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26 May 2025

Chen Hongbing bent forward as he entered the room, in that way typical of people whose height is in constant conflict with doorframes and low-hanging ceiling-lights. He was actually extraordinarily tall for a Chinese man. On the other hand, the architect who designed the shikumen could hardly be accused of a lack of consideration for extravagant bodily proportions. The door was a good three metres high, so it hardly required him to hunch his shoulders as he did, or stretch out his chin which, as it approached his breastbone, seemed to linger hesitantly. Despite his size, Chen seemed gaunt and subservient. His gaze had a furtive nature about it, as if he were expecting to be beaten, or worse. Jericho got the impression he had spent his whole life conversing with people who towered over him while he stayed seated.

If indeed this was Chen Hongbing.

The visitor touched the doorframe fleetingly with the tips of his fingers, as if wanting to assure himself of something solid to grasp in case of a sudden collapse. Confused, he looked at the pile of removal boxes, then crossed the threshold with the caution of a tightrope walker. The white midday sun stretched across the room, a sculpture of light, broken into a billion pieces by the whirling dust. In that pale light Chen looked like a ghost narrowing his eyes. He looked younger than Tu Tian had said he was. His skin stretched tautly over his cheekbones, forehead and chin; a face which was deeply carved with lines. Around his eyes, though, a fine macramé pattern branched out, more like cracks than lines. To Jericho, they looked like testimonies to a difficult life.

‘
Ta chi le hen duo Ku
,’ Tu Tian had said. ‘Hongbing has eaten bitterness, Owen, for many long years. Every morning it comes up, he forces it down again, and one day he will choke on it. Help him,
xiongdi
.’

Eaten bitterness. Even misery was available for consumption in China.

Jericho looked indecisively at the box in his hands and wondered if he should heave it onto the desk as planned or back onto the pile. Chen’s arrival was ill-timed. He hadn’t expected the man to come this early. Tu Tian had said something about an afternoon visit, and it wasn’t even twelve yet. His stomach was rumbling, and his brow and upper lip glistened with sweat. The more he ran his hands over his face and hair to mix the dust and sweat, the less he looked like someone who was about to move into the expensive, trendy neighbourhood of Xintiandi. Three days without
shaving had taken their toll. Encased in a sticky cloth of a T-shirt, which showed the 37 degrees Celsius and what felt like 99.9 per cent air humidity much more than the colour it had once possessed, and having hardly eaten for twenty-four hours, Jericho wanted nothing more than to put the move behind him as quickly as possible. Just one more box, then off to a food stall in Taicang Lu, carry on unpacking, shower, shave.

That had been the plan.

But when he saw Chen standing there in the dusty light, he knew he couldn’t put his visitor off until later. Chen was the kind of person who would stay in your mind if you sent him away, and besides, out of respect to Tu Tian it was completely out of the question. He put the box back on the pile and put on a B-grade smile: warm, but noncommittal.

‘Chen Hongbing, I take it.’

The man standing opposite him nodded and looked bewilderedly at the boxes and piled-up pieces of furniture. He coughed slightly, then took a small step back.

‘I’ve come at a bad time.’

‘Not at all.’

‘It just so happened that I – I was nearby, but if it puts you out I can come back—’

‘It’s no trouble at all.’ Jericho looked around, pulled over a chair and put it in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat, honourable Chen, make yourself at home. I’m just moving in, hence the chaos. Can I get you anything?’

You can’t, he thought, you would have needed to go shopping for that, but you’re a man. When women move house, they make sure they have a full fridge before the first box even leaves the removal van, and if there isn’t a fridge, they buy one and plug it in. Then he remembered the half-full bottle of orange juice. It had been on the lounge windowsill since yesterday morning, which meant it had led a two-day-long existence in the glaring sun and intelligent life might even have developed inside it.

‘Coffee, tea?’ he asked nonetheless.

‘No, thank you, but thank you very much.’ Chen sank down onto the edge of the chair and stared intently at his knees. If he had come into contact with the surface of the seat, it was by an amount barely measurable physically. ‘A few minutes of your time is more than I can expect in these circumstances.’

Awkward pride resonated in his words. Jericho pulled a second chair over, placed it next to Chen’s and hesitated. There were actually two comfortable armchairs which belonged in front of the desk, and both were in sight, but they had mutated into misshapen clumps of bubble wrap wrapped in packing tape.

‘It’s my pleasure to be able to assist you,’ he said, trying to stop his smile from widening. ‘We’ll take as much time as we need.’

Chen slid back on his chair and sank cautiously against the backrest.

‘You’re very friendly.’

‘And you’re not comfortable. Please accept my apologies. Let me find some more comfortable seating. It’s still packed, but—’

Chen lifted his head and squinted up at him. Jericho was confused for a second, then it hit him: essentially, Chen looked good. In his younger years he must have been one of those men women said were beautiful. Until the day when something had ground his well-proportioned features into a mask. Somewhat grotesquely, he now lacked a facial expression, if you didn’t count his occasional nervous blinking.

‘No, I won’t allow you to do that on my account—’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

‘No, I can’t allow you to.’

‘They have to be unpacked anyway.’

‘Of course, but at a time of your choosing.’ Chen shook his head and got up again. His joints clicked. ‘Please, I beg of you! I’m much too early, you’re in the middle of something and I’m sure you were less than enthusiastic about my arrival.’

‘No, that’s not the case! I’m pleased you’ve come to see me.’

‘No, I should come back later.’

‘My dear Mr Chen, no moment could be better than this one. Please, stay.’

‘I couldn’t ask that of you. If I had known—’

And so on and so forth.

Theoretically, the game could carry on for ever. It wasn’t that either of them harboured any doubt about the other’s position. Chen knew only too well that he had caught Jericho at the wrong moment, and no assurances to the contrary would change that. Jericho, in turn, was aware that Chen would have been far more comfortable on a bed of nails than on any of his kitchen chairs. The circumstances were to blame. Chen’s presence was down to a system in which favours chased one another like puppies, and he was ashamed to the core at having messed it up. It was because of one of these favours that he was even here in the first place, then he had foolishly arrived too early and stumbled into the middle of a house move, thereby shaming their mediator and putting Jericho, the mediated, into the unpleasant situation of interrupting his work on his account. Because of course Jericho wouldn’t ask him to come back later. The ritual of pleasantries allowed for an open-ended succession of ‘No, yes, not at all, but of course, it would be an honour, no, I couldn’t, yes, no, yes!’ A game which, if you wanted to master it, took years of training. If you were a
peng you
, a friend in the sense of a useful go-between, it would be played differently than if you were a
xiongdi
, a close confidant. Social standing, age and gender, the context of the conversation, all of these were factored into the coordinates of decorum.

Tu Tian, for example, had shortened the game when he had rather bluntly requested the aforementioned favour, just by calling him
xiongdi
. The diplomatic walk on eggshells could be dispensed with amongst close friends. Perhaps it was because he was really very fond of Chen, but maybe he just didn’t want to interrupt the golf match for such a long-winded process, the outcome of which was already clear either way. In any case, once he had come out with it, the yolk-yellow late afternoon sun broke through the cheerfully dispersing clouds and bathed the surroundings in the tones of an Italian Renaissance landscape painting. Two days of rain came to an end, and Mr Tu, who had begun
comme il faut
with the words: ‘Owen, I know you’re up to your ears in it with the move, and I wouldn’t normally bother you’ – looked up to the heavens, picked up his Big Bertha club and ended succinctly – ‘but there’s a favour you could do for me –
xiongdi
.’

Tu Tian on the Tomson Shanghai Pudong golf course, two days before, deep in concentration.

Jericho waited obediently to find out what the favour might be. Tu was temporarily on another planet as he swung into a powerful drive. The rhythmic momentum came from his back, muscles and joints working in automated harmony. Jericho was talented; for two years now he had enjoyed the honour of playing on the best courses in Shanghai, when people like Tu invited him along, and when they didn’t he played in the renowned but affordable Luchao Harbour City Club. The difference between him and Tu Tian was that one of them would never get close to achieving what the other one seemed to have been given genetically. Both of them had decided relatively late to spend time hitting little white balls at over two hundred kilometres per hour in an attempt to guide them into small holes in the ground. But on the day when Tu first walked onto a golf course, he must have felt as if he was coming home. His game was far beyond being described with attributes like accomplished or elegant. From the very beginning, Tu had played the way newborn babies swim. He
was
the game.

Jericho watched respectfully as his friend sent the ball into a perfect trajectory. Tu paused in the teeing position for a few seconds, then let Big Bertha fall with an expression of pure contentment.

‘You mentioned a favour,’ said Jericho.

‘What?’ Tu wrinkled his forehead. ‘Oh, yes, nothing major. You know.’

He set off, briskly following the journey of his ball. Jericho marched behind him. He didn’t know, but he had a good idea what was coming.

‘What problem does he have?’ he asked, taking a guess. ‘Or she?’

‘He. A friend. His name is Chen Hongbing.’ Tu grinned. ‘But that’s not the problem you need to help him with.’

Jericho was familiar with the caustic element of his remark. The name was a bad joke, and one at which those it poked fun at were least able to laugh. It was likely that Chen had been born at the end of the sixties in the previous century, when the Red Guards had inflicted terror on the country, and when newborns had been given the most preposterous names in honour of the revolution and the Great Leader Mao: it was quite common for someone of the age where they could not yet control their bladder to be called ‘Down with America’, ‘Honour of the Leader’ or ‘Long March.’

It was actually fear that had bestowed those names. An attempt to come to terms with things. Before the People’s Revolutionary Army brought a bloody end to the Red Guards in 1969, there was uncertainty about who would rule China in the future. Three years before, on the Square of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, Mao Zedong had come down to join the mere mortals, as it were, and had a red armband tied around his sleeve, thereby symbolically becoming the leader of the Guards, a million-strong bunch of predominantly pubescent fanatics, absconding from their schools and universities, who sheared their teachers’ heads, beat them and chased them through the streets like donkeys, because anyone who knew the simplest of things and wasn’t a farmer or a worker was regarded as an intellectual, and therefore subversive. The chaos didn’t end until the spring of 1969 – and only then because the so-called Gang of Four were rattling their chains loudly in the background. But the Red Guards walked the same path as their victims and found themselves back in re-education camps, which, in the opinion of many of the Chinese people, made things even worse. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, raved about cultural operas and warmed up to some of the worst atrocities in China’s history. But the naming of children, at least, slowly normalised.

Chen, Jericho estimated, had come into the world sometime between 1966 and 1969: a time in which his name was about as common as caterpillars in salad. Hong-bing literally meant ‘Red Soldier’.

Tu looked at the sun.

‘Hongbing has a daughter.’ The way he said it implied that this alone was worth telling the story for. His eyes lit up, then he got a grip of himself. ‘She’s very pretty and unfortunately very reckless too. Two days ago, she disappeared without a trace. Generally speaking she trusts me, and I’m tempted to say she trusts me even more than her father. Anyway, it’s not the first time she’s taken off for a while, but before she has always let someone know, so to speak. Him, me or at least one of her friends.’

‘And she forgot this time.’

‘Or she didn’t have a chance. Hongbing is worried out of his mind, and rightly so. Yoyo has a tendency to annoy the wrong people. Or, shall we say, the right ones.’

Tu had outlined the problem in his own way. Jericho pursed his lips. It was clear
what was expected of him. Besides that, the name Yoyo had unleashed something inside him.

‘And I’m supposed to look for the girl?’

‘You would be doing me a good turn if you met with Chen Hongbing.’ Cheerfully Tu spotted his ball and began to pace more briskly. ‘Only, of course, if you feel you’re able to.’

‘What exactly has she done?’ asked Jericho. ‘Yoyo, I mean.’

Tu stepped over to the white object in the shortly cut grass, looked Jericho in the eyes and smiled. His look said that he wanted to get back to putting now. Jericho smiled back.

‘Tell your friend it would be an honour.’

Tu nodded as if he had expected nothing less. He called Jericho
xiongdi
one more time and turned his undivided attention to the putter and ball.