The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon

by Liu Zhenyun

  Everyone laughed.

  Huang Xiaoqing left the diner the next day to work at the distillery and by the following spring was transferred from bottling to sales, a promotion that often took her out of town with Li to sell their products all over China. She received a percentage of the profits, as much as fifteen hundred a month, much more than Liu made as a cook. Believing that his old classmate was helping them out, Liu would take Li’s hands when they met and say:

  “You’ve been very good to us, and I, your elder, will never forget it.”

  In the meantime, rumors about Li and Huang were flying around town; everyone knew about the affair, everyone but Liu Yuejin, until one winter night, that is.

  Pacific Distillery had a security guard named Zhang Xiaomin, the son of Li Gengsheng’s cousin, which was how Zhang got the job. On the night of the winter solstice, Li drove back to the factory after a night of drinking; Lao Zhang, who’d also had a lot to drink at a class reunion, was dozing off in the guardhouse. Li called out at the entrance, but no one responded. Then it began to snow and the drunken Li shivered in the cold wind; he called again and still got no response. So he opened the gate, stormed into the yard, and kicked open the guardhouse door. Once inside, he picked up a club like a police baton, which Zhang carried on his belt on his rounds. Emboldened by the alcohol, Li gave Zhang a savage beating, something he’d gotten used to doing in recent days. At one point, the club smashed a mirror hanging above the bed, sending glass shards raining down; one made a gash on Zhang’s face, but the blood did not stop Li.

  “You fucking idiot.” Li spat into Zhang’s bloody face. “I’d be better off keeping a dog around than keeping you.”

  He tossed away the club and left. Lao Zhang took the beating and cursing without complaint, but was left with a scar on the left side of his face once the wound healed. His girlfriend broke up with him because of it. Upset, he went to Xiang’s Diner one day when Liu was making lunch and whispered something to him. Liu put down his spatula and ran to Pacific Distillery, where he kicked open Li Gengsheng’s office door and found him and Liu’s wife, both stark naked. Liu went up and began hitting Li, who did not fight back, until he couldn’t take it any longer. Zhang Xiaomin ran off when he saw them fighting, while Liu’s wife got dressed and left without trying to stop them. In the end, Liu lost the fight; no longer big and dumb, Li, the victor, crouched on a chair, still naked, and lit up a cigarette.

  “It is what it is, so sue me.”

  Soon Liu’s sad tale of being beaten by his wife’s lover when he caught them in the act spread around town, giving Liu the reputation of being gutless, sort of like Li back when they had been in elementary school, except that it was all right for a kid, whereas, for Liu the cuckold, it was a tremendous loss of face. Early the next morning, Liu went back to the distillery with a bunch of relatives, but Li had already left with Lao Huang to sell their liquor in Hainan. Unable to vent his anger on Li, Liu stormed the workshop with his helpers and smashed bottles, sending Maotai flowing like a river. But that didn’t ease his frustration; instead, he felt his mind was a total blank. As he lay in bed that night, he was puzzled, not over why he hadn’t known about his wife’s infidelity for a whole year, but over why the two of them had got together in the first place. Liu could understand why his wife had fallen for Li, probably for his money, but he wondered what Li had seen in Huang Xiaoqing, who wasn’t pretty, with tiny, slitty eyes, a thin face, and a nose covered in freckles. She was past thirty, and Liu saw nothing attractive about her. Why would Li pick up with her, since he could probably have any woman he wanted? Was it simply because Liu had kicked him back then? But Liu wasn’t the only one. All the others who had abused Li were now married, so was Li going to get involved with every one of their wives? That wouldn’t be possible, would it? For Liu, it was exasperating to be cuckolded and truly unbearable to be puzzled like that. Still confused, he went to ask a friend he could trust, Lao Qi, a flatbread vendor with a stall by Xiang’s Diner.

  “I’m puzzled, too.” Lao Qi was turning the cakes as he scratched his head with a greasy hand.

  Liu went to ask other people he trusted, but instead of giving him a satisfactory explanation, they thought something was wrong with him, that he was on the verge of losing his mind. Liu was the only one who knew he was more normal than usual. In the end, he gave up and called Li Gengsheng, who was in Xi’an at the moment. Li didn’t pick up at first, and when he finally did, he was caught off guard by what Liu wanted to know.

  “I just like her waist,” Li said. “So tiny I can put my hands around it.”

  That made Liu’s head buzz. During the thirteen years of their marriage, he hadn’t noticed any difference between her waist and those of others; now he felt worse than when he’d learned of the affair. Li had seen something special in her waist, which justified the affair and turned Liu into the guilty party. Putting down the phone, he felt that all the days of the past forty-two years had changed color, but that was not something he could share with his friends. If he did, it would be turned into another joke.

  That was when he began to drink, and when he was drunk he was a different man. The upside of being drunk was the ability to forget things; the downside came the day after, when he sobered up and was so sad he could cry. Yet when no tears came he simply sat, lost in thought, eventually turning suicidal, not over the affair or the reason behind it, but because everything was all twisted and he couldn’t wrap his head around it. In the past, when he heard about a suicide, it brought fear to his mind, but now it felt like a liberation. There were many ways to kill yourself—drinking pesticide, slitting your wrists, jumping into a river, or electrocution—but all he could think of was hanging. His neck started to itch at the thought of it; he could even feel the sweet sensation of a rope around his neck. At times he shouted in his sleep:

  “Someone bring me a rope.”

  Committing suicide sounded grand, but in the end he did not go through with it, because of his son, who had been dragged into Huang’s affair. He was twelve. Based on what she’d done, people began to speculate on her past, saying it was hard to tell whether he was indeed Liu’s son. So Liu took his son to the county hospital for a DNA test, whose result showed that they were indeed father and son. Three months after the test, Liu and his wife were divorced. Huang wanted the son with her, but Liu said he’d club the boy to death before he’d give him up. Being the guilty party, Huang knew she had no right to insist, so she said:

  “You can have him, and I’ll give you a monthly allowance.”

  Still upset with her, Liu blurted out:

  “I don’t want your slutty money. I wouldn’t take anything from you even if he and I had to beg on the street.”

  Those words made him feel wonderful, even winning a thumbs up from the man in charge of the divorce decree work. The bravado felt fantastic, but six years later, Liu realized how foolish he’d been, for his words had gotten him into a load of trouble and backbreaking hardship. In the meantime, he was also aware of his own inconsistency: he’d said he didn’t want her slutty money and yet he’d asked Li for a compensation of sixty thousand yuan during the settlement. Money was money, nothing slutty about it, but Liu had spoken too fast.

  5

  Yan Ge

  Yan Ge, the CEO of the Greater East Asia Real Estate Development Company, was originally from Hunan. He’d always been on the slender side, even when all his friends put on weight after turning thirty and walked around with drooping paunches. With peasants as parents, he lived in poverty until he was thirty-two; as a college student in Beijing, he had to save half of his lunch for dinner, which he managed by adding more rice. Ten years after graduating from college, he still had little to show for himself after switching jobs seventeen times. Everything changed in his thirty-second year, when he met a special person. When you are down and out, the dark nights seem never ending, but once your luck changes you can become rich and famous overnight. It had been less than two decades since meeting his “p
atron saint,” and he had already been transformed from a penniless man to a billionaire, no small feat for someone whose major in college was ethics, not real estate, architecture, economics, or finance. Courses in ethics had taught him nothing; he became a member of the upper class by building houses. Now photos of him appeared on billboards along Fourth Ring Road, from which he looked out at his real estate empire.

  Troubles cropped up once he became rich, not because of his wealth, but because of the people around him. After turning forty, he detected two major changes in China: one, people were getting fatter, and two, they had become more petty. Traditional Chinese beliefs have it that people get more broad-minded as their bodies fill out. But not the people around Yan Ge—the larger they got, the pettier they became. As if that weren’t enough, they were also stubborn hair-splitters with whom he had to deal constantly. He didn’t mind if other people, even his friends, were stubborn, but his own wife was getting fatter and pettier by the day, and that was a major headache. Qu Li had been a quiet, slender girl, but after the age of thirty she began squabbling over every little thing. There she was, the wife of a businessman worth billions, bickering with the people at the neighborhood beauty salon over something as simple as a hairdo.

  Before his rise, Yan Ge never brought up his past, and now, whenever he mentioned eating leftovers in college, people laughed and complimented him on his sense of humor. But he sighed over his conviction that Chinese people had no understanding of humor. He had always thought that humor was linked to language, but now he realized that it was tied to race, that those with a sense of humor were a different animal altogether. The twist was, people with no sense of humor could do lots of comical things. Take a look outside and you’ll see how the world has changed: bath houses are now called cleansing plazas, a diner has become gourmet city, a barber shop is a beauty center, nightclub girls are ladies, later changed to princesses. He felt he was in the minority whenever he went out, and he had to learn to be humorous.

  “This is Mr. Yan, CEO of the Greater East Asia Real Estate Development Company.” He played down such introductions:

  “No need for that. I just build houses.”

  When people commented on his fitness, he’d say:

  “You have to eat to get fat.”

  When people said his business was so big that his company had built half the houses in Beijing, he’d shake his head:

  “I’m just a laborer, moving bricks and cement. Please don’t laugh at me.”

  Once people started saying he was funny, he stopped joking with them, not because he disliked being funny, but because he’d suffered as a result. He was surrounded by fat, petty people, who were ruthless in life and in business. Water boils at a hundred degrees centigrade—for them it was fifty; water freezes at zero—for them it was fifty. Their boiling and freezing points were exactly the same.

  In his view, the biggest change after the age of forty was that he stopped being funny and turned into a stern person; as time went by, he grew to dislike jokes. If one of his subordinates joked with him, he would reply with a frown:

  “Can’t you be serious for a change?”

  Instead of responding to a friend’s joke, he would simply repeat what had been said verbatim, without so much as a smile. Looked at differently, Yan was more or less the same as the people around him, except, of course, he was not fat.

  More than a dozen Greater East Asia ventures were in progress, each headed by a foreman, of which Ren Baoliang was one. Yan Ge often went to the sites, where men from all over China—Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Anhui, and Henan—labored. He enjoyed listening to the migrant workers, who were extraordinarily witty, even though they survived on turnip stew with cabbage or cabbage stew with turnips. They revived Yan’s residual sense of humor. His foremen thought he came to inspect their work; he did that, but mainly he wanted to listen to the migrant workers talk, for a breath of fresh air. As the sages said, ancient traditions often reside in crude places and wisdom emerges from the common man. Fat, petty people had gobbled up all amusing things and words along with their abalone and shark’s fins, while what remained managed to survive among unpolished people who lived on turnips and cabbage. The slaves write history, Chairman Mao said. He was right.

  Among his dozen or so foremen, Ren Baoliang was Yan Ge’s favorite, because he was funny sometimes and obtuse at other times. The workers thought Ren was a shrewd man, but to Yan, Ren was simply foolish, crude maybe, or just obtuse, though with a sound logic. That is, Ren spoke the truth, which sounded ridiculous at first, but its veracity came through clearly if you paid attention. There’s nothing funnier than the truth.

  One evening, Yan went to Ren’s site, where construction was underway on the CBD building, which was already fifty-some stories high. Yan and Ren rode the elevator to the top, where they could see all of Beijing in the sunset.

  “What a view!” Yan said with an admiring sigh.

  “The girls ought to be on the prowl again,” Ren said, pointing to the street below, where the people moved like ants. He spat. “They’re whores,” he said angrily, “but now everybody calls them ladies.

  “Let’s forget about building houses, Mr. Yan,” Ren continued. “Let’s open a whorehouse. It’s a much easier way to make money.”

  It was a non sequitur that sounded stupid at first, but was actually quite funny. Yan had been bothered by something when he arrived; now doubling over from laughter, he forgot his problems and stayed an hour longer than planned, even though he had a dinner engagement that evening. All lit up, Tiananmen Square had never seemed so beautiful. So Yan started coming to Ren’s site once a week, mainly to listen to the workers and Ren talk; he ate in the dining hall if he came at mealtime. The workers had eaten so much of Liu Yuejin’s turnip stew with cabbage that their stomachs churned when they picked up their rice bowls; but not Yan, who thought the food was delicious. He could easily down two bowls, eating so heartily that sweat bathed his forehead.

  “Time for another revolution,” Ren would say when he saw Yan enjoying the food. “You’ll have food like this every day when the revolution comes.”

  That made Yan laugh.

  One day Yan came to the site at lunchtime. Tired of the food in the dining hall, Ren bought a boxed lunch to eat on the steps in his little yard. It wasn’t much of a yard, just a small enclosure some three meters from the work tent, beneath a date tree, with a table he fashioned out of discarded planks. Ren was having roast chicken with chestnuts when he spotted Yan. Thinking Yan was there for lunch, he said as he chewed:

  “Wait here. I’ll send someone to get you some.”

  But Yan was not there to eat or to listen to them talk that day. He was looking for someone, not anyone in particular, just someone who could pretend to be someone else. After Yan’s involved, prolonged explanation, Ren was still confused.

  “Are you putting on a play, Mr. Yan?”

  “Acting out in real life, not in a play.”

  “Why do you need to act something out in real life?” Ren laughed after a momentary pause. “You can see real life going on all over the place.”

  “If you don’t do something right, you’ll have to act it out again, won’t you?”

  Yan followed up with a detailed description of what he meant by something not done right. It turned out that he had been carrying on with a pop singer who specialized in songs praising the nation and motherhood; she’d done that so long she’d become anorexic. In fact, she was faking anorexia; it was just that the songs were so nauseatingly saccharine that her fans were disgusted by the nation, by motherhood, and by her. She used her lost appetite as a ruse to divert people’s attention and change her style in the process, for she was also sickened by the nation and motherhood. Put differently, it was a ploy.

  One day Yan went to see her, not for the nation or motherhood, but for their own sake. When they finished what he’d come to do, she put on a pair of dark glasses and walked him down the stairs, which was next to a small lane bustlin
g with all sorts of business that made life possible—a shoemaker, a mutton barbecue vendor, a bike repairman, a popcorn maker, a boiled corn vendor, and a baked sweet potato vendor.

  Before they parted, the pop star went up to buy a baked yam, at the very moment a tabloid reporter was eating soup across the lane. Surprised to see her there, he snapped a picture. No problem if it had been anyone else, but he was a journalist, so naturally it appeared in the next day’s paper, filling half a page. There were two pictures, actually: one, a street scene with bustling crowds and the various businesses, the other, a close-up in the upper right corner.

  The pop singer was standing in front of the stall, about to stuff a yam into her mouth. Beneath the photo was a caption: ANOREXIA, ANOTHER PUBLICITY STUNT? Being in the paper didn’t hurt her, nor did claims of a publicity stunt; she needed to stay in the public eye, and however that was accomplished didn’t matter. The problem was, Yan Ge’s head was peeking out from behind the singer’s right shoulder; he looked like he was the anorexic.

  He didn’t mind being in the paper, since his picture was on a billboard on Fourth Ring Road, but in this particular photo he was not alone. To be sure, not many people would recognize him either from the billboard or the paper; but his wife would, especially because she’d long suspected him of having an affair, a suspicion that became fact thanks to the picture in the paper.

  His wife, Qu Li, was in Shanghai visiting her parents, and when she returned that afternoon, she’d see the photo as soon as she stepped off the plane. If she could quarrel with a beautician because she was unhappy with her hairdo, just imagine what she’d do when she saw Yan Ge with another woman in the paper. Burying a knife in him was not out of the question.

  Before she lashed out at anyone, Qu Li was in the habit of conducting an investigation, which was always more unpleasant than the actual fight. Based on this logic, it was safe to assume that, after reading the paper, she would check out the “scene of the crime.” To deceive his wife, Yan thought he could re-enact the previous day’s events, so that when Qu came to ask around, people would say he hadn’t arrived there in the company of the pop star. If Yan “happened” to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, he could claim he did not know the singer, and there was a chance that Qu Li would believe him enough to spare him.