The Stone Monkey

must be suffering. He added softly, “I’m going out. I’m going to get you some medicine.”
    She didn’t respond and he rose and walked into the living room.
    He glanced at the children, who looked uneasily toward the room where their mother lay.
    “Is she all right?” the teenage girl asked.
    “Yes. She’ll be fine. I’ll be back in a half hour,” he said. “I’ll get some medicine.”
    “Wait, Father,” Chin-Mei said uncertainly, looking down.
    “What?”
    “May I come with you?” the girl asked.
    “No, you will stay with your mother and brother.”
    “But . . . ”
    “What?”
    “There is something I need.”
    A fashion magazine? he thought cynically. Makeup? Hair spray? She wants me to spend our survival money on her pretty face. “What?”
    “Please let me come with you. I’ll buy it myself.” She was blushing fiercely.
    “What do you want?” he demanded.
    “I need some things for . . . ” she whispered, head down.
    “For what?” he asked harshly. “Answer me.”
    She swallowed. “For my time. You know. Pads.”
    With a shock Wu suddenly understood. He looked away from the girl and gestured angrily toward the bathroom. “Use something in there.”
    “I can’t. It’s uncomfortable.”
    Wu was furious. It was his wife’s job to take care of matters like this. No man he ever knew bought those  . . . things. “All right!” he snapped. “All right. I’ll buy you what you need.” He refused to ask her what kind she wanted. He’d get the first box of whatever was in the closest store. She’d have to use that. He stepped outside and locked the door behind him.
    Wu Qichen walked down the busy streets of Chinatown, hearing a cacophony of languages—Minnanhua, Cantonese, Putonghua, Vietnamese and Korean. English too, laced with more accents and dialects than he’d ever known existed.
    He gazed at the stores and shops, the piles of merchandise, the huge high-rises ringing the city. New York seemed ten times bigger than Hong Kong and a hundred times the size of Fuzhou.
    I’m scared for our children. We have to leave. We have to get as far away from here as we can . . . .
    But Wu Qichen had no intention of leaving Manhattan. The forty-year-old man had nurtured a dream all his life and he wouldn’t let his wife’s sickness or the faint threat from a bully of a snakehead deter him from it. Wu Qichen was going to become a wealthy man, the richest ever in his family.
    In his twenties he’d been a bellboy then a junior assistant manager at the Paradise Hotel on Hundong Road, near Hot Springs Park, in the heart of Fuzhou, waiting on rich Chinese and Europeans. Wu had decided then that he would be a successful businessman. He worked hard at the hotel and, even though he gave his parents a quarter of his income, he managed to save enough to buy a sundries and souvenir shop near the famous statue of Mao Zedong on Gutian Road with his two brothers. With the money theymade from that store they bought one grocery then two more. They intended to run the businesses for several years and save as much money as they could then buy a building and make their fortune at real estate.
    But Wu Qichen made one mistake.
    The economic face of China was changing drastically. Economic free zones were prospering and even the top politicos had been speaking favorably of private business—the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping himself had said, “To be wealthy is glorious.” But Wu neglected to remember the first rule of Chinese life: that the CCP—the Chinese Communist Party—runs the show. Wu was bluntly vocal in his call for closer economic ties with Taiwan, ending the iron rice bowl system of guaranteed employment regardless of productivity, and cracking down on party and government officials’ taking bribes and levying arbitrary taxes on businesses. Ironically Wu didn’t even care about what he advocated; his point was merely to attract the attention of Western trading partners—in Europe and America—who, he dreamed, would come to him with money to invest because he was the voice of the new Chinese economy.
    But it wasn’t the West who listened to the skinny man; it was the cadres and secretaries of the Communist Party. Suddenly governmental inspectors began appearing at the Wus’ stores, finding dozens of violations of health and safety codes—many of which they simply made up on the spot. Unable to pay the crushing fines, the brothers were soon broke.
    As shamed as he was by