The Fat Years Read Free Page B

nowhere quite like it.” Is it also as frightening as his fictional Beijing? I asked as we left the restaurant after lunch. He gazed about the airy, glazed mall, as we glided down the escalator back to street level on a perfect, blue-skied August day. “Not today. I don’t know about tomorrow, though.”
    JULIA LOVELL, FEBRUARY 2011

A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION
    This book uses the
pinyin
Romanization system. Only a few letters sound very different from normal English. They are:
    c = ts (
Fang Caodi
sounds like Fang Tsao-dee)
    q = ch before i (
qigong
sounds like chee-gong)
    x = sh (
Xiao
sounds like Shee-ao)
    He in
He Dongsheng
is pronounced something like Huh

LIST OF MAIN CHARACTERS
    Lao Chen, the protagonist, a journalist and novelist with writer’s block
    Fang Caodi, an erstwhile friend of his, who has led a globe-trotting, jack-of-all-trades life
    Little Xi, another old friend of Lao Chen. Had a short-lived career as a lawyer, now has a marginal existence as an Internet political activist
    Big Sister Song, her mother, the owner of the Five Flavors restaurant
    Wei Guo, Little Xi’s son, a law student and ambitious Party member
    Jian Lin, an acquaintance of Lao Chen, a wealthy real estate entrepreneur, and holder of cinema evenings
    He Dongsheng, his cousin, a high-ranking government official
    Zhang Dou, a former child slave-laborer, now an aspiring guitarist
    Miaomiao, his girlfriend, formerly a journalist
    Ban Cuntou, another cousin of Jian Lin, and once a classmate of Little Xi; now a highly influential figure in government circles
    Wen Lan, a former girlfriend of Lao Chen; an international jetsetting political adviser
    Dong Niang, a high-class prostitute
    Zhuang Zizhong, an elderly editor of a literary journal
    Hu Yan, an academic, member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, expert on rural China
    Gao Shengchan and Li Tiejun, organizers of an underground Protestant church, the Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground, in Henan Province
    Liu Xing, a former classmate of Gao Shengchan, and a local government official
    County Head Yang, a young and ambitious local government official

Part One

1.
TWO YEARS FROM NOW
Someone not seen in a long time
    O ne whole month is missing. I mean one whole month of 2011 has disappeared, it’s gone, it can’t be found. Normally February follows January, March follows February, April follows March, and so on. But now after January it’s March, or after February it’s April … Do you understand what I’m saying—we’ve skipped a month!”
    “Fang Caodi, just forget it,” I said. “Don’t go looking for it. It’s not worth it. Life’s too short; just look after yourself.”
    No matter how clever I was, I could never change Fang Caodi. Then again, if you really wanted to search for a missing month, Fang Caodi would be the one to do it. In his life, he’d probably spent quite a few missing months just existing. He was always turning up unexpectedly in odd places like he had vanished for a million years and was being reborn just when you were least expecting him. Maybe someone like him really could accomplish such a politically unfashionable task as restoring a missing month.
    The thing is, at first I didn’t really notice that a whole month was missing. Even if other people told me about it, I wasn’t ready to believe them. Every day I read the papers and checked the Internet news sites; every night I watched CCTV and the Phoenix Channel, and I hung around with intelligent people. I didn’t think that any major event had escaped my notice. I believed in myself—my knowledge, my wisdom, and my independent judgment.

    On the afternoon of the eighth day of the first lunar month of this year, as I left my home in Happiness Village Number Two and set out on my usual walk to the Starbucks in the PCCW Tower Mall of Plenty, a jogger suddenly pulled up in front of me.
    “Master Chen! Master Chen!” the jogger gasped while trying to regain his breath. “A whole month is