The Five Brothers' Dream

Yide arrived finally in New York.
When the plane landed, outside the window stretched a lead-gray sky. The clouds pressed very low, like a length of damp old woolen cloth draped over the whole city. Beside the airport runway, snow that had not yet fully melted lay in patches. Wind swept beneath the wings, carrying the hard cold particular to a northern winter. California’s sunlight, Miami’s sea wind, the open wilderness of Texas—all seemed to have been left far behind in that moment. What New York offered him in welcome was not tenderness, but a tension that came straight at the face.
The taxi drove out of the airport, and the scenery beyond the window changed little by little. First came gray elevated roads, warehouses, parking lots; then dense streams of traffic, bridges, tunnels, and, farther away, the gradually sharpening outlines of towers. The driver was Indian, wearing a wool hat, with soft music playing in the car. He glanced at Yide through the rearview mirror and asked, “First time in New York?”
Yide nodded. “Yes. Last stop before China.”
The driver laughed. “Good. New York will not let you sleep.”
Yide laughed too. Looking ahead at the buildings rising higher and higher, he thought this sentence sounded exactly like New York. This city seemed born not to allow anyone to sleep too peacefully. It excited people, and it exhausted them. It let them see hope, yet at any moment it also made them feel that they were only one tiny grain of dust among the crowd.
He did not go first to his hotel. Instead, he asked the driver to take him near Central Park.
When he got out of the car, the wind rushed immediately against his face. New York’s winter wind was far colder than California’s, like a knife sharpened between the buildings. Most of the trees in Central Park had already shed their leaves. Their dark, thin branches stretched toward the sky. A light frost lay upon the grass, and in the distance a few squirrels leapt back and forth near the roots of trees. There were still many runners. Some wore thick athletic clothes; some had headphones over their ears; the white breath they exhaled scattered into the air in little clouds. A horse carriage passed slowly by the roadside, its wheels rolling over the cold, damp pavement with a soft sound.
Standing at the edge of the park, Yide suddenly felt that New York was strange. It had placed its softest piece of green land in the very center of the hardest forest of steel in the world. Around it were towers, money, companies, finance, and the desires of countless people behind pane after pane of glass. Yet in the middle, it had left this great stretch of trees, water, grass, and winter silence. However urgent this city was, it had still left itself one place to breathe.
He walked slowly north along the park.
On the road there was a hot dog cart, steam rising from its metal trays, carrying the smell of onions and mustard. The vendor was a Middle Eastern-looking man. Seeing Yide stop, he called out, “Hot dog? Coffee?”
Yide bought a cup of coffee. Holding the paper cup in his hands, he felt the heat slowly warm his fingertips. The vendor asked where he was from, and Yide said China. The man smiled and said, “Everybody comes from somewhere. In New York, nobody asks too much. You work, you pay, you move.”
Yide listened, and something stirred in his heart. Everyone came from somewhere; everyone carried his own past, yet New York pushed them all forward. Here, it did not ask about your old identity, your family standing back home, whether you had once been respectable or poor. It asked only: Can you stand? Can you pay the rent? Can you keep from being swept away in this current of people?
作者：the time he walked north to Columbia University, the weather had cleared slightly, and a faint light seeped through the cracks in the clouds.
The stone steps of the campus were solemn and quiet. The columns before the library were like ancient gates. Students hurried past holding books, their scarves fluttering in the wind. This place was entirely different from Stanford. Stanford was sunlight, lawns, red tiles, and an open campus, like planting thought in the soil. Columbia was set within the city, like a hard tooth biting into the northern blocks of Manhattan. It did not have California’s ease, but it possessed a New York depth and urgency. Learning here did not withdraw from the world; it was tightly surrounded by the world.
Yide sat for a while on the campus steps. Beside him, two students were arguing about something. One said financial markets had to be read through models; the other said models could never keep up with human fear. Yide half understood and half did not, yet he found it interesting. Along this journey, he had seen that American universities were not merely places for teaching. Stanford was connected to technology and entrepreneurship; Columbia was connected to finance, media, law, and international politics. A campus was not an ivory tower, but a sharpening room beside the heart of the city, where young people sharpened knowledge, ambition, and the edge with which they would enter the world.
In the afternoon, he took the subway south.
What shook him about the New York subway was not its cleanliness, but its truth. The platforms were somewhat old. From deep in the tracks came a rumbling sound. Wind rushed out first from the darkness, and only afterward did the lights of the train appear. Inside the carriage sat all kinds of people: a white man in a suit and polished shoes, a Latina mother holding a child, a young girl carrying a drawing board, a Black teenager wearing headphones, and several Chinese-speaking tourists. Some read newspapers, some dozed, some stared at their phones, some looked out toward the dark tunnel beyond the window. No one paid much attention to anyone else. Each person was like a small island in motion.
The train carried him to Midtown.
When he came up from underground, the crowd on Fifth Avenue surged toward him like a tide. The shopwindows were bright, the traffic dense, and flags along the roadside snapped sharply in the wind. Elegant stores stood one after another. Behind glass were jewelry, leather bags, perfumes, suits, and the faces of mannequins, calm as though without joy or anger. Yide walked along the sidewalk and saw women in mink coats, and also homeless men wrapped in blankets; tourists raising cameras, and delivery workers pushing carts through gaps in the crowd. Wealth and poverty were separated only by a pane of glass. Respectability and destitution brushed past one another on the same street corner.
He looked up and saw Trump Tower.
In the winter light, the building seemed sharp, its golden letters flamboyant and confident. Few people came and went at the entrance, yet tourists continually stopped to take photographs. Yide stood across the street and looked for a while. He thought of those bosses in the Pearl River Delta who had only just become rich, and of many people in China who were infatuated with tall buildings, famous brands, and golden decoration. He suddenly felt that certain languages in the world of commerce were universal: high, bright, expensive, hard—making people feel pressure before they had even stepped inside. A building was not only a building. It spoke to the people across the street: Look, this is the shape of success.
Farther south, the wind on Sixth Avenue was even sharper. The tall buildings formed a long canyon, and wind poured through from both sides, blowing newspapers along the ground as they rolled and flipped. At a street corner, Yide asked for directions. A young office worker in a black overcoat stopped. Hearing that he wanted to go to Macy’s, he pointed into the distance and said, “Keep walking south, then west a little. You can’t miss it. Big red sign.”
Yide thanked him. The young man smiled once, then hurried back into the human current.
Macy’s was indeed enormous. Its size was not the lively crowdedness of a Guangdong department store, but the volume of an old commercial empire. People came and went at the entrance. Shopping bags swung in their hands. Elevators moved up and down. The smells of perfume, leather, and coffee mingled together. Standing on the first floor and looking at the dazzling array of goods, Yide thought of the broad shopping centers of Los Angeles, and then of the department stores now rising in China. He felt that New York retail was like an old machine: many gears, a long history, parts already somewhat worn, yet still possessing astonishing capacity. Shopping here was not merely buying things. It was being swept into the city’s prosperity, and for a brief time believing that one too belonged to this brightness.
Toward evening, he continued south and arrived near Seventh and Eighth Streets.
In winter, darkness came early. Streetlights lit one after another. Near New York University, the atmosphere suddenly became much younger. Bookstores, cafés, little restaurants, record shops, bars, and all kinds of strange small stores crowded together. Students crossed the street corners with backpacks, and laughter, car noise, and music mixed into one sound. There was a black cube standing quietly amid the flow of people, like a riddle the city had casually placed there. Children pushed it, students leaned against it, tourists circled it to take photographs. Yide stood nearby and looked for a while. He felt that it was like a secret sign of New York: within order there was play, within seriousness there was absurdity, and within steel and concrete there was still a little mischief.
Walking nearby, he felt hungry, so he sat down in a small shop by the street and ordered fried chicken, French fries, and a Coke.
The shop was very warm. A thin layer of mist had formed on the glass windows. The girl behind the counter moved briskly and asked whether he wanted hot sauce. Yide nodded. Beside him sat several university students talking about movies and exams. A Black young man entered with a guitar, bought a Coke, and sat in the corner tuning the strings. Yide took a bite of fried chicken. The skin was very crisp, and the aroma of hot oil spread at once. He suddenly laughed. After walking through so many cities, seeing so many towers, bridges, casinos, beaches, and universities, what finally settled a traveler was a piece of hot fried chicken and a cold cup of Coke.
He sat down in the little square by the black cube. The Black young man beside him plucked his guitar twice and softly sang one line. A student nearby laughed and said, “Man, not here, too cold outside?” The young man shrugged. “Music pays better inside.”
The people around them laughed.
Yide laughed too. He did not fully understand all their words, but he understood the ease in them. New York was cold and hard, yet everywhere it had these tiny pockets of warmth: a cup of coffee, a joke, a piece of music, a piece of fried chicken, a hand willing to stop in the cold wind and point the way.
When he came out from around NYU, night had fully fallen.
Near Washington Square there were street performers, and the sound of a piano drifted out from the crowd. The arch appeared white and quiet beneath the lights. Students and tourists passed under it like a ceaselessly flowing river. Standing there, Yide suddenly thought: if Stanford was a field, and Columbia was a knife, then NYU was a street. It had no boundary with the city. Outside the classroom was the crowd; outside the library was the café. As soon as thought stepped through the door, it met market, art, poverty, love, and noise.
At night, he finally headed toward Manhattan’s Chinatown.
The farther south he went, the more familiar the smells became. Chinese signs gradually multiplied: roast meats, seafood, bakeries, herbal medicine, travel agencies, accounting offices, long-distance buses—like a street from a distant hometown. The lights of the shops were not as splendid as Fifth Avenue, yet they were more full of human smoke and fire. Someone called out prices in Cantonese. Someone pushed a goods cart in and out through a back door. Old people walked slowly carrying vegetables. Young people stood at shop entrances smoking. The smell of fish, ginger and scallion, hot soup, and cold winter night air mingled together, and Yide suddenly felt his chest soften.
His hotel was near Chinatown. It was not large, and the storefront was somewhat old. The front desk clerk was a middle-aged Chinese man. Hearing Yide speak Cantonese, he looked up and smiled. “Just arrived in New York?”
“Yes. I walked all day today.”
“You cannot walk through New York in one day.” The man handed him the room card. “Walk for ten years, and there will still be places you have not seen.”
Yide accepted the card and said, “But today has already given me enough to think about.”
Entering the room, he put down his luggage and walked to the window. Outside were the streetlights of lower Manhattan. Farther away, the lights of tall buildings were like a sheet of cold stars. Downstairs, people were still talking. Cars passed. There was the sound of an iron gate being pulled down, and also the clang of a wok from the back kitchen of a restaurant. New York was never truly quiet. It merely lowered its voice and continued operating through the night.
Yide stood there for a long time.
He thought of the road he had taken that day: from the cold wind of the airport to the bare trees of Central Park; from the stone steps of Columbia to the shopwindows of Fifth Avenue; from the golden sign of Trump Tower to the surging shopping crowds of Macy’s; from the black cube of Seventh and Eighth Streets to the young lights of NYU; from the heat of fried chicken, French fries, and Coke to the familiar hometown sounds of Chinatown. New York was like a thick book. Not one page was gentle, yet every page was full of opportunity.
The opportunities here were not glittering like Las Vegas, nor passionate like Miami, still less fragrant with California idealism. New York’s opportunities were colder, harder, more direct. They were hidden in rent, in human flow, in the elevators of financial buildings, in the hot dog carts by the street, in immigrants’ backpacks, and under the feet of every person who refused to stop.
Yide suddenly understood that New York was not a city that welcomed people.
New York was a city that tested people.
It did not ask how beautiful your wishes were; it only watched whether you could stand firm in the cold wind. It did not care where you came from; it only watched whether you could find your own position on this street. It gave people pressure, and it also gave them a measure. If a person could understand New York, he would know that the commerce of the world did not consist only of land, goods, and relationships. It also consisted of speed, density, credit, human flow, culture, and endless unfamiliar demands.
The night deepened.
Yide drew the curtains. In the room, only a small lamp remained lit. He took off his coat and suddenly felt that his feet were sore, but his heart was bright. This journey through America, from the West Coast to the East Coast, was like a long thread stringing together technology, scenery, desire, land, ocean, universities, immigrants, and finance. In New York, that thread had finally tied itself into a knot.
And that knot was tied inside his heart.
He knew that after returning to China, he would surely look at business differently, and look at himself differently as well. The world was too large, the cities too many, the opportunities too deep. If a merchant guarded only his original abacus, sooner or later the age would close the account book on him. Only by stretching one’s feet farther and placing one’s eyes higher could one hear the wind before it began to rise.
Outside the window, Manhattan was still shining.
That light was cold.
Yet from the distance, it seemed to be calling.