Under Fishbone Clouds

by Sam Meekings

  ‘You can stay with me now. We can help each other. Do you understand?’ He nodded quickly, and she was reminded of ducks bobbing for food.

  ‘My name is Bian Shi.’ The wife of Bian – her maiden names were left under a floorboard in her father’s house. ‘I live over there.’ She pointed down the alley, toward the wider streets he had never ventured near. He looked about him for his ‘uncles’, not believing what was happening. Was this a trick?

  ‘First things first. What can we do?’ She looked about her, and for a moment Yaba thought her tone might shift again, and that she might haul him to a judge. He flinched, an involuntary habit. ‘Now listen, I can’t take you home with no job, no purpose. He’ll only get mad – at the both of us. No name, no family, that’s bad enough,’ she said, as if to herself, moving her hand to the small of his back and pushing him forward through the alley towards the side-door of the restaurant. She looked at him and winked, although her heart was beating faster than ever.

  Together they strode purposefully between the clutter of boxes and deliveries into the kitchen. The floor was littered with the debris of offcuts, cigarette ends, potato eyes, spilt slops, the bad ends of discoloured vegetables and the overlapping footprints of the barefooted chefs, assistants and young boys rushing about in the cramped and sticky heat. Dumplings floated to the top of vast pans of steaming water, woks fizzled and meat dripped from hooks on the wall. The man who might be assumed to be the head chef, stocky and unshaved, was cursing and shouting at the cowering staff, though his hands never strayed from the delicate curls of pastry he was wrapping around small nubs of mince. When he saw a well-dressed pregnant woman and a grubby street kid standing in the corner he stopped shouting. The deafening thread of noise quickly trickled to an awkward silence. Then he spoke.

  ‘I think you’re in the wrong place.’ His words were calm and measured, but had a sharp, urgent edge to them.

  ‘No, I’ve come to talk to you. Are you the head chef?’ There were a few titters of laughter. The thump of her heart filled her stomach. The chef went back to folding the pastry, his thickly accented words swilling from his wet lips.

  ‘This is a restaurant. I’ve a job to do, so you’d better send your complaints somewhere else.’

  The jostle of the kitchen began again, with more plates clattering in the overcrowded sink. The diversion was evidently over. But she did not move.

  ‘Listen,’ her voice quivered up to the next octave. ‘I’ve come to ask you to give this boy a job. Something simple is fine, washing dishes or chopping vegetables. He’ll give you no trouble, I can assure you of that. Just keep an eye on him, teach him what to do and he’ll pick up the rest.’

  The chef wiped his hands on his dirt-streaked shirt. His face was blotchy and red. ‘There are no jobs. Where do you think you are? Now, I’ll ask you again – please,’ he exaggerated this word, mimicking a simpering civil servant, ‘get out of my kitchen.’

  ‘Just a simple job. I’m sure there’s something that needs to be done in here. It’s a mess, and you all look busy.’ She tried to laugh lightly at the end of her speech, but instantly regretted it.

  ‘If I came into your house begging for a job, I’d probably get the shit kicked out of me and end up in some stinking jail. What makes you think you can charge in here and order me about? Huh? I told you: There are no jobs! Why don’t you –’

  ‘Now look –’

  ‘No! You look.’ His voice was raised now, and the staff turned their heads down, closer to their work. ‘You stuck-up bitches are all the same. Don’t you know there are a hundred other starving families down the street, all begging for jobs? What do you want me to do, house a spastic, a lazy brat or a retard just so you can eat your fucking twelve-course meal in peace? Why don’t you go back to your poor bastard of a husband, if you even have one, and take that runt with you? Go on, get out of my kitchen!’

  He spat the last of these words, his cheeks glowing like coals. There were a few more titters, though most of the staff knew better than to stay in close proximity of the chef when the snake-like vein on his forehead began to throb.

  ‘My “poor bastard of a husband” is the owner of this restaurant,’ she said, her hands folded over her bump, her teeth pressed tightly together. There were no more laughs.

  ‘Your husband?’ the chef stuttered, not sure whether to believe her.

  ‘You look as though you’re busy, and, as it’s nearly time for lunch, it seems he had better start right away. I trust you will treat him properly.’

  She nodded to the boy, and he took a step forward, borrowing from her strength. The chef finally bowed his head and gestured to a chopping board beside the strung-up birds.

  ‘Yaba, I will come back for you at eight.’ She turned and walked out of the door.

  Outside she leaned her swollen frame against the alley wall and let her pulse shudder down to her shoes, the sounds of strained and muted swear words reaching her from the window. She clenched and unclenched her fists, bit her lips and, finally, smiled. When she returned to the house she instructed the servants to clear out a small bedroom in the north wing, and she then placed in it some of the toys and gifts that had been prepared for her own child. By the time her husband crossed the hall that evening, dead-eyed and clutching the wooden supporting pillars to correct his loose and sprawling steps, she had a carefully constructed story prepared and did not stop speaking, despite his slurred interruptions, until it was finished. The mute, she told her husband, showing a strong will that he had never imagined she possessed, had been treated badly by street-thieves and deserved a second chance, a childhood. If they helped him, she argued, then the god of children would be better inclined to show favour to their own baby. She then marched off to bed before her husband had time to formulate a response.

  It was Yaba who, after Yuying was born five and a half weeks later, first weighed the screaming baby in his skinny arms and comforted her wails by humming mountain songs. And it was Yaba who later took Hou Jinyi under his wing when, more than a decade later, history got round to repeating itself.

  Yaba’s tongue was not the first of its kind, and it will not be the last. There is a fine thread that links the act of speech and the act of violence. It is with these threads that people wind the fragile fabric of their lives. Take it from me – I have witnessed my fair share of arguments. Dissent, disagreement, confession, free speech, talkback. These are all tinged words, words that are seared onto flesh. Words that people take too lightly.

  Consider Sima Qian, working into the evening. The first century BC was sprawling to its sunset, though no one yet had comprehension of this way of measuring time. Even two thousand years later, the Gregorian calendar would be seen as something indeterminably foreign and, furthermore, unnecessary, as it was still possible to measure spans of years in terms of the length of the current emperor’s reign. Sima Qian had followed his father to become the royal historian of the Han court. The book he was working on, knotting the characters from the bottom to the top of the page before sliding down to the next column, was the Shiji, the first history to take in the dynastic characters, policies and economics of the previous two thousand years.

  Sima Qian traced out the ideograms until the light was too dim to continue. He could hear nothing but the night birds swooping through the woods that sloped out from the bottom of the garden, and the tinny creak of the old timber. He wrote of the man who unified the vast country from disparate warring kingdoms, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

  If you had told him that millennia later, even when all dynasties were over, a leader of China would unashamedly ape this first emperor’s policy of burning books and strictly regulating information with the threat of state-sanctioned violence, Sima Qian would probably have simply nodded sagely, not in the least surprised. The policies and propaganda of the party that had promised to liberate China, and the personality cult built up around the chubby Communist chairman, would be all too familiar to Sima Qian. Chinese leaders, emper
ors, generals, warlords, presidents or politburos must be the unmovable anchor on which the state is moored. They must be gods to men; what else is there to stem the chaos? The themes of Sima Qian’s history – the cyclical ups and downs, destructions and renewals, separations and unifications – suggest that little of the last dark century would shock him.

  He could not sleep; he returned to the table and folded his legs under him as he tapered a tiny lamp. He rubbed his hands together, warming the skin. ‘Though bitter, good medicine cures illness,’ he wrote. ‘Though it may hurt, loyal criticism will have beneficial effects.’ His wrist slowed, the writing stopped.

  The day had receded from the house like a tide that draws away from the shore only to build towards its eventual return. Even the birds were silent, yet still he could not sleep. It was then that the emperor’s guards arrived to collect him. His wife and his children were asleep. He went with the guards peacefully, without a struggle. He had been expecting them for weeks now, ever since he had made the mistake of interceding to the emperor on behalf of an old friend, a general, who had surrendered to the enemy in a skirmish in the distant plains outside the capital. Sima Qian should have known, however, that loyal criticism (especially in the form of defending another who has dared to disobey the will of the living god) often had a cost.

  ‘We will try and do this as quickly as possible. Bite down on this.’

  He bit down. It was a thick ribbon of leather, tasting of night sweat and saliva. The surgeon was old and careful, with fat, steady hands. Sima Qian was naked, held down. He tried not to scream and shake, tried to control the functions of his bladder and bowels. He failed. This was a punishment designed to lead the guilty to commit ritual suicide in shame. Yet Sima Qian did not do this. After the operation, he continued working on his epic history, his newly high voice barely heard, bandages knotting his scabby, darkened lap. The thread between speech and violence overhangs everything, like a network of tapped telephone wires above a city.

  In the same city where Sima Qian was castrated, with only mountain herbs for anaesthetic, where he was mutilated and carried home for the smallest of crimes, the bleeding stemmed by the expert stitches of the royal surgeon, this same cycle of speech and violence would continue. What is it about words – is it that they contain the threat of offsetting the delicate balance on which whole worlds depend? Or that they are so easy to give out, but impossible to ever take back? Words and fear, speech and violence. That which persists wins. Or, as the historian might have posited: no one wins, everything persists.

  The day after he had tried to steal mantou, Jinyi arrived at the restaurant an hour before it opened and loitered outside till the back door was unlatched. Bian Shi was there again, swaying between the chopping boards, commenting and questioning. It was only after she left, half an hour before the lunch rush, that the kitchen became more lively and animated. The head chef, however, soon silenced the staff with a gruff shout.

  ‘You. Thief. Yes, you. Come here.’

  Jinyi turned and slowly approached the chef. The whole kitchen had stopped working to watch.

  ‘Now, you can consider yourself safe when the boss’s wife is here. But yesterday you tried to steal from my kitchen. I don’t take kindly to thieves. I want you to know that. However, I’m prepared to let you stay and work here. I’m generous, see. I guess that’s my biggest weakness.’ He grinned, pleased with himself, and some of the staff sniggered.

  ‘I pride myself on keeping a good kitchen. If there’s a mistake, it’s me who gets a kick in the balls. Understand? So, if you’re going to work here, I need to know that I can trust you.’

  ‘You can trust me,’ Jinyi replied, perhaps too quickly.

  ‘Ha. If your mouth is as fast as your nimble fingers, then I think your word isn’t going to be quite enough, country boy.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Well, if you’re as hungry as you said you were yesterday, when you stood there looking like you were going to cry or wet your pants, then I figure we ought to give you something to fill your stomach.’

  The head chef smirked and reached behind him. When he turned back round, Jinyi’s eyes moved to his bear-like hands. Gripped between his fingers was a jam-jar filled with warm pig fat, used to grease the woks and flavour stocks. Grey lumps floated like jelly in the thick, slimy liquid.

  ‘I’m not drinking that.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like you’ve got a choice, boy.’

  Jinyi looked around at the many expectant eyes. The chef was right.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Wait a minute. You’re eager, aren’t you? I bet this is a delicacy where you come from. Ha! Now, I wouldn’t want to hurt one of my workers by scalding their mouth. I want you to be able to drink it all down without spilling a drop. So we’re going to do you the courtesy of cooling it down for you, aren’t we?’ He addressed the rest of the workers in the kitchen. They murmured their agreement.

  The head chef pulled off the wad of newspaper stopping the top, and brought the jar close to his face. He hocked, a rattling sound coming from the back of his throat, and spat a ball of watery green mucous into the jar of fat. He then passed it to the worker beside him, who did the same. The jar was passed from hand to hand, with each person in the kitchen’s spit dribbling into the sloppy oil. Only Yaba refused, with a shake of the head. They let it be – after all, the mute lived in the same house as the boss. The head chef finally took it back, and, after reinserting the wad of paper, shook it gently, mixing the froth. He handed it to Jinyi.

  ‘Cheers.’

  No one said a word. Jinyi held the jar, trying not to look at it. It was lukewarm, and more than half full. He closed his eyes and tilted it back, opening his throat and trying to ignore the sticky lumps. He swallowed and swallowed and, even when the jar had been drained, had to keep swallowing for fear of retching it all back up. He let out a loud belch and the head chef nodded, and, as though nothing had happened, everyone resumed their work.

  The Tao Te Ching, those huddled characters mapped out millennia ago with strokes of black ink across sheafs of silk, reveal an ebb and flow of unstoppable process, the unwinding of all things according to the natural way, the Tao. The beliefs behind it survive in the minutiae of everyday rituals and actions. The metaphor at the heart of the Taoist work, namely the intricate balancing act of yin and yang, suffuses all aspects of life. Jinyi had heard this before, but only now did it become a working mantra. Inside the black, a ball of white, and inside the white a matching black marble: nothing is absolute. Black and white, night and day, electron and neutron, field and sky, feminine and masculine, all hovering on invisible scales. Yin and yang.

  Take cookery, for example. In the kitchen they measured always the balance between the fan and the cai – the filler (rice, grains, dumplings and steamed buns) and the taste (meat, fish and poultry, various roots and greens floating in sauces) – making sure neither dominated a meal. Salty, sweet, sour, bitter, hot. Jinyi commited the five elements of taste to memory, as again and again he rubbed garlic into the minced pork and cabbage, as again and again he was told to bind the masculine and feminine, the grain and the flavour.

  Each one of them, from the brick-shouldered head chef to Yaba with his twitches and signals that everyone in the kitchen interpreted in a different way, through to Jinyi himself, stood by the stoves from morning till midnight, stealing only five minutes somewhere in the middle of the day for a meal of stale buns or the blandest of day-old pancakes.

  The best days in the kitchen were those when the patrons ordered more than they could hope to finish – the expatriate Japanese bankers and businessmen often made a habit of over-ordering to impress their dining guests. After all, no one wanted to lose face. On those days, plates came back from the tables still bearing a dribble of sauce, a handful of dumplings or thin shreds of picked-at leftovers.

  And so Jinyi learnt to join the sudden bustle of the kitchen staff when the waiters returned with a stack of plates,
to plunge into the fight of splintered chopsticks and unwashed hands for the dregs of someone’s unfinished dish. In this way he tasted things he had only ever heard talk of before, things that had once seemed as unrelated to his own life as dragons or unicorns. Yellow fish pulled up from between the coal barges on the river, shreds of sweet and sour pork, forest-picked mushrooms dark with soy. Each time he was lucky enough to get more than a mouthful he avoided sipping water for the next few hours in order to preserve his tongue’s memory of the strange and melancholy tastes. Even the ever-glowing fire impressed Jinyi; at his aunt and uncle’s they had clumped together dry grass and dung to feed a five-minute flame, braising food as quickly as they could before the fuel fizzled down to embers.

  Yangchen, who Jinyi thought must have been around his own age, despite his receding hair, obsession with money and an awkward way of shaking his head from side to side while working, spent those first weeks pestering Jinyi with questions.

  ‘You wanna know something?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘That man upstairs right now with a curled moustache – I saw him when I was hauling the buckets in – you know what they call him? The Butcher. Wouldn’t know it from that Western suit and the furs slung round the shoulders of those giggling girls on his arms, would you? And you know why they call him that? Because he’s –’

  ‘Cut it out,’ the head chef barked.

  ‘He’s right, Yangchen,’ a passing waiter joined in. ‘If Mr Bian heard you talking about the customers like that, we’d all be out of work, and you know it.’

  Yangchen shrugged, then lowered his voice so that only Jinyi, standing beside him, could hear. ‘I’ve never even seen the venerable Mr Bian. Not once, the whole time I’ve been here. Doesn’t stop me hearing about him every day, though. I shouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t some people in here who even pray to him. We ought to have an altar or something.’ He grinned at his own joke.