$hitcoin: Load the China FUD
The following extract appears in the novel $hitcoin., available now from , Amazon.co.uk, and all other good booksellers. Read more information at deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin.
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哀 (SORROW) / 樂 (JOY).
Chengdu, China.
哀1.
She wakes with his scent still on the pillow, though as the day overcomes her slumber, she can’t help but count the mornings since she last woke up next to him. What is it now, two weeks? she asks herself, reaching to switch off the robo-voiced alarm reading the news on the phone he bought her. She thinks of his wife, in some expensive apartment in some central district of Chengdu, far from this block of cramped shoebox apartments on the industrial outskirts. She scolds herself as she gets out of bed & regards her tired face in the mirror. You should be thankful you’re not still in the dormitory. Staring at her face, she feels her beauty’s fading with each day spent here, hope ebbing away with it. She wonders how much makeup to apply: if he’s visiting the factory, perhaps she should do everything possible to entice him into visiting her apartment later. But each additional flourish she adds to her face seems to intensify the hatred the other girls have for her. She smirks a little, thinking maybe she ought to make herself prettier than a Disney princess, just to see the jealousy in the eyes of all those simple plain-faced peasant bitches at the factory. They hated her from the second she arrived.
With a little concealer & mascara and the faintest hint of color added to her lips, she’s ready to face the day. She walks down five flights of stairs to leave the building, forever afraid the rickety elevator will break & plummet to the depths with her trapped inside. But would that really be such a bad thing?
China wasn’t supposed to be like this. She’d had big visions of a glittering metropolis filled with newly built skyscrapers, where every building rocketed skyward with the awe & grandeur of Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers. Hannah’s emails had conjured Chengdu as a place of wonder & riches, where wealthy men would fall instantly in love with a pretty young thing like her: This customer from the bar I work at bought me so many gifts!!! French perfume, Italian handbags. And maybe it was true. Maybe Alicia would’ve stayed with Hannah at the World Class Lounge if Hannah had only warned her what was expected of the girls who worked there. Alicia almost laughs at the naivete of her earlier attitude as she walks toward her workplace. Is it really any different to how things worked out at the factory? If she’d stayed at the Lounge, just gone along with it & done what was expected of her, she never would have had to endure those months of sorrow & torment in the dormitory, girls sobbing softly on a dozen beds at either side of her in the darkness of night, familial bonds forming between the emigres from each of China’s lesser provinces, she excluded from it all as a Chinese-in-appearance-only foreigner. As things had progressed with the boss, she’d begged him to take her away from it, using the promise of full agency over her body — the thing he clearly desired as much as any of Hannah’s gift-buying customers desired hers — to push him into providing a place they could be alone together. Now, it’s just a place where she’s alone.
Alicia tries to push sorrowful thoughts away & carry herself with dignified defiance as she begins passing the humming factories sharing a street with her workplace. However bad things seem, she consoles herself by remembering she’s been promoted above all those plain-face peasant bitches who hate her.
As her workplace comes into focus behind its prison-like metal bars, she sees the girls who hate her standing outside. Dozens, maybe all, of them. Alicia thinks first there’s been a fire, but soon sees the police officers standing & talking with them — dozens. Two vans of the kind she’s never seen this far from the city center government offices. She freezes. It’s common for police to appear without warning, to swoop in & snap up some poor girl who’s done something to give them cause to question her paperwork, but this is different. There’s so many of them. Thoughts fall away, she unable to ascribe the scene any meaning beyond vague existential danger. She turns away from the factory & begins walking back in the direction she came from.
樂 1.
The glass fill splash reflects the ethereal purple glow of the wall-wrapped lighting.
“You been busy?” Wei asks, handing Vincent the g&t.
“Always,” Vincent says, swigging the drink.
“This is Hendricks,” Wei says. “From London.”
“It’s good.” Purple refracts through the glass as Vincent tips it toward himself.
“It’s busy here tonight,” Wei says, scanning Venus for attractive females.
“One of the last chances to party before the international crowd goes home for Christmas,” Vincent replies.
“I’m gonna be in Hong Kong at Christmas,” Wei says. “You go there pretty often, right?”
Morgan — a tall, strikingly-handsome, Harvard-educated dynamo of entrepreneurship — approaches the table with Yu, an almost-equally tall model agglomeration of good genes, flawless skin & high cheekbones, slender frame accentuated with a very expensive sequined halter-top dress. Wei fistbumps Morgan & leans in to give Yu European-styled cheek kisses, then talks with Morgan as Vincent repeats the greeting: “You closed the deal yet?”
“Eh,” Morgan says. “I don’t know if we’ll get it done before New Year.”
“Chinese New Year or Western?”
Vincent and Morgan talk about their plans for the holidays as Yu greets a gorgeous girl in a tight white dress that perfectly accentuates a prominent chest & curves to a slender waist.
“Hong Kong!” Morgan says, winning Wei’s attention away from the beauty in white. “What are you doing there?”
“This and that.”
“Going just to go?”
“Yeah,” Wei says. “Pleasure, not business.”
“A lot of pleasure to be had in Hong Kong,” Morgan laughs. “I just read an article in Vice that called it Disneyland for adults.”
A trio of female Swiss students join the table at some point. Wei asks Vincent what he thinks of Hong Kong.
“You know, it looks sort of like Shanghai, but the feeling’s different. More concentrated, and more international.”
“You know that girl over there?” Wei asks, lounging back in the booth a little while later, pointing his g&t glass at the gorgeous girl in the white dress at the booth’s edge, talking to Yu & one of the Swiss girls.
Vincent can’t discern from this angle, & with purple saturating everything, whether the girl’s pure Chinese or maybe huáyì: “I don’t know her.”
Someone brushes past the girls and approaches their table, a spectacled acne-flecked guy with unkempt hair in a disheveled but obviously-expensive suit.
“Yo, bro, wassup?” Wei says, rising from his seat to pour the new arrival a drink. “Hey Vincent, did I introduce you to my buddy Justin yet?”
“Hi,” Justin says, in awkwardly high-pitched English.
“Morgan,” Wei calls across the table as he fills glasses with g&t, “you were telling me about investing in cryptocurrency, right? This is the man to talk to. He’s got the third-biggest Bitcoin mining corp in Chengdu.”
“Yeah… we’re trying to grow it, actually.” Justin coughs. “We’re aiming for second.”
“Oh yeah?” Morgan asks. “What’s it called?”
“BitSong. We called it BitSong because Bitcoin is for everyone, just like music. And because we want to build a dynasty. Like the Song dynasty.”
“And the Song dynasty invented money, right?” Wei says.
“They were the first world government to introduce paper currency,” Justin says, his English-speaking voice strangely unsettling. “And gunpowder. And they made China’s first navy. And the population more than doubled under the Song dynasty. And we want to double BitSong every few months. So that’s why we called it that.”
“Yeah, right, I remember you told me something like that,” Wei says, attention diverted as the girl in white moves away from their table without he having given her a drink. “Excuse me one moment, gentlemen.”
“So… mining Bitcoin,” Morgan muses. “That’s pretty much like printing money, right?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“Of course,” the girl in the white dress tells Wei, “I mean, I’m actually moving to America in a few months… I’m going to Princeton… Chemistry…”
She disappears again a short time later, without Wei having asked for her number.
The next morning, the home’s strangely quiet. Wei pads around the apartment, heats a bowl of whatever that thing is in the refrigerator, & wonders where his parents are. By mid-afternoon, he’s bored of the mystery, & makes plans to meet Vincent & Morgan at Venus again.
“The girl in the white dress…” Morgan ponders, casting his eyes across the purple-hued booth to the spot she’d been standing. “That was Joy.”
“That’s her English name, right?”
“I don’t know,” Morgan says. “Is ‘Joy’ not a typical Chinese name?”
“You think Yu might let me have her number? I wanted to tell her something about the conversation we had yesterday.”
哀2.
Why doesn’t he answer? He usually sends a message eventually, if only to reduce the risk of his wife seeing her missed calls. Alicia barely leaves the purgatory of her tiny apartment in the days that follow, only venturing to a local mart to stock up on instant noodles. It isn’t until Thursday that her repeated internet searches for his & the business’s names turn up any results, but when they do, the silence is replaced with an overwhelming chorus of commentary: article upon article reporting on the arrest of a local factory owner & investigation into tax evasion & undocumented workers. Alicia reads it all in numb dumb incomprehension for hours, until thoughts & comprehension finally come to her: This is his apartment. However long it’s been since he stayed here, it’s still registered in his name. Which means — even if she’s done nothing wrong, even if she has blame for nothing — she will be ensnared in the investigation if she stays here. The world outside has suddenly become immensely threatening, and her complete isolation all the starker. The apartment is no longer a refuge. You have to leave this place. She packs her mercifully few possessions into her tattered suitcase in all of ten minutes, then takes to the chilly winter streets, moving through early evening twilight, wondering if Hannah will forgive her for rejecting the World Class Lounge.
樂 2.
Wei’s mother reappears in the home Sunday evening looking gouged of emotion: “They’re investigating the accounts. Of the business. One of the policemen said we might learn more tomorrow.”
More’s not learnt until Tuesday, when Wei’s father returns looking emotionally hollower than his mother.
“When you go to Hong Kong, you can take 20,000 RMB in cash,” Wei’s father tells him. “I will give you the address and phone number for Hyde & Pearce. They are the best people to handle it.”
“Come to Hong Kong with me,” Wei says to Joy over dinner at The Cathay Room.
“What?!” Joy laughs. “I barely know you.”
“So get to know me. Come on! Hong Kong’s fun. Do you have anything better to do?”
Her parents are taking to Prague for the holiday; Joy’s own plans of drinking heavily with Yoon & Subu are not worth mentioning. “Okay! Sure!”
哀3.
“This is my friend Alicia,” Hannah says in perfectly Sichuanese-accented Mandarin, introducing Alicia to a spectacled and acne-flecked guy with unkempt hair and a disheveled but obviously-expensive suit. A bottle of Jaibin baijiu rests on the table in front of them. The acne-flecked guy leans forward & pours Alicia a glass. She takes a delicate sip, smiles demurely, and listens as Hannah lists off his accolades: a computer genius, an entrepreneur making a fortune through Bitcoin mining, and a keen student of history.
“I named the mining company after the Song Dynasty,” the Bitcoin guy says. “They were the first government in the world to print paper money. And also I like the double meaning of Song in English. Like Bitcoin, music is for everyone.”
“Would you like to hear a song?” Hannah asks, passing the karaoke room’s control pad to Alicia. “Alicia has a wonderful voice.”
樂 3.
“This place is amazing,” Joy says of the room Wei booked at the Mandarin.
“So my Dad’s being investigated for tax fraud,” Wei says over cocktails at The Nest, twinkling neon skyline filling the dark-lit bar’s huge windows. “What even is that? It just sounds so preposterous.”
Wei delves into the burden his father charged him with delivering to Hyde & Pearce, only half-joking as he laughs over the realization it would’ve been useful if he’d asked to Joy carry another 20,000 RMB over the border to Hong Kong.
“How much does he need to move?”
“I think ideally he’d move everything, and I don’t know how much everything is, but it’s a lot more than 20,000 RMB.”
“What happens if he can’t move it?”
“I guess the more he has, the more tax they’ll try and screw him out of. I don’t really get how it all works. So… Chemistry?”
“…the story of Jean Patou,” Joy says, gazing dreamily across The Nest at Hong Kong’s grand skyline, “who created this fragrance, called Joy, when his business was failing at the start of the Great Depression. And he combined these thousands of flowers — ten thousand jasmine petals, two thousands roses — and created this incredible fragrance, one of the world’s greatest. And he went from poverty to the highest end of the luxury fragrance spectrum. And ever since I heard that story, I really thought how cool it would be to make my own fragrance.”
“You should totally do that. That’d be awesome! My cousin is a buyer at J’Adore Pacific. If you did it, I’m sure he’d hook you up with an order.”
Talk quickly turns to practicalities, and by the time the next cocktail’s ordered, a firm plan has been made — shifting Princeton to contingency and going all-in on a dream.
“If you want to move a lot of money out of the country quickly, you could think about moving it into cryptocurrency,” Charlie Richards says in the Hyde & Pearce offices. “We’d be able to facilitate a physical cash purchase for conceivably any amount for your father within Shanghai through an intermediary.”
“That sounds cool,” Wei says. And in front of a Starbucks a few hundred meters from Admiralty Tower, Wei tells Joy. “And actually, I know a guy who’s big into Bitcoin mining. Maybe I could sort something out through him.” Talk then turns to her philosophy on fragrance, how she’d based it on the artwork of Van Gogh, seen in a trip taken to Amsterdam with her family four years ago: Van Gogh’s broad powerful brushstrokes and deep layering of tints from within a highly-restricted palette; it was an artistic strategy she found bled seamlessly into scent production, taking a few robust & unexpected aromas — coriander, rosemary — & layering them with lighter citrus notes and floral weightlessness to create something dynamic & unforgettable.
“That’s incredible,” Wei says. He forgets all about his father’s trouble with the tax investigation as he feeds off the boldness of her ideas. “We could distribute it to all the largest cities in China through my cousin. And we could see about getting a distributor set up here, and in Seoul, Tokyo, Jakarta, Bangkok, maybe I might even be able to speak with someone in New York and get something set up over there –
wow, I’m getting so excited!”
“Me too! Ohmygod! My own fragrance!”
“Yeah! You know who Peter Thiel is? He founded PayPal, with Elon Musk. He’s got this thing, the Thiel Fellowship. He’ll invest, like, $250 million into your idea — or $250,000, something like that — but you’ve gotta work on it full-time. No college. Put that shit on hold. And go 110% for something bigger. Something incredible. Something like your fragrance idea. Look — this is going to sound crazy. But… what if you were to do something like that? I mean, I could help you with the money to set it up…”
“Shut up! Are you actually serious? Mygod! I don’t know…”
“Look, you don’t have to answer me now. Just think about it. As a possibility.”
She answers him two weeks later at Venus, he & her in the booth’s corner.
“What?!”
“I said let’s go with it. The fragrance. Yolo!”
“…and my mother thinks I should get out of the country,” Wei tells Joy over dinner at chef André Chiang’s The Bridge the following night. “She recommended Korea. She says all you need is $125,000 for an investor’s visa. What about launching the fragrance there? Dad’s giving me a lot to invest into various ventures, to hopefully keep it hidden from those government fucks and the tax investigation.”
When Wei is on his knees holding the ring up in a hotel room later that night, Joy’s overcome with her namesake emotion.
哀4.
“I have to go back and get it. It was my grandmother’s necklace. My family would never forgive me if I lost it.”
What Alicia told Hannah is a half-truth — the necklace had belonged to her grandmother, but it was far from a priceless heirloom or anything of any sentimental significance. It was a nothing piece worth a few Malaysian ringgit that had been in a box of belongings marked for disposal after her grandmother died. Alicia wasn’t even sure that she’d brought it to China. But her grandmother’s necklace was the first excuse she’d thought of for leaving the small living space she’s sharing with Hannah & one other Chinese-Malaysian bar girl.
The bus moves for an hour from the buzz & noise of Chengdu’s center to the night-quiet industrial outskirts, Alicia’s mind wandering further, from the nearing-zero temperatures of Chengdu night to the balmy tropical warmth of Malaysia. She lets her mind tumble over disconnected images — the factory owner, his (imagined) wife, the Huawei phone he bought her, the cramped apartment she lived in alone, the sofa at the apartment she’s living on now, the dormitory at the factory, her dead grandmother’s cheap pewter necklace, the pale skin of the Bitcoin mining kingpin & his bush of unkempt pubic hair, the lyrics of the Gavin Chou ballad she’d sung in the karaoke room — Always be true, Never nothing less than that, Always with you, Never wanting more than that — : there is no reason or logic or order to any of it. It’s just things that happened. A loosely connected series of events, one prompting the other introducing another. Maybe life is this, and nothing more than this. A loosely connected series of events, until your possessions are boxed for disposal by those who come after.
Alicia gets off the bus a few stops earlier than she’d intended, wanting to walk past the factory, almost certainly for the final time, propelled into this endeavor by nothing more than curiosity. And as she walks past the factory, she sees a light inside. She stops & stares at it from the street. She trains her ears & mind to obscure the distant buzz of traffic and focus on the low mechanical hum emanating from inside: it’s something new, not the usual frenzied overlapping sounds of garment production. She briefly considers that she may be lost, that she’s staring at a different one of the district’s dozens of factories, but the frazzled rust edging the metal bars is too particular. This is the place. She wonders if he’s inside. She wonders if he’s visited. She takes her phone from her pocket, looks at the WeChat messages she sent, still unread by him. She stands like this until the cold ceases to bother her, until she feels herself blending into this mess of barely connected narratives forming the second-tier city of Chengdu; her own story, known only to her, losing any sense of meaning amidst the millions of other narratives playing out across the city; the mystery of her manager, his factory, some small fragment of a city & country’s development, shifting global capital, the whole confusing epic of human history. The Song Dynasty was the first world government to print paper currency. She has something close to 1000 RMB in her purse. Her bank account contains somewhere between 2000 and 3000 more. If she returns to Hannah & the World Class Lounge, that could quickly grow. Always be true. Never nothing less than that. She wonders if Gavin Chou actually wrote those words himself. She wonders what he was thinking about if he did. What are you doing? She’s asking herself the question, but she’s not sure who the ‘you’ refers to — her, Alicia, or he, Taiwanese pop star Gavin Chou, or him, her jailed sugar daddy factory owner. In any case, she doesn’t know the answer. She taps out a message to him, begging him to call her, to let her know what’s happening, to at least let her know if he’s safe… then she deletes it all before sending it, and stares at the factory. What are you doing?
A door opens. She stares at her phone & starts walking, suddenly conscious of how long she must’ve been standing out there, likely picked up on CCTV. She gets to the factory’s edge before turning back, and sees two figures talking quietly at its door. She snaps a photo, then carries on back to the haggard grey apartment block, climbs five flights of stairs, and realizes she doesn’t have her key.
樂 4.
Wei’s father looks at his son in incomprehension: “You want to get married?”
A lavish ceremony is impossible, even if the bride’s family pays for it. It would be the ultimate show of disrespect to the authorities inspecting him. But as Wei further explains his & Joy’s plan for the perfume shop in Myeongdong, Seoul, and an expanding empire of fragrance from there and beyond using the money his father needs sequestered, the concepts become cogs within a much larger apparatus, at least according to the sketch currently being daubed in Wei’s father’s mind.
“…and Justin told me that me being in Seoul would actually work out amazingly well for getting your money out through BitSong,” Wei continues. “He said that the Korean government puts crazy restrictions on capital outflows and cryptocurrency, but the people there are going crazy for Bitcoin, so the price is like fifty percent higher than it is anywhere else. So Justin can send whatever’s mined at the factory to me in Seoul, I can cash out through a Korean exchange, and you’re making fifty percent extra on everything that’s getting filtered through BitSong.”
Wei’s father smiles. “Son, this girl sounds like she really means a lot to you.”
“She does, Dad. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before. The connection we have is unreal. I’m truly in love with her.”
Fifty percent extra. “Son, your mother and I worried that the day would never come when you told us you were getting married. You know, your mother and I were married before her twenty-first birthday, and we had you soon after. She’s told me again and again how your generation waits longer for marriage, that it’s become customary to wait until you’ve established a career for yourself before you seek someone to share your life with. So until your thirtieth birthday, I waited with patience. But, over the past six years, I began to think you’d never marry.”
“I hadn’t met the right girl, Dad.”
“No. I suppose you hadn’t. And this girl of yours — what was her name?”
“Joy.”
“It sounds like she’s really special to you.”
“She is, Dad. Just as special as Mom is to you.”
“Yes… that must be true… and forgive me for not offering my immediate congratulations. It’s just, with the stress of the investigation, and the government watching our every move, it seemed like an impossible time. But… you say the two of you could live in Korea together? And your friend would have no problem in transferring the Bitcoin from the factory to there?”
“I’m telling you, Dad, it’s the perfect solution for everyone.”
“Then you have my blessing. But with one condition — Joy’s parents must be seen to pay for the wedding. You can tell them that we will reimburse them for every yuan once you’re settled in Seoul. But the government here cannot see that I’m lavishing money on a ceremony.”
“Sure thing, Dad.”
Wei holds his arms out and smiles at his father. For the first time since Wei left to study in London, his father hugs him. All the bitter disappointment of Wei’s failed studies & decade-plus of listless mediocrity are forgotten as they embrace, and Wei’s father thinks of what his son’s told him of his plans for Korea –
Fifty percent extra. And his son’s genius idea of renting the factory space to his friend at BitSong for use as a Bitcoin mine, at a pitifully low declared rental fee, & concealing the bulk of his wealth in digital currency. Were it not for his son’s ingenuity, those treacherous bastards of the government would likely have taken the family’s every yuan before locking him up. “Son, I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you, Dad. You have no idea how much that means to me.”
哀5.
The snoring of the other Chinese-Malaysian girl echoes from within her bedroom & recalls Alicia’s mind to the constant soft night-noise of the dormitory as she stares at the photo snapped outside the factory on her phone. She’s lying on an imitation leather sofa with most of its covering eroded in patches with a blanket pulled over her. Hannah sleeps in the second of the apartment’s two bedrooms. The room Alicia sleeps in is not exactly a living room; more a narrow strip of semi-private hallway. Alicia touches her thumbs to the phone screen’s center & slowly slides them apart, the fuzzy outlines of the two figures smoking cigarettes outside the factory growing larger but no clearer. She thinks of those American TV dramas, where some heroic law enforcement agent tells his younger computer-savvy colleagues to enhance the image. If only it were that easy; she sees faintly illuminated facial features in the photograph, but no more than that. She repeats this same useless action each night once the other girl’s snoring has begun, & again when Alicia is inevitably woken by the banging of doors & loud conversations in the public hallway beyond the semi-private one that is her home.
She scans the features of each of the World Class Lounge’s customers in the days that follow, trying to line them up with the features vaguely seen each night on her phone screen. She knows this is ridiculous –
that the odds of any customer matching the blurry image from outside the factory, in a city of 15 million people, is completely preposterous — but she does it anyway. It’s something to think about it; a mystery to keep her mind occupied. She’s given up on contacting him after her last pain-filled messages, where she drunkenly poured her soul into WeChat, drew no response. But she has to keep trying. She has to do something. Something other than just existing, & flitting from loosely-connected event to loosely-connected event with no agency of her own.
Then it all makes sense: he enters again, the Bitcoin mining guy with the spectacles and the acne-flecked face and the unkempt hair and disheveled but obviously-expensive suit and the bush of untamed pubic hair, now mercifully shielded within his suit pants. The messy hair, the slender-to-the-point-of-frailness figure, the contours of his spectacles’ frame: all perfectly align with the much-studied photograph. It seems impossible, but…
He sees her staring at him. He looks away shyly, then looks back, she still staring, & he smiles. Without wanting to weight her action with further thought, Alicia strides across the bar & sits next to him. She feels the eyes of another bar girl, whose job it should be to first approach the customer & welcome him joyously & proffer menus, burn into the back of her head. From the corner of her eye, she sees Hannah also watching her, shocked by the uncharacteristic boldness with which she’s made her approach.
“Hi!” Alicia says. “Do you remember me?”
“You’re the girl who sings. The Gavin Chou song.”
“And you’re the Bitcoin guy.” She immediately regrets these words, so loaded with gold-digging overtones, but he’s already been drinking, and if he’s bothered by what she says, he doesn’t show it.
She’s telling him that she’s got a song she’d love to sing to him, & he says he’d love to hear her sing it, & the bar girl brings the menu over & looks at Alicia sternly before smiling broadly for the Bitcoin guy & asking what he’d like.
A bottle of Jaibin baijiu is brought to the flashing lights of the karaoke backroom. He pours her a glass & she sings another Gavin Chou song, then one by G.E.M., drinking quickly between bursts of vocals, prompting him to refill her glass repeatedly & increase the rate of his own consumption. She laughs & flirts and duets with him on a Gavin Chou & Joey Huang song about a mermaid, & when they leave the bar, she sees Hannah stare malevolently, as if Alicia has stolen away the affections of the Bitcoin-rich guy just to spite her.
He lives in a plush 14th floor apartment in a tower right beside Tianfu Square, with huge windows providing the sweeping view across the city that finally match her original expectations of China. She flirtatiously pushes him into letting her try glass after glass of exotic European alcohol, he barely able to stand by the time she’s guided him through his drinks cabinet. All the alcohol prolongs the inevitable intercourse but she doesn’t not enjoy it — the drunkeness banishes much of the bizarre awkwardness with which he’d conducted himself in the bar’s backrooms on the last occasion they met. Once it’s over, & he passes out, she compares it to her experiences with him of the factory & decides the Bitcoin guy has in every way outperformed his meagre efforts — he seeming to age with each second spent in the act, until he finally comes & collapses in exhaustion at the end of it. She thinks maybe this could be her true Chengdu destiny, as she gazes again across the skyscraper-filled cityscape, but then reminds herself that this is a business transaction, and she’d be foolish to expect anything more to develop from it. With heavy snoring indicating the Bitcoin guy is now soundly asleep, she takes his phone from a bedside table & delicately uncurls his fingers & presses them to his phone to unlock it. She scans his text messages, then WeChat, finding meme-filled chats with similarly nerdy guys, reams of 10-second clips of his friends fucking girls, but nothing that ties him to him from the factory. Frowning, thinking the whole sordid night a failure, she delves through the mass of applications on his phone, so many she has never heard before, until she sees one she guesses might be another messenger app — Telegram. When she opens it, she finds what she’s been looking for: messages exchanged with some guy called Wei, scores of them, referencing the factory. She scrolls back through the messages until all mention of the factory disappears & she sees weekly exchanges of plans to meet at Venus in Lan Kwai Fong. From there she moves forward, seeing an explanation of why the Bitcoin guy so perfectly matched the blurry image she spent so long studying: My dad loved the factory idea! The space is going to waste now anyway, let’s talk it over in person soon… She takes out her own phone & photographs each of the messages, then angles the phone above her head & snaps a selfie with the Bitcoin guy’s face & naked hairless chest clearly visible on the bed behind her.
樂 5.
The tension between the two sets of parents at the head table is palpable. Neither has said or done anything to outwardly indicate their displeasure with proceedings, but it’s clear from the sullen expression on Joy’s father’s face what he thinks of this: his daughter being hastily shunted into a marriage, much expense spared on the ceremony, giving up an American Ivy League education for a business funded by a family of such pathetic character. Her mother was more supportive, harping on endlessly to her husband of ‘changing times’ and ‘a woman’s right to choose.’ “The family has a lot of money,” she’d told him, “and only one son to inherit it all.” He would have preferred his daughter married some buffoonish American than lowering herself to this. But, drinking glass after glass of baijiu and gorging on beef, duck, & crab in the less-than-five-star banqueting hall, he consoles himself with the bridge-groom’s family’s promise to reimburse them two-fold for all wedding expenses, just as soon as the couple have set up Joy’s long-dreamed-of perfume venture in Seoul.
“Thanks for coming, guys,” Wei tells Vincent & Morgan & Yu & Yoon & Subu & other assorted international friends grouped together at one table as the newly-married couple make their rounds of their guests’ tables, prompting a chorus of “Of course!” & “We wouldn’t miss it!” & comments on how beautiful Joy looks & wry comments from the guys about how well Wei’s scrubbed up & how Joy’s having a positive influence on him already.
“Huh,” Wei says, taking his phone from his pocket & reacting to something on it as they leave the table.
“What?” Joy asks.
“I don’t know… someone’s trying to get in touch with Dad… they say it’s urgent… excuse me one moment.” He leaves Joy looking worried between the tables, drawing interested glances from several guests & adding to the ever-deepening disapproval of some of Joy’s closest family members. “Dad, I got a message from someone telling you to check your WeChat. They say it’s urgent.”
“Who is it?” Wei’s mother asks.
“They didn’t say.”
Joy’s father looks at Wei’s father with undisguised disgust. Wei’s father calmly takes his phone from his pocket, holding it as close to his face as possible. No message notification has appeared, but the bubble beside WeChat shows new unseen messages. He knows instantly who the sender is — that girl, whose chat he’s muted. Trying his best to seem unbothered, Wei’s father stands & excuses himself.
“What is it?” Wei’s mother asks.
“It’s nothing,” Wei’s father says. “Business. A small thing that someone was taking care of for me.”
Wei’s father strolls as nonchalantly as possible to the banqueting hall’s nearest exit, ignoring staff as he approaches the hotel’s entrance, not looking at the phone again until he’s a good twenty meters from the building. That stupid whore, he thinks. When will she give up and just get on with her life? Disturbing me on my only son’s wedding day… And contacting Wei! He’s only just begun to wonder how she could have got Wei’s number when the message opens: the screenshots of Wei & Justin’s conversation about setting the Bitcoin mining operation up at the factory, the selfie taken from his bed, vaguely threatening messages about ‘a friend’ having told her ‘something interesting’ about the factory and the Bitcoin mining operation…
哀樂.
What do you want?
Alicia stares at the long-awaited WeChat message. So abrupt. So direct. She has no idea how to answer it.
What do I want?
She’s walked almost two hours from the cramped apartment, a few blocks south of Jiuyanqiao Bar Street — home to the World Class Lounge — , taking a meandering route along the north side of the river, and then through the ever-growing crowds & concentration of commerce — shops, restaurants, malls; from where she’s standing when she receives his message, she can pick out the Bitcoin guy’s apartment building from among the towers dotted around Tianfu Square.
What do I want?
She wants all of it: the luxury housing, the upmarket shopping, the quality cuisine, the city & all within it. And why stop at Chengdu? She thinks of Shanghai, with surely five times the amenities & ten times the glamor. Or Hong Kong. Maybe even some city further from here, somewhere glittering & glamorous, like Paris, London, New York…
Money is the only thing keeping her in that cramped apartment on the south-side of the river. Money was the only reason she was ever banished to the city’s industrial outskirts. Money was what doomed her to live in the dorm with two dozen other girls, and his money is what moved her to the modest upgrade of her own one-room living space.
The promptness of his reply & the bluntness of his question — What do you want? — tells her that she now has power. While she only vaguely understands his connection to the Bitcoin guy and whatever’s now going on at the repurposed garment factory, she knows that she knows enough to exert control over him. Agency. Agency over her life & his.
Alicia keeps walking until she reaches a Starbucks, then picks one of the menu’s most expensive items — a java chip mocha something something. She sits & waits for her drink, pondering the message. What do I want? The rush she felt upon opening the message is quickly fading, replaced by immense fear of the unknown she has now committed herself to. The moment I reply to him, he’s in control again. He can approve or deny her request. He can do any number of things. But the result will depend on his response. My future will depend on his response. Alicia is called to the counter to collect her drink. She takes it back to her seat, takes a quick sip of the thick cold liquid, then stares again at the ominous text message. What do you want?
$hitcoin. by Haydn Wilks
$hitcoin is available now from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and all other good booksellers. Read more information at deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin. [NOTE: These are Amazon affiliate links.]
