He finished 24th, which put him 12th in the Chase standings. Although he was still technically in a position to advance to the next round, his position was much more precarious than he wanted, and the 24th place finish was a disappointment. Lexi Patterson had actually finished the race ahead of him, and it was only the 3 point bonus for his win at Jusenkyo that kept Wang ahead of her in the points. He couldn't afford to lose to her again.... And Kai Qiang's paranoid obsession with the Vilitan Mountain Challenge Course was making Wang nervous about it. Qiang had raced there twice and hadn't done well either time, but his fixation was still a little odd.
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Rinzi Zakhilwal had done much better. After talking to a few reporters and telling them he was happy to finish in the top 10, but he wasn't going to get complacent, he went looking for Qiang to "congratulate" him on winning the Stock Car Studs contest. Qiang was in the middle of an interview, talking to a foreign reporter in his ungrammatical and heavily accented English. Zakhilwal walked up behind him, ruffling his hair and interrupting him to say, "Heyyyy, what's up, Mr. Studly!" in Chinese.
"Don't DO that!" Qiang said angrily, also speaking Chinese now. He glared at Zakhilwal as he smoothed his hair out, putting it back the way he wanted it. "What did I tell you about ruffling my hair like that?"
"I'm sorry, I can't resist," Zakhilwal said in a teasing tone. "You're just too irresistibly studly."
Qiang scoffed and shooed him away, then turned back to the reporter he had been talking to, apologized in English for the interruption, and went back to his interview.
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Walk Free was a small charity dedicated to providing medical, financial, and legal assistance for victims of Chinese foot-binding. It was run by two women named Qingmiao Shen and Ning Yu, both of whom came from poor rural families in northern Jiangxi Territory and had bound feet.
Shen had really been through hell with overbearing parents and an abusive marriage. Yu was much more fortunate, except for being born into a poor family that still thought foot-binding was socially acceptable. When she took an IQ test in 2nd grade, she scored high enough to get transferred to a boarding school for gifted children in downtown Nanchang. The boarding school changed her life. Yu had a law degree, but not from a highly regarded school. She had to go where she could get a full scholarship, even if it wasn't the best school she could get into.
Walk Free operated on a shoestring budget. Even when they won a lawsuit, there wouldn't be much money in it because foot binding only existed in the most backward backwaters where everyone was poor. The Sherpa authorities had stamped it out in the cities.
Yu handled the money and took care of anything that required a knowledge of the legal system. Shen did a lot of the hands-on work of finding women who needed help and reaching out to them. She didn't have much in the way of useful skills, but she was willing to put in a lot of time and hard work.
Yu was getting ready to go to the courthouse in Pingxiang to file a lawsuit on behalf of a woman from a small village in the surrounding countryside. She had all the paperwork ready to go, but before she submitted it, she needed to double-check that the check for the filing fee wouldn't bounce. When she first opened the online banking page, she didn't understand what she was looking at. Her first thought was that the page had crashed or her browser had glitched. Then she realized that thingmajig stuck between the numbers in the account balance was not just a random character added by a glitch: it was a crore symbol. Her next thought was that the bank had made some mistake, such as mistyping someone's account number, and deposited a large quantity of money in the wrong account. She called the bank to alert them to the mistake, but they insisted that everything was in order. "It's an online donation through your website," the bank representative explained. "The payment already cleared, so that money is yours."
Yu took a closer look at the transaction records from Walk Free's website and found the donation: ₹1.136 crore from a Kai Qiang in Guilin, Guangxi. She didn't follow NSSCRA and although she had heard Qiang's name before, she had never seen it spelled out in Tibetan script, so she didn't recognize the name, and she wound up just staring at the screen wondering who the hell had sent her so much money and what prompted the huge donation. She was totally baffled. It felt a little silly to get so excited about numbers and letters on a screen, but Ning Yu knew it meant so much more than just numbers. She called Qingmiao Shen and she could hardly contain her excitement enough to get the words out. "Sister Shen, you're not going to believe this..."
Now they could focus on their work without worrying about money.
