by Tash Aw
Yanyan shook her head and laughed. “I got fired. That’s why I need someone to share the rent.”
Phoebe looked out the window and saw the same view that she had seen earlier, the deep hole of the construction site, the broad avenue cut by concrete bridges, the multicolored Liteful shopping center, the masses of people dragging heavy black bags full of cheap goods—a nowhere, could-be-anywhere place.
“I know the room’s a bit small,” Yanyan said, “but we can shift that chair and the TV and roll out the mattress.” She reached underneath the bed and attempted to drag something out, and Phoebe could see that it was a thin mattress rolled up and stuffed under the low bed.
“It’s okay,” Phoebe said, “we don’t have to do it now.” She calculated that with the mattress rolled out, there would be about a small handbag’s width between it and the bed. She wondered how long ago Yanyan had lost her job, how long now that she had spent her days waking up at midday, how long that she had let her hair get greasy and go unwashed, but it did not seem the right time to ask such questions.
Imagine your new splendid life, and it will soon come true!
Phoebe thought, It would be so easy to walk out of this tiny room. She could make up an excuse and say, I’m late for an appointment, but thank you for showing me the room; I’ll call you later once I’ve decided. She remained standing in the middle of the room, still clutching her bag. She did not know where else to go.
“Hey, are you hungry? It must be lunchtime now,” Yanyan said, looking around at the walls as if hoping to find a clock, but there wasn’t one.
Phoebe shook her head. “Don’t worry, please don’t go to any trouble. I’ve just arrived, I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“I’m starving—let’s have a simple lunch!” Yanyan insisted, and went to the cooking area.
Phoebe wondered what kind of meal she would prepare, and just thinking about lunch made her realize that she had not had breakfast; suddenly she felt so hungry, her stomach began to swell with an ache she had never experienced before. As she listened to the sounds of Yanyan busying herself in the kitchen—the sound of water from the tap drumming against the bottom of an empty kettle, the clang of steel against steel, the click-clack of chopsticks, Yanyan humming a little tune—Phoebe felt tired and in need of rest. She tried to think of the number of times someone had cooked a meal for her since she came to China, the number of times she had sat in someone’s home eating a meal, but not a single instance came to mind. She sat down on the bed and found the mattress thin but firm. The windows were open and she could hear the noise of the traffic, the nonstop beeping of scooters and the growl of buses. A cool wind was blowing and made the room feel airy. She looked across at Yanyan, whom she had not yet had a chance to scrutinize—a tall thin girl, scrawny, most would say, who walked with a stoop, which was a shame because her height would have given her a striking appearance were she not rapidly turning into a young hunchback. She could be beautiful, but instead she was mediocre. Maybe she would look at Phoebe and learn how to stand upright and keep her hair neat and stylish. Phoebe looked at Yanyan’s long unwashed hair, which shrouded her cheeks messily, making her look like a child who had recently awoken from a bad dream.
“Come, come, eat,” Yanyan said, and sat down next to her. She handed Phoebe a plastic bowl of instant noodles, spicy-seafood flavor. She had not torn off the cover properly, and when Phoebe brought the bowl to her mouth, little bits of paper tickled her lips.
“Hey, look!” cried Yanyan. She held up a cheap plastic toy—a key ring with a small blue plastic cat attached to it. When she pulled at the chain, the cat lifted a pair of chopsticks to its whiskery snout, greedily slurping some plastic noodles. “It came free with the packet of noodles. Here, take it—it’ll be your good-luck charm in Shanghai. It will help you get the best job in the world.”
Phoebe took the blue cat and put it in her handbag. She did not want it, but she did not want to hurt Yanyan either. She stirred her noodles with her chopsticks, watching the bits of freeze-dried vegetables slowly uncurling. They all looked the same—she never knew what vegetables they were supposed to be. Down in the construction site below, heavy works were starting up, and the deep booming sound of pile drivers resonated in her chest.
She wrote in her journal: Wind and rain are raging, I am shaking and swaying, but I must recover; I will rise up.
SHE SPENT A FEW days cleaning the apartment, wiping the black dust from the tops of the cupboards and scrubbing the lines of moss that were forming in the bathroom. She made sure that there was a good store of instant noodles and assorted biscuits in the kitchen, and when she was satisfied that her new home was in reasonable order, she began to think about her own appearance. She went to the fake-goods market at Zhongshan Science and Technology Park, even though she’d heard it was cheaper to buy counterfeit products on the Internet. The thing about luxury high-style goods was, you had to see what they were like in real life before knowing whether they would suit you; even she knew this. She spent a long time going from shop to shop, expressing interest in certain items before walking away, knowing that the same item would be on sale a few shops away and that the shopkeepers would be forced to come running out to the street after her to offer her lower prices than their competitors. First she selected a wallet made from glossy red leather with a gold clasp buckle, which even came in a box with the logo printed in gold above the words MADE IN ITALY. When she was bargaining with the shopkeeper, she said to him, You are so unscrupulous; you dare to say this is made in Italy, when everyone knows it’s fake. And the shopkeeper said, Little miss, it’s the truth! Don’t you know, Italy is full of factories owned by Chinese people, and those factories are full of Chinese workers producing large volumes of luxury goods! Phoebe did not fully believe this—she could not imagine entire towns and villages in Italy full of Chinese people stitching clothes and handbags and having nothing to do with the locals—but maybe it was true, maybe she now owned a genuine foreign-manufactured luxury item. Next she hesitated over a scarf with distinctive checks and some large shawls made from pure 100 percent pashmina, and since winter was around the corner she thought about buying a fashionable down jacket too, something in a bright shiny color that would make her look energetic and sporty and even give the impression that she had just come back from a holiday in an expensive snowy place like Hokkaido.
Finally she chose the most important item, a handbag. This is how people would judge her. From afar they would notice what kind of bag she was carrying and would decide if she were a person of class or not. She knew which kind of bag she wanted—it was the most desirable brand but also the most illegal of all the counterfeit products. Some of the shopkeepers thought she was a spy for the trading office and asked her many questions before admitting that they kept stocks of it. The difficulty in purchasing this bag excited her; she felt as if she was buying something very rare and exclusive, even though it was a fake. Eventually one shopkeeper pushed aside a wall lined with shelves to reveal a smaller room hidden behind the shelves, and behind this smaller room, which was filled with ordinary bags, there was another, even smaller room, and it was here that the bag she wanted was kept. There were two other women in that tiny room, examining the high-quality stylish bags with care. They were both executive-looking women wearing business clothes and carefully applied makeup, and being in that private space with them made Phoebe feel equally important. There was only one brand of bag in that room—the coveted LV brand—but in many styles and variations, the famous pattern and colored monogram repeating all over the walls and surrounding her like the very air she breathed, making her feel slightly giddy.
Phoebe took a long time before selecting the one she wanted, for even the fakes were expensive, and in the end she had to settle on the most inferior model and style. But it was still beautiful, she thought, as she walked out of the shop with the bag already on her shoulder. She had transferred some of the contents of her old bag into the new one and discarded
all the unwanted items in a bin outside the shop. When she looked at some of the things she’d thrown away—the cheap dried-up lipstick, a cracked mirror, a worker’s pass from one of her old jobs in Guangzhou—she wondered why she had carried those dead objects with her for so long.
She went to an Internet bar and made herself new profiles on QQ and MSN so that she could chat with people online—so that she could chat with men. Searching her email attachments, she found a nice photo of herself. It had been taken in Yuexiu Park in Guangzhou, but in the background there were only trees and lakes, so no one would look at the picture and make the link: Guangzhou, factory worker, immigrant. She remembered that day well: She had just left one job and was about to start another, but she had two days off in between and also some money saved up. She had dressed in nice jeans and a colorful T-shirt and taken the subway to the park as if she were having a day out with friends, only she did not have any friends. She bought red-bean shaved ice and ate it while strolling around the artificial lakes, watching the artists painting water-colors of goldfish and hilly landscapes and oil portraits of Hollywood actors. There were couples and families everywhere, and although she was on her own, she felt that she was one of them, that she was someone who had a past and a future—and life was only going to get better, just as it would for everyone around her. Near the boating lake, she found a spot to sit under some bamboo trees. She was on her own, but it was okay, she was happy. She took out her phone and held it at arm’s length, lifting it up slightly so that she could look at it with a raised chin—it was better this way, as it made her neck look thinner. She took a photo, but it wasn’t so good; she was squinting a bit because of the sun. She tried it again, but this one didn’t work either. One of the old men who sold tickets for the row-boats called out to her, asking if she wanted him to help her take a photo. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t ask you to marry me in return!”
He peered into the narrow screen, and Phoebe was worried that he didn’t know how to work the camera. But as he held it out he said, “This phone is so old. My grandson had a phone like this three years ago when he was still in middle school.” It made her laugh, and in the photo she appears sunny-faced and natural, full of the promise of the bounteous years ahead of her.
As she looked at the photo on the computer screen, she knew it was just the right kind of photo to have on her profile—taken by someone else, a friend on an outing, maybe even a boyfriend. It made her appear desirable, unlike the kind of blurry self-shot images where the person was always looking up at the camera, the kind that instantly told the viewer: I have no friends. She wrote a few lines about herself, a professional career-oriented young woman with experience of foreign work and travel. She gave her true age and stated that she wanted to meet respectable, successful men. Within minutes of posting her profile, she began to get requests from men she didn’t know, who all wanted to get to know her better. She was overwhelmed; she never imagined she could be so popular. Suddenly the whole of Shanghai seemed full of friends and potential partners, thousands of them. She typed replies to the people she deemed the most suitable, her fingers moving across the keyboard, trying to keep up with several conversations at once, but it was difficult; she was not used to typing so much, and she knew she was making mistakes. Sorry for the delays in my replies, she said, as some of the men became impatient. It was thrilling to chat to people she barely knew, and she began to imagine what some of them might be like—rich, handsome, successful.
But very soon she saw that many of them were just high school and college kids who were having some online fun—they said so themselves. They had no intention of ever meeting up. She became angry that they were wasting her time, so she learned how to block them from contacting her. Young people were no use to her; she needed to meet successful adults. She was not interested in pimply adolescents. Some men seemed okay when they first started chatting, but gradually Phoebe would discover something wrong with them.
To tell you the truth, I am married, so I am just looking for casual fun.
Actually, my age is 61, not 29, but I am still very energetic and strong.
Honestly, I really do drive a Ferrari and I live in a luxurious penthouse apartment, but you cannot visit me, because my grandmother lives with me and she is disapproving of the girls I meet—you should not suspect me of being a factory worker!
My Internet business is going so well at the moment, but I have cashflow problems. Could you lend me 2,000 yuan and I will pay you back on our first date?
I am not so interested in knowing what your favorite ice cream flavor is. Right now I am imagining lifting your skirt and touching your thighs higher and higher until …
Some men became angry when she took a bit longer to reply. They were pushy and some said impolite things to her. But she couldn’t type very fast, and it was hard to keep so many chats going at once. She soon learned to tell which men were educated, because they were the ones who typed their answers very quickly, but she also discovered that educated men often used the most obscene words. And then there were men who seemed nice at first, but soon it was clear that they were just out to trick her. Even though she did not know what they could possibly cheat her out of, she sensed that they were bad people who were up to no good. She heard stories all the time, tales of swindlers and liars—bamboozlers. She did not want to be one of those poor victims who got bamboozled.
One by one, Phoebe began to delete her newly made friends, blocking each one until her contact list showed only a couple of guys—guys who had said hello, how are you, but had not yet had the chance to show how deceitful and black-spirited they were. She began to get random messages from men that didn’t even start with a greeting, just shameless suggestions for physical relations, most probably high school students, but who knew, maybe they were frustrated middle-aged husbands and fathers. She knew it was because she had a nice profile picture, which she should replace with something fake or a neutral image, something like a cartoon character. A superhuman character with great strength, maybe. That would deter everyone with unsavory intentions. She would become like so many other people in cyberspace, hiding behind an image of something other than themselves. But as she looked at the photo of herself, she hesitated. Her eyes were glowing with laughter and promise, and the vegetation behind her was so lush it reminded her of her home. She could not bring herself to delete this image from her profile. When the rest of Shanghai looked at her, she did not want them to see just a gray shadow of a nobody; she wanted them to see her, Phoebe Chen Aiping.
She looked at her brand-new fake Omega watch. It was 6:55 P.M. She had not realized how late it was—she had spent nearly four hours in the Internet café. She double-checked the time on the computer, in case the watch she had been sold was a dud. It was still 6:55. She looked one last time at the photo of herself, just as another message popped up on-screen. Little miss, hello, I like your profile, would you like to chat? I think we might be compatible. She closed the page and signed herself off the computer.
When she got home, the room was dark and Yanyan was asleep on the bed, wrapped up in a thin blanket. The windows were open and there was a slight chill to the evening air. Phoebe stood at the window and looked at the blinking red and pale-gold lights of the cars trailing their way through the traffic. The street stalls had their lights on now, the plumes of smoke from the little charcoal grills rising into the night air.
“Where have you been, you’re very late,” Yanyan said quietly.
“Trying to find work. Why are you in bed so early? It’s barely eight o’clock.”
“I haven’t gotten out of bed all day.”
“Oh, Yanyan.” Phoebe sighed as she sat down on the bed next to Yanyan. “Not again. What are we going to do?”
As night fell, the giant hole in the construction site below the window looked black and infinite, as if it were ready to swallow up the cranes and bulldozers around it. Maybe Yanyan and she and everyone in their building would disappear into the hole
too, Phoebe thought.
“Come, I’ll make some dinner,” she said.
Yanyan sat up and pulled her knees to her chest, shielding her eyes as Phoebe turned on the light. The single fluorescent strip bathed the room in a harsh white glow.
“Only instant noodles again, sorry,” Phoebe said.
“It’s better than eating a banquet on your own,” Yanyan replied quietly.
Later, once Yanyan had settled back in bed, Phoebe opened her “Journal of My Secret Self.” She had not written in it for some days. She paused, knowing that Yanyan was not yet asleep—her breathing was even and almost soundless. Phoebe needed solitude when she wrote in her journal; she had become used to being alone when confronting her fears. It was easier that way, for she could be as weak and fearful as she wanted and there would be no one to witness it. She turned off the light and waited in the darkness. When she heard Yanyan’s breaths turn heavy with dream sleep, she held her mobile phone next to her journal and began to scribble a few lines in the ghostly blue light.
Time is flying past you, Phoebe Chen Aiping; you know you are being defeated. You are a new person here in Shanghai; you must dare to do things the old you would not have done. Forget who you were, forget who you are. Become someone else.
6.
PERFORM ALL OBLIGATIONS
AND DUTIES WITH JOY
THE WEATHER TURNED COLDER AND SHARPER AS SPRING FESTIVAL approached. Most days, Justin spent the morning staring at the ice that had formed overnight on the balcony, bizarre shapes hanging from the railings in jagged shards or clinging to the drainpipes like brilliant shiny fungus. The leaves of the potted plants were coated in ice—fat glassy bulbs that reminded him of Christmas decorations. On brighter days the sun would be strong enough to start shrinking the icicles, and he would stand at the window watching the water drip slowly onto the concrete floor of the balcony.