He borrowed another fifty from Gou and told Fang to get Zhong to go with them to lunch. Fang went, but Zhong was not in his room. So the four of them went to Damaishi Street for pork jelly buns, followed by a visit to a teahouse. It was dark when they split up.
On his way home, Zhuang thought about his terrible loss at the mahjong table. Li Hongwen had said lucky in cards, unlucky in love. His luck at the table had been lousy, so did that mean there was something romantic in store for him? He paused and, lost in thought for a moment, regretted not going to see Tang Wan’er earlier. Maybe he could go now. On second thought, it was getting dark, and Zhou Min might be home, so he headed reluctantly toward Shuangren fu.
A figure squatting outside the gate jumped to his feet and shouted when he spotted Zhuang.
“Junkman! Collecting junk and scraps!”
Zhuang laughed when he saw that it was the old man who spouted doggerel.
“You’re still collecting scrap at this hour?” Zhuang said, as the taste of alcohol rose up with a belch.
Ignoring him, the old man pulled his cart down the main street and rattled off another bit of wisdom:
Getting drunk on revolution’s brew, ruins the party’s name, causes stomach woes true
So drunk his wife can only fume and stew, so she complains to the discipline crew
The party secretary says if asked to drink, you would, too.
. . .
Zhuang opened the door. In the brightly lit house, his wife and Hong Jiang were sitting on the sofa counting money and punching numbers into a calculator. “It must have been a good month,” he said when he saw the stacks of bills.
“A good month?” she said. “The shipment of Jin Yong’s martial arts novels sold well at first, but we never anticipated that five more bookstores would open on the same street, all of them selling Jin Yong’s novels. Business went downhill fast, since we couldn’t get anything from our supplier. No matter how many times we count, this is barely enough to pay the two girls’ wages and our taxes. Hong Jiang bought three bookshelves a few days ago, and we have no books to put on them. You’re out there all day long. Why don’t you check things out for us? Hong says that the Tianlai Publishing House in Hunan just published a book. What’s the title again?”
“Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Hong said.
“Lady Chatterley’s Lover is in great demand, but we can’t get copies,” Niu Yueqing said. “Don’t you know the Tianlai editor-in-chief? They’re always asking you to write for them, so why don’t you contact them tomorrow and ask them to send books?”
“That’s easy,” Zhuang said. “Hong Jiang, send a telegram in my name.”
“That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear,” Hong said. “Most of the time, you complain that I use your name to cause trouble.”
“Just my name. Don’t tell them I own the bookstore.”
“You’re always so cautious. If we’d used your name for the bookstore, we could have had anything we wanted.”
“I’m a writer. A writer writes. What would people think if they knew I owned a bookstore?”
“In this day and age, there’s nothing wrong with a writer owning a business. Fame is wealth, and you shouldn’t squander it. You can’t get rich from writing alone. A novella is worth less than a single character written by the calligrapher Gong Jingyuan,” Hong said.
“He has something else to talk to you about,” Niu Yueqing said to Zhuang. “Go ahead, Hong Jiang.”
“After running the bookstore for a year, I have a pretty good picture of the market. Writing books is not as good as selling them, and editing books is better than both. Many bookstores now edit their own books, either by buying a publishing house outright or by printing books illegally. Chapbooks are all about sex and violence, and there’s no need for proofreading. With print runs in the millions, those people are getting rich. You know Xiaoshunzi on Zhuquemen Street, a stinking little shit who can barely read. Well, he hired some people to cut and paste erotic passages from other works and put out a book that made him a hundred and fifty thousand. Now he rides around in a taxi and eats exotic seafood at the Tangcheng Restaurant every day.”
“I know all that,” Zhuang said. “But that’s not what we should be doing.”
“I knew you’d say that,” Hong said. “But there’s something Shimu and I have talked about. A bookseller produced a martial arts novel by someone named Liu De. They’re having trouble selling it and are offering it to us at half-price. I was thinking we could take it and change the cover. We can give the author’s name as Jing Yong. I’m sure we’ll make a bundle.”
“How?” Zhuang asked.
“Jin Yong’s books sell out. This one can’t compare with his, but if we print the author’s name as Jing Yong in cursive style, it will look like Jin Yong at a casual glance. If we’re caught, we’ll have every right to say the author’s name is Jing Yong, not Jin Yong. I’ll take care of everything, except for the hundred thousand that you and Shimu have to put up.”
“As long as Zhuang Laoshi agrees, I’ll get the money.” Niu Yueqing turned to Zhuang. “Wang Ximian has invited us to a celebration for his mother’s seventieth birthday tomorrow. We can go together. I’ll borrow eighty thousand from him, and we’ll make up the rest from our savings.”
“So the old lady is going to be seventy? I thought she was younger than that,” Zhuang said. “I agree, we should go, but how can we borrow money at a birthday party?”
They could not agree on what to do, so she sent Hong back to the bookstore.
“Are you going back to the compound tonight?” she asked him.
“It’s too late, someone would have to get up to open the door for me.”
“So you’d go if it were still early, is that it? What kind of couple are we, then?”
Zhuang quietly went to bed. She followed a while later, but they kept their distance from one another. Then they heard the weepy notes of a flute on the city wall.
“I wonder who’s playing that,” Zhuang said.
“Who’s playing that flute?” she echoed, and they fell silent.
Zhuang hadn’t wanted to voice his thoughts about the flute player, and he was surprised to hear his wife say the same thing. All he wanted was for her to fall asleep quickly, but he heard a rustling from her side. She nudged him and tried to take his hand, which was what he had feared. Turning his back in disgust, he ignored her, pretending not to have noticed her movements. After lying silently for a while, he felt bad about treating her that way, so he turned to fulfill his responsibility, only to hear her say, “You’re not up for this, so let me help you while you tell me some stories.”
Naturally, he tried to tell her stories he had repeated many times, but she wouldn’t have it and asked for stories about real people.
“Where would I get those?”
“How about some of your experiences?”
“Like what? Like when the pigs at home are hungry, how can we sell the husks?”
“I’m just wondering why you can’t do it all of a sudden. You must have serviced someone else.”
“You watch me like a hawk, so how would I dare get near anyone?”
“No one? Weren’t you with Jing Xueyin for years?”
“I didn’t touch a hair on her head. I can swear to that.”
“You poor thing. Why don’t I find you someone? Tell me, who do you have your eye on?”
“No one.”
“Don’t think I don’t know you. All you lack is the nerve. When I brought up Wang Ximian’s birthday party for his mother, you happily agreed to go. That tells me you have your eye on his wife.”
“So what if I do?”
She fell silent, which he mistook as a sign that she was asleep, but then she said, “Wang Ximian’s wife loves to dress up. She’s not a young woman, but she tries to look like one.”