If only he had more money to invest, he thought. Li Xueshi had recently bought a brand-new speaker set, and the two of them spent hours listening to the sounds of rappers paying frantic homage to places they’d never seen, New York, London, São Paulo. They had beautiful women in their beds and the best of everything: Lamborghini, Rolex, Versace. Together, the two of them mouthed the syllables.

No, there wasn’t much for men like Zhu Feng here. He had ideas. He had ambition. He had taste. He liked that phrase, taste. It was something that belonged, emphatically, to his and Li’s generation. Not the shabbiness of his parents’ lives, their shuffling steps, the curtailed hopes that seemed to express nothing more than a desire to chide bao, chuan de nuan—to be full in the belly, to be warmly clothed.

At first he’d tried moving 1,000 yuan to his account. He let it sit there for a month before moving it back, and no one noticed. Gradually the dawning realization set in. As long as the books added up when they were tallied at the quarter’s end, the money, it seemed, was his. And why not? Why let the money sit there, inert, when it could be spent, used, transformed and multiplied? All those disbursements across the province—there were dozens every month, and who was going to notice an extra account getting its share? No one, that’s who.

Swagger swagger get that cash, he chanted to himself. Swagger swagger make a stash.

He took out 10,000 yuan and doubled it. The next time, he siphoned off 50,000 yuan and made an additional third on top of that. Every week, he watched the new columns of numbers in his account grow. At the end of every quarter, he moved the original sum of money back to the government’s account and plowed the profits back into the market. Eight months passed like that, his mind a whirl of giddy arithmetic. In the mornings, as he walked to the subway, passing ranks of old men gambling on the street over their chessboards, he wanted to crow aloud, Fools! We have better games now.

The thing was, he told himself, of course the market was up and down, of course he knew that—he wasn’t stupid. But the government would never let the market drop. It had happened before, three years ago, and people still talked about it. The market had dropped by more than 40 percent and people were panicking and rushing for exits, but then the government had ordered the country’s top hundred companies to buy up shares, push, push, push, make the line hold, and it had. No way the market would be allowed to fail. The government was not very good at a lot of things but it was very, very good at ensuring profits.

The problem was time. There were just two more weeks before the books would be tallied at the end of the quarter by Old Lou, who was drunk most afternoons and deficient at the job, but even he would notice if 100,000 yuan was missing. Two more weeks and four of those days were the weekend—okay, ten more days.

Zhu Feng didn’t know what to say. “So he stopped driving a taxi?”

“They wouldn’t license him,” she said matter-of-factly. “It took him years to get back on his feet again.”

“Anyway, it was a long time ago,” she said. Outside the television was playing a commercial for luxury men’s cologne.

He looked uneasily at his father. “Dad,” he said, trying to recall his resolve from earlier that afternoon, “I wondered if I could maybe borrow some money.”

His father grunted. “What for?”

Zhu Feng didn’t meet his eyes. “It’s complicated,” he said. He thought of what his mother had said in the kitchen—too many rotten officials—and felt something twist in his chest. Maybe they didn’t need to hear the whole story.

Give it a few more days, he told himself. Just a few more days and you will be fine. All that anxious refreshing, all that marking of time—what was the point? He had days to work with, which were made up of hours, made of minutes, made of seconds—he was young, he had time. This was the way the world worked: you couldn’t buckle over, couldn’t be afraid. Something would step into the breach, he told himself. The market would straighten itself out, the government was going to intervene. The world was a profusion of opportunities waiting to be unfolded, he thought as he drifted off to sleep. He had only to stretch out his hand.