You could hear her sweet voice in every Chinese grocery store, barber's shop,

and old Cantonese restaurant. Bill felt as if he had gone back to the 80s when

his aunts used to hum to the banned tunes of "The Song of Four Seasons" and the

like. He himself missed the boat: once he grew old enough (last year in high

school) to be interested, Teresa Teng was taken over in the mainland by new

waves of stars from Hongkong, Taiwan, and later the west. He was swept off his

feet for the next six years. By the time he was married, however, Bill thought

he was done with mushy pop music. Yet two years later, he came around the globe

to run into Teng and be smitten.

He was crossing the SF-Oakland bridge in sister Fan's van when he first

listened to the "Do you know who is the one I love?"(你可知道我爱谁) and "It

doesn't matter who you are."(不管你是谁) The simple melodies and plain and

carefree verses bore no trace of the useless fake heartbreak or self-pity that he

had grown out of and turned to hate so much. In fact, the drama in even some

of her sad songs, e.g., "When will you come back"(何日君再来)or "Good Wine

with Coffee,"(美酒加咖啡) cracked him up every time. He might be heartless, or it

might be the language of that era, but Teng seemed not bending backward to try

to move her audience. She seemed above the melancholy that she was trying to

express, and Bill had a hard time taking the lyrics literally. Among all the

singers he had laid ears on, she was in a class of one.

To his new gang, it was a joke to be Chinese and not know Teng. Mostly five to

ten years older, they were first amazed by Bill's sudden infatuation which in

turn endeared him to them. The school kid knew nothing about the world and they

had to educate him.

Sister Fan was also unique in that she seemed to have endless energy and always

fly by the seat of her pants. Not only she herself juggled half a dozen projects

besides her day job but she also had a problem seeing people around her idle.

After Bill had squandered a few weekends, she got him a one-time assignment

selling CDs for a friend. Saturday morning, she dropped him off at the job

herself.

It was a flea market in a big warehouse in downtown Oakland. Vendors unloaded

their goods in plastic jackets, digital CDs from classic piano, jazz, pop, to

computer software, in cardboard boxes from their vans and dump them in big piles

at their booths. 9:00 am, the gate opened and customers poured in like hungry

fish to their feedlots. There was not much haggling as each disc asked for five

bucks and both the seller and the buyer felt it a good deal. Transactions were

smooth and cash-only. Bill never knew such commerce could exist in the US.

He ran into a problem from the start. A 40-ish coworker, Tony, towering over

him and maybe not impressed by his medium stature, seemed to dislike him.

Loading a heavy box of goods over his shoulder, he sneered: "This is why you

feed the big guys first."

It turned out that among the four that manned their booth, only Bill knew enough

to catalog the discs to make it easier to search. He recognized many of the CDs

and softwares, thanks to his informal education in western music and schooling

in computers. Many foreigners came for the same popular hits that he enjoyed in

college. He spoke broken English just as the others but customers came to him

for help.

Tony soon became friendly and before long whispered one word in Bill ear:

"fiber" followed by some detailed advice: "The network is the computer and we

are going through a new revolution. They are digging trenches and laying down

fiber optics like crazy. I'm giving you pearls. Buy fiber stocks. You won't

regret it."

Bill had never bought a stock but didn't ask how--it would make him look more

like a greenhorn. It was just another way of gambling, he had heard, where

fortunes were more often lost than made. He was content with what he was doing

for now. Early afternoon, when Laowu came to pick him up, he had made 100 bucks

for four hours' work, more than he would as a teaching assistant. He felt bubbly

even in the traffic jam toward SF, listening with his new friend to another

cassette of Teresa Teng.