All the Flowers in Shanghai (33 page)

“What has happened to you?”

I could not talk for the tears would not stop and my throat felt strained and somehow locked. I wanted to speak but when I opened my mouth all that emerged was a whooping sound. My voice could not compete against the tears.

“Take your time,” she patted my shoulder, “it will come, whatever it is, and we all have plenty of time.”

“Aiiiya, time to make a million suits of green and blue?” moaned a lady behind me.

The other women laughed.

Madam Zhang gathered up my hair, now dirty and unkempt, into a ponytail. Reaching over, she took a strip of red ribbon—in that room every ribbon was red—and tied my hair back.

“We can’t offer you much, things here are not good,” she said flatly, then she groaned. “This is crazy. You cannot stay here. I will take you back to the station.”

She walked from behind me to the other side of the worktable immediately in front of me. “We should go now so you can catch the next train.”

She held out her hand. “We should go.”

“No,” I whispered; my breath was weak but my tears were drying at last. “I don’t think I can ever go back.”

“But there is nothing here for you.”

“Then it will be like this cloth around us, it is not much at present but in your hands has the promise of something much more.”

I continued to look down into the working surface of the table and the deep scars from all the cutting, but I felt her bend down close to my face.

“Ai, I always liked you, like my son once did. Well,” she whispered in my ear, “if you stay here you will have to work and life will be difficult.”

Madam Zhang walked around and stood behind me again, then and rested her hands gently on my shoulders. “We have lost twenty minutes since you arrived and we have a very strict quota to fulfill. If we miss it there are penalties, but if we do more then we receive benefits—sometimes food, sometimes a stupid badge—so for now we must all return to work.” She stroked my cheek as if to wipe away the last of my tears. “If you stay, you must work.” Then her hands suddenly left my cheeks and she tugged my ponytail sharply, which didn’t hurt but surprised me. I turned and saw her face close to mine. She was beautiful still, more padded in her old age, but her face had a sheen and her eyes were a hard nut-brown and shone with a light I had not seen since I last saw Grandfather’s. I smiled at her faintly. “Good. Now . . . what can you do?” she asked me bluntly.

“I don’t think I can do anything.”

“So that is how you have lived?” She sighed faintly, thinking. “But you must be able to sew a little . . . use a needle? I remember you as a bright girl, who would probably have been able to stitch on a button. Can you remember doing that?” I nodded. “Well, I’ll remind you how to sew on buttons, and you can do that.”

She grabbed a piece of cloth, a button, a needle and thread, and slowly looped a long piece of cotton through the needle and placed the button on the cloth. Then she started to loop the thread through the eyes of the button and back into the cloth.

“Occasionally, you must loop the thread through the knot at the back,” she turned the cloth over to show me the stitched knot on the cloth, “to give it strength. And to give it more strength, you can wind the thread around underneath the button, then tie that off, and finally tie off the thread at the back of the cloth. Here . . . now you try.”

She gave me the cloth and button to look at and I pulled it a little between my fingers and thumbs; it looked tidy and strong.

“Practice a few times, then Ah Sui here,” she walked over to a tubby little lady three tables behind me on the opposite side of the room, “will start to give you trousers,” she held a pair up, “and you will sew on the buttons.

“Now, I must get back to my planning and some sewing. The group leader will return at six o’clock and, as you will see, we must be ready for his inspection.”

She came over to me once more, bringing more cloth and some buttons.

“Do some practicing,” she ordered me, though in a kind voice, then turned and went to the back of the room to continue whatever it was she had been doing when I slipped through the door.

I struggled with the buttons, lancing my fingers and thumbs several times, but by the fourth attempt my work started to follow Madam Zhang’s example, which lay teasingly in front of me. Hers was so exact and tidy . . . but by the time I ran out of buttons mine did at least have the same strength. I straightened up and within a few seconds she was standing behind me again. I felt like I was back at school and let myself slip willingly into being the child again. I felt happy just having someone concern themselves about me.

She picked up my practice attempts and looked at them closely.

“Well, it’s pretty ugly, isn’t it, my dear?” I felt my head droop in shame, as if I had failed her. “But it is functional and that is what is important. It was good that you never made your own wedding dress.” She looked at me and smiled. “I remember it well . . . you sat and watched me for hours.” She left me briefly and I looked around to see her gathering together twenty or more pairs of trousers. She stacked them on the table in front of me.

“Get some buttons and thread from the storeroom through the door behind us. Do as many of these as you can, but you must do more than thirty by the end of the day . . . that means you have just four hours.” She gave me a wide smile and a wink. “Then, if you want to carry on tomorrow, you will have to do ninety every day. Today you can take it slowly.”

The other women all chuckled to themselves.

The room was airy and smelt slightly of flowers or grass; it had a high ceiling and long windows to either side, which stretched down to half the height of the room. The white metal window frames pivoted at the center so they could be pushed open, leaving a space at both ends. I stood up and walked to the end of the room. There was a gap of about ten feet between the edges of the desks to either side, and at the last desk on the left I could see Madam Zhang studying schedules and patterns. Like her, each seamstress wore black trousers and a white shirt, but some had colored scarves, too, and Ah Sui wore a hat with embroidery on it. Each sat in front of a sewing machine, which, when all were working together, made tremendous whirring and clattering.

The door at the end of the room led to a darkish corridor barely big enough for a man to enter. After twenty feet or so there was another door. I pushed this open to find a large area with twelve rows of shelves, all stacked with cotton trousers, bolts of material, and hundreds of boxes of buttons. The storeroom was poorly lit, with bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, so it was quite dark. I walked up the aisle immediately in front of me and through the shelves, between the clothes and boxes, I could see the racks stretching away to either side, all filled with finished clothes. It seemed endless. At the end of the aisle, I found the wall had two large doors that must open outward to allow work to be dispatched and materials to be delivered. I looked at the huge hinges to either side of the doors, and the bolts locking them in place; they were clean and well-oiled. Although everything here seemed basic, it was at least neat and in good order. I turned to find the buttons and return to the sewing room, realizing that I had just lost another twenty minutes.

As I passed Madam Zhang on my way back, she called out to me: “Feng, you don’t have time to watch the flowers grow here.” She was talking very seriously. “If you are going to stay, you must work quickly. If not you should leave.” She beckoned me to come closer and I walked over to where she was sitting behind her table and sewing machine. In a whisper she told me, “This is not Shanghai—and China is no longer the same these days. You must work hard in order to live. I don’t know what happened to you but this is a new China and a new time . . . for better or for worse, there is no turning back for any of us. Now . . . go to work.”

I nodded and went back to the worktable. I sewed on as many buttons as I could for more than three hours. My fingers bled and my muscles ached and cramped hard and tight, so that I had to stop occasionally and flex my hands to relax them.

Madam Zhang and Ah Sui came to my table. It was twenty minutes to six.

“Well, how many have you done?” Madam Zhang asked.

We counted the pile and it was twenty-six.

“That is good,” she commented, then grabbed my hands and examined the needle marks and the redness of them. “Can you do the remaining five?”

“Five?” I said, alarmed.

“Yes, you will need to do at least one more than the minimum, as the leaders like to see enthusiasm and devotion to the cause.”

“What is the cause?” I asked, a bit too abruptly.

She looked back at me, hard-eyed.

“The cause,” she emphasized these two words, “for you is getting something to eat, which you will only do by sewing buttons onto trousers. The cause for them is building a new China. They are sweeping into the cities and want to change everything there . . . and they don’t want to do it naked. They are proud of their shiny enamel badges, basic clothing, and red scarves, so we are proud of them, too. Isn’t that right, Ah Sui?”

“Oh, yes,” Ah Sui answered, giggling as she did so, “we’re old but we believe, too.” Then she smiled at me. “I’ll do two, you do two,” she pushed two more in front of me, “and Lao Ding, behind, you will do two.”

At six o’clock the machines stopped and through the windows we heard footsteps approaching, then the doors opened and five students entered. Immediately everyone stood up and remained very still.

They were all dressed like the youths crowding the station in Shanghai and those on the train, all wearing clothes made in this room. Two of the five were young girls, with their hair in braids and a few spots on their cheeks and chin; they could not have been older than seventeen. Of the three young men, one was clearly older, in his early twenties, short, with closely cropped hair and a round face under his glasses. He was thick-set with large forearms and a wide waist. His expression was friendly but his manner was official.

“Comrade Zhang, please can you give me the productivity figures for today’s work?” he asked flatly.

“We made one hundred and twenty-four trousers. Four more than the quota. Fifty-two shirts. Seven more than the quota. And we cut and finished three hundred scarves,” Madam Zhang replied, just as flatly.

“Excellent work on the production of trousers and shirts but there must be more enthusiasm for scarves,” he said, very forcefully, and the skin of his scalp undulated as he continued to instruct us: “Scarves are essential, they are a unifying symbol of the movement.”

Ah Sui smiled and clapped, and Madam Zhang stared hard at her.

“Exactly! That is the spirit.” Then the spokesman looked up at the roof and shouted, “Clap and sing to the glory of the nation and Chairman Mao. Let productivity rise!”

The four others repeated this feverishly, and then the leader said, “However, Comrade Sui, please remove your hat and scarf. We should maintain our diligence at all times: red scarves only are permitted, and a hat with a star at its center is better. Comrade Zhang, can you introduce the new comrade in your team?”

“Yes, this is Comrade Sang.”

I looked up, trying to avoid eye contact.

“Do you have any documents, Comrade Sang?”

“No, they’re lost.” I looked more directly at him, though he was some twenty feet away.

He and his team had remained standing in the empty space between the door and the rows of tables, but now he came to the other side of my worktable to inspect me more closely. He smelled strongly and his breath was very acidic. I noticed that his hands, too, were soft, so, like me, he had not worked hard before.

“Well, if you intend to remain here, then we will get you some new ones. Everything must be documented and accounted for in the People’s Republic. Chairman Mao will not accept anything less,” he finished and studied me closely. “How old are you?”

“I am thirty-nine,” I answered quickly. I was not afraid of him but this situation was very strange to me and I was glad that I had found shelter with Madam Zhang and her team. He wrote something on his clipboard.

“What is your full name?” he asked.

“Qin Feng,” I answered, making up the first name I could. “I am from Wuhan.”

He wrote this down then looked up and nodded at me and at Madam Zhang; I felt relieved when he left the room with the other cadres.

The seamstresses all sat down. After a few minutes of silence Madam Zhang scolded Ah Sui.

“Sui, you know you should not play up to him like that. You’ll get us all into trouble.”

“I know, but it’s so silly! I’m glad I will be dead before these foolish children lead us to ruin,” Ah Sui whispered, and then winked at me. Her face was fat and round, and when she smiled she looked like a handmade doll.

“Time to close,” Madam Zhang ordered.

The women spent an hour tidying up and taking inventory and I helped where I could. Everything was carried back into the storeroom so that the main workroom was left empty except for the worktables on which the covered sewing machines still rested. As we finished clearing the room, Madam Zhang sat down at her own table and continued checking through various schedules and lists. The other women gathered around her and Ah Sui locked the door leading to the passageway and storeroom.

Madam Zhang stood up; she held some small tickets in her hands.

“Here are your coupons for rice, meat, and other things.” She started handing them out.

Ah Sui interrupted, looking at me.

“I’ll give you one of mine . . . I had a few from before so you can have one, otherwise you cannot buy anything.” She gave me a coupon.

The other women looked at each other. They were old, mostly in their sixties, and their faces were chapped and marked with little scars and blotches. Each of them gave me a coupon, which I was told would be enough to tide me over for a few days. If they had known my life, I doubt they would have been as generous. I feared what would happen when I eventually told Madam Zhang. I had no influence here and must rely on coupons and kindness.