice a week on top. When I go home, I have all the chores Paula doesn't have time for and her kid to take care of....Sorry, Marv, but I am running out of steam. I think I've got to drop this one."

  "Why are you always like that? What's your problem, Jong?!" Marvey blurted out. She was very upset. "Why do you not treasure the opportunities that you are given at all?"

  "No...no...no...no. I really, really appreciate that you got me that job."

  "But you're not doing well and you don't even want to try to improve the situation! You just quit! Just like that. Unbelievable!" She said. "I don't mean to sound patronizing, but you were fired from your last job, I heard, because of your bad work ethics. And I thought it was a misunderstanding, but now I think I was mistaken."

  "What are you talking about?!" I sighed deeply. "I'm giving this opportunity my all." I was frustrated at her unjustified accusation. I tried very hard to implement all the crazy experimental applications that the Project Dragon One team asked of me. I was not exhausted for no reason. "Trust me, I take this very seriously."

  "But you're not communicating with the team. How do you know what you should or should not work on when you're hiding in the lab doing fifteen-hour-days running on false assumptions? You've got to talk to other people, try to understand them, and learn to impress them with what you do. You can't just code all day and think that your job is done."

  "My English is bad, I know it," I said. "But that's all. I don't think things are going as bad as you said."

  "It is! Jong," she said. "The team is talking about replacing you, because they can't communicate with you. And I told them that if your communication skills do not improve within three months, then they are free to do replace you because by then my internship ends and there will be no one there to stop them."

  I leaned my back against the wall of the corridor for support as Marvey continued.

  "That's the reason why I brought you here to join the Toastmaster meetings so you could get more and more comfortable about speaking in front of other people through practises, and learn to communicate and defend your own views in a clear and coherent way...You can't just quit this, like you did with everything else!"

  "What do you mean with everything else? What else did I quit?" I was taken aback by what she said. Her comment was totally lost on me.

  Outside, a silver-color limousine stopped in front of the community center entrance. I knew who it belonged to immediately and what it was doing here.

  The driver in uniform and white gloves stepped out of the car into the foyer of the community center and nodded to Marvey.

  "I'll be right out." She said to the man whom I immediately recognized as Kelvin's usual driver.

  "Why is he picking you up?" It did not matter how many times I told myself that they were seeing each other for real, not just in my worst nightmares, I still felt betrayed, hurt and angry every single time.

  "You honestly don't know why he's picking me up?" Marvey posted me a challenge, to which I did not answer. "He's picking me up because you ran away from me in Alexandria. You ran away from whatever you think was an unbridgeable gap between us and was too afraid to even try working it out with me together. He's picking me up because you quit!"

  "I did not quit loving you. You're always in my heart."

  "Great! A love confession
from a married man," she said, throwing her hands in the air in exasperation. "Now you're gonna quit your role as a husband and a father as well. Unbelievable!"

  "No." Instead of letting our conversation linger on about me, I diverted her attention to the most problematic part of the equation at hand. "Kelvin is not the perfect boyfriend you think he is. I have known him since we were kids..."

  "Stop it, Jong! You have no right to say anything about my choice of boyfriend, because you gave up your right to have an opinion on this matter last year!" As soon as she finished her last words, she stormed out to meet the driver of her ride to the road of no return.

  Chapter 23

  By the time I got home, after walking three miles on foot because I felt like torturing myself physically in the unbearable, lingering summer heat to do something the others called 'clearing the head', I had pretty much calmed down, or more like I had no more energy left in me after such a long day to feel angry about anything at all. All I wanted was to unlock my home door, take off my clothes drenched in sweat, throw them as far away from me as possible without covering the household essentials like the television and the fan, and crash on the sofa to sleep over all the troubles of the world until my alarm rang tomorrow morning.

  This was unfortunately not the plan the universe had for me.

  As soon as I opened my home door, I saw a man, completely naked, about to reach climax as he was doing... my legal wife from behind. Paula was on the sofa bed with her back bent, her dress hitched as far up as her waist.

  "I can explain this! It's not what you think!" Paula said to me, delivering the line that every person caught cheating says. I mean, when was the last time someone in a similar situation said, 'Gotcha! This is exactly what you think! Let's get a divorce!'? No, they always try to deny it. That's human nature for you. We are all creatures tormented by guilty pleasures.