The Five Brothers' Dream

On the day he left Stanford, the morning mist still lay at the foot of the hills.
Zhide accompanied him to the station. The two brothers stood by the roadside, neither saying very much. The trees of a California winter were not desolate; some leaves had turned yellow, while others remained green. Sunlight leaked through the branches and fell thinly upon the suitcase. Zhide straightened the collar of Yide’s coat for him and smiled.
“Second Brother, it is good for you to go out and see more. America is not one place. It is many places.”
Yide nodded. “I want to see it for myself.”
When the car began to move, he looked out through the window and saw his younger brother still standing by the roadside, a backpack on his shoulders, his figure growing smaller and smaller. At that moment, Yide suddenly felt something strange. In the past, the brothers had eaten at the same table in their hometown. Now one remained on the far shore of the Pacific to study for a doctorate, while the other, carrying half a lifetime of dust from the sea of commerce, continued forward. Fate was like a very long highway: it sent people to different places, and then, on some morning, made them set out again.
He first went to San Francisco.
San Francisco was a city wrapped in sea fog. By day, mist rose from the bay and lightly wound itself around the hillsides and buildings. When the wind blew, flags along the streets snapped and fluttered, and in the air there was the smell of sea salt, coffee, and damp wood. Standing near the Golden Gate Bridge, Yide saw that red bridge spanning the strait, half in sunlight and half hidden in fog, like a vast stringed instrument gently plucked by the wind of the Pacific.
He met an old man selling postcards. The man’s hair was gray, and he wore an old hat. Seeing Yide gaze at the bridge as though lost in thought, the old man smiled and asked, “First time here?”
Yide understood. He nodded and answered in somewhat halting English, “Yes, first time. Very beautiful.”
The old man handed him a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge. “Fog makes it more beautiful. If everything is clear, people look once and leave. With fog, they keep imagining.”
Yide was startled for a moment, then suddenly felt there was something very interesting in those words. If everything was perfectly clear, there was no room for imagination. But if there was a layer of mist, people were willing to look once more, to take one more step. Was business not the same? Opportunities that were too clear were seen by everyone and divided up long ago. Truly enticing opportunities always carried a little fog. One could not see them completely, yet one was unwilling to leave.
He walked for a long time through San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The streets were not broad. Lanterns hung in the air. Red papers were pasted at shop entrances. In the glass windows of roast-meat shops hung glossy ducks, and from herbal medicine stores came the smell of dried tangerine peel, codonopsis, and American ginseng. Several old people sat at a street corner, speaking Cantonese about rice prices back home and the studies of their children and grandchildren. Yide entered a small restaurant and ordered a bowl of wonton noodles. The proprietress heard his accent and asked, “From Southern Yue?”
Yide smiled. “From around Ruizhou.”
The proprietress cleared a table as she spoke. “Our generation did everything when we came here. Washing dishes, carrying plates, opening shops, saving one cent at a time. Is America good? It is good, and also not good. Good because if you are willing to work, there is always food to eat. Not good because no one feels sorry for you.”
That sentence was plain as a bowl of hot soup, yet Yide remembered it for a long time. So America’s freedom was not a light and floating freedom. It had wind, cold, loneliness, and also pairs of hands made rough from washing dishes.
From San Francisco, Yide went south to Los Angeles.
When the plane landed, what lay outside the window was a vast spread of sunlight. Los Angeles was not restrained like San Francisco. It was bright, broad, and open, like a city stretching both arms wide. Freeways looped layer upon layer. Cars, like schools of silver fish, flowed soundlessly beneath the sun. Palm trees stood tall, their shadows falling upon the road, slender and carefree.
Yide rode in a taxi through the city. The driver was Mexican, dark-skinned and warm in speech. He asked where Yide came from, and Yide said China. The driver laughed and said, “China, big country. America also big. Here, everybody drives. No car, no life.”
Yide looked at the endless stream of traffic outside the window and felt that the sentence was both a joke and a truth. Here, a city was not measured by the feet, but by wheels. The houses were not necessarily tall, and the streets not necessarily lively, but wherever roads reached, shopping centers opened; wherever roads reached, warehouses were built; wherever roads reached, business followed. America’s prosperity was not all gathered upon one busy commercial street. It lay within this enormous web of roads.
He went to Hollywood, and he also went to neighborhoods where Chinese people gathered. On Hollywood Boulevard, tourists crouched on the ground looking for the names of stars. Along the street, people dressed as movie characters posed for photographs with visitors. On the distant hillside, the great letters stood like a signboard that would never lower its curtain. Looking at the souvenir shops, cinemas, studios, and tour buses, Yide suddenly understood that stories too could become an industry, and dreams too could be sold for money. So long as a place knew how to tell stories, hillsides, streets, old houses, and lights could all become commodities.
In the Chinese district, he saw Chinese-language newspapers piled at the entrance of a supermarket. Real estate advertisements took up entire pages: buying houses, renting houses, loans, immigration, overseas study, insurance. Yide picked one up and turned through it again and again, his heart quietly brightening. So the life of Chinese people in America also revolved around houses, children, status, and the need for security. Only here the rules were different, the language was different, and trust was built more slowly. Whoever could become a bridge in this middle ground might find a business.
After that, he went to Las Vegas.
Leaving Los Angeles, the scenery outside the car window gradually turned desolate. The desert opened wide. Distant mountains were like sleeping beasts. The sky was so large it seemed to have no edge. At dusk, Las Vegas suddenly appeared ahead. It did not emerge slowly like an ordinary city; it was more like a lamp suddenly switched on. In the middle of the wasteland, neon lights, hotels, fountains, music, and enormous advertisements surged toward him all at once, as though someone had moved all the desires of the human world onto this one street and made them shine at night.
When Yide walked into a casino, his ears were filled with the chiming of slot machines. The carpet was soft, the lights warm, and there were no windows in the air, nor any sense of time. A middle-aged American man sat beside a roulette table, a glass of wine at hand. Seeing Yide standing and watching, he smiled and asked, “You play?”
Yide shook his head. “Just watching.”
The man shrugged. “Watching is safer. Playing is more fun.”
Yide smiled too. After a while, the man lost several chips, yet his expression remained relaxed. “You know, people come here not to win money. They come here to feel lucky.”
Yide’s heart stirred. People did not come here to win money; they came to feel that they might win. What casinos sold was not the game of cards or wheels, but the illusion of luck. When business reached this level, it had already seen very deeply into the human heart. It knew that people feared ordinariness, feared hopelessness, feared remaining all their lives the same person they had always been. So it gave them a lamp, a table, a chip, and in a few brief minutes allowed them to believe that fate might turn and look at them once.
Deep in the night, he walked alone along the Strip. The fountains rose and fell with the music, water scattering beneath the lights like broken silver. Some people laughed, some embraced, and some lay drunk by the roadside. Yide suddenly thought of the construction sites of the Pearl River Delta. The lights there belonged to cranes and searchlamps; the lights here belonged to neon and desire. Over there, people gambled that land would rise. Here, people gambled that the next hand would win. The forms of business under Heaven were different, yet at their deepest root they could not escape two words: the human heart.
Later, he flew to Texas.
Texas gave him the feeling of vastness. As the plane descended, he saw the earth spread flat, highways running straight, cloud shadows moving slowly. This place did not have California’s elegance, nor the casino city’s enchantment, yet it possessed a steady and rough strength. Wind blew across the plains, carrying the smell of dry grass, soil, and gasoline. Large pickup trucks passed one after another by the roadside. The steaks in restaurants were alarmingly thick, and the coffee was strong enough to taste bitter.
At a roadside restaurant, Yide shared a table with a truck driver. The man was tall, with a heavy beard. Before eating, he removed his hat and nodded to him. They spoke for a few moments, and the driver said he spent more than half the year on the road, carrying goods from Texas to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Atlanta.
“Don’t you feel lonely?” Yide asked.
The driver thought for a moment and said, “Sometimes. But road gives me work. Work gives me life.”
Listening, Yide suddenly felt solemn. The road gives him work, and work gives him life. What a simple sentence, yet it spoke the sinews and bones of a country. America’s prosperity was not only Wall Street and Silicon Valley, not only universities and movies. It was also in the trucks on these long highways, in warehouses, oil wells, ranches, and the labor of countless ordinary people. Without these coarse and hard things, even the most beautiful finance and technology would be nothing but towers in the air.
Texas quieted Yide considerably. He saw another form of land: no longer the inch-by-inch, ounce-by-ounce land of the Pearl River Delta, but land vast, heavy, and carrying the temperament of nature. The people here spoke directly and did things directly. They liked big cars, big houses, big skies. Yide felt that the commerce of a place often grew in the likeness of its soil and wind. Where waterways were dense, people were flexible. Where land was vast, people were expansive. In port cities, people knew how to do business that flowed. In desert gambling cities, people knew how to turn illusion into gold mines.
At last, he arrived in Miami.
Miami in winter was like a passionate dream. As soon as he left the plane, warm damp wind rushed against his face, carrying the smell of seawater, palm trees, perfume, and music. On the streets there was English, and there was Spanish. Some people came out of office buildings in suits, while others walked barefoot from the beach. White sand, blue sea, colorful houses—all seemed washed by sunlight, so bright that even the heart loosened.
By the sea, Yide met a young man selling coconuts. His skin was dark and his smile brilliant. He cut open a coconut and handed it to Yide, saying in accented English, “Miami is not America, not Latin America. It is both.”
Yide took a drink of the cool coconut water and looked toward the sea. He felt the sentence was well said. Miami was like a door: one side connected to America, the other to the Caribbean and the Latin world. People, money, languages, goods, music, and dreams all moved in and out from here. It was not foggy like San Francisco, not spread wide like Los Angeles, not vast like Texas, and not dreamlike like Las Vegas. It was hot, bright, and flowing, like sea waves striking the shore without pause.
At dusk, Yide sat alone on the beach.
The sun slowly sank, and the sea surface was dyed gold and red. In the distance, a yacht passed, leaving behind a white streak upon the water. Children ran along the sand. Couples leaned together and watched the sea. An old man slowly put away his fishing rod. Yide suddenly felt that along this journey he had seen not only American cities, but also how a country placed different desires in different places.
San Francisco showed him the bridge in the fog and the endurance of immigrants.
Los Angeles showed him consumption, roads, and the industry of stories beneath the sunlight.
Las Vegas showed him how desire could be packaged into a splendid illusion.
Texas showed him the strength of land, highways, and ordinary labor.
Miami showed him the ocean, the tropics, and the business born from the meeting of many cultures.
He thought that commerce had never been simple buying and selling. Commerce was looking at people, looking at roads, looking at the soil and wind of a place, looking at why the people there rose early, why they hurried about, why they were lonely, why they were willing to hand over their money. Some paid for safety. Some paid for happiness. Some paid for status. Some paid for hope. If a merchant saw only the prices on the shelves, he would forever do only small business. Only when he saw the human heart behind those prices could he truly go far.
Sea wind blew over, carrying a faint saltiness.
Yide remembered his father’s words: the vision must be opened, and the heart must also be guarded. At this moment he finally understood that opening one’s vision did not mean wanting more greedily. It meant knowing that the world was vast, that there were many roads, and that in one lifetime, a person did not have to fight forever at one table over one piece of meat. Guarding the heart did not mean refusing risk. It meant that amid prosperity, temptation, illusion, and applause, one still remembered where one came from, why one set out, and what in the end one must carry back.
Night gradually fell, and lights along the shore lit one by one.
Yide stood up, patted the fine sand from his trouser legs, and looked toward the broad Atlantic. In the distance there were no acquaintances, no brothers, no promises made over wine, and none of those crowded land parcels and difficult human obligations back home. Yet his heart was not lonely. For this journey through mountains and seas, cities and neon, highways and the words of strangers had already laid out a new map inside him.
On that map, there was not only real estate.
There was technology, movement, service, culture, immigration, education, trade, and countless opportunities that had not yet been named.
He knew that in the end he would return. Return to Canton, return to the Pearl River Delta, return to that familiar, damp, lively, and cruel marketplace. But the Ma Yide who returned would no longer be the Ma Yide who had come.
When he arrived, he had carried a single breath of unwillingness.
When he returned, he carried back a sea.