by Liu Zhenyun
These campaigns tended to be expensive, a fact that lessened Jia’s chances, since gifts from plaintiffs seldom find their way into the hands of people with no power, people like him. Judges, on the other hand, wielded considerable power, which not only brought in revenue above their salaries, but allowed them reimbursement for their expenses. Discouraged by not being able to feed at the public trough, Jia could only turn to personal means. His salary was a bit over two thousand a month; his wife earned a little more than a thousand as a hospital nurse; and his father sold ginger on the street for a pittance, not the sort of thing you gave as a gift for your superiors. How would it look if you gave one of them a pot of peanut oil or a couple of live hens or a basket of ginger? These days, even expensive objects were out of fashion; money had become the gift of choice. The thirty judges, with their access to government funds, were able to help their candidacy along with gifts of money, leaving Jia Congming in their dust after half a year. Worse yet, he was squeezed dry, with no more money to give. But since he’d already spent money on the position, it would be a waste if the job went to someone else. In name, a judicial committee member was above a chief justice, but missing out on the promotion would also cause a huge loss of face if the new chief justice became his superior. Which was why Jia could not simply throw in the towel. But money was hard currency and he could not count on any of his poor relatives, who actually came to him for help. And with no real power, he had no rich friends. No matter how hard he thought, he failed to come up with a solution, and he could only sigh and complain after he came home, since he did not want to unburden himself at work.
On this particular evening, Jia’s father returned home from a day of selling ginger and saw that his son was unhappy. He asked what was wrong.
“It’s all your fault,” Jia said gruffly.
“What did I do?” his puzzled father asked.
Jia told his father how he’d wanted to send a gift in hopes of getting a promotion to deputy chief justice, but could not come up with the money. So he took that out on his father.
“If you wanted to be involved in business, why ginger? Why not go into real estate. I wouldn’t be unhappy if I had a wealthy father at home.”
“Is sending a gift of money the only thing you can think of?” his father asked, also disheartened.
“No. Instead of selling ginger, you could have become the provincial governor. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about sending gifts, since people would beg me to take the job of deputy chief justice.”
“Before I started selling ginger,” his increasingly downcast father said, “I sold fake liquor for a fellow named Hua. And I had to go around begging people. That experience taught me that if you want someone to do something for you, do something for them first, like help them out of a jam. Do that, and they’ll return the favor. That’s much better than handing them money.”
Something suddenly became clear to Jia Congming.
“All those lawsuits you got me involved in that year,” he said angrily, “had to do with helping out purveyors of fake liquor.”
He sighed.
“But this isn’t about fake liquor. We’re talking about high officials, not piddling tradesmen or peddlers who come to us for help. What problem could a leading official have that I could help with?”
He walked off. But as they say, the heavens always leave a way out. An official’s dilemma urgently needing resolution fell into Jia’s lap. His father was a good friend of Big Head Zhao, a chef at the Hongyun lou Restaurant in town. Their friendship was born not because Zhao was one of Elder Jia’s customers, but because they were both incurable gossips. For Jia, that had been a lifetime pursuit, but Big Head had been taciturn until the age of forty-five, when he abruptly took to gossiping. For the lifetime gossip, idle chatter became habit, and it was an easy addiction for people had been uncommunicative most of their lives. For them, going without food for a day could lay no claim to starvation, but twenty-four hours with no gossip was a day of deadly tedium. To satisfy his craving for chitchat, Big Head paid frequent calls on his neighbors, and those visits increased after his wife died, leaving him with too much time on his hands. Once he and Jia became friends, after getting off work at the restaurant, instead of going straight home, he headed to Jia’s to exchange the latest gossip.
The annual National People’s Congress was about to convene during one of their conversations, and by then talk of Li Xuelian’s protest had spread like wildfire from the county to the city. The two men’s talk naturally turned to her, and Big Head, who could not keep a secret, revealed their relationship to elder Jia. He began with their middle-school days, and the Big White Rabbit candies he’d given her; he told how he’d tried to kiss her on the threshing ground, how they’d met in Beijing on one of her protests, and how he’d let her spend the night in his bed when they’d come that close to having sex, and so on. He talked up a storm. Jia Congming happened to be home during this particular conversation, and at first paid no attention to what was being said around him. Until, that is, something clicked. He knew that Chief Justice Wang Gongdao, County Chief Zheng Zhong, and Mayor Ma Wenbin were agonizing over Li Xuelian’s trips to Beijing to lodge her protest. They had reached the end of their tether over this affair, and Jia realized that if he could come to their aid on this, he’d be doing exactly what his father had suggested. That could make his promotion a foregone conclusion. It sure had it all over monetary bribes. Ensuring that she took a new husband was a better means of getting Li Xuelian to give up her protests than mediation or surveillance. Since her issue was whether the divorce was real or a sham, if she married another man, her legal case would become moot. There was also her former husband’s slander in calling her Pan Jinlian to deal with; Pan Jinlian finding a husband was pretty much the same as a prostitute getting married. Jia was ecstatic, though he took pains not to show it.
“Uncle,” he said to Zhao, “since you and Li Xuelian have an intimate history, and your wife is dead, isn’t this a golden opportunity for you?”
“How’s that?”
“Keep chipping away her resistance until she’s yours. Didn’t I hear that she was quite a beauty in her youth?”
“She sure was,” Zhao agreed. “I wouldn’t have kept up the relationship all those years if she hadn’t been.” He sighed. “I just messed up at the critical moment.”
“It’s not too late to start over.”
Zhao shook his head. “It’s not the same now; everything has changed. And even if I wanted to, she’s tied up with her protest.”
“That’s exactly why I think you should get her to marry you,” Jia said.
“What do you mean by that?”
Jia told him about the officials’ dilemma, though he knew that as well as everyone else in the county and city, where word of her protest had reached the ears even of women and children. Still, Jia thought it worth repeating.
“If you can make this public headache go away by marrying her, not only will you have gained a wife, but the officials will be in your debt.”
“Those are two different things, getting married and coming to the aid of government officials.”
He paused.
“And if I did help them, what would be in it for me?”
“You help them, they help you.”
“How can they help me?”
“You can’t tell me that everything is perfect in your life. Isn’t there anything you’d like to be better?”
Zhao thought for a moment.
“Everybody has something they’d like improved. For me, it’s my no-account son. He has a part-time job in the Bureau of Animal Husbandry. He’d like to become a permanent employee, but nothing has panned out so far. He comes home every evening just itching for a fight.”
“There you go,” Jia said with a clap of his hands. “If you can resolve the Li Xuelian issue, get her to stop her protests, while the chief justice has no leverage in the Bureau of Animal Husbandry, the county chief and mayor do. Improving his
job situation would be easier than shit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they made him a division head.”
Big Head Zhao got lost in thoughts.
“What’s there to think about?” Jia asked him. “We’re talking two birds with one stone here.”
“But what if I handle my end, and they don’t do what they promised?”
“You still wind up with a wife. But if they do as they promise, you get both.”
Zhao shook his head. “What worries me isn’t that I don’t have a wife, and that my son picks a fight with me every day.”
“That’s why you have to give it a try, for your son. I can’t think of any other way for you to come to the attention of the county chief or the mayor.”
Zhao began to waver. “I could try,” he said, “but how do I know they’d keep their word?”
“Don’t you trust the government? In the name of the courts and the legal system,” he said solemnly, “I promise you that if you help them, nothing will keep them from looking after your son.”
Zhao still had doubts.
“The way you’re so eagerly making this your business, I wonder what’s in it for you.”
Jia laid it all out, revealing his desire to become deputy chief justice.
“My good uncle,” he said with a clap of his hands, “you and I are grasshoppers tied to the same string. We live or die together. If you perform a service for the leadership, I’ll benefit along with you. The day I become deputy chief justice, you and I will run that courthouse, won’t we?”
“You make it sound so simple,” Zhao said, “but I need to think about it.” He returned home.
Jia Congming had had his say. He lost nothing if Zhao failed to do what they’d talked about, and stood to score big if he did. No need to be concerned, either way. And so he was surprised when Big Head came to see him the next day, prepared to give it a try, not because he was particularly keen on it, but because he’d talked it over with his son. What started out as a casual conversation, a bit show-offy, perhaps, had his son, who’d been in a funk over his job situation, raring to go. He forced Big Head into it. Sons everywhere will fight to keep their fathers from remarrying, while Big Head Zhao’s son actually nagged his to find him a stepmother. For Big Head, it was a matter of negotiating a way out of a predicament. Jia was thrilled with the news.
“Do it, then. If it turns out well, for you and me, the sky’s the limit. If it doesn’t, it’s no skin off our noses.”
“That’s how I see it, too,” Zhao said.
They said good-bye, and Big Head went off to deal with Li Xuelian. Jia wasn’t especially confident that Zhao could manage, but as he said, either the sky was the limit, or it was no skin off his nose. With that he put the matter out of his mind. He was surprised when Big Head called him almost immediately to report on his progress with Li Xuelian; he was not surprised to hear that things were not going well. Big Head and Xuelian were seeing things differently, and Jia knew that it was too early to report to his superiors. If he jumped the gun, and Big Head made things go from bad to worse, that would sour his superiors’ impression of him, Jia Congming. You don’t lift the lid off the pot till the rice is cooked. If people familiar with Big Head got a whiff of the rice, they’d steal the glory from him. Jia was attempting an experiment, pausing after each step to see how things were going, or, as they say, crossing the river by feeling the stones. To his astonishment, Big Head actually felt his way to the opposite bank of the river, accomplishing his goal. Not in his home county, but a neighboring one; and not in his home province, but in Shandong. Big Head sent Jia a short message, saying he’d done it, but Jia remained doubtful. So he sent a short message of his own:
“For real?”
Big Head replied solemnly:
“We’ve slept together. Isn’t that enough for you?”
Now Jia believed him, and the blood surged through his veins. He couldn’t wait to report to his superiors. The authorities had chased Li Xuelian for three days after she’d escaped from her home, and, infuriatingly, had come up empty. Now was the moment to make his report. But report to whom? He wasn’t sure. As a member of the judicial committee, by rights he should report to his immediate superior, Chief Justice Wang Gongdao. But he had second thoughts. He did not like Justice Wang, with whom he’d argued back when Wang was a courtroom judge. Wang held grudges, and constituted the main obstacle to Jia’s promotion to deputy chief. He’d showered the man with gifts, none of which had wiped the slate clean. How, he wondered, could a squat, overweight man with no eyebrows be so narrow-minded? Next in line would be County Chief Zheng Zhong, Wang’s boss. He would be a better person to receive Jia’s report, since it would be more beneficial to report directly to the County Chief; if Jia went first to Wang, Wang would get the credit when he passed the report on to the county chief. Taking that route would be the height of stupidity. Additionally, going over Wang’s head would make Wang look bad, as a man who could not manage what his underling—Jia Congming—did. That could well lay even better groundwork for Jia’s promotion. Filled with excitement, he went to the county office building to see Zheng Zhong.
In the three days Li Xuelian had evaded the forces looking for her, Zheng Zhong had completely lost his appetite. He’d skipped meals, but wasn’t the least bit hungry, and his lips had begun to blister, manifestations of his worried state, but that had not helped him find his quarry. Under normal circumstances, a judicial committee member could not easily obtain an audience with the county chief. But these were special times, and all Jia had to say was that he had news of Li Xuelian to be treated differently. Zheng summoned Jia to his office, where he was given details on the situation involving Big Head Zhao and Li Xuelian. It came as a stunning and unexpected development. One he did not entirely believe at first.
“For real?”
The same thing Jia had asked Big Head Zhao. He whipped out his cell phone and showed Zheng the short message from Zhao. Beyond the news that Zhao had slept with her, he showed Zheng a message Zhao had sent only an hour earlier:
We’re at Mt. Tai. We’re getting married when we get home.
“It’s all right there, Chief Zheng. It has to be real. And if Li Xuelian gets married, what would she gain by continuing to protest? The fact that she went with him to Shandong, not to Beijing, is even more proof.”
Zheng was still not totally convinced.
“This is a serious affair. I’ll not tolerate the slightest screw-up.”
“In the spirit of the Party, Chief Zheng, I guarantee you that nothing will go wrong. I’ve spent the last two years working on this. As the saying goes, I waited till the rice was cooked to lift the lid.”
That sealed the deal. Convinced at last, Zheng felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He was enormously relieved. Three chaotic days, mobilizing more than four hundred policemen, all wasted. She’d gone to Shandong. Jia Congming had accomplished what had confounded all those policemen. Zheng knew what had driven Jia to devote time and energy to this: there was a vacancy at the deputy chief justice level.
“You’ve performed quite a service to the government. I hear there’s a deputy chief justice vacancy. When this is all wrapped up, the organization department will take this into consideration.”
Zheng’s comment regarding the deputy chief position overwhelmed Jia’s initial plan to mention Big Head Zhao’s request about his son’s job. The county chief had only hinted at his promotion, and he could not possibly bring up an additional request, giving the impression that he was bargaining with the Organization Department. So he kept his mouth shut; he could always broach the subject of Big Head’s son once his promotion was a fait accompli.
“Don’t mention this to anyone,” Zheng said.
“Not a word, Chief Zheng.”
Jia left the office in high spirits, and was no sooner out the door than Zheng Zhong felt ravenously hungry. Reminded that he hadn’t had a proper meal in three days, he got on the phone and told his secretary to o
rder a bowl of noodles. He then phoned Mayor Ma Wenbin. Back when Li Xuelian had fled her home, he’d wanted to confine the incident to the county and keep the mayor in the dark. But Ma had found out and put Zheng on the defensive with his first angry phone call, expressing his disappointment in Zheng for forgetting the three wise sayings. Zheng had reacted by soaking his underwear in sweat. Over the three days of failed pursuit that followed, Zheng had sunk into lip-blistering despair. The next time Ma blew up, he figured, the Organization Department would get involved. But then, unexpectedly, everything turned around, proving the adage that “the heavens always leave a way out.” The problem was solved, finally, and all he could think of was to inform Mayor Ma in order to overcome the negative impact left by Li Xuelian’s escape. Ma was in Beijing on opening day of the NPC. At lunch when Zheng’s phone call went through, Ma was surprised by the news and by how the results had been accomplished.
“Who thought up this strategy?” he asked.
Zheng’s first instinct was to take the credit himself, but if the truth came out later and Ma learned of it, Zheng would have outsmarted himself again, as he had done before, by hiding the news of Li Xuelian’s escape.
“Just someone who works in the judicial system, a relative of the man who got it done, and someone who knows Li Xuelian.”