Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [91]
The film they saw that night was Setting Sun Street from 1981, and the wine they drank was more of the 1989 Château Lafite. Jian Lin had instructed a broker to buy five cases of this at auction, so, for the next few months to come, they would probably be drinking this same vintage. Of course, Lao Chen could hardly complain about drinking 1989 Château Lafite every month.
The film had been shot in a district around the Buddhist Setting Sun Temple on Liang Guang Road on the edge of Beijing’s Second Ring Road. The film depicted the lives of a number of ordinary people at the start of the Reform and Opening era, and from it you could see the new market-economy model. One of the characters depicted was a conman pretending to be from Hong Kong, who wore a showy white suit, spoke a fake Cantonese, bragged, and extorted money and sex. Young Chen Peisi played an unemployed youth, euphemistically called “a youth waiting for work,” who raised pigeons and whose favorite phrase was “Byebye, all!”
When the film had finished, He Dongsheng recited a poem by the Yuan dynasty poet Ma Zhiyuan:
“Look at
the ants crawling round and round marshaling their troops,
the bees roiling in confused chaos brewing their honey,
and hordes of buzzing flies fighting over the blood.”
Then he went on: “The market economy can spur on people’s initiative and enthusiasm, but sometimes it looks chaotic, like it isn’t working. The key thing is to have a firm grasp of its regular rhythms—the government should not manage anything, but it has to manage everything. It taxed the mental capacity of two generations, with us going back and forth and round and round, working ourselves to death—even now I break out in a cold sweat dreaming about it at night.”
Lao Chen almost laughed out loud. He was thinking that He Dongsheng would not even have gone to bed at midnight and, even if he did, he would have insomnia. How could he dream back to an earlier time? After that brief reverie, Lao Chen pretended to listen to He Dongsheng’s long-winded lecture about the many political confrontations that had occurred during the thirty-plus years of Reform and Opening. Lao Chen was really thinking about Little Xi, whom he had not seen for a mere two days.
At the end of his speech, He Dongsheng said, “There will always be flies, but we can’t stop eating just because there are flies around.” Then he went quiet, and the three of them just drank their wine in silence as usual until midnight.
He Dongsheng went to the toilet and then asked Lao Chen if he wanted a lift home. Lao Chen was afraid that He Dongsheng would want to cruise the streets again and keep him up too late, so he politely declined.
He Dongsheng left and Lao Chen stayed behind. Jian Lin told him he was going to London to attend a wine auction and to buy himself a few cases of Burgundy. Lao Chen was happy to see that Jian Lin was over Wen Lan. When he took his leave, Jian Lin said “Byebye, all!” in the manner of the film actor Chen Peisi.
It was an early summer evening, and Lao Chen was feeling particularly good—his feeling of happiness was back again. As he started to walk home he thought to himself that before he went back to Miaomiao’s house, he had to remember to pack up and take along his big bag of cholesterol-lowering oatmeal. He came out of Jian Lin’s apartment complex, turned a corner, and had just reached the street, when he was startled by a big black SUV pulling up next to him. He thought he recognized He Dongsheng’s car, but he noticed that it was Fang Caodi driving. Little Xi and Zhang Dou were in the backseat, and the three of them were shouting at him to get in.
“Hurry!” they yelled.
“Whose car is this?” Lao Chen asked as he opened the passenger door.
“Just get in,” they said.
Lao Chen hadn’t fully got his mind around what was going on before he was already in the car and it was taking off down