Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [17]
By that time I was a celebrated journalist, a novelist, an expert on mainland China, and a self-improvement specialist. I was also a bestselling author, and this status gave real meaning to everything else I wrote. Most people had never read my books and had no idea what I’d written; they just knew that I was a bestselling author. 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 United Daily and moved to Beijing.
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 Comprehensive Cultural Guide to Beijing well before the Beijing Olympics. I was interviewed on a China Central TV books program, and thus you could say that I had received Chinese government approval.
At that point there was only one thing that I wanted to do, write my Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time—my literary masterpiece. In an age when there are no first-rate writers, I still wanted to prove that I was the best of all the second-rate writers. I refused all further requests to write journalism and started to concentrate solely on my novel.
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.