Chapter 88: A Rare Opportunity That Cannot Be Chased

They walked home together, grandfather and grandson, greeted along the way by many familiar neighbors. It was a heartwarming feeling.

While great cities changed from day to day, Chinatown seemed frozen in time. In Su Mu’s memory, it had been this way ever since he was a child, and even now it remained much the same.

America was in the midst of a presidential election, and President Ronald Reagan’s reelection seemed all but certain. Posters promoting the campaign could be seen everywhere else, and students at Stanford University had even taken to the streets in spontaneous marches to support his return to office.

But here, in this forgotten corner, there was nothing at all. No one seemed to care. When President Reagan visited China in April, some Chinese residents celebrated for a while, then once again became indifferent.

The steamed bun shop on the corner had been open for more than thirty years. It began business at six every morning and closed its doors before ten. The old bachelor surnamed Qiu was blind in one eye and had never managed to find a wife. In the mornings he sold buns; in the afternoons he mostly played mahjong.

Aunt Liu, who ran the barbershop, had shut it down and now stayed home every day helping look after her grandson. Her son and daughter-in-law were both working. What she liked most was when people praised how handsome her grandson was.

Everywhere hung signs written in traditional script, some of them up for more than a decade. There was a deep human warmth in the place.

The white people and black people outside did not want to come in, and the Chinese inside did not want to go out. It was like a besieged city, one that had carried the homeland across the Pacific and set it down on American soil. The old folk drew a circle for themselves and lived within it, unwilling to have much contact with the world beyond. The young liked to go out and test their mettle, but in the end most of them still came back.

In recent years, there had been a noticeable increase in Southeast Asians settling in the Chinatown district, people from all sorts of countries. They were not used to dealing with American society and mostly preferred to live near Chinese neighborhoods. Koreans were no exception. In the 1980s, Korea was still poor, lagging far behind the developed countries, and one could even find shops selling Korean food.

Su Mu was describing the sights and events of Silicon Valley, and his grandfather listened with great interest. Last time Su Dingcai had gone to Menlo Park, he had returned and given a detailed “report” on how comfortably his son was living at school.

This made the old man a little uneasy. Deep down, he still felt that Su Mu was a child who ought to be under his care. Still, seeing that his grandson was living well made him happy...

After a sumptuous dinner, after so long without Chinese food, Su Mu ate until he felt he might throw up. During the idle talk after the meal about life in Menlo Park, he briefly told his family about his idea of selling computers. The old man, with his narrow outlook, naturally lectured his grandson that he ought to focus on his studies and最好 not meddle in such messy affairs.

The old man did not even know what a computer was, so to him the business naturally seemed dubious. Chinese people were accustomed to caution, and there was also a generation gap between him and Su Mu. Young people were always a little more radical, whereas the ambition and spirit of Su Mu’s grandfather had long since been worn down, bit by bit, by life.

Since their thoughts were different, they often could not converse on the same wavelength. That was why Su Mu had invested in the supermarket on his own back then and not dared tell his family. He felt he had done nothing wrong, but his family might not have seen it that way.

People usually only talk about which family has raised outstanding children, but in truth there are no few examples of children led astray. Parents’ advice is right more often than not, though not always. Out of love and concern for their descendants, they tend to choose the safest path.

Su Mu did not argue. He let it go in one ear and out the other. Whether he listened or not did not matter, so long as the old man was happy.

By a little after eight, he returned to his room and sat in his familiar chair, his gaze fixed on the plain old radio by the edge of the desk. He had already told his parents not to sell it, saying only that it had accompanied him for so many years and that he wanted to keep it as a memento. It would fetch next to nothing as scrap metal, and his parents had agreed without much thought.

Now he bent down and switched it on. News crackled out of it, the host speaking in English and describing in detail how incompetent Ronald Reagan’s opponent was. After turning through quite a few channels, Su Mu finally confirmed that there were no strange Chinese programs.

Charged particles thrown off by the sun visited the Earth constantly, like roamers of the cosmos. Minor solar storms were common, but an irregular and rare storm like the last one appeared only once every few years.

Occasionally, there might also be a brief but powerful solar storm, yet Su Mu could not possibly stay by the radio every moment... He did not even dare move the old set, afraid that if he placed it in the wrong spot, he would never again receive those strange messages.

“Something you can run into, but not something you can seek out,” he murmured, lying on the bed. Only when the next super solar storm arrived would he be able to confirm whether it really had anything to do with solar activity.

After thinking through the recent “big business” plans, mainly the supermarket, software development, and selling computers, all industries Su Mu believed had vast prospects, he used reverse reasoning based on his knowledge of what the future world would roughly look like. It was easy to guess which sectors would explode with growth.

This was thanks to a fortunate convergence of timing, catching the release of the world’s five hundred most valuable brands, and also thanks to those hosts who could never find enough content to talk about. They kept repeating how amazing the sharing economy and mobile payments were, how Tencent’s stock had risen again, how the old Ma who did internet e-commerce had been knocked off the throne of the richest man, and so on. From all that, Su Mu gleaned quite a lot of useful information.

In this era there were no smartphones, and people generally went to bed early. Accustomed to the comfortable life in the big villa, sleeping in his own narrow bed instead felt awkward, as though he might roll over and fall off at any moment. It took a long while before he finally drifted into a deep sleep...

The next day.

Early in the morning, after breakfast, Su Mu saw Li Ping’an with his face bruised and swollen black and blue. Curious, he asked, “Got beaten for chasing some other guy’s girlfriend?”

“It’s nothing. My dad was going to hit me, but on the way out I accidentally bumped into a telephone pole, and then my dad didn’t beat me anymore!”

When he said the last sentence, Li Ping’an even looked rather pleased with himself, as though compared with a beating from his old man, he might prefer crashing into something to make himself feel better.

His father was notorious for being a tough old bastard when he was outside, and he showed no mercy even when disciplining his son. This fellow had been practically beaten into adulthood, and Su Mu was already used to it. He asked in exasperation, “What did you do to make your dad angry again?”

“I dropped out. You’re not at school, so I don’t feel like going either. I skipped class for three days, and my dad found out yesterday. He went crazy. Before I could run, he had me cornered at home.”

Li Ping’an had not yet eaten breakfast, so he went to a nearby stall and bought a fried dough stick, plus two scallion pancakes and a cup of soy milk. The stall was near Old Lady Lin’s house, which was now closed up; she had gone to a sanatorium to enjoy her later years in peace.

He went on, “Is your place fun? I can’t stand staying at home anymore. Let me crash at your place for two days—got room?”

“Sure. You’d better tell your dad first.”

Since childhood, Su Mu had played a role much like an older brother’s. Now that Silicon Valley offered so many opportunities, going out to try his hand at things was a good idea.

At that moment a young blond-haired man also came to buy fried dough sticks and greeted Su Mu and Li Ping’an. “Good morning. Long time no see. How have you been lately?”

He lived nearby as well. His father was Jewish and his mother Chinese. His hooked nose looked sharp enough to kill, and his Jewish features were unmistakable.

What was funniest of all was his name. Because his mother’s surname was Qian, his father had actually named him “Money Helberg.” Chinese people knew his surname was Qian, while at school his classmates addressed him as Money. In a way, his parents had practically done him in...