Life went on in its own way since August 2021, when he called me of his personal marriage plan falling flat and his turning jobless again. It was probably in September when he told me that he had started dating a girl in her early 30s. She had a job, probably an accountant, and seemed to accept the fact that he was jobless for a while, understanding that keeping a job for long is not something alarming. Then I heard no more of this girl when he called me for some other matters that I did indeed forget about it.
Then he said he met another woman but having kept her waiting in a restaurant for about ten minutes, he rushed to the restaurant breathless he had booked in advance, with some expensive gift he bought for her. He said it was about RMB 500. I remarked that it was quite a pricey gift. He replied: “how can I buy a gift less than that, to be equal to a girl’s dignity?”
It was a rather difficult dinner he had with that woman, who was nearing 40 years of age. “She spent the whole time complaining how I could be late for a meal I had booked advance and to meet a prospective girlfriend?”In her eagerness to get married, he swallowed the incessant nagging and towards the end of the meal he realised there was no way he could find happiness in this woman, nor she in him.
In his future WeChat communication with me, in text or in voice, he mentioned no more of his any new girlfriends or dating events.
For about three months thereafter he did not have any contact with me, even though I texted him on WeChat whether he would still want to pay his personal insurance through my company. His silence I well understood. Not having much saving and having no jobs, paying every month the minimum of some RMB 2,500 for his future retirement was indeed a luxury.
Then I called him and was surprised that he almost immediately answered my phone. But he sounded somewhat weird. His voice was less shrill than usual, but a little hollow, horse and husky. I didn’t pursue the question with regards to his personal social insurance, for the sake of not embarrassing him, and only asked he had been getting on.
He said he was taken ill, and in fact he was just out of the hospital. He didn’t explain what his illness was but just said he felt weak and exhausted, but a few days of transfusion had put his health back on track.
He said he had earned RMB 20,000 as a commission for fixing a company with a money-lender. That was all he earned since he became jobless in August for the entire year of 2021.
He said he was still going to interviews and talked of some potential employer or other, for which I could not pay much attention to or attach any hope for.
Then fast-forward into mid-February 2022, when I heard him again. He said jubilantly that he had found a new job, got a monthly salary a bit beyond RMB 20,000. I congratulated him and said that that was quite a lot more than he had usually earned in the past. He said he would be hired to be an investment director for a boss who was setting up a semi-conductor factory in Kunshan, Suzhou, and was about to launch an investment fund to focus on the semi-conductor industry.
“Very broad and ambitious plans the boss has,” he said, adding that the boss liked him and thought he would help realise his big industrial and investment goals.
I noticed on his moments on his WeChat that almost every piece of message he had posted was related to the semi-conductor industry: how market research should be done, how due diligence should be carried out, how an ideal startup in semi-conductor should look like... , although I cannot fail to notice the broad, stretching wheat field, which must be from and about his village in Shaanxi Province, and a short blurb under his WeChat name, which read: The other side of Love is not hate, but mediocrity, which obviously referred to his failed four-year love affair with that real estate salesgirl.
In early March, he was posted to work in the Kunshan semi-conductor factory, where he worked with a few other workers, trying to fully man the factory so as to start production as soon as possible.
In late April, he called me again. To my surprise he was in Shanghai just as I was. He told me that he was under lockdown since end of March. While life was quite boring and depressing, being confined indoors in his 25-sqm apartment rented for more than RMB 2000, he was sort of working off-site in that company. He called me out of his loneliness, nothing serious.
On 2 June, he called me again, saying his compound was free again, and he could go out as early as “yesterday”, but was shocked to hear that I was still under lockdown, and didn’t expect any lifting of the lockdown soon.
On the afternoon of 14 June, my desktop WeChat let out two quick and short beeps. I thought it must be some shameless salespeople trying to promote something to me again. I lazily clicked on the icon of WeChat at the bottom of the screen to bring it full to the screen to see who it was. Then I saw it was Haw Zhang. Two messages that I saw immediately. One is “Aye”, the other “Out of employment again!”
I was stunned. I couldn’t reply anything meaningful. My mind was in turmoil. How could this be?
Then half an hour later, he called, saying that he was requested to join an online conference and was told to leave the company “today”. He said that the boss realised that it was too difficult to proceed with such ambitious plans and thus decided to cut down on his operations, letting go of “any new initiatives”.
Hearing this announcement he said his head almost splintered and sputtered. “What an unfortunate point of time this is and what an uphill battle it would be to find a job again!” he exclaimed to me.
He was composed enough and asked the boss not to terminate his salary as of that day, but considering the near impossibility of finding any job soon, to consider paying him the full month of June? The boss readily agreed, to his gratefulness. I commended him highly of his negotiation skills for this.
He was letting a few close contacts know of his bad news in case there could be any help forthcoming, including a Suzhou-based boss running a translation software company. The Suzhou entrepreneur has some other thoughts or plans to launch some new business, therefore he could be the immediate person to consider hiring. He helped that entrepreneur to meet with some investors, though they didn’t ultimately invest in him, he gained the warm feeling and appreciation of him. However, meeting him could happen only when no quarantine of 14 days is necessary for a Suzhou person coming into Shanghai, or a Shanghai resident arriving in Suzhou. That is bad news. As the saying goes, “a long lane has its twists and turns and a long night is fraught with dreams（路必有弯，夜长梦多）”. That Suzhou entrepreneur was his only prospective source of employment.
It was now that I learned he also had a younger bother in Guangzhou, running a clothes factory. He might have to move to Guangzhou and join him, to help him in anyway he could, but that was his Plan B, because he had not the face to tell him that the Big Brother was out of job again!
I asked him to consider leaving Shanghai, either to go back to Shaanxi Province, since he also told me this time that his mother was hospitalised for a leg bone fracture. Any personal medical cost would be borne by him, even though her mother could have 60% of her medical expense covered by the state insurance, or to go south to Guangzhou to support his younger brother, or find a job in that city. “Guangzhou may not be a bad choice for you, now that Shanghai is shunned and avoided by many cities in the country, and many companies haven’t yet resumed their operations to the normal way,” I said, feeling quite a bit of sunshine and hope for him should he go to Guangzhou.
He said that he would stay in Shanghai, and try his luck still. His tenacity and bravery was rather admiring, and he was not just someone to accept his fate easily, I thought.
Thinking how hopeless it was to find a job for the next few months, I tried to lower his expectations by asking him once and again “take it easy and relax for some time” as I was beginning to be rather worried about his health, already 37 in age, rather senior among the office-goers nowadays.
I hanged on and deliberately passed on some gossip to him so he could delay his futile offensive, and count himself as not so unlucky. I mentioned that our mutual acquaintance Victor Song committed suicide in November last year.
Having made hardly a single penny since 2019, he tried to export masks, gloves and medical equipment to some African organisation, and tried to set up a fund with some Arabs promising to put tens of millions of US dollars into his hand so he could invest in China and achieve a win-win situation for both sides and he was signed up to advise around a dozen companies who intend to raise funds, quite many of those companies nearing or past due diligence of some investors already, but then none seemed to be about to close any time soon and for each case, he saw a weird, mystic and gloomy tunnel leading nowhere. Quite baffled by these fruitless efforts, he ended his life.
Victor Song was famed as a financial advisor and he made his name nationally for being behind one startup that was acquired by Alibaba in 2010. Yet such a great man has not been able to close one case since 2019.
Victor Song actually decided to hire him as his personal assistant, having met him and thought him a super capable person, having the potential of bring in big deals and closing big deals for him. But Hawk didn’t like the terms he offered as he could get only 20 per cent of the share of profit for each case, and thus didn’t have warm feelings for him, and has basically ignored him ever since.
I did not mention the experience of another financial advisor, Peter Ai, someone educated with some computer technology but chose to enter the investment banking industry, for quick bucks. To my knowledge it was hard to verify with evidence that he actually has ever closed any deal all through the past six or seven years, earned some small pocket money in the role of a mentor in a District-level startup contest in Jinshan District now and then, and in the summer of 2020, poverty forced him to become a salesperson promoting some sort of meal-ordering APP, which competed head-on with Eleme and Meituan. At the age of around 40, he went to each restaurant, trying to get the owner to sign up with his APP. After three months, he gave up and became a Partner in a New York-based finance group, which has tried to solicit and get some Chinese companies to pay for advisory and training services to go IPO in New York, in the way of SPACC, which has lower listing requirement. I met him in a restaurant through a mutual acquaintance. He sat at the table, looking rather hapless and absent-minded as to focus on any topic others raised, eyes grovelling about the table and stuffing himself food with hardly any table manners so to speak. Out of curiosity, I pressed him with the question how he had fared with that finance group. A bit stunned by the question, he paused a little, obviously deliberated on how to respond to this thorny question, he said that he had found a couple of companies that have expressed interest in SPAC but just seemed hard to make up their minds yet. “If ever one deal closes, I would get a commission of RMB 100,000. That is more than you could earn in an office job, right?” My question actually started him off with his sales pitch, adding that I could have some great companies in my network that may be enthusiastic about SPAC. A few days after that meeting in November 2021, he sent me a WeChat message asking me to enter a group that sells some goods with “great prices”. So he did e-commerce as well!. Once entering the WeChat group I was flooded with one sale announcement after another that I quickly fed up and withdrew. Just a month ago, he sent me another WeChat Group message and this time I saw it was that New York finance group, which organised meetings for prospective partners like him and heads of Chinese companies to enter. Obviously he still hasn’t closed one deal, else he would shower me and others, with whom he shared quite a few WeChat groups, big and small, with a breaking news announcement. No, I haven’t seen any of such announcements from him yet.
And then I thought of an American Taiwanese, Dawson Liang, who for a number of years has also been engaged in fund raising services, but never succeeded in one case, and eventually he was persuaded to join a direct-selling Taiwanese company selling water machines that were claimed to bring some sort of unique efficacy to one’s health. He went to the training and work meetings of that company regularly but at the age of more than 60, he had sold only one water machine over almost a year. But then he didn’t receive his commission in full, and walking along the street in the Spring Festival of 2019, he suddenly fell down on the road, and was diagnosed with having cerebral hemorrhage, a symptom of high blood pressure he had long suffered from and have long complained of headache. In Huashan Hospital, doctors said that there was a blood clot the size of an egg in his head and immediate operation should be done to it, after a direct relative of his could sign on a paper agreement. Single in Shanghai, his divorced wife working in New York and his son also working in New York and treating him as a complete stranger, his operation was delayed for a week, when his divorced wife flew over from the US, it was too late to conduct the operation. He came out of coma in about a week, then found himself suffering from incontinence of urine and feces, in short, gatism. Two weeks thereafter, his friends and that Taiwanese company took him out of the hospital and drop him off at a remote Shanghai convalescent hospital at the monthly cost of around RMB 20,000. The US consulate could no help to him citing that there was no vacant bed or room in some convalescent hospitals in the US. After half a year’s stay in this Shanghai convalescent hospital he eventually got accepted by a convalescent hospital in Taiwan. In this Shanghai convalescent hospital when a few friends visited him, brought him some donations and food, Dawson somehow burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably. Friends say that the cerebral hemorrhage has also caused some damages to his mental power, so that means, physically and mentally he would not be able to work any more, and have to relay on social institutions forever.
I didn’t tell Hawk of either Peter Ai nor Dawson Liang, but was fearful of his ever falling into such bad fate, particularly that of Dawson Liang’s. It’s bewildering to think that Hawk, who studied automobile in college, and Peter Ai, who studied IT in college, chose to enter the financial advisory scene. Sure, there was easy money and big windfalls to get ten years ago, but as the Chinese economy took an unmodest dive in the second half of 2017, making quick and big money out of this profession has been far from possible.
I am getting really concerned about Hawk now. Walking out of the park and reading a collection of Myanmar short stories translated into English, I could not for long forget about Hawk. As the dusk approached, some loud speakers began blaring Tango music, and a large crowd of people were standing away from the loud speakers, which were hidden behind some big potted flowers in front of a swimming pool closed due to Covid-19, smiling serenely and sweetly. Then I noticed the majority of the people were women. Not enough men to dance with them, yet they were there, feeling confident and content.
Life seems to come back normal, and things may turn for the better, I thought, and felt truly a bit optimistic about Hawk’s Shanghai dream again.
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Note: Chapter 1's web address -
https://www.jianshu.com/p/51b32425643d
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