With one of his manicured fingers, Xin pushed the sushi tray away from him and a little to the left, then placed the bottle of Tsingtao beer and its accompanying glass behind it at an equal distance. It looked better to him already. He was far from subscribing to the obscene order principles of people who put everything at a right angle. Occasionally he even saw the purest order in the appearance of chaos. What could be more perfect than total homogeneity without imperfections, just as a perfectly empty spirit resembles the cosmic ideal, and every thought is a form of contamination, unless you summon it deliberately and dismiss it again at will. To control the mind is to control the world. Xin smiled as he made a few more corrections, shifting the small bowl for the soy sauce, breaking the chopsticks apart and laying them parallel in front of him. In its own way, wasn’t Shanghai a wonderful chaos too? Or rather a secret plan, an ordering of capriciousness which only revealed itself to the educated observer?
Xin pushed a few clumps of rice a little further apart on the wooden board until their appearance appealed to him.
He began to eat.
Xintiandi
When Jericho looked back, his life in China seemed like a confused succession of dangerous risks and escapes, all encircled by soundproofed walls and building sites, in the shadow of which he had striven to improve his financial state with the industriousness of an animal burrowing a hole. In the end, the hard slog had shown results. His bank manager began to seem more like a friend. Dossiers about shares in deep-sea vessels, water treatment plants, shopping centres and skyscrapers were presented to him. The whole world seemed intent on making him aware of all the things he could spend his money on. Clasped against the bosom of better society, respected and overworked, Jericho ended up paralysed by his own achievements, too exhausted to add the final chapter to the story of his nomadic life by moving to the kind of area it would be worth growing old in. The step was long overdue, but the thought of packing up yet again made him go cold. So he gave priority to lying wearily on the sofa in the evenings as floodlights and construction noise leaked through the curtains, watching feature films and murmuring the mantra I-have-toget-out-of-here to himself, then falling asleep in the process.
It was around this time that Jericho began to seriously doubt the point of his existence.
He hadn’t doubted it when Joanna had lured him to Shanghai, only to leave him three months later. He hadn’t doubted it when he’d realised he didn’t have enough money for the flight back, nor to rebuild the life he’d left behind in London. He hadn’t doubted in his first Shanghai digs on the edge of a highway, where he’d lived on damp floors and struggled to squeeze a few litres of brown water from the shower every morning, the windows of the two-storey house rattling lightly from the never-relenting traffic.
He had just told himself it could only get better.
And it had.
To start with, Jericho had offered his services to foreign enterprises that had come out to Shanghai to do business. Many felt insecure within the fragile framework of Chinese copyright protection legislation. They felt spied on and cheated. With time, though, the self-service mentality of the dragon had given way to great remorse. While, at the beginning of the century, China had still happily plagiarised everything hackers unearthed from the depths of the global ideas pool, now even Chinese business people were increasingly despairing about their state’s inability to protect ideas. They too began to be on the receiving end of the words ‘It seemed worthy of imitation to us’, which was a polite way of saying ‘Of course we stole it, but we admire you for having created it.’ For years, the Long-Nose accusations that Chinese companies and institutions had stolen their intellectual property had been indignantly rejected or not even acknowledged, but Jericho found that now it was Chinese companies, above all, who needed web detectives. Native entrepreneurs reacted excitedly to the fact that, during his time with Scotland Yard helping to build up the department for Cyber Crime, he had been fighting against them. In their opinion, it could only be advantageous to have their patents protected by someone who had previously done such an excellent job of clobbering them when they crossed the line.
Because the problem – an undulating, proliferating, all-enveloping, truly uncontrollable monster of a problem – was that China’s creative elite would go on cannibalising itself so long as a nationally and internationally accepted and implementable system for the protection of intellectual property rights remained elusive. It had always been obvious that capitalism, practically reinvented by China, was based upon property rights, and that an economy whose most important asset was knowhow couldn’t exist without the protection of brands, patents and copyright, but it hadn’t really interested anyone – not, that is, until the day when they themselves became victims of the situation. By now, the country suffering the most economic damage at the hands of Chinese espionage was China itself. Everyone was digging around in other people’s front gardens, and with electronic spades wherever possible. The hunting ground was the global net, and Owen Jericho was one of the hunters, commissioned by other hunters as soon as they got the impression that they themselves were the quarry.
Once Jericho became part of that network without which no favours would be done and no trade negotiated in China, his career ascended like a rocket. He moved five times in five years, twice of his own free will, the other times because the houses he was living in at the time were to be pulled down for reasons he could no longer remember. He moved to better areas, wider streets, nicer houses, getting ever closer to realising his dream of moving into one of the rebuilt shikumen houses, with stone gateways and peaceful inner courtyards, located in the pulsating heart of Shanghai. Even though he had to make compromises along the way, he had never doubted it would happen at some point.
One day, his bank manager asked him what he was waiting for. Jericho replied that he wasn’t quite there yet, but would be someday. The bank manager made him aware of his bank balance and said that ‘someday’ was, in fact, now. With the revelation that he’d been working so hard he hadn’t paid attention to the possibilities now open to him, Jericho left the bank and teetered home in a daze.
He hadn’t realised he had come so far.
With the realisation came the doubts. They claimed they’d always been there, but that he had avoided acknowledging them. They whispered: What the devil are you doing here anyway? How did you even get here?
How could this happen to you?
They told him that it had all been for nothing, and that the worst position anyone could ever find themselves in was that of having achieved their goals. Hope blossoms beneath the shelter of provisional arrangements, often for a whole lifetime. Now, suddenly, it had become official. He was to become a Shanghaian, but had he ever wanted that? To settle in a city he would never have moved to without Joanna?
As long as you were on the journey, said the doubts, you didn’t have to think about the destination. Welcome to commitment.
In the end – he lived in a fairly prestigious high-rise in the hinterland of Pudong, the financial district, the only drawback of which was the fact that more skyscrapers were being constructed around it, that and the noise and a fine brown dust which settled in the windowsills and airways – it took a further eviction by the city authorities to shake him from his lethargy. Two smiling men paid him a visit, let him serve them tea and then explained that the house he was living in had to give way to an utterly amazing new-build. If he so wished, they would gladly reserve an apartment in it for him. But a further move for the duration of the coming year would, much to their regret, be unavoidable. To which end, the authorities considered themselves overjoyed to be able to offer him an apartment near Luchao Harbour City, a mere sixty kilometres outside Shanghai – which, for a metropolis lovingly embracing other towns in the course of its expansion, wasn’t really outside at all. Oh, yes, and they wanted to start work in four weeks, so if he could – you know. It wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, and they said they were very sorry, but they weren’t really.