But the completely unaware Brian Brooks just kept twisting and turning, as happily as if he were doing a yangko dance, determined to infuriate those city passengers who looked down on him. By the time he finished gnawing on that piece of meat and his hips were sore from all the twisting, he finally stopped, only to find the atmosphere a bit strange. Quite a few gazes were directed behind him. With difficulty, he turned his head and Brian Brooks saw a face flushed pink, a mix of shame, anger, and astonishment, as if she couldn’t believe someone would be so brazen and indecent on a public bus. This wasn’t just some low-level groping—this was outright molestation. She stared hard at the face so close to hers: pale to the point of looking sickly, with ordinary features that, when put together, could only be called clean, not really matching his whole getup. She seemed about to speak, her eyes brimming with tears, the very picture of pitifulness.

“Grace, which stop are we getting off at?” Brian Brooks asked with a righteous look, showing not the slightest intention of admitting fault in the face of everyone’s scorn. Instead, he looked around and shouted, eyes wide and voice booming, “Never seen a man being close with his wife before?”

As he spoke, Brian Brooks turned around. Perhaps intimidated by the sudden burst of ferocity from this hooligan, she instinctively stepped back, and with Brian Brooks deliberately leaning away to keep his distance, a rare empty space opened up around the girl. Although many people still lamented that a beautiful flower was stuck in a pile of cow dung like Brian Brooks, at least they no longer looked at the two with lecherous eyes or let their imaginations run wild about their earlier “performance.” A few of the men who had been thinking of taking advantage of her quietly pulled their hands back.

Even so, when the bus reached the next stop, the girl still hurried off. Brian Brooks was sure this wasn’t her stop, and he didn’t forget to shout after her retreating figure, “Grace, when you get to Mom and Dad’s, tell them I’ll come over after I buy some cigarettes and liquor.” Brian Brooks’s fellow villager was dumbfounded. He’d been tricked and set up by Brian Brooks plenty of times back in Zhangjia Village, but seeing this rascal dare to pull off something in the city that he himself hadn’t dared even to imagine after years here, he felt both jealous and admiring. He thought to himself, “No wonder he’s from Zhangjia Village—he really is a cut above the rest.”

Brian Brooks rubbed his backside, closed his eyes, and a wicked smile curled at his lips as he secretly savored the moment: “Comfortable.”

He changed buses midway, squeezed onto another, and then changed again. By the time he finally got on the last bus, his fellow villager told him they’d reach their destination in a little over half an hour. Wiping the sweat from his brow, Brian Brooks said nothing. The earlier spicy episode hadn’t left him particularly excited. When he finally managed to snag a seat in the back and wanted to take a good look at the night view of this proud city of the republic, Brian Brooks absentmindedly took out the slip of paper with a number on it, folded it into a paper airplane, and placed it in his palm. He looked out the window, then up at the skyscrapers he was seeing in real life for the first time, and murmured, “Do I have to look up like this my whole life?”

Chapter Ten: Ambition

Shanghai was like one of those old five-mao popsicles from years ago—it melted away before Brian Brooks could even get a few licks, and he never got a taste of it. Brian Brooks had just sat up straight, ready to properly take in the bustling night scene of this big city, when his fellow villager’s shout told him to get off. Snapping back to reality, he realized this stretch of road was no different from the outskirts of Harbin: rows of low houses, tangled power lines, and mostly small eateries along the roadside that looked like street stalls, or pink-lit hair salons with a few women made up like fairies standing at the door. Only then did this country bumpkin realize that even in this lofty city, there were places not so far removed from his own world. Standing on tiptoe and craning his neck, he found there were still things he could see.

As the most successful and worldly example from Zhangjia Village, Brian Brooks’s fellow villager actually just worked odd jobs at a northeastern restaurant. Naturally, the job he introduced to Brian Brooks was also odd jobs—the dirtiest and most tiring kind. But for Brian Brooks, just having a place to stay and not having to worry about his next meal was enough to make him almost grateful to this fellow villager he otherwise found so disagreeable.

For lodging, he squeezed into a tiny twelve-square-meter room on the second floor of an old shared apartment with his fellow villager. Once a bed was in, there was barely any space left. For food, he ate the restaurant’s leftovers, and occasionally, when the stingy boss was in a good mood, Brian Brooks and his fellow villager would get a meal with a bit of meat. As for work, he went to the market to buy vegetables, helped the chef, served food and tea to customers, and cleaned the restaurant—Brian Brooks was basically working in every possible way. On top of that, the plump boss’s wife would sometimes flirt with Brian Brooks, and have him run errands for her precious son. She even dumped her daughter’s schoolwork—she was in her third year of middle school—on Brian Brooks, who had just graduated high school, hinting that her daughter’s graduation grades would be directly tied to his already meager monthly pay. When there were customers who tried to dine and dash, the skinny-armed, thin-legged Brian Brooks would be dragged out to keep order. After a month, even Brian Brooks’s fellow villager felt sorry for him. But then he’d remember how he used to work himself to the bone like a dog, and now could even spare time to visit the hair salons a few streets away, and he’d toss that feeling right into the gutter.