The Five Brothers' Dream

Fortunately, Ma Yide’s melon car had not overturned.
It had stopped more than ten carriages behind the derailed section. Though the violent impact had jolted and shifted its body, the seal was still intact, and the iron shell was not broken. But this did not mean safety. The train was forced to remain where it was, with the line cut off in front and behind. Before the flood receded, no one could move anything.
Ma Chengzhi told Ma Yide the news he had learned.
“The car did not overturn. They say your carriage is still there.”
Ma Yide dropped into a chair, as though someone had pulled him back from the edge of a cliff.
Zhao Youlan joined her palms, tears falling. “The Bodhisattva has protected us. The Bodhisattva has protected us.”
But Ma Cunhui did not relax. He only asked in a low voice, “How many days has the car been stopped?”
“I don’t know,” Ma Chengzhi said. “Repairs will take time.”
Ma Cunhui closed his eyes. “Melons cannot wait.”
This sentence was like a cold knife slowly entering everyone’s heart.
The emergency repairs continued for several days.
Soldiers and civilians worked together. Cart after cart of sand and stone was filled in, and section after section of track was laid again. By day, the sun blazed; by night, workers continued under gasoline lamps. Overturned carriages were righted by cranes. Damaged goods were cleared away. Along the railway line lay mudwater, oil stains, broken wood, and all kinds of scattered cargo. Finally, the line was barely restored. The long-delayed freight train was remarshaled and continued southeast.
But the true disaster was only beginning.
After the train entered desert and Gobi regions, the weather grew suddenly hot. By day, the carriage was roasted by the blazing sun, and the iron skin became hot enough to burn a person’s palm. There was no ventilation inside. The temperature climbed day after day; according to workers along the line, at its highest it may have reached sixty or seventy degrees Celsius. The melons had originally been picked at seventy to eighty percent ripeness, waiting to mature slowly along the journey so that by the time they reached Canton, they would be perfectly sweet and fresh. But now, delayed by the flood and sealed inside an iron carriage under high heat, they were like fruit locked in a giant steamer.
The first to change were the melons in the upper layers.
Their skins began to soften. Sticky liquid seeped from the stems. Their fragrance turned from clear sweetness to sour rot. Then one basket pressed upon another. Rotten juice dripped through the gaps of the bamboo baskets and flowed onto the melons below. The lower layers softened from soaking, then split open in turn. The wheat straw drank up juice, fermented, and grew hot. Inside the carriage, the smell changed from sweet to sour, from sour to foul, and finally became a stench of decay so intense it could make a person retch. Those fragrant melons, once round and full beneath the Hami sun, had now collapsed one after another into liquid, spreading across the floor like a yellow, sticky dream rotting upon the rails.
At first, Ma Yide knew none of this.
He could only wait.
作者：the fortieth day, he was guarding the entrance of the telephone office every morning. Even the female operator at the post office recognized him. Whenever she saw him, she would say, “Checking on the ancient Western Region melon car again?”
Ma Yide forced a smile. “Checking on my fate.”
On the forty-first day, the wholesalers were no longer polite.
“Boss Ma, are your melons gone or not? We cannot wait empty-handed.”
On the forty-second day, some people began to mock him.
“Young man, your fortune dream was too big, wasn’t it? From the ancient Western Regions to Canton, you thought melons would stay fresh? Did you think you were shipping stones?”
Ma Yide endured it and did not answer.
At night, he sat in the courtyard, flicking the old abacus again and again.
Pa. Pa. Pa.
Each sound was like a melon splitting open.
He calculated the remaining value of the goods, the spoilage, the freight, and whether he could break even if only half the melons were good. Then he calculated how many years it would take to repay his third uncle if only thirty percent remained. By the end, the beads were confused, and so was his heart.
Zhao Youlan brought him a bowl of herbal tea and said softly, “Yide, drink this and sleep a little.”
“Mother, I cannot sleep.”
“Even if you cannot sleep, close your eyes.” She sat beside him and looked at his thinning face, her voice trembling. “If the money is gone, Mother will repay it with you. Do not ruin your body.”
Ma Yide’s eyes grew hot, but he clenched his teeth and said, “I borrowed the money. I cannot let you repay it.”
Ma Cunhui came out from the house and said only one sentence: “Check again tomorrow. If the goods arrive, whether good or bad, you go receive them yourself. A businessman cannot only welcome good goods; he must also welcome bad goods.”
On the morning of the forty-fifth day, the call finally came.
Canton North Station freight yard notified him: the ancient Western Region melon car had arrived.
When Ma Yide heard this sentence, he felt no joy. Instead, his whole body turned cold. He rode his bicycle to the freight yard. Along the road, the sunlight of Canton was so bright he could hardly open his eyes. People on the roadside were still shouting their wares, bargaining, laughing, and chatting. This city did not know that his life or death in business was locked inside one railcar.
The carriage stood deep within the freight yard.
The seal was still intact, yet an indescribable smell was seeping from the cracks of the door. It was not the fragrance of melons. It was the smell of sour rot, fermentation, trapped heat, and ruin mixed together. Several loading workers covered their noses and cursed.
“What’s inside? Dead rats?”
Ma Yide stood before the carriage door, his fingers trembling.
He untied the seal with his own hands.
The instant the iron door was pulled open, a wave of heat carrying a rotten, sweet, fishy stench rushed into their faces, almost knocking people down. Inside the carriage, the melon baskets that had once been stacked neatly had long since collapsed. Many bamboo baskets had soaked through and rotted. The wheat straw had blackened. Yellow juice had pooled in a thick layer across the floor. Some melons still looked whole from the outside, but at a touch they caved in, like wounds ripened to the point of bursting.
Ma Yide stood there for a long time without moving.
Thirty-five days of dreaming of wealth, forty-five days of anxious waiting, the sunlight of Tianshan, the melon fields of Hami, his third uncle’s fifty thousand yuan, his parents’ warnings, and his cousins’ efforts—all of it had, in this moment, become a carriage floor full of rotten water.
A loader beside him asked, “Boss, are we unloading or not?”
Ma Yide’s throat moved. At last he spoke.
“Unload.”
His voice was so hoarse it did not sound like his own.
“Pick out whatever can be sold. Whatever cannot be sold must also be cleared out.”
After saying this, he rolled up his sleeves and was the first to step into that carriage where the heat had not yet dispersed and the stench of rot pierced the nose.
Beneath his foot came a soft, wet squelch.
Rotten melon juice covered the sole of his shoe.
At that moment, he did not cry.
For he suddenly understood that what he had truly stepped into was not a railcar of rotten melons, but the first bitter lesson of a businessman. All the dazzling visions of tenfold profit that had filled his youth were extinguished in this sour, rotten mess beneath his feet. Yet it was precisely after that extinguishing that he saw for the first time: fate does not show special mercy simply because a person is young, clever, and daring enough to gamble.
Only later, when the accounts were settled, did Ma Yide understand that the fifty thousand yuan had not vanished all at once. It had been cut away cleanly, slice by slice.
The railcar fee was twenty thousand, like the first great well swallowing almost half the principal. The field payment in Hami was more than twenty thousand, and the laborers’ wages more than ten thousand—money he had handed over with his own hands, believing then that it was not money, but seed that would return multiplied. The railway’s compulsory insurance, impossible to claim against in any meaningful way, cost more than two thousand; the receipts bore red stamps, cold and unyielding, leaving no room for negotiation. At Canton North Station, unloading, sorting, and clearing rotten melons required temporary laborers and cost nearly another ten thousand. Travel, telephone calls, meals, lodging, favors, storage, and miscellaneous expenses added another five thousand in scattered pieces. When the account book was opened and the abacus beads were pushed, the fifty thousand yuan had rotted away like a carriage full of overripe melons, not one drop left.
Even more bitter was that among the sixty tons of fragrant melons, only a small portion could truly be picked out and sold. The laborers covered their noses as they searched through the carriage. Rotten melon juice flowed everywhere, and when their soles stepped in it, it made wet squelching sounds. Whenever they found a few not yet fully spoiled, those melons seemed like living mouths pulled from a heap of corpses. They were hurriedly loaded into baskets and sold cheaply to nearby vendors. In the end, he barely recovered ten thousand yuan, not nearly enough to cover the capital.
Ma Yide stood at the edge of the freight yard, his whole body reeking of sour rot, his eyes bloodshot from exhaustion.
He sat on the floor for a while, hopelessly and looked very tired.
Unexpectedly, at that moment, several men who looked like local thugs surrounded him. The one in front had a shaved head and a cigarette clamped between his lips. His smile did not reach his eyes.
“Boss, doing business here—you understand the rules?”
Ma Yide lifted his eyes. “What rules?”
“Freight yard clearing fee, site-watching fee, brothers’ hard-work fee.” The bald man held up three fingers. “Three thousand. Pay it, and leave in peace.”
Ma Yide gave a cold laugh. “My melons have already rotted into water, and you still come to squeeze out juice?”
The bald man’s face darkened. “Outsider, don’t let your mouth be too hard. Canton North Station is not your ancestral hall.”
The men beside him immediately closed in. One reached for the remaining baskets of melons. Ma Yide seized the man’s wrist.
“Who dares touch them!”
“You want to die!”
The man swung a fist at him.
Ma Yide turned sideways but did not avoid it fully. His mouth split at once, and the taste of blood surged up with the stench of rotten melon. With his other hand, he grabbed a broken strip of bamboo from a basket and struck aside the second blow. Seeing the situation turn ugly, several hired laborers also shouted, “Don’t bully him! There are police in the freight yard!”
The scene immediately fell into chaos. Melon baskets toppled over, rotten melons rolling everywhere. The bald man lunged forward and grabbed Ma Yide by the collar. Ma Yide was slammed against the iron side of the carriage; pain shot through his back, yet he refused to let go. Amid the confusion, someone in the distance shouted, “Police are coming!”
Only then did the men retreat, cursing. Before leaving, the bald man pointed at him.
“Boy, consider yourself tough.”
Ma Yide wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and looked at the rotten melons scattered across the ground and the few baskets of barely saved good ones. Suddenly, he laughed.
As he laughed, his eyes reddened.
He knew that this trip had not only failed to make him rich. It had buried fifty thousand yuan and all his youthful arrogance together in the rotten melon water of Canton North Station.
Far away in the ancient Western Regions, Ma Chengzhi received the news and remained silent for a long time. At last, he said only, “Brother, hold on.”
Ma Chengye wrote him a letter. In it, there were only eight characters:
When defeat stands before you, stand straight and close the game.
At this time, Ma Yide thought: if only he had spent fewer days sightseeing in the ancient Western Regions, if only he had picked the melons and shipped them two days earlier, perhaps he might have avoided this disaster. Joy had turned into grief; he should have handled the serious matter first and gone sightseeing afterward. He had mistaken what was important for what was light.
While drowning in regret, he pressed that letter into his account book.
Many years later, when he looked back on his first attempt to trade melons from the ancient Western Regions, what he remembered most clearly was not how sweet the Hami melons had been, nor how fierce the flood had been. What remained clearest was the rotten heat that struck his face when that carriage door opened at Canton North Station.
That was fate’s first slap across his face.
Loud, humiliating—and enough to wake him completely.