The New Year Boyfriend Read online

Lian and Brock stood on either side of Winnie and wrapped their arms around her.

  “We will help you find a way out of this,” Brock said.

  But Winnie had a feeling her fate was sealed.

  2

  Zhong Kai eased his car along the streets of Shanghai waiting for his app to ping telling him that someone needed a taxi. At five in the morning, the sun was already starting to rise over the tall buildings and empty streets. Most people would balk at working such an early shift, but Kai thought it was the best time to be on the road in Shanghai. It was the one time of day you wouldn’t get stuck in traffic and could easily zip from one place to another. He found it was more profitable too. There were fewer riders, but almost all of them were either heading to the airport or train station, so he could travel a far distance in a short amount of time. It also gave him time to be alone and think. He couldn’t be on his phone or computer while he was driving. He could only be alone with his thoughts or listen to the radio.

  At seven, he ended his shift, logging out of his taxi app, and headed to Dong’an Road and Fudan University Cancer Center. He went past the hospital to the nearby neighborhood that had been converted into what people called Cancer City. People with cancer who were seeking--or hoping to seek--treatments at Fudan often had to live here, where the rent was cheap, because they couldn't afford to stay in the hospital long-term.

  Kai’s mother was one of them.

  Here, the roads slimmed into alleyways too narrow for cars to pass. Kai parked his car and walked the several blocks to the apartment his mother was living in. The morning was in full swing. Many people were being taken to the hospital on stretchers or in wheelchairs for their treatments. Other people were opening their shops--grocery stores, fruit stands, medical supply shops, apothecaries, noodle shops, and more. Everything a person could need, they could find here. Kai stopped at a fruit stand and bought a bag of apples. It was January and freezing cold, so few fruits were in stock, but you could always find apples.

  He dodged a puddle in the road and nodded to a few people he had come to recognize who were sitting in their apartments with the doors open. Despite the cold, many people opened their doors and windows at first light to let in the fresh air, even though it wasn’t exactly fresh. The coal plants that burned continually to heat the entire country north of the Yangtze River turned the winter sky into a perpetual dark gray cloud that never seemed to dissipate until the coal plants were shut off in the spring.

  Finally, Kai came to his mother’s house. Two of his aunts and three of his cousins, all boys, were there already. Two of his cousins were smoking in an attempt to keep warm while the third shuffled his feet and scrolled through his phone.

  “What’s up?” Kai asked as he greeted them each with a handshake and hug. The boys had come to drop their mothers off to take care of Kai’s mother while Kai was working. They usually hung around, smoking and chatting, until each had to head to school or work for the day.

  “Not much, man,” Fenghe said. “Dead tired. Took a girl home last night.”

  The boys all laughed and nudged each other knowingly.

  “Nice,” said Kai. “You going to see her again?”

  “I don’t know,” Fenghe said. “Who has the money for a girl? Especially in this city.”

  “Shanghai girls are the worst,” Hongji added. “You have to have a car, an apartment, and a million yuan in the bank before they will even look at you.”

  “If they want you at all,” Kangmu added, not looking up from his phone. “They all want their own careers now. It’s not enough that men outnumber women in this country. Now, the women don’t want to get married at all.”

  Kai chuckled. “You just have to make yourself what women want. Stop playing games all day and drinking all night.”

  “What do you know about it?” Fenghe asked, stamping out his cigarette. “Got a girl you been keeping secret.”

  “You know I don’t,” Kai said. “Every spare jiao goes to mom’s treatments.”

  The guys all nodded. They teased each other, but Kai’s mother’s illness weighed on all of them. They all pitched in together to help support each other. They all knew that if they were in a bad situation, they could always rely on their family to help them.

  “Any hot tips?” Kai asked. His cousins were generally more spoiled than he was. They were always looking for ways to make money for the least amount of effort. For years, Fenghe made money as a gold farmer in World of Warcraft, but the game company had cracked down on that in recent years. Hongji tried making money by flying to Hong Kong, buying a dozen of the latest iPhones, and then smuggling them back in China without paying import duties. It worked the first time. He managed to get through security without being caught. But the second time, the customs officials found the phones in his backpack. He lost the phones and had to pay a huge fine.

  “Check this out,” Kangmu said, handing Kai his phone. “ New Year is coming up.”

  Kai took the phone and read the headline. It was an article about how young, successful Chinese women were paying men to pose as their boyfriends to their families during the New Year holiday to avoid being set up on dates when visiting their families. Some of the girls were paying as much as fifteen hundred American dollars to men willing to pose as a fiance.

  Kai shook his head and handed the phone back. “Man, that sounds like a good deal. Let me know if you find a rich young lady who needs a New Year boyfriend.”

  “If you found a girl that rich,” said Hongji, “forget posing. Marry that girl.”

  Kai shook his head and rolled his eyes. Avoiding marriage was the whole point of the arrangement. But he didn’t know any girls that well off. His day job was in IT, and while he knew some women who hoped to make a good career, he didn’t know any who would be rich enough to hire a boyfriend for a week.

  Kai looked around the neighborhood and noticed that the apartment directly across the street was empty.

  “What happened to the Xu family?” he asked.

  Hongji looked over. “They were leaving as we arrived. They got bad news.”

  Kai nodded. Xu Anchi had been getting treatments since before Kai and his mother had arrived. He didn’t need to know the specifics of Anchi’s “bad news” to understand what she must have been going through. Either the doctors had told her that the cancer had progressed to the point that treating it wouldn’t help, or the money for treatments had run out. Kai had seen it happen over and over again in the months his mother had been living here, and he was determined for his mother not to suffer the same fate. It was why he was moonlighting as a taxi driver even though he had a fairly good day job. He needed to earn as much money as possible to pay for whatever treatments they could get her for as long as he could.

  He went inside the small apartment to see his mother before he had to head to work.

  “Kai!” his mother called from her chair that was situated across from a small television set. Her face glowed and she waved him to her.

  “Hey, Ma,” he said, clutching her hands and kissing her cheek. Her face was thin and her skin dry. She had a handkerchief wrapped around her head to keep her head warm after losing her hair. “Have you had enough to eat?”

  She waved him off. “I can’t keep anything down.”

  “I have to take her to the IV center later to make sure she stays hydrated,” one of his aunts told him as she busied herself cleaning the room. The other aunt went outside with a small bag, probably to pick up a few things for the day.

  “You can’t even drink water?” Kai asked.

  “Don’t worry,” his mother said, as she always did, not wanting to bother him with the minutia of her treatments. “The doctors are taking good care of me.”

  He knew they were. But he also knew they could be doing better if he had more money. Like most people in China and in Cancer City, Kai and his mother didn’t have health insurance, so treatments were a flat rate. Such a system was mostly fair for run-of-the-mill stuff, like the flu or a br
oken arm. But for something like cancer, the costs could get astronomical. Treatments were basically offered on a menu. You would pick and choose what treatments you wanted based on what you could afford and hope for the best. Kai wanted to save enough money for a better treatment, but the smaller treatments she needed every day, like IV drips, often drained away any money they had. And she continued to get sicker. Kai feared they were only prolonging the inevitable if he couldn’t find a way to pay for a more aggressive treatment.

  “Do you have plans for New Year?” his mother asked him.

  Working extra taxi shifts, Kai thought to himself but didn’t say. He knew it would upset her if she knew just how much he was working to pay for her treatments. She didn’t even know he was working as a taxi driver. She thought he was earning enough at his IT job. But Kai just squeezed his mother’s hand and smiled.

  “I’ll spend the extra time with you,” he said.

  “Bah, don’t worry about me,” she said, waving him off. “You are young. I hope you make time for some fun.”

  “I will, Ma,” he said. Then he kissed her forehead and left to go to work. But they both knew that he would be too stressed about money to relax. Kai figured that one day his mother would be gone. If not from the cancer, then from old age. He could live for himself then. Until that happened, he would do everything he could to take care of her.

  His father had left them when he was a little boy. He barely remembered his father. He had taken a mistress back in his hometown and left them with nothing. Kai’s father’s mother had offered to take him, but his mother refused. She wouldn’t send her son away to be raised by someone else. So she worked hard to provide for both of them. She worked in restaurants and hotels, she took in washing and picked up cans and bottles from the trash for recycling. Kai got his work ethic from her. Somehow, she managed to keep them fed and housed. With a little help from her family, she was able to send Kai to university.

  Kai knew that she had sacrificed the whole of her youth for him. He had hoped that after he went to school, she could slow down. That he could get a good enough job to take care of her.

  But then she got sick.

  Now, there was no slowing down or extra money for either of them.

  Kai replayed these same troubles over and over in his head as he drove to work. He parked several blocks away from his office where it was cheaper. He grabbed a steamed bun from a street vendor and ate it in the elevator on his way to his desk. He clocked into two minutes before nine and wound his way through the rows and rows of tables with computer monitors on them and the people in front of them seated in rolling chairs. There were no cubicles here. That would take up too much space.

  Kai switched on his computer and logged into the system. He already had a backlog of work to get through. His job was debugging a new game that was supposed to be the next WoW or DOTA. An MMO that would grab the attention of players not just in China, but around the world.

  For three hours, Kai almost mindlessly clicked through the list of bugs and scanned the code on the backend to try to fix the problems. At exactly noon, music came on alerting everyone that it was time for lunch. Many of the other employees stood to head down to the cafes or restaurants to find something to eat, but a few people lingered at their desks, using the time to play their own games or chat online with their friends. Kai took a moment to check his personal email. He was about to toss one message that looked like spam into the trash, but he looked at it again.

  “A business proposition for you,” the email was named, which sounded like a scam, but then he noticed the “from” address. It was from the official Whirlwind URL. Whirlwind was his company’s biggest competitor. He clicked on the email.

  “Dear Mr. Zhong,” the email read. “I am the head of acquisitions at Whirlwind and would like to meet with you to discuss an important business opportunity. It will be worth your while. Please reply and let me know when would be a good time to meet.”

  Kai shook his head in disbelief. It was too good to be true. Whirlwind was interested in him? He, of course, had applied for jobs at Whirlwind many times, but his application always came back rejected. This email wasn’t from HR, though, But the “head of acquisitions” who hadn’t even signed his name.

  He almost tossed the email in the trash again. Something seemed off about the correspondence. But then he thought about his mother. Maybe Whirlwind was looking for some freelance consultants. It wouldn’t hurt to at least talk to this guy and see what he had to say, right?

  He replied to the email, letting the sender know he could meet after work, and hit send. Then he went down to the cafeteria to find a bite to eat.

  By the time lunch was over, he had practically forgotten about the weird email.

  3

  Winnie blinked herself awake as her flight started its descent. She checked her watch. It was five am in Shanghai. She was flying into Pudong airport, but she needed to go to Hongqiao airport in another part of the city to catch her flight to Harbin. Traveling during Chinese New Year was the literal worst. Everyone in China has to go home for Chinese New Year. It’s the world's largest human migration with around four hundred million people trying to get from major cities around the world back to their hometowns. There were very few remnants of China’s communist era left, but a collective holiday schedule was one of the holdouts. Trying to travel by plane or train or bus is generally a nightmare. Winnie was actually surprised she managed to get a flight from Sydney to Shanghai at all, considering how many Chinese students and immigrants live in Australia. But traveling to China was the easy part. Getting to Harbin, about fourteen hundred miles north of Shanghai, was another story.

  It was so early, the subway wouldn’t be open yet. Besides, she didn’t think she could catch the flight if she took the subway. She’d have to take a taxi. This early in the morning, it usually wouldn’t be difficult to catch a car, but with the holiday, she wasn’t going to take any chances. She’d have to use Didi, the ride-hailing app that had sprung up in the years since she had last been in China.

  Not only had she not been home in two years, she hadn’t been back in China at all. She had been dreading it. But now that she was here, among familiar faces, smells, and words, she actually felt calm. She was home.

  She didn’t have any checked luggage, only a backpack, her purse, and a carry on case, so she was able to breeze through customs and security and go to the pickup area. She checked her phone and saw that her driver was named Kai and he was already waiting for her. She looked around and saw the car with the right license plate numbers parked across from her, a rather handsome young man standing outside of it, waiting expectantly for his rider. She gave him a wave, and he nodded back. As she approached, he offered to take her carry-on case, but she just shook her head as he opened the back passenger door and she slid inside. She felt more comfortable keeping her belongings with her.

  “Hongqiao, right?” Kai asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And try to hurry. I have an eight o’clock flight.”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “I know a shortcut.”

  “No shortcuts,” she said. She had heard of these kinds of tricks. Drivers claim they know a “better” way just to take twice as long and run up the meter. “Just take the normal route, but drive quickly.”

  He nodded and smirked. “Whatever you say.”

  They rode along in silence for a moment, and Winnie took a moment to breathe and watch the sun rising over the city, the rays peeking through the skyscrapers. Shanghai had always been huge, with some of the tallest buildings in the world, but she seemed to have forgotten just how impressive the city was. Sydney was a city, but it was nothing like this.

  “So, where did you fly in from?” Kai asked her, breaking the silence.

  “Sydney,” she said, being polite.

  “Going home for New Year?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied.

  “Where is home?” he asked.

  “Harbin,” she said.r />
  “Wow!” he said, shaking his head. “Cold! I mean, it gets cold here, but Harbin…” He shuddered. “They have the ice festival there.”

  “I know,” Winnie said. The Harbin Ice Festival was world famous, and people would come from all over to see the massive ice sculptures the festival was known for or stay overnight in an ice hotel. Winnie had been going to the ice festival with her family since she was a little girl and was looking forward to getting to go back this year.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to the ice festival,” Kai said, more to himself than Winnie, she thought. “Mom would love it.”

  “You should take her,” Winnie said.

  “Huh?” Kai asked, as though he forgot they were talking. “Oh, right. Yeah, maybe someday.”

  Winnie’s phone rang and she saw it was Lian. “Wei?” she answered.

  “Hey,” Lian said. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” Winnie said, checking her watch. 6:15. She was cutting it close. She reached up and tapped Kai on the shoulder. “Hey. Sorry. But can you speed it up?”

  Kai looked at his speedometer. “I’m already going like twenty over the speed limit--”

  “I’ll pay extra,” Winnie said.

  Kai hesitated, looking around as though a cop might pull up beside him at any moment. “I’ll get you there,” he finally said, and Winnie sat back as she felt the car speed up.

  “Thanks,” she said, then went back to her conversation with Lian. “I’m on the way to Hongqiao now. I’ll be home by noon.”

  “Be sure to eat some of your nainai’s dumplings for me,” Lian said.

  “You know I will,” Winnie said. “If mom wasn’t pressuring me to marry Chang so much I might actually be looking forward to being home.”

  “Don’t let her get to you,” Lian said. “Just smile and be polite. Then just before you leave, tell her the truth. That way if she tries to kill you, you will have a flight waiting for you.”

  Winnie chuckled. “I wish it were that easy,” she lamented. “Do you remember Songyi? We went to high school together. She scored even higher than me on the gaokao.”