The Friday Memo

He worked on the memo for nine days.

He worked on it at his desk in the office, in the slow hours between errands; he worked on it in the boarding house at night, with the small electric ring boiling water for tea beside him; he worked on it on Sunday afternoon, sitting in the western light of the third reading room of the Municipal Library, where the librarian — *Su Wanyin*, he had now learned how to think the name silently without permitting himself to feel anything — had brought him three more documents, on his quiet request, that he had not yet been able to find through any other source. She had not stayed to talk. She had brought the documents and gone. He had read them and made his notes and gone home.

The memo went through four drafts. The first was too long; it contained, by his own count when he reread it, eleven separate ideas, of which only three were worth keeping. The second was too short; it had stripped the analysis to the bone in the wrong places, and read like a man trying to be impressive by saying nothing controversial. The third was nearly right but had — he noticed this only after he had walked away from it for a full day — three sentences that, while accurate, were the kind of sentences that a man like Director Pang would underline with a red pen and remember for years.

He rewrote those three sentences. The fourth draft was, he believed, the right one.

He had considered, in the second day of writing, whether to ask Lao Wei to read it. He had decided against it.

He had decided this not because he distrusted Lao Wei — by the second week of October, his confidence in Lao Wei was, if anything, the steadiest fact in his professional life — but because he understood, from the two stories Lao Wei had told him in the rain, that Lao Wei would not want to be asked. The man who did not give advice did not want to be co-author. He wanted to read the memo, when it was finished, on his desk like everyone else, and to know — privately, unobligated — that he had not touched it.

So Lin did not show it to him.

He showed it to no one.

On Thursday night he printed the final draft on the office printer, late, after Lao Wei had gone home. Six pages, single-sided, no bullet points, no charts, no executive summary. The conclusions were in the body of the text in the third and fifth pages, embedded in paragraphs of analysis that demanded to be read. A man who only skimmed it would not find them. A man who read it carefully would find them naturally and would think, while finding them, that he had thought of them himself. This was not an accident.

He stapled the pages.

He carried the memo home.

He slept poorly. He woke at five-thirty. He drank a cup of plain water. He took the memo out of his satchel, looked at it for thirty seconds, and put it back. He put on his blue shirt and his grey trousers and his polished shoes. He put the memo in a plain manila folder. He set out for the office.

He arrived at six fifty-one. The corridor was empty. He went into the small office, set down his satchel, and sat at his desk with the manila folder in front of him.

He did not deliver it immediately.

He waited until eight-fifty. By eight-fifty, Section Member Ye was at her desk, Hu Erming was at his, and Lao Wei had been there since seven-forty-five. Zhao Yifan had not yet come in. Pang's secretary was in her office; Pang himself was, Lin had ascertained from a small unnoticeable glance at the corridor, not yet at his desk.

This was the right window.

He stood. He carried the folder out of the small office, down the corridor, around the two corners. He climbed the half-flight of stairs to Deputy Director Sun's office on the same floor.

Sun's secretary was a woman in her thirties, sharp-faced, who had made it her practice — Lin had observed over the past nine days — to make junior cadres wait at least three minutes regardless of circumstance.

He nodded to her. "Good morning. I have the memo Deputy Director Sun requested."

"Set it on my desk."

He set it on her desk. He did not turn to leave.

"Yes?"

"He asked," Lin said politely, "that I deliver it personally and answer any questions he might have on first reading."

"Did he?"

"He did, when he requested the memo."

She studied him for a moment. Then she pressed a button on her desk. "Deputy Director, the new clerk from the General Office is here with his memo."

A pause.

"Send him in."

He went in.

Sun was at his desk with three folders open in front of him and a thermos of tea at his elbow. He had been writing on a margin in pencil. He set down the pencil. He looked up.

"Lin Zhaoxu."

"Yes, Deputy Director."

"Six pages?"

"Yes."

"Sit."

He sat at the edge of the leather chair across the desk, the manila folder in his lap. He did not offer it. Sun did not yet ask for it.

"What is the memo about?"

"It is the analysis you requested. On the Western Industrial Park."

"Yes. And what does it argue?"

It was — he had been waiting for it, without knowing he had been waiting for it — the harder question. The memo contained an argument; Sun was asking him to compress the argument into a sentence. In a sentence, it would be naked of its supporting evidence, and Sun could agree or disagree without reading the memo at all. To compress badly was to be remembered for the bad compression. To compress well was to be remembered for the compression — and the memo, the actual document, would never be read.

He answered carefully.

"The memo argues, Deputy Director, that the proposal as currently drafted is technically sound on its merits but has a procedural difficulty that has not been addressed in the briefs. The procedural difficulty is in conflict with a clause in the 1998 land-use master document for the western district. The conflict is reconcilable, but reconciling it will require coordination across the two relevant offices. The memo does not recommend whether the proposal should proceed; it suggests how the procedural difficulty might be addressed, *if* the proposal is to proceed."

Sun listened.

When Lin finished, Sun said nothing for a moment.

Then he held out his hand. Lin gave him the folder.

Sun opened it. He read the first page.

He read it slowly. He read the second page. He read the third. He looked up.

"You read the 1998 master document?"

"Yes."

"Where did you find it?"

"At the Municipal Library, Deputy Director. It had been re-indexed in 2001 under *agricultural* rather than *industrial.* A librarian helped me locate it."

"A librarian."

"Yes."

Sun looked at him for a moment longer than was strictly comfortable. Then he returned to the memo. He read pages four, five, and six.

He set the folder down.

"Did you write this by yourself?"

"Yes, Deputy Director."

"Without consulting anyone?"

"Yes, Deputy Director."

"Including," Sun said, "Section Chief Wei?"

"Including Section Chief Wei."

There was a small pause.

Sun closed the folder. He set it on the corner of his desk, on top of the pencil he had been using.

"Lin Zhaoxu. Send a copy to Director Pang. Send another to me — to this office, to my secretary, in a sealed envelope. Don't send it anywhere else. Don't show it to anyone. Don't discuss it. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Deputy Director."

"Including Section Chief Wei?"

"Yes, Deputy Director."

"Good. Go."

He stood. He bowed his head a fraction. He went out.

In the corridor, he understood several things at once, the way one understands several things in the moment after a stone is thrown into still water.

He understood that Sun had read the memo, and that Sun had liked it.

He understood that Sun had asked twice — twice — whether he had consulted Lao Wei, and that the question had not been suspicious. It had been, in fact, the opposite. Sun was asking it for his own purposes. Sun wanted to know whether the memo could be cited cleanly, without anyone else's name attached.

He understood that the sealed envelope to Sun's secretary, separate from the copy to Director Pang, was not a redundancy. It was an insurance policy. Sun was preserving a copy that did not pass through Pang's hands.

He understood, finally, that he had — without intending it, without planning it — entered for the first time in his career into the shadowy second economy of Qingyuan officialdom: the economy in which a senior cadre quietly accumulated, in a sealed envelope on his secretary's desk, the original work of a junior who did not yet have a patron.

Sun was not yet his patron. Sun might never be his patron. But Sun had decided — Lin saw it clearly now — to keep a copy of the memo for the same reason a careful man kept any document. *Because someday, someone might ask, and he wanted to be the one who could answer.*

He walked back down the corridor. He returned to the small office. He sat at his desk.

Lao Wei did not look up. Lao Wei had not looked up the entire time. Lin understood — by the rhythm of his breathing, by the way his cup of tea sat untouched at his elbow when ordinarily he would have refilled it twice already — that Lao Wei had known where Lin had gone, had known what he had carried, and had decided to know nothing about it.

Lin pulled out a clean envelope from his desk drawer. He placed his second copy of the memo inside. He sealed it. He addressed it: *To Director Pang, General Office. From Section Member Lin Zhaoxu. Subject: Memo as requested by Deputy Director Sun (Policy Research Section), 11 October.*

He carried it to Pang's secretary's office. He set it on her desk. He returned to his own.

At three fifteen that afternoon, Director Pang's secretary appeared at the door of the small office.

"Lin Zhaoxu. The director wants to see you."

He stood. He smoothed his shirt. He went.

Director Pang's office was, that afternoon, slightly different from the morning of his first day. The dark wood desk, the calligraphic scroll, the leather sofas, the cabinet with the porcelain horse — all unchanged. But the man behind the desk, when Lin came in, looked up immediately.

He did not continue signing documents. He did not make Lin wait standing.

"Sit, Xiao Lin."

Lin sat.

The manila folder was open on Pang's desk. The memo had been read; the second page had a small pencil mark on it, in the right margin.

Pang regarded him for a long moment.

"You have a good head, Xiao Lin."

"Thank you, Director."

"Did you write this entirely yourself?"

"Yes, Director."

"Did Section Chief Wei see it?"

"No, Director."

Pang nodded. The small movement at the corner of his mouth was almost a smile, but it did not quite reach his eyes. His eyes were watching Lin with the careful interest of a butcher inspecting a piece of meat — admiring its quality, calculating its price.

"We will find a way to use you," he said. "I think you will be very useful to me, Xiao Lin."

He said *to me*, not *to the office.*

Lin understood the word.

"Thank you, Director."

"You may go."

He stood. He bowed slightly. He went out.

In the corridor, he walked twenty paces before he allowed himself to feel what he felt.

What he felt was two things, simultaneously, and they did not contradict each other.

The first was pride. The pride was small and bright. It had nothing to do with Pang. It had to do with the work — six pages he had written by himself, in nine days, without help, that had been read by two senior cadres and judged sound by both. It was the kind of pride a man earned for himself once and remembered for a long time.

The second was a cold, flat awareness — the kind he had been learning to recognize since the morning in the corridor with Sun — that he had just been seen by the wrong man.

Director Pang would find a way to *use* him.

Lao Wei's stories, in the rain, had been about young men whose work had been seen. The difference between the two — the man who drove a taxi and the man who would be deputy provincial governor — had been in the man between them and the next rung.

Lin Zhaoxu was now, by the events of the day, in possession of two such men. He had Sun, who had quietly kept a copy in a sealed envelope. He had Pang, who would find a way to use him.

He was no longer, he understood, in the position of the eight-day clerk who had stumbled in a corridor.

He was now in the position of the man who had to choose, very carefully, whose hand was on the next rung when he climbed.

He returned to the small office.

Lao Wei was still at his desk. The tea at his elbow was, finally, fresh. Lao Wei lifted the cup; he sipped from it.

He still did not look up.

But after a long moment, he said, in a voice meant for no one in particular:

"It's a good day to leave the office on time."

It was the first time in five weeks that Lin had heard Lao Wei suggest, even obliquely, that any day was a good day to leave the office on time.

Lin understood.

At six o'clock he closed his desk. He picked up his satchel. He nodded to Lao Wei, who nodded back without looking up. He went out.

He walked home through the cool October evening.

The leaves on the gingko trees outside the library — as he passed it, two streets out of his way — had gone fully gold, and were drifting down in the windless air, and a young woman in a navy ribbon was sweeping them off the steps with a broom that she held very carefully, in the manner of a person who had been taught, a very long time ago, that no task was too small to be done with attention.

He did not stop.

He walked past the library.

He kept walking.

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