Miss Chopsticks (6 page)

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.

He went home to talk things through with his wife, who worked in a printing factory. At first Wang Tong was reluctant. All her life she had loved books and she wasn't sure she wanted to join the uncultured ranks of small traders. Nor could she see herself as the boss-lady of a restaurant, all slavish smiles and servility to those above her, all frowns and severity to those below. However, when Guan Buyan explained the gravity of the situation, she reconsidered. They had only been married two years and had no child, why not try to turn their fortunes around by starting a business? After all, how could a man who couldn't keep himself become a father in the future?

Guan Buyan's plan was to open a fast-food restaurant on a very small scale, since a small boat is easier to steer. This meant that he would not need many staff or a fancy shopfront and, if he chose a good location, close to a commercial or tourist centre, he might just be able to survive, or even expand. As the saying goes: the belly can do without clothing but not without food.

The name came to him before anything else. His father had always told him that his dead mother had been determinedly cheerful, even when faced with the worst. ‘Don't be sad,' she would say, ‘if there's nothing to be cheerful about, look for happiness, for only those who fool themselves can be truly happy.' He decided that he would call his restaurant ‘The Happy Fool' after the mother he had known only from a photograph copied from her work-unit card. All the other photographs of her had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution because of their connotations with the ‘past'. There was no wedding photograph because the embroidered wedding gown had
been considered ‘feudalist', no graduation picture because the clothes she had been wearing were ‘capitalist', and the group photograph that had been taken when some Soviet experts visited her workplace was said to be ‘revisionist' now that China had fallen out with the USSR.

By a great stroke of luck, a family friend knew of a small shop to rent on Red Guard Lane, near to the Confucius Temple. It was an area where the streets were always full of shoppers and tourists, so Guan Buyan took the place immediately, even though it meant being neighbours with Kentucky Fried Chicken. It wasn't his intention to become a ‘people's hero' among fast-food restaurateurs, but he had been reared on the slogans of Mao Zedong and so it was natural that he should create a slogan for his shop. On its first day of business the Happy Fool was emblazoned with the words, ‘Don't Let McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken Destroy Our Chinese Taste for Freshness.'

Few people know the history of Red Guard Lane, or the fact that, before the Communist Party came to power in 1949, it had a very different name. Then it was known as Face Powder Lane, after the pink rouge that its many courtesans applied to their cheeks, and it was famous throughout the Yangzi delta for its large number of sophisticated brothels inhabited by artistic women who could sing and dance. Clients would be welcomed into the courtyards with lines of verse recited by the strapping fellows on the gates, and when choosing a young lady, would be required to guess her name from a fragment of Tang or Song dynasty poetry. In this way, rough working men who had never touched a calligraphy brush or read the classics would be prevented from entering its perfumed rooms.

In the early 1950s, Face Powder Lane became Red Guard Lane, and the reformed prostitutes earned their living by writing lucky couplets for doorways, or copying correspondence for the illiterate. Then came the ten years
of the Cultural Revolution, and the few remaining women were forced to undergo Political Criticisms and physical punishment. By the end of the seventies, the street had become ‘one hundred per cent Red' and all the houses had been taken over by worker and peasant functionaries. These people converted the slabs of famous Anhui ink (which the prostitutes had hidden under the floorboards) into props for the legs of wonky beds, and turned the wolf-hair calligraphy brushes that had been treasured for generations into bottle washers. High-quality rice paper that had once borne beautiful poetry was used ‘to resolve the outgoing problems of the masses' – that is, as toilet paper – while the silk on which the courtesans would paint their delicate pictures was stuffed into the split-crotch trousers of babies and toddlers to serve as makeshift nappies. Incense burners from the Ming dynasty became crocks for storing rice and beans; writing tables with secret, mirror-lined drawers were transformed into hencoops or shelving. As for the rest of the furniture, it served – along with the manuals on the art of love, the erotic drawings and the diagrams showing how men could conserve their sexual energy – as firewood; it was said that one long opium couch could last for fourteen meals. In short, anything the worker and peasant functionaries had not seen before was labelled ‘feudalist, capitalist and revisionist', and destroyed. The Red Guards had no idea that the beautifully decorated, tiny porcelain shoes (which they imagined to be a form of punishment for the prostitutes, who would be forced to have their feet jammed inside them) were in fact the famous ‘golden-lily drinking cups' that were used to serve spirits and wine to the clients at the brothels. The only things they left untouched were the alcove beds, carved with dragons and phoenixes, on which countless prostitutes and their clients had slept. After a comfortable night in one of these, workers and peasants, who had previously slept on wooden planks or
on the floor, could be heard to exclaim angrily, ‘No wonder those vile women weakened the wills of their clients. Just sleeping on those beds turns your bones to jelly.' But, even so, they couldn't quite bring themselves to chop these ‘beds of sin' into firewood. Instead they reformed them by stuffing pictures of Chairman Mao into the frames at the bedhead that had once contained erotic art.

Nanjingers said that Red Guard Lane was the most revolutionary street in the whole city, and it is perhaps because it was so thoroughly reformed that its history was completely forgotten until recently. It was only at the end of the 1990s, by which time almost all the streets and alleys with some claim to past fame had been rediscovered and registered by the city officials as historic Chinese sites, that people began to recall old Face Powder Lane, which had flourished over a hundred generations and several dynasties. Or perhaps it wasn't a lack of historical knowledge, but a fear of its bad reputation. Whatever the reason, when the American giant Kentucky Fried Chicken decided it wanted to open a branch on this street, the city officials were surprised. If the Yanks are so clever, they muttered behind closed doors, why didn't they want the prime territory on Sun Yatsen Avenue?