And there had been girls, and old grannies, and young men stopping to admire them as they stood, shoulder to shoulder, chanting bravely at the cowardly goons from Boss Wing’s factory, goons who’d been so tough just a few minutes before, willing to slap you in the head if you talked too much, ready to dock your pay, too. Ever since they’d tried to go out on their own, life had gotten worse. Boss Wing had a huge operation now, with plenty of in-game muscle to stand guard against rich players who hunted the gold farmers for sport, but he had grown cruel and cheap and you were lucky if you saw half the wages you’d earned after all the fines for “breaking rules” had been charged against your salary.
Their phones rang and buzzed with photos from other Boss Wing factories where the workers had gone out too, and there were wars in Mushroom Kingdom as the Webblies kept anyone else from working their zone. And the police came and they’d stayed brave, Matthew and Ping and all his friends. They were workers, they were warriors, they were an army and their cause was just. They would not be intimidated.
And then the gas came. And then the clubs started swinging. And then the screams had started. And then Lu had run, run through the stinging clouds of gas and the chaos of battle—so like and so unlike the million battles he’d fought in the games—and he’d thrown up and now—
Now he had no idea where to go.
And then his phone rang. The number was blanked out, which made his pulse hammer in his throat. Did the secret police blank out the number when they called you? But if the secret police knew he existed and had his phone number, they could just pick him up where he stood, using the phone’s damned tracking function.
It wasn’t the police. With trepidation, he slid his finger over the talk button on the screen.
“Hello?” he said, cautiously.
“Lu? Is that you?” The call had the weird, echoey sound of a cheap net-calling service, the digital fuzz of packets that travelled third class on the global network. The accent was difficult, too, thick-tongued and off-kilter. He knew the sound and he knew the voice.
“Wei-Dong?”
“Yes!”
“Wei-Dong in America?” He hadn’t heard from the strange gweilo since they’d gone back to Boss Wing and Ping had had to kick him out of the guild. Boss Wing didn’t allow them to raid with outside people anymore, or even talk to them in-game. He had spyware on all his PCs that told him when you broke those rules, and you lost a day’s wages for the first offense, a week’s wages for the second.
“Lu, it’s me! Look, did I just see you and Ping getting beaten up by the cops?”
“I don’t know, did you?” The disorientation from his head wound was fierce, and he wondered if he was really having this conversation. It was very strange.
“I—I just saw you getting beaten up on a video from Shenzhen. I think I did. Was it you?”
“We just got beaten up,” he said. “I’m hurt.”
“Are you badly hurt? I couldn’t reach Ping, so I tried you.” He was excited, his voice tight. “What happened?”
Lu was still grappling with the idea that the gweilo had just called him from thousands of kilometers away. “You saw me on the internet in America?”
“Every gamer in the world saw you, Lu! You couldn’t have timed it better! After dinner is the busiest time on the servers, and the word went around like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Everyone in every game was chatting about it, passing around links to the video streams and the photos. It was even on the real news! My neighbor banged on my wall and asked me if I knew anything about it. It was incredible!”
“You saw me getting beaten up on the internet?”
“Dude, everyone saw you getting beaten up on the internet.”
Lu didn’t know what to say. “Did I look good?”
Wei-Dong laughed like a hyena. “You looked great!”
A dam broke, Lu laughed and laughed and laughed, as all the tension flooded out of him. He finally stopped, knowing that if he didn’t he’d throw up again. He was by the train station now, in the heavy foot-traffic, all kinds of people moving purposefully around him as he stood still, a woozy island in the rushing stream. He backed up to a stairwell in front of a beauty parlor and sank to his haunches, squatting and holding the phone to his head.
“Wei-Dong?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you calling me?”
There was an uncomfortable silence on the line, broken by soft digital flanging. “I wanted to help you,” he said at last. “Help the Webblies.”
“You know about the Webblies?” Lu had half-believed that Matthew had made them up, a fantasy army of thousands of imaginary friends who would fight for them.
“Heard about them? Lu, they’re the ass-kickingest guild in the world! No one can beat them! Coca-Cola Games is sending us three memos a day about them!”
“Why does Coca-Cola send you memos?”
“Oh.” More silence. “Didn’t I tell you? I’m working for them now. I’m a Turk.”
“Oh,” said Lu. He knew about the Turks, but he never really thought about what kind of people would work in ten-second increments making up dialogue for non–player characters, or figuring out what happened when you shot an office chair with a blunderbuss. “That must be interesting.”
Wei-Dong made a wet noise. “It’s miserable,” he said. “I run four different sessions at once, and I’m barely earning enough to pay the rent. And they make so much money off of us! Last month, they announced quarterly profits, and games with Turks are earning thirty percent more than the ones without. They’re hiring more Turks as fast as they can—it’s all over the board here. But our wages aren’t going up. So I’ve been thinking of the Webblies, you know…” He trailed off. “Like maybe you guys can help us if we help you? We all play for our money, right? So why shouldn’t we be on the same side.”
“Sounds right to me,” Lu said. He was still trying to comprehend the fact that the Webblies were apparently famous with American teenagers. “Wait,” he said, playing back Wei-Dong’s accented, ungrammatical speech. “You’re paying rent?”
“Yeah,” Wei-Dong said. “Yeah! Living on my own now. It’s great! I have a crappy room in a, not sure what you call it, a hotel, kind of. But for people who don’t have any money. But I can get wireless here and I’ve got four machines and there’s plenty of stuff I can walk to, at least compared to home—” He began to babble about his favorite restaurants and the clubs that had all-ages nights and a million tiny irrelevant details about Los Angeles, which might as well have been the Mushroom Kingdom for all that it mattered to Lu. He let it wash over him and tried to think of places he could go to recuperate. He fleetingly wished for his mother, who always knew some kind of traditional Chinese remedy for his ailments. They often didn’t work, but sometimes they did, and his mother’s gentle application of them worked their own magic.
He was suddenly, nauseously, overwhelmingly homesick. “Wei-Dong,” he said, interrupting the virtual tour of Los Angeles. “I need to think now. I don’t know what to do. I’m hurt, I’m on the street, and I can’t call anyone in case the police trace the call. What do I do?”
“Oh. Well. I don’t know exactly. I was hoping that you’d know what I should do, to tell you the truth. I want to get involved!”
“I think I want to get uninvolved.” Lu’s homesickness was turning to anger. Who was this boy to call him from the other side of the world, demanding to “get involved”? Didn’t he have enough problems of his own? “What can you do for me from there? What is any of this—this garbage worth? How will everyone going to jail make my life better? How will having my head beaten in help make things better? How?”
“I don’t know.” Wei-Dong’s voice was small and hurt. Lu struggled to control his anger. The gweilo wanted to help. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know how to help. Lu didn’t know how to help, either.
“I don’t know, either,” Lu said. “Why don’t you think about how to help and call me back. I need to find some
where to rest, maybe a nurse or a doctor. Okay?”
“Sure,” the gweilo said. “Sure. Of course. I’ll call you back soon, don’t worry.”
Every time a Hong Kong train came into the Shenzhen Railway Station, it disgorged a massive crowd of people: Hong Kong people in sharp business styles, rich kids, foreigners, and workers from Shenzhen returning from contracts abroad, clutching backpacks. The dense group got broken up by the taxi-rank and the shopping mall, and emerged as a diffuse cloud onto the street where Lu had been talking. Now he worked his way back through this crowd, listening to snatches of hundreds of conversations about business, manufacturing—and gold farming.
It was on everyone’s lips, talk about the strike, about the police action, about the farmers. Of course most people in China had heard of gold farming and all the stories about the money you could make by just playing video games, but you never heard this kind of businessperson talking about it. Not smart, fancy people with obvious wealth and power, the kind of people who skipped back and forth between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, talking rapidly into their earwigs, telling other people what to do.
What had the gweilo said? Everyone saw you getting beaten up on the internet! Were these people looking closely at him? Now it seemed they were. Of course, he was bloody, staring, red-eyed. Why wouldn’t they stare at him? But maybe—
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” She was 22 or 23, with perfect fingernails on the hand she rested on his arm, coming on him from behind. He gave an involuntary squeak and jump, and she giggled a little. “You must be,” she said. She held up her phone. “I watched the video five times on the train. You should see the commentary. So ugly!”
He knew about this. Any time something that made the government look bad managed to find its way online, there was an army of commenters who’d tweet and post and comment about how the government was in the right, how the story was all wrong, how the people in it were guilty of all kinds of terrible things. Lu knew he shouldn’t believe any of it, but it was impossible to read it all without feeling a little niggle of doubt, then a little more, and then, like an ice-cube on a bruise, the outrage he’d felt at first would go numb.
The thought that he, himself, was at the center of one of these smear-storms made him feel like he was going to throw up again. The girl must have seen this, for she gave his arm a little squeeze. “Oh, don’t look so serious. You looked great on the video. I’m sure no one believes all that rubbish!” She pursed her lips. “Well, of course, that’s not true. I’m sure lots of people believe it. But they’re fools. And so many more were inspired, I’m sure. I’m Jie.”
“Lu,” Lu said, after trying and failing to come up with an alias. He was not cut out to be a fugitive. “It was nice to meet you,” he said, and shrugged her hand off and set off deeper into the crowd.
She grabbed his arm again. “Oh, please stop. We need to talk. Please?”
He stopped. He didn’t have much experience with girls, but something about her voice made him want to stay. “Why do we need to talk?”
“I want to get your story,” she said. “For my show.”
“Your show?”
She leaned in close—so close he could smell her perfume—and whispered, “I’m Jiandi.”
He looked at her blankly.
She shook her head. “Jiandi,” she hissed. “Jiandi! From the Factory Girl Show!”
He shrugged. “What kind of show?”
“Every night!” she said. “At 9PM! Twelve million factory workers listen to me! They phone me with their problems. We go out over the net, audio, through the, uh,” she dropped her voice, “the Falun Gong proxies.”
“Oh,” he said, and began to move away.
“It’s not religious,” she said. “I just help them with their problems. The—” she dropped her voice “proxies are just how we get the show into the factories. They try to block me because we tell the truth about the working conditions—the girls who are sexually pressured by their bosses, the marketing rip-offs, the wage ripoffs, lock-ins—”
“Okay,” he said. “I get the picture. Thank you but no.”
“Come on,” she said and looked deep into his eyes. Hers were dark and lined with thin, precise green eye-pencil, and her eyebrows were shaped into surprised, sophisticated arches. “You look like you need a place to clean up, and maybe a meal. I can get that for you.”
“You can?”
“Lu, I’m famous! I have advertisers who pay a lot to sponsor my show. I have millions of supporters all over Shenzhen, even in Guangzhou and Dongguan. Even in Shanghai and Beijing! I’m a hero to them, Lu. I can put your story into the ears of every worker in the Pearl River Delta like that!” She snapped her fingers in front of his nose, making him blink and start back again. She laughed. “You’re cute,” she said. “Come on, it’ll be wonderful.”
“Where do we go?” he said, cautiously.
“Oh, I have a place,” she said.
She grabbed his hand—her fingers were dry and cool, and touched with cold spots where the rings she wore met his skin. She led him away through the crowd, which seemed to part magically before her. It had all become like a dream now, with the pain crowding Lu’s vision into a hazy-edged tunnel. He wondered if she’d have something for the pain. He wondered if she knew any traditional medicine, if she’d mix him up a bitter tea with complicated scents and small bits of hard things floating in it. All this he wondered, and the streets and sidewalks slipped past beneath their feet like magic. You could automatically follow your guildies in a game, just click on them and select follow, and the whole guild could do that when there was a lot of distance to cover, so that only one player had to pay attention on the long march across the world, while the others relaxed and smoked and ate and used the toilet, while their characters trailed like a string of pack-animals behind the leader.
That’s what this felt like, like he was a character whose player had stepped out for a cigarette and a piss-break and the character bumped along mindlessly behind the leader.
“Do you live here?” he said as they reached the lobby of a tall apartment building. It was a “handshake building,” so close to the building next to it that the tenants could lean out their windows and shake hands with their neighbors across the lane. The lobby smelled of cooking and sweat, but it was clean and there was a working intercom and lock at the door.
“No,” she said. “I do some of my shows from here. There are two or three of them, to confuse the jingcha.” He thought it was funny to hear her use the gamer clan term for police. She saw it, and said, “Oh yes, the zengfu think I’m very biantai and they’d PK me if they could.” He laughed at this, because it was nearly impenetrable slang—The government think I’m a pervert so they want to “player-kill”—destroy—me if they can. It was one thing to hear a boy with his shirt rolled up over his belly and a cigarette hanging out of his face saying this, another to hear this delicate, preciously made-up girl.
The elevator was broken, so she led him up five flights of stairs, the walls decorated with lavish graffiti: murals of curse-words, scenes of factory life, phone numbers you could call to buy fake identity papers, degrees, certificates. Lu’s own dorm room was in a building that Boss Wing rented, and he climbed twice this many stairs every day, but this climb felt like it was going to kill him. On Jie’s floor, there was an old lady squatting by the stairway door, in the hall. She nodded at the two of them.
“Mrs. Yun,” Jie said, “I would like you to meet Hui. He is a mechanic who has come to repair my air-conditioner.” The old lady nodded curtly and looked away.
Jie attacked one of the apartment doors with a key ring, opening four different locks with large, elaborate, thick keys and then putting her shoulder into the door, which swung heavily back, clanging against a door-stop with a metallic sound. She motioned him inside and closed the door, shooting the four bolts from the inside and slapping at several light-switches.
The apartment had two big rooms, the living room in whic
h they stood, and a connecting bedroom that he could see from the doorway. There was a little kitchen area against the wall beside them, and the rest of the room was taken up with a sofa and a large desk with chairs on either side of it, covered in a litter of recording gear: a mixer, several large sets of headphones, and a couple of skinny mics on stands. Every centimeter of wall space was covered in paper: newspaper clippings, letters, drawings—all liberally sprinkled with stickers, hearts, cute animal doodles.
Jie waved her hand at it: “My studio!” she said, and twirled around. “All my fan mail and my press.” She ran her fingers lightly over a wall. Peering more closely at it, Lu saw that every letter began “Dear Jiandi” and that they were all written in neat, girlish hands. “I have a post box in Macau. My friends send the letters there and they scan them and email them to me. All right under the zengfu’s nose!”
“And the old lady in the hall?”
She flopped down on the sofa, her skirt riding up around her thighs, and kicked her shoes in expert arcs to the mat by the door. “Our building’s answer to the bound-foot grannies’ detective squad,” she said, and he laughed again at the slang. Back in Sichuan, they’d used this term to talk about the little old ladies who were always snooping around, gossiping about who was doing something evil or wicked. They didn’t really have bound feet—the practice of binding little girls’ feet to the point where they grew up unable to walk properly was dead, and he’d never seen a real bound foot outside of a museum, though the grannies would always exclaim over the girls’ feet, passing evil remarks if a girl had large feet, cooing if she had small ones—but they acted all pinched anyway.
“And she’ll believe that I’m a repairman? I don’t have any tools!”
“Oh, no,” Jie laughed again. It was a pretty sound. Lu could see how she’d be a very popular netshow host. That laugh was infectious. “No, she’ll think we’re having sex!”
He felt himself turning red and stammering. “Oh—Uh—”
Now she was howling with laughter, head flung back, hair fanned out over the sofa-cushions. “You should see your face! Look, so long as Grandma Mao out there thinks I’m just a garden-variety slut, she won’t suspect that I’m really Jiandi, Scourge of the Politburo and Voice of the Pearl River Delta, all right? Now, get your shoes off and let’s have a look at that head-wound.”