Shanghai Fools: A Novel

by Vann Chow

  Shanghai

  Fools

  A Novel

  Copyright © 2016 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.

  Master Shanghai Trilogy

  Book I : Shanghai Nobody

  Book II: Shanghai Fools

  Book III: Shanghai Clowns

  大智若愚

  (Dà zhì ruò yú)

  The wise often appears as a fool.

  — Laozi, founder of Taoism

  Table of Contents

  Master Shanghai Trilogy 3

  Prologue 8

  Chapter 1 11

  Chapter 2 15

  Chapter 3 18

  Chapter 4 25

  Chapter 5 28

  Chapter 6 34

  Chapter 7 38

  Chapter 8 49

  Chapter 9 54

  Chapter 10 59

  Chapter 11 65

  Chapter 12 69

  Chapter 13 72

  Chapter 14 75

  Chapter 15 81

  Chapter 16 85

  Chapter 17 93

  Chapter 18 96

  Chapter 19 101

  Chapter 20 107

  Chapter 21 113

  Chapter 22 116

  Chapter 23 122

  Chapter 24 130

  Chapter 25 138

  Chapter 26 145

  Chapter 27 152

  Chapter 28 154

  Chapter 29 160

  Chapter 30 167

  Chapter 31 175

  Chapter 32 181

  Chapter 33 189

  Chapter 34 194

  Chapter 35 198

  Chapter 36 209

  Chapter 37 216

  Chapter 38 226

  Chapter 39 231

  Chapter 40 238

  Chapter 41 241

  Chapter 42 248

  Chapter 43 252

  Chapter 44 261

  Chapter 45 268

  Chapter 46 272

  Chapter 47 281

  Chapter 48 287

  Chapter 49 293

  Chapter 50 300

  Chapter 51 304

  Chapter 52 310

  Chapter 53 315

  Epilogue 322

  Thank You! 328

  About the Author 329

  Find Vann Chow on Social Media 330

  Prologue

  My name is Jong. My American friends call me John. I was born and raised in Shanghai, a city of 23 million and home to 370,000 millionaires and 90 billionaires. It is the largest city proper in the world. — I bet you did not know that.

  Shanghai is a place where you would see extremely rich citizens of China with dazzling, jealousy-inducing lifestyle almost everywhere you look, living only a street away from the poor, shriveled, maltreated, hardworking people doing back-breaking jobs in the background whose sole insignificant presences are to make everyone less unfortunate feels a bit better about themselves. Then there are the rest of us, the invisible people in between, the nobodies. We are not interviewed in social news reports. We are not of interest to the thousands of brands from foreign countries that wanted to enter China. No economic study has been commissioned about us. There is no one out there in the social media to mock our lifestyles or pity our existences.

  We live in places where the rich did not conquer and the poor did not occupy. We eat in places whose owners could barely afford to pay the rents themselves, getting their sub-par food supplies from suppliers whose strategy of survival in the business is to squeeze every penny out of their clients. We use public transportation driven by people who are constantly annoyed at the lack of respect for their professions, by people who are constantly annoyed at the quality of their services. We work mostly in stuffy offices six days a week, generating just enough revenues for the companies to stay afloat and pay our custom-stipulated New Year bonuses as if they are rewards sent from heaven that we do not deserve. We buy imitation luxury goods and put them online to impress our friends who always seem to have more than us. During the few public holidays we have, we flock to the same touristic attractions and take picture of the same thing like sheep wearing human clothes instead of using our eyes. Our mothers, wives, or girlfriends, are always on our back about our lack of motivations and ambitions. Behind closed doors of our infallibly unsatisfying homes, we have fights about money with our families during dinner while the television show drones on in the background. And we all dream of becoming the 1% that could afford to leave all of these behind, including the people pointing fingers at us openly and the people who gossip about us behind our backs. We delude ourselves that if we just put our foot down and keep pushing, one day we would be able to achieve whatever we, or our families want, unaware that the universe and its inhabitants, including people of our own miserable community, are out there to screw us, waiting to see us get slaughtered emotionally and physically from education, to sports, to investments, so they could climb the social-economic ladder on our backs —or just get a girlfriend, if they are guys, which is not as easy as it seemed if you live in a place where there are on average only 0.76 woman to every man.

  This is the story of one such fool. A fool full of optimism for life, whose daily goals include working as few hours as possible while being clocked in as long as possible, getting the most saving while enjoying the maximum benefits of everything, finding someone to love him enough without breaking his bank, and enjoying the simple pleasures of living such a complicated, decision-rich life that runs like a soccer match that requires minute-by-minute commentary accident-free, until the next day come.

  This is my story.

  Chapter 1

  What a hot summer day.

  The temperature had been hanging around forty degrees most of the afternoon, and only starting to fall by the time I managed to get out of the office.

  Still, the blast of hot air hit me as an invisible force field, and I felt like I was under attack of an unknown Marvel's super-villain that, in my imagination, had a miniature burning furnace on the chest of his body suit, exactly the place where Iron Man's Palladium Arc Reaction sat.

  At that moment, I felt an itch inside my nostril and I sneezed hard. My bodily fluid sprayed everywhere in one foot radius of my nose. A lady who walked by screamed in horror.

  "Yikes! You're disgusting!" She was extremely offended. "Wear a mask if you're sick!"

  It was of no use for me to apologize, as it appeared that my further disgusting presence in her life was not appreciated. She shooed me away as she herself scrambled off across the zebra crossing, ignoring the honks of cars trying to squeeze past each other in the semi-gridlock that was common for the hour in Shanghai.

  After wiping my nose with an old piece of crumbled facial tissue I found deep inside my pant's pocket, I watched as a couple more people sprinted by as soon as they saw me with the tissue over my nose, I sighed.

  Ever since the 2002 SARS outbreak and the 2006 bird flu scare, it was impossible to even blow your nose in public without risk being suspected to be a carrier of some form of deadly influenza viruses.

  And in times like this in Shanghai, the chance of catching a cold for an office worker like myself, after being constantly shuffled between air-conditioned spaces and the hostile nature several times a day, was sky high.

  This was the daily struggle of the white-collar nation in the sweltering summer —you have the choice of being stuck in the air-conditioned office all day to enjoy the cold breezes from the
industrial-strength air conditioners, or being scorched to death in the summer heat outside of the office that threatens to knock you out should your health be sub-optimal, so much so that you almost want to take a step back into the office and work some more, despite having already spent most hours of your life locked up with your demanding boss and your insolent subordinates.

  I looked at my watch. It was 8:42pm. I have got to hurry, I thought to myself.

  My best friend Kelvin, if you still remember him, had organized a party with all of our common friends to celebrate my last visit to the hospital to remove the last bandages on my body from a burning accident.

  In case you forgot, this was what happened —almost a year ago, my ancestral home was being bulldozed, a power pole fell into its ruins and caught fire, taking everything down with it. Foolishly I tried to extract something of value in the burning piles of ruins and ended up getting engulfed in a fireball when the fire ignited the propane gas tank stored in what used to be our kitchen. I had second degree burns all over my body and had to stay in the hospital for two months. After that, I had to visit the hospital regularly so that the doctor could monitor the progress of my recovery, all expense paid for by Kelvin's dad, our friendly neighbor when we still lived in the village together many years ago.

  I walked closer to the edge of the sidewalk and stretched my neck to search for a taxi that was free of passengers. The bright side of a traffic jam was that you could just pick a cab on the road where they normally would not be able to stop. The not-so-bright side was, it was in a traffic jam.

  Then I spotted it. A driver smoking heavily in an aqua blue taxi standing fourth in line behind the traffic light beckoned me to get in.

  Just when I opened the door to jump onto the backseat, the door from the other side opened and a girl slipped it at the same time.

  "Hey, it's mine!" We spoke simultaneously.

  "It's you!" We spoke simultaneously in Chinese again as soon as we recognized each other.

  "Jong!" Marvey wrapped her arms around me, catching me off-guard. I could not help but let out a laugh. She giggled and released me.

  "I cannot believe you're here!" I said after I had a few seconds to calm my nerves. "What are you doing here?"

  "I'm here to be at your party!" she said matter-of-factly, "and to work. The work thing is of course not as important as seeing you. I am so happy!"

  I felt my face getting warm from the same happiness that we seemed to share.

  Just then the cab driver blared at us, "Shut the doors would the two of you? What's the destination?"

  "They are still so rude! Just like how I remembered it." Marvey smiled and whispered to me in English as I gave the address of the restaurant where my party would be held. "Oh, how I love to be back here!"

  Chapter 2

  To be honest, I never imagined that I would see Marvey in Shanghai again after the last time she visited me in the hospital. At that time she was still more or less on her summer holidays. After she went back to school, given how it was her third year in Harvard, being the most critical year of the whole course of study, I expected her to be too busy searching for jobs in America than to come back here.

  "Why? Did you think it would be so hard for me?" She teased me when I told her what I thought.

  "No...that's not what I meant." I fended off her accusation clumsily.

  "I want to work somewhere in Asia when I graduate, so I thought this summer I should find an internship here. And luckily for me, when the companies saw that I indicated knowledge of Chinese in my language skills section on my resume, they all gladly offered me interviews."

  "I don't doubt that many offered you a position as well, didn't they?"

  She smiled and didn't answer, so I asked her where would she be working and what would she do.

  "Financial analyst! I'm going to be a Financial Analyst in a Norwegian bank. Can you imagine?"

  "Well...no, not exactly." I was slightly disappointed at her job title, as I had always thought that Marvey would pick a line of work that totally blew me away, something out of the ordinary. Very quickly, however, I thought it through in my head. Even someone as brilliant as Marvey needed an off-the-shelf job that paid well. I still recall our conversations about her student loans.

  "You don't look very impressed."

  "I'm always impressed when it comes to you." That was true, in case you haven't noticed my secret crush on her.

  "And what about you?" She asked. "Where are you working now? Is your new office around?" She remembered that I was unceremoniously fired from my last company for having sneaked out of work to rescue our belongings in the old house just before the fire broke.

  "My office is right there." I jerked my head towards the direction of the new tall building on my right, to which she screamed in surprise.

  "No way! We work in the same building! I'm on the 72nd floor. It gives me jitters just to look out of the windows. You?"

  "58th."

  "These Chinese skyscrapers are really something."

  I smiled back at her. To be honest, the view looking down from the building gave me vertigo sometimes. Even the walk to the coffee machine and the restrooms required me to walk along the gigantic floor-to-ceiling windows, which was why I practically almost never left my desk. Of course, I was also occasionally so immersed in playing online games that I forgot about everything.

  The cab had edged out of the dead zone and inched itself onto the highway. Its speed picked up as we chattered away exchanging all the stories of what happened in the past year since we last saw each other.

  The driver suddenly mumbled a bunch of profanities in Shanghainese, obviously towards a cab that zoomed past us from the right lane.

  "What did he say?" It piqued Marvey's curiosity.

  I shook my head pretending not to have understood. In fact, it was better left unexplained, because I could guarantee that it involved the names of a few animals engaging in some unseemly actions that I did not want to find myself explaining to the girl of my dreams.

  Chapter 3

  The dinner party went by quickly. Everyone was surprised to see me arriving with a foreign girl, with me being such a loser and all normally. Although they had heard much about my adventure in America with Marvey from Kelvin, it was a different thing when we appeared in front of their eyes together. The guys kept teasing us and trying to embarrass me with anecdotes from my sad past in front of my 'white girlfriend'. The girls, however, would not bother to talk to her. They insisted on speaking about topics that Marvey could not join in, to cut her out. I did not think they were jealous, because, hey, it was not as if yours truly was a very attractive bachelor that had been snatched away by this foreign girl. It was more because they did not feel comfortable in her presence, the presence of someone who always stole the limelight everywhere she went —or was that just my impression because I liked her so much?

  When we ended up in a club nearby to grab a drink, we sat separately. Marvey was immediately surrounded by Kelvin and a few guys and gals who could speak English very well. They were all "Hai gui", or "Returnees" from oversea educations. They, I suspected, immediately felt a strange connection to the American girl. I was glad to see that despite the cold reception at the beginning, Marvey was now deep in conversations with them about something that interested her animatedly.

  As opposed to the "Hai gui" group, you have the rest of us who had never been outside of the country properly —my short time spent in Boston with Shirley and Marvey did not count, really —those of us who did not have amazing lineage and deep pockets to pay for an education. Do not get me wrong, they were not exactly poor, only I was. They were after all friends of Kelvin. To hang out with Kelvin more than occasionally, one would need to have a fairly reasonable income if not direct hand-outs from one's parents. These people were all professionals with great jobs and beaming with ambitions, literally the guests of any Great Gatsby-ques party. I knew them because I could tag along a lot with Kelvin after I 'got
famous' for single-handedly initiated the destruction of the soccer field at the Bao Shan Shanghai University stadium a year ago, when a group of Shirley's hired-hands tried to run me and my phone down unscrupulously with a car. They thought that event was really, really cool.

  Having almost no friends at all —well, that was not true. I still had my teammates from online games that I never met in real life, and my teammates from the soccer club, as well as all the kids I coached in the soccer team —I gladly obliged to the celebration party that would never have happened, were it not for Kelvin and his friends. Which was why I was now suffering in a sea of relentless bantering about some trader's banter and brags that neither could I understand nor participate.

  This would be how Marvey talks in a few years, I thought to myself.

  It was a mistake on my part that I never asked her what her major was at the university. All I knew was that she had been taking Mandarin classes semester after semester back in Boston, which was why she spoke it so well. Now when I came to think of it, I supposed her major had something to do with Business or Finance or something real brainy like Econometric.

  "Hey, let's take a picture together." A girl in the group sitting next to me whose name I never remembered leaned really close to me suddenly. She was so close that I almost fell out of the seat as I tried to scoot away from her enthusiasm out of reflexes.

  "Why are you backing away?" She asked the obvious question as she flailed her bare arms and legs in my close proximity. The lack of personal space made me very uncomfortable. "Don't be afraid of me. I won't bite," she said. "I just want to post our selfie on my Instagram. Do you have Instagram? We should exchange Instagram!" As I was pondering how a person could say the word 'Instagram' three times in such quick succession without feeling stupid, there was a blinding flash, and another flash, and more flashes coming from everywhere.

  To my abhorrence, half of the club was now looking at us. Some were screaming on the top of their lungs, some were hyperventilating.