Land of Big Numbers

by Te-Ping Chen

  Once, at a pharmacist’s, she saw a woman filling out a receipt with a fat black pen. Its shape was familiar, and her heart stopped. “May I try?”

  The clerk knitted her brows, but Xiaolei was sheepish and insistent, and at last she shrugged and gave her the pen and a piece of thin gray cardboard, the inside of a pillbox, to try it on. It was lighter in the hand than Xiaolei had remembered, and had no silver clip, no alpine etching. But it sat in her hand the same way, and it, too, had that glossy sheen. “How much?” she’d asked the woman.

  The clerk frowned. “Not for sale,” she said.

  “Please,” Xiaolei said. She started writing with it. It wasn’t a fountain pen, she discovered; inside was a raspy ballpoint that skidded over the cardboard’s surface, leaving only a wisp of an imprint behind.

  “It works better on the pad,” the clerk said, and that was true. Xiaolei could see the receipt she’d just written out in a clear black hand. The clerk looked at her curiously, and then pushed the pad forward kindly. “You can try.”

  But Xiaolei had already disappeared out the door, shaking her head. “Thanks,” she called out behind her. “It’s not what I’m looking for.”

  Land of Big Numbers

  It was a screenshot of a conversation sent to him by Li Xueshi, one that promised riches and redemption. Shandong Abundant Sanitation Ltd. They’re going to win a government contract to build six military hospitals, it read. Hard-to-come-by opportunity. The avatars of the two chatting were still visible—​a Japanese anime character, a cartoon rabbit—​but their names had been blacked out.

  Zhu Feng felt his pulse race, as though the little cone of privacy around him and his phone shimmered slightly. Who is this guy? he messaged Li. He’d known Li since he was four and they’d lived in the same crummy apartment building; they were almost like brothers.

  Don’t know. Saw it appear in a friend’s timeline. Not a bad tip.

  Zhu Feng winced and readjusted his pillow, sprawling on his back. Through his room’s cardboard-thin walls, he could hear the sound of his mother chopping in the kitchen and the canned laughter from one of his father’s television programs. Sure, if you have money, he wrote.

  Ask your parents, Li replied. Better move fast, or you’ll miss this one, too.

  God, Li was a lucky bastard. They’d grown up in the same dingy high-rise, with its dirty concrete corridors and busted elevator, but a decade ago Li’s father had changed jobs and gone into real estate. He’d moved the family to a complex across town and now ferried them around in a sleek black Mercedes. Li got a “play money” allowance and these days talked constantly of new investments, futures, options—​impossible words that sounded to Zhu Feng like exotic forms of freedom. Already his father had promised to buy Li and his girlfriend an apartment whenever they got married.

  And then there was Zhu Feng, who still woke every morning in his childhood bedroom. The once-fresh curtains were stained, the bedsheets damp in the humidity. What girl would ever want to marry him, with his joke of a salary, no car, no prospect of a place of his own?

  With a sudden flash of determination, he rose and walked into the living room. “Dad,” he said brusquely, “I need to borrow some money.”

  Boyang’s rheumy eyes turned from the television and wavered on him. Zhu Feng looked away: something about eye contact with his father made him feel deeply uncomfortable. For a moment, he regretted having said anything at all, but Boyang was scrutinizing him with a furrowed brow. “What for?”

  “An investment opportunity. A stock. Li Xueshi said—”

  “What does Li know?”

  “His family is connected, he knows things . . .”

  His father turned his eyes back to the screen. “You have a steady job. If your friend wants to gamble, let him.”

  “But Dad—”

  It was too late. Boyang was already uncapping a tiny bottle of cheap grain liquor and sipping it, as though to fortify himself against his son’s words. “The rich don’t know what poverty means,” he said ponderously, and turned up the volume.

  Later, over a dinner of weak beer and lamb skewers, Li was sympathetic.

  “The older generation, they don’t get it,” he said, crunching a deep-fried peanut. For months, Li and another friend had been working to develop an app, one that would let you transpose your face onto a dog, a pig, a Qing emperor, blue tassels hanging down from a square yellow cap. The dog could bark, the Qing emperor could tell you, May all your wishes come true.

  “There’s a whole world out there,” Li said. “I keep telling my dad he should back us. He says, ‘If I can’t hold it, screw it, or eat it, it’s not real.’ ”

  Li sighed emphatically, then grinned. “Hey, did I tell you about last night?” He started talking about the latest club he’d taken his girlfriend to, where the alcohol had been served in giant bowls made of ice and the waitstaff all wore glittery makeup.

  Zhu Feng nodded along, only half listening, feeling nervous despite himself. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded squeaky and unnatural: “Li, can I borrow some money?”

  His friend raised his eyebrows.

  “Not much,” Zhu Feng hastened to add. “Just a thousand yuan, enough to buy some of that stock you mentioned.” He smiled sheepishly as his friend clapped him on his back.

  “Anything for you, brother. I never thought you’d get the nerve,” Li said. Even before his father had gotten rich, Li had always been the bolder one, throwing spitballs at girls in class, taking more than his portion at school lunches, and talking back to teachers, as Zhu Feng watched self-consciously, envious of his daring.

  On the bus back to his parents’ apartment that night, riding through the darkened city, Zhu Feng downloaded a trading app. Do you want to build a new high-prosperity life for yourself? it asked. He clicked Yes, jubilant, and the app installed.

  * * *

  Weeks later, he paid Li back, slapping a pile of red 100-yuan bills onto the white tablecloth of a recently opened five-star seafood restaurant. Together, they toasted with white porcelain teacups that sparkled with newness. The waitresses, with red aprons tied neatly around their backs, were especially pretty, he thought. Shandong Abundant Sanitation Ltd. had done well, doubling in a matter of days after his purchase. On Li’s advice, he’d used the money to buy more stock—​and that had gone up as well.

  The stock market! It was like discovering a secret passcode. It was such easy money. It was a whole thing that existed, that minted millions of fortunes all around the country, and now he was finally inside of it. The government was encouraging everyone, too. In one corner of the restaurant, the television was tuned to the state broadcaster and showing the Shanghai index, up 30 percent for the year. “The bull run has only just begun,” the anchor was saying. There were hairdressers made millionaires. There were schoolteachers who quit their jobs overnight. THE WORLD’S BEST-PERFORMING STOCK MARKET, another state-run financial daily had proclaimed that morning.

  All around Zhu Feng, it seemed, people were buying, buying, homes and stocks and second and third houses; there was a whole generation who’d gotten rich and needed to buy things for their kids, and the same dinky things from before didn’t pass muster: penny rides on those plastic cartoon figures that flashed lights and gently rocked back and forth outside of drugstores; hawthorn impaled on sticks and sheathed in frozen yellow sugar casings, a cheap winter treat. They needed to buy because they had the money and that’s what everyone else was doing; they had simple lives, and it was their children who were going on to do the complicated things. Also, the government said it was the buying opportunity of a generation, everything under construction, new apartments and roads everywhere, China was going up and up and nobody wanted to be left behind.

  Even the government office where he worked was being renovated and expanded, new particleboard and conference rooms being added. As the weeks went by and construction dragged on, his coworkers groused at the fumes, but Zhu Feng, glued to his trading app, didn’t
mind. Everything was poisonous anyway, he reasoned, no matter the quarter of the city you were in; either it was the smog or it was that sickly sweet smell, sharp and chemical, that meant you were near a construction site, some kind of glue, some sort of sealant. You could quail and buy a face mask like so many people were doing now, or you could be a man and just breathe it all in. Pow!

  At night, as he lay in bed, he could picture all the stock codes lined up in his head, nodding and waving and flickering in a row. There was 921015, the digits of his birthday. There was 814036, the hog company he’d heard about on the news. There was 640007, another tip from a coworker. He felt tenderly toward them and urged them on, smoke signals spiraling up into the sky.

  It wasn’t something, he thought, that men like his father could ever understand. Poor men working their poor-men jobs, shut out, wearing their rumpled, baggy old men’s jackets, relics of another era, going nowhere. You had to feel sorry for them, really.

  For as long as Zhu Feng could remember, his father had been moody, fitful, prone to periods of depression. His mother used to say his father had once suffered a “blow” many years ago, but who hadn’t suffered a blow?

  “What kind of blow?” he’d ask, on those days Boyang spent simply lying in bed with the shades drawn. She wouldn’t say.

  Eventually, Zhu Feng stopped wondering. Whatever it was, he should have gotten over it by now. The man was only fifty-three, but already carried a substantial paunch, face liver-spotted and breath reeking. For years he’d worn the same shabby blue hat and fake leather coat and cruised slowly around town on his scooter saying, “Modi, modi,” to passersby, hoping they’d hand him some bills and hop on his bike, “Modi, modi,” like he was pushing fake Rolexes or hawking children’s socks on the street.

  When Zhu Feng was young he’d loved to ride with his father on his scooter—​the big wheels, the way its engine could roar! It was like sitting astride a great mechanical beast, the steady vibrato of the engine humming underneath, the reassuring sight of the two handles splayed in his father’s grip.

  Then, as the city got richer and everyone got their own scooters or cars, it saddened him, the thought of his dad waiting for a sign of recognition, scrimping on fuel and coasting, propelled by his feet as much as he could between passengers. Now that Zhu Feng was a grown man with a job of his own, it made him angry, too. Couldn’t he try harder? “Modi, modi.”

  For months now, his father’s main preoccupation had been a red-billed pet songbird he’d bought at the bird market; he was endlessly unhooking its cage and refreshing its water dish, urging the bird to do its backflips, trying to make it sing. In the mornings, he’d take the birdcage and walk it to a nearby park, where he’d join a group of elderly men, also with their birds. There they would carefully hang their cages in the trees, and spend hours playing chess and chatting. It was all wrong, Zhu Feng thought. Bird-keeping was an old man’s hobby, and his father wasn’t old yet.

  “It’s winter,” his father had said at first, explaining why he was driving his scooter only a few days a week. “Business is slow.”

  But that was four months ago, and now it was April, and the fullness of the month was showing in the trees, which unfurled themselves tentatively at first and then in a rain of tiny buds that scattered themselves over the sidewalks. And still Boyang was taking his bird for walks, and still he was driving perhaps just three days a week, forcing Zhu Feng’s mother, Junling, to pick up more shifts at the hospital despite her bad back. It made Zhu Feng want to scream.

  If only he had more money to invest, he thought. Li Xueshi had recently bought a brand-new speaker set, and the two of them spent hours listening to the sounds of rappers paying frantic homage to places they’d never seen, New York, London, São Paulo. They had beautiful women in their beds and the best of everything: Lamborghini, Rolex, Versace. Together, the two of them mouthed the syllables.

  No, there wasn’t much for men like Zhu Feng here. He had ideas. He had ambition. He had taste. He liked that phrase, taste. It was something that belonged, emphatically, to his and Li’s generation. Not the shabbiness of his parents’ lives, their shuffling steps, the curtailed hopes that seemed to express nothing more than a desire to chide bao, chuan de nuan—​to be full in the belly, to be warmly clothed.

  If only he had more money. He could double it, triple it, in the market. Everything was going up, up, up around him. In a short time he, too, would be on his way.

  Then one day, not long after he’d first begun trading, he made a key discovery. There were a dozen government funds he administered, sending allotments all over the province, filling out the same slips of paper in triplicate that left his hands covered in black ink. He had been handling bank transfers for months before he’d accidentally transposed two digits and sent a batch of funds astray. He’d found out about it only when the Linyang County forestry bureau had called him demanding to know where their allotment was. By then it was six weeks later, and if they hadn’t called him up, it was possible no one would ever have noticed.

  At first he’d tried moving 1,000 yuan to his account. He let it sit there for a month before moving it back, and no one noticed. Gradually the dawning realization set in. As long as the books added up when they were tallied at the quarter’s end, the money, it seemed, was his. And why not? Why let the money sit there, inert, when it could be spent, used, transformed and multiplied? All those disbursements across the province—​there were dozens every month, and who was going to notice an extra account getting its share? No one, that’s who.

  Swagger swagger get that cash, he chanted to himself. Swagger swagger make a stash.

  He took out 10,000 yuan and doubled it. The next time, he siphoned off 50,000 yuan and made an additional third on top of that. Every week, he watched the new columns of numbers in his account grow. At the end of every quarter, he moved the original sum of money back to the government’s account and plowed the profits back into the market. Eight months passed like that, his mind a whirl of giddy arithmetic. In the mornings, as he walked to the subway, passing ranks of old men gambling on the street over their chessboards, he wanted to crow aloud, Fools! We have better games now.

  He went downtown to the shops that had English signs, big floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and many-syllabled names: Ermenegildo Zegna and Raidy Boer (“step with world fashion”). He bought new coats, new pants, and a set of sturdy leather shoes, and thrilled to their touch. All around him, he suddenly found himself noticing the brands other men wore, the make of their coats, the look of their cuffs. On the street, whenever he saw the insignias he recognized, he felt his heart give a pleased thump.

  At night he returned to his parents’ apartment complex, where retirees loitered in the courtyard and the surrounding streets sold nothing more exciting than stale cigarettes and tofu. But for the first time, ascending the concrete stairs, he felt a sense of private elation.

  He didn’t tell anyone what he was doing, not even Li. Wait until he’d made a fortune, and then he’d surprise them all. He’d quit, start his own company, buy a villa somewhere abroad; lots of people these days were buying passports in Spain, in Greece. Li and his girlfriend had recently gone to Rome—he’d seen the photos. He pictured himself somewhere in Europe, in a sunny café. He’d have to learn a new language, of course. He pictured himself opening up his mouth like a baby bird learning how to sing.

  * * *

  A few times a month for work Zhu Feng traveled to some third- or fourth-tier city, the same sprawling affairs with their knockoff fast-food chains, incessantly honking cars, apartment blocks erected only a year or two previously, and, everywhere, scaffolding like hanging vines. He’d liked that part of the job before, a change of scenery, at least, but since he’d begun trading, he found the trips tedious. It meant poor cell-phone reception, long meetings with local cadres about this fertilizer program or that reforesting effort, days of muddy shoes and terrible food.

  On one such trip that winter he and his colleagues set ou
t early, first by train and then by car, six of them in a van that drove an hour and a half along a rain-slicked highway and then bumped unsteadily along a rutted road. They were going to meet with a village party committee to discuss reforesting. Zhu Feng kept his hands curled around his phone, periodically hitting refresh. The market opened soft, he saw, dropping 3 percent before the signal cut out. It was chilly, and his breath drew fragile circles that expanded and disappeared on the van’s window.

  They reached the village and piled out of the van around noon, stamping their feet and breathing into their hands. There were rows of brick houses, piles of rain-softened firewood, and at the entrance, a group of shouting villagers.

  The group wasn’t very impressive, only twenty or so of them, but they had mustered a hand-painted banner that read GIVE US BACK OUR LAND, GIVE US BACK OUR LIFE, and were waving it energetically.

  Zhu Feng didn’t know what the banner was referencing, but thought he could guess. Along the highway, they’d passed billboards advertising new high-rises that were going up in the area, the same kinds of computer-rendered images of sleek apartment blocks that plastered cities everywhere now; Zhu Feng assumed these villagers were being relocated to make way for their construction.

  “We are not the land committee,” the head of the local forestry bureau said loudly to the crowd. “We are with the forestry bureau!” He spoke briskly and with an edge of irritation, as though the protesters had received, but neglected to read, the memo.

  The crowd murmured, trying to size them up, but the officials were bundled in coats and the villagers didn’t seem to know whom to approach. One woman looked like his mother, Zhu Feng thought, something around the eyes. She wore a puffy red coat with a wide-brimmed straw hat wrapped in plastic against the rain.