The Five Brothers' Dream

When Yide flew into California, America had already entered winter.
As he came out of the airport, the first breath of air he drew into his lungs carried a dry, cold clarity. It was not the damp chill of a Lingnan winter, nor the wind of Canton city mixed with dust, gasoline, and moisture. It was a cold like freshly washed glass. The sky was very high, so blue it seemed almost unreal. In the distance, low mountain shadows lay quietly upon the earth. The trees were sparse and open, the highways broad, and cars slipped past one after another, yet one rarely heard the harsh sound of horns.
Sitting in the back seat of the taxi, Yide looked out at the low houses, the orderly lawns, and the rows of silent trees. In his heart there was suddenly a little emptiness, and also a little brightness.
Zhide was waiting for him at the gate of Stanford University.
After so many years apart, his younger brother had grown somewhat thinner. He wore glasses, a dark coat, and an old backpack. Between his brows there remained the clean brightness of youth, but there was also a calmness ground out by years alone in a foreign country. He had already completed his master’s degree and was preparing to continue on to a doctorate, his direction being the internet and investment. When the two brothers saw each other, they first laughed, and then embraced with force. Yide patted his brother’s shoulder and said, “You rascal, you really look like an American student now.”
Zhide laughed. “Second Brother, you still have the air of a Canton boss.”
They walked into the campus together.
Stanford was not like the university Yide had imagined. It had no high walls, no solemn gate. It seemed instead as though a grove of trees, a spread of grass, and a row of yellow-walled buildings with red-tiled roofs had naturally unfolded across the land. The trees by the road, even in winter, were partly green and partly already turning yellow. Leaves had fallen to the ground and were gently lifted by the wind. In the distance, the lawns were wide and open. Students rode past on bicycles in twos and threes. Some carried books. Some held coffee. Some walked while talking, their expressions free yet focused. Sunlight fell upon the arcades and stone pillars, warm but not intense, like a silent invitation.
Yide walked very slowly.
In China, he had grown used to crowded campuses, bustling offices, and noisy markets. He had rarely seen such a place: no one urging you forward, no one questioning you, no one rushing to tell you where you ought to go. Yet precisely within this ease, he felt a deeper power. The freedom here was not looseness; the openness here was not disorder. It was like a fertile and quiet piece of soil, allowing people to bury their ideas in it and wait for them to sprout on their own.
“This place does not feel like a school,” Yide said. “It feels more like an invisible marketplace.”
Zhide nodded. “It is a marketplace, and also a testing ground. Many things first emerge here—in classrooms, laboratories, dormitories, cafés. At the beginning they are only the ideas of a few students. Later they become companies. Still later they become industries.”
Yide’s heart stirred.
They walked to a small café on campus. The place was not large. Outside the windows were trees; inside was the fragrance of coffee. Several students sat around a table, speaking in low voices. Laptops and draft papers were spread before them. Someone was writing formulas on a blackboard. Someone was typing in a corner. Someone, while drinking coffee, was drawing a diagram that looked like a business plan. After Yide sat down, he held the hot coffee in both hands and felt his palms slowly grow warm.
“In your letters, you talked about the internet,” Yide asked. “What kind of business is it, exactly? I do not understand computers. The wires cannot be seen, the goods cannot be touched. How does it make money?”
Zhide smiled and said, “Second Brother, when you did real estate, you relied on location. If the location was good, people came, and money came. The internet is the same, except its location is not by the roadside. It is at the information crossroads that people pass through every day. Whoever occupies that entrance can collect rent.”
Yide’s eyes brightened. “You mean there are shops online too?”
“There are,” Zhide said. “Only they are not called shops. They are called platforms, portals, search engines, communities. Shops in the real world are limited by streets. Shops online can face the whole world at once. Houses in the real world are built slowly; products online can be changed quickly. In the real world, once someone has taken a piece of land, there is nothing you can do. Online, as long as you have a new method, you may be able to break through from a place no one else thought of.”
Yide was silent for a long time.
These words were like a key, slowly opening an old door in his mind. He thought of those land parcels in southern Canton, of the planning maps across the Pearl River Delta, of the predicament in which he had been tied down layer after layer by capital, approvals, villagers, and banks. The business of land was too heavy—so heavy that every step forward had to be padded with money. Yet the world Zhide spoke of seemed like a road far lighter, far faster. It too had risks, it too burned money, it too could fail; but its speed made Yide’s heart beat faster.
“But what about bubbles?” Yide asked. “You said America has bubbles too. When a bubble rises, do people all go mad?”
Zhide looked out the window. “They do go mad. Once capital becomes hot, every story can be sold for money. An idea has not yet been made into anything, but its valuation has already flown into the sky. A website has not yet made a profit, but investors are already fighting to send it money. When a bubble rises, the cleverest people and the greediest people often sit at the same table, and no one can tell who truly understands and who only pretends to understand.”
Yide laughed. “Then it is not so different from real estate.”
“Not so different,” Zhide said. “The bubble in real estate comes from everyone believing land will rise forever. The bubble on the internet comes from everyone believing users will always come, and traffic will always be valuable. A bubble rises because people believe in the future. A bubble falls because the future fails to arrive on time. But bubbles are not entirely bad. They burn through a great deal of money, but they also leave many roads behind. Highways, talent, companies, technologies—many of them are built within bubbles. The truly capable person is not the one who avoids bubbles completely, but the one who can see clearly, inside the bubble, what will burst and what will remain.”
Yide held the coffee without drinking for a long while.
These words made his heart grow hot. In the past, he had thought commerce meant buying low and selling high, taking land and putting up buildings, seizing an advantage one step ahead through relationships. Only after arriving here did he discover that a truly mature market was not built only by piling up resources. It also rewarded imagination. It rewarded risk-taking within rules. It rewarded beginning again after failure. American freedom did not mean no one controlled anything; it meant people were allowed to try and fail. American openness did not mean there were no thresholds; it meant the thresholds were not written only in origin and relationships, but also in technology, credit, contracts, and the ability to express value.
Toward evening, the sky gradually darkened. Wind passed through the woods in front of the campus, and the leaves rustled softly. The two brothers left the little café and drove to Zhide’s apartment by the hills.
It was a small apartment, near a slope, with several tall trees outside. The furnishings were simple: a desk, a computer, several rows of books, an old sofa. In the kitchen were half a bag of rice and several packets of instant noodles. Looking out the window, one could see the mountain shadows in the distance and scattered lights. The American night came very quietly. There was none of the clamor of Canton’s night markets, none of the roar of construction sites. Only the refrigerator hummed softly. Once in a while, headlights swept across the mountain road and quickly vanished.
Yide sat on the sofa and suddenly laughed. “You are a doctoral student, yet you live worse than my company driver.”
Zhide laughed too. “Many opportunities in America are thought up in places like this. Garages, dormitories, small apartments—a few people, one computer, one idea. Here, people are not afraid of being small. They are afraid of having no idea.”
That night, they talked for a very long time.
They talked about how the internet erased distance. They talked about whether large numbers of Chinese people would go abroad in the future. They talked about international students needing housing, cars, schools, and help with paperwork. They talked about how Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, lawyers, accountants, and real estate agents grew around immigrant communities. Zhide said that the American market looked free, but its rules were very detailed; contracts, taxes, credit, insurance, and law—none could be handled carelessly. Yide said Chinese bosses had courage and moved quickly, but once they came to America, if they did not understand the rules, the greater their courage, the harder they would fall.
The more they talked, the more excited they became.
Yide discovered that he had originally thought of America only as a distant consumer market. Only now did he understand that it was more like an enormous net. Universities connected to technology; technology connected to capital; capital connected to companies; companies connected to markets; and markets connected again to immigration, housing, services, and trade. This place was not necessarily easier than China, but its opportunities were more scattered and more transparent. No one would automatically make way for you because you were a newcomer. But as long as you found a demand, observed the rules, and explained your value clearly, the market might give you one chance.
“In China,” Yide said, “many businesses must first find people, then find money, then find a project. Is it the other way around here? First have an idea, then find people, then find money?”
Zhide thought for a moment. “More or less. But ideas themselves are not worth money. Only what can be made is worth money. Americans like to hear stories, but in the end they still look at data, contracts, growth, and cash flow. People here dare to invest in the future, but they also turn their faces very quickly. If you can persuade them, they give you money. If you cannot deliver, they replace you at once.”
Yide nodded.
He liked this coldness. Compared with so many unclear, unspoken relationships in China, maintained through banquets and face, this coldness made him feel refreshed. The American market was like winter air—cold, yet transparent. It was not like the mists of Lingnan—warm, but at times making it impossible to see the road.
Deep into the night, they called home.
From the other end of the telephone, their parents’ voices came from their distant hometown, carrying the familiar accent and a slight electric current. Their mother asked whether Zhide was eating well, asked whether Yide was cold in America, and reminded the two brothers to take care of each other while abroad. Their father said little. He only said, “When a man is outside, his vision must be broad, but his heart must also be guarded. When you see what is good, learn from it. When you see what is disorderly, do not follow it into disorder.”
As Yide listened, his eyes grew a little sore.
He suddenly thought of the muddy roads of their hometown when he was small, of his father’s back as he returned carrying a shoulder pole, of his mother boiling porridge before the stove, of the brothers crowded around one table eating together. In those days, none of them could have imagined that one day two brothers would sit in a small apartment by a hillside on the other side of the Pacific, talking about the internet, investment, bubbles, and an age that had not yet fully arrived.
After they hung up, the room became quiet.
Zhide turned on the computer. The screen lit up, shining upon his face. Yide stood by the window, looking at the mountains and the night outside. The California winter night was clear and cold. The sky was deep as ink. A few lights were scattered on the slope in the distance, like stars that had not yet joined into a city. Yet in his heart, something burning hot was slowly rising.
He knew that this trip to America was not merely to see his younger brother.
He had come to see another kind of commercial civilization: one that connected campus to market, technology to capital, failure to beginning again. Here, no one guaranteed that you would become rich, and no one bore the bottom for you. Here there was freedom, and therefore cruelty; openness, and therefore competition; clear rules, and therefore not many excuses. Yet precisely because of this, Yide felt excited.
He thought that at the crowded real estate table in China, perhaps he was only someone who had arrived late. But between China and America, between technology, overseas study, Chinese community services, investment information, and emerging markets, perhaps there was still a road others had not fully seen.
That road was not on the map.
It lay in the conversation between the two brothers that night, in the cold mountain wind outside the window, in the blue glow of the computer screen, and also in the ambition newly kindled in Yide’s heart.
California’s winter was very cold.
Yet Ma Yide felt that in his own heart, a spring had quietly begun.