Land of Big Numbers Read online

  After seeing the video of the self-immolation, I messaged her. Are you okay? I asked.

  The reply came a few hours later: Hi, Big Brother! I’m doing fine.

  Are you in Beijing?

  Of course I’m in Beijing.

  I stared at the blinking cursor. I’d never told her that I knew her identity online, and I worried that if I said something, she’d see me as somehow untrustworthy, as though I’d been spying on her.

  Beijing must be very cold now, I wrote at last. Make sure you wear warm clothes.

  That February, we both went home to see our parents and celebrate the Spring Festival. I took charge of the dumplings, chopping the fennel and leeks, cracking an egg and swirling it about with gusto. I was happy. The week before, our team had entered into a local competition and had won a month’s supply of instant noodles and certain bragging rights. Replay, replay: my fingers knew the commands so instinctively that sometimes I’d wake in the dark with fingers twitching.

  Lulu, though, seemed only partly present; often you had to call her name twice to get a response. Sometimes I’d get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and see a glow in the living room, which meant she was awake, and online.

  One night we gathered around the television watching the Spring Festival gala. It was an annual tradition put on by the state broadcaster: cheesy skits, patriotic odes, terrible slapstick—​the whole country watched. I excused myself and logged on to check Lulu’s account. The most recent post was from that evening, just before we had sat down to dinner. It was a line of text in quotation marks: “If you want to understand your own country, then you’ve already stepped on the path to criminality,” it read. And then: Happy Spring Festival, comrades!

  A shiver ran through me. I logged off and walked back into the living room. Our parents sat on the couch, with Lulu on a stool beside them, their faces pallid in the television’s flickering light as I joined them, stealing glances at this strange person, my twin sister.

  The next day, the two of us went out to buy some ingredients for my mother: flour, fermented bean paste, ground pork. It felt odd to walk the half-mile to the supermarket together, the first time we’d been alone since she had visited me at college.

  On the way, we passed a park where we used to play as children, and we could hear the sound of children there now. It was sunny, and the warmth lulled my skin.

  “Where did that quote come from?” I said. “The one from last night.”

  She kept walking. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been reading your account.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A man was walking by with a small dog, its face scrunched like the heel of a sausage, and Lulu nickered at it as it passed.

  “Come on, Lulu.” I stopped walking. “I’m worried about you.”

  She stopped a few feet ahead of me and stood there, not looking at me, arms crossed. “How did you know?”

  I explained about the poetry. “Do other people know it’s you?”

  She shrugged. “A professor. Some other students.” When I pressed her, she said reluctantly that a classmate had reported her to the department head, and that one of her professors had taken her aside and gently warned her that she should stop her activities online, lest it “influence” her future.

  “They’re right, you know,” I said. “Don’t you worry about how this might affect you?” One of the videos she’d posted, I remembered, showed a woman kneeling on the ground and wailing, “The government are traitors! The government doesn’t serve the people!”

  Lulu just stood there, staring at the little shopping complex opposite us as if she were trying to memorize it. There was a bilious orange fast-food restaurant, three test-prep centers, and two real estate agents’ offices.

  “Or our parents?” I said. They’d both retired by now, but each had a modest pension that I imagined could be taken away, and anyway, the ruining of Lulu’s prospects would be the greatest loss of all. When I thought of having to support them on my own in their old age, my stomach creaked unhappily.

  She nodded. “Of course,” she said, finally. “I’m not stupid.”

  “So you’ll stop, then?”

  She looked at me for a moment, a little dreamily. “Did you know in the Song Dynasty it was illegal to throw away any pieces of paper with writing on them?” she said. “People had to go to certain temples with sacred fires set up where they could burn them instead. That’s how much they revered the written word.”

  I wanted to shake her, but I didn’t. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

  She started walking again.

  “Where are you getting all this stuff?” I asked. She unbent slightly and explained that she had downloaded a tool that unblocked overseas websites. “It’s not hard,” she said. “But things get deleted quickly, so I have to keep reposting them.”

  “I had no idea these kinds of things went on,” she added soberly. “We were lucky.”

  “We weren’t rich.”

  “Dad worked for the government. We were comfortable.”

  Of course we were, I told her, but so were lots of people, and it didn’t mean that she had to expose herself to trouble.

  “It’s better than just playing video games all day,” she shot back, suddenly angry with me. “What’s the point of that?”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and shrugged, taking a few extra breaths to calm myself. It was strange to see Lulu angry; she was usually so even-keeled. “Fair enough,” I said. We kept walking, not looking at each other. Inside the supermarket we parted, as though with relief.

  Back on campus, spring brought translucent white buds to the trees, like the tiny cores of onions. The birds grew noisy and self-righteous, clacking and clamoring at all hours outside my window, making it hard to sleep. Lulu had stopped posting, I was pleased to see. I began working part-time at a restaurant downtown that served large, expensive banquets, helping to prepare plates of cold chopped meats, glassy collagen, and frilly slices of cucumber dolled up to look like miniature peacocks. There was a rhythm and a repetition to the work that I liked, a sense of contentment in washing up at the night’s end and putting things back where they belonged.

  One day in May, just before graduation, I checked back in on my sister’s account. Lulu had stopped updating her chat status: for several weeks, it had read simply out, and I’d grown worried.

  It was as it had been months before: she’d gone back to posting frenetically, as though she’d lost control; in one day alone she had posted forty-three times. There were the same postcards of protests around the country, the videos and photographs she’d been sharing before, and a lot of simple text posts, too, one after another: 3:34 a.m.: If this country were a vegetable, it would be a rotten, bitter melon. 3:36 a.m.: I am the daughter of a government sanitation worker. I know the smell of s—. 3:37 a.m.: I’m sorry, friends, just a little tired today after so many posts. There are many beautiful things, too, in this life. And then she’d shared a series of pictures of small goats leaping in the air, tiny hoofs aloft against green grass. 3:41 a.m.: Okay, I am sufficiently soothed to go to sleep. Good night, comrades, until tomorrow.

  The posts went on and on—​thousands of them had accumulated in the time since I’d stopped checking. I scrolled through them with a mounting sense of horror, and then paged back up and felt my stomach flip: somehow she’d amassed 800,000 followers.

  I messaged her frantically, fingers scrabbling at the keys. Goats?

  A few hours later, she answered me. Did you like them?

  They’re okay.

  I’m sorry, Big Brother. I couldn’t stop.

  I sat and watched the cursor blink, like a slow pulse.

  A lot of people are paying attention to you. I couldn’t tell if I should be proud of her, worried for her, or angry with her; I supposed I was all three.

  Yes, they are. Another long silence. Don’t be upset, Big Brother. I just felt this was something I had to do.
Don’t you agree?

  I’m working now, I wrote her, hoping she could sense my anger. Running late, got to go.

  After she graduated, Lulu moved in with her boyfriend, Zhangwei, in Beijing. She started her own anonymous website, a constant stream of news about protests and human rights abuses around the country. There was the story of a woman, beaten to death by police, whose daughter had paid to keep her body frozen in a morgue for six years, unwilling to inter the evidence. There was the story of the village where officials had torn down an elderly grandmother’s home in the middle of the night to make way for a shopping mall; she’d been given no warning and had died in her bed as the roof collapsed. Each post carried its own mordant title: THE MOTHER POPSICLE; THE FRUSTRATED SLEEPER.

  They came for her one night, to the third-floor apartment that she and Zhangwei were renting. They burst in through the door without warning and informed her, politely, that she should go with them. “The landlord must have given them the key,” she told me later, stunned. It was that particular detail, oddly, that seemed to haunt her.

  It was midnight when Lulu called me from the police van to say that she was being taken away. “Tell our parents,” she said. “Please. I’m sorry.” Her voice broke, and I barely recognized it. She sounded like a child in a blizzard who’d lost her scarf. It was easier to think of that than to think of the alternative: Lulu, cuffed into a van and taken away by four men who sneered at her for being unmarried and living with her boyfriend, for trying to stir up trouble, for spreading rumors—​a crime punishable by seven years’ imprisonment.

  When they began interrogating her, it was worse. “Did you go to any of these places?” they kept asking. “Did you confirm any of these things yourself before spreading these rumors online?”

  No, Lulu said. No.

  “So you didn’t know if they were true, then.”

  Later, they laid her on the ground and kicked and beat her. They didn’t fracture any bones, but I pictured her bones anyway, each individually absorbing every blow. Lulu would have known all of them by heart: sternum, tibia, floating rib.

  I called my mother, who, on receiving the news, still half asleep, went blank. “You must be mistaken,” she told me sharply. “Let me call Lulu to straighten things out.” It was an old reflex of hers, this instinct to turn to her daughter.

  “You can call; she won’t answer,” I said, but she’d already hung up. When I called back, my father took in the news helplessly, as though he’d been expecting it. I tried to explain the kinds of things Lulu had been writing, but he cut me off.

  “Lulu is my daughter. I can imagine,” he said. There was a particular heaviness in his voice that surprised me, and it made me think that maybe he’d known her better than the rest of us had.

  Lulu was freed after six days and went back to her apartment to convalesce. We flew to Beijing the next day to see her. It was the first time I had been in her apartment, whose living-room wall bore a giant decal from a previous tenant, featuring silver and pink trees and a striped pink kitten. YOU ARE MY HAPPY SURPRISE, FRIENDS ARE BETTER IN AUTUMN, it read. Lulu’s skin looked yellow and darkly bruised, and there was a dart of something red in her right eye that peeked out when she looked in certain directions.

  “I’m all right,” she said. She seemed acutely embarrassed to see us. They’d only wanted her to stop what she was doing, she said. She’d been a good student, one of the best in her class—​she didn’t have to ruin it all. It was a misunderstanding, she told us. They’d let her go, after all.

  It seemed that she wanted us to go, too. We stayed for a week, our mother fussing in their tiny kitchen, preparing large meals of things sliced and intricately diced and cooked over a high flame. “I’m okay,” Lulu said, until we stopped asking.

  After we went home, Lulu started chatting me late at night, at odd hours. I was usually awake anyway. Since graduating, I’d moved back home to work in the kitchen at a local hotel. I spent my days chopping and rinsing, bleary-eyed, and my nights with teammates, locked in online combat. There was something that intensified in her messages during those months. She wanted to know how our parents were, if it was raining, if I’d eaten yet. She wondered if she could sue the police who’d beaten her; she’d been having stomach pains ever since. She wanted to know if I remembered the story of the mother who died in the hospital down the street from us before we were born. She wondered if there was any way to learn the fate of the dead mother’s child today—​had it lived, it would be about our age by now.

  Soon after that, the posts on her site started up again, thick and fast. I watched with a sinking heart, trying to distract her. When are you and Zhangwei getting married? I tried. Didn’t you want to have a baby?

  Soon, she said. Maybe.

  When the police came and took her away again, she was prepared; she got up quietly from the couch and went with them without a word, leaving her keys behind. This time when they allowed her access to a phone, she called a lawyer, not me. The police raided the apartment, taking her computer, the blue-sleeved laptop my parents had given her. They also left behind a notice saying that she was formally being arrested and charged.

  At the trial, Lulu wore an orange jumpsuit, with hair shorn so short that she was barely recognizable. She stared straight ahead at the prosecutors, never once looking out at the audience. We’d flown out for the occasion; we hadn’t seen her for six months. She was given a sentence of three years, then jerked away through a door at the opposite end of the courtroom, and that was all.

  On the plane, my mother wept all the way home. “What more did she want?” she kept saying.

  To her left, my father hushed her. “There’s nothing we can do now,” he said. The thought, strangely, appeared to console him.

  Back at home no one seemed to know that anything had happened to my sister, and no one asked, either. It was as if a great white blanket of snow had descended, softly muffling everything in its path.

  Time passed, and eventually I was made a sous chef at the hotel, with a modest raise and a new, slightly taller paper hat. When I felt restless or agitated, which was often, I’d log on and join my teammates online.

  One night I brought my girlfriend home for the first time. I’d met her the month before on the lowest basement floor of a warrened-out block devoted to the sale of electronics: a fluorescent-lit maze of close-set booths selling secondhand phones, cases, speakers, and power banks. Her name was Mao Xin, and she was one of the few girls working behind the counters there. She could tell you the difference between 100 WH and 161 WH, could quote the price per giga­byte of different models; she’d spent so damn long in the shop figuring out which items were comparative junk, she confessed sheepishly, that she didn’t see any point in stocking the others at all. “But then we’d just be selling maybe six things,” she said with a frown.

  As it turned out, she’d grown up riding the same bus route I had, and in a city as big as ours, that was enough to feel like fate. We liked to imagine that we had seen each other on the bus as children, stiffly bundled in the winter or swinging our legs impatiently in the summer, had maybe even clung to the same pole.

  Over dinner that night, as we sat and slurped potatoes stewed with ginger and pork, my mother quizzed Mao Xin. I could see that she wanted to like her, had observed the way she’d helped chop the garlic and cut the yellowing tips off the chives. Mao Xin exuded a kind of benevolent competence that soothed everyone, even my mother, who had grown jittery since Lulu’s trial, prone to repeat herself, easily annoyed. Under Mao Xin’s spell, I paced the apartment looking for things to do. I wiped away browning soap residue from the bathroom counter, and bundled and took out the trash without being asked.

  As we talked, I could see Mao Xin’s curious eyes flicking around, eventually landing on a photo of Lulu atop a bookshelf across the room, high enough that you needed to squint to really see it. “Who’s that?”

  “It’s his sister,” my father said. The photo had been taken the day she
won our district’s top score for math in the college entrance exam. In it she was grinning maniacally at my father behind the camera, a little out of focus.

  “I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said to me. “She looks like you.”

  “They’re twins,” my father said.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s in the northeast, preparing to get her Ph.D.,” my mother said.

  Later, when I walked Mao Xin outside and explained what had really happened, her face fell. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” When she was growing up, she said, there was a man who used to station himself outside the government offices down the street from her home, with torn fatigues and sneakers so worn they flopped open like petals around his ankles. He’d tell anyone who would listen about how the army owed him seven years of back pay. He’d been there every day through her childhood, she said, until one day he disappeared for good.

  “It sounds like he was crazy,” I said.

  “I think so,” she said. “Maybe not at first, though.”

  “You must have been scared of him.”

  “More just sorry for him,” she said.

  We planned our wedding for a few days after Lulu was to be released from prison, a boisterous dinner in the nicest hall of the hotel where I worked. I’d been made a full chef there that month, which felt like a sort of wedding gift. We served big platters of cold jellied meats and swans made of mashed-up radishes, with carrot beaks and black sesame eyes. It should have been a happy occasion, and I guess it was, but whenever I looked at Lulu, sitting across from me with a distant look in her eyes, my heart caught in my throat.

  As the banquet wound down, my father, unnatural in a rented tuxedo, began coughing violently. When he didn’t stop, Zhangwei signaled to one of the waiters for water.

  “Drink up,” Lulu said. He drained the glass, almost angrily, it seemed. The coughs sputtered, subsided. “You’re okay?” she said.

  He had been drinking, his face was flushed, and his eyes focused suddenly on her, as though surprised she was there. “Do you think what you’ve done is meaningful?” he said.