Miss Chopsticks (20 page)

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 isn'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.

The next morning Five woke up surrounded by a beautiful fragrance. At first she thought that she was still dreaming – she had spent the night dancing and singing in grassy meadows – but gradually she realised that she had gone to sleep in Mei Mei's bed. She looked across at the spare bed and saw Mei Mei wrapped in a towel, fast asleep. It was only eight o'clock so she closed her eyes and tried to recapture her beautiful dream.

The ten beds in the girls' dormitory were arranged in two rows on either side of the room. Mei Mei, who was the dormitory head, slept closest to the door, in Bed One; Five was opposite her, in Bed Ten. The girl who had slept in Bed Nine had left and not been replaced. All sorts of girls worked at the Dragon Water-Culture Centre, but most of them came, if not from the city, then from a town. It was difficult for Five to talk to them. They looked down on her
because she came from a village, and their conversation was full of words that Five didn't understand – words like ‘trendy', ‘sushi', ‘
ku'
(cool) or ‘
yi-mei'er'
(email). It took Five ages to work out that ‘hunk' meant a ‘handsome boy', and ‘babes' were pretty girls. But it wasn't only the words they used that made them difficult to understand. They all spoke different dialects! There was a girl from Ningbo, a city very close to Shanghai, who Five couldn't understand at all. She had arrived quite recently and always looked very smart, but she had a high-pitched voice that was almost unbearable to listen to, and used different words for ‘I', ‘you' and ‘her'. Then there was the girl from Hubei Province who used the same word for ‘shoes' and ‘children'. Even the girl who came from Anhui, Five's province, presented problems: the northern Anhui dialect she spoke was so different from Five's that when, at the start of each day, she said, ‘Who wants to die? If none of you are dying, I'll go and die!' she filled Five with fear, until she realised that the girl was actually saying, ‘Who wants to wash? If none of you are washing, I'll go and wash!'

Five even had difficulty remembering these girls' names. In order to do so, she secretly created a foot diagram in her head. The five beds on one side of the room were the left foot, the five on the other side, the right. Mei Mei was, of course, the first toe of the right foot. Then came the girl from Sichuan, who was forever fretting about whether her chilli sauce was going to run out. The third toe on the right was the one from the north of Anhui while the fourth was the Hubei girl with pebble glasses. The fifth toe of the right foot and the first of the left foot were both from north-east China. Every day they complained about the heat in loud voices that sounded like they were quarrelling. Whenever they were in the room, Mei Mei would hide herself away somewhere else to read; but Five found these two girls the easiest to understand.

The second toe on the left foot was from Xinxiang in Henan Province. Her elder sister and her younger brother were foot masseurs too. Mei Mei said that foot masseurs from Henan were like sports shoes from Wenzhou – they had taken over all big cities in China, and had a very good reputation. The third toe of the left foot was the new girl from Ningbo, the fourth toe wasn't anyone and the fifth was Five herself.

Of course there were dozens of other girls at the Water-Culture Centre who didn't sleep in the dormitory and whose names and job titles Five had difficulty with. She was at a complete loss to remember who did what shift until Auntie Wang devised a system for her: the soles of the feet were women and the tops of the feet were men; the left foot was the early shift and the right foot was the late shift. Auntie Wang would say things like ‘The left sole needs more towels' or ‘Take these disposable slippers to the top of the right foot'.