LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SIX

      Baozhai Liao had found both success and difficulty in her relatively young life. But facing the man sitting across from her now was one of the most terrifying things she had ever done.

      She had grown up on the far outskirts of Beijing, near enough to see the towering skyscrapers in the distance, yet far enough to realize at a very young age that if she ever wanted to get closer to them, she would need to find a way to do so by herself.

      Growing up, her parents had been of little help. Her father was a small, local merchant, barely making ends meet by buying and selling whatever he could, and drinking up whatever profit he brought home. Her mother kept their tiny house, scrimping and saving to put food on the table and dreaming of the day when her husband would someday make a deal that would make them all rich. Baozhai slept in a cramped attic every night and dreamed of getting out of there as soon as she could.

      But when the means to that end arrived, it wasn’t through any sort of brilliant business deal of her father’s. Several years earlier, the local government had come through one day and announced that their neighborhood was being rezoned for apartments and that all of the inhabitants had to move. However, they would receive compensation.

      When they heard the amount—forty thousand yuan—the teenage Baozhai had felt something shift inside her. Before that day she had been a loyal family member, trying to do whatever she could to help her parents survive. But when she heard about the yuan her family would soon receive, she realized that the opportunity she had been waiting for had finally come.

      Once the payment had been transferred to their bank, the next morning she had forged a withdrawal slip and her father’s signature and withdrew ten thousand yuan from the account. The bank teller didn’t even look at her twice, as they were all used to Huan’s daughter making deposits and withdrawals for her father.

      But Baozhai didn’t take the money back home. Instead she had walked into the city, nervously clutching the worn satchel filled with bills, ready to make her own way.

      She found a cheap room in the basement of a four-story apartment building, and hid the rest of her money, not trusting banks. Then she began looking for a job, and soon found one in a local restaurant. And it was there her luck turned again.

      Baozhai’s mother had always doted on her only child, contrary to most Chinese families, which preferred sons. In particular, she had said that her daughter’s beauty could rival that of a princess. Well, apparently the man who stopped in for lunch one day thought so as well, for he gave her his card and told her to come by his office on her next day off. The company name on the card was for one of the largest modeling agencies in China.

      Two days later Baozhai, wearing the best clothes she could buy in her neighborhood and made up as well as she knew how, walked into the offices of Dao International Models Management and handed the card to the well-coiffed woman at the front desk. Five minutes later she was sitting in a chair in Mr. Peng’s office, watching him watch her. He had her speak, then asked her to rise and walk across the room. Baozhai didn’t know what exactly he was looking for, but he apparently liked what he saw for he signed her to a contract and she started modeling two days later.

      The next few years had passed in a blur of trips around the world, lavish parties, and meeting and mingling with the rich and famous from across China and beyond. Baozhai soaked up every bit of it and transformed herself from a meek, shy, lower-class girl into a sleek, polished model whose face made men desire her and woman envious.

      To her, the funniest part was that she didn’t think she was all that attractive. The makeup artists and stylists performed miracles, transforming her from what she considered to be a plain girl into the graceful-looking, stylish woman who could sell cars, perfume or jewels with equal ease. But when the shoot was over and she wiped her face clean, the person staring back at her from the mirror was the everyday, ordinary Baozhai.

      Everything had been going along perfectly—she had even arranged to repay her parents the ten thousand yuan “loan”—when tragedy struck. During a party to launch a new Chinese vodka, the company CEO had gotten very drunk and tried forcing her to have sex with him. Baozhai wouldn’t have any of it and had pushed him away—so hard that he had fallen into a glass table and severely injured himself.

      The blowback was swift and severe. Neither company wanted the incident to become public, so they swept it under the rug and shunted aside any witnesses. Unfortunately that included Baozhai. Mr. Peng had retired by then, and the new head of the agency had been busy putting his own stamp on their lineup. The incident with Baozhai had given him the perfect excuse to fire her and, to ensure that she wouldn’t talk about why, he blackballed her among all the major modeling agencies.

      Baozhai went from being the toast of the town to having nothing again. Locked out of her company penthouse, her Lexus taken back by the company, she was able to recover and use the funds she had saved to check into the Four Seasons while she figured out what her next steps were going to be.

      And that was where she had met Zhang Liao.

      Baozhai was far too worldly, or perhaps jaded, to believe in love at first sight, especially since she had seen other friends of hers in the modeling world get used, abused and discarded by men and women as often as the changing of the seasons. It was why she had avoided any sort of romantic entanglements during her modeling career, even though it brought accusations of being cold, a lesbian or just not “with it.”

      But with Zhang, it was different. Divorced from the persona she had inhabited for years, Baozhai was free to be herself around him, unguarded, or perhaps less guarded. She knew his family—there was hardly anyone in Beijing who didn’t—and yet he was polite, friendly and approachable. They had first bumped into each other at the front desk, then again in the elevator. When their paths crossed at the restaurant that evening, Zhang insisted that it had to be fate and invited her to join him for dinner. Five minutes after sitting down, she realized why they were so good together—they were both from similar, isolating worlds, surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, and always not entirely sure whom to trust and whom to watch out for.

      By the end of their superb meal, when he asked to see her again, Baozhai didn’t have to think about her answer.

      She kept her previous life concealed for the first few months of their relationship—entertainment and politics were often a dangerous combination, and there was also the mystery of her sudden disappearance from the fashion world. She had vanished so cleanly that the media had no idea where she had gone. The tabloids spread rumors and pored over every “clue” they discovered. For her part, Baozhai read the international papers and laughed when she learned what had “happened” to her that day—she had gotten gender reassignment surgery, and was now working as “Bao” in men’s modeling; she had gotten hooked on drugs and resorted to pornography.

      When she had revealed her former life, Zhang had smiled and said he’d already been aware of it—her background had been assiduously researched before their second date—and he simply figured she would tell him about it when she was ready. It was at that moment, with his trust in her revealed so easily and honestly, that Baozhai realized she was in love with him.

      Their relationship progressed rapidly after that, and eight months after they first met, they were married, with their first child soon following. When Baozhai had gotten pregnant with their second, she had been concerned, but Zhang had told her not to worry. “There are rules for the majority of Chinese families, and there are rules for the rest of us,” he’d said with a smile. “But not the same rules for both.” True to his word, they hadn’t ever been bothered once by the government regarding their two children.

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