Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [87]
When Lao Chen introduced them, they saw at once that they were indeed like-minded. They then seriously attempted to analyze why, when everyone around them experienced an ineffable feeling of happiness and a mild form of euphoria, they always remained clearheaded and aware. Fang Caodi said the American Food and Drug Administration had issued a warning in 2009 that some common medicines given to treat asthma, such as Montelukast, Zafirlukast, and Zileuton, could cause depression, anxiety, insomnia, and even suicidal tendencies. Maybe the asthma medicines prescribed in China had the same side effects.
Little Xi, however, said that this was pretty strange, because the antidepressant medicines she took should have had the opposite effect. These medicines stimulated the brain to secrete more monoamines like serotonin and norepinephrine, which caused people to become excited. So people like her on antidepressants should not have been able so easily to notice that other people were high. She had read a report stating that mood-altering antidepressants had already surpassed blood-pressure medicines as the most commonly used prescription drugs in America. When over-the-counter drugs were also considered, antidepressants were now the number-one most-used drugs in America. Many Americans who were not really suffering from clinical depression, but who didn’t feel good, whose spirits were low, or who were unhappy in their work, resorted to some kind of antidepressant. Little Xi wondered if perhaps many Chinese people were also taking antidepressants on their own initiative and feeling high all day.
Fang Caodi corrected her by reminding her that no matter how prevalent antidepressants were in China, there was no way that everyone was taking them. The phenomenon they needed to explain was why almost the entire nation was experiencing a feeling of a high, while clearheaded and sober people were so few.
During the entire trip from Henan to Beijing, the two of them exchanged stories of the things they had experienced during the past two years. Lao Chen could only listen until Fang Caodi drove his dust-covered Cherokee into the village where Zhang Dou and Miaomiao lived.
When Zhang Dou heard Little Xi’s voice he thought it sounded familiar. Little Xi also felt that she had seen Zhang Dou before, but could not quite remember where.
That night, Zhang Dou and Miaomiao put up a tent in their yard and gave their bedroom to Little Xi, while Fang Caodi put up a folding cot in his room for Lao Chen to sleep on.
Little Xi had already said she wanted to be with Lao Chen, but she needed a little time to adjust, a hint that she didn’t want to move in and live with him straightaway. Fang Caodi said Little Xi could stay in Miaomiao’s room for the time being, and when the weather was a little cooler, he and Zhang Dou could build on another room for her.
Lao Chen speculated that if for the moment Little Xi didn’t want to move in with him, that didn’t mean she wanted to live for a long time in the countryside. He didn’t, however, push her to decide straightaway; he thought that by staying for a while with Miaomiao and Zhang Dou and having Fang Caodi to talk to, she would avoid the prying eyes of the government, and this was not a bad idea at all.
It was very difficult for an outsider like Lao Chen to anticipate what sort of a powerful fighting spirit might be generated when people like Fang Caodi and Little Xi, who had been without a comrade to share her Chinese-style idealism for such a long time, came together. Not to mention with a strong young man like Zhang Dou as their ally.
After a detailed discussion with Fang Caodi and Zhang Dou, Little Xi gradually began to regain her memory of the first day of that lost month. It was on the eighth day of the first lunar month, after the Spring Festival holiday had ended and people started to return to work, that the television, papers, and Internet reports all carried the same news: the global economy had entered