Party Members

By Arthur Meursault

Deep within the heart of China, far from the glamour of Shanghai and Beijing, lies the Chinese every-city of Huaishi. This worker’s paradise of smog and concrete is home to Party Member Yang Wei, a mediocre man in a mediocre job. His content life of bureaucratic monotony is shattered by an encounter with the advanced consumer goods he has

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camphor Press Ltd
• Release date: Aug 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910736371

Book preview

1

Yang Wei was born into mediocrity. It wasn’t his fault. Very few of us are born into greatness and even fewer of us inherit it, but Yang Wei had the entire mah-jongg table stacked against him. Genetically, he was the product of thousands of years of uneducated peasant stock; the heavens were filled with the watchful eyes of his inglorious ancestors who had passed countless dynasties unquestioningly shovelling dung from behind herds of more valuable water buffalo. Culturally, he was the result of a moribund educational system, a society short on innovation and creative thinking, and a family with no vision beyond their next chance at a free banquet. A citizen of a country of over a billion people; Yang Wei was just that: not one in a billion, but one of a billion.

The place of his birth was one of China’s more average provinces, though at least his ancestors had been blessed with the foresight of moving to a location that would one day urbanise and not get left too far behind in the remorseless road to progress and profit. Far from the dour power of Beijing and even further from the upwardly mobile skyscrapers of Shanghai, Yang Wei’s home province sat comfortably in the safe zone between the unassumingly lethargic and the dangerously ambitious. Access to the eastern seaboard kept it reasonably economically afloat, and the province was free of any troublesome ethnic minorities from the hinterlands. On a local scale, home was the drab, small city of Huaishi, which had been belched into existence as a small settlement thousands of years ago and had since bloated into a grey industrial smear of three million smog-choked inhabitants. A local state-owned tourist board claimed the city was world famous for a certain kind of braised chicken, though six neighbouring towns also wrote the same dubious claim on their poorly written and never-read tourist literature. In the years since economic reform began, Huaishi had become known in the region for manufacturing sewing machines that didn’t immediately explode in their users’ faces. The sewing machines had since disappeared, so employment opportunities outside of government consisted mainly of precarious entrepreneurship or, if one had blighted their family’s prospects by being born a girl, prostitution. Both involved getting screwed by the Communist Party.

It was this most average and mediocre of Chinese cities that had brought forth Yang Wei. For the first twenty or so years of his life, Yang Wei had been pushed and shoved through China’s education factory and had achieved what was expected of him and millions of countless others. Originality, creativity, self-reflection, and all the other useless qualities unnecessary to China’s relentless growth had been expunged to create a reliable army of the unreliable. Any morsels of these vices that may have sat nascent within the young Yang Wei had been successfully harmonised out of his system. During his youth, all of Yang Wei’s decisions were made for him by his ever-watching parents, and he passed through kindergarten to university without any conscious thought other than memorizing the useless facts required to pass meaningless exams and move on to the next stage. At no point did Yang Wei ever question if what he was doing was right, and at no moment did he ever wonder if there was anything more to life. The boy’s predetermined path was to fulfil his parental expectations, assume some kind of professional responsibility, acquire a wife, and finally spawn another mediocrity to ensure the continued existence of his family’s DNA far into a mundane future. In this, Yang Wei was exceptional in his mediocrity.

At school Yang Wei learned that China was the greatest country in the world and that all foreigners were cultureless savages. He had also once been told in school that foreigners all held the Chinese in high esteem for their shrewd enterprise and great industrial craftsmanship; but those concepts were far too lofty for him. Following his teacher’s speech, Yang Wei had looked up the word industry in the dictionary – gongye – and saw that it contained the same character as used in worker – gongren. Looking out of his bedroom window he observed the dishevelled workers returning home late in their dirty overalls. They looked horrifically tired – their sad faces lined with sweat, grime, and age. He had been worried for weeks afterwards that if he didn’t pass his exams he might also have to be as exhaustingly industrious so had strengthened his resolve there and then to enter local government, where this quality was rightly discouraged. If the young Yang Wei had harboured any dream at all, it was to become a bureaucrat. At night he dreamt of mountains of paperwork and rivers of ink that he could sail upon atop a raft of pens and rubber stamps.

After university, what few connections his average family possessed succeeded in obtaining him a position somewhere in some office in some department in some ministry somewhere. There was never any question of doing anything else. Within the Ministry, Yang Wei kept himself busy for eight hours a day, five days a week, by doing things. Nobody really knew what these things were other than the fact that they required lots of paperwork and signatures, but everybody knew it was vital to be seen doing as many of these things as possible. Alongside him were many others who also did things and shuffled around in the office in the department in the Ministry; occasionally pausing to eat things and watch things on television in the evening. His life was wonderfully small, and there was nothing that the endless minutia of the Ministry’s administrative procedures could not make small. All life, from birth to death, could be condensed to a series of approval forms and certificates. Nothing could happen in Huaishi unless Yang Wei and his peers sanctioned it first through a torrent of bureaucratic hurdles: they had discovered happiness. Neither too rich nor too poor; just safe average security, with the little electronic pleasures of life to make the commute to work more bearable.

When he was at the age of twenty-eight, a plain girl with a pleasing lack of personality was introduced to him by his worried parents. He obediently enjoyed a brief period of premarital sex with her (which was an interesting diversion from his normal monthly exchange with a prostitute) and did the right thing by marrying her just three months after getting her pregnant. Satisfied that their future daughter-in-law’s ovaries were working, Yang Wei’s parents gave their approval and promptly spent their entire life savings on buying the happy couple an apartment. The bump didn’t even show on the day. All was as it should be.

Five thousand years of his ancestral lineage gloriously culminated on Yang Wei’s thirty-fifth birthday. Celebrating over a meal of chicken’s feet, pickled eggs, cold beef slices and a bottle of mind-blowingly strong baijiu, Yang Wei surveyed the three-bedroom apartment his parents had provided, his rapidly aging wife falling asleep in front of part 63 of a 745-episode Korean soap opera, and his son, who was smashing a toy car against the wall. He saw that it was good and he had done everything expected of him. An ancient saying attributed to Confucius states, At thirty I stood firm. At thirty Yang Wei had achieved the job, wife, and child that had always been his destiny, so at thirty-five Yang Wei had decided to stop standing firm and had sat back down again.

Reclining in his favourite armchair, Yang Wei caught his alcohol-reddened face in the reflection of his glass. He considered the shape and colour of his visage and wondered how he must appear to the world. Naturally skinny, he was just beginning to develop the belly that was a welcome product of age and stability. Apart from that, very little could be said about Yang Wei’s appearance. His was the face of millions of men. Behind his thick, black glasses, a thin, smooth face that bore a few scars of adolescent acne stared back at him in the reflection. Normally he wore the standard accoutrements of the typical mid-level government official: white shirt, cheap trousers, shoes shined as if his life depended on it, and a large belt buckle with a fake Western-brand logo. But at home he was relaxing in his secondary and more leisurely outfit of a pastel-coloured polo shirt tucked into the same cheap trousers; however, as within the office, one hand was permanently attached to a cigarette and the other to an iPhone. Fiddling with his iPhone, Yang Wei suddenly noticed that the apartment next door had failed to lock their Wi-Fi connection with a password, meaning that Yang Wei could use their Internet signal instead of his own. Even though his own Internet connection was paid on a fixed monthly basis so that using the neighbour’s Wi-Fi gave him no monetary benefit at all, illicitly using something for free that somebody else had paid for gave Yang Wei a spurt of joy greater than anything else he had received on his birthday.

Yang Wei rarely experienced true raw emotion of the positive variety, (Yang Wei in fact experienced little emotion at all, other than irritation when his son would disturb him during his favourite TV shows), but now happiness glowed in his face alongside the baijiu, and he let out a loud burp in contentment.

Mediocrity was his to enjoy.

2

Later, much later, when Yang Wei’s fortunes were radically diminished and he had time to reflect upon his misery, he would often think back to how exactly it had all begun. During one of the many days when he lay trapped within his warm, damp prison, his mind wandered back to that cold morning in the office, the meal, and that stupid designer handbag that had initiated his downfall.

It had been a typically grey, polluted and bitterly cold day in the grey, polluted and bitterly cold city of Huaishi. Visitors from another country (not that many passed through this modern urban paradise) might remark how strange it was that there was no sound of bird-song to start the morning unlike in other places. Those same visitors might even conclude after some light research that the reason for the lack of bird-song in Huaishi was because there were no birds in Huaishi. History books would tell them that the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce airborne pests in the 1950s in order to increase grain production had enjoyed an over-whelming success in eliminating bird life from the city, though had enjoyed less success in increasing grain production. A walk outside for longer than ten minutes would also inform the foreign visitors that any birds fortunate enough to have survived the 1950s would surely have perished since in the all-consuming smog that enveloped Huaishi each and every day. However, those foreign visitors would be guilty of improper thinking and inaccurate reporting, for there was in fact bird-song in Huaishi. The Party had seen fit to install loudspeakers around People’s Square and certain selected parks that blasted out prerecorded tapes of various bird noises every morning at six – just after the workers finished painting the grass green.

The hard blasts of the early winter wind pounded against Yang Wei’s bedroom window along with the occasional piece of rubbish that had been sent hurtling upwards. Huaishi’s dawn chorus of wind-carried grit pitter-pattered against the windows of its inhabitants. As always, Yang Wei woke up with his early morning cigarette breakfast and spent the first ten minutes of his day expectorating his lungs and spitting thick yellow mucus into the toilet bowl. Of course, the thick polluted air outside and Yang Wei’s chain-smoking habit ensured that more mucus would be generated soon. Without a toilet bowl this would have to be hawked up over the elevator floor, the pavement outside, and potentially the back of a bus seat. He ignored his wife and child, who were gawping at the television set as per their daily routine, and stepped out into the cold, dull, Party-given day.

Somewhere amidst the layers of underwear, cheap suit, sweater, and puffer jacket that his wife insisted he wear, was Yang Wei, joining all the other enwrapped bodies cheek by jowl on the commute to work. Due to an excess of baijiu the night before, Yang Wei had risen late and had decided to take a taxi to work rather than his usual bus. He stepped out of his apartment compound to look for a taxi, but was immediately knocked sideways by an ancient-looking grandmother who was hurtling along the pavement on a silent, electric-powered bicycle.

Look where you’re going! the old woman shouted at Yang Wei as she sped into the distance. The bicycle had clipped him on the arm, knocking him straight down into a puddle of fresh saliva. Yang Wei picked himself up but had to jump against the wall quickly as another three or four electric bicycles swerved around him.

Carefully, Yang Wei crept to the edge of the pavement and tried in vain to hail a taxi. The morning rush hour was in full charge and several other people were also attempting to hasten their trip to work. A rusty old vehicle with a light shining to show that it was free was inching its way forward through the traffic. Yang Wei raised his hand and stepped towards it. From nowhere, another office worker in almost identical clothing to Yang Wei ran out from behind him, jumped into the taxi, and slammed the passenger door behind him before Yang Wei had even got close. Defeated, Yang Wei headed back to the pavement and tried to hail another taxi; but every time another competitor for the cab service saw him raise his hand they would run further up the road than him so that they could get a taxi before him. Yang Wei played cat and mouse a few times with his fellow commuters – each running further up the road whenever they saw somebody else waiting for a taxi, only to have another potential passenger run past them – but gave up when he realised he had already run almost a kilometre away from his apartment during his attempt to get to work quicker. He walked to the bus stop dejectedly. There had once been plans for an underground train network in Huaishi to alleviate the madness of rush hour and help the people get to work easier, but somebody in the upper provincial government had decided to serve the people by buying himself a chateau in France instead.

All the buses were crowded. It had taken at least three before Yang Wei could squeeze himself onto one. There were far too many people on the bus for Yang Wei to move, let alone find a seat on which to wipe the snot that had accumulated uncomfortably in his nose. Crushed against a sea of humanity, Yang Wei concentrated every fibre of his being on removing his iPhone from his coat pocket, lifting it inch by inch amidst the sea of elbows and armpits, and finally and triumphantly raising it to within an inch of his face so that he could watch a video of last night’s episode of Voice of China. The whole process took over ten minutes.

If Yang Wei had been able to tear himself away from concentrating on his phone and look out of the grime-covered bus windows, he would have seen the whole of the city pass by as the bus crawled through the heavy traffic. Cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, motorbikes, even the occasional old wooden cart led by a donkey competed on the congested urban arteries to slither forward, blaring their respective horns to each other as they did so. The whole city was screaming at itself: a scream that would last the entire day and well into the early hours of the night, commencing again after a few hours’ respite. Drivers leaned permanently on their horns against the cyclists, cyclists screamed at pedestrians to get out of the way, and pedestrians screamed at one another to move aside. It was a seething city of permanent anger with a scowl on every corner and a frown on every baby.

Although everything in Huaishi looked old and tired, especially the citizens, there was remarkably little truly old in this city, despite its supposed thousands of years of history. The city was a grey mess of squalid narrow roadways and imposing broad expressways crammed with traffic at all hours. Tower after tower of morbid office blocks and apartment compounds repeated endlessly to the city outskirts. If there was little history, there was even less greenery. A few dead trees lined the roads. Billboards of photographed flowers were nailed to fences in an attempt to brighten up the surroundings, but the effect was diminished by the huge propaganda slogans interspersed with the flower photos proclaiming that Huaishi was THE PARIS OF ASIA, A WONDERFUL GARDEN FOR ALL TO ENJOY, and THE FOREST OF PROGRESS. At the centre of all this, lying in the middle of the city like a congealed fishhead in a bowl of grey noodles, was People’s Square.

People’s Square itself, once the bus finally fought its way to its vicinity, was a dull, concreted space surrounded by neon palm trees that lit up at night and could sometimes be made to look like an endless cycle of exploding fireworks. In the centre of the square was a large electronic display with statues of happy children dancing around it. This display acted as a kind of clock and was continuously counting down the months, days and minutes until the next very important milestone as designated by the local government. During Yang Wei’s lifetime he had seen it count down to The Glorious Return of Hong Kong to the Motherland, The Glorious Return of Macau to the Motherland, The Glorious Year 2000, The Glorious Entry of China into the World Trade Organisation, and The Glorious Beijing Olympics. A local television company had recently acquired sponsorship of the clock, which was currently counting down the time until "The Glorious November Premiere of Season 4 of China’s Got Talent on Huaishi TV!"

A few steps away from People’s Square, on a broad avenue lined with parked Audi vehicles, lay the grand, Soviet-style Ministry building where Yang Wei worked. It was a relatively well-maintained building compared to its neighbours. The entrance to this imposing, grey monolith of bureaucratic activity was elevated from the street by an enormous stone staircase. The large grey steps were tiring for the workers to climb every day, but all agreed that having them was preferable to allowing easy access to disabled beggars who might be seeking aid from the powers that be.

Fighting his way off the bus, Yang Wei managed to squirm past the wall of bodies and jogged towards his daily workplace. Fifteen minutes later, as Yang Wei sat at his desk and hunched over his oily noodle breakfast in an effort to keep warm in the unheated office, Little Qi walked by and changed his life forever.

"Fuck me, Old Yang, are you still eating those cheap three-yuan noodles after all these years?"

A single, solitary noodle slipped out of Yang Wei’s mouth and landed on his desk with a wet plop. Little Qi had been in the same class at university as Yang Wei and had been the youngest in the class. They came from similar backgrounds and had graduated with similar grades; after graduating they had even started work in the same Ministry office at the same time and had spent many an evening getting drunk and groping KTV girls together. Yang Wei considered Little Qi as one of the closest things he had to a friend, especially as the small age difference between them gave him a mild sense of superiority. Little Qi was also well known for his crude turn of speech – a vulgar habit that had been entertaining during university but embarrassing after graduation. Though they worked in the same department, Little Qi was situated on a different floor, so it had been months since they had last bumped into one another. Somehow, Little Qi looked … different.

Little Qi, long time no see! said Yang Wei. Have you eaten your breakfast yet?

Yes, there was definitely something different about Little Qi. He looked a lot smarter than he previously did and was not wearing a jumper over his shirt but was instead sporting a suit jacket. Wasn’t he cold?

Fuck me, my old classmate doesn’t see me for six months and all he asks is if I’ve eaten my breakfast or not. Little Qi pulled out a packet of cigarettes and threw one of them onto the desk in front of Yang Wei, where it landed next to the oily noodle. Old friend, have a cigarette to warm you up instead of that street food.

Yang Wei caught a glimpse of the cigarette packet that Little Qi was holding at just the right angle for him to be able to make out the name. Little Panda brand! How was Little Qi smoking Little Panda brand? Had he been given a packet by one of the leaders? And … yes … Yang Wei’s eyes widened as he saw that resting atop Little Qi’s trousers was the big shiny buckle of a brand new Lacoste belt. It was genuine! The crocodile was even facing in the correct direction! Where had Little Qi received that?

He lit the cigarette, and its ninety-yuan luxury taste flowed down his throat. It was good. Much better than the two-yuan rolled-up tar parcels in the garish red packet that Yang Wei normally sucked on throughout the day.

Little Qi, why are you not wearing a jumper? You’ll catch a cold if you are not careful.

Haven’t you heard? My new office has central heating! Now I can roll up my shirt and show my belly even if the snow outside is as white as a foreigner’s pussy! As he spoke, his fingers moved imperceptibly to the belt buckle, adjusting it so that the golden crocodile emblem caught the light of the dim desk lamp.

New office? Yang Wei nearly spat out the cigarette. When did such good fortune land upon your head? Your brother Yang has been slaving away in the same office as you since graduation and you don’t tell him that we’re getting new offices?

Little Qi smiled. It wasn’t just the Little Panda cigarettes, the new belt, and the lack of jumper that had changed about him. There were other things. He seemed to be taller, straighter, and he held his head high while all the while maintaining bright eye contact. In a physical aspect he was not too dissimilar from Yang Wei – nor for that matter from any of the dozens of other boys who had been crammed into a classroom with them during school. They all had the same messy black hair, black-framed glasses, and yellowed teeth from a thousand illicit teenage cigarettes and a million fully legal adult cigarettes. They were all thin, with the first blossoming of a future paunch resting on their stomach. And yet Little Qi seemed to have an air of confidence that he lacked six months ago, and that his old classmate certainly didn’t have right now.

An arm was placed on the mediocre man’s shoulder. Forgive me, Old Yang. I should have shared my good news with you earlier. I’ve had a promotion! I moved up to the eighth floor last week and can even see the leaders from across the floor. I came down to collect some old files and thought I should stop by and share my good fortune with my old friend.

* * *

Just as he finished speaking, a woman from the Accounts Department walked past and stopped at the sight of the two colleagues. Her real name was Little Jade, but she insisted that everybody referred to her by her English name of Rainy. There was even a sign – I’m Rainy, a Sunshine Girl! – on her desk to remind people of her sophisticated moniker. Above all, she was one of the prettiest girls in the department, and her teeth sparkled as she spoke.

Congratulations on your promotion, Teacher Qi, she gushed. Your wife must consider herself so lucky!

Thank you, Rainy. Let’s wait for the weather to get a little warmer and your Big Brother Qi will treat you to a dinner. I want to see you wearing a shorter skirt before I offer you a free meal.

She held her hands together in playful but sincere gratitude. Waaaaah! Thank you, Teacher Qi! Don’t forget or I’ll be angry! Bye-bye! Rainy said the last word in English and then skipped away.

Teacher Qi? Promotion? The eighth floor? Yang Wei asked himself many questions. How had this dog-shit peasant child managed to steal such glory? Whose arse was he wiping to be given such reward? Yang Wei had spent the same amount of time each day moving paper around and playing online poker after three-hour lunch breaks; why was he still eating three-yuan noodles? He stubbed out the annoyingly expensive cigarette in anger.

Congratulations, Little Qi, he muttered through gritted teeth. I’m very happy for you. Insincerity was the lifeblood of Chinese officialdom, and like all young men who floated along deep within the bowels of Communist bureaucracy, Yang Wei excelled at it. With equal insincerity, Little Qi stood back up and patted his inferior colleague on the shoulder reassuringly.

Thank you, old friend. Come, let me invite you for dinner tonight. Bring your wife along. Teacher Qi wants to share his good luck with all those who supported him on the way.

Sure, let me know where you want to go.

Fuck me, it’s cold here. I’d better go before my dick freezes and drops off and you add it to your street noodles. I’ll call you later. As he turned to walk away, he looked back at Yang Wei and added a final bye-bye. In English.

Hatred surged through Yang Wei’s veins. It was bad enough that somehow Little Qi had tricked his way to good fortune or had gained the favour of somebody higher up, but how dare he try and behave like a fucking foreigner. It was so typical of all these stinking upstarts that as soon as they tasted success they suddenly felt they were better than their Chinese brothers and began imitating those cultureless, big-nosed foreigners who sometimes passed through the polluted third-tier city that Yang Wei called home. Like many Chinese men, he was filled with a peculiar mix of inferiority and superiority that permeated his every thought and feeling. Normally the two contrasting forces formed an equilibrium and cancelled each other out, but today Little Qi’s provocations had been just enough to fill Yang Wei with pure rage. As the blood of anger surged through him, a strange thing suddenly occurred. He felt his pants tighten as the pumping hormones hardened his penis deep beneath his many layers of clothing. He sneaked his hand down and readjusted his underwear to release the pressure on his throbbing erection. This odd reaction had never happened before, and Yang Wei realised he should try to calm down. He took a few deep breaths to release the tension. The swelling abated, but still he wondered whether he would be able to ditch the wife after dinner and take his mood out on a cheap countryside hooker.

Yang Wei! shouted a voice from the other side of the office. Yang Wei! One of the managers was staring at him.

Yes, sir! replied Yang Wei.

I need those documents you promised me ready in one hour. Do it now!

Yes, sir! replied Yang Wei.

His morning ruined already by his apparent lack of career success, Yang Wei vowed to try harder