DAN DONG DOESN'T BELIEVE IN omens Omens such as an enormous red spider or a double-yolk egg, which the old folks in his home village consider ominous. Otherwise, he would decide against attending the banquet and go with his wife. Little Plum, to get expired canned food that the factory where Dan used to work is giving away. Instead, he just flings his plastic sandal and smashes the spider as it crawls by the makeshift nightstand (improvised from a washboard atop a stack of bricks, all under a crocheted cover), and be pays no attention to the extra egg yolk he eats at breakfast.

So now you know where we are; in Dan Dong's loft room. It used to be an office on top of a cannery in an industrial suburb of Beijing. It's ten o'clock in the morning, and he's taking a shower under a short rubber hose that Little Plum is holding. She stands on a chair, trying to steady the hose. The water comes in spurts and gushes from the rusty pipe that crawls along under the ceiling. That is how they shower, by diverting hot water that is the factory's runoff and merely appears clean. Three years ago, when the factory partially shut down and turned 60 percent of its employees into "reserve workers," collecting only 20 percent of their original wages, Dan came home carrying a soap dish, a comb with missing teeth, and a pair of broken plastic slippers for the public bathhouse, and he told Little Plum that he had cleaned out his locker and would never have to work the night shift again for the rest of his life. He was not worried about getting a job until he found, two months into his reserve worker status, that he and Little Plum only had fifty-five yuan in the bank. Not even enough for the two of them to have a Big Mac dinner at McDonald's.

A couple of days later, Dan saw an employment ad in a newspaper. It said that a five-star hotel needed security guards, and that candidates must be taller than 1.8 meters. As a tall, strong, good-looking man, Dan figured he had a chance. He went to the hotel in his best outfit, a polyester sports jacket atop khaki slacks, with a pair of black leather shoes to match a fake Dunhill bag he borrowed from a neighbor. As he wandered into the lobby, a woman approached him asking if he was here for the meeting. He nodded yes, and she said the meeting had already started. She ran him up the escalator, through an indoor balcony, and out to a ballroom with tables laid for a banquet. A banner hanging over the podium said "Donate Your Wealth, Plant Forests, Fight Desertification, and Take Back Our Green Fields!" The woman asked him to please sit down wherever he could find a seat, then disappeared.

He sat at a table next to the door. The banquet had already begun, and he was starved, so he swept through the dishes in front of him without knowing what they were. A man sitting next to him introduced himself as a reporter from the Beijing Evening News and asked which press outlet Dan belonged to. Wishing to be left alone to enjoy the free lunch, Dan answered he was from the Beijing Morning News. The guy said he'd never heard of it, and Dan replied that it was newly established. A Web site? Yes, yes, a Web site. After Dan was stuffed and was thinking about slipping out, the reporter asked if Dan would go with him to pick up their fee. What fee? Oh, just the two hundred yuan for their attendance...