Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [42]
One day in the early 1980s, “Mom” told Fang Lijun that she was getting too old to be a hippie anymore and she wanted to go back east and live with her daughter. So the two of them shut off the water and electricity, boarded up the windows, and took a train across the United States to Maryland, where they split up. Fang Lijun headed north to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. There he ended up as a cook in a self-service chop suey joint in Boston’s Chinatown. The boss liked him a lot, too, and he worked there for several years.
One day Fang Lijun suddenly decided to go to the Harvard-Yenching Library, and from then on he was hooked. He worked only in the evening at the restaurant, and in the daytime he jogged from Boston Chinatown to Cambridge to read the Chinese periodicals in the Harvard Library. That was when he started writing letters to the editor at Mingbao—that was me, Lao Chen.
In 1989, he really did return to the mainland, and in 1992, when Deng Xiaoping made his celebrated “southern tour” to promote economic development, Fang Lijun left China again—he always moved against the mainstream.
Back in America, Fang Lijun sent me a letter telling me that he was doing odd jobs in New York’s Chinatown. At the time I was back in Taiwan working for the United Daily and I heard that the China Times Weekly News had set up an editorial office in New York. I casually recommended Fang Lijun to them, and they actually brought him in to act as an editorial assistant there. In no time at all, they promoted him to assistant editor. Fang Lijun wrote and thanked me profusely, and I really did feel a special sense of accomplishment. I knew that Fang Lijun, as an experienced and knowledgeable jack-of-all-trades, was perfectly suited to being an editor for a news magazine.
The next time I received a letter from him, Fang Lijun was in Nigeria in West Africa. He later told me that he had always kept in touch with a Nigerian he’d met in the international guesthouse in Chunking Mansions, and he’d invited him to Africa. When Fang Lijun was young, he had always dreamed about going to friendly states like Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania and making a contribution to their development. So he went without the slightest hesitation. It turned out that his Nigerian friend wanted to trade with China. He asked him to be his partner. Fang Lijun thought of all those red, white, and blue fabric bags the Chinese use to carry goods and other things when traveling. They could buy them in China, ship them to Nigeria, and sell them all over West and Central Africa.
Those red, white, and blue cloth bags were a big hit with the Africans, and so Fang Lijun’s partner wanted them to set up their own factory and make the bags themselves in Lagos. After making money in the Nigeria–China trade, Fang Lijun visited Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania, but he didn’t want to end his days in Africa. He went back to live in China with a plan to set up a small Cantonese restaurant just outside Li Jiang City in Yunnan.
Luckily for him he was too slow. The restaurant plan came to nothing long before Li Jiang was devastated by the great earthquake of February 3, 1996. Fang Lijun then traveled all over western China. I remember he predicted that when China started to develop its tourist trade, too many people would come and ruin China’s scenic and historic spots.
He traveled for seven or eight years, visiting Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai,