Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [126]
Little Xi and Fang Caodi sat there expressionless and depressed. He Dongsheng looked victorious. Lao Chen sat there staring blankly at nothing. After a long while he regained his composure and saw that it was already growing light outside.
“Brother Dongsheng, let me remind you again that we have all made a ‘live or die together’ pact. No one is going to reveal anything that was said here last night. That way we can continue living our ordinary lives and you can continue living your official-promotion-and-money-spinning life. You think it over carefully. People, if there’s nothing else, I’ll let Mr. He go home.”
The others remained silent, so Lao Chen gently addressed their captive. “You can go now.”
He Dongsheng hesitated for a moment, rose, felt his arms up and down, and walked slowly to the door. Then he turned around and said by way of justification, “You think I care about official promotion and making money? I do what I do for the sake of the nation and the people.”
They all looked at him expressionlessly.
“Believe it or not, as you wish,” added He Dongsheng serenely, and then he walked out the door. A few moments later, they heard his SUV drive away.
Lao Chen, Little Xi, and Fang Caodi sat there in silence.
They walked slowly outside into the dawn light.
“I’d better go,” said Fang Caodi.
“Fine,” said Lao Chen.
“Can I give you a lift into town?” asked Fang Caodi.
“No, thanks,” said Lao Chen. “It’s light now. Little Xi and I will go and catch a bus. You’d better get going.”
Fang Caodi gave each one of them a hug, said his good-byes, climbed into his Jeep Cherokee, and drove off.
“Master Chen,” asked Zhang Dou, “are we going to be in any trouble?”
“I guess it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” said Lao Chen.
Zhang Dou nodded.
“Take good care of Miaomiao,” said Little Xi.
The three of them hugged for a long time and said good-bye.
“I have some friends on the Yunnan border,” Lao Chen said to Little Xi, “who have never had that small-small high feeling. Shall we go and visit them?”
“If it’s no trouble,” Little Xi answered after a moment’s thought, “I’d like to bring my mother, too.”
“No trouble at all,” said Lao Chen with a smile.
The eastern sky was bright, and the two of them shaded their eyes as they walked arm in arm into the harsh light of day.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The Fat Years is a unique combination of a mystery novel with a realistic exposé of the political, economic, and social system of China as it is today, and will be for the foreseeable future.
The novel posits a mystery while at the same time offering a social and political critique of the nation in which the mystery takes place. We don’t learn how the mystery came about or why until very near the end. In the meantime, there are several related questions: what happened during a spell of exactly twenty-eight days in the spring of 2011 when the government carried out one of the Chinese Communist Party’s periodic violent crackdowns? Why are most Chinese people unable to remember the violence and the economic panic of this crackdown? Or, in fact, any of the other even more violent episodes in the sixty-plus-year history of Chinese Communist Party rule?
Some of the story may initially seem to follow a familiar theme: two people suddenly meet again, some twenty years after a period when they were spending a great deal of time together, which for them was in the liberal days of the mid- to late 1980s. At that time the male protagonist, Lao Chen, had been attracted to Little Xi, but nothing ever really happened between them. When he meets her again, he is once more intrigued by her, but she doesn’t trust anyone who trusts the party-state regime. Chen’s pursuit of Little Xi leads us through both the very significant underground Christian movement and a land-rights protection campaign that demonstrates the flexibility of local Party officials.
The realistic exposé, with only one or two exaggerations, reveals the Chinese Communist party-state control system, and the Chinese Communist Party’s plans