The Five Brothers' Dream

This was his last afternoon in America.
There were no magnificent buildings, no broad sea, no stone columns of the stock exchange, and no sunlit lawns of Stanford. There was only a small garden, several small trees, a graffiti wall, an advertisement, a few strangers, and a little dog that had mistakenly believed his shopping bags contained food. Yet strangely, Yide felt that this moment was most like America.
America was not a neat answer. It was a pile of things placed side by side: skyscrapers and homeless men, universities and casinos, finance and fried chicken, luxury advertisements and graffiti on walls, dessert shops with lines and ice cream in the cold wind, strangers’ jokes and everyone’s deeply hidden loneliness. It placed many contradictions on the same street, yet did not hurry to explain them to you. It only let you look, let you walk, and let you rearrange them inside your own heart.
From the shopping bag, Yide took out a small notebook he had just bought.
The cover was simple, black, with hard, clean edges. He took out a pen and wanted to write a few lines, but for a moment did not know where to begin. In the end, he wrote only three words:
Hong Kong. Internet. Mainland.
After writing these six Chinese characters, he looked at them for a long time.
After this whole journey, the vague thought in his heart finally began slowly to take shape. The road of real estate was not something he would abandon, but it could no longer be walked as before. The mainland market was too large, with too many opportunities, and too crowded as well. If he charged directly into it, he might not have any advantage over state-owned enterprises, Hong Kong capital, and local giants. But Hong Kong was different. Hong Kong had funds, law, international vision, a financial window, and the commercial sense closest to the mainland. If he first gained a footing in Hong Kong, then used the internet to open a road, connecting the scattered demands of information, services, investment, property, overseas study, and trade, and then turned back to enter the mainland market, perhaps he would not be fighting others for one piece of land. He would be building a bridge.
A bridge was lighter than land.
A bridge also reached farther than land.
The more Yide thought, the brighter his heart became.
He remembered what Zhide had said at Stanford: the location of the internet is not beside the road, but at the information crossroads people pass through every day. At the time, he had only found it fresh. Now, after traveling through America, he truly understood. Every street in New York was an entrance. Wall Street was the entrance to capital. Chinatown was the entrance to immigration. SoHo was the entrance to consumption and fashion. Little Italy was the entrance to food and feeling. Universities were entrances to knowledge. Airports were entrances to movement. The essence of business was to guard the entrance, connect demand, and allow strangers and money that had never met to encounter one another.
What if Hong Kong were treated as an entrance?
Mainland enterprises wanted to go out. Funds wanted to go out. Students wanted to go out. Goods wanted to go out. Overseas capital wanted to come in. Technology wanted to come in. Brands wanted to come in. Ideas wanted to come in. In the past, all of this had depended on acquaintances, intermediaries, banquets, faxes, and business cards. In the future, could it depend on a faster information platform? Could one first do information, then service; first gather people, then gather money; first test the waters with light assets, then seek heavy-asset opportunities? Could the new knife of the internet be used to cut open the thick meat of traditional commerce?
At this thought, Yide’s breathing quickened slightly.
He was not from a technical background, but he understood markets. He did not understand code, but he understood the human heart. He knew who was anxious, who wanted speed, who wanted convenience, who was willing to pay for safety and ease. Technology could be left to people like Zhide. The model could be designed by those who understood the field. Capital could be found in Hong Kong. The market waited broadly in the mainland. One person did not need to know how to do everything. The key was knowing where one stood, and knowing which people should be pulled to the same table.
The sky over the little garden gradually darkened.
The model in the advertisement appeared even colder and more glamorous in the dusk, while the graffiti on the wall seemed instead to brighten. Streetlights lit one by one. Pedestrians’ footsteps grew more hurried than in the afternoon. Nearby restaurants began to grow lively. People lined up at entrances waiting for tables, and laughter and the clatter of plates came from within. New York’s dinner culture was like a small festival repeated day after day. During the day, people ran through offices, schools, subways, and streets. At night, they handed themselves over to restaurant light, friends’ conversation, the sound of wineglasses, and a hot meal. However hard life was, at night one still had to eat like a human being.
Yide thought that after returning home, he must also invite Zhide to a good meal. He would bring a fountain pen to Lide, gifts to his parents, and tell everyone at home about the things he had seen along the road. He would speak of the fog in San Francisco, the sunlight in Los Angeles, the lights of the gambling city, the great roads of Texas, the sea of Miami, the wind of New York, the bronze bull of Wall Street, and the little garden in SoHo. But some things could not be spoken; they could only become action.
He closed the notebook and put it back into the bag.
At that moment, his thoughts had already flown back to China. Across the Pacific, to Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, to the office towers of Central, to the city growing day and night across the Shenzhen River, to the lands in southern Canton that had once made him unwilling to accept defeat, to the roaring factories and newly built roads of the Pearl River Delta. He seemed to see the outline of a new game slowly appearing behind the clouds.
It was not retreating.
It was circling once, then returning.
A true merchant could not only know how to charge forward. He also had to know when to turn. Turning was not yielding, but searching for a greater slope. Taking a detour was not cowardice, but a way to strike from a higher place. Yide suddenly felt that this journey to America had not simply been sightseeing, nor merely a way to broaden his eyes. It was like a long rehearsal, taking him to different cities, letting him see different commercial logics, and finally placing him in this small garden so that he could quietly ask himself: Where, exactly, should the next step go?
The answer had already been written in the notebook.
Hong Kong.
Internet.
Mainland.
These six characters were like three nails, temporarily fixing his future in place.
The sky grew darker, and the wind cooler. Yide stood up and picked up the gift bags. The little dog ran over from the distance again. This time it did not sniff his bags, only barked once at him, as though saying farewell. Yide waved to it and smiled.
“No food left. Only a business plan.”
The dog, of course, did not understand, but it wagged its tail.
Yide walked along the street toward his hotel. The shopwindows of SoHo had lit up. The restaurants of Little Italy had lit up. People were still lining up outside the dessert shop. The great ice cream cone, standing in the winter night, looked both ridiculous and lovely. New York spread the lights of its final evening beneath his feet, like a farewell, and also like an urging.
He turned back and looked once more at that small garden.
The few small trees still stood in the wind. The graffiti on the wall said nothing. The luxury advertisement gleamed coldly beneath the lights. The crowds coming and going did not stop, and the city did not slow even half a step because of one Chinese merchant’s departure. Yet Yide knew that this afternoon had already remained inside his life.
Here, his American journey had come to a perfect end.
He carried away gifts, photographs, the faint fragrance of pastries, and also a larger thought.
The airplane would carry him back to the East.
But his heart had already arrived, one step earlier, at the next battlefield.
***
That night, in his New York hotel, Yide called home.
On the other end of the telephone, his mother’s voice carried both happiness and worry. She said that the fifth son, Xinde, had also graduated—from the philosophy department of Fudan University. He had studied well, and his character was quiet and clean. Yet now that it was truly time to find work, he did not know where he ought to go.
His father took the telephone beside her and said, “Philosophy is a thing that sounds lofty when spoken of, but once it falls upon the rice bowl, it becomes difficult. Staying at the university to teach would be a steady road, but there may not be a place for him. Going to a publishing house as an editor would also suit his studies. In the future, if he writes some articles, perhaps he might even become a writer. Only that road is too slow, too poor and plain. I fear he may not endure it.”
His mother added, “His nature is not like yours. He does not know how to charge forward in the same way. Why not let him follow you for a while first? Let him see some of the world inside your company, learn how things are done. It will not prevent him from finding something more suitable later.”
Yide held the telephone and looked out at the New York night beyond the window. For a moment, he said nothing.
He thought of his fifth brother as a child, sitting on the threshold with a book in his hands. When others ran out to play, he lowered his head and read as though lost in it. Such a person had mountains and rivers in his heart, and also solitude. To send him into the marketplace might not be suitable; yet to let him guard only one writing desk seemed dangerous too, for the age was running too fast.
“Let him come back first,” Yide finally said. “A road is not fixed dead all at once. Whether he works with me for a while or goes to a publishing house, the important thing is not to let the fire in his heart go out.”