The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Read online

  One of the things Joyce most liked about staying in hotels was the way staff sneaked into your room and tried to make everything new, doing absurd things such as folding the end of your toilet roll into a triangle. It was a delicate little attempt to make a singularly unattractive object—a half-used toilet roll—look brand new again. She had thought of adopting the technique for home use, but decided her guests, most of whom were rather slovenly young people, would laugh at her. And besides, she was not a details person, nor was she a person of consistent habits. She knew she would have done it for three days and then dropped it.

  Joyce’s failure to pay attention to detail often jumped up and bit her on the bottom—and it looked as if it might do so again on this occasion. In the past week she had already been caught out once by the presence of an illegal ingredient in the small print on the label of an item she had bought for the vegetarian café. And she had a sinking feeling that she might be disgraced again. The worry drove thoughts of Marker Cai out of their pole position at the centre of her thoughts. Had she carefully checked the label as she bought each item? Probably not. But it was too late for her to take over the job of checking the ingredients lists herself. Linyao had already tossed several items to Philip ‘Flip’ Chen, given a third of them to Joyce, and retained the rest to examine herself.

  The young woman looked at the collection of condiment containers in front of her: ketchup, dark soy sauce, Japanese chilli powder, sesame seed powder, and some sort of bottled satay sauce. At first glance, it all looked veggie enough. But Linyao had drummed it into her troops: the utmost vigilance in label-reading was the only way to maintain physiological and ideological purity.

  Joyce had been in way too much of a hurry to do the shopping properly. After they had abandoned their crumbling office block on Henan Zhong Lu, Wong had said that he was going to the opening of some sort of new dining club tonight—it had a stupid name, ‘This Is the Good Life’ or ‘Really Living’ or something like that. So she had taken the opportunity to stop work early too. How could she work without a desk or an office? She had raced to a food store, grabbed some fresh condiments, and then walked briskly to the café.

  ‘Remember this is a code three meal,’ the chair of the society said, pursing her lips and staring coldly at each label.

  Joyce nodded. Code one meals were strict vegetarian. Code two meals were strict vegan. And code three meals were restricted vegan meals, conforming to the vegan code with extra conditions attached by the client who had ordered the food. In this instance, the client had given Linyao strict lists of possible ingredients, and she had thus classified the meal as code three point five, also known as hyper-vegan. Joyce bit her lip as she read the ingredients list on a product without taking in a single word. When she became stressed her brain seemed to wipe itself clean, a process she could never repeat when she tried meditation or yoga. She shook her head to get her brain working and started reading again.

  On the other side of the room, Phil Chen nodded his head to a heavily syncopated rhythm audible only to him as he read the back of a jar of Dijon mustard: water, mustard seed, vinegar, salt, citric acid and potassium metabisulphite.

  ‘I tink you be lucky today, sista,’ he said in a broad Jamaican accent. ‘Dis stuff be mostly ohkay.’ He put it down and picked up a jar of Lee Kum Kee Chilli Bean Sauce and traced his finger down the ingredients list: chilli, water, fermented soy bean paste, fermented broad bean paste, sugar, garlic, spice, modified corn starch, soybean oil, food acid, disodium 5 inosinate. ‘And dis one too.’

  As usual, Phil’s accent put a broad smile on Joyce’s face.

  Although one hundred per cent Chinese by blood, Phil Chen had learned English while spending most of the past year as an exchange student in New York. He had lived with the family of Royston Marley Lewis, seventeen, in an apartment off 125th street, and found the environment of Harlem so fascinating that he had spent more time studying Royston’s happy and creative family (five adults, only two of whom were related to each other, and four children, most of whom had different fathers) than focusing on what he was there to do: business studies at the City University of New York.

  Raised in a small town north of Beijing, Phil (his name was an Anglicisation of his Chinese name Fei) spoke no English at all when he arrived in the United States, although he could read and write it quite well: such is the situation of people who learn languages largely from books. So he naturally assumed that the pronunciation of Royston’s family was the best way to speak the words he knew so well from his English textbooks. None of the Lewis family had much time for him (nor did the teachers at CUNY) so he spent long hours with Salvation Preciousblood Constance Lewis, Royston’s 83-year-old grandmother, who had moved to New York from Jamaica only three years earlier. It was a joy to finally find out how people in the United States pronounced the words he had written in hundreds of exam answers over the past six years.

  I ask, he asks, they asked = I arks, he arks, dey arks.

  First, second, third = Fussed, secun, turd.

  A, B, C, one, two, three = air, bee, see, one, two, tree.

  Baby, you and me = Mama, I an’ I.

  As he became more relaxed about speaking in English and mixed with more people at the university, he was pleased to discover that his value judgement was correct. The Lewises’ English was the best English. The young men (of any colour) who spoke like Royston’s family members were the popular ones, the ones who were looked up to, the ones who set the style for others to follow. While most of the teachers spoke in the softer, more sophisticated, affricative accents he heard used by Westerners in movies and on the BBC World Service, the coolest of the boys and hottest of the girls spoke like the Lewises. So he did too.

  Now he had been back in China for seven weeks, and was delighted to show off his fluency in English. But although most English speakers understood what he said, they always looked faintly surprised at his Yo, homey greetings and Jamaican accent. This rather upset him. He had never understood why his speech patterns were considered odd until Joyce commented a few days earlier that it was funny to hear that sort of accent coming out of a Chinese face.

  ‘Wot chew mean?’

  ‘You know, like a, a, a, a, whatdoyoucallit, a West Indian accent sortofthing,’ she had stammered awkwardly.

  ‘Indian? I not speakin’ Indian, gul.’

  ‘No, I mean like black people and all that,’ she said, her shoulders creeping upwards with the embarrassment of having said something that was probably un-PC. ‘You know. Africa. Jamaica. Around there.’

  ‘I lairned me to speak English in Noo York.’

  ‘New York, yeah. That’s where I meant.’

  But his family and friends were getting used to his accent, and since he had also picked up New York teenage fashion sense, copying his garments precisely, label by label, from Royston’s younger half-brothers Washington and Stevie, he dressed the part too, in baggy trousers and shapeless XXL T-shirts. He had shocked his Chinese friends by declaring that blue denim jeans were out of fashion. ‘Nobody wear dem. Only de moms. De hip people, dey doen wear dem. Dey wear udder casual clodes. Usually yellow or brown colour like dis. Dem call car-keys.’ He yanked the spare folds of cloth on his voluminous low-crotched khaki Chinos and left his Shanghai contemporaries gaping. Phil, everyone decided, had become totally cool. He was never without a backpack containing two items—his skateboard, and a megaphone used for declaiming rap poetry on the streets. The boy who had been born Fei, and who had then become Philip, now asked people to call him Flip, but most were too taken aback at the transformation to call him anything at all.

  Linyao gave out a yelp, followed by a sharp intake of breath.

  Joyce and Flip froze and turned to stare at her. For a few seconds, nobody breathed. Linyao was holding a thin, dark brown bottle with a blue and red label. ‘Who bought this?’ she asked, her voice dangerously low and calm sounding.

  Joyce recognised the product. It was a bottle of Lea & Perrins sauce,
a brown, dark-tasting liquid which her father used to pour onto sausages and steaks. Her shoulders flopped. ‘Er. It may have been me,’ she said in the shrivelled voice of a child admitting to an illicit visit to the cookie jar. She’d assumed it was made out of vinegar and cornflour—that’s what it tasted like.

  Linyao stretched out the unpleasantness by reading out the ingredients list extremely slowly: ‘Vinegar. Molasses. Sugar. Salt.’ She paused. ‘And anchovies,’ she added in a whisper.

  There was silence for a full two seconds.

  ‘Oops. Oh dear,’ Joyce said nervously. ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘Anchovy am wot?’ Flip asked.

  Linyao turned her head to him while somehow managing to keep her hurt, accusatory eyes fixed firmly on Joyce. ‘Murdered fish,’ she said. ‘Fish who were caught, skinned, decapitated, murdered and put into tins, all while they were still alive, in all probability.’

  Joyce shook her head in wonder. ‘Ha ha. Anchovies. How on earth did those get in there?’

  Flip stared. ‘Lemme see de bottle.’

  Linyao held it up. Now it was Flip’s turn to give a squeal. ‘Aiee! I put some of dat stuff on my snack yesterday—ach, mardared fish.’ He began spitting theatrically into a sheet of kitchen paper, and then scraping his tongue with his fingernails. ‘Ew, ew, ew,’ he whined. ‘I can’t believe I eating poor little live fishes.’

  ‘They’re not alive,’ Joyce said, wondering whether it would make the situation better if she admitted that many times she, too, had consumed Lea & Perrins sauce, not realising that it was not strictly vegetarian.

  ‘They were once,’ Linyao said, icily, ‘before they were murdered to be put into this sauce.’

  ‘I better go tro up,’ Flip said. ‘I hate dis.’

  As he left, Joyce considered running after him to explain that it was too late to scrape his tongue or throw up. If he had eaten the sauce the previous day, the material would surely no longer be in his stomach, but would have moved on to his intestines, or been purged. But she decided to keep quiet. She had sinned. She was in disgrace.

  ‘I guess I didn’t—’ Joyce began.

  ‘Read the label,’ Linyao barked. ‘That’s obvious enough.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s really low on the ingredients list, which probably means there are only a few, like, molecules of anchovy in it. Not even adding up to one whole fish per bottle, probably.’

  Linyao said nothing. Joyce bowed her head and tried to look contrite. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I will not have a bottle of meat in this restaurant,’ Linyao shrieked. In direct contradiction to her words, she threw the bottle across the room, where it hit the wall with a crash, leaving ugly splodges of brown all over the restaurant’s east wall. ‘Now clean it up.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Linyao turned to go back to the pantry, but then faced Joyce again. ‘And when you’ve cleaned the walls, throw away the cloth or sponge you used. Throw it away outside the building.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Tears pricking behind her eyes, the young woman dropped to her knees and started picking up pieces of broken glass, while reflecting, not for the first time, that the reputation vegetarians and vegans had for being gentle animal-lovers had some spectacular exceptions—Linyao being an obvious one. Yet she felt that the chairperson of the Shanghai Vegetarian Café Society was even more tense today than she had been the past few days. Was there something in particular irritating her? Or was it the already-known fact that she was a grouch, having messed up her life fairly comprehensively by the age of thirty-one? Fortunately, Linyao’s outbursts of temper usually disappeared as quickly as they began. Joyce had barely finished picking up the pieces of glass when Linyao joined her, scrubbing the wall with a dishcloth, even though it meant that the ‘meat sauce’ was likely to touch her skin.

  ‘Sorry I’m so uptight,’ Linyao said. ‘It’s just that Vega is—’ She paused to try to find the right words. ‘Vega is—very particular. He’s very careful. And he has a foul temper. I mean, I’ve never actually met him. But I’ve heard he’s got this hot temper.’

  Joyce asked herself: Worse than yours? Then she blushed, wondering if she had uttered the phrase out loud. But the older woman did not immediately react, so apparently she had not.

  ‘Worse than mine,’ Linyao volunteered. ‘Much, much worse.’

  That’s hard to believe, Joyce thought.

  ‘You probably find that hard to believe,’ the other woman continued, ‘but—’ She stopped, as if she realised that it would be bad manners to speak ill of an honoured guest who was soon to grace their restaurant. ‘If he had found an anchovy in his sauce—but never mind. He’ll be here soon enough. We’ll all meet him.’ The tone in her voice was unmistakable: a one hundred per cent solution of pure, undiluted awe.

  The two continued to clean up. Flip returned to the scene, announcing that he had changed his mind about throwing up and would just try to struggle through. ‘I tink I will have nightmares about de ghosts of anchovies ’aunting me and saying, “Why you eat me? I doen do nutting to you”. I feel like a cannibal.’

  Joyce was going to say that he could only consider himself a cannibal if he, too, were a fish. But looking at his pasty face, blubbery skin and shiny hair, she felt that the comment would have been a little too accurate. And besides, Linyao’s vegetarian ideology stressed the basic unity of all sentient beings.

  The three of them worked fast, knowing that there was not much time before Vega and his team of animal liberation activists were due to arrive.

  But the brown stain was not coming off the wall.

  ‘Dis meat sauce, it stick,’ Flip said.

  ‘It’s not meat sauce. It’s got one molecule of—’ ‘I teasing you, sista.’

  ‘Go and get some stain remover,’ Linyao said. ‘Something really strong. There’s a hardware store on Sichuan Nan Lu which will probably have something.’

  ‘Will do.’ Joyce picked up her bag and headed to the door.

  ‘And read the ingredients,’ Linyao barked.

  Flip sniggered. ‘Yeah, careful. A lot of cleanin’ fluid ackshally made of stek, you know.’

  ‘Har-har-har,’ Joyce said. ‘I’ll search high and low to find one which is entirely meat-free.’

  As she put on her coat, Linyao’s mobile phone trilled—the ring-tone was a Cantopop tune. She burrowed around in her handbag to find it and quickly stabbed the answer button. Lines appeared between her eyebrows as she listened to the caller. ‘Not home yet? Probably stuck in traffic. It’s dreadful today. Call me if they’re not home in twenty minutes.’

  Joyce gave her a quizzical look.

  ‘Jia Lin’s not home from school yet.’

  ‘Who takes her home?’

  ‘We have a Filipina domestic helper who doubles as bodyguard and cook.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t allowed to have Filipina domestic helpers here.’

  ‘You aren’t really. But lots of people do. She’s listed as an employee of my ex-husband’s company. Anyway, she and I take turns collecting Jia Lin from school. Well, to be honest, she does it nearly all the time, and I do it occasionally. That was my cousin. She’s at home waiting for them.’

  ‘The traffic’s been dreadful all week.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m not worried. They must be on the bus on the way home. It can take more than an hour to go that tiny distance when the traffic’s as bad as this. Now stop loitering and get the cleaning stuff.’

  Linyao leaned back in her chair and a gram of the worry that she had dealt with earlier bobbed up again like a drowned man who sinks out of sight and then dramatically resurfaces. At that moment, the lucky dip of her life was evolving into something a little more serious: not a fairground game at all, now, but a game of roulette; maybe even Russian roulette. The potential pain quotient in the situation quietly rose. The delivery of a child from school to home should have been straightforward: it always had been in the past.

  Scenarios crowded into her mind. She chose the
most comforting and focused on them: they may have stopped off to see someone, or go to a shop. After all, what could go wrong when a child is released by one responsible adult, her teacher, to the care of another responsible adult, her domestic servant? Yet, however long the odds, she found it difficult to set the worry aside. The fact that the ball was in play was enough to cause a tiny knot in her stomach, a weight in her bowels, the beginnings of an ache in the centre of her chest.

  Linyao worked hard to control her mind, slamming her thoughts forcefully back to the situation at hand. ‘Anchovies,’ she spat. ‘Vega would have killed us, and I may even mean that literally—how many other vegans can you name who carry guns?’

  Joyce stepped out into the residual sunshine of the darkening day. It had been an unusually chilly week, and the morning had started out cold, with a stiff breeze shaking the trees and shrinking people into their army-surplus greatcoats. But the sun had come out by midday, and warmth had begun to creep into the air as the afternoon wore on. Now it was just after five thirty, and becoming cold again.

  The Shanghai evening rush hour was beginning in earnest. A cacophony of traffic sounds filled the air as Joyce tripped along the wide, uneven pavement: cars hooting, the air-brakes of trucks farting, bicycle bells jingling, motor scooters buzzing, the roar of heavy buses dragging their 12-tonne loads. It was hard to believe what her guidebook said—that just twenty years earlier, Shanghai had been a city mainly of bicycles, with just a few black ‘Red Flag’ limousines for the officials and business people. Today, you could still see hundreds of bicycles on the main roads—but they were squeezed like toothpaste into thin lines by hundreds of cars jostling their way to dominant positions at the heart of the main routes.