The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (33 page)

‘What about
weega
? Does the word
weega
mean anything to you?’

This time the man’s response was immediate. His eyebrows rose. ‘Uyghur?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Minority tribe. Good food. That reminds me. I am feeling hungry. But the Uyghur people are associated with social unrest. Bombs and things.’

‘Ah. Now I think we are getting somewhere.’

Wong looked around and noticed that a People’s Armed Police car had moved onto the pavement and was rapidly gaining on them. ‘
Aiyeeaaa
! Police is coming! Move faster, move faster.’

Cai and McQuinnie were straining: they had reached a slight uphill gradient and the platform had become extremely heavy. Wong threw his hands onto the elephant’s blanket-covered butt and started to help them push.

Out of the corner of her reddening, sweat-and-salt-filled eyes, Joyce noticed that they were passing what had become one of her favourite haunts in her first week in the city: Mo Jo’s, a café on their right. ‘Special: cappuccino with warm sweet potato and chocolate cake with ice cream, RMB50’, the blackboard said. She would have loved to stop for a drink— although she might have given the potato and chocolate cake a miss. Joyce loved shopping and it felt weird to her to be passing through one of the most famous shopping streets in the world and not be loitering in front of the shop windows. On the other side of the road there was a string of Shanghai boutiques. Several had plaques in the window saying: ‘Shanghai Tourism Consumption Recommendable Spot’. She also noted, out of the corner of her eye, the Shanghai Elephant Dressmaking Shop. Not a very enticing name to women shoppers, surely—and almost as bad as Hong Kong’s Hung Fat Brassiere Company.

‘Let’s go in here,’ Marker shouted, indicating a shopping mall entrance on their right. ‘Must not stop it moving. Must not lose momentum.’

‘Okay, but hang on a minute,’ said Joyce, pulling something out of her pocket. She had several of Megiddo’s smoke capsules with her. ‘I nicked these from the magic guy’s box.’ She pulled out the ignition strings and threw them onto the ground. They exploded silently and purple smoke started to pump out.

With a loud grunt, Marker pushed the platform at an angle and the structure moved to the right, sliding with a bump into a somewhat grubby air-conditioned shopping mall filled with displays of cheap clothes.

A dense cloud of purple-pink smoke drifted over the pavement. Commander Zhang’s police car roared past the shopping mall entrance, lost in the tinted smokescreen. The car emerged from zero visibility to see a street stall selling toys and camera film directly in front of them. The driver, Sergeant Xie Zhen Ting, slammed on the brakes but there was not enough time to stop. The car hit the stall before screeching to a halt and spinning around. A roar of anger erupted from the stallholder, who had stepped out of the kiosk to smoke a cigarette and narrowly missed death. She and several other vendors gathered around the police vehicle and started screaming through the window. Shanghai citizens might normally be respectful of the authorities, but using a car to mow down people’s licensed businesses on a pedestrian precinct—that was well beyond the pale, even for uniformed officers.

Zhang wound down the window to bark at the crowd to move away. But an old man rushed over to the car. He grabbed her lapels and pulled them so that her face was centimetres away from his. ‘Idiot girl—you should be locked up. You drove through my wife’s shop. You will pay, cop or no cop.’

‘Please get your hands off me.’

‘You will pay, idiot police woman.’

‘Look, I’m sorry about your shop. You will be compensated.

You must file a claim.’

‘You will pay now.’

‘Just file a claim with—’ ‘You will pay now.’

The crowd took up his chant: ‘Pay now. Pay now. Pay now.’

Commander Zhang bashed Xie on the chest with her gloved hand. ‘Money,’ she barked. Senior members of the paramilitary forces in China often carried wads of cash for paying stool pigeons, distributing bribes and so on. Xie peeled off a few notes and Zhang offered them through the window.

The old man spat on them.

The crowd expressed the same thought verbally: ‘Give more. Give more. Give more. Give more.’

Zhang grabbed the entire wad of money out of Xie’s hands and placed it in the man’s hands. ‘Here. Now move.’

No one moved, but Sergeant Xie yanked the car into reverse gear and started to move it, unceremoniously bashing people out of the way. ‘Sorry,’ Zhang shouted. ‘Sorry. Please move.’

The crowd cursed them with their hands and mouths as the sergeant disentangled the car from the debris of the stall.

‘I think they went into the building behind us,’ said Xie. ‘We can’t follow.’

‘That’s what you think,’ said Zhang. ‘Switch places.’ She elbowed him hard and slid into his seat, while he got out of the car and ran around the front to get into the passenger seat. Before he had even closed his door, she floored the accelerator and skidded the car back the way they had come, and then spun the wheel, driving straight into the shopping mall. Screams filled the narrow space as the car entered the main corridor and people threw themselves against the walls to let it pass.

‘They can’t be more than a few metres ahead of us,’ Zhang crowed.

13

In ancient China, the fire people of Panyi Lake used to have
contests. Whoever could extinguish the temple’s ceremonial
floating candles quickest without water would be the
headman for the following year.

The Rong family used wooden caps on long sticks to snuff
out the flames. They always won the contest.

The wise man went to the Xin family and said: ‘I have
a new invention. It is called the bellows. You can use it to
puff air at each candle and blow it out.’

The Xin family found that it worked. They bought the
bellows from the wise man.

When the Rong family heard about this, they said to the
wise man: ‘Make a very big set of bellows for us.’

The wise man did so.

On the day of the fire contest, the temple abbots made the
biggest ceremonial fire the temple had ever had. They grouped
dozens of large candles together to make powerful flames and
set them afloat in the temple pond. The Xin family used their
small bellows to blow them out one by one.

Then it was the turn of the Rong family with their giant
bellows. But the more they blew air, the brighter and more
fiercely the fire burned.

Blade of Grass, if the scale of your response does not
match the scale of the problem, your problems grow instead
of shrink. Killing a gnat with a rock hammer breaks your
table.

Remember that a glass of water is a drink; enough glasses
of water is a river; too many rivers is a flood.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.

Wong was not just skinny, he was skeletal. Yet here he was, using his weight to move a mountain—almost
literally
move a mountain, for what was a sleeping elephant but a huge, climbable mound of organic matter? Part of him had still not finished pondering the miracle of how four smallish human beings could transport this tremendous weight. It was one of those principles that provided an interesting mental game for him to play with. It was like rolling a boulder down a hill. It was tough to budge it initially, but once it had begun to roll, it would move of its own accord—and you eventually have the opposite problem: how to stop it moving.

Inside the shopping mall the floor was flat, and the rolling structure had not lost its momentum. The polished granite surface allowed the platform, with its forty-eight rattling, screeching wheels, to move along swiftly. An obese, gaping security guard gave chase, blinking his eyes in disbelief.

Linyao, hoarse and exhausted, had joined the team pushing the platform, while Joyce took over the role of running ahead, shouting at people to get out of the way. She had no idea what the Chinese was for ‘Please move aside, there’s an elephant coming,’ but it didn’t seem to matter. Waving her hands and shouting: ‘Out of the way, please, out of the way,’ seemed to do the trick. Indeed, had she known the right Chinese words, they would probably have done more harm than good, as people would have stopped to point at the
lao wai
running along and trying to speak Mandarin. As it was, a trundling platform alone was unfortunately diversion enough to cause a significant number of people to stop and stare—even when it was heading directly towards them. ‘Move, please,
move,
’ Joyce shrieked at people who stood open-mouthed as they were about to be run over. Some people even squatted down on their haunches to watch themselves get flattened, and almost had to be kicked out of the path.

When fresh screams erupted behind them, Wong turned to see what was happening. A strange, low, tearing sound could be heard from the location at which they had entered—and shouts and cries from the same direction. He listened intently—and realised it was the stop-start revving sound of a car engine echoing off the hard-surfaced walls of the mall. ‘
Aiyeeaa
,
ji-seen
,’ he said out loud. Those crazy Chinese police officers had driven their car into the building. They were driving along the corridor, nudging people out of the way. In a speeding vehicle, they would catch up in a matter of seconds.

He was about to share these thoughts with the others when an ear-splitting howl filled the shopping mall. The police chief had turned her siren on, causing a diatonic wail to echo around the building like the cry of a giant, wounded wolf. Looking back, Wong realised that it was a smart move, as people turned to see where the sound was coming from—and then leapt to safety in shop doorways as they saw the police car flying down the corridor at them.

‘They’re inside. Inside the building. They’re coming,’ Marker Cai gasped.

‘I know, I know.’

The cart reached the end of the corridor and rolled into an open space—a high-ceilinged area used for temporary shows and displays, the current one being a school concert. Seconds after entering it, they heard Joyce’s voice from in front: ‘Whoa, guys, whoa. We have to do a left. We have to do a left.’

Wong swung his head around the corner of the mound of sleeping elephant to see that they did indeed have to slow down. There was a large escalator directly in front of them. They would have to move left or right, and the corridor to the left looked notably wider, since the right side had seats spilling out of a café, narrowing the space. But slowing down meant that the police would catch up with them for sure.

‘Whoa, guys, you gotta stop and take a left,’ Joyce repeated.

Cai raced round to the front of the platform and managed to slow its forward movement.

At that moment, the police car skidded into the main atrium of the mall. It was now just 100 metres away from them. The vehicle halted and stalled as a woman with a mobile phone and a stroller crossed its path. The shopping mall’s own security guard, who had been chasing Nelson and his group, was now in a state of confusion and was rushing towards the police car.