◎ The Nouveau Riche ◎
By the time Gu Qiao went to pay the bill, the people she had not wished to see had already left. She drove the yellow Dafa home with Lou Deyu.
“Dad, tomorrow go to the post office and wire five thousand yuan home. Tell Mom to get a telephone line put in — it’ll make it easier for us to stay in touch.” The profit from the leather jackets had surpassed Gu Qiao’s estimates. She had originally planned to give Deyu a sum of money to go home and upgrade the canning equipment, but now she had changed her mind.
They were more than father and daughter — they were allies. Because they shared the same family, and because they both loved that family and wanted a better life for them.
Throughout the drive, Gu Qiao didn’t mention the irrelevant people they had encountered — not a single word. What she spoke to Deyu about was stockpiling and renting a warehouse. As long as they had a stable supply of leather jackets, there would always be buyers.
“Dad, I can’t give you your share of the profits just yet — that money needs to go toward building up inventory.”
Deyu quickly said: “I didn’t put in a single yuan of capital — what am I drawing a share for? I’m just lending a hand. This is the least I can do.” The fact that his debts had derailed Gu Qiao’s schooling weighed on him; helping her out now at least eased his conscience a little. Even if that history didn’t exist, helping your own child wasn’t something you should expect to be paid for.
“If you truly only want to lend a hand, then tomorrow your job is buying takeaway and doing packaging. I’ll find someone else to handle sourcing, and pay them their commission accordingly.”
The moment Deyu heard that the money would go to someone else, he was immediately alarmed: “I can handle that too — why bring in an outsider? The advertising is already out there; I don’t need to stand in the elevator with the board anymore. I can do this.” He didn’t refuse the share again. If the money was allocated to him, he could always return it to Gu Qiao. But if it went to a stranger, it was gone for good — like a steamed bun thrown to a dog, never coming back.
Gu Qiao’s rented rooms were not far from the hotel. She was currently staying at the hotel every day while Deyu lived alone in the rented rooms. The two places were close to each other.
The yellow Dafa drove past the hotel Gu Qiao was staying at. Deyu said: “You can stop here — it’s only two bus stops to my place.”
Gu Qiao insisted on driving all the way to the entrance of the lane before stopping. Deyu watched the yellow Dafa disappear from view, the oversized advertisement stretched across its rear window standing out prominently. The longer Deyu looked at the model in the leather jacket on that advertisement, the more he thought there was a three-part resemblance to someone he knew.
—
Room 510 had its windows open. The scent of leather jackets drifted out through the gaps. Gu Qiao sat at the table tallying the profits from this round of business. The more she calculated, the more awake she became — sleep was out of the question. A single order of five thousand leather jackets: it was the largest deal she had ever closed. Just sourcing that batch had required three separate refueling stops for the yellow Dafa.
The clock pointed to ten. Gu Qiao went to the telephone and dialed a familiar number without looking at the keypad — she pressed each digit entirely from memory.
Gu Qiao and Luo Peiyin spoke on the phone every day. Usually she called him, because Luo Peiyin now had a mobile phone and there was no risk of a missed call.
Gu Qiao connected to the long-distance operator and said in the English Luo Peiyin had taught her, fluently and without hesitation: “Please charge the call to the recipient.”
At this time, international calls were billed to the caller by default, unless you specifically requested after connecting that the recipient cover the cost.
That year, international direct dialing had not yet launched. Before you could speak to the other party, you had first to go through the long-distance operator.
Before Luo Peiyin left for America, he had specifically told Gu Qiao that whenever she called him, she should tell the operator to charge the call to the recipient — meaning that when she called him, she needed to state in advance that Luo Peiyin would pay. Otherwise the cost would fall to her.
When Gu Qiao heard this, she had immediately and generously offered to pay for the calls herself — she had money now. Luo Peiyin explained that if he paid, the phone charges could be converted to air miles, and when the miles accumulated enough, they could be exchanged for a free flight ticket.
Gu Qiao didn’t know whether paying phone bills in America actually earned air miles. What she did know was that calling America from China cost more per minute than she made in profit on one pigskin jacket, and international calls from America were unlikely to be cheap either. Half-convinced, half-skeptical, Luo Peiyin told her that the money she saved could count as her contribution to his stake.
Probably worried that Gu Qiao wouldn’t be able to express all of this clearly in English, Luo Peiyin had written the phrase out on a piece of paper. As though not entirely trusting her English, he read the full sentence aloud and then had her repeat it back. He watched her lips as she went through it, hesitating, stumbling over the phrase — and when she had finished her imperfect English recitation, she asked in very fluent Mandarin: *Can you really exchange phone bills in America for flight tickets?* Luo Peiyin said it was true, and then kissed her.
Before he left for America, he had her practice the phrase until she could say it without thinking.
Now, as Gu Qiao repeated those familiar words, she could feel the ghost of pressure against her lips returning.
—
The first time Gu Qiao called Luo Peiyin on an international line from the hotel phone, she spoke at extraordinary speed and kept the call to exactly four minutes and fifty-nine seconds. One second less felt like a waste; one second more risked going over. Time was money — and here it had the most literal meaning imaginable. Her speech came out in an unbroken rush, word pressed against word, sentence pressed against sentence, with no gaps left between them. One second of phone charges was the cost of one egg, and silence was far too extravagant — Gu Qiao refused to let a single egg shatter on the floor.
After that first call ended, Gu Qiao’s nose was damp with perspiration, as though she had just fought a hard battle. The second call she still held to four minutes and fifty-nine seconds. The third time, she reminded herself to keep it controlled — one call translated to nearly a hundred yuan, and if this kept up, Luo Peiyin would have nothing left to eat. She had told herself she would stop at fifty-nine seconds, but Luo Peiyin’s measured way of speaking stretched the time, and all the words she had been holding back spilled out after all; she held firm and cut the call at one minute and fifty-nine seconds. The fourth call, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth… not a single one failed to end right on the fifty-ninth second.
Gu Qiao’s care for money did not diminish as her income rapidly grew.
This time, after the call connected, words still came tumbling out of her in rapid succession. She didn’t mention a single word about running into Zhou Zan at Maxim’s. Phone charges were too precious — she would not waste a single second on him. Every word came out crackling with excitement, like sparks flying.
She finished speaking, and heard Luo Peiyin say: “Slow down. I want to listen to your voice properly.” Gu Qiao slowed down, uncertain for a moment how to speak. She managed three seconds of normal pace before the rush returned; only when she was asking a question did she slow down. She asked Luo Peiyin for his exact address — she wanted to wire him the phone charges first. The stake he had invested was steadily earning returns, and it would more than double well before summer. Her business was going very well.
This question was met with silence.
Silence, during an international call that cost over ten yuan a minute, was an outrageous luxury. Gu Qiao assumed the signal was poor — though the number of mobile phones in America had long since surpassed seven figures and was approaching eight, far ahead of any other country, it was still early days for the technology, and signal quality was far less reliable than a landline. She asked twice in a row: “Can you hear me?” When she was about to ask a third time, she heard Luo Peiyin say that his phone bill was well covered.
“What’s the weather like there today?”
“It’s sunny.” Gu Qiao glanced toward the window. She couldn’t even remember whether the day had been cloudy or clear — her head had been so full of figures there had been no room to notice the weather.
When the second hand swept toward fifty-eight seconds again, Luo Peiyin spoke on the phone about his plans for their future. By summer, she could come to America on a dependent visa, take a few months of language courses, then formally apply to a school and enroll in whatever subjects she liked, converting the dependent visa to a student visa. He wouldn’t let her worry about money anymore.
He explained it as plainly as he could. Gu Qiao understood. He saw her unfinished education as her great regret and had put forward what he believed was a workable solution. They could be together again; she could resume her studies and have time to breathe. What she had lost at eighteen, he intended to give back to her this year. Though the loss was not of his making, he believed he had a responsibility to help her make up for it.
Even though Gu Qiao was deeply reluctant to waste a single second of silence, she fell silent. Every second spent on these charges could buy one egg, and one egg after another was shattering on the floor.
Gu Qiao held the receiver and opened and closed her lips. For the moment, she couldn’t bring herself to say: *Even though I want very much to be with you, but…* The weight of everything before the *but* was too great — and what came after it had to be heavier still. An overseas phone call couldn’t carry that much.
He didn’t know how well her business was going here right now. He was still working from his earlier impression that she was struggling to earn a living. If he could have stood beside her and seen with his own eyes how she was making money, he probably wouldn’t feel that she had anything to regret.
In the silence, she heard the voice on the other end of the line say: “I love you.”
Outside the window, streetlamps glowed, and light from passing cars, neon signs, and the still-lit windows of nearby buildings scattered and poured into the room. On the other end of the line, the day had only just begun. Not only were they separated by an ocean — they were speaking across the divide of day and night.
Gu Qiao’s voice dropped very low. She heard herself say into the receiver: “I love you too.” She said those four words without any hurry at all.
—
One time, Gu Qiao answered a call from Luo Peiyin and heard, unexpectedly, piano music drifting through the line — flowing directly from wherever he was into her ear and down into her heart. She asked where he was. Luo Peiyin said he was on the street: someone had thrown an old piano out and left it beside a rubbish bin. Gu Qiao was astonished — who throws a piano in the rubbish?
Back home it was two in the afternoon, and Gu Qiao had been so busy she was only now finding a moment to eat her midday meal. Deyu and Peng Zhou were both in Room 510, stuffing food into their mouths as fast as they could out of sheer hunger. On the other side of the line, it was already deep into the night there. She didn’t say a word — she simply listened to the sound of that worn old piano drifting through the phone from wherever it sat.
—
Through that spring, leather jackets crowded every bus and every subway car. People seemed to have coordinated without discussion, dressed uniformly in leather — though the quality and styles varied, from a distance it was one jacket pressed up against another. Leather jackets drifted through the streets like the poplar fluff of March and April, everywhere you looked, as ubiquitous as bell-bottom trousers had been a decade or so before.
From spring into summer, leather jackets gradually vanished from the streets as spring clothes gave way to summer ones. But this did nothing to slow Gu Qiao’s business — if anything, it only grew. When the streets were full of T-shirts and shorts and sundresses and sandals, Deyu watched bundle after bundle of leather jackets get packed up and loaded onto trains bound for Erlian.
On the last day of May, Gu Qiao’s peak daily turnover reached six hundred thousand yuan. After subtracting storage, packaging, and all the various overhead costs, the net daily profit was fifty thousand. Not every day matched that figure, but from that point on, not a single day saw the daily turnover fall below one hundred thousand.
Gu Qiao moved out of Room 510 and into a suite upstairs. She hired a dedicated accountant to manage the invoicing and inventory counts. She acquired a printer for the office so contracts could be printed whenever needed. For the sake of making business easier, Gu Qiao bought herself a mobile phone. This mobile phone, due to domestic signal limitations, couldn’t connect to the overseas long-distance operator — but that didn’t stop Gu Qiao from using the hotel phone to share the news with Luo Peiyin.
The money she earned was more than enough to buy a four-bedroom apartment in Yayuncun, but Gu Qiao only replaced the old yellow Dafa with a new one. For her, the most important quality in a vehicle was carrying capacity — not for appearances, but for goods.
As her income grew, Gu Qiao stopped saying “Please charge the call to the recipient” when she connected to the long-distance operator. She no longer begrudged the cost of a plane ticket. Even if Luo Peiyin paid the charges and accumulated enough miles for a free flight, she was willing to pay herself.
The first time Gu Qiao didn’t say the phrase, Luo Peiyin specifically reminded her not to forget. The request had to be authorized by him, after which the call could go through. But this time the operator didn’t ask for Luo Peiyin’s consent. Gu Qiao said she hadn’t forgotten — she told Luo Peiyin that at the rate she was currently earning, one plane ticket was no longer something she needed to count.
Over the phone, Gu Qiao grew more and more at ease — no longer speaking the way she had at the beginning, cramming every sentence up against the next with no room to breathe. Her pace gradually returned to normal. She shared every piece of good news with Luo Peiyin over the phone. Apart from herself and her business partner, the person who knew most precisely how much she was making was Luo Peiyin.
She told him almost every day exactly how much his investment had grown in her hands. It had practically become a fixture of every call.
The better business got, the busier Gu Qiao became. But she was busy with enthusiasm and with hope, and she hoped the busyness would never stop.
Gu Qiao didn’t conceal her excitement over earning money in the slightest — she was so elated she was nearly beside herself. Sums in renminbi kept leaping from her lips, leaping and leaping, crossing the phone line into Luo Peiyin’s ears — and along with the numbers, something else traveled through too: a fresh, unabashed delight that belonged unmistakably to the newly rich.
By the time the year reached its hottest days, Gu Qiao’s savings were enough to purchase a four-bedroom apartment in Yayuncun. She longed desperately to see Luo Peiyin — to share the joy of everything she had earned with him, face to face.