Dictator

She called me on Tuesday. I was typing some nonsense at my desk, while the air conditioner pumped an endless stream of cold air into an office decorated entirely in gray and white. The only splash of color was the light blue dress worn by Lin, my colleague at the next desk. She hammered away at her keyboard, her wrists rising and falling as though she were not an employee at this drab company but a pianist composing her greatest masterpiece.

“Hey, long time no see.” I slipped into the restroom to take the call, and she greeted me with that cliché.

“Hey, Anna,” I said quietly, unsure whether my supervisor might be in one of the stalls. “What’s up?”

“Remember that secret you told me back when we were still in school?” she asked excitedly. “Now’s our chance.”

I had told Anna all sorts of things in graduate school. We had been almost completely open with each other. I knew she was obsessed with K-pop; she knew I loved horror movies. I knew she was bisexual; she knew I was straight and stubbornly conservative in a distinctly Chinese way. I even knew she had a tattoo just below her pubic bone: a little portrait of her dead kitten, Mia. Although I had never seen the tattoo in person, I had seen photographs of it on her social media twice—once on her birthday and once on the anniversary of the kitten’s death. It was cute. The tattoo artist had given the cat a cartoonish look, with big, watery eyes and round pupils that gleamed like amber. But I had met the real Mia in Anna’s dorm room: a spoiled, chubby creature who meowed for food whenever anyone came near and never let strangers like me stroke her back or sniff her paws.

I hesitated in the restroom, surrounded by the orchid scent of the air freshener, which almost made the place feel fancy. Someone coughed faintly in the next stall, so I decided to keep my side of the conversation as vague as possible.

“Is this about that thing you told me?” I asked. Someone in the stall to my left was now sniffling loudly.

“No, but close,” she said. “I got my scholarship money, so now we can take a trip to Hong Kong! There’s a concert, too. I can get you a ticket.”

Right, I told myself. An invitation you’ll have to turn down, because you work for a big-name company.

“I picked this weekend and bought you a plane ticket,” Anna continued. Her voice now sounded like melody from heaven. “Am I a good friend or what?”

“Yes, you are,” I admitted. By any reasonable measure, Anna was a perfect friend. She listened quietly and nodded sympathetically whenever I told her something embarrassing, and she was always eager to join me for a meal. She never shared my secrets with anyone and remembered every detail of our conversations, however trivial—a meme I had sent her, an unfamiliar name I had casually dropped.

Now I was excited, too. I returned to my desk. Lin was still pounding away at her keyboard as if she were taking her anger out on it. Poor Lin. Her supervisor had saddled her with an extra assignment: putting together a draft advertisement. At yesterday’s meeting, she had accepted it with an air of easy confidence. Now she was paying for it.

I seldom talked to Lin. She had a notorious nickname: “the dictator.” It wasn’t just because she was stubborn when it came to making decisions, but also because of her attitude toward her colleagues. “Cooperation is an essential skill at this company,” the slogan on our office whiteboard read. But Lin certainly did not possess this precious virtue.

Last week, during an online group meeting, she sharply criticized a project another coworker had spent three weeks working on.

“I don’t know why we should waste so much time on a single design proposal,” she said, pointing at herself with her index finger. “Personally, I think the plan is too unrealistic. First of all, the costs would spiral out of control if we had to build a metal statue in front of that shopping mall. Honestly, no one would pay attention to that warrior unless it were a popular cartoon character.”

I stared at my dusty screen, trying to find a word to describe her performance. Her lips were outlined in maroon, and her teeth were too white, contrasting sharply with her tanned skin. She gestured like an experienced supervisor, even though this was a meeting among peers, and she spoke with absolute certainty. How could I describe this woman, who was in her forties but still held the same position as me? A clown trying her best to overwhelm us with her superior work experience?

“Don’t get so worked up, Lin,” one of our teammates said. He was a young man with two graduate degrees, one in physics and one in geometry. I still didn’t know why or how he had ended up at our advertising company. “This is a group project. Maybe we can listen to everyone else’s ideas before making a decision.”

A rude, middle-aged woman who was too proud to listen to other people’s opinions? I thought. But honestly, that might be too long a description.

“I’m not worked up. I just want to make our project perfect,” Lin said, her lips opening and closing like an unstoppable engine. “I thought we could come up with a better plan and based on my experience I assumed the plan we were working on might fail and…”

Gosh, she was an extraordinary speaker. Her words gushed out like wastewater from a dilapidated sewer. I opened WeChat and scrolled through the messages to see if anyone felt the same way I did: Lin was a disaster. A horrible disaster, dragging our meeting out for an eternity.

“She’s a dictator,” a colleague typed in our private group chat. “If our boss were here, she’d ask him to step down as CEO so she could take his place.”

A dictator. That was the most precise word I had heard anyone use to describe Lin. She was actually a dictator at home, too. I had once seen her submissive husband and silent son in our canteen. The bald man was pale and skeletal, like a long, thin rat with cloudy yellow eyes. He ate like a rat as well, taking forever to chew a single piece of cabbage. Her son sat silently, absorbing every meaningful word his mother said to him, though the whole canteen could hear her voice.

“Eat more of this and that. Drink more water. No more Coca-Cola… You’re too short. Eat some pork ribs instead of fried chicken,” Lin said, using her chopsticks to knock a spoonful of oily chicken nuggets out of her son’s hand with precision. I felt sorry for the boy. I wondered whether Lin’s husband was also under that domineering hen’s wing, but the answer was obvious, wasn’t it?

There was no more time to think about Lin and all those tedious matters at work. That Friday afternoon, I slipped away to my apartment as soon as it was time to get off work. I packed my lace swimsuit and the skirts I hadn’t worn since I started working. I checked my small apartment twice before leaving, especially the kitchen and bathroom—I didn’t want to waste money because of a leaking faucet or an induction cooker I hadn’t properly switched off. Before 9 p.m., I was already on the plane to Hong Kong. The flight was great. Apart from a guy in the seat behind me who snored loudly for half an hour, everything was fine.

I arrived in Hong Kong three hours later. The humid air crept into my nostrils the moment I stepped off the plane. Anna was at the airport, waiting for me.

“Babe! I’m here!” she yelled in Mandarin, her voice cutting like a blade through the haze of Cantonese and hot air. I ran to her, and we hugged as though we hadn’t seen each other in decades. In fact, we had said goodbye just three months earlier at this same airport.

“Why don’t you follow me on social media?” That was the first thing she said to me. “I really want you to follow that account.”

I knew what she meant. Anna had created a new account to document her life as a doctoral student. She had always wanted to become an online influencer, which meant money and fame. She certainly had the knack for it; her selfies always got hundreds of likes. I took out my phone, opened her page, and tapped “Follow.” Two hundred followers already.

“Here.” I showed her my screen. “Happy now?”

She laughed. We waited among the crowds for the subway. Many girls our age were dressed in cartoon-inspired outfits, with colorful wigs, bright eyeshadow, and crystal-pink or coral lip tint. I knew they must be there for the concert Anna had been talking about. Anna had already dyed her hair for it, too. It was now platinum blond, gleaming under the white station lights. She had posted her new hairstyle two weeks earlier, and I thought I might have liked the post.

“Don’t you have something to tell me?” she asked suddenly.

“What?” I said as the arriving train brought a gust of cool wind.

“Don’t you notice anything different about me?” Anna asked as we pushed through the crowd to board the train. My hands and feet got knocked or scraped a few times, but her damp palm kept a tight grip on my wrist.

“You dyed your hair,” I said when we finally settled into the train, each of us holding on to the metal pole in the middle of the carriage with one hand.

“You noticed! But you didn’t like my post,” she said. “I’m annoyed about that.”

You should never believe girls like Anna. Their anger might just be a pretext for something else. Beautiful girls like her use these excuses to tease their boyfriends or get their parents to give in. But close friends like me never quite know where we stand with them.

So I pulled my phone out of my baggy jeans pocket again, opened her page, scrolled down to the post, and tapped “Like.”

“There. You’re so needy,” I said.

She smiled.

“That’s because you’re my best friend,” Anna said with a wink.

We finally arrived in Causeway Bay. I dragged my suitcase behind me and followed Anna down street after street, passing a bunch of drunks and a small crowd of chattering university students before we reached our destination. Anna had booked me a room in a small hotel: a bedroom with one bed and a shabby bathroom. By Hong Kong standards, it was quite nice, since star-rated hotels often cost much more while offering similar conditions. I threw my backpack on the bed and parked my suitcase in the narrow hallway. Anna stood there, staring at me until I sat down on the bed with its beige sheets.

“This is a very nice hotel room,” I told her. “You’re a really good host.”

She nodded, but she didn’t move. The air between us tightened for a few seconds, and just as I was about to say something to ease the tension, she spoke.

“Tell me the truth. Have you been very busy lately?”

“Yeah, kind of.” I thought back over the past few months and sighed. “There’s been a lot of tedious stuff at work, and we’ve been super busy these past few days, so…”

“You haven’t liked any of my posts since you started your job,” Anna said, walking over and sitting down right next to me. “You don’t like me anymore, do you?”

I usually didn’t know where to draw the line between ordinary, healthy neediness and overwhelmingly dramatic neediness. But so far, Anna hadn’t set off any alarm bells. In fact, she had always been like this, ever since we were in the same graduate program. I thought one of my colleagues, who always wore gold-rimmed glasses and changed girlfriends every month, might have a few tricks for handling this.

I shook my head. “It’s just work. You know what? One of my colleagues has been quite annoying. She…”

I wanted to talk about Lin then. She was a suitable subject for us to gossip about. I could complain about her oversized ego and her notorious reputation at our company. Gossiping with a friend about someone they didn’t know was always a good choice—a good way to quickly ease the tension and awkwardness. But Anna just looked at me, staring at my face.

“Fine. I just really care about my friends, especially my best friend,” she said. “Sweet dreams. Tomorrow we can have fun at the concert.”

She didn’t look as though she was going to have fun, I thought.

“Maybe you can order something to eat here now, or we can go downstairs to the cha chaan teng,” she added. “The cha chaan teng downstairs is a bit expensive, though.”

“That’s fine. I can buy you a late-night meal,” I said, unconsciously biting my lower lip, as I always did when I was nervous.

“It’s very expensive,” Anna said. “Besides, I just had a full meal with my friend.”

“That’s fine. You can order some dessert,” I said. Looking back now, I was so dumb.

“I know a really good Korean restaurant nearby. We can order from there,” she said, taking out her phone. “Let’s order their famous spicy fried chicken.”

But I… I opened my mouth and closed it again. I understood what she meant now: she just didn’t want to go to that cha chaan teng. The choices she offered were traps, a way to make herself seem considerate, not real choices at all.

We ordered food from the Korean restaurant and finished eating at midnight.

“You can take a shower now while I set up the projector.” She pointed at the hotel room’s tiny projector. “We can have a movie night. A girls’ night!”

I heard that familiar joy in her voice and nodded. That was my Anna. But first, I had to throw out all the rubbish we had left after eating the chicken wings and legs. Bones and chili sauce were everywhere. I took a plastic bag from the hotel drawer—luckily, they had some—swept the greasy, stripped bones into it, and carried it toward the door.

“What are you doing?” she called out as I was about to open it. “You can take a shower first.”

“I want to throw out this bag of rubbish. It’ll smell once the grease dries,” I replied, half my arm already outside the door.

“Can’t you take a shower first? The projector will be ready any minute. I want you to watch that trending horror movie with me now!” Anna said.

I sighed, put the bag outside the door, and went back into the room. Anna smiled and moved over a little to make room for me.

“Sometimes I feel like you’re my mom,” I mumbled as the horror movie began.

“What?” She turned to look at me, blinking like a suspicious cat.

“I think sometimes you’re like my mom,” I said, avoiding her eyes. Instead, I stared at the worn-out remote she was holding.

“Why? You mean I manipulate you?” she asked, her voice rising. A monster in the movie let out a horrifying roar.

“Kind of. But I think it’s fine,” I said. The monster on the screen was now tearing a victim apart, exposing flesh and bare bones under the spotlight. “Let’s focus on the movie, please?”

Anna didn’t say a word for the next hour and a half. Even when I pretended to be scared or laughed loudly, slapping my thigh and yelling, “That’s hilarious!” she didn’t react to anything I did, as though she had already seen the movie several times. When it was over, she finally spoke.

“I really don’t like what you said,” she said flatly. “I just want you to be happy.”

“Okay, I’m really sorry for what I said,” I apologized. “I was too tired and wasn’t thinking straight. Sorry.”

She went back to her dormitory that night. I stood at the hotel room door, waving goodbye to her. As soon as her figure disappeared at the end of the hallway, a wave of exhaustion washed over me. Anna had always been like this, I told myself. This was the kind of person she was. Sensitive but warm-hearted, needy but generous. I owed her this trip. After all, she had planned the whole thing. She deserved a considerate response, a friend who would follow her rules.

I took the bag of chicken bones outside. In the darkness of the Hong Kong night, I walked past three intersections before finding a dumpster. A few drunk foreigners whistled at me as though I were out prowling under the dim streetlights. I found my way back to the hotel from memory, making eye contact with several Indians staying next door—I still couldn’t tell whether they were friendly or simply annoyed, their faces rigid. I took a hot shower at 3 a.m., and finally, at around 4 a.m., I sank into the muddy pit of dreams.

The next morning, Anna’s phone call woke me up. She called at seven o’clock, an unwise time to call someone who had been awake almost all night. My spine seemed to rattle with a dull ache as I tried to move my lips.

“Hey, babe, we need to get to the concert venue early, before ten this morning,” Anna said. She seemed to be somewhere noisy.

“What?” I asked weakly, rubbing my eyes and trying to clear my vision. “But the concert doesn’t start until seven tonight.”

“You have to get here before ten, or ten thirty at the latest,” she said. “I’m already on the subway. The queue for merchandise is long today. You might miss your chance if you get here late.”

Who cares? I yawned. I didn’t even like that K-pop group. I tried to sit up and felt my tailbone crack as I did. I was even more exhausted than I had been the night before. Sleepiness was like a swarm of worms crawling through my body and mind.

“Are you listening? I’ll be waiting for you at the stadium!” Anna yelled, then hung up.

I flopped back onto the soft mattress. The Indian guests next door slammed their doors, the noise echoing through the shabby hallway. I buried my head deep in the pillow as the smell of disinfectant rushed into my nostrils. I really didn’t want to get up, but I dragged myself out of bed through sheer willpower, cultivated by working nine to five. I quickly washed my face and brushed my teeth. The dirty bathroom mirror reflected only a vague image of me: a tired face with drooping eyelids. I took out my foundation and began patting the pale liquid onto my face, then applied some pink blush to my cheeks. Finally, when the face in the mirror looked rosier and more lively, I went outside.

I arrived at the stadium ten minutes after Anna’s deadline. The queue stretched from a nearby café to the stadium. There must have been thousands of people. They all wore short skirts or denim shorts, as though they were at the beach. Most of them were girls, and they all wore the same style of Korean makeup. I searched the crowd for Anna, but she was nowhere to be seen. My phone rang just as the mingled scents of perfume and makeup were beginning to suffocate me.

It was Lin. She sounded annoyed when I answered.

“Are you listening?” she said. “The copy you submitted has two typos. Why didn’t you check it?”

“What?” I yelled, the harsh sunlight forcing me to close my eyes.

“Your—copy—has—two—typos,” she repeated at an annoyingly slow pace. “I need you to revise it this afternoon.”

I remembered that copy. We had deliberately included two typos as a creative choice, and our supervisor had approved the idea. I didn’t know why Lin was bringing it up now.

“That’s part of the creative concept. You can ask the other team members. The supervisor knows about it, too,” I yelled.

There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds.

“Nobody told me about this,” Lin said flatly. “We can’t be irresponsible toward our clients.”

Of course we hadn’t told you. Otherwise, the discussion would have gone on forever. I fell silent, too.

“So what do you want?” I asked as calmly as possible, trying to steady myself amid the excited crowd. “You can ask the others.”

“They’re not answering,” she said. “Maybe I should call the supervisor about this.”

Okay, then you’ll get yourself fired. I was beginning to understand why she had never been promoted.

“Maybe you can let this go. I mean, everyone agreed on the idea. You don’t need to be so…” I hesitated. “So stubborn.”

There was silence on the other end again. She seemed to sniff a little.

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this? I can’t be held responsible for these mistakes.”

“Then how am I supposed to prove it to you?” I was beginning to lose patience. “You can ask the others if you want. I’m quite busy right now.”

“Maybe you can arrange a meeting with everyone this afternoon,” she said. “An online meeting.”

“I’m in Hong Kong,” I said as a girl standing next to me splashed a few drops of milk tea onto my shirt. “I’m quite busy.”

“Why are you in Hong Kong?” Lin asked.

Geez, she really was a dictator.

“That’s none of your business,” I said. “I need to hang up now.”

“Fine. I’ll correct the typos myself. I don’t think this is a good creative idea,” Lin said.

You can’t, I almost yelled.

“You really should ask the supervisor first,” I said calmly, tapping the record button. I didn’t want to get fired.

“Then I’ll call him, but our project will be delayed,” she said.

“Lin, you really, really should ask the supervisor,” I said, taking a deep breath. “And you know why we didn’t tell you about the idea we agreed on.”

“Why?” she yelled.

“Because you’re a dictator. A self-centered dictator,” I said. “Go ahead and ask the supervisor. Don’t bother me again.”

She hung up first, which I hadn’t expected. When I turned around, Anna was right next to me.

“Where did you go?” she asked sharply. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Why are you wearing that plain shirt and those navy-blue trousers? You could have worn the short pink skirt I bought you.”

I didn’t answer. The phone call had used up all my patience. At that moment, all I wanted was somewhere shady to sit. I shook my head weakly and walked over to a bench in the shade near the ever-growing queue. Anna stood where she was. She didn’t follow. Her blond hair shone brightly in the sunlight. Her leather skirt was light blue, just like Lin’s dress, which somehow made me furious.

“You should be standing in line,” Anna said, grabbing my wrist when she finally came over. “You’ve been acting really weird since you started working.”

How did she define weirdness? I looked at her, realizing that I had never noticed it during all the time we had spent together in graduate school. She had always been like this, manipulating everyone around her, someone whose demands never ended. A dictator.

A dictator. As the word drifted through my mind, I frightened myself. Anna was looking at me, too—or, more precisely, observing me. She grabbed my wrist again, but I simply pulled free.

“Well, you don’t seem to care about me at all,” Anna said. “I thought you were my best friend, after all.”

“We are, aren’t we?” I said flatly. “We are.”

She stared at me for a few more seconds. For the first time, I saw a different Anna. She looked at me as though I were some strange piece of architecture, a monstrous hybrid of Gothic roofs and a Chinese-style garden courtyard.

“Fine,” she said distantly. “You can wait here for tonight’s concert. I’ll go.”

I sat on the bench all afternoon, wondering whether I should send the recording to my supervisor. I wondered whether Lin had simply corrected the typos without asking. I wondered whether she would tell someone—anyone who might hold it against me—that I had called her a dictator.

I was worrying about my future and my career when Anna returned with several girls dressed like her. They all had hair dyed in light colors.

“Babe, these are my new friends. We met at the merchandise booths,” she said joyfully.

The girls giggled like a flock of noisy pigeons.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m Anna’s friend. Nice to meet you all.”

They answered one by one. Then one girl whispered to another, and they giggled together. Like a game of telephone, they passed the message along, each leaning close to the next girl’s ear, until it finally reached Anna. She laughed loudly, almost exaggeratedly.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. They think you’re cute, babe,” Anna said, taking my hand. “Let’s go. We’ll be late for the concert.”

My memory of that night was like a fragile bubble filled with sweat and shouting. I could barely hear any of the songs because the girls next to me kept calling out the names of their favorite members. Five or six times, everyone around me stood up as though responding to some signal, but as soon as I stood up, they quickly sat back down. I could never get the timing right, and I never understood what the Korean idols said that prompted such waves of applause and laughter. Anna switched seats with another girl and was now six rows away from me. Everything was a mess. I buried my head in my knees as the electronic beats drilled into my mind. I wanted to escape, go back to my hometown, and forget everything I had suffered through over the past few days.

Anna didn’t see me off at the airport when I left. Before boarding, I checked her social media again. She had posted a lot of pictures. In them, she was surrounded by the girls I had met that afternoon. They were all smiling at the camera, all youthful and beautiful. I liked the post and left a comment: “So gorgeous!” followed by three heart emojis.

As soon as I got off the plane, my supervisor called.

“Listen, has Lin called you recently?” he asked in a serious tone. “She told me she wants to quit.”

I hesitated for a few seconds. I had known this was coming, but I had never expected it to land on me.

“No, she never called me,” I answered.

The supervisor told me that Lin was a loyal, experienced employee, just as she had always prided herself on being. I nodded and responded with simple “mm-hmms” and “ahs.” Then he said, “I really hope you can take over her work, now that her position is vacant. So…”

A wave of dizziness washed over me. All I remembered was saying yes to everything he said.

After hanging up, I opened Anna’s page again without thinking. My comment had no replies, not even a single like. I didn’t know what I was expecting or hoping for, but I kept refreshing her page.

At last, I deleted my comment. The girls in her photos all stared at me as I looked back into their eyes. I hesitated for a while, then tapped “Unfollow” on Anna’s page.