Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [68]
Lao Chen was left standing by himself, grudgingly, in the room. Miaomiao came in and put a plate of chocolate cookies on top of the desk for him and then abruptly left.
Lao Chen was feeling bored. He popped a cookie into his mouth, and picked up a few out-of-date periodicals and a couple of small local newspapers, which he flipped through at random. He really couldn’t see how Fang Caodi could discern the true facts of history in them. He went on to look at odd half-pages from editors of the Southern Weekly, Southern Metropolis Daily, and China Youth Daily, and incomplete issues of the Caijing Magazine, Southern Window, and Asia Weekly.
Lao Chen recalled that everything had been calm in Beijing during that period, there had been no big disturbances; if there had been even one, it would have left some impression on him. From the so-called evidence that Fang Caodi had collected, it would seem that there had been some sort of unrest in other areas of the country, but that was nothing unusual. China is so big that it’s not unusual for there to be some kind of turmoil somewhere every day, he thought. He never looked for that kind of news, and even if it did catch his eye, he would just skip over it. China is such a big country, there are so many things one doesn’t know about. These little bits and pieces of evidence collected by Fang Caodi don’t explain anything. In fact, to say that one whole month has gone missing isn’t strictly accurate, it’s just that people’s recollections of that month are different, he insisted to himself. Furthermore, if you deliberately looked for bad things happening in China, you could find plenty of examples. If you looked only for good things, you’d find a whole panorama of them. Big countries are all like that. Look at the United States or India. What’s so unusual about China? The most important thing today is that the world economy has fallen into a period of crisis everywhere, except for in China.
Little Xi, where are you? I hope you can put the past to rest, and return to the good life of the present. If you want to live with me, then we can live well together.
Perhaps it was due to the chocolate cookies, but Lao Chen began to feel better, and he became even more firmly resolved to locate Little Xi.
As the early-spring evening fell, the atmosphere of their outdoor candlelit dinner was very conducive to happiness. Fang Caodi cooked dish after dish and piled them on the table. He invited Lao Chen to taste them first and asked Zhang Dou to play his Spanish guitar for atmosphere. Nearby in the yard, Miaomiao began dancing with her dogs and cats.
Lao Chen had a few mouthfuls and thought each dish tasted pretty good. “What part of China are these dishes from?” he asked Fang Caodi.
“Chop suey vegetables,” said Old Fang. “Look closely, I’m using Sichuan peppers, Hunan black bean sauce, Guangdong shrimp sauce, Thai lemon grass, and our own coriander, sweet basil, lemon leaf, and leeks. They’re all organic. We just pick ’em and eat ’em. And we fertilize them with our own and the cats’ and dogs’ poo.”
Conversation over dinner was pleasant, and what was most surprising to Lao Chen was when Fang Caodi told him why he admired him so much. Lao Chen had always thought it was because his literary style impressed Old Fang, but Fang Caodi said it was because of something Lao Chen had once said, though he couldn’t remember it. In 1989, when Fang Caodi allowed himself to be interviewed, he insisted that he was genuinely clairvoyant. When he’d seen the military blockade on the road to the Summer Palace in 1971, he’d known the Mao Zedong–Lin Biao incident had happened. When he’d looked out of the window of Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions onto Nathan Road and seen a man jump to his death across the street, he’d known that something was about to go wrong in Hong Kong, and, sure enough, the Hang Seng Index collapsed from seventeen hundred