Chapter 43

Chapter 44

The exams in the first semester of sixth grade were basically a formality. At most, the results served as a reference for giving the top students extra attention and helping the stragglers along. I kept to myself in class as usual. Honestly, finding common ground with these children was a little too much to ask.

My homeroom teacher still resented my giving up my place at Experimental Middle School and found little ways to hassle me whenever there was nothing better to do. Fortunately, in an age when grades meant everything, none of that posed much of a problem. The winter at the beginning of 1995 was long and cold. With nothing to do after the exams, I asked Zhang Xiaotong to get me an ID card. She hesitated briefly, then went to take care of it.

My parents had made quite a bit of money trading stocks and were now feeling pleased with themselves, starting to consider buying a new home. Zhang Xiaotong was treated as an honored guest in our house. Without her occasional pointers and help finding connections, making money would never have been this easy for my parents. Every so often, Mom would poke a finger at me. "You... what did you do in a past life to deserve this? Xiaotong treats you better than she treats her own parents..." Whenever that happened, I just grinned foolishly. Damn, even my parents had picked up on the signs. That wasn't good either.

Yang Yuanzhe came by from time to time to show me their progress and ask for supporting materials. I was very satisfied with their efficiency. This was exactly the sort of frantic speed I wanted from a one-way workflow. At the online gaming companies I knew about, the planners fought with the programmers, and marketing fought with the production team. All that arguing was neither efficient nor interesting. What I wanted right now was to squeeze out as many ideas and details as possible, and have the technical team implement them without wasting words. That was countless times better than so-called "adjusting to one another." Most of the time, internal democracy at a company was just another word for inefficiency.

While I continued pointing Yang Yuanzhe and the others in the right direction, my parents finally decided to move. We would say goodbye to the old home our family had lived in for decades and move into a newly built residential complex nearby. The funny thing was that the apartment my parents bought was one of the unsold units at Sun Homeland-or, as the advertisements put it, "a limited number of premium homes remaining." I scratched my head for ages. This was awkward. I was making money off my own parents now.

I hurried to contact Zhang Xiaotong, and my nominal cousin and actual girlfriend paid our family a timely visit. After chatting with Mom about the apartment, she said she could get a better price at Sun Homeland. Mom was overjoyed, then privately poked me in the head again. "Look at your Xiaotong. See how good she is to you..." There was nothing I could do but keep smiling wryly...

After all the upheaval of buying a new home and moving, New Year was nearly upon us. I was practically breaking time apart and counting out my days second by second, while my parents could not have been more relaxed, busying themselves every day with getting the apartment in order and such. The home-renovation craze had yet to take full hold in 1995. I secretly counted myself lucky that I didn't have to pinch my nose every day against strange smells laced with all sorts of toxins.

Zhang Xiaotong visited our home more frequently. Ever since she had sorted out the apartment issue, my parents had started looking at her almost as though she were their daughter-in-law... The thought gave me chills. More often, though, I simply went to see her. We behaved respectably in front of other people, but in private we were incredibly intimate. Part of my fear of making things explicit came from this concern: most of the time, love was like fireworks. The instant they bloomed, they were so beautiful that you felt even dying in their midst would be fine. Once those fireworks faded and vanished, perhaps all that remained was habit.

I had seen too many examples of love slowly turning into familial affection after marriage, and it frightened me a little.

I had also seen too many examples of love beginning in a blaze and ending miserably, and that frightened me a little too.

Ah, if anyone was to blame, it was Zhang Xiaotong for being so lovely and so beautiful that night. The night really was the best excuse for every sin.

Of course, I also had to admit that, after all these years together, so many little things she had done at my side had moved me deeply. In my previous life, people who gave me that sort of care had usually passed through in a flash. Zhang Xiaotong was the first to keep it up, unchanged, for more than eight years.

All I could do was hope I could keep bringing her pleasant surprises, and let our love turn into familial affection before it faded.

Honestly, I had little confidence in myself. Life was too long, and the road ahead stretched far into the future. There were too many temptations and too many changes, none of which could be predicted.

Everything was changing. Whether I could keep control of it myself was hard to say.

After enduring a Spring Festival of drinking tables, mahjong, television, and sunflower seeds, February 14 arrived, bringing both Valentine's Day and the Lantern Festival. This time, Zhang Xiaotong took the initiative to ask me out, and I accepted, flattered by the attention.

The Lantern Festival fell on a Monday, but that did nothing to diminish the evening lantern displays or the bustle of the crowds in the streets. Zhang Xiaotong took my hand and led me into the crowd viewing the lanterns. As we looked at one old-fashioned lantern after another, I could only sigh at life. Everything I had played with, looked at, and eaten as a child was filled with warmth in my memories, yet seeing it now, it was nothing special. Standing behind the crowd, I spent more time looking up at Zhang Xiaotong's white-jade neck and her little ears, red from the cold.

Although Zhang Xiaotong was already in high school, she still loved these things. The nineties marked a divide between two eras. Many people still clung to the old things, while many others pursued ever newer, faster-moving trends. Over the next few years, these differences would gradually become more pronounced, forming a clear dividing line. Some explained this separation as a gulf between people born in the seventies and those born in the eighties. It was nowhere near that simple. Three years made a generation. People who tried to categorize everyone were usually fools.

Still, I did feel that the things of the digital age weren't as purely enjoyable as what we had now. Perhaps that was because I was an old-fashioned, traditional person myself?

"Cold?"

I asked Zhang Xiaotong amid the noisy crowd.

"A little." Zhang Xiaotong covered her ears. "You?"

"No," I said. "Are we going to keep looking?"

"Let's not." Zhang Xiaotong lowered her head and pressed her icy little cheek against me. "Let's go for a walk."

After squeezing out of the crowd, I stood beneath a streetlamp, catching my breath. "All these years of family planning, and nothing to show for it..."

Zhang Xiaotong smiled and put her arms around me. "We'll have to wait a few more years to see the results. Oh, Xingwen, I have something to tell you."

I lowered my head and kissed her hand. It was so cold. "What is it?"

Zhang Xiaotong first looked around to make sure there was hardly anyone nearby, then took a wallet with an incredibly rough-looking surface out of her pocket. One glance told me it was a popular Gucci model for 1995. This girl was probably like me: she had money but no idea how to spend it, and only knew how to buy this sort of mass-market stuff.

"Your ID card, bank cards, and PINs are all inside." Zhang Xiaotong handed me the wallet. "You worked hard to earn this money. I can't keep it all to myself forever."

I froze.

Zhang Xiaotong continued, "There are two cards, an ordinary savings card and a gold card. The money is seventy-five percent of the funds we currently have available to use at any time-roughly seven hundred million US dollars."

My mind went numb. "Since when did we have that much money?"

Zhang Xiaotong watched me with a broad smile, apparently enjoying my dumbfounded expression. "You spend every day busy figuring out ways to make money on every front. How can you not even know how much you've made?"

I shook my head, looking every inch an idiot. "I had a rough idea, but how did it get to be so much...?"

Zhang Xiaotong gently pulled me onto her lap and held me. "Have you forgotten about stocks and futures?"

I shook my head. "No."

Zhang Xiaotong said, "After those two trades in coffee beans and plywood, they had absolute faith in your business instincts. They staked every bit of money they could find at the time on your decisions."

My mouth stayed open for ages. "You..."

Zhang Xiaotong kissed my cheek lightly. "Darling, this is the Valentine's Day present I prepared for you."

Warmth filled my heart, snapping me out of my enormous shock. Was this the power of a lover? It wasn't as though I had never considered the possibility that Zhang Xiaotong might pocket all the assets herself. I simply hadn't cared, because I still had more resources that would let me start over from nothing. But judging by all the little details of daily life, Zhang Xiaotong was genuinely good to me, far better than I was to her. So I felt perfectly comfortable leaving the money with her. Back then, I had only thought that if we really fell out one day, I could consider it a few billion spent on a childhood companion.

I had never anticipated that my relationship with Zhang Xiaotong would develop into romance.

When Zhang Xiaotong said this was the Valentine's Day gift she had prepared for me, I understood perfectly. This girl had long considered me the person closest to her. These futures trades had begun back in the summer, and she had waited until now to reveal them and surprise me.

It seemed asking her to get me an ID card had been entirely unnecessary. The girl had probably made her plans long ago.

On that night of biting winds, the light painted a beguiling gold across Zhang Xiaotong's face. I took the wallet, filled with nothing but gratitude, faintly recalling something I had once said to her years ago.

As though she knew my heart, Zhang Xiaotong said softly, "The most important thing in a person's life is having someone who understands them." Her voice was soft and gentle, her smile lovely.

The people passing in the street, the colorful lanterns, the bitterly cold air-all of it faded in my eyes. At their center was only Zhang Xiaotong, clear and distinct, beautiful and moving.

Zhang Xiaotong smiled at me. "What's wrong?"

I sighed. "Ah..."

"Hmm?" Her smile remained.

"Silly girl," I said, holding her hand. "Isn't my money your money? Why draw all these lines...?"

Zhang Xiaotong held me and said, "I deposited the money in overseas banks through several different channels. Only the savings card is domestic. Like you, I don't spend much. You can put the money to more use than I can. I trust you."

I hugged her. "Actually, I'm unsure about something too. Now that we've come this far, do you think we should tell our families?"

Zhang Xiaotong shook her head. "I don't think we should. Like you said, we can wait another couple of years."

I laughed. "How come you sound like me now?"

Zhang Xiaotong tapped me on the head. "Because I think you're right. Having money doesn't necessarily make people happy. Only when they know what they want can money become a tool for achieving their goals. Before then, it's better to go through a little hardship."

"That's more or less it," I said, looking at several street vendors in the distance. "You have worries when you have money, and worries when you don't. People who live with a purpose have the fewest worries."

Zhang Xiaotong followed my gaze. "What are you looking at?"

Seeing those vendors, I felt a little excited. It really was them. To think I would run into them at this time, in this place.

I took Zhang Xiaotong's hand and ran toward them. "Why don't we go over and find out?"

Around the edges of the lantern fair, several vendors selling pendants and jewelry had spread out white cloths at intervals, covering the ground with glittering trinkets. Two others sold secondhand books, everything from bedroom arts to compendiums of thick-skinned ruthlessness, piled at varying heights into little mountains. Another had set up a telescope and charged people to look at the moon. I could not have been more familiar with these stalls; I had long grown used to them. I brought Zhang Xiaotong to a stop at a stall beside them, where several young men had gathered. They had spread a few old newspapers on the ground and laid out a row of cutout cassette tapes, along with a handful of cutout CDs. A handsome young man with long hair had his head lowered as he fiddled with an acoustic guitar. Judging by its appearance, that guitar had cost no more than thirty yuan.

The handsome long-haired guy was Shao Ke. We had shared drinks and lamb hot pot in the winter of 1999. Later, at the end of 2000, he went to Beijing to work as a graphic designer for a multinational education group. After that, he worked in animation, print media, and freelance writing, among other things. We lost touch after August 2002.

Beside him, the square-faced guy with a short crew cut and thick-rimmed glasses was Wang Yi, a man who looked almost ten years older than he really was. At the end of 1998, he had started an underground band, which lasted until it broke up in the first half of 1999. In 2001, he joined what was billed as Asia's largest advertising agency as a graphic designer. Three months later, he was promoted to design director, then resigned and went home to work as an independent producer. In 2002, he became the design supervisor at a joint venture in Hangzhou.

On the outermost edge was Gao Kang, with his disheveled hair and bulging eyes. He was acknowledged as both the most talented and the most self-destructive person in their circle. Even in 2002, he was still holed up at home, supporting himself by repairing computers for internet cafés. He independently produced a great deal of music, animated shorts, and graphic designs, and wrote many scripts, but without exception he kept them all to himself, showing them to no one outside his small circle.

In the middle of them, drumming up business with his Buddha-like build, was Zhang Chen, a college student we called Brother Chen. His parents were both university professors. They lived frugally and raised him strictly, yet somehow had produced a textbook businessman. Even as a student, he had been the best of them all at managing money and making it. Later, he switched to IT. I hadn't contacted him for more than two years, so I didn't know whether IT had given him a kicking.

The moment I saw them, I thought of the taxi the six of us had ridden in that winter, the hot water in the filthy washbasin at Gong Lei's place, and the porn and Parasite Eve that night.

I had finally seen them again.

I turned to Zhang Xiaotong and asked, "Am I crying right now?"

Zhang Xiaotong looked at me and nodded, a little flustered. "Yes... what's wrong?"

I said to Zhang Xiaotong, "Come here. Hold me."

Without a word, Zhang Xiaotong held me. I choked up for a little while, held back my tears, and only then slowly loosened my arms.

"It's nothing. Just the wind," I said, lowering my head. "And I remembered some unhappy things."

Zhang Xiaotong patted my hand. "Don't think too much. I'm here."

"Mm." I took her hand. "I feel like listening to music. Come look at the tapes with me."

Zhang Xiaotong smiled and nodded, a trace of worry in her eyes.

"I'm really fine," I said. "I remembered some books I read before, and just felt that life was hard. Don't hit me. That was way too artsy."

This time, Zhang Xiaotong nodded with a smile, the worry gone from her eyes.

I led Zhang Xiaotong over to the cutout-tape stall, crouched down, and asked, "Got any Manson?"

With that one question, all their eyes turned to me.