‘Will you give me two minutes to explain all this to my sister,’ begged Three.
The two women glanced at their watches. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll come back for you later. If your sister decides she wants to take the job, then don’t leave.’ They began to walk away.
‘OK, I’ll take it!’ said Five, spreading her arms to block the women’s path. She guessed that they were going to look around to see if there was anyone else suitable, and if they found someone better, they wouldn’t come back for her. Five had lost out to her sisters too many times to stand by and watch this job being taken away.
‘Are you sure? In that case, we’ll ask the office to draw up a contract straightaway. They can make a copy for your friends here too, so that they know where to find you, and can help you find a representative if you have any complaints. We have over a hundred workers at our Dragon Water-Culture Centre. This is our registration number.’
The thin woman began opening a big folder.
‘You might also like to know,’ added the thin woman, ‘that Mr Guan is our guarantor.’
Three’s face lit up at this information. ‘That’s wonderful. Mr Guan found me my job too. I’ve been working at his younger brother’s restaurant for two years now, we were just waiting for him.’
At this moment, the group of people queuing by the office began calling out ‘Mr Guan is here!’ Seeing the number of people who seemed to know who he was, Three kicked herself for thinking that she could use her acquaintance with him to jump the queue. Reluctantly she told Uncle Two to wait under the willow tree and pulled Six to the back of the long line of job-seekers. Five was led by the two white-coated women to the queue for registration, which only had three or four people in it. Three was prepared for a long wait, but as Guan Buyu passed by on his way to his office, he stopped at the place where Three stood and gave her a smile.
‘Is that Three? What are you doing here? Come into my office. There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.’
Filled with pride, Three dragged Six by the hand and followed Mr Guan through the crowd and into the lobby of his impressive office. The lobby had two desks, one for registering job-seekers and one for sorting out contracts, and Three expected Mr Guan to sit down at one of these. Instead he led her through to the inner office where there was a desk that seemed the size of a bed, and a high-backed chair that dwarfed even the tall Mr Guan Although the office was small, three of its walls were covered in books.
Three immediately noticed on the desk the gift that she had asked the Tofu Lady to pass on to Guan Buyu – a piece of brightly coloured brocade. Because she didn’t understand silk, she had asked someone to buy it for her from the well-known old silk shop, Rui Fu Xiang, and it had cost her half a month’s wages. Her mother often said that if you fail to repay a debt you know you owe, you will be paid back in bad luck!
Guan Buyu picked up the piece of brocade.
‘Three, my sister-in-law says you’ve been doing so brilliantly at the restaurant, you’ve become her right-hand woman. I’m delighted. This is exactly what this office is for: helping you girls from the countryside find your feet in the city. But I don’t like to see you imitating city people’s bad habits and spending money on presents. I know this brocade is no use to your family, so I won’t return it. But take this money for your mother instead, and when you want to thank me in future, thank me by being a good person and doing good deeds, do you hear? Now then, tell me, is this a friend you’ve brought with you?’
‘This is my younger sister Six. Another sister, Five, came with us, but she’s already in the queue for contracts with two women in white uniforms from some water place.’
‘Well, that’s excellent. The Li family is clearly very lucky. I’ll be interested to hear how Five gets on.’
Throughout this conversation, Six had been entranced by the fact that Mr Guan seemed to be able to twist around on his chair without moving his body. When he suddenly span round to face in the opposite direction, she gave a gasp of shock.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ mumbled Six, embarrassed at having drawn attention to herself. ‘It’s just that I … I’ve never seen anyone turning round while sitting down.’
Guan Buyu gave a loud bark of laughter and looked a little closer at the girl standing next to Three.
‘Tell me about yourself, Six. What is it that you dream of doing?’
Six did not hesitate. ‘To work in a library,’ she blurted out. ‘My teacher said that cities have a place where you can look at books, touch books, be with books all the time. It would be so great if I could work in a place like that.’ Six’s eyes shone with her yearning for books.
‘Goodness,’ said Guan Buyu in surprise. ‘You’re the first person from the countryside to want work as a librarian! How odd that, when so few city people have ever thought of such a profession, I should find a country girl with an affinity for books.’
Mr Guan appeared to be muttering to himself and Six was worried that she had said the wrong thing, but suddenly he swung round on his chair and gave her a huge smile.
‘Six, I can’t find you a library to work in right now, and besides that kind of job requires a very particular kind of training. However, I’ve got a friend who’s about to open a very special teahouse where the customers will be able to borrow books to read while they drink their tea. If you’re willing, I could propose you as a waitress. That way you will be working surrounded by books, and will perhaps get a foot on a ladder that will help you find other work with books later on. What do you say?’
Six felt her cheeks turn red in excitement. ‘Really? Oh yes! I would love a job like that, Mr Guan!’
‘Then take this note to the contracts people and they will draw up an agreement for you to sign.’
Guan Buyu stood up and offered his hand to Six: ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Six. Now, off you go with your sister and promise me you will do good work and read good books.’
In all Six’s seventeen years she had never before shaken hands with a man, but she knew from her books that she ought to do so as naturally as she could. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I promise I will be a good person, read good books and do good deeds.’
It was with huge excitement that the three sisters burst out of the doors of the job centre to find their waiting uncle. Uncle Two, who had been squatting next to their pile of luggage, watching the spectacle of the market and the crowds of people chatting and haggling over prices, was completely taken aback by his nieces’ good fortune. He had never dreamed Five and Six would have found jobs by lunchtime and he was delighted for them. But he was also anxious. It was time for him to go and catch his train, and the two girls had been told to wait until their new employers could come to collect them. Would they be safe? He wouldn’t see them again until they all returned to the village for Spring Festival.
Three told him not to worry. Then she reached up to the big willow and broke off a twig. Carefully pinching off the new shoots, she drew out the core so that, in her hand, there remained only a tube of willow bark. She pulled off a piece of the outer bark at one end to reveal the softer layer of bark beneath. In this way she made a mouthpiece for a spring willow-whistle of the kind their mother had taught them to make when they were children. Putting the willow-whistle to her lips, she gave a quick toot and passed it to Uncle Two.
‘If you ever miss us, blow this,’ she said. She hoped it would bring her uncle the luck of the big willow.
3
The Happy Fool
Three didn’t make it back to the Happy Fool restaurant until later in the afternoon. She had waited until Five had gone off with her new employers and then she had started to walk back to the restaurant, which was in the bustling area of Nanjing close to the Confucius Temple. Preparations for the evening meal were already well under way when she arrived and Three had no time to take her luggage to her lodgings two streets away. Instead she put on her uniform and got straigh
t down to work, pausing only to greet her employers, Guan Buyan and his wife, Wang Tong, whose little business had become her second home.
The Guan brothers, Buyu and Buyan, had no history of involvement in business. In fact, to be more precise, they belonged to a family who had, like many Chinese, looked down their noses at business people for generations (believing the old saying ‘Only the crooked engage in trade’) and had considered themselves to be intellectuals. Their elderly father had never worked outside an institute of higher education in his life. Even during the Cultural Revolution, when intellectuals were condemned as ‘passers-on of useless knowledge’, he retained a post in the university – albeit cleaning the toilets. His wife suffered paroxysms of anxiety at the time about his refusal to bow down to the peasant leaders. He was young and strong-willed, and he knew that, because the peasants were illiterate, he could use his cleverness to make a mockery of them behind their backs. Like everyone, he wrote the required Letter of Resolution, saying that he espoused the aims of the Cultural Revolution, and pasted it up on the wall of his workplace. However, his had a double meaning.
Because some Chinese characters are pronounced in the same way, the language offers many opportunities for puns. For example, the sound of Five’s name, Wu’mei, means either the number ‘five’, , or the adjective ‘charming’ . Old Guan made clever use of this possibility for misunderstanding when he wrote his Letter of Resolution. If you were listening to someone reading it out, and couldn’t see the characters, it could mean this:
I resolve every day to clean away shit, to brush the white-tiled floor and not to forget the teachings of our peasant leaders.
But if you were looking at the characters, you could also take it to mean the following:
Every day I must clean away History, get rid of the professional class and follow the dirty feet of our peasant leaders.
The peasant who had been put in charge of the university couldn’t read, of course. When he saw that people were laughing at Old Guan’s Letter of Resolution, he was perturbed and asked for it to be read out to him. Fortunately, he couldn’t hear anything amiss because he had no concept of what a pun was. Old Guan was safe, and was saved the punishment of being sent to poverty-stricken North Jiangsu to plant sweet potatoes. However, his wife was so traumatised by the experience that, by way of a warning to their first-born son, she changed his name from Yu (meaning ‘Speak’) to Buyu (‘Don’t speak’), and when she became pregnant with their second son, she decided he would be called Buyan (‘Be silent’). Sadly, she lost so much blood during childbirth that she died before she had a chance to name him herself.
During the Cultural Revolution, each urban family was required to send their children to the countryside in order to be ‘re-educated’ by the peasants, who, it was believed, understood life better than any academic. Fortunately, Guan Buyu managed to finish junior middle school before he was sent off to the fields so when, in 1977, the Cultural Revolution came to an end and China reinstated university examinations, he passed without difficulty. After taking his degree, he stayed on at the university to teach, and although he did not make it to the level of Professor, he was nonetheless a recognised expert in sociology within the university.
His younger brother, Guan Buyan had not fared so well. After failing the university entrance exam, he had to resign himself to a lowly job as a bookseller for the government-run bookselling chain Xinhua. Their father was deeply disappointed that his second son would not bring honour to his ancestors, but took comfort in the fact that Buyan’s work was still within the sphere of culture, and that his marriage was stable whereas Buyu and his wife were on the verge of separation.
But Buyan’s life was to be turned upside down by the government’s introduction of the Open Policy. This policy included three major reforms that would have a huge impact on people’s lives in the 1980s. Peasants were allowed to leave their land to seek work elsewhere; permission was given to trade with foreigners (although at first only to companies in the specially designated Economic Zones in the south); and anyone at all was allowed to set up their own business. Educated people were immediately suspicious. To them, this was just another political movement by a different name, and it was better not to get involved. After all, the first pig to get fat is the first one to find itself on the table. But matters developed in a most unexpected way: poverty gives rise to a desire for change, and those who had nothing to lose – the peasants and the urban unemployed – began hawking goods from little stalls. Their risk-taking paid off, and before anyone noticed, people who had once held the lowest status in society were suddenly the heads of ‘ten-thousand-yuan households’ – a terrible shock to those state workers whose monthly wage was less than a hundred yuan.
It was only in the early 1990s that city people really began to wake up to the fact that ignorant yokels had taken over the streets outside their own front doors. Still, when all was said and done, they had the advantage. Peasants had only limited education and experience, and they didn’t really have the vision for anything major. With the freedom to choose one’s own career and the opening up of the market causing every household to rush to modernise their home and buy new electrical goods, a shockwave of consumerism rapidly spread across China. Before long, even the educated couldn’t ignore the huge sea of opportunity that stretched out before them. In fact, it became the fashion to ‘jump into the sea’ of commerce and, even people who didn’t know how to run a business, let alone how to keep accounts, took the plunge, often using the government as a safety net by winning government contracts or having a government functionary as a manager or consultant. Those without such connections simply opened up shop in their own homes. There was a saying at the time: ‘Out of nine hundred million people, eight hundred million are in business and another hundred million are waiting to open for business.’ Countless people drowned in this sea of commerce, but since the people on the shore could not see those who had failed and sunk, all they witnessed were the successful bosses returning in triumph. Those who came late to the race were taking an even bigger gamble, especially as they often leapt into the sea with decades’ worth of their friends’ and relatives’ savings. All this continued until 2000, when the tidal wave of people setting up private businesses started to recede from the densely populated east of China.
The Guan family had been among those who believed that this mad rush to go into business would lead to social chaos, and that the emphasis on short-term success and instant benefit would have a very bad influence on national morality. So those close to them were extremely surprised when, in 2001, at a time when the shores of commerce were littered with shipwrecks, the Guan family’s younger son decided to scrape together the capital to open a fastfood restaurant – especially since he planned to open up right alongside the American giants McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. For a time, Guan Buyan’s acquaintances talked of nothing else.
‘I suppose that, after twenty years of standing enviously on the sidelines, the family’s finally cracked,’ said one friend. ‘But they’re in for a shock if they think opening a restaurant is like running a Xinhua bookshop. Because the government owns every single Xinhua bookshop in the country, the employees simply obey orders about which books to stock. What’s more, those bookshops will never be short of customers while there are all those work units buying up hundreds of copies of a particular book to distribute to their staff. But fast-food restaurants are another matter … Ten years ago there was a whole forest of them, the streets were full of the smell of cooking. Now the surviving places are all either part of a chain or Westernised. If you want to attract customers you’ve got to call your restaurant something like “N Donald’s” or “Kentucky Duck” to attract customers. But Guan Buyan’s planning to call his “The Happy Fool”. He’ll never get anywhere with a common old name like that.’
Another concerned friend went to talk to Guan Buyan’s older brother.
‘What’s come over Guan Buyan, trying to build a business
out of the last few drops of opportunity? You’re older than him, why don’t you try to talk him out of it?’
But in this matter, as in chess, Guan Buyu remained true to his name: silent and watchful. Although the brothers had never discussed the matter in detail, it was plain to him that his younger brother was not simply chasing after fashion, or taking a risk just for sake of it, he was actually having problems at work.
Guan Buyu was cleverer than his younger brother. Though he taught sociology at the university, his eyes and ears were everywhere and he knew how to seize an opportunity. It took only a couple of evenings and a few drinks with local officials to find himself invited to be an employment consultant. He was allowed to open an office by the big willow tree and given a remit to dispense advice and help to peasants and laid-off city workers looking for jobs. In this way, he earned a nice bit of additional income. If he hadn’t been in the throes of a divorce from his wife, he would have been extremely contented.
Guan Buyan, on the other hand, was not as outgoing or ambitious as his brother and knew that he could never measure up to him. He had planned to pass his days quietly in the Xinhua bookshop, asking no more of life than for a bit of food in his bowl. It had never occurred to him that his job would be in jeopardy from the new reforms, but not long after he got married in 1998, even the state-owned media began to totter. Until then, fewer than five hundred publishers had served a population of over 1.3 billion, but now they were decentralising and splitting up. This inevitably led to reforms at every level of the quasi-military publishing industry, including the government-run bookshops. Guan Buyan saw redundancy looming and decided to jump before he was pushed. Chinese people need to ‘keep face’ as a tree needs to keep its bark, and luckily there was still time for Guan Buyan to get himself a reputation for being ‘in search of better things’, rather than on the shelf.