Authors: Aisling Juanjuan Shen
I tore a piece of paper out of the notebook on my desk and grabbed a pen.
Boss Zhou, it was my honor to have worked for you for the past two months. Now I have to leave. Please forgive me. I am really sorry.
I ran to my dorm and grabbed my handbag. I didn’t have time to take more than just my ID and phone book. Everything else—my clothes, shoes, toothbrush, bedding, and so forth—I left behind.
I waited in the shadows by the corner of the office building until the guard got up and stepped behind his booth to urinate. Then I reached in and took the key off the table and unlocked the small gate. I didn’t stop running until I reached the main road. I looked behind me, but I saw nothing but darkness. The iron gate of GrandKnit was already out of my sight and out of my life.
Late at night, I knocked at Manager Huang’s door. Sitting on his bed and catching my breath, I told him I was going to Xiamen to set up a new company with Boss Zhou’s biggest client.
“Did you run away from them? God, don’t you want your poor little life any more?” Manager Huang said as he drew all the curtains in his room.
He could see that I was ready to defy death. He sighed and sat down next to me. “I just don’t know how to deal with you.” He took out two thousand yuan.
“Go to Guangzhou airport and buy a ticket right now,” he urged me. “Leave as quickly as you can.”
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST,
I thought you would never show up,” Song yelled out in the capacious, marble-floored airport lobby, spreading his arms. “Welcome to Xiamen.”
His huge stomach looked like it was about to drop to the ground and break open like a watermelon. I moved my eyes away from it. There was a giant Dell billboard on the wall. In its glass frame I saw the reflection of my ashen, gloomy face.
Yes, you’ve made it, I told myself. I had climbed one step up the ladder. I controlled my own life once more. But I was filled with trepidation. All I knew of this beautiful seaside city was the tiger in front of me. I quickened my steps and walked past his extended arms. The bright and beautiful sunshine embraced me as soon as I stepped out of the revolving glass doors. In the distance, mushrooms of white cloud offset by the deep blue sky floated leisurely behind a row of mountains.
Song snapped his fingers, and immediately a new green Volkswagen taxi pulled up in front of us.
“Why Xiamen?” I asked Song from the back seat. “I thought you lived in another town.”
Song sat in the front passenger seat, his arm hanging out the window, his hand playing with the wind. “That’s where I live, but it’s better to trade in Xiamen. It’s one of the largest ports in China. Besides, it’s more discreet here. It’s too noisy in my town.”
“What do you mean by ‘discreet’?” I lifted my head. “You are going to formally register the new company and pay taxes, right? We should do this right. I don’t want to be involved in any more illegal business.”
“Of course,” he said flatly. “You don’t have to worry about those things. I just meant that too many people in my town were in the knitting business. They’ll get jealous, and I want to avoid trouble.”
I reminded myself to stay alert. As long as Xiao Yi and I were in charge of accounting and sales at the new company, which I was sure we would be since Song was illiterate, we would know whether the business was legal and how much our share of the profit should be.
We drove for forty minutes until we reached a hotel downtown.
“Come meet Old Two, my buddy from Shanghai. Since I’ll be spending the majority of my time in my town, he’ll be the manager here in the Xiamen office. He’ll do the accounting and deal with Customs. Be nice to him.” With a laugh, Song pointed to a short man in his forties who was standing in the middle of the hotel room and gazing at me with a smile, his arms crossed on top of his stomach.
Old Two looked like a typical canny man from Shanghai. Gravity had not been kind to him. One word immediately sprang to mind when I saw him:
droopy
. With his pale, flabby skin and baggy eyes, he looked like he was made of flour.
I couldn’t believe that Song had already found one of his own people to boss us. It seemed he had never taken me seriously about us being equal partners and he was planning to treat Xiao Yi and me as just translators, the same as at GrandKnit.
As soon as Song led me to my room, I closed the door and questioned him sternly. “What is this Old Two doing here? I hope you will still honor our deal. We are partners, not just boss and employees.”
“Relax. He’ll just pay the bills, cook and clean for you, and he’ll deal with customs. He is an old cunning fox, good at those kinds of things.” Explaining slowly with a false smile on his face, Song settled into a chair by the window.
He didn’t trust me at all, I realized. He wanted his own people to get the machines through Customs and keep Xiao Yi and me in the dark. No doubt he was worried that I would betray him, just as I had betrayed the Zhous. I had no plans to deceive him, though, and as long as he treated me fairly, I intended to be a faithful worker. All I had wanted was enough money for a stable life with enough food and clothing. I guessed that this was retribution—once you betray someone, no one will ever trust you again.
I bit my lip. I needed to swallow this bitter melon I had planted for myself. Even if I wasn’t going to be a full partner, I still deserved more money than the Zhous had paid me. “Where is the five thousand you promised you’d give me once I arrived?”
“Fuck you. All you care about is money. Don’t you care about me at all?” Song asked, exasperated.
“No,” I said. “There is
nothing
between you and me. From now on, things are strictly business.”
He walked toward me. “Come on. Wouldn’t it be better if you and I were lovers? We’d work well together.”
I cringed and backed away. Shoulders squared, I tried to appear as menacing as possible and declared emphatically, “I don’t want to sleep with you any more. And if you don’t give me the five thousand, I’ll leave
right now
.”
“All right, all right. I’ll stop bothering you, damn it. Relax. Here’s your five thousand. I am a man of my word.” He took a stack of money out of his leather pouch, threw it on the bed, and then stormed out the door, cursing loudly.
I gripped the five thousand yuan tightly in my hands and fell to the bed. I could feel my body shaking, but I couldn’t tell whether it was out of anger or excitement. For the first time in my life, I was holding a fortune in my hands, but strangely I didn’t feel like jumping up and down for joy as I had imagined doing thousands of times. Instead, I felt like crying, as though this stack of cash had been hidden deep among prickly bushes and I had had to crawl in slowly and push aside the brambles with my bare hands so that by the time I had fished it out, my skin was cut and bloodied.
The next day, we signed a one-year lease for a spacious three-bedroom apartment on the nineteenth floor of a residential and commercial building called the Huicheng Commercial Center. That afternoon, the first two things we moved into the living room were a fax machine and a Compaq computer we bought from the city’s electronics center.
At three in the afternoon—nine in the morning in Paris—I sat down at the desk and gazed at the fax machine nervously.
Fifteen minutes later, it started to squeak and slowly spit out a piece of paper. “Congratulations to the new China Knit Company!” I saw Jacques’s handwriting on the smooth surface of the fax paper. I relaxed.
Song was jubilant. “You are right. I shouldn’t have worried that they’d only sell machines to the Zhous. These foreign devils will do business with anyone as long as they can make money. Tell him that I’ll buy many more machines from him than the Zhous.”
I happily agreed and started writing. Turning to leave, Song cocked his head to Old Two. They were leaving together.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“Oh,” he said, “we’re going to the import-and-export agent. We also need to find a warehouse to store the machines once they are unloaded at the dock.”
“Wait up. I want to go with you.”
He waved me off. “No need. It is a men’s occasion, not good for a woman to be there.”
Old Two said, “Ah-Juan, I didn’t think you’d be so eager to walk around outside. I heard the Zhous were hiring assassins to get rid of you and Xiao Yi.” The door closed behind them. The red
Make a Fortune
banner attached to it swayed lightly.
I stopped writing and pondered my situation. I could feel fear slowly rising within me. I had just turned twenty-three. I wasn’t ready to die. I pressed my hands to the edge of the desk. Outside the windows, a dark cloud had just blocked the sun and the room was in shadow. A feeling of depression and regret took control of me. What a tricky situation I was in. My old boss was out to get me, and my new boss was trying to control me.
Eventually, the cloud moved away and the sky turned crystal blue. The air coming into the room smelled clean and sweet and tasted like the ocean. Cars were honking leisurely on the street below, and once in a while I heard the whistle of a traffic cop. Xiamen is just across the strait from Taiwan. It’s warm and breezy all year around. There is not a lot of traffic on its wide, clean streets lined with small palm trees. Most of the vehicles are red or green Volkswagens. People walk around in casual clothes and flip-flops, more relaxed than Cantonese. But they speak loudly and stiffly, as if they are trying to crack walnuts with their teeth as they talk. The sound of people shouting in the local dialect drifted to my ears, and I found that I couldn’t understand a single word. I remembered the hot summer day when I had arrived at the Guangzhou airport a year earlier, when I couldn’t understand a single word the Cantonesespeaking taxi driver said.
Yet I had survived, I thought, through LongJiang and through Amway. I still had problems, but now I was in a new city with five thousand yuan in my pocket. After everything else I’d been through, I knew I could get through this.
I grabbed the phone on the desk and called Xiao Yi. She was now working as a quality controller in a toy factory in a town near Long Jiang.
“Xiao Yi, please come here as soon as possible. I need you. The city is beautiful, and I got the five thousand from Song,” I said.
“Is everything set up? Customs, wire transfers?” She sounded very skeptical.
“Not yet, but we are working on it. Why don’t you come here and we can work out everything together?”
“No, I’m not coming now. I won’t give up my job here until you have brought in the first shipment of machines. I’m happy here. It’s a private company, but they’re much better than GrandKnit. They even have medical insurance. I need to be safe in life.” Her tone was so decisive that I could picture her shaking her head at the other end of the line.
I put down the phone, disappointed. I was alone, and I was nervous. I didn’t know how to protect myself from Song and Old Two. But I told myself to sweep aside the worries and keep going forward. I had gotten this far, and I was not going to turn back now.
That day, I went to the post office on the first floor of the building and wired two thousand yuan to Huang. I left the
note
to the recipient
page blank except for my signature at the bottom. Next to the post office was a beauty salon with a big garish sign flashing the words
Best in Xiamen
. I walked in, sat down on a chair, and told the young handsome barber in a suit that I wanted him to cut my hair very short, as short as possible.
“Jesus, are you a monk?” Song yelled unhappily at the sight of me, his eyebrows frowning. “I’ll fire you if you have your hair cut so short next time. A secretary can’t have inch-long hair like a man’s.”
“I am not your secretary, and it’ll grow back.” I glowered and stormed into my room.
The next day, we purchased $125,000 worth of KOKETT machines from Jacques. Song slowly scribbled his name down at the bottom of the purchase agreement Jacques had faxed over. A feeling of joy filled the room. Song put his arms behind his head, leaned back in his leather chair, and said loftily, “Now that you work for me, you can’t dress yourself like a country bumpkin any more. Go to this store in the LianHua district, and get yourself some decent clothes. Talk to the owner, Ah Mei. She’s my woman and will take care of you.”
He reached into his bag, took out some cash, and shoved it in my hands. “Here is seven thousand yuan. Go buy yourself a cell phone, the newest Ericsson model. Don’t tell Xiao Yi. It’s a bonus for you only.”
The Ericsson mobile phone was no bigger than my palm, and as I held it tightly in my hand and walked briskly in the enchanting afternoon sun, I felt like I had truly joined the ranks of the wealthy. In 1997, very few people could afford a mobile phone, especially the newest and smallest Ericsson model. It would have cost an ordinary person in China five or six months’ salary.
But as soon as I walked into Ah Mei’s store, my brief selfglorification was shattered by what greeted my eyes—rows of delicate lace bras, silk panties, and thongs displayed on wooden shelves and exquisite wool suits and pants hanging in open compartments as classical music flowed out of a central speaker system. Staring at my reflection in the shiny marble floor, I hoped nobody would notice my worn-out cotton blouse and linen skirt.
Ah Mei, a short, round thirtyish woman wearing heavy makeup, greeted me warmly. I realized that Song must have told her I’d be visiting. I chuckled nervously in response and then sat in a chair and watched her run around the store picking out things for me.
Following her instructions, I grabbed the pile of lingerie and clothes she had chosen and hurried into the fitting room. I shrugged off my clothes and looked at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t bear to look at my ordinary face and rough skin for more than a few seconds, and I quickly moved my eyes away. Staring at the pile of lace and silk on the chair, I was at a loss for what to do. I almost felt that the blossoming lace at the edges of the bras, as delicate and thin as butterfly wings, would bite me.
“Are you all right?” Ah Mei’s voice asked, and before I could reply, the door swung open and she was standing behind me.
“God! Are you still wearing your grandmother’s panties?” Bending down to where I had left my clothes on the floor, she exclaimed, “Look at this. It’s almost rotten.”
She picked up my bra with the tips of her polished nails and hastily threw it into the garbage can in the corner. I wrapped my arms over my chest and moved to the shadowy part of the fitting room, extremely embarrassed.
“Come here. Try this on. It’s called a push-up bra, the newest model. It makes your boobs look incredible. Every girl in the city has one of these.” She grabbed a bra from the pile and dangled it in front of me. I was too shy to take it from her, so she pulled my arms apart herself and looped the straps over my shoulders.
“God. Your skin is rough like a chicken’s. You need to go to a beauty salon. Look at mine, smooth like a baby’s. Touch it, touch it.” She chattered and scolded me interminably, all the while forcing me to try on different clothes. Occasionally she would grab my hand and make me rub the skin on her arm. I would giggle awkwardly in response.
An hour later, all my old clothes were in the garbage can, and, in addition to the new clothes I was wearing, Ah Mei threw in two suits, two skirts, and two bras.
“Here you go. Now you look like a city girl.” She handed me the bag containing the clothes.