The Noodle Maker

by Ma Jian

  He had a face that indicated he was not suited to manual labour. It was heart-shaped, and as white as the moon. His lips were as moist and red as those of a young girl – although this was probably an early sign of tuberculosis. The whites of his eyes were yellow. He often smiled for no reason. When he was listening to the old woman’s story, and later writing the letter for her, the smile had never once left his face.

  As he sat beneath the light bulb staring at the brick wall, his thoughts turned to Chi Hui, a girl he had been writing to for one of his clients. Although he developed strong feelings for almost every woman he wrote to, it was to Chi Hui that his mind returned most frequently. Thinking about her, he felt his spirit take flight like a plastic bag dancing in the wind. In the past, thoughts of her made him reflect on maple leaves in spring, the smell of foreign cigarettes, the similarity between urethras and the gutters on the streets, or a couple embracing casually as they emerge from the public latrines. But the old woman’s words had upset his usual pattern of thought, and his mind became confused.

  (In the late dusk, the professional writer often sees the street writer stumbling across the intersection in the centre of town. It always strikes him that he has the eyes of an insecure youth, the balding head of a middle-aged man, the wrinkled brow of a sixty-year-old and the body of a child. He has no idea what’s going through his mind, but he longs to find out. Perhaps this is why he always keeps an eye out for him on the streets.)

  ‘The Absurd is more real than life itself,’ the street writer scribbled on the corner of his newspaper.

  The letters he composed revealed nothing of his true character. In each one, he adopted a different voice. He could take on the role of a lawyer, a schoolgirl, a peasant, or a widow. He could be anyone, no matter what age or gender. If one had to fix an identity to him, one would have to say he was a composite of all the roles he assumed. Each letter was a new beginning for him, an opportunity to try out a new persona. Sometimes he felt as though he were skating on ice, in random overlapping circles. He knew where he had started from, but had no idea where he was going.

  In the morning, he lodged complaints on behalf of plaintiffs, in the afternoon he wrote rebuttals for the defendants. He would write passionate professions of love, but would often have to pen the rejection notes that followed. He couldn’t help feeling sad for the people whose love he helped turn down. He lived his life through his letters. Late at night when all was quiet, the words he had written would chum inside him like grass in a cow’s stomach. Among the piles of paper on his desk was the draft of a letter he had written the week before, which started: ‘Dear Comrade Chi Hui, It’s time we put an end to our relationship (although it saddens me deeply) …’ The street writer remembered having to beg his client to allow him to add the phrase in brackets. He had written thirty-five love letters to Chi Hui for this client, and had experienced the anxiety of the first declaration of love, the steamy passion that ensued, opposition from the girl’s father and work unit, the attempted transfer of residency permits, a brief affair with a third party, a weepy reconciliation, and now the final break-up. He was tortured by the thought of the pain he had caused Chi Hui. He felt a sudden urge to betray his feckless young client, and disclose to Chi Hui all the young man’s hidden faults. What troubled him most was that the day after he wrote the final letter to Chi Hui, this fool asked him to write a letter to a new girl.

  He turned the draft letter over, picked up his pen and wrote: ‘I can see your sad little face, your raven-black hair blowing in the wind. There are tears in your eyes. How could he have broken up with you so cruelly? Do you realise that I helped him write that letter to you? You should see his handwriting – it’s a disgrace! You have been in my thoughts all year. I have read every letter you sent back to him, my darling.’ (Even though he wrote love letters for a living, a blush always rose to his face when he used terms of affection like this.)

  Turning the page over again, he read: ‘You mean nothing to me now. You only chose to go out with me because Yuci had dumped you. I just filled the gap. Yuci showed me the letters you wrote him. They were much more loving than the ones you sent me.’ Then, in his own note to Chi Hui he wrote: ‘I wrote that letter myself, word for word. Chi Hui, I can’t bear to think of you reading it. I’m terrified that you might get hold of some sleeping pills. If only I could fly to you twice as fast as that damn letter to stop it contaminating your hands.’

  Flicking to the other side again, he read: ‘You depress me. And so does your dull family. I feel like a corpse when I’m with you. Your graceful exterior cannot hide the ugly scars left by your terrorised childhood.’

  ‘I love your charming gestures, Chi Hui,’ he continued on the other side (even though he had never seen this girl who lived a thousand kilometres away). ‘I love your family, I love your frailty. Your background and character happen to match mine exactly.’ He paused for a moment, overcome by a momentary sense of pride, then continued: ‘Of all the young ladies I’ve seen …’ (his clients sometimes showed him photographs of their loved ones) ‘you are the most beautiful. You have the melancholy air that is characteristic of our classical “fragile beauties”. We are both thin and weak. We should spend our lives together in sickness, tending to one another’s needs. When I look at you, I see the first snow of winter falling on my home town, the frosted windows of a wooden cabin, a cup of steaming milk tea. Oh, I can’t forgive myself for writing those cruel letters to you!’ On the other side, he had berated her gourd-shaped face and lifeless expression. ‘I have corresponded with you for a whole year. How can I just abandon you now in such a heartless way? I must be mad!’

  He turned the sheet back and forth. He knew both sides of it were real, and that he was trapped in between. He was aware that he’d made some progress, though. Ten years ago, he was a feeble young man who was prone to tears and could only digest minute quantities of food. Now, however, he was a mature man of thirty with a range of complex emotions. As a boy, he only liked to watch sad films. When he saw the heroine die in the Korean film The Flower Girl, he cried in front of his classmates. He was always drawn to people with scars on their bodies, because he knew that each scar represented a moment of pain.

  He continued his note to Chi Hui: ‘I longed to have a scar as a child, but I was sixteen before I finally succeeded in cutting myself. My inertia and lethargy have prevented me from achieving anything of great importance in life. Perhaps my poor digestion and weak heart are to blame. I chose to become a street writer because I thought it would cure me of my loneliness, but now I find myself vexed by a multitude of worries. These anxieties are bad for my health. Whether I see parents saying goodbye to their children at a train station, or a group of friends chatting and laughing, I always feel a wave of nausea.’

  After a brief hesitation, he went on: ‘I often feel I’m so light that I could drift into the sky. To prevent this happening, I keep lumps of metal in my pockets to weigh me down. Sometimes, my feet seem to leave the ground. I’m so small and thin, I wonder why the wind hasn’t carried me away yet.’ He stopped again, sensing that he was now just writing to himself. He knew that in the end, he always managed to disappear from the page. He could be whatever people needed him to be, but he was never able to enter their lives.

  As the street writer sits under the lamplight, we can examine his haggard face and slowly vanishing body. (In his notes, the professional writer often remarks on the street writer’s smile and premature wrinkles. Anyone who has grown up in a fishing village will immediately picture the street writer as a shrimp that has just been scooped from the sea.) His frail and sickly appearance allowed him to melt into the background, but it didn’t stop his business from flourishing. His skills were in great demand. Illiterate migrants who settled in the town’s new district were grateful for his service, as it enabled them to pass themselves off as locals. Young people who had left school early also relied on him to fill the gaps in their education. They milled around him all day. He would smile
knowingly as they passed on to him all the latest gossip about their neighbours. He received information faster than the speed of a telegram, and was the first person people turned to if they wanted to know what had happened that day.

  ‘Have you seen that cat again?’ people asked as they passed him on the street corner. His knowledge concerning the notorious ‘foreign cat incident’ had made him famous throughout the town. A foreign cat the size of a dog had escaped from a chemical plant run by a Sino-Western joint venture. The plant’s delivery driver, Old Sun, was one of the first to hear about the escape. Since he knew that the cat often scurried past the street writer, Old Sun asked him if he’d seen it recently. The street writer then divulged all the information he had picked up about the case. He told him that because the foreign cat had one blue eye and one red eye, and could say ‘Good-bye’, Good morning’, ‘Long live Chairman Mao’ and ‘Pig’ in English, it was arrested, interrogated, and detained on charges of foreign espionage. The police discovered a bugging device and telegraph transmitter fixed to its tail, and behind its eye a miniature camera that had been secretly photographing the dark side of China’s socialist system. The curious thing, though, was that during its interrogation by two officials from the National Security Department, it cried out ‘Long live Chairman Mao.’ The reactionary spy was clearly trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The night they were preparing to escort the cat to Beijing, it bit through its chains and escaped. The street writer said he had seen it several times, scampering past him then disappearing over the high wall across the road. It was a year later before the police officers finally tracked the cat down and beat it to death with wooden sticks.

  The street writer would work late into the night, classifying the drafts he had written during the day, and attaching notes to them. The notes might remind him to ask the client for details of their family background and political status, in case the police decided to check his records. In the new urban district that resembled a plaster stuck over an old wound, he had become acquainted with many important people, including the director of the Party committee of the Industrial and Commercial Management Department, and a poultry farmer who had been selected as the local representative to the National People’s Congress. The illiterate farmer received sackloads of letters exposing various crimes and cases of official corruption, as well as applications for residency transfers. The poor delegate could be seen every day, tramping up and down the streets on his way to discuss one of the multitude of disputes he had been called upon to solve. His suit grew dirtier and his back more bent by the day. Children walking home from school would trail behind him and chant:

  Little old man with a crooked back

  Falls in a dung pit and picks up a cowpat …

  If he was not sleeping or writing letters for his clients, the street writer’s mind would always turn to the draft love letters piled on his desk. To him, they were the most precious things in his life. They contained descriptions of his loved ones, declarations of passion sprinkled with a few obscene words that, since the Open Door Policy, no longer condemned one to a life in prison – words like ‘love’, ‘soft lips’, ‘the sun around which I revolve’ and ‘melancholy’. He felt affection for every woman he wrote to, he poured his heart out to them. He kept not only the drafts of the letters he sent them, but also the letters they sent back to his clients. He developed a deep understanding of female emotions, and treasured the insight he gained into women’s most intimate thoughts.

  On summer evenings, when couples were strolling outside in the warm sea breeze, the street writer would lean over his desk, hard at work, the sweat pouring from his brow. The tasks his clients assigned him never fully satisfied his creative desires. In his bones he was a poet. When people fell in love in spring, as they invariably did, he employed all his poetic skills to fall in love on their behalf. When autumn drew in, he would write letters breaking off the affairs. If there were a thousand love letters in spring, he would have to write over nine hundred rejection letters in autumn. His life was very much tied to the seasons.

  His complicated love life made him nervous, and when he returned to his shed each day, he would check every corner of the room to see whether someone was hiding there. The search took nearly half an hour to complete, because the previous owner had crammed the corners with planks of wood that he had planned to make furniture with. There were also six or seven boxes filled with burial clothes, paper lanterns and incense coils, and under the bed that took up a third of the room was another heap of odds and ends. When he lay on the bed at night, he always worried about what was hidden below, and whether someone had sneaked underneath to spy on him. Before entering the shed, he would stick his ear to the front door and listen for any noises. He kept a hammer under his pillow so that he could deal with anything that might appear at the foot of his bed at night. He made marks on the wooden boxes, and checked them regularly to ensure that nothing had been moved. In a secret drawer of his wardrobe, he hid the letters he wrote to his clients’ women in which he expressed to them his undying love. Of course, he never posted them. They were the most personal and truthful letters he ever wrote.

  As time went by, he became increasingly anxious about the content of these secret letters. Sometimes he would sneak one out from the bottom drawer and cross out a few lines before returning it carefully to its place. From a letter he wrote to Chi Hui, he erased the line: ‘Oh life, you move too fast. Take my hand, and stay for a while, and tell me what you’re all about.’ A scrap of paper he tore from another letter and consigned to the bin was marked with the words: ‘This ink pen has written letters to you for seven years. It understands me, forgives me. You can ask it any question you like, if you harbour any doubts about my love for you.’ Another rejected passage read: ‘Women hold an irresistible attraction for me. With one of you by my side, I feel warm and at peace. You radiate waves that seep into every part of my body. Whether I am sitting on the corner of the street or in the back of a cinema, just one glimpse of the downy hairs on your skin sends me into a rapture.’

  He stared at the long shadow on the wall above the chest in the corner of the room. ‘It really does look like a policeman tonight,’ he told himself. He had often thought of clearing the shed of all its clutter, including the planks of wood, but he was never at home during the day, and he was afraid that at night the noise would draw the attention of the neighbours and police.

  One morning, however, he decided to stay in and give his room a thorough clean. He tore down the red cloth that hung along the centre of the bed and put it away in the chest. He then gave the table and walls a lick of paint, and decorated the room with new calendars printed with pictures of auspicious red crowned cranes and photographs of the film star Liu Xiaoqing. When he lay in bed that evening, the room seemed much more welcoming. That night he slept so well, he ejaculated in his dreams.

  At three or four in the morning, he was woken by a soft, muffled noise. He opened his eyes and saw a long, thin shadow flitting around the room.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, beads of sweat dripping from his furrowed brow. Now he could see the shadow was an old hag with long white hair and ingot-shaped shoes.

  ‘That incinerator was too hot,’ the shadow said, humming like a mosquito. ‘I’m looking for a piece of cloth that hasn’t faded yet.’ She bent down and rummaged inside the chest.

  ‘This is my home!’ he replied, breaking into a sweat.

  The flickering apparition laughed. ‘Had! But I have lived here all my life! I know every corner of this room like the back of my hand. When the dirty handkerchief under your pillow was new, I used to keep my ring inside it. Have you taken a look under the bed yet?’

  The street writer shook his head from side to side, and discovered he was still alive, and that the old hag flitting before his eyes was alive too. The strands of black hair on his balding head stood up on end. He opened his mouth, his tongue thirsting for a drop of water.

  ‘What’s under the bed?’ h
e asked. He watched the old hag move towards him, then lower herself, or rather fall, onto the bed. ‘What a pathetic creature you are,’ she hummed. ‘You’re as thin as a matchstick. How much longer are you planning to stay here?’

  ‘But I live here,’ he said to the dim and blurry face. These words soothed his nerves, and soon the hairs on his head drooped back down onto his scalp. He suspected that he was speaking to a ghost. This was a regular occurrence for him. He had been visited by the ghosts of the Virgin Mary and Chairman Mao, a girl he had seen in a magazine, and a woman with small feet who had walked past him on the street. One night, when the spirit of a policeman who had harassed him a few years previously paid a visit, he slapped his face and knocked his helmet off. Who knows, maybe this muddle-headed old woman was just another of those ghosts. He attempted to get out of bed, just as he’d done when he went to slap the policeman, but his legs couldn’t stop shaking.

  ‘You little worm,’ the old hag said, in the same harsh tone she used with her son. ‘You’re like a maggot burrowing into a corpse. You run into our shed every night, pretending to be mad, always calling out some woman’s name. In a few thousand days, those girls will be like the old housewives you see outside, dragging their children down the street. Even the freshest face will one day resemble a chunk of salted gammon. All women become smelly and clumsy in middle age. Why didn’t you listen to what the mother of that actress told you? Why are you still here, wasting your time writing those obscene letters?’