The Noodle Maker(19)

She wiped her tears dry, put her pen down and stared at herself in the mirror: a little taller than the average woman, a pair of big dark eyes that attracted the gaze of every passing man. As far as she was concerned, her beauty was only of use to men, it was a nuisance to herself (although she would have been upset if people had ceased to look at her). She knew that, from an early age, she had been forced to employ a large portion of her energies fending off the lecherous advances of her male admirers, and had consequently lost sight of the more important things she should have been doing with her life.

But writing the play gave her a sense of inner worth. As she continued to work on her script, the men in her life left her dance-floor and retreated to their seats in the corner. At last she was able to take the lead role and march forward with her head held high. She trod on air. Now, each man she encountered seemed as dull as wax. The triumphant expression on their faces after they had slept with her filled her with disgust. Love always ends in failure, she told herself at the end of each affair.

‘Who do you think you are? You wretch!’ she scribbled to herself in the margins of her script.

One night, on the back of her script she wrote a letter to the painter:



My sweetheart, the time has come for us to part. Will you ever know how much I loved you? Life is an illusion, only you are real. The one thing my suicide will prove is that I am a failure, and that I have nothing to my name. When I was with you, my hands were filled with petals of love. Without thinking, I tossed them in the air and the wind carried them away.





The characters in her play and in her life exhausted her. She tried to guess what the professional writer who was composing a story about her had planned for her future. She tried to guess what she herself had planned for her future, and who would end up killing whom. This state of being calm on the outside but restless within put her in mind of two actors she had seen swimming across the television screen dressed in heavy octopus costumes. She could sense the pain it had caused them to move so slowly and seemingly at ease. She was now living in the calm that heralds the approach of middle age. She knew that time was running out, and wished that she or the writer would quickly bring her story to an end and consign her to oblivion.

But as soon as she attached herself to her character in the play, her spirits lifted a little. She didn’t realise that writing is a meaningless act of vanity, and that she was merely patching a few people and events together in order make her life seem more interesting. She took the lead role of her play, and through her eyes, she was able see how stupid and naive men are. She wondered how these poor souls could ever hope to find a ‘graceful companion’ among a generation of women who had grown up reading Analysis of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and The Fall of Chiang Kaishek. Today’s women are corrupted. How can you expect a girl who has grown up reading Selected Writings of Mao Zedong to be cultivated, elegant or refined?

‘Men force us to wear these fripperies,’ she wrote to herself. ‘When they fall in love, they give us jewellery, dress us up, and allow us to twist them around our little fingers. They never see the vulgar thoughts that lie hidden beneath our smiles. All my tastes and ideas are formed for their benefit. They fall in love with the woman they have created from us.’

She remembered the wolf-man featured in a television documentary. A few days after she had seen the programme, the wolf-man appeared to her again, popping up between a man and woman who were locked in an embrace. Later, she saw it peering furtively from between two brick houses, from under the brim of a little girl’s hat, from inside a bus and from behind the glass pane of a shop window. The wolf-man could only stand on all fours. She was always terrified it might appear one day between the lines of her script.

Slowly it dawned on her that her character was planning something, something she would only find out about after the event had taken place. In her script, she placed herself in situations she would never have experienced in real life (although later she realised that these situations were in fact variations of events in her past). In this way she was able to detach her spirit from her body and place it in a position from which she could learn new things about herself and discover how others behaved towards her. She was like the wolf-man, crouching in a dark corner, staring at herself.

First she realised that the innocence she had projected in the past was a sham. She discovered that she was constantly scheming, and that when she was swooning in the smell of fresh flowers and the sight of blue skies, she always had one eye firmly open. Even when she was immersed in her writing, she never managed to close that eye. In her play she slowly revealed the ugliness a woman prefers to keep hidden: the bad breath that lurks behind her tidy white teeth; the lock of hair that appears to be falling casually over her face but is in fact deliberately concealing a wide chin; the silence she adopts to mask her ignorance; the loose clothes she wears to hide her flat chest. As she revealed these secrets, Su Yun suddenly caught sight of a ball of light, the mysterious glow that shines after a suicide attempt.