The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (5 page)

Yes. She’d turn around. They could do the assignment tonight. Be good for them to have the extra responsibility. Instead, she could go to Jia Lin’s school—actually, her after-school tutorial club—and meet her at the gates. On rare occasions when she had done so in the past, Jia Lin had never said anything, but Linyao knew the girl found the extra attention significant.

She was almost ready to spin on her heels when another thought struck her. The catering job tonight—to make a sumptuous vegan dinner for an important group of eleven visitors staying temporarily in Shanghai—was no ordinary booking. The visitors were a much talked-about group of international animal rights activists called the Children of Vega. The visit of this group was the most discussed event in recent memory, as far as vegetarian circles in this city were concerned. The charismatic boss of the group was said to be extremely sensitive about his food. Woe betide anyone who served him an ill-conceived meal, or one with anti-ideological ingredients. This thought made her feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was too risky to leave it to the youngsters.

To ponder over intractable dilemmas is like doing the cha-cha-cha. Two steps north, one step south. Pause. Turn around. Two steps south, one step north. Pause. Turn around. Linyao was performing this complex manoeuvre in her head, and her feet were starting to do the same thing as she twisted her body one way and then the other. Then she made up her mind.

She started walking forward again. No; she couldn’t skip it. On this occasion, she had better oversee the catering job herself, and leave the job of collecting her daughter to her domestic helper, who did it automatically unless informed otherwise. Can’t risk the Children of Vega being upset. A link with Vega could put their café on the map as far as vegetarianism in China went—perhaps even internationally. She’d pick Jia Lin up from school tomorrow, or another day.

And so, with a few seconds’ thought, we make quick decisions we are to bitterly regret over long hours ahead. For perhaps this is the biggest dilemma of creatures who live temporal lives. Trapped in mono-directional time, we have no ability to step outside and see our lives from more useful angles. Linyao is an over-busy woman eleven and a quarter years older than Joyce, and her problem is not her awareness of the number of possibilities ahead of her, but her lack of awareness of them. Her life has become a high-speed sequence of decisions, huge numbers of them a day, almost all of which are made with little or no thought. Life is not a box of chocolates, but a lucky dip containing an infinite number of tightly wrapped packages, some of which held diamond rings while others harbour miniature nuclear bombs. You just keep absently picking out the packages, every minute, every day, your whole life long. Lu Linyao, on this occasion, picked a 30 ticking package out of the lucky dip of life and slipped it in her bag to explode later.

First came the sauce inspection. Linyao had always been a meticulous person, but today she was excelling herself. She stood on the staff deck of the small, closed restaurant and prepared for battle. The nine years she had spent in Canada (during which time she acquired a Canadian passport, a child, a Filipina domestic helper and—temporarily—a husband) had given her an easy fluency in English.

‘Ingredients check,’ she barked. She started grabbing the bottles and jars from the condiments tray and tossing them to the two young people standing in the centre of the room.

‘I’ll do them. Let me do them,’ Joyce McQuinnie said guiltily, snatching bottles from the air. The British-Australian teenager had replenished most of the items on the condiments rack, feeling that important guests needed fresh, clean jars and bottles, not grubby, half-empty ones. As a child, she had always been told off by her older sister for her constant desire for ‘brand new’ things. Her sister had sneered that
brand new
meant the same as
new
, but she still felt the two words together conjured up a delight lacking in the word
new
on its own. It wasn’t until years later that it became obvious to her that first-born children place less value on the virginity of mundane items, while younger children, inevitably dressed in hand-me-downs with ‘not too many stains’, considered it an issue of great importance.

One of the things Joyce most liked about staying in hotels was the way staff sneaked into your room and tried to make everything new, doing absurd things such as folding the end of your toilet roll into a triangle. It was a delicate little attempt to make a singularly unattractive object—a half-used toilet roll—look brand new again. She had thought of adopting the technique for home use, but decided her guests, most of whom were rather slovenly young people, would laugh at her. And besides, she was not a details person, nor was she a person of consistent habits. She knew she would have done it for three days and then dropped it.

Joyce’s failure to pay attention to detail often jumped up and bit her on the bottom—and it looked as if it might do so again on this occasion. In the past week she had already been caught out once by the presence of an illegal ingredient in the small print on the label of an item she had bought for the vegetarian café. And she had a sinking feeling that she might be disgraced again. The worry drove thoughts of Marker Cai out of their pole position at the centre of her thoughts. Had she carefully checked the label as she bought each item? Probably not. But it was too late for her to take over the job of checking the ingredients lists herself. Linyao had already tossed several items to Philip ‘Flip’ Chen, given a third of them to Joyce, and retained the rest to examine herself.

The young woman looked at the collection of condiment containers in front of her: ketchup, dark soy sauce, Japanese chilli powder, sesame seed powder, and some sort of bottled satay sauce. At first glance, it all looked veggie enough. But Linyao had drummed it into her troops: the utmost vigilance in label-reading was the only way to maintain physiological and ideological purity.

Joyce had been in way too much of a hurry to do the shopping properly. After they had abandoned their crumbling office block on Henan Zhong Lu, Wong had said that he was going to the opening of some sort of new dining club tonight—it had a stupid name, ‘This Is the Good Life’ or ‘Really Living’ or something like that. So she had taken the opportunity to stop work early too. How could she work without a desk or an office? She had raced to a food store, grabbed some fresh condiments, and then walked briskly to the café.

‘Remember this is a code three meal,’ the chair of the society said, pursing her lips and staring coldly at each label.

Joyce nodded. Code one meals were strict vegetarian. Code two meals were strict vegan. And code three meals were restricted vegan meals, conforming to the vegan code with extra conditions attached by the client who had ordered the food. In this instance, the client had given Linyao strict lists of possible ingredients, and she had thus classified the meal as code three point five, also known as hyper-vegan. Joyce bit her lip as she read the ingredients list on a product without taking in a single word. When she became stressed her brain seemed to wipe itself clean, a process she could never repeat when she tried meditation or yoga. She shook her head to get her brain working and started reading again.

On the other side of the room, Phil Chen nodded his head to a heavily syncopated rhythm audible only to him as he read the back of a jar of Dijon mustard: water, mustard seed, vinegar, salt, citric acid and potassium metabisulphite.

‘I tink you be lucky today, sista,’ he said in a broad Jamaican accent. ‘Dis stuff be mostly ohkay.’ He put it down and picked up a jar of Lee Kum Kee Chilli Bean Sauce and traced his finger down the ingredients list: chilli, water, fermented soy bean paste, fermented broad bean paste, sugar, garlic, spice, modified corn starch, soybean oil, food acid, disodium 5 inosinate. ‘And dis one too.’

As usual, Phil’s accent put a broad smile on Joyce’s face.

Although one hundred per cent Chinese by blood, Phil Chen had learned English while spending most of the past year as an exchange student in New York. He had lived with the family of Royston Marley Lewis, seventeen, in an apartment off 125th street, and found the environment of Harlem so fascinating that he had spent more time studying Royston’s happy and creative family (five adults, only two of whom were related to each other, and four children, most of whom had different fathers) than focusing on what he was there to do: business studies at the City University of New York.

Raised in a small town north of Beijing, Phil (his name was an Anglicisation of his Chinese name Fei) spoke no English at all when he arrived in the United States, although he could read and write it quite well: such is the situation of people who learn languages largely from books. So he naturally assumed that the pronunciation of Royston’s family was the best way to speak the words he knew so well from his English textbooks. None of the Lewis family had much time for him (nor did the teachers at CUNY) so he spent long hours with Salvation Preciousblood Constance Lewis, Royston’s 83-year-old grandmother, who had moved to New York from Jamaica only three years earlier. It was a joy to finally find out how people in the United States pronounced the words he had written in hundreds of exam answers over the past six years.

I ask, he asks, they asked = I arks, he arks, dey arks.

First, second, third = Fussed, secun, turd.

A, B, C, one, two, three = air, bee, see, one, two, tree.

Baby, you and me = Mama, I an’ I.

As he became more relaxed about speaking in English and mixed with more people at the university, he was pleased to discover that his value judgement was correct. The Lewises’ English
was
the best English. The young men (of any colour) who spoke like Royston’s family members were the popular ones, the ones who were looked up to, the ones who set the style for others to follow. While most of the teachers spoke in the softer, more sophisticated, affricative accents he heard used by Westerners in movies and on the BBC World Service, the coolest of the boys and hottest of the girls spoke like the Lewises. So he did too.

Now he had been back in China for seven weeks, and was delighted to show off his fluency in English. But although most English speakers understood what he said, they always looked faintly surprised at his
Yo, homey
greetings and Jamaican accent. This rather upset him. He had never understood why his speech patterns were considered odd until Joyce commented a few days earlier that it was funny to hear
that
sort of accent coming out of a Chinese face.

‘Wot chew mean?’

‘You know, like a, a, a, a, whatdoyoucallit, a West Indian accent sortofthing,’ she had stammered awkwardly.

‘Indian? I not speakin’
Indian
, gul.’

‘No, I mean like
black
people and all that,’ she said, her shoulders creeping upwards with the embarrassment of having said something that was probably un-PC. ‘You know. Africa. Jamaica. Around there.’

‘I lairned me to speak English in Noo York.’

‘New York, yeah. That’s where I meant.’

But his family and friends were getting used to his accent, and since he had also picked up New York teenage fashion sense, copying his garments precisely, label by label, from Royston’s younger half-brothers Washington and Stevie, he dressed the part too, in baggy trousers and shapeless XXL T-shirts. He had shocked his Chinese friends by declaring that blue denim jeans were out of fashion. ‘Nobody wear dem. Only de moms. De hip people, dey doen wear dem. Dey wear udder casual clodes. Usually yellow or brown colour like dis. Dem call car-keys.’ He yanked the spare folds of cloth on his voluminous low-crotched khaki Chinos and left his Shanghai contemporaries gaping. Phil, everyone decided, had become totally cool. He was never without a backpack containing two items—his skateboard, and a megaphone used for declaiming rap poetry on the streets. The boy who had been born Fei, and who had then become Philip, now asked people to call him Flip, but most were too taken aback at the transformation to call him anything at all.

Linyao gave out a yelp, followed by a sharp intake of breath.

Joyce and Flip froze and turned to stare at her. For a few seconds, nobody breathed. Linyao was holding a thin, dark brown bottle with a blue and red label. ‘Who bought this?’ she asked, her voice dangerously low and calm sounding.

Joyce recognised the product. It was a bottle of Lea & Perrins sauce, a brown, dark-tasting liquid which her father used to pour onto sausages and steaks. Her shoulders flopped. ‘Er. It may have been me,’ she said in the shrivelled voice of a child admitting to an illicit visit to the cookie jar. She’d assumed it was made out of vinegar and cornflour—that’s what it tasted like.

Linyao stretched out the unpleasantness by reading out the ingredients list extremely slowly: ‘Vinegar. Molasses. Sugar. Salt.’ She paused. ‘And
anchovies
,’ she added in a whisper.

There was silence for a full two seconds.

‘Oops. Oh dear,’ Joyce said nervously. ‘Ha ha.’

‘Anchovy am wot?’ Flip asked.