Days with a woman's companionship

Author: Yang Jianye
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: When you arebeautiful, who do you meet with---a fashion novel that is absolutely capable of changing your reading taste. A disappointed man wraps his sorrow in a light-hearted and playful tone, tracing fragments of his life in leaps and bounds. The days spent with loved ones, the love that sways like a ship in theshock of the Chinese stock market, the irretrievable past spent moving between Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. With fresh writing style and expressive language, it serves as a delightful pastime after meals or a mental workout after satisfying your eyes. A life without women is lonely, but does a man with a woman by his side necessarily find happiness? This is a story of a man and four women. Shen Xiaodan is thefirstwoman in my life. Because I was poor, she left me. Qiqi is thesecondwoman in my life. She is like a poem, a dream. A high school dropout who made a living by hawking goods in Xidan night market, she introduced me to the concept of being "early-maturing." Ninglin is thethirdwoman in my life. She had mansions in Shenzhen, Mercedes-Benz cars, and a dozen or so minions. She was a "mistress" of a Hong Kong tycoon and a major in the Shenzhen stock market. She was gentle like water yet tough as steel. I rose from a minion to become her "bedroom lover." She wanted my body but not my money. As a man who longed to be complete, I couldn't stand it any longer and escaped from her. Du Yuyun is thefourthwoman in my life. She was a "left-behind lady" in Shanghai. I met her in the lobby of the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai, and she was the pure woman I yearned for. She took me back to her home in Shanghai. Two women in my life met there, and I had to choose between them. A life without women is lonely. Does a man with a woman by his side find happiness?
Excerpt: From Shenzhen to Shanghai, I paused for a day and then boarded a train back to Beijing the next day. The Shanghai stock market was strong, far more dynamic than the collapsing Shenzhen market. I needed capital investment but had nothing to my name, so I had to return to Beijing to raise money. Hundreds of miles separated different worlds. Shanghai and Shenzhen were different. Beijing was different from Shanghai too. When I told my family I was trading stocks in Shenzhen, they looked at me coldly. I thought they must think I'm like the "speculators" on Beijing streets, having learned to deceive people. My younger brother asked, "What did you bring back from Shenzhen?" I replied, "Nothing." My older sister asked, "What do you want to come home for?" I said, "I need money." My father then concluded, "Then you're a liar." I didn't dare show them the two stocks I had on me. If they had understood the huge difference the paper certificates represented, my father would have said I wasn't his son again. 1991. Most Beijingers were still unclear about what the stock market was. In Beijing, there were only seven relatives I knew personally. I went back to Beijing for six of them. The seventh, a three-and-a-half-year-old, couldn't even support herself yet, so I had no hope for her. My family was ordinary. My father used to be a high school teacher and continued to teach at several schools after retiring. He said he was bored with doing nothing, but in reality, he was annoyed because he had no money to spend. The salary he received from the schools where he taught was several times his pension. My mother also retired. She did so early to take care of my sister's child. After my sister graduated from university, she was assigned to a factory as a technician. After giving birth, she was promoted to the archives department. My sister's husband, who had moved to Beijing from Harbin, was working on his graduation thesis when she was in university. After graduating, he was assigned to a factory in Beijing, and sister found him there. He is now the head of the operations department at the factory. They live in a two-bedroom apartment in the factory dormitory, and their child has been raised by my mother. I also have a younger brother. He is a truck driver for a transportation company and often travels to deliver goods, so I rarely see him. He is married. His wife works as a restaurant server in a high-end hotel. These two live with my parents. When they got married, they had their eyes on the room I was living in, but I managed to get rid of them with a plausible excuse. This is my core support. I need their financial help to turn things around in the Shanghai stock market, but only in material terms. I dare not hope for their spiritual endorsement. Like when Xin Xiaofeng once explained to me what stocks and the stock market were, I passed that knowledge onto my family. I said, "If you lend me money today, I will pay you back with multiplied benefits tomorrow." My sister's husband asked, "What kind of benefits?" I replied, "If you keep your money in the bank, you get only a few percent interest per year. Buying treasury bonds or government bonds yields only a percent, and that's still dead money—can't be withdrawn for several years and can't be transferred. You'll lose a lot of money. Compared to trading stocks with me, you're missing out on a huge return. If things go well, I'll pay you back with interest within a few months. I'll give you 30% profit." My sister's husband looked at his wife. She stared at me. "Is that really true? Such high interest?" My father chimed in. "But what if you lose money? Won't that just give you away?" "How can you say that? You have to give people hope." I was really annoyed. People in power always think this way. Fortunately, my younger brother wasn't swayed by his father's words. He said, "I'll lend you the money, but there's a condition." "What?" "I'll partner with you. We'll do it together." That surprised me. I reminded him. "As Dad said, there's a chance I could get rich, and there's a chance I could lose. Lending you money has no risk for you. But if we lose money together, you'll just have to take the blame." "I'll take the blame." His wife yelled out, "Are you crazy?" This ends our conversation for now. Aside from my family, the only other person in Beijing I could rely on was Xiaosan. I thought he had already married An by now. He was so determined. But when I knocked on his door, it was still him and his "child-mother" who greeted me. His wife said, "You came at just the right time. He rarely gets home these days, and you happened to run into him."