Chapter 14

Chapter 15

A few days after we returned from Shenyang, the October holiday began. Zhang Xiaotong had to go to the provincial capital to give some sort of speech because of her reputation as a young writer, leaving me wandering around outside with nothing to do. As it happened, Yang Yuanzhe and Ge Jinqiu came looking for me. After thinking it over, I took them to the pool hall Guo Zhen frequented.

As soon as we walked in, a few regulars recognized me as the "expert" who had beaten Guo Zhen that day. Seeing the two people I had brought along, they assumed we were all at the same level. They never expected me to walk straight through the pool hall without stopping and lead Yang Yuanzhe and Ge Jinqiu into the video game room.

Just as I had expected, there were original IGS gambling machines here, a rarity anywhere in China in 1992, along with a dozen or so electronic mahjong machines. I bought a hundred yuan's worth of tokens, gave half to Yang and Ge, and sat down at a mahjong machine myself. It had probably been almost ten years since I had touched one of these.

One or two curious onlookers followed us over from the pool room and stood behind me to watch.

I still more or less remembered how to play electronic mahjong. In 1999, I had done some work related to electronic gambling, so I was familiar with these machines that only made money and never lost it. Usually, only two or three machines in an arcade would let players win money during a certain period on any given day, and there was no fixed pattern. After a few rounds, I could roughly tell what payout ratio each machine had been set to. That went for poker machines as well as mahjong machines.

The people watching were puzzled when I switched machines after only a few rounds. In their view, a mahjong machine would only start paying out after swallowing a certain number of points. This was their first time seeing someone scatter money around the way I did.

After switching machines six times, I finally found one I could win on. After I doggedly lost to the computer nearly ten times, it graciously gave me a "bleeding deal," a special bonus period in which the opening hand could produce a yakuman.

Now it was the people behind me who were astonished. They could not understand it. Could mahjong machines have patterns too?

After I won once with Big Three Dragons and once with Thirteen Orphans, a crowd had gathered behind me. Even without looking, I knew they all wore strange expressions.

At that moment, I heard someone behind me say, "You really can do everything."

I knew Guo Zhen had arrived without even turning around. After winning a "Tohoku Shinkansen" hand on a self-draw, I turned and smiled at him. "Nothing to do over the holiday, so I came to hang out with you."

Guo Zhen looked at the outrageous number of points on the screen. "You're good at this. Studied it before?"

I shook my head. "No. Too many people here. Let's not talk about it."

Guo Zhen understood immediately. The fewer people who knew the secrets of mahjong machines, the better. "All right. Those two over there your friends?"

I peered through the gaps between people's heads. Yang Yuanzhe seemed to have a crowd around him too. Judging by the sounds from the machine, he was playing Street Fighter II.

"Yeah, I brought them. They haven't caused any trouble here, have they?"

"No problem. You've got me." Guo Zhen sat down beside me. "You're not going to keep playing? You could get another big hand."

"No need," I said. "Call the owner over for me. I'll cash these out, and we can go see how they're doing."

The points on the mahjong machine came to over three hundred yuan. I asked Guo Zhen to return two hundred to the owner for me. "I'll keep my stake. Treat the rest as money I never won."

Holding the two hundred yuan, Guo Zhen looked at me for a long while, then nodded and did as I asked. When he returned, he told me, "The owner said you can play for free whenever you come from now on."

"It's only two hundred. Isn't that a bit much?"

As I spoke, Guo Zhen and I squeezed into the crowd around Yang Yuanzhe. Yang was completely focused on his match, and "53 WINS" stood out in the upper left corner of the screen. By my estimate, we had only been in the arcade a little over an hour. The guy apparently had not lost once.

"So you brought people here to challenge the place." Guo Zhen shook his head with a smile. "There are plenty of good players here. Your friend's really something."

I laughed. "Don't think he's the only good one. I should be a little better than him."

Guo Zhen watched Yang Yuanzhe use Guile's high-low pressure to score a perfect victory over his opponent, then shook his head. "I don't think anyone could be better than that."

I put in a token. "Watch this. These are advanced techniques."

In 1992, probably nobody knew what links or Combos were yet. Yang Yuanzhe had never played against me, and I caught him completely off guard. Beside us, Guo Zhen clicked his tongue in amazement at this way of playing. Little did he know that Chinese enthusiasts would only gradually master these techniques several years later. Right now, everyone was still at the stage of pressure-based play.

Yang Yuanzhe had been so absorbed in the game that he only realized it was me after he lost. "Well, look who's been hiding his talents."

"Oh, hardly. Just a few little tricks." I used a traditional character to finish off the computer in a few punches and kicks. "You're definitely better than me. You just haven't learned the theory."

Yang Yuanzhe watched me use links one after another with considerable envy. "So you can do that too! Let's go again!"

His aptitude for games was beyond anything I could match, and before long, I lost. Guo Zhen laughed beside us. "Not so good after all, huh? Looks like your friend's a little better."

I took the opportunity to introduce Yang Yuanzhe and Ge Jinqiu to Guo Zhen. Much as I had expected, these people would become powerful allies when I first got started.

Over lunch, watching everyone raise their glasses and chat happily, I felt happy too. It had been a long time since things had been like this. The days of the past were slowly being recovered.

Time passed quickly. Zhang Xiaotong returned from her speaking engagement, the holiday ended, and we went back to class. Just like that, 1992 was almost gone. In early December, I asked Zhang Xiaotong to work out the accounts. After deducting all the expenses for expansion, the three cake shops had earned more than I had expected that year-a full six million yuan. Sun Electronics had also stumbled its way through several campus network projects. After the payments to Wan Bochen and Liu Mingyao's share of the profits, it had still brought in over five million. It seemed I had underestimated the profits in emerging industries. But that also meant an era of competition and low margins was approaching. We had to prepare.

I asked Zhang Xiaotong to start considering selling the cake shops. Almost everything was done in secret. Before New Year's Day, she first gave each of the three branch managers a red envelope containing a hundred thousand yuan, then bought the rented premises at a high price. Afterward, she contacted Dong Qinghua and said she wanted to concentrate on her studies and hoped to sell the three cake shops. A slightly lower price was fine. By then, Dong Qinghua was deputy director of the cable television station, thanks in no small part to the advice Zhang Xiaotong and I had given him. Naturally, he agreed to help. I had Zhang Xiaotong hint that there would certainly be something in it for him once the shops sold.

Dong Qinghua proved capable and found a buyer within a few days. I knew of the man too. He was from Hong Kong, had a particular fondness for hotel investments, and had opened several hotels and entertainment complexes in Beiguan. But that had happened after 1996. I really had not expected him to have so much money already. I asked Zhang Xiaotong to first contact this wealthy man, Sui Yunfei, by phone and quote nine million yuan for the full transfer of all three shops, properties included. Without a second thought, Sui Yunfei began bargaining. Zhang Xiaotong left the matter hanging, while we went to class and read as usual, as though nothing were happening.

Zhang Xiaotong's classmates gradually learned that she had money and often found excuses to make her treat them. I advised her, "Don't stoop to those kids' level. If they ask you to treat them, go ahead. But if they ask for money, that's out of the question."

After nearly a month of back-and-forth negotiations, the three Snow Fate shops were sold to Sui Yunfei for 8.2 million yuan. Zhang Xiaotong was very calm when she announced it at home. Of course, she did not say exactly how much they had sold for. She only said she wanted to settle down and study for a while, and gave my eldest aunt and my uncle by marriage another red envelope of a hundred thousand yuan each.

Having money really did give a person's words a different weight. No one in the family dared voice the slightest objection to anything Zhang Xiaotong said. My youngest aunt and her husband were too embarrassed to ask their daughter how much she had earned in front of the relatives. They were simply delighted to hear that she planned to focus on studying. Following our original plan, Zhang Xiaotong showed her parents one-tenth of the funds she held, which was already enough to leave them speechless.

Zhang Xiaotong gave her parents five hundred thousand yuan to support their continued border trade business. It was not that we were stingy. I expected we would have even more uses for money in the coming year, and preparing ahead was necessary.

After settling matters at home, Zhang Xiaotong and I began working nonstop to prepare for Sun Electronics' next stage of development. With sufficient funds now available, we smoothly secured the AST dealership. At the time, dealership contracts did not yet have mandatory sales quotas. Zhang Xiaotong called Liu Mingyao and instructed him to approach a few larger companies first.

The advantages of being a brand dealer soon became apparent. Hearing that we were an authorized dealer, many large companies came to us on the strength of that reputation. Zhang Xiaotong and I began dividing Sun Electronics into two departments. We rented an office in a high-rise to establish a sales department, with Liu Mingyao responsible for all its affairs, and bought the Sanhao Street storefront outright to serve as our retail outlet. In the course of all this, our staff expanded to nearly thirty, and turnover rose along with it.

The year beginning in early 1993 saw the greatest demand for branded computers among Chinese businesses, and it was also the most profitable year for brand dealers. That was precisely why we chose this moment to abandon the cake business and move into electronics. I reckoned that if we made it in 1993, we might truly have made it. In 1994, we could move into appliances. VCD players and large-screen televisions would be coming into fashion.

The initial success of our AST dealership had clearly spurred some people into action. In April 1993, IBM began looking for a suitable business dealer in Sanhao. In my view, IBM's stronger selling points should have been business integration and e-commerce. Unfortunately, the environment in China was not right yet, so they could not play to their strengths. Later, McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers would get involved too, leaving IBM still able to do little more than sell computers.

IBM, known as the "brand for laptops bought with public funds," simply stopped bothering with us after its earlier, rather unpleasant talks with Sun Electronics. I could not be bothered either. It was not going to amount to much anyway. Hadn't the other brands squeezed it into submission in the laptop market? Zhang Xiaotong and I instructed Liu Mingyao to keep hammering away at HP. We had to secure that brand, whatever it took. The future laptop market would inevitably belong to low-priced machines. As for Sony? Forget it. In the future, I would crush it to pieces in the gaming market.

After school started, something else happened just as originally expected.

Discord between parents, the sorrow of every family. The beginnings of a single-parent household.

Every day, I watched them fight and quarrel. When I had been younger, I had not really understood why two people who could live together would take pleasure in arguing every day. Now I understood, but I still could not find a solution.

Most of the time, I chose to put it out of sight and out of mind, finding Zhang Xiaotong and wandering around with her to pass the time.

I knew that after dragging things out like this for a year, they would divorce. That was fine too. For me, it would be a release.

1993, a troubled year.