He banged down hard. Hard and loud. Wells heard the Russians scrambling. A flashlight beamed at him, no more than twenty yards away.
Seconds later, the shooting started.
16
THE THREE ELEVATED HIGHWAYS CAME TOGETHER in a jumble of ramps that soared above the warehouses of northern Guangzhou. Once called Canton, the city had been a commercial center in China for centuries. Now Guangzhou was a metropolis of eight million people, the manufacturing heart of southeastern China. The trucks and buses on its highways never stopped, even on damp nights like this one, when rain pounded down and the air seemed too humid to breathe.
Beneath the highway junction lay a darker world. The concrete pillars that supported the roads formed a kind of room, noisy with the thrum of big engines in low gear. The space had no lights, but it was illuminated secondhand by cars passing on the nearby surface roads. Their headlights gave the space the unsteady glow of an after-hours club, offering glimpses of the rats that dodged through the pylons. The place wasn’t exactly a five-star hotel.
But it was dry, Jordan Weiging thought. He had walked for hours, looking for a place to escape the rain, ever since those cops had chased him from Huangshi Boulevard. Damned cops. Jordan had learned to hate the police since he came to Guangzhou six months before. They seemed to be everywhere, and they were quick to use their sticks.
Jordan hadn’t been looking for trouble on Huangshi, only a doorway where he could sleep in the shadows of the street’s skyscrapers. He hadn’t thought anyone would care. Huangshi was Guangzhou’s version of the Las Vegas Strip, giant hotels beside low-rent two-story bars. Even in the rain, whores walked the avenue, smiling and blowing kisses at the men who surveyed them. They wore thigh-high skirts and tight tank tops and were barely in their teens. Even the ugliest ignored Jordan, though. In their own way, they were showing him mercy. He was so obviously broke that tempting him would have been unkind.
But the police hadn’t been so polite. Tonight they had pulled up as he rested in the shadow of the Guangdong International Hotel and told him to move on. He pleaded with them for mercy, told them he meant no harm, and one seemed ready to let him stay. But the other, a skinny man with dirty yellow teeth, spat at his feet.
“Damned migrant,” the cop said. “We have too many of you rats already.”
“What about them?” Jordan pointed to four street-walkers. The girls cocked their hips and cooed like pigeons at the cops.
“The hotels don’t mind them. Anyway, they pay us in ways you can’t.” The cop tapped his wooden nightstick against his hand. “Now move.”
SO JORDAN MOVED. The rain cut through his jacket and sweatpants and soaked his feet until he couldn’t feel them. He wanted to lie down on the cracked sidewalk and let the water wash him away. Let the cops find him and do their worst. Then he stumbled onto the space under the junction, where the North Ring Highway met the Airport Toll Road.
The McDonald’s wrappers and dirty blankets showed him he wasn’t the first to find the space. Jordan wondered why anyone who could afford the luxury of eating at McDonald’s would sleep here. Probably the wrapper had come from the road above.
At least he was out of the rain. He pulled off his jacket and folded it neatly, then slumped against a pylon on the cleanest patch of ground he could find. Whoever had been here before had a taste for Red Star Erguotou — cheap, strong sorghum liquor. Empty bottles of the stuff littered the place. Jordan reached for one, hoping for a few drops. He was amazed when he heard liquid sloshing inside, almost half a bottle. He took a tiny sip, coughed as the liquor burned his mouth.
He waited a moment to be sure the bottle wasn’t contaminated, then took a longer swig. His stomach was empty — he hadn’t eaten all day — and the liquor hit him quickly. He rubbed his eyes. He wanted to believe that this bottle proved that his fate had changed. One day, when he was rich, he’d hold it up and explain to his children how he’d come to Guangzhou and built a fortune from nothing.
He looked at the Red Star bottle, still a quarter full. He ought to save it, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. Tonight he would drink like a rich man. He tipped up the bottle and gave himself another slug.
JORDAN’S REAL NAME WAS JIANG. Jiang Weiging, in the traditional Chinese style, family name first and given name last. But he thought of himself as Jordan, hoping that some of the luck of Michael Jordan’s name would rub off. In his pack, he carried a dirty Chicago Bulls cap, black with a snorting, red-faced bull over the brim. His most prized possession.
He had loved basketball as long as he could remember. During the good years, before his father got sick, his family had enough money for a television and a VCD player — a cheap Chinese version of a DVD. Jordan’s father liked basketball too. Together they’d watch highlights from the NBA that had been copied onto video disks and sold for two yuan, barely a quarter, at the market in Hanyuan.
In his heart, Jiang knew he wasn’t much of a player. He was strong but small, barely five feet. When he was seven, he’d lost his left pinkie and ring fingers to the spokes of his father’s bicycle. So he’d never play in the NBA, the
Americans thought the Chinese liked basketball because China was jealous of America, Jordan thought. But he didn’t want to be American. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to be American. He didn’t care about other American sports. But the flow of basketball, the mix of grace and power in the game, felt natural to him.
Jordan reached into his pack and pulled out his Bulls cap. He rubbed its logo and a genuine smile creased his face. Even now he could see his namesake jumping high, slamming home a dunk.
Jordan had come to Guangzhou from Chenhe, a village in Sichuan Province. Ziyang, his father, had died of AIDS three years before, after getting HIV from a contaminated needle. He’d been infected while selling plasma to raise money for Jordan’s school fees. To save money, the plasma collection stations reused needles, a horribly efficient way to spread the virus. Whole villages were infected before Beijing outlawed the practice.
After Ziyang got sick, Jordan took his father’s place in the fields. He couldn’t afford more school anyway. “Without money you can’t expect a miracle,” his mother told him. Jordan had gotten seven years of school, and he figured that was enough. He could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. He read well enough to get by, though the complicated characters confused him. For two years, he and his mother muddled along.
Then she took sick, losing weight, coughing furiously, clots of phlegm and blood. Jordan brought her to the hospital in Hanyuan. The doctors looked her over and said they couldn’t do anything, even if she could have afforded treatment. She died a few months later, leaving Jordan alone. His nearest relatives were his second cousins, who lived in a village a few miles away and could hardly feed their own children.
He collected a few yuan by selling off his mother’s clothes and the little television, and set off for Guangzhou, the heart of the Chinese manufacturing miracle. He’d just turned sixteen. Everyone knew there was work to be had in Guangzhou and Shenzen, the twin boomtowns of Guangdong Province. Boys not much older than Jordan had come back from Guangzhou with motorcycles and computers. Some had even built houses for their families. He would find a job too.
But he didn’t.
What Jordan didn’t know, what he couldn’t be expected to understand, was that China was a victim of its own success. The factories that made toys and shoes and cheap furniture, the low-skill products that had provided jobs for tens of millions of migrants like Jordan, were themselves migrating to other Asian countries. In Indonesia and Vietnam, land was cheaper, construction costs lower, the workers equally diligent. In higher-end
