Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

If we pick out just one letter from the thousands he wrote, we will be able to see the fluidity of his style, his commitment to his art, and his deep insight into human nature. He dreamed of becoming a professional writer, or at least an intellectual. (Although he based the letters on what his clients asked him to write, he always refined the vocabulary and style, hitting the right note every time.) His words flowed in a continuous stream, like moonlight glittering on the surface of a river.

One day he wrote a letter for an old woman who was hoping to dissuade her daughter from pursuing a relationship with a professional writer. As the letter bore little relation to what she had asked for, she returned it to him the same afternoon and demanded a refund. The writing of this letter caused the street writer so much distress that he considered abandoning his profession. Here’s an extract from the rejected letter:

… It’s curiosity that first draws men and women together, not love. They are curious to know whether they could ever be united into one. Your father was a writer. He wrote articles for newspapers, but never managed to publish a book. I stumbled into a relationship with him without thinking things through. At first I was drawn to his unusually large face — it was the size of a plantain leaf. His gaze made me smile and blush. The day a woman’s skin first feels the touch of a man’s lips, she loses her fear of the breasts hidden beneath her clothes, and is happy for the man to touch them and squeeze them.

I was as curious about my anatomy as he was, and I let this man with the large face caress and fondle my entire body, then prise my legs apart. The act that followed was horrifically obscene. Had I known as a young girl that women must spend half their lives with their legs wide open, so that men may thrust themselves in between, I certainly would never have let myself get involved with them. When I first smiled at the plantain-leaf face, I never imagined that my blush was somehow connected to that vile organ of his. Before long, I had ‘fallen in love’, or at least that’s what my friends told me. I assumed that ‘love’ referred to all those shameful, sordid feelings one experiences when a man takes possession of one’s body. Once we had become familiar with one another’s intimate parts, we were able to move in together, and my friends told me how blissfully compatible we were.

I was foolish. Even when I found out what this so-called ‘love’ amounted to, I failed to put a stop to it. On the contrary, I was happy to satisfy his every craving, and we became stuck to each other like glue. We would expend our energies, collapse in exhaustion, then have a meal and fall asleep. This was the pattern of our days, it was called ‘normal married life’. Then you came along. The one good thing about your birth was that it destroyed our sex life. Today you are the age that I was when I first met him. If you listen to what your mother has to say, perhaps you will choose a better path for yourself.

My first piece of advice is: never believe anything a man tells you. Above all, never trust a writer — they trap you in a web of words from which there is no escape. They earn their living making things up, they are professional liars. They tell you stories about things that never happen in the real world. At least, I’ve never witnessed any love story like the ones they write about in their books.

I presume that you and the writer have commenced a sexual relationship, because if he has already spoken to you of love, he has no doubt been simultaneously making moves on your body. If this is the case, perhaps you have discovered that love is a word of little consequence that men spew from their mouths without thinking. Or perhaps your curiosity about sex has blinded you to love’s true nature. We are both women. We are fully acquainted with the various mounds and dips of our bodies, and know they are not nearly as sublime as men imagine. You must fend men off for as long as possible, because as soon as they have squeezed and probed every part of your flesh, you become worthless to them, no better than a lump of meat on a chopping board. Don’t wait for your wedding day before you start knocking some sense into him. Tell him at once that he must stop dragging you off to bed, or to deserted sheds and grassy verges. Ensure that you remain standing or seated at all times. Never give him an opportunity to press you down onto the floor.

You convince yourself that his search of your body is a search for love. But love cannot be groped or fondled …

He had based the ten-page letter on the information the old woman gave during their conversation. She said she had tried to write the letter herself, but her hands shook so much she was unable to hold a pen. The street writer was stunned by her candour and her cynical attitude to love.

When he remembered the cold expression on her face, his skin crawled. He blushed when he thought of the sentimental love letters he had written in the past. He knew that the women who had received them were now waddling contentedly down the street, clutching their pregnant bellies, while the men who had sent them were returning to him on the sly, asking him to pen letters to their new mistresses.

‘Love is a waste of time,’ the old woman told him. ‘If that writer wants to marry my daughter, he should come and take a look at me first. I’m the image of who she will be nine thousand days from now. When he sees me, his love-sickness will vanish like a puff of smoke.’

The old woman mumbled on to him about how young people today confuse heartache with suffering. She said they are two different things: real suffering courses through the body like blood, but heartache is a fleeting reaction to a petty lovers’ tiff. She said if one feels elated with the joys of love, then it means one has not delved fully enough into one’s partner’s soul. Finally, after she told him that the daughter who ignored all her letters was planning to perform a public suicide, she cried: ‘She really is my reincarnation! Nobody can stand in her way. She’s planning to hire a tiger from the zoo and feed herself to it. If she returns to this world, we’ll form an unbeatable team.’

After the old woman walked away, the street writer had to tap his head before he could think clearly again. That evening, he returned to his shed in the entrance passage of an apartment block in the centre of town, and tried to sort out the old woman’s muddled thoughts. (Apparently the shed’s previous owners — a mother and son who ran a private crematorium business — had taken a trip to the suburbs one day, and hadn’t been seen again since.) He focused his mind; the light bulb hanging above him shone on his balding head. Although he lacked the old woman’s sharp eyes that could see through the vanity of this world, the grey matter inside his skull had been taxed so hard over the years that wiry hairs jutted from his nostrils.

He had a face that indicated he was not suited to manual labour. It was heart-shaped, and as white as the moon. His lips were as moist and red as those of a young girl — although this was probably an early sign of tuberculosis. The whites of his eyes were yellow. He often smiled for no reason. When he was listening to the old woman’s story, and later writing the letter for her, the smile had never once left his face.

As he sat beneath the light bulb staring at the brick wall, his thoughts turned to Chi Hui, a girl he had been writing to for one of his clients. Although he developed strong feelings for almost every woman he wrote to, it was to Chi Hui that his mind returned most frequently. Thinking about her, he felt his spirit take flight like a plastic bag dancing in the wind. In the past, thoughts of her made him reflect on maple leaves in spring, the smell of foreign cigarettes, the similarity between urethras and the gutters on the streets, or a couple embracing casually as they emerge from the public latrines. But the old woman’s words had upset his usual pattern of thought, and his mind became confused.