Country Driving [188]
“All I’m asking for is two months,” Master Luo said. “You owe me three.”
“C-c-c-can’t do it.”
“And all I want is to go for four days. Four days is enough.”
“It’s not p-p-possible. We might get new business any time.”
With that, Boss Wang left the room, and Master Luo grinned at me. I had learned to be careful during this period—I watched myself around Master Luo. Not long ago, I had invited him to dinner at a restaurant on Suisong Road, where we drank a couple of beers and talked for two hours. The next day Boss Wang was full of questions for me: Where did you go with Master Luo last night? Why were you gone so long? And why are you always so curious about the factory? In other parts of China, during other writing projects, I occasionally had to reassure people that my stories wouldn’t cause them political problems. But entrepreneurs in southern Zhejiang didn’t worry about things like that. Their only fear involved business: they worried that I might be an undercover competitor hoping to start a bra ring factory of my own. After noticing Boss Wang’s nervousness, I showed him a copy of one of my books, and I printed out published stories from the Internet. I told him the truth—I had no interest in poaching Master Luo, and I liked writing so much that I wouldn’t give it up for all the bra rings in Zhejiang.
In the factory, the negotiations continued all the way until eleven o’clock in the morning of July 27, 2006, which was when Master Luo learned that his son had been born. He received the news on his cell phone, via text message from a relative. The baby had been delivered by C-section; the mother was expected to remain in the hospital for two or three days. And all at once the factory conversation made progress. Boss Wang agreed to grant leave, and he paid one month’s back salary. They still owed two months’ wages, an amount that they calculated would be adequate to ensure Master Luo’s return. He immediately went out and bought a train ticket to Hubei. He was scheduled to leave in the middle of the night, and if there weren’t any delays he’d meet his son before the baby was three days old.
That evening, before Master Luo’s departure, I took him to a celebration dinner in downtown Lishui. We rode in my rented Santana, and Master Luo commented that it was the first time he’d left the development zone in three months. For dinner he chose a Sichuanese restaurant, where we ate spicy eel and Chongqing chicken and mapo bean curd. It wasn’t nearly as elegant as the places he recalled from Chaonan days—the Golden Dragon, the Golden Beautiful Garden—but Master Luo was pleased.
“I wish I were still in Guangdong,” he said. “If I were, I’d buy a lottery ticket, because this is a lucky day. In Guangdong they sell the Hong Kong lottery tickets, but you can’t buy them here.”
I asked him how he would handle the planned-birth officials. When migrants violate the policy, they often have children away from their place of registration, but Master Luo’s child had been born in his hometown. He had told me his older son was there, too, and now he paused for a moment, thinking about my question. Finally he said, “It won’t be a problem.”
“Will you have to pay a fine?”
“It won’t be a problem,” he said again. “It’s already been handled.”
He changed the subject and raised his glass; we drank to the health of his newborn son. Master Luo beamed and commented once more that he wished he could buy a Hong Kong lottery ticket. He was owed serious money; he worked at a factory on the verge of bankruptcy; he had just missed the birth of his son. But from his perspective, on that summer evening, he was the luckiest man in all of Lishui.
III
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR I HAD TRAVELED REGULARLY to southern Zhejiang, until the place started to feel like another home. I enjoyed driving the new expressway, gazing out at the familiar scenery along the Ou River, and I always stopped to see the same places, the same people. In Lishui they built a new hotel called the Modern Square, and I negotiated a