The Fat Years by Koonchung Chan

Author:Koonchung Chan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385534352
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-10T10:00:00+00:00

“Is that her?” asked Fang Caodi.

“It certainly sounds like her,” said Lao Chen.

“From her tone, she’s one of us,” Fang said.

“From the tone, the writer is not young either,” said Zhang Dou.

“Where was it sent from?” Fang Caodi asked Zhang Dou.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask someone online to help me find out.”

When Lao Chen saw that it might be Little Xi, he was so overcome with emotion that he had to sit down and hold back his tears.

“Let me tell you about those twenty-eight days,” said Fang Caodi as he handed Lao Chen another bottle of beer and sat down in front of him. He took a few deep breaths, like an athlete warming up before a race.

“That year, just before the Spring Festival, I took a trip to Macau, and on the way back I stayed in Zhongshan in Guangdong for a change of scene. Zhongshan was once a very prosperous area, but people from Hong Kong and Macau were no longer coming to buy houses or holiday there, the factories had shut down, the peasant workers had to stay in the countryside rather than return to work in the city, and university graduates could not get jobs. I had been cooking for a baked-squab restaurant for only a few days when I was let go. I didn’t care, I could just enjoy myself. On the eighth day of the first lunar month, I noticed that the Southern Daily and all the other papers at a newsstand had the exact same headline: ‘World Economy Entering Period of Crisis.’

“Everybody was feeling worried, the atmosphere became extremely tense, and my landlady came looking for me. ‘Did you register at the police station before you moved in?’ she asked. ‘What kind of age are we living in?’ I asked. ‘Do outsiders have to register to live in Zhongshan?’ She retorted that if I didn’t register I couldn’t stay, and I said she was violating our contract. At this point the neighbors came over—the local authorities had told them to. They actually said that my landlady could pay for me to stay in a small inn, but I could no longer stay in their courtyard, and they made me hand over my room key immediately. I asked for my deposit back and told them I’d move out.”

“What point are you trying to make?” asked Lao Chen, growing impatient.

“Paranoia,” said Fang Caodi, “it was like that for at least a week. Everybody said China was going to fall into chaos, the machine of the state was nowhere to be seen, the situation was approaching anarchy. It was lucky the peasant workers had not come back to the city, or there would have been serious trouble. But I should never have left Zhongshan. If a city like Zhongshan was that tightly wound up, I should have known that the farther inland I went the worse it would be. As I made my way over the hills, I felt like a mouse crossing a busy street and I acted quite recklessly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.