Land of Big Numbers

by Te-Ping Chen

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “You didn’t even know these people,” he said. “Whatever their problems might have been, they had no relation to you.”

  Lulu looked down at her plate, appearing not to hear. She’d grown adept at that while in prison, or maybe she’d always had that skill: how to sort the world into clear categories, what she thought was worth paying attention to, and what wasn’t. I was in the latter category now. She’d nod at me occasionally and respond when spoken to, but that was all. I tried not to let it upset me.

  My father’s face was getting red; none of us had ever seen him like that before. “Dad, let’s just leave it,” I said. Guests at nearby tables had stopped their conversations, craning to hear. “It’s no use.”

  “You are our daughter,” he said fiercely, ignoring me. “Everything we could, we did for you. You were all our worries, all our hopes.”

  He was coughing again, small mangled noises sticking in his throat. Lulu’s expression softened. “Dad, drink more water. It sounds like you’re really sick.”

  He ignored her, setting the glass down in the same ring of condensation. He was suddenly an old man, or maybe I’d only just noticed. “Do you think I had your chances in life?” he said. “Do you know what I could have done if I had them?”

  It was hard to believe that the two of them were fighting; it was something I hadn’t seen before. Our mother and I looked at each other, then looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” Lulu said quietly.

  “You want to help people, Lulu, but don’t deceive yourself,” he said. “All you’ve done is hurt yourself, hurt your family.”

  My mother laid a hand on his and stilled him with a look. Zhang­wei stood up, as though to end the discussion. It made you aware of what a tall, fine-looking man he was, stiff black hair that stood up in a dense thatch, thin lenses highlighting watchful brown eyes. “I think Lulu had better get some rest now,” he said to my parents. There was nothing impolite about his tone, but there was a finality to it that reminded us all of his solidity, his determination to protect my sister, and I liked him the better for it.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me as he ushered her outside, away from the noise and lights of the wedding party. “I’ll take care of her.”

  She hadn’t been treated badly in prison, she’d said when we were all first gathered again in our parents’ living room. There had been a female guard she suspected of having a crush on her, who used to smuggle her packets of instant noodles and an occasional stick of gum. During the day they’d work on a manufacturing line, assembling Christmas lights. At night they’d watch the evening news and whatever sports match was being televised. But she’d missed the sunlight, she said. She’d missed Zhangwei, missed us.

  “Thank you for your letters,” she said to me, and I looked at the floor, away from our parents. “It was no problem,” I muttered, embarrassed for them. It hadn’t occurred to me that they hadn’t been writing regularly as well.

  Lulu changed the subject. “So you’re playing in the Shanghai invitational? That’s really wonderful.”

  It was: after playing together for six years, my team had finally qualified. Out of four teammates, I’d met only one in person thus far. I thanked her.

  “Is there prize money?” she asked.

  I told her yes, a little.

  “Excellent,” she said, grinning.

  Our parents were very quiet. I suspected they wanted an apology, and also that it wasn’t forthcoming. When Lulu said that she and Zhangwei were planning to move nearby, our mother froze, as though she’d been handed a cracked egg and didn’t know what to do with it.

  “He thinks it’ll be good for me to be closer to home,” Lulu said, breaking the silence. “At least while I get used to a normal life again.”

  “What can you do out here?” my mother asked stiffly. “Can you find work?”

  Lulu tossed her head, and a flash of her old arrogance flared in her. “Yes, Mother. I was the top-scoring student in our year for math, don’t you remember?”

  “Maybe Mao Xin could give her a job,” my mother said. It wasn’t a tactful remark, but then my mother loved Mao Xin, had come to rely on her in a way that reminded me of her relationship with Lulu before she had gone to college.

  “Sure,” I said, with an apologetic glance at Lulu. “Anyway, that’s great news. We’ll have to celebrate.”

  She smiled at me, a little sadly. “Thanks, Big Brother.”

  Eventually she found work handing out tea samples at the mall, a chain store with neon-green hills on its sign. It was an easy job, and the boss didn’t ask questions about her past. In the meantime she was learning a lot about tea, she said, about the oxidation process, about the proper way to steep different varieties.

  “Wow, they really train you over there,” our father said. In the weeks since her release, he had become a champion government booster, missing no opportunity to point out to Lulu how nicely the roads had been paved since she’d left, how grand the malls were that had been built. “There are so many opportunities for young people now,” he said. It was a new tic of his, and it grated. Earlier that day, as we strolled the neighborhood, he’d pointed out a set of recently upgraded public toilets across the way. “They even installed a little room where the sanitation workers can rest,” he said. “It has heating and everything. You see what good care they take of all the workers now?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Anyway, it’s temporary,” Lulu said of her job, and that, of course, is what scared us most of all.

  I could see that she was planning something. Once, when she was using my laptop, I saw over her shoulder that she had a document open, titled “An Open Letter to the National People’s Congress.” When she got up to use the bathroom, I scrolled hastily through the text, seeing a list of half a dozen names signed, her own and those of a few lawyers and professors, no one I’d ever heard of. I didn’t say anything to her, but later that afternoon I pulled Zhangwei aside and told him what I’d found. He nodded.

  “I know,” he said. “Your sister doesn’t change.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but I bristled a little anyway. “She wasn’t like this when she was younger,” I said.

  “Of course not—​she was too young then.”

  “You don’t know what she was like.”

  “Okay,” he said patiently, his eyes on the door behind me, waiting to see if Lulu would walk in. He was always mentally tracking her location, the world’s most devoted bloodhound.

  “I mean that. She was smart. She was probably the smartest in our school.”

  “And you think she isn’t smart anymore?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said, but Zhangwei was already flicking the ash from his cigarette and walking away, disappointed in me.

  I flew to Shanghai for the midseason invitational alone, shrugging off Mao Xin’s offer to accompany me, but when I arrived I immediately wished she was there, just to see the spectacle. The games took place in a stadium downtown, the floor lit up with strips of red and blue LED lights. The stadium was packed, and as we played in padded seats onstage, headsets on, the crowds waved red and blue glow sticks.

  We won two rounds and went on to trounce the South Korean team in the third. In the background, the crowd was moaning, their sounds mingling with the noise of my own blood as we clicked frantically, sending out great gusts of orange fire. “Never give up! Never say die!” the crowd chanted.

  When the games were over, the flashing scoreboard had us in third place. The cameras flocked to the floor, descending on us like black hooded birds. We gave sheepish smiles and said how proud we were, how we’d be back next year to win for sure. Somehow we were ushered onto a podium, beside the other winning teams. They handed us a trophy as silver confetti rained down, great clouds of delicate parallelograms. When I watched the video later, it looked as if we were standing in a hail of razor blades. We hoisted the trophy into the air, all five of us. It w
avered and nearly tipped, but the tallest among us righted it and we let it hover there, admiring it.

  Four months later Lulu went back to prison, this time on charges of trying to subvert state power, after she had circulated an online petition calling for all government spending to be made transparent. This time the prison was not so nice, and the judge gave her a ten-year sentence. The last time I saw her, she had lost fifteen pounds and looked shrunken, the same size she’d been in high school.

  A few years after she was jailed, Zhangwei moved back to his hometown to be closer to his parents and got married to someone else. He wrote us a letter apologizing. I threw it away after seeing the return address, but Mao Xin fished it out of the trash and insisted that I read it. “Your sister is a truly rare person, and it is with the greatest sadness that I have to move on,” he’d written. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help her more.” I stood there for a minute, admiring his penmanship, which I’d never seen before. It was elegant, balanced—​almost noble, I observed, before tossing the letter out again.

  After the Shanghai invitational, our team started competing heavily on the domestic circuit, winning actual prize pools now and again. With Mao Xin’s encouragement, I cut back my hours at the hotel and devoted more time to training. The following summer, we flew to Sydney for the global finals. It was my first time abroad. By then we had fans, even sponsors; we entered the arena wearing identical jumpsuits with the name of an energy drink printed across our chests.

  On the plane, we crossed the ocean, heading south. I took out my camera and snapped a photo for my next letter to Lulu. The flight attendants passed out headsets and I slid one on, suddenly homesick. I closed my eyes and thought of my sister. I prayed for victory, and hoped that she would be proud.

  Hotline Girl

  The highways were adorned with thousands of roses each spring. They came in bright pinks and butter yellows, perfect potted visions in the center meridian. The annual choreography of thorns and petals usually came in April, after the winter gloom lifted. During those dark and choking months, the authorities painted the roads a luminous yellow: For better cheer and energy during the gray! The bulletins came like that, dozens of them a day:

  Attention, they said. This afternoon, shorthair kittens (and they would appear onscreen, big-pawed and blinking, and commuters would look up and smile).

  Attention: how maple syrup is made (a man in a stark forest drilling into a tree, gray vats of boiling liquid).

  Attention: the ginkgo leaves are turning gold around Nanshan Park—​come see!

  And so on.

  When Bayi stepped out that morning, like every morning, she slipped a red lanyard with her identification card around her neck. The lanyard’s color confirmed her status as a resident of the city, hard-won after years of jobs at its margins. The card had her picture and name and work unit on it. Anyone entering the city had to wear one. Each card synced with the city’s sensors and recorded the bearer’s activity. At the end of the day, you could log on and see the number of miles you’d walked; it was one of the system’s more popular features.

  “I’m going on a highway, I’m going on a lightning bolt,” she sang as she walked to the subway. For years she’d wanted to be a singer, tried to make her voice the strong, slender vessel she wanted it to be, tried to write a breakout hit. They were short melodies, just a few refrains repeated on a loop; she couldn’t seem to figure out how to write a full one, chorus, verse, bridge.

  The trains were packed that morning. All the stations piped in classical music at rush hour; it was supposed to soothe tempers, but everyone still pushed and elbowed one another. Bayi distrusted it instinctively, anyway; all those long, meandering phrases—​it felt like cheating. She wanted her music precise, to have a point.

  When she’d pushed her way through the crowds, up the elevator seven floors, and into the office, she could see the oily bristles of Qiaoying’s hair over his screen. “I had a plumber come this morning,” she said, shrugging, as he stood and frowned at her. “They’re always running late.”

  She didn’t apologize. She’d realized early on apologies were the surest way for Qiaoying to decide that you were ruan shizi, soft fruit, easily picked on. The other girls didn’t get that. They kept their eyes lowered, almost visibly leaning away as he passed their stations. One girl would spring up and hide in the bathroom any time he approached their corridor, the one that bore a sign saying HOTLINE GIRLS.

  “We’ve already had twenty-seven calls,” her friend Suqi whispered to her. They both looked automatically at the girl sitting at the row’s end and sighed. The girl, Juanmei, had been picked as this year’s office Model Worker. It wasn’t clear why, except that she had pleasing features and long hair that fell in a silky black rain about her face. For months her glowing image had blanketed the subway and billboards across town: WARM, GENTLE, CAPABLE: GOVERNMENT WORKERS CAN HELP YOU RESOLVE ANY QUESTION, ANY CONCERN. CALL THE SATISFACTION OFFICE TODAY: 12579.

  When the switchboard pinged, no one looked to Juanmei anymore. Ever since her award she’d been slack, creating more work for the other girls. All calls had to be answered within forty-five seconds. All chats had to be replied to within twenty seconds. It meant that while Juanmei was sitting idly there with her headset on, Bayi and the others were scrambling, picking up, pressing hold, picking up, muttering, pressing return on their keyboards, typing fast. When she first came to the city, Bayi had worked for a time in fast food. It was that same complicated kind of dance, keeping ten orders in your head simultaneously, twirl, turn about, begin again.

  The switchboard pinged once more as Bayi opened up her chat screen and faced a barrage of popups. The easiest thing was to send a smiley face. She started all her conversations that way. There were set programmed keys for smiley faces, and another key that spat out: Hello, Satisfaction Office, what can I help you with?

  The switchboard kept pinging, the big timer with its red numerals counting down. If no one picked up by the time the number hit zero, a buzzer sounded and everyone’s rating was docked. Still, the other girls didn’t budge; they were waiting for her to take the call. Everyone knew she’d just arrived. She jerked on her headset irritably. “Hello, Satisfaction Office, what can I help you with?”

  A swarm of words enveloped her ear, a raspy connection. It sounded like the person was dialing from a rooftop on a windy day.

  “Excuse me, I didn’t catch that . . . You want a housing—​I’m sorry, please restate the matter. You’ve been evicted?” She was guessing now, half the time you could fill in the blanks yourself. There were complaints about corrupt officials, questions about social subsidies. There were all the lonely people who dialed the government day after day, wanting to talk, the elderly or mentally infirm, many with complaints that would never be resolved. One mother called regularly to inquire about a daughter who had gone missing ten years before: kidnapped, she was sure. One agitated man called their office for months, complaining there were termites in the tree opposite his building; he was convinced they’d get into the wires and electrocute the neighborhood. They’d sent an inspector, who’d found nothing. They’d sent someone who’d pretended to spray, to set his heart at rest, but it didn’t satisfy him. At last they’d sent someone to chop the whole thing down, and he stopped calling.

  “Excuse me, not a housing—​you want to report someone? . . . An unregistered kitchen knife? Let me take that down.”

  She began typing, simultaneously pressing the button for Tell me more on four different windows that popped up. One woman was complaining about a court verdict, saying the judge was related to the defendant. Another man claimed authorities were illegally taxing his restaurant. A senior said he hadn’t been getting the rise in pension payments he was owed.

  Her shoulders were starting to ache and she rubbed her eyes, staring out at the sea of computers around her. It always surprised her how quickly time passed, taking down notes, sending links, marking case urgency by color. A few times Bayi routed re
d compassion packets to callers, just to smooth things over; there was a common budget for that, for the particularly obstreperous cases who refused to hang up. “I’m going to report you to your supervising agency—​oh, I just received a notification—​thank you for your good intentions. No, I know you are only trying to help.” It was astonishing how many residents just needed to feel they’d extracted something, anything, from the other end of the line, even if it was only 10 or 20 yuan.

  At noon the deliveryman arrived outside and unloaded two hundred boxed lunches, white containers of rice or noodles with vegetables and shredded pork. The options were nearly identical but everyone crammed the narrow hall in a frantic rush anyway, the grease turning the cardboard orange and translucent.

  As they waited, Suqi stretched out her leg and showed off one boot, and she and Bayi squealed. “You got them!”

  “I did,” Suqi said proudly. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “A little,” Bayi said. The boots were knitted from soft brown leather, studded with the whorls of tiny seashells, and cost a month’s salary. Suqi had the office’s highest bonuses; her satisfaction rate was extraordinary, and she almost never got repeat callbacks. It wasn’t because she used the red packets, either; there was just something so reasonable and capable in Suqi’s manner—​she never argued and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the government’s workings, knew just what resources she could offer, was genuinely good at helping people. She was a hard worker, too: in the evening she picked up extra shifts working in transport.

  The call came around 2 p.m., when they’d settled back into their stations, into that midday stretch when calls ebbed and it was hard to keep your eyes open. One of the girls on the line kept a spray bottle nearby, periodically misting her face to stay alert. Bayi was feeling lazy, dealing with some chats by simply sending a nodding face, which bought another minute before you had to reply again.

  The switchboard pinged, and Bayi waited until the timer showed ten seconds left, then punched firmly and straightened up. “Hello, Satisfaction Office, what can I help you with?”