The Noodle Maker(56)

When her family discovered that she was swallowing sleeping pills every night, and that her health was seriously deteriorating, they had no choice but to take her to hospital. The secretary and Chairwoman Fan took her flowers, her pay cheque, a bar of soap and a pair of silk gloves. She lay calmly in her hospital bed, staring blankly at the white walls. A few days after she returned home, she took all her clothes off and ran through the streets naked. Racked by shame, the family left town and set up home in a farm in the suburbs. But her past caught up with her, and her parents were forced to send her to live in their old village. Some years later she married a peasant, but when he learned about her reputation, he became violent, and frequently beat her to within a breath of her life.

Chairwoman Fan had still not retired by then. After the girl with big breasts resigned from work due to ill health, the secretary moved to her desk. The two cactus plants on the window sill grew so tall, they had to be moved outside into the corridor.





The Abandoner or The Abandoned

The conversations between the writer and the blood donor never lead anywhere. Instead of prolonging an argument, they often choose to leave it hanging in mid-air. It is interesting to note, however, that during tonight’s conversation, the blood donor seems to be gaining the upper hand. The blood donor is by nature a profit seeker, believing that people should use all means possible to get what they need from this ugly world. The writer is an idealist, but when confronted by reality and his own failures, he overcomes his disappointment by adopting an air of indifference. He is a cripple who can think but not move. In his undernourished brain, he weaves the stories of the book he knows he will never write.





She emerged from between her mother’s thighs just a month before the One Child Policy was launched.





(In his mind, the professional writer sees the father carrying his retarded child down the street with a furtive look in his eyes. The father’s downturned mouth and sunken cheekbones speak of his despair. The little girl in his arms looks calm, but slightly perturbed. These two always seem to be on their way to somewhere.)





Since he was blood type A, and was born in the Year of the Ox, the father was both stubborn and shy. When he was twenty, a cabbage-faced old woman in a grain shop read the lines on his hand and told him he would never have a son. After he married, his wife produced a daughter with severe disabilities, and five years later, a second daughter, who was normal. The father then paid six yuan for a lame man called Zeng to read his fortune again. Zeng predicted that at forty-eight he would have a third daughter; at forty-nine, he would be promoted to a more senior position (he was now a middle-ranking accountant in the Municipal Treasury Board); at fifty, a gentleman would travel from the south-west and bring him good luck (he looked up all his friends and relatives who lived in the south-west, and discovered he had an uncle who was an ex-Guomindang general and was now living with a guerrilla force in Burma, although the family hadn’t heard from him for over thirty years); at fifty-seven, his mother would pass away and his wife would die of lung disease; at sixty, he would meet a widow with blood type A who was born in the Year of the Sheep, and she would marry him and give him a fourth daughter. Death was destined to strike him in his sixty-third year. He once asked the lame man Zeng if there was any way he could prolong his life span by a few years – just two more years would do – but the fortune teller insisted that it was impossible to alter the course of fate.

The father was in fact more upset about the lack of a son to carry on his family name than about the shortness of his own life. He pushed the thought of the widow to the back of his mind, and focused all his attention on procuring a son. Since their first daughter had been born disabled, his wife’s work unit had made an exception to the One Child Policy and granted her a quota of two children, but they would certainly never allow her to try for a third. The only way she could procure another pregnancy authorisation would be if one of their children happened to disappear. Had it not been for the family planning regulations, the couple would have been free to conceive one child after another until a son turned up, but as things stood, the accountant decided that his only hope lay in getting rid of his retarded daughter.

So he embarked on a battle against his fate. When his retarded daughter reached the age of seven, he grabbed her in his arms, carried her to a public park and attempted, unsuccessfully, to abandon her on a bench. After three further failed attempts, he took a day off work, hoping to finish the job properly. His future depended on ridding himself of her. Only with her gone could he try again for a son. The fortune tellers hadn’t mentioned that his first daughter would be born retarded, or that the government was planning to introduce a One Child Policy. If he had known at the time how the future would unfold, he would have told his wife to get an abortion the moment she first found out she was pregnant.