Sun Wei is a Chinese novelist, short-story writer and essayist. She was born in 1973 in Shanghai and grew up in a family of intellectuals. She received her B.A. in Journalism from Fudan University in 1996 and her Master’s degree in International Business Administration from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 2001. She started writing fairy tales and novels in her teenage years. In her 20s, she worked as a director at Shanghai Television Station and later as the General Manager of a state-owned media company specialized in documentary and TV column production. In 2003, she quit her job and became a full-time writer and then she went into a period of maturation and high productivity. She regards writing as her fate and believes that a writer has an obligation to truthfully describe the times he/she lives in with his/her individual judgment.
By Sun Wei
It was Tuesday, but by the time he left the office, the traffic was no longer busy in downtown Shanghai. All the annoying inconsequentials of the day - five internal meetings, two international phone calls, and the talk he gave to three incompetent subordinates - swirled in his head. The key was swirling in front of the Toyota dashboard. His empty stomach also felt as if it kept swirling inside him.
On the way from 66 [1] back to Hongqiao [2], the neon of restaurants pulsed all around him. He counted himself lucky to be able to shut out the bustle of the day, the hustle of his surroundings: though his stomach was empty, his mind was still filled with troubles. Finally he got home, drove into the underground parking lot; and switched off the ignition. In the elevator he heard his stomach make a loud plaintive sound. He straightened the lapel of his suit, lifted his chin a bit, and turned away from his reflection in the mirror.
He tried to think only about the dumplings he had been looking forward to for hours. He liked to sneak into the kitchen to see her prepare them. He liked to hear the sound of minor explosions the instant the frozen dumplings plopped into the boiling water. She pulled her hand back after each throw. This brought back memories from his childhood of Spring Festivals [3] where he would always take big steps back each time he ignited a firecracker and threw it on the ground. Perhaps there would be scrambled egg with tomato for dinner. The previous night when he went downstairs for a beer, he spotted in the fridge, besides the milk she had just bought, two tomatoes, wrapped in film, with price tags still on.
The elevator door opened straight into his duplex apartment. There was light in the kitchen downstairs, but the living room was dark. The TV was off. She was asleep on the sofa, still wearing her work suit, her handbag lay awkwardly under her head.
As he approached her she opened her eyes, looking a little panicked, as if she was trying to work out who he was. In a second she was wide-awake. She sat up, ruffled her hair and said, ‘The gas stove has stopped working.’
‘How come?’ he dropped his briefcase on the floor, and went to sit on the sofa beside her.
‘It was that way when I came in. The igniter makes a noise, but it just won’t light.’
‘How come?’ he said again, frowning, making no move.
She poked him, ‘Go and take a look.’
Slowly he stood up, looked around, as if he were lost. She dragged him towards the kitchen, left him at the stove, stepped back, and, leaning on the microwave, watched him. He reached out and with his fingers on the knob; hesitated.
‘Press then turn, that’s right, just like that. ’She said.
The knob clicked when he turned it. A spark leaped up, then was gone without a blue circle of flame materializing. He tried again. He exerted a little more force on the third attempt. But still there was just a spark.
‘What is the problem?’ she asked him.
‘How should I know!’ His tone was stiff. He stayed standing in front of the stove, studying it intently and brooding over it. He couldn’t bring himself to try again and fail again in front of her. He felt her judging gaze questioning his very manhood.
He strutted out of the kitchen, and flipped on the light in the living room. She followed him as he fumbled along the wall until he found a door handle just under the staircase. He pushed open the small door, letting out a smell that was a mixture of rust and dust, revealing a cupboard. Along its wall ran a gaspipe with the valve visible. Right under the pipe was a Samsonite suitcase, medium size, dark green, the top of which was covered by rust flaking off the valve handle. He mumbled curses, dragged the suitcase out with one hand and chucked it on the floor behind him.
She all of a sudden had this impression that it was she who was being dragged by the hair and hurled out of a door, as if it didn’t matter to him how hard she hit the floor.
How could she have forgotten the existence of this cupboard? she asked herself. It was weird, for the suitcase was hers, and it was she who had put it there herself. In the first two months after she moved in here, this suitcase was in the cloakroom upstairs, for there was enough room. Somehow they discovered this cupboard, and the suitcase found its way there. Then she just forgot about this cupboard, altogether with the suitcase. Although she cleaned the whole place every week.
With the suitcase gone, he had ample room to pull the valve. Both hands grasping the red handwheel, he took a deep breath, then swivelled it to the left. The handle loosened. ‘What are you waiting for? Go to the kitchen and see if it’s OK now,’ he said to her.
Long-faced, she moved in that direction.
He stopped when the valve could not turn any more and shouted, ‘OK. Try the igniter.’
‘No, still not working.’ Her voice came from the kitchen.
He turned the valve in the opposite direction, called out, ‘Again?’
‘No flame!’
‘All right,’ he wiped his hands on his trousers, before he remembered they were his good work-clothes. Cursing under his breath, he went into the bathroom. ‘Looks like it’s not about the main regulator,’ he said to himself. Of course it was not. Could she be getting up in the middle of every night to turn that off? He was just letting her know that he was doing something.
Coming out of the kitchen, she saw the door to the cupboard was still open, and the suitcase still lying on the floor. He emerged from the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. He shrugged his shoulders at the sight of her: ‘There is really nothing more I can do.’
‘But we have to figure something out. It has to be fixed,’ she said.
‘It beats me,’ he took off his suit jacket and tossed it onto one side of the sofa; letting out a heavy sigh, before slumping onto the other side.
She was hungry. Actually she had been hungry while still at work. Before dozing off on the sofa, she had been in the kitchen meaning to make something for herself, only to discover the stove was broken. She felt as if the apartment was no longer responding to her demands. Now this impression became more intense. She stood in front of him, arms crossed, legs apart, feeling her dress tightening on her thighs and her jacket tightening on her back. The raised voice was hers: ‘You are sitting on my handbag.’
He lifted his eye lids, and dug the bag out from behind his back. He made no move to pick up his suit jacket so she could sit down. She set her mind on just standing there, until he cleared some space for her. She was not going to do it for him. Neither was she going to sit down without an invitation, of some sort.
‘We must fix the gas stove!’ she announced, not moving. He got the remote, and then the television set lit up behind her: perhaps the signal transmitted under her armpit or between her legs.
She stepped even closer, ‘Can’t you hear me?’ She could sense that behind her the channels were changing rapidly. With her standing in the way, he stretched his neck in different directions, which was the only sign that she was after all not transparent.
‘You’re not fixing it, are you? You’re just going to leave it like that for good?’ Her frustration grew and grew and she felt the gears of her head grinding to a halt.
‘Look, can’t you just get me something to eat? I’m starving’, he said, tenderly and earnestly, as if nothing had happened.
‘How can I? With the stove down?’ The gear wheels still felt stuck.
‘What about the microwave?’
‘That’ll take someone smarter than me.’
He sighed. She noticed and snapped at him, ‘that’s why we’ve got to fix the stove now!’
He said, ‘Let’s not discuss this now. We’ll just eat out tonight. I’m so hungry that I think my blood sugar’s running low.’ He was a man who already had one failed marriage in his past and knew it was inviting unhappiness upon himself to talk about anything with a woman. Quickly he turned off the television, and rose to his feet; then he put on his suit jacket, and fetched his wallet and keys from his briefcase. When he noticed she was not moving, he held her shoulders from behind, and pushed her towards the door.
Before switching off the light, she pointed at the pendant lamp and said, ‘That’s broken too. How many times have I told you about it? You just turn a blind eye to everything.’ It was an antique-bronze-colored lamp, resembling a flower with six petals, each hosting a bulb. Two out of the six stayed dark.
‘Just leave it. It’s not going to kill us.’
He turned off the light; she hastened to say, ‘The chain’s broken too’, before he opened the door. For a good few months they hadn’t had to unfasten the chain to open the door. She used to adore this brass chain, like something one would find in a quaint inn.
‘I told you. Just let it be. There is no point in a door chain anyway.’ There was impatience in his voice.
He let her walk in front of him, before she thought of something else. For a while now, it had always been he who walked in front, with her following, like a traditional Chinese couple who had been together for ages. Today she felt as though he were seeing her off. It felt like a goodbye between two polite acquaintances who were not really close.
He drove the car past the front of the apartment, and onto another fork of the road. Before she even spoke, he chose a restaurant and pulled up in the car.
This restaurant had not been there for long. Most of the flowers in the bouquets at the door had withered, and the aquarium did not boast many fish. The front desk was in mint condition, and four girls in high-necked cheongsam [4] that split at the upper end of the thigh were teasing each other and having a good laugh.
He leafed through a few pages before handing the menu to her. The manager instantly moved towards her, and, with the ordering sheet in his hand, asked, ‘What do we want to eat tonight, my sister?’
She was a little bit put off by the saccharine male voice, and stopped going through the menu. The manager was a diminutive man, hair disheveled, the collar of the white shirt revealing the slightly raised collarbone. He had thin eyebrows and tiny eyes, which were throwing anxious glances all around and showed affected enthusiasm when she turned her face to him.
‘What cuisine do you do here?’ She asked.
‘Sister, what we have in this restaurant is the authentic Shanghai cuisine, but if you fancy cuisine from Hunan, Sichuan, Guangzhou, or from Northeast, stuff like that, we can do them as well.’ His neck swung to the cadence of his speech, as if he were truly devoted to every word he spoke.
All she could do now was to lower her gaze and stare at the menu, ‘It’s quite late now, we shall have just a little dim sum.’ She turned to the last page: ‘Wonton [5] with veg and meat filling…’
‘Wonton’s sold out today.’
‘Noodle, then, with potherb mustard and shredded pork.’
‘Noodle’s sold out too, sister, how would you like a kilo of shrimp?’
She began to detest this manager, treachery written all over his face. She’d rather have those frozen dumplings: once outside work, she did not like the idea of having to deal with someone else’s calculating behavior. She was fond of the promptness of the blue flame on the stove, but of course it belonged to the past now. She was fond of the clamorous noise a dumpling made when dropped into boiling water. She was also fond of him engrossing himself in eating, and afterwards his satisfied, even grateful, way of brushing aside his plate before sinking into the sofa to watch TV.
From the other side of the table he interrupted. ‘Forget it. I’ll order.’ She observed when he took the menu the manager lost no time in bowing in his direction, ever so ready to take note of his words.
His finger slid down on the page, ‘Pickled yellow croaker, sautéed pumpkin with lily bulbs, stuffed lotus roots with sugared glutinous rice, duck tongues.’
He paused for a second. ‘Four cold dishes, already, sir,’ the manager turned his head and glanced sideways at her; she sensed there was something defiant in his arched eyebrows.
‘Braised pork in soy sauce and braised bamboo shoots.’
‘Can we eat that much?’ This time it was she who interrupted him. She stared at him, fingernails scratching the tablecloth.
He raised his eyes, utterly uncomprehending of the reason why she got cross. He gently said to her, ‘Day after day we’ve been having dumplings. It’s not often we go out and have some nice stuff. Also I’m really, really hungry.’
‘Do you want fish? A fresh one.’
‘You mentioned shrimps?’ He put his palms together and said this surprisingly in a tender tone.
‘Yeah… sure…’
‘But I don’t see where you could be keeping them?’ he chuckled, through his nose.
‘Don’t worry sir, if you want shrimps, we’ll take care of that, and you can be sure they’ll be the freshest.’
‘OK then, half a kilo of stir-fried shrimps. Hurry up, please.’
After the manager left, quiet descended on the table. He lowered his head to look at his fingers, locked them, pressed them, then unlocked them. A few minutes later, he stood up and walked towards the door. She watched him. He picked two newspapers from the stand, returned to his seat, and began to read. She too made her way to the stand, and took a good look at what it presented. On one of the smaller shelves there were many commercial postcards. Biting her nails, she casually took half a dozen, and walked back to her seat.
She pushed a postcard in front of his face, between his eyes and the paper he was reading. The postcard had the logo of the Four Seasons Hotel. ‘What do you say if I apply for lessons in the culinary arts?’ she asked. She felt that she was being sarcastic.
He did not lift his head, two syllables tumbled out of his throat: ‘No need.’
‘Just there you said, day after day you’ve been eating dumplings and how you want to have something nice, didn’t you?’ She hunched over the table, tapped the newspaper in his hands, said in a lowered voice, ‘you could have told me if you didn’t like it.’
‘I didn’t say…’ he lifted his head, refocused his eyes, and hastened to recover, ‘well, I did say we can sometimes improve on that. But you don’t have to do it yourself. We can hire a housekeeper.’
‘Housekeeper?’ she glared at him. He again immersed his face in the newspaper.
‘Hey!’ She said, ‘Who’ll do the hiring? You or me? Do you know how difficult it is to find the right person, and to manage her? Especially someone who’s not educated. Do you have any idea?’
He knew. Despite that he said, ‘what’s so difficult about it? Don’t you supervise ten or more people? Not to mention you majored in business administration…wouldn’t that be enough training for facing a housekeeper?’
‘Do we let her go to the market too?’
‘That would be fine.’
‘What if she bought something unhygienic? Or was dodgy with money?’
‘It is not really worth bothering about.’
‘When will she come to work? We never get home on time, so who’ll open the door for her?’
‘Give her the keys.’ He was still reading the paper, his voice floating like the mumblings in his sleep.
‘It doesn’t bother you letting a stranger have our keys?’
‘I don’t care.’
She felt a lump in her throat, choking her words. She took a deep breath. He had no clue that their conversation was suspended, he might even have forgotten her presence at that end of the table. She took another deep breath, rapped the table a few times, as if she were giving a lecture to her subordinates at work:
‘I’ve thought it over. I don’t like housekeepers. I don’t like having a stranger in our house. I don’t like, apart from my job, wearing out my brain trying to outwit a housekeeper. I don’t like letting a stranger have our keys.’
There was no response from him.
‘What’s more, we can’t hire a housekeeper: our stove is down.’
Still no response.
‘Did you hear me! We must fix the gas stove!’ That old gearwheel just stuck there, tapping in her temple back and forth.
‘Just let’s have some quiet for a minute!’ he abruptly waved his hand, to shake off something that he assumed to be her postcard brushing the back of his hand, but it was a corner of the newspaper blown up by a breeze from the front door. He knocked over a cup of water. She leaped up with her handbag. He jumped to his feet too, holding the dripping paper.
That was when the dishes were being served. A waiter was standing there, holding a tray. The manager was in a fluster, wiping the spilled water, with facetious agility. She was not vexed by the slight brush of the mop on her stockings. She had now entered a space where nothing could irritate her.
The cold dishes resembled blocks of wax. Not until they were in her mouth did she realize how hungry she was. Quite soon the steaming braised pork and braised bamboo shoots arrived. He helped her to some. They just carried on eating. For a long while no words were exchanged.
He had been through one unsuccessful marriage and was then transferred from Beijing to Shanghai. She had once lived with a man before separating. And then the same thing had happened again, after which she lived alone for two years.
As lone individuals each had hated choosing restaurants just by their neon displays or looking through windows. Each hated going through the motion of looking for an empty parking space, or sitting alone at a gigantic table, and facing the affected warmth in the eyes of the staff. They found each other through a dinner pal scheme advertised on an online social network. They had not found the ‘dinner-pal’ idea, drawn up by the office workers of that area very attractive or ideal: strangers don’t have much to say to one another. But they had found it the lesser of two evils.
After a few months the Dinner-Pals in their particular group dispersed; everyone else found their particular pal, leaving only these two. He worked in Plaza 66; she in Westgate Tower [6].
Every day they made appointments before finishing work; they’d been to Jinting, Zen, Element Fresh [7], had tried almost all the outlets in Food Republic [8]; one could see them also in Yonghe Soybean [9], Guilin Rice-Noodle [10], Jiabi Buns [11] , Duck-Blood Soup with Rice-Noodle [12], and in the queues for Shengjian [13] on Wujiang Road [14]. They usually stuffed themselves to avoid midnight hunger, went Dutch on the bill, and then each drove to their own homes.
When her office moved to Ryan Plaza [15], almost on the other side of town, he did not care for another dinner-time companion; neither did she. There was too much traffic between Huaihai Road and Nanjing Road [16], in view of which he suggested looking for a place somewhere between their houses. He lived in Hongqiao, and she Nandan Road [17]: as a matter of fact, they did not live that far away from each other.
They established their dining venue at Ajisen Ramen [18] and had been dining there for several months. One day she received a circulating email, written by a disgruntled former employee, alleging spoilt, potentially poisonous dishes were frequently served there; she forwarded him the pictures, which were stomach-churning. I will never set my foot in there again, she said. They then found another, more satisfying, favorite place, which was a Canton-style ‘Tea Restaurant’. They had to stop going there after that restaurant went out of business. For a while their diet consisted only of roast fish in a particular Hunan-style restaurant. It was not very clear whether the end of that period was brought about by his discovery that the particular diet led to cancer, or her complaint that her whole wardrobe began to stink of roast fish. They’d fallen in love with the braised meat done in Shanghai style, only to find, at the beginning of summer, the waists of their trousers had tightened. One place that did Sichuan cuisine had Boiling Spicy Fish-slices on sale for three months, they sold an enormous ‘basin’ of fish for 38 Yuan. They ate that for two months and stopped at the appearance of ulcers in their mouths. They happened to drop by at a hotpot venue, which presented them with a 50 yuan coupon for their 150 yuan meal. And they kept coming back in order to make use of the 50 yuan coupon they received at the end of every visit. They did not use the coupon they received the sixth time.
Frequently they found themselves quarrelling with a waiter or a manager. There was the time that beef pot containing enoki mushroom was more sour than preserved
plum. Once they saw plainly that their dish was mistakenly served to another table and, after the diners there had two or three helpings of the Sautéed Corn with Pine Nuts, was removed and delivered to their table. On another occasion the supposedly steamed grayling [19] turned out to be braised, and offensively salty; and the faint taste of rancidness did not help either. Each time one of them raised the roof, while the other remained unusually reserved. They never lost their tempers together.
It was always his over-ordering that she picked upon. ‘Your eyes are always bigger than your belly.’ She knew that bolting down too much interfered with one’s sleep, but she did not want to leave food behind on the table; she found that wasteful. So she ended up again and again stuffed to the gills, except for that time in the Thai restaurant when they ordered some prawns that cost an exorbitant 58 yuan and they turned out to be six miserable, grilled shrimp presented on a vast plate.
On the other hand, he was not too happy with her fastidiousness. She habitually examined the bowls and plates against the light, in the manner of an antique connoisseur, and invariably demanded them to be changed if they were anything less than immaculate. She never touched the puff pastry in desserts, which according to her theory of contained trans-fatty acids. She would umpteen times stress to the waiter to inform the chef that there should be no MSG - absolutely none – otherwise she would be drinking water the whole night long and still feel thirsty. One more thing: she would never set foot again in a restaurant where a waiter had once stepped on her toes.
Now, with their gas stove broken, they were back in a restaurant. After a few minutes of observing table manners, they each ate silently and efficiently, in an undeclared competition, just like before. In the old days, the rule was that each would pay half of the bill no matter how much he/she had shoveled down, so there was no point in holding back.
She suddenly had the impression that after the dinner each would open their wallet to split the bill, then say goodbye. He would drive away in his Toyota, she in her Nissan - but to different homes. The only difference was that, this time, she’d have to pack everything she owned in the apartment into a medium-sized suitcase, open the trunk of the car, and put the suitcase in it. Which seemed as simple as boiling a packet of instant frozen dumplings. She was frightened.
‘Really, we should see to the stove as soon as possible,’ she was saying that to herself.
‘Mmmm,’ with some food in his mouth, he unexpectedly lifted his head and replied.
She almost forgot how softly he used to talk to her, when she was some strange, ‘dinner-pal’ woman.
She put down her chopsticks, feeling worn out, she leaned back for a while. ‘Can you, maybe, try to work something out, try to repair the thing?’ Her voice was thin and weak, carrying even an element of sobbing, which surprised herself.
He laid down his chopsticks, yawned, rubbed his temples with his thumbs and said, ‘I almost fell asleep. God, do we have to talk about this, now?’
She nodded. And then nodding again with more gravity, she asked, ‘What can we do, you think?’
The last time they had dined out, it was at a restaurant of North-Eastern cuisine. He was just back from the suburb that day, appetite destroyed by fatigue. He asked if they could just have dumplings. That would be much quicker. She said fine, and that she wanted to go to bed early anyway.
Her seat was just outside the kitchen, and behind her, she could see the wok used for the dumplings through a crack in the door. She nudged him, and said that the dumplings were not made in the restaurant; they were frozen dumplings bought from a supermarket. When served, four or five of them fell apart. She said, she’d have done a much better job boiling these dumplings herself.
He said, he heard that instant frozen dumplings were the least ‘corpse-like’ of all the instant foods. He had one, and felt it didn’t taste terrible. She agreed. He said, how about next time you come to my house and make the dumplings? I’ll buy the dumplings.
She went to his home to boil the dumplings. They quietly ate plenty of them. She liked the procedure of cooking the dumplings, simple and orderly, everything under control, though admittedly she was a little fearful when it came to dropping the dumplings into the boiling water. She loved that gas stove, a completely western-style import, easy to ignite, also incorporating an elevated and slim frame, and the elegant rings, all of which made it stand out from other stoves like a ballerina does from ordinary women.
She also loved his apartment, a duplex for single people. Downstairs were kitchen, guest loo, tall and capacious living room, LCD TV and computer desk just under the window; upstairs were a bedroom that conveyed a sort of tranquility and ease, a main bathroom with a tub and a commodious and bright cloakroom. All the design and details of the furniture, electric appliances and the curtains were choice, including even a towel stand in the guest loo, and an organizing caddy for bathroom wares. There she thought it was great she could gain some insight into his inner world. This was a man of taste, of tranquility and depth, who had an appetite for the exquisiteness of life. He actually was not the silly guy he appeared to be.
She also noticed the crumpled bed sheet, the bundled dirty shirts under the stool in the cloakroom, the muddy footprints on the floor of the main bathroom. Tenderness welled up in her. It appeared that he had been dispirited recently; he needed someone to take care of him.
Their dinner-buddying was thus relocated to his apartment, although it sounded ridiculous for two people with five-figure incomes each per week to have every day a pack of dumplings that cost them just 24 yuan.
She boiled the dumplings, and left in the morning. She went to her own place to change her clothes before rushing to the office. They did not meet at weekends, which was the tradition inherited from the ‘dinner-pal’ period, until one Saturday afternoon, he called: ‘I’ve just been to Carrefour, and got 14 packs of dumplings. My fridge’s crammed now… Why don’t you come live here and cope with them?’
‘Damn the gas stove.’ She was biting her nails again.
‘You could look for the company that gave the guarantee. It must be on the internet. Easy.’ He put down the chopsticks, and burped. This thing must be promptly ended, and he wanted to go home and sleep.
She was delighted they had returned to this subject and said, ‘I’d imagine it would be pretty tricky trying to find the company who are responsible; even if we can dig them up on a foreign site, it would be impossible for them to come over.’
‘How come…’ He frowned, tapping out a rhythm on the table, looking not anxious, but bored.
‘It is not made or assembled in China. It’s imported.’ She explained.
‘Awful business. Couldn’t you try to contact the property management?’
‘The property management don’t know I exist. Sir.’
‘They don’t know I exist either. I go to work too early and come back too late.’ He laughed, trying to change the subject.
‘So what are we gonna do?’ She did not feel she had the strength to carry on.
‘We’ll just go out to eat. What do you think?’ He touched his chin.
As a matter of fact, he did not like this suggestion of his. For quite a while now, they did not change the location of dinner; dumplings in the living room had been their most consistent fixture ever since they’d met. These days had been like a smooth and endless highway, on which they might just run on and on, if there was no reason for them to hit the brake.
‘Do you think we’ll never fix the stove?’ She sighed.
He suddenly felt sad. He wanted to console her.
‘Perhaps…I can ask the landlord. But,’ he remembered, ‘this apartment was rented for me by the company, I don’t know the landlord. Also the lease ends in two months, when the company will arrange another apartment for me. You know, I’m too busy to sort out this sort of thing. They take care of these things for me.’ He felt he was panting at the end of this speech. He felt life in general made him pant. He felt like an idiot.
The waitress approached timidly, carrying the tray. The manager, with his mouth ajar, was gesturing her to quickly draw nearer. ‘Sir, that is all you’ve ordered.’ The manager gingerly placed a plate in the centre of the table, and smiled to the right at him, and to the left her, his face wizened by the effort.
In the plate was a golden hairtail, deep-fried, beaming.
‘Didn’t I order stir-fried shrimp?’ He banged the table, rattling all the plates.
‘Let me explain, our purchaser saw in market the hairtail was much fresher than the shrimp, so he just bought the hairtail for you. Hairtail is as nutritious as the shrimp; it is also the specialty of our restaurant. If you really like stir-fried shrimp, you would be most welcome to drop by tomorrow, only that please come a little earlier, otherwise the market will be closed.’ The manager spoke fluently and volubly, with a great deal of neck movement, which after his spiel twisted a couple of times possibly from inertia. Then he shut his mouth, eyes twinkling.
He stood up, without saying a word, overturned the table. All the golden, the white, the crimson and whatnot, were joined by the tablecloth into a big mess on the floor.
When they got back to the apartment, the brass door chain was still broken, and two out of the six bulbs in the living room lamp were still dark. They would be leaving all this behind in two months’ time. For her, it could be earlier.
He was in the sofa pressing the remote-control, the channels changed so quickly that even the visuals could hardly keep up.
She asked, ‘Do you want me to enroll in the culinary arts class?’
A number of bizarre syllables were produced in his throat, then he stood up beside her, went to the kitchen to get some water to drink. On his way to the bookshelf, he stumbled over her suitcase, making a groan; after that his knee bumped into the opened door to the cupboard. She heard a hard kick, then some relieved panting.
He took down from the shelf the bottle of sleeping pills, swallowed two, and gulped the greater part of a glass of iced water. He walked back to the sofa, put down the glass, uttered a barely intelligible ‘I’m going to bed’, and staggered upstairs, leaving the television on.
She sat in front of the TV, her aching shoulder and neck hugged by the sofa, and began to watch the program that happened to be on the screen.
A bird was feeding his chicks in the nest.
Two squirrels, facing each other, were munching some fruit.
In the jungle, a number of tribesmen were building houses with twigs and digging a water channel with shovels.
They piled firewood, lit the fire, and sat around it to pray.
She stood up, walked to the kitchen. In the darkness, she took hold of the knob, pressed down, gently twiddled with it; a hoop of blue flame shot up, like festival fireworks in the night sky. She twiddled again, the flame went out.
She went to the door of the cupboard, with both her hands she gripped the red wheel, turned it to the left, and felt it loosen. With all her strength, she swiveled it to the opposite direction as far as it would go, making sure it could not tighten any further. Even then she did not mind giving it another push, for it would not be turned on again.
(Translated from the Chinese)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my Irish mentor Patrick Cotter, my Chinese friends Romy Chen, Xu Qin for their help in the translation of the story.
[1] Plaza 66, in Nanjing Road W., is a commercial and office complex in downtown Shanghai, China. Completed in 2006, it was developed by Hang Lung Properties of Hong Kong. The office building has 66 floors, which is why it was named Plaza 66.
[2] Hongqiao, with Hongqiao Road as the main thoroughfare from the city’s Hongqiao Airport to downtown Shanghai, sprawls in the west of the city. As one of the first areas in Shanghai to experience the real estate boom, it is a high-end residential area coupled with some great entertainment and leisure facilities.
[3] Spring Festival, also the Chinese New Year, is the most important festival for the Chinese people when all family members get together, just like Christmas in the West. Celebrations traditionally run from Chinese New Year's Eve, the last day of the 12th lunar month of the previous year, to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first lunar month in the new year, making the festival the longest in the Chinese calendar.
[4] Cheongsam, also known in Mandarin Chinese as qipao, was a one-piece ankle-length Chinese dress for Manchu women in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). During the republican period (1912-1949), the baggy Cheongsam was tailed to fit the taste of modern people.The stylish and tight-fitting gown first appeared in Shanghai in the 1920s and was made fashionable by socialites and upper-class women. Nowadays, Cheongsam is designed to show off the natural female form that is not practical yet sexy. Some Chinese restaurants require their waitresses to wear Cheongsam as the uniform to attract customers.
[5] Wonton, or Chinese dumpling, is a staple to the diet of many Chinese cuisines, though it may be known by several other names in different regions of China. While meat with veg remains the most popular filling, there are a lot of new varieties, such as chicken with mushroom, beef with corn, shrimp with bean, etc. Like noodles, Wontons are commonly boiled and served in a soup. Compared to a full course dinner, a bowl of wonton is convenient, inexpensive and filling enough. If the customers order Wonton in a restaurant in the first place, it can be speculated that they won’t order other dishes later on.
[6] Westgate Tower, in Nanjing Road W., is a mall and office complex developed by the Shanghai Westgate Mall Co Ltd in 1997. Together with the CITIC Square and Plaza 66, Westgate Tower with all its sophistications has formed a high-end commercial "golden triangle" in Jing’an District downtown Shanghai.
[7] Jinting, Zen, and Element Fresh are the names of the restaurants. Jinting is one of the city’s premier Chinese restaurants for good quality Shanghainese food. Zen of Hong kong offers authentic Cantonese dishes. Element Fresh is a chic restaurant that makes the freshest American food in Shanghai.
[8] Food Republic is a food court chain run by the BreadTalk Group based in Singapore. There's something for everyone at this chain of family-friendly, basement level food courts.
[9] Yonghe Soybean is a famous breakfast orientated Soy Milk chain from Taiwan.
[10] Guilin Rice-Noodle is a spicy noodle soup in Guilin, a tourist city of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southwest China.
[11] Jiabi Buns is a kind of steamed buns with mince or red bean paste fillings.
[12] Duck-Blood Soup with Rice-Noodle is a yummy noodle soup popular in Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province.
[13] Shengjian, fried buns with mince filling, is a traditional Shanghai dim sum.
[14] Wujiang Road, by Nanjing Road W., is a famous snack street in Jing’an of downtown Shanghai. The street not only boasts a grand collection of local delicacies but also fine snacks from other parts of the country.
[15] Ryan Plaza, in Huaihai Road M., was completed in 1998. It is a 26-storey Grade A office building in Huangpu District downtown Shanghai, developed by Hong Kong's Shui On Group.
[16] Huaihai Road and Nanjing Road are two famous commercial and business streets in downtown Shanghai. Nanjing Road represents the most touristy place of the city, while Huaihai Road symbolizes more of a taste, style and fashion..
[17] Nandan Road is in Xuhui District of downtown Shanghai.
[18] Ajisen Ramen is a Japan based chain of fast-food restaurants, selling Japanese noodle soups.
[19] Grayling is a precious species of freshwater fish in the salmon family.The Yangtze River is one of the rare places in China where the common grayling occurs in a natural habitat.This fish is much valued in Shanghai for its fine and delicate texture.