Chapter 18

Chapter 19

The summer vacation passed neither quickly nor slowly. In the blink of an eye, Lu Wei had been in Beiguan City for a week. The appliance store's name and recruitment were more or less settled, and most of the merchandise inside had been arranged. Following our usual corporate naming convention, the store was called "Sun Electric Appliance City." It had four floors and seventy employees: four floor managers, ten technical staff, forty sales assistants, ten security guards, and six cleaners. I had Lu Wei put the manager's office on the top floor, making it convenient for Zhang Xiaotong and me to discuss strategy in private. Once we shut the door, it didn't matter how shocking the things we said were.

Lu Wei was nominally in charge of Sun Electric Appliance City, so we basically left all the schmoozing to her. Zhang Xiaotong and I were happy to take it easy-though we weren't actually taking it easy. Zhang Xiaotong had to promote the new magazine. She had met practically all the provincial leaders in education and culture, and they remembered Beiguan City's talented young girl. Some brushed the matter off, while others gladly agreed to help. Teen magazines were in a lean period right now; having one more was better than having one less.

Whenever I had a spare moment, I couldn't help thinking about the ridiculous predicament teen magazines were in. The overseas magazine YES! wasn't allowed in, while the domestic Chinese and Foreign Youth would also end up folding a few years later. Ultimately, it wasn't that Chinese people had anything against entertainment. It was that they loved entertainment too much, so it had to be resisted even at the policy level. The high-sounding justification was "preventing people from losing their ambition to idle pleasures," but in reality, they were simply afraid someone else would pocket all that money.

Actually, this worked out well. Without pressure from overseas, as long as we avoided excessively objectionable content at this stage and survived, the road ahead would be easy. Magazine censorship was still fairly strict in 1993-94. I reminded Zhang Xiaotong to build good relationships with the heads of a few departments, so we wouldn't get cut down while we were thriving.

Nominally, Crimson Youth was a magazine Sun Electronics had funded for Zhang Xiaotong, so Liu Mingyao could naturally shield us from certain problems. Following that line of thought, I considered whether to have Sun Electronics put together another magazine covering computer hardware and software news. Computer News had launched in 1992 and stayed alive, doing better and better. If we launched something combining news and gaming content now, would there be a market for it?

Thinking of how timid I had always been about getting things done before, I made a snap decision and contacted Liu Mingyao. "Hello? Is that President Liu?"

"Don't insult me..." Liu Mingyao seemed to be in a good mood. I could hear a little of Cai Qing's laughter over the phone. So the guy had already gotten into the swing of things. "You never call me with anything good. Out with it."

I asked him straight out, "Interested in starting a magazine to give Sun Electronics a print media presence? Or rather, can you still spare some energy to run a magazine?"

Liu Mingyao perked up a little. "Tell me what you have in mind. If I can't do it, I can find someone. We should've had a print media platform ages ago."

I said, "How about this? Find a group of this year's graduates from Dongda. They don't need magazine experience, but they need to know their way around computers and games and be able to write coherently. Then find someone who knows how to run a magazine. Have the company invest and let them have a go at it themselves. You don't need to get involved either. Let whoever runs the magazine handle distribution. Tell me how it goes in a month. Some of your senior and junior schoolmates must have print media experience. Ask them whenever there's something you don't understand."

"Damn, how is this asking whether I want to start a magazine? You're practically forcing me to!"

"The capable have to do more," I said. "Just wait for the fun. We're going to make big money off this magazine someday, my friend."

Half convinced, Liu Mingyao went off to do as I said. How could he have imagined the future growth of online gaming magazines and hardware review magazines? I whistled and went off to play games.

Guo Zhen had been in great spirits lately. Every time he challenged me to Street Fighter and lost badly, he still came away delighted. When it came to fighting games, I was already starting to fall a little behind Yang Yuanzhe, never mind the others. Whenever we had nothing to do, the four of us would head out for drinks, and I would tell them things they had never heard of. Writing, music, film, and ideas-things that needed to be passed down from one generation to the next, things that evolved a little every three to five years, things that never ended. I gradually steered our conversations in that direction, and we began to find our first common topics.

I knew how high Guo Zhen's IQ was-close to 190. Though he had never liked traditional education, he quickly took in some of the things I shared. I tried asking what he had in mind for the future. Guo Zhen shook his head. "Nothing for now. Just taking things as they come."

Hearing those words from Guo Zhen at his current age still surprised me a little. I had always known he was the sort to drift through life, but that had only been because he was lazy and lacked opportunities. Several kilograms of heroin had once been placed in front of him, and he hadn't even batted an eyelid. He had gone off with me for a three-yuan bowl of cold noodles as usual. Actually, this was what I wanted. I felt that people's outlooks took shape when they were very young, and so did their personalities. Whatever happened afterward, their outlooks and personalities determined their fates. The reason I had sought out these old friends first was that they had good outlooks, and had already had them at a very young age.

That was incredibly rare.

I spent a great deal of time hanging around with these friends. Occasionally, Zhang Xiaotong had a complaint. "Aren't you supposed to be busy?"

"Of course I'm busy. Busy building my own core team." I kept writing without looking up. "Don't you think we have too few people we can use right now, big sis?"

"How can that be?" Zhang Xiaotong found what I said unbelievable. "Isn't recruitment going smoothly?"

"That's different." I stopped my pen and looked up at Zhang Xiaotong. "This year's graduates don't have enough experience. We were unbelievably lucky to find talents like Liu Mingyao and Lu Wei. Finding more would be a pipe dream. As for people with work experience, their knowledge and ways of doing things don't fit our current approach. Hiring them would definitely cause problems. If we don't start cultivating our own team early, then when? These are among the people I want on that team."

Zhang Xiaotong tilted her head. Her expression and pose were so adorable I almost wanted to pounce on her and take a bite. "Aren't you thinking a little too far ahead? How many years away is that?"

I smiled. "You know Japan?"

Zhang Xiaotong nodded. "I do."

I said, "Japan has a large population and very little land. They have a method called land reclamation, but they don't just fill the sea with dirt. They buy coal and various rare-metal ores from other countries and use them to reclaim land and build cities. That way, a hundred years later, they'll have increased both their land area and their mineral reserves."

"I've heard of that. I think they started reclaiming land back in 1913."

"The Japanese have money now, so they're buying even more ore." I blew the dust off my manuscript paper. "They're planning for a hundred or two hundred years from now. We don't need to look that far ahead, but we ought to give some thought to three or five years, or seven or eight."

Zhang Xiaotong understood what I meant. She pointed at my nose. "You're really devious!"

I mumbled as I lowered my head and started writing again. "Whatever you say. Thank you for the compliment..."

On August 25, the inaugural issue of Crimson Youth successfully closed for submissions, more or less on schedule. Every day that passed left us with one less day of summer vacation. Lu Wei scheduled the appliance store's opening ceremony for the twenty-seventh and invited some city leaders to attend. Liu Mingyao delivered the goods to Beiguan City in several breathless trips. Each time, he left before he had even finished talking. Zhang Xiaotong smiled at Lu Wei. "That classmate of yours seems quite charming." Lu Wei smiled like a little fox too. "A love match. How nice. We didn't do a thing."

I shook my head. "Even heroes fall before a beautiful woman."

Both women glanced at me. "What are you getting so philosophical about?"

I rolled my eyes and muttered, "If the company gets any more beautiful women, won't even an upright gentleman like me lose the will to work?"

They both spat out a "Pah!" at me in perfect unison...

Joking aside, Liu Mingyao was quite capable. He had already nearly finished the preliminary preparations for Sun Software. I received the résumés of several editors and thought they looked pretty good. Conditions at the editorial office were a little rough to begin with; they would have to make do with a room in the company's office building. Since Sun Electronics was itself a major hardware business, the editors barely needed to worry about news and information. My instructions were for them to do a good job on software knowledge and computer games.

As for advertising, I had Liu Mingyao tell the sales department, "For now, just put full-page Sun Electronics ads in the magazine. Give it two months, and countless clients are bound to come knocking."

Liu Mingyao got the idea and went off to carry it out. I was pleased, not so much because things were progressing smoothly, but mainly because it was good that he had gotten used to a ten-year-old talking in such a worldly manner. Whatever ideas I had in the future, I could have them carry them out for me.

Once the first issue was finished, the self-styled literary types in the editorial office admired the two of us with a reverence as boundless as a surging river. Over this period, we had not only guided them meticulously through every detail of the work, but also shared a great deal of knowledge they had never heard of. They suddenly realized that whether it was pure literature and art or entertainment, they still had a long way to go. This was good. People had to be humble or suffer a blow before they could improve quickly.

Everyone looked forward eagerly to the things Zhang Xiaotong currently had in hand. Only I was still thinking and calculating. There simply wasn't enough time. There were only a few months left in 1993. The loan wouldn't come through until September, and bidding and selecting a construction crew would take at least a month of running around. By then it would be October, leaving at most three months of work before the cold forced construction to stop. Work wouldn't resume until the following spring, after March. All that time, the interest on the bank loan would just keep piling up...

After thinking it over for a while, I supposed my only option was to find a way not to pay everything in one lump sum, and come up with something that made money fast over the winter to ease the problem of tied-up funds.

There was no need to be too cautious about investing now. Basically, as long as the investment was large enough, profit was guaranteed. The main thing was the rate of return. Only investments yielding more than a hundred percent interested me. I was putting so much effort into real estate because it could currently bring returns of more than sevenfold. As for other industries, having done planning work for a consulting firm, I could roughly calculate the investment and returns for most of them. After turning it over in my mind, I thought of a very interesting industry.

Lying on Zhang Xiaotong's increasingly full thighs, I asked lazily, "Why hasn't Lu Wei called today?"

Zhang Xiaotong was gently stroking my hair, her own long hair spilling over my face. It tickled pleasantly. At my question, she raised her head and tossed her hair. "I think she went out to eat with a few tax officials. I took your advice and stayed on my guard, so I had Wang Xiaoyan go with her. I'm afraid those two will be the only ones coming back on their feet."

"If she makes it back alive, have her come over," I said, still lying there without moving. "Say, Xiaotong, how did you develop like this? How can these legs be so comfortable?"

Zhang Xiaotong lightly thumped my head. "You little imp. Keep teasing me and I won't let you lie there anymore."

I knew she was only saying it. She couldn't bear to make me get up.

"Do you know why I want Lu Wei to come over?"

"No. Who ever knows with you?"

I stretched, my hand brushing Zhang Xiaotong's calf, whether deliberately or not. Her face reddened.

"I want to invest in a factory in Yulin County."