Chapter 516 - Brothers Reunited

Ruan Xiao'er ordered an array of dishes, including the local specialty, roast suckling pig. The waiter, however, apologized: the dish had recently been banned by order of the great Master of East Gate. Dongmen Chuiyu occupied such an unassailable position in East Gate Market that some joker had saddled him with the nickname, and the indigenous folk had taken it up.

"The Master says eating piglets is wasteful—they should be raised to full size before slaughtering. If you insist, you'd have to pay an extra surcharge—enough to buy ten piglets." The waiter added helpfully, "You can see, sir, that really isn't worth it. We do have spit-roasted pork; it's quite good. Even Master Liu is fond of it…"

"Fine, bring us a portion of the spit-roast," Ruan Xiao'er said.

The three brothers had been apart a long time. Opportunities to gather like this—sharing wine and conversation—were rare now. Each of their lives was full. That was entirely different from the old days: then, they had struggled daily merely to scrape together a living, toiling from dawn to dusk without getting enough to eat, enduring endless hardships. Now, their busyness gave them a sense that their lives had meaning.

Ruan Xiao'er had become thoroughly proficient at operating the heavy guns atop the Beacon Tower. As a key NCO, he was now training new coastal artillerists. Two new heavy guns had been delivered to the naval range, destined for installation somewhere—he did not know where—but the orders to train gunners kept coming in with urgency.

He was expert at working the guns and equally expert at training new hands. He had even devised a set of gunnery jingles, turning the procedures and key points for each station into rhyming mnemonic verses. The task was no easy feat, because although Li Di endorsed the approach, he required that the jingles be in "new speak." The Cantonese-dialect rhymes Ruan Xiao'er had originally composed no longer flowed properly.

A few days after he raised the problem, Li Di brought Wang Tao to help. Wang Tao was a semi-professional folk-art performer; composing rhymes in Mandarin was easy for him. The jingles were written and put to use as they were completed, with excellent results. When Li Di reported to Chen Haiyang, it was decided to extend the model. Ruan Xiao'er received a commendation from the People's Commissar of the Navy.

Ruan Xiaoqi was not only studying "advanced" subjects—mathematics, geometry, physics—but also doing regular internships at the Machinery Works, learning steam-engine construction and operating principles, and touring the hull structure of the 8154 fishing trawler in person. At the large testing pool Wen Desi had built for the Navy, he studied how waves affected models of different hull types.

All of this opened a door the fisherman's son had never imagined. Ruan Xiaoqi was exhilarated; he absorbed every bit of knowledge poured into him like a sponge. Sometimes, because his basic education was so weak, he suffered intellectual indigestion. He compensated with sheer memory, swallowing material whole. Before long, Ruan Xiaoqi was one of the top students in the naval junior-cadet program.

Everything that usually appealed to boys his age had lost all interest for him. Every spare moment went to study. What he loved best were the top-secret albums that could only be borrowed from the library on a naval cadet's student ID—and could not be taken out of the reading room. These albums were unique to the Australians; everything depicted in them was lifelike. They contained the warships possessed only by the Australian navy: giant vessels of steel, cannons thicker than a man… Every time, Ruan Xiaoqi was entranced.

These albums glorifying the transmigrated collective's overwhelming might were produced by a special unit within the Propaganda Department, expressly for brainwashing the indigenous elites the collective intended to groom as future leaders. All images had been curated and Photoshopped, with anything inconvenient to explain carefully removed or obscured. Image selection also followed set standards: for instance, the most advanced warship type shown in the naval albums was the pre-dreadnought battleship, up to about 1900—and only a handful at that. The albums were filled instead with sailing warships and old-fashioned sail-and-steam hybrid vessels. This was to avoid giving indigenous viewers the impression that Australian technology had regressed. Later, the collective could claim that dreadnoughts, aircraft carriers, and submarines were all its own inventions. The captions, too, were entirely fabricated historiography, written by Lin Shenhe. To prevent the text from becoming too florid and contradicting the invented Australian history later assembled, he was instructed to keep descriptions vague and brief. Dates and years were omitted entirely to avoid complicating the future compilation of historical records.

The three brothers' experiences were rich and varied, yet now, reunited after so long, a thousand words rushed to their lips but none would come: the secrecy drilled into them by the Navy prevented them from discussing the most exciting parts of their careers.

Not knowing what to say, the three turned their gazes to the street beyond the private room's window.

East Gate Market had by now grown into a small town. The transmigrated collective had brought thousands upon thousands of immigrants from the mainland, drastically expanding the customer base. Wages paid to employees, compensation to laborers, and sums remitted to local suppliers provided the material foundation for commercial prosperity. A thriving market brought vitality; it drew many locals to settle nearby, and also attracted people from the mainland: petty peddlers, ruined artisans, unemployed shop clerks, destitute prostitutes, and countless others with nothing to their names—all hoping to claim a share of the boom.

The original three planned streets—one running north–south, two east–west—had gradually filled with buildings; little vacant land remained. Thanks to good planning, space had been set aside not only for shops, pedestrians, and vehicles, but also for vendors' stalls, marked out with white-painted squares. In some open lots, one could still pitch tents and set up booths.

Newly planted coconut-palm saplings lined both sides of the street. Using biogas from public latrines and the garbage-processing station, Wang Luobin had equipped the entire East Gate Market street network with biogas streetlamps. Recently, a gasification furnace had been built specifically to produce coal gas, supplementing the sometimes-plentiful, sometimes-scarce, and occasionally interrupted biogas supply.

Thanks to an ample coal-gas supply, streetlamps had spread from the East Gate main thoroughfare to the side streets. Many larger shops willing to pay the connection fee had also installed gaslights. The large storm drains laid below the streets during the original planning proved invaluable for running gas pipes. Had steel not been rationed, limiting pipe production, Wang Luobin would have gaslit the entire East Gate Market.

Even so, the nighttime illumination of East Gate Market was dazzling. The old-style candle-lit lanterns—dim and oily—had vanished from the lighting system except as decorations. Even those who still burned candles now used the far brighter "Australian wax."

Cheap, bright lighting not only improved public safety but had also given rise to night markets unknown in Lingao before, changing the habit of many locals who used to retire at sunset. Members of the Bairen Commune had taken to strolling here with their families after dinner. Some women even brought their needlework to do under the street lamps of the East Market.

Beneath the bright gaslight, hawkers and shop clerks called out to attract custom. A row of food stalls stretched into the distance, warm and inviting.

"It's not like it used to be," Ruan Xiao'er was the first to break the silence. "When we first came to Lingao, East Gate Market was nothing but one trading house and mostly wasteland. Hardly any shops—just shed stalls."

"Yes, who'd have thought it would grow so fast, so big," Ruan Xiaowu said. Recalling how the three brothers had looked when they arrived in Lingao, he was overcome with emotion. "We didn't even have a whole set of clothes between us."

"Little brother had no clothes at all—came in bare-assed and swinging in the wind."

Ruan Xiaoqi reddened. "You call what you were wearing 'clothes,' Second Brother? A scrap of rag covering the front, bare in the back."

"Come to think of it, when the chiefs first came to sterilize us, they even looked at our… well, our backsides. I thought they were going to use us as catamites. I was thinking: these chiefs want an awful lot of catamites!"

"Ha ha ha!" The three burst out laughing. The humiliation and terror of those days—recalled in times of success—held no pain, only the sweetness of savoring their triumph.

"Lingao really is a good place," Ruan Xiaoqi said softly.

"Better to say our luck wasn't bad—running into the chiefs," Ruan Xiao'er corrected.

"Who could have imagined the three of us sitting in a grand restaurant like this, eating like gentlemen?" Ruan Xiao'er gazed at the table laden with food and sighed. "If only Father and Mother could have lived to see this—how happy they'd be."

He raised his cup and poured a libation onto the floor. The three fell silent, each visited by a distant sorrow; the faces of their dead relatives seemed to float before their eyes.

Ruan Xiao'er refilled the three cups. Everyone began chatting again.

"Xiaowu, you've really made it!" Ruan Xiao'er clapped his brother on the shoulder. "From now on, I'll have to call you 'sir.'"

"Big brother is joking," Ruan Xiaowu said, embarrassed. "I wouldn't dare."

"In the military, you follow military rules," Ruan Xiao'er said seriously. "Our instructors used to say: even if the soldier is the grandfather and the officer the grandson, the grandfather must still salute the grandson. That's what discipline means."

"Ah, I wish I had one of those!" Ruan Xiaoqi was fascinated by his second brother's officer's short sword. He drew it from its sheath, turning it over in his hands, beaming with delight.

"It won't be long. Once you graduate, serve a few months' shipboard internship, and you'll be commissioned. This sword was presented by Director Wen himself! Who knows if you'll be that lucky."

"We don't know when we'll ever graduate," Ruan Xiaoqi said. "The teacher says learning to be a naval officer takes many years—at least three or four. Not like Second Brother—you're already a captain. When will I ever be a captain?"

"Ha ha—you silly boy." Ruan Xiao'er, several years older, saw further than his brothers. "The program you're in is also called the cadet course, but you do a lot more book learning. Chief Li told me once: you're all being groomed for big things. When the time comes, maybe you'll be promoted even faster than Xiaowu."

(End of Chapter)