3 The King of Diamonds (Part 1)
Tu Yi was an ambitious man. Always had been since he was a kid growing up in a poor neighborhood in L City. He was the son of a prostitute who witnessed his mother live the life of a beaten dog, abused by everyone around her, losing to her pimp, losing to the father of her child, losing to her self.
Tu Sya, however, had a very shrewd idea of her son's character. He was proud, stubborn, and possessed of an intelligence that clearly marked him as a force. It was for this alone that Tu Sya endured all that the world could give her, for her son whom she believed was different from anyone else.
When Tu Yi was thirteen, a man came to the house. His name was Guang He, and he introduced himself as Tu Yi's father, a middle aged owner of a fairly successful restaurant in town. The man stank of sweat, his cheap suit smelling of body odor.
When he saw Tu Yi, there was no surprise on his face. Tu Yi was tall for his age. His cropped hair revealing features that were too mature to be a kid. His eyes were especially keen and sharp, meeting his father's gaze without hesitation or shame. It was fortunate that when he looked at him, the man remembered his own father. Tu Yi carried the the same features, the same bearing, and the same intelligence even poverty cannot hide.
Tu Sya told Tu Yi to pack his bag. He will now live with his father. It was time for him to find his own way in the world. Tu Yi knew how much it must have cost Tu Sya to say the words. She was then in her thirties, thin and scraggly, her lips cracked with the smear of lipstick. She was sick with syphilis and dying but she was not as selfish as to let her only son sink in the same boat with her. So, she let him go. She wore a faint smile when she watched him vanish from sight. They never saw each other again. Tu Yi didn't even know that she died a week later, beaten to death by an irate customer who found out he had infected his pregnant wife with the sexually transmitted disease which killed their son.
Tu Yi began working for his father soon after as payment for his board and lodging. Guang He's wife demanded it, one of the concessions she imposed before agreeing to let her husband's bastard son live with them. Tu Yi's lodging turned out to be the back of the house, far from everyone, especially Guang He's legal children who treated Su Yi like a dog employee. No birthday celebrations for him, no gifts during the holidays, no wages except for the occasional money Guang He would remember to give him for his school fees.
No matter. Tu Yi had by then learned that he had the ability to take care of himself better than anyone else. He insisted on enrolling in a school that the best families in his neighborhood go to because it was required of them as future leaders of the community. It didn't mean, however, that these sons and daughters of the best families were the best students or the best leaders. They were rich, bored and hardly bothered to show themselves in class, let alone fulfill the requirements their classes need to finish a term.
So, Tu Yi saw an opportunity and grabbed it. By the end of his first year, he had helped ten students jumped to their last year with almost perfect grades, courtesy of Tu Yi's vigorous defense of class privilege, especially in learning how to keep and bury secrets of all kinds. He became the go to liaison for hire, the keeper of secrets, the emulsifier of stinks rich kids leave behind in their search for pleasure and mischief.
When Tu Yi was eighteen, Guang He became ill and the restaurant fell to his eldest son, Guang Han, to manage. Of course, he failed. The old customers didn't like the new menu, which Guang Han who considers himself a good cook, added to the list. He also increased the prices of his new concoction, which the old customers didn't like at all. So, the restaurant went bankrupt in just six months.
Guang He died at the end of the six month a failed man, having watched his eldest son squander the only thing of value he had created in his entire life. Jewels were sold to pay for the funeral. Then the restaurant. Then the house. Guang Han, his siblings and his mother prepared to leave the house for the new owner, which turned out to be Tu Yi.
Tu Yi was ruthless. He had read his rich classmates right. They were nothing but airheads who needed someone like him to prop them up, make them appear brilliant while he worked behind the scenes to make them appear so. He also read his eldest brother and his father right. Bankrupt the restaurant and the entire family will drown into nothing as fast as water falls down the drain. It was his time and he grabbed it.
The restaurant reopened and remained the fixture of the ruling elite as progress swept L City in the next twenty years. Tu Yi never looked back from then on. He soared higher and higher until a man came into his life that would change everything.
It was summer and Tu Yi was twenty five years old. He was unmarried but going out with a respectable lady who was the daughter of a local banker. He was not in love with her but what was love for someone as ambitious and ambiguous as Tu Yi but a commodity? The girl had connections and he latched onto that with everything he had. His courtship was short and sweet; his affection light but sincere; his honesty beyond reproach. He was ambitious but not cruel so the promises he made to the girl was set in stone. They became engaged a year later and finally, he met her relations for the first time. His target was Fu Qiang and that meeting was to change his life.
It is said that when god made the world, he didn't send Adam but a scholar to first test the waters of his creation. The scholar was very wise and very admirable. His knowledge was large and his curiosity as deep as the ocean. He created things and built things. He renewed the grass, cared for flocks. His life was blessed and he was happy.
God watched the scholar and was satisfied. He then sent Adam hoping for another miracle but he was wrong. Adam entrapped himself in Paradise with a woman who ultimately led him astray. Adam meddled with snakes and fruits that never bore anything other than hardship and strife. The scholar flourished. Adam barely made it out alive of Paradise.
If Fu Qiang were to be compared to the most lucky of god's sons and creations, it was to the happy scholar. It was said that when Fu Qiang was still young, he met an old lady who foretold his future. The future was good and abundant. It was especially so for Fu Qiang.
When Fu Qiang was in his teens, he shocked the entire world when he bought an old cotton mill which will become the springboard of his greatest contribution to mankind: diamonds in the rough. Opaque, black, pink, blue, silver and gold diamonds, the most fabulous, expensive rock in the world.
The obscure cotton mill had been sitting on that pile of precious rocks for years and never knew what it had until Fu Qiang bought the company and razed the building to the ground to begin his mining operation.
Who would have known? Nobody did except for Fu Qiang who seemed to have stumbled on the riches simply by accident. He was only seventeen years old at that time. Lucky him, the once poor Fu Qiang who became a member of the global elite in only two years.
When Tu Yi and Fu Qiang met, Tu Yi was locked in a passionate embrace with a girl, his fiancée Li Jing. They had just gotten engaged and found a nook in which to savor their moment in the limelight. Tu Yi's lips were raining tender kisses down Li Jing's neck when someone cleared his throat. The lovers broke apart, their faces red and met the amused smile of a dignified old man in his early 60s, tall, slim, his ascetic face kind, his eyes sharp. Fu Qiang.
Li Jing's father or any member of her family was not related to Fu Qiang by blood. Instead, Li Jing's father was the son of a man who Fu Qiang considered a good friend. Good enough that when he died, Fu Qiang became the surrogate father to his three kids. It was said that their mother also became Fu Qiang's woman but there seems to be some argument against this gossip, however.
For one, Fu Qiang's wife, Fu Ru Shi was a beauty. Fu Qiang married her when she was barely fifteen and she proved to be headstrong and shrewd at the same time. Of course she knew that the woman had other motives than indebtedness to get closer to her husband but since she controlled the purse-strings, it was easy for her to manipulate the scheming woman into a corner. You fuck my husband, I fuck with your kids' lives. The warning was there and the woman knew it. So, she can't do anything but back off.
Of course nobody knew what Fu Qiang really thought about all this but he seemed to have been easy going and accepted what his wife decided. Li Jing's father grew up hating Fu Ru Shi. She controlled their lives like she controlled the lives of her own husband and children. She had his mother married off to a traveling salesman and even decided which school her children should go to. Since she didn't want any of them working for the family's company she sent them all abroad, paying generously for their tuition fees and other necessities so that they wouldn't think of going back to disrupt her life again.
Two of the kids did decide to settle abroad after they graduated except for Li Jing's dad who came back home and decided to start a business. He bought a failing local bank and drew on his connections to fill its coffers up. Fu Ru Shi by now was complacent enough to offer her help. Maybe the fact that her rival had died years ago had something to do with that. But she opened an account in the bank and put some few millions into it and that started it all. Other families close to the Fus saw which way the wind was blowing and followed suit.
The Li family was never welcomed again to the Fu house, however. By helping Li Jing's dad in his business, Fu Ru Shi effectively cut the bonds tying the two families together. The Li family was now the employee of the Fu family and thus, their lives have nothing to do with Fu Qiang or the rest of his family anymore.
In fact, it was the first time in several years that the Li family saw Fu Qiang again. Li Jing sent him an invitation never expecting he would come in person. But for Tu Yi, it was the opportunity he had been waiting for. From that moment on, the rest of his life will follow the same trajectory as Fu Qiang's. He will know and possess power and that same power will doom and destroy him once he meet Fu Qiang's granddaughter, Fu Fan Bao.
