Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  “Good evening, Mrs. Pang,” she sang out at the sight of the innkeeper at the front door. Mrs. Pang was scowling, her arms folded like a sergeant in discipline mode.

  “You!” Mrs. Pang spat out, her voice shrill. “I don’t want trouble in my place. You and your foreign friend get out! Stupid whores!” Her litany continued as she grabbed Ming’s arm and pulled her up to the room. “Your American friend is making big trouble. You take her back where she came from. I don’t want them coming around here!”

  “Them?”

  “Stupid foreign devil!” Mrs. Pang unlocked the door to the guest chambers. The interior was as black and airless as the grave. As Ming’s eyes adjusted to the dark she made out a trembling form lying on the bed in a heap of torn clothes, with a mass of tangled, copper hair. The pummeled creature lying there was Zoe.

  Chapter Eight

  The handyman from the guesthouse drove Ming and Zoe to the next village before dawn—in exchange for most of the cash they had left—and dumped them on a sooty thoroughfare, where they sat in a dank restaurant for five hours.

  Zoe’s muscles screeched with every move. It hurt to even hold the teacup. At intervals, as she told Ming everything, she had to stop and sip tea to wash the gravel from her throat. They spoke in English so that the restaurant proprietor, who sat at the next table watching them, wouldn’t understand.

  “Thugs in the pay of the police department, no doubt,” Ming acknowledged. “That’s what’s going on; they rule the village. A police officer probably called Mrs. Pang and told her the foreign guest was making trouble and they’d shut her place down if she was going to harbor troublesome guests.”

  “But what am I going to do about my research?”

  Ming shook her head. “You’ll have to be patient.” Ming was cheerful in a most un-Ming like way, as if some magic formula had cured her stormy sighs. “In qi gong you sometimes lose, right? Haven’t you ever fallen down and come back up?”

  Ming had taken a bite of the rock Buddha while Zoe had become like the supergirl from her old commercial, drained of her powers. “We’ll go back to Beijing. I’ll get Han to take you on as an intern, and you can live in the apartment they put me in. And you can talk to my parents about Sunshine Village and use their stories for your dissertation.”

  They had just enough cash for bus tickets to Chengdu. From there they boarded a flight—courtesy of New Icarus Capital—to Beijing. On the back roads of Sichuan and in the air, Ming filled Zoe in on her new obsession—the New China.

  “Don’t you see?” Ming prodded. “That peasant girl Jing Yin’s family would own their home simply by virtue of occupying it, and those thugs would go to a jail where they’d have to study new job skills, and read literature and philosophy, like a university with bars!”

  It was a fine fantasy to keep Zoe’s mind off her defeat. “We could make the rich put a certain amount of their money into investment accounts that go to paying the living expenses of the poor,” she offered.

  In Han Cheng’s office, Zoe followed Ming’s lead. “I’m thinking about trying business, instead,” Zoe told Han. “An MBA, perhaps, combined with Chinese studies.”

  Han looked at her as if she suddenly mattered. “You can come aboard as a part-time trainee,” he said. “We can pay you a little.”

  And so it was that Zoe slid into a corporate limbo called New Icarus Capital. Three days a week she followed the hordes along the streets of Beijing’s business district, where music synthesizers blared like geomancers coaxing the concrete to keep sprouting new department stores and skyscrapers. New Icarus was in a cinder-gray building on the eighth floor—the prosperity floor according to feng shui.

  In the front office there were two administrative assistants, Tian and Fanny, who’d given herself an English-sounding name for an office where English was required. A corridor diverged, leading to Han’s corner office on one side, and Tom Wendall’s on the other side, like the heavyweights of a barbell. The two interns occupied an open space in-between. On the other side of the reception area was a conference room that the partners had decorated with sepia photographs of bare-breasted women scrubbing laundry in streams beside bamboo groves, of barefoot peasants carrying baskets of rice balanced on poles over their shoulders, and of a courtesan in gold bracelets playing a lute—Asia before investment capital.

  Most afternoons Tom would disappear by three. Ming would step out shortly after, then reappear at five with Tom ten minutes in her wake. Zoe, calculating percentages of profit and loss throughout the day, was developing a fascination with fractions of all kinds.

  Tom had come up with the company’s name. “You can’t fly up to the sun with wax wings, but we’ve got technology to make anything possible, ” he had told Zoe proudly on her first day, at a get-acquainted lunch. Tom’s silky strands of light brown hair framed a pliable, pancake face. While Han talked, Tom sat with his hands folded; he wore a wedding ring, Zoe noticed. He avoided looking at Ming when her brother was present.

  Like all private equity funds, New Icarus used other people’s money to invest in companies. They specialized in taking over companies that remained on the books of provincial and city governments, businesses that had no capital of their own and thrashed about like dogs with distemper. Ming showed Zoe how to write reports adding up building maintenance expenditures, payroll, and raw material costs relative to sales revenue. Zoe’s calculations were intended to prove—contrary to company management claims—that debts far surpassed the profits. It was not a difficult job. Sometimes Han and Tom would decide to invest, other times they’d leave the company to die. Zoe assumed the report for Sunshine Village Silicon Works Enterprises would look like all the others, although Ming took on that particular assignment.

  When Zoe first checked her e-mail in Beijing, her inbox was overflowing. Three messages from the other side of the world pleaded: Urgent: Are You Alive?—from her mother. A message a day from Jeff; several from girlfriends with updates on romances that were either too non-committal or too insistent on commitment; a dozen from classmates who hadn’t even known she was in China; and one from Professor Engelhorn: Hope you arrived safely. I’m eager to hear about your adventures. Odd word for him to use, adventures. She replied that she was now in Beijing to interview the Chengs and seeking historical documents about the Third Front. There was exactly one message from Danny Hirsch: Hope you got there safely. Love, Danny.

  Once she answered him, Danny e-mailed a few more times the following week. Then there was a blank stretch from Monday to Saturday before he wrote: Sorry been remiss. I’ve had a friend staying here. We’re off to Rio for a little Carnival diversion, so will blow some sea breezes your way.

  Rio. Danny wasn’t going to wait. If he had been talking about a male buddy, he would have furnished a name. She foresaw the ritual ahead. She’d seen old girlfriends kiss Danny on the lips at parties. Then they’d kissed Zoe on both cheeks. As an ex, she might run into him at some such party someday, drink too much, remind him of old times and maybe even have a fling with him. That would be okay, as long as you restricted your bad behavior to no more than once a year. Those were the unspoken rules.

  “He’s dumping me,” Zoe told Ming and felt empty, as if the past three years with him had gone missing.

  “It’s not your style to be dumped.” Ming gestured at the buildings outside their apartment window. “Somewhere there’s someone who’s really your soul mate, and—who knows?—he might even walk into New Icarus Capital one day. You should get back into your qi gong. There’s a park down the street and a guy who teaches it at six every morning.”

  The next morning Zoe kickboxed beneath a grove of poplar trees whose leaves were covered in black soot. Breathing in Beijing car fumes and dust from a neighboring construction site, Zoe exhaled twice for every inhalation. Enlightenment comes from you, not the air, your brain is a muscle that can master all. Where had she heard that? She kicked sid
eways, imagined her feet could lift entirely off the ground.

  “Yes,” she told Ming when she returned, wiping sweat from her face. “I feel a little less stuck.”

  While Zoe gathered material for her dissertation in the months that followed, she felt a vague dissatisfaction—as if her time at New Icarus Capital were a perpetual limbo, and the Chengs’ accounts of Sunshine Village filtered through too many layers of distant memory. On the two weekdays they had off, and sometimes on weekends, Ming had a habit of disappearing—getting together with old friends from school, she’d claim. Zoe assumed her apartment mate was meeting Tom or perhaps another man. Left alone, Zoe applied for permission to examine Third Front documents in the government archives. Each week she called to see if anyone had reviewed her application, and each time a different person answered the phone and said either they hadn’t had a chance to consider it yet or they had no such documents in their possession. She recorded thirty interview hours with the Chengs and several of their employees—all of whom had been happy to leave the village behind. She read six books and took notes for her orals, studying over the clatter of drills and pile drivers outside.

  Some nights, Hand and Tom would require the young interns to attend New Icarus Capital business dinners, where potential investors would talk about their quarterly performance and look at Zoe and Ming as if they were double-digit investment returns. Zoe changed the subject when they pulled out their phones and asked, “How can I reach you?” She saw Han pretending not to notice Ming making languorous eye contact. He would pimp his sister for a deal.

  One morning Tom told Zoe that the bald investor from the previous evening had asked if she was a lesbian. Tom snickered when he said it. He was all right if you could get past the cheating on his wife.

  “Naw, I’m just in training to be a cat lady,” Zoe said. The next day Tom brought in a Chinese welcoming cat for her desk.

  “Actually,” Ming confided on a quiet afternoon in the office, “Tom wants something he can’t buy. He just doesn’t know what it is. He told me, if he could do anything, he’d fly an airplane. I have to tell you something, because I trust you. But you have to keep it secret. We’re seeing each other. Sometimes we meet here in the afternoons and do it on the floor after hours?” She grinned at her confession, flashing her Dr. Perlmutter teeth.

  “It’s the worst-kept secret in the office.” Zoe looked down at the shiny parquet floor, imagining puddling sex juices. While Ming was begging her not to tell Han, her own idle hormones shrieked.

  One afternoon in late March, Han called Ming and Zoe into his office. “I have to congratulate you,” he said. “You’re both part of this Sunshine Village deal, so come in early tomorrow and help us see it through. We’ve got a meeting with a man who is very interested in buying the factory there with us as a partner and transforming it. So we shall see what he has to say.”

  “What’s his name?” Zoe asked.

  “Be here by eight,” was Han’s reply. In their own office, Ming explained to Zoe that she had made a grievous faux pas. To provide an ambitious intern with the name of a high-value client was simply not done—an intern with real potential would track him down before the meeting and set up her own deal.

  “Well…even I don’t know his name,” Ming segued into a stammer, suddenly flustered. “Tang Fei told me a potential buyer had been looking around…that maybe someone was interested…”

  The next morning, Ming was up and dressed by the time Zoe got back from her workout.

  “You should wear the black suit,” Ming said. The first three weeks of Zoe’s intern wages had gone mostly into clothes appropriate for the job.

  “Don’t you want to wear it?” They also shared clothes.

  “No, today it’s yours. Like these?” Ming presented a small satin box. Inside was a pair of gold earrings that went nicely with the buttons on the suit that was their joint favorite. “You can borrow them.”

  Zoe put them on. Ming watched her with the oddest twist of a grin.

  When they arrived in the office, Han gave each of them a set of briefing papers. The mysterious potential buyer was due at nine, so with less than an hour before he arrived, Han revealed that his name was William Kingsley Sun. He was an entrepreneur in microchip production.

  “Silicon Valley?” Zoe asked.

  “All secret stuff,” said Tom. “We think he’s been working in Russia.”

  Caterers arrived with coffee and tea and the soggy round things that passed for bagels beyond the borders of New York City. Zoe was trying to get bagel dough off the roof of her mouth when Fanny ushered their visitor into the conference room.

  “Hellew,” he said, his accent right out of an Edwardian drama, and the symphonic depth of his voice like nature bursting through the walls. Zoe had expected an oligarch jaw and flinty, carnivorous eyes, but William Kingsley Sun had the brooding air of a man who had seen too much and carried the world’s burdens wrapped in a shroud of bon mots. His eyes were almond shaped and flecked with gold; his haircut expensively tousled, as if he’d been too busy thinking to look in the mirror. And he was an accomplished seducer—Zoe could tell that by the way he looked into her eyes. He seemed somehow familiar; maybe she’d seen him interviewed on television?

  “My son doesn’t want to eat breakfast anymore unless it’s an Egg McMuffin,” Han commenced. That was how he started all meetings; his anecdotal way of conveying that the global economy was at their doorstep.

  “When you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is,” said William. “Chekhov once wrote that in a letter.”

  Zoe pushed away the inappropriate thought of getting it on with William Kingsley Sun right there upon the rosewood table; his gaze, intent on her own, implied that he was quite accustomed to sealing deals that way.

  A pause; it was time for the visitor to make his pitch. “You’ve seen my business plan,” William began, glancing first at Han, then Tom, then Ming and Zoe. “But I haven’t told you how I’m going to make this happen. It will be big, I can promise you that. The next Microsoft will happen in the little town of Sunshine Village.” Magic words. Han and Tom liked that, someone so cocky he’d do anything to keep from failing.

  Han maintained a poker face in meetings, but when he was pleased with a pitch he would lean forward, elbows on the table and hands folded; when bored, he would lean back, toying with a pen or a wadded up piece of paper. He was leaning forward now.

  “You’ve seen Sunshine Village. Now I’m going to show you the chip. Not just any old chip, a nano-chip—tinier than the tiniest thing you can imagine.” He held up something translucent, less than ant-sized. From his pocket, William retrieved a magnifying glass and handed it to Zoe. His arm grazed within half an inch of hers and the space between them sizzled.

  “This nano-sized particle will do many things,” William continued. “Manufacturers can use it to make toy dogs talk, or a shirt change from white to purple in the flash of an eye. These chips function according to the particular message they receive. No doubt the military would pay handsomely for such a technology, but I do not plan to sell them to generals and soldiers. I assume you send your employees for regular physical examinations?”

  Tom and Han both nodded, although Zoe had never heard anyone in the office mention a required checkup.

  “There is a common little medical device called an otoscope. The doctor sticks it in your ear to see if your eardrum looks okay. But a doctor could place this chip on the end of the otoscope, and with one little probe in the ear, the chip is implanted in the outer cortex. Just imagine, ladies and gentlemen, a computer database that sends messages to nano particles that can dance on the head of a doctor’s otoscope. To what end? you might ask. Happiness for all.”

  “Happiness?” Han frowned momentarily over his steepled hands, as if happiness had nothing to do with anything whatsoever.

  “What makes you happy, Han?
” William Sun asked. “Watching your son grow up? Enjoying a fine dinner? Seeing your business succeed? And how did you arrive at this happy state of affairs? You studied, worked hard, and have earned the right to enjoy the finer things in life. Of course, you incidentally boost the fortunes of others by the simple act of going to buy a new car with a plush leather interior. The salesman is ecstatic.”

  Zoe could almost smell new-car leather.

  “Now suppose you happened to be born into humble circumstances; suppose you live in a dirt shack and work for pennies, or perhaps you are a restless young university graduate who lives in a tenement with three roommates and dreams of becoming a great artist. Being poor, on the other hand, is like being a perpetual child. Your life always in the hands of someone else—your landlord, your employer, your charitable friends.”

  Han was listening with something resembling rapture in his eyes. Tom chewed on his lower lip. Ming’s lips were curled into a surreptitious smile. It was like landing in a movie where everyone else was brainwashed, Zoe thought.

  “Imagine a global economy with no bitterness. With the program we’ve developed, these little chips can erase all bitterness. I cannot tell you everything. This is classified technology after all. Which brings us to the factory in Sunshine Village. You could buy a stake now, with capital upfront,” William said. “They’ll go through your money in less than six months—I’d say three, in fact. All the while, they’ll repay you in monthly installments at thirty percent interest; that’s your terms. When the coffers are empty, we become the new owners. I’m the chief executive, you’re the capital partners.”

  Zoe felt the bagel dough rumbling in her stomach, and was sure she was going to vomit on the table if she didn’t flee the room. Yet, in spite of herself, William Sun’s next words held her to her chair, as if she were watching a gruesome but suspenseful movie.