Every speck of dust of the era that lands on an individual’s head is a sharp sickle.
The meeting over, the crowd no longer pushed and shoved as eagerly as it had on the way in. It moved like a stream with too little water pressure—slow and sluggish. They had gone up to the mountains and down to the countryside in the best years of their lives, endured years of hardship, and returned to the city only to find no work. Confusion and worry were stamped on every face. No one knew what the future held.
Huang Zhanying had fallen silent too. She rode her bicycle in a wobbly line, and only after a while said, “What kind of job do you think they’ll assign us?”
“No idea.”
“You’re not worried at all?”
“Didn’t they say the street office would come around? Just wait at home. We’ll know when the time comes.”
“...”
Huang Zhanying stared at him without blinking, then said suddenly, “I’ve noticed you’ve gotten really strange lately. You used to be so weighed down with worries, and everything you thought was written on your face. How did you become so happy-go-lucky?”
“I’m nineteen now. I ought to be a bit more mature. Isn’t it better to be easygoing?”
Chen Qi brushed her off with a casual answer. “I’m going to the bookstore. You coming?”
“No. I’ll ask some other people and see what I can find out.”
“Then I’m off!”
He waved a hand, pushed off, and his 28-inch bicycle went blazing back to Dashilar with sparks and thunder.
Dashilar was less than three hundred meters from its east entrance to its west entrance, yet it packed in the finest goods in all the capital: Donglaishun, Tongrentang, Neiliansheng’s cloth shoes, Ruifuxiang’s silks, Zhang Yiyuan’s tea, Liubiju’s pickles, Daguanlou’s movies, Tianhuizhai’s snuff, and so on and so forth. But during that great torrent of the age, all these time-honored shops had been renamed, and they were still gradually getting their old names back.
There was also a theater left standing called Guangdelou. Years later, a fellow named Guo Degang would perform there.
The Xinhua Bookstore was in Dashilar too, only a hundred meters from Menkuang Hutong. You could step out your door and be at work. The Xinhua Bookstore head office was a bureau-level state-owned enterprise; the city, district, and county stores below it were equivalent to subsidiaries or branch companies.
Chen Qi parked his bicycle and went in to have a look. The place was crowded, with people gathered around the social science shelves, browsing back and forth.
A few years earlier, bookstores had been allowed to sell only nine categories of books, six of them works by revolutionary leaders. Then the 1978 National Science Conference was held, and social science books gradually became more plentiful. What was so interesting about this stuff, really? Yet people were hungry for it all the same.
One young girl was holding a copy of the Geographical Atlas, reading it with relish. An old man who looked like an intellectual was actually reading an English-language edition of China Travel. Some magazines that serialized fiction were even more popular. People rushed at them like Gorky pouncing on bread...
Chen Qi tiptoed quietly up behind a woman and suddenly shouted, “Mom!”
“Good heavens! You little brat, you scared me to death!”
The woman turned around. She was in her forties, slim, and still quite attractive. It was his mother, Yu Xiuli.
“Meeting over?”
“Over.”
“Come here...”
She pulled Chen Qi outside to a corner and asked, “What did they say?”
“From what I gathered, the focus is on collective cooperatives to place us youth awaiting employment.”
“Collective cooperatives? That won’t do...”
She frowned. “Sigh, we got a notice too, saying children can take over their parents’ jobs. Your father’s a salesman, always running around outside. My job at the store is more stable. Why don’t I retire early and free up a position for you?”
“You’re only in your forties. Why retire so early? So you can go square dancing with the old ladies?”
“Square what?”
“Anyway, you two don’t need to. I can manage on my own.”
“Manage my ass! Collective units are a rung lower. They pay less, and you’ll have a hard time finding a partner later.”
“But I’m handsome! Finding a partner won’t be a problem!”
He said it with perfect confidence, and Yu Xiuli agreed wholeheartedly. What could she do? Her son really was handsome.
“All right, let’s not talk about this now. We’ll talk tonight...”
Chen Qi didn’t want to bicker about it here, so he changed the subject. “Mom, that Geographical Atlas looks good. Buy me a copy, will you? I’ll read it at home.”
“All you ever do is read books that don’t do you any good!”
Even as she said it, Yu Xiuli went into the store. Before long she came out with a copy of the Geographical Atlas and told him, “Don’t go running around when you get home. Tonight, wait for your father to come back, and we’ll have a proper talk about it.”
...
The compound enclosed seven inner courtyards.
Chen Qi’s family lived inside. Their place was about twenty square meters: his parents had the inner room, and a bed was set up for him in the outer room.
There was no heated brick bed. In winter they burned honeycomb coal briquettes, and the power went out from time to time. To bathe, you either went to a bathhouse or washed at home. Washing at home was a hassle: you had to boil three pots of water in a row, one for each person. One person would sit in the big tub inside and wash while the other two waited outside. The toilet was shared as well. Every household kept a chamber pot for getting up at night, and in the morning you ran to the public latrine to empty it. Wang Fei has emptied one of these too—which also proves she got up at night. Mm.
The Xinhua Bookstore was a decent work unit, but it couldn’t compare with the big factories. The workers at big factories were the ones everyone envied: from birth to death, one-stop, everything arranged for them. Chen Qi’s family had three people. Both parents earned wages, and their total monthly income was around a hundred yuan. They had no financial pressure at all. Some colleagues had elderly people above them and three or four children below—they were the ones who truly had it rough.
At the current price level, rice was 0.19 yuan per jin, pork 0.75 yuan per jin, cabbage 0.03 yuan per jin... The key problem was insufficient supply and extreme scarcity. You needed ration coupons for everything. Without coupons, you couldn’t buy anything even with money.
There’s been enough talk about ration coupons; I won’t dwell on them.
It was already noon.
The sunlight finally broke through the grayish-yellow clouds and shone into the room with a hint of spring.
Chen Qi sat at the table, idly leafing through the Geographical Atlas. It described many of the motherland’s famous mountains and great rivers, its topography and landforms, and so on.
What the meeting had been about left others muddled, but he understood it clearly.
The idea was to put these people into collective enterprises—repairing furniture, making clothes, popping popcorn, running a canteen under contract—anything to give them work.
The approach was sound. In 1949 the capital had 73,000 service outlets; now only a little over 10,000 remained, while the population had grown. People’s daily needs were nowhere near being met. These people could step in and fill the gap; there was no fear of going hungry.
Collective enterprises had been born precisely to solve employment. Their property rights had always been murky, trailing a heap of problems left over from history. But in a place like the capital, they were still better than self-employed businesses. The self-employed sector in the capital developed relatively slowly; next year would count as its first true year.
Others rejected collective enterprises, but he was fine going anywhere. It was only a temporary foothold, after all.
As for the long-term plan—well, in the early days of reform and opening up, there were only a few paths: pose as a cultured man and dabble in scar literature; find a work unit and lie low; head south as a wheeler-dealer, get rich first and trample the latecomers; or go into film and television to chase Gong Xue, Zhu Lin, Li Jianqun, Tao Huimin, He Qing, Chen Hong, Lin Fangbing...
He would naturally do what he was good at.
“Speaking of which, this is a great age for turning the world upside down... But all that is too far away. First I need to get out of this lousy hutong; I don’t want to empty any more chamber pots.”
His thoughts settled, and he felt lighter at once. He flipped through the atlas again and came to a page showing a place of beautiful, sheer, and magnificent scenery.
“Mount Lu?”
He grinned and nodded. “Nature made an immortal’s cave; boundless scenery lies on the perilous peak... Mount Lu really is a fine place!”
Chapter 2