Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [31]
He watched me intently, waiting for my answer, so I nodded.
He looked as excited as if he’d just hit the jackpot, then he glanced around like he was afraid someone was spying on us.
“I’ve finally found the answer,” he said. “It’s only those of us who are on asthma medication who are not high. This is our secret.”
I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
“Have the people around you all forgotten that month?” he asked.
“What month?”
“The month when the world economy went into crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began.”
I didn’t understand.
“Doesn’t everybody say that the two events—the world economy going into crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially starting—happened simultaneously with no time at all in between?” he asked. “But there was actually a one-month gap between those two events, or, more precisely, there were twenty-eight days, counting from the first working day after the spring holidays.”
He continued: “Do you find that when you talk about the whole country being in turmoil, the panic buying of food, the army entering the city, the Public Security forces cracking down, and the entire population receiving the bird flu vaccine, nobody remembers these things?” I guess he said all this because I was slow to respond.
I started thinking how true it was that nobody talked about these things anymore. It certainly was like they thought such things had never taken place, but I didn’t know if they really had forgotten.
“Then I guess you’ve forgotten, too,” he said as he sat down and hung his head. “I was wrong. It was so much wishful thinking.”
“Uncle,” I said, “I remember.”
“You remember?” His face lit up.
“Yes. I remember everything that happened that year.”
He still looked at me skeptically.
“I remember running around all over buying up pet food, and I remember being afraid to go outside during the security crackdown.”
“That’s wonderful, wonderful. Thank God I’ve finally found somebody who remembers!” he exclaimed. “What’s your name, little brother?”
“Zhang Dou.”
“Little brother Zhang Dou, I’m Fang Caodi, but you can call me Old Fang. From now on, you’re my good brother, a brother closer than a flesh-and-blood brother—because you’re the only brother of mine who remembers what happened that month. You absolutely must not forget the things you remember now. We’ve got to find that lost month.”
I would do whatever he said because he’d saved me and Miaomiao and our cats and dogs. I also said to myself, “You must never forget that you are a stray that Miaomiao took in, and Miaomiao treats you better than anybody else.”
Wei Guo’s autobiography
I’m Wei Guo, twenty-four years old.
I have not kept a diary for a long time, but today this diary has to be written down as a historical record.
Today, I made a great stride toward my life goal because today I became an official member of the SS Study Group. I feel so proud, because I am its youngest member. The SS Study Group brings together political and business circles. Its formal members include government officials of vice-ministerial rank, army officers of major-general rank, directors of major state-owned enterprises, chairmen of sovereign funds, and leaders of China’s top-100 private businesses, as well as a few professors and institutional heads from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and key universities. In fact, our network of connections extends all the way up to the Heavenly Court.
We are not ivory-tower bookworms. We study political and legal thought and scholarship concerning statecraft, and how to assist the state in governing the nation. Our motto is “perfect wisdom and courage”—we promote a martial spirit, heroism, and the robust qualities of manliness. We constitute a new generation of superior men with a sense of mission. In this age of mediocrity without any sense of honor, we courageously affirm that we are the genuine spiritual aristocracy of China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.
Of course, not all our members come from revolutionary families—some of our academic members are from commoner