For The Win (37 page)

Mala nodded regally, keeping her straight face on for as long as she could, but as she left the room, hobbling on her cane, he was sure he heard a girlish peal of giggles from her.

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Matthew's first plate of dumplings tasted so good he almost choked on the saliva that flooded his mouth. After two months in the labor camp, eating chicken's feet and rice and never enough of either, freezing at night and broiling during the day, he thought that he had perfectly reconstructed the taste of dumplings in his mind. On days when he was digging, each bite of the shovel's tip into the earth was like the moment that his teeth pierced a dumpling's skin, letting the steam and oil escape, the meat inside releasing an aroma that wafted up into his nostrils. On days when he was hammering, the round stones were the tender dumplings in a mountain, the worn ground was the squeaking styrofoam tray. Dumplings danced in his thoughts as he lay on the floor between two other prisoners; they were in his mind when he rose in the morning. The only time he didn't think about dumplings was when he was eating chicken's feet and rice, because they were so awful that they alone had the power to drive the ghost of dumplings from his imagination.

Those were the times he thought about what he was going to do when he got out of jail. What he was going to do in the game. What the Webblies were planning, and how he would play his part in that plan.

The prison official that released him assumed that he was one of the millions of illegal workers with forged papers who'd gone to Canton, to the Pearl River Delta, to seek his fortune. He was half-way through a stern, barked lecture about staying out of trouble and going back to his village in Gui-Zhou or Sichuan or whatever impoverished backwater he hailed from, before the man actually looked down at his records and saw that Matthew was, indeed, Cantonese -- and that he would shortly be transported, at government expense, back to Shenzhen. The man had fallen silent, and Matthew, overcome with the comedy of the moment, couldn't help but thank him profusely -- in Cantonese.

There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and this was not his people.

Those were not his dumplings.

It wasn't until he debarked at the outskirts of Shenzhen and transferred to a metro subway that he started to feel at home. It wasn't until then that he started to think about dumplings. The girls on the metro were as he remembered them, beautiful and polished and laughing and well fed. Skulking in the doorway of the train, watching his reflection in the dark glass, he saw what an awful skeleton-person he'd become. He had been a young man when he went in, a boy, really. Now he looked five years older, and he was shifty and sunken, and there was a scrub of wispy beard on his cheeks, accentuating their hollowness. He looked like one of the mass of criminals and grifters and scumbags who hung around the train station and the street corners -- tough and desperate as a sewer rat. Unpredictable.

Why not? Sewer rats got lots of dumplings. They had sharp teeth and sharp wits. They were
fast
. Matthew grinned at his reflection and the girls on the train gave him a wide berth when they pulled into the next station.

Lu met him at Guo Mao station, up on the street level, where the men and women in brisk suits with brisk walks came and went from the stock exchange, a perfect crowd of people to get lost in. Lu took both of his hands in a long, soulful, silent shake and led them away toward the stock exchange, where the identity counterfeiters were.

These people kept Shenzhen and all of Guandong province running. They could make you any papers you needed: working permits allowing a farm girl to move from Xi'an to Shenzhen and make iPods; papers saying you were a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer; driver's licenses, vendor's licenses -- even pilot's licenses, according to the card one of them gave him. They were old ladies, the friendly face of criminal empires run by hard men with perpetual cigarettes and dandruff on the shoulders of their dark suits.

They walked in silence through the shouting grabbing crowds, the flurries of cards advertising fake documents shoved in their hands by grannies on all sides of them. Lu stopped in front of one granny and bent and whispered in her ear. She nodded once and went back to waving her cards, but she must have signalled a confederate somehow, because a moment later, a young man got up off a bench and wandered into a gigantic electronics mall and they followed him, threading their way through stall after stall of parts for mobile phones -- keyboards, screens, dialpads, diodes -- up an escalator to another floor of parts, up another escalator and another floor, and one more to a floor that was completely deserted. Even the electrical outlets were empty, bare wires dangling from the receptacles, waiting to be hooked up to plugs.

The boy was 100 meters ahead of them, and they trailed after him, slipping into a hallway that led toward the emergency stairs. A little side door was slightly ajar and Lu pushed it open. The boy wasn't there -- he must have taken the stairs -- but there was another boy, younger than Lu or Matthew, sitting in front of a computer, intently playing Mushroom Kingdom. Matthew smiled -- it was always so strange to see a Chinese person playing a game just for the fun of it, rather than as a job. He looked up and nodded at the two of them. Wordlessly, Lu passed him a bundle that the boy counted carefully, mixed Hong Kong dollars and Chinese renminbi. He made the money disappear with a nimble-fingered gesture, then pointed at a stool in a corner of the room with a white screen behind it. Matthew sat -- still without a word -- and saw that there was a little webcam positioned on the boy’s desk, pointing at him. He composed his features in an expression of embarrassed seriousness, the kind of horrible facial expression that all ID carried, and the boy clicked his mouse and gestured at the door. "One hour," he said.

Lu held the door for Matthew and led him down the fire-stairs, back into the mall, back onto the street, back among the counterfeiters, and a short way to a noodle stall that was thronged with people, and that's when Matthew's mouth began to generate so much saliva that he had to surreptitiously blot the corners of his lips on the sleeve of his cheap cotton jacket.

Moment later, he was eating. And eating. And eating. The first bowl was pork. Then beef. Then prawn. Then some Shanghai dumplings, filled with por. And still he ate. His stomach stretched and the waistband of his jeans pinched him, and he undid the top button and ate some more. Lu goggled at him all the while, fetching more bowls of dumplings as needed, bringing back chili sauce and napkins. He sent and received some texts, and Matthew looked up from his work of eating at those moments to watch Lu's fierce concentration as he tapped on his phone's keypad.

"Who is she?" Matthew asked, as he leaned back and allowed the latest layer of dumplings to settle in his stomach.

Lu ducked his head and blushed. "A friend. She's great. She organized, you know --" He waved his chopsticks in the direction of the counterfeiters' market. "She's -- I don't know what I would have done without her. She's why I'm not in jail."

Matthew smiled wryly. "You'd have gotten out by now." He plucked at his loose shirt. "Though you might be a few sizes smaller."

Lu showed Matthew a picture of a South China girl on his phone. She looked like the perfect model of South China womanhood -- fashionable clothes and hair, a carefully made up double-eyelid, an expression of mischief and, what, power? That sense of being on top of her world and the world in general. Matthew nodded appreciatively. "Lucky Lu," he said.

Lu dropped his voice. "She's amazing," he whispered. "She got me papers, cancelled my phone, let the number go dead, then scooped it up again with a different identity, then forwarded it through a --" he looked around dramatically and pitched his voice even lower -- "Falun Gong switchboard in Macau, then back to this phone. That's why you were able to call me. It's incredible -- I'm still in touch with everyone, but it's all through so many blinds that the zengfu have no idea where I am or how to trace me."

"How does she know all this?" Matthew asked, gently, the dumplings settling like rocks in his stomach. He was a dead man. "How do you know she isn't police herself?"

"She can't be," Lu said. "You'll see why, once we meet up with her. This much I'm sure of."

But Matthew couldn't shake the knowledge that this girl would be taking him back to prison. In prison, everyone had been an informant. If you informed on your fellow prisoners, you got more food, more sleep, lighter duty. The best informants were like little bosses, and the other prisoners courted their favor like they were on the outside, giving them the equivalent of the "3 Gs" -- golf, girls and gambling -- with whatever they could scrape up from the prison's walls. Matthew had never informed and had never been informed upon. He always chose the games he played, and he never played a game he couldn't win.

And so he was numb when he met Jie, who smelled wonderful and had fantastic manners and a twinkling smile. She had his new identity papers, with the right picture, but a different name and identity number, and a fingerprint that he was sure wasn't his own on the back. She chatted amiably as they walked, about inconsequentialities, the weather and the food, football scores and gossip about celebrities, a too-perfect empty-head that made him even more suspicious of this girl and her impeccable acting.

She led them to a small, run-down handshake building in the old Cantonese part of town, a place where the buildings grew so close together that you could stick your hand out your bedroom window and shake hands with a person in a bedroom across the street. This was where Matthew had grown up, the "city-within-a-city" that the Cantonese had been squeezed into as South China ceased to be merely a place and had become a symbol for the New China, the world's factory. Being back in these familiar streets made him even more prickly, giving him the creeping certainty that he would be recognized any second, that some poor boyhood friend of his would be marked by this secret policewoman and sent to prison with him. He steeled himself to keep walking, though with each step he wanted to turn and bolt.

The flat she led them to had once been half of a tiny apartment; now it was reduced to a single, tiny room with piles of girly clothes and shoes, several computers perched on cheap desks, a sink whose rim was covered in cosmetics, and a screened-off area that presumably hid the toilet. The shower was next to the stove and sink, a tiled square in the corner with a drain set into the floor, a shower-head anchored to the wall, a curtain rail bolted to the ceiling.

Once the door was closed, Lu's girlfriend changed demeanour so abruptly, it was as though she had removed a mask. Her face was now animated with keen intelligence, her bearing aggressive and keen. "We need to get you new clothes," she said. "A shave, a haircut, some money --"

One thing Matthew had learned in prison was the importance of not getting carried along by other people's scripts. A forceful person could do that: write a script, spin it out for you, put you in a role, and before you knew it, you were smuggling sealed packages from one part of the prison to another. Once someone else was writing the script, you were all but helpless.

"Wait," he said. "Just stop." She looked at him mildly. Lu was less calm -- Matthew could tell at a glance that he was completely in this woman's power. "Madame, I don't mean to be rude, but who the hell are you, and why should I trust you?"

She laughed. "You want to know if I'm zengfu," she said. Lu looked scandalized, but she was taking it well. "Of course you do. I've got money, apartments, I know where to get good ID papers --"

"And you're very bossy," Matthew said.

"I certainly am!" she said. "Now, have you ever heard of Jiandi?"

He
had
heard that name. He thought about it for a moment, casting his mind back to the distant, dreamlike time before prison. "The radio lady?" he said, slowly. "The one who talks to the factory girls?"

"Yes," she said. "That's the one."

"OK," he said. "I've heard of her."

Lu grinned. "And now you've met her!"

Matthew thought about this for a moment, staring into the girl's carefully made-up eyes, fringed with long, dark lashes. Finally he said, "No offense, but anyone can claim to be someone who no one has ever seen."

Lu started to speak, but she held her hand up and silenced him. "He's right," she said. "Tank, the only reason I'm walking around free, still broadcasting, is that I am a very paranoid lady. Your friend's paranoia is just good sense. Have you ever considered that you've never
listened
to me broadcasting, Tank? You've been here plenty for the broadcasts, but you've never tuned in. For all you know, I
am
zengfu, infiltrating your ranks with a giant, elaborate counterfeit that has other cops calling in, pretending to be listeners to a show that never goes any farther than the room I'm sitting in." Lu's mouth opened and shut, opened and shut. She laughed at him. "Don't worry, I'm no cop. I'm just pointing out that you're a very trusting sort of boy. Maybe too trusting. Your friend here is a little more cautious, that's all. I thoroughly approve."

Matthew found himself hoping that this girl wasn't a cop for the simple reason that he was starting to like her. Not to mention that if she was a cop, he'd go straight back to jail, but now that his panic was receding, he was able to consider what she would be like as a comrade. He liked the idea.

"OK," he said. "So, if you're Jiandi, then it should be easy for you to prove it. Just do a show, and I'll tune in and listen to it."

"How do you know Jiandi isn't a cop?" She had a twinkle in her eye.

"Not even the cops are that devious," he said. "They couldn't stand to have all those Falun Gong ads and all that seditious talk about the party -- it wouldn't last a week, let alone years and years."