After completion and printing of the first edition, life in China has not stopped even in the context of LaoWei. Some readers will certainly like to know how the prominent characters of this book were doing further.
SunLi’s son and his maternal grandparents come to ShenZhen and move into the new apartment. There they live together with the young parents. At a little more than one and a half years, HaoKang is almost dry. He understands everything you tell him, even complicated matters (he even understands LaoWei’s hesitant Chinese), but doesn’t yet speak more than a few words.
Wang LanBo’s son lives with his grandmother while his parents are separated from him and work in ShenZhen.
“Mayor” Song begins to renovate one of his houses. His “spring chickens” take over the sale of the apartments. First, however, the current rental income is lacking (all tenants having been terminated), money from the sale of condominiums cannot be expected until the end of the conversion work. The financing of the extensive and therefore expensive remodelling can be managed without banks. He has about half of the necessary money on his own accounts, the other half “lets” his son, the head physician of the central hospital. He doesn’t want to get it repaid.
One of the pretty grand-daughters is pregnant, LaoLao will soon be great-grandmother.
The friends of programmer Wang who emigrated to Australia are unhappy. They can’t cope with the Australian way of life. The woman is regretting particularly that she is now for the first time in her partnership financially dependent from her husband, and as a housewife she does not feel challenged enough and also has difficulty with learning English. She would like to go back with her daughter to China, but her husband is hesitating.
Finally, many months after the World Cup in football, there is again a major sporting event: the Asian Games. They have been held in GuangZhou. Again the Chinese are offering an opening show which is stunning, imaginative and exciting. My football friends comment: “After this show no country in Asia will like to host the next Asian Games again, for how do they want to surpass that?” CCTV 5 is broadcasting as usual 24 hours a day, the other stations as well are occupied with sports. An interview with, if I understood correctly, a deaf athlete from Macao struck me: she seems to be reading from lip, writes with 10 fingers at a prodigious rate her answers on a keyboard, the text appears on a display in the studio; the discussion is of course slower than usual, she sometimes deletes a half or a whole sentence, starts again, but they take all the time which is necessary for this interview.
On a business trip to GuangZhou during the Asian Games, we wind up with a police control. Our driver was for almost eight hours “arrested”, because he had quite large knifes in his car, in case that he must defend himself in dark streets. He finally gets off it with a fine.
Also in this year, in 2011, there will be no boredom for a few weeks: the Universiade will be held in ShenZhen, across the city the countdown is running. At the weekends I am riding four times along the construction site of the central stadium, the complex is on the way to my pitches. Then China has really been allowed to host many international major sporting events. Only that within in the foreseeable future there will be no football World Cup in China.
HaoKang and many other small children, but much more so the larger ones, can observe on TV how “Chang’e 2”, China’s recent lunar probe, is launched to the moon.
For HaoKang, the rocket doesn’t fly to the Man in the Moon, as my grandson would call it, but to the Woman in the Moon. Chang’e is the goddess of the moon who according to Chinese myth soared to the moon as against professional advice she took an overdose of a medication that would make her immortal. Other Chinese (and old Aztec) positions perceive on the moon not a woman (Chang’e), but a rabbit or a hare.
The launch is effected on National Day, 1 October 2010, the 61st Anniversary of the founding of the Peoples’ Republic of China. For the first time a probe was successfully launched straight to the moon, without acquiring an extra boost from a few previous orbits around the Earth. The probe was guided into an orbit around the moon, taking it down to 15 km above the lunar surface, so as to transmit high-resolution images to Earth. No doubt, China is capable of highest technological achievements, and certainly as well to provide decent safety pins that would not twist. See considerations of safety pins and other quality issues in a section of the next chapter.