The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Read online

  There had been an outcry two years earlier, when officials had proposed banning bicycles from the city centre. After all, since people of importance had cars, why did they need to cater for the rabble? The car lobby argued that in the 1930s, before the communist takeover, there had been more cars in Shanghai than in all the other cities in China put together, so it was right to return the city to being a motor capital. But the Shanghai press took the rare step of actually reporting the outcry of common citizens, and the plan was eventually withdrawn.

  Yet now, day by day, an increasing number of cars of all shapes and sizes filled the city, and bicycles were again in danger of being completely squeezed out. During rush hour, the steaming vehicles inched along, radiator to bumper along every road, whether major highway or small side lane. They became trapped, grille-to-grille in the narrow roads alongside the courtyard houses in the older parts of town. They made life difficult for pedestrians as they perched half on the pavements, or sometimes simply drove along them.

  In the single week during which Joyce had lived in Shanghai, the evening rush hour had stretched from being forty-five minutes during which the traffic moved more slowly than usual, to seventy-five minutes in which vehicles barely moved at all, topped and tailed by an hour each side during which cars rolled forward in bad-tempered jerks—which was also a pretty good description of the people driving them. And if an extra factor was ever thrown into the mix—an accident, bad weather, a VIP visit, a small conflagration in a shophouse on the main road—then traffic came to a complete halt for an unpredictable length of time.

  Yet central Shanghai’s road problems had never quite reached the world notoriety of Bangkok traffic jams—until four days ago. On that Saturday, two major sets of roadworks began on the eastern stretch of Nanjing Dong Lu, joining the three which were already there. Five major sets of roadworks in a relatively short space were too many. On the Monday, there had been a period of steaming, angry gridlock between five-thirty and six forty-five, interspersed with spasmodic bursts of movement.

  Worse was to come. This being China, with all the attendant fawning on officials, VIP visits were the worst thing. Joyce knew that later in the week, some sort of international summit was due to be held in Shanghai, with politicians flying in from around the world. Those were the worst interruptions of all. The previous Friday, a European prime minister was in town, and the main north–south road, Xizang Lu, was blocked for fifty minutes during the morning rush hour. Almost everyone had been late for work that day: one of the newspapers carried a photograph of a school morning assembly with just three pupils. Later this week—was it tomorrow night?—some sort of meeting was taking place in Shanghai involving the Presidents of China and the United States. There was also an anti-American demonstration planned, to coincide with the visit. There was much speculation as to whether the march was organised by independent activists or activists employed by the Chinese government—but whichever it was, it would bring the city to a halt for everyone except officials. It would be worth completely avoiding the centre of the city for the next couple of days, Joyce realised.

  She had spent a lot of time thinking about cars and driving, since she signed up to take driving lessons as soon as she got here. Her father, who spent most of his time in New York, had been horrified to hear that she was learning to drive in China. ‘They don’t know how to drive in that country. They just buy driving licences—they don’t have to do any tests or anything. You’ll be flattened on your first day on the road.’ But his warnings had not been heeded. It was probably true that in parts of China you could get a driving test just by paying money to the right person—the abysmal lack of motoring skills among many rural drivers seemed proof of that. She’d heard stories of one province where the only driving test was a written one. So as long as one could memorise rules, one could get out onto the street as a licensed driver without ever having driven a car.

  But in Shanghai the system proved to be similar to that in other countries: there were driving schools, and there were lessons to be taken and a test to be undergone. Joyce had signed up for twenty lessons—the rule of thumb being that the average person needed roughly as many lessons as she was years old—and the first was scheduled for eleven o’clock the following Tuesday. Joyce had been very careful to specify the time, so that the morning rush hour would be over, and there would be a pause before the lunchtime rush hour kicked in and jammed the streets again.

  But she was wondering whether she had made the right decision. Flip had had his test the previous week, and ended up with a time slot of five thirty to six. In the event, the car turned onto the main road, got stuck in a traffic jam, and barely moved. The examiner gave him a pass mark, despite his having skipped many of the official manoeuvres he was supposed to do. ‘He should really have extended de test, but I de the las’ one for de day, and he obviously wan’ go home,’ the young man said afterwards. She liked Flip and had initially wondered whether he might become her first Chinese boyfriend—until he confessed to her that he was trying to decide whether he was gay. And then she had met Marker Cai: gorgeous Mister Sigh, whom she was going to meet for coffee one of these days.

  The thought put a grin on her face as she gingerly trod the busy pavements leading to the hardware shop. The early evening gridlock brought one bonus to pedestrians. During the earlier parts of the day, it was hard to cross a road of weaving, jerking, stop-start traffic. But during rush hour, the cars sat still most of the time, crawling forward only once or twice every few minutes. That made crossing the road easy. The main streets of the city became long thin car parks of stationary vehicles.

  Strolling down the side road, she quickly found the hardware store and chose a bottle of super-strong stain remover. Although she knew that Flip had been joking about the presence of steak in cleaning fluid, she carefully checked the ingredients list to make sure there was nothing objectionable in it. After all, who would have thought there would be fish in Lea & Perrins? Of course, the bottle of cleaner she wanted was three times the price of the one next to it. It was always the way in China, and the thing that made life difficult and expensive for people from overseas. Products which were recognisable and had bonuses such as believable lists of ingredients on them were usually imported, and thus pricey. But there were always tempting local versions of everything, at a fraction of the price, but bearing no information in English, and often very little in Chinese. Does one take the risk? No; better to pay the premium.

  Two minutes later, she was walking back across the main road and noticed that she was walking in between precisely the same cars; none of them had moved. And a minute after that, she slipped once more through the doors of the Shanghai Vegetarian Café Society.

  Linyao and Flip were working at a table, chopping vegetables.

  ‘He scares me,’ she was telling him.

  ‘I too, now you tole me dat,’ the young man replied.

  Joyce had intended to go straight to the wall and start the stain removal process, but decided instead to join the others. This conversation sounded too good to miss. She guessed they were talking about the mysterious visiting god of animal-lovers. ‘Vega?’

  Linyao nodded. She was tense: her right leg was vibrating on its heel.

  ‘Relax. He’s on our side,’ Joyce said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  The older woman nodded again. ‘True enough. Or so it seems. But he’s extreme. You know how this sort of movement attracts extremists sometimes.’

  ‘You mean he goes around rescuing animals from labs and all that?’

  ‘That’s just for starters. Let me tell you what I’ve heard about Vega.’

  Her conspiratorial tone inspired Joyce to pull her chair in more tightly. Clearly, there was some good goss about to emerge, and good goss about a celebrity they were about to meet was irresistible. Was he young and good-looking? She was tempted to ask Linyao whether she had a picture of him, but was worried she might appear crass.

  Linyao leaned forward into the con
versation. ‘There used to be two main animal rights groups in Shanghai. There was one north of Suzhou Creek called All Living Things—it was a very Buddhist group—and there was one that came out of Hongqiao called Friends of Creation, which was more a humanist sort of thing, a mixture of Chinese and Westerners. The Friends put out a lot of leaflets and stuff, and occasionally picketed the wet markets and things, but nothing too controversial.

  ‘All Living Things was a bit more lively. It was run by this young woman called Zhong Xue Qin. She was brilliant at press and publicity. She was always on TV, campaigning outside restaurants, harassing the stallholders at the wet markets and writing articles in the newspapers about animal welfare. She was also incredibly tall and thin and beautiful, which helped—classic Shanghainese blood, you know. But one time her group actually got into a fight at a restaurant serving southern Chinese food—you know how in the south they like rare animals freshly cooked. The cooks had got some endangered stuff—flying squirrels and the like. But the restaurant was owned by someone high up in the Party. Zhong and two of the group went to jail for a week. After that, we thought she would quieten down. But she became even more extreme.’

  ‘What sorta ting dey do?’

  ‘They found labs where animals were being experimented on, and stopped people going in. They got students at the universities to stop going to vivisection classes. And then she started campaigning against this supermarket chain, owned by a powerful family.’

  ‘Which one?’ Joyce asked.

  ‘Mee Fan Trading in Chinese,’ Linyao said. ‘It’s owned by a family named Mee. Actually, the real name is Memet, or something like that—they are from the far west, Urumqi—but the Guoyu version is Mee. The far west of China has lots of problems, and several members of the family moved to Canada, and some moved to London. Anyway, there were various meetings and eventually the second son of the Mee family, a UK-based guy, flew into China to join the family firm and was giving the task of sorting out the problem with Zhong Xue Qin. They met. And the predictable thing happened.’

  ‘What?’ Flip asked.

  ‘You typical man,’ Linyao scolded him. ‘Can’t you guess? She’s dirt poor but beautiful and fiery. He’s got no principles at all, but is stinking rich.’

  ‘They fell in love?’ Joyce ventured.

  Linyao gave a single nod. ‘They fell in love. They got married three months after they’d met. Which was kind of weird, because she was born in Shanghai and he was born in London from an Urumqi Muslim family in a sort of self-imposed exile. She managed to convert him to being a supporter of animal welfare, and now she had his endless buckets of money behind her. The Mee Fan supermarkets started carrying organic food—her influence. One day she broke into a lab at Shanghai Second Medical University to release some mice. But while looking for rodents, she went through all sorts of no entry doors, and touched all sorts of things she shouldn’t have touched. She caught some horrible disease and died within three days.’

  ‘Aiee! ’ said Flip. ‘Like Ebola or someting?’

  ‘Something like that. Maybe Ebola or Marburg or SARS. I don’t know exactly. None of this was ever printed of course, but you hear things in the right circles.’

  She seemed to have stopped speaking, but Joyce felt the story was unfinished. ‘I thought you were going to talk about Vega—where does he fit into all this?’

  ‘Her rich husband went crazy with grief and anger. He fled to London. Dropped out of sight. This was maybe two years ago. Then, about seven or eight months ago, people in my circles started hearing about a new animal rights group coming out of London. It was called the Children of Vega and it was run by a young man codenamed Vega. It had a special focus: animal welfare in China.’

  ‘You reckon that was him? The husband?’

  Linyao nodded. ‘I reckon he had decided to glorify his wife’s memory by starting a group in her honour, to fight for animal welfare in China. They don’t do leaflets. They don’t do picketing. They don’t do interviews. They are a real civil disobedience type group—and they have huge budgets: his pockets seem to be bottomless. Their first action was to stage a major raid on a live food market in Guangzhou. A great team of people in black masks descended on the place and held up the stallholders. They stole loads of amazing animals —there were red and white flying squirrels, masked palm civets, Chinese muntjacs, martens, leopard cats and so on. The really cool thing was that they left behind some money for the stallholders—so that, technically, they had bought the animals rather than stolen them.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Flip. ‘Soun’ like he got style.’

  ‘Style and scale. He only does big jobs. Their second job was to close down a bear bile farm in Sichuan. They used their weapons in that one, and a security guard got killed, which upset a lot of people in vegetarian circles. But the police never traced it to anyone. Everyone wore masks. I mean, no one knows officially whether either of those jobs were Vega’s gang— no one claimed responsibility for them. But to people in veggie circles, it seems obvious. Who else could it have been?’

  ‘Why is he coming here tonight?’ Joyce asked. ‘Does he want to sign us up? Masked people and weapons and things— it all seems a bit heavy.’

  Linyao shook her head, to the younger woman’s relief. ‘He doesn’t want to sign us up. I told him that we had a small group and were not very into civil disobedience. We just cook tofu. But he’s planning a few operations here, I think, in the next week or two. He’s had the Shanghai Friends of Creation and All Living Things working for him for some time, setting up something. He’s very strategic. He sends an advance team who work with local activists, suss out the scene, and prepare a project. Then he and his main team fly in, do the job, and disappear. He said he needed to be here for a few days and wanted some place where he could be sure the food was strictly vegan, to his personal standards. That’s where we fit in.’

  ‘Phew,’ said Joyce. ‘So we’re not part of the action. We’re just the caterers.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Armed break-ins, like, so aren’t my thing. But cooking up a decent lentil loaf—that I can manage.’

  A tinny burst of pop music erupted below the table. ‘My mobile again,’ Linyao said.

  ‘You like Cheung Hok-yau?’ Flip commented, his admiration for her ring-tone evident from his face. ‘Classy mama.’

  Joyce walked over to the wall and started spraying it with the stain remover. ‘Better get this meat sauce off before they get here.’

  ‘Lemme help.’

  With Joyce spraying and Flip scrubbing, the stains started to fade. They worked in silence. Despite her outward appearance of calm, Joyce, who spent much of her time anxious about nothing at all, was becoming increasingly nervous about the short-fused, gun-toting god of vegans from London. To her way of thinking, there was something horribly illogical in the concept of animal welfare activists carrying guns. If you didn’t want animals to be hurt, then you shouldn’t want humans to be hurt—humans were, after all, just a particularly big, ugly, stupid, troublesome breed of animal.

  Linyao spoke on the phone in rapid Shanghainese, interspersed with bits of Mandarin and English. Her eyes were wide with fear and excitement when she finished the call. ‘Change of plan.’

  The others turned to look at her.

  ‘He’s doing some sort of operation in town tonight.’

  ‘Tonight? What sort of operation?’ Joyce felt a wave of distaste at the prospect of being linked with any activity that might include violence. After all, she had practically been through an earthquake today—excitement enough to last her a month.

  ‘I don’t know. But it’ll be big, knowing him. And stylish.’

  Flip pointed to the semi-prepared food laid out on the kitchen table. ‘Does dis mean he not comin’ after all? Can we eat all dis ourself?’ The prospect produced a theatrical expression of big eyes and lip-licking.

  ‘No. They’re going straight to the event. They’ve been working on it for days.’

&nbs
p; ‘So what do we do?’ Joyce asked.

  ‘We need to meet them at the site, with hot, packed, code-three sandwiches.’

  ‘Let’s get this straight. They’ll do some sort of stunt, rescuing animals or something, and we are just the outside caterers. We make the food available, deliver it and we leave?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  Joyce shrugged. ‘It’s okay, I guess. This reminds me of something I read about the movie business in Teen People. People in the business love to talk about being in it because it sounds so glamorous, but every movie is really six people doing glamorous things and four hundred holding lights or making sandwiches and coffee.’

  ‘It won’t be difficult,’ Linyao said.

  Flip moved over to the kitchen and started assembling the wraps.

  ‘Gloves on,’ Linyao barked at him. ‘Germs are animals and I don’t want any animals in Vega’s sandwich.’

  The younger woman’s brow wrinkled. She’d thought of a problem. ‘Where’s the operation and how are we going to get there? The traffic’s chock-a-block outside.’

  Linyao moved to the window and took a look. Traffic was stationary for as far as the eye could see. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s bad. It’s been terrible all week.’

  ‘Wait till tomorra night. Dat when de summit start. De two Presidents? It not wurt getting outta bed. ’cept I tinking I might go to de demo tomorra evenin’.’

  ‘If we take the van, we won’t get there until next month.

  We’re just going to have to walk or go by bike. If we can be ready to go in twenty minutes, we’ll make it on time.’

  The three of them were soon energetically preparing food in the kitchen: peeled grilled peppers and roasted eggplant slotted into home-made whole-wheat wraps lined with cos lettuce and yellow tomatoes, with a fresh carrot stick inside.