how hard he washed he always gave off the impression of being deeply unclean. Regardless, it was humiliating being left behind, and on a day like any other, a Tuesday, the absurdity of it all hit him. Very suddenly and for no instigating reason, he snapped. He walked into his boss’s office and issued a firm “I quit.” That was all he said. His boss, young and handsome and therefore valued by the world, didn’t ask why or any other questions. He offered a pleasant, “Okay,” and that was that.
On that Tuesday like any other, Zhao gathered his belongings from his desk, shoved them inside his bag, and left without saying good-bye to anyone, not even the mousy accountant whom he’d had a crush on for over a year and who earned three times his salary. He spent the subsequent weeks “sorting things out.” He locked himself in his room for days at a time, reading the news on the Internet and following with interest a great number of microbloggers who spewed on the topics of politics, social issues, and cute animals. He became deeply engaged in a few TV series set in various dynasties. He bought a potted plant and tended to it daily. He quit smoking. He got back in touch with his mother, whom he had begun officially totally ignoring a couple years before because she nagged him to an annoying degree about why he hadn’t bought an apartment, why he hadn’t found a wife, why he wasn’t a top-level executive, and so on. He called her up (not at all surprised that she had the same phone number all these years later—she never let things go) and told her he’d quit his job, and that he was still renting that crappy room in that crappy shared apartment, and that the future still looked uncertain, and that the only women he’d ever slept with were prostitutes or otherwise irreversibly ugly and/or deformed. Oddly enough, his mother hadn’t seemed to mind all of these highly inappropriate confessions. In fact, she only grunted in response, told him to take care of himself, hung up, and then picked up their relationship right where it had left off—sending snapshots of eligible bachelorettes in the post, calling to gossip about the nouveau riche whose houses she cleaned, e-mailing links to travel agency websites (she’d developed a fondness for spaghetti and dreamed of being sent on a senior citizens tour to Italy), and so forth. Three weeks after he’d first called, she even made a trek into the city to stay with him a weekend. She scrubbed and reorganized his room, cooked hearty meals for him and the surprisingly friendly flatmates he’d never really spoken to before, and told him, albeit in a vague way, that she was proud that he was her son and happy to have him back in her lonely life.
And then she was gone again. His plant grew. His TV series turned to reruns. This two-month period of his life had been nice, had been necessary, but he knew it couldn’t last forever.
Dressed in his crispest button-down shirt, a Playboy bunny belt buckle, and navy-blue slacks, Zhao lumbered down the dusty stairwell to the street, planted himself on the sidewalk, and flagged down a taxi. He arrived at his destination twenty minutes early, paid the driver, and got out. He paced before the bleak white structure, Communist-era architecture at its finest.
So there was the job, this tangible possibility here before him, but there was also the feeling of wanting to be somebody, a sense of this being a last chance, and there was the weight of guilt at the pit of his stomach and the desperation of wanting to be rid of this weight, unburdened. To be employed at all wasn’t ideal; employment meant setting an alarm and getting properly dressed every morning and spending less time surfing the Internet, and it meant letting go of all the tiny freedoms that he had so recently fallen in love with. But he could waste his whole life away floating in ideals, freedoms. He could wake up a ninety-year-old man, unmarried and unaccomplished—with nothing to show for himself and no one there to love him—and say, “Well, at least I stayed true to my ideals.” But where was the freedom in that?
The very next week, the government officials who would be overseeing his position invited Zhao to a restaurant to make their formal employment offer. His eyes skimmed the contents of the contract. Hereby referred to as the employee. Can do. Can do. If this contract is broken, a penalty of 100,000 yuan will be assessed. Boring. Boring. Over the course of the summer, the employee must rehabilitate a minimum of two fat kids.
He glanced up from the printed pages and into the stale eyes of the government officials sitting around the white-clothed table. The waitress, a dark-skinned country girl with shapely legs, brought a plate of salted duck’s feet and set it before the men.
“If my wife would allow it,” one of the officials said, eyeballing the waitress, “I would take that one home and keep her.” The men laughed collectively. The waitress blushed and scurried away. Another of the officials, an older fellow with crinkly skin and beady black eyes, poured Zhao’s cup full of rice wine. Zhao nodded, acknowledging this act, and then felt his phone vibrate against his leg. He slipped it out under the table as the old man filled the others’ cups. His mother. He rejected her call and shoved the phone back into his pocket.
The waitress brought another dish, fried peanuts. “Zhao here could take her home. No old lady to worry about, is there?” The first official socked Zhao in the arm. There was laughter, and there was a glint of envy in each of the laughing officials’ eyes. Zhao did not notice this glint. He only heard the laughter and then felt, again, a vibration on his leg. He slid his phone from his pocket. A text message from his mother. It read, “How about her?” Embedded within the text message was a blurry photo of yet another anonymous woman’s face, probably snapped at the supermarket or the Grand Ocean department store or in line for a five-mao public restroom. A wave of regret washed over him; he was sorry he’d ever taught his mother how to use her phone’s camera function.
“Now, you do understand, Zhao, that if you fulfill the terms of the contract, there is an opportunity to move up the ranks. It’s not usual, to skip the test, but these are special circumstances and this is a club, you see, and in a club, members make the rules, but we can also break them.”
Zhao nodded. A set-for-life cushy government job? No Party exam necessary? Yes, please.
Satisfied with his mute response, the officials returned to their chatter. Zhao excused himself. He strolled into the bathroom, pissed, rinsed his hands in the sink, and studied himself in the mirror. His perfectly round face housed eyes so deeply set that they verged on sunken in. He stroked his cratered, stubble-less chin with his hands—he couldn’t grow a beard, but his toes were coated in hair. He took a step back and eyed his figure—not exactly an ideal shape: extraordinarily slim in the limbs, sure, but playing nurse to an ever-growing gut akin to that of a pregnant woman.
But oh, well, and never mind.
Zhao inhaled and mouthed, “You deserve this,” into the mirror. He puffed his chest and sauntered out, passing the waitress. She leaned against the wall outside the private banquet room in limbo between the kitchen and the officials’ table. Zhao studied her: thin arms that jangled from her body like those of a marionette, slight overbite that forced her lips into a perpetual pout, shiny black hair slicked into a bun, skin the sandy color of unfinished plywood. He thought, Me and this waitress, we could be good together. He briefly entertained snapping a quick picture of her with his phone and sending it to his mother with a text that read, “Her.”
He didn’t. He sat down. The men chattered on. He stared, still, at the waitress.
“Zhao, what do you think?”
The chatter stopped. The air was thick, silent. The officials, each one a door to a new life, sat before him, sat around him, awaiting his answer.
A voice from the kitchen shouted in a countryside dialect, and the waitress disappeared.
Zhao cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, and he felt freedom flee his body. He said, “Yes. We have a deal.” He felt his phone vibrate again. She was relentless. He slipped it out and rejected the call. The waitress returned with two dishes—real dishes, not appetizers or snacks, but wonderful, steamy, spicy Hunan food. The crinkly official, the one who’d poured the wine, removed a pen from his shirt pocket and placed it in Zhao’s hand. Zhao signed the contract and stuffed himself full. And he drank. And they drank. And they drank and they drank.
2.
THEM FAT KIDS