shook her head. “No, my mom—she’s fine. Well, actually she’s terrible, but harmless. It’s more my father. He’s the head of Bashful Goose Snack Company. Papa Hui, you know. China’s richest man. The nation’s most beloved tycoon. Whatever.”
Zhao nodded gingerly, muttered some indiscernible interjection, perhaps aware for the first time of what an important and wealthy person she was—perhaps in awe.
Kelly went on, again losing control of her mouth. “And he’s not so much a nag as he is neglectful. He sent me away to the U.S. when I was only fourteen. At the time, I stupidly convinced myself that he’d made that decision so that I’d get the best possible education and then come back to China where he’d start training me to run the company. And of course I was more than happy to go to California, pay my dues in school, and also get away from—” The goose’s beady, demonic eyes—eyes that glowed red in the dark. A tingle down her vertebrae. “Never mind. But yeah, after I came back, I realized he probably just sent me overseas to get me out of his hair. I wasn’t cute anymore. I was all, like, chubby and zitty and fourteen. I wasn’t useful. Anyway, so obviously I grew out of that—the physical awkwardness, I mean. Not the uselessness. Here I am with this stupid job title, running ‘corporate social responsibility.’ Do you want to have a guess at how many ‘responsibilities’ there have been in the past two years?”
Zhao made an I-don’t-know face, which turned his ham lips out at an angle Kelly found truly revolting. She looked away.
“None,” she spat. “Not a one. Corporations here don’t give a shit about anything but money. Did you know that in America, almost all companies give money to charity? A lot of them even run their own charities.”
Zhao furrowed his brow. “Isn’t that just so they can evade taxes?”
Kelly, genuinely surprised that he possessed even this fleeting awareness of the outside world, sighed, resigned. “Yeah, well. At least it gives their CSR departments something to do.” She cradled her head in her hands, her gaze traveling the chipped laminate desktop. “Sometimes I wish the old man would just die already.” She jerked and abruptly looked up, straightened her spine. Her voice changed, deepened. “But you know I don’t actually mean that. Please, as if. He hasn’t formally left the company to anyone yet anyway—really pisses his lawyers off. I think he thinks he’s immortal or something. Hell, maybe he is. He’s healthy as a twenty-five-year-old, his doctors say. His cholesterol is lower than mine. And anyway, that’s terrible, isn’t it? Wishing my own father dead? To be honest, I’ll probably die first, at least metaphorically, of embarrassment. He’s been doing all these interviews lately with business magazines. And when I come up in the interviews, all he says is that he hopes I’ll find a husband soon. Like my education, my charity work, my management philosophies don’t mean a thing to him. All he wants is for me to find some man and to get married and to pop out a baby. I mean, what century is this? Should I ask my waxing girl at the salon if anyone there can bind feet?”
Zhao—half listening, staring out the window at a pecking bird, at fatties strolling past, at fatties also eyeing that pecking bird—nodded sympathetically.
She slapped the tops of her thighs. “Sorry to unload. All I’m really trying to say here is that I really care about these kids”—she gestured toward the window—“and I want this camp to be successful. I need it to be.”
Zhao nodded again.
Kelly’s voice strengthened. “So it’s imperative that we run a well-oiled ship.” Sharefest was officially over. But it had been necessary, that bonding. “Even if we may have our disagreements on how things should be done, we must work together. We share a common why.”
An effective leader doesn’t lead from a podium, but from the ground below his or her people.
“Okay,” Zhao said. “Sure.”
Kelly held her hand up for a high five. Zhao stared blankly at her, at her hand. A few century-like seconds later, his eyes lit up with recognition and he slapped his palm against hers. A gust of wind through the window rustled the Lays bag. Zhao’s gaze first met the bag and then Kelly’s face. Her gaze had also settled on the bag.
They both retracted their hands, placing them at rest on the desktop.
“We shouldn’t,” she said. “We should just phone in an order somewhere. Some rice and vegetables. Something nutritious. We’ve got to set a good example.”
“The local government has warned all the restaurants in town not to deliver here under any circumstances. Violators face hefty fines or jail time.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a sensible policy, isn’t it?” Kelly snorted. “Ha, couldn’t be bothered to actually fork the money over, but sure as hell could find the time to fine people and create new rules. Death and taxes, eh?”
Zhao nodded. “So back to the cafeteria then? I’m sure the cook’s got plenty of leftover blob.”
They both looked down again at the chips. And then at the still-open drawer containing cookies and crackers and a delightful assortment of high-calorie, high-deliciousness snacks.
MEANWHILE IN LOVELY FIVE-STAR MACAU…
THE OFFICIAL ADJUSTED HIS ROLEX, RAN HIS FINGERS THROUGH HIS thick head of hair, inhaled deeply, and considered the range of decisions that spread out before him. In this life, there were so many decisions, and each came stuffed with so many consequences.
He stood under low-wattage bulbs. He stood in his Armani suit. He stood and he thought.
He thought not of Zhao, whom he trusted fully to rehabilitate the minimum of two fat kids, and not of that pushy heiress, who had at last stopped calling to pester him for the address, probably turning her attention instead to the latest trend in pubic hair grooming or some other equally serious issue. He thought not of his wife at home, puttering around in overpriced dresses and nagging everyone within a hundred-meter range, nor of his mistress watching TV and drinking supermarket wine and running the air-conditioning 24/7 in the apartment he paid for. He thought not of those fat children, mere statistics, who would soon be cured of their ailment anyway. He thought not of the other officials and the warden who sat around a table nearby, awaiting his return.
No, he thought of food, just food: of the platters of sashimi before him, of these elegantly displayed, beautifully cut pieces of raw fish; of the drool that pooled around his gums. A woman bumped into him as she reached for a plate, bringing him to his senses. He was fixating too much on this spread before him. He was being shortsighted. There were places to go, places to be. Naan, hairy crab, curry, sushi, sea cucumbers, chocolate, dim sum—platters and plates and pots and spreads as far as the eye could see.
He snatched up the tongs and loaded his plate with fresh tuna, salmon, eel. He loaded and loaded and then hesitated, considering adding more to the precariously stacked mountain on his plate, but then he thought, Fuck it, this is a buffet; there are stacks and stacks of clean plates. I am a free man, I am a hungry man, and I can come back as many times as I want.
…AND THE DAMAGE DONE
AFTER ALL WAS SAID AND DONE, IT WAS UNCLEAR WHOSE HAND HAD reached into the bag first. And it was also unclear into which of the two mouths any individual snack item had disappeared, but based upon the pile of discarded wrappers in the wastepaper basket, in a matter of minutes, Zhao and Kelly had collectively consumed seven Dove chocolate bars (three white, two milk, and two dark), five bags of flavored Lays (two cucumber, two shrimp, one barbecue), two sleeves of Chips Ahoy! cookies, one packet of Bashful Goose Seaweed Bites, sixteen White Rabbit candies, seven Bashful Goose Red-Bean-Filled Snack Cakes, thirteen Watermelon Wigglers, one Bashful Goose Sesame-Paste-Filled Snack Cake, twelve spring onion crackers, six egg yolk moon cakes, one loaf of French-style baguette bread, and three boxes of caramel popcorn. Their bodies screamed out with discomfort, their stomachs distended, and they both leaned back in their swivel chairs and dropped off into coma-like sleeps.
MEANWHILE, ACROSS CAMPUS…