by Vann Chow
Shanghai Nobody
A Novel
Copyright © 2015 by Vann Chow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
"In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time." --- W. Somerset Maugham
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Problem 7
Chapter 1: Queens 10
Chapter 2: The Problem is Not The Problem 16
Chapter 3: The Don Quixote Solution 21
Chapter 4: The Correct Way To Showing Off 27
Chapter 5: Hierarachy of Needs 32
Chapter 6: Hot 36
Chapter 7: Scammers 42
Chapter 8: Fun and Games 50
Chapter 9: On The Way Back 57
Chapter 10: Foreign 66
Chapter 11: Happiest Day 71
Chapter 12: Recreating the Happiest Day 75
Chapter 13: Elusiveness of Happiness 81
Chapter 14: Regret 84
Chapter 15: Brain Damage 88
Chapter 16: CNN 93
Chapter 17: Grandson 97
Chapter 18: Pretension 104
Chapter 19: The Perfect Girl 110
Chapter 20: Ashtray 117
Chapter 21: The Shirley Show 121
Chapter 22: Soccer Field 133
Chapter 23: Parental Guidance 139
Chapter 24: Airplane 148
Chapter 25: Hugs 156
Chapter 26: Game 163
Chapter 27: Chinese Living In America 172
Chapter 28: Dancing 179
Chapter 30: Land 190
Chapter 31: Leave 197
Chapter 32: Small town America 203
Chapter 33: Drive to walk 213
Chapter 34: Church of God 221
Chapter 35: Thunderstorm 227
Chapter 36: Puzzle 229
Chapter 37: Tornado 235
Chapter 38: Hold on to me 241
Chapter 39: Make you feel my love 248
Chapter 40: Father and Son 253
Chapter 41: Life 263
Chapter 42: Gratification 267
Chapter 43: Special Treatment 273
Chapter 44: Rush 276
Chapter 45: Broadcasted 282
Chapter 46: Evidence 293
Chapter 47: Fire, fire 302
Chapter 48: Superhero 310
About the Author 318
Prologue: The Problem
The problem is, there are simply way too many Chinese men on this side of the world.
After years of killing off --- I am not going to spare your sensitivity because it is what it is --- baby girls and let live the baby boys in Mainland China by the ignorant bunch, there are officially way too many Chinese males in the country for each of us to have a fair chance of being in a heterosexual marriage. This means, I am stat out of a girlfriend, wife and a lifelong companion.
The good news is that not having married at the age of thirty, which is way above the average marriage age for Chinese men for the past five thousand years, has nothing to do with you, or me, per se. It is just all circumstances.
This artificial, unnatural selection created a situation where women are in high demand. It has turned Chinese women into thinking of themselves as princesses, if not queens, of any heterosexual relationships, and Chinese men, into a desperate female-attention seeking animal with less self-esteem than newspaper fetching dogs and more showoff-ish than courting peacock when they get the chance.
Any typical Chinese girl would say, if we were to do an interview on the streets of Shanghai, Beijing, or even the rather westernized Hong Kong, an ideal husband would be someone rich with house and car, preferably in plural forms, acquired via a nice, awe-inspiring job with high salary. In absence of any of the above, they should be born rich, or have a dying relative that would inherit them a large sum of money or rights to a profit making company. Shall neither of these apply, it would still be acceptable to simply have an above average height and above average build, in combination with dashing looks and a head of reasonably dense hair.
What this means is, I am pretty much screwed.
I do not need your pity. I realized that the more compassion I get, the more competition it meant for me in the marital market.
Chapter 1: Queens
At thirty-three, I had just broken up with a long-term girlfriend of four years. I thought I would be with her forever, not only because I loved her, which I did of course, but also for the fact that I would never let her go for if I ever did, I would never get a second chance again at having a girlfriend.
The relationship was going well for a very long time.
Like many couples that had been together for a few years, we talked about getting married and talked about buying a house. Then we talked about signing the papers at the municipality because a full Chinese feast of a wedding would come at too hefty a price and we also talked about renting a small place together which could only fit the size of one human being and a dog, that role regrettably filled by me, so that we could live together immediately after marrying. After about another three months I proposed that in order to further reduce our expense, I could continue to rely on my mom's excellent housekeeping and cooking skills, my ex-girlfriend and then-future wife could move into my parent's house which I was already living in. She agreed somewhat reluctantly. And one day when she was showing me wedding dresses options from a Chinese online shopping website which offered wedding gowns the price of a piece of carrot, or something like that, I gave her the unfortunate remark that these dresses were way too low quality to be used in a proper wedding.
That apparently was the wrong thing to say, for she exploded. There was no word for the level of rage she attained on hearing my casual remark which was meant to be said and ignored.
Everything went downhill from there.
Understandably she had a lot of suitors, just like any other girls in China with two arms and legs. However, she was my fiance as soon as she said yes to my marriage proposal, which was in completely virtual reality settings in front of the Eifel tower where I gave her a virtual diamond ring the size of an egg. She made a commitment and to her credit she stuck to it pretty much all the way while waiting for me to save up enough money to buy her a real ring, which would have to start at a much lower karat than the one she got in virtual reality, until that moment.
That moment, she fired up one of the many apps that was password-locked which I never bothered to hack into on her phone because I respected her privacy and now greatly regretted it, to show me the list of notifications from strange men much more qualified in her eyes than me to offer her a comfortable family life.
I argued that they would never love her more than I did and no one would make her happier than I did. She retorted the famous line that was floating around the internet like wildfire a couple of years ago --- I would rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle. This totally shut me down, because until then I thought what we have was true love. I absolutely did not expect that my girlfriend, someone of reasonable upbringing and good education would feel equally disgusted, as all the other women in our time and age, by laughing on the back of a bicycle in the imagery scenario, that she would tarnish our love by prescribing this line to me! What a denigration to our relationship!
For years I had been watching Jay Chou'
s music videos and most of them consisted of him carrying a girl on the back of his bicycle on a country road having a good time. It was all very romantic and affectionate. Apparently everything was just a poor man's illusion. If my girlfriend, the nicest, sweetest woman in the world thought this was laughable, then no other girl would think any better of it.
Creeps flew up my spine. I frowned, and left the premise.
We broke up and I could not bring myself to speak to her ever again for she represented very well the other side that I was up against. It was not a single woman that I was facing. It was the whole Chinese female population.
My friend whom I had told this to, Kelvin, said I was wrong. We were, in fact, up against the whole of female population which was becoming more and more self-centered, selfish, greedy and money-focused. For he had friends who had friends who live in other parts of the world. He said all women were the same.
In some countries like Japan or Korean the men had it worse because most of the women did not work, unlike most Chinese women, so they had even more incentive to make the husband-picking threshold ever higher and the process ever more excruciating to ensure their future lives were completely foolproof. Meanwhile in South East Asian countries like the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, most women made more money than men because of the abundance of opportunity to work in foreign countries as household helpers who, by virtue of relative health of the foreign economies, could afford them to be ever more critical of their male suitors.
Unfortunately for me, he added, as if he was doing much better than me, I drew the short stick. Being an engineer, I was quintessentially boring and unromantic already because of my profession and natural disposition that led me to this career path. This was wrong, of course, because I considered my virtual reality proposal trick a romantic feat, but I didn't bother correcting him.
At thirty-three, I was broke, without a girlfriend and without a prospect of having one, up against the whole of female population.
This was the problem.
A very big problem.
Chapter 2: The Problem is Not The Problem
If only there was a solution to every problem in this world, there would be no need for engineers.
The one at hand, the biggest problem I had ever encounter, was so challenging that I decided to dedicate my whole life into solving it, so I would never be out of work in a sense.
There was a Chinese saying that went like this: If you are resolute, you could sand down a steel rod into a thin needle. And hence day and night I thought about the girlfriend problem. I caught myself smiling to myself a couple times, and smiled even more at myself for having smiled at myself because I have finally found a problem so worthwhile I could not stop thinking about it.
And eventually I figured it out. The problem I thought was a problem was not a problem at all. There were more men at marriage age than women in China was not a problem. Most men could not afford to live up to the standards of living most women in China desired was not a problem. Women were in high demand in the marital market while men were not was not a problem. Couples broke up because of financial squabbles was not a problem. My girlfriend left me was not a problem. I had a hard time looking for a new girlfriend without improving my financial status was not a problem. None of the above were problems. They were phenomenon .
The real problem was, I live in such circumstances and I believe that my individual life would be subjected to the generalization these phenomenon highlighted. So the problem was really in my head. I did not need to accept all these phenomenon to be the governing rule of my life, even if it was for the society as a whole. I could be the exception. I could be the fish that swims upstream. I could break out.
There was a million thing I could do. I could work harder and make more money. I could save on frivolous things and focus on saving up for the big things that women care about, like brand named handbags and foreign breed puppies. I could borrow money to invest in stocks or start a business and get my foot into the door to the better world. I could maybe even send my resume for the thirteen time to Google to get a position there, which was like the golden ticket to a life of reasonable comfort which many could only dream of. This sounded actually like a good plan.
I conveyed my newfound confidence to Kelvin. He said nonchalantly that he was once like me. And in fact, there were a lot of me's out there. All the me's were thinking we could break out and be different. We could walk in the opposite direction from the shoving herd of sheep. We would eventually be trampled all over by the rest of the pushing herd.
He explained that there was no way one could jump from one social class to another via traditional means, not even working a white collar job. Working for oneself by starting a business was in his eyes an even worse gamble, because that meant giving up a stable income over the unknown mystical future where only one in a billion succeeded in building something that one could live off with. Saving up money was in his eyes a must but he had an excellent point that with the low interest rate any interest accrued from the saved sum would be negligible. Any money would be better off invested. He asked if I had some good investment ideas already in mind that could be started with the amount of money I had in my bank account. Given that I had a negative balance, that was where the conversation stopped.
In the end we settled on improving my looks. A charming look could go a long way. I was quite satisfied with my own look but he told me to count the number of women who passed by us on the streets and smiled at me. I went out of the cafe and stood by its window. I smiled for five minutes like a creep at all female creatures that walked by and none of them returned my smile, not even the chihuahua in the hands of an old lady.
Admittedly, that experience made me feel like an idiot. My friend had made his point.
I thought improving my looks would mean making me more attractive looking, like shaving regularly, putting gel in my hair and style it like I was a Vogue model, or even going to the gym to improve my muscle weight. Turned out, "Dress up like you're rich." was his advice.
Even in China, we knew this to be "pulling a Don Quixote".
Chapter 3: The Don Quixote Solution
The Don Quixote solution was not a very robust one. I was, however, an empiricist. I decided to still give it a go.
While I was not a rich man nor was I born into a rich family, I did have a relatively financially stable and sheltered life. I lived with my parents who rented an apartment in a high-rise in the middle of the city. I was the only child. This meant that I was being treated as a little God since the day I was born. They were used to growing up the same way, being also the lone child and only offspring on whom their parents could cast all their dreams and hopes.
Having a boy was an absolute honor to the Chinese family, notwithstanding the fact that as a boy you get a lot of perks which were part of the patrilineal system that had long been seen as the only way to deal with inheritance in China. A boy had the right to inherit old lands from his father who received it from his father, who in turn received it from his own father and so on. The tradition had it also that a family line was tracked only from the male side, which meant if you had, based on the one-child policy, produced a girl, your family line would come, quite sadly really, to an end at your generation. This was not only financially inconvenience, it was a shame to your family.
Some people did not have land to inherit to begin with, and some people did not mind conventions. Some others respected nature's chance of game where there was always a 50% chance of conceiving a girl and 50% chance of conceiving a boy. Then there were some people who thought they could profit from raising a child, regardless of gender to increase household income, especially when the girl reached marriage age. Custom had it that a dowry must be paid by the groom's family to the bride's family as a show of goodwill before marriage.
The dowry could go anywhere from a pair of coconuts to a million dollar mansion with seaview at the Shanghai Bund and beyond. In these days and age, those that made
the decision to keep a girl (thank God they did) were blessed. For there was an abundance of men who overwhelm the market with labourers, engineers, doctors, architects, and other stereotypical male profession seekers, and there were not enough women in workplaces where you would expect more of them.
The society was certainly turning upside down by this imbalance of genders. Personally, as I was saying, I had lived relatively well taken care of. I had a job at an ecommerce startup in the middle of the city as a software engineer. It did not pay much, and in fact way below international average for software engineer of my calibre that mastered the same skillset but it paid the bills. Due to the fact that I had started out much earlier in the field of smartphone application development than a lot of people who came in waves after app development became a hype, I could sit in my position rather comfortably as a senior figure in the team, delegating work to the young engineers and doling out criticism or compliments, when needed, to them to further secure my position of indispensability in the office when the bosses would eventually come around.
Without the going-out expense from when I was in relationship such as movie tickets, dinner bills and presents, I could cut down my spending dramatically. I did not need to pay for food (lunch at work and dinner at home), nor did I have any fixed expense such as phone, internet or TV bills because the company paid for my smartphone contract which entitled me to unlimited high speed internet which I could use to stream any TV program online I wanted to watch for free.
In a few months when my debt would be settled, I would be officially out of the "long term salary end" league which had, according to my unofficial calculation, at least three hundred million unwilling members.
With the promising prospect, I ignored the fact that I had yet to settle my debt and went ahead to buy me two pairs of new trousers, two pairs of new leather shoes, a pair of brand name sunglasses and three featured outfits (I was too lazy to mix and match myself) on display in the windows of a department store on Nanjing Road.