◎ A Cousin Arrives from Afar ◎

Gu Qiao’s great-great-uncle, as a highly respected elder in the village, liked to make the rounds at the village entrance to gauge popular sentiment and gather information about goings-on among the neighbors.

On the fifth day of the New Year, after welcoming the God of Wealth, the great-great-uncle made his rounds through the village, casting critical scrutiny upon the Spring Festival couplets at each household’s door. In his old-man’s view, any family that had not requested his calligraphic contribution over the New Year celebrations had door decorations that were insufficiently auspicious. The couplet posted at Lou Deyu’s gate in particular — was that supposed to be decent penmanship?

The great-great-uncle commanded great respect in the village, and anyone who saw him was obliged to greet him. He was currently appraising the Spring Festival couplets at the Gu family’s door when a girl in a blue padded jacket came out of the Gu family home. Old though he was, his eyes were sharp; he immediately recognized this girl as Gu Qiao. Yet this girl kept her large bright eyes wide open without so much as glancing at him, tucked her hands in her pockets, and hurried straight past him. The great-great-uncle coughed three times and still failed to attract the attention of those large eyes. He watched Gu Qiao disappear out of the alleyway, and in his fury struck the ground three times with his walking stick: “Like father, like child!”

The great-great-uncle considered his family to be among the rare households of scholarly breeding in the village. He himself taught at the village primary school; his son was the director of the township middle school; his youngest grandson was about the same age as Gu Qiao and was now studying at a vocational college in the provincial capital. The great-great-uncle believed his family improved with each generation, and by the time of his grandson they were sure to produce a university professor. As for Lou Deyu — this type of person had only prospered for a brief spell, and didn’t even have a child carrying his name. He’d turned out worse than an ordinary country man. Honestly, no one could understand what he had been so smug about back in his heyday. Still, this debt business had taught Lou Deyu a lesson; he no longer swaggered around as contemptuously as before. But who knew how he had passed that insufferable attitude on to his daughter.

Back when the great-great-uncle was teaching at the village primary school, he had had very little regard for Lou Deyu; Lou Deyu had been on the receiving end of his ruler quite a few times. Later, when Gu Qiao started primary school, the great-great-uncle was still teaching there, and Gu Qiao was no well-behaved, quiet child either. His youngest grandson had merely repeated some rumors about Gu Qiao’s family, and Gu Qiao had shoved him right off his feet with a slap. When he told Gu Qiao to hold out her hand to be punished, she simply ran away. A child like that — you could see what she would become at three years old. It was entirely within his expectations that she hadn’t gotten into university. As for Lou Deyu, when he was at the height of his prosperity, he had refused to contribute money to renovate the Gu family ancestral hall, and the great-great-uncle had long since abandoned any expectations of his character. Lou Deyu’s subsequent massive debts had completely confirmed everything he had suspected about him.

The great-great-uncle made his rounds from one end of the village to the other. When the sun was high in the sky and he was about to turn back home to eat his dumplings, he spotted a rather tall young man dressed as if he had stepped out of a film. His appearance and bearing were quite unlike those of the local villagers, and had attracted the attention of several young women, young married women, and men smoking dry tobacco. The great-great-uncle heard this young man asking a small boy with a bubble of snot under his nose where Lou Deyu’s house was. The small boy, having pocketed the chocolate the young man gave him, ran ahead to lead the way.

The boy ran and chewed his chocolate and talked at the same time: “Those five big brick-and-tile rooms up ahead — that’s his house!”

The great-great-uncle’s mind turned the matter over: an outsider? Coming to find Lou Deyu? Surely Lou Deyu hadn’t gone unrepentant and racked up more debts! That worthless creature — his old troubles would soon come back to pester him. The great-great-uncle grabbed his walking stick and headed for the Gu family home.

Gu Qiao’s pager had broken the day before. She had initially thought it was a battery issue, but after replacing the battery the pager screen was still blank. Before returning home, she had specifically encoded a number of commonly used phrases into numerical codes for non-urgent communication with Luo Peiyin. But now her pager was broken. On the fifth day of the New Year, Gu Qiao casually tied up her hair, threw on her padded jacket with a scarf, and with her arms in the sleeves of her work overskirt and hands tucked in her pockets, made her way to the brigade headquarters. She didn’t tell anyone at home that she was going to make a phone call to Luo Peiyin.

Gu Qiao had no intention of telling her family about her relationship with Luo Peiyin. Her family didn’t know much about him — only that he was her cousin-by-marriage’s stepson, currently studying abroad. Based on this limited information alone, convincing them he was a reliable person would be virtually impossible. Besides deepening her family’s worry for her, nothing would be gained. Once she had earned enough money, she was confident that without any explanations, her family would no longer feel she had been deceived by anyone.

She called Luo Peiyin’s pager several times, but received no reply. “My pager is broken and hasn’t been repaired yet” — these words could not be translated into numbers and transmitted to a numerical pager display. If only Luo Peiyin had a Chinese-character display pager, at least messages could be converted into Chinese characters. But as he was currently abroad, what reason would he have to own one?

In the end she dialed the phone number of her cousin-by-marriage’s house. The one who answered was Luo the Fourth. Hearing Gu Qiao’s voice, Luo the Fourth immediately launched into a detailed account of all his New Year recreational activities, leaving Gu Qiao no room to get a word in. Once he had finished reporting every single pleasure of his New Year, and heard Gu Qiao ask after Luo Peiyin, he told her not very cheerfully that his second elder brother was not at home — probably gone to Shanghai. Luo the Fourth asked if Gu Qiao wanted to speak to his mother; Gu Qiao said no need.

After hanging up the Luo family’s phone, Gu Qiao dialed Peng Zhou’s mobile phone.

The mobile phone proved its worth over the pager after all — the moment the call went through, Gu Qiao heard Peng Zhou’s voice, with none of the roundabout chains of contact a pager required. Peng Zhou hadn’t expected it to be Gu Qiao calling: “Little Gu?”

“That deal going to Erlian Haote — I’ll do it with you.” Making money was still too slow. To earn fast money, she would have to do border trade.

“You’ve finally come around. I’ve been waiting for your word. Let me tell you, don’t be afraid — find a few more people to ride with the truck to Erlian Haote, no one’s going to rob you. You can put your mind completely at ease! I’m still putting in the bigger share — if it weren’t safe, I wouldn’t dare do it either. This is my entire fortune on the line. How much goods can you pull together?”

“How much capital do you have?”

“Depends on how much goods you can get. The more the better! I can borrow some money from friends to turn things over. If we’re making one trip, better to make it a big one rather than a small one!”

“Let me calculate it more carefully, and I’ll get back to you tomorrow with an answer.” The two workshops that had been her regular partners at Dahongmen had moved back to Zhejiang — apparently to a place called Haining, where there were also many leather jacket manufacturing operations, and where they had fellow villagers to look out for them. Removing those two from the equation, the goods she could purchase at an advance payment discount would need to be reduced accordingly.

“You keep your word — don’t go back on it. Let me tell you, if this deal comes through, it’ll top what you’d earn killing yourself for half a year. In this day and age, it’s the bold who eat well and the timid who starve.”

After hanging up, Gu Qiao grabbed the phone again and paged Luo Peiyin’s number — still no reply. The room’s heating was poor, and the hand Gu Qiao had been clutching the handset with had gone red with cold.

“Qiao’er, who’ve you been calling? You’ve been at it so long — have you found yourself a boyfriend in the city? Tell your auntie — what’s this young man like?”

“Auntie, what filling are you making for your dumplings today?”

“Cabbage and pork. Qiao’er, if you haven’t got someone, I’ll introduce you to one — no stranger, just my nephew. His father opened a furniture factory in the village and is making quite a bit of money. Let me tell you, my nephew is no worse than any city boy. Plenty of well-off people in the countryside now too. Do you know about that village in Tianjin? What was it called — the village’s wealthiest man is in the newspapers and on television all the time, and I can see it on television from this far away.”

“Keep busy, auntie. I’m off.”

Gu Qiao tucked her hands in her pockets and walked out of the brigade headquarters. Today she needed to make a trip to the county town to get her pager fixed. She wasn’t worried about anything bad happening to Luo Peiyin, but she didn’t want him to be anxious if he couldn’t reach her. Once this Erlian Haote trip brought in money, she was definitely going to have a telephone installed at home — it would make staying in touch with her family so much easier.

With this thought in mind, she tucked her cold-reddened hands into her pockets and walked briskly homeward in her thick cotton shoes.

The small boy with the snot bubble still hadn’t finished his chocolate when he shouted toward the Gu family home: “Uncle Lou! You have a visitor!”

Lou Deyu was in the living room attending to his sister-in-law. In the countryside, Gu Qiao had reached the age for discussing marriage. Now that Lou Deyu’s debts were being gradually repaid and his reputation among the neighbors was slowly recovering, word had spread throughout the township that the eldest daughter of the Gu family was both capable and attractive. The New Year had barely passed before Lou Deyu’s sister-in-law came calling to introduce a prospective match for Gu Qiao.

Lou Deyu had received no small number of beatings from his third elder brother as a child. With many brothers in the family but little food, he as the youngest had always received more beatings than grain. He had never had a particularly warm relationship with his third brother and sister-in-law. Hearing this time what the sister-in-law was proposing, Lou Deyu immediately let out a cold snort: “We’re not in the business of picking up scraps. I actually know the person you’re talking about — his front face looks like the back of his head. What on earth are you thinking, trying to introduce someone like that to our family?”

“What kind of talk is that? His parents are both in the Grain Bureau, and the boy himself is on the public payroll. Ordinary people can’t even get a look-in. So he’s not much to look at — can good looks put food on the table?”

“We’re not short of food in this family! But if you don’t head home about now, Third Brother might not leave any food for you — ever since he was a child, in his eyes there’s been nothing but food.”

“You—”

Lou Deyu was just about to see his sister-in-law off when he heard that someone had arrived at the house, and came out quickly — only to find this visitor was even more unwelcome than the sister-in-law.

He looked the person over from head to toe, then from toe to head, and confirmed that this was indeed the third-marriage old man’s son.

It was the third-marriage old man’s son who spoke first: “Uncle Lou.”

Lou Deyu turned those three words over in his mind. Not “Uncle by marriage” — just “Uncle Lou”? What manner of address was that?

The sister-in-law had also followed them out and was staring at the young man in front of her: “Deyu, who is this young fellow?”

Lou Deyu said unwillingly, in a single word: “Relative.”

“A relative? How come I don’t know him?”

—