Lao Chen was feeling bored. He popped a cookie into his mouth, and picked up a few out-of-date periodicals and a couple of small local newspapers, which he flipped through at random. He really couldn’t see how Fang Caodi could discern the true facts of history in them. He went on to look at odd half-pages from editors of the
Lao Chen recalled that everything had been calm in Beijing during that period, there had been no big disturbances; if there had been even one, it would have left some impression on him. From the so-called evidence that Fang Caodi had collected, it would seem that there had been some sort of unrest in other areas of the country, but that was nothing unusual. China is so big that it’s not unusual for there to be some kind of turmoil somewhere every day, he thought. He never looked for that kind of news, and even if it did catch his eye, he would just skip over it. China is such a big country, there are so many things one doesn’t know about. These little bits and pieces of evidence collected by Fang Caodi don’t explain anything. In fact, to say that one whole month has gone missing isn’t strictly accurate, it’s just that people’s recollections of that month are different, he insisted to himself. Furthermore, if you deliberately looked for bad things happening in China, you could find plenty of examples. If you looked only for good things, you’d find a whole panorama of them. Big countries are all like that. Look at the United States or India. What’s so unusual about China? The most important thing today is that the world economy has fallen into a period of crisis everywhere, except for in China.
Little Xi, where are you? I hope you can put the past to rest, and return to the good life of the present. If you want to live with me, then we can live well together.
Perhaps it was due to the chocolate cookies, but Lao Chen began to feel better, and he became even more firmly resolved to locate Little Xi.
As the early-spring evening fell, the atmosphere of their outdoor candlelit dinner was very conducive to happiness. Fang Caodi cooked dish after dish and piled them on the table. He invited Lao Chen to taste them first and asked Zhang Dou to play his Spanish guitar for atmosphere. Nearby in the yard, Miaomiao began dancing with her dogs and cats.
Lao Chen had a few mouthfuls and thought each dish tasted pretty good. “What part of China are these dishes from?” he asked Fang Caodi.
“Chop suey vegetables,” said Old Fang. “Look closely, I’m using Sichuan peppers, Hunan black bean sauce, Guangdong shrimp sauce, Thai lemon grass, and our own coriander, sweet basil, lemon leaf, and leeks. They’re all organic. We just pick ’em and eat ’em. And we fertilize them with our own and the cats’ and dogs’ poo.”
Conversation over dinner was pleasant, and what was most surprising to Lao Chen was when Fang Caodi told him why he admired him so much. Lao Chen had always thought it was because his literary style impressed Old Fang, but Fang Caodi said it was because of something Lao Chen had once said, though he couldn’t remember it. In 1989, when Fang Caodi allowed himself to be interviewed, he insisted that he was genuinely clairvoyant. When he’d seen the military blockade on the road to the Summer Palace in 1971, he’d known the Mao Zedong-Lin Biao incident had happened. When he’d looked out of the window of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions onto Nathan Road and seen a man jump to his death across the street, he’d known that something was about to go wrong in Hong Kong, and, sure enough, the Hang Seng Index collapsed from seventeen hundred points to only slightly over one hundred. In that American commune in 1975, when his hippie friends were beating on pots and pans to celebrate the end of the Vietnam War, he’d had a vision of refugees swarming out of Vietnam, and, of course, his vision became reality. As he went on talking and talking, Lao Chen had interrupted him and asked, “What’s the significance of these premonitions? Did they change anything later?”
“Lao Chen,” said Fang Caodi, “with that one question you woke me up from my dreams. When I thought about it, my powers of premonition that I thought made me different from other people never had the slightest influence on the world, and never even changed my own fate. They really didn’t have any significance at all.” From that time on, Fang Caodi no longer considered his premonitions to be of any importance and no longer put himself under any pointless pressure. This was all due to that one question of Lao Chen’s. From that he knew that Lao Chen was an extraordinarily talented person.
“Little brother,” Fang Caodi instructed Zhang Dou, “Lao Chen is far wiser than we are; we should listen to him, you understand?”
When Lao Chen, who was eating with great gusto, heard Fang Caodi say this, he felt a little embarrassed. He stood up to give Old Fang a hug.
Lao Chen found he was enjoying the flavors of their long dinner very much, so much so in fact that some of his lost feeling of happiness started to come back. He felt so good that he actually found himself telling his two companions how he’d come to know the insomniac national leader He Dongsheng. He explained how He Dongsheng would sleep through the films Jian Lin showed, but could not sleep at night, and so drove his own car all over town, and when he was pulled over by a traffic cop, he phoned his secretary, who then wiped his ass for him.
After dinner, Zhang Dou carried on playing his guitar, and Fang Caodi sang Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.” Old Fang sang it perfectly in the style of the young Dylan.
As they continued drinking Yanjing beer and eating cookies, Zhang Dou took out his computer and went on the Internet. Fang Caodi asked Lao Chen to show him how to look up his friend.
“I’m not exactly sure,” said Lao Chen. “I only have this note.” He took it out of his pocket.
“What does it mean?” asked Fang Caodi.
“I think it is
Zhang Dou took a look.
“Let’s go to Henan and look for her,” said Fang Caodi. “I’ll drive. Professor Hu said that church is in Henan-we can find out where exactly when we get there.”
“Whoa. Don’t get too excited,” said Lao Chen. “That church is called the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground, but I don’t even know for certain that Little Xi
“I found
“You just put in
Zhang Dou nodded.
Lao Chen had only guessed at Chinese characters for
There was only one link, a post put up two weeks before on the club3.kdnet.net “Cat’s Eye” server:
Idiot Numbskull, you say you are so brokenhearted you’ll never post another message. Well, I’m pretty brokenhearted too, but I understand-all your thoughtful articles are willfully deleted by the Internet police and maliciously attacked by a gang of “angry youth” thugs (those people in their fifties and sixties who act like thugs when they go on the Internet). You never use malicious language and you always present the facts and make reasonable arguments, so I greatly admire your firm resolve; it encourages me to keep on going. I’m not afraid of the angry youth, and I’m even less afraid of those aging hoodlums. I will persevere to the end because I believe that human beings are rational and that the truth cannot be suppressed forever. Good-bye for now, friend, we’ll meet again in this virtual world.
“Is that her?” asked Fang Caodi.
“It certainly sounds like her,” said Lao Chen.
“From her tone, she’s one of us,” Fang said.
“From the tone, the writer is not young either,” said Zhang Dou.
“Where was it sent from?” Fang Caodi asked Zhang Dou.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask someone online to help me find out.”
When Lao Chen saw that it might be Little Xi, he was so overcome with emotion that he had to sit down and hold back his tears.
“Let me tell you about those twenty-eight days,” said Fang Caodi as he handed Lao Chen another bottle of beer and sat down in front of him. He took a few deep breaths, like an athlete warming up before a race.
“That year, just before the Spring Festival, I took a trip to Macau, and on the way back I stayed in Zhongshan in Guangdong for a change of scene. Zhongshan was once a very prosperous area, but people from Hong Kong and
