Under Fishbone Clouds (15 page)

The
Tao Te Ching
, those huddled characters mapped out millennia ago with strokes of black ink across sheafs of silk, reveal an ebb and flow of unstoppable process, the unwinding of all things
according
to the natural way, the Tao. The beliefs behind it survive in the minutiae of everyday rituals and actions. The metaphor at the heart of the Taoist work, namely the intricate balancing act of yin and yang, suffuses all aspects of life. Jinyi had heard this before, but only now did it become a working mantra. Inside the black, a ball of white, and inside the white a matching black marble: nothing is absolute. Black and white, night and day, electron and neutron, field and sky, feminine and masculine, all hovering on invisible scales. Yin and yang.

Take cookery, for example. In the kitchen they measured always the balance between the
fan
and the
cai
– the filler (rice, grains, dumplings and steamed buns) and the taste (meat, fish and poultry, various roots and greens floating in sauces) – making sure neither dominated a meal. Salty, sweet, sour, bitter, hot. Jinyi commited the five elements of taste to memory, as again and again he rubbed garlic into the minced pork and cabbage, as again and again he was told to bind the masculine and feminine, the grain and the flavour.

Each one of them, from the brick-shouldered head chef to Yaba with his twitches and signals that everyone in the kitchen
interpreted
in a different way, through to Jinyi himself, stood by the stoves from morning till midnight, stealing only five minutes somewhere in the middle of the day for a meal of stale buns or the blandest of day-old pancakes.

The best days in the kitchen were those when the patrons ordered more than they could hope to finish – the expatriate Japanese bankers and businessmen often made a habit of over-ordering to impress their dining guests. After all, no one wanted to lose face. On those days, plates came back from the tables still bearing a dribble of sauce, a handful of dumplings or thin shreds of picked-at leftovers.

And so Jinyi learnt to join the sudden bustle of the kitchen staff when the waiters returned with a stack of plates, to plunge into the fight of splintered chopsticks and unwashed hands for the dregs of someone’s unfinished dish. In this way he tasted things he had only ever heard talk of before, things that had once seemed as unrelated to his own life as dragons or unicorns. Yellow fish pulled up from between the coal barges on the river, shreds of sweet and sour pork, forest-picked mushrooms dark with soy. Each time he was lucky enough to get more than a mouthful he avoided sipping water for the next few hours in order to preserve his tongue’s memory of the strange and melancholy tastes. Even the ever-glowing fire impressed Jinyi; at his aunt and uncle’s they had clumped together dry grass and dung to feed a five-minute flame, braising food as quickly as they could before the fuel fizzled down to embers.

Yangchen, who Jinyi thought must have been around his own age, despite his receding hair, obsession with money and an awkward way of shaking his head from side to side while working, spent those first weeks pestering Jinyi with questions.

‘You wanna know something?’

‘Huh?’

‘That man upstairs right now with a curled moustache – I saw him when I was hauling the buckets in – you know what they call him? The Butcher. Wouldn’t know it from that Western suit and the furs slung round the shoulders of those giggling girls on his arms, would you? And you know why they call him that? Because he’s –’

‘Cut it out,’ the head chef barked.

‘He’s right, Yangchen,’ a passing waiter joined in. ‘If Mr Bian heard you talking about the customers like that, we’d all be out of work, and you know it.’

Yangchen shrugged, then lowered his voice so that only Jinyi, standing beside him, could hear. ‘I’ve never even seen the
venerable
Mr Bian. Not once, the whole time I’ve been here. Doesn’t stop me hearing about him every day, though. I shouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t some people in here who even pray to him. We ought to have an altar or something.’ He grinned at his own joke.

Jinyi realised he had made the mistake of responding neutrally where everyone else either shouted or ignored. Yangchen had
mistaken
his casual nods for interest.

‘Did you ever see a car before? Great big black things, like midnight lions. I almost pissed myself first time I saw one. Well, did you?’

Wearily Jinyi nodded his head. ‘Of course. I’ve been in cities for nearly ten years.’

‘Yeah, but you’ve still got that country look about you.’

‘What look?’ Jinyi asked.

‘As if you don’t quite believe anything you see.’

‘The country isn’t that bad. But I’m not a country boy, you can see that.’

The head chef barked again. ‘He’s right, you’ve got that look. It’s the way you study everything as if you don’t know whether to try talking to it or eating it. That’s the look.’ The kitchen bubbled with laughter.

‘Better than bald and hen-pecked,’ Jinyi retorted, and more
laughter
came. The clock ticked that little bit faster.

Jinyi soon felt at home in Fushun; it was a new feeling for him, a strange new sense of suddenly being relaxed in his own skin. It was not, however, the stone floor he shared with seven others in a cramped room at night, balled up on a mothy animal skin listening to newborns whine and be comforted with hushed lullabies, that made him feel this way, but the sweaty kitchen where he stood for eighteen-odd hours of his day. I can understand this: kitchens speak to the body in a language of warmth and comfort. The more time he spent by the searing heat of the stoves, the more Jinyi was able to forget his humiliating introduction and that first beating
he had received from the head chef. The more he did his job and garnered small praise and acceptance, the more he put to the back of his mind ideas about moving on again. Everything is paid and earned with time, he thought to himself, and he even tried to share this new idea with the others. No one listened; why should they, when you have to learn these things for yourself?

‘We’re lucky,’ Jinyi would find himself saying. The other staff would mock him for this tirelessly, but he found he did not care.

A kitchen, he reasoned, could be any country. The smells conjured up provinces, towns, houses, people, treats. The hiss of cabbage curling in the pan reminded him of playing outside the window with the dogs and other kids from across the fields; a face full of steam from the towers of dumplings transported him to the crimson flush of early summer. Our olfactory senses bring back little memories that haunt us with our inability to locate them; smells taunt us with associations. Jinyi even imagined his uncle and aunt’s pale faces appearing in the dust-clouds of ground flour rising from the fistfuls of dough, and he let them stay, watching him as he made dumplings.

‘It’s an art form. Anyone will tell you that.’

‘Really?’ Jinyi was not sure whether Yangchen was joking with him. ‘Like calligraphy?’

‘Exactly the same. Everyone has their own style, and that’s just as important as what they create.’

‘You can write?’

‘No, course not. I can read, though. Well, some words. Enough to get by. And you?’

‘No.’

‘No, I heard that no one writes in the country. If they saw ink there, they’d think it was grape wine and drink it.’ Yangchen grinned, pleased with himself.

‘I’d like to. I’ve seen people doing it. Doing it properly I mean, with the right paper and the ink. Like painting the veins on a leaf. I’m going to learn one day.’

‘Sure. You’re going to learn after work. Petition the Japs to let you into a university maybe? Sure.’

Jinyi turned from Yangchen, engrossing himself in the task. He did not like to be mocked, especially when he was confiding in someone.

Was it an art? He was not sure. There are hundreds of types of
dumplings, and those served in the three Bian restaurants were renowned as the best in the city. At moments like those, as Jinyi folded the seams of the thin sheets of dough tight around the
stuffing
, his fingers pinching ridges in the top before scooping them into baskets, he would not have been able to believe that this skill, the secret of the Bian restaurant dynasty, would die with him. He would have shaken his head and told you that people always need to eat.

‘You know what you ought to do? Join the Communists. No joke – my brother has already joined up and gone down south, to help root out the Japanese,’ Yangchen said.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Jinyi replied, growing annoyed. ‘How’s that going to help? Running down south while we’re stuck in the
middle
of Manchuria seems a bit cowardly to me.’

‘Suit yourself. But at least I’m thinking of things to do, not just ignoring everything.’

Jinyi shook his head and laughed. Give too much space to silly dreams about the future, he thought to himself, and you lose the present.

‘Tonight?’ It was a giddy whisper, delivered in a tone usually reserved for lewd gossip. The question buzzed around the kitchen; even the gangly waiters looked more twitchy than usual.

The kitchen was blanched with summer; steam foamed to the ceiling then spread into damp clouds, while busy, sticky bodies jostled together beneath. The fire crackled as the vegetables were fried.

‘As soon as the shift finishes?’

Yangchen sidled up to Jinyi. ‘You coming?’

The head chef, however, had overheard. ‘Don’t you even think about it! Not him. We’ve got enough already.’

Yangchen opened his mouth to speak, but could not think of any way to respond. Yaba, however, stooping near the solitary window, suddenly brought his fist down against the stained wooden
worktop
. Then he turned to face the rest of them, and brought his fist down a second time before looking at Jinyi and giving a curt nod. Everyone had paused to watch him by then, but he did nothing
more except turn back round to carry on with his chopping. The head chef sighed.

‘
OK
. But if he causes any trouble, we’ll swear we don’t know him. Right?’

Jinyi kept his head down and waited, as ever doing his best not to inadvertently hack off his fingers as his mind slipped somewhere above his body, like oil shifting on water. After the last customers had finished and the waiters had been fed, the workers threw the last of the scummy bowls, knives, boards and chopsticks into an oblong trough to wait for water to be drawn in the morning, and
assembled
beside the door. Yaba squatted to noose his dog’s cumbersome body to a table leg. There were five of them left: the head chef, Yaba, Yangchen, a middle-aged kitchen porter with a limp, and Jinyi.

‘
OK
, this is what we’re going to do. I’m going first, along the river and up over the main bridge. Qingsheng, you and Yangchen go round by the covered market, over the walkway. Yaba, you take the country boy and go behind the houses and cross by the second restaurant. When you get there, today it’s three knocks, wait, then two knocks. Understand?’

And then they were going their own ways, Jinyi striding alongside Yaba, waiting till the others’ footsteps dropped out of range to speak.

‘So where are we going? I mean, should I drop out now? I don’t want any trouble, Yaba, you know that.’

Yaba turned and beamed, patting Jinyi on the shoulder before increasing his speed. They had passed the market-stalls and street vendors facing the restaurant, and were now approaching rows of single-storey terraces, their faces darkened by the coal dust heavy in the breeze. They skirted around the terraces to a mass of
ramshackle
buildings, the paving stones giving way to hardened mud and gravel. Then they were in the midst of scavenged shacks, with makeshift roofs of rusted corrugated iron shared across a couple of dwellings. Broken restaurant tabletops had been set up as sliding doors, and bricks were stacked precariously without cement to bind them, the summer wind whistling through the gaps. Yaba placed his finger on his lips, then pointed to a tiny alley running between the rows of houses.

They had to move like crabs, side-stepping as they squeezed themselves down the tight shortcut, their torsos pressed against the dark bricks on one side and their backs grazed by the junk-shop
clutter on the other. Jinyi felt Yaba’s hand steady at his shoulder again, stopping them just before the end of the tight path,
listening
for the sound of gravel crunching beneath scuffed boots, the unmistakeable sound of the night patrols. Jinyi could hear nothing but Yaba’s steady breathing, thick and nasal, and was suddenly glad he had not simply headed back to the cramped stone floor where he slept off the hot days.