Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao. Jonathan Tel

clouds,” as the saying goes. He operates through offshore investment vehicles. He always denies personal responsibility, but if necessary he agrees to pay compensation anyway. Some of his clients, though, they get greedy, they overreach. Sooner or later, he fears, a scandal will break; maybe he’ll only be peripherally involved, but the authorities will be under pressure to lop a tall tree. But it seems to him that his corruption (if that is how it is to be defined) is outside himself—it existed thousands of years in the past, and will exist thousands of years in the future—he can take neither praise nor blame. He’s less concerned for himself than for his daughter. If he falls, then she won’t be able to study abroad, and her dreams will never come true. Let him just stay out of harm’s way for a few more years, he prays, another decade. He thinks of the zodiacal animals, a heavenly menagerie; if he lives through the full cycle again, it’ll be more than he expects. By then her career will be established, and nobody in America will care if a producer’s father is locked up in a Chinese prison, or executed, in fact she might use it to advantage. She’ll hint that her father was a dissident, persecuted for his commitment to democratic values. Personally Qin is happier in his own country—vacationing in New York or London or Tokyo only when his wife and daughter insist—but he accepts that his daughter will be a citizen of the world. And in certain moods he’s an optimist. There’s every chance, provided he plays his cards right, that he’ll rise to greater and greater heights, he’ll be too big to fail, investors will shower his daughter with money in order to get in with him. What he hopes, above all, is that she has a child. He’s no stickler for tradition—Xiaxia can give him a grandson or a granddaughter; she can marry a big-nosed Westerner, for all he cares—but one way or another he wants his lineage to continue. The contemplation of his own mortality consoles him.

      “Cheers!” Qin says in English, leaning forward with his whisky raised.

      *

      “I’ll phone you when I’m done,” Qin tells his chauffeur.

      Snow is shunted in heaps and the sky is heavy. The snuffling chauffeur closes his eyes with his mouth open, as if spelled into a deep sleep. The dashboard ornament is a plastic sunflower that raises and lowers its leaves perpetually. Qin advised Nie to admit nothing; there is no reason to panic. But the man has come all the way to Beijing just in order to meet with him. He can’t refuse. Right now he needs a drink.

      He’s in a foreign language bookstore, the Bookworm. It’s not just the words that are foreign, the very shapes of the books and magazines, the designs of the covers, come from far away. For good luck he buys a hardback in English—Gets inside the heads of people living in China today, declares the blurb; difficult to tell whether it’s fact or fiction. He goes to the bar, where a red-haired bartender greets him in Mandarin, and he orders a double Glenfiddich. He feels safer here, half in China and half abroad. Sometimes an outsider can understand us in a way we do not understand ourselves. His wife sees a psychoanalyst, who sits in silence while she talks.

      Nie comes in, and Qin realizes he’s picked the wrong location. The idea was to bring Nie somewhere he’d be uncomfortable, to give Qin an advantage. But Nie is more than uncomfortable enough already. His face is haggard and his trouser cuffs are soaked. He’s unused to this climate; probably he walked from the subway. What if the accountant were to rant, to assign blame, to confess in public? Many here would not get it, guessing this to be a quarrel between boss and employee, or between father and son, or between lovers; others would relish every word.

      Qin springs up and seizes Nie by the elbow. “I’m taking you somewhere more private.” As they leave, a couple is murmuring, “Je t’aime.” His daughter taught him the expression on the Air France flight. Throughout their stay at the hotel on the Champs Elysées, and at the Louvre, and in various department stores, he never had occasion to use that phrase, or indeed any of his minimal French, though quite possibly Xiaxia, strolling by moonlight along the banks of the Seine, spoke it and had it spoken to her. As pretty as his daughter is now, so was his wife in her youth. What did she see in him: Did she perceive, beneath the surface, some kind of beauty? On their wedding night, she conceived. The timing was wrong; he had a career to pursue. Four years later, Xiaxia was born. He has always given his wife everything she’s entitled to. He is faithful—not that sex was ever the center of their marriage; the world holds other desires, far more potent.

      The chauffeur steers toward the curb, and, yawning, double-parks. The Audi has an adaptive suspension system; when Qin is at the back, his ride is smooth. But he believes that as soon as he gets out the chauffeur switches the suspension to sporty mode, and as if it were his own takes the vehicle for a spin, feeling every pothole and bump and irregularity of Beijing.

      The passengers tramp around a snow drift, their track already flattened and darkened by generations of pedestrians. They enter the wholesale market—multiple levels of consumer goods. They take a series of escalators to the food court on the top floor. Here, at least, it’s most unlikely Qin would encounter anybody he knows.

      Neither is hungry.

      They sit on plastic chairs. A not very clean table is between them. Two cups of water, left behind by previous diners, stake out the surface. There’s a NO SMOKING sign, and indeed nobody is smoking.

      “Help me,” Nie says.

      Qin tips his head back and sucks through his teeth. He feels an urge to charge forward, head-butting the accountant till their glasses collide and smash. How ugly Nie is, with his squinty little face and his fading hair! How ugly Nie’s wife is too! How ugly the twins: he’s never seen such ugly girls in his life! What a perfectly ugly family! How he hopes Nie does not go through with the operation: it would be horrible to confront his naked eyes.

      Meanwhile Nie is rambling on, stammering and repeating himself, descanting on the suspicions of his boss, his fear the municipality might appoint an outside auditor. . . . In reaction to this frantic talk, Qin grows in power. He has never been so sure of himself in his life. He stands and raises an arm as if saluting from a podium, and it is his turn to speak. He proclaims this is a problem that will pass. It is not important in the grand scheme of things. The paper trail can be obscured by a further series of transactions, more debits, more credits, more borrowings, more loans. . . . We are facing danger, yes, there will be further dangers in the months and years to come, but so long as we stand together, united in the face of adversity, a glorious future lies ahead!

       ELVIS HAS LEFT BEIJING

      They were sisters, but of course they were not sisters. (That would be contrary to government policy.) Their families had lived side by side in the Shijingshan District of Beijing for many generations. They were born during the same calendar year, but in different traditional years—Linlin, a month older, was a Monkey and Feifei a Rooster. Perhaps that made the difference.

      When she was twelve, Linlin had her first period and a month later so did Feifei. Linlin kissed a boy when she was sixteen; a month later, Feifei. They went through various teenage enthusiasms together, too—their calligraphy phase, their boy band phase, their phase of crushes on other girls. On the parapet of a warehouse destined for demolition the spray-painted slogan appeared: WOMAN’S DESTINY IS TO RULE OVER MAN; they accomplished this when they were seventeen, the year they both lost their virginity.

      To everyone’s surprise they scored high on the national exam and got into college. They decided they would take their future seriously. They had a gift for languages; they watched American movies and British TV series, and haunted the English Corner to ask questions of native speakers.

      On graduating they both accepted a position at a multinational company (not the same one). Their work was a little humdrum. A more urgent topic engrossed them: Whom should they choose as their first real boyfriend? He’d be somebody more senior than themselves, earning a decent salary, aiming high. But should he be Chinese or a foreigner? They listed the advantages of each.

      Chinese:

      • Understands your background.

      • You understand his.

      • Can meet his parents.

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