The Bridegroom: Stories

An Entrepreneur’s Story

I never thought money could make so much difference. The same children who were often told to avoid me will call me Uncle now whenever they see me. Their parents won’t stop asking how things are or whether I have eaten breakfast or lunch or dinner. Many young men in our neighborhood greet me as Lord Liu, and some girls keep throwing glances into my office when they pass by. But at heart I’m disgusted with most of them. They used to treat me like a homeless dog.

The most unexpected changes came from my wife, Manshan, and her mother. Three years ago, when I was a temporary bricklayer in a construction company, I proposed to Manshan through a matchmaker. Her mother, Mrs. Pan, didn’t like me, saying she’d rather throw her daughter into a sewer than let me marry her. Her words hurt me. For a whole weekend I didn’t go out, sitting on a taboret, drinking black tea and chain-smoking. A friend of mine told me that perhaps Mrs. Pan wouldn’t give me her daughter because I didn’t have a secure job.

“Look,” he said, “that girl works on the train. As long as the iron wheels move in our country, she’ll have her rice bowl.”

“So I’m a bad match, eh?” I asked.

He nodded and we said no more. It was true my job was temporary and I had no stable income, but I guessed there could be another reason for the Pans to turn down my proposal. In their eyes I must’ve been a criminal.

What had happened was that two years earlier a fellow worker named Dongping said to me, “Brother Liu, do you want to make money?”

“Of course I do,” I answered.

“Well, if you work with me, I guarantee you’ll make five hundred yuan a month.”

“Tell me how.”

He described his plan, which was to buy fancy cigarettes in the South and sell them in our city at a higher price. As his partner, I’d get forty percent of the profit if I provided labor and a tenth of the capital. I agreed to take part in the business, although I knew it was illegal. A month before the Spring Festival, I went to Shanghai and shipped back a thousand cartons of Amber cigarettes, but we didn’t sell all the goods before the police arrested us for profiteering. We lost everything — the police confiscated the money we’d made and the remainder of the cigarettes. I was imprisoned for three months, while Dongping got two years because he’d been in the business for a long time and had other partners. I didn’t know he was a “professional.” Our names appeared in newspapers; our pictures were posted on the streets. So, to the Pans I must’ve seemed a hoodlum. At times I couldn’t help feeling ashamed of myself.

I loved Manshan, but I hated her mother. There was no way to erase my past; what I should do was improve my future. At the time — after the Cultural Revolution — colleges were being reopened, but I dared not take the entrance exams because I hadn’t even finished middle school. I was hopeless. To tell you the truth, my only ambition was to become a decent mason, someone Mrs. Pan wouldn’t bother to think of as a potential son-in-law.

The next summer I heard that Manshan had enrolled in the night college, studying modern history in her free time. So I went to the class too, though I couldn’t register officially, unable to pass the exams. The class was large, about eighty people gathering in a lecture room; the teacher never knew my name, since I didn’t do homework or take tests or ask any questions. I told my classmates that I was a clerk in a power plant. It looked like they believed me; even Manshan must’ve taken me for a regular student.

Half a semester passed, and I began to like the textbooks we were reading, especially those chapters on the Opium War. I thought that Manshan might’ve changed her opinion about me, because she didn’t show much dislike of me in the night class. I begged the same old matchmaker to propose to her again, but the hag refused to help me. Only after I bought her a pig’s head through the back door, which weighed forty-two pounds and cost me thirty yuan, did she agree to try again.

This time Mrs. Pan said, “Tell Liu Feng to stop thinking of my daughter. He isn’t worthy. He’s the rooster that dreams of nesting with a swan.”

Those words drove me mad, and I swore I’d take revenge on the old bitch. A friend advised me, “Why bother with the mother? Why not go to the girl directly?”

That was a good idea, so I began trying to approach Manshan. She always shunned me at the night college; I’d follow her whenever I could. Heaven knew how many times I dogged her until she reached home in the small alley. She never bicycled alone, usually together with three or four girls from the railroad company. I had no chance to get close to her.

One evening I stopped her before she entered the classroom building. I asked her to go out with me on Sunday. As I was talking, my legs were shaking. She looked scared, fat snowflakes landing on her pink woolen shawl. She said, “I’m too — too busy this Sunday. How about next week?” Her cheeks reddened. She was panting a little.

“On what day?” I asked.

“I’m not sure yet. I may have to fill in for a comrade on the train.”

“Okay, I’ll speak with you again.”

I waited like a patient donkey the following week, planning to ask her out again, but she didn’t show up for the next class. I thought she might’ve been ill. At the time, flu was spreading in the city and giving red eyes to thousands of people, so I was worried about her. Then my worry turned into disappointment, because three weeks in a row she didn’t come to the night college. I realized she had quit. My initial response was to go look for her on the express train. But on second thought I changed my mind, feeling miserable because I’d never meant to frighten her like that.

I quit the night college too, and soon I left the construction company. The job paid too little, only one and a half yuan a day. By that time, things had changed — it was no longer illegal to run a private business, and you could sell merchandise for a profit. The government was encouraging people to find ways to get rich. A peasant who had made a fortune by raising ermines was praised in newspapers as a model citizen and was inducted into the Communist Party. So I started selling clothes at a marketplace downtown. Every two or three weeks I’d go to the South and return with four large suitcases of fashionable clothes, mostly dresses and bell-bottomed jeans. They sold like ice cream on a hot day, even at a doubled price. Each trip would bring me a profit of at least nine hundred yuan. I’d never thought I could make so much money, and so easily. Sometimes I wondered if the banknotes were real, but whenever I took out a sheaf of them at a shop counter, the salesperson’s eyes would gleam.

Soon I had a large sum in the bank, but I didn’t know what to do with it. My father had been a senior engineer before he died, and I’d inherited from him a decent apartment. There was no way for me to spend so much money. I was worried about my savings, which were known to everybody in the neighborhood and were accumulating rapidly. Every month I’d deposit over a thousand yuan.

Clearly the state can take away my money whenever it likes, just as thirty years ago the government confiscated the wealth of the capitalists and the landowners and redistributed it to the poor. The same thing can happen at any time to us, the newly rich.

Money is a funny thing. It can change your personality. No, not that you actually change inside, but the people around you change their attitudes toward you. This can make you look on yourself differently, as though you were a high official or a celebrity. I haven’t lost my senses; inside, I’m the same small man, the same Liu Feng. In our city there’s an entrepreneur in the furniture business. Every evening he’ll ride a brand-new Yamaha motorcycle to Eight Deities Garden and sit down to a fifty-course dinner alone. He won’t speak to anybody and always eats by himself. Behind his back, people call him a spendthrift, a loner, a neocapitalist, an heirless man. To a degree I feel for him. He must have been maltreated by others. Now he’s rich; if he can’t hurt them physically, he wants to humiliate them by showing his contempt. People love money, while he doesn’t give a damn about what they love. So he squanders cash like trash, eating like an emperor.

That feeling is hard to suppress. Last summer I went to the Central Zoo to see the monkeys. It was a muggy day and I didn’t enjoy watching the animals walk lazily in their cages. Some of them looked half dead. At noon I felt hungry. A small crowd was gathering in front of a bakery kiosk, buying cookies, cakes, fruit, and drinks. I waited patiently in the beginning, but the two saleswomen seemed to avoid helping me. A few people who came later than me had already gotten what they wanted; still the women would pay no attention to the banknote I was waving under their eyes, probably because I looked poor and nondescript. I wore a boiler suit, which was clean and quite new.

Finally one of them asked me, “What do you want?”

“Let’s see — what’s the best stuff you have here?” I said.

“Just tell me what you want.”

“What’s your most expensive cake?”

The other woman muttered, “As if he could afford it.”

That inflamed my temper. I took out a bunch of ten-yuan bills and cried, “Give me all the cakes and cookies you have here!”

They turned pale. Their manager came out and tried to calm me down, saying the shop ought to save some pastry for the afternoon. I wouldn’t give in and claimed that I had twenty workers waiting to be fed, so I bought all the cakes and cookies, and hired two boys on the spot to help me carry the stuff to the pit where four bears lived. A crowd watched me dump into the pit all the cakes and cookies, which somehow none of the animals even touched.

The incident was silly. I was upset for days; to some extent I felt ashamed of what I’d done. There were beggars at the train station and at the harbor, and I myself had known hunger pangs. But the incident made me famous in our city. This was ridiculous. Why should a man’s name be based on his ability to waste money? Anybody — even a kid — can do that, if he has the money in hand.

People in our neighborhood began to show their respect for me. If they saw me carry something heavy, they’d help me readily. Some older women asked whether I was looking for a fiancée. I said I wasn’t interested. Then came a number of matchmakers who tried to convince me of the importance of having an heir before I reached thirty. I told them to forget it; I was in good health, unlikely to die before fifty. A few girls would eye me boldly, as if my face were a blossoming peony. I wasn’t interested in any of them, because my heart was still with the girl I loved.

My business had grown too big for me to travel to the South frequently, so I contracted with a garment factory in Dan Yang County, near Shanghai: they would make stylish clothes for me and have them shipped to my company. I stopped retailing and started wholesaling. This was much easier for me, and my profits soon tripled. Five months ago I rented my own office and warehouse and hung a lacquered sign on the front door that says: NEW CLOTHING INC.

Then one day my former matchmaker came and asked if I was still interested in Manshan. Of course I was. This time Mrs. Pan begged the old woman to help her daughter, saying, “I always knew in my heart that Liu Feng is a very able man.” I felt overjoyed and confused at the same time. The girl used to treat me like a bedbug, why would she deliver herself this way? Just because I was rich now?

We agreed to meet on the Songhua River that Saturday. On Friday afternoon I took a hot bath in Three Springs Bathhouse and had a haircut in there. I didn’t sleep well that night, possessed by a sensation that knotted my chest and stomach, and I couldn’t help murmuring the girl’s name as if she were with me. Even the air I breathed felt like it was burning me inside.

The riverbank was full of people on Saturday morning, a whole school of children singing their school song and waiting for ferryboats there. I rented a dinghy before Manshan showed up.

She came, almost a different girl, in a black silk dress and a perm. She looked prettier. I was amazed that she didn’t seem afraid of me at all, as though we’d been dating for years. She smiled, whispering, “You look like a gentleman.”

Her words surprised me, because no one had ever called me that, and I didn’t know what to say, wondering if I’d really changed so much. I had on denim shorts, a topee, and a pair of sunglasses. How could I remind her of a gentleman?

We paddled across the main channel and moored at a small island in the middle of the river. I felt dizzy as the sun was blazing on us. Sitting on the white sand, I saw the city across the water appear smaller — the concrete buildings looked like toy houses, as smokestacks at the paper mill were spitting greenish fumes. Along the other shore, parasols were bobbing a little like clusters of mushrooms. The breeze was warm and fishy.

Manshan said timidly, “Do you still hate me?”

I didn’t know how to answer, puzzled by the question. My heart was racing. She was so pretty — elegant, I should say. A bang of hair curved on her smooth forehead, and her nose was so straight and so high that it looked like sculpture. Her buckteeth propped up her lip a little, but to me, her teeth were also beautiful. I stretched out my hand, stroking her cheek and small ear, wondering if this slender girl sitting beside me was the same person I’d followed so many times from the night college to the dark alley.

With her toes she pried her white sandals off and buried her feet in a small pile of sand. “Do you still hate me?” she asked again without raising her head.

“Stop that!” I snapped. Somehow the question troubled me. A wind passed by, throwing up waves on the river like endless tiles.

I hooked my arm around her shoulder; to my amazement, she didn’t turn away. Instead she was peering at me, her eyes moonstruck and her pointed chin so exquisite that I almost wanted to bite it. As my mouth moved to touch her lips, my heart began jumping and my hands grew bolder.

She didn’t resist me and merely said she was afraid of getting pregnant. That was what I wanted. I thought that if she got my baby, she’d never leave me. So I told her, “That will be good. I’ll take care of you and the baby. I love kids. Don’t be scared.”

So on our first date I secured our union, but I wasn’t very happy. The whole thing had been too easy, easier than swimming across the river. I was disappointed to some extent. Manshan seemed no longer like the girl who had always made me feel so humble and so unworthy.

A month later we got married. After the wedding the Pans sold their small house and moved into my apartment. I bought a lot of expensive things for my bride, like a ring, a diamond wristwatch, fourteen pairs of leather shoes and boots, a Flying Horse moped, six pairs of earrings, and a gold necklace. In fact, I got thirty gold necklaces, all twenty-four-karat, and put them into a porcelain jar, which I sealed and then buried under a linden in the small park behind our apartment building. I may lose everything at any time; the city can confiscate my business and savings just by issuing an order, so I’d better hide some wealth away. Because nobody is allowed to buy gold bars, which are under the state’s control, I bought those expensive necklaces and buried them away, even though I knew I might never be able to sell them if I need money. If I’m turned into a capitalist — a reactionary element of our society — who would dare to buy anything from me?

Manshan has become a business partner of mine. Now that she works on the train to Shanghai, she directly brings back some expensive goods, which can be ruined by the postal service. Also, this saves time and expenses — we don’t have to pay for the shipping fee and the insurance. I give her thirty percent of the profits made from what she helps bring back. She seems happy and looks even younger, like a teenager. But her youthful face bothers me, because I want her to be the mother of my children. For some reason I can’t get her pregnant, no matter how hard I try. I don’t know what to do and dare not go to the hospital to check it out, afraid to lose her if it turns out to be my problem. In our neighborhood there used to be a college teacher whose sperm couldn’t crack his wife’s eggs, so she left him for a sailor. She desperately wanted to be a mother. Sometimes I can’t help wondering whether Manshan is on the pill, but so far I haven’t found any evidence.

I still hate my mother-in-law. Her pumpkin face often reminds me of a banker’s wife I saw in a movie about the old Shanghai. One night I got drunk and slapped her, but she didn’t tell her daughter about it. Since I became her son-in-law, she’s been so patient that she never loses her temper. In the morning, when Manshan is not home, I often light a few banknotes in her mother’s presence to kindle the kerosene stove, which has twelve wicks. But she’s never angry. I feel that her calmness means she despises me.

I read in Law and Democracy the other day that an entrepreneur in Henan Province had slept with both his wife and her mother in the same bed to revenge his humiliation — the mother had called him “hooligan” when he was a butcher, but later when he founded his own chicken farms and became a rich man, she had given him her daughter. I wish I could do the same to my old bitch of a mother-in-law, but for the time being I must work harder on giving Manshan a baby.