Hour of the Rat (17 page)

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“Thank you, I very much like to drink beer.”

I settle myself on the couch.

“Wa Keung and I make dinner,” she says after opening a bottle and pouring a measure into a plastic cup.

“Please don’t go to any trouble.”

“Just something simple. Wa Keung is very good cook. Better than me. You want to watch TV?”

“That’s okay.”

She switches it on anyway. Oh, great, a Chinese soap. Cue the giggling ingenue and the inevitable crying child. I dig into
my backpack for a Percocet. It’s been … what? A couple of hours since the last one?

“Moudzu!” Mei Yee yells. “Come in here!”

Moudzu emerges from a room across from the bedroom.

“You can fix the computer?” she asks.

He grins and nods. “Sure. Very easy. I already get parts.” He stands there in his outsize sneakers, waiting for me to hand it over.

I’m not crazy about letting him have my laptop, but if he can really fix it, maybe it’s worth the risk. I try to remember: Is there anything on the hard drive that might get me in trouble? Anything about the Great Community? I’m careful about how I log on, using the VPN and all, but maybe there’s some cookie, some hidden file, something that you could find if you copied the hard drive and dug deep enough.

“Do you need to take it someplace?” I ask.

“No,” he says, his grin getting broader. “You want to see? I show you.”

Better than watching TV, I guess. I push myself to my feet with one of the crutches, grab my cup of beer in my free hand, and follow him.

Moudzu’s lair is one of the newer additions: a spare concrete block. But that’s not what I notice when I part the curtain made from a patterned sheet and peer inside.

It’s dark, lit up by battered computer monitors and a bunch of blinking diodes, from modems, from power strips, from who knows what. The computers sit on a makeshift desk consisting of a detached door propped on top of crates against one wall and another ad hoc desk made out of a shipping crate against the other. One monitor has a game going on, explosions and flashing swords, another a series of chats against a background of noisy, cluttered Flash
animation—for some reason a couple of cartoon rabbits drinking cans of cola. There are anime and gaming posters on the wall that I can just make out in the dim, bluish green light. Books are piled everywhere there aren’t computers or pieces of computers. Between the desks and the bed, there’s about six inches of clearance through which to walk.

Moudzu switches on a lamp that shines down on the larger, door desk. Aside from the two monitors, there are a bunch of electronic parts and components, a couple of portable hard drives, and what I think is an internal one, some circuit boards, rectangles of RAM. Now I can see that the crates holding up the door are subdivided into plastic bins, like they had at the workshop that was New Century Seeds, with additional bins beneath the desk.

Moudzu rummages around and holds up a small Phillips-head screwdriver. “I can fix.”

I am a little fuzzy because of the Percocet and the beer, not to mention the fucking weird day I’ve had, and also maybe a little more euphoric than I should be to make a decision like this, but as I try to think it through, I figure there’s really no way these guys can know who I am and what may or may not be on my computer.

“What do you think is wrong with it?” I ask.

“Motherboard. And you need new screen.”

I watch for a while, sitting on the bed with my bum leg stretched out under the smaller desk, the one made from the shipping crate, Percocet spreading through my veins and nerves and muscles like warm, narcotic honey, as Moudzu expertly takes my laptop apart, removing a series of tiny screws with his magnetized Phillips head, lifting off the top case, and sticking his fingers in its electronic guts. The scents of garlic and scallions and meat drift in from the kitchen.

Moudzu retrieves a pencil-thin soldering iron from one of his bins.

“So you like computers,” I say by way of small talk, an activity at which, admittedly, I suck.

He nods, focused on the components strewn across the desk, the soldering iron in his hand.

“Is this the kind of work you want to do in the future?”

He smiles but doesn’t look at me, touches the tip of the soldering iron to a coil of solder and the edge of a circuit board. “Not only this.”

The smell of singed metal fills the room. He holds the soldering iron down a moment longer to seal the connection, lifts it up with a flourish.

“I want to be like Steve Jobs,” he says. “Make new Apple. Something better.” He grins. “Maybe I call my company Peach.”

A
FTER THAT IT
’
S TIME
for dinner. Too much food, which happens just about anytime a Chinese person invites you to his home and which always embarrasses me. Dried noodles with meat and spices, chicken in bean sauce and ginger, fried rice cakes with shrimp, pumpkin stuffed with sweet taro, and a lot of vegetables. Wa Keung must have picked some of this up while I was at the doctor’s; they couldn’t have made it all so quickly.

“Really good,” I say, and it is.

“We grow a lot ourselves,” Mei Yee says. “The rice and the vegetables. We also have chickens and a few pigs.”

Wa Keung shakes his head. “But crops don’t grow the way they used to. In the southern fields, many things die or don’t grow right. We had eggplant last year, and most of them were shaped strangely. Couldn’t sell them. Afraid to eat them.”

“What do you think causes it?” I ask, although of course I already know the answer.

Wa Keung snorts and laughs. “The workshops, of course. The pollution. They were supposed to clean it up in Guiyu, but all they’ve done is move it to other places, closer to us.”

“People get sick now, all the time,” Mei Yee chimes in. “Everyone knows someone with cancer. Everyone.”

Great, I think, looking at the delicious food on my plate. Who the fuck knows what’s in this stuff, how safe
any
of it is?

I eat it anyway. You know, to be polite.

W
A
K
EUNG POURS A
round of
baijiu
, for everyone but Moudzu. Clear grain alcohol, ranging from pretty smooth to furniture-stripping, depending on how much you spend.

“Drink, drink,” he says, noticing my hesitation. “A little bit is good for you. Anyway, you cannot drink the water here.” He waves at the dispenser by the refrigerator. “We have to spend money on water from out of town.”

I sip. The stuff burns my throat.

“We’ve had enough,” he says. “The guy, the one who hit you, his bosses—they take people’s land. Beat people. Poison our crops. Get rich and give us nothing. That farmer, the one who bombed the government offices in Fujian, he had the right idea.”

He pours himself another shot of
baijiu
and tosses it back.

“Yeah,” I say. “I can see why you’re angry.”

“So you’re a reporter?” he asks. “An environmentalist?” I shake my head, reluctantly.

The disappointment shows on both his and Mei Yee’s faces, though they quickly cover it up with smiles.

I had a feeling, you know? That they didn’t just rescue me and take me to the doctor and stuff me full of food and have their kid fix my computer because they’re nice people, though they seem nice enough. They’re looking for justice, for someone
to pay attention to their problems, for things to be put right. I don’t know how much news coverage even does for situations like this, but sometimes, if the central government’s sufficiently embarrassed,
sometimes
the problem gets addressed.

And then moved somewhere else, out of sight.

“Why you come here, then?” Mei Yee asks flatly.

“Looking for the brother of a friend,” I say. I tell them the story and pull out my photo of Jason.

They haven’t seen him.

“Environmentalists come all the time to Guiyu,” Mei Yee says. “Not so much out here.”

“I understand,” I say. We sit in silence. Wa Keung drinks more
baijiu
. I have another glass of beer.

Then it occurs to me: These guys are farmers. They grow things. Like, from seeds.

“
Ni zhidao Xin Shiji Zhongzi Gongsi?
” I ask. Have you heard of New Century Seeds?

Wa Keung frowns. “Sure,” he says. “Sure, we just plant some.”

I
TELL
W
A
K
EUNG
I can walk, and I follow him outside with the aid of my crutch—between the Percocet and the beer, I’m feeling pretty good.

We go out behind the house, and Wa Keung points to a paddy cut into the hill that I can just make out, water glinting under the moonlight.

“Rice,” he says. “First time I try this kind. Sprouting now. Seems good enough.”

“So it’s just normal rice?” I ask.

“No, they say it’s special kind. They tell us in conditions like this it grows better than normal rice.”

“Conditions like what?”

He turns his palms skyward and spreads his arms. “Like all of
this. The pollution. The bad air and dirty water and poisoned earth. They say the rice will still grow, no matter what.”

Prickles rise on the back of my neck. I’m not even sure why. I mean, rice that can grow in bad soil, that’s a good thing, right?

“No matter what? How can it do that?”

“Not sure. They say it’s ‘scientific process of development.’ ” Wa Keung shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’d rather grow same rice we grow here for generations. But last year’s crop hardly worth growing. Old rice can’t live here anymore.”

There’s something buzzing in my head, about Jason, about him being into the environment, about a seed company in the middle of a toxic-waste dump.

Jason may be off his meds, but something’s not right here.

“Do you think this new rice is safe?” I ask. “My meaning is … if it can grow in these conditions …”

Do you really want to be eating something that can grow in poisoned ground?

He shrugs. “Who can say? Nothing is safe here. But we still have to make money. We have to eat. What choice do we have?”

Wa Keung drives me in the
tuolaji
to a bus stop in the town where I saw the doctor, where I can catch a bus back to Shantou. He and Mei Yee made the polite offer that I should stay at their place for the night; I just as politely turned it down. I’m not the person they hoped I was, and they’ve already done enough for me. Besides, I want to get back to Shantou, to my hotel, to my own room and my own bed, temporary as it all is.

Before I go, Wa Keung tells me a little more about the New Century “Hero Rice” seeds.

“They say you can’t save seeds and grow from them the next year,” he tells me. “That you need to buy the seeds each time.”

“That sounds a little complicated,” I say.

“Maybe it’s not true. Maybe that’s just what they want you
to think, so they can make more money.” He grins, and for the first time I can see that he’s Moudzu’s father.

“Rice is rice,” he tells me. “If it isn’t processed, you can grow it. Of course we’ll try to use what we grow. Why should we pay them over and over again?”

We go into a little shed tacked onto the main house, stuffed with random junk—a broken chair, a stack of empty plastic buckets, a battered suitcase—and he aims a flashlight to show me the bag the rice came in, which they’d been using to store some of Moudzu’s computer parts. It’s a couple feet high, white woven plastic with a red, gold, and black stencil on it of your basic Chinese proletariat hero thrusting a hoe into the air, rice growing triumphantly in the background.
NEW CENTURY HERO RICE
! it says, in Chinese and English.

Is this some kind of joke?

Wa Keung dumps the components out onto the floor—a bunch of old keyboards, mostly.

“Here,” he says, folding the bag up and holding it out to me. “You can have it if you want.”

I stuff it into my daypack.

“Do you know any reporter?” he asks, “who maybe is interested in our story?”

“Maybe,” I say. I’ve met a couple anyway. “When I return to Beijing, I can ask.”

He smiles and nods, but I can’t tell if he believes me. I don’t know if I believe myself.

The other thing I do before we leave is pay Moudzu some money for the parts and trouble he took to fix my laptop. Because, what do you know, it boots up fine now.

“You should get new one,” he informs me solemnly. “This one very outdated. Most people don’t bother to fix.”

“True,” I say. “True.”

I
TAKE THE BUS
back to Shantou and a taxi to my hotel, the Brilliant Star Inn. I’m managing with one crutch and trying to juggle the other as I enter the minimal lobby: a small room with a red-cushioned couch framed in fake chrome; a glass-door cooler filled with water, sodas, beer, and energy drinks; shelves with sundries for sale that are mostly packaged underwear and Pringles chips and, with a nod to Shantou’s international reputation, radio-controlled crawling soldier toys and Barbie rip-offs called Spank Me Girl!

Behind a reception counter covered with walnut-grained plastic veneer is a friendly hotel worker representing the colors of the Brilliant Star posse—a bright yellow jacket with purple stitching that claims her name is L
A
T
OYA
.