"EMPTY" and WINNERS OF THE 2015 FAIRY TALES COMPETITION [II]

EMPTY by Zigeng Wang

Father passed away. Before he died, he asked me to pour his ashes into the river. He must have been muddled; the river in front of our house had dried up long ago. He left behind a diary. There is this story saying that he met mother in the fish shop beside the river. My mom was the daughter of the fisherman who owned the shop. Every morning grandfather would harvest a net of fish to sell in the shop. My father didn’t like to eat fish, but one day after school he saw this girl in the shop; after that, he frequented the place to buy fish and secretly set them free in the river.

However, that is not consistent with my memory. I don’t remember seeing a river in front of our house. When I was young, there were only the outdoor world (enveloped in smog) and the indoor world (isolated by various air purifying equipment). Ever since that massive blackout, the government built many power plants on the upper stream of the river in order to meet the ever-growing need for electricity for that equipment. Gradually, the lower stream dried up and the ship moved on the dry land. But I took it for granted. After all, it transported air, which is as crucial to mankind as water is to fish. I don’t trust my father’s memory. He was a novelist and his love story sounded dubious. In my memory, he would never set fish free. He was cold and arrogant and would only talk to the fish in his tank. He forbade me to study architecture or get entangled with the ship on the dry land—but how could I avoid it? That ship was running this world.

He restricted me from studying architecture, yet he was an architect when he was young. He would never talk about those early experiences. He was a savior-like figure in his age, leading the design of the first ship. But at some point in his life, he refused to engage with this world and concealed his identity, beginning to write a novel with the pseudonym of “outsider.” To be exact, he wrote the novel for 20 years, but never published it. He didn’t even finish it before he died. During that time, the whole family moved to this shabby house under the bridge. He refused to participate in the government’s centralized heating program and isolated himself. He set up a reading room on the platform of the building, right behind the billboard. He often said he was shuffling between two cities, but neither could see him. His fish tanks were everywhere in the reading room, and the walls were covered with various types of clocks, collected from all over the world; some were not telling the right time, and some were static forever. There was an old red telephone that he never allowed me to touch, yet he would never answer it himself when it rang. He was such a strange person.

I was ashamed of my Quasimodo-like father. He refused to embrace the world, but to a large extent, it was a world built by him from an early age. EMPTY is the world.

I must admit, EMPTY is a wonder of the time. Without its innovative business model, the air pollution could never have been addressed. EMPTY is by no means only an air company. Its cooperation with manufacturing companies induces win-win results. First of all, it is a ship, an OEM factory floating on the high seas—that means it doesn’t need to build a physical factory on land, obey the laws of a certain country, or pay taxes. Its recent deal with Apple is typical. After loading the components and cheap labor force in China, it sailed to the U.S. and assembled the products on the way, thus greatly reducing time and costs. Besides, EMPTY helped solve the long-existing issues of deficit and trade between China and the U.S. China had enjoyed a large trade surplus with the U.S., so many products were exported but very few were imported; therefore, the transportation costs of cargo ships increased as they would come back empty. My father thought about the air! His idea could solve the trade issue with almost zero cost, and also created a way to address the problem of air pollution. Chinese and foreign media were deeply impressed. Air imported from the U.S. got many Chinese people addicted. Five years ago, it replaced cash as the form of salary for on-board workers, and the rest was sold on the internet platform of Alibaba. My father built the whole sales strategy and system. He put the server on the ship, avoiding about 4 trillion Yuan each year in taxes. If the ship was an OEM factory when sailing to the U.S., then it is a warehouse of EMPTY air when sailing back. People say my father was steering not only a ship, but a mobile Special Economic Zone for the wellbeing of mankind.

Obviously, tens of thousands of people benefited from my father’s concept. EMPTY was deemed the victory of globalization. Francis Fukuyama even republished a book for it, only to assure the world that it would eventually go from the bankruptcy of diplomacy to the end of Keynesian globalization; that EMPTY would not only provide clean and breathable air, but reduce costs for manufacturing companies and provide jobs, upgrading hundreds of pillar industries following the establishment of a permanently-thriving real estate market. For some time, both EMPTY and my father were stars under the spotlight. But a rumor from 40 years ago returned to ruin him. It must have been a long-brewed revenge. As the visibility of the air was very low, ground and air transportation were frequently delayed. EMPTY produced a drone to transport clean air with Boeing, using GPS to deliver air to the exact location of the customer. But there were problems. Like a fire balloon, the drone flew very slowly, making the delivery period unpredictable. Someone bribed experts to say that EMPTY had lied about the efficiency of the product and manipulated the weather forecast, hoarding produced goods to delay the time of delivery. They claimed that EMPTY was making profits through such evil means. EMPTY was a subordinate company of Alibaba, which owns the world’s largest E-payment platform, Alipay. EMPTY was making deals on that platform, so it could accumulate capital paid by users. The more slowly it delivered goods, the more cash it would gather. Some ill-intended people said that Alipay was becoming a “cloud bank” that required no physical space, and claimed that my father was not trying to build a Special Economic Zone, but this placeless bank.

That incident didn’t stop EMPTY from becoming the most powerful enterprise in the world, but it did overwhelm my father. He said he had been deceived by his world, and that we were all probably fish in the world of smog that saw beauty through it.

Text.- “Empty” by Zigeng Wang.