Jia Pingwa - Ruined City

“That must be where he was heading when he walked out,” Fang said.

“I know where he’s going,” Li corrected him. “Another round of job rankings has begun, and he’s trying to get the committee members to promote him to senior editor. A waste of time. Two years ago, Wu Kun was promoted to editor-in-chief, and the old man was passed over. This year they told him he wasn’t senior enough. Ho!” he exclaimed, “I win.” He turned over his tiles. It was a banker’s win. He did the same thing three more times, and that made him even more talkative. He could not stop crowing about his wins or reproaching Gou Dahai for letting Zhuang pick up an “eight myriad” tile. He reminded everyone that they had to pay up at the end of the game.

“Li Laoshi frowns when he loses but turns into a chatty old woman when he wins,” Fang said.

“So I’m your common enemy now. You’re all jealous. Winning at a gaming table isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. As they say, lucky in cards, unlucky in love. Hey, sorry, four of a kind,” Li said, while taking a tile to play another hand. “The good luck keeps on coming. Too bad there’s no bonus tile. Zhidie, I’m going to say something you may not like, but Zhong missed getting the rank of senior editor because of Wu Kun, who’s tight with Jing Xueyin. She’s the one you have to talk to.”

Zhuang had his opportunities, but he fell a bit short of winning a round and had to borrow some money from Gou Dahai. Though he was looking at the tiles, he could not stop thinking about poor Mr. Zhong. It was hard to imagine how the old man had managed to survive all these years. He sneered when Li asked him to speak with Jing Xueyin.

“She’s free to do what she wants. What right do I have to try to talk to her? Zhong isn’t a young man, and he’s still hoping to receive a letter from an old classmate?”

“There’s more to the secret,” Li said. “Have you ever been to his house? He has a fair number of performance-enhancement tonics. Now, he’s been living alone for more than a dozen years, since he and his wife don’t sleep together, and we’ve never seen him with anyone else. I think he’s taking the tonics because the girl gives him hope. He’s probably hoping to reconnect with her and enjoy a late-life marriage,” Li said before suddenly shouting, “Got it!” He slammed the tile on the table, snapping it in two, with one half sailing out the window.

“Not so fast,” Gou objected. “You need two for that, and you only have one.”

“You saw the tile break in half!”

“So what?” Fang said. “You have only one in your hand and you need two. It’s not a win.”

Li went to the window to look for the broken piece, but to no avail. He asked everyone to pay up and was angry when Gou and Fang refused.

“This is not a banker’s win, Hongwen,” Zhuang said. “Do you expect the three of us to take off our pants and pawn our jackets to pay you?”

“Since you want to weasel out of paying up, I’m not buying lunch,” Li said. “Let’s just pretend I gave you the money, and you can buy your own lunches.”

“No need for you to buy anything,” Zhuang said. “I’ll treat.”

He borrowed another fifty from Gou and told Fang to get Zhong to go with them to lunch. Fang went, but Zhong was not in his room. So the four of them went to Damaishi Street for pork jelly buns, followed by a visit to a teahouse. It was dark when they split up.

On his way home, Zhuang thought about his terrible loss at the mahjong table. Li Hongwen had said lucky in cards, unlucky in love. His luck at the table had been lousy, so did that mean there was something romantic in store for him? He paused and, lost in thought for a moment, regretted not going to see Tang Wan’er earlier. Maybe he could go now. On second thought, it was getting dark, and Zhou Min might be home, so he headed reluctantly toward Shuangren fu.

A figure squatting outside the gate jumped to his feet and shouted when he spotted Zhuang.

“Junkman! Collecting junk and scraps!”

Zhuang laughed when he saw that it was the old man who spouted doggerel.

“You’re still collecting scrap at this hour?” Zhuang said, as the taste of alcohol rose up with a belch.

Ignoring him, the old man pulled his cart down the main street and rattled off another bit of wisdom:

Getting drunk on revolution’s brew, ruins the party’s name, causes stomach woes true

So drunk his wife can only fume and stew, so she complains to the discipline crew

The party secretary says if asked to drink, you would, too .

. . .

Zhuang opened the door. In the brightly lit house, his wife and Hong Jiang were sitting on the sofa counting money and punching numbers into a calculator. “It must have been a good month,” he said when he saw the stacks of bills.

“A good month?” she said. “The shipment of Jin Yong’s martial arts novels sold well at first, but we never anticipated that five more bookstores would open on the same street, all of them selling Jin Yong’s novels. Business went downhill fast, since we couldn’t get anything from our supplier. No matter how many times we count, this is barely enough to pay the two girls’ wages and our taxes. Hong Jiang bought three bookshelves a few days ago, and we have no books to put on them. You’re out there all day long. Why don’t you check things out for us? Hong says that the Tianlai Publishing House in Hunan just published a book. What’s the title again?”

“ Lady Chatterley’s Lover ,” Hong said.

“ Lady Chatterley’s Lover is in great demand, but we can’t get copies,” Niu Yueqing said. “Don’t you know the Tianlai editor-in-chief? They’re always asking you to write for them, so why don’t you contact them tomorrow and ask them to send books?”

“That’s easy,” Zhuang said. “Hong Jiang, send a telegram in my name.”

“That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear,” Hong said. “Most of the time, you complain that I use your name to cause trouble.”

“Just my name. Don’t tell them I own the bookstore.”

“You’re always so cautious. If we’d used your name for the bookstore, we could have had anything we wanted.”

“I’m a writer. A writer writes. What would people think if they knew I owned a bookstore?”

“In this day and age, there’s nothing wrong with a writer owning a business. Fame is wealth, and you shouldn’t squander it. You can’t get rich from writing alone. A novella is worth less than a single character written by the calligrapher Gong Jingyuan,” Hong said.

“He has something else to talk to you about,” Niu Yueqing said to Zhuang. “Go ahead, Hong Jiang.”

“After running the bookstore for a year, I have a pretty good picture of the market. Writing books is not as good as selling them, and editing books is better than both. Many bookstores now edit their own books, either by buying a publishing house outright or by printing books illegally. Chapbooks are all about sex and violence, and there’s no need for proofreading. With print runs in the millions, those people are getting rich. You know Xiaoshunzi on Zhuquemen Street, a stinking little shit who can barely read. Well, he hired some people to cut and paste erotic passages from other works and put out a book that made him a hundred and fifty thousand. Now he rides around in a taxi and eats exotic seafood at the Tangcheng Restaurant every day.”

“I know all that,” Zhuang said. “But that’s not what we should be doing.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Hong said. “But there’s something Shimu and I have talked about. A bookseller produced a martial arts novel by someone named Liu De. They’re having trouble selling it and are offering it to us at half-price. I was thinking we could take it and change the cover. We can give the author’s name as Jing Yong. I’m sure we’ll make a bundle.”