The Selected Stories of Xu Zechen by Zechen Xu & Arrieta Fernando

Author:Zechen Xu & Arrieta Fernando
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Short Stories (single author)
Publisher: Bridge 21 Publications
Published: 2023-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

5

The next day Ziwu said that he didn’t want to go to the Old Summer Palace. Instead, he wanted to go buy a CD player. He had always had weird musical taste. He liked to listen to those weird ‘speaking songs’ that sound like someone’s talking in their sleep. As soon as he started humming one of those songs I felt at once that we belonged to two completely different generations, despite the fact that I was only five years older than him. And, sure enough, after buying the CD player he had to go buy some CDs. That was because he was young. I didn’t go with him buy the CDs. That was because I was old. There were times when I really did feel old, like at that moment, when I couldn’t decide on what to do. I didn’t want to be part of that protection money racket, that I was sure of. Even the idea was too damn ridiculous to me. But I also worried about the cost of moving somewhere else. I’d have to start over from scratch, right at the moment when Ziwu had just begun to taste what it is to make money. I wanted him to succeed, very much wanted that. I had promised my parents and my aunt that I’d see Ziwu to better and better days.

With Ziwu away, I spent the whole morning sitting in front of the TV. We had no cable. The landlord had said that, if we had cable, the rent would have to be even higher. So there were just a handful of channels to choose from. But I wasn’t really watching anything anyway. I just kept zapping through those few channels to while away the morning a little faster. Ziwu sent me a text message. He was out on the street, eating. I fixed myself a bowl of instant noodles. Before Ziwu had come to stay with me a bowl of instant noodles was more often than not my only meal of the day. It’s easy to make, so you can make it whenever you feel like it. But Ziwu didn’t like instant noodles, and so we just ate out a lot. After lunch I dozed off for a while, then decided to go out to take a look around. By the courtyard’s entrance I met Rusty pulling in a beat-up bicycle I had never seen before. I asked whether he had already finished working for the day. He said he hadn’t, he had come back home to get some hot tea. A short while later I was coming out of our shared toilet and saw him walking ahead of me with a large glass jug of tea in his hands. The bicycle had disappeared.

The entrance to Beijing’s Silicon Valley was eternally crowded. I searched all over for anyone wearing an inside-out jacket, but there wasn’t anyone in sight wearing a jacket that way. Thinking about it later, I realised that any gang must have many

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