by Xinran
XINRAN
Miss Chopsticks
Translated from Chinese
by Esther Tyldesley
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Copyright © The Good Women of China Ltd. 2007
Translation copyright © Esther Tyldesley 2007
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Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
About the author
Also by xinran
A Note on Chinese Names
Translator’s Note
Introduction
1 Under the Big Willow
2 A New Year and a New Life
3 The Happy Fool
4 The Water Dragon
5 The Book Taster’s Teahouse
6 The Three Sisters Explore Nanjing
7 Six and the Teahouse Customers
8 Diagrams and Dialects
9 Three Falls in Love
10 English Lessons
11 Uncle Two Visits the Gates of Hell
12 Homecoming
Afterword: The Story After the Story
Map of China
Map of Nanjing
Editor’s Note: A List of Chinese Festivals
Acknowledgements
For PanPan
My son, my best friend, the powerhouse behind my
motherhood
MISS CHOPSTICKS
Xinran was born in Beijing in 1958 and was a successful journalist and radio presenter in China. In 1997 she moved to London, where she began work on her seminal book about Chinese women’s lives, The Good Women of China. Since then she has written a regular column for the Guardian, appeared frequently on radio and TV, and published the acclaimed Sky Burial and a book of her Guardian columns called What the Chinese Don’t Eat. She lives in London but travels regularly to China.
ALSO BY XINRAN
The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices
Sky Burial
What the Chinese Don’t Eat
A Note on Chinese Names
In Chinese, the surname comes before the given name, e.g. ‘Li Zhongguo’, who, in this book, is the eldest son in the Li family. ‘Zhongguo’ is the Pinyin way of writing the Chinese character that represents Mr Li’s name . Pinyin is a language system that uses the roman alphabet to represent the sounds of Standard Mandarin. However, in Chinese, different characters can have the same sound. (pronounced zhong), which means ‘loyalty’, sounds exactly the same as (also pronounced zhong), which means ‘middle’ or ‘central’. For this reason, the Chinese often hasten to give the meaning of their name when introducing themselves, to avoid confusion. For example, in chapter eleven of Miss Chopsticks, ‘Li Zhongjia’, the second brother in the Li family, is asked by the policeman how to write his name: ‘Li as in the fruit tree? Zhong as in loyalty? Jia as in family?’
Names are further complicated by the fact that a lot of Chinese are called one thing at home, and another on their official registration documents. This is why, in chapter four, the managers at the Dragon Water-Culture Centre are so surprised to find that Five doesn’t have any other name but ‘Five’, which sounds like a family nickname.
Translator’s Note
Translating anything from Chinese into English is never an easy task. The two languages are so different, both structurally and grammatically; individual words often do not have an exact match; what seems pithy and concise in one language can seem clumsy and tedious in the other. I have heard translating between the two compared to capturing a cloud and putting it in a box: you will never quite get it all in – and by the time you are through, the result, though not without its own merits, will no longer be exactly the same shape.
This was particularly true when trying to convey a sense of Xinran’s Nanjing, a city with a distinctive regional culture, centuries of history and its own very special cuisine. As a native of Nanjing, Xinran has brought her home city vividly to life in this book. However, her passing references to the things that make Nanjing unique often assume a certain knowledge in the reader, and take a lot of explaining in English. Fortunately for me, Xinran was always happy to help answer my queries. What are Yangchun noodles? What was it the Red Guards did with the fine paper from the houses of the courtesans? Surely that thing Nanjing girls love to eat couldn’t really be a boiled egg with a feather-covered embryo inside … or could it? But finding answers to my questions was only the beginning of my work: how could I incorporate what Xinran had told me into the text, while at the same time keeping her lightness of touch and not drowing the reader in information?
Another problem was the shape of the Chinese language. There are not many different sounds in Mandarin, providing endless opportunities for puns, and allowing the Chinese to express a great deal of sly humour in very few syllables. Preserving these flashes of brief, offhand wit is always one of the hardest challenges for a translator, and was particularly so in this book, which is full of such humour. A related challenge was Chinese’s great wealth of proverbs, folk sayings and four-character set phrases handed down from the classical language. Xinran’s text is richly studded with these idioms, which are highly condensed and contain more information in four or five characters than a long English sentence. Include every detail and you end up with a ponderous, inelegant English style; leave them out and the language becomes sparse, dull, and quite unlike the lively original. How, too, could I convey to the reader the ideas behind the political slogans with which the characters jokingly pepper their conversation without embarking on digressions to explain Chinese politics?
A further issue for this book was its use of register and dialect. In a country bigger than continental Europe, dialects vary hugely from region to region, to the point where some dialects could arguably be classed as different
languages altogether (the incident in the dormitory where girls from different provinces of China cannot understand each other is no exaggeration). On top of this, north China is as different from the south as the east is from the west, or Germany from Spain. All of this is reflected in the way people talk. Because the heroines of Miss Chopsticks come from a poor, country village, their way of expressing themselves, and the logic behind their thinking, is completely different from that of their city employers. What’s more, the fact that, unlike her sisters, Six has been to school for several years means that she speaks and thinks in yet another register. Trying to give all the characters in this book individual voices, retaining their liveliness and local colour without slipping into parody, was far from simple!
No translation can ever live up to the variety and beauty of the original. Still, I hope that when you open the box that is this book, you will find enough of Xinran’s beautiful cloud – the sense of place; her empathy with the resourcefulness and courage of three young women so far from home they seem to have entered another time; the moments of poignancy, and the flashes of subtle sarcasm – to give you a sense of what I found when I first took up Miss Chopsticks and began to read.
Esther Tyldesley, Edinburgh, February 2007
Introduction
Before I came to England in 1997, I worked as a radio presenter in Nanjing. My programme Words on the Night Breeze was a talk show that discussed women’s issues and, in order to research items for the programme, I frequently travelled to many corners of China. Once, in a small village in the northern province of Shanxi, I heard about a woman who had committed suicide by drinking pesticide because she couldn’t give birth to a boy – or, as the Chinese put it, she couldn’t ‘lay eggs’. Virtually no one in the village would attend her funeral, and I asked her husband what he felt about this. ‘You can’t blame them,’ he said, without a trace of rancour. ‘They don’t want her bad luck to rub off on them. Besides, it’s her fault that she only managed to give birth to a handful of chopsticks and no roof-beam.’ I was struck by this way of referring to girls and boys. I had never heard it before, but it seemed to epitomise the manner in which the Chinese view the differences between men and women. While men are believed to be the strong providers, who hold up the roof of the household, women are merely fragile, workaday tools, to be used and then discarded. The thought made me feel melancholy, but, as I was standing there pondering the man’s words, I heard one of his daughters pipe up from nearby, ‘I’ll show the people in this village who’s a chopstick and who’s a roof-beam.’
In the course of my work as a journalist, I met many ‘chopsticks’ – girls from poor villages who lived lives of drudgery in arranged marriages. At first my encounters with them were limited largely to my visits to the countryside. However, as China began to reform its economy during the 1980s, and peasants were allowed to seek work in the cities, these ‘chopstick’ girls began to be found working as waitresses and cleaners in city restaurants, shops and hotels. City people would often overlook them, almost as if they weren’t there, but I always tried to engage them in conversation, and to find out their stories. And I thought about them a lot when I first arrived in London.
In order to survive financially in those early days in England, I worked for a short time as a shop cleaner and waitress. Western people looked through me in the same way as city people looked through ‘chopstick’ girls in China, and I felt that I understood better what their life must be like. I was inspired by the self-belief and determination that drove them to make a place for themselves away from their homes and relatives. As I’ve said, that period of my life was brief, and, after working as a teacher, I was able in 2002 to publish my first book, The Good Women of China. Since then I have returned frequently to my homeland and have watched the extraordinary changes that are taking place in China as it surges into the twenty-first century. Whenever I visit, I see hundreds of chopstick girls becoming part of the structure that holds up the roof of China, in the same way that China itself, which was closed to its neighbours for so long, is now becoming part of the framework that holds up the world.
For a long time now I have wanted to write down some of the stories of the girls that I have met. I’ve felt that, if I didn’t capture these lives for myself, my son, and for others, I would regret it deeply. Of all the girls I have talked to, there are three particularly close to my heart, and whose stories seem to speak for so many others. In order to protect their identities, I have written this book as if they were sisters who all worked in Nanjing, even though, in real life, they are not related to each other and I only met one of them in Nanjing – the other two came from Beijing and Shanghai.
It has given me great pleasure to write about Nanjing, the place I love best in China. Situated on the lower reaches of the Yangzi River, it is a city of huge importance in Chinese history and culture. It was the capital of six dynasties and, when the Republic of China was founded on 29 December 1911, with Sun Yatsen as its provisional President, Nanjing became its capital too. Evidence of its long history is everywhere – in the beautiful Confucius Temple, situated near the Qinhuai river, and in the great city wall, which was built between 1366 and 1386 by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang after he founded the Ming Dynasty. This wall was constructed with such skill and was so strong that it still exists almost in its entirety, and is the oldest standing city wall in the world. Of course, modern Nanjing has spread beyond its boundaries and, of the thirteen original gates, only two are still standing. But, walking along the top of the wall, as I liked to do when I lived and worked in the city, it is possible to look down at the ancient trees and the old moat, and imagine oneself back in time. Nanjing is renowned for its plum blossom and, in spring, I loved to watch the first pink buds open against the backdrop of dark-green cedars which are a feature of the city. Outside the walls, parks had been created where, throughout the day, you could watch Nanjingers relaxing amidst the trees. The morning was the time for old people to exercise and play chess; later in the day women would come to chat, sew and prepare vegetables; in the early evening, men would stop by on their way back from work until their wives or children called them home for dinner.
In 2002, I revisited one of my favourite haunts: the section of wall that lies in the south of the city. I was astounded to find it transformed. Hundreds of buildings had sprung up outside the wall, like bamboo shoots after rain, and there was a large street market. It was then that I thought that perhaps the story of my chopstick girls should begin here, close to the Zhonghua Gate that has stood for six hundred years and witnessed so much joy and pain.
1
Under the Big Willow
Beside Nanjing’s ancient moat, there is a big old willow tree much loved by the people who live nearby. Beneath its shady branches, men play chess and local women peel vegetables or scour cooking pots while they sit and chat to each other, occasionally glancing across the water at the crumbling city wall with its magisterial gate, which has survived since the Ming dynasty. These days it’s not easy to spot the willow tree amidst the hubbub. The local street market, which sells everything from fruit and vegetables to animals and bicycles, has become so popular that crowds of people throng the narrow lanes of stalls and shops. And a new job centre has been built not far away, which attracts queues of migrant workers wanting to take part in China’s boom.
It wasn’t always like this. In the late nineties, these streets close to the southernmost gate in the city wall were far sleepier. There was no ring road, few people had cars and, if you wanted to get somewhere fast, you had to endure a bone-shaking ride in a makeshift taxi that was actually one of the three-wheeled tractors mass-produced for agriculture. Yet, even then, the traffic must have seemed extraordinary to someone newly arrived from the countryside. To people brought up with a peasant lifestyle, who had never seen cars, tall buildings or telephones, and who were often illiterate, the city, with its looming wall, was a huge and daunting prospect. Fortunately for them, the men and women under the bi
g willow were always happy to help a stranger, and would give them the nod about friends and acquaintances who had a job to offer. Little by little, the big willow gained a reputation for being the place to go if you were looking for work, and the market beside it grew ever bigger, much to the delight of the local government officials who got more rent from the stall holders, and the annoyance of the local residents who complained about the noise and the dirt.
This story starts in 2001, when the market was neither big nor small, and the men and women under the willow were good at finding people jobs but not yet overwhelmed by the task. It begins on a cold, February morning when a nineteen-year-old girl called Sanniu, which means ‘Three’ in Chinese, found herself standing beside the big willow tree, bewildered by the coming and going around her. Three was running away from home because her parents planned to marry her to the crippled son of a local government official. She had been lucky. Her Uncle Two had been sympathetic to her plight and had agreed to help her leave their small village in Anhui Province. He worked on the building sites of Zhuhai, a prosperous city on the southern coast of China, and only ever came back to the village at New Year, when they celebrated Spring Festival. As soon as he had arrived home that year, he had seen what was in store for Three and promised secretly he would take her with him when he returned to his job at the end of the holiday.
Uncle Two was the second brother in the Li family; Three’s father was the first. Both brothers were dogged by the misfortune of having families of girls. In fact, Three was the third daughter of six. Her father had been so disappointed by his lack of sons that he had never given his children real names, and so they became known by the order in which they had been born.
