in our great company’s logo.
The next morning, our dear founder Papa Hui set off to begin his first debt-free day at the snack shop.
“Good-bye, Mama Hui!” he called. “Be safe!”
“Good-bye, bashful goose!” he called, opening the door. “Be good!”
But as soon as he had taken a step out, that bashful goose lunged at his canvas-clad legs. Papa Hui slapped the goose away, but it only came back at him more aggressively. It pecked. It bit. It honked.
“Bashful goose, what’s wrong with you?” Exasperated, Papa Hui bent down and looked directly into those beady little eyes. “Why are you suddenly so outgoing?”
In place of an answer, the goose hid its face behind its wing, honked, and then took off in a waddle-run toward the field that led to Old Woman Wu’s house.
Old Woman Wu once had a reputation as a very skilled baker, and in the old days of revolution and reeducation, she had generously baked for the ravenous village children all manner of pies and cakes spiced with creative famine-time ingredients including but not limited to: grass, tree bark, pond algae, and sparrow’s feet. But when her husband died in a railway construction accident, Old Woman Wu devolved from her cheery, anything-is-possible self into a weepy recluse. Her long raven-black hair turned gray, and the now well-fed children took to calling her “Witchy Wu.”
Papa Hui chased after the goose, running and running across that field, sweat sprouting from his pores, all the while trusting fully, inexplicably, in this goose and where it would lead him.
The goose at last stopped at Witchy Wu’s gate, honking furiously and flapping its wings. Papa Hui bent over at the waist, clutching his knees, panting. He looked up just in time to spot Witchy Wu throwing open the door, seeking the cause of the commotion that had violently woken her from her midmorning nap. When Papa Hui’s calm eyes met her frantic ones, they both knew it was fate that had brought them together.
The rest, as they say, is history. Papa Hui joined forces with Witchy Wu and rebranded the store with a new mascot and a new name. The two tossed out those dusty, old packages of State-owned-factory-produced snacks and began developing and producing their own original snack products to wild acclaim. Villagers simply couldn’t get enough of Bashful Goose Snack Company’s Watermelon Wigglers and Tangerine Crumbly Cakes (one whole tangerine in every bite!), among other delights. The company’s good luck turned to great luck when Papa Hui took a bet on a new form of advertisement—a TV commercial, one of the very first in a nation where the hottest new must-have product was a TV set. The Bashful Goose logo soon became as iconic as Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square, and the first Bashful Goose jingle, a catchy ditty composed by Papa Hui himself, became the anthem of a generation with money to burn. Factories were erected to meet the surging demand and trucks were dispatched and the snacks were soon available in all corners of our great nation, from the ports of Shanghai to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia to the mountains of Tibet.
In the late 1990s, Witchy Wu sold her shares of the company to Papa Hui and retired with her many-decades-younger boyfriend, a former Australian soap opera actor, to Canada, where the happy couple still resides today.
Thanks to that fateful encounter with that bashful goose, Papa Hui is now the richest man in China. And to this day, the goose who led him to his fortune continues to follow him everywhere he goes…
ENOUGH ABOUT THAT DAMN GOOSE!
WHAT CUTESY, QUAINT LORE, BUT THAT WASN’T THE GOOSE KELLY knew. In the backseat and now just mere kilometers from headquarters, hyperventilation seized her.
This “bashful” goose had brazenly tormented her throughout her childhood—pecking at her armpits, biting the backs of her knees, yanking out her hair, shitting in her bed, tearing her homework to shreds, and cleverly framing her for a variety of devious acts (including but not limited to: smashing a precious Ming dynasty antique vase and clogging the toilet with the jagged pieces, eating four tins of expensive caviar that had been given to Papa Hui by Boris Yeltsin, leaking information to the press about possible insider trading committed by some of Papa Hui’s New York friends, scratching Dr. Dre lyrics into the paint of Mama Hui’s Lamborghini, and purchasing marijuana from a Nigerian drug dealer [how the goose pulled that one off, she still wasn’t sure]).
Trying to explain to her parents that none of this was actually her doing had proved an impossible task. Any time she even so much as hinted that the goose might not be a perfect angel, Papa Hui burned red in the face and shouted about what a spoiled girl she was, and how things were different when he was growing up, and how they wouldn’t have any of this—not the cars, not the apartments, not the vacations, not the hired help, not the electronics, not any of it—if it weren’t for that goose, and “Don’t you dare blame the goose!”
Frankly, Kelly had been relieved when, following the marijuana incident, her fed-up father made the decision to send her to Los Angeles for high school. She lived there in a big, empty house in Culver City with a nanny who spent most of her time either on the phone yapping in a baby voice with her boyfriend back in China or working to improve her English by watching endless episodes of Law and Order; attended a snooty school for rich troubled girls who found her dull and called her “Slanty-Eyes McGee” and “Sucky-Sucky Blow Job Five Dollar,” among other charming names; slouched on city buses beside men who reeked of urine and women who muttered incoherently to themselves—and these were the moments that comprised the best years of her life. This was her era of safety, of stability, of freedom, and then when she went on to USC and ditched the nanny and moved into an off-campus condo, she felt even freer still.
Why she’d chosen to leave that paradise of palm trees and traffic jams, and why she thought there would be anything here in China for her, she still didn’t fully understand, but she inhaled deeply, got out of the car, and began the long but pleasant enough journey through the headquarters grounds, passing fountains, multiple goldfish ponds, a bamboo forest, and then, at the front of the building, a gigantic gold-coated statue of enemy number one.
From behind the mahogany desk he’d had custom crafted in Sweden, Papa Hui greeted his daughter with a terse, “In a moment.” Kelly shut the door and stepped inside. The old man was hard at work on a Sudoku puzzle haphazardly torn from a newspaper—a sizable corner of the puzzle was missing, rendering the thing unsolvable. Kelly shook her head. Why on earth did he not just buy a book of them? Or get an iPad and download an app? Or at least hire someone with better ripping skills, or perhaps, you know, just employ a pair of scissors to properly remove the puzzle in its entirety?
Principle, that’s why. Here was a man whose net worth was in the billions, but who often humble-bragged to the media about spending less than one hundred renminbi a day. Fifteen bucks. Yeah, sure. She always shook her head when she skimmed such articles—such a limited budget was easy to adhere to for someone whose meals were provided for him at the office by the country’s top chef, and who had a driver so therefore never had to pay cab fare, and who had already purchased everything he could possibly need, and—
Kelly jumped involuntary, her legs jelly. A familiar honking sound snipped its way into her thoughts. The goose waddled up from behind her and nipped at her calf. She swatted its beak away, shouted, “Off!” The goose ducked and lunged for her fingers. She threw her hands up in surrender, took a few careful steps back, and lowered herself to sit on a chair, the goose standing its ground, watching her with unblinking eyes.
In all this commotion, her father, still concentrating on that unsolvable puzzle, never once looked up.
HAIR EXTENSION APPOINTMENT—KELLY HUI—THREE P.M.
“SO YEAH, MY DAD AGREED TO GIVE THE MONEY. AND I THINK THIS IS going to catapult me to fame. It could, I mean.” Kelly studied the way her face moved in the salon mirror as she spoke. Her eyes appeared dead and dull as she delivered this information, very unlike those glitzy girls on TV—so she wasn’t quite ready for her close-up. Oh, well. She would get there. There was always something new to work on, a million yet-untraveled roads to self-improvement.
Stefan smiled