How Satisfying It Is to Talk Nonsense with Relatives

Twenty years ago, my dad got drunk and let it slip to someone that he had made two hundred thousand yuan in a year raising chickens. Before long, every chicken on his farm had been poisoned to death. Later, my dad bought an eighty-million-yuan apartment in Beijing outright, and he didn’t tell a single person back home. Even my grandparents had no idea. Now my dad has long since become the CEO of a corporation worth several hundred million. Every time we go home for New Year’s or the holidays, he makes my mom and me help him pretend we’re poor. At the New Year’s Eve dinner, I sat there bundled in a thick cotton coat and cotton slippers, both hands shoved into my pockets. And so began my proud inheritance of my father’s fine tradition: talking absolute nonsense. Who would’ve thought I’d overdo the act and run into someone I knew? Me: “President Gu?” Him: “President Shen?” Then we both clapped a hand over each other’s mouths.