Under Fishbone Clouds (54 page)

Yuying stayed lying on the
kang
long after her elder daughters had gone to work, leaving only creases in the undersheet. Her body hummed, sighed, creaked, not used to doing nothing. This was the first day she had not slept in her clothes for years – she eyed the two blue Mao jackets, distinguishable only by the armband sewn onto one, and the two pairs of slate grey trousers crumpled like shed skins beside the bed. She reached out and shoved them as far from herself as she could, as if to wear them would be to slip back into every mistake she had ever made. She waved away her
youngest
daughter’s offer of company, and watched her slouch off, quiet and confused.

She would only sink in my misery, Yuying thought, justifying her actions to herself; she wants a perfect mother, one who could make the world right for her, not this rag-and-bone mass of wasted years and bad decisions. Perhaps I was never made to be a mother, or a wife. Perhaps it is my own fault. Yuying resisted the urge to reach for the ball of twine or to make the bed, any action whose effects might spill out into the world. Instead she stared at the cracked ceiling, wondering how a single word – a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, even a nod or a shrug – might rewrite history. Words and actions escape from you and take on a life of their own, she thought, their meaning shifting and changing until they have welled up into an unstoppable tornado.

Take the elderly street cleaner who suddenly began to hum a patriotic song as he swished his brush through the dust and puddles. The skinny woman working at the noodle booth on the corner turned suddenly, the song reminding her of her recently deceased husband, and in doing so she accidentally knocked over a jar of chilli oil. She mopped up the translucent red drool from the worktop, but some had already dribbled down into the bubbling pot of noodle broth. The late-for-work engineer, using up two more
minutes he did not have, gulped down a boiling bowl of noodles without waiting for his tongue to run screaming to his brain, and then set off to the behind-schedule bridge being erected further up the river to more easily connect Fushun with the provincial capital. Halfway through the day, thanks to the excess chilli in his
breakfast
, his belly started squealing and squelching, and he was soon sprinting for the nearest bush, his trousers barely down between his ankles before the steaming torrent erupted from his burning behind. After he had exhausted the number of secluded spots in which he could let loose his rumbling bowels, he hobbled off to find the nearest public toilet. Hours later, the foreman, thinking the engineer had finished his tasks for the day, declared the bridge ready to open. The next morning, a rickety bus full of young men returning home from the fields for the holidays plunged into the strong currents of the river when one of the supporting legs of the bridge buckled under the weight – it had not been properly
safety-checked
on the previous day. A local tragedy, everyone agreed.

But why stop there? One of the drowned boys’ fathers was a local Party official. He vented his grief by sending the Central Authority an angry letter, which he promised to also publish in the national newspapers (all run by the Party, of course), decrying the shoddiness of a revolution that could not even ensure the building of working bridges. In return, he was publicly criticised and sent to a
humiliating
outpost in the freezing grasslands of Inner Mongolia. The local state-owned logging commission had been waiting years for this same official to stop vetoing their plans, and promptly bribed his greedy replacement. Within a year, the forests surrounding the city had all been uprooted; the air was thick with smoke, asthmatic children came choking to the hospital every day and the birds and foxes, denied their usual nourishment, took to scavenging from the local fields and farms, leading to another famine. Trucks filled with grain were sent from the neighbouring county, but could not cross the broken bridge. Hundreds scrambled into the river to swim across to reach the food, but were swept away by the current. Thousands more died of hunger and malnutrition, and all because of the song an elderly street cleaner chose to hum one morning.

And still I could go on. But let us return to Yuying, sinking into exhaustion. Even her imagination was turning everything sour. She spent the day sifting through her own life, half sleeping, half
rummaging through her restless grief, searching for deeper roots to better explain how everything had gone wrong.

By the time she rose to find a few rice crackers to fill her stomach, Jinyi was back and pasting couplets on the front door. She listened as her daughters arrived and hovered around him while he glued the two strips of red paper over the flaking paint, angling them to cover some of the scrapes and scratches in the door.

‘Pa, where did you find those?’ Manxin asked. ‘Didn’t we throw ours out years ago?’

‘Of course. These are brand new. I think. I came across them on the way home.’

‘You didn’t steal them, did you Pa?’ Liqui asked cautiously, her knuckles raised nervously to her lips in expectance of a
confirmation
of her fears.

‘No!’ Jinyi frowned, then laughed. ‘You really don’t remember who I am at all, do you? Your old dad wouldn’t do anything like that.’

‘But Granny Dumpling told us about how one time –’

‘Oh. Hmm. Yes, well, that was when everyone was starving, and the Japanese were eating for free everywhere. So in a way, by
stealing
food, I was making sure the Japanese soldiers had less. I was just doing my best to help end the occupation.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Xiaojing snorted.

Jinyi finished and stepped back to admire his handiwork. The two strips were not quite parallel, and the gold lettering was already beginning to peel. Jinyi was too embarrassed to tell his daughters that when confronted with the piles of couplets, he had picked the first pair he saw, unable to connect the swirling characters that his wife had once taught him with the words in his mouth. He had been forced to ask the stallholder to read the couplet to him, blaming a quickly fabricated short-sightedness. Just a little out of practice, that’s all, he told himself.

‘Anyway, I didn’t steal them; I got them from a stall outside the market, in exchange for just a single food coupon. Don’t look at me like that – we’ve got enough inside for a feast. And don’t tell me you lot wouldn’t trade an apple for a whole year of good luck.’

‘So we’re going to celebrate?’ Liqui asked.

‘Of course. I’ve invited Yaba over, too. It’ll be nice. All the family back together again. I mean, uh, well …’ He realised his slip, and so did the girls. They stood in awkward silence.

Then Jinyi remembered the cartoon of twin red fish folded on the ground. He waved them up in the cold air before pasting them between the vertical lines of fluttering characters.

‘Now, Xiaojing,’ Jinyi said as he patted them on. ‘We put pictures of fish on our door at Spring Festival for good luck. The word “fish”, you see, sounds very similar to the word “leftover”. Now, I guess most of the gods are hard of hearing, because if you have fish on your door then they’ll make sure you have enough in the coming year. Enough food, enough money, enough clothes – so much, in fact, that you’ll have some left over.’

‘Pa. I know all of this. I may not have gone to school yet, but I’m not stupid,’ Xiaojing replied, and Jinyi suddenly remembered being thirteen himself.

‘Yes, I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to know what you’ve learnt, what you remember. I’ve been away for so long …’ He fumbled with the words, and picked dirt from his fingernails. ‘If you ever need my help …’

‘We know,’ Liqui said quickly, seeing the look on his face. ‘So why are there two fish?’ she asked, the only way she could think of to show her love.

‘Erm. I’m not sure. I suppose because everything works better together than alone. People, Mandarin ducks, even fish.’ Jinyi looked up, and caught his wife’s eye at the window before she turned back toward the bedroom. ‘Let’s go inside, it’s getting cold.’

While the girls were sharing tidbits of gossip at the kitchen table, passing bundles of thread and wool between them, Jinyi knocked as lightly as he could on the bedroom door.

‘Yuying?’ he whispered into the grain. ‘Can I come in?’ The
question
struck him as ridiculous. It was his bedroom. No, it was their bedroom. No, it was loaned to them by the state, with was led by the people – ‘Why am I tying myself in knots?’ he muttered to himself.

‘Yuying, when we lost the boys …’ Stupid euphemism, he thought; no one ever got lost: we knew exactly where they were. ‘We survived. Together. Do you remember you once told me I was the worm in your stomach? You meant I could guess what you wanted, what you would say, even before you could yourself.’

He glanced over his shoulder to check that the girls were still
giggling
and talking, before pressing his face closer to the door. ‘Well, I don’t know what to do now, and I need your help. Yuying. I love you. I always have.’ It was the first time he had said it.

The door, however, said nothing in reply, and Jinyi eventually retreated to the lumpy nudges of the futon. The cold was so thick that night that he felt he was swimming in it, twisting and
fidgeting
his way through the drawn-out hours till sunrise.

Spring Festival has always been my busiest time of year. As the moon hollows out at the end of the lunar year, it is time to take stock. The Jade Emperor studies a family’s behaviour over the
previous
twelve months and assigns the next year’s fortune to them accordingly. Call it karma, or divine justice, if you like. Yet in a country with a population of over one billion, people are not so arrogant as to assume that the Jade Emperor personally looks over their every dull action. They realise that he has far better things to do. Thus the job of giving a brief account of each family falls to yours truly, the Kitchen God. Who better? After all, the kitchen is where most of the juiciest gossip, the most clandestine of
whispers
and the bitterest arguments can be heard. Perhaps this is why most families try to bribe me – during Spring Festival, I find
sugary
snacks, glutinous red-bean dumplings, homemade candy and twirls of toffee all set on my altar to ensure that my mouth is full of sweet tastes when I open it to give my report to the Jade Emperor. Well, what did you expect? This is China, a place where a bribe, a reference to a well-known uncle, a carefully chosen gift or secret handshake can get you anything. People get the gods they deserve.

Yaba arrived just before midday, lumbering in without knocking, nodding his big bald head at Jinyi and the three girls milling around the main room, before sloshing a large jar of rice wine down on the table.

Jinyi grinned. ‘Where did that come from?’

Yaba simply opened his palms, as if to say that perhaps his inability to speak was not such a bad thing in the face of certain questions.

The two men – one shrunk and slightly withered, the other plumper, slower, bald – saw straight through the masks of wrinkles
and scars to the younger, more familiar faces hidden beneath and fell quickly into a familiarity of old jokes and sign language. Neither felt the need to mention all the things that had happened since they had last met, and Yaba was soon lighting two cigarettes in his dry, yellow mouth, one of which he passed to his old friend.

As the three girls gathered at the table, Jinyi handed them each a small red packet. Inside was a single crumpled banknote, not enough to buy more than a couple of carrots. Only Xiaojing did not manage the obligatory smile; she was too busy studying the watermark and trying to fathom what she might do with this inky scrap of starchy paper.

‘Manxin, do you want to get your mother, and then we can eat?’ Jinyi asked sheepishly. His eldest daughter carefully pushed her hair back from her round face, and took a deep breath before
slipping
through the bedroom door, pushing it closed behind her. The distorted echoes of Manxin’s pleading whispers could be heard in the main room, and Yaba scratched his chin as the rest of the
family
tried, and failed, to blot them out with small talk.