I

Legend has it that the Shucun villagers originally lived on the other side of the Himalayas. Due to tribal rivalries their forefathers were forced to abandon their homes in order to flee the carnage and their flight took them all the way to the Hengduan Mountains. For forty-nine days they marched, and they still had not put towering peaks, a landscape strewn with forbidding boulders, and dark forests behind them. Birds and beasts often stopped to gawk at these refugees, as if they had never seen humans before. Now the flatbread and the dried meat on which they had subsisted were depleted, and wild berries and vegetables could not stave off the pangs of hunger. Their clothes were torn and their shoes were worn down in the long march. The lineage was threatened by imminent extinction before they reached safe haven.

Zhewa the Elder mounted the tallest rock he could find, gashed his palm with his sword, took the long bow made of silkworm thorn from his shoulder, drew a falcon feather-tipped arrow from his quiver and released it into the air with his bleeding hand, praying that the gods would lead them out of the jungle to a land of sanctuary.

With a whiz, the arrow disappeared in a blue sky finely fragmented by the leaves and branches of the forest. Zhewa the Elder, guided by the call of the arrow which only he seemed to hear, led his people onward. Everyone became swift of foot again, a new urgency and expectation in their tread.

The towering trees that had hemmed them in began to recede and all of a sudden their eyes were dazzled by a sunlit panorama.

They saw foothills with low vegetation that descended into five small plains in five different directions, much like a fully open flower with five petals growing in the midst of uninhabited forests, mountain peaks, and gorges. It faced south and was sheltered from the wind. There, larks sang in the woods, squirrels skittered from branch to branch, and fawns walked unconcernedly by. Not far down from their feet the Jinsha River roared by, throwing up snow-white foamy crests.

In the meantime, that arrow guided by the gods was standing quietly near a clear brook, planted in the soil of a plot of land that needed no further clearing or leveling for dwellings to be erected on it straightaway. On the other side of the brook lay swaths of wild wheat already golden and ripe for harvesting. This was indeed a home given by the gods! In confused awe and elation, they prostrated themselves to give thanks to the gods for the blessing.

As their foreheads touched the warm soil, the quiet earth beneath their knees suddenly started trembling and a fantastic roar reached their ears from all sides. They could not tell if it was the sound of the shaking of the leaves and branches of massive trees in the wind, or the crashing of the waves of the Jinsha River on its banks, or a peal of thunder in a perfectly clear day. As they wondered, shadows converged from all directions and eclipsed the sunlight on the green grass. They looked up, half rising from the ground, and all strength drained from their legs. They saw bears; not one, but hundreds, maybe thousands of them, emerging from tree roots, low mounds, among tufts of grass and flowering shrubs, much as mushrooms growing under big trees on a rainy day. These plump, stocky figures standing erect not far from the tribesmen eyed them in silence.

The average height of these bears was comparable to that of humans of shorter stature, but they possessed two or three times the mass of an average man. They had round ears, shiny black fur and a white patch at their neck shaped like a crescent moon with its horns pointing upwards. What is most striking to the observer was an almost human face between the black tufts of hair at the temples, a milky white chin, a flat mouth, and small eyes. These upright bears standing in neat formations gave the impression of grotesque-looking, corpulent local villagers dressed in black hooded jackets gathered to challenge the interlopers with sabers drawn and ready to defend their home.

Escape was hardly possible. More bears were springing up out of the ground and now numbered more than the trees in the surrounding forests. Even the habitually calm and composed Zhewa the Elder could not stop the muscles in his face from twitching and quivering, for he knew only too well that a bear standing upright was a bear poised for attack, and the force of a swinging bear’s paw would instantly break the bones of even a strong bullock, not to mention a man. Zhewa closed his eyes in despair, waiting for his final moment. 

As his fate hung by a thread, a flash of light cleaved the sky, brighter and stronger than sunlight. In that light he felt a sensation of warmth enveloping his body. Am I already dead and on my way to the netherworld? He wondered. Fortunately he was not feeling any pain, by the mercy of his gods! Out of curiosity he opened his eyes a crack to have a peek at the road that his soul had embarked upon. In his partially obstructed view a cloud radiating a brilliant golden glow was moving toward where they were prostrated, its dazzle bringing tears to his eyes. At its approach the nine hundred ninety-nine species of fauna and flora dispersed and the bears with a human face densely carpeting the hillsides parted to make a wide path for the moving light.

The moment the blinding light went out, Zhewa saw before him a humongous bear, its height reaching straight into the clouds and its whole body luminescent. It had a splendid reddish brown coat, a powerful head, and the strong build of a bullock. When it walked slowly on all fours, it appeared at a distance to be a moving mountain, with a massive, bulging, muscular back, and bulky shoulders. “This must be the Bull Bear of legend, the god of bears!” Zhewa cried with wonder to himself.

In the awed silence, the Bull Bear walked at a slow, regal pace, his pelt glistening in the sun. His every footfall was so light it gave an impression of not wanting to hurt the grass underfoot. With a calm composure and half-closed eyes warm and mellow like water, he walked in the manner of a king touring his realm. As his eyes swept past the beings lying at his feet, they felt calm and warmth hitherto unknown to them and, strangely, no fear at all. He paused and turned his head around to take a sweeping survey of the bears with a human face gathered in formations. Where his eyes, like a wind sweeping through the woods, landed, the bears let fall their front paws and dropped them to the ground.

With a slight nod at Zhewa the Elder, the Bull Bear turned into a streak of light and disappeared in the hills. Almost at the same moment the land resonated with another earth-shaking roar as the hundreds of bears with a human face turned in a body and disappeared to their caves without a trace. Only sunlight and the shadows of the clouds traveled silently across the smooth grassy plain.

The prostrate humans, as if wakened out of a dream, had a moment of dazed wonderment before regaining the presence of mind to bring their brows back down into contact with the soil to complete their thanksgiving to the gods.

Thus began the settlement of the Shucun villagers on this plain, where they’ve lived and bred until this day at the border of Yunnan and Sichuan, boasting 272 households in five large tracts of densely spaced dwellings. Shucun village is in the jurisdiction of Xuyang County of Yunnan Province and is unreachable by car, boat, or plane. This virtual isolation from the rest of the world has meant that these people are self-sufficient in food and clothing. They rely on the Elder to preside over weddings and funerals as well as seed sowings. They revere the God of the Bears, worship the Bull Bear as God incarnate and treat the bears with a human face as benefactors and friendly neighbors that have taken them in.

They have observed to this day the prohibition issued by Zhewa the Elder against harming any bear.

Liu Yushan, Deputy County Chief of Xuyang, tall and plump in his middle years, had his hair heavily pomaded and possessed a face bronzed and creased by long exposure to the sun, and eyes that became bloodshot the moment he imbibed alcohol. He was also a chain smoker of Double Happiness cigarettes and when he spun a tale he smoked with a vengeance. He shook his head unapprovingly, with the words “silly and ignorant” quivering on the tip of his tongue, but for some reason decided to hold them back.

“Was there ever another sighting of the Bull Bear?” I asked.

“There was a report by village people putting out ears of corn on their roofs to dry under the sun that they had seen a golden glow in the forest, which they had at first suspected to be a forest fire but the glow was gone in a flash,” Liu Yushan answered. “That prompted some to bruit about the manifestation of the God of the Bears. There followed much beating of drums, blowing of trumpets and the killing of sheep and hogs that were offered to the gods. Some woke up to find, when they went to work in the fields, one or two giant foot prints showing five toes, with no follow-on prints that led in any direction. They couldn’t have belonged to an ordinary animal, unless it had flown in, landed at the spot and flown out. The morning dew that had accumulated in the depressions, unaccountably, formed contours and outlines strikingly similar to those of the plains of Shucun.”

Those were stories that vied in grotesqueness as they were relayed from mouth to mouth and were not to be taken seriously.

“Xiao Liu, are you properly fed?” Liu Yushan asked abruptly as he lights another cigarette. “It’s a long way to Shucun village. I think you should leave as early as possible.”

I happen to share the same family name as Liu Yushan. Like him, I am also rotund of body, although much fairer and finer in complexion. Nonetheless, one plump face and another often looked quite alike. For that reason the deputy county chief warmed to me immediately and right away refer to me as “Xiao Ben Jia,” a term of endearment that was something like “my young cousin.” Then he went further and everyone he could get hold of, he asked rhetorically if we look like father and son. And throwing his heavy arm around my shoulders, he shoved and paraded me around until I felt almost light headed. 

The fact is there was no way that this deputy county chief and I could be perceived as father and son. I realized that he was only forty-six and I was over thirty-four. It was only due to the different environments in which we had lived that he looked much older than his age and I had kept my youthful look. I didn’t feel comfortable being called “Xiao Liu” either. In my company, indeed, in almost all foreign or pseudo-foreign companies in Shanghai, people call each other by their English names. My English name is Kevin, which I have used in more than a decade of hopping from one Fortune 500 company to another.

Fourteen months ago, I was once again at the privileged forefront of the layoff list of my company. The downsizing was attributed to the economic crisis. It seemed I never had any luck with foreign companies. It took me two or three years to be promoted to a supervisory position, but in seven or eight years, after those I had once supervised were given managerial jobs, I stayed a mere supervisor. Every time there is a campaign of sending cadres into the field, salary cuts or layoffs, I never fail to figure prominently on the list of candidates.  

This time around, after a hiatus of twelve months of unemployment, I got hired by HZ Communications China. But before my chair in the prime commercial real estate in downtown Shanghai was warmed by my behind, I was again sent into the field. Dressed in Calvin Klein attire, carrying an Emporio Armani attaché case and a Montblanc pen in my shirt pocket, I flew all the way from Pudong Airport in Shanghai to Kunming, where my company has an office. From there I traveled by car and, after days of driving, arrived at long last in this little town at the border of Sichuan Province, hemmed in by tall peaks crowned by dense clouds.

Come to think of it, were it not for the misplaced paternal affection of Liu Yushan, I would not have been able to make so much progress in so short a time in my work. I had arrived only yesterday morning by the overnight long-distance bus. Mr. Liu, the deputy county chief, had dinner with me and this morning he came during breakfast to grace me with his presence, and the best car in the county government motor pool was placed at my service and was now parked outside. This was my transportation to the Shucun village.

This best car, allegedly once a Mazda SUV, looked as though it were only a few years my junior and after many successive replacements of parts, traces of its former self were almost all gone. As I depressed the pedal to drive up the road leading into the mountains, I could still see Liu Yushan in the rear view mirror waving to me from a distance. Ahead of me was an inky sky threatening rain, and a chain of mountains whose ridge resembled the ripple-like furry back of a divine beast, ornamented by splashes of spring blooms and veiled in mists.

I revved the engine up the ascending road and as the car made a turn around a bend, Liu Yushan and the county town of black-tiled single-level houses vanished behind me. The puny car was swallowed in the folds of the mountain spurs, surrounded by the soughing of winds blowing through the giant trees.

II

HZ Communications China was founded four years ago by the parent company HZ, headquartered in the Asia-Pacific region, with the ambition of becoming the largest equipment manufacturer in its specialized field in China.

In its eagerness to win the contract of supplying networking communications equipment and services to China Mobile for its markets in Jiangxi, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Fujian provinces, and in order to build and foster, in advance of the contract tender, a glittering, positive public image for itself, HZ Communications China offered, in collaboration with Yunnan Mobile, a gift of a satellite phone to the remote and impoverished Shucun village. And I was the sole company representative sent on a field trip to Shucun as part of this public relations campaign.

I’d been on the road for a good four hours and it was one o’clock in the afternoon. After eating one and a half steamed buns I still had a whole bag of them left. Two canisters of gasoline went into the tank of the car and four remained, sitting in the back seat. According to the detailed map Deputy County Chief Liu gave me this morning, at the end of the motor road I was to leave the car and walk on for another four hours until I came to a plain in the shape of five petals with five large aggregations of houses with shale-tiled roofs. That would be the Shucun village. He had hoped I would postpone my trip by a day so that he could accompany me tomorrow. He couldn’t get away today because he had meetings to attend. The idea of spending a day more than I had to in this place in the middle of nowhere did not appeal to me. “All right, you can’t miss it,” he said. “There’s only one trail leading to the village.”

The mountain road was recognizable as such only intermittently. It was not infrequent for the tires to scrape the lush leaves of ferns, throwing up fragments of foliage and twigs that gave off an intense herbal fragrance. The foreshadowed rain did not materialize as clouds and mists dissipated. Thin shafts of sunlight peeked out from distant clouds, much like a stingy spotlight seeking out the chosen people of God lost in this vast wilderness.

I stepped on the gas to head into that patch of sunlight when suddenly something like a ball of fire, or perhaps a lightning bolt rolling down the side of the mountain, blocked my way. It was a brilliance that defied description—golden red, like the softest core of a flame. It spread like afterglow in a sunset and was accompanied by an earth-shattering rumble. Leaves started raining down from the trees in the dense forest and vegetation and rocks dimmed, as if the entire world, under the shock of this brilliance, had absconded into negative film. Even the image imprinted on my retina turned in half a second into a transient negative image. 

I instinctively tried to stop the car by stepping on the brake pedal, but the car was going a bit too fast and the brakes were a little worse for wear and the car kept hurtling until it crashed with a racket into something like a soft wall. The light instantly went out, like spent fireworks. I was knocked out of my wind as I hit the steering wheel, hurting my ribs in the process. My forehead crashed into the windshield. The crazy-quilt world through the cracked glass rolled ninety degrees to the left and I, cramped and stuck in the car seat, fell to the right toward the ground. An even louder racket of things tearing and splitting apart followed. Then total darkness and a blank.

I remembered wrapping my hands in my sleeves to protect them against the broken glass when I clambered out of the twisted car door.

The car looked like a crumpled cardboard box.  

To the left of the front end of the car lay a huge beast with reddish brown fur. The size of three all-terrain vehicles combined, it sprawled in the middle of the road like a hill with a fantastic color, its chest heaving in uneven breathing; after a few jerks, it did not succeed in its attempt to stand up. In all likelihood, it had rushed down the side of the hill next to the road and came right into the path of the car and was hit in the chest and abdomen, the softest parts of its torso.

When I staggered past the humongous beast, my knees suddenly started quaking. Less than a hundred meters ahead, that beautiful sheaf of light filtering down through the clouds was trained serenely on the mists rising from the bottom of a precipice. The deceptively wide and level mountain road came to an abrupt end here, without any forewarning, dropping off into an abyss. I saw nothing under my feet but puffs of clouds and vapors hugging the sheer cliff.

If my car had continued to travel another hundred meters, I would have gone over the cliff. Most probably I would at this moment still be airborne in a free fall, shrieking in terror and describing a parabolic arc through space like a grotesque, sheet metal bird.

With a tumultuous churning in my chest I lost consciousness.

III

My body was in a constant swinging motion.

I had no sensation in my hands and feet and I couldn’t move.

My back bumped against rocks and my shoulders hurt as if they were dislocated.

I forced my swollen eyes open and saw the blue sky oscillate right and left about an axis constituted by a wooden pole. My hands and feet were tethered to the pole and my body slung on the pole was carried by two men. The glare of the sun prevented me from having a clear view of their faces except for strings of some dainty little moon-white ornaments dangling from their long plaits that tinkled with each step they took. They appeared to be tiny animal teeth of various kinds.

During one stage of the march, my body hung over a chasm. With every swaying motion, I could glimpse out of the corner of my eyes the lush abyss. I was terror-stricken, fearing that I could be let go and tumble into that deep, bottomless maw. I had an urge to scream but I was slung over a pole with hands and feet tied together, and my broken ribs hurt so much I couldn’t produce a sound.

I could vaguely discern, at the foot of the deep gorge, the contours of a green flower with five petals, crowned by glistening cyan pistils. The veins on the petals seemed to outline a neat patchwork of planting fields. A weathered voice was singing hu-ma-hu-ma-la-ni-yeh, hu-ma-hu-ma-ge-la-jia. Strangely the voice, while by no means orotund, sounded as if it had traveled a great distance, feeble but articulate, breathing every word into my ears. Peace and serenity entered the sense of hearing and radiated out into infinite space, and my pale, plump soul once again floated out of the body.

IV

Truth be told, I got my present job at HZ Communications China through the help of my one-time girlfriend Jessica. She very tactfully expressed her disappointment with me. I was working at HZ then, headquartered in the Asia-Pacific region. She had a job with MG at the time. In my successive hops from company to company, I never managed to catch up with her as she moved up the corporate ladder.

Following my layoff, the stock market plummeted to 1,000 and new entries on help wanted websites almost dried up. I sent out my CV to dozens of places without getting a job offer. After being out of work for six months, I shed my pride and started asking old colleagues for help. Michael, Manager of Human Resources at the HZ Asia-Pacific headquarters, told me there was nothing he could do for me, but a subsidiary newly set up by HZ was expanding its operations and might need people.

He added with a sly laugh over the phone: “Kevin, don’t you know?” He added with a sly laugh over the phone. “That Jessica of yours has joined HZ Communications from MG. She is now the sales manager there and enjoys great popularity and respect. I understand that the two of you have kept up with each other all these years. With her in that position, there’s no reason she can’t find a suitable job for you. By the way, she has not had a boyfriend since breaking up with you. She is the legendary iceberg beauty of HZ.” 

As a last resort and with the greatest reluctance, I went to see Jessica. It was our first meeting since she moved out of our apartment. We sat on the balcony of the Starbucks inside the Metro City Mall in Xujiahui District on an off day in autumn, enjoying the last sunshine of the year, drinking cappuccino and eating blueberry pie. She was the typical Shanghai girl with delicate, regular features—eyebrows painted into two slim arcs, an oval face, large eyes with lashes that fluttered non-stop like the wings of a butterfly, and the inevitable paper napkin in her left hand that constantly went up to dab at her mouth (a stack of napkins would thus be killed off before a cup of hot frothed beverage was finished).

She looked even more beautiful than six years before. Her hair was shorter now, falling down to her shoulders and slightly curled, framing a face with smooth, well-fleshed out cheeks. A glittering platinum pendant of Guanyin dangled on her necklace. Her French manicured nails discreetly showed off the smooth, white complexion of the fingers wrapped around the coffee cup. Her eyes no longer shifted and wandered, but often held mine with a smile. This added to her attractiveness but often forced me to avert my eyes in blushing embarrassment.

“Why don’t we do this,” she said in a soft, even tone. “You come to the sales department and help me out. I will talk to human resources.”

A job, that’s what I’d been aspiring to! But I really hated to put Jessica out.

“It’s very easy,” she said, as if guessing my thoughts. “The job opening has been there for quite some time now and hasn’t been filled for lack of suitable candidates. Human resources would thank me for it.”

On Tuesday I was notified to go to the personnel department to fill out a staff registration form. I was familiar with this procedure at HZ. It would be followed by the formalities of recruitment. I hadn’t expected it to go so smoothly. When Jessica accompanied me to the personnel department to pick up the form, we met Carl in the corridor. For the shortest moment Carl had a startled look but he recovered quickly and came over with a big smile to give me a few pats on the shoulder. I caught a fleeting look of embarrassment as he did so.

Carl and I went back a long time. During the two years I worked as an employee at the Asia-Pacific headquarters of HZ and the four years I was chief of procurement, I watched as he rose through the ranks from a salesman to sales manager. At the annual meeting of the company held at the Sheraton Resort Hotel on the beachfront of Yalong Bay in Sanya in Hainan Province, the two of us basked in our success. I was rated the star of cost control for that year and he, in an exhibition of the full panoply of his excellent qualities as a sales expert, gave the only speech that did not induce sleep at the convention. 

He was tall, liked to play tennis, and had at the time the physique of an athlete. He was always dressed in a smart suit and wore a neat crew cut. His oblong face with a shiny forehead was never without its warm, friendly signature smile. His faultless Mandarin and English with a British accent, spoken with great variations in tone and inflection, conveyed an enthusiasm that proved contagious and gave an impression that he was an orator whenever he opened his mouth. We had had no interaction at the workplace and had only heard about each other. That convention finally brought the two mutual admirers face to face. At the formal dinner we drank a lot of Merlot together and afterwards in the lobby bar commanding a view of the beach we finished half a bottle of Chivas Regal between us as we talked about women.

Now Carl had gained some girth at the waist but had otherwise changed little. Only he was now a vice president of HZ Communications. “So it’s Jessica who got you to apply at our company?” Carl said. “I didn’t know that. Excellent! Now we’ll be working together again! Welcome!”

With that he solemnly offered to shake my hand in a very formal gesture of welcome, as if this was already my first day at work. The grip of his hand instantly reassured me and I privately congratulated myself. After filling out the forms, I was seen to the elevator by Jessica and suddenly realized I was humming a tune. Fortunately, Jessica didn’t seem to have heard it and as she said goodbye she appeared somehow to be absent-minded and anxious to leave.  

A week went by, and then a month. I went down every day to check my mailbox and went online three times to scan through my emails, but still no notification of hiring decisions or reporting to work. Strangely and uncharacteristically, Jessica had of late been offline all the time on MSN. My pride prevented me from calling her on the phone to make any inquiries. I could only tell myself, wait, and wait some more.

Six weeks later, no longer able to stand the anxiety that was eating me up inside, I finally decided to call Jessica. She seemed to be occupied with something and only acknowledged having heard me with perfunctory hems and haws and was noncommittal. I swallowed my pride by repeating my questions. 

“Why don’t you send an email to Carl and ask him?” she said. “Didn’t he promise you a job last time you met? His responsibilities now include overseeing personnel matters in consultation with human resources.” 

Ten minutes later I received an email from Jessica, the kind of formal, work-related email so familiar to me in the past. It read, in English: “Dear Kevin, how are you? This is Carl’s office email, please contact him directly. Best regards.” It was followed by Jessica’s electronic signature in Chinese and English.

I was puzzled. Didn’t Jessica say it was very easy and that the company was eager to fill the vacancy but had not been able to find a suitable candidate? I had thought the matter would be clinched with the agreement of Jessica and human resources. Why did I have to go through Carl also?

I couldn’t very well demand an explanation from Jessica. When she said she’d help me find a job, I had struck a lukewarm pose. How could I now give an impression of total dependence on her? There was no alternative but to follow her suggestion. After much consideration and a dozen revisions, I finally fired off an email stripped of all emotion to Carl, asking him if his “distinguished company” had arrived at an opinion either for or against hiring me after reviewing the application form I filled out.

Before business closing time the following day I received Carl’s response, in which he disclosed that the matter was still under examination and consideration and had not been submitted to him by the personnel department and expressed deep regret about the long wait the applicant was subjected to. It was a short, correct but hollow letter that had probably been drafted by his secretary. But I saw a ray of hope toward the end of the message, for Carl added: “Hey, pal, don’t forget your old friend. Come in and have a chat when you pass by someday.” The body of the text was written in formal English, here at the end he sounded familiar. 

Working up enough courage I decided to “pass by,” thinking this was in all likelihood the only opportunity to produce movement in the matter. On a sunny morning I rode the subway to the Huangpi Road station and took the exit for the Pacific Mall on Huaihai Road. I killed time by strolling through the streets and then came to the lower level of the Hong Kong Grand Century Place Mall and stood idly for a while before dialing Carl’s office number, making sure he would hear the noise of the shopping crowd. “I happen to ‘pass by’ your office building, how about my bringing up a coffee for you?” I was going to say casually and cheerfully to him.

The moment I said a hearty hello, I found it was his secretary who took the call. She asked in a businesslike manner for my name, position, and reason for the call and told me to hold. Minutes later she informed me that Carl agreed to see me after 2:00 PM.

Before going to the appointment with Carl, I “passed by” Jessica’s office. I did this as an emotional warm-up to the manufactured chance meeting with Carl and also to reconnoiter for signs of the possible hitch in my job application. Jessica’s first reaction when she saw me wave at her from the door was one of astonishment, followed by delighted surprise. She put down the file in her hands and came to the door to let me in. She invited me to sit with her for a while in her office and had her secretary bring me a cup of coffee. 

When she learned I was here to see Carl, her delight seemed all the greater. “You did the right thing,” she said. “It’s high time that you get together and have a good chat. After all, you’re no strangers to each other. You were always so naïve about such things.”

To my very casual question about the matter of my job application, she replied by asking me if I was on a diet because she found me thinner than before. Without waiting for an answer, she said abruptly, “Carl is my superior. You’ve done the right thing by coming to see him on your own.” Then she bade me goodbye, saying she had business to attend to.

In ignorance and confusion I rode up in the elevator and walked the length of the corridor to the door of Carl’s office. His secretary checked my name and the time of appointment on her agenda book before admitting me. Carl didn’t put on airs, although his enormous desk and the high-backed leather chair were somewhat intimidating. For about half an hour we talked about the weather, soccer, and old gossip going back to our days at HZ Asia-Pacific headquarters. Then I finally summoned the courage to broach the matter of my job application.

“I really miss the nine-to-five days,” I started to say. “Sitting idly at home with nothing to occupy me is tough.”

He took a quick glance at his watch and assumed a startled look. “Oh, I nearly forgot I have a meeting at two thirty. Time really flies when old friends chat. It was a real pleasure, Kevin. Do come again when you have the time.”

With that he rose to his feet and offered his hand. It was a warm, forceful handshake. He left me with no alternative but to make for the door, albeit hesitatingly. At the door I turned my head around and said embarrassedly: “My job application …”

He appeared to have anticipated the question. Looking up from the dossier he was reading, he nodded with a smile. “We’ll talk about it some other time.”

The secretary in the meantime had opened the door and was waiting on her feet for me to leave. After I came out of the inner office of the vice president, the secretary opened the door to the corridor.

V

Xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa!

The rhythmic sound assailed my ears from all sides, as if I were surrounded by a huge crowd chanting in unison. This constant assault on my eardrums wakened my soul.

Where was I? The deafening sound caused ringing in my ears and a splitting headache. 

Through the narrow cracks between the eyelids I forced open with great effort, I gradually made out a very large room in darkness, with no lights, except for slivers of sunlight filtered through cracks in the brick walls casting a smattering of points of light on the sooty walls and floor. Further away in the middle of the room a shaft of light came down at an angle, its outline substantiated by the rising smoke and floating dust in the room. A puny figure, whose hands were busy doing something, crouched by the fire pit under a skylight. 

It had the feel of a scene from a dream.

I found myself propped on a pile of firewood in a corner of the room, my back chafing against the prickling twigs. I tried to shift the position of my body, only to find that I was still bound by ropes. My hands and feet were now free, but my torso was securely wound in coils of hemp ropes. When I tried to take a deep breath, a sharp pain in my ribcage elicited an involuntary scream from me. The echoes of the scream startled me. So I was not dreaming after all! 

At the sound of my pained cry, the ambient shouting, as if on cue, went decibels higher. Xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa! The points of light on the walls shifted and shimmered. There was really a noisy, impatient crowd gathered outside obviously.

In a panic I started shouting uncontrollably. “Untie me! Untie me! Where am I? Who are you?”

In response, the shouting of the crowd became even louder. Xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa!

Then I saw the puny figure crouching by the fire pit stand up and walk with a light tread and at a deliberate pace to the door, push it open and say something in a soft tone. The shouting ebbed, and there followed the sound of receding feet scattering in different directions, and the points of light on the walls were restored one after another and became steady again.

But the sound out of me did not abate; I could hear my own scream for a long time. It was prompted by an uncontrollable terror. Finally, drenched in sweat, I fell silent. I had shouted myself hoarse.

In the enforced quiet I suddenly became aware of a third living being in the room besides me and that puny figure. Two eyes the size of tennis balls squinted half closed were spying on me, about three meters from me near the wall, eyes with a naïve twinkle mixed with interest and curiosity.

Seeing that I had finally sensed its presence, the being winked one of its eyes and suddenly moved its furry face to rest its chin on the floor, and, opening wide its mouth, it gave a huge yawn. Its mouth was as wide as the span of a palm, and opened to reveal two rows of sharp, white teeth. What I had thought to be an amorphous pile of earth occupying a space of about four square meters next to one wall, I realized now, was in fact the inert form of this being that had hitherto been lying quietly. When it yawned, its back heaved and the reddish brown fur on its impressive bulk gave off a wondrous luster in the dim light.

I recognized it now. This was the enormous beast that was injured when it came into the path of my car. 

A man and a beast were put up in the same half of the room. But our treatments couldn’t be more different. I was thrown onto a stack of firewood while that beast lay comfortably on a thick mat of hemp. I was bound up while it was free to move about and had before it four or five wooden bowls containing honey, dried fish, smoked meat, golden kernels of wheat, and bright red nandina berries. A king’s feast, if you will.

Then I was suddenly reminded of the story told by Liu Yushan. Could this beast be the Bull Bear of legend, the God of the Shucun villagers?

What a disaster! Why did I pick their God to crash into right on their turf? I reckoned that the most likely scenario was that the Shucun villagers found the two of us lying on the ground and transported us back to their village. They would naturally do their best to restore health to their God. As for me, someone who had the temerity to hurt their God, my prospects were dire. Would I be served up to the Bull Bear, just like the dried fish, the smoked meat, and the rest?

In great fright, I put my feet down on the floor and moved sharply back, and losing my balance, fell off the stack of firewood and landed with a racket on the floor. But the puny figure remained seated by the fire pit, seemingly oblivious to the great noise, the deft movements of the hands continuing without the slightest pause or hesitation. 

In the shaft of light sent down from the skylight sat two wooden barrels, from one of which the puny figure took some powdery stuff and mixed it with a dark red liquid ladled out from the other barrel. Soon, in the manner of a dove flying out of the hand of a magician, a dark red fawn materialized with all its limbs. On the floor illuminated by the shaft of light stood already three longs columns of horses, deer, cows, sheep, and other animals I couldn’t name. The work continued without letup. The dust picked out by the shaft of light danced about the seamed, soft and serene face.

“Granny!” I cried with all my might. “Granny, help me!” All I managed to get out was a hissing sound trapped in my throat and tears rolling down my cheeks. I was ignored.

VI

In the two weeks since I “passed by” Carl’s office I waited anxiously but heard nothing back. I considered “passing by” his office in the Hong Kong Grand Century Place a second time, but remembering the awkwardness of that first episode, I hesitated. Every morning I would wake up about seven o’clock and plan to leave at nine, but would then put it off on various pretexts and surf the Web on my computer until eleven. 

I was driving myself mad by this procrastination. By the end of another week of futile waiting, my cell phone rang one morning at ten-thirty. The area code was from the Huaihai Road vicinity and my heart raced. It did indeed come from HZ Communications, and from none other than Carl himself.

At the other end of the line, Carl’s laugh sounded cheerful as spring. “Hey, Kevin, I’m so sorry to bother you,” he said. “Are you free tomorrow and day after tomorrow? I wonder if you’d be able to help me out. I have two friends visiting from Hong Kong and they will be here in Shanghai this weekend, but unfortunately I’m leaving tonight on a business trip to Beijing. Can you play host to them on my behalf and take them around Shanghai?”

“No problem,” I said, only too eager to oblige. “It’s only proper that I should do it.”

Proper my ass! I kicked myself afterwards for being so masochistic and self-degrading. After all, the friendship between Carl and me did not go beyond sharing a few drinks one night in the distant past. If he had come to Shanghai from out of town, I wouldn’t necessarily have cared to play host to him, let alone entertain his friends on his behalf. And yet I was so obliging, as if he had granted me a favor and a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity that I didn’t even have the presence of mind to ask who would pay the expenses. 

Those two visitors from Hong Kong were very demanding, and treated me like some underling designated by Carl to pander to their every need. On Saturday, they clamored to be taken on a tour of the Oriental Pearl Tower, with me, naturally, picking up the tab. In the evening I wined and dined them at a teppanyaki place on Riverside Boulevard and got a paid receipt from the restaurant. Early on Sunday morning I accompanied them to City God Temple, where we had xiao long bao dumplings (soup dumplings) the Temple is famous for before I was able finally to hustle them into a cab that took them to the airport. Then I called Carl to report that the two-day excursion was a success.

I could hear the hum typical of a crowded restaurant in the background as he thanked me in a loud voice. “Kevin, you are a good pal! I can accomplish anything with your help!”

That took out of my mouth the question I most wanted to ask. And what he said also essentially shut me up about whom to take the paid receipts to for reimbursement. I allowed Carl to hang up on a got-to-go, cheerful note, comforting myself with the idea that since Carl now owed me a favor, he would actively intercede on my behalf and secure the job for me.

I waited another month without hearing anything from HZ Communications. I began to despair of it. I got ready to scour the help wanted sites online, lower my sights and cast a wide net when sending out my CV. But it was poorly timed, for Christmas was approaching and it was the slowest season of the year for recruitment. Even when a post was advertised, the contact person’s heart was not in it. So I temporarily suspended my job search and slept in every day until the sun was high in the morning.

I was wakened out of my sweet dream by the loud musical ringtone of my cell phone. “Kevin, are you free today?” Carl said jovially. “How about playing a round of golf with me?”

I agreed with alacrity. Opening my eyes, I found that day had not broken yet and a pale moon still hung in the sky. Trembling with winter cold, I paid dozens of yuan for a taxi to take me to the golf course on Longdong Boulevard in Pudong. The sun stole across the sky as the cab negotiated the long, bumpy road to the green. I told myself this time I must get a definitive answer about my job. Eighteen holes would be enough time for me to get a clear and detailed answer out of him. 

And I got to ask the question. Carl gave me the answer. “HZ is a Global 500 company that countless would-be candidates try to get in. It is public knowledge that HZ Communications China is spearheading HZ’s planned expansion in the China region. As a result we get more job applications than we have time to review. They are all talented people. Besides, the company is not really short-handed. The hiring campaigns are only for public consumption, a sort of PR, contrary to what Jessica told you.”

“But,” Carl continued, “I will try my best to secure a job for you. Have some patience.”

In his new position, Carl has acquired new hobbies and tastes. Tennis is a white-collar sport and golf is for the gold collars. He strode with confidence and self-assurance and his swings were graceful and well-practiced, as if he was born for high management. I, on the other hand, struggled and stumbled along, tormented by the freezing suburban temperature, and managed several times to hit the ball into the river. And when I tried to strike a ball by the river, I accidentally landed my foot in the water. It was a wonder that they were able to maintain the green in such unusual lushness even in this weather. 

At the end of this day of misery for me, Carl paid for both of us and took me home in his car. This greatly improved my mood. Without a doubt what perked me up most was his promise to “secure” a job for me. I came down with a serious cold, but there was peace in my mind. It was with deep gratitude to Carl in my heart that I spent New Year’s Day with a sniveling runny nose.

Twice in a month I called Carl to say “Happy New Year.” On the second occasion, after I’d exhausted all the pleasantries, I hemmed and hawed, loath to hang up. 

“It’s very difficult,” Carl then answered my unspoken question. “The company has suspended its recruitment campaign. But don’t you worry! I will do my best on your behalf. Just wait patiently for a while longer.”

When February came around, with the Chinese New Year barely a week away, I called Carl again to wish him an early Happy Chinese New Year. “I am busy,” he said and hung up impatiently.

Meanwhile, Jessica evaporated from the earth two thirds of the time, leaving MSN messages unanswered and answering my text messages two or three days late and taking my calls one out of three times only. In the six years after we broke up, she had remained in touch on online chats and had always been ready not only to analyze the difficulties I encountered in life, but also to help me untie emotional knots. What had happened to change all that?

On the fourth day of the lunar New Year, I braved ridicule by calling Carl, who was in a surprisingly friendly mood. “Come by my place, will you?” he said.

I thought to myself: “You are inviting me to formally wish you a happy New Year!” So I spent hard-earned money to get two bottles of Château Margaux red and a box of Montecristo cigars and headed straight to Carl’s apartment. Carl readily accepted the New Year’s gifts and treated me to two cups of fresh brewed coffee and one eighth of a cheese cake and offered me a return gift of two bottles of Chateau Latour. It appeared he didn’t try to take advantage of me and had invited me over truly to have a friendly get-together on this festive occasion.

I felt contrite for having misread his generosity of spirit. When there was still no news about the job after the Spring Festival, I decided not to be an awkward burden to Carl and Jessica any longer. I figured that companies would soon start a new round of recruitments and I was all set to start my own job search online when the mailman came with the announcement that a registered letter was waiting for me to pick up with proper ID.

The job offer arrived finally.

The staff registration form I filled out bore the number of 89. When I reported to the personnel department in great elation, I found to my puzzlement and surprise that the others who were there also to complete the formalities of recruitment had the numbers 106, 107, and 108. That meant that during the agonizing five months of waiting for the job offer after I filled out the registration form, seventeen people who filed after me had been hired by the company ahead of me.

On a later occasion when I had coffee with Jessica alone, I mentioned this fact. She averted her eyes and fiddled with the platinum Guanyin on her necklace. Not to embarrass her, I was going to steer away from the topic when she suddenly said something that threw me into confusion.

“Kevin, it’s not that I didn’t want to have anything to do with you,” she said. “It was for your own good. In that situation, I found it inappropriate for me to intercede for you. Some people enjoy feeling important. If things were too easy, their psychological needs would be left unfulfilled.”

Carl and I met again when he received me in his office. This time we met not as old colleagues and not for idle chat. Now we worked for the same company again, where he was management and I was on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. I offered a million thanks and he strode out from behind his enormous desk and patted me on the shoulder, without the least air of superiority, saying I must prove with my sterling performance that he was well justified to give strong backing to my hiring. Then he announced to me that at present there were two departments willing to take me. One was the sales department overseen by Jessica and the other was the marketing department managed by William. He wanted to know which one I’d pick but didn’t need an immediate answer. He gave me two days to consider my decision.

“There’s no need for further consideration,” I said. “I’ll go with the marketing department.”

On the first day of work at the marketing department, William organized a welcome dinner for me, with the attendance of all the marketing department staff. When Mary timidly said that her nanny had to go home in the evening, leaving her son unattended if she attended the dinner, William waved his hand. “It’s your choice,” he said. “Do you want to pick Kevin or your son?” And that triggered a ripple of naughty laughter in the office.

William sported a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, had neat, white teeth, and long hair that fell down to his shoulders. He was witty and was the only person in the company to have the air of an artist. Word had it that everyone in the marketing department was his fan. His fan club included even young girls and middle-aged ladies from other departments of the company, who frequently came to the marketing department on the pretext of some kind of official business, or occasionally sat in on a party of the marketing department, for the sole purpose of catching a witticism or two from William.

The welcome dinner was held at Xianghuqing, a restaurant specializing in Hunan cuisine, on a side street two traffic lights away from the company. It boasted an impressive façade but service was slow and sloppy. Buckets and mops sat around, waiting to be removed from the main eating hall, and the private banquet rooms had water stains on their walls and the chairs smelled faintly of mold. I couldn’t understand why William preferred this restaurant with no ambiance to speak of, except possibly for the fact that its owner, who was on good terms with William, allowed him to bring his own alcohol. A case of six bottles of Arhus Absolut Vodka of the raspberry flavor, William’s favorite, had been carried into the reserved banquet room by Thomas and placed on the tea table.

William had a rule for his parties: there must be alcohol in everyone’s glass. For those who couldn’t hold their drink, there was the alternative of beer. Out of gratitude for such a generous welcome, I heroically poured myself a full glass of vodka. The proper way to drink this kind of liquor was to do it fast—tilt and empty. Before the hot dishes were served, Thomas had already made me down three glasses of the strong stuff. My job title had been decided before the welcome dinner and I was named PR chief—not too shabby by half. Thomas was my only subordinate in the PR team, a young man with red lips and white cheeks, fresh out of college, delicate like a girl and small in build but self-confident and unafraid to look you in the eye. A favorite expression of his was “I have an old head on young shoulders.” His staff registration form bore the number of 90 and he was recruited by the company five months ahead of me, but ended up being a staff member of greater seniority dancing attendance on me.

“Boss, I look forward to a fruitful career under your able leadership,” Thomas said in apparent earnest to my face. We drank three glasses to that and soon other colleagues gathered around us, as if by previous agreement. As the hot dishes and the sizzling iron griddle tappan were served, the ambient noise sounded like thousands of water droplets dancing in a wok with boiling oil: a cacophony of conventional toasts, backhanded compliments, slights disguised as intimacy, and gossip and anecdotes bandied about, some familiar and some esoteric to me. Suddenly I felt safe and relaxed, and the tight muscles in my shoulders loosened with an audible click. The cobwebs that had clogged my mind in the recent past were swept away. I finally belonged again, to a collective that had opened its arms to me. I no longer needed to feel haunted by the sense of being deprived of a group identity.

To every toast I responded by throwing back my head and emptying my glass, feeling toasty and warm in my heart, although the alcohol in my stomach felt cold like fragments of glass. Smiling faces hovered around me. I wanted to have something to eat. I reached for the bean curd strips with my chopsticks and picked up a bunch of them, but they fell off, leaving only two or three strands between the tips of my chopsticks. Mary was propelled toward me. Someone filled a glass with beer and pressed it into her hand. Under her flimsy, single eyelids, there was a look of timid embarrassment.  

“Drink it up! Drink it up!” Someone said before she was able to utter a word. She opened her mouth, revealing two disproportionally large front teeth that glinted in the light. “Drink it up! Drink it up!” She choked and covered her mouth, while the tidal waves of voices pressed her to finish the remaining half glass. “Drink it up! Drink it up!” And I threw back my head one more time, or was it two more times? By the time I put down my glass, she had already returned to her seat, and was looking at me with an expression of contrition.

The roast fish was served on a large sizzling griddle warmed by a gas burner. Amid cheers, William rose to his feet and thrust his wine glass in front of mine. “Do you still remember my name?” 

“William,” I answered with effort. He swept the room with his eyes before shooting me a complicit smile. “No, no, no! What kind of pal are you? How can you forget my name? What punishment do you think you deserve?”

I remember drinking up three consecutive glasses by way of punishment and I flicked my wrist to invert the glass to show not a drop remained in it. “Only casual acquaintances call me William,” William said, holding his wine glass in his hand. “You should call me Will. Pals always call me Will. Hey, you really can hold your drink.”

I thought I detected some surprise in his eyes. I steadied myself with effort, put a hand to my shirt front, and tried not to knock over my wine glass as I set it down carefully on the table.

“You made another mistake.” William’s words, indistinct at times, continued to pour into my ears. “You have drunk a toast to everyone around the table except to Will. Come, we must drink this up!”

“All right, let’s drink it up!” My voice seemed far away to me. Someone thrust a nice-looking, semi-transparent wine bottle our way and seemed to be filling my glass. A cool liquid washed over my fingernails. I could see William was still holding his glass high. Then a proud smile sprang into his face, much like the expression on the face of a matador bowing to the audience after having pulled out the sword that gave the coup de grace to the bull. My hands dropped to my sides involuntarily. I had a sense that someone was trying to steady my corpulent body. Both my consciousness and my body went into a freefall. 

That was indeed a totally enjoyable party and I was happy and touched. That’s what I told myself when I woke up the morning after. But my olfactory perception said otherwise. A smell of roast fish permeated my suit and every layer of clothing, down to my underwear, a surfeit of spices infiltrated every fiber. And a strange chemical aftertaste lingered in my gastro-intestinal tract. Raspberry my foot! What kind of additive did they mix into that heady spirit?

I walked into the office with an embarrassed, sheepish air early next morning. A front desk girl who was at the welcome dinner was already standing next to my cubicle, her hands on the back of my swivel chair and a white, bare knee half resting on the seat, twisting her body left and right, tittering as she chatted with William next to her. When she caught sight of me, the hilarity of her tittering, with a hand over her mouth, heightened. “You did really good last night,” she said to me. 

William came over and gave my shoulder a couple of playful jabs. “From now on, you call me Will.”

From that day on I was called on to attend one dinner party after another organized by William almost every other day. At the second one, it was I who took the others out for a drink at the suggestion of William. At each round of dinner parties, people in the marketing department sat down to wine and dine William, all apparently on special terms with him, or more correctly, all in the belief that their group was the only one enjoying favor with Will. Some parties were organized by William for media friends, still others for company brass. The parties came in all sizes, from five or six to a dozen, the only constant being alcohol and inebriation. And unless higher standards were called for, William normally asked his assistant to make those dinner reservations at Xianghuqing Restaurant.

The smells of roast fish and raspberry dogged me. I often stared vacantly in the morning at the work in hand and at the lunchbox at lunch time. When I received an invitation to a party, I’d feel infinitely weary, but when no invitation came, I’d feel unaccountably disappointed. A dinner party can be a quick way to effectively exorcise the anxiety of someone with too much time on his hands and at a loss to know what to do with it and someone dreading aloneness. A dinner party, on its wobbly feet, carries the onerous responsibility of dispensing a sense of belonging, trust and cordiality, and emboldens its participants with alcohol. Yes, I must admit that I get a sense of belonging in those cozy private banquet rooms packed with fellow humans and flowing with food and drink and drowned in noise. But in that briefest moment preceding the plunge into the drunken state, I felt as if I were sitting on the brink of a sheer cliff paved with thousands of smiling faces, impaled by an acute sense of emptiness. 

I became a hot item in the marketing department, I was now William’s favorite. This was already public knowledge. My worth and stature steadily rose with the increasing number of dinner parties I attended. Everyone showed deference to me in manners and in tone, even though I had not been given any assignment yet, and was still in a phase of “studying” dossiers and cases. Thomas hovered about me all the time, trying to get me to talk, even when there was nothing to talk about, and endeavoring to find common language between us, undaunted by the generation gap. 

“Oh, you mean Johnny the pop singer? How could I not listen to his songs,” he said in an excited, loud voice, as if he had just found a kindred spirit. Backing up a few steps, he pretended to arrange the papers on the desk and gave a few light taps on the keyboard before coming before me again. “Oh, I absolutely adore his Looking Back a Second Time and Quitting You Is Like Quitting Smoking! I just knew we would have a lot in common and get along. I am more mature than my age would indicate.”  

He danced about me for the obvious purpose of getting me to take him to the dinner parties. “I am your only subordinate,” he said. “We are the same. We should share weal and woe and be always seen together.”

He hit the right chord with me and I felt a rush of warmth surge through my body. “Boss, taking an errand boy with you to these parties will be a measure of your importance in the public eye,” he added.

At the table Thomas’s eyes lit up. He was all worked up and engaged everybody, especially William. When William raised his glass, he would try to beat everybody to be the first to raise his and to say something appropriate for the occasion. At least it saved me a lot of energy and spared me many obligatory shots of liquor. The downside is when there is such a gung ho person at the table the dinner will inevitably drag on for quite some time. Weak-willed as I was, I never had the courage to leave early and always stuck to the bitter end.

Shortly after I began taking Thomas to one of those dinner parties, my invitations to them started to dwindle. 

At the end of the work day, Thomas would act mysterious and make a point of telling me he had to leave first. When I went downstairs, I would see him waiting at the elevator, with his back turned toward me and feigning not to have seen me.

He no longer bothered to seek out topics of common interest to us. When I tried to start a chat, he would answer perfunctorily in monosyllables, with his eyes glued to the computer screen and his fingers dancing on the keyboard, apparently too busy for idle chat. Therefore, when Thomas re-exhibited his previous eagerness to talk to me one day, I obviously said too much.

“Boss, why did you pick the marketing department when you had a choice between marketing and sales?” Thomas asked.

“It was because of Jessica,” I said. I told him in broad strokes that there had been a special relationship between Jessica and me and that in order to avoid the embarrassment of working in uncomfortably close proximity, I had decided against going into sales.

That greatly piqued the interest of Thomas, who avidly probed into the nature of my special relationship with the Iceberg Beauty of the company. Lured on by the natural pleasure in two men talking about a beautiful woman and driven by that damnable vanity of mine, I revealed that Jessica had been my former girlfriend. In retrospect, that indiscreet conversation probably paved the way for my exile to faraway Shucun village.

At a regularly scheduled Monday meeting, a discussion was initiated about how to implement the company’s ambitious bidding plan. With any eye to burnishing his credentials, Carl was committed to winning China Mobile’s telecom network equipment contracts for six provinces, reportedly worth 800 million yuan. Jessica was made head of the bidding team. The marketing department was to launch a PR campaign in support of the bidding effort. One of the highlights of the campaign was the donation of a set of satellite phone equipment to the impoverished, remote mountainous areas of Yunnan Province with a view to boosting HZ Communications’ image of good corporate citizenship.   

“Let’s go American for once and hold a democratic election,” William said in an apparent good mood, before adjusting his eyeglasses with a broad smile. “Let’s see which team will be picked to go out to the field on this idyllic trip.”

For a few hushed minutes, people exchanged glances and looked away unconcernedly. William acted like a cheerful game show host, reeling off one name after another of the team leaders. A few hands were raised then lowered. Finally he pronounced the name of Kevin. Before I realized my name was called, a forest of hands sprang up before my eyes. Nearly everyone voted for me. As they kept their hands in the air, some looked out the window and others stared at me pokerfaced. 

VII

A grayish black pig, its four hooves tied together, was slung on a pole and carried by two men to the raised platform. The posture of the pig reminded me of the way I was carried into Shucun village. 

The sky was overcast all the way to the horizon. The clouds, like layers of ink strokes, hung low. The surrounding mountains, whose outlines were fudged by the fogs, became one with the sky. In the clearing, hundreds of people, men, women, old and young, had gathered, all dressed in cross-front upper garments of hand-woven cloth and baggy pants; their plaited tresses were ornamented with pendants consisting of bone-colored animal teeth and tusks. They formed a large amorphous, haphazard circle around the platform raised on a dozen harvested ginkgo tree trunks of equal size.

When the pig slung on the pole was brought closer to the platform, an agitation rippled through the milling crowd. The sight of the pig drew their feet forward and the circle closed in. Only the kids, oblivious to what went on about them, were still weaving between the adults’ legs, absorbed in their own games involving mud and stones.

That puny figure I had seen creating clay animal figurines in the middle of that big house was now draped in a long gown with embroidered hems and edgings and wore a tall, six-peaked hat with gold inlays. He stood at the left of the platform, facing the crowd, with his wrinkled left hand raised. A few days before, I had found out that he was not an old granny, but an elderly man with facial features uncharacteristically soft for a man. He was the current elder of Shucun village. His name was Shuren.

Lifting his left hand and touching the tip of his middle finger to his forehead, he kept his eyes closed and remained silent for a while. Pastel colors of red and white were applied to his forehead and there was blue paint on his cheek prominences. Then without warning he stretched out his hand with the palm facing skyward and snapped open his eyes, at which moment screams erupted from all directions. Xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa! A crescendo of voices gradually fell in with one common rhythm. 

Two men immediately laid low the pig and another two came forward to hold it down securely, forcing one side of its face into the ground, leaving a beady, rolling, puzzled eye in the other side straining to look up at the sky. There was a sudden pitiable wail accompanied by a desperate thrashing of its four hooves upon the earth. A sharp knife was unsheathed, raised high, and with a glint arcing through the air, was plunged once, twice, and thrice into the creature. A frenzied cheer went up from the crowd, drowning out the increasingly shrill, painful howling of the pig. Even the children had stopped their games and had insinuated themselves to the front row to gawk. Reflected in their dark, glowing pupils was blood that kept spreading until it soaked through the large tract of sandy ground on which the four strong men were standing.

I must have peed in my pants because I felt a warm wetness in the seat of my pants. I was positioned at the other side of the platform, securely bound up with ropes, left there like another head of cattle. I knew they were gathered to invoke blessings upon their Bull Bear. Obviously, in their logic, lives had to be taken as a sacrifice to ward off evil so that the Bull Bear would recover from its injuries.

Two more stout men detached themselves from the crowd and lifted me up, one on each side of me, and threw me down, landing me right beside the pig. Another round of loud cheering erupted from the crowd. Xia-lu-wa, xia-lu-wa! Squirming and wriggling, I tried to say something in my defence but knew it would be all to no avail. No one here understood the language of Han Chinese, something I had been unprepared for when I set out for Shucun. Nor did they speak Tibetan, much less English. The way they pronounced their vernacular it sounded closer to ancient Sanskrit. It was a linguistic system generally foreign to me, but I correctly guessed the meaning of this chant. Xia-lu-wa meant “kill him.” My ears had been inundated by the sound of this chant hundreds of times already in the past few days.

I half rose on my knees, in a last-ditch attempt to struggle free. At that moment Shuren pressed down on my shoulders. “Chee-ma-lah-lee-aye-jia-duh, ma-coo-joo-loo-tah-mi-kah-lah-aye-jia-duh.” This was not addressed to me but to the crowd that was surging forth. After uttering those words, he suddenly bent down and translated them for me in awkward Han Chinese. He was telling them humans are too impure, far more so than animals and therefore are unfit for being sacrificed to the gods.

His voice was soft and low, no louder than a whisper, but was extremely clear amid the thunderous clamors of hundreds of people. The excitement of the crowd gradually subsided. But I could still feel the slight tremors of the ground. The four hooves of the pig were still thrashing, until the twitching finally stopped.

For the first time in days I was unbound.

The crowd had dispersed. On the raised platform sat the severed head of the pig, its tail and hooves, as well as the hundred or so dark red miniature animal figurines, which Shuren had spent days making by mixing pig’s blood with glutinous rice paste. The color of those pillars supporting the platform was quite suspect. I had thought at first they were turned brown by long exposure to rain and wind, but now I could see blood slowly seeping into the wood grain.

Two kids were laughing boisterously at the foot of the platform, fighting each other to stab with a twig at something resembling a small ball. It appeared to be a fun toy, bouncing about and unbreakable even after being stabbed multiple times. It turned out to be the heart of a pig, which had retained its elasticity and was still blood-smeared.

I was well aware that I was still a prisoner awaiting execution on an indeterminate date. Shuren told me that the villagers had agreed to allow me to live among them for the moment, until the recovery of the Bull Bear. I knew that Shuren spoke Han Chinese poorly, but he had made an effort in choosing his wording, just to make me feel better. The truth behind those words should be if the Bull Bear was on the way to recovery, I would be returned to my world. On the other hand, if it should die from its injuries, then I would not escape the retribution of a life for a life. For now though, I could relax during a kind of reprieve. After all, even a pig being readied for sacrifice had to be fed properly. 

Light was failing. I tiptoed around the edge of the platform and seeing no one around I surreptitiously quickened my steps toward a low hill. I passed through a large pasture between two clusters of village houses and started racing toward the forest. A sprinkling of people was moving about in front of some village houses at a distance, others were working the fields on a hill further away. I was sure no one had noticed me, and even if they had, I would be too far away for them to catch up with me. I finally came to the edge of the woods. I believed that once I entered this vast dark palace, they no longer would be able to find me among these gigantic, densely intertwined tree trunks and branches, in this impenetrable space lurking with unsuspected dangers. Suddenly, there was a shriek, apparently the sound of some strange bird calling in the depth of the wood. I backed away a few steps in fright.

From the other side, where the setting sun painted the plain a rosy tint, rose indistinctly the sounds of “jia-luo-ni-jia-yeh, mo-lo-mo-lo.” People who had been moving about, or bent over the field they were working, everybody, no matter where they found themselves to be, instantly stopped whatever they were doing and turned to stare after the setting sun while repeating in unison after the leading voice. Jia-luo-ni-jia-yeh, mo-lo-mo-lo.

The massive shadow of the forest crawled inch by inch closer to cover my body and block the sunlight above me. On the spur of the moment I made a weak-kneed but, I believed, wise decision. I started racing back toward the village. I told myself that before the Bull Bear breathed its last breath, I should still have plenty of time to plan my escape. I could first find out where the road out of the village lay.

By the time I approached, panting, the familiar big house, night had fallen. A candle seemed to be expressly placed on the window sill, lighting the road, as if expecting the return of the chastened would-be escapee.

VIII

Thomas was to have accompanied me on the trip. There was no getting out of it for him and the plane tickets had been purchased with that in mind. 

“Kevin, you’ll be traveling to a remote part of China,” William said to me the day before departure. “Who knows when you’ll be able to return? And don’t you think you need someone from your team to man the fort here?”

Thomas, who had been taking his time, plenty of time, packing his laptop, returned the laptop to the desk and headed straight to the fountain to make himself a cup of coffee. He appeared to have prior knowledge of the arrangement, for he hadn’t shown the least signs of getting ready for travel. I remember he came to work that day carrying his usual shoulder bag, but no suitcase. In the end I went to the airport alone, and the company car that was supposed to take me there was canceled at short notice on account of some other use.

It was so transparent. William and Thomas were complicit in it. I further suspected that Thomas was a spy working for William. My sudden ostracism and exile could only be attributed to Thomas’s report to William that Jessica, manager of the sales department, was my former girlfriend, and maybe there was more than meets the eye in our relationship.

When I started working at the marketing department, Jessica had called to congratulate me. She sounded to be in a magnanimous mood, and didn’t even ask why I hadn’t chosen her department. I was made to feel somewhat guilty by her magnanimity. A week after her call, on a busy morning, we finally came face to face in an elevator. In anticipation of the warm weather, which was still in the offing, she had changed into an ice blue spring suit, a windbreaker, a silk scarf and a skirt that showed off her white jade-colored calves. She looked perky and attractive. 

It was the opportunity I’d been waiting for and I grabbed it. “What a surprise meeting you here! Are you free at lunch time? Why don’t we go eat at Cai Dieh Xuan Restaurant?”

The dinner invitation was long overdue, but, unable to swallow my pride, I kept putting it off. 
The elevator was so crowded that once I had turned to speak to her I could no longer turn back around and my eyes had nowhere to rest but directly on her face, at close range. A familiar fragrance wafted from her hair into my nostrils. She was wearing Christian Dior J’adore. She lifted her eyelids to throw me a reproachful glance and briefly curled a corner of her mouth in a smile before quickly extinguishing it. 

“All right,” she said. “It so happens I have something to talk to you about.” It was terse and said in a low voice. As the door opened, I was pushed out of the elevator by the exiting crowd.  

She was already seated at a table with upholstered seats by a window when I arrived. She raised a hand to attract my attention. There had to be more than a hundred patrons in the main hall of the restaurant. A girl in a white long skirt was continuously playing the piano. Not knowing what to say, I kept urging her to choose from the menu. She demurely deferred to me by pushing the menu back to me, so I plunged into a perusal of the menu. I thought to myself that she should know what this was about and I shouldn’t need to clumsily cast about for the right words to say to her. I was thankful that when the cold hors d’oeuvre was served she flicked her hair back behind her ears and looked at me seriously. That was the characteristic gesture that used to signal she had something important to say to me. 

“Kevin,” she said, “will you be willing to help me with something?” I nodded with alacrity. I had been fretting about how to return her favor and she just gave me the answer. 

“Good, I’m glad,” she said with a smile. “You’ll not be able to wriggle out of this promise. Word has it that you are now the favorite in the marketing department. Can you keep an eye on William for me? I’d like to find out if there’s any chink in the armor of William or the marketing department. I need to have a definite answer as soon as possible. Kevin, with your easy access to William, this shouldn’t be difficult, right?” 

My chopsticks froze, either in my own bowl or a dish in the middle of the table. I couldn’t tell because I was dumbfounded. I came out of my bewilderment to find Jessica still gazing at me, her beautiful fingers twirling the platinum Guanyin pendant on her necklace and her teeth lightly biting her lip.

During that period William took me to dinner parties nearly every day. They invariably ended in us getting stone drunk and hitting each other’s shoulder with a playful fist as he insisted on my calling him Will. Jessica was well aware of my closeness to William. Worse, while the blockbuster Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs looked romantic on the screen, in real life what they did in that story could scarcely be called honorable. On the one hand I had no wish to be an unsympathetic person begrudging a favor to a friend, but on the other hand I didn’t want to be a dishonorable man, although I had long been judged by Jessica to be a useless man.

“I know William’s personality has a way of causing offence,” I said haltingly. “He is careless and abusive with words. He likes to show off. Don’t pay too much attention to all that. Besides, the marketing department works to support your sales department. Taking him down would not necessarily benefit your department.”

Jessica had expected the difficulty of persuading me. “That was uncalled for,” she said. “Do you think this is about some personal gripe between me and him? You still don’t understand, do you? I am asking you to do this not only for my own sake but also for Carl, and for the future of the company, including your own future.”

“As a matter of fact, it is Carl, not me, who wants you to do this,” she added. “He personally saw to your recruitment with a view to turning you into someone who can accomplish things for him. He put you in the marketing department so that you could help him identify William’s failings that he could use to bring him down.” 

Did Carl put me in the marketing department? I had thought it was my own choice. Then it suddenly dawned on me that Carl had known how I would choose when he gave me the two choices! I was truly naïve and was so easy to manipulate! I started to feel a tinge of resentment.

Jessica knew me only too well. When she saw the slight shadow on my brow, she already guessed which way the balance in my heart had tipped. She abruptly beat a retreat from the subject “Let’s eat first,” she said, laying her hands on the table.

The following day, Carl called me when the office closed for the day. The familiar voice boomed heartily in the phone. “Kevin, you haven’t left, have you? Come by my office.”

“Yes,” I replied with eagerness, “yes!” It was then that William was walking out of his office, carrying his bag in his hand and his windbreaker on his forearm. He jerked a thumb toward the street and I remembered only then that there was another dinner party that night. William was signaling me to leave. “Oh, I don’t think I can make it to your office today,” I said haltingly into the phone. “I have an engagement tonight.”

When Carl spoke again after a silent second, he sounded a little upset. “Kevin, I’m waiting here for you. You come up first before you leave for your engagement.”

“Yes,” I said promptly again, “yes!” I was puzzled by my reaction. Why was I always reflexively deferential to Carl, heeding his every beck and call? Kevin, drop in when you pass by the Hong Kong Grand Century Place one of these days. Kevin, play host to my Hong Kong friends for me and take them sightseeing for a couple of days in Shanghai. Kevin, how about a round of golf with me. Then I understood all of a sudden the meaning of the five-month delay in receiving my recruitment notification. It was a game of taming an animal, to condition me to associate his mere voice with good news and gospel, and an edict intimately bound up with the fondest wish of mine. And it worked.

Carl’s talk with me was rushed, for I had to tell him that William was waiting downstairs for me to go to the dinner party. If I showed up too late, it would surely trigger his suspicion.

Carl cordially patted me on the shoulder and casually flicked off a fallen hair there. He confirmed to me that the job Jessica wanted to entrust to me was indeed not planned by her but was his idea. He hoped that I would, for the great future of the company, decide to join their camp. Correcting himself, he declared I had been one of them all along, because of our association with each other when we both worked at the Asia-Pacific headquarters, and because it was he who took care of my recruitment into HZ Communications, and also because of Jessica. “Do you really have the heart to let her down?” he asked. 

He had to trot out all those reasons naturally because of my continued failure to take a position one way or the other. I would see an anxiously waiting William five minutes after I left here, and would once again drink with him until we both got drunk as a skunk today, ditto tomorrow, likewise the day after. I could hardly imagine how I’d face him if I agreed here to become an accomplice to his downfall.

Carl didn’t see me out, but the moment before I walked out of his office, I could hear him say to my back in his British accented English with its pleasant inflections, “Kevin, I know you. You will do it, I’m sure of it. We look forward to hearing from you.” He never for a moment faltered in that self-confident tone.

I remember it was a dinner party in the high standards category. William took me in his Land Rover to the Thai Village Shark Fin Restaurant inside the Grand Soluxe Hotel in the Hongqiao District instead of to the usual Xianghuqing Restaurant.

On the way I puzzled about the possible reason for Carl and Jessica to gang up in a plot for his downfall. What did he do that had so antagonized them? They talked about the future of the company. Could William have been plotting something to the detriment of the interests of the company? I fretted, until I walked into a private banquet room filled with gastronomic delights and radiating a subdued elegance.  

Around the table were placed bright red gladioli. Outside the full-length window by the honor seat a stream flowed quietly in the shade of banana plants. The menu had been put together ahead of time and featured braised shark’s fin, South African abalone, braised green crab with Vermicelli en Casserole, braised goose feet in abalone sauce, plus Cabernet Sauvignon. My spirit was lifted at the prospect of this sumptuous feast, and the question that had been troubling me was temporarily put out mind, even though I knew all this luxury was not intended for me.

William’s honored guest was the president of HZ Communications. We all called him Old John behind his back.

Old John came from Taiwan. In discussions he was always very serious and engaged, as if he had never left school. His face must have been very handsome in his youthful days. Traces of his good looks were still visible in the oblong shape of his face and his straight nose. Even now he didn’t look bad at all. He wore his dense, grizzled hair side-parted, slicked back behind his ears. He never went out without getting into a well-tailored, old-styled suit with a silk kerchief tied about the collar of his shirt, in the manner of the lao ke la, the old classy gentlemen of old time Shanghai.  

Fate wasn’t exactly kind to him and one couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him. Five years before, a vice president of marketing at the corporate headquarters of HZ was nearing retirement because of advanced age. When the board of directors scoured the industry for talent to replace him, their attention was drawn to Old John, who was then a vice president at SME, a competitor. When the head-hunting company hired by the board went to him to try to hire him away, Old John neither accepted nor refused the offer, which was sweetened by generous options and a salary double his present pay, but said he would consider it. 

When a year later, Old John was marginalized in the aftermath of the surprisingly swift rise to power of a group of young turks at SME, he decided to accept the HZ offer. Only it was a little too late, for the vacancy left by the retired vice president had been filled at the HZ head office. In the meantime HZ Communications China, Inc. was eager to open for business but in dire need of fleshing out its high management. That was how Old John ended up becoming president of HZ Communications China. It was easy to imagine his reluctance to take the job. While he went up from vice president to become president, HZ Communications had none of the weight of the HZ parent company in the industry. That meant that when invitations to future industry summits were issued, he would probably be less likely to get one than a branch manager of the parent company, even though he was the president of HZ Communications.

The board of directors agreed that as long as Old John was willing to remain in the position at HZ Communications until retirement, the board would reward him with options, not of the subsidiary, but of the parent company at that time. In that case he would effectively return to the parent company upon retirement and would sit on its board, and would be a heavy-weight in the industry and become a permanent entry in the Who’s Who of the electronic communications industry.

That was the gossip I garnered over the course of my employment at HZ Communications.

Apparently William and Old John were on quite familiar terms with each other. Often I had a hard time deciphering what they were talking about. Occasionally they would burst out laughing with knowing glances at each other over some joke, the hilarity of which was however lost on those around them.

Well, those around them meant just me and Mary, who never got into the spirit of the party and bent over her smartphone to send text messages whenever she got a chance, presumably to her nanny. Tonight she had been drafted again to the dinner party and was taken away from her Dong Dong.

Mary had a fairer complexion than most women. In happy moments, her white complexion would be tinged with rosiness, but when she was tense or sad, it would take on a bluish tint. While she did not have the healthy-looking, smooth and fine skin of Jessica, there was a special kind of delicate and sensitive beauty about Mary. She had uncreased eyelids and a straight nose and lips that were always ever so lightly pressed together. Deep down she must be a quiet and discreet person. Perhaps feeling out of her element in the department, she often spoke in a tentative, uneasy voice, which tended to become increasingly tenuous until it became inaudible at the end of her sentence. What enlivened her face were the two disproportionately large front teeth that were half revealed whenever she smiled. They evoked the image of a timid, cute little white rabbit.

William liked to tease Old John for being a henpecked husband who so feared his wife that in all the years when his wife and daughter stayed faraway in the United States he still dreaded taking an escort girl out. Holding a glass of wine in his hand, Old John facetiously shook his head and sighed and leaned over to whisper something into William’s ear. It sounded like he was wary of what the police of mainland China might do in that case. 

“You are wrong, you are wrong,” William said, waving a hand dismissively before suddenly shouting out, “Mary, have I invited you here to eat, or to send text messages? Well, get over here and have a drink!”

Old John did have an impressive capacity for alcohol! I was already half drunk as a result of clinking glasses with him, when he only started to show signs of slackening. William prodded Mary to drink three rounds of three cups each to Old John. Clearly little able to hold her drink, Mary forced down the first three cups with a rigidity of gesture that came from anger she had to suppress because it was bad form to make a scene on such an occasion. With the fourth cup, she already showed signs of going into a stupor. Soon she was to take the sixth drink.
Old John had sat in the honor seat, with me and William placed next to him on both side, and Mary opposite us. William left his seat and made Mary take his seat while he sat down on the other side of her. “There’s no fun in drinking like that,” he said. “With the remaining three cups, let’s throw dices. Whoever loses drinks one. How about that?”

The two dice cups containing six dice each were flipped over to rest on the table. Old John waved a hand in a gentlemanly manner to indicate that the lady should go first. Mary managed to scatter the dice all over the floor in the first try. Old John, clearly a pro, flexed his wrist to move the cup in a grinding pattern. As the cup was almost lifted off the surface of the table, the dice kept rolling inside. Three 2’s, four 2’s, three 3’s, four 3’s, five 3’s. Slightly inebriated and still feeling upset and in an urge to win, she called time and again only to find she had misjudged. Old John, obviously a little embarrassed by his winning streak, deliberately lost to Mary a few times and drank up for her. The three remaining cups were long gone, but Mary was loath to give up yet and Old John was just beginning to enjoy the game. Thus the seesawing went on and penalty drinks were downed by one or the other in a seemingly never-ending game.

I wasn’t sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me, but William’s chair seemed to be nudging closer and closer toward Mary. This caused Mary to move closer to Old John without realizing it herself and as they guessed at the points of the dice, their knees nearly touched. Whenever she guessed wrong, Mary drank with increasing abandon, shooting to her feet, throwing her head back to down the drink as if wishing to kill herself on the spot with some poison. Before she had a chance to sit down, William gave her a push, sending her stumbling into the lap of Old John.

The unsuspecting Old John caught her in her fall, but his arms froze because he didn’t have the strength to pull her up, nor did he have the temerity to let the momentum of her fall send her straight into his arms. But they were in fact in each other’s arms, with Mary’s elbows on Old John’s chest and her knees landing between his thighs. She gave a short, sharp cry, with confusion in her eyes, as if puzzled by the posture she found herself in. When she tried to straighten up by supporting herself on something, she found that whether she accomplished that by using her hands or her legs, she would cause her body to have more points of contact with Old John’s body. Abruptly sobering up she frantically twisted around and, with one hand, gripped the table as support, knocking over two glasses of wine in the process, spilling a full glass of liquor on her and on Old John’s legs. With a cry, Old John pushed Mary away to salvage his suit.

If I were Mary, I would have given William a slap on the face the moment I got up off the carpeted floor. But, would I really? I asked myself. Mary merely stared at William with fury in her eyes, while William pretended the whole thing had nothing to do with him. “Ah yah! How did this happen?” he clamored. “How did it happen!” 

With a clean cloth napkin, he dabbed at the wine-stained trousers of Old John and when he was satisfied that they were relatively dry, he gave them a few extra wipes in a meaningful way, after which the two exchanged a glance and burst out laughing. With two fingers Old John lifted his still moist trouser legs and swayed. His normally serious, wooden expression was gone from his face, and in its place was an excited glow that gave the impression he had just come off a Shoot the Chute ride.

They retrieved the dice cups and the dice that had been scattered onto the carpeted floor in Mary’s struggle but two dice remained missing after much searching. “Why don’t you two go on betting on something else,” William said. Then he turned around and asked me, “Do you know some other game?” 

I gave a perfunctory answer. “How about finger guessing?” Nobody knew how to play it. Then I said, “How about rock-paper-scissors?”

William clapped his hands. “This is good!”

Mary was pressed back into that same seat. She had a somber face, the alcohol almost gone from her system. Only moments before she had stood apart from the rest of us, gripping her handbag and coat all set to leave. She told me later that rock-paper-scissors was a game she often played with Dong Dong.

After drinking another three cups, she called out, “Rock Paper Scissors!” She started raising her hand when she suddenly drew it back and began sobbing into her hands until she buried her head into her folded arms and cried now with a vengeance. As she wept with an utter abandonment, her shoulders convulsed uncontrollably. The fit of crying killed the mood around the table and a disgusted William said with a frown, “She’s drunk.” 

I hurried over to the cashier to settle the bill with a credit card and gave the name the receipt should be made out to. 

Old John pulled his white BMW up by the curb to bid us goodbye. William went around to the front passenger side door and held opened the door. “You are in luck today,” he said to Mary. “Since it was the president who got you drunk, let him make up by taking you home.” 

With those words he shoved Mary toward the front seat. Mary held tight to the door, adamantly refusing to get in. Old John stuck out his head. “Let her be, let her be!” 

“I’ll take her home,” I immediately said. William thrust her toward me and laughed. “She has spoiled the fun. She’s all yours! I’ll go get my car and wash my hands of you.”

The two of us were left standing in the nippy night air of early spring. The Chinese parasol trees lining the boulevard rustled in the breeze. There were a few lonely neon signs that remained lit, accentuating the quiet of the night. A line of taxis seemed to have gone to sleep. I ran over and knocked on the window on one of the waiting taxis. The driver, still drowsy, started the engine. I hastened back to Mary, who was standing near the curb, her head inclined, and her face pale, gripping the front of her blouse with one hand. She appeared to be suffering. I whispered into her ear, “There, there! The cab is here. Just hold on for a little while. You will be home in a bit.” 

I held the door open but she did not budge. I was left no choice but to put my arm around her waist to try to get her into the car.  

Suddenly, she slapped away my hand. “Don’t touch me!”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I didn’t mean …” Before I had time to finish the sentence, she already stumbled into the cab and slammed the door shut. With a puff of exhaust fume, the cab pulled away from where I was standing and vanished into the night.

The next morning I sat in my cubicle and kept an eye on the corridor through which every employee must pass in order to reach the time clock to punch in. At 8:50, Mary still hadn’t shown up, as she normally did. I had found out she always arrived for work earlier than most only because I happened to come to the office early a few times. Nine, five past nine, then half past nine, and there was still no sign of her frail figure.

What trouble did Mary get into? Did she fall ill because she had had too much to drink? Or did her son have some kind of accident the night before because he was left unattended? Whatever happened, how could she cope alone? Everyone at the office knew that Mary was divorced. She had worked previously at MG and was Jessica’s colleague in the PR department there. She resigned in order to devote herself to carrying her baby to term. She never suspected that her husband had been carrying on with another woman during her pregnancy. The moment her child turned three, she got a job. It was not easy for a single mother to raise a child.

On the third day Mary showed up at 8:50. Set off by the dark blue high collar knit sweater and black short coat she was wearing, her complexion looked surreally white. She must have noticed I was observing her. When she passed my cubicle, she deliberately avoided my eyes. Everything went back to normal. She turned on her computer, efficiently read and replied to emails, made phone calls and talked and laughed with self-assurance. I began to suspect that my worry had been unwarranted. Maybe she never really minded what happened a few nights before. 

At ten she left her desk to make copies. It was the opportunity I had been waiting for and I picked up a few file folders at random and followed her. It was a spot near the water fountain that normally had little traffic. Outside the glass wall one could see the parking lot below. 

I went up to her and asked in a low voice, “Are you okay?”

The beam of light from the scanning lamp of the copier swept across her face back and forth, like a searchlight moving across a stone statue. The question once asked couldn’t be retracted. It hung in the air, unacknowledged, so I answered my own question. “If you don’t like drinking at dinner parties, you don’t have to in the future.” 

She abruptly turned around to face me, her face even paler than before and the look in her eyes razor-sharp. “Do I have a choice?” she asked. “It doesn’t cost you anything to give that advice, but can you really refuse to drink in a situation like that?”

I was at a loss to answer her and was a little crestfallen. “Mary, I said all that only because I care about you. I …”

“Oh, thank you very much!” Mary said in a shrill voice. “When you first came to the company, I watched how they ganged up to try to get you drunk. I was worried about you then. It never occurred to me that you were just like them. You enjoy that kind of thing!”

My face turned crimson. Thomas chose this moment to make his way to the copier with a bunch of files. He was startled by the expression on my face but greeted me as if he had noticed nothing. “Boss, just leave your documents with me. I’ll do them for you. I have a lot to copy myself so I’ll just wait in line here.”

Mary pulled out the last page of her document out of the copier. The edge of the A4 paper glinted in the sun, a sharp knife that silently broke the continuity of the air. With a blank look in her eyes, a spring in her step, and calm composure she turned around and left holding between her fingers the originals and the copies in two separate stacks. You would think she never uttered a word and that serene expression on her face never changed. 

At this moment my feet were heading to the copier, but my mind was telling me to run after Mary and clarify things once and for all. My right foot managed to step on the toes of my left foot. With a grimace and a frown, I tried to decide which document I should pull out from the stack held in my left arm and my right hand hesitated in the air. Then I gave the copier an unreasonably wide berth, mumbling a string of sounds unintelligible even to myself. As Thomas nodded in feigned understanding, I made my way back toward the office in a weaving manner with his eyes following me like a spotlight.

Soon it was lunch time. When I insinuated myself into the crowded elevator, the overcapacity alarm went off and I had to beat a shame-faced retreat. Gripped by a sudden urge to stay as far away as possible from the milling humanity on this floor, I turned about and walked to the nearest exit. I pushed open the metal door and walked eleven floors down. Never before had I, with my corpulence and low energy, chosen the stairs over the elevator.

In sharp contrast to the well-appointed office space, the fire escape stairwell was dark, stark, narrow, deserted, and even a little run-down. My lonely footsteps echoed between the grimy tiled surfaces. It was there that I ran into Mary again, a dark blue figure, long hair tied into a bun, and a white-complexioned side of her face flashed before my eyes as she made a turn in the staircase. I ran after her.

I called after her, “Mary, wait for me. Listen to what I have to say!” 

“Mary, if I am not the kind of person you thought I was, then what kind of person am I?” I said. “Well, it’s hard to make you understand in a few words. You’ll understand as time goes on. What I wanted to say is, Mary, if there’s any social activity of the department that you’d rather not join, you don’t have to. I’ll ask William to exempt you!”

There was a blank look on Mary’s face and she didn’t slow down, but neither did she exhibit the kind of hostility she adopted toward me earlier that morning. With her hands in her coat pockets, she said dismissively, “You’ll do that for me? Do you really believe you can accomplish that?”

My generous impulse choked for a brief moment in the throat of reality, but my answer was as fast as the momentum of my descending steps. “Of course I can!”

Mary did not change her pace as she said casually, as if of some trivial matter, “You must have heard about what happened to Rita. I’m not like her. I have a kid. Dong Dong has nobody but me to count on, so I can’t afford to lose this job. Do you understand now?”

I had never seen Rita, who had left before I reported to the marketing department. The official version was that Rita failed the annual performance appraisal of the personnel department and had tendered her resignation after William had a talk with her. But another scenario was bruited about in the grapevine. In this version of the story, Rita graduated from Columbia University summa cum laude, had short hair and long legs, and was very capable and proud. She never deigned to attend any of William’s dinner parties, nor any drinking party with Old John present. It was also rumored that the infamous annual performance appraisal report was personally penned by William and signed by Old John.

I realized that Mary did not believe I was capable of protecting her, that she even doubted my sincerity. She mentioned Rita as a subtle way to advise me not to promise more I could deliver, and not to risk the livelihood of a single mother like her just for the sake of feeling good. 
Hah! Was I such a person? After feeling upset for a while, I realized that I was indeed such a person. But then I immediately came up with a counter-argument. Who says I was just bluffing? Who says I can’t get William to permit Mary to absent herself from the parties? I am after all William’s pal now. He has even asked me to call him Will and if I didn’t call him Will, he would punish me by forcing me to drink a cup of liquor.

That thought bolstered me up. “Mary, I don’t care what you think of me. But I’ve decided to take you into my charge. Next time William has a dinner party, you don’t say anything to his face. You just go home after work and leave the rest to me. I will take care of the matter for you.”

In my excitement, I added for good measure, “Mary, why do you always care about what people think and appear to be so tensed? Why don’t you relax and be yourself as you do now? See? You look so good when you relax!”

In the flight after flight of stairs, our footsteps echoed in the quiet of the stairwell as we walked down one behind the other, our paces gradually coming in sync with only half a beat’s difference in the rhythms of our steps. Whenever I rounded the bend to the next flight of stairs, she would also take on her next flight. I had only the time during five or six steps to have a view of her below me, after which she would be hidden by the handrail and would come back into my view at her next change of flights. When I finished my little speech, my view of her was blocked by the handrail and the only response I heard was the hollow sound of treading.  

A sense of unease arose in me. Could what I said have made her despise me even more? At a turning I suddenly saw her stop in the middle of the flight to look up at me. That brief meeting of our eyes was accompanied by a soft twitch of a corner of her mouth. I could see the return to her eyes the look of friendliness and trust that she used to reserve for me, only mixed now with a tinge of contrition. Tilting her head at that angle to look up at me, she reminded me of a demure flower turned toward the sun. That was the Mary I was familiar with, the person that all this time I had cared about without realizing it, that I had meant to protect.

But it was at that instant that I was struck by a fear. I had not expected that it was so easy to assume a burden. What was most risible was the fact that I had arrogated to myself the role of her protector against William with a confidence that was based on my belief that William considered me a pal—a basis that recalled the fabled ass in the lion’s skin.

It so happened that the very next day William organized another dinner party at Xianghuqing Restaurant, to which all staff members in the marketing department were invited. Half an hour before the office closed, Mary quietly readied her handbag, which she laid at the foot of her chair, and looked over her shoulder at me. To her querying look I could only respond with an affirmative nod and a smile signifying everything’s under control. I watched as she quietly shut down her computer, picked up her handbag, and disappeared behind the closing door of the elevator, leaving an empty chair which I’d have to explain to William.

William was careful to spare my sensibilities. “Kevin, oh Kevin, it was just that one night for the two of you,” he said with a slight frown and an arching of eyebrows. “Do you mean to tell me that after just one night, you’ve become her guardian?”

I could detect an effort to suppress anger on his part. The most practical response at a moment like this would be to immediately follow that up with unsparing self-mockery and the promise of not repeating the offence in the future. But somehow his vulgar imagination breached the limits of my patience. “We are not that sordid.” 

I could see his face flush with fury, but only for a moment. Carefully and with an expression frozen at the moment of changing, he examined me. “Kevin, what’s the matter with you?”

I hastened to explain haltingly. “I’ve probably had too much to drink these days and hurt my liver. That’s why I have mood swings.” I then added, “Will, I am only asking you to cut some slack for Mary, seeing that she has a tough time bringing up a child all by herself. Besides, she just can’t cut it when it comes to drinking, so she really doesn’t contribute much to dinner parties anyway.”

Backing down meant that I had no ace up my sleeve, and that I was merely temporarily out of control. That was the cue for William to unleash his fury on me. “In my department you don’t play big daddy protecting someone!” he said, pointing his finger at my nose. “You’d be lucky to get your own work done!” 

He huffed and puffed around the desk. I remained silent and standing at attention, unsure where to rest my eyes. After a while, he seemed to come to a decision to let me off the hook this time. “I’m warning you. Only this once! If you ask me for leave again on her behalf, I’ll give both of you a very long leave of absence!” Then he pointed at the windbreaker hanging on the coat rack. “What are you standing there for? Don’t you see it’s time the party started?”

I unhooked the windbreaker and draped it respectfully over my arm and followed him out of his office. The other staff in the department judged by the fact that we came out of the manager’s office together that my friendship with him must have grown by leaps and bounds. Therefore they all vied to flash a friendly smile at me. The entire department, carrying a case of raspberry vodka, descended in the elevator, walked out of the building, turned right, and entered once again that private banquet room redolent of roast fish.  

I phoned Jessica. I never suspected that I would so soon consent to be a spy, not for lucre or the prospect of a promotion up the corporate ladder, nor for revenge or justice, but because of a pressing need to face an impending crisis. How would I ask William again for leave on behalf of Mary with the next dinner party looming and how would I deliver on my promise to Mary? 

Clearly my thinking through and accepting her offer so soon caught Jessica by surprise. Her startled tone in the first two or three minutes of our phone conversation caused my cheeks to burn and my voice to drop almost into a whisper. After I managed to finish my rambling account, I sensed a hesitation at Jessica’s end before she spoke up with a funny tone. “Is that all?” 

“That’s all,” I answered in embarrassment.

I heard a noise which sounded as if Jessica was switching her phone to the other ear. Then she resumed in her usual even and soft voice. “Kevin, do I have to remind you that even if William uses his office as the manager of his department to compel his subordinates to participate in dinner parties against their will and forced them to drink alcohol, there’s no way to prove it and anyway it’s no big deal. Besides, is it work-related? Has he violated any company rules? Do you really think Carl can take action against him on that basis alone? I have business to attend to at the moment. I can’t continue this conversation. Put your mind to finding his work-related missteps. We will discuss how to deal with him when you find something more damnable to hold against him.” 

“Wait!” I was desperate to prevent Jessica from hanging up, but was at a loss to find in a pinch anything more damnable, so I grabbed at any straw that came within reach. “You know, William seems to be on intimate terms with Old John.”

Jessica’s answer came fast. “We knew that. They have always belonged to the same faction.”
I was again casting about for a subject, but the jabs that I threw seemed to lack punch. “William is a pander for Old John. He set up Old John with female colleagues of the department, who wined and dined Old John and even came close to offering other services.”  

Jessica interrupted my stuttering account. “Kevin, I told you already, all that is of no use to us. There’s no need to rush. Spend more time to find some actionable information. It can wait a few days.” 

I thought to myself that in those few days William might again demand Mary’s attendance at one of his dinner parties. How would I keep my promise to Mary? I was on the point of saying something when Jessica suddenly changed back to her funny tone. “Kevin, are you dating Mary?”

I hastened to clarify. “I am not only speaking for Mary. As I said, there are other victims in the marketing department.”

“Is that so?” Jessica said. “How come I am unaware of any complaints? I have the impression that they all enjoy that with William.”

Suddenly a name popped into my mind and I grasped at the straw. “Rita! You should have seen her, right? Everybody at the marketing department knows that William did something with her annual performance appraisal and compelled her to resign because of her refusal to participate in the dinner parties.”

“Hmm, that sounds more interesting, if we can get real proof.”

Yes, I was a spy in the marketing department. Whatever the value of the information I gathered, I had become a threat planted by Jessica in the proximity of William. My exile was a correct decision by William, who wanted me away from the marketing department, away from Shanghai and maybe even out of this life completely. In that case I would become a mere statistic in a report of an unsolved case shelved in some police station.

To be continued >>>