Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [37]
Should I continue to help him? I wondered. Suddenly I became extremely curious. What was he like, this kid who took the same medication I did? I’ve had many bouts of this sort of curiosity in my life. You could say that I’ve traveled my whole life’s road on the basis of this sort of curiosity. So I decided to take care of the kid.
He was so big and heavy! I had a hell of a time dragging and lifting him into my car. Finally I got him in and took him to Peking University Third Hospital. I was afraid he would check out and leave the hospital, so I went to see him the next morning. He was still sound asleep. When he woke up in the afternoon, he asked me in a wheezy voice to buy some groceries and take them to his family in Huairou; he wasn’t even afraid that I’d disappear with his money. I decided to do what he asked. I’d wait to see the next card, just like in a poker game. By the third day I knew I’d been right. He remembers that month. We are the same, and I’ve finally proved that I’m not alone. Ha! He is Zhang Dou, and I made him my brother, closer than a flesh-and-blood brother.
In two years, he’s the only person I’ve found who is like me. Everybody else is different.
At first I thought all those other people just didn’t want to talk about the events of that month. Then later I realized that they recalled things wrongly, completely differently from the way I remembered them. Finally I came to the conclusion that in all their memories there were twenty-eight days missing. In order to verify this memory loss, I went to the library to look up the daily and weekly newspapers from that year, but the library had only online versions and it was no longer possible to read the printed versions. The online reports of those twenty-eight days were completely different from my memory of them: they held that the world economy had gone into crisis at the same time as the official start of China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy. The horrifying month that came between these two historical events had completely disappeared.
For a while I thought that even though the government had distorted the truth, at least the common people would remember what had happened, but later on I had to admit that it was a case of total collective amnesia.
Complete collective amnesia. I suspected that this amnesia was related to the nationwide bird flu inoculation that spring, but I could not confirm my suspicion.
I started to frequent Beijing’s secondhand bookstores looking for related reports, but all I could find were official government newspapers and mindless entertainment magazines. There were no publications that carried the truth.
I bought a Jeep Cherokee in Beijing and took off south on the G4 Beijing–Hong Kong–Macao highway to collect more evidence of that month. It was only in rather strange places, though, that I found a few snippets of corroborating evidence. For example, in a guesthouse at the foothills of Mount Huang, I found a complete issue of the financial magazine Caijing that reported on how the new round of great economic decline in early February of that year was affecting China; at Hengdian World Film Studios in Zhejiang, I saw part of an Asia Weekly magazine from Hong Kong that reported on how the people were hoarding food that year; in a squalid urban village near Wuhan University in Hubei, I picked up half of an old China Youth Daily, published by the Communist Youth League, in which the