Under Fishbone Clouds (12 page)

3

1944 THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY

The skin on the bottom of Bian Shi’s feet was like the stale steamed bread left uneaten in the restaurant. She rocked forward on the balls at the base of her heel. Her broken toes were bent under the hook of her feet, the nails digging down into the ground like
chicken
claws. Three-inch golden lilies, her mother had told her. And she had overheard, amid the backroom belly-laughs of her horde of elder brothers, talk of the sublime ripples in the vaginal lips that are created by this tradition. Her mother had kissed her twice before pressing the loose brick down on her tightly noosed feet. She had been promised desserts for a week.

It was the smell that made her wretch, the sour smell of dead flesh and drunken men’s breath. For this reason she never took her gold-hemmed slippers off in her husband’s presence. Not even now, after fifteen years of marriage. She had forced herself to get used to his nocturnal journeys to the many women of the city’s outskirts, to ignore the rumours of a regiment of hidden children. At least there was no other wife, no concubine, and Bian Shi thanked me and the household gods for this.

She had heard about the ghosts that haunted old houses even before she had been sent as a gift to Old Bian. She had therefore not been surprised to find that corners of the house were populated by the restless arguments, petty betrayals and hushed conversations of its past; that the voices of ancient relatives were caught like spiders’ webs between the courtyard trees; and that the city moon forced its way through every tiny nook, turning the celebratory reds to war-like golds and reinvesting the damp bed furs with life. She had been used to sharing a bed with her elder, unmarried sister, their bodies
knotted
into its narrow frame. For the first few years in the new house she sank inside the large marital bed, never certain of which nights
her husband would crawl in beside her and which nights she would spend alone, listening to the walls. These days, however, husband and wife slept on different sides of the mansion.

Despite her slow hobble, rocking on her heels as she made her way down the street, Bian Shi made it to her husband’s restaurant just in time.

The bulky, bald-headed chef had steam rising out of his nostrils. His right hand gripped the hair of a scrawny teenage boy.

‘So. What is this about?’ she asked wearily.

The head chef released his hold, allowing Hou Jinyi to spin around and catch sight of the small middle-aged woman who had just entered the cramped kitchen. Her pudgy stomach bore the leftover sag of a decade of pregnancies, but she seemed almost regal to Jinyi, with her blue dress swimming around her sides, her eyes narrow and dark. She in turn studied him. Despite his nineteen years, Jinyi was short, still waiting for an elusive growth spurt that must have run away from him when his back was turned. His hair had neither been washed nor cut in months. The residual grease and dirt allowed him to push it back behind his ears, revealing his oblong face and tightened cheeks.

The two of them were almost eye to eye. Jinyi dropped his gaze. It would only get him in more trouble if he did not accord her the respect an aristocratic lady deserved. So instead he looked down at his shadow, noticing how it had dribbled down around his feet like an embarrassing accident. His hunt for a new life was not going well – he was restless, uncertain, still wanting to put down roots but never quite sure where the soil would be welcoming. Earlier that morning he had watched a Japanese truck filled with
hollow-faced
men driving through the city. He had recognised a couple of the desperate faces peering out from the back, each one avoiding the eyes of those down on the street.

‘So.’ Bian Shi had a habit of saying this, waiting for the gaps in her speech to be filled by someone else. ‘You were caught stealing.’ It was not a question, and yet he felt compelled to speak.

‘Yes.’

Bian Shi nodded, something inside her bristling. Everything repeating itself, she thought; isn’t that what always happens if you
wait long enough? She had already decided that déjà vu was the gods’ way of telling her something. (I can neither confirm nor deny the truthfulness of this, I am afraid, for even gods have gagging orders.) She did not consider that thefts kept happening because there were a thousand hungry mouths in the city and only a dozen households and restaurants with enough food.

‘What did you take?’

Jinyi gulped.

‘
Mantou
.’ A small steamed bun. Flour and water. He had pinched a single bun from a plate returned at the end of a meal, piled by the kitchen’s back entrance, waiting to be washed up. Though it was hard and stale, it was the best thing he had tasted in weeks. ‘I thought it was just part of the leftovers.’

Jinyi had been standing on the street, his hand creeping in through the door, his fingers crawling like spiders over the
concertina
of stacked plates, feeling for the discarded dough. Yet just as he had reached for another bun, a fist had clamped round his forearm and yanked him in. The kitchen was fast becoming a footnote in the history of theft, Bian Shi could not help thinking; a catalogue of hopeless journeys that somehow led to her. Yet she was incapable of ever turning anyone away.

‘Could have been going for anything. There are expensive knives lying around,’ the head chef said, standing with his heavy hands on Jinyi’s shoulders. Behind the three of them the kitchen staff bustled about their tasks.

‘We ought to call in the boss, give him a real beating. Or send him to the troops. They’re always looking for workers. Get you sent to one of those Jap mines – how’d you like that?’ the head chef leered. ‘That would teach them all a lesson, that they can’t mess with us.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s just a hungry kid. And it looks like you’ve already started dealing out punishments,’ Bian Shi said as she eyed the cut at the side of the boy’s mouth, his left eye blinking up the beginnings of a bruise. ‘Give him the stale
mantou
.’

The chef began to stutter, then folded his arms and walked back to his chopping board in the depth of the kitchen. ‘Sure, why don’t we take pity on all the petty criminals and undesirables in the city?’ he muttered, frustrated, as usual, by Bian Shi’s strange show of compassion.

The angry thwack of his cleaver on the wood rose above the
noise of scuffling feet and relayed orders. You do not usually find a head chef lopping through the thin cuts of pork, but the
restaurant
was the emptiest it had been in years. This was thanks to the occupation: the only people who could now afford to eat there were the Japanese who were either stationed in the city or had recently followed the aeroplane trails to the new state of Manchuria. Among them there were many who chose not to pay, who put everything on a tab. And what, they seemed to ask, was the restaurant going to do about it?

‘So. What’s your name?’

‘Hou Jinyi.’

‘Not from here.’ This was not a question. She looked him up and down.

‘Not from anywhere. That’s no excuse, I know. I’m sorry, but who was going to eat that? The chickens pecking through those baskets would have got to it a few seconds later if I hadn’t.’

‘So this is what you do,’ she was still smiling, but the tone had changed, had sunk a little deeper.

‘No!’ He quickly looked round, happy to notice that the other staff were at least pretending to ignore the small scene. ‘I’m not like that. Look at me,’ he urged. ‘I’ve either been working or trying to work every day of my life. And I can tell you which one is worse. I’d rather be sore with hernias and limps than edgy, always looking about for things to magically materialise.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Anything people want. Anything. I’ve worked fields twenty hours a raining day, tilled, ploughed, cooked, cleaned houses, looked after spoilt children, made candy, swept streets, counted coal shipments, cut hair, worked as a standby burial man, stitched up old shoes that have fallen apart and been fixed a hundred times before and are still being worn against their will, and,’ he paused for breath and let his lips curl up toward his hedgerow eyebrows, ‘more odd jobs than I can remember.’

Bian Shi leaned against the door. Lucky she had got there before her husband, she thought. She always did the accounts herself, despite not being able to read or write, totalling the figures in her head and dotting the boxes in the kitchens with numbers and doodles of birds, moons, dragons and lions, symbols that only she understood. When her children were not at school they were with
Peipei the nursemaid, while her husband spent his days in the parts of the city the settled troops did not bother to rake through.

‘Show me your hands.’

Jinyi held his dirty hands away from his body, as if he was ashamed of them.

‘You work with your hands?’

‘Me and everyone else.’

‘Can you cook?’

‘Sure. Me and everyone else.’

‘But can you cook well?’

Jinyi shrugged. ‘Good enough to eat.’ He let his hands fall to his sides, no longer knowing what to do with them; he reached for nonexistent pockets and, on not finding any, shoved his hands behind his back.

‘Why not show us, then?’ She nodded her head toward a
workboard
beside a battered pot of simmering water.

Jinyi did not dare look at her to check whether this was a joke. He walked to the workboard as casually as he could manage. The bruises drummed through his head, and his tongue flicked at the cut on his lip, his tastebuds fizzing with the metallic rush.

He studied the piles of ingredients, the pots, bowls, boards and knives.

‘Do you want me to make dumplings?’

The head chef snorted behind him. ‘Yeah, just saunter in and make dumplings. Ha!’

‘Our dumplings are made from a secret recipe,’ Bian Shi said,
ignoring
the chef. Jinyi looked about him at the nearest bowl of minced pork. A secret? What? Spring onions? Garlic, certainly. Salt, pepper. Chillies? Doubtful. He caught sight of the dough, laid out in sheets and ready to be whipped into furrowed clouds around the
marble-sized
balls of mince. The secret must be the flour, he reasoned. A bowl of it sat next to him, heaped and ready for kneading.

‘Why not make something more simple for us?
Wotou
, perhaps?’

Peasant food. For months Jinyi had eaten
wotou
for breakfast, lunch and, on the few days which stretched to three meals,
dinner
. These buns made of cornflour and water, perhaps some potato starch as a binder, are steamed for twenty minutes – or less,
depending
on the urgency of hunger. They are tasteless, but filling. I have seen whole lives lived on this bland snack.

‘OK.’ Jinyi reached for the bowl of cornflour and dipped his hand in, letting the grain slide out between his fingers. His eyes searched the worktop for things to add. What would impress them? He heard the chef’s heavy breath somewhere behind him, and knew that Bian Shi was watching his hands. As quickly as he could, and not daring to look up, he stole a handful from the russet-coloured bowl of dumpling flour and mixed it in with his own. He sank a cup into a nearby pan and pulled out enough tepid water to begin combining the mixture into a gummy yellow glue.

With one hand he dribbled the liquid in, a bit at a time, while his other swirled the dough around the bowl, his thumb the pivot stopping it from sticking at the centre. This was the key: halting the flow of water before the dough was quite bound, still loose enough to break apart if stretched. The steam would do the rest, he hoped. Was this an audition, a test? Would school have been like this? Or was it simply a ruse to waste time until troops arrived to arrest him? He wondered whether he would be allowed to eat the food when he was done, and his stomach made a sound like the revving engine of a car that will not start. He suddenly felt guilty about the packed streets of people with whom he should be sharing these strange and wasted treasures. Unconsciously he shaped the dough into little yurt-like buns, pushing his thumb halfway up through the centre of each flat underside. His hands worked
without
him, as though he was still stirring sugar or massaging scalps, as though he was drawing back time. He finished quicker than he could believe, and he placed the eight
wotou
on the middle rung of a circular wicker-floored turret, ready to be steamed.