In the 1990s Taiwanese society still had a certain amount of respect for bestselling authors.
My luck held. After the millennium year of 2000, my books were published on the mainland one after another.
Then in 2004, Chen Shuibian was reelected as president. I received a retirement package from the
When I first arrived, I had a feeling of urgency and started to write very industriously. I wrote about Taiwan and Hong Kong culture for the mainland, and about Beijing and Shanghai for Taiwan and Hong Kong. The most important thing I did was to bring out my
At that point there was only one thing that I wanted to do, write my
Since then, I have not written a single word.
I have to confess that I don’t have to worry about meeting my living expenses. Western philosophers say that happiness consists in being moderately famous and moderately well-off, but not too famous and not too well-off. I don’t depend on royalties to get by; they don’t amount to much, anyway. The thing is, back in the early 1990s, when I was still working in Hong Kong and planning to get married, I bought a ninety-square-meter apartment on Hong Kong island, in Taikoo Shin. After my girlfriend went to Germany and married a German, I handed the apartment over to an estate agent to rent out for me and returned to Taiwan. Every year after that when we negotiated a new rental agreement, both the rent and the value of the property had soared. When I sold it just before Hong Kong’s 1997 retrocession to China, it was worth almost ten times what I had paid for it. In all my working life I could never have made enough money to buy such an apartment at a later date. When the Asian financial meltdown hit, the Taiwanese dollar depreciated, but fortunately all my money was safely in Hong Kong dollars with the HSBC. In 2004, when I moved to Beijing, I bought three apartments in Happiness Village Number Two, just ahead of the government prohibition on foreigners, including people from Taiwan and Hong Kong, purchasing more than one residence. I lived in one apartment and rented out the other two. I converted all my money to Chinese renminbi and it appreciated in value. As the world economy continued to be hit by wave after wave of crises, only China continued to flourish, and my small earnings were enough to live on quite well.
I’ve worked very hard on my writing, but I have lost all inspiration. It disappeared exactly two years ago, just as official Chinese discourse announced that the global economy had entered a period of crisis while China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy had begun. From that time on, I began to see that everyone in Beijing, and everywhere in China, was living well. I felt so spiritually and materially satisfied that I began to experience an overwhelming feeling of good fortune such as I never had before.
An insomniac national leader
For more than a year, except for the New Year and other holidays, I’d been going to Jian Lin’s firm’s restaurant on the first Sunday of every month to have dinner, drink red wine, and watch old movies. Jian Lin is the owner of the Capital BOBO Properties Corporation. He is a member of the “old three classes”-the three secondary school classes of 1967, 1968, and 1969 that never graduated due to the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, when the college entrance examinations were reinstated, he went to university. He later became an official and often associated with artists and writers. Then he plunged into business in Hainan and somehow made it big in real estate, but he still has an air of culture about him and regards himself as “a scholar and a merchant.” He likes to discuss national affairs, and every year at Chinese New Year he writes a few traditional-style poems and sends them off to his friends and customers.
Jian Lin is a workaholic, but two years ago he started a new custom. He began to have dinner with his friends and family and afterward show an old movie-on the first Sunday of every month. At first his movie evenings were very popular, but gradually his relatives cried off, and then his friends wanted to choose the films they liked before they would show up. By the start of winter, Jian Lin and I were often the only ones there.
After the first time a friend took me along, I became a regular. I had a lot of spare time, I lived fairly nearby and I loved to watch those post-1949 Chinese films. I hadn’t got to see them in Hong Kong and Taiwan, so it was a new experience for me.
I was the only one who never missed a screening. Jian and I didn’t have any connections on any other level-I didn’t want anything from him and, because I wasn’t especially important, he didn’t have to be on his guard with me; I was the best sort of person for him to have a friendly social relationship with. In the winter, when there was just the two of us, Jian would bring out a bottle of red wine-always the finest-vintage ’82, ’85, or ’89 Bordeaux. Sometimes we’d go through two bottles in one evening. The Taiwanese had started drinking high-quality red wines fifteen years before the mainlanders got in on the act, so I could join him in appreciating his wines, and I would willingly listen to him showing off the enological knowledge he had picked up in books. He had found an ideal wine- drinking partner. But whenever a crowd turned up, I noticed he was pretty parsimonious-for them, he brought out a few bottles of only ordinary vintage. This, to me, indicated our greater friendship.
The only thing that concerned me was that I couldn’t pay him back. That made me feel like a freeloading literary type. Jian Lin always served Bordeaux, never Burgundy. After looking up Burgundy on the net, I told him about it; he seemed curious and wanted to know more. I hit on a plan. When I want back to Taiwan for the Lunar New Year, I looked up my secondary school classmate Ah Yuan.
Ah Yuan is the largest collector of Burgundy in Taiwan. When the global economy hit the skids, Ah Yuan’s wealth shrunk, but his Burgundy collection was still intact. I had never asked Ah Yuan for anything before, but this time I asked him to give me two bottles of good Burgundy. He gladly told me to take a few more bottles, but I declined because of customs duties. I took just two bottles, one white wine and one red.
I sent Jian Lin a short message asking him what was showing the following Sunday. I told him I was bringing a Batard-Montrachet 1989 and a Romanee-Conti 1999.
When I took the two bottles over to the restaurant, there weren’t any other guests, just me and Jian Lin. He carefully examined them, exclaiming, “Great wine, great wine… Let’s open it and let it breathe.”
“What’s on tonight?” I asked while he gently poured the red wine into a crystal decanter.
It was the 1964 film
“Are you kidding? If I’d seen it, Chiang Kai-shek would have had me shot.”
“Those were good times, 1964,” Jian Lin said. “The Three Years Natural Disaster was over, people’s living conditions were beginning to recover, and the Cultural Revolution had not yet started. But in 1959 Old Mao was unhappy. He had nothing to do after resigning his post as National Chairman, so he put out the slogan ‘Never forget the class struggle.’ And this film responded to his call to remind the masses never to forget that there were still class enemies concealed among the people. It was advance notice of the coming Four Cleanups Movement to cleanse politics, the economy, Party organization, and ideology. It was also a prelude to the Cultural Revolution.”
“I’ve invited my cousin to watch the film and taste your wine,” Jian later said as we were eating.
I didn’t remember ever meeting his cousin and I wasn’t particularly happy about sharing my expensive wine with someone I didn’t know.
Just then a rather stern and pale-faced man with sparse hair came in and greeted Jian Lin as “Elder Brother.”
“This is my cousin, Dongsheng. This is my good friend from Taiwan, Lao Chen.”
“He Dongsheng, we’ve met before,” I said as we shook hands. “It was at the Macao session of the Prosperous China Conference in 1992; you were the representative from Fudan University.”
“Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng said softly.
Jian Lin looked puzzled. “Do you two know each other?”
“Yes, yes,” He Dongsheng repeated.
