◎ Someone Like You ◎

In the winter of 1994, “The Water of Forgetting” was playing everywhere on every street, and all that water pooled together and flooded Gu Qiao’s ears.

Gu Qiao’s Yellow Dahua was parked in front of the “Gu Jia Software Specialty Store.” This May, her new shop had moved to this location — a spot she had scouted for a long time. The moment she heard the previous tenant was vacating, she immediately brought a bag of cash and signed a three-year lease with the landlord. The space was large enough to be divided into software sections. Positioned at a street corner intersection, the visibility was excellent and parking was convenient. She had overseen the renovations herself — right down to standardizing the dimensions of the software shelving units and display stands.

Nothing like her first rented storefront — which had no street frontage, was on the second floor with barely ten-plus square meters, faced the shady side of the building, and needed the lights on even in daytime.

After March 6, 1993, antivirus card sales had indeed surged dramatically. But within one month, Gu Qiao’s V36 antivirus card had sold fewer than three hundred units. And most of those had been sold while Gu Qiao herself stood watch at the distributor’s shop. The moment she stopped hovering and turned her attention to the production line, V36’s sales growth slipped to single digits per week.

She had stockpiled five thousand units of inventory — afraid she couldn’t keep up with demand — and had gone to Huaqiang North to hoard another batch of circuit card components. None of it proved necessary.

Gu Qiao had arranged to settle accounts with the distributor monthly. When she looked at one month’s sales figures, she doubted her own eyes. When she asked how sales could possibly be so low, the distributor told her that was just how the market was — if customers didn’t want to buy her antivirus card, there was nothing he could do. Gu Qiao was suspicious. She paid fifty yuan to hire a student to go in and try to buy the card — and that’s how she learned she’d been swindled.

When a customer came in asking to buy an antivirus card, Gu Qiao’s card was nowhere on the recommended list. Later, the person she’d hired persisted in asking specifically for the V36 antivirus card — and the distributor still suggested they buy something else instead.

When Gu Qiao went to confront the distributor, he refused to admit it, until Gu Qiao produced a recording. His confidence deflated — he stopped saying she was making false accusations. But the deflation didn’t last long before he puffed himself back up: “If you don’t want me as your distributor, we don’t have to do business. I couldn’t care less about your product anyway!”

The distributor’s original plan had been: a hundred yuan per card to Gu Qiao, with him handling all advertising and promotion. After all, Gu Qiao’s antivirus card had absolutely no name recognition.

Gu Qiao rejected this arrangement. She asked the distributor what retail price he intended to charge — he told her that was none of her business. Gu Qiao knew the retail price would definitely not be below two hundred and fifty yuan. She proposed that all advertising and display materials be handled by her, with the cards sold to the distributor at two hundred and ten yuan each. She had arrived at this price based on her previous experience selling leather jackets — without going to the border, a jacket retailing for eighty yuan earned her ten yuan at most, sometimes only five to sell more volume.

“Never mind an unknown antivirus card like yours — even for well-known software, the distributor price is only half the retail price. You don’t do business like this. I’m telling you, at this price, you won’t sell anywhere.” Obviously you’d push the product that earns you over a hundred yuan and push the one that only earns forty to the back. Even a fool understood that logic.

Gu Qiao silently spat on this smooth-talking old man and didn’t bother asking why, if the earnings were so poor, he’d taken on her distribution in the first place. From everything he’d said, she already understood: take it on without selling it and you eliminate a competitor at no cost — and her prepayment was effectively zero, while the advertising was ready-made. Sell one and earn one, with no downside. The other distributors had probably all calculated the same way.

In April of 1993, Gu Qiao drove her Yellow Dahua, loaded up the unsold antivirus cards and her homemade promotional display boards, and that same day set off to find a storefront through a real estate agent.

The first shop had been rented in far too much of a rush — but a price point lower than comparable products, combined with a lucky draw promotion, still managed to compensate for the storefront’s shortcomings. The grand prize of a twenty-nine-inch color television held considerable appeal for customers. It was in that sun-starved old shopfront that Gu Qiao made a clear profit of a hundred and fifty thousand yuan selling V36 antivirus cards. She split half the money with Xiao Jia, who was seeing this much cash in person for the first time and spent quite a while trying to refuse his share. But the strong sales of V36 lasted only three months.

Xiao Jia had been given critical responsibilities on a major project at the research institute and had virtually no time to develop a new version. V36 quickly fell behind other antivirus cards on the market. Although it could still be sold at a discount with some profit remaining, Gu Qiao spent a full day and night unable to sleep, thinking it through, and ultimately decided to abandon it. An antivirus card wasn’t finished once it was sold — at minimum, she had to provide a year’s worth of after-sales support. If an outdated antivirus card couldn’t defend against new viruses that emerged in the future, large-scale problems down the line would spell real disaster.

She understood procurement and sales, but not research and development — there was no way for her to update the card’s version. By the time winter of 1993 arrived, Gu Qiao’s latest venture had already come to an end. On the day she temporarily closed the shop, Gu Qiao downed half a bottle of two-pot-head liquor. The next morning, she drove straight to the Asian Games Village and decided to buy an apartment to cheer herself up. She had been working hard for years, and now she’d earned enough to buy a place. Even if she never made a lot of money again, she could still lead a comfortable, modest life.

But the moment her car turned into the Asian Games Village, she swung it around and headed straight for the train station. She bought a ticket to Wuhan, and from Wuhan to Changsha — and then to Guangzhou, touring the computer electronics districts of every provincial capital along the way. She went from shop to shop in each electronics district, and finally headed from Guangzhou to Shenzhen. Her small notebook was filled with every piece of software currently selling well. Those software products from Huaqiang North rode along with her in a long-distance bus from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, and then back to Beijing. Back in Zhongguancun, she walked circuit after circuit.

She didn’t understand research and development — but she understood procurement and sales. Shops selling software on the street were mostly computer shops that happened to carry software on the side: computers were the main course, software an afterthought. But she decided to open a store that sold only software.

Gu Qiao subscribed to every newspaper that had anything to do with computers — not a crack went unexamined, and she paid especially careful attention to advertisements. She didn’t just sell the products that were already hot; she actively sought out software that had just been developed. Established, quality products would give her a stable income, but if her business was going to far outpace the surrounding shops, that alone wouldn’t be enough.

She placed an advertisement in a computing newspaper, describing her strengths in sales and promotion of new products and welcoming collaboration. She had originally written “grow together with her,” but just before the advertisement went out she deleted the words “grow together” — people with new products and dreams preferred to collaborate with someone who already had a mature operational system.

A voice calling “Manager” pulled Gu Qiao back to the winter of 1994.

The shop assistant Xiao Qin said, with some excitement: “Manager, Lin Haichuan just came into our store to look at software. I didn’t realize he was so tall — you really can’t tell from television.”

“What time did he come in?”

“Around ten-thirty.”

“Ten-thirty?” Gu Qiao was puzzled. She had arranged to have lunch with Lin Haichuan at Maxim’s at noon — what was he doing here now?

“Yes! A customer called out his name and asked for his autograph, and then he just left! I only caught a glimpse of his back — he was gone so fast! I really hadn’t noticed how long his legs were on television! In person he’s just as dashing as on screen.”

Dashing? Hearing Xiao Qin use those words to describe the real-life Lin Haichuan, Gu Qiao almost laughed.

She had known Lin Haichuan for three years. Perhaps because she was accustomed to seeing him in that pig-leather jacket from back then, she had been genuinely startled to see him play a swordsman-hero on television. When she had first chosen Lin Haichuan to model for her, it was because his build had a fifty-percent resemblance to Luo Peiyin — and even that was only fifty percent.

The last time Gu Qiao had seen Lin Haichuan in person was when Peng Zhou continued using his pig-leather jacket photo for advertisements. After the period costume martial arts drama aired and Lin Haichuan became famous, he had called Gu Qiao to ask her to stop using those photos and damaging his dashing image.

Gu Qiao had originally signed only a one-year contract with Lin Haichuan. But later, when Peng Zhou came back from Hainan having lost money and returned to his old trade, Gu Qiao not only lent him fifty thousand yuan to start over, but also paid a thousand yuan to renew a two-year portrait rights contract with Lin Haichuan — giving it to Peng Zhou as a free gift, so he could continue using the old advertisements to promote his pig-leather jackets.

The two-year usage period hadn’t expired, so Gu Qiao naturally couldn’t simply stop using it. Lin Haichuan gritted his teeth and decided to pay Gu Qiao three hundred yuan as a breach-of-contract penalty — his manner suggesting that Gu Qiao was even getting a fifty-yuan windfall out of the deal, given that a two-year contract cost a thousand yuan, a year and a half had already passed, and only half a year remained.

Gu Qiao didn’t take his three hundred yuan — but she did have Peng Zhou change the advertisement. She reminded Peng Zhou to absolutely not throw away the old advertising boards. They might come in useful someday.

Now that day had come.

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