Liking what she heard, Wan’er threw herself into his arms and told him that when she and her husband were arguing one time, she had played a serenade on the radio as a means of calming things down, but he had kicked the radio over.
“He’s ignorant,” Zhou Min said.
“He’s all muscle,” she said, “like a mule!”
Their passion cooled after a month or so, and their money was running out. To Zhou Min, this was what a man could expect from being with a woman. Wan’er was beautiful and glamorous, they were living in a big city, and yet none of this brought him the satisfaction he sought or helped him find what he was looking for. There were new movies to see, fashionable clothes to wear, and plenty of accessories to buy. What he lacked were new ways of thinking, fresh ideas. There were no changes in the morning sunlight scaling the city wall, the same flowers bloomed in the garden, and even though women now wielded more authority than their husbands did, they were still limited to one day — Women’s Day — on March 8th. An eighty-year-old man could be a bridegroom, but he was still an old man. Zhou Min, who was now mired in depression, could not reveal these thoughts to Wan’er, and was reduced to making his way to the city wall in the mornings and evenings to play his flute. But that did not solve the problem of finances, so he went looking for work, and found it at the neighborhood Clear Void Nunnery, where several side rooms were being renovated. Since the workers were paid daily, he was able to buy a fish and half a jin of fresh mushrooms each day to take home for her to make dinner.
With his fair skin, Zhou Min stood out among the gang of laborers, so the on-site foreman put him in charge of purchasing materials. That meant he was subject to inspections by the nuns, which in turn brought him into contact with Huiming. In the wake of several conversations, he learned that she had arrived recently from the Yunhuang Temple. Although she had not been put in charge of the nunnery, she maintained a high degree of visibility and authority, thanks to her youth and breadth of knowledge; the other nuns deferred to her. Drawn to Huiming’s good looks, Zhou Min went to see her whenever he could. One day he looked up from a book he was reading and spotted her waving to him from a wisteria trestle. He put down his book and rushed over.
“You are different from the others,” she said. “What are you reading?”
“Romance of the Western Chamber,” he replied. “The Putuo Monastery…” He stopped.
“Don’t you think our Clear Void Nunnery compares well with the Putuo Monastery?”
Zhou Min took a look around and was about to respond when she smiled. She then continued in a more serious tone of voice: “The minute I saw you here, I knew you were no common laborer, and I was right, you are a reader. If you just read for fun, that’s fine. But if you are looking for something more, a deeper meaning from books, I know someone you might enjoy meeting.”
“That sounds wonderful,” he replied. “But whoever it is, I wonder if he would be interested in meeting me. I would need your introduction.”
“You are such a smooth talker, you could get your foot in any door in the city,” she said as she wrote out the person’s name and address and a brief letter of introduction. Overjoyed, Zhou Min turned to leave.
“Hold on,” she said. “I’d like you to deliver another letter to him, this one from me.”
Letters in hand, Zhou Min went to the address Huiming had written down. It was the home of Meng Yunfang, beyond the wall to the left of the Yunhuang Temple.
Meng gave Zhou Min a warm welcome, inviting him to tea, then peppering him with questions about what he was reading, if he had ever tried writing, and who he might know in Xijing.
Zhou Min, who was quick-witted, gave rapid answers, inspiration enough for Meng to invite him into his study, where they carried on a long and pleasant conversation.
Back home that night, Zhou Min described his day to Tang Wan’er, who said, “Xijing has never been an easy place to settle in, and we came here without knowing a soul. We’re lucky you met that fellow. Now don’t stop at one visit. Go see him often.”
Zhou Min took her advice. Every few days he paid Meng a visit. At first he used Huiming’s urging as a pretext, but as time passed, he began taking things along — a fish, some greens. Xia Jie was equally fond of Zhou, often telling him how impressed she was by his neat appearance and criticizing her slovenly husband in front of him. Within a month, Zhou was a regular houseguest, and he began asking Meng about the writing life. Meng, always the pedant, could expound on all sorts of things, from classical Chinese aesthetics to modern Western art, and all Zhou Min could do was nod his head and vow to take in everything his laoshi had to offer in hopes of improving his own talent. His work during the days was hard, but even worse, it left him little spare time. Since Meng was known around town, Zhou wondered if he might help him find a position at a newspaper or magazine office. That way he would have time to read and to write, and even when he was busy he would be surrounded by educated people, which would help him improve faster.
“There is plenty of talent in Tongguan,” Meng said, “and the people there are unique in many ways.” He smiled.
Not knowing what he was getting at, Zhou assured Meng that he would understand if he was asking too much. Finding a job was already hard enough, and finding one in an editorial office might be all but impossible.
“I can see that you’re not fated for an ordinary life,” Meng said, “and I’m not boasting when I say that I know someone at nearly every magazine in town. At the moment, they are all fully staffed, but if I put in a word for you, I wouldn’t be wasting my breath. That said, to be part of Xijing’s artistic and literary community, you need to be well informed. How much do you know about it?”
“How much do I know? I step out the door and I’m completely in the dark.”
“I’ll tell you. There are two types of special individuals called “xianren”: one type is known as social xianren. They might have status in society, they might not; they might be employed, they might not be. For the most part they are energetic, spirited, capable individuals who like to meddle. They enjoy moving commodities around, they’re good at mediating, they love to eat, drink, gamble, and go whoring, but they do not smoke opium. They pull scams, but they don’t mug or rob people. They know how to create a disturbance and how to put one down. Xijing’s fashion and food industries are in their hands, and our economic development depends on them. They move comfortably in legitimate circles and are in control of the underworld. They are represented by four individuals, their unofficial leaders, widely known as ‘the Four Young Knaves.’ If they like you, they will feed you their own flesh, but they will also turn on you without notice. Avoid them. Want to know how best to describe them? You can get a good idea by listening to their jargon. They don’t call money cash, they call it ‘handles.’ A good buddy is a ‘steel brother,’ getting on with women is ‘drilling a hole,’ a beautiful woman is a ‘bomb’…” Meng Yunfang was going to say more but stopped, seeing a smile on Zhou Min’s usually diffident face. “You don’t believe me?”
“No, I believe you,” Zhou said, reminded of his Tongguan experience, pondering the difference between small-town and big-city Knaves: they might be of a different caliber, but their jargon wasn’t all that different. “In today’s society,” he said, “if you can imagine it at home, it’s bound to happen in real life, so I believe everything you say.”
“That’s enough about that crowd,” Meng said. “Now I want to tell you about the second type: cultural xianren. There isn’t a person in Xijing who hasn’t heard of the Four Young Knaves. But the ‘Famous Four’ are even better known. If you have your heart set on becoming part of Xijing’s literary community, you can’t do so without knowing the Famous Four. The painter Wang Ximian is number one. He is forty-five years old, a former jade factory carver who began painting in his spare time, and became famous within a few years. He was recruited by the Xijing Academy of Traditional Art, but chose instead to go to the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda as artist in residence. The pagoda is an essential tourist attraction for foreigners, among whom his paintings are extremely popular, especially his albums. He can produce four or five small albums a day, at hundreds of yuan apiece, splitting the profits with the Pagoda management. His income far exceeds that of other painters. What sets him apart is his uncanny ability to copy the masters, from Shi Tao and Bada Shanren down to Zhang Daqian and Qi Baishi. Over the past couple of years, the value of Shi Lu’s paintings has risen steadily, so Wang paints them in the master’s style, so perfectly executed that even Shi Lu’s family cannot tell they are fakes. As a result, the road to wealth has opened up for him; being a man who is particularly fond of women, he says that his passion for painting vanishes when there is no beautiful woman to mix the ink and arrange the paper. Last summer he invited several friends to join him on a trip south to Mount Wutai, ostentatiously hiring four taxis, one for women only. Once there, his lover lost a gold ring while swimming in a ravine pool, but when the other guests anxiously volunteered to dive in and look for it, he simply said, ‘If it’s lost, it’s lost, forget it!’ making a ring worth at least twelve thousand yuan seem like a piece of mud scraped from his skin. He reached into his pocket, took out a thick wad of bills, and handed them to her.