The Noodle Maker

by Ma Jian

  Anyone observing the couple through the window could have only guessed at the intense feelings welling up inside them. The shameful idea that had come to the entrepreneur the night before had now transformed into a glorious mission. He fetched the box with the pharmacist’s photograph on the lid, tipped some of the ashes into it, opened the window, tossed out the remaining ashes, and closed the window again. (One day he forgot to shut the window, and the stray dogs loitering outside sneaked in and gobbled up half of the twelve swooners that were lying on the floor.) He washed down the hot metal tray with a wet flannel, and dropped the tape into the cassette player. Everything was in order, everything had gone according to plan. All that was left to be done was for the mother to lie down on the tray. ‘It’s ready now,’ he said to her softly.

  She lay down flat on the tray, just as she had seen the posthumous Party member do. She let her hands drop naturally to the sides and fixed her eyes on the ceiling. As the son was about to switch the furnace on, the mother raised her hand in the air and said, ‘Play the music!’

  ‘All right,’ he said. He leaned back and pressed the play button, waited for the prelude to finish, then slowly pushed the tray into the furnace to the rhythm of the Salammbô aria. The paper ingot shoes were the last to go in. Stuck to the soles he saw a patch of grey ash and a brightly shining drawing pin.

  ‘The electricity bill’s under the premium bonds!’ he heard his mother cry from inside the furnace, as the lyrics of the dirty song began to blare out. Without a word, he brushed his hair back and slammed the steel door shut.

  The Suicide or The Actress

  Su Yun was sixteen when she first stepped onto the stage. It was the height of the Cultural Revolution, and she was determined to pour all her youth and vitality into the revolutionary heroines she played. She took the roles of Jiang Jie, the brave activist who is shot in a Guomindang jail, and Liu Hulan, the Communist martyr who is decapitated by Japanese invaders. She sang the part of the shepherdess who loses her feet to frostbite in her attempt to rescue her state-owned flock, and danced the role of the fearless peasant leader, Wu Jinghua, who bayonets the evil capitalist landowner.

  But the winds brought in by the Open Door Policy blew away those revolutionary heroines, and Su Yun lost her way. She tried to keep up with the changing times and relax her moral views, but was kicked back time and again by a series of failed love affairs. She slowly lost her grip on reality and retreated inside herself. She wanted to travel to the core of her being, to see what lay at her life’s end.

  Su Yun’s initial plan was to die alone, but she was afraid that without an audience, her performance would go unnoticed. When she thought that she would soon become a heap of white powder inside a blazing incinerator, her heart clenched.

  What if she shed no tears at the moment of death? She was incapable of predicting how she would react. When she tried to imagine taking her last breath, crazed thoughts fluttered through her mind like dry petals falling from a withered bunch of flowers. A laugh rose from the pit of her stomach.

  Her life seemed like the string of maxims she copied from magazines, then tore up and tossed on the floor. These maxims gave her strength and insight. They taught her, for example, that ‘a sage must assume the guise of a fool’. As well as jotting down these maxims, she also liked to copy out from Milan Kundera’s books passages that mock female frailty. ‘He really must hate women,’ she said to herself. ‘He implies that without us, the world would be a better place. What a cheek! Although, I must admit, my foolish behaviour today does seem to support his argument.’

  She felt as though she had lived a hundred years. Everything that happened in the world seemed to her like a tedious repetition of some past event. One day she made up her mind to write a play about a woman who wants to commit suicide. She tried to remain objective, but couldn’t help writing herself into the script. While she worked on her suicide play, she continued her career as an actress, having to die day after day on stage. The strain was almost too much for her to bear. In the midst of her distress, a new idea came to her. She decided that in her play she would return from death to perform her suicide once again.

  As her thoughts took shape, she sat down at her desk and set to work on her second draft. First she sketched an outline of the male lead, who was a composite of her current boyfriend – a painter who worked in the municipal museum – and several other men she had known.

  She made the lead a little taller and bulkier than her boyfriend, and gave him a graveyard voice that suggested a sentimental character and a long history of heartbreak. Through his untidy, tobacco-stained teeth, she made him spew a few of the vulgar terms and phrases that filled the latest magazines – words like: IQ, spiritual enlightenment, ‘my bleeding heart’, ‘too vile for words’, and ‘chasing skirt’. This was her idea of the perfect man.

  In real life this man was cold and arrogant, and showed her little respect. But in her play, he became her servant – the meat under her knife that she could dissect and analyse as she pleased.

  Having assigned him his correct position, she smiled to herself and lowered her pen. She knew that in dealings with people, it is essential to first assign positions. This applied not only to her and to him, but to the four billion other people on this planet. No human contact is possible without first assigning positions. If two people are talking to each without prior knowledge of their respective ranks, they will achieve nothing. They might as well be talking to themselves.

  Before she lifted her pen again, she flicked through her notebook and read a couple of remarks she had jotted down about him:

  He is lying in bed moaning about how tired he is. It’s all an act. He just wants me to go over to him so that he can pull me down and have his way with me. He didn’t ejaculate last night when we made love, so he is desperate for my body.

  I have noticed that since the three-legged dog moved in with him, he has been less attentive to me, and his outlook on life seems to have matured.

  She felt distanced from these remarks. Reading them now, they seemed to her like the vague and shadowy dreams that drift away upon waking from a deep sleep. She found it hard to separate the stories she had written from the events in her real life. But already she saw herself as the lead actress in her play, and the only member of her audience.

  Gradually, she felt that her life was being taken over by her character in the play, or that she had somehow become that character in real life – a failure of a woman who had the impertinence to tell others how to lead their lives. Her different selves suffered from different afflictions, making it impossible for her to know where she stood in relation to others. She longed to escape and free herself from her troubled existence. She tried taking an overdose of sleeping pills, but didn’t manage to lose consciousness. Later, she consulted the works of Heidegger, hoping to use his philosophy to untangle the mess in her mind, but after wading through a couple of tomes she discovered that Heidegger was even more confused than she was.

  Realising there was no other choice left for her, she made up her mind once and for all to take her life during a suicide attempt.

  ‘If only everyone could get on with each other!’ she cried.

  She wanted to go and talk to the painter, the man she both loved and pitied. But ever since he started looking after the three-legged dog, he seemed to have lost interest in her. All she could do now was write her play, incorporate him into the narrative (whether he liked it or not), then kill herself for him, to fill the emptiness in her soul.

  Her play embarrassed her. She was afraid of looking back over what she had written because she knew there was little difference between her life and her script. Looking back would have been tantamount to returning to her past. The self in the script was tainted with all her own traits and experiences. She grew accustomed to calling the woman in her script ‘I’.

  As the weeks passed, she felt like an old bunch of grapes that was fermenting in the sticky mess of life, waiting to distil into a pur
e and transparent wine, then evaporate into thin air.

  ‘The vagina is a very depraved dance-floor,’ she scribbled in her notebook.

  Her thoughts drifted back over the last decade. The painter was probably her longest-staying partner on this dance-floor. The other men who turned up occasionally, including the professional writer, the blood donor and a friend from drama college, only stayed long enough to dance a tango or a jig before retreating into the background. Although she was unwilling to include these minor characters into her play, she couldn’t wipe them from her memory, and in the end they somehow or other managed to find their way onto the page. As she constantly oscillated between her script and her life, her mind became confused and feverish.

  When she was not working on her play, the emptiness that engulfed her at dawn, at midday, and especially on summer afternoons, dragged her spirits down. She suspected that her writing was merely an excuse to waste time. ‘Everything I bring to completion is dull and meaningless,’ she wrote to herself several times.

  But she needed to keep writing. Although she knew she had little control over her actions, she sensed she was somehow participating in them. She suspected that the professional writer was secretly writing about her, and this increased her unease.

  ‘It’s God’s fault. He is the cause of all this trouble,’ she cried out from her script. ‘Why does He punish me in this way? First I lived within His lies, then I lived within my own. Now I’m not sure whether all of this is just a lie too. I have to assume that everyone feels this way. You ask me why I lie. Well I could ask you, “Why should I not lie?” Have you not heard any of His lies yet?’

  Once she had calmed down a little, she lowered her head and thought for a while, then started to plan the stage design for her play.

  ‘The backdrop of the stage is a single piece of hardboard,’ she wrote in her notebook. ‘If there is a clock in the props department, hang it up. If not, paint one, but make sure to attach metal dials to it. When the clock strikes the hour, the stagehands must rush behind the hardboard and turn the dials to eleven. (A mark should be painted behind the clock to show them how far to turn.)

  ‘Dress: The female lead should wear one of the chiffon nightgowns criticised in the latest Open Door Policy memorandum. If the club’s Party secretary permits, the top three buttons can be left undone and the sleeves rolled up a little. Deal with this matter in accordance with current levels of reform. The chairs should date from before the campaign against the “Four Olds”. The Party secretary must understand that the female lead is corrupted by the evils of Bourgeois Liberalisation, and is not fit to sit on a revolutionary-style chair. The table in the corner of the room can be fake.’

  From the piles of paper on her desk, she picked up a few pages of script and started reading them aloud. It was a scene in which her alter ego, Su Su, is visited by Li Liao and Old Xing – two characters based respectively on the professional writer and the blood donor.

  A small single room in the actors’ quarters above the Jiefang District art centre.

  LI LIAO: [Knocks on the door.] Su Su! [Knocks again.] It’s me! [SU SU gets up slowly from her chair and walks towards the door.] I waited two hours for you in the restaurant. I thought something must have happened to you.

  [LI LIAO walks in and stands beside SU SU’s chair. His lined face resembles a walnut. SU SU averts her gaze and links her hands across her chest.]

  LI LIAO: What’s the matter? [He notices the awkward expression on her face.]

  SU SU: Old Xing’s just been round.

  LI LIAO: So?

  SU SU: I said yes to him. I said I would marry him.

  [The actor playing LI LIAO can improvise on his expression here, but should not resort to knocking the chair over.]

  LI LIAO: We’ve been seeing each other for nearly a year now, and we’ve never had a row. Why would you want to marry him?

  SU SU: The fact is, I don’t love you.

  LI LIAO: But you told me you loved me.

  SU SU: So what? Why do you believe everything I say? Didn’t you say yourself that women are incapable of telling the truth?

  LI LIAO: I have grown used to the way your words differ from your actions. In fact, I’m starting to find it quite sweet.

  SU SU: I’m sorry, women are made of salt, not sugar …

  Su Yun carried the pages to her bed and lay down. In the rehearsal room below, the art centre’s orchestra was tuning up. She lit a cigarette with one hand and continued reading the script.

  LI LIAO: How can you marry him? Do you really think he’s better than me? When he stands up straight, he doesn’t even reach your shoulders. Is it because he’s got money, and his pockets are stuffed with Foreign Exchange Certificates and egg ration tickets? Or are you playing one of your little games? Is this just another act?

  The orchestra below swelled in a sudden crescendo. It sounded like an earthquake. Above the roar, a soprano belted out flirtatiously: ‘The girls are as pretty as flowers. How the men love to gaze upon them! …’

  Su Yun could no longer hear herself speak. She repeated: ‘Is this just another act?’ at the top of her voice, but the words were drowned by the music.

  She listened to the French horns and trombones struggling to play in unison. The drums were so loud they made the floorboards shake and the old lamp on her desk flicker. She noticed an eye of the white cat in the framed picture on her wall turn from blue to red.

  LI LIAO: What did I do wrong?

  SU SU: Don’t ask, don’t ask. [She is almost shouting now, but her expression is still calm.] We should call it a day. I stopped loving you ages ago. I only said I loved you when I was caught in the heat of the moment. It didn’t count.

  LI LIAO: Does what you say now count?

  SU SU: Yes.

  LI LIAO: I don’t believe you! I’ve heard you say all this a hundred times before.

  [They glare ferociously at one another. SU SU’s fierce expression is out of keeping with her flowery nightgown. The stagehands should prepare to turn the dials to eleven when the clock strikes the hour.]

  SU SU: It’s getting late, you should be on your way.

  [Just as LI LIAO is about to storm off stage, OLD

  XING walks through the door. This man is short and deathly pale. He is dressed in a Western suit and platform heels. Standing next to him, LI LIAO looks like a tramp in his tattered shirt and scruffy plimsolls. OLD XING leans down, pulls out a present from his bag and, with both hands, offers it to SU SU.]

  OLD XING: This is for you. It’s a pack of imported cigarettes.

  SU SU: Thank you. Don’t bother taking your shoes off. Come in, come in!

  ‘Our glorious Motherland. The place I grew up. On this infinite expanse of . . .’ As the soprano paused for breath, Su Yun shouted out again: ‘Come in, come in!’ The soprano belted out a final ‘Aaaah’ as the drums rolled into a frenetic climax, then suddenly a magical calm descended upon the room – a calm similar to the relief one feels after revealing one’s naked body to another person for the first time. Su Yun lowered her voice to a whisper.

  LI LIAO: So when did you accept his proposal?

  SU SU: An hour ago.

  LI LIAO: Well that’s that then.

  SU SU: I have the right to choose my own path in life.

  LI LIAO: Yes, but you have no right to lie.

  ‘This is not true,’ Su Yun scribbled fiercely across her script, under the words ‘I said I would marry him’.

  In fact, she had never loved either of these two men. She had only got involved with them because she wanted to make the painter jealous and stir him from his apathy. But her acting skills were still quite rudimentary at the time, and she had little understanding of her role. In reality, all she wanted was a chance to flaunt her female charms and entwine men in her web of lies. In this world, lies are unavoidable, and are sometimes very useful. Men presume that women only cry when they are upset, but women know very well that their tears fall as easily as piss.

 
She wiped her tears dry, put her pen down and stared at herself in the mirror: a little taller than the average woman, a pair of big dark eyes that attracted the gaze of every passing man. As far as she was concerned, her beauty was only of use to men, it was a nuisance to herself (although she would have been upset if people had ceased to look at her). She knew that, from an early age, she had been forced to employ a large portion of her energies fending off the lecherous advances of her male admirers, and had consequently lost sight of the more important things she should have been doing with her life.

  But writing the play gave her a sense of inner worth. As she continued to work on her script, the men in her life left her dance-floor and retreated to their seats in the corner. At last she was able to take the lead role and march forward with her head held high. She trod on air. Now, each man she encountered seemed as dull as wax. The triumphant expression on their faces after they had slept with her filled her with disgust. Love always ends in failure, she told herself at the end of each affair.

  ‘Who do you think you are? You wretch!’ she scribbled to herself in the margins of her script.

  One night, on the back of her script she wrote a letter to the painter:

  My sweetheart, the time has come for us to part. Will you ever know how much I loved you? Life is an illusion, only you are real. The one thing my suicide will prove is that I am a failure, and that I have nothing to my name. When I was with you, my hands were filled with petals of love. Without thinking, I tossed them in the air and the wind carried them away.

  The characters in her play and in her life exhausted her. She tried to guess what the professional writer who was composing a story about her had planned for her future. She tried to guess what she herself had planned for her future, and who would end up killing whom. This state of being calm on the outside but restless within put her in mind of two actors she had seen swimming across the television screen dressed in heavy octopus costumes. She could sense the pain it had caused them to move so slowly and seemingly at ease. She was now living in the calm that heralds the approach of middle age. She knew that time was running out, and wished that she or the writer would quickly bring her story to an end and consign her to oblivion.