◎ What’s So Great About Having Money ◎

Luo the Third, hearing the commotion downstairs, also came down. She and Luo the Fourth together admired Gu Qiao’s car.

Madam Luo, uneasy about the yellow Dafa van’s reliability, declined Luo the Fourth’s request to take a joyride in it.

Luo the Fourth dragged himself back to the living room, and the moment he spotted the Jianlibao drinks Gu Qiao had brought, immediately went to tear them open.

Madam Luo stopped him.

“I want to see if any of them are winners.” Luo the Fourth didn’t particularly like the drink itself, but lately, every time he saw a can of Jianlibao, he felt compelled to open it. The advertisement claimed that pulling a ring tab printed with a winning design would earn the puller fifty thousand yuan in prize money.

Fifty thousand yuan! How many meals at KFC could that buy? He’d never have to ask his mother for allowance again — never have to envy his second brother.

He would become one of the wealthiest primary school students in the entire school, buying the latest handheld game consoles and electronic watches.

A while back, Luo the Fourth had spent his allowance buying many cans of Jianlibao. He didn’t drink them — he’d open each one, check the tab, and if there was no winning design, hand it to a classmate. The entire class had received Jianlibao courtesy of Luo the Fourth. One boy who had once quarreled with him drank a can that Luo the Fourth had pressed upon him and fell ill. The boy’s parents suspected Luo the Fourth had played a prank and tampered with the drink, and the matter was brought to the teacher. Madam Luo only then learned of her son’s “generous hospitality.” It was later proven that the boy had gotten sick from eating barbecued lamb skewers near the school — several other students who’d eaten the same skewers also fell ill — and Luo the Fourth’s name was cleared.

Luo the Third recounted the story to Gu Qiao as though telling a comedy.

Luo the Fourth was most unhappy. He posed three questions in rapid succession.

First, to his third sister: “Can you honestly say that when you pull a tab, you have absolutely no hope of winning?”

Second, to his cousin: “Cousin, don’t you want to win fifty thousand yuan?”

Gu Qiao was candid: “I do.” She recalled how she had bought scratch-and-win lottery tickets one after another after seeing Xiao Jia win five hundred yuan in one go — yet the most she had ever won was a single yuan. Through repeated disappointment, she had come to accept that she could not get rich through luck and could only rely on her own two hands. Now she no longer harbored fantasies of winning; instead, she envied the sales surge that this prize-winning advertisement had generated. Thanks to the pull-tab prize promotion launched a few months earlier, Jianlibao’s sales had skyrocketed. Gu Qiao found herself thinking about how to make her own business grow.

Luo the Fourth’s third question was directed at the air: “Who doesn’t want to win the fifty-thousand-yuan grand prize?”

Gu Qiao felt compelled to remind her prize-crazed younger cousin: “Have you ever considered what your actual odds of winning are?”

“It’s either win or not win. Two possibilities.”

Luo the Third gave her foolish younger brother a smack: “What an idiot!”

Had it been a math problem, Luo the Fourth would never have answered one-in-two. But when it came to himself, he had cast objectivity aside entirely.

Madam Luo sent Luo the Third and Luo the Fourth back to their rooms so she could speak with Gu Qiao alone. When she learned that the family’s debts had just been fully repaid, Madam Luo did not share Gu Qiao’s happiness.

She had always feared that Gu Qiao would take her assistance for granted — yet Gu Qiao had not come to her for help even once, and now she felt a strange pang of disappointment. She had, at times, harbored resentment: you and your family are so proud of your independence. But after all, these were her own relatives; when she thought of her cousin-by-kinship, no matter how she calculated it, she owed that cousin more than the cousin owed her. She had originally intended to have a proper conversation with Gu Qiao about the family’s debt situation the next time she came — but her cousin-by-kinship had cleared those debts without ever asking for her help.

She had once feared that her cousin’s family would become a burden to her, but now that her affection for her cousin had won out over all other considerations and she had resolved to step in and help — the crisis had resolved itself.

Gu Qiao’s words from before echoed in Madam Luo’s ears — words she had once dismissed as spoken in wounded pride. Now she almost suspected that Gu Qiao had come here expressly to show off: to prove she had cleared the debts without any help from her. She no longer needed to wear Madam Luo’s hand-me-downs either; the colors Gu Qiao wore now leapt right into her eyes, utterly unlike the clothes she had once given the girl. In Madam Luo’s eyes, even Gu Qiao’s outfit had become a form of silent reproach.

Yet Madam Luo could not find a single trace of gloating or provocation in Gu Qiao’s eyes. She was genuinely sharing good news.

Madam Luo was not without ordinary human understanding. She knew perfectly well that by any reasonable standard, she should be happy for her cousin-by-kinship, happy that Gu Qiao was doing better than before — even if Gu Qiao had chosen a path diametrically opposed to what she had mapped out for her.

After all, she was just a girl in her early twenties, and making money in this world was never an easy thing. Doing individual business might earn a decent income, but in terms of social standing, there was none to speak of. Gu Qiao’s family didn’t know how to plan a future for her — she would still need Madam Luo’s guidance. Her concern for Gu Qiao temporarily dispelled the murkier emotions.

Madam Luo had heard from Zhou Zan that Gu Qiao and Xiao Jia had maintained a close friendship, and that Xiao Jia’s parents had a very favorable impression of Gu Qiao. In Zhou Zan’s telling, Xiao Jia was an excellent young man.

A young man and a young woman who got along well — Madam Luo’s thoughts naturally drifted toward romance and marriage. Based on Zhou Zan’s description of Xiao Jia, she felt he was quite a good prospect.

“The family’s problems have been resolved. It’s time you started thinking about your own affairs. Your business is not a long-term plan, in my view. Enroll in an adult education program and get yourself a diploma. As for school, you don’t need to worry about that — I’ll take care of it.” Even setting aside the question of employment, a basic educational credential was a prerequisite for marriage prospects. No matter how open-minded a partner’s parents might be, graduating from high school alone was a bit difficult to present.

Madam Luo’s view of self-employed traders was no different from society’s general opinion. Gu Qiao simply felt that her aunt was limited by her own perspective and didn’t understand where things were heading — she didn’t take it as a slight against herself.

Gu Qiao did not share this view: “Auntie, I read the newspaper every day, and I feel that change is coming very soon. Going forward, private businesses like mine will have enormous room to grow.” In the past two years, the official attitude toward the private economy had shifted back and forth, and the direction had remained unclear. When Lou Deyu had set up a small workshop back home hiring people to work for him, her grandmother had warned him to be careful, not to be too brazen, to watch out for being labeled a capitalist. Lou Deyu had said her grandmother was overthinking things. Yet in those two years, the general attitude toward the private economy had not been particularly encouraging. But in these last few days, Gu Qiao had caught a new scent on the wind. Since the New Year of 1992, the newspapers had been paying more attention to the economy than to anything else.

Gu Qiao had recently subscribed to three newspapers and read each of them carefully every day. She analyzed the new landscape reflected in them for her aunt, growing more and more animated as she spoke. She felt that a greater opportunity was coming. In these past few days, she had been wondering whether clothing was truly her biggest opportunity. Yesterday she had found time to go and look at the current pager models available. She had a vague sense that the profit margins there were bigger than on leather jackets. Her capital on hand was limited for the moment — if she wanted to get into the pager business, she’d need to close a few bigger deals first. She was waiting for a better policy environment before pulling Xiao Jia in. For now, the direction was still unclear, and asking Xiao Jia to give up a perfectly good career to do individual business with her would look to everyone else like dragging him down.

Madam Luo was surprised that someone as busy making money as Gu Qiao had managed to maintain the daily habit of reading the newspapers. What Gu Qiao was saying bore resemblance to something Luo Bo’an had mentioned briefly at the dinner table a few days before — though he had moved on from the topic quickly. Luo Bo’an spoke little at home, likely because he had already said everything that needed saying outside of it. What little they exchanged was household matters, and as Luo Bo’an took scant interest in household matters, few words were spoken.

Gu Qiao noticed that her aunt showed little interest in any of this and said only what was worth saying before letting it go.

Madam Luo immediately changed the subject: “You and Xiao Jia are close?”

Gu Qiao wasn’t sure why her aunt was asking: “Do you have some business with Xiao Jia?”

Madam Luo realized Gu Qiao had misunderstood and was about to clarify when Gu Qiao’s pager went off.

Gu Qiao looked at the number — unfamiliar, but she often received calls from unknown numbers through her business.

“Auntie, may I use your phone?”

Gu Qiao called back. “Hello…”

She heard a familiar voice ask where she was.

Luo Peiyin was waiting at a public telephone booth for Gu Qiao to call back — and this time the wait was not long.

The last time he had waited for her call was in 1990. He hadn’t found her at the Chen household; they said she had moved out. He went to her new address and she wasn’t there either. He queued at the payphone nearest to her home. The man ahead of him in line lavished tender, syrupy words into the receiver: “I missed you — did you miss me? How much did you miss me?” Then a dry laugh. “Did you think of me while eating? I thought of you when I ate an apple…” Then he pulled out a small notebook and read aloud a love poem he had just written for the woman on the other end, every line ending in an exclamation mark.

Luo Peiyin endured more than ten minutes of this pointless back-and-forth. Eventually, even his basic courtesy abandoned him. He said irritably to the man ahead: “Are you ever going to finish?”

The man turned and shot him a glare. “If you can’t wait, go find another phone!”

Then he turned back to the receiver and continued reciting his love poem. Luo Peiyin knocked hard on the glass partition. The man turned in fury — and then took one look at the difference in their heights and the expression on Luo Peiyin’s face. Luo Peiyin shoved a ten-yuan note at him: “Go find another phone.”

“What’s so great about having money!” The words grew quieter and quieter as the man, cowed by their height difference and Luo Peiyin’s expression, took the ten yuan and his little poetry notebook and left.

Luo Peiyin stood in the phone booth and waited. Ten minutes — no response. Fifteen minutes — still nothing.

It was the tail end of spring in 1990. The spring breeze was not cold, but as it moved across him, it stirred a few currents of restlessness.

The person waiting behind him grew so anxious they began stamping their feet, and said the same words Luo Peiyin had said moments before: “Are you ever going to finish?”

Luo Peiyin reached into his pocket again and produced another ten yuan. He told the person behind him to go find another phone.

“What’s so great about having money?”

At the twenty-eighth minute, Luo Peiyin redialed — this time the number for Xiao Jia’s family home.

Xiao Jia told him that Gu Qiao was probably on the train back from Erlian Haote and would likely arrive the next day. He would go pick her up at the station, and Luo Peiyin shouldn’t worry.

Luo Peiyin hung up. The moon was very full that night, but he had no inclination to look at it.

This time, the air outside the phone booth was colder than that night — though Luo Peiyin didn’t feel it. He had gone straight from the airport to her stall, but she wasn’t there.

Every word Gu Qiao spoke was perfectly clear: “I’m at your house.”

She couldn’t help asking: “Are you still in Shanghai?”

Learning that Luo Peiyin had already returned from Shanghai, a few bubbles of quiet joy rose in Gu Qiao’s heart — that meant she could see him a few more times. Her voice remained perfectly calm; the person on the other end couldn’t possibly tell that she was smiling.

She hung up to find her aunt standing right beside her.

“Who was that?”

Gu Qiao saw no reason to conceal it: “My cousin.”

“You two are still in contact?” Luo Peiyin had left before the New Year and was gone for quite a while. By the time he returned, Gu Qiao had already moved out. She hadn’t expected that Luo Peiyin would actually come to her and ask why Gu Qiao had moved, and where to. At the time, she hadn’t wanted anyone to know the real reason Gu Qiao had left — she told him only that Gu Qiao preferred living with girls her own age and had moved to a friend of her father’s. Then she added that Gu Qiao was a girl from the countryside, and her family’s values were traditional — they felt it was improper for a girl to live under the same roof as a young man of similar age. She had laughed it off after saying it, as though the whole thing were completely unnecessary.

Luo Peiyin had given her a look — a look that said she was telling some kind of joke. She and her stepson had almost no eye contact in their daily lives, and that one glance had left her unsettled for quite a while afterward.

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