Li Mingxia
The Cloud Pavilion teahouse stood at the western end of Yu Street, two blocks south of the Cloud Peak — the two were not the same establishment, though the names confused new arrivals. The Cloud Peak (云峰) was where men met to exchange envelopes. The Cloud Pavilion (云榭) was where they met to drink tea and pretend they were not exchanging anything at all. Lin had walked past the Cloud Pavilion perhaps eight times in his three months in Qingyuan. He had never been inside.
He arrived on Wednesday at two fifty-six in the afternoon.
The teahouse occupied a small two-story building set back from the street behind a low wall. A small carved sign above the door read 云榭 in slightly worn lacquer. He pushed the door open. The interior was dim and warm and smelled of long-steeped tea and the faint ghost of pipe tobacco from a generation that had largely passed away. The first floor held perhaps twelve square tables, half of them occupied, mostly by older men reading newspapers in the slow contemplative way of the retired.
A woman in a plain blue cotton jacket — the proprietress, perhaps fifty-five, with grey at the temples — looked up from her counter and said, before Lin had spoken:
"Comrade Li is upstairs. The room at the back."
He bowed his head. He climbed the narrow wooden stairs.
The second floor was four small private rooms, each separated from the corridor by a wooden screen. The door of the rearmost room was open. Li Mingxia was seated at a low square table by the window, alone, with a small unglazed clay teapot, two cups, and an open book. She wore the same grey wool dress she had worn at the banquet, the small jade pin at her collar. The book was a paperback, plain spine, not ornamental. She did not stand when he entered.
"Sit, Section Member Lin."
He sat across from her. The window looked out over a small inner courtyard — a single old plum tree, its bare November branches reaching upward, a stone water basin at its base. Snow had not yet come to Qingyuan but would, in another two weeks. The air against the glass was cold.
She poured.
The tea was Pu'er. Not young Pu'er. He could tell by the colour — a deep, settled, almost black amber — and by the way the leaves had unfurled in the pot. Twelve years old, perhaps. Fifteen.
He drank.
"Good?" she said.
"Good."
"It was a gift from a friend in Yunnan, last year. I do not drink it often. I drink it on certain afternoons."
"This is one of those afternoons."
"Yes."
She set down her cup. She closed the book. She placed it face-down on the corner of the table. The cover, when it was face-down, showed nothing.
She said: "I will not waste your time, Section Member Lin. You are a young man with much work to do. I am an older woman with the same. We will speak for forty minutes. After that we will not see each other again socially for some time. Whatever I have to say to you in this room is the contents of the entire conversation we are likely to have for at least a year. Do you understand."
"I understand."
"Good."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she said:
"I have known your section chief for nineteen years. I am, as he may have told you, related to him by marriage — distantly. My husband's mother was Lao Wei's first cousin. The relation is small. The friendship is not. He and I have, over nineteen years, had perhaps six conversations of the kind he and you have had recently in the back-alley noodle shop. Each of those conversations changed the shape of one or both of our careers. He came to me eight days ago. He told me about you. He spoke for thirty-five minutes. He spoke as he speaks — without effusiveness. At the end of the thirty-five minutes I understood that he had decided to introduce you, in his way, to the people he considers his friends. I am the second of those people you have met. There will be others. I will not name them yet."
She paused.
"I want to make clear what I am, in this network, and what I am not.
"I am not Lao Wei's superior. I am not anyone's superior. I am a Section Chief, mid-level, in a quiet office whose responsibilities sit at the boundary of the Mayor's Policy Coordination function. I have been in this position for eight years. I will be in it, probably, for another four or five before I am moved either upward or sideways. I am not ambitious in the way that this system rewards. I would have been a deputy bureau chief by now if I had been ambitious in that way. I am not."
"Yes."
"What I am, instead, is — a node. There are perhaps thirty of us in the city of Qingyuan. We are spread across bureaus. We hold positions that are mostly mid-level and slightly below. Some of us are clerks. Some of us are section chiefs. One of us is a deputy mayor — but the deputy mayor among us is an old man, and he has been a node for so long that the rest of us have stopped counting his rank when we count him. We do not call ourselves a faction. We do not call ourselves anything. There is no name. There is no list. There is no formal meeting. There is no leader. There are only — small webs of acquaintance, in which information flows, slowly, when it needs to."
She paused.
"The web exists because the city of Qingyuan exists. The city has had, over the past forty years, eleven mayors and nine party secretaries. Each of them has come and gone with his own faction. Each of them has tried to remake the city in his own image. The city has survived all of them. Not because the city is strong. Because there have been, in every era, a few hundred mid-level cadres in this city who quietly understood that the institution they served was not the mayor and not the secretary but the city itself — its sewer system, its school registrations, its land records, its hospital staffing, its small factories. Those cadres do not, ordinarily, make policy. They make the policy of the powerful go in straight lines instead of broken ones. They ensure that documents are not lost. They ensure that money sent for school construction does not entirely disappear into a contractor's pocket. They ensure that when a mayor falls and his men are scattered, the records of what happened during his tenure can still be located — by the next mayor, or by an investigation, or by some young clerk in twenty years who is trying to understand the past."
A pause.
"That is what we do, Section Member Lin. We are not heroes. We are not, mostly, even particularly principled people. Several of us are venal in small ways — in the way that small officials in our system are almost always venal in small ways. We accept gifts. We do small favors for relatives. We are not pure. But we have, each of us, decided at some point in our careers that we would not be — instruments. That we would not be the clerk Liu Wenbing was. That we would not be the clerk Liu Wenbing's section chief was. That we would be — something between. The third man. The one who survives by understanding the system, and who uses the survival to preserve, in small careful ways, the things that ought to outlast any one mayor's tenure."
She lifted her cup. She drank. She set it down.
"I am telling you all this, Section Member Lin, because I want you to understand what you have agreed to, when you agreed to it yesterday in Liu Aijun's office. You have not joined a conspiracy. You have not committed yourself to any particular politics. You have not promised to do anything dangerous. You have simply — entered a small web. The web will, in the next forty years, occasionally ask small things of you. A question relayed. A document copied. An observation passed on. Some of those things will be slightly risky. None of them will be — heroic. The risk will accumulate slowly, over decades, in the way that all real risk in our system accumulates. By the time you are fifty, you will have done perhaps one or two things, each year, that — if exposed — could end your career. You will have also, by then, helped to preserve a number of small things in this city that would otherwise have been lost. The trade is — uneven. It is uneven in a way that, on the day you make it, looks bad. It looks better in retrospect."
She paused.
"You may, at any time, withdraw. I am telling you this so that you know. There is no oath. There is no test. If you decide, in five years, that you wish to be — only — Director Pang's clerk, or Mayor Cao's research staffer, or whatever you have become by then — you tell Lao Wei or me or whoever your nearest contact is, and the small flow of small requests stops. You do not have to explain. You will not be punished. The web is not a thing that punishes people for leaving. It is, in this respect, almost the only such organization in our country."
She smiled, for the first time since he had walked in. It was a small dry smile, of the kind that might appear on the face of a woman who had told a private joke to herself.
She said: "Do you have any questions, Section Member Lin."
Lin had been listening with the kind of attention he had not given to any speech in a long time. He had listened with both hands flat on the table and his cup of Pu'er growing slowly cool in front of him.
He had several questions. He chose two.
He said: "How does a person enter the web. Originally."
"Most of us are introduced. As you have been. By an existing member, who has decided to spend a piece of his own credibility on the introduction."
"And the member who introduces — what does he gain."
A small pause.
"He gains the satisfaction of having extended the web by one node. He gains the small future security of having one more person in the city who, in some future moment, may be able to help him. He gains nothing, in any direct or measurable sense, that would justify the risk of misjudging the new node."
"So if he misjudges, he pays."
"He pays. Yes. Lao Wei has paid this price once, in nineteen ninety-six, when he introduced a young man who was — not who Lao Wei had thought he was. The young man reported the existence of the web upward, after some months of observation. Three of the people Lao Wei had introduced him to had their careers damaged. Lao Wei himself was reassigned for two years to a research office that was, briefly, almost as quiet as the one Liu Wenbing had been sent to. He returned to the General Office only after a careful rehabilitation, the cost of which was — significant — to several other members. He has not introduced anyone in twenty-eight years. Until you."
Lin sat very still.
He said: "I will not — be the young man of nineteen ninety-six."
"That is what every node says when first introduced."
"Yes."
"Some of them mean it. Some of them think they mean it."
"Yes."
"Lao Wei has told me he believes you mean it. I have decided to believe him. If I am wrong, the cost will be his and mine to bear. Not yours."
She lifted her cup again. She drank the last of the Pu'er.
She said: "The second question."
Lin thought.
He said, slowly: "The retired Bureau Chief Su Yongqing. Where does he sit, in the web."
A pause.
She said: "That is — a question I had not expected so quickly."
"I am asking it because Liu Aijun has his calligraphy on her wall, and Sun has known him for forty years, and his daughter has been — careful — about her father in a way that suggests he has been careful about himself. I would like to know whether his retirement is what it looks like, or whether it is — different."
Li Mingxia was silent for a long time.
Then she said: "Section Member Lin. That is the kind of question that, asked one year too early in a young clerk's career, ends the young clerk's career. You have asked it eleven weeks into yours. I am not going to answer it today. I will say only this. Old Su was — when he was active — what would have been called, in a different country, the senior member. He has been retired for nine years. His retirement was — a strategic choice, at a moment when his continued activity would have endangered too many other people. He has not, since his retirement, made any move that would suggest he is anything other than a man reading books in his second-floor study. The web has not, since his retirement, had a senior member. It functions as a flat network. It functions, in this respect, slightly less efficiently than it did when he was active. That is the price."
She paused.
"His daughter is not a node. She has never been asked to be one. Her father has insisted on this since she was a child. He would, I think, prefer that her life remain — outside. I am telling you this so that you understand: in becoming entangled with her, you are not entangling yourself with the web through her. The two facts are separate."
"Yes."
"They are also, however, related. In the small sense that her father has — observed — your interactions with her. He has not said anything. He observes. He has, last week, given her permission to give you the book of Su Shi's poetry that you had been about to give her. The permission was not explicit. The observation that she could be permitted to do so without his interference was, however, the act of permission. Do you understand."
"I understand."
"He has, in this small act, indicated to her — and through her, to me, who has been told — that he does not object to the direction in which his daughter has begun to move. That is the nearest thing to an endorsement Old Su Yongqing has issued in ten years."
She set down her cup.
She said: "You are doing well, Section Member Lin. I do not say this often. I will not say it again to you for some years. Use the encouragement now. It will not return."
"Thank you, Comrade Li."
"Comrade Li only in this room. In every other context I am Section Chief Li. Even when we are alone in a corridor."
"Yes, Section Chief."
She smiled again. The same small dry private smile.
"You may go, Section Member Lin."
He stood. He bowed his head. At the door of the small private room he stopped.
He said: "Section Chief."
"Yes."
"The book on the corner of the table. May I ask what it is."
She looked at the book. She looked at him.
"It is a translation," she said, "of *The Analects.* Not the standard one. A new annotation by a scholar in Taiwan. I read it on Wednesday afternoons. It was a gift from Old Su, two years ago. He gave it to me on my forty-eighth birthday. He said — and I am telling you this because you have asked twice now about him, and because a third asking would be one too many — he said: *Mingxia, when you are forty-eight you will have stopped reading the new books. Read this one anyway. There is something in it that I did not see when I was your age.*"
"Did you find it."
"I am still looking. I have eight years left until I am his age, when he gave it to me. I will see, by then."
She nodded once.
He went out.
#
He walked back to the office through the cold afternoon. The light was going. The first of the streetlamps had come on along Yu Street. The river, where he crossed it, was a flat dark grey under a low overcast sky.
He thought, walking: *I have just been told a great deal.*
He thought: *I have been told that the web exists. I have been told approximately how it functions. I have been told that Su Yongqing was once its senior member and no longer is. I have been told that Su Wanyin is not a node and has been deliberately kept apart from it. I have been told that her father has — by silence — endorsed me.*
He thought: *I have been told all of this on a Wednesday afternoon, by a woman I had met once, briefly, in a banquet hall.*
He thought: *That is — a very large amount of information to give a young clerk eleven weeks into his career.*
He thought: *Why.*
He stopped, halfway across the bridge, with the cold wind off the river in his face.
He thought, slowly: *Because they need me. Or because they need something I am near. Or because they need a young clerk who is, specifically, in Director Pang's office.*
He thought: *The web has access to everything in this city — except the working notes of the directors of the major offices. Liu Aijun said so explicitly, yesterday. The web has been watching Pang's expenditure pattern. It has not been able, until now, to see *inside* Pang's office.*
He thought: *I am — possibly — not the only thing they want from me. I am — possibly — the proximity to Pang's correspondence, his agenda annotations, his off-channel arrangements.*
He thought: *I am a window, more than a person.*
He stood for a moment looking at the water.
He thought: *That is a — sobering — thought.*
He thought: *It is not a thought that should make me reconsider. Lao Wei has chosen this. Lao Wei has spent capital. Lao Wei would not have spent capital on a man he meant to use only as a window. Lao Wei has made a bet that I will be, in twenty years, a node who would have been valuable for myself, not only for my position.*
He thought: *That bet is — flattering. It is also — terrifying.*
He walked the rest of the way.
That evening, at the boarding house, he wrote one paragraph in his notebook:
*Met Li Mingxia. Web is real, larger than I had estimated, older than I had imagined. Old Su was its senior member. Su Wanyin is — by his choice — outside. The web sees me as both a person and a window. I do not yet know which they value more. It does not matter. I have agreed. The agreement holds.*
He closed the notebook.
He went to bed. He read three poems by Su Shi before sleeping. The book was, indeed, a beautiful object — the paper a soft cream, the type set with care, the woodblock illustrations at the chapter breaks unmistakably Republican-era in their restraint. He read slowly, the way Old Zhou had instructed, and at the end of the third poem he closed the book and set it on the desk and turned out the light.
He slept until morning.
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