Miss Chopsticks

by Xinran

  While she was speaking, Meng had laid out some egg biscuits in front of Six. They were rather like the deep-fried dough chips they ate during Spring Festival in the countryside, but a lot nicer. Six ate too quickly, and then felt very thirsty. She saw Meng reach for a bottle of water so pointed to the sink in the storeroom behind the curtain to say that she was very happy to drink tap water. Meng did not stop her, so Six put her mouth to the tap, drank a big mouthful and felt much better. Then she looked around the storeroom. It was a small, cramped space just big enough to hold two people with shelves reaching from floor to ceiling. The top shelves held lots of different-sized boxes, the middle shelves were used for the tea sets and the bottom shelves had a number of plastic buckets on them for storage, cleaning and emptying tea leaves into. To the left of the tap was a little table which Meng was using to unpack the shopping.

  While Six was gazing about her, Meng took out a piece of white kitchen paper, and discreetly wiped the biscuit crumbs off the tap.

  ‘I’m back!’

  A strong male voice resounded through the teahouse and, before long, a young man dressed in white corduroy trousers and a black corduroy jacket squeezed into the storeroom carrying two big cardboard boxes.

  ‘That looks good,’ he said to Meng. ‘Have you saved any for me? You’ve only been a capitalist for a few days but you’re already exploiting your workers: I didn’t even have time for lunch!’

  The man put down his boxes, wiped his hands on the curtain, and held out his hand to Six: ‘Hi, welcome to the Book Taster’s Teahouse.’

  Six had never shaken hands with a young, unmarried man before but she remembered reading in magazines that men and women were very casual around each other in the big city, so with a great effort she put out her hand. The warmth of the man’s strong grip made her feel quite odd; she could feel the blood pulsing through his fingers.

  ‘Have my parents had time to oppress you yet, child worker?’ he asked, laughing.

  ‘Kang!’ said Meng crossly, untying a beautiful red scarf from around her neck. ‘Don’t make such thoughtless jokes. Six has only just finished middle school and it’s her first time in the city, so it’s hard for her to know whether you’re serious or not. She might think you’re being disrespectful. Six, don’t listen to his nonsense. Young people these days think it’s fashionable to make fun of their parents. That’s because they’ve never been sent to the countryside to learn what’s what. You’ll have to tell him about what life is like in your village so he knows what good fortune really is.’

  ‘There you go finding fault again Mother. I know, I know, when you were younger you all had to attend those Recollect Bitterness meetings where people talked about what life had been like before Communism made it much better, but do we have to have them now? If so, please could you invite us to a Recollect Bitterness Meal. We’re starving. Put some food in front of us and you can lecture us all you want about how the country’s going to the dogs.’

  ‘Kang’s got a point, Meng,’ said Thick Glasses. ‘Let’s put all the things away and then go out for a meal. Tea and sweet things before supper are bad for the appetite. Kang, give Ruth a call so she can come and meet Six. Then Six will know everything about our little world.’

  Shu Kang pulled out a mobile phone from an inside pocket, dialled and immediately began to talk in English. Six’s mouth fell open when she heard this. Even the English teacher she admired the most had never spoken English so quickly. She was even more astounded when Meng began speaking to her son in English. Six had thought Thick Glasses was the most scholarly person in this family, but even the wife knew English. How lucky she was to be working for such intellectual people! An image appeared in her mind of herself talking freely in English with the members of this family, discussing books, history, foreign countries, the life in her village …

  She stood there, entranced, but was brought down to earth with a bump when the family started exchanging dubious glances about her silence and Meng came up and put an arm round her shoulders.

  ‘Are you missing your home, little Six?’ she asked.

  ‘I … no …’ she stammered. She was embarrassed to tell them what she had been thinking about. Suddenly her daydreams seemed shameful. As if she were a dirty toad wanting to eat swan’s meat.

  That night scenes from the evening kept whirling in front of Six’s eyes like a magic lantern as she tried to sleep in her tiny room in the Shu family’s apartment. The supper she had eaten in the little dumpling restaurant seemed like the beautiful scenes Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl glimpsed when she struck the matches, but even better: Six had seen much more than the Little Match Girl’s roast goose and old grandmother. She kept pinching herself as she lay on her soft bed: was all this real or a dream?

  More than anything else, her thoughts kept returning to Ruth, a fair-haired, light-eyed bignose from England. From the moment Ruth walked into the restaurant, Six’s eyes hadn’t left her, and she paid no attention to anything else. She had never met a real bignose before, though of course she had read about them in books. The only time she had really seen what they looked like was when she sneaked off secretly to the cinema the time she had visited the local town for an essay competition. The film showing was called The Bridges of Madison County and it was about two middle-aged bignoses who were having an affair. Six had left before the end because she had panicked when the man and the woman had started kissing. If anyone in her village had found out she had watched such a thing in the cinema, she would get a bad name. She had seen how her good friend Moli had been destroyed by getting a bad reputation among the villagers, even though she’d done nothing to deserve it. Her parents had locked her up because she’d lost face for them, and fifteen-year-old Moli had killed herself by drinking pesticide. Six’s father and mother were already mocked by the villagers for having no sons. If, on top of that, it was discovered that Six had watched a dirty film, the whole family would be finished.

  Six remembered how in awe she had been of the actress in The Bridges of Madison County. But now that Six had seen Ruth, the actress paled in significance. She spent the evening watching every move that Ruth made and trying to understand her foreign ways. Ruth often behaved strangely. She couldn’t use her chopsticks properly and she spoke Chinese in a very funny way. Her pronunciation was so odd that often it was quite difficult to understand what she was saying. She mixed up the four tones of pronunciation so that she made the verb ‘to eat’ sound like ‘seven’ and she asked the waiter for a ‘clean fat person’ when she wanted a clean plate. Six could see that Thick Glasses and his wife were very fond of Ruth: they kept picking up dumplings in their chopsticks and putting them in Ruth’s bowl. Shu Kang lost patience with them and kept shouting ‘Stop it, that’s enough! Mum, Dad, how many times have I told you not to put food in her bowl? Show a little respect for a foreigner and let her decide for herself how much she wants. Your “Chinese love” is too intrusive.’

  Meng didn’t agree with her son.

  ‘Ruth’s an educated person, and she’s come to China to experience Chinese culture. If we do everything in a Western way, treating her as a foreigner, she won’t learn. Idiocy masquerading as wisdom!’

  ‘Ruth,’ said Thick Glasses in English, ‘would you like to be treated as a Chinese or Westerner?’

  ‘Chinese, of course!’ said Ruth earnestly, putting down her chopsticks and clasping her hands on her chest. Six smiled. Ruth pronounced the word ‘Chinese’ so that it sounded like ‘middle fruit’ …

  While Ruth, Kang and Thick Glasses were discussing goings on at the university, Meng told Six how Ruth had been sent by a Scottish university to study Chinese in Beijing for a year. Kang had also been at university in Beijing and had met Ruth when they took part in a language exchange. Once Ruth had finished her year’s study abroad, she had returned to Scotland to continue the last two years of her degree. They did not see each other again until Shu Kang went to Britain to see her, and the two of them made a short t
our of Europe. Now Kang was in Nanjing studying for an PhD, and Ruth had come to join him. In order to earn an independent living, Ruth had found a job as an English teacher in a college for primary school teachers, and she and Kang had been living together in rented lodgings on the outskirts of the city for almost a year now.

  ‘And not a word about getting married …’ Meng added regretfully.

  Six felt her face flush red at the idea of Ruth and Kang living together. How could they do such a thing? Surely they would bring shame on the family!

  ‘Aren’t you afraid people will make nasty jokes?’ she whispered.

  ‘Make nasty jokes about what?’ Meng asked, mystified.

  ‘About your son living with a girl before they’re married! Won’t people gossip about you?’ Six could not understand how such educated people could fly in the face of decency without giving it a second thought.

  Meng smiled. ‘Six, times are changing. When I was young, even holding hands in public was impossible, let alone cohabiting. If unmarried men and women were caught living together they’d be accused of having “an improper lifestyle”, or of engaging in “problematic thinking”, and forced to write self-criticisms. My parents weren’t even allowed to touch each other in front of other people when they were married! But these days, young people kiss in public without a care in the world, and it’s become quite common to live together before marriage …’

  Six felt overwhelmed by confusion. All she had done was spend three hours on a bus and she had entered an entirely different world. Her teachers at school would say, ‘One seed not harvested brings a harvest of sorrow, a family without sons brings death to the family line, but to fly in the face of decency brings the end of the world.’ If living with a man before you were married was not considered indecent, then what was?

  Seeing Six’s distress, Meng patted her rough hand.

  ‘It’ll take a while, but you’ll come to understand why there are such huge differences between the city and the countryside. In many ways, people in the countryside are living in a different century from those in the city, and it will take them many years to catch up.’

  Meng did not feel able to tell Six that, in her view, the Chinese countryside was as much as five hundred years behind the city. She remembered how shocked she had been when she had been sent to live in a village during the Cultural Revolution. Although the place hadn’t been that far from a town, still, there had been nothing to eat but a string of salted dried turnip at every meal all year round. The five years she spent there had completely destroyed the young Meng’s faith that socialist societies were the most successful in the world. When she got back to Nanjing she had taught herself English and had tried to learn as much as she could about foreign cultures. It seemed to her that, although capitalist countries were, as the Chinese said, ‘struggling in deep water and burning in the fire’, they were, in many ways, far more advanced than socialist countries. She had racked her brains over why it had to be like this, and used all the spare time she had from her job in the sales department of an army-run factory to give herself the education that she had been deprived of by the Cultural Revolution.

  ‘Auntie Meng, are you all right?’

  Six noticed that Meng was staring blankly into space and worried that she had upset her by asking such forward questions about her son. She realised that there were white hairs at Meng’s temples and that she was a woman with many cares.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Meng reassured her. ‘It’s just my way. I often go off into a dream when my mind wanders.’

  Kang came to his mother’s rescue.

  ‘When Mum’s mind wanders she’s thinking about serious affairs of state or international relations. You’ll soon discover, Six, that the things that worry her are far removed from normal people like you and me!’

  ‘There you go again, you silly boy! No sense of proportion!’ Meng scolded her son, at which point she noticed that everyone had finished eating, so she asked for the bill.

  Six glanced in her direction and was astounded to see Meng take out three ten-yuan notes. Could a few small dumplings really be so expensive? Thirty yuan was as much as her mother earned for a whole season of vegetables. Perhaps the restaurant they were eating in was grander than she had thought …

  In fact, the restaurant was a modest little place – a branch of a well-known dumpling restaurant in north-east China that sold dumplings stuffed with pickled vegetables, as well as noodles and pork at a reasonable price. But Six didn’t know this. She said goodbye to Kang and Ruth as they rode off on their bicycles, and followed Shu Tian and Meng home in a complete daze, trying to imagine the palatial dwelling in which such a rich and cultured family must live. She couldn’t have been more surprised when they arrived at an apartment that was about the size of the Li family’s kitchen.

  Much later, Six would find out that Shu Tian and Meng had never managed to rise high enough in their jobs to qualify for a larger flat. The fact that they had spent most of their youth in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution meant that they were at a great disadvantage in the job market compared to those who had completed university in the ordinary way. Fortunately Shu Tian had managed to get a job at the youth magazine but he had remained a mid-ranking editor through his whole career. As a result, Shu Kang had been three before the family were able to leave the old-style residential building that they had lived in when first married, with its communal kitchen, toilet and wash room, and where families lit little fires for cooking in the corridors. They had been allocated a small seventh-floor flat in one of the new apartment blocks that were springing up around the city. This flat had a tiny, six-metre-square kitchen, three minuscule bedrooms and a bathroom. They had lived there for twenty years, content with their lot but perplexed when some of their colleagues managed to get themselves allocated large flats with several living rooms.

  At the end of the 1990s, the government changed its housing policy and instructed each work-unit to do away with its communal housing and allow its employees to buy their flats. Shu Tian joked that the smallness of their flat at least meant that they didn’t have to get into too much debt to buy it. He and Meng watched as their more powerful colleagues somehow found the cash to buy their large apartments – or even to snap up two or three low-cost flats – but they didn’t complain. Kang had moved away to university, making it possible to sit down in the kitchen to eat, while Shu Tian was able to give to Meng the study he had created by covering over their tiny balcony and use the guestroom instead, knowing that any visitors could be put up in Kang’s old bedroom. Even the queuing time in the morning for the two-square-metre toilet felt much shorter. The couple were extremely adept at making the best of things: being right under the roof meant there was no one to disturb their sleep; a tall building with no lift was a great opportunity for exercise. Too hot in summer or cold in winter? In their view, the best way to a good atmosphere was for two people to stay close and love one another. They also believed that books and study were the way to improve the world. So, when the army factory where Meng worked started looking for a private buyer and told Meng to stay at home on a minimal retainer, and it looked as if Shu Tian might face compulsory early retirement from his publishing company, the couple decided to pool their savings, take some of the money that Kang had been earning doing translation work, and start up the Book Taster’s Teahouse. Their waitress could sleep in Kang’s room if necessary, and they would just have to invite fewer guests to stay.

  Six’s disappointment at the size of the Shu’s apartment was offset by her astonishment at the way it was decorated. There were books on nearly every wall, while in the kitchen, woks and other utensils hung from the ceiling, and the walls were lined with shelves of spices, oils, rice, vegetables and crockery. Even the toilet had things suspended from the ceiling while the walls were covered with drawings. The whole place looked to Six just like the art museums she had seen in books. She was particularly taken by the little pot containing coloured pencils and scra
ps of paper hanging in the toilet. The members of this family really knew how to make the most of their time: they even wrote down ideas while relieving themselves!

  The room where Six was to sleep was the least crowded room in the flat. Apart from the bed, it contained only a desk, a bookshelf and a dozen or so cardboard boxes, like the one Six used to keep her textbook in at home. She thought of the nights she had spent awake, listening out for rats in case they were gnawing away at her book. She wondered if city people had to put down rat poison to stop their books from getting eaten: illiterate country rats just loved the taste of words. Casting her eye around the little room, Six thought about how crowded the lives of city people were. Everything had to be stacked in huge piles, whereas her family’s possessions were laid out around the courtyard, the kitchen or the storeroom. Even the walls of Shu Kang’s room were covered in paper: little notes written in English. She went over to the desk, which was narrower than the desk she used at school. There was a photograph of the whole family on the desk, as well as one of just Ruth and Shu Kang, taken while they were swimming. Shu Kang was in a pair of swimming trunks that clung tightly to his buttocks; Ruth was wearing something that barely covered her body. Six could not stop herself from staring at the picture, her face flushed, her heart thumping. Lying down on her bed fully clothed, she tried to sleep. She could not imagine what the future might hold for her in this strange city. She felt as if her world had been turned upside-down.

  6

  The Three Sisters Explore Nanjing

  Early one Wednesday morning, Five got up as quietly as she could and crept through the dormitory to the bathroom. For a country girl used to getting up at dawn, she had found it difficult to adjust to the strange routine at the Dragon Water-Culture Centre, where they worked late and slept until mid morning. But, after three weeks, she was beginning to become accustomed to it. This morning, however, she had forced herself to wake early because she was going to meet up with her sisters for the first time since she had arrived in Nanjing and she wanted to have as much time with them as possible.