Banquet Season

The banquets began with the first week of November.

There was no formal calendar for them. They simply began. The temperature dropped; the leaves were almost down; the year-end work plans started circulating; the bureaus began to hold their internal review meetings; and as a natural consequence — like fish moving downstream — the banquets came.

A banquet, in Qingyuan's municipal officialdom, was not the same thing as a meal. A meal was something you ate. A banquet was something you *participated in.* It was a multi-hour ceremonial event with a precisely defined seating order, a precisely defined toasting sequence, and a precisely defined set of verbal exchanges that would, over the course of the evening, produce a precisely defined set of social outcomes — some of them, most of them, invisible to anyone who had not been at the banquet.

Lin Zhaoxu had attended one banquet so far in his career. The Zhao Yifan welcome lunch had been a small thing — a private room at a midrange restaurant, six men and one woman, no formal toasting hierarchy beyond the basic gestures. It had been, at most, a banquet's small cousin.

The first real banquet of his career came on the fourth of November. It was the General Office's internal annual planning banquet — held, by tradition going back at least twenty years, at *Pinyu Lou*, a large traditional restaurant a kilometer north of the Municipal Government building, in a private hall that the office had reserved every November since before Lin had been born.

The banquet had eight tables. Each table held ten people. Eighty cadres, then, in total — the entire General Office and its associated bureaus, plus selected guests from elsewhere in the city government. The seating chart for the eighty cadres was the result, Lin had observed over the past two days in the office, of three separate and somewhat anxious meetings between Director Pang's secretary and a woman from the office of the deputy mayor.

He was assigned to the eighth table. The eighth table was the lowest — at the back of the hall, near the kitchen door, where the noise was greatest and the dishes arrived last. He had been seated there along with five other section members of his level and three younger clerks. The tenth seat at his table was Section Chief Li Mingxia.

This, he understood, was deliberate.

He arrived at the restaurant at five-forty for a six o'clock banquet — early, as a junior should, to verify the seating and confirm that nothing had gone wrong. He stood for a quiet moment in the doorway of the hall, taking in the geometry of the room. The mayor's table was at the far end, beneath a large red banner with white characters reading *Loyal service, harmonious office.* Mayor Cao would not actually be at this banquet — he had a higher engagement — but Deputy Mayor Liu would be, and Director Pang would sit on his right.

Lin walked, slowly, through the room. He found the eighth table. He took his seat.

By six the room was filling. By six-fifteen the head table had filled. By six-twenty Deputy Mayor Liu had arrived, and the room had gone briefly silent and risen in a small reflexive bow, and Liu had nodded to the room and sat. The banquet had begun.

The eighth table was, in social terms, the safest place in the room.

It was also the most useful.

Because Lin understood, by the second course, that the lowest table at a banquet was not — as a more naive observer might have thought — a place of exile. It was a place of *observation.* From the eighth table, he could see the entire room. He could see who toasted whom; he could see whose cup was raised first to whom; he could see who laughed too loudly at whose joke and whose face went, very briefly, hard at the wrong moment.

He could see who toasted Director Pang.

He counted them.

Director Pang was toasted by — over the course of the first hour — eleven separate men. Three of them were directors. Two were deputy directors. Six were section chiefs. The eleven men, Lin noted in his head, formed a cluster around Pang's table; they came up to it in waves, in roughly the order their seniority dictated. None of the men who toasted Pang were from the smaller table where Section Chief Wei — Lao Wei — sat with several of the office's older mid-level cadres.

Lao Wei was at table four. He had been seated, Lin observed, directly under the small alcove with the carved screen — a position that, if you knew how to look, was the seat of *the senior who has chosen not to seek further.* It was the seat of the man who had decided long ago that he would not need to be promoted again. Lao Wei was, of course, only a section chief — too low for that seat to be his by right of rank. But the seating chart had honored him with it anyway, and Lin understood that this was the doing of Director Tian, the head of the Policy Research Section, who had been on the seating committee.

Across the room, Lao Wei drank from his cup steadily. He did not toast anyone. He was toasted twice — once by Section Chief Hu of the Records Office, and once by an old man Lin recognized vaguely as the retired former director of the General Office, who had been invited as a courtesy. Lao Wei stood for both toasts. He drank his cup. He sat.

He did not look at Lin.

Lin watched the room.

At the head table, Deputy Mayor Liu was, midway through the banquet, asked by Director Pang for a small speech. Liu rose. He spoke for perhaps ninety seconds. He praised the office's hard work over the past year; he commended Director Pang's leadership; he acknowledged the contributions of *every single member of the office, from the senior cadres down to the newest section members.* He smiled at the room. He sat.

The toast that followed was a general one. The whole room rose. The whole room drank.

When the general toast had finished, Director Pang rose. He took his cup. He walked, with a small expansive smile, across the room — past tables six, seven — toward table eight.

He stopped at the eighth table. He raised his cup.

"To the new young men," he said. "Welcome to the General Office. Drink up, drink up."

The eight younger men at table eight rose. They drank.

Director Pang's eyes, however, were on Lin.

"Xiao Lin," he said. "Come here. Let me introduce you to a few people."

Lin set down his cup. He came around the table. He followed Director Pang.

Director Pang led him not to the head table — that would have been too much honor for a section member — but to table three, which held the three deputy directors of the office, two senior researchers, and four section chiefs. He stopped at the chair of one of the senior researchers, an older man Lin recognized vaguely from the corridor: Researcher Qin, of the Policy Research Section.

"Old Qin," Director Pang said warmly, "this is the new young man I told you about. From Yanjing. The one who wrote the memo on the Western Industrial Park."

Researcher Qin looked up. He had one of those careful, thinking faces that aged well — the face of a man who had spent his career reading documents others would only skim. He nodded slowly.

"The memo," he said. "Yes. I read it."

He did not say whether he had liked it.

"Old Qin," Director Pang said, "is the senior researcher in our Policy Research Section. He was one of the original drafters of the 1998 land-use document you cited."

Lin felt, very briefly, the floor shift slightly beneath him.

"Researcher Qin," he said, bowing his head a fraction. "I am honored. The 1998 document was a very fine piece of work. I learned a great deal from it."

Qin's small face did not change. But his eyes — Lin saw it, in the small fold at their corners — went slightly more attentive than they had been.

"You read it carefully?"

"As carefully as I could in three afternoons."

"What did you think of the third section?"

The third section. Lin had read it. The third section had been on the principle of *flexible adjustment* in land-use designations — a section that, on first reading, had seemed to be an internal contradiction with the second section's emphasis on stability, but which on second reading he had understood to be a deliberate compromise between two factions of the original drafting committee. The third section had been, in fact, the section he had quoted in his memo to Sun.

He answered carefully.

"I thought, Researcher Qin, that the third section was a very honest section. It was honest in a way that documents at that level rarely are. I thought that whoever drafted it understood that the second section could not stand alone without producing absurdities in practice, and that they had introduced the principle of flexible adjustment not as a contradiction but as a — corrective. A safety valve."

He paused. He looked at Researcher Qin's face.

"I thought," he said more quietly, "that whoever drafted it must have been a man who had spent some time in actual townships, watching how master plans broke down in contact with real terrain."

There was a long pause.

Researcher Qin took a small slow sip from his cup. He set the cup down.

"I drafted the third section," he said.

"Yes, Researcher."

"You knew?"

"I did not know. I guessed."

"Why did you guess?"

"Because the third section was written," Lin said, "in slightly different prose than the second section. The second section was written in the prose of a senior planner. The third section was written in the prose of someone who had read the second section with a slight degree of impatience. I assumed that whoever had drafted the third section had been the second-most-senior person in the room, and had been brought in late — perhaps in the third or fourth round of drafting — to fix something the senior person had been unable or unwilling to fix."

Researcher Qin looked at him.

His expression did not change. But something in the quality of the air at table three changed. The two other senior researchers had gone quiet; one of the section chiefs, mid-toast at the next chair, had paused with his cup halfway to his lips. Director Pang, beside Lin, had gone slightly stiff.

After a long moment, Researcher Qin laughed.

It was a short, dry laugh. He shook his head, slowly.

"Director Pang," he said, "this young man has read your office's documents very carefully indeed."

"He has," Pang said smoothly. "He is — as I told you — quite promising."

"Sit," Researcher Qin said to Lin. "Sit beside me for a moment, Xiao Lin. The young man at the next chair is going to fetch us some hot tea, since I have grown tired of baijiu. Yes? And you are going to tell me what else you read in the briefs."

The young man at the next chair — a section member from the Policy Research Section — got up and went, with great alacrity, to fetch tea.

Lin sat.

For the next eleven minutes, Researcher Qin questioned him.

The questions were not — Lin understood by the third question — adversarial. They were the questions of an old researcher who had not had a good young listener in some years and was, with the slight social cover of a banquet and the cup of baijiu in his hand, indulging himself. He asked about the second appendix. He asked about the cross-reference to the 1996 commerce regulations. He asked, with a small careful smile, what Lin had thought of the missing fourth appendix — *the one*, he said, *that was redacted from the public version, did you notice that?*

"I noticed," Lin said.

"You noticed."

"Yes."

"And what did you make of it?"

"I made nothing of it, Researcher. I assumed it had been redacted for a reason that was not my business. I noted that the document was internally complete without it — that the analysis I needed could be done without it — and I left it alone."

Researcher Qin nodded slowly.

"That was the correct answer," he said. "It was redacted because it contained the names of the original landowners in the western district, several of whom — eight, if I remember — were related by marriage to the family of the then-mayor. The redaction was correct. The fact that you did not pry was also correct."

He set down his cup.

"Director Pang," he said to Pang, who had been standing beside the table the whole time with his hands clasped in front of him, "your young man knows when not to look. That is a useful quality. May I borrow him sometime, for our section?"

Director Pang's smile did not change. But Lin felt — through some small currents in the air — that Director Pang's smile had been instructed, very clearly, to be careful.

"Of course, Old Qin. Of course. He is at the disposal of any senior in this building who has need of him. We are all one office."

"We are all one office," Researcher Qin agreed, mildly.

He turned back to Lin. "Go back to your table, Xiao Lin. Drink your wine. Don't get drunk. Young men who get drunk at banquets are remembered for it. Go."

"Yes, Researcher Qin."

Lin stood. He bowed slightly to Researcher Qin, slightly to Director Pang, and walked back across the room to table eight.

He sat down. He picked up his cup. He drank what was in it — it was tea, not baijiu; he had switched ninety minutes ago — and he set the cup down.

Across the table, Section Chief Li Mingxia was watching him.

Her face was perfectly impassive. She raised her cup, very slightly, in his direction. She drank.

He raised his cup, slightly, in return.

They did not speak. They did not need to.

He understood — and this was what he would write later that night in the notebook in the false bottom of the drawer — that he had just been seen by Researcher Qin. Researcher Qin was in Lao Wei's network, not Pang's. Researcher Qin was in the same horizontal substrate that Lao Wei and Li Mingxia and Section Member Ye and the quiet old Hu Erming all inhabited. Researcher Qin was not powerful in the hierarchy. He was very powerful in the substrate.

And Researcher Qin had decided — *in front of Director Pang* — to be openly favorable to Lin.

This was a thing that had been done deliberately.

It had been done because the substrate had decided, between the time the memo was delivered and tonight's banquet, that the young clerk in the General Office was worth a small public investment.

Lin sipped his tea.

He felt, for the first time since he had stepped off the train two months ago, the small warmth that came from understanding that he was not alone in the room.

The banquet went on.

It ran until past nine. It ended in the slow careful unwinding that all Chinese banquets ended in — the senior leaving first, the next-senior leaving second, each in turn, while the juniors stayed until the end and supervised the closing of the room. Lin stayed until the end. He tipped the waiter. He thanked the manager. He took down a small wooden plaque from the wall on Pang's behalf — a calligraphic plaque with the office's name on it that was, by tradition, kept by the office between banquets. He carried it out to the car.

He walked home through the cold dark streets.

The wind had risen. There were, somewhere far off, the small popping sounds of firecrackers — someone, in the residential district two blocks away, celebrating something. He did not know what.

He climbed the stairs to his room. He sat at the desk. He did not, tonight, take out the notebooks. He did not, tonight, write anything.

He simply sat at the desk, in the small room, with the cold air coming through the window, and he thought.

After a long while he reached up and took down the calligraphy brush case. He ground a small amount of ink. He took a sheet of newsprint. He weighted the corners with the teacup, the inkstone, the brush case, and the smooth small stone from the library courtyard.

He held the brush above the paper.

He wrote a single character.

It was 局.

*Bureau. Situation. Game. Set-up. The board on which one plays.*

In Chinese, it was a word with many meanings, all of them connected. The position you found yourself in. The chessboard you could see and the larger chessboard you could not. The bureau you worked within and the bureau you worked against.

He looked at the character.

He thought: *The map is the local 局. Researcher Qin is part of a larger 局. Old Cao is part of a still larger 局. There are 局 above 局 above 局, and the man who survives is the man who knows which 局 he is in at any given moment.*

He weighted the paper to the desk.

He went to bed.

He slept, for the first time in eleven days, deeply and without dreams.

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