“So you’re worried about Wan’er, but no one so much as made a noise when I had a headache last night.”
“What nonsense is that?” Zhuang said. “You snored all night long, so how could you be sick? Are you jealous of someone’s ill health? Be careful or you might fall seriously ill.”
“You heard her snoring all night?” Wan’er asked. Liu Yue flashed a charming smile before walking out. She was barely out the door when Zhuang and Wan’er turned toward each other and stuck out their tongues, snake-like. She rushed over to hold him tightly as tears ran down her cheeks. She sucked on his lips. Zhuang tried to put his tongue in but was too nervous to manage it, so instead he pinched her arms to disentangle her before Liu Yue returned with the vitamins. Sitting in a chair, shaded by the lamp and complaining about a pebble in her shoe, Wan’er wiped her tears away and bent over to remove her shoe. She took the bottle. “So all I get is medicine, Zhuang Laoshi.”
“You ingrate,” Liu Yue said. “This is not bitter medicine.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s not bitter; it’s still medicine, and all medicine is toxic.”
“Zhuang Laoshi has to write something, so let’s leave him alone,” Liu Yue said as she dragged Tang out of the study.
When the note was finished, Zhuang thought about Wan’er; they hadn’t seen each other for some time, and now that she had finally come, there were so many people around that they could not find a private moment to talk. He had wanted to arrange a time to meet, which was why he had sent Liu Yue away, but Wan’er had used the opportunity to kiss him, rendering his mouth useless for talking. He quickly scribbled a note, which he would try to sneak to her before emerging with the letter for Zhong Weixian to read and hand to Zhou. They had more tea, and when the water boiled on the stove, Liu Yue shouted from the kitchen that she was cooking the noodles. Zhuang asked the guests to stay for dinner, but Zhong declined with thanks, saying he had to be going. With his bad eyes, he would have trouble riding his bike home at night. He got up to leave, followed by Zhou Min and Tang Wan’er, who told Zhuang to take good care of himself. Niu Yueqing stopped her, saying she had some mung beans for Wan’er to take home to make porridge, since the young couple probably did not have much at home. She begged off, but Niu Yueqing insisted and forced the sack into her hand, adding that mung beans’ cooling effect was especially good on hot summer days. They went back and forth with obvious affection. After walking Zhong Weixian and Zhou Min to the gate, Zhuang turned to look at Wan’er, who was still chattering with Niu Yueqing and Liu Yue; he was sure the two women would walk her out, and he would not be able to pass her the note. Then he saw Zhong and Zhou Min unlocking their bikes, and that gave him the idea to roll up the note and insert it into the keyhole on the lock of Tang Wan’er’s red bike.
As she walked with Niu Yueqing and Liu Yue, Zhuang, who was talking to Zhong Weixian at the gate, called Niu Yueqing over to say good-bye to the old man. Niu Yueqing walked to the gate, while Wan’er went to her bike and discovered the note inside the keyhole. Immediately realizing what it was, she took it out, smoothed it in her pocket, and read it as she bent over to unlock the bike. It said, “Come by at noon the day after tomorrow.” Hiding it in her palm, she was overjoyed as she pushed the bike to the gate, where the visitors shook hands with Zhuang and his wife. When it was her turn, in addition to making sure he could feel the note in her hand, she scraped his palm with a finger. They exchanged smiles.
Niu Yueqing was oblivious to what went on, but not Liu Yue, who saw everything.
. . .
Zhao Jingwu and Hong Jiang were busy making preparations for the expansion of the bookstore; they worked on Young Knaves Number Two and Number Four in the city to buy the next-door storefront and obtain an operation license. As everything was coming together, they spent several days making connections and forging friendships with relevant personnel at the Industrial and Commercial Bureau, the Tax Bureau, the Utility Bureau, the Environmental Sanitation Bureau, the Public Security Bureau, and the Subdistrict Office. After a roasted duck dinner at the Xijing Restaurant, they hosted another banquet at the Delaishun Restaurant, where they all enjoyed a soup made of cow, donkey, and dog penises, followed by all-night mahjong games. The two made sure to lose more than they won. All these activities helped to reduce the distance between them, to the point that they were calling each other brother. Hong Jiang was in charge of the funds for the expansion. The martial arts novels by Jing Yong had brought in a hundred and twenty thousand yuan, so he took eighty thousand to Niu Yueqing, along with the receipts for her to repay the debt to Wang Ximian’s wife. Niu Yueqing returned forty thousand to him, telling him to talk to Zhao Jingwu about the gallery. Hong Jiang then told her there was still fourteen thousand yuan outstanding, all owed by retailers outside Xijing. The amounts owed by each were not large enough to warrant a personal visit, since the expenses for travel and room and board would cost pretty much the same. All he could do was write to them, but it was likely the money would be lost. Without going into detail, Niu Yueqing could only curse the debtors, complaining about how times had changed, and that people were no longer trustworthy. She took out several hundred yuan for his monthly salary. Saying it was too much, he insisted on returning fifty. In fact, he had already collected the outstanding debts, because the retailers had not been allowed to cart away the books without paying up front. He had given the money to a distant relative to open a junk station in Wangjia Lane by the east gate.
The walled area there was Xijing’s famous “ghost market,” where the city’s junk was bought and sold every day after dark and before sunup. Funny thing was, it was called the ghost market because of its hours of operation, but the area did have an eeriness to it. It was low to begin with, and the section of the moat outside the gate was the deepest and widest, with the most vegetation, shrouded in fog in the morning and at dusk. The streetlights were dim, and the people at the market usually talked in low voices. Dressed in tattered clothes, with disheveled hair, they rushed about, casting shadows on the moss-covered city wall by the streetlights that were sometimes oversized and sometimes diminutive, a sight both gloomy and scary. Early on, the market had been the gathering spot for junk collectors to sell their wares to people who needed parts — a pedal wheel or chain for a bicycle, a burner tile or a hook for a gas stove, masonry nails, broken windows in need of repair, a section of water pipe, faucets, chairs, used planks to replace the leg of a bed, plywood, house-painting rollers, caps for hot water bottles, springs for home-made sofas, burlap sacks, and the like. People went there for daily necessities they could not find at state-run or privately owned stores, or because they could get things cheaper there. But as the size of the market grew, those frequenting the area were no longer limited to the ragged country folks who came into the city to collect junk, or the teachers and government employees who dressed in four-pocket shirts and wore their hair parted down the middle, combed back or crew-cut. Gradually mixed in were men in baggy shirts with baggy pants, tight shirts with tight pants, baggy shirts with tight pants, and tight shirts with baggy pants. They brightened up the place, peppering their speech with an argot that no one could understand. Women with blood-red lips and blue eyes or girls with full breasts and prominent hips ran their stalls. These fashionable types changed their looks constantly, wearing three-inch, chopstick-thin stilettos one day and slippers revealing chubby white toes with scarlet nails the next. As for the men, they might sport light brown hair down to their shoulders in the morning and show up in the afternoon with their heads shaved. They were often heard bragging about the name-brand items they wore. Believing that the addition of the new group raised their status and value in the city, the original buyers and sellers in the market basked in the prestige at first, but soon they realized that the newcomers were nothing but hooligans, rascals, thieves, and pickpockets, people who sold brand-new bicycles, wheelbarrows, and three-wheelers cheaply, or dealt in items the old-timers had never seen before, such as rebar, cement, aluminum ingots, copper rods, all sorts of pliers, wrenches, electric cables, wire, even broken manhole covers with the words “urban construction” still visible. Soon more junk shops opened up in the narrow Wangjia Lane, not far from the ghost market, including the one run by Hong Jiang’s relative. Business was good from the get-go; the proprietors reaped impressive profits by reselling the junk to state-run junk stations or directly to factories and township industries in outlying counties. Niu Yueqing and Zhuang Zhidie, and even the three female bookstore clerks, were unaware of Hong Jiang’s secret venture.