The Fat Years

experience a pleasing sense of pride; then he stood up and staggered over to the bathroom. Gao Shengchan took immediate advantage of his absence to phone Li Tiejun and tell him to make an appointment as soon as possible with County Head Yang.

Fang Caodi knew that Jiaozuo was an important producer of Chinese medicines such as foxglove (Rehmannia glutinosa), Doscorea opposita yams, Achyranthes bidentata root, and chrysanthemums, so he had already planned to buy some supplies, to cure Zhang Dou’s internal injuries and Miaomiao’s strange sort of idiocy. He got up at four thirty, completed his qigong exercises, and went out before dawn without disturbing Lao Chen’s sleep.

After their long drive the day before, Lao Chen was extremely tired, but he didn’t sleep well all the same. He got up at six and had breakfast in the hotel restaurant, but he had to wait until nine before Fang Caodi finally arrived, carrying a big backpack full of herbal medicines. At that point, Lao Chen looked quite annoyed. The two of them left hurriedly and set out for the Warm Springs township.

When they reached the center of the provincial city, Fang Caodi asked a taxi driver if he knew if there was a Christian church called the Grain Fallen on the Ground in Wen County. The taxi driver said it was only a short distance away and told Fang Caodi to follow him and he would take them right to the front door free of charge.

“Isn’t it an underground church?” asked Lao Chen. “How come everybody knows the address and there are Christian spring couplets openly displayed on the front gate?”

“The Henan people have not offended anybody,” said Fang Caodi, “but everybody criticizes them. Look how generous this driver is.”

Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were in the yard preparing to leave for their meeting with County Head Yang.

“Our fellowship has a thousand members in the Wen County area alone,” said Li Tiejun proudly. “How could the county head dare refuse to see us?”

Gao Shengchan kept reminding Li Tiejun that when they met with the county head to leave the talking to him. He felt confident that he could persuade Yang to solve the Zhang Family Village land-rights encroachment, so he asked Li Tiejun not to interfere.

As they were thinking and talking, the four men met at the front gate.

“Morning, friends!” Fang Caodi spoke up, afraid that Lao Chen’s Taiwanese accent might give rise to suspicion. “Sorry to trouble you, but is this the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground?”

“That’s right,” Li Tiejun answered somewhat warily. “Who are you looking for?”

“We’re looking for a woman called the grain does not die,” said Fang Caodi. “Her real name is… er, what is it?”

“Wei Xihong, Little Xi,” Lao Chen said.

“Do you know her?” asked Fang Caodi.

“Wei Xihong, Wei Xihong.” Li Tiejun didn’t want to lie, so he just repeated the name. “Little Xi, Little Xi…”

“She’s from Beijing,” offered Fang Caodi.

“From Beijing,” Li Tiejun went on repeating as though he was thinking about it, “from Beijing, come to Henan from Beijing…”

“Who’s in charge here?” asked Fang Caodi impatiently.

“God is in charge here,” said Li Tiejun.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Fang Caodi.

“Forget it, let’s go,” said Lao Chen, pulling Fang Caodi away.

Li Tiejun turned around, closed the front gate very purposefully, and walked off with Gao Shengchan toward the township. The shepherd has a responsibility to protect his sheep, he thought. “Those two,” he said to Gao Shengchan, “might be Public Security informers, so I didn’t want to tell them anything, but I didn’t lie either.”

Gao Shengchan had not said a word, but he had a different opinion of Chen and Fang. He knew where Little Xi was, and he didn’t want to help them find her. He knew that they would come back, and he felt a little uneasy about his refusal to talk to them. He had to handle things in the order of their importance, and the most important of important things he had to concentrate on now was to prevent his fellowship from being drawn into a protest.

If Lao Chen had not received Zhang Dou’s text message he would not have known for certain that Little Xi was there and he might have had his confidence shaken by this encounter. Now that they had located the church, he knew for certain that Little Xi was there somewhere. Those two fellows were simply unwilling to tell them the truth. He told Fang Caodi to stay there at the church and watch for Little Xi to come out while he himself returned to the township center, found an Internet cafe, and tried to communicate with maizibusi online.

Lao Chen and Fang Caodi didn’t know that Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were fully aware that Little Xi was at that very moment inside the church attending a Bible-reading class. She would not leave the church that day, but would eat lunch there and in the afternoon she would go on the Internet and surf the virtual world, or perhaps use her maizibusi web name to write a blog on the peasants’ rights defense movement. She might even receive an answering post accusing her of being a sonovabitch who turned the truth upside down. Dinner in the village at five p.m., participation in the fellowship witness meeting at six-thirty, and at eight a discussion with the most enthusiastic brothers and sisters of the plans for the final meeting on the Zhang Family Village land-rights protest. Little Xi felt that her life was richly rewarding.

The population of the Warm Springs township was less than a hundred thousand, but there were quite a few Internet cafes. As Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun were going into the county head’s office in the county government building on Yellow River Road, Lao Chen was entering an Internet cafe that had just opened for business. He was extremely excited when he found maizibusi’s blog and comments. Little Xi was so far away and yet so close, but four hours passed before Lao Chen posted his first comment.

At first he thought he would play it cool, so he wrote a post saying that he was traveling with a friend in Henan and visiting Jiaozuo to buy Chinese medicines. He disingenuously asked her if she was still in Beijing and said he’d like to meet up with her. He probably thought that she would respond to this by saying what a coincidence that she was also in Jiaozuo, and why didn’t he meet her for dinner at the Yiwan Hotel? Fortunately he didn’t send this message. Who was he going to fool? It was too ridiculous.

So he wrote a different message, apologizing for when Wen Lan had suddenly appeared, and saying he hoped he could see Little Xi. To such a message, however, she would probably just respond that it was no big deal, no need to apologize, never mind, see you sometime when we have the time. He still would not get to see her-given her assumptions about his relationship with Wen Lan, she probably would not want to be alone with Lao Chen again.

He would have to tell her the honest truth-that he had come to Jiaozuo in Wen County deliberately to see her… that he wanted to see her because he wanted to be with her. He decided it was time to declare his love. If he could do so openly, everything else could be talked through in more detail later. Some twenty years earlier, he had fallen in love with Wen Lan and she had hurt him badly. For many years after that, he didn’t dare have any feelings for anyone else. To open his heart now to Little Xi would certainly take a great deal of courage. Lao Chen sat there blankly for two hours before he finally wrote a nearly five-thousand-word post titled “A letter to maizibusi from someone who is not a stranger,” in which he poured out his thoughts and feelings in fast-flowing prose.

The first line of Chen’s letter was: “When you open this letter, I will be at the Modern Fuxi Internet Cafe on Yellow River Road in Warm Springs township, Wen County, Jiaozuo City…” Next he told her that after he’d met her at the Five Flavors restaurant in Wudaokou in the 1990s, he had always loved her. He’d never expressed himself at the time because she had so many male friends around her all the time and then later she had an English boyfriend. Still later, because he’d been hurt so badly he was afraid to ever try to have another serious relationship. Lao Chen described how he and Wen Lan had met, become engaged, how she’d dumped him, and how, twenty years later, he ran into her by chance as a French crystal chandelier.

Most importantly, he told her how very recently he had lost his heart to another woman whom he had not seen in a long time, how he had learned to get in touch with her, how he had waited for her reply, how they had met again, how he had lost contact with her again because of Ms. Wen’s barging in, how he had looked her up on the