Miss Chopsticks

by Xinran

  The boy was still not entirely sure that he understood, so he put off doing this exercise until he had finished all his other homework. By that time it was very late. He did his best, but he still couldn’t make a sentence, and he was worried his teacher would hold him up to ridicule the next day. He decided to consult his family again.

  Pushing open the door of his grandmother’s room, he saw that she was already asleep. Pushing open the door of his parents’ room, he found them in the middle of making love. His father yelled at him to get the hell out. Not understanding why, the little boy returned in tears to his room to complete his homework.

  The next day, the boy’s father received a call from the teacher wanting to know if the homework was all the boy’s own work.

  ‘Why? Has he said something “counter-revolutionary”?’ asked the father, anxiously.

  ‘No, no …’ said the teacher. ‘It’s just that it’s so good.’

  That evening, when the father opened his son’s exercise book, he saw five big red stars and the words:

  ‘When the Nation sleeps and the Party plays with Society, the People weep.’

  Six couldn’t follow this joke either, but she was troubled by it. From then on, she avoided certain pages in the visitors’ notebook, in the same way that she avoided books that spoke too openly of what men and women got up to in bed. Once, after closing time, she had glanced at a few pages like this, and had gone so weak at the knees that she couldn’t do her work. It was right to ban such books, she thought. After all, if people in the village read them, there’d be nothing growing in the fields!

  Little by little, Six got to know the regulars at the Book Taster’s Teahouse and they got to know her. Although she dreamed of having conversations with the more bookish customers, she realised that, no matter how much she learned, they would always see her as a waitress. The politeness with which they treated her came from a strong sense of hierarchy, and was driven by compassion and pity more than anything else. In the end, the people she liked best, and who put her most at ease, were those who came for the tea and jokes, rather than the books. After the teahouse had closed for the day, she would pore over the visitors’ notebook to read the messages these people had left, noting the way that the personality of each customer lived on in their handwriting. There was the affectedly scrawled style of the educated businessmen who came in a hurry and left in a hurry; the rigid pattern-book characters of men in their forties, who had a lingering fear that any irregularity in length or line thickness might incur criticism; and the fine, delicate script of the women. She would close the book thinking about how women wrote very little in the notebook, but how the few words and phrases they left were like tantalising hints, leaving the reader craving for more. She longed for the day when she could see into the hearts of city women so that she could learn to be like them.

  8

  Diagrams and Dialects

  Five’s vision of the great dragon at night had stayed with her during the weeks that followed the day off with her sisters. The moment she had seen its glittering scales shining through the dark, her feelings about her job had changed. It seemed to her that she was living and working in a truly magical place, and she was sure that it must contain some secret that would help her, a mere chopstick, become something better.

  She continued to see her sisters on her free day, but she didn’t always enjoy their outings. Sometimes Three couldn’t join them, and said that Five and Six were now familiar enough with the city to cope without her. However, without Three as their guide, the two younger sisters argued about what to do. Five wanted to spend the day looking at the thin people in shop windows, while Six insisted on meeting up with students from the university. When they were with Six’s friends, Five felt desperately uncomfortable. The bignoses jabbered away in their ‘foreign language’ and she could do nothing but sit silently and watch. Things weren’t much better when the conversation was in Chinese. None of Six’s friends, not even the Chinese ones, could believe that she didn’t know how to read, and when she tried to talk to the university students about farming, they didn’t understand a word. This was partly to do with the Anhui dialect that Five spoke, and partly because Six wasn’t very interested in ‘translating’ what Five had to say. How Five wished she had the courage and the knowledge to go off on her own, but she was tied to Six by her ignorance. Things were better when Three came out with them. They would visit big shopping centres or shopping malls with food courts. There Six could meet her friends, and Three could go for a walk with Five nearby, so that all of them could enjoy their time in their own way.

  Five thought a lot about how she could find the secret hidden in the Dragon Water-Culture Centre. She dreamed of returning to the village for Spring Festival having proved that a stupid girl can be clever in the city. She thought about how relieved Uncle Two would be when he came back from Zhuhai for the festival and saw that she had heeded all his warnings. But Three and Six both said that, if you wanted to live your life in comfort, you had to earn serious money – and if you wanted to earn serious money, you had to go to school. Was this really the only way? Engineer Wu repaired the machines just by looking at pictures, and Auntie Wang never so much as glanced at a sheet of paper. Mei Mei was the only one who got up early in the morning to read books, and yet she was just a humble worker rather than a manager. Six had read a lot more books than Three, but she was still no good at arranging vegetables. The more Five thought about it, the more she was convinced that there must be a path to a decent life that didn’t involve reading and writing. And so she made herself a little plan: to follow Engineer Wu and Auntie Wang’s example, and use her eyes and ears to learn everything she could about how the Dragon Water-Culture Centre functioned. If she watched and listened carefully, she didn’t need to ask questions. After all, her mother often told her that whenever a woman opened her mouth, it caused misfortune. It didn’t do to go advertising your skills to the world. What was important was not what you said, but what you did.

  It was Engineer Wu who first noticed the change in Five’s behaviour. He realised that she had begun to accompany him whenever he worked overtime, without claiming for the extra hours. He asked Auntie Wang if she had asked Five to do this, but she was just as surprised as he was. They decided that Five must want to learn technical skills, which was good news for the Dragon Water-Culture Centre: the more an assistant knew, the better her ability to cope in an emergency. Besides, this way Engineer Wu had a helper.

  For Five, it was as if she was learning to see and hear for the first time. She watched how Engineer Wu would prod part of a machine with a screwdriver, then stick his ear to another section and listen. Sometimes he simply put a hand on the machine and stood there lost in thought until the problem became evident to him. He estimated everything by sound and feel, only using measuring devices as a last resort when he had to open up machines for repair. Sometimes he had to work late into the night to resolve a problem. People said his hours were as long as Manager Shui’s, but Five didn’t mind staying with him. She loved following him as he moved among the pipes and the pumps. Captivated by her new insights, Five began to listen to machines too. She even got up early so that she could accompany Engineer Wu on the rounds he made before the Dragon Water-Culture Centre opened. The pools were cleaned and sterilised the night before, but they needed to be checked again in the morning, along with the showers, thermostats and fire safety equipment.

  Five was particulary fascinated by Engineer Wu’s big book of drawings, which he called a ‘flow chart’ of the Dragon Water-Culture Centre’s plumbing. It was full of little arrows, squares and circles, and Five longed to understand it. If she could learn the laws of the pump room in the same way that she had learned the laws of nature – sowing in summer and reaping in autumn, or using nets for shrimp and hooks for fish – she could be a big help to Engineer Wu and Auntie Wang. She begged Engineer Wu to let her borrow the diagrams, but he said they were more important to him than money, and he would
be lost without them.

  When she had made the morning rounds with Engineer Wu, Five would run off to Auntie Wang to begin the job she was paid for. The preparation of medicines for the pools was a strictly monitored process. Each preparation room would boil or steam their special pre-soaked herbs for a given time, and then add them to the pools in fixed quantities. At this point, Auntie Wang would look at the colour of the water, test the temperature with a thermometer and sniff the smell by the side of the pool to check that everything was up to standard. Five learned all this so quickly that Auntie Wang was quite taken aback. She was particularly impressed by the fact that Five could gauge the temperature of the water simply by feel, and didn’t need to use the thermometer. When Auntie Wang told her she had ‘natural genius’, Five couldn’t see what was so special. Wasn’t looking at water just like looking at the sky to tell what the weather would be? If there were fish-scale patterns in the sky, then there would be no need to turn over the slices of sweet potato that had been put out to dry; if there were little hooks of cloud at the sky’s edge, it meant a rainstorm was on its way. In stuffy weather, bugs would bite; cloudy days with grey water were best for fishing … all this you could know by looking. As for her sense of smell, what was so special about that? It was easy to know about things through smell. When her dad had checked the strength of pesticides by using the little pieces of white paper that Six had told him about, she had always known the answer before the white paper came out of the can, just by sniffing. She never said so, of course. In fact she had often wondered why her father, who had worked the land all his life, could be so slow on the uptake. Her mother said that it came from smoking fruit-tree leaves in his pipe, which had left him without much of a sense of smell.

  Soon Five had made herself invaluable to Auntie Wang, and it wasn’t long before the managers of each pool began to notice her skill and add their own praise to Auntie Wang’s. However, they were much more dubious when Auntie Wang decided she was confident enough in Five to allow her to check a pool on her own. It wasn’t until Auntie Wang had checked Five’s results twenty times and found them exactly the same as her own that the pool managers started to trust her. Indeed, there were many people in the Dragon Water-Culture Centre who thought that this silent little ugly duckling might be in the process of becoming a swan.

  Five was aware that people’s attitudes were changing, but she didn’t fluff up her feathers. Her mother had always said that, just as a guard dog should keep its tail between its legs and not bite without reason, so an honest person should keep her head down and not show off. Instead of chatting with the other girls, Five would spend her free time studying Engineer Wu’s pictures and comparing them with the real machines. She also took every opportunity she could to look at Mei Mei’s foot-massage diagrams. At first she was utterly bemused by these pictures of the sole of the foot that showed its links to the different parts of the body. Then she realised that the human anatomy wasn’t that different from the pig’s – and she was very familiar with the insides of a pig because her family always slaughtered one shortly before Spring Festival.

  Whenever her father killed a pig, he called his daughters to watch so that he could give them a lecture:

  ‘Now, listen carefully. We may not have any sons in this family to slit the throat, flay the skin or open up the stomach, but I want you to watch these male tasks so you know how it’s done; and I want you to learn how to do woman’s work well so that you are not laughed at in your husband’s home.

  ‘Six, I don’t want you kicking up a fuss about blood just because you’ve had a few years of schooling. Everyone needs meat, whether they are educated or not, and you can’t have meat without blood. Your Uncle Two says there are people in the city who don’t eat meat in order to protect animals. Protect animals? That’s a joke! Are animals more important than people?

  ‘Now, watch how I do it. Remember, you must stab to the heart with one blow. Don’t make the animal suffer by stabbing more than you have to!’

  Everyone in the village said that Five’s father was a good hand at killing pigs: he always hit the mark with the first stroke of the knife. As soon as the knife fell, the pig, hanging trussed up by its four feet from a tree, struggled, shook and screamed, and gouts of blood gushed out. At this point, the sisters could never stop themselves shaking; their throats tightened and they found it difficult to breathe. When he saw that the pig had given up the ghost, their father would blow through a length of iron pipe he had found somewhere and inflate the carcass of the dead pig until it was tight as a drum. Then he would remove the hair and skin, and cut off the tail and head. What frightened Five the most was watching the belly cut open. One slash of the knife and all the organs tumbled out into a big basin, and a blast of bloody stench hit them in the face. Sometimes her father would even reach into the empty belly of the pig and poke about, to clear out whatever remained inside. Their father then chopped the pig into big pieces so that the best back loin, the belly pork, the front and back legs and the trotters could be sent to the market for sale, and thus provide new clothes for the entire family. (Almost all of the pig was sent to market, even the suet on the stomach; the family was left with the smaller pieces of fat from around the intestines, the scrag end for preserving, the tripe and chitterlings, which they ate to celebrate Spring Festival.) While their father chopped, their mother taught her daughters how to clean the innards, bone and joint the meat, and lay it down for salting. As she wielded her knife she would show them which bits were the heart, lungs and liver, telling them the functions of the innards, which were roughly the same for people. And so the sisters learned how, when washing the heart, you had to cut down to the thick blood vessels in order to get rid of the valves on top, and squeeze out the blood inside; how when washing the liver, you first had to remove the gall bladder; how when cleaning the intestines and stomach, you had to wash them carefully with salt before dousing them again in vinegar to get rid of the smell. The best fun was turning the larger and smaller intestines inside out, although it was very smelly work. The girls would squirt each other with water from the intestines and fall about laughing. Five loved how the pink lungs became snow-white and slippery when they were washed. You had to keep squeezing them out over and over again but she felt a great sense of ‘achievement’ – a word that Six had brought home from school and insisted on using all the time.

  When Five looked at Mei Mei’s foot-sole diagram, she thought about all the things her mother knew. Even though, like Five, she had never been to school, she had a great understanding of the human body. Her mother’s skills were an inspiration and, before long, Five had spent so many hours pouring over the picture, she felt courageous enough to think she understood it. One evening, when Mei Mei was lying on her bed complaining about how exhausted she was, Five offered her a massage.

  ‘Do you want a rub?’ she said. ‘I’ve rubbed Mum’s feet at home and she said it felt really good. Want me to try?’

  ‘Really? All right then, give it a go.’ Mei Mei stretched out a foot from her quilt. ‘Start with the right foot, it’s got more stamina, it doesn’t matter if you press a bit hard.’

  Five beamed and took Mei Mei’s foot.

  ‘Your feet are so soft and narrow!’ she exclaimed admiringly. ‘Now I can see what Uncle Two means when he says that city people’s toes are all packed tightly together because their feet never have to grab the ground when walking; when we country folk walk along the dykes with carrying poles, our toes are all splayed from gripping the mud.’ Five started to rub Mei Mei’s foot, but after a few seconds the normally softly spoken Mei Mei gave a yell of laughter so loud that the girl in Bed Six stuck her head out from underneath her quilt: ‘Hey, keep it down a bit, I’m trying to get an early night.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry!’ Mei Mei and Five apologised hurriedly, sticking out their tongues in the way Chinese girls do when they apologise.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’ Five asked quietly.

  ‘Massaging a foot i
sn’t like scratching an itch,’ said Mei Mei. ‘Come on, you lie down on my bed and I’ll show you.’

  Mei Mei jumped up and arranged her pillows so that Five could lie down. Then she pulled up a stool and took Five’s foot in her hands.

  ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘you really do have a wide pair of feet. You must be very good at field work. Now listen carefully. There are lots of different techniques when giving a foot massage: you can knead, pinch, pat, prod, push or use all sorts of other kinds of pressure. When you touch the foot using these techniques, particularly at the meridians and places where the blood vessels and nerves are concentrated, you can feel what’s wrong in the body …’

  Mei Mei pointed to a place between Five’s toes. ‘Look at this, for example. The skin here is very thick. That means your brain is tired.’

  ‘My dad says I haven’t got a brain,’ said Six.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Mei Mei. ‘Everyone’s got a brain. But of course, not everyone uses it. However, I think you’ve been using your brain a lot recently. See this swelling under the big toe? I bet it feels tender, right? What have you been up to these last few days to make your foot behave like it belongs to a big intellectual?’

  When Mei Mei got no reply, she looked up to find that Five had fallen fast asleep. Quietly she went to fetch a big clean towel and curled up on the dormitory’s spare bed. It didn’t cross her mind to get under Five’s quilt because she knew that the smell of stale sweat would be unbearable. She had once tried to persuade Five to wash her bedding more often, but Five had said that she couldn’t remember which month her mother said she wasn’t supposed to wash her quilt, and she was afraid of offending the Nine Star Goddess, giver of sons. She had promised to check with her sisters which were the lucky days for cleaning, but she kept forgetting.