There’s a little place Daisy likes, one of those Taiwanese style boba houses, all bright plastic and cheerful green-and-yellow graphics, weird manga sprites on skateboards trailed by icy lightning bolts, holding up cups of product, which are iced teas and shakes served with giant straws so you can suck up the tapioca balls that float in them like chewy shotgun pellets. I really don’t like boba, but whatever. They have the local beer, Zhujiang. Works for me.
“David and I aren’t together anymore,” she informs me in English, leaning over her boba. She sips. I watch the tapioca balls shoot up the straw, like red blood cells pumped through an artery in one of those biology videos we had to watch in school.
“Right,” I say. “Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter to me. He is not a serious person.”
“I don’t really know David,” I say. “I’m friends with his brother. They haven’t heard from him in a while, and they’re worried about him.”
“Humph,” she says, sounding like every young heroine in every bad Chinese comedy I’ve ever seen. “They should not worry. I think he is fine.”
“Do you know where he is?”
She shrugs again.
The thing I’m starting to figure out is that sometimes people will just answer your questions, tell you what you need to know. Other times they want to tell you their story first.
So ask for the story.
“Why do you say David isn’t serious?”
She sucks up a noisy strawful of boba balls, then stares at me over the plastic cup, chewing on the last few pellets.
“We come here because he say he has business,” she finally tells me. “He say we do the business and leave. We stay in this… in this cheap guesthouse. Noisy. Dirty. Okay, I can put up with this. I know worse places. Then he say he has to go to Guiyu. He don’t know when he comes back. He don’t know where he wants to go after. I don’t want to go to Guiyu.”
“Guiyu?”
“Bad place. Dirty place. Nobody wants to go there.” She abruptly shoves her empty drink aside. “Okay, I tell him, I wait for you here. I get some work. When you finish, you tell me.”
She tucks a lock of her glossy hair behind her ear, like none of this matters.
“He doesn’t come back. He doesn’t have real business. He just has stupid dreams.”
“Sorry,” I say, and I’m not sure what to say after that. I want to know what happened to Jason, but that’s not the rest of her story.
“So you’re working at the factory,” I say.
She smiles at me. “Yes. They are always looking for girls.”
Now she takes a package of cigarettes out of her purse. Marlboros. Offers me one. I haven’t smoked in years, but I’m tempted.
“No, thank you.” I have to hold the line somewhere. She taps one out, lights it, inhales.
“It is a silly job,” she says. “I sit on a stool all day, painting toys. Silly. Every day, ten hours, on a stool. Sometimes more. It smells bad, from paint and things. My back hurts. My hands. My head. I hate it.”
“But you’re not doing that now.”
She laughs. “No. One of the bosses from the factory, he watches me. Says he can give me a better job. In the office. So I do that now.” She takes a long drag on the cigarette. “He gets me an apartment, too. Not so nice. But better than, than…” She frowns. “Better than sushe, how do you say that?”
“Dormitory.”
“Yes. Better than dormitory.”
Not quite two months and she’s gone from the factory floor to the office.
I don’t need to ask what the rest of the deal is.
“Sounds like you’re doing okay,” I say.
She gives me a look. Draws on her cigarette, holds it between her fingers, palm up, the smoke curling around her face. She looks like a movie star.
“I can do better,” she says. “And I will.”
I ASK HER IF she has “David’s” cell-phone number, and she shakes her head. “Old one won’t work. He must have new one.”
“Do you know if he’s still in Guiyu?”
She looks at me like I’m pretty stupid. “How can I know?”
Fair enough.
“When was the last time you heard from him?”
“Maybe… a month ago.”
I try to think of a nice way to ask, So did he dump you or what?
“Did he say… anything about his plans or…?”
“He say a lot of stupid things,” she snaps. “He say what he does is important. He say he can’t come back right now. It’s not safe. He say he loves me but he is no good for me.” She laughs again. “Maybe that second thing is true.”
Not safe. Great.
“Why isn’t it safe?”
“I don’t know,” she says, playing with her straw, sounding like a sullen kid.
“Look, I just want to help his family. Is there anything you can tell me? Anything at all? Just so I can let them know something?”
She sticks her finger on the top of the straw, then lifts it up, watches the liquid drain out. I want to reach across the table and smack her.
Instead I take a deep breath. There’s no point in me getting all worked up over Daisy and her bullshit, over Jason/David and whatever he’s been up to. I don’t have to be doing this. Nobody’s forcing me. I’m trying to do a favor for a buddy, and if this is as far as I get, no one’s going to accuse me of being a Fobbit slacker.
While I’m thinking all this, Daisy’s apparently doing some thinking of her own.
“Okay.” She reaches into her purse-a fake Gucci. Gets out a wallet. Opens that and from an interior pocket pulls out a piece of folded paper.
“This,” she says. “This is what he give me.” She holds on to it for a moment, smoothing the creases, keeping it neat. Then she puts it on the table in front of me, careful to avoid the ring of water left by my beer.
I pick it up. Unfold it.
There are three names, written in pen, in messy, back-slanted print-
“Modern Scientific Seed Company, Dali
Bright Future Seed Company, Guiyang
New Century Seed Company, Guiyu”
– and what I think are the Chinese translations next to them.
“So what is this?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes. “Names of seed companies.”
I am so wanting to smack this girl. “Yeah, I see that, but why did David give it to you?”
“Don’t know,” she says, doing her best to sound indifferent. “Just something he is interested in. You know, he’s always talking about these… these bad seeds.”
Bad seeds?
“He ask me to keep this paper,” she continues. “And if the right person comes, to give it to him.” She shrugs. “I guess that person is you.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GUIYU IS ABOUT AN hour and a half’s drive from where I’m staying. After I have a late breakfast, I decide to hire a taxi to take me there. There are buses, but I don’t know the territory, and from what I can find out on the Web, it looks confusing and complicated. Guiyu is a collection of villages that just sort of grew together, and though I have an address for New Century Seed Company, it doesn’t say which village.
“I need to go to this place,” I tell the first taxi driver who stops for me, showing him the paper.
He looks at the paper and shakes his head, waves his hand. “Don’t know it,” he tells me.
I recognize these gestures. He knows, but he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.
“Do you know where this is?” I ask the next taxi driver.
He looks at my paper. “Sure,” he finally says, in heavily accented Mandarin. He looks at the paper another moment, and then he looks at me. “Why you want to go there?”