Old Wei

The office was empty by seven that evening except for two men.

It had been raining all afternoon — a long, slow autumn rain that had begun a little after lunch and showed no sign of stopping. The windows of the small office on the fourth floor were beaded with water; the courtyard below had emptied; the cicadas, finally, were gone for the year. The fluorescent lights overhead made the wet glass shine.

Section Member Ye had left at six fifteen, gathering her files into a cloth bag with the particular efficiency of a woman who had a child to pick up before seven. The man at the fourth desk, a quiet older clerk named Hu Erming who Lin had not yet spoken to in three weeks, had left at six thirty. Zhao Yifan had not come back to the office at all that afternoon; he had gone out at three to attend, he had said, *some family matter*. Lin had now seen Zhao Yifan's coat on the back of his chair perhaps two days out of every five.

Which left Lao Wei.

Lao Wei did not leave. He had brought, at some point in the morning, a small enamel bowl of instant noodles up from the drawer of his desk; he was eating them now slowly with chopsticks, by the light of his desk lamp, while reading a thin folder of monthly reports. Beside him, on the desk, the chipped thermos and the foil packet of cheap green tea. He did not look up as Lin closed his own desk drawer and prepared to leave.

Lin paused, his satchel half-strapped over his shoulder.

"Lao Wei. Goodnight."

"Mm."

He took two steps toward the door.

"Sit down, Xiao Lin."

It was not loud. It was not commanding. It was the soft tonal voice of a man who had already decided that what he was about to say did not require force.

Lin set his satchel back on his chair. He sat down in the chair across from Lao Wei's desk — Section Member Ye's chair, in fact, which she had pushed in carefully when she left.

Lao Wei finished his noodles. He set the chopsticks across the empty bowl. He pushed the bowl aside. He took the cigarette from behind his ear, looked at it for a moment, and tucked it back. He did not smoke it. Lin had now spent twenty-three days in the same office as Lao Wei, and he had not yet seen him smoke a single cigarette.

"You drink tea?" Lao Wei said.

"Yes."

"Pour."

He gestured vaguely at the side table, where the office's communal teapot sat — emptied, by Ye, before she left, but the water in the dispenser was still hot. There was a packet of Lao Wei's own green tea on the table, beside Ye's, beside Hu's. Lin took up the teapot, rinsed it, dropped a pinch of Lao Wei's tea into it, and filled it with hot water. He brought it to the desk along with two cups. He poured one for Lao Wei. He poured one for himself.

He set Lao Wei's cup in front of him with both hands. He sat.

Lao Wei took a small sip. He set the cup down.

"My grandfather," he said, looking out the dark window, "served as a clerk in the township government in this same county for forty-three years. He retired in 1979. He never made it past section chief. Forty-three years."

He said the number slowly, as if testing how it sounded.

"My father," he continued, "served as a section chief in the county Bureau of Civil Affairs for twenty-six years. Retired in 2002. Died of a stroke nine months later. Did not live to see his sixty-seventh birthday."

Lin said nothing.

"I have been in this office," Lao Wei said, "for thirty-one years. I started as a clerk in 1993, when the General Office had ten people instead of forty-six. I have served under five mayors. I have served under four party secretaries. I have prepared tea for four hundred and fifty-six people who outranked me."

He paused. His eyes did not leave the window.

"I tell you this," he said, "because I want you to understand that I am not a man who is going to give you advice."

He turned, finally, and looked at Lin.

His eyes, Lin thought — not for the first time — were exactly the color of the thin green tea between them. Pale, weak in appearance, much sharper than they looked.

"I have lived a long career," Lao Wei said, "by not giving advice. The smart men in this building who give advice — to younger men, to colleagues, to anyone — are usually killed by the advice they give. Because advice creates a record. Because the man who took the advice, when he succeeds, forgets you; and when he fails, blames you. The first thing I learned, Xiao Lin, was not to give advice. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Lao Wei."

"Good. So I am not going to give you advice. What I am going to do is tell you stories."

He took another sip of his tea.

"There was a young man in this office," he said, "in the year 1996. He was twenty-four. He had graduated first in his year from East China Normal University. He had passed his civil service exam first in the prefecture. His name was Chen Daolin. He was — by every measure I had ever met — the smartest young man I had ever seen step through these doors."

The rain rattled against the window.

"In his first year," Lao Wei said, "Chen Daolin wrote, on his own initiative, a policy memo on urban-rural land allocation. The memo was very good. He gave it to his director — a man named Director Tian, who is not relevant to the story; he died in 2008 — and Director Tian, recognizing its quality, passed it up to the deputy mayor. The deputy mayor, recognizing its quality, passed it up to the mayor. The mayor used parts of it in a speech to the provincial conference. Chen Daolin's name was on no part of any of this."

He paused. Lin sat very still.

"In the spring of 1997," Lao Wei said, "Chen Daolin was promoted to section chief. The youngest section chief our office had appointed in twelve years. He was twenty-five years old."

"In the autumn of 1997," he said, "Chen Daolin wrote a second policy memo. This one was on cadre rotation reform. The memo was also very good. But this time, instead of giving it only to his director, he made several copies. He gave one to his director. He gave one to the deputy mayor's office, directly. He gave one to a senior researcher at the provincial party school whom he had met at a banquet. He attached a cover note to each copy with his own name on it."

A pause.

"He did not understand," Lao Wei said, "that the second memo was the one that would kill him."

Lin asked nothing. He waited.

"The deputy mayor," Lao Wei said, "saw a junior cadre going around his director. The director saw a junior cadre making him look unnecessary. The senior researcher at the party school saw a young man trying to skip three rungs of the ladder using a memo as a trampoline. None of them said anything. But within six months, Chen Daolin had been transferred — *promoted*, technically, because the new title was deputy section chief in another department, but everyone understood — to a small bureau in a county west of here. Within a year he had been transferred again. Within two years he was running the records office in a township so small that you would not be able to find it on a map of the prefecture."

Lao Wei lifted his cup. He looked into it.

"He drove a taxi," he said quietly, "in Hangzhou. He died in 2017, in his sleep. He was forty-five."

The rain went on.

"I went to his funeral," Lao Wei said. "His wife told me he had still kept, in a drawer, a printout of the second memo. He had read it sometimes, at night, alone."

Lin did not speak. He had stopped breathing for a moment without realizing it. He let his breath out, slowly, and the small sound of it was loud in the room.

"There was another young man," Lao Wei said, after a moment.

"In 2003. In this same office. His name was Liu Honggang. Yanjing University. First in the exam. Twenty-three years old. He was, in his first month here, given a small responsibility — to draft, on behalf of his director, a single paragraph for inclusion in a provincial-level government work report."

He paused, looking at the rain.

"Liu Honggang wrote a beautiful paragraph. It was, in fact, three sentences. The three sentences were so beautifully constructed that the deputy mayor used them in a speech. The mayor noticed and asked who had drafted them. The director, when asked, was *honest*. He said: *one of my new clerks, a young man named Liu Honggang.*"

Lao Wei set his cup down.

"Liu Honggang was promoted six months later," he said. "Two years after that, he was made deputy section chief. Three years after *that*, section chief. Six years after his arrival, at the age of twenty-nine, he was deputy bureau chief in a major city bureau. The fastest rise the General Office had seen in twenty years."

"Where is he now?" Lin said, his voice almost a whisper.

"He is the Deputy Mayor," Lao Wei said. "Of a city west of here. He is forty-four years old. He is a candidate, I am told, for promotion to deputy provincial governor within the next three years."

Lin sat with this for a long moment.

"I do not see," he said slowly, "what makes the second story different from the first. They both wrote good things. They both wrote things that were noticed. One died driving a taxi. One is about to be a deputy provincial governor."

"That is correct," Lao Wei said. "That is exactly what you should be asking. *What is different.*"

"Tell me."

"No," Lao Wei said. "That, you will work out yourself. I have told you the stories. I do not give advice."

He smiled, very faintly. It was not a kind smile and not a cruel one. It was the smile of a man who, after thirty-one years, had decided to risk a small fragment of himself on the unknown direction of a stranger.

"Drink your tea, Xiao Lin. It's getting cold."

Lin drank.

The tea was cheap. It was, in fact, slightly bitter. He drank it anyway. He drank all of it.

Lao Wei, after a moment, picked up the empty bowl that had held his noodles, set it on top of the chopsticks, and stood. He walked to the small sink at the back of the office and washed the bowl. He did this slowly, with the efficiency of a man who had washed his own bowl in this same sink for thirty-one years. He dried it with a small cloth. He returned it to the bottom drawer of his desk.

"Go home," he said, without looking at Lin. "It is going to rain harder before midnight. If you have an umbrella, use it. If you do not, walk fast."

"Yes, Lao Wei."

Lin stood. He gathered his satchel. He went to the door. He paused there, his hand on the frame.

"Lao Wei."

"Mm."

"Thank you. For the stories."

"I did not give you stories. I told you stories. The difference is small but important. Goodnight, Xiao Lin."

"Goodnight."

He did not have an umbrella.

He walked through the rain.

It was a cold rain, by the time he was in the alley near his boarding house — colder than it had been at seven, with the small bite in it that meant winter, though it would not arrive for another two months. Water ran off the eaves of the small noodle shop and down the back of his collar. His shoes squelched on the tile. He did not hurry.

He thought about the two stories.

By the time he reached the staircase of the boarding house, his clothes were wet through and his hair was plastered against his forehead, and he had begun, dimly, to understand the difference.

He climbed the stairs to his room.

He took off his wet jacket and hung it on a hook to dry. He took off his shoes. He sat at the desk in his soaked shirt. He took out his notebook — the work notebook in his breast pocket, which was still mostly dry — and on a clean page, in characters smaller than his usual hand, he wrote:

*Chen Daolin failed because he allowed his work to leave the building under his name without a sponsor.*

*Liu Honggang succeeded because his director did not steal his name — because his director was honest enough to give it, when asked, to the right ear.*

*The lesson is not about whether to put your name on the work.*

*The lesson is about whether the man between you and the next rung is the kind of man who will speak it correctly when the right person asks.*

He looked at this for a long time.

He added, beneath it:

*Lao Wei is, for the moment, that man.*

*The question I cannot answer yet is whether Director Pang will ever be that man, or whether — if it ever comes to it — Director Pang will be the kind who eats my name and chokes on it later.*

He closed the notebook. He set it on the desk. He went to wash his face and dry his hair.

When he came back, he stood for a moment looking out the window into the dark wet alley below, where the rain made small coronas around the single yellow streetlamp at the corner.

He understood — he understood with a flat, cold certainty he had not had at the start of the evening — that something had changed today.

Lao Wei had told him stories.

That was a gift, he understood now, more rare than the cup of Tieguanyin on his first morning.

Because a man who has spent thirty-one years not giving advice does not break his silence for a clerk he believes is going to fail.

He went to bed.

---