Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

Su Yun hurriedly ran through the plot of the play in her mind as she stepped onto the stage in the basketball court. The audience exploded into rapturous applause, drowning the song ‘Kill the Tiger and Climb the Hill’ that was booming from the loudspeakers. The wild tiger entered the stage on its hind legs and waved at the audience; a team of athletes then strode confidently onto centre stage, and the audience continued to cheer and whistle. The tiger soon grew tired, and had to go back down on all fours, but it still managed to raise its front paw to the audience and wave cheerfully. Su Yun was wearing a clean white tracksuit. She had attached a plastic flower behind her right ear. Her skin looked rosy against her white clothes. She looked good enough to eat. Those in the know could tell from the blue piping that her tracksuit was imported and cost at least fifty FECs — domestically produced trousers didn’t have that distinctive blue piping.

She glanced about her with a fixed smile on her face, trying to adopt the expression the Chinese women’s volleyball team wore on their triumphant return from the Olympics. Unfortunately the tiger was looking the other way, and didn’t see her confident grin. As the applause rose in a crescendo, Su Yun scanned the audience for the painter’s face. She knew where he would be sitting. The day before, she had gone to see him at the municipal museum. She gave him a ticket, and told him it was for her one-woman show. When he asked her what act she was performing, she told him it was a suicide show. He smiled and said, ‘That sounds very intriguing.’ She searched the crowd once more, and at last caught sight of his panic-stricken eyes.

‘He thinks I’m lying again,‘she said to herself, ‘or playing a game. When the tiger sinks its teeth into me though, he will feel sorry. But it will be too late. He will be upset to see my foot go, or my ear. That will bring him to his senses. The moment the tiger pounces on me, he’ll scramble over the wire cage and come to my rescue.’ She waved to him again, and he waved back. The noise of the crowd slowly died down. For a moment, she lost her will to perform, but her professional instincts took over. Twelve years of life as an actress enabled her to keep calm and move gracefully to centre stage.

She took a deep breath, then commenced the act she had decided upon in consultation with the club’s manager. As the song ‘The Peoples’ Liberation Army and the People Go Together Like Fish and Water’ started to play, she began a mime of washing the clothes of the beloved PLA soldiers. Half her mind was focused on the mime, the other half on the tiger. She knew that after she had hung the laundry out to dry, she would have to dance back to the army barracks, and the tiger — that ‘class enemy’ with the face of a man and the heart of a beast — would leap out from the bushes and dig its teeth into her. After she had died, the tiger would be caught and arrested. But on its way to the local police headquarters, a heroic PLA soldier would rush over to avenge her death by plunging a bayonet into the tiger’s back. Marking the spot where Su Yun had been devoured, the soldiers would erect a heroine’s plaque then sing ‘The Internationale’.

As the plot raced through her mind, her steps became increasingly confused. Soon she looked like a Japanese puppet, bobbing up and down to the music’s cheerful beat. Her gestures for rinsing the clothes were not in the least convincing. The script specified that she should now lift her skirt, dunk the clothes into a pail of fresh water and beat them with a stick as fiercely as the fictional hero Wu Song battled with the tiger in the famous episode from Outlaws of the Marsh. Unfortunately, the tiger before her misinterpreted her gestures as signs of aggression, and let out a horrific roar. She was aware she would have to improvise much of the action, because she hadn’t had time to meet the tiger before the show, let alone conduct any rehearsals.

She skipped across the stage with tiny steps (which had once earned her the second prize in a local dance competition), moving closer and closer to the tiger. She gestured to it to circle her, but the tiger was panicked by her sudden movement and jumped three steps back. When the music blared out again, she took it as her cue to break into a song that expressed her joy at cleaning the clothes of the beloved Peoples’ Liberation Army. She planted one foot in front of the other and wiggled her hips up and down. A fire exploded in her chest. ‘Why is it taking so long?’ she asked herself, determined not to look behind her to check what it was doing. ‘Paper tiger!’ she cursed. Then suddenly, without any warning, the tiger pounced forward, and well before it was planned for in the script, clamped its jaws around her chest.

The audience noticed two little horns sprout from the top of Su Yun’s head, and watched her use them to try to fend the beast off. The people in the front rows could even hear her struggling to keep to her lines, squealing: ‘The uniforms of our comrades, the PLA soldiers …’

The tiger continued to lash out at her as she tried to prise from its jaws the uniform she was washing. Even the music that heralded the arrival of the beloved PLA soldiers did not deter the beast. The terms of the contract stipulated that the tiger was legally permitted to devour every part of her. The tiger attempted to clamp its jaws around her skull, but her two horns got in its way, so it decided to leave her head alone for the time being and start tucking into one of her arms. During this moment of respite, Su Yun craned her neck down through the space between the tiger’s legs, and stared at the audience who were now howling with terror. The leg that wasn’t crushed by the tiger’s weight could still move freely. She lifted it in the air and gazed at the line of English words printed down the side of her tracksuit bottoms: WHEN YOU GO ABROAD, BE SURE TO WEAR WHITE! THEY SAY THAT THE STREETS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES ARE AS CLEAN AS PUBLIC GARDENS. Very soon, only her horned head could move — every other part of her was crushed under the tiger’s weight.

She met the tiger’s gaze. Had the beast not smeared blood over her eyes, she would have been able to see very clearly the beautiful markings on its face, which were much more vivid than those on the toy tiger that hung on her wall (a birthday gift from an old boyfriend). The tiger stared at her eyes as it bit into her flesh. To her surprise, she quite enjoyed the sensation of being chewed; she had never experienced the feeling before. The audience screamed in horror. The tiger wiped its bloody mouth across her chest, then looked up and glanced at the commotion breaking out in the stalls. Su Yun took advantage of this pause to twist her head round and look in the painter’s direction, but unfortunately her pathetic little horns obstructed her view.

Assuming that she was attempting to escape, the tiger dug its claws into her again and blocked the air from her nose and mouth. ‘I love you, my darling,’ she murmured to the painter. ‘Now you know I wasn’t lying. I want to start my life over again.’

She felt the tiger tuck into the area below her waist. Since she was unable to move, she hoped the tiger would first pull out her guts so as to cover up the parts that most attracted men’s attention. She shook the animal’s blood from her face, then lifted her head, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sky outside the window. The trembling horns on her head made her seem quite animated. Instead of the sky however, her eyes fell on the words of the red banner hanging from the chairman’s podium: UPHOLD THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES, CONSTRUCT SOCIALISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS. Then, seated below the slogans, she saw the painter, utterly motionless, staring blankly at the stage.