Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

by Jan Alexander

  “Manufacturing chips is, of course, the primary business,” William continued. “But I’m in the refinancing business too. Think for a moment of the majestic cliffs looking over the river at Sunshine Village. I am envisioning luxury condominiums and a golf resort. You build a beautiful village, stores that sell fashionable clothes and fine cars, fine restaurants. You get visitors, but these things are there mostly for the residents too. How can such things be available to simple village people, you ask?

  “That is the beauty of loans. You build, and you offer a beautiful village to your people and you don’t even have to spend a lot on salaries. Instead you give them loans. How do you expect these loans to be paid back? Well, you collect from the employee paychecks. This is the beauty of a synergistic town, do you see?” William’s eyes gleamed with the fervor of his words. Han’s mouth opened slightly, but nothing escaped.

  “You can sell the loans on the capital markets, but they won’t collapse because the payback keeps coming out of payroll. And you don’t have to cut your payroll in lean times, because your employees are paying you interest to employ them. What if people run up more debt than can be garnished from their paychecks? What if an employee quits? Well, that all takes us back to the beauty of these nanochips.”

  Zoe decided it was time to interrupt him. “Why not just charge people fifty thousand dollars on credit for the privilege of working for you?”

  Tom inhaled sharply, Han glared at her, and Ming pursed her lips.

  “It’s all in the mind,” William told her, smiling. “Striving is in the mind. Frustration is in the mind. Even indebtedness is in the mind. We are in the business of making loans, but also in the business of making nanochips with classified software that transmits messages, messages that remind people how much better life is when he or she possesses material things.

  “Imagine,” he went on, “a world where everyone is industrious. We can make a world where credit is always available, even if cash isn’t, so a husband and wife never have to fight about money again. We can make a world where people are focused on making more money, where they’re not temperamentally drawn to wasting time in idealistic pursuits that don’t pay off. For example, let’s say you have a daughter who wants to be a writer instead of obtaining an MBA. You give her two years, see if she makes it; if not, she goes to the doctor for a checkup and the next day she can’t wait to start applying to business schools. Now, those with the inclination to be teachers, nurses, police officers, and nannies can pursue that line of work, but importantly, they can still consume. Remember, we’re in the business of credit and can make it attractive for schools, hospitals, and government agencies to go private and develop a credit arm, which we can subcontract. You pay wages, you take the credit card payment out of the paychecks at a fair interest rate, and you sell the debt on the securities market. The more people you employ, the more revenue they produce for you as they consume goods and boost the economy. Everyone wins. Everyone’s happy.” He was still looking at Zoe, and she wondered if his gaze could brainwash.

  “Well,” said Han, finally. “My old business school classmate, Jonathan Cass, said you could be trusted to have a vision.”

  “Jonathan…” William Sun chuckled. “Quite a sloop he’s been racing.”

  The conversation drifted to someone’s golf score and something about “…married a DuPont, you know.” Zoe’s clung to the table to keep from passing out, picturing a village of people enslaved to a string of company stores. She’d had enough. She pushed herself up, and walked unsteadily to the door.

  “Got an errand,” she muttered, and escaped outside into a chalky noontime.

  Zoe was back in the apartment, throwing clothes, shoes, and books into her suitcase, when the doorbell rang. She froze. A scraping sound, then sprightly footsteps retreating down the hall. She tiptoed to the front door and saw that someone had slipped a piece of paper underneath. She unfolded the paper to discover a note, in English, handwritten in elegant sweeps and curves.

  Dear Zoe, I had hoped to find you here. I will wait in your lobby. I implore you to allow me a word. It is about a matter of grave concern to your future. I am not at all what I seem. A man with capitalism charging through his soul would have sent you a text message, n’est-ce pas? W.K.S.

  “Implore?” Zoe scoffed. She brushed her hair, then picked up her suitcase. If this self-important tech entrepreneur was waiting in the lobby, she would be indisputably on her way out, at least. In the elevator mirror she saw, too late, that she’d forgotten to take off Ming’s earrings.

  In the lobby, William Kingsley Sun was sitting in a straight-backed chair that offered a view of the elevator doors, reading a print edition of the International Herald Tribune. Seeing her, he stood up. “Might we take a walk?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a plane to catch. Anyway, walking around here gives me a giant headache.”

  “Pile drivers, ground-level ozone, cell phones blasting, trucks with no mufflers—the many delights of Beijing.” William sounded almost nice, strangely enough. “I’d be happy to escort you to the airport.” He insisted on wheeling her suitcase outside, and helping her scan the street for an empty cab.

  “What’s this matter of grave concern to my future?” Zoe asked, but her voice was lost in the roar of traffic and pile drivers. Rush hour lasted all day in Beijing. Dozens of taxis limped along in traffic, every one of them occupied.

  “What time is your flight?” William asked.

  She looked at her watch. It was nearly three o’clock. “Quarter past four.”

  “What time is the next one?”

  “Seven twenty.”

  “Why don’t we sit down somewhere, then you can try for the later flight?”

  Other pedestrians shoved and jostled them. The noodle shop down the street was packed. Zoe thought of sitting in the park, but an afternoon drizzle was turning into serious rain. She led William back to her apartment lobby. Two people occupied the only chairs.

  There was nowhere to go but her own apartment.

  “You forgot to mention during our meeting,” Zoe said as she poured tea, “that some enterprising resident of Sunshine Village could put the local jasmine tea into bags, pack them together in a box with a picture of a giant Buddha, and sell it all over the world as ‘Sunshine Tea’ for ten dollars a box. Then, as it catches on in the best gourmet shops around the world, this enterprising resident could substitute the jasmine tea with chemically scented weeds and charge twenty-five dollars a box.”

  “Touché.”

  “So, were you ever even in the village?”

  The slick William Sun giggled like a shy schoolboy. With nothing but the cheap blackwood coffee table between them, Zoe tugged at her skirt, her bare knees feeling too naked.

  “I’m in something of a hurry,” Zoe reminded him.

  “Yes, everyone’s always in a hurry in this century.” He looked nervous himself. He reached for his teacup, but it slipped from his hand and crashed to the floor. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  Zoe fetched paper towels and sopped up a pool of tea from among the shards of the teacup. “It’s just a cheap cup.”

  “I bet you’re good at fixing things.” He knelt down and retrieved a large shred of porcelain. “Something you should know,” he said, while the two of them were still examining the floor, “I used to be a Buddhist before I saw that the gods were all corruptible.” Golden sparks seemed to light up from his eyes, and Zoe had the strangest impression of Buddha surrounded by devotees, stating firmly that it was time to buy real estate instead of stocks.

  “You know what the Buddhists say, don’t you?” William Sun continued. “Expedient means? Tell people what they want to hear? You might say ‘this deal will make you richer,’ to the partners at New Icarus, when you really mean ‘this deal will make you happier than riches ever will.’ I wasn’t surprised when you left.”

  “Well,
I’m not really a private equity trainee. I’m an academic doomed to penury. You know, living like a perpetual child.”

  “Nothing like the word ‘deal’ to make one’s eyes glaze over,” William said. Holding up the smallest remain of the broken teacup, he said, “Imagine that this represents the rich.” He held up a larger remnant. “The big piece here is the poor. And this is the work of the civilizers.” He pieced the two shards together.

  “Where did you hear that word ‘civilizers’?”

  “You might not believe me, but the meeting today was all about expedient means. So this is what I wanted to offer you. How would you like to work for a company that plants chips that control thoughts, but it’s just the opposite of what I proposed? Han gets a chip. Tom gets a chip. Big shots all over the country get chips—and they wake up one day wondering why are they are devoting their lives to the pursuit of money? Why do their lives seem hollow and meaningless? They start noticing the poverty of those who work for them, of people in the streets who are in desperate need of money. And then they decide to make some changes. It’s a revolution that comes from those at the top.”

  Zoe frowned, pulling her skirt lower over her knees. They were so close she felt a sizzling sensation when he spoke. He’s just admitted he’s a con artist, she reminded herself.

  “There’s a job for you, if you’ll accept it. Ming is coming to work with me. What do your academic advisors really know about Chinese history?”

  She stiffened, nearly knocking the table. “How do you know about that?”

  “Oh, I’ve been talking to your devious but loyal friend Ming. She knows something about expedient means herself. So, I’ve seen Chinese history professors. They believe a power-hungry eunuch wanted control of the throne so he fooled a young prince; in actuality, the prince was vicious and stupid from inbreeding. Academics believe that women’s feet were first bound in the Sung Dynasty, but they have no notion of the fashion designer who made lotus shoes for the dancers and the ladies of the court. What are you reading for your orals? I’d love to see.”

  Zoe dug out two reference books from her carry-on. No harm in that, surely.

  William looked through her books long enough to make Zoe start worrying about getting to the airport. “This is bullshit on page thirty-five,” he said.

  “I suppose you were there.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you consider this? Go take the orals, just to show these doddering professors what they don’t know. Then, when you’re finished, come back to Sunshine Village and work with me. I can’t pay much at the moment, but I’ll give you a signing bonus if you promise to come back.”

  “Can I think about that? From New York?”

  “Well, you’re traveling without your survival gear.”

  William pulled something out from the depths of his beautiful suit. Opening his palm, he revealed a slightly-rusted Swiss army knife, with a blade that wouldn’t go in all the way.

  Zoe felt the room spin. “William Kingsley Sun…..W.K. Sun Wu Kong?”

  He nodded. “If you like this transformation, I’ll keep it.”

  Her knees were way too wobbly to stand up and go anywhere.

  “You’ve taken on quite a fetching mortal form yourself,” he said and looked at her, through her, as if he’d known her forever.

  “Worst pickup line I’ve ever heard from a lapsed-Buddhist, self-confessed con man.”

  William rose to his feet, yanked a hair from his head, and uttered the word “Change!” Suddenly there were two William Suns in the room—both in the same fine suit, with the same dip in their wavy brown hair. Then there were two more. All identical, although Zoe observed that the eyes of the copies were muted somehow, less fiery, progressively tamer, as if they were a photocopy, then a photocopy of the photocopy, and so on. And as suddenly as the lot of them had appeared, they were gone, the room emptied—except for a butterfly with iridescent indigo wings fluttering against her cheek, the way her mother used to do with her eyelashes when Zoe was little, and call it a butterfly kiss.

  A popping sounded, and William was back in his chair, legs crossed as if he’d been there all along.

  “Would you like,” he asked, “to know who you are?”

  Part II

  The Roller Coaster to the Sun

  Chapter Nine

  Sunshine Village was beautiful in those days. The river was home to plump fish, and a playground for lord and servants alike. The fields and forests were lush and as green as an emerald.” William Kingsley Sun seemed to be gazing way past Zoe and the apartment, back a thousand years or so.

  He said that Zoe used to plant rice in the same fields where Jing Yin and her mother toiled. “Your name was Zenia. I taught you martial arts, and I used to watch you in the fields. You’d stop to admire the patterns in the vein of a rice stalk, or cock your head to the symphony of swallows and sparrows.”

  “You’re romanticizing the past. I’ll bet I hated planting rice.”

  He told her about the heavens, too, and how they ended up on a cramped slum of a cloud.

  “A slum in heaven?”

  “It even smelled like moldy cabbage.”

  “My mom and I were only migraine poor,” Zoe acknowledged. “Over-extended credit cards poor. Genteel poor.”

  The air between them felt electric as they talked and drank wine, way past the departure time of the last flight to Hong Kong. Ming still hadn’t come home.

  “Ming set all this up with you,” Zoe declared as an observation.

  The days that followed saw Zoe, Ming, and the un-earthly William Sun begin to make quiet plans to further the spread of enlightenment, with the little corporate apartment as their citadel. As New Icarus Capital interns, Ming and Zoe were compiling the paperwork facilitating the loan that Sunshine Village Silicon Works Enterprises would never be able to pay back. Han and Tom were already making plans to take over the company in a matter of months and install William Sun as the new CEO.

  In their spare time, the three conspirators designed a software program that harnessed the wisdom gleaned from a thousand years of mankind’s blunders. They combed the internet to select potential recipients for their program. William, in the form of a tiny gnat, would visit these individuals and deposit nanochips into their ear canals. They were, as it happened, all men. Men who ran corporations, men who lived to see their stock prices rise, and considered it a virtuous exercise to periodically lay off staff so that their shareholders—a tribe that included themselves—could make more money. They were the masters of cold calculations that led to mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and other deals that combined the manufacture of several products, but mostly earned big bonuses for the men who thought it up. On the list of recipients, too, were government men who believed their power was something close to holy, and men who played investment games that required encroaching upon the squares where pawns dwelt.

  “One morning,” said William, “they will awaken, and everything will look different. When they ponder the wealth that was so alluring the day before, a nagging thought will wrap itself around their brains like a belt that’s too tight. That’s the first phase. Then they’ll start to see that they have the power to make everyone’s lives as bountiful as theirs have been.”

  Ming danced around the room with excitement. “We should give them—or the program should give them—the idea to set up a national Ministry of Civilization run by a revolving group of writers, sculptors, humanities professors, and all kinds of artists and thinkers. They’ll have peer panels that review plans from would-be civilizers, and each year a group of recipients gets enough money to live very well as long as they keep doing creative work.”

  Zoe mulled that over. “But they shouldn’t reward bad art.”

  “Banality and self-indulgence are disqualifiers,” William said, tapping notes into the program. “No funding for blood and gore via
special effects, no funding for books that stipulate rules for finding a husband or how to invest like a rich guy. No post-modern gratuitous raunch masquerading as the voice of its generation.”

  Ming sighed. “I’m an awful writer.”

  “You can work on it,” said William.

  “Where my mom comes from, in Mississippi, there’s a legend of a young blues singer who met Satan at a crossroads,” Zoe said. “Satan tuned the man’s guitar and made him a master of the blues. Satan, you know, was a god of fertility with horns representing the crescent moon and a pitchfork for tilling the soil before the Christians defeated polytheism and made him the bad guy. We’re tilling the soil of the New China. Can’t we tune Ming’s laptop to make it sing?”

  Throughout April they hatched their plans, the three of them in agreement about the messages they’d deliver. William who slept on the sofa in Ming and Zoe’s apartment or spent wakeful nights tinkering with the software—unbeknownst to his New Icarus benefactors, he had no money for a home of his own. He stashed his clothes in Zoe’s closet, and the trousers and soft silk ties filled Zoe with a sense of intimacy. She was holding out, inhaling discipline. She knew it was possible for people to work together and be lovers too; her mother had been happy living and working with Nathan, the theater director. But the thought of her mother, and of home, reminded Zoe that she had a mortal life with obligations of its own. William had said he wouldn’t insist. Actually he’d said, sounding preposterously formal, “I can inhale discipline and exist without carnal pleasure for five hundred years. You tell me when you’re ready.” The air between them continued to sizzle, and she knew she was denying herself something that would be celestial. But would it swallow her whole?

  She grew to know him well anyway, in those close quarters. She knew he liked to shower both in the morning and the evening. He would emerge in a black kimono, his hair damp, his skin fragrant with vetiver soap. “Plumbers are deities who have shown us the path for conquering savagery!” he declared to Zoe once. “Standing under a hot shower fills you with love for humanity. Everyone smells like a spring garden in this century.”