Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
www.unnamedpress.com
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright 2015 © Carly J. Hallman
ISBN: 978-1-939419-60-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955220
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Designed & Typeset by Scott Arany
Cover Design by Jaya Nicely
Interior illustration by Zejian Shen
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
For my family
FAT PEOPLE FAT CAMP
AT THE ROOT OF IT ALL: THE MEMOIRS OF A CHINESE HAIR TYCOON
THE TURTLE
THE EX-MILLIONAIRES’ CLUB
FAT PEOPLE FAT CAMP
When our ducks grow fat, our stomachs growl happily! But then our children grow fat, and our nation’s heart grows heavy!
—CHINESE FOLK BALLAD
If you’re a fatty and you’re ready to make a change, come on down to our fat camp today!
—CHINESE RADIO COMMERCIAL JINGLE
1.
WE NEED MONEY AND WE NEED IT NOW
KELLY HUI, THE TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER OF BASHFUL Goose Snack Company’s founder and China’s richest man, Papa Hui, strode through the Jiangsu government building’s entrance, gave her name to the teenage security guard, and plopped herself down on a rickety chair. The meeting she was waiting for, certain to be a snore-fest, was tragically the most exciting work-related thing she’d done since her father had made her the head of corporate social responsibility—a department in which she was the sole employee—two years before. To be fair, this was also the only work-related thing she’d done.
She rummaged through her Hermès bag, found her iPod, stuck her earbuds in her ears, and put on a Radiohead song. She tapped her foot in rhythm on the floor. She listened to another song, and then another, and then another. Swatted at a fly that buzzed around her head. Glanced down at the time—ten past—and sighed loudly. The guard, a scrawny kid who couldn’t have been more than seventeen and who, Kelly thought, probably spent most of his day secretly masturbating under his little podium, looked up. That’s right, she thought, flipping her hair over her shoulder, store this one away for later.
Then she thought: Did I really just invite a teenage peasant to deposit my image in his spank bank? Did I really wake up at seven a.m. to ride all the way out to this craptastic Communist-era building with no air-conditioning to meet with a government official who is probably just going to ask me for some sort of favor but who can’t be bothered to show up on time to do so? Did I really study my ass off at USC to head up a nonexistent department in a polluted city that doesn’t even have a California Pizza Kitchen? Did I really think Papa Hui was going to set me up in a decent job, train me to run the company, and then, ha, leave the company to me? Do I still think that? Do I still hold on to this false hope? Why? Why am I here? What am I doing? Is my iPod going to run out of battery?
She began to sweat slowly, drop by drop, and then profusely. Breathed in, out. Removed a tissue from a small pack in her purse and dabbed her forehead. Turned off her iPod. Just as she yanked the buds from her ears, the guard barked her name.
She rode up in the wobbly metal box of an elevator to the eleventh floor, where a serious-looking middle-aged official with an unnaturally lustrous head of hair met her. He led her down the dim hallway. A sour stench, not unlike that of rancid meat, hung in the air. She held her breath and wondered why these assholes couldn’t bear to spend a little money sprucing up their workplace; heaven knows they spent enough on their cars and women and watches and weird medicinal foods.
“How is your father?” the official asked. He stepped briskly in his crocodile-skin shoes.
“Healthy as an ox,” Kelly answered, and wasn’t that the truth. At almost sixty years old, his cholesterol was lower than hers, his skin showed not a wrinkle, and he’d jetted off to Cuba the previous year to have his heart preemptively replaced with that of a twenty-two-year-old. “Yeah, he’s sure going strong,” she added in a tone that did little to hide her disgust.
The official paid this tone no heed. “Good to hear,” he said. They entered his dusty closet of an office. He sat down behind a cheap laminate desk and gestured for Kelly to sit across from him. The chair creaked under her weight. I know I’ve packed on a few since L.A., she thought, but come on.
The official cleared his throat into his hand, obviously a rehearsed gesture that provided him an opportunity to flash his Rolex. “Now look, I respect your father a great deal, and I don’t wish to waste any of your time, so let’s get down to it, shall we?”
Kelly nodded. Here it comes.
“As I’m sure you’ve heard, our great province recently made national headlines for having the chunkiest children in all of China.”
Yeah, she’d heard and vaguely remembered; it’d been the talk of Jiangsu social media for a few hours, until some other headline came along and then that became the talk, and then another headline, and on and on.
The official continued. “Obesity has many causes. For instance”—he counted them off on his fingers—“pregnancy, laziness, capitalist greed, drinking too much cold water, being born under an inauspicious moon. But doctors agree that the most prominent cause of obesity is consumption of fatty junk foods.”
Beads of sweat burst from Kelly’s forehead, and a tremble seized her hands—this was why he’d called her here. Of course. He was going to blame the Bashful Goose Snack Company for childhood obesity and try to force it to pay what would surely amount to a hefty fine, and Papa Hui would be furious at her for agreeing without his consent to attend this meeting. His majesty would, of course, refuse to pay the fine (he viewed all fines as bribes, and not paying bribes was one of his “core principles”), and then the government would shut the whole empire down, and then what would she do? Return to America and attend graduate school on high-interest student loans? Stay in China and be forced to move in with her newly impoverished family in a one-room hovel in the countryside where she’d be pecked to death in her sleep by that damn goose?
Sweat oozed from her skin, and she could feel the color draining from her face and her mascara bleeding into and stinging her eyes, and she reached into her bag to dig for another tissue, and she considered just running away, hauling ass for good, but she feared if she stood she would faint and—
The official, looking concerned, pulled a bottle of Evian from a pack under his desk and handed it to her. She unscrewed the dusty cap and took a big gulp.
“Now, don’t worry,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is to shut anyone down over this. After all, I myself know that the occasional Bashful Goose Chocolate-Cream-Filled Snack Cake or, say, the rare Bashful Goose Fried Corn Dough Ball in the context of an otherwise healthy diet is a perfectly reasonable indulgence.
“In fact,” he went on emphatically, “Bashful Goose treats are my personal favorite brand of snack food. When my wife and I got married many moons ago we decided to forgo the wedding candy and instead serve our guests Bashful Goose snack cakes. Now you may ask: Why tempt fate in that way? Why throw caution to the wind in the face of such dire potential consequences? But to that I say: you must do what you love, and to hell with tradition and superstition and the rest of it. And, I’ll tell y
ou, my wife and I are still together to this very day.”
Kelly tried not to snort. Ha, and exactly how many mistresses do you have? How “together” are you, really? She couldn’t quite bring herself to speak these thoughts aloud though; in all her days, she had never seen a government employee appear this excited about anything.
The official stared past her with dreamy eyes, thinking fondly of either his wife or processed balls of carbohydrates. The tiniest bit of drool gleamed in the corner of his mouth and then Kelly knew for certain which one it was.
“Cool story,” she said dismissively. Her sweat production slowed. She glanced down into her bag at her iPhone, at the time. She had a hair appointment in the afternoon, and if the official kept on like this, she wouldn’t make it and she’d be left to go about her life with ratty-looking extensions until Stefan, who was quite booked up these days, could find another slot for her. “Now, what is it that my company can do for you?”
The official ran his fingers through his own gorgeous head of hair. His Rolex reflected a flickering beam of fluorescent light. “Well, it’s safe to say that all of us here in Jiangsu Province have lost a fair bit of face in this obesity crisis, wouldn’t you agree?”
Kelly nodded. Sure, yeah, cut to the chase.
“And so we in the government have decided the best way to save face is to save our children from being swallowed up by their own hungry mouths! And that is where you come in.” With flourish, the official yanked opened his desk drawer and removed an old, clunky Dell laptop, which he opened to reveal a slow-loading PowerPoint presentation. “We would like to invite you, the Bashful Goose Snack Company, to donate funds to start our province’s very first government-certified weight-loss reeducation center!”
Thoroughly convinced of the rightness of it all, and with a couple of hours left until her hair appointment, Kelly ordered her driver to deliver her to Bashful Goose headquarters, where she would ask Papa Hui himself for the funds. The city went past in a blur, all skyscrapers and steamed bun shops and trees and Volkswagen taxis. She sprawled out in the backseat of her Audi, stuck her earbuds in, and hit Play on a guided meditation track she’d downloaded. Prompted by a soothing female voice, she tried to focus on all things good and pure: this project and what it could mean. The state-of-the-art fitness facilities, the virtual reality weight-loss visualizer, the flown-in European chef. Rehabilitating the province’s fattest kids as an act of charity, as an act of kindness, as an act of selflessness. Proving herself capable to the old coot, proving to him that she should be the one to someday run the company.
And keep focusing on those positive things, keep focusing, the voice said, stay with it, stay with it.
But at that, Kelly’s thoughts shot to the reason she was listening to this stupid hippie’s amateur track in the first place; to the reason she played host to all these anxieties, and she always burst into nervous sweats, and she insisted on living across town from her family in a shitty neighborhood her mother didn’t feel comfortable in, and she normally avoided going to her father’s office at all costs—why her life, her miserable excuse for a life, had long ago taken a turn for the pathetic: the goose, that bashful goose.
THE LEGEND OF THE BASHFUL GOOSE
FROM THE BASHFUL GOOSE SNACK COMPANY OFFICIAL WEBSITE:
ONE AFTERNOON, MANY YEARS AGO, WHEN OUR GREAT NATION HAD officially opened up but most of us still toiled in her fields, Papa Hui, our company’s dear founder, found himself strolling around the willow-lined Three Horse Lake in his hometown of Old Watermelon Village.
Yes, Papa Hui stepped forward, crunching autumn leaves beneath his feet. But philosophically, he found himself at a standstill, at a crossroads in his life. He had just paid off the 20,000 yuan loan he’d taken out to open Papa Hui’s Snack Shop, Old Watermelon Village’s first grocery-like store. In this way, he was a free man. But, as the saying goes, when life removes one set of chains, it usually, and happily, snaps a new set into place: the local doctor had just confirmed that his beautiful young wife, Mama Hui, who had missed her visiting aunty for the second consecutive month, was indeed pregnant with the couple’s first child.
With a child on the way, Papa Hui pondered as he strolled: Can I really just go on selling dusty bags of State-owned-factory-produced snacks? Don’t I owe the next generation something more, something better? Is there a kingdom I can build, he mused, worthy enough for this child to someday inherit?
Tangled in his thoughts, Papa Hui hadn’t heard the footsteps that had been following him for some time—until now. Startled, he whirled around, but whoever, or whatever, it was ducked behind a willow branch. Never mind, Papa Hui thought, it’s just some devilish child playing pranks, maybe one of those Wang children, whose parents had miraculously avoided fines or forced sterilization despite their blatant violations of family-planning laws.
Papa Hui, tickled by the thought of one of those little buggers hiding, cried out, “Bashful child, come out, come out!”
But no child emerged; no child answered these shouts.
He slapped at a mosquito that landed on his arm. A breeze rustled the willows, and a dark cloud moved across the sky.
Papa Hui’s thoughts took a sinister turn. He contemplated other potential pursuers: Another aspiring snack-shop entrepreneur who hoped to kill off the competition. A weirdo from a neighboring village who had decided to take a step up from torturing field mice and try his hand at murdering thirtysomething men. The Gang of Four. The Hong Kong mafia. An escaped convict. A Soviet spy. And if it is someone dangerous, he thought, what then? Who am I to fight off such an enemy? I am no one, just a simple man; I am no one.
Resigned to this fate, he turned back around—his helpless body trembling, his shoulders slumped in defeat—and continued on his walk… toward what?
And again, he heard the footsteps. He paused. A sliver of golden sun peeked through the clouds and shone down on him. Enveloped in this light and warmth, a sense of bravery flooded his body. I am not no one, it struck him, I am a father-to-be, I am the boss of Old Watermelon Village’s most successful snack shop, I am a husband, I am a man, I am a Chinese, I am someone! He shook out his trembles. He pushed back his shoulders. Bursting with pride in his own humanity, which he felt then for the first time, he charged toward the nearest willow branch and, with both arms, swept the leafy limb aside. Nothing. He swept aside another droopy branch, and another, and another, until at last he found his pursuer.
Papa Hui, looking down at the little devil who’d caused him so much fear, couldn’t help now but laugh. “Bashful goose, come out, come out!” he said, and the goose did come out, and it followed him home.
“Good night, bashful goose!” Papa Hui called out the window that night to the bird. Mama Hui just rubbed her belly and rolled her eyes.
From the other side of the window, nestled in the dirt, the goose honked in response and bashfully covered its face with its wing, in what is now the bashful goose’s most famous pose, pictured in our great company’s logo.
The next morning, our dear founder Papa Hui set off to begin his first debt-free day at the snack shop.
“Good-bye, Mama Hui!” he called. “Be safe!”
“Good-bye, bashful goose!” he called, opening the door. “Be good!”
But as soon as he had taken a step out, that bashful goose lunged at his canvas-clad legs. Papa Hui slapped the goose away, but it only came back at him more aggressively. It pecked. It bit. It honked.
“Bashful goose, what’s wrong with you?” Exasperated, Papa Hui bent down and looked directly into those beady little eyes. “Why are you suddenly so outgoing?”
In place of an answer, the goose hid its face behind its wing, honked, and then took off in a waddle-run toward the field that led to Old Woman Wu’s house.
Old Woman Wu once had a reputation as a very skilled baker, and in the old days of revolution and reeducation, she had generously baked for the ravenous village children all manner of pies and cakes spiced with creative famine
-time ingredients including but not limited to: grass, tree bark, pond algae, and sparrow’s feet. But when her husband died in a railway construction accident, Old Woman Wu devolved from her cheery, anything-is-possible self into a weepy recluse. Her long raven-black hair turned gray, and the now well-fed children took to calling her “Witchy Wu.”
Papa Hui chased after the goose, running and running across that field, sweat sprouting from his pores, all the while trusting fully, inexplicably, in this goose and where it would lead him.
The goose at last stopped at Witchy Wu’s gate, honking furiously and flapping its wings. Papa Hui bent over at the waist, clutching his knees, panting. He looked up just in time to spot Witchy Wu throwing open the door, seeking the cause of the commotion that had violently woken her from her midmorning nap. When Papa Hui’s calm eyes met her frantic ones, they both knew it was fate that had brought them together.
The rest, as they say, is history. Papa Hui joined forces with Witchy Wu and rebranded the store with a new mascot and a new name. The two tossed out those dusty, old packages of State-owned-factory-produced snacks and began developing and producing their own original snack products to wild acclaim. Villagers simply couldn’t get enough of Bashful Goose Snack Company’s Watermelon Wigglers and Tangerine Crumbly Cakes (one whole tangerine in every bite!), among other delights. The company’s good luck turned to great luck when Papa Hui took a bet on a new form of advertisement—a TV commercial, one of the very first in a nation where the hottest new must-have product was a TV set. The Bashful Goose logo soon became as iconic as Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square, and the first Bashful Goose jingle, a catchy ditty composed by Papa Hui himself, became the anthem of a generation with money to burn. Factories were erected to meet the surging demand and trucks were dispatched and the snacks were soon available in all corners of our great nation, from the ports of Shanghai to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia to the mountains of Tibet.
Year of the Goose Page 1