Free The Fat Years by Koonchung Chan Page A

overconfident about the drinking capacity I thought I’d built up at the restaurant. That night we didn’t drink Chinese rice wine, but we had something called Rémy Martin. I drank too fast, wasn’t used to foreign liquor, and before I knew it I was plastered … I remember Ban Cuntou pointing at the TV reporting on Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit and asking me, “What do you think about Gorbachev?”
    When I woke up, I was in bed and he was sitting on the sofa in his underwear reading the paper. I realized I had slept with him. To get even with Shi Ping? I don’t think I’d have done it for that. Ban Cuntou had deliberately got me drunk. “Well, this time you finally got to me,” he said when he saw I was awake.
    “Ban Cuntou, you’ve gone too far this time!” I said angrily.
    “Well, you’re no St. Joan the virgin martyr either,” he retorted.
    Ever since college, I’d always known that guys like him were smooth-talking and insincere, so I shut up. With a terrible headache, I went to the bathroom, had a quick shower, got dressed, and left without saying another word.
    In the days after that, everybody was busy going to Tiananmen Square. Shi Ping wrote a new poem in support of the students. I was still furious with Shi Ping, and we were both busy with our own activities on the Square.
    Then they started shooting at us, and Shi Ping and I were separated.
    A couple of weeks later, I was arrested, but they let me go when they found out I was pregnant.
    Actually, I was already three months pregnant. I was so caught up in the June 4 events that I didn’t even notice. At the time I believed it was Shi Ping’s child, but later on I didn’t dare say for certain.
    I lived with my mother and waited for the baby. The big courtyard was full of people from political and legal circles, who all knew of my situation; we had to put up with a lot of tongues wagging and fingers pointing behind our backs. Fortunately, after June 4 everyone felt they had just survived a calamity and they didn’t want to be too nosy and attract attention.
    I didn’t hear anything from Shi Ping for a long time. He escaped to Hong Kong in secret. Later on, he went to France and married a Frenchwoman. He never even sent me a single letter to let me know he was safe.
    When my son was born, I named him Wei Min, giving him my last name. When Wei Min was twenty years old, he changed his name to Wei Guo, exchanging the word “people”—Min—for “nation”—Guo.
    Our restaurant was closed for a year and a half, but the following autumn, we received a notice that we could open again. Did Ban Cuntou help me? I don’t think so.
    Mother and I became extremely busy reopening the restaurant and trying to make a living. To begin with, business was very slow. The national economy was in decline, and many people were out of work in Beijing. President Jiang Zemin had let it be known that he intended to crack down on private businesses like ours. The people who had made up our most solid customer base couldn’t satisfy the thought-police investigators, so their work units fired them, and they didn’t have either the money or the spirit to eat in restaurants. A lot of our regulars had been foreigners, but they had not yet returned to China. Needless to say, the winter of 1991 was a cold one.
    In 1992, Deng Xiaoping made his “southern tour” in support of continued economicReform and Openness, and then Beijing’s financial conditions started to improve. At that time we worked particularly hard on our business and didn’t go in for any more “salon” activities. My mother and I read up on some new recipes, remodeled the restaurant inside and out, trained a new cook from Guizhou, and business gradually picked up, but it was exhausting work. My mother handled the lunch crowd while I took care of my son in the daytime, then I handled the dinner crowd. Gradually some of our old customers started drifting back. They would talk for hours, taking from five