The Other Faction

The summons came on a Thursday afternoon at three minutes past two.

Lao Wei picked up the phone on its first ring, listened for perhaps eight seconds, said *yes* twice, and hung up. He looked across the room at Lin.

"Pang's office. Now."

Lin set down his pen, picked up a clean notebook, and walked.

Pang was at his desk. He looked up when Lin entered. He did not gesture to a sofa.

"Xiao Lin. The Office of the Party Secretary has requested a meeting with you. Today. Three forty-five. The Secretary is conducting his quarterly review of new young people. There will be three of you. You will go up. You will be one of three. You will bow. The Secretary will ask each of you a single question. You will answer. You will then leave. Total time: four minutes."

Pang leaned back.

"This is a routine event. The Secretary does this twice a year. It is not significant. But —" His eyes settled on Lin. "I want you to understand something. The Secretary will ask you a question. You will answer it correctly. You will not say anything memorable. You will not say anything clever. You will be entirely, completely, perfectly forgettable. Do you understand me?"

"I understand, Director."

"Mm. Three forty-five. The reception room is on the seventh floor. Three forty-three at the door. Not earlier."

"Yes, Director."

"Go."

Lin went.

#

He had never been to the seventh floor.

It was the top floor of the building. Mayor Cao occupied the south wing. Secretary Han occupied the north wing. A wide carpeted reception area separated them — a polished round table with fresh flowers, two long sofas, a hush that did not occur on any of the lower floors. The carpet swallowed footsteps. The light came from concealed sources.

He arrived at the door of the Secretary's reception room at three forty-three exactly.

The other two young clerks were already there. A woman of perhaps twenty-five, in a grey suit, whom Lin recognized from the orientation roster — Wu Xiaomei, Bureau of Civil Affairs, third in the prefecture exam two years ago. The other was a man of perhaps twenty-six, second in the prefecture exam last year, from the Bureau of Education. Neither spoke. They stood against the wall in a small careful row.

A secretary opened the door at three forty-five.

"Come in."

The room was large, plain, austere. Two long windows looked out over the city to the north. Heavy traditional furniture — dark wood, lacquered red, long sofas with crocheted antimacassars. A single long scroll on the wall, in calligraphy of an unfamiliar hand, that read *实事求是* — *seek truth from facts.* A low tea table in front of the central sofa, with a single small porcelain teapot and four cups arranged with the symmetry of a board game.

Secretary Han was seated on the central sofa. He was alone.

He was, in person, smaller than he had appeared from a distance at any banquet. A dry, compact man in his late fifties, with iron-grey hair cut short, with hands folded in his lap. His suit was a dark plain wool. His eyes were narrow and patient and very dark.

"Sit," he said. "All three of you."

They sat. The three young clerks took the three other sofas, in a wide square around the tea table. The secretary withdrew, closing the door soundlessly.

Han looked at each of them in turn.

He spoke first to Wu Xiaomei. "You are from Civil Affairs. Your county is Beidu. Your father was a hospital administrator. Yes?"

"Yes, Secretary."

"My condolences on his passing two years ago. He and I were on the County People's Congress committee together, briefly, in the nineties. He was a good man."

"Thank you, Secretary."

"My question for you. In the work you have done so far, what has surprised you most?"

Wu Xiaomei answered competently. She spoke for ninety seconds about the difficulty of coordinating disability-services payments across township-level offices. She did not perform. She gave a real answer. Han nodded once, slowly. He did not comment.

He turned to the young man from Education.

"Tian Yongsheng. You are from Anqing. Your mother is a primary school principal, your father is in the railway."

"Yes, Secretary."

"My question. When you submitted your essay for the civil service interview — I read it; I read several that year — you wrote a paragraph at the end about the role of the educational examination system in maintaining social mobility. Has anything in your three months at the Bureau of Education caused you to revise that paragraph?"

Tian Yongsheng's face flushed faintly. He had not expected a question that referred to his interview essay from a year and a half ago. But he recovered. He answered for two minutes — a careful, slightly more nuanced version of his original argument, now informed by what he had seen of how the examination system actually operated at the prefectural level. Han listened with the same flat patient attention. When Tian finished, Han nodded again, once, slowly.

He turned to Lin.

"And you are Lin Zhaoxu. From Qingyuan County. Your father is a high school physics teacher. Your grandfather was a primary school teacher in the same county for forty-three years. First in the prefecture exam this year. Yanjing University Public Administration."

"Yes, Secretary."

A small pause. The flat patient eyes held Lin's.

"My question," Han said, "is the one I asked you in my office on your eighth day in this building. Do you remember it?"

The question went through Lin's chest like a small cold needle.

He remembered it perfectly. He had been summoned, on a Thursday morning, to a brief audience with the Secretary that had lasted ninety seconds, during which Han had asked him a single question — *Where is your hometown?* — and Lin had answered, and Han had nodded and said nothing more.

He remembered the question. He had thought, at the time, that the question was a courtesy. A formality.

He understood now, in this moment, that the question had not been any of those things.

Han had been waiting six weeks to ask it again.

Lin said: "You asked me where my hometown was, Secretary. I answered: Qingyuan County."

"I did. And now I will ask it differently. Where, Lin Zhaoxu, is your hometown."

Lin sat very still.

He thought, in the long second after the question, with great speed.

The first time Han had asked the question, the question had meant: *where are you from, in the geographic sense.* The answer had been the literal answer. Qingyuan County.

The second time, *now*, the question meant something different. The geographic answer was already known. Han had stated it himself in his preamble: *From Qingyuan County.* The question being asked now was therefore not the literal one. It was a coded question. It was asking something else.

What.

A *hometown*, in Chinese, was 故乡 — the place you come from, the place you return to. But it was also, in older usage, the place where your bones would be buried. The place that was *yours,* in a deeper sense than the place that produced you.

Han was asking: *where, Lin Zhaoxu, is the place that is yours.*

He was asking, in a coded officialdom phrasing that no one in the room would write down: *where, in this city's politics, do you intend to belong.*

Lin had two seconds.

If he answered *Qingyuan,* he was answering only the literal question. He was being modest, evasive, and in Han's eyes, slightly thick. Han would nod once, slowly, and the audience would be over.

If he answered something clever — if he tried to indicate, through some small phrase, that he understood the coded question and was attempting to answer it — he would commit himself, in this room, in front of a tiger, to an alignment he had not yet decided on. Pang's instruction had been: *do not impress him.* Pang's instruction had been: *be forgettable.*

And yet —

Lin Zhaoxu thought, with a cold clarity that surprised him: *Pang is wrong.*

Han did not invite three young clerks to a four-minute audience for a forgettable answer. Han invited three young clerks because Han wanted to know, before any of them rose another rung, who was clever and who was not. The forgettable answer would not protect Lin from Han. It would simply confirm that Lin was not interesting. And being not-interesting to Han meant indifference. Indifference was a worse fate than enmity. Indifference meant one was filed under *junior cadres of no account.* Once filed, the file did not move.

He had two seconds. He had used most of them already.

He said: "Secretary, my hometown is Qingyuan County. My family's village. The school where my grandfather taught for forty-three years. Where my father teaches now. Where my sister will, in two years, attend her first year of university and then leave. That is where my bones will go.

"But you are asking me a different question. And so I will give you a different answer."

He paused.

"My hometown is wherever the rule of law is honored, the people are served, and the work is done with care. That is where I would like to live. That is where I would like to do my work. If, in twenty years, the Qingyuan I serve in is that place, I will have served well. If it is not, I will have failed. I do not yet know whether I will succeed. I have been here forty-six days."

A silence.

He had broken Pang's instruction. He had said something. He could not now pretend he had not.

Han looked at him. The flat patient eyes did not move. The face did not move.

After a moment, Han said: "Forty-six days."

"Yes, Secretary."

"You have been counting."

"I am a young man, Secretary. Young men count."

A second silence.

Then — slowly, slowly — Han's mouth moved into the faintest expression Lin had ever seen pass across the face of a senior official. It was not a smile. It was the small movement of a man who had heard, in three sentences, exactly what he had been waiting six weeks to hear.

Han nodded once.

"You may go, all three of you," he said. "Thank you for your time."

They rose. They bowed. They went out.

#

In the corridor, the three young clerks did not speak. They walked to the elevator together. They rode it down in silence. When the doors opened on the fourth floor, Lin nodded to the other two and stepped out alone.

He walked to the small office.

Lao Wei was at his desk. Zhang Xiaodong was at his desk. Section Member Ye was at her desk. None of them looked up.

Lin sat down. He picked up his pen. He bent over a document.

He felt, in his chest, the small dry hot beating of the heart of a man who had just been observed, very closely, by exactly the wrong person.

After a few minutes Lao Wei stood up to refill his thermos. On the way back to his desk he paused, beside Lin's chair, and said quietly — to no one, to the wall, to the ceiling — three words.

"Pang will know."

Then he was past.

Lin understood.

He bent over his work. He worked for the rest of the afternoon. At six fifty-five he packed his satchel and walked out. He did not, that evening, go to the boarding house. He walked to the long bridge over the Yu River, and he stood at the railing for a long time, watching the water, and he thought about what he had done.

He had broken Pang's instruction.

He had probably been correct to do so. Han had clearly, by Han's small final nod, marked him — in some tiny, currently invisible way — as one of the *interesting* young people. That was an asset.

But Pang would, by tomorrow morning, know that Lin had said something memorable in the audience. Pang's network was not — as Lin had seen in the past forty-six days — without sources on the seventh floor. Pang would know. And Pang would understand, correctly, that Lin had ignored a direct instruction.

The cost of that understanding could be very high.

Or it could not.

Pang was not a fool. Pang understood that a junior who attracted Han's interest was, in a strange roundabout way, valuable to Pang. A clerk whom both factions found *interesting* was a clerk whose star was rising. A clerk whose star was rising — if managed correctly — could be ridden by a director up the chain.

The question was whether Pang would interpret Lin's disobedience as *betrayal* or as *a useful young man who could not be fully controlled.*

Lin did not know.

He stood at the bridge for forty minutes. The river ran below him.

He thought, finally: *I do not know which way Pang will read it. But there is no rewinding it now. The minute is gone.*

He laughed, very quietly, at the small private joke.

Then he went home. He wrote one line in his notebook:

*Two tigers see me. Pang will know. The thing is done.*

He slept badly.

In the morning, when he came into the office at seven thirty, the side table where the mooncakes had been was empty. Only a single small folded note remained at the corner of the table.

The note was in Lao Wei's handwriting. It contained one sentence.

*Be at your desk, working, when Pang summons you. Do not anticipate. Do not apologize.*

Lin read it. He folded it. He took it to the bathroom and burned it over the sink with a match from his pocket.

He returned to his desk.

He worked.

Pang summoned him at ten forty-eight.

The summons, when it came, was not what Lin had expected.

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