Gui Zhe

Penguin had been publishing the Penguin Specials series for awhile now - small paperback books (and e-books) - they are generally under 100 pages (but usually close to it), there are both fiction and non-fiction titles and they are usually things that are too short to get published on their own. Occasionally they have a subseries going on inside of the main series - there are quite a lot of them in the "China Specials" for example. And this novella is part of another of these subseries: "Zhejiang Specials". The 5 novellas printed in this subseries come from contemporary authors from the Zhejiang Province - authors who are not familiar to the English speaking world (I am not sure if any of them were ever translated in English before). "Fleeing Xinhe Street" is one of these 5 and if the rest are as good as this one is, Zhejiang Province seems to have some very talented authors.

The novella is deceptively simple when it starts - a 40 year old man that never fit anywhere manages a "Guarantee Company" - a loan operation which borrows money from companies and people who can afford it, paying them a reasonable interest (much bigger than the one the bank would pay on a deposit) and loans the same money to other companies who need them (at an even larger interest rate, much larger than what the bank offers). Wang Wuxian has a lot of friends, cares about animals (and always picks up strays from the street), makes fun of his own body, color-blindness and lack of a wife and is the last man you would suspect in being dishonest. And yet, one day he leaves Xinhe Street in Wenzhou City in the Zhejiang Province and runs to USA, leaving local businesses in the red. So what happened?

There is an easy explanation - bad luck. One company took a very large loan so they can pay their bank loan and get a new bank loan (by the time we meet everyone, that had become a practice - banks are a lot more likely to give short term loans and a business can take the interest for the few days/months they need the money before the bank approves a new loan). Except that this time, the bank management had decided to cut off the loans and change the rules so a glass factory owner ends up owning Wang Wuxian's company a lot of money. The factory closes, the loan defaults and our hapless usurer runs away.

If that was the whole story, it would have been a nice commentary in fiction to the changing attitude of the Chinese population and businessmen towards money. But this absconding leaves a shoe factory in a really bad situation - their capital was in Wang Wuxian's company so with him gone and their bank calling their own loans, the owner is about to lose his business - one which his father built from the grounds up. To top all the problem, the bank seems to know about the practice which everyone had been involved in and is unwilling to work with the businesses after the usurer is gone. As the details start emerging while we get to know Hu Weidong, the shoemaker who risked everything for the good interest rates, one starts to see shades of something different. Was the timing and the escape really a result of a run of bad luck and bad timing? Or was there something else happening. By the end of the novella, we learn what really happened and the only question remaining is who you should be feeling sorry for the most.

As with most Chinese stories and novels I had read, the language is somewhat simple and the prose is almost flat. I don't think it is just the translation - it seems to be the style of the Chinese authors so if you expect bright prose, you will be disappointed. The novella sounds like a story someone tells to you - starting with what happened and then slowly explaining what happened before that thus making that initial idea of what happened redundant and incorrect by the time it is done. The repetition of certain elements add that oral cadence to the story which does not grate but adds to the story in the same way it used to do it for the Ancient Greeks for example. Maybe the final resolution was a bit cliched but then cliches exist for a reason and I really enjoyed getting to that end.

PS: And if you do not plan to read it and you had not guessed yet: of course there was a femme fatale and a rejected man looking for revenge at the bottom of all that.… (meer)