The Five Brothers' Dream

Unlike the gradual distancing between him and his eldest brother Rende, Xinde and his third brother Lide, who worked at the Ruizhou court, slowly began to visit one another more often.
By rights, Ruizhou was farther from Canton. At that time, transportation was not as convenient as it later became; going back and forth by bus always consumed half a day. But distance between brothers sometimes does not lie upon the road, but in the heart. Xinde was in the Personnel Department of the Provincial Foreign Trade Administration, and Lide was in the Ruizhou Intermediate Court. One handled cadre files, transfer orders, salaries, and training; the other came into contact with case files, trials, judgments, and procedures. Both had entered government offices. Both had worn uniforms. Both had sat through long meetings. Both understood the kind of days in government office that were calm on the surface and patterned beneath. In this way, they unexpectedly had more common topics than before.
When Lide first heard that his fifth brother was doing rather well at the Foreign Trade Administration, he could not help laughing. “You rascal, weren’t you going to become a philosopher back then? How did you also run into officialdom?”
Xinde said, “Third Brother, philosophers also have to eat.”
Looking at him, Lide said half jokingly and half seriously, “I thought you would lecture on Kant at Fudan. I did not expect you to be studying cadre résumés now.”
Xinde laughed too. “Kant speaks of reason; the Personnel Department speaks of qualifications. In fact, they are not so different. Both ask what a person relies on in order to stand.”
Hearing this, Lide froze for a moment, then burst into loud laughter. “Not bad, Fifth Brother. Have you changed your nature? You speak more and more like a government cadre.”
Xinde lowered his head and drank tea, yet there was warmth in his heart. He knew that within his third brother’s words there was teasing, but also a measure of new regard. In the past, when the brothers looked at him, they always felt he was too bookish—studying philosophy, writing good characters, soft-hearted, quiet-spoken, like the one in the family least connected to earthly affairs. Now that he had entered government office, understood the measure of handling matters, and understood the twists of human feeling, Lide’s gaze toward him had changed.
Once, Lide said, “Come to Ruizhou this weekend. I’ll take you to meet someone.”
Xinde asked, “Who?”
Lide smiled somewhat subtly. “My girlfriend, and her father.”
Xinde quickly understood. The girlfriend his third brother spoke of was Zhang Yaoyao; her father was Zhang Jianqiang, the once incomparably glorious boss of Shenmoon Appliances Group in Focheng.
Xinde had long heard Zhang Jianqiang’s name.
He was a resounding figure in the rivers-and-lakes world of household appliances. What glory Shenmoon Appliances Group had once possessed: trucks forming long lines outside the factory gate, CCTV advertisements sounding every day, and on the wall of the boss’s office photographs of Zhang Jianqiang with central leaders. Many people in Focheng, when they spoke of Zhang Jianqiang, carried a legendary tone. Transferred from the army, he went traveling in Japan, carried Japanese appliances back one by one, dismantled and studied them, imitated and improved them, and built his own patents and brand. At that time, he seemed the very representative of the rough heroic entrepreneurs of the early reform era—bold, quick-handed, able to endure hardship, and daring enough to gamble with his life.
But when Xinde first met Zhang Jianqiang, he felt that the man was not entirely as he had imagined.
It was at a restaurant in Ruizhou. Lide arrived early, and Zhang Yaoyao sat beside him. She wore a light-colored coat; her features were delicate and clear. When she smiled, there was a little of the water air of Jiangnan, yet also the brightness of a wealthy Focheng family. Seeing Xinde, she stood and called, “Fifth Brother.”
For a moment, Xinde did not know whether he should accept this, and could only smile. “Miss Zhang is too courteous.”
Lide said from the side, “Just call her Yaoyao. Do not make it sound like a meeting.”
Zhang Yaoyao laughed. “Then you should also stop sounding like a court officer.”
As they were speaking, Zhang Jianqiang arrived.
He was somewhat thinner than Xinde had imagined, his complexion slightly dark, a cigarette held between his fingers. As soon as he entered, he coughed twice. He still had the bearing of a boss, his eyes still sharp, and when he sat down, he naturally took the seat of honor. Yet the spirit that had once swept across markets seemed to have been hollowed out in part by something. He smoked too much; his fingers were faintly yellow. When he spoke, his breath was not steady enough, and when he smiled, there was also fatigue in it.
“This is Lide’s fifth brother?” Zhang Jianqiang looked Xinde over. “I hear you graduated from Fudan’s philosophy department and now work at the Foreign Trade Administration?”
Xinde nodded. “I have only recently entered. I am in the Personnel Department.”
Zhang Jianqiang exhaled a mouthful of smoke and smiled. “Studying philosophy is good. When one has done business long enough, one also needs philosophy. Otherwise one cannot understand why yesterday people still lined up to buy your goods, and today no one wants them.”
The table fell quiet for a moment.
Lide took over the words. “President Zhang is still adjusting now, isn’t he? The household-appliance market is highly competitive; changing direction is normal.”
Zhang Jianqiang waved his hand. “Do not call me President Zhang. It is tiring to hear. In this age, the word boss is not easy to bear. In the past, when we made household appliances, we relied on courage, speed, and one breath of strength. Whatever the Japanese had, we dismantled it and learned it. Whatever the market lacked, we made it overnight. At that time, as soon as goods came out, people lined up to haul them away. Now it is no longer so. Happy Home Appliances, Midea, and a pile of factories—everyone can make them, and everyone dares to fight a price war. Household-appliance products have become too numerous, and profits are thin as paper.”
As he spoke, he lit another cigarette.
Zhang Yaoyao frowned. “Dad, smoke less.”
Zhang Jianqiang looked at his daughter and laughed. “You control me more strictly than the Industry and Commerce Bureau.”
Zhang Yaoyao was displeased. “You are coughing like this, and you still smoke.”
Zhang Jianqiang moved the cigarette a little farther away, yet still could not bear to put it out. “Habit. When a person grows old, if he does not smoke a little, his heart feels empty.”
Looking at him, Xinde suddenly felt that the sentence was somewhat desolate. A man who had once held machines, workers, trucks, advertisements, patents, and markets in his hands now said, “If I do not smoke a little, my heart feels empty.” That emptiness was not something cigarettes could fill. Perhaps the market had changed, the enterprise had grown old, and the methods of heroes no longer worked. Perhaps the people around him still called him boss, but he himself knew that the days when he could summon wind and rain were receding with the tide.
Zhang Jianqiang said he wanted to change his line and make road lighting.
“Streetlights have demand,” he said. “Cities must expand, roads must be built, development zones must be constructed. Everywhere needs light. Household appliances entered thousands of households, and competition became chaotic. Streetlights are different—government projects, road projects, the threshold is higher, and relationships matter more. It is not that the market is no good. It is that people must change their brains.”
Lide asked, “Are you confident?”
Zhang Jianqiang smiled. There was a little of his former boldness in it, and also a visible strain. “Where in business is there ever complete confidence? Back when I carried Japanese appliances home, who gave me confidence? But now it is different. Young people react quickly, and enterprises also have to be handed to those who understand new things. This brain of mine is still stopped in the age of dismantling machines, opening molds, and seizing markets.”
Listening, Xinde felt very complicated.
From this man, he saw the shadow of that generation of private entrepreneurs from the early reform era. They had rushed out of mud and water, their courage larger than the system, their footsteps faster than policy. But once the age changed, once markets became finer, capital, technology, brands, and management all demanded more. Their coarse and forceful methods of the past began to seem laborious. It was not that they were not intelligent. It was that the experience of one generation had suddenly become insufficient.
That night, they did not drink much, but Zhang Jianqiang drank somewhat quickly. When they were leaving, he patted Lide on the shoulder, then looked at Xinde and said, “You Ma brothers each have prospects. One in the court, one in the Foreign Trade Administration—you are both people of the state. People of the state are good. Stable. We people doing business—when the wind comes, it blows us first.”
Lide said, “Uncle Zhang, entrepreneurs also work for the country.”
Zhang Jianqiang laughed. “That is true in words. But when the wind blows, the country has a roof. Sometimes we have only an umbrella.”
Xinde remembered this sentence for many years afterward.
The second time he saw Zhang Jianqiang was already in the hospital.
That day was overcast. The sky over Ruizhou hung very low, and the air felt stifling. Lide called Xinde and said, “Uncle Zhang has been hospitalized. The situation is not good. Yaoyao asked me to go with her. If you have time, come too.”
As soon as Xinde heard the word hospital, his heart instinctively tightened. He had always disliked hospitals, even feared that disinfectant smell and the low voices in wards. But this time, he did not refuse. He thought of the man in the restaurant the last time, smoking, coughing, and still talking of transformation, and unease rose faintly in his heart.
When he arrived at the hospital, Zhang Yaoyao was standing outside the ward, her eyes red. Lide stood beside her, his expression more somber than usual. The doctor had just come out. His words were very soft, yet seemed to close a door slowly: late-stage liver cancer; the situation was not optimistic.
Xinde entered the ward and saw Zhang Jianqiang lying on the bed, almost unrecognizable.
The last time they met, although he had been tired, he was still a boss, still Zhang Jianqiang. But this time he had become terribly thin. His face was wax-yellow, his eye sockets deeply sunken, a needle inserted into the back of his hand, and the fingers that once held cigarettes lay withered outside the quilt. The ward curtain was half drawn. The light was gray and white. On the bedside cabinet were a thermos cup and several examination sheets. In the air was the smell of medicine, and also a kind of irreversible silence.
Seeing Lide and Xinde, the corners of Zhang Jianqiang’s mouth moved, revealing a bitter smile.
“You came?”
Lide went closer. “Uncle Zhang.”
Xinde also called softly, “Uncle Zhang.”
Zhang Jianqiang wanted to sit up, but could not. Lide hurriedly supported him, but he waved his hand. “No, no. Now my body no longer obeys orders. In the past, when I ran the factory, if I said how many goods must be produced today, the workshop moved. If I said which batch would be shipped tomorrow, the drivers lined up. Now look—I tell myself to sit up, and I cannot even sit up.”
After saying this, he laughed first himself. There was not much humor in that laugh; more of it was helplessness. Standing to the side, Zhang Yaoyao’s tears fell at once.
Seeing his daughter cry, Zhang Jianqiang instead frowned. “What are you crying for? As the daughter of a boss, you must save your tears. If outsiders see, they will think our Shenmoon Appliances has truly failed.”
Lide said softly, “Yaoyao is worried about you.”
Zhang Jianqiang looked at Lide, and his gaze suddenly softened a little. “Lide, you are a steady person. In the future, if she has matters, help her watch over them. Matters in an enterprise are complicated—not simpler than the court.”
Lide nodded. “Uncle Zhang, rest assured.”
Zhang Jianqiang looked again at Xinde. “You study philosophy, yes?”
Xinde had not expected him to remember and hurriedly said, “Yes.”
“Does philosophy speak of fate?”
For a moment, Xinde did not know how to answer and could only say, “It does, but in a different way.”
Zhang Jianqiang gave a bitter smile. “I did not believe in fate before. I thought that as long as a man dared to act, fate had to step aside. Now lying here, I know that sometimes fate does not argue with you. It waits until you are tired, then takes out the account book.”
The ward was very quiet.
Xinde’s throat felt as though something had blocked it. He remembered how Zhang Jianqiang had said that when the wind came, it blew them first. Only now did he understand that some winds are not the winds of market, not the winds of policy, not the winds of competition, but winds that blow from within the body. That wind is the most soundless, and also the most ruthless.
Zhang Jianqiang closed his eyes for a while, then slowly opened them again. “Household appliances or road lamps—it is all the same. Doing them, one way or another, is wanting to make life a little brighter. But in a person’s lifetime, when it is bright, he always feels it is not bright enough. Only when it darkens does he remember that many lamps were not lit in time.”
These words were very light, as though squeezed from deep in his throat. Zhang Yaoyao could finally no longer hold back and covered her mouth as she walked to the window. Lide stood at the bedside, the blue veins on the back of his hand faintly taut. Xinde lowered his head and saw a small patch of winter light on the floor beside the bed, pale as an old sheet of paper.
When they came out of the hospital, the sky had already darkened.
In the corridor, someone pushed a hospital bed past, the wheels making a soft sound. Zhang Yaoyao walked in front, her figure very thin. Lide followed behind her without speaking. Xinde walked last, and suddenly felt that the smell of the hospital was heavier than before, yet also more real. Philosophy books spoke of human finitude, death, and fate. But only when one truly stood at the door of a ward and watched a man who had once shaken the sea of commerce be slowly pressed down by illness did one know how heavy those words were.
Outside the hospital, the lights of Ruizhou streets had come on, and traffic still came and went as usual. The market would not pause even half a step because one boss had fallen. The age would not slow because of one person’s pain. In the distance was an advertisement for household appliances, and beside it, streetlights on a newly built road lit one after another. Looking at those lights, Xinde suddenly thought of Zhang Jianqiang’s idea of changing to road lighting. Perhaps he truly wanted to fight once more. Perhaps he only wished to grasp a little new light before the tide withdrew.
Lide suddenly spoke. “Fifth Brother, human glory truly cannot be relied upon.”
Xinde said, “But without glory, a person is unwilling.”
Lide looked at him and gave a bitter smile. “You philosopher have come back again.”
Xinde shook his head. “I now feel that philosophy is not in books. Perhaps it is at the hospital door.”
Lide was silent for a while, then lightly patted his shoulder.
The two brothers stood in the night colors of Ruizhou and did not speak again for a time. Behind them was the hospital; before them were the city lights. One was the end of a person, the other the appearance of a city continuing forward. At that moment, Xinde suddenly felt that he and his third brother had grown a little closer. Not because they were both in government offices, not because they had common topics, but because together they had seen one person move from prosperity to decline, from storms in the sea of commerce to a bitter smile on a sickbed.
Some brotherly feeling deepens slowly in just such silence.