Li Ang - The Lost Garden

A terrifying fear rose from the bottom of my heart; it gripped me and refused to let go.

What came to mind right away was that there was another woman. I suffered the same sort of pain and dismay as the last time he left me. But this time, with the intimate relationship between us, the thought of him with another woman brought me a strong and totally unexpected desire that gnawed on me daily amid jealous rage.

I could not keep from thinking that he hurried away from my body in order to satisfy another woman and make her moan with pleasure beneath him. I also realized that whenever I did not know where he was, whenever I felt his detachment, my doubts, worries, jealous anger, and pain would surface to highlight his recent perfunctory performance and hurried behavior. And the feeling that I had not been truly satisfied for a long time intensified and appeared nakedly in my body.

The desire felt like a burning, shuddering sensation, accumulating and swelling somewhere inside, refusing to be eliminated. It pestered me day and night, complaining loudly that it had not been satisfied; it was a stubborn desire that went beyond pain. However, because of our intimate contact, the desire was concrete and solid evidence that we’d been together, and it continued to bring me basic faith and comfort.

It was clear to me now that the fear of pain from this love would not drag me down and make me cower and wait passively, as it had the last time; instead I knew it would make me fearlessly fight for what I wanted.

And all this, I told myself, was because of my abiding love for him.

Zhu Yinghong began to work on the people in Lin Xigeng’s office.

She worked on them not to ingratiate herself. Lin was given to parading their relationship at the office and among close friends. “She’s from the Lucheng Zhu family,” is how he usually referred to her. “Her uncle is chairman of the board of Huatai Trust.” Yinghong knew he hoped to benefit from this connection.

Her focus was on Lin’s personal assistant, the director of the accounting office, and his driver, making sure they received special treatment because of her. She had a way of letting them know that she cared about those who worked for Lin, for she was, after all, the young lady from the Lucheng Zhu family.

Lin’s drivers seldom stayed for long; he often entertained at bars late into the night and had to race to a construction site in central Taiwan at eight the following morning. Most drivers could not keep up with that kind of schedule; they complained that the boss could catch up on sleep in the car so he didn’t care how late he stayed at the bars. The salary they received wasn’t high enough to risk their lives on the highway.

When one of the drivers quit, Yinghong, using Xigeng’s safety as an excuse, replaced him with a young man who had just been discharged from the military, a country boy Mudan had helped her find in Lucheng. With the assistance of the director of accounting, who had just written off a large sum of unaccounted-for money with her help, Yinghong slowly increased the driver’s salary to an amount he could not possibly get anywhere else. Back when few private drivers in Taipei wore uniforms, Yinghong took it upon herself to design a simple uniform in a dark color and teach him protocols befitting a chauffeur.

In the end, everyone was happy. At first, Lin didn’t know how to deal with a driver who knew the proper etiquette, but his flair and his confidence — he was, after all, paying the man — quickly led him to act as if he’d been using a driver like that all along. Sometimes he even used his driver as an example to criticize other drivers’ lack of manners. Yinghong now had Xigeng’s whereabouts under total control, unless, of course, he took the company car or hailed a taxi.

She was aware that, except under extraordinary circumstances, Lin was too impatient to wait for a taxi or for his assistant to arrange for a company car. His conceit and arrogance would not allow him to scheme to avoid her tracking; besides, he was convinced that he could handle her even if she knew what he was up to.

“Women. They’re all alike,” she could almost hear him say.

From the driver, she learned that Lin had no steady female companion over a period of time, though sometimes he took one of the bar girls to a hotel after a banquet.

“They left the hotel quickly,” the driver would say.

Little by little, she got to know everything regarding his daily schedule and activities. It was apparent that, in order to avoid potential problems, he would not take any of his one-night stands to any of his apartments throughout the city. She was aware that men in Lin’s position did not casually show their business cards at entertainment locations, for they would not want the girls to call them. What she had to watch out for were the women he took to the apartments.

Cold and unending rain is typical of winter in the Taipei Basin. Blooms on the “sudden golden showers” had turned into the proverbial yellow flowers of yesterday. On the rare occasions when the rain stopped for a day or two, the sun would show its elusive face only in the afternoon, and it usually had to peek through cloud layers. It was at such a time that she made an important decision — to resign as special assistant to the chairman of the board at her uncle’s company.

The rise in real estate value was cyclical, and everyone knew that the next upward trend was on the horizon. At each new project, model houses would be crammed full of brokers and buyers who were serious about purchasing; there was no need to advertise or to populate construction site shows with pretty, scantily clad girls. The sales prices might even jump several times a day, so if a buyer hesitated for even an hour, the new price might have increased by a factor of ten. Too rich for your blood, please feel free to leave, because there are more buyers waiting to take your place, since no one can predict how much the price will increase by that afternoon.

At first Lin promoted several sites that had been planned for quite some time, which led the other construction companies to follow suit. But when the real estate business turned white hot, Lin decided to halt most of the sales, despite the puzzling looks from others. Knowing that another rise was just around the corner, he was going to wait until prices surged before selling the remaining units.

That presented him with some uncommonly free time, just as the island’s trade-based economy took off and the real estate business enjoyed an unprecedented boom. He played a few rounds of golf before complaining about too much free time. Yinghong saved the day with a timely suggestion for him to run for the Construction Guild directorship; he agreed, under the urging of friends and with the support of his staff.

In order to mediate the intricate interpersonal relationships among factions and smooth over the election process, Yinghong convinced Lin that she should begin working in his company as his special assistant. Naturally, he was aware that, once she was in his company, there would be another pair of eyes watching him, thus decreasing his personal freedom. But the title of guild director apparently was more attractive than anything else; with that title, he knew that he would be seeing the genesis of a new business.

Yinghong also began to accompany him to the endless banquets for guild members, as well as for officials assigned to supervise the election. There had been no change in entertainment and banquets among Taipei’s businessmen; it was still the same formula of a relatively early dinner, during which they drank and fooled around. The real pleasure was still visits to bars, including piano bars, where they drank, played finger-guessing names, sang karaoke, danced, and flirted. As usual, the presence of “girls” was what made these outings lively. As the nights wore on, the men would take the “girls” out for a snack before making individual arrangements. A “short stay” at a hotel cost five thousand NT, while eight thousand would get her to stay the night; this was the origin of “long eight, short five.”