Miss Chopsticks (19 page)

Six didn't know where the foreigners had heard all this
information about China. Was this the ‘Propaganda' Kang talked about when he described how the Western media would say things about China that weren't true? Why was it that the China these foreigners described sometimes seemed unrecognisable to her?

She decided to ask Thick Glasses and his wife about it. They exchanged a glance, then Thick Glasses said, ‘Six, why are our two ears on two sides of our heads? So we can hear sounds that come from different places. The things your villagers used to say about the city don't necessarily resemble the things you see for yourself here, do they? And is your Second Uncle's version of city life the same as Three's? China is very big. The north and south, the east and west, the countryside and the cities are all different. People say all sorts of things about them according to the knowledge they have managed to pick up. Some are true, some are false, but there's nobody in this world who can be the final arbiter. It is important to think and see for yourself. You can't believe everything you're told, but nor can you suspect everything either, do you see?'

Meng looked at her kindly. ‘It's good that you're making friends with the foreigners, but you shouldn't talk too much about things you don't understand, especially not politics. Some of the people you meet in this teahouse won't be as good as others. These people won't mug you or steal from you, but they might bring a false accusation against you for using “reactionary language”. Nobody with a brain in their head would believe that a little girl like you could be a reactionary, but a lot of people in China don't have the education to know that you have to think things through before leaping to conclusions. They have little understanding of how to be a decent person. Those people might see your words as an opportunity for promotion, or to earn some extra money; they won't consider the rights and wrongs of the matter. You've come to the city to see the world. It's very important to look around
you before deciding what you think. You're still young. You need to see more of life, and read more books. Reading will allow your intelligence to grow wings and take flight. Look at me – at my age there are still heaps of questions to which I haven't found an answer!'

‘Really? There are still things you don't understand?' Six could not believe it.

‘Yes, we all have them. The more you read, the more you want to know, and so the more questions you have.'

It was after this conversation that Six began to understand why Thick Glasses and Meng would take certain books home with them in the evenings. The library, so lovingly put together by Thick Glasses for his customers, was growing. As the teahouse became better known and attracted more business, lots of people were contributing books to the shelves. It was Six's job to enter these new books into a log. She would painstakingly divide them into categories, with a serial number for each. Who knows, she thought to herself, maybe some day the teahouse would have enough books to open a quiet room solely for reading, like the big bookstores she had seen in the centre of town. But there were some books that Meng and Thick Glasses didn't want entered in the log, and which they immediately hid in the storeroom behind the blue curtain before taking them home at closing time.

At first Six thought that the couple were simply greedy for more books to add to their personal collection. After all, Meng had told her that she still had a lot of questions to answer. But as time went by, she heard customers say things like, ‘This book is still banned, but the ban on that one has been lifted', and only then did it really dawn on her why not every book could be put out for people to read.

She was surprised to find that it was often the upstanding Guan Buyu who brought in these secret books. Although she had never returned to his book-lined office, he often came to the teahouse to meet up with some
friends, and was always friendly and pleasant to Six. He even confided to her that his teahouse meetings were actually a ‘reading group' that had existed clandestinely for years, and was now able to use the teahouse as a base. One day she plucked up courage to ask him about ‘banned books'. How was it possible to know which book was off-limits? Thick Glasses had told her to check with him before she entered books that touched on religion, freedom of speech, law, or relations between men and women, but there seemed to be so many opportunities to make a mistake. Guan Buyu told Six that she was not alone in being confused: the policies of the Nanjing officials were many and ever-changing, making it virtually impossible to be a hundred per cent sure what the ruling was on a controversial book. It was therefore best only to lend books to people you knew and trusted. With ordinary customers, even regulars, you should be extremely wary. Better to say that there were ‘no new books' than to put others in danger. It had never occurred to Six that reading books could be dangerous, but she took Guan Buyu's warning to heart. She couldn't bear the idea of landing a book lover in trouble.

She noticed that Thick Glasses and his family also took care with some of the jokes that were written in the visitors' notebook. If she asked Kang to explain a joke to her that she didn't understand, he would pretend not to hear her; a short while later Meng or Thick Glasses might discreetly rip out the page from the notebook.

One day she rescued one of these discarded pages and read the following:

In the 1980s, at the time of the Open Policy, the three Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Li Peng were out driving a car called China when they came to a three-way junction. According to the road sign, straight ahead was Socialist China, to the left
was Russia, which was in the process of disintegration, and to the right were the capitalist nations of America and Great Britain. Both Jiang and Li looked towards Deng for guidance. Without so much as a pause for thought, he said, ‘Signal left, but turn to the right'.

Six had absolutely no idea what these words meant, so she tried reading another joke a little further down the page:

One day a little boy was given some homework by his teacher. He was to write a sentence using the words Nation, Party, Society and People. The child didn't understand what these words meant or how they were related to each other, so he asked his father over supper. The father tried to explain in words the boy would understand.

‘Imagine these words apply to our family. Granny is the Nation: without Granny none of us would be here. Daddy is the Party: his word is law. Mummy is Society: she takes care of everything in the home, but if she gets angry there's no peace for anyone in the house. And as for you, you're the People: you should obey the Party, help Society and win glory for the Nation.'

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.

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.