◎ Cousin ◎

In the winter of 1994, the Oriental Pearl Tower had just been completed.

Between flying and taking the train, Gu Qiao chose the train. Shanghai Station was closer to where she needed to be. Though the journey was longer, leaving in the evening and arriving in the morning made little practical difference in time — and the money saved could go toward printing more advertising catalogs.

The moment she stepped out of the train station, rain began falling outside. Before coming, Gu Qiao had assumed that Shanghai, being in the south, simply couldn’t be colder than the north. Arriving in Shanghai, she discovered a different species of cold. Being cold wasn’t only about dry, biting northern winds slicing into your face — a fine, dense rain slanting against your body could make you feel chilled to the bone just as well. She regretted not bringing a thicker coat. Half her suitcase was taken up by promotional materials for the game software discs — she hadn’t packed a single padded jacket. Even what she had on was only a cashmere sweater beneath a black outer coat.

She had specifically bought that black coat before the trip. That color had been sorely lacking in her wardrobe, but bright colors were too memorable — especially for the shop owners in the electronics market, for whom the ability to remember faces was an essential professional skill. When she was scouting things out, she didn’t want to leave a lasting impression.

She had thought: I’m stepping straight from the cab onto the train, so it doesn’t matter if I’m a little underdressed — I’ll be fine once I get to Shanghai.

Outside Shanghai Station, small guesthouse owners were everywhere hawking for business. Gu Qiao had no umbrella, and setting off through the rain to hunt for lodging herself was no telling how long it would take. She simply negotiated a price with a curly-haired woman on the spot: a private room, with bathing facilities, forty-five yuan a night.

Over these past two years, whenever Gu Qiao traveled, she had stayed in places like this. Curiosity drove her to try new things — she was willing to try them, even if they cost a little more — but once was enough. Extended indulgence was still a mild luxury for someone in her position right now. Back in the days when she sold leather jackets at the international hotel, that was one thing — the venue was a facade, fundamentally a means of making money from money. This was different: paying for a room was a straightforward act of consumption, nothing more. She wasn’t here for one or two days — money had to go where it mattered most.

Having stayed in enough small guesthouses, Gu Qiao well knew that reality never quite matched what the landlord promised. But to be this far off — that was still, on reflection, a bit of a surprise.

Her room was on the second floor. The corridor was dim, the staircase steep, and every step groaned underfoot. Gu Qiao hauled her suitcase up, step by laborious step. She used the key to open the door and was greeted by a hard wooden plank bed. This was the most expensive private room the guesthouse offered. The other options were double rooms and four-bed dormitories.

It was an inner room without windows. Up north, winter cold was dry; here, it was damp and penetrating. There was indeed the promised bathing facility — a public shower room, a narrow strip of space with four cubicles, requiring one to queue. At the same price, another place wouldn’t be much better. Better to save the time and rest.

—

Though the guesthouse’s accommodations were nothing close to what its owner had boasted, the cooking was first-rate. The aroma of red-braised pork crept bit by bit along the rim of the pot, down the steep staircase, through the crack of the door, and into Gu Qiao’s nose. Wrapped in her blanket, Gu Qiao drank hot water and ate dry bread alongside the fragrance. Apart from her undergarments, her suitcase held only suits and her coat — not a single sweater. Up north, it was cold enough outside in winter, but once you stepped indoors and had the heating on, it was a warm season all its own.

Thinking that indoors might be no warmer than outside, Gu Qiao decided it was better to head out promptly and get a feel for things. She couldn’t walk into negotiations with people knowing nothing at all. She asked the guesthouse owner to borrow an umbrella. The owner produced a well-worn old umbrella and placed it in front of Gu Qiao: “Ten yuan!”

Gu Qiao didn’t bargain — she put down ten yuan, took the umbrella, and walked straight out.

According to the map she’d purchased, Qiujiang Road Electronics Market was not far. She took a red Xiali sedan, still in her black coat, and headed straight for Qiujiang Road. Because of the rain, business along Qiujiang Road was quieter than usual. Gu Qiao went from shop to shop with her umbrella, letting each owner pitch her on the newest electronic games available, while mentally cataloguing what each shop currently carried, what was selling best. She didn’t just listen to what the owners told her — she also carefully noted roughly how much stock remained on the shelves for each type of game disc. Afraid of mixing things up, she would step outside after each shop and transfer what she’d memorized onto paper.

She went from shop to shop until dark, until the soles of her feet ached, and still the rain fell outside. Gu Qiao folded her umbrella and squeezed onto a public bus, letting it carry her wherever it would. She knew that in a city with public transit this developed, whichever bus took her somewhere, another would bring her back.

She wasn’t just riding the bus to save money — arriving in a new city, the public bus was a clearinghouse of information. You could hear what local residents were most concerned about, and perhaps pick up something that never made it into the newspapers.

The bus was filled with the constant sound of overlapping voices — but making sense of the local dialect presented Gu Qiao with considerable difficulty. Voices from every direction poured into her ears, drowning out even the sound of rain outside.

Because she couldn’t fully understand it, Gu Qiao found it all rather fresh and new. From that freshness, a quiet happiness stirred in her chest. Through the misted glass, Gu Qiao caught sight of the Oriental Pearl Tower. The papers had reported it was completed that October. She thought of Luo Peiyin’s trip to Shanghai in 1992 — the person he had been then would never have seen the building before her eyes now.

People boarded and alighted, alighted and boarded. Gu Qiao rode all the way to the last stop. There, she transferred to another bus and kept going. She wanted to take a good, thorough look at this city. As the bus grew quieter, the window seat finally came free. Gu Qiao settled in before the glass and watched the neon lights flickering past outside. She reached out one finger and wrote three characters on the fogged surface.

From one bus to the next, Gu Qiao managed to catch the last service back to the guesthouse before the buses stopped running. There was a short stretch between the bus stop and the guesthouse. Umbrella up, Gu Qiao passed a dumpling shop. In the warm amber light, she swallowed down a bowl of small wontons, driving a little of the damp chill from her body.

This kind of night was made for a hot bath, then dropping yourself straight into bed. But the showerhead delivered only cold water, and the bed was cold too. From the room next door came the sounds of a man and woman — the walls were paper-thin, and everything that wasn’t meant for her ears reached them clearly, one sound at a time.

She took out her CD player. What slid into her ears was “When Love Has Become the Past.” Chen Qing had given her this CD — she’d never listened to it before.

*”One day you’ll come to know — that life without me is no different…”* Gu Qiao pressed the off button.

Listening to the irregular sounds from next door, she lay in the dark running through all the games she’d seen in the electronics market that day, mentally tallying probable sales volumes.

Lying awake alongside Gu Qiao, in his own way, was Peter Zhao.

Peter was from Taiwan — the first representative of LC Capital’s Shanghai office on the mainland, overseeing LC’s investment activities in China. Although LC was a long-established hardware manufacturer, its investment business was relatively new compared to established investment banks. Its investment arm had only been split off from the main company in the late 1980s, focused on information technology investment. The Asia-Pacific business hadn’t even begun until the early 1990s, and in China, there was only a single office in Shanghai. If the Asia-Pacific region was the periphery, then China was the outer edge of the periphery.

Peter was not optimistic about China’s investment market and had long been hoping to transfer back to headquarters. Now Peter was finding that circumstances were entirely beyond what he had expected. He had heard rumors that the Shanghai office where he worked might be shut down — those above were not satisfied with him, not only because he had achieved nothing so far, but also because he had been unable to offer a credible projection of future returns. He genuinely no longer wanted to be in Shanghai — yet what awaited him after a shutdown would be nothing like what he had hoped for either.

At the Asia-Pacific headquarters, there were at least two people who wanted to make things difficult for him: Cohen and Luo Peiyin.

Peter had had dealings with Luo Peiyin before, and had long heard of Luo Peiyin’s record in Singapore — though the man had only been at LC for just over two years. For reasons Peter couldn’t quite grasp, the old man at San Francisco headquarters paid Luo particular attention.

Changfriend Software was the only investment in the China region that looked even remotely successful, and in Peter’s view it was merely passable at that — he was not optimistic about the future IPO, either. Besides, that investment had been initiated by the Asia-Pacific headquarters. The friction between him and Luo Peiyin had been seeded at that time. Back then, he hadn’t believed in the company’s prospects — but he hadn’t expected it to develop so quickly in just two years.

This could hardly be blamed on him. In previous years, restrictions on foreign investment had been far too tight — especially in their line of work — and the unification of the renminbi exchange rate hadn’t happened until this year. To do venture capital under those conditions had been virtually impossible. Simply not losing too much money should have been counted as an achievement in the eyes of headquarters.

He had worked at LC for over ten years, had endured more than two years of hardship here — and yet LC didn’t credit him for his efforts.

As for Cohen at the Asia-Pacific headquarters, he would never speak up on Peter’s behalf either. Cohen had always marginalized the China region, even recommending to San Francisco that LC’s Shanghai office be dissolved. In private, Cohen’s words had been cutting — translated plainly: cut this money-losing liability loose long ago. Now Cohen was worried that Luo Peiyin’s growing influence at headquarters posed a long-term threat to him, and was eager to dispatch Luo to what he privately called the “wasteland” of investment — he certainly wasn’t going to spare any thought for Peter.

Peter lit another cigarette and muttered a local expletive under his breath. The Changfriend launch had him there — what was Luo Peiyin rolling over to interfere for? He’d said he was attending as a private individual rather than in an official company capacity — who knew what game he was actually playing?

Gu Qiao was woken by the cold in the morning. A single blanket over her felt pitifully thin. It was freezing, and yet she lay there wanting to linger. She reflexively touched her forehead — it was warm. She didn’t bother reaching for a thermometer; she simply swallowed a fever-reducing tablet she had prepared before the trip.

Gu Qiao gathered herself, washed up, and changed into the outfit she’d prepared. A pale yellow suit with a sapphire-blue coat — colors impossible not to notice. Yesterday, when she had been scouting the market, she’d wanted to avoid being noticed. Today, she was afraid of not being noticed enough.

Changfriend Software had been selling very well. If she could move up a tier in their distribution hierarchy, all the better; if not, getting acquainted with other distributors might still prove useful — perhaps for collaboration on the game software side.

The small mirror in the guesthouse room had yellowed celebrity photos pasted behind it. Gu Qiao picked it up, looked at her own face, and smiled at her reflection.

Despite having no appetite, Gu Qiao went to the same dumpling shop she’d visited the night before. She had to eat something — otherwise she couldn’t last an entire day outside. The elderly man at the next table was eating rice porridge, dunking a deep-fried dough stick into soy sauce and biting into it with evident relish. That good appetite did not infect Gu Qiao. She forced the salty soy milk down.

It was still early. Gu Qiao walked a little further. Worried that the bus would crush wrinkles into her coat, she decided to hail a cab. She noticed a young woman watching her. Gu Qiao smiled back and took the initiative to greet her: “Hello!”

The young woman clearly hadn’t expected that response. She paused for a moment, then smiled: “Hello!”

The young woman was around the same age as Gu Qiao, but the two were dressed in entirely different styles. Everything on Gu Qiao leapt straight at the eye, as though demanding attention; the young woman wore only white and grey, and was thoroughly understated.

A red Peugeot Santana pulled up in front of them. Two people who had just greeted each other couldn’t very well fight over the same taxi. Gu Qiao asked first: “Where are you headed?”

“The Hilton.”

“Same. If you don’t mind, we could share the cab.”

In the car, Gu Qiao learned that the young woman was named Xu Ling — a journalist with a technology newspaper, heading to the Hilton for a software launch.

“It wouldn’t be Changfriend, would it.”

“How did you know?”

“I’m going there too.”

“You are?”

“I’m a distributor.” Beneath several layers of distributors above her.

The two were mutually curious. On the way, Gu Qiao, unbothered by the passing scenery outside the window, launched into a conversation with Xu Ling about chain software stores abroad. She was eager to learn from the overseas experience, but the materials she could get her hands on were too limited.

As they talked, Xu Ling suddenly said: “You’re not thinking about doing a software chain, are you.”

Gu Qiao didn’t deny it. She smiled: “Do you think it has a future?” Gu Qiao had always believed it did. Whether or not she was the one to do it, someone would. But she wanted to be the one who made it happen.

Xu Ling seemed to remember something. She turned to Gu Qiao and said: “There are LC people attending today’s launch. Changfriend is one of their investments.”

Seeing a flicker of uncertainty on Gu Qiao’s face, Xu Ling continued: “Do you know what venture capital is? LC is currently focused on information technology investment in China — they’re very interested in this market here, and what you’re doing with software is tangentially related.”

Recently, the LC Shanghai office had placed an advertising budget with their newspaper — in exchange, naturally, for Xu Ling writing a full-page feature promoting LC.

Xu Ling added: “You might want to find an opportunity to talk with Peter — he’s the head of LC’s operations in China. It may not lead anywhere now, but perhaps there will be an opening in the future.”

“With so many people there, I doubt I’ll get a chance to speak with him.”

“This launch drags on for an entire day. You can wait for the evening banquet — there’ll be fewer people then.”

“But I don’t have access to the banquet.” Gu Qiao didn’t give up even so. “Can you see any way I might get in?” She didn’t really think it would work — but what was there to lose in trying?

Xu Ling had almost said *I’ll bring you in* — but a whole day was too long; she had wanted to slip away before the banquet and do something more interesting.

Seeing the conflicted expression on Xu Ling’s face, Gu Qiao quickly said: “You’ve already helped me more than enough — I’ll handle this myself.”

“Your face is a bit flushed, isn’t it?”

Gu Qiao smiled: “I’m just warm.” To herself, she thought: this fever-reducing tablet really isn’t pulling its weight — it still hasn’t taken effect. The fever seems more serious than she’d thought. Still, she had one more tablet on her — getting through to the banquet would definitely be manageable.

The two kept talking all the way to the hotel entrance, where Gu Qiao stepped in first to pay the fare.

Getting out of the car, Xu Ling took out her wallet to give Gu Qiao half. To make it a round number, she actually paid a little over half.

Gu Qiao smiled and declined: “I enjoyed our conversation — and I’d have paid the same fare on my own anyway.” Not just enjoyable, but useful. Gu Qiao reflected that one of the reasons she’d felt troubled by having no money — beyond the many practical difficulties — was that she was by nature a generous person. Having no money had suppressed that side of her, making generosity impossible when she would have liked it.

“My fare is reimbursable,” Xu Ling thought to herself. If there weren’t even travel expenses to cover, she wouldn’t have come here in the first place. Attending launch events meant writing puff pieces — in her heart, it had nothing to do with real journalism.

This time Gu Qiao didn’t refuse. She gave Xu Ling the receipt and tucked the money into her wallet.

The hotel, of course, was nothing like Gu Qiao’s small guesthouse — and also quite unlike the international hotel where she had once sold leather jackets. The latter had a history of decades, and though it had been recently renovated, the marks of time still showed.

Gu Qiao had been running over in her mind how to get into the evening banquet — until she saw a particular back.

Far too familiar. And she had once sold clothes for a living — she held an impression of a person’s build more firmly than of their face.

Gu Qiao’s mental image of a reunion with Luo Peiyin had always been quite simple. She had thought seriously about her own future, and about his — and as for their reunion, the first order of business was to give him the dividends she still owed him. She was not a person who followed through on many things she said, but she had followed through on this: she had multiplied the principal he had given her several times over. As for what would come after — she seemed to lack the imagination. Perhaps because there was so little common ground left between them. Though they had gone from being in different time zones to being in the same one, the distance was still too great.

The principal Luo Peiyin had given her — along with everything she had earned from it — she had left untouched, kept in the bank. At first it was a demand deposit; then, since he didn’t come home even for the New Year, it became a fixed deposit. In May 1993, the one-year deposit rate at her bank exceeded ten percent. Because of that, she had called Peng Zhou to urge him to abandon the Hainan business and come back. She’d said: encouraging deposits, tightening loans — and real estate speculation runs on loans. Based on the thin financial knowledge she’d picked up from newspapers and books, she felt the frenzied money-making climate in Hainan might be due for some kind of shift. Peng Zhou, of course, hadn’t listened to her tentative suspicion.

But the interest rates kept rising, and when yet another year’s fixed deposit came due for renewal, Gu Qiao didn’t much regret having not locked in a two-year term.

Xu Ling followed Gu Qiao’s gaze and said, jokingly: “Most men in suits, as long as the build is decent enough, look passable from behind. But the face is another matter entirely.”

Gu Qiao knew very well what his face looked like. By the time they reached the elevator bank, he turned around.

For reasons she couldn’t explain, Gu Qiao felt that his face looked somehow different from how she remembered it — perhaps his presence was sharper now, harder-edged, with none of the gentleness she had imagined.

Gu Qiao stood rooted to the spot. Playing out this kind of scene in a public space was acutely awkward. But she hadn’t anticipated it at all — there was nothing to do but play it out. His tie was beautifully knotted. Back when Gu Qiao had first rented her stall at the market, she had sold ties too — three for ten yuan, and she’d sold them well, because she could teach people how to tie them. She had never seen him dressed this formally before.

Right up until the moment they had broken up, Gu Qiao had never felt the distance between them was so great. She hadn’t seen his face when he listened to her on the phone — in her memory, the two of them had always been close, even before they had defined their relationship; he had never looked at her the way he did today.

He had not ignored her — but how to describe it? He looked at her the way a brain surgeon might examine a patient’s skull: careful scrutiny that had nothing to do with feeling. He had looked down at her before too — but it had been nothing like today.

The elevator doors opened. Gu Qiao didn’t know what floor Luo Peiyin was going to — maybe they would separate in the elevator and she would lose sight of him again. She felt she had to say something — but what? Should she say: I still haven’t given you your share of the dividends — let’s find a time to discuss it properly? In that moment she finally understood why she had held on to those dividends — neither donating them nor sending them through his relatives. Because only this way, when they met again, would she have something to open the conversation with. A reason that could carry the exchange forward even if he rejected it.

Otherwise, what would there be to say? What had he been doing in nearly three years she didn’t know. Including whether he had fallen in love with someone else — she didn’t know that either.

Just before stepping into the elevator, Gu Qiao suddenly called out: “Cousin!” The sound of her own voice startled her.

She was already wearing a color that drew the eye — and that word *Cousin* pulled everyone’s attention straight to her.

Gu Qiao fell back on her old professional instincts and looked at his suit. The fabric was excellent. The tailoring was impeccable. Even on someone without a frame like his, it would look good. She realized for the first time that she seemed to have lost the courage to meet someone’s eyes — she could only look at his clothes, and reach the incidental conclusion that those clothes were expensive.

Calling out “cousin” this loudly and getting no response — that would really be embarrassing.

Gu Qiao was all but pushed into the elevator. Luo Peiyin used his arm to shield her slightly — the motion was quick, and by the time she looked at him, his hand was already back in his trouser pocket. She heard Luo Peiyin ask her: “Which floor?”

Gu Qiao’s instinct told her the question was directed at her — though he had been standing before the elevator alongside others. She saw that his finger had already pressed the floor she needed, and simply repeated the floor number.

Xu Ling found this pair of cousins remarkably odd, to the point where she began wondering whether “cousin” was actually a term of kinship at all, rather than some kind of nickname. There were plenty of people taller than Gu Qiao’s cousin, but for some reason Xu Ling felt a certain pressure in the air. Some people simply had the ability to alter the atmosphere around them by sheer presence alone. Xu Ling much preferred people who lifted the mood of everyone around them — though she had to admit that Gu Qiao’s so-called cousin was far more than just a good-looking back. Compared to him, she still liked Gu Qiao’s personality more.

Gu Qiao’s mind was working rapidly: he was going to the same floor. Could he be attending the launch as well?

Before the elevator reached her floor, he didn’t say another word to her. The moment she stepped out, Gu Qiao was already reaching into her handbag for her card holder, pulling out a business card — a speed that nearly struck Xu Ling dumb.

“Cousin, this is my business card.” On it were her pager number and her mobile number. The roaming charges were steep, but she hoped he would call.

The card lingered in the recipient’s hands for only half a second before Gu Qiao caught a trace of a smile at the corner of Luo Peiyin’s mouth. He didn’t let even that trace linger more than half a second.

The one thing that gave Gu Qiao any comfort was that the card had not been handed back to her.

At check-in, Xu Ling saw the invitation Gu Qiao’s cousin was holding. Gu Qiao didn’t need to find anyone else — her own “cousin” could get her into the banquet. If he was willing.

—