The Noodle Maker(9)

From a distance (or from the town’s highest clock tower), the long narrow shed looked as bright as an open eye. When he first set up business there, the entrepreneur invited the most talented artist in town, a member of the ‘Wild Beast’ school apparently, to paint a large mural along the shed’s outside wall. He paid him fifty yuan for it. At first, the artist was reluctant to fix his art onto a wall: he believed that art and beauty were fluid concepts, and encompassed activities such as pissing, burping, spitting and fondling women and bottles of beer. But the entrepreneur was persistent, and at last persuaded him to paint a scene of a girl with golden hair burning to death to the sound of beautiful music. Instead of the metal tray, he painted her lying on an imported Western Dream mattress, and squiggled a few lines below to indicate an electric grill. One look at the girl’s smile and softly protruding breasts (which exceeded the maximum cup-size allowed by the Open Door Policy’s poster regulations) and you could die a happy man.

Unfortunately, the minute the artist put down his brush, a woman from the neighbourhood committee turned up with two policemen in tow. They ordered the artist to paint over the line of cleavage (a stroke of brown paint slightly darker than the surrounding flesh tone). Once the offending cleavage had become flat and uninviting, the artist was ordered to mask the girl’s bare legs. The muslin skirt he painted over them seemed to satisfy the policemen, as it fell just below her knees. At the top left hand corner of the mural he had painted a skinny little god, China’s Lord of the Sky, and without waiting to be asked, the ‘Wild Beast’ quickly daubed a white cloud over the god’s penis, and painted two more under his feet for the sake of symmetry. Then, in the background, he added a crowd of representative workers, peasants, businessmen, students and soldiers rising to the heavens with big smiles on their faces. Among their ranks were a couple of ‘Four Eyes’ (otherwise known as intellectuals) who had been allowed back on the scene since the Open Door Policy. The artist filled the remaining blank spaces with pretty angels and beguiling devils – you could tell them apart by the horns. At the bottom of the picture stood the Lord of the Underworld, who held opposite duties to the Lord of the Sky. It was clear from the images that he was responsible for punishing the most serious category of criminal: counter-revolutionaries. He employed torture techniques borrowed from Christianity, Islam and Buddhism: drowning in boiling fat, being run over by a car, pecked to death by eagles and eaten alive by snakes. The entrepreneur’s mother later stuck a pair of paper horses over this section to hide the gruesome scenes.

The old apartment building with the half-blocked entrance passage looked very similar to the August 1st Uprising Memorial Museum in Beijing (without the ornate portico and huge arched windows, of course). The decoration of the facade reflected the different stages of prosperity brought about by the recent reforms. A few well-off families had replaced their old wooden cased windows with aluminium frames and tinted glass. A bureau head had even installed air-conditioning, a foreign machine that sucks out hot air and blows in cold. You could guess the wealth of each household by the style and condition of the clothes that hung from the windows on bamboo poles. Most of the rooms on the ground floor had been converted into shops. A poster of a foreign movie star was pasted to the window of the Comrade Lei Feng Hair Salon.

The mother crossed her legs and picked up a burial nightshirt. The smoke from the burning incense coil spiralled through the morbid stench. One shirt had been worn by three different corpses already, and you could still smell aftershave (probably French) on the collar. She searched the garment for imperfections as carefully as though she were inspecting her own body. Her nimble fingers laboured through the night, darning every hole and tear. By the morning the shirt was looking brand new again, folded up on the top shelf of the office.

There was one embroidered jacket still lying on the bed though. If the entrepreneur had been more astute, he might have guessed what use she had in mind for it.





(At this point in his thoughts, the professional writer exhales a deep breath and moves his gaze to the night sky. Colours always look more seductive in the dark, he says to himself, as he listens to the noises coming from inside and outside the lit-up windows. Since it is quieter than the daytime, you can hear pebbles bounce off the shoes of a passer-by, and children under a street lamp humming ‘Learn from the Good Example of Comrade Lei Feng’. A bicycle bell rings out occasionally, then melts into the darkness. At this time of night, people become sad and mysterious creatures. It’s only when they are cooking, resting or chatting that the flavour of life pours from the streets and drifts into every home. As long as there are no women quarrelling, people can stare at the stars, share a meal with some friends, or go out on a date …)