◎ Unfreezing National Assets ◎

Gu Qiao took her first long-distance train trip at eighteen. Before boarding, she had already made up her mind: even if she came to the city and couldn’t find Lou Deyu, she wasn’t going back.

Just before the departure, Gu Qiao ran to the barbershop and had her hair cut off. That hair, which had grown all the way down to her waist, was sold for six yuan and fifty cents with a single cut. Because the price had been agreed upon before the cutting began, the owner, unwilling to take a loss, cut it down to ear-length in one stroke. But her hair was so thick that one hand couldn’t hold it all, and the single cut wasn’t even. A proper trim would have cost extra, and Gu Qiao, not wanting to spend more money and being in a hurry to get to the train station, didn’t bother fixing it. She stuffed the money into her pocket and walked out of the barbershop.

She had barely stepped outside when she heard the people inside laughing: “How did you manage to cut that poor girl’s hair so it looks like a chicken’s been gnawing at it? Though her face is lovely — she actually looks quite charming.”

And so it was with this chicken-gnawed haircut, two bulging fertilizer sacks, and a backpack that Gu Qiao squeezed her way onto the train.

Half of what she carried in her backpack was food — flatbreads her mother had baked for her, and boiled eggs. She had originally intended to leave the eggs at home, since she couldn’t eat that many, but then she thought that the boiled eggs could fetch a better price on the train, so she packed them after all. Before she left, her mother pressed twenty-seven ten-yuan notes into her hands for the road — a family may be poor at home, her mother said, but must travel in comfort. Gu Qiao knew this was nearly every penny of savings the family had; otherwise, the amount wouldn’t have come out to such an odd figure. She took five notes and pushed the rest back into her mother’s hands. “I won’t need this much.”

Gu Qiao left the money at home and took with her a large bag of pumpkins and loofah gourds. Aside from the ones set aside for Uncle Chen, she could sell the rest. Having grown up listening to her father, she knew that these things, sold on a train to city people, would fetch a higher price than back home.

Though Gu Qiao had no intention of returning, she brought very few clothes. The ones she liked best were all left for her two younger sisters. What she took were the old clothes she cared least about. Out in the world, she was sure she could always find work to earn money. Her sisters were at home, buried under all that debt — there was simply no way to buy new clothes for them.

The two large sacks she had boarded the train with were down to one by the time she got off. On the train, she had sold half a sack of freshly milled flour and half a sack of loofah and pumpkin, along with ten boiled eggs. She hadn’t eaten a single egg herself.

That August was scorching. After getting off the train, Gu Qiao didn’t even stop to wipe away her sweat. She fished Uncle Chen’s address out of her pocket and dragged her bulging fertilizer sack in search of a bus. The bus was even more packed than the train had been, so crowded she couldn’t see the route map posted on the window. It wasn’t until five stops had passed that she realized she had boarded in the wrong direction.

By the time Gu Qiao finally pushed her way off the bus with all her luggage, she and her clothes looked as though they had been steamed — her face a patchwork of flushed red and pale white.

Gu Qiao stood at the bus stop waiting for the next bus heading to Zhenbi’er Hutong. Her father’s friend, Uncle Chen, lived in Zhenbi’er Hutong. It was Gu Qiao’s first time seeing so many vehicles on the street, though most of them looked more or less the same — only a handful of colors, the most eye-catching being the big yellow vans. From the large advertisement on the bus stop board, Gu Qiao recognized the small red car running along the road as a Xiali.

Her gaze drifted from the cars to the people. This city held so many people, yet Lou Deyu was nowhere among them.

Lou Deyu was her father. Gu Qiao had taken her mother’s surname. A year ago, Lou Deyu had left home with the family’s savings and never returned. It wasn’t until three months ago, when creditors began showing up at the door one after another, that Gu Qiao’s mother discovered that her husband had not only taken the family’s savings, but had also borrowed tens of thousands of yuan from others. With the high interest added on, this debt had already ballooned to nearly one hundred thousand yuan. That year, even a skilled bricklayer earned only a little over a hundred yuan a month. When she heard the figure, Gu Qiao’s mother fainted from shock. Gu Qiao was pulled out of school by a neighbor and called home. There were now five people in the household: her grandmother, an elderly woman whose legs had recently been giving her trouble, who spent her days resting in bed and could barely take care of herself; three children, of whom Gu Qiao was the eldest, while her two younger sisters were still too small to be of much help. When their mother fell ill, only Gu Qiao could manage things.

Over those three months, Gu Qiao watched helplessly as the family’s motorcycle, color television, stereo, and rice cooker were hauled away one by one. Even the brand-new broom and the new gourd ladle were taken. In the end, the creditors from their own village and the neighboring one drove the family of five out of their large five-room tiled house with the covered walkway and into two small earthen rooms. These two creditors were in-laws, and also her father’s largest lenders. Thinking they’d never see the money again, they had shown up early one morning with over ten young men from their extended clan, blocking the door and demanding the house be vacated. Gu Qiao grabbed an iron spade and charged outside. She told the dozen men gathered there that whoever kept blocking her family’s door and hurling abuse would have to answer to her.

Village elders came to mediate — debts must be repaid, they said; that was only right. But a family of five, a woman with an elderly grandmother and three daughters, being cornered by over ten men shouting insults at their door — that was no longer right, no matter who owed whom. They should all go home and think it through. The creditors, of course, refused. Lou Deyu was nowhere to be found, and the house was all the collateral there was. If someone else seized it first, they’d have nothing left to collect on. It was finally Gu Qiao’s mother who spoke: “Who told your father to borrow the money? Give them the house.”

The loan receipts were right there, stamped with her father’s fingerprint — Gu Qiao accepted the debt. But with the house gone, where were they supposed to live? She herself was old enough to go out and work, and could find her own accommodation. But what about her mother, grandmother, and sisters? In the end, one of the village creditors made a small concession. After all, driving a family of elderly and young women out into the street would look very bad, and judging by the way this girl was ready to fight them to the death, they couldn’t actually force anyone out. He proposed that the family continue living in the earthen rooms until they found a new place. Gu Qiao agreed to this settlement — but the house could be handed over only if they were also given back the loan receipt, with this considered a full settlement of that particular debt. The creditor refused: the house only covered the principal; what about the interest? Gu Qiao said: “Those are the stereo and writing desk your people carried off — don’t think I didn’t notice. I’ve kept track of everything that was taken and by whom.” She also had the agreement to rent the earthen rooms witnessed and signed, to make sure no one could later deny it.

Once that account was settled, the family of five moved into the two earthen rooms. The place had been vacant for a long time and had mice running across the rafters. Gu Qiao borrowed a cat from a neighbor. The cat ate mice every day until its belly was round and full. The outer walls of the earthen rooms only reached half-height, so with help from her two younger sisters, Gu Qiao laid the other half herself. One sister asked Gu Qiao whether their father was coming back. Gu Qiao said: if he’s a man, he’ll crawl back to this family on all fours if he has to; and if he isn’t a man, then this family doesn’t need him anyway.

Gu Qiao was certain that Lou Deyu had been swindled out of his money because of greed, not that he had deliberately absconded with it and left the family to face the wreckage. This judgment was based on facts, not feelings.

Before Lou Deyu had left home with the money, the household had been, for the most part, a peaceful one. Aside from the occasional arguments between Gu Qiao and her father, there was rarely any quarreling. The content of their arguments was always the same: Gu Qiao resented her father’s blatant favoritism. She loved her sisters and was willing to look after them, but a father ought to treat her the same as the others. Lou Deyu’s complaint against Gu Qiao was equally singular — he accused her of reading a few years of books and getting too big for her boots, even looking down on her own father.

Gu Qiao and her father were never particularly close. She couldn’t quite explain why Lou Deyu treated her more distantly than he did her sisters — the distance had nothing to do with her being a daughter, nor with her carrying the Gu surname. Her second sister also carried the Gu name. But as a child, Gu Qiao had often watched with longing as Lou Deyu carried her second sister on his shoulders to the temple fair to watch the lion dance. She would hold her mother’s hand and wish she could sit on Lou Deyu’s shoulders too, just for a while, to see the lion more clearly. But Lou Deyu refused. He said Gu Qiao was too old, too heavy — he couldn’t carry her.

Before Lou Deyu had made his fortune, people called him “the layabout,” “Master Gu’s husband,” or “Gu Qiao’s father.”

In his younger days, Lou Deyu was the idle wanderer of the surrounding villages — good-looking enough, but never doing any honest work. As a young man, his work points were fewer than those earned by girls. He preferred small speculative schemes, and was periodically hauled off to the commune for criticism and re-education. Gu Qiao’s mother was the village’s model worker. No one could quite figure out how a model laborer had come to fancy such a backward element. The one most pleased by the match was Gu Qiao’s paternal grandfather — too many sons, never enough money for all of their weddings, so getting one of them off his hands was one less burden.

Gu Qiao had two younger sisters. When the third was born, her maternal grandfather, wanting to appear magnanimous, specifically had the third sister take Lou Deyu’s surname, Lou. Lou Deyu didn’t particularly care one way or another. Unlike most men in the village, he set no store by having sons, nor by the family name. He often said: who on earth is going to look up to me just because I’m a man, or because my name is Lou? The only reason people respect me now is because I have money! Money — money is what matters most. With money, you’re the boss. That’s what Lou Deyu said.

Lou Deyu was a failure for many years. Then the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was designated, and even here in the far north, Lou Deyu began doing proper business. The man who had once been the village’s most notorious layabout became its first ten-thousand-yuan household. He rebuilt the house and reinvented himself, replacing the teeth he’d knocked out in old brawls with gold ones. Since the gold teeth were on both sides, they could only be seen when he laughed wide. Lou Deyu’s laughter grew louder and more generous, and the villagers said it was because good fortune had put him in high spirits. When Lou Deyu first had those gold teeth put in, he smiled very openly at Gu Qiao too. She complimented him on how gleaming they were, and he told her exactly how much they had cost — gold teeth were beyond the means of most people. But when Gu Qiao asked how he had knocked out those two teeth in the first place, he went cold again, walking past her without a word, leaving her standing there alone, bewildered.

Gu Qiao had heard the village gossip: that her parents had been married less than eight months before she was born, and that she might not be Lou Deyu’s daughter at all, but someone else’s child by her mother.

Gu Qiao had never believed such rumors. But sometimes, Lou Deyu’s deliberate or unconscious neglect of her made her wonder: perhaps her father was foolish enough to have taken the gossip as truth.

Lou Deyu, however, was firmly convinced he was a clever man. He had seen the wider world and was not content to remain the wealthiest man in a small village. Having savored the advantages of money, he only wanted more.

The previous autumn, Lou Deyu came home from outside and told Gu Qiao’s mother that he was about to make a great fortune. The family’s savings account was in Gu Qiao’s mother’s keeping, and Lou Deyu demanded his wife hand over the money so it could hatch new money. The story was this: a warlord from the Fengtian Clique had deposited a large sum in Citibank in America back in the 1920s. The money had now grown to several hundred million US dollars. The state and America had long since signed an agreement allowing China’s frozen assets in American banks to be unfrozen and returned to their rightful owners. But the unfreezing required a large sum of collateral, and the heir to this fortune had no ready cash. As fate would have it, Lou Deyu had happened to encounter this very heir on one of his trips away. The heir promised that anyone who contributed money toward the unfreezing would receive a hundredfold return.

Gu Qiao’s mother suspected Lou Deyu had run into a swindler, but Lou Deyu said he had personally seen all the documents, each stamped with bright red official seals. Gu Qiao’s mother said: if this were truly a chance to get rich, would it really be our turn? Lou Deyu was deeply offended. It’s long been my turn to get rich — why shouldn’t I? What makes me less than anyone else? Have you always looked down on me? Have you always felt I was inferior to that despicable person with the surname Zhou? His sudden fury left Gu Qiao’s mother with nothing left to say.

Lou Deyu was reluctant to share this opportunity with others and wanted to profit quietly on his own. But once he imagined any sum of money multiplying a hundredfold, he began to think about borrowing. The people who lent him money were enticed by the high interest rates he offered, and besides, his house and motorcycle were right there — even if the money wasn’t repaid, those things would cover it. No one could have guessed that Lou Deyu had borrowed from not just one source, keeping it all hidden from his family.

With both the family savings and the borrowed money in hand, Lou Deyu boarded a train in high hopes. The day before he left, he gave Gu Qiao’s mother a glimpse of the glorious future ahead: his wife and children would ride in a private car; their house would be expanded into a two-story building — no, two stories wasn’t enough; at least three.

Gu Qiao was at her county high school, coming home once every three weeks. By the time she returned and heard from her mother about the scheme to “unfreeze national assets,” her father had already been gone for over two weeks. She had immediately sensed something was off. She had just studied history: the warlord in question — with the surname Wu — had clearly been part of the Zhili Clique, not the Fengtian Clique.

At the time, the worst outcome Gu Qiao had imagined was that her father had squandered the family savings. She had never expected Lou Deyu to have borrowed such an enormous sum on top of that.

Gu Qiao’s mother kept saying: if only she had stopped him. But Gu Qiao knew there was no stopping him. Once Lou Deyu had made up his mind to believe in the scheme, he was already a gambler. And when a gambler stakes everything on the dream of a lifetime, no one can hold him back.

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