The Noodle Maker

by Ma Jian

  As the old hag sank to the floor, he heard a rustling noise from inside the chest. Two mice scuttled out from under the bed and jumped into the lowest drawer of his desk.

  ‘Why not put an end to it now? You’ll have to go sooner or later, so you might as well get it over with. Ha! I see our belongings are still here. At least you haven’t stolen anything.’ The rustling noise came to a stop. He put his hand over his lungs and heart to check whether he was still alive. When all the sounds died down, he sat up in his bed, turned the light on and waited for dawn to break.

  Early next morning, he returned to his corner of the street. It was a fine day. He could tell there was no wind because the plastic bag wasn’t moving and the white clouds in the sky were perfectly still. Squatting down against the wall, he hunched his shoulders and wondered why his spirits were so low. Perhaps he was upset by the old hag who had pestered him last night, or by what the mother of the actress had told him the week before, or perhaps the strain of writing so many letters every day was finally taking its toll. Having lived away from his family so long, his thoughts often drifted back to his hometown, although the sight of the white plastic bag always flicked him back to the present as fast as the snap of a rubber band. Now, as he squatted in the corner, he remembered how, as a child, when the maple leaves were turning red, he had walked up to a tree, his eyes brimming with tears, pulled out a pencil and carved into the trunk the words ‘Help me! Help me!’ Even from an early age, he liked to write down words to express what was on his mind. He remembered standing for hours in front of a shop counter gazing at the fountain pens he couldn’t afford to buy; running all day along the banks of a river after his mother had slapped him in front of his classmates; secretly grieving for a girl next door who had committed suicide; pulling out the first shoots of grass in spring and rolling naked over the bare earth.

  Now, as a man of thirty, he felt that the hopes that each new spring had promised were empty and deceitful. He had discovered that the stages of his life’s journey were in fact as neatly mapped out as the Chinese characters on the pages of his draft letters. He knew he presented a pitiful sight, and that his mind was filled with dry and meaningless memories. The old hag who had badgered him last night was right – he was a piece of scum, stuck by gob to the street corner.

  He picked up his pen. Whatever happened, he knew he had to write. Two peasants who had asked him to draw up a complaint were standing patiently by his side. They had travelled into town to report that their village Party secretary had murdered a widow and her children. After the street writer finished the letter, he helped them post it and invited them for a meal. When the peasants looked up at him gratefully from the restaurant table and squeezed the white dumplings in their trembling black hands, thoughts filled his mind once more. He had seen many peasants like them before, on the trains he took back to his hometown. They lived like cockroaches, scuttling from one place to the next, struggling to make a living. He thought of how, when they sat in the trains, the smells of rancid food wafting from their fake leather bags would merge with the stench from the toilets at the end of the carriage.

  Whenever he returned home, he felt as frail and vulnerable as a silkworm that had just shed its cocoon. His residency permit would forever be fixed to his place of birth; he had no back-door connections to help him apply for a transfer. The only way he could survive in this coastal town was to melt into the background. He seldom entered shops, and only visited the public showers once a month, making sure to sneak in just before closing time. He only dared fetch water from his outside tap in the middle of the night. To avoid washing his clothes and then having to hang them out to dry, he just scraped the oil and dirt from shirt collars every four days with the blade of his letter knife. He took his meals at one dumpling stall whose owner he trusted. He always left his shed early in the morning, before any of his neighbours were up. He was amazed he had managed to survive all these years without raising any serious alarms.

  ‘Look at her make-up! She looks like a painted eggshell!’ he mumbled, staring at a woman passing by on the street. He was shocked by this comment. He buried his head in his hands, grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled: ‘I really have gone mad this time. Nothing seems real.’ As the nib of his pen scratched across the page, the image of himself as a child flashed through his mind again. He saw himself aged six, climbing out of a box, looking up with large moist eyes and crying, ‘Let go of me! I can get out by myself.’ He grabbed the child and placed him down on the ground. The boy crawled across the floor, and suddenly one of his legs fell off. Then his head fell off, and rolled towards the beam of light slanting through the window. ‘You’re not real,’ he said, walking over to the child and digging out the eyes from his face. He then saw the child’s eyes displayed in a shop window. A fat woman bought the eyes and walked off with them, and he chased after her through a maze of narrow streets. It was a dream that had recurred for thirteen years.

  ‘Those eyes see everything,’ he often sighed, when he woke up from this dream. ‘When I rise into the sky, I will fly like a bird.’

  Walking home at night in the lamplight, he often saw the dismembered child falling to the ground like a feather. But tonight, as he approached the intersection in the centre of town, the old hag’s words still racing through his mind, his thoughts cleared, and a terrible sense of guilt descended upon him. He felt ashamed of his dishonest profession, and all the love he had helped destroy. He had wanted to lead an honest life, but there was no place for honesty in this town.

  In the silent hours before dawn, he was still awake, writing at his desk.

  ‘Only through suffering can man gain wisdom. People who have never suffered are incapable of growing up. Happiness is a wooden cabin one finds after a long and difficult journey; people who take the easy path never get to see it. The unhappiness I’ve suffered in the past has been other people’s unhappiness. It has left no mark on me.’

  When the rake-thin street writer saw the truth at last he laughed out loud. He thought about what the mother of the actress had told him, and about the hundreds of love letters he had written. Although his clients had exploited his creative skills, they had supplied him with a great deal of knowledge. The women’s intimate revelations had allowed the virginal street writer to mature gracefully. He realised that he had finally overcome his shyness and embarrassment, and that it was now time for him to seek out his own love. Stunned by this idea, he jumped onto his bed and stood still for a moment. He was elated. He would never have believed that the day might come for him to embark on a real love affair of his own.

  ‘But whom shall I love?’ he asked himself. Blushing, he thought of Chi Hui, the young woman from a distant province to whom he had written passionate love letters for an entire year. A fortnight ago, he had been ready to strangle his client for all the pain he had caused her. The love that had fallen from her letters like snowflakes had made him dizzy with confusion.

  He pushed the cynical words of the actress’s mother to the back of his mind, sat down on the ground and leafed through all the correspondence relating to Chi Hui. A strange passion welled up in his heart. He wanted to conduct a love affair with a woman all by himself. He wanted to suffer the agonies of love. He wanted to kiss someone, conquer them, adore them. He wanted a woman of flesh and bone. A thin layer of sweat moistened his face. He laughed with delight as he looked through the drafts of the letters he had sent Chi Hui. He realised he loved her, that perhaps he had always loved her. In these letters, he had written descriptions of her beautiful hair, teeth, dimples and breasts, and between each word and every line he had left traces of his love.

  He rose to his feet and walked to his desk. An immense joy seemed to fill the room. The hitherto numb nerve endings in his groin and thighs suddenly came alive. His mind clouded, his chest ached with anticipation, his pulse quickened a beat. He imagined smiling coyly as Chi Hui shook her head at him. He scooped a pile of Chi Hui’s letters into his arms and jumped back onto the b
ed. He ran his tongue over his upper lip, stretched one leg in front of the other and chuckled contentedly.

  Hearing a soft knock at the door, he quickly swallowed his laugh. Experience had taught him that the sound of laughter always attracted the police. He fastened his belt, and like a man who has been summoned for interrogation, opened the door with his head hung low. A figure, smelling both stale and sweet, darted inside, slammed the door and stood in front of him. Through his eyelashes, the street writer recognised the face of the actress’s mother. She twisted her large mouth into a smile, and gazed at him with eyes that were as deep and narrow as the eyes of a leopard.

  ‘It’s you …’ he whispered, terrified and confused.

  ‘My daughter committed suicide last night. She never listened to my advice.’ The old woman edged closer and wrapped her arms around him.

  He had no time to put up a struggle. The old woman carried the frail, tubercular street writer to the bed, and pressed her wine-stained lips over his mouth. The next image that shot through his mind was not Chi Hui and her flowing locks, or the policeman who had harassed him on the street corner – it was the old woman’s dark eyes glinting in the lamplight. Then his mind went blank and all he could see was a white plastic bag floating in the still air. Suddenly, he felt his tiny body, like a puff of breath, plunge into a dark vat of grease. He tried to free himself from the old woman’s grip, but before he could summon the energy, the lights went out, everything went black, and he could no longer see a thing.

  Let the Mirror Be the Judge or Naked

  The professional writer sees the girl running naked down the street, her drooping nipples as sad and lonely as the eyes of a blind man. In his mind, he still confuses this girl with the entrepreneur’s mother, whose personality seems to have seeped into many of the characters of his unwritten novel.

  The girl’s breasts were large, plump, heavy, soft and pendulous. Women see these fleshy protrusions as tools for flirtation and nurture; for men, they are the inspiration for a multitude of criminal thoughts. Erudite students refer to them as bosoms; artists portray them as pink-tipped peaches; peasants merely regard them as objects that droop to the stomach and are grabbed hold of when babies need a feed. In the villages, men get to see naked breasts all the time; for them a bare breast is as unremarkable as a bare arm. But as soon as these protrusions enter the towns, they become objects of immense value. Modern women mystify them, hiding them inside tight brassieres. Photographers are always careful when they aim their cameras at a woman’s chest, because they know that too much cleavage can lay them open to accusations of ‘Bourgeois Liberalism’, and consign them to a four-year stint in prison.

  The more daring contemporary writers refer to them variously as ‘curvaceous pillows’, ‘tender dumplings’, ‘rose petals’, ‘ripe grapes’ and my longed-for refuge’. When describing the experience of touching a breast for the first time, they claim they ‘joined the immortals’, ‘fainted with delight’, ‘tottered on the precipice between life and death’. As a reaction against this sentimentality, avant-garde writers prefer to use words like ‘tits’, ‘knockers’ and ‘withered strawberries’.

  With the advent of the Open Door Policy, a few facts about breasts have entered the public consciousness:

  Large, round breasts signify a virtuous wife and able mother. Good marrying material.

  Medium-sized, pert breasts with pale pink nipples signify the ideal mistress. (Breasts like these make artists drool with desire.)

  Wobbly or drooping breasts, whether large or small, indicate a woman who has indulged excessively in sensual pleasures, and is past her prime.

  Women with very small breasts are usually chaste and demure, and tend to be highly intelligent. Their lack of self-esteem produces a particular sensitivity, and they often show a talent for poetry or academic work. When attempting to seduce a man, they drape themselves in loose garments, turn the lights down and whisper sweet words into his ear. They gaze up at him affectionately, and try to divert his eyes away from their chest to their shapely legs, full lips, soft hands, flowing hair, or gracefully arched eyebrows. They secretly buy themselves breast pumps – a product available on the market since the Open Door Policy – and as soon as they return home, they bolt their doors and start pumping. A local department store received two thousand pumps one day, and sold out in under two hours.

  A Japanese businessman investigated the Chinese breast market and decided to open the town’s first cosmetic surgery. Women were offered injections of fluid that swelled the breasts for three days. During this time, their boyfriends could fondle and squeeze them without causing any pain. These injections were ideal for women who were approaching their wedding night, or a date which promised a night of passion. The clinic was also able to heighten flat noses, cut creases into hooded eyelids, smooth out wrinkles, pluck bushy eyebrows into elegant thin lines, or remove the eyebrows completely and replace them with tattooed arches. If you were unhappy with the size of your chin, width of your forehead, shape of your teeth or mouth, they could help you put them right too.

  A few months later, the papers reported news of a great advance in scientific discovery. Following a hundred days of experiments, Chinese scientists had successfully produced a breast-enlarging cream. One technician carelessly smeared some of the product over her mouth during the tests, and a few minutes later her lips swelled to double their previous size. The manufacturers claimed that if a flat-chested woman rubbed two jars of the cream onto her chest, she would develop breasts the size of small dumplings. The papers also mentioned that foreign scientists had created a breast-enlarging technique that entails stuffing sacs of sticky translucent fluid inside the skin above the ribcage.

  It seems that breasts play a very important part in our lives.

  The young woman who had recently been assigned to the town’s Cultural Propaganda Department owned the type of breasts that signify a good wife and able mother. When she was at university, the sight of her breasts caused male students to walk straight into the trees and lampposts by the side of the road. When she entered the cafeteria, the male students dropped their chopsticks, overcome with lust and awe. She realised that she was one in a thousand, the owner of two priceless treasures. But she also knew that she would have to spend the rest of her life worrying about when to hide them and when to show them off. She could close her eyes and be able to guarantee that her figure was more attractive and shapely than that of any of the girls surrounding her.

  She had not always been so proud of her breasts. When the two lumps of flesh started protruding from her chest, she assumed she had contracted some disease, and was too afraid to tell her mother. When she understood that she was in fact becoming a woman, she felt guilty and ashamed. She sensed the eyes of the crowd focus on the breasts that stuck out so visibly from her tight shirt and wobbled from side to side as she walked down the street. She found it hard to get used to the scrutiny of the crowd, and spent her early teenage years with her shoulders hunched.

  Women with pretty faces but flat chests know the importance of flicking their hair back flirtatiously. Some even learn to wiggle their bottoms when they walk past a man, expose some thigh when crossing their legs, or whisper suggestive words between their pink lacquered lips. Women who are neither pretty nor buxom have to rely on their intelligence, wide reading and refined manners if they want to arouse a man’s desire. But before she had even left university, this girl was already aware that her soft, pale breasts were destined to be the overriding reason for men’s interest in her, and the source of her future happiness. Having felt ashamed of them in the past, she now regarded them as mysterious and fascinating objects.

  After she graduated from university, she moved to this town and took up the job assigned to her by the Party. She was to spend every day in an office with the same four women and one man. Had she not suffered the problems she encountered during her first month, she could have retained her post until she was sixty-two years old, then retired peac
efully. It was a secure job. The first day she arrived in the office, the two cactus plants that had been hovering between life and death suddenly burst into a blaze of white flowers. The atmosphere immediately relaxed. She knew she was brimming with youth, and that each breath she exhaled filled the air with the scent of spring. Although her female colleagues felt secretly threatened by her arrival, they gave her a courteous welcome. But as soon as she left the room, they would start discussing whether her pale complexion was the result of an application of the imported ‘Snowflake’ cream, or whether her seemingly slender waist was in fact held in by a corset.

  ‘Her stomach looked a little wobbly,’ the elderly book-keeper informed the others after following the girl into the women’s toilets.

  The middle-aged translator looked up from her typewriter. ‘Her face is so plump she has dimples in her cheeks already,’ she said. ‘When I turned forty, the skin on my face was still tight and smooth.’

  ‘Not yet twenty years old, and she’s already got the breasts of a matron,’ Chairwoman Fan, the fifty-five-year-old virgin smirked. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s had an abortion.’

  The young secretary who had recently married joined in and said, ‘Maybe she’s injected them with something.’

  ‘It looks to me like she’s been rubbing them with cream,’ the old virgin opined, returning to her seat by the window. ‘Or else, she’s let too many men squeeze them. Why else would they be so big?’ If you had been observing Chairwoman Fan closely, you would have noticed a malicious spark in her eyes. She had worked at her desk by the window in the corner of the room for the last thirty years. Before the girl with big breasts arrived in the office, she had never bothered to engage in idle chatter with her colleagues. No one ever dared approach her desk, or even so much as glance out of her side of the window. She always ensured that the half of the window that her desk touched was kept immaculately clean. She stuck a ‘No Smoking’ sign over the top pane, and hung a length of cloth over the two lower panes to block out the sun’s rays that hit her desk in the afternoon. Her corner of the room always smelt of wet galoshes and moth balls. The girl with big breasts was assigned the desk opposite her. From the old virgin’s vantage point, the girl’s bosoms did indeed look extraordinarily large. They protruded so far, they seemed as though they were about to attack the desk.