The crowd didn't know what "exec. asst." meant. Wandering Zhou explained that it was short for "executive assistant to the CEO." Poet Zhao therefore found himself suddenly promoted to executive assistant, having thought that he was merely a salesman, and as a result, he quickly shed his look of exhaustion, beamed happily, and proceeded to push aside the people who were standing in his way and walk over to Wandering Zhou. He bowed and announced that all the flyers had been distributed. Then, like a real assistant, he discreetly positioned himself behind Wandering Zhou. Zhou looked up and asked, "Have you been asleep all afternoon?"
"No." Poet Zhao shook his head emphatically. "I spent the entire afternoon walking through town distributing ads."
"Your breath smells like you just woke up," Wandering Zhou said.
The crowd erupted in laughter as Poet Zhao blushed furiously. He repeated that he had spent the entire afternoon distributing ads with Song Gang. Wandering Zhou replied with a slight smile, "I saw Song Gang but didn't see you."
Poet Zhao still wanted to defend himself, but Zhou gestured for him to be quiet. Then Zhou launched back into his account of his legendary exploits. Missy Su sat across from him, hanging onto his every word. Wandering Zhou saw that Poet Zhao's face and neck were covered in sweat, so he paused and thanked him for all his hard work. Then he returned to his account of his adventures in Africa: "African peasants are the most efficient workers in the world."
The crowd asked, "Why is that?"
Wandering Zhou replied, "They toil in the fields naked, and shit and piss as they work. That way, even as they are plowing the soil they are also fertilizing it."
The crowd marveled and sighed their approval, agreeing that this was indeed an ingenious approach. That way the peasants took care of two farming tasks at once, saving both time and energy. What's more, they added, those farmers wouldn't even need to wipe their bottoms, since they could just air-dry them as they worked.
Then Wandering Zhou pointed to the virgin beauties walking around outside and told the crowd, "If this handful of young women has already got you googly-eyed, how will you deal with having all three thousand of them here?"
Wandering Zhou said that he once traveled to an island in the Pacific. He uttered a few guttural sounds and said that this was the islands name, explaining that it literally meant "isle of woman." It was not until he had stepped onto the island that he realized he had entered a Country of Women. There were around 45,800 women there, and every one of them was as beautiful as a goddess. Only there were no men. One man before him had traveled to this island, but that had been eleven years earlier. Wandering Zhou looked straight at his audience and said, "Just think, they hadn't seen a single man in more than a decade, and then there I was."
He took a dramatic pause and slowly sipped some green tea, then asked the waitress for a refill. The men in the shop waited anxiously to hear the rest of his story, grumbling that the waitress was too slow. They waited for Zhou to take another sip of tea, then asked excitedly, "What did they do when they saw you?"
Wandering Zhou took a deep breath before continuing. "They lined up to gang-rape me. But of course my virginal night was to be spent with the ruler of the Country of Women."
Wandering Zhou explained that, contrary to what one might expect, the ruler was not an old lady. Instead, they had chosen the most beautiful woman in the land to be their ruler. Sighing, Wandering Zhou described at length the beauty of that eighteen-year-old queen: "Foreigners would call her a Venus, while the Chinese would compare her to the legendary beauty Xi Shi."
The crowd was now dying to know whether or not he ended up bedding this beautiful young queen. The men prompted, "Did you give her your virginity?"
"No." Wandering Zhou shook his head.
"Why not?" the men asked in astonishment.
Wandering Zhou said, "Although she was very beautiful, we were not in love."
The men shook their heads in disbelief, then asked, "What happened next?"
"Next?" Wandering Zhou answered casually. "Then I escaped."
The men asked, "How did you escape?"
"Very simple," Wandering Zhou said. "I used makeup to disguise myself as a woman."
The men heaved loud sighs of regret, and one complained, "Why did you want to escape? If it had been me, even if there had been a pistol aimed at my head, a cannon aimed at my butt, and a fleet of Tomahawk cruise missiles aimed straight at my heart, I still wouldn't have fucking left that island even if my life depended on it."
"That's right," the other men cried out.
"I beg to differ," Wandering Zhou said. "I definitely want to save my virginity for a woman I truly love."
As he said this Wandering Zhou glanced at Missy Su, who blushed in embarrassment. After listening to Zhou's adventures in the Country of Women, several of the women in the crowd asked him, "How many countries have you visited?"
Wandering Zhou made a show of calculating mentally, and then replied, "Too many. I couldn't even count them with the help of a calculator."
Poet Zhao's opportunity to brownnose had arrived, and he said, "Boss Zhou can speak the languages of thirty different countries, including of course that of our own China."
The crowd cried out in amazement, but Wandering Zhou shook his head modestly. "That's a bit of an exaggeration. Of those thirty languages, there are only about ten that I know well enough to conduct business. Another ten I know only well enough to carry on day-to-day conversations, while the final ten I can only use for simple greetings."
"That's still amazing!" the crowd exclaimed.
Poet Zhao continued brownnosing, adding, "Everywhere Boss Zhou goes, he always stays in the presidential suites of five-star hotels."
The crowd cried out in awe, but Wandering Zhou again waved modestly, saying, "Sometimes I don't stay in the presidential suite. For instance, if a visiting president happened to be in the same hotel, then I would stay in the business suite."
At this point, Wandering Zhou remembered that the previous night he had slept with Poet Zhao on his straw mat on the side of the road, and how some in the crowd might have seen him, so he decided to take a different tack. He said that he was someone who knew both how to stoop and how to hold his head high, someone who could stay in the presidential suite of a five-star hotel but was equally content sleeping by the side of the road. He added that he once slept for three days and three nights in the Arabian desert, where the sun was so strong that he was almost baked into a mummy. He also slept for a week in an Amazonian rain forest, where wild animals wandered by him as he slept. Once a female tiger slept with him, and when he rested his head on a fallen tree trunk, the tiger did the same, and so they spent the entire night sleeping face-to-face. The next morning the tigers whiskers tickling his face woke him up, and only then did he realize that he and the tiger had spent the entire night sleeping together like husband and wife.
Poet Zhao continued his brownnosing, saying, "Boss Zhao's cell number is not even a Chinese number but, rather, it is from Brit-something or other."
Wandering Zhou corrected him, saying, "British Virgin Islands."
Some of the crowd asked in surprise, "Are you a citizen of those tiny islands?"
Wandering Zhou shook his head and said, "My company has registered there, thereby allowing it to be listed on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange."
The crowd cried out in surprise, "Your company is traded on the U.S. stock market?"
Wandering Zhou replied modestly, "Many Chinese companies are registered in the U.S."
Some of the townspeople bought and sold stocks, so they asked what his company's ticker symbol was. Wandering Zhou replied, "ABCD." Then he told them that if they had a chance to go to the United States, they should buy his stock — its performance had increased three years in a row. Everyone gasped in surprise and eagerly asked him for his cell number. When he told them, they stored it in their pockets as if it were a precious treasure, though he warned them that they shouldn't call without good reason. "Even if you just say hello three times, it could still cost you a full month's salary."