Besides the day shift, Nan occasionally worked at the front office at night. He hated to be seen by everyone at the entrance and dared not look at his pocket dictionary before ten p.m. There were four other guards, but he was scheduled to work mainly with Ivan and Tim. Tim was a spare black man from Canada, around sixty, and wore a gray mustache and a lumpy ring though he was single, divorced long ago. He often talked to Nan about his retirement plan. He was working another job too, driving a shuttle bus between Logan Airport and downtown Boston. With a mysterious look and some pride he told Nan that he had to hold two jobs to make enough money for a mansion he had been building in a suburb of Toronto. That was his dream home, which he'd retire to and which would cost him more than half a million dollars.

"When are you going back to Canada to live in your big house?" Nan asked Tim one afternoon, standing at the glass door of the tiny office.

"As soon as I'm through with this job, in a year or two. I don't like it here."

"You mean Hampden Park or Boston?" "I mean the United States." "But zere's a lawt of snow in Canada, right?" "I don't mind."

"Don't you have better jawbs here?"

"Give me a break!" Tim cackled. Then he rolled up the sleeve of his pale blue shirt. "Look here." He pointed at his forearm.

"What? You mean you have hair on your skin?" Actually, Nan found Tim's arm as smooth as his own.

"No. Pigmentation."

"Oh, you are cahlored," said Nan.

In fact Tim wasn't very dark, his skin at most mocha. "That's right. Blacks are treated like trash in this country."

"But you make more mahney here."

"Yes, plus I'm busting my ass."

"How much more do you make here zan in Canada?"

"It's not the number but the purchasing power of the U.S. dollars that counts. For example, for a pack of toilet paper you pay three bucks here, but you have to pay four in Canada."

"Is Canada a better place for blacks to live?"

"Yes, that's why I'm a Canadian citizen and proud of it."

"So minorities are tritted equally there?"

"No, of course not. Still, Canadians are more open-minded than Americans."

"How do they trit Chinese?" "Similar to blacks, I would say."

Nan remembered something. "I have a question for you, Tim."

"What?"

"Is a Chinese also cahlored?" Nan had seen some job ads that encouraged "people of color" to apply, but he wasn't sure if he was considered colored. How odd that term was. Wasn't white also a color? Why were whites viewed as colorless? Logically speaking, everybody should be "colored."

"I'm not positive about that here," said Tim. "In Canada people don't call me 'colored' to my face."

"Come on, you have dark skin."

"Why should I lie to you? I'm black, but not colored. 'Colored' is a bad word in Canada."

"I wish I were cahlored, zough." "Why's that?"

"If you are cahlored here, you can have better employment."

"That's baloney, Nan! Blacks only have the shitty jobs nobody wants." Tim's bleary eyes stared at him, their corners wrinkled in rays.

Nan didn't respond, wondering if that was true. Ads for government jobs and teaching positions almost always urged "people of color" to apply, and he wondered if he should try for one. He'd be happy if he could work as a fireman or postman. Any stable job would be great. It wasn't just for the pay, but for the benefits and the sense of security-some peace of mind. On the other hand, Tim might be right-Nan had never seen a black postman or fireman in Woodland.

Later Nan pondered his conversation with Tim. Although he admired the old man's hardiness, it made him uneasy. Despite his age, Tim held two full-time jobs, running like a machine without respite. People here worked too hard, obsessed with the illusion of getting rich. Americans often disparaged workaholism in Japan, but most of them worked as hard as the Japanese, if not harder. In this place if you didn't make money, you were a loser, a nobody. Your worth was measured by the property you owned and by the amount you had in the bank. On the radio, the host of Money Matters would ask callers blatantly, "What's your worth?" You couldn't answer "I hold two master's degrees" or "I'm a model worker" or "I'm an honest guy." You had to come up with a specific figure. On TV, jolly old men would declare, "I feel like a million bucks!" Nan once saw in a lonely hearts section of the Boston Herald that a man seeking women described his profession as "millionaire." Money, money, money-money was God in this place.

THE OTHER GUARD often paired with him was Ivan, a man in his mid-thirties, a recent immigrant from Russia. Ivan was a squat fellow, broad in the shoulders and thick in the stomach, and often wore a knowing grin on his face, whose rugged features showed a good deal of strength and cunning. He drove a white pickup that had a short body but four seats in the cab. Every night he brought along a laptop and typed away on it. Nan hadn't seen such a small computer before and was impressed by Ivan's dexterity in using the machine, for which Ivan said he had paid more than $4,000. One night when most of the residents had turned in, the two guards talked. Ivan claimed he was already wealthy, though he'd come to America only six years before.

"What are you doing wiz your computer here?" Nan asked him. "Business."

"What kind?"

"Transport oil."

"To anozzer country?"

"To Europe."

"Have you been in zis trade for long?" "Yes, very many years." "So you're a rich man?"

"Yes, I am." Ivan smiled, and his fleshy cheeks broadened, reminding Nan of a giant owl.

"Zen why are you working at Hampden Park?"

"Look, I'm making money just sitting here while I can work with Russian companies for big deals. This way is better to use my time. Time's money."

"Zat's true." Nan remembered that back in China, where you had nothing but time, no one was paid by the hour but all by the month. But here you made money by selling your hours. He asked Ivan again, "You don't work during zer day?"

"Of course I do. I visit people for business. That's why I work here at night most the days."

"Do you already own a house here?"

"No. My wife and I lease an apartment in Dorchester."

"Why didn't you buy your own house?"

"What's a house? It's just shelter. Like a car, it's just a vehicle. There's no need for fancy products. Why should I let a house waste my capital? Tell you what, we own a very expensive apartment in Switzerland."

"Reelly?"

"On Lake Geneva, beautiful place. Did you ever visit Europe?" "No. How mahch does it cawst? I mean zee apartment." "That's classified information. We bought it to invest. Real 'state was skyrocking over there, you know."

"How come you got rich so quickly here?"

"I followed my ways."

"You don't share your expertise?"

"All right, let me offer you one advice, Nan," Ivan harrumphed, his large eyes gleaming in the dimly lighted room. "In America there're only two ways to acquire riches. First, use others' money; second, use others' labor. I'm doing both." He hee-hawed.

Although Nan knew what Ivan said was true, he felt discomfited. He had once spent a year and a half poring over Marx's Das Capital, and he understood how capitalists accumulated their wealth. In theory, all profits resulted from surplus labor, the blood and sweat of workers. Evidently Ivan had intuitively grasped the essence of capitalism. But how could he- Nan -act like a capitalist? Besides having no capital to invest, he simply couldn't imagine himself using others' money or labor. That would amount to exploitation, wouldn't it? Yet to succeed in this place, shouldn't he do something like what Ivan had been doing? Maybe he had to, but how?