even really understand why he’d stayed around at the hospital waiting for me to wake up. I couldn’t be bothered with all that. My only worry was what might happen to you if you ran out of food.
The next morning, he came back and told me he had delivered the groceries. He said a woman took them in, and when he told her I was in the hospital, she just smiled slightly and nodded. She offered him some cookies. “You have quite a collection of cats and dogs at home,” he said. I was very relieved when I heard that.
He came to see me again that afternoon. “Why are you looking after me?” I asked. He said that when he saw me lying on the ground panting for breath and fumbling for my pocket, he realized I was asthmatic. He was, too, and had been taking corticosteroids for a long time, so he took my inhaler out of my pocket.
“Since I take corticosteroids, too,” he went on, “I wanted to know what it was like for other people with asthma.”
“What do you want to know?”
“To see if you think other people are different from you.”
“Of course they’re different. They don’t have asthma!”
“Are they happy?”
When he said that, I felt like I’d received an electric shock. It’s not that I’m not happy. I haven’t been unhappy since I started living with Miaomiao a few years ago. She doesn’t talk to me now, but we’re still not unhappy. But for the last two years, I’ve felt that there is something different about the people I meet. I can’t say exactly what it is, but they seem to be unusually happy. Whatever it is, I feel like I’m different from them. Even when we’re happy, we have a different sort of happiness.
He watched me intently, waiting for my answer, so I nodded.
He looked as excited as if he’d just hit the jackpot, then he glanced around like he was afraid someone was spying on us.
“I’ve finally found the answer,” he said. “It’s only those of us who are on asthma medication who are not high. This is our secret.”
I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
“Have the people around you all forgotten that month?” he asked.
“What month?”
“The month when the world economy went into crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began.”
I didn’t understand.
“Doesn’t everybody say that the two events-the world economy going into crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially starting-happened simultaneously with no time at all in between?” he asked. “But there was actually a one-month gap between those two events, or, more precisely, there were twenty-eight days, counting from the first working day after the spring holidays.”
He continued: “Do you find that when you talk about the whole country being in turmoil, the panic buying of food, the army entering the city, the Public Security forces cracking down, and the entire population receiving the bird flu vaccine, nobody remembers these things?” I guess he said all this because I was slow to respond.
I started thinking how true it was that nobody talked about these things anymore. It certainly was like they thought such things had never taken place, but I didn’t know if they really had forgotten.
“Then I guess you’ve forgotten, too,” he said as he sat down and hung his head. “I was wrong. It was so much wishful thinking.”
“Uncle,” I said, “I remember.”
“You remember?” His face lit up.
“Yes. I remember everything that happened that year.”
He still looked at me skeptically.
“I remember running around all over buying up pet food, and I remember being afraid to go outside during the security crackdown.”
“That’s wonderful, wonderful. Thank God I’ve finally found somebody who remembers!” he exclaimed. “What’s your name, little brother?”
“Zhang Dou.”
“Little brother Zhang Dou, I’m Fang Caodi, but you can call me Old Fang. From now on, you’re my good brother, a brother closer than a flesh-and-blood brother-because you’re the only brother of mine who remembers what happened that month. You absolutely must not forget the things you remember now. We’ve got to find that lost month.”
I would do whatever he said because he’d saved me and Miaomiao and our cats and dogs. I also said to myself, “You must never forget that you are a stray that Miaomiao took in, and Miaomiao treats you better than anybody else.”
Wei Guo’s autobiography
I’m Wei Guo, twenty-four years old.
I have not kept a diary for a long time, but today this diary has to be written down as a historical record.
Today, I made a great stride toward my life goal because today I became an official member of the SS Study Group. I feel so proud, because I am its youngest member. The SS Study Group brings together political and business circles. Its formal members include government officials of vice-ministerial rank, army officers of major- general rank, directors of major state-owned enterprises, chairmen of sovereign funds, and leaders of China’s top- 100 private businesses, as well as a few professors and institutional heads from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and key universities. In fact, our network of connections extends all the way up to the Heavenly Court.
We are not ivory-tower bookworms. We study political and legal thought and scholarship concerning statecraft, and how to assist the state in governing the nation. Our motto is “perfect wisdom and courage”-we promote a martial spirit, heroism, and the robust qualities of manliness. We constitute a new generation of superior men with a sense of mission. In this age of mediocrity without any sense of honor, we courageously affirm that we are the genuine spiritual aristocracy of China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.
Of course, not all our members come from revolutionary families-some of our academic members are from commoner or intellectual families-but most do. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a judge of the Republic and I grew up in a big courtyard full of people from political and legal circles. Still, I could be regarded as the one with the least illustrious background in the Group.
Perhaps I should be thankful to Professors X, Y, & Z-especially to Professor X-because they were the ones who nominated me to be a member-in-waiting a year or so ago. Thus, I was finally able to become an official member today. Professor X brags that he’s the one who spotted me first. I let him think so, but in actual fact when I was studying first-year law, I investigated all my professors to see which one had the best future prospects, and which one would go the furthest in the shortest period of time. And
I made the right choice, too. Professors X, Y, & Z are the founders of the SS Study Group. Their position is that ideas and power should be united in order to make China stronger. Because they had already mastered the Western and Chinese classics, they were able to attract to the Group those government officials, army officers, and business executives interested in political thinking. X, Y, & Z want to become state tutors, and they believe that within ten years their ideas will control the fate of the nation. All this is in perfect accord with my own ten-year plan.
Of the three, X controls an important scholarly journal, has the widest circle of connections, and is the most popular with the media. He has the biggest mouth, too, and is rumored in the academic world to have a national security background. Y has the highest academic standing, is the leader in his field, serves as dean of a newly established faculty in a key university in the south, and is quite well-known in overseas academic circles. Z lectures to a research class on national security strategy at the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University in Beijing. This research class is made up of civil and military leaders and includes provincial officials as well as high- ranking officers.
