One Yuan

Rice paddies give way to factories. A village disappears from the map. Three generations of the Chen family find their lives reaching farther afield. Chen Musheng still hems trousers for one yuan.

In 1980, the land outside Chen Musheng’s house was still rice paddies.

He was forty-three and made a living hemming trousers at the entrance to the village. Press the pedal once, the iron wheel turned three times, and one pair of trousers earned him one yuan.

That year, his father told him he was good for nothing.

“You don’t even farm anymore. You sit here hemming trousers for people?”

Chen Musheng said nothing.

A few days earlier, officials from the village had come by. They said a road would be built to the south, and farther south there would be factories.

No one knew what kind of factories.

All they knew was that the surveyors had painted a red mark on the lychee tree in front of the Chen family home.

The next year, the tree was gone.

Ten years later, the rice paddies were gone too.

Six-story factory buildings rose where the fields had been. Workers came from Henan, Hunan, Sichuan, after spending two days and two nights on trains.

They made radios, digital watches, telephones.

Chen Musheng’s little shop was squeezed between two factory blocks. He changed the sign from “Musheng Tailor Shop” to “Musheng Clothing.”

In 1999, hemming a pair of trousers still cost one yuan.

His son, Chen Hao, thought he was a fool.

“Dad, people in those factories make more than a thousand a month now.”

Chen Hao studied English.

A world map hung on his wall. He could not have pointed to London, nor Seattle, but his teacher had told him that anyone who wanted to work in foreign trade needed English.

The first time he went online was at an internet café.

Three yuan an hour.

On QQ, he met a girl who told him she lived two thousand kilometers away, in Harbin.

They chatted for half a year without ever meeting.

Chen Hao thought it was the strangest thing in the world: someone he had never seen knew more about what was inside his head than the father sleeping in the room next door.

Later, the girl moved to Canada.

Her profile picture stayed gray for years.

In 2003, the village officially disappeared from the map.

It was given a new name:

High-Tech Industrial Park.

The Chen family received three apartments as compensation.

The first time Chen Musheng rode an elevator, he pressed himself against the wall and did not dare move.

From the twenty-first floor, he looked down and could no longer find his rice paddies.

He could not find his father’s grave either.

The grave had been relocated long ago.

The lychee tree was long gone.

Only his tailor shop remained, on the ground floor.

Trouser hems: one yuan.

“Why don’t you raise the price?”

He would say, “It’s only a little thread. What is there to charge for?”

Chen Hao really did go into foreign trade.

He traveled to the Port of Ningbo and saw shipping containers stacked like children’s blocks all the way to the horizon.

He went to the Middle East and saw Chinese-made air conditioners hanging beside bullet holes.

He went to Europe and watched the news from a hotel room while a city somewhere was being bombed.

The presenter said it was a war that would change the global order.

The next morning, Chen Hao went to negotiate a five-hundred-thousand-dollar contract as usual.

The client complained that shipping costs had gone up by seven hundred dollars.

That evening, Chen Hao called his father.

“They’re fighting over there,” his father said. “Is it dangerous?”

“I’m nowhere near it.”

On the television screen, thousands of kilometers away, people were running for their lives.

At the bottom of the screen, an advertisement appeared:

LIMITED-TIME OFFER. CLICK TO CLAIM YOUR COUPON.

In 2012, Chen Hao’s daughter, Chen Yu, was sixteen.

She did not like listening to her grandfather talk about the old village.

She thought he spoke too slowly.

She had Weibo, Tieba, Renren, and later WeChat.

She knew what the president of the United States had said.

She knew there had been an earthquake in Japan.

She knew that someone had been murdered in a county she had never visited.

But she did not know the name of the woman who sold breakfast downstairs.

In 2018, Chen Hao became rich.

Not from foreign trade.

From the redevelopment of the old urban village.

Suddenly, he had more money than he had ever imagined.

Only a few days after the money arrived, Chen Hao came to take his father out for dinner. The old man was still at the sewing machine. Chen Hao pulled up a stool and sat down. One of its legs wobbled.

“Dad, close the shop. Your eyesight’s getting worse, and you’re still working for so little.”

Chen Musheng stopped the machine, turned the trouser hem over, and held it close to the lamp.

“Someone’s coming for these tomorrow.”

“Then close it after that. I can afford to look after you.”

The old man glanced up at him, then reached under the table for a plastic bag.

“That pair you left here. They’re ready.”

Chen Hao took the bag. He had bought the trousers on a business trip, worn them once, and found them too long. He had left them at his father’s shop without giving them much thought.

“I don’t wear these anymore.”

“Nothing wrong with them.”

Chen Hao unfolded the trousers. Both hems had been pressed flat. The old crease lines were still there. He folded them again and laid them across his knees.

His phone rang. Someone from home wanted to know when they would arrive.

“Go ahead and order. I’ll be a little late.”

Chen Musheng began working the pedal again. Chen Hao sat beside him, one hand steadying himself on the edge of the stool. He said nothing more about closing the shop.

In 2020, pork rose to more than thirty yuan a jin.

Chen Musheng was eighty-three.

He was still hemming trousers.

One yuan.

“Grandpa,” Chen Yu said, “your price hasn’t changed in forty years.”

The old man lowered his head and threaded a needle.

“Trouser legs haven’t changed.”

By then, the city no longer looked like a city.

Subway trains ran beneath what had once been ancestral graves.

Elevated highways flew past the old clan hall.

Drones delivered medicine.

Algorithms delivered meals.

Young people sat in twenty-square-meter rental apartments and joined video conferences.

The clan hall was still there.

During Qingming Festival, members of the Chen family living in America, Australia, and Singapore all opened video calls and bowed toward the ancestral tablets through their phones.

Chen Musheng stared at the screen.

“Who’s that one?”

No one knew which person he meant.

In 2023, Chen Musheng died.

While sorting through his belongings, Chen Yu found a metal box.

Inside were old grain coupons, foreign remittance certificates, a first-generation Chinese identity card, a stock subscription certificate, a faded slip of paper with a QQ number written on it, and several dozen one-yuan notes.

She photographed everything and uploaded the images to an artificial intelligence system.

“Based on these materials,” she typed, “write something about my grandfather.”

Three seconds later, words began appearing on the screen.

It wrote about reform and opening up.

It wrote about urbanization.

It wrote about generational conflict.

It wrote about the disappearance of rural life.

It wrote about technological revolution.

It was good.

Better than anything Chen Yu could have written herself.

She stared at the screen for a long time, then asked:

“Why did he never raise the price in forty years?”

The artificial intelligence paused.

A line of text appeared:

“Perhaps because he missed the past, or perhaps because he was a simple and kind man.”

Chen Yu deleted the answer.

She remembered asking her grandfather the same question when she was a child.

Back then, the old man had been altering a pair of trousers for a young factory worker.

The woman had just arrived from Guizhou.

Her Mandarin was poor.

In her pocket was a single crumpled five-yuan note.

Her grandfather gave her four yuan in change.

Only after the woman had walked away did he turn to Chen Yu and say:

“When you leave home to make a living, even one yuan is money.”

Outside the window, ten million lights came on across the city that had grown out of a village.

In the distance, a two-hundred-thousand-ton cargo ship was leaving the harbor.

Farther away, the war had not ended.

A rocket was rising from a launch site in another province.

The stock market had already closed.

A delivery rider was waiting at a red light.

Someone was applying to emigrate.

Someone was studying for the civil service exam.

Someone in a livestream had just sold the ten-thousandth piece of clothing that evening.

Someone was being born in a hospital.

Someone was deleting a résumé in a rented room.

In a server room somewhere, artificial intelligence was still calculating.

Chen Yu closed the computer.

And suddenly she understood.

The machine knew what had happened to the age.

But it might never know how heavy one yuan could be.

She knew.

But that was all she knew.