Miss Chopsticks (9 page)

‘Look, my friend,' he said to the person on the other end of the line, ‘come here for a bathe. It'll be much nicer to talk with our jackets off … What, you think I'm abusing my power to push my friends around? … OK, OK, just let me know when you're on your way and I'll make sure there's a quiet room for you. That's settled then. I'll be waiting!'

Manager Shui put the phone back into his pocket and brought his train of thought back to the office with visible effort.

‘Sorry, sorry, remind me who you are … It's Five, isn't it? That's right, the new assistant! Well now, Five, is that what your family call you? Is there something else you'd prefer to be called? No? Never mind, I like calling you Five.'

Without giving Five time to reply, Manager Shui pressed a small bell on the desk, and a thin girl came in like the ones Five had seen standing behind the big glass windows. She was dressed entirely in green, and her clothes were extremely eye-catching. Five's heart began to beat faster just looking at her and she didn't even dare to lift her head to look this green person in the eye.

‘Miss Lin, this is Five, who's just come to join us. Will you take her to see Engineer Wu in the pump room, please. Also, it's my reading hour next, but if Director Chen from the City Political Bureau calls, please put him through.'

‘Certainly, Manager Shui. No calls between one and two, unless it's the City Government Director. Come on now, Five, let's go and see Engineer Wu.'

Five followed the green girl out of the office, keeping her head lowered. Then, to her distress, instead of leading her silently down the corridor, the green girl started asking her questions. Five was terrified she would give a stupid answer and kept her eyes glued to the floor.

‘Five, where are you from?' asked the green girl kindly.

‘Chuzhou Prefecture, Anhui Province,' Five said in a voice as faint as a mosquito.

‘Have you ever been to Nanjing before?'

‘No,' she whispered.

The green girl tried again.

‘Five, what kind of flowers do you like?'

‘Flowers?' Five was puzzled, but she still did not dare to raise her head, keeping her eyes fixed on the two pretty legs walking along beside her.

‘Flowers from your garden, or flowers that grow nearby your house? What sort do you like the best?'

‘Sweet-potato flowers,' Five answered without hesitation.

‘Sweet-potato flowers? What are those like? I've never seen a sweet-potato flower.'

The green high-heeled shoes came to a stop. Five had only ever seen one pair of high-heeled shoes in her life. Uncle Three had bought them in the local town for his wife and they had been the talk of the village for quite some time, until Aunt Three said they hurt her feet and she wasn't going to wear them any more. But the green girl's shoes were much higher. Weren't they uncomfortable?

‘Come on, Five. Tell me what a sweet-potato flower looks like.'

‘Oh, I …' Five had no idea how to describe a sweet-potato flower. Surely they were so common that everyone knew what they looked like? As always, she fell back on her mother's words: ‘Some are as big as a hundred-day-old baby's fist, but then you find tiny ones, like a woman's thumbnail. When they are open, they are the shape of a funnel, and the fields look like a green sky filled with stars.'

The high heels started walking again. ‘Well, Five, you're full of surprises. I've never heard of a “green sky”. That must look very beautiful. So, tell me some more about yourself. If someone invites you out to eat, what kind of food do you like?'

Five didn't know how to reply to this question at all. She
had never in her life been invited to a table where there were guests, and her father had always said that girls couldn't take part in banquets.

The green girl didn't seem to mind that Five wasn't answering and launched into other questions.

‘Perhaps you like karaoke? Or films? Why don't you look up? I think we must be about the same age.'

Five tried her hardest to raise her head but she still felt very uncomfortable at the idea of looking directly at such an elegant person.

‘You're very lucky to have found a job here, Five,' the girl continued. ‘I've worked in a lot of companies, but our Manager Shui's the most cultivated manager I've had, and the most honest and fair. You can spend three years in most companies without laying eyes on the boss, but Manager Shui is always chatting to the staff. There's lots to learn here, whether you've got an education or not. You'll pick up some very useful skills … Now, I'm going to introduce you to Engineer Wu. His full name's Wu Dali, but everyone calls him Engineer Wu because he's in charge of the pump room and the plumbing. He doesn't talk much, but he's an honest man, and very good with technical things. If there's any problem with the machinery, he knows what it is just by listening to it, or looking at the water in the pools. Manager Shui says he's a complete treasure and is worth half the company, so no one dares to disobey Engineer Wu's orders.'

Although Five had some difficulty keeping up with what the green girl was saying, she managed to form a picture in her head of a tall, imposing man. But when she was led in front of Engineer Wu, she realised she could not have been more wrong. In fact he was what the people in the village called ‘half a yard': no taller than Five, and very skinny. His flesh barely covered his bones and, every time he moved, you could see the muscles rippling under his skin.

‘Hello,' he said, in a voice that seemed far too kind to be
a man's, ‘you must be Miss Five! Don't worry if you feel all at sea right now. Anyone chosen by Banyue will be able to learn quickly. Use your eyes to watch and your mouth to ask, and in just a few days you'll know all about what happens inside the Water Dragon's Palace.'

For the first time since she had entered this strange place, Five relaxed. Engineer Wu spoke in a way she could actually follow. She even had the courage to raise her head a little and look properly at the difficult-to-understand green girl. How beautiful she was! Just like the pictures of film stars Three had brought home at New Year. Village women said a beautiful woman had a face like a full moon, a mouth like a cherry and lips like thin willow leaves, but the ones in Three's pictures all had pointed chins, hollow cheeks, big mouths, and lips full enough to fry dinner on. Five remembered hiding in the storeroom every day to look at herself in a mirror she'd sneaked into her pocket. She knew she wasn't beautiful by village standards but perhaps she had a ‘city' kind of beauty. Despite days of gazing into the mirror, she couldn't decide what to think of her appearance, but she knew that no one else in the village measured up to Three's pictures either. Even Six, whom everyone said was so pretty, had lips that were too thin. But this green girl had everything …

Engineer Wu gently tapped Five on the shoulder.

‘Five, are you all right?'

‘I'm … I'm fine. It's just that she's so pretty!' The words slipped out before Five could stop them and seemed to embarrass the green girl, who whispered a few words in Engineer Wu's ear and swayed off down the corridor. Five watched her until she disappeared round a corner and then sighed.

‘Why didn't I look at her earlier?'

‘What was that?' Engineer Wu asked.

‘Nothing,' Five whispered, trying to implant the green girl's beautiful face in her memory. ‘Nothing …'

Engineer Wu seemed to be a very patient person because he didn't speak again until he was certain that he had Five's full attention.

‘Now, Five, let's go and get some lunch. We'll have to start work in a while and, while we're eating, I'll tell you a bit about the Water Dragon's Palace.'

Five felt anxiety welling up inside her.

‘How can I work if I don't know anything?' she cried. All her life she had thought herself clumsy. It took her ages to learn how to do new things. She remembered how, the first time Three came back from the city, she had tried to teach her to arrange vegetables. A day and a half went by and Three kept yelling, ‘How could our mother have given birth to two such different people? Why can't you see you'll damage the produce if you handle it like that!' Her father had been sitting nearby, and had rebuked Three, knocking his pipe out on the stove. ‘Stop laying into Five just because she's a bit slower than you. Don't think that, just because you've spent a bit of time in the city, you can tell your sister what to do.' Three had cried all night because of this reprimand, and Five had felt it was all her fault. Now this Engineer Wu thought he could explain her job in a few words! What if she didn't understand? Three said that countryside people were naturally more stupid than city people, and she was the stupidest girl in the village …

When Engineer Wu took Five to the workers' canteen to eat lunch, he made sure to sit her in a corner facing the wall so that she had her back to the endless stream of employees coming to get their lunch. He could see that she was having difficulty coping with the stress of meeting new people, and was struggling to communicate. He knew that, without a careful handling of the situation, it would be easy to destroy her confidence. The Dragon Water-Culture Centre was a relatively new business and even Nanjingers had
taken a while to get to understand how it worked. He was going to have to find a way to explain things to Five slowly and clearly otherwise she would never get to grips with city life.

Engineer Wu's understanding of the countryside came from his mother, who had been born in a village in Sichuan. As a young woman she had come to work in the city with her husband, but she never managed to shake off her feeling of inferiority. Even in later life, when she was helping take care of old people who lived alone, she would refer to herself as ‘stupid', and rarely laughed, joked or went for a stroll in the streets with friends. Engineer Wu, who had grown up with his mother's silence, felt a great deal of sympathy for country girls like Five who came from male-run villages where they received little love or attention. To him they were like blades of grass growing in the cracks between stones: they wanted to see the sunlight and find a space to breathe, but the wind and rain hammered down on them. It was all too easy for these girls to be utterly crushed by men and to feel that they were worthless. Although their ignorance gave them courage to leave their homes, this same ignorance could very quickly become a source of fear and self-loathing when they realised how little they knew. He had known girls who had committed suicide because, after living the circumscribed way of life in the countryside, that hadn't changed for centuries, they found it impossible to adapt to the pressures of modern life in a city, or deal with its freedoms. He was determined that this shouldn't be Five's fate.

‘Here's your lunch,' he said to her, placing a tray down in front of her. ‘Eat up.'

Five looked at the food and remembered the first time her father's fist had struck her head: ‘You've done no work,' he had shouted. ‘How can you eat?' It had not been a hard blow, but it had been strong enough to bash into
Five's four-year-old head the belief that you can't eat before you've completed your tasks.

‘I'm not hungry,' she said.

‘You may really not be hungry, but this is the big city. All workers eat at mealtimes, or else you have to go hungry until the next meal: there's no stove to keep your food warm here. Hurry up and finish it. This is a part of the wages you'll be earning from today. Just make sure you do your work properly afterwards.'

‘All right, I'll eat.' Five gave a nod and started to wolf down her food. In a few minutes the big tray of fried rice and vegetable soup was empty, consumed by Five with great slurping noises. Engineer Wu smiled. By the looks of things, she would have fainted if she hadn't had something to eat soon, and her healthy appetite was a good sign. The man who had taught him his trade had once said that people who liked big meals, ate quickly and weren't picky about their food, made hard, capable workers. This was why in ancient times artisans choosing apprentices always held a meal called ‘Welcoming Meal to Greet the Master' as a practical test of their skill.

When Engineer Wu had finished eating he put his tray on an empty table to his left, and took out several pieces of paper from an inner pocket of his orange boilersuit. Selecting a blank piece of paper, he plucked a pen from his top pocket and drew a diagram.

‘Take a look at this, Five. What do you see: a body, a head with eyes, nose, mouth, ears, whiskers and horns, claws, and a tail? OK, what is it?'

‘A dragon,' exclaimed Five, delighted by the skill of Engineer Wu's drawing.

‘Now, Five, listen carefully. The dragon's head is for thinking and organising and that's called the office. Manager Shui works with his assistants in the office, telling everyone what to do. The tail of the dragon is used to store the herbs that will be brewed into medicine for
the pools. It is also where the pumps and boilers are kept – that hot and noisy place that you saw when you came in. In this dragon's belly are all the guts: the pools, the treatment rooms, and the relaxation rooms. Pump room workers and assistants like you are the dragon's feet and claws; if any part of the dragon's body hurts or itches we'll be there to soothe or scratch it, because customers will only be happy if there is no problem anywhere on the dragon's body. That's the only way we can turn a profit!'

‘But what are the pools for?' Five asked in confusion.

‘We fill the pools with medicinal herbs,' Engineer Wu explained patiently. ‘Bathing in these waters can cure illnesses or stop you getting ill.'

Five seemed completely taken aback.

‘But aren't you supposed to drink medicine?' she asked. ‘Not just wash in it … In our village, we all drink the medicine from the doctor. It's really bitter, but my dad says that if medicine's not bitter it won't work!'