Shanghai Nobody_A Novel

by Vann Chow

  The referee blew his whistle repeatedly at these men, who were, in stark contrast to us, not wearing any sports uniform and obviously did not belong to the field. One of the guys ripped the whistles from this mouth and kicked him in the stomach. As he fell to the ground, the crowd roared. Their angers had fallen on deaf ear, because as soon as they reached us they started thrashing their arms and legs at my soccer brothers and I, ignoring the public around us.

  One man spotted me behind the captain's wife, who was now holding Jessie's hand trying to run towards the dormitory entrance away, and he pointed at me to the others.

  “That's the guy!” He bellowed to his fellow mercenary.

  I back towards the center of the field and held up my smartphone “Come get me!” I beseeched. Although they did not understand why I had to provoke those men, my team mates came to my defense. The two group broke into a brawl.

  “What is happening?” There were voices coming from the PA system around the field.

  Another voice replied that he did not know.

  As I expected, this match, albeit amateurish, was broadcasted live to local channels because it was the quarter finals. The voices belong to the commentators sitting at the top level of the five story dormitory which doubled as the commentator and VIP area for guests at the soccer matches here. They were now describing the scenes that unfolded before their eyes as if it was just another normal game. Our fight was but another soccer match for them.

  “We've gotten a tip,” I heard one of them said as I was dodging the punches of the tallest man in the group. “This is breaking news, ladies and gentlemen, happening right in front of our eyes. The Pudong Hero Number 4 team is being beaten by some men that had attacked the city patrol at the airport earlier. Reports indicated that they were spotted only moments before that incidence with the oldest daughter of Li Kun, who was now suspected to be connected to the current violence.”

  “Is that not He Yuan Zhong?”

  “Who?”

  “The South Sea Ip Man!”

  “That South Sea Ip Man that fought off the two rogue passengers on the Hainan flight two weeks ago?”

  The crowd cheered as soon as they heard the name that the media had dubbed for me.

  “What do you think they want from him? Why would Li Kun's daughter wants to beat him?”

  I held up my phone as I slipped from my assailant's feverish grab and took the opportunity to wave it in front of the camera that was now focused on me. “Check the internet! Check the internet!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  Brother Chong grabbed me all of a sudden from behind and pulled me towards him. Two milliseconds later the body of a man crashed to the spot where I was standing.

  “Did you upload everything?” He asked me as he was fending off another attack. The assailant jabbed his eyes in the chaos which made him really mad. He slammed his palm hard on the guy's face and shoved as hard as he could.

  “Yes! It's on the internet.” I could now spot some people from the audience checking their phone, looking for the treasure of information I left on the message board. I hope someone would read it and spread it soon, before it would get pulled from the internet by whatever dark forces that lurked on the internet, working against the common people.

  “Then let him have the phone.” Brother Chong said wisely. “Let him have the phone before one of us get killed or kill someone by accident!”

  It was a pity to let go of my smartphone, although it was not my own property but my company's. Lots of photos from my trip to Boston were stored there and I hadn't had the chance to download it to my personal computer yet.

  “Just let go!” The tall guy going after me echoed Brother Chong's advice.

  “Aaarrrhh!” And with unwillingness I threw the phone as far as possible behind me. The tall guy rushed towards it, his eyes transfixed to the projectile. When the phone was about to land, he went down on all four to close the distance between him and the phone. He missed by a huge margin. Not a soccer player, we concluded.

  It did not matter to him of course. His aim, we could now all guess, was to destroy all evidence stored in my phone. He was hell-bent on his aim that he scrambled immediately to his feet and tried to stomp the device as hard as he could with his right foot.

  “Everything's on the internet!” One of the commentator yelled through the microphone. “Stop the fight everybody. Everything's on the internet already.”

  “Our analysis at the Headquarter is now analyzing the data for us now. Please be patient and stay on this channel as we find out for you the truth behind his scandalous fistfight unfolding now at the Bao Shan University soccer field.”

  A dozen of campus security had finally arrived and came rushing towards the field with their jingling handcuffs and batons. They hit our assailants, as well as our own men with their swinging batons indiscriminately. Our men were quick to be subdued, being unwillingly dragged into the fight. We squatted and huddled ourselves in a circle on the center of the field like baby ducks. Cuts and bruises lined the visible areas of my team mates. Shirley's hired guns tried to escape naturally.

  “It appears that He Yuan Zhong has been swindled out of his ancestral land by someone called Shirley. Li Kun's daughter's English name is Shirley Li, our analyst confirmed.”

  “The chat history that was posted on the internet only twenty minutes ago titled The Dirty Secret of the Burn Pit group is pointing towards her involvement in this unscrupulous act. Please stay tune as we get more data from the Headquarter on this.”

  “Now on the field, it appeared that two dozens of campus security had arrived and there were more now parking their wagons on the left and right entrance in a triangle. It seems like they are building up blockades on both sides.”

  A few men in suits tried to blend into the by-standing audience, but they were being shoved back to the field by crowd of angry students.

  One man climbed on the Mercedes and tried to pull it out of the parking lot. With both sides of the exit blocked, he decided his best chance of escape was to run through the middle of the field.

  “What the hell does he want to do?”

  “It appears that the criminal wants drive his car through the middle of the field so he could reach the other side that was not blocked!”

  “Pubbbff!” A loud bang reverberated in the air. “Pubbbf! Pubfhhh!” Another two loud bangs caused the women in the audience to scream and the men to cringe.

  “Someone shot the tires.” The car lost control and spinned on its final intact tire.

  “It's not stopping. Looks like the driver is still giving gas!”

  “Pufbbaaafff!” The last shot sent shrapnel of glasses through the air. It had pierced through the window pane and shot the driver on his forehead.

  “This is breaking news, ladies and gentlemen It appeared that the armed police arrived and had shot down the criminal.”

  The car lost thrust and skidded on the wet grass. We hurriedly scrambled to our feet in case the car glided towards us. After a few moments it screeched to a halt, splashing mud everywhere in the process.

  Everyone was rounded up and transported back to the Bao Shan police station when the penal transportation, two a huge caged vans, came to pick us up. The dead man was carried on a stretcher into the back of an ambulance to the morgue.

  Chapter 46: Evidence

  The incriminating chat I had obtained in Boston from Shirley's tablet were enough to convince the world that she had conspired with the architects and executives working for the Sun of China group to hoax the land out of my family. There were other evidence to foul play in the way the group had tried to obtain land in the same area for their grand luxury flats project.

  Despite that, being stolen from her device at her own home, the chats were not admissible as legal evidence. Since the theft occurred outside of the jurisdiction of the Shanghai criminal court of justice, Shirley could not do anything to me except to file a theft report in Boston from oversea, herself under strict cour
t order forbidden to leave the country while under investigation for criminal incitement of the assault of the city patrol at the airport, and the so-called Bu Shan Soccer Field Rampage by the media. Such a filing would likely result in a state arrest warrant out for me in Massachusetts, and even United States. A pity, because despite everything I said, I would like to see it again.

  “Wait a minute.” My phone rang. I pulled it out of the leather sheath to see that it was Kelvin. I was daydreaming at work again about what had transpired. The hair-raising event that occurred the day before to me and my soccer brothers was still imprinted in my mind. I was exhausted physically from the fights as well as jet lag, and mentally I was in no mood to write software for our supermarket clients, but this was Shanghai. The world would not stop on your behalf, and a holiday request to the upper management could not be altered so easily. It was two and a half weeks and two and a half weeks exact it should be. Nothing more, and less would not be reimbursed. Of course, if I was like Brother Chong and Goalie Wong who broke some body parts and had to stay at the hospital, I supposed my company had no choice but to let me go.

  Luckily, unlike the others, I did not suffer any huge bodily injury. The only real damage was in my heart. All the photos I took in Boston with Jessie were now irretrievable stuck in the memory card of my smashed smartphone which I tossed away under Brother Chong's advice to get the violent thugs off our backs. A few of them scrambled for it at the same time and in the chaos one of them landed on it at the end of a jump, stamping the phone into pieces. The corpse of it, was now kept in an Ziploc bag in the evidence box for this case, together with a dozen of other guns that the thugs had on. Luckily they thought we were so weak to warrant shooting us and did not pull them out.

  “I have to pick up this call.” I said to two girls who had came over with an extra box of chicken fried rice with eggs during lunch time as bribe such that I would offer them the first hand account of the story between Shirley and I. Until that moment, I was only busy munching on one spoonful after another of the steaming hot fried rice, enjoying my once-in-a-life-time attentions from those normally haughty ladies from marketing department who rarely visited the engineering department, listening to their excitements regarding what they saw on the news yesterday and repeated on social media all evening till this morning without saying a single word.

  “Who's calling you? The police?” One of the girls made a guess eagerly.

  “Just a friend.” I stood up and walked into a conference room made with glass from floor-to-ceiling and shut the door. The girls stood outside as if they were waiting for me. In fact, they did appear to really be waiting for me. A rare occasion. I was more used to being ignored, dismissed, forgotten, then waited by and waited on...

  “Hey! What took you so long to answer.”

  “What?”

  “Li Kun is tearing down all the houses on our old streets. It's happening right now!”

  “The Sun of China group is under investigation, how could they?”

  “No, Shirley is. Not her father nor his company.”

  “Does your parents know? What are they going to do?”

  “Nothing...they sold the land long time ago, did you forget? That's where they got their capital to make their first investment. ” Kelvin and I grew up together on the same street until our parents both moved out of Feng Cheng Village, looking for better life. His parents left nothing of their past behind. In Chinese, we called this 'Po Fu Chen Zhou', to break the cauldrons and sink the boat. An idiom derived from Xian Yu's heroic act to motivate his soldiers to keep fighting in war since they were at the point of no return. “The news channel number two is reporting some protests over there. Turn on the television.” Kelvin urged.

  I grabbed the remote control that was casually strewed on the table together with some stray cables and turned on the television in the room, only to find heartbreaking images of rubble and half collapsed ancient buildings. In front of it, a woman was wailing at the interviewer from channel two. The camera zoomed in on her face. She brushed back the fallen hair that hid her face temporarily. Tears were streaming down her face as she mumbled words of plead to the girl. “This house belonged to my family for centuries. The inner court was erected at least four hundred years ago. Why did no one inform me that they are pulling it down today? The men from Sun of China group told me they would apply a heritage preservation license for it! They lied! They lied to me.”

  My jaw fell open. I recognized this middle-age woman. She was the wife of our village driver for the slow bus number 3 that crossed the villages nearby.

  “Why do you think the men from the Sun of China Group lied to you?”

  “They want to make money!” Her tone suggested that she thought this was a rather dumb question. “They want to build luxury homes, the kind that we could not afford with our compensations. It's like this everywhere!”

  “So you are aware of their intentions? Did you sign a contract?”

  “Yes...but,” tears swelled up in her eyes as if she had suffered a great injustice. “they promised. I'm old and illiterate. How was I supposed to know better?”

  The cameraman swung the focus of his equipment away from the wailing woman who had knelt on the rubble in the peripherals of what used to be her land, thumping her chest in agony, and zoomed in on the female reporter. Microphone in her hand, she fought her compassion down her throat, made a description of the situation now at our street and said, “The old makes way for the new. This has been the cycle of life for centuries. Modern society needs to move forward. Does it always means moving ahead on the expense of our historical heritage? Will we not lose something valuable in the name of city expansion? That's the question we should all spare some thoughts on. News Channel 3, reporter Wang Fang Huang from Feng Cheng Village.” before she closed.

  “Does your parents know?”

  “No, not at all. They hadn't been back since they signed two and a half weeks ago.” Now panic rose up my spine. We had to stop the workers before they pull down our ancestral house with all our belongings in there. “Damn you, Li Kun.”

  “Bastard.” Kelvin agreed with my sentiment.

  I turned off the television and pushed the glass door open. “I'm going there. All our stuff is in the house.”

  “Go get your parents. I will pick you all up and we'll go with the car. ”

  The two girls spotted the weariness from my demeanor. They dashed out after me to the lobby and I only lost them when I forced the elevator doors closed as soon as I slipped in.

  Chapter 47: Fire, fire

  “Here. Here!” My father grabbed the water hose from a man wearing no shirt. “Let me have it! Now turn up the water for me. Quick!” The man was too concerned about the fire to fight.

  He was our neighbor. Someone I only knew the face of and not the name.

  “You've come too late.” He said with a frown as he ran to the water outlet and turned the tap wider as my father instructed. “Li Kun's men already torn down everything on our streets.”

  “I can see that.” My father fought with the dancing hose in his aged hands. Green veins surfaced from his arms where the sleeves were pulled up. My mother could not cope with the scene in front of our eyes. Our ancestral house was now no more than a pile of rubble Dust eddied on the surface still unsettled.

  “Come! Help Mr. He put the fire off!” Kelvin's dad, Mr. Zhang called to the dozen of workers that he rounded up from the market. “I won't pay you a dime less!” He shouted after them as they poured down the stairs at the back of the truck to the front of the house.

  A fire had broken out. The pike pole that stood next to the house were bulldozed by accident and fell to the middle of our open courtyard. A fall would not necessary caused a fire or power outage, as long as there was still slack in the cables between itself and the next one, and when the transformer stayed undamaged. Of course, this was not the case.

  The village had gained electricity only fifteen years ago. To laid a power grind in
a poor ancient village developed in a haphazard way meant the poles were erected by people who had less knowledge than they ought to have, the materials used were less than perfect and repairs were few and far in between.

  The fire caught on easily as most parts of the house still contained a huge amount of wooden elements.

  “Don't use water!” I shouted at the guys. “You can't put out an electric fire with water! It will only make it worse!”

  No one could hear me. I ran to Kelvin and his dad, who immediately saw the problem. “But we have nothing else to put out the fire!” Kelvin squinted.

  Just when we were saying that, a spring of fire shot up from the ground when the water hit the high voltage power line. My father was thrusted backwards from the shock waves. A man behind he held the old man in his arm just in time and they fell on their butts on the ground over each other. I saw my mother climbed out of the front seat of the truck Kelvin brought us here with and ran towards them.

  “No, mom!” Kelvin rushed forward to stop her as soon as he saw me moved. Confirmed that she was kept at bay, I sprinted towards the worker and my father, and helped them to their feet.

  “Turn off the hose, turn off the hose!” I yelled repeatedly until everyone near me was repeated it. A man nearest to the fire hydrant heard our call finally and tried to turn the water off. It was too heavy for him. Another man from opposite the road watching us joined him at once. They put their backs into it and managed to turn the rusty faucet anti-clockwise as another shorter, but equally menacing sparks shot out from the top of the downed poke.

  “My house.” My father howled. “My house!” He was sobbing loudly when I reached him. His face smeared with ashes and small scraps of broken pieces of woods. The man who saved him had hurt his tailbone when he fell backwards to the uneven ground. His face showed a tortured expression no less pitiful than my father's. Tears rolled off the corners of my eyes.

  “Get our records. Get them in the office!” My father begged me as I approached. “I have stored them in the drawers. The keys are on the top left compartment.”