The Fat Years

I don’t feel like going home right away, so I catch a taxi to the Swire Village in Sanlitun and go to Starbucks. Ever since the Wantwant China Group acquired Starbucks, many Chinese drinks have gone global. Take this great- tasting Lychee Black Dragon Latte I’m drinking now. I’ve heard that Wantwant Starbucks together with a Chinese investment consortium called EAL Friendship Investments (EAL for Europe, Africa, and Latin America) have opened outlets in several Islamic cities in the Middle East and Africa, including Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, Khartoum, and Dar es Salaam. This is one big new global market guaranteeing that anywhere the Chinese live in the world there will be a Starbucks. In business never forget culture-a wonderful expression of China’s soft power.

Coming here was the right thing. I feel better and that familiar feeling of happiness comes flooding back. Look how busy the mall is. The young people look great, and there are so many tourists and visitors from abroad-what an international city. And everybody’s shopping-stimulating domestic demand and contributing to society.

I remember that a couple of months ago, a friend of mine studying rural culture at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences asked me a favor. Her niece from Lanzhou was in Beijing for her winter vacation and staying with her. When she asked her niece where she fancied going, she said she wanted to go to Y-3 to buy some clothes. My friend hadn’t a clue what Y-3 was, so she asked me. She’s such a bookworm. It didn’t even occur to her to look it up online. Y-3 is a new clothing brand started as a cooperative venture between Adidas and Japan’s celebrated Yohji Yamamoto. “Y” stands for Yohji and “3” is probably for the three leaves of the Adidas trefoil logo. The Y-3 brand is really hot here. In fact, they say the biggest Y-3 market in the world is in China, and its flagship department store is right in front of me now, opposite the Swire Village Wantwant Starbucks.

When they opened just before the 2008 Olympics, they occupied only about one-third of the fourth floor of the five-story Adidas outlet. Now one whole floor belongs to Y-3. Of course Adidas also expanded its Swire Village area by taking over the floors once occupied by Nike. This was all due to the merger and reorganization of the local brand Li Ning with Adidas, but the thanks should go to the Chinese government’s new policies. Every brand that wants to enter the Chinese market has to have at least 25 percent Chinese-owned capital; with 50 percent or more, they can receive even more favorable terms. If they want to be listed in Shanghai, they have to meet extra requirements, I can’t remember exactly what. Any foreign brand that does not meet these conditions has to wait for the Ministry of Commerce to grant it special permission; if it doesn’t receive special permission, then it has to remove itself from China’s 1.35-billion-person market.

I’ve lived over half my life in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and I always used to believe that for any place to develop it had to rely on exports. The population had to depend on living frugally and getting rich through thrift in order to fill the first bucket of gold. But now I finally realize how important domestic demand and consumption are. If the Chinese are willing to spend money, they may not be able to save the world, but at least they can improve their own situation.

I’m not blindly praising China. I know China has many problems. But just think about this. There was the 2008 financial tsunami, when the developed capitalist countries, led by the United States, began to self-destruct. They enjoyed only a couple of years of slight recovery before they fell into stagflation again in 2011. This new crisis spread right across the globe, leaving no nation untouched. And now there’s no end in sight to this depression. Only China has been able to recover, surging forward while the others are on the decline. With domestic demand filling in for the dried-up export market, and state capital replacing evaporated foreign investments, the current forecast is that this year will be the third successive year of more than 15 percent growth. Not only has China changed the rules of the international economic game, we’ve also changed the nature of Western economics. Even more importantly, there has been no social upheaval; in fact, our society is even more harmonious now. You can’t help accepting that it’s all really incredible. Now I’m beginning to get emotional. It’s been happening to me a lot recently, being so easily moved that I actually start to weep.

Then I remember how depressed Little Xi looked and it makes me sad. Everybody around us is living the good life, while she’s becoming more and more despondent. I take a couple of deep breaths and fight back my tears. I used to be a very cool guy. Why am I so sentimental these days? I quickly fly out of Starbucks.

A future master

Ever since the All Sages Bookstore, the best one in Beijing for humanities and academic books, had been forced to close down, I hardly ever went to the Haidian area near Peking University’s east gate. But about a week after the Sanlian Reading Journal spring reception I found myself over there. Things had been fine all week, nothing unpleasant had happened. Every day I read the papers, surfed the net, and watched the TV news, and every day I congratulated myself on living in China. At first I didn’t think about Little Xi. I figured her attitude was out of tune with my life and my present state of mind. But then for a few nights in a row the last dream I had before waking up was about her, and it got me all aroused. I guess it had been too long since I’d been with anyone. I also dreamed about Fang Caodi, a repetitive dream of walking up and down in the same spot. I was sorry I hadn’t taken their cell phone numbers. But they hadn’t contacted me, either-I guessed I wasn’t that important to them. I didn’t know how to track down Fang Caodi and actually I didn’t really want to. But I still had an idea of how to find Little Xi and that’s what brought me to the east gate of Peking University.

In the 1980s, Little Xi and her mother were getihu, self-employed entrepreneurs. They ran a small restaurant called the Five Flavors in a one-story temporary shack outside some apartments near the university’s east gate. I called Little Xi’s mother Big Sister Song; her Guizhou-style goose was very popular, but the main attraction of the Five Flavors was that Little Xi and her mates hung around there all day. They chatted all day and all night, so that the restaurant became a sort of Haidian salon for foreigners and intellectuals. They went out of business for a few years, but after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 southern tour called for continued economic reforms, they found a place nearby and started up again. Whenever I came to Beijing, I would go over there to eat, but I hadn’t been there for years and didn’t even know if the restaurant was still there.

As soon as I reached the east gate, I knew I was out of luck. The surrounding apartments had all been torn down to build office towers. The Five Flavors was gone, the All Sages Bookstore was gone, too, so I left without a backward glance. I decided to walk over to the Photosynthesis Bookstore in the Wudaokou district and browse around. It was better than nothing, and I could kill some time having a cup of coffee. This used to be the rock-music center of Beijing’s Westside, with quite a few performance venues, but I hadn’t followed those guys in recent years and didn’t know if there were any venues left. On Chengfu Road just before Wudaokou, I passed by a restaurant and then felt like I’d missed something, so I stopped. Turning back, I saw that the front was extensively decorated. The place was simply called Five Flavors, with no indication whether it was a Chinese restaurant, a Western restaurant, or some kind of club. I decided to go in and investigate.

The inside was also elaborately decorated, though the tables and chairs were quite ordinary. There was a stage that could just about accommodate a four-man rock band. The front hall was empty, but I heard the sound of a loud, resonant, and very familiar voice ringing out from the back room. I drew the curtain and marched in. “Big Sister Song!” I called.

“Lao Chen!” Little Xi’s mother recognized me instantly.

“I came to see you, Big Sister Song.” It felt a little hypocritical saying that.

“It’s good to see you after all this time!”

She picked up a room-temperature bottle of Yanjing beer and led me into the front hall. “It’s so great to see you, Lao Chen, I’ve really missed you.”

I felt a little ashamed that I’d lived in Beijing for so many years and had never come to see the old lady. “I ran into Little Xi last week,” I said.

Big Sister Song suddenly lowered her voice. “You should talk to her, try to get her to stop all her antics.”

“I only ran into her briefly at a bookstore. Will she be coming over?”

“Definitely not.”

“But do you have her cell phone number so I can give her a call?”

“She doesn’t use a cell phone.” Big Sister Song kept her eye on the door as she spoke. “She’s on e-mail. She spends all her time arguing with people on the Internet, and she keeps changing her address. I wish you’d talk to her.”

I figured dropping her an e-mail would be better than not being able to reach her at all.

Big Sister Song stood up purposefully. “I’ll get you her new e-mail address.”