Miss Chopsticks (2 page)

In the course of my work as a journalist, I met many
‘chopsticks' – girls from poor villages who lived lives of drudgery in arranged marriages. At first my encounters with them were limited largely to my visits to the countryside. However, as China began to reform its economy during the 1980s, and peasants were allowed to seek work in the cities, these ‘chopstick' girls began to be found working as waitresses and cleaners in city restaurants, shops and hotels. City people would often overlook them, almost as if they weren't there, but I always tried to engage them in conversation, and to find out their stories. And I thought about them a lot when I first arrived in London.

In order to survive financially in those early days in England, I worked for a short time as a shop cleaner and waitress. Western people looked through me in the same way as city people looked through ‘chopstick' girls in China, and I felt that I understood better what their life must be like. I was inspired by the self-belief and determination that drove them to make a place for themselves away from their homes and relatives. As I've said, that period of my life was brief, and, after working as a teacher, I was able in 2002 to publish my first book,
The Good Women of China
. Since then I have returned frequently to my homeland and have watched the extraordinary changes that are taking place in China as it surges into the twenty-first century. Whenever I visit, I see hundreds of chopstick girls becoming part of the structure that holds up the roof of China, in the same way that China itself, which was closed to its neighbours for so long, is now becoming part of the framework that holds up the world.

For a long time now I have wanted to write down some of the stories of the girls that I have met. I've felt that, if I didn't capture these lives for myself, my son, and for others, I would regret it deeply. Of all the girls I have talked to, there are three particularly close to my heart, and whose stories seem to speak for so many others. In order to protect their identities, I have written this book as
if they were sisters who all worked in Nanjing, even though, in real life, they are not related to each other and I only met one of them in Nanjing – the other two came from Beijing and Shanghai.

It has given me great pleasure to write about Nanjing, the place I love best in China. Situated on the lower reaches of the Yangzi River, it is a city of huge importance in Chinese history and culture. It was the capital of six dynasties and, when the Republic of China was founded on 29 December 1911, with Sun Yatsen as its provisional President, Nanjing became its capital too. Evidence of its long history is everywhere – in the beautiful Confucius Temple, situated near the Qinhuai river, and in the great city wall, which was built between 1366 and 1386 by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang after he founded the Ming Dynasty. This wall was constructed with such skill and was so strong that it still exists almost in its entirety, and is the oldest standing city wall in the world. Of course, modern Nanjing has spread beyond its boundaries and, of the thirteen original gates, only two are still standing. But, walking along the top of the wall, as I liked to do when I lived and worked in the city, it is possible to look down at the ancient trees and the old moat, and imagine oneself back in time. Nanjing is renowned for its plum blossom and, in spring, I loved to watch the first pink buds open against the backdrop of dark-green cedars which are a feature of the city. Outside the walls, parks had been created where, throughout the day, you could watch Nanjingers relaxing amidst the trees. The morning was the time for old people to exercise and play chess; later in the day women would come to chat, sew and prepare vegetables; in the early evening, men would stop by on their way back from work until their wives or children called them home for dinner.

In 2002, I revisited one of my favourite haunts: the section of wall that lies in the south of the city. I was
astounded to find it transformed. Hundreds of buildings had sprung up outside the wall, like bamboo shoots after rain, and there was a large street market. It was then that I thought that perhaps the story of my chopstick girls should begin here, close to the Zhonghua Gate that has stood for six hundred years and witnessed so much joy and pain.

Beside Nanjing's ancient moat, there is a big old willow tree much loved by the people who live nearby. Beneath its shady branches, men play chess and local women peel vegetables or scour cooking pots while they sit and chat to each other, occasionally glancing across the water at the crumbling city wall with its magisterial gate, which has survived since the Ming dynasty. These days it's not easy to spot the willow tree amidst the hubbub. The local street market, which sells everything from fruit and vegetables to animals and bicycles, has become so popular that crowds of people throng the narrow lanes of stalls and shops. And a new job centre has been built not far away, which attracts queues of migrant workers wanting to take part in China's boom.

It wasn't always like this. In the late nineties, these streets close to the southernmost gate in the city wall were far sleepier. There was no ring road, few people had cars and, if you wanted to get somewhere fast, you had to endure a bone-shaking ride in a makeshift taxi that was actually one of the three-wheeled tractors mass-produced for agriculture. Yet, even then, the traffic must have seemed extraordinary to someone newly arrived from the countryside. To people brought up with a peasant lifestyle, who had never seen cars, tall buildings or telephones, and who were often illiterate, the city, with its looming wall,
was a huge and daunting prospect. Fortunately for them, the men and women under the big willow were always happy to help a stranger, and would give them the nod about friends and acquaintances who had a job to offer. Little by little, the big willow gained a reputation for being the place to go if you were looking for work, and the market beside it grew ever bigger, much to the delight of the local government officials who got more rent from the stall holders, and the annoyance of the local residents who complained about the noise and the dirt.

This story starts in 2001, when the market was neither big nor small, and the men and women under the willow were good at finding people jobs but not yet overwhelmed by the task. It begins on a cold, February morning when a nineteen-year-old girl called Sanniu, which means ‘Three' in Chinese, found herself standing beside the big willow tree, bewildered by the coming and going around her. Three was running away from home because her parents planned to marry her to the crippled son of a local government official. She had been lucky. Her Uncle Two had been sympathetic to her plight and had agreed to help her leave their small village in Anhui Province. He worked on the building sites of Zhuhai, a prosperous city on the southern coast of China, and only ever came back to the village at New Year, when they celebrated Spring Festival. As soon as he had arrived home that year, he had seen what was in store for Three and promised secretly he would take her with him when he returned to his job at the end of the holiday.

Uncle Two was the second brother in the Li family; Three's father was the first. Both brothers were dogged by the misfortune of having families of girls. In fact, Three was the third daughter of six. Her father had been so disappointed by his lack of sons that he had never given his children real names, and so they became known by the order in which they had been born.

It was one thing to help Three escape from the village,
but quite another to know what to do with her. Uncle Two had racked his brains until he remembered his friend, Gousheng, who came from Nanjing. Gousheng was one of the migrant workers who worked with him on the building sites and Uncle Two often spent the night at his home in Nanjing in order to break the long journey between Anhui and Zhuhai. He had a warm-hearted, capable wife who sold tofu from a tiny shop, and would be just the person to give Three advice.

What Uncle Two didn't know – and which would prove to be very useful – was that Gousheng's wife was one of the best-known traders in her area, and that her shop was situated not far from the old willow. Everyone in the neighbourhood called her the Tofu Lady and used to joke that her personality was hotter than the chilli oil she served, and her voice bigger than her minuscule shop.

Fortunately for Three, the Tofu Lady had also refused to marry the man her parents had chosen for her. In the early nineties, she had been living in Shanxi, a poor, dry province in northen China, and had eloped with her childhood sweetheart, Gousheng, rather than marry the son of a neighbouring family in exchange for a wife for her older brother. She and Gousheng had taken the bus to Xuzhou, the furthest destination their local bus station had been able to offer. But even there, they felt worried that their parents might find them, so they gritted their teeth and paid tens of yuan for train tickets as far south as they could go: all the way to Nanjing. In Nanjing they were forced to recognise that dreams must give way to reality. They had just enough money for three nights in the city's cheapest guesthouse; after that they were penniless. On the fourth day, Gousheng had joined a labour gang that was going to work down south, while the Tofu Lady found a menial job in a small takeaway restaurant selling stinky tofu fritters: a great Nanjing speciality not unlike deep-fried blue cheese.

From then on, life was hard. Gousheng came back to Nanjing only for the Spring Festival holiday, when many of the migrant workers returned home for a month. But, even then, the couple had to be secretive about their relationship. With no authorisation from their village they could not obtain a marriage certificate, and cohabitation was still against the law. If anyone asked, they said they had lost their certificate and were getting a new one, while all the time secretly searching for someone who would make them a fake. A few years passed, and they managed to save some money. It was just enough for the Tofu Lady to bribe the Nanjing police to authorise their marriage, and to obtain the necessary permission to set up her own little tofu shop.

In fact this so-called shop was really no more than a hole in the wall. It had a front open to the elements and a few rickety wooden tables set out on the road. Inside, the entire establishment consisted of a wok of oil for deep-frying, a stove made from an oil drum, an old school desk she had picked up somewhere, etched all over with mathematical equations and sums, and a bench that could seat one person comfortably but was cramped for two. There was a bottle of soy sauce, a small jar of chilli oil and a few cheap disposable bowls and chopsticks.

Although the locals made jokes about the Tofu Lady, they also acknowledged that her heart was warmer than her wok of boiling oil. She never took money from children who wanted a snack and she couldn't abide seeing girls from poor families picked on. If a country girl in search of a job stopped at the shop to ask her way to the big willow, the Tofu Lady would force her to sit down and eat several bamboo skewers of stinky tofu before she went on her way – without pausing to enquire whether or not the girl was partial to this particular delicacy. Rumour has it that, if a country girl had experienced this once, the next time she came to visit she would bring along a steamed bun or a pancake so as to avoid having to accept any tofu, the
strong smell of which hung like a cloud over the whole area.

Three and Uncle Two, however, relished the tofu they ate when they eventually found their way to the Tofu Lady's shop on that February morning. They had got up before dawn to catch the long-distance bus, and were so hungry that they wolfed down several skewers of it. They had barely finished when the Tofu Lady banked up her fire, asked the owner of the breakfast stall next door to keep an eye on things, and, without taking off her apron, marched Three and her uncle over to the big willow to see if any of the chess players there had connections that could set the frightened country girl on the right track.

They arrived in the middle of an argument. A group of chess fanatics were engaged in a heated, red-faced debate about whether one of them should have moved his knight, while four old ladies who were sorting vegetables a little distance away looked on in amusement.

‘Hey,' shouted the Tofu Lady, her loud voice easily making itself heard above the shouting, ‘haven't you lot had enough of bickering about your games? Why not do a good turn for once and give this girl a helping hand?'

The men all turned round at once.

‘So, Tofu Lady,' one of them shouted, ‘who's your maiden in distress today? At this rate, you might as well turn that tiny snack bar of yours into a job centre. You could call it the “International Centre for Village and City Integration”.'

‘Yeah,' said another, ‘the government may tell us that our businesses should be “International”, but we're already ahead of the game here. In six months, your pokey little lane will be covered in signs for Foreign/Chinese Joint-Funded Companies and Global Ventures. You'll have everything but the United Nations!'

The people under the tree burst into loud laughter, but their teasing didn't bother the Tofu Lady. It was her
philosophy that if you didn't have the money to amuse yourself, you needed a bit of idle chatter to spice up your life, otherwise you'd go mad from boredom. She turned to a man who was standing slightly apart from the others.

‘Mr Guan Buyu, I heard that girl you helped the other day has gone on to great things in the department store. You may rather watch chess than play it, but when it comes to people, they're pawns in your hands. So, hurry up and think of something for our Three here. Aren't you the one who's always saying, “You should seize the moment when a life's at stake, for gratitude is eternal”?'

The man standing next to Guan Buyu nudged him and chuckled. ‘Who'd have thought the Tofu Lady was so quick off the mark? These days as soon as she opens her mouth, logic and philosophy come pouring out!'

‘If I am, it's all thanks to your training,' said the Tofu Lady, smiling. ‘This big tree seems to have become a kind of school for philosophers, like the ancients had. But come on, let's hear your ideas. Country girls are like plants trying to grow through cracks in stone: they need a bit of nurturing.'