The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (11 page)

Joyce pedalled as fast as she could. The wind whipped her hair. Her hair whipped her face. Strange bits of particulate matter and wisps of chemicals from factories far and near entered her mouth and nostrils, and began their journey to her lungs. Here was a speck of sulphur dioxide from a coal-burning plant on the plains of Mongolia. And there was an infinitesimal particle of diesel exhaust from a Siberian truck. And here was a trace of nitrogen dioxide from a power plant in Wuhan. Not all the matter was man-made: a proportion of the matter slipping into her system was soil from the windswept plains of the lower Urals. Sixteen of the world’s worst polluted cities are in China, but they do not hold on to their by-products: they generously share them with their neighbours for miles around. Shanghai is a city surrounded by one of the biggest urban conurbations on the planet—some seventeen million people, or two Londons side by side. The air is frightening.

There’s a significant downside to cycling in Shanghai, which can be summed up thus: if the traffic doesn’t get you, the pollution will. The roads are poisonous, yet it is a city in which uncovered food is often carried by bicycle—obscenely pink plucked chickens, their skinny strangled necks dangling out of baskets, collecting fumes in their dead beaks, feet and pores.

Conscious that she was serving a man who had a short fuse and a big gun, Joyce was being extra careful. She had managed to pack the hyper-vegan meals in an airtight box and covered it securely with a cloth to keep at bay the blackish particles in the air. Linyao referred to it as Siberian black pepper. In this city, Joyce was moved to ask herself, was there any actual air left in the air? In urban China, living itself was lethal. But then it probably was anyway, sort of.

Despite these morbid, confusing thoughts, Joyce was moving and she was happy. There was a lot to be said for the traditional way of travel in China. While the sheer number of bicycles filling the streets sometimes made it difficult to move any faster than the speed of the slowest of the other pedal-pushers, at least forward movement remained a little more constant on bikes than in cars—a clear case of the turtle and the hare principle in action, slow and steady winning the race.

On several main streets bicycles had their own lanes, and could keep crawling forward when motorised vehicles ground to a halt. Sometimes the bicycle lane was marked merely by a white line on the road. On other streets there were little metal picket fences holding the cars at bay. And every few minutes one came upon blocked junctions where the canny cyclist could either ignore the traffic lights or simply dismount, cross the road as a pedestrian, and then resume her journey while jealous car-drivers watched, frustrated and immobile, angrily picking their noses and glaring at the traffic cops.

One of the challenges of negotiating Shanghai—indeed, all China—was that the most important road rule appeared nowhere in any Chinese motoring manual or driving lesson. You had to work it out for yourself. It went like this: the Heavier Entity Has Right of Way. Thus, bikes could pull out in front of pedestrians, motorbikes could pull out in front of bicycles, cars could pull out in front of motorbikes, vans could pull out in front of cars, and dirty big ten-tonne trucks could do whatever they liked, whenever they liked, whether their actions caused death and disaster or not. A second crucial rule was this: the only exception to the first rule was when the driver of any vehicle was carrying people wearing uniforms: this raised the weight category of the vehicle by one notch, or two notches if the uniform-wearers were visibly armed. People who did not know these rules did not live long on Chinese roads, and thus neatly removed themselves from the gene pool.

At regular intervals the official road rules clashed with the unwritten rules. For example, the law said that pedestrians had right of way if the green man was shining, and cars turning right had to wait until walkers were off the road. In these instances, the unwritten rules took precedence—cars were heavier than people—and vehicles would simply honk their way through the pedestrians. Foreigners did not know this and could often be seen arguing with pushy drivers while the reflections of the green man flashed across windscreens.

Joyce had been riding on Shanghai streets for six days now, and no longer felt that death was both inevitable and imminent every time she got on the saddle. But being on the roads was still stressful, as one regularly passed crowds which had gathered to stare at the human and vehicular results of traffic accidents. When she cycled past such a scene, she was always tempted to speed up and continue along the road with her eyes tightly shut—another reason why she was poor proof of evolutionary theory.

Her present level of stress should have been increased by the fact that the delivery was running late—but then no one could blame the Shanghai Vegetarian Café Society for that. It was the short-tempered Vega who was really running late, and who had changed the plans at the last minute. Now Vega—he was a question mark, for sure. What would he be like? He had become a legend in the international vegetarian community so quickly. It was interesting that Linyao had unabashed admiration for his work in freeing bears and so on, but then added the comment that he was ‘a bit extreme’. What did that really mean? She pictured a masked, caped crusader—a sort of superhero figure hovering between good and evil: there was something attractively Darcy-ish about the concept.

There was another simple but important reason why she was intrigued by him: he was male and English-speaking. Three-quarters of the vegetarian society in Shanghai were women, and the few men were of the spotty, wimpy sort—not really men at all, in her book. Only two spoke reasonable English, and of those, only Flip had any sense of cool about him. Vega, whatever his faults might be, sounded like a seriously bloke-ish bloke, to use the language of her British mother.

The lights changed to green and Joyce stood heavily on the pedals to get the clunky machine moving again. Murderous fellow road-users aside, she enjoyed cycling—it reminded her of being eleven and pedalling furiously up and down the promenade near the apartment where she and her sister used to live in New York with a nanny and their father, an Australian property developer who travelled for business all the time. But it was a shame the Chinese had such crappy bikes, she said to herself, not for the first time that week. How could a civilisation which took cycling so seriously not have discovered the delights of the titanium-framed, ultra-light mountain bikes which filled the bike parks of New York schools? Here in Shanghai, one did occasionally see colourful imported bikes, but the great majority were still the old, Forever brand models. No longer were Chinese bicycles available only in black, but they were still ponderous old-fashioned models. Whenever one had to ride uphill, it became apparent that they had been carved out of solid blocks of wrought iron, or perhaps lead. Flip had told her that there was a shop somewhere selling foreign-style mountain bikes for 400 yuan, but she had not been able to find it.

When she first arrived in Shanghai from Singapore she had assumed, pityingly, that Chinese people would be unable to afford expensive imported bikes. But she soon learned that assuming Chinese citizens were poor was always a fallacy. Big cities like Shanghai and Beijing always seemed to be overflowing with things that most people—even in London or New York—would not be able to afford. It was what she quickly learned to call ‘the no small numbers’ principle. Since China had so many people, the smallest proportion of them— ten per cent, two per cent, a quarter of a per cent, whatever— was a big number anyway. She’d read that by 2009 there would be more middle class people in China than the entire population of the United States.
Plus
a billion others aspiring to join that class. Middle class people would want decent bikes, so they’d have to import a few more nice shiny ones, hopefully with chrome fittings and whitewall tyres. Joyce could hardly wait.

By standing up and putting the full weight of her 53 kilos on the pedals, Joyce managed to get her wrought iron bike accelerating up to a reasonable speed, despite the fact that she felt like she was dragging a bicycle factory with her. Then she turned the corner from Ruijin Lu to Changle Lu and approached Maoming Nan Lu, where she came within sight of her destination: the Jin Jiang Plaza Tower. It was a skyscraper in the classic Western mould—gold and glittery, with thousands of watts of light bulbs focused on it from ground level, turning it into some sort of glowing monolithic monument. It was gorgeous and crass. Looking at the spate of new angular spikes rising from the Shanghai cityscape, it became obvious that human nature had really not changed an iota from the days of the Tower of Babel. Let us build a tower to heaven and then we shall be as gods.

She turned the bike down a side street just before the hotel and looked for a sign which identified her drop-off point. There it was: Herborium, written in English and Chinese over a small shop with packets of herbal medicines in the window. She took out her mobile phone and dialled the number Linyao had given her.

‘
Wei
?’ barked a young woman’s voice.

‘Er, I’m from the Shanghai Vegan Café Society? I bought the hyper-vegan meal packs? I’m outside the Herborium place?’ Joyce spoke in slow, careful English, still not confident enough to use her halting Chinese on the phone.

‘Leave them in the shop doorway,’ a female voice replied.

‘When’s the operation actually going to—’ Joyce began to ask, but the signal clicked off. Vega’s staff were obviously in no mood for idle conversation.

She placed the basket of food in the doorway, taking out one meal pack—she’d made a spare—for herself.

Instead of heading for home, she walked smartly to the Jin Jiang Plaza Tower. While Vega and his crew were eating their lovingly prepared meal, she planned to go to the hotel’s new restaurant, find Wong, and tell him to leave immediately. If Vega and his gang were somehow going to stage some sort of stunt to spoil the opening party or humiliate the individuals there, her boss needn’t be among the victims. In fact, she might earn some major brownie points with Wong if she persuaded him to leave before Vega turned up and embarrassed all the unfortunate people who stayed.

As she walked, she straightened her clothes as best as she could; dressing to be a cyclist in Shanghai did not really leave one chic enough to swan through the cafés of fancy hotels. But she had quickly learned that being a Westerner gave her a certain power of entry in China. Since young Western people tended to dress in such class-inappropriate ways (the poor ones often dressed stylishly, the rich in denim rags), hotel staff could never tell whether you were a backpacker or a child of the billionaire banker in the presidential penthouse suite. Thus she’d stick her nose in the air and wander through fancy hotels at will.

Donning a snooty expression, she waltzed calmly across the dazzling, over-lit, over-air-conditioned lobby and marched past the reception desks. When she reached the private elevator that took guests to the 45th floor restaurant, she found a sign outside explaining that the restaurant was closed this evening for a private party, the name of which was given simply as TIL.

She sneaked around the sign and took the elevator up, enjoying the glittering view of the city through the external glass wall almost as much as Wong had. Reaching the gloomy corridor at the top, she followed its curves till she came to the blazing, neon-lit doorway that her employer had entered an hour earlier. ‘This Is Living’ said the sign. This was it—the dining club which Vega and his storm-troopers planned to attack this evening. The door was shut. She tried to push it open, but it was locked.

After tapping on the door for a couple of minutes, she heard someone unlock it from the inside. A man in a Mandarin-collared staff uniform eyed her suspiciously. ‘Yes, missy? You want?’ He looked from side to side, as if he expected other people to be present. He looked genuinely surprised that there was no one in the corridor other than herself. Had the other guests left servants or bodyguards outside? And if so, where were they?

‘Yes, missy?’ the doorman asked again.

Missy missy missy. What a funny title she had had to get used to. Or was it missee? The whole -ee ending thing had been a problem for her, as was the ‘L’ and ‘R’ switching thing. When people in China spoke that way, it made her think of the worst sort of mock Chinese from the old days of British television: ‘You wantee drinkee tea, missee? Velly nice.’ It was the Chinese of her father’s old Peter Sellers’ videos. It was Goon Show Chinese:
Ying Tong Yiddle I Po
. It was not the sort of Chinese that decent, aware, politically correct young people would dream of acknowledging. But what to do when you went to China and some people actually did say: ‘You are Blitish, missee?’ You couldn’t comment on it or quote it or correct it or laugh at it or even admit to noticing it.

The truly awkward thing with stereotypes was not that they were inaccurate; it was that they were sometimes on target. Over the past week, she had learned that the Blitish Missee thing was only a minor factor in what was known locally as Chinglish; there was a host of other linguistic switches she had to get used to. Instead of
yes
or
no
, people sometimes answered a question by repeating it as a statement. Almost everyone pronounced her name as two syllables: Joy-Si. And everyone pronounced Q as CH. And ZH was J. And R was the hardest of all—it kind of hovered between the sound of J and R and SH. One thing she had discovered that was a great comfort to her: absolutely no Chinese person ever said:
Ah so.
The Western comedy screenwriters had got that one dead wrong. To her surprise, she found that the only linguistic group which used that phrase regularly were expat Germans.

‘Missy?’

‘Yes. I’m with Mr Wong. I’m a bit late.’

His eyebrows rose. He was not happy. She was, indeed, very late. But was she meant to be there at all? His irritated look said that his instructions specified there were to be only eighteen guests, and according to his restaurant diary, all eighteen of them had arrived more or less on time—so who was this girl?