Miss Chopsticks

by Xinran

  For the next half an hour, Five and Six entertained their sister with extravagant and humorous guesses about what each of the city festivals was supposed to mean, until eventually her gaunt face broke into a faint smile. But when they parted, they could see that the smile was already fading.

  Back at work, Five and Six both reflected on their elder sister’s experience. Their reactions were very different. Five was furiously indignant on Three’s behalf. To her, the whole thing was cut and dried: Big Ma was a bad man of the sort her mother had always talked about. The kind of man who wanted a foot in two boats or to wangle food out of two families. Five was surprised that Three had put so much trust in him. Surely her older sister had been in the city for long enough to have looked for a man before; so many people liked her, praising her nimble hands and saying she was as quick on the uptake as any city girl. Besides, Nanjing was such a big place, with so many men. Why was she determined to hang herself from this one tree? Their father said that, if a dog had gone hungry for three days, it would abandon its master and go to others for food. It seemed impossible to Five that Three had never thought about a man before Big Ma, or that she could be so foolish as to continue to pine for him now that he had proved himself so faithless.

  The way Six saw it, Three was not nearly as ‘citified’ as Five thought she was. For all her success at the Happy Fool, Three still had no real knowledge of urban life. If she had, she wouldn’t have mistaken Big Ma’s friendliness for love. It was clear he had simply been trying to help her get a better paid job. Six remembered conversations with Three where she had talked in confusion about the ‘Three Cs’ of the city: cars, computers and credit cards. While Three vaguely understood about cars (although she couldn’t think why anyone would buy something that cost so much in taxes, fines and parking fees), she had never got to grips with the idea of computers and credit cards. Six saw that, however long Three stayed in the city, she would never shake off the peasant mentality that had been drummed into her since birth. Even though she didn’t want to repeat the anguish of her parents’ generation, she couldn’t escape the fact that, for an uneducted country-woman, the goal of life was a husband: a prop to support her, the sun in her sky. The only way a peasant woman could prove her worth was by bearing children and doing housework. So it was that, as soon as Three believed that Big Ma was her own, her virgin heart was lost.

  Of course, Six didn’t discuss her opinion with Five. If anything, Five was an even more hopeless case. Six still giggled when she thought of the incredible knots Five had tied herself in when trying to explain how businessmen used the conference rooms at the Dragon Water-Culture Centre. ‘They’ve got these magic rooms,’ Five had said. ‘They’re full of televisions, “kara”-something machines that can make people sing, and electric brains … Auntie Wang says we’re going to open two meeting rooms that can change talk.’

  ‘Change talk?’ Six had asked, intrigued.

  ‘You know, change foreigners’ talk into the words we speak … I think it’s called “trans”-something …’

  ‘Translate,’ Six had supplied helpfully.

  It wasn’t that Six herself had known what ‘multimedia’ rooms were when Five had first tried to explain them. But her education had given her the ability to find out about things she didn’t know. Her school had been her secret life. She was the only girl in her village to go to middle school, and she had rapidly realised that the boys who attended the school never spoke at home about the books they were reading. She could understand why: their families, who did not even know one end of a book from another, would have no idea what these books were talking about. To village people, even the local town, with its one short street and dozen little shops, was almost a foreign country. At first Six had been puzzled as to why her two uncles, who were members of the Production Brigade and went regularly to the town, did not think to tell everyone about their experiences outside the village. Then, one day, she had asked her Uncle Three this question, and received the following response:

  ‘Silly girl, if people don’t have anyone to compare themselves to, they don’t know they’re being wronged. It’s comparisons that make people unhappy: those who don’t know good fortune, don’t know poverty. We’re so poor here that even the town officials don’t want to visit us. Why would they? What’s in it for them? A mouthful of salty water and a lump of steamed sweet-potato bread … If I went around talking about other people’s rich lives to everyone, do you think I would be popular? The less people have to worry about, the better. They may be poor, but they’re at peace. They don’t make trouble, and that’s the most important thing. Listen to old men talking about fighting the Japs, or the Revolution; or their sons remembering the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution: as soon as anyone starts stirring things up, the peasants suffer. Take all these economic changes – what’s the betting that they make things worse? Who’ll farm the land if everyone’s off doing business? And do we really think we can beat foreigners at their own game? As soon as the Boxer Rebellion started – as I’ve heard it, because the Chinese were wanting to lead a better life – the foreigners cut off more than a dozen heads in this village! No … As long as the days pass peacefully and we’ve got food and clothes, it’s best just to keep out of trouble. Keep what you learn to yourself, I tell you. Leave if you’re able, and find yourself a husband outside. If you can’t leave, then live your live in poverty but at peace. Happiness is accepting your fate …’

  As soon as she had heard these words from Uncle Three, Six decided that, one day, she would leave the village to see the city, like Uncle Two and many of her male classmates. But now that she was in the city, and she had met people like Ruth, she realised that the city was just a springboard to the rest of the world. Five and Three would never understand things in the way she did. Five was too ignorant to realise that the people in the Dragon Water-Culture Centre weren’t all ‘kind and good’, they were just pitying her. And Three had tragically failed to realise that Big Ma was just being kind because she came from Anhui: she had been like a thirsty plant who took a drop of water for rain.

  There was a saying in the countryside: ‘When a man goes to the city, the first thing he learns is how to spend money on women; when a woman goes to the city, the first thing she learns is how to look men in the eye.’ But, having seen for herself how peasants behaved in the city, Six wasn’t sure they really learned anything: their city skills were like flowers cut for decoration – destined to wither without their roots. She, however, was determined to get a proper education – to cross the river, even if it meant taking things one stepping-stone at a time. As her mother always said in times of great difficulty and distress: ‘There is no road under heaven that cannot be walked; even stones carry the footprints of insects!’

  Six had heard one of Shu Kang’s university friends talk about the ‘Three Modern Items’ essential for life in the twenty-first century: computing, driving and English. It seemed to Six that, of these three skills, English was the most important. After all, Shu Kang had said that English was ‘the mouse of the computer, and the steering wheel of the car’. Six felt that, if she could master English, she would be well on the way to building her bridge across the river. But, as things stood at the moment, her English was less a stepping-stone and more a pebble. She had to face it: the pronunciation difficulties she had when she spoke Mandarin, rather than village dialect, were as nothing compared to her problems with English sounds. They made her feel as if there were weights tied to her tongue, and her garbled efforts were often greeted with giggles: ‘No, no,’ Ruth would say kindly. ‘“Shit”is for swearing, not wearing. A “shirt” is for wearing.’ Nevertheless, Six was absolutely determined. She would never allow the fate of her mother and her elder sisters to become her own. She would perfect her English.

  It did not cross Six’s mind that she should use the money she was putting aside for her mother to pay for English lessons. Nor would she accept charity from her employers, even though Thick Gl
asses and Meng had offered to help. She kept firmly in mind her mother’s words: you can’t depend on others to build your reputation; you must earn it for yourself with your own heart and brain. So Six studied English in her own way. First she memorised new words, then she put the words together in the only way she knew how (following Chinese sentence structure), then she fearlessly engaged Ruth and her foreign friends in conversation. At first the foreigners would fall about laughing at her odd word order. She would say things like, ‘We everyday in teahouse with friends drink tea’. Gradually, however, the foreigners realised that ‘Six’s English’ could help them with their Chinese. Although they would correct her sentence structure, they took note of the word order she had used and applied it when they formed Chinese sentences. They also realised that Six’s tendency to translate bits of Chinese slang and everyday phrases directly into English could help them understand colloquial Chinese. When Six said things like, ‘People mountain, people sea’, ‘Morning three night four’, ‘Wang eight eggs’, ‘Wield a big knife in front of General Guangong’ or (everyone’s favourite) Mao’s phrase, ‘Good good study, day day up’, they would quiz her about what exactly the phrase meant in Chinese until they managed to create a dictionary:

  People mountain, people sea – Great crowds of people

  Morning three night four – Blow hot and cold

  Wang eight eggs – Bastard

  Wield a big knife in front of General Guangong –

  Show off

  Good good study, day day up – Study hard so as to

  make progress every day

  Eventually, Six too began to see the funny side of this ‘east-west mixture’. When someone said something like ‘I’ll give you some colour to see see’ (I’ll show you!), she would burst into giggles.

  Shu Kang and Ruth’s foreign friends all liked Six very much. They found her very different from the Chinese students they met at the university. The offspring of one-child families, these students had been the kings of their little families since they were born and had been so hot-housed that they had lost the instinct for being interested in things. Perhaps their parents, who had toiled and suffered to satisfy their only sons or daughters, had never even thought to cultivate that interest in the first place. A life where everything these young people wanted was theirs for the taking had warped their innate desire for struggle and new experiences. To Ruth and her friends, Six’s eagerness to learn about the world was refreshing.

  For her part, Six observed the Chinese students with great interest. In her dull, quiet village, she could never have imagined that there were so many sources of pleasure and amusement available to young people. These students showed her how youth could be a carefree time – free of worry and concerns – but they also gave her the impression that university students could go anywhere in the world: there was nothing they could not do and no words they could not say. Therefore, every time a group of young people had been to the teahouse, Six would go over to the visitors’ notebook and, if there were no other customers, read aloud the things they had written.

  One day, she watched a group of students fall about laughing over something in the book. When they had gone, she was so eager to see what it was that she asked Meng’s permission to go and read it, even though there were still two customers in the teahouse. Meng had become familiar with Six’s obsession with the notebook and was happy to indulge it. She nodded kindly and Six began to read:

  In recent days our university has been swept by a fad for ultra-short skirts, each shorter than the last. Leader X considers this to be in extremely poor taste, and has therefore put up a notice banning short skirts on the university board. Ever since the announcement went up, it has caused a great furore and students have begun pinning responses to the board. The first came from a girl in the Chinese department who wrote a delightful poem:

  Knives are out all over the school

  Just because of the short-skirt rule

  Who’s showing wisdom in this case?

  The noticeboard will reveal their face.

  The second to make their mark on the notice board were the school medics:

  The common cold is caused by a virus, not by the COLD.

  Those sharp-eyed guardians of books in the library wrote:

  Let ultra-short skirts be fashionable!

  With so little space to hide books, we can give our

  eyes a rest.

  After careful consideration, the canteen daubed their contribution:

  There’s no difference between short skirts and spare ribs: both shrink when in contact with water.

  During the lunch break all the other departments in the university wrote their own views:

  FINE ART DEPT:Venus de Milo proves that a tasteful lack in certain areas can be even more beautiful.

  ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES DEPT: Surely you aren’t trying to tell us global warming is a myth?

  MATHS DEPT: If we allow the existence of a rectangle 1m in length, then there is no logical reason for a square 0.3 metres in length not to exist.

  HISTORY DEPT:Helen of Troy’s beauty did not change because Churchill and Hitler had different tastes.

  PHYSICS DEPT: Cloth may be an insulator against bad taste, but air is an excellent insulator too.

  LAW DEPT: The law exists to protect us against the evil thoughts brought out in the accuser by short skirts, not the short skirts of the defendants.

  BIOLOGY DEPT: The basic difference between humans and apes is not the length of skirts, but the different thoughts induced by long and short skirts.

  POLITICS DEPT: The move from long skirts to short skirts and on to ultra-mini skirts, is an embodiment of a democratised collective. PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPT:Lowering the vision of the other party in negations is the very thing we’ve been striving so hard to achieve all these years.

  Finally, the Association of Low-Income Students added:

  Give us bigger bursaries!

  We’re so poor our clothes don’t cover our bodies.

  When Six finished reading, everyone in the teahouse burst out laughing. She had no idea why. The effort of reading had prevented her from following the meaning of the words. But even if she had, it was unlikely that she would have understood the innuendo-laden humour.

  Most jokes were still a mystery to Six, but she was gradually beginning to understand the concept of humour. A Danish student had shown her how pain can be changed into happiness through laughter. She had met this student when he brought a carton of ice-cream into the teahouse and asked if she wanted to try some. Six had been delighted at the idea of sampling this famous American food that she had heard so much about, but the first mouthful sent her into shock: it was so cold that the nerves above her eyes throbbed in agony. The Dane had taken Six’s face in both hands, saying, ‘What are wrong, Little Six? Is your face hurting?’ No man’s hands had ever touched Six’s face before and she felt instantly dizzy, as if her body were melting away. She became fascinated by this man with kind hands and a kind nature, and so tried to help him with his Chinese as much as possible. It was when they were doing an exercise on the subject of ‘mothers’ that he showed her how surprising humour can be.

  ‘My mother is very thin,’ Six said slowly, so he could understand, ‘but she holds up the whole house. My mother has never been to school, but she has taught us all how to live. My mother does not love beauty for herself, but she has raised six beautiful daughters. My mother is not talkative, but every word she says helps you understand life. My mother is very hard-working, but she has never made anything nice for herself to eat or wear. My mother is very brave, but she often cries because she doesn’t have a son …’

  ‘Six, you have spoken about your mother so beautifully,’ said the Danish man (he spoke such bad Chinese that he pronounced ‘mother’ as ‘horse’). ‘Do you want to hear about mine?

  ‘My mother is very fat, she has a belt for a watchstrap. My mother is very fat, her waistline is like a race track. My mother is very fat, when she goes
for a paddle at the seaside it has an effect on the tides. My mother is very fat, when she goes to the beauty parlour it takes them twelve hours to give her a facial. My mother is very fat …’

  Before he had finished, Six’s tears had turned to laughter.

  Six encountered a great deal of humour of this kind, as well as ideas that were very different from those of Chinese people. Once, an English girl left a piece of homework with her so that she could correct the Chinese. She liked it so much that she copied it out and stuck it over her bed:

  Money can buy a bed, but it can’t buy good sleep.

  Money can buy a house, but it can’t buy a home.

  Money can buy food, but it can’t buy flavour,

  Money can buy a gym, but it can’t buy health,

  Money can be used for trade, but it can’t buy friends,

  Money can buy qualifications, but it can’t buy ambition.

  Six often asked Meng about the things she was learning. One day she asked her about jokes. ‘Why do people want to invent so many of them?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Because they like to laugh,’ was Meng’s first, casual response, but when she saw that Six wasn’t satisfied with this answer, she elaborated. ‘Chinese people don’t have much happiness to talk about. Their lives have been full of tears, troubles and bitterness, and their memories provide few opportunities to smile. Without salt, food has no flavour; without laughter, people are boring. If we don’t claw a few laughs out of our lives – even if those laughs are bitter chuckles, cold smirks, foolish giggles or idiot grins – then the great Chinese tradition of wit and wisdom will lie down and die. Laughter is like chopsticks. Without chopsticks the traditional Chinese way of life would be gone. The same goes for our sense of humour. Your father may say that his family line will end because he only has a handful of “chopsticks”, but chopsticks are essential to life.’ Meng gave a sigh. ‘Actually, I don’t think Chinese women have learned to laugh enough. It’s a firmly held belief in our culture that a good woman does not laugh or cry – but, until we do so, we can’t be truly good women.’