Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

He rose to his feet and walked to his desk. An immense joy seemed to fill the room. The hitherto numb nerve endings in his groin and thighs suddenly came alive. His mind clouded, his chest ached with anticipation, his pulse quickened a beat. He imagined smiling coyly as Chi Hui shook her head at him. He scooped a pile of Chi Hui’s letters into his arms and jumped back onto the bed. He ran his tongue over his upper lip, stretched one leg in front of the other and chuckled contentedly.

Hearing a soft knock at the door, he quickly swallowed his laugh. Experience had taught him that the sound of laughter always attracted the police. He fastened his belt, and like a man who has been summoned for interrogation, opened the door with his head hung low. A figure, smelling both stale and sweet, darted inside, slammed the door and stood in front of him. Through his eyelashes, the street writer recognised the face of the actress’s mother. She twisted her large mouth into a smile, and gazed at him with eyes that were as deep and narrow as the eyes of a leopard.

‘It’s you …’ he whispered, terrified and confused.

‘My daughter committed suicide last night. She never listened to my advice.’ The old woman edged closer and wrapped her arms around him.

He had no time to put up a struggle. The old woman carried the frail, tubercular street writer to the bed, and pressed her wine-stained lips over his mouth. The next image that shot through his mind was not Chi Hui and her flowing locks, or the policeman who had harassed him on the street corner — it was the old woman’s dark eyes glinting in the lamplight. Then his mind went blank and all he could see was a white plastic bag floating in the still air. Suddenly, he felt his tiny body, like a puff of breath, plunge into a dark vat of grease. He tried to free himself from the old woman’s grip, but before he could summon the energy, the lights went out, everything went black, and he could no longer see a thing.

The professional writer sees the girl running naked down the street, her drooping nipples as sad and lonely as the eyes of a blind man. In his mind, he still confuses this girl with the entrepreneur’s mother, whose personality seems to have seeped into many of the characters of his unwritten novel.

The girl’s breasts were large, plump, heavy, soft and pendulous. Women see these fleshy protrusions as tools for flirtation and nurture; for men, they are the inspiration for a multitude of criminal thoughts. Erudite students refer to them as bosoms; artists portray them as pink-tipped peaches; peasants merely regard them as objects that droop to the stomach and are grabbed hold of when babies need a feed. In the villages, men get to see naked breasts all the time; for them a bare breast is as unremarkable as a bare arm. But as soon as these protrusions enter the towns, they become objects of immense value. Modern women mystify them, hiding them inside tight brassieres. Photographers are always careful when they aim their cameras at a woman’s chest, because they know that too much cleavage can lay them open to accusations of ‘Bourgeois Liberalism’, and consign them to a four-year stint in prison.

The more daring contemporary writers refer to them variously as ‘curvaceous pillows’, ‘tender dumplings’, ‘rose petals’, ‘ripe grapes’ and my longed-for refuge’. When describing the experience of touching a breast for the first time, they claim they ‘joined the immortals’, ‘fainted with delight’, ‘tottered on the precipice between life and death’. As a reaction against this sentimentality, avant-garde writers prefer to use words like ‘tits’, ‘knockers’ and ‘withered strawberries’.

With the advent of the Open Door Policy, a few facts about breasts have entered the public consciousness:

Large, round breasts signify a virtuous wife and able mother. Good marrying material.

Medium-sized, pert breasts with pale pink nipples signify the ideal mistress. (Breasts like these make artists drool with desire.)

Wobbly or drooping breasts, whether large or small, indicate a woman who has indulged excessively in sensual pleasures, and is past her prime.

Women with very small breasts are usually chaste and demure, and tend to be highly intelligent. Their lack of self-esteem produces a particular sensitivity, and they often show a talent for poetry or academic work. When attempting to seduce a man, they drape themselves in loose garments, turn the lights down and whisper sweet words into his ear. They gaze up at him affectionately, and try to divert his eyes away from their chest to their shapely legs, full lips, soft hands, flowing hair, or gracefully arched eyebrows. They secretly buy themselves breast pumps — a product available on the market since the Open Door Policy — and as soon as they return home, they bolt their doors and start pumping. A local department store received two thousand pumps one day, and sold out in under two hours.

A Japanese businessman investigated the Chinese breast market and decided to open the town’s first cosmetic surgery. Women were offered injections of fluid that swelled the breasts for three days. During this time, their boyfriends could fondle and squeeze them without causing any pain. These injections were ideal for women who were approaching their wedding night, or a date which promised a night of passion. The clinic was also able to heighten flat noses, cut creases into hooded eyelids, smooth out wrinkles, pluck bushy eyebrows into elegant thin lines, or remove the eyebrows completely and replace them with tattooed arches. If you were unhappy with the size of your chin, width of your forehead, shape of your teeth or mouth, they could help you put them right too.

A few months later, the papers reported news of a great advance in scientific discovery. Following a hundred days of experiments, Chinese scientists had successfully produced a breast-enlarging cream. One technician carelessly smeared some of the product over her mouth during the tests, and a few minutes later her lips swelled to double their previous size. The manufacturers claimed that if a flat-chested woman rubbed two jars of the cream onto her chest, she would develop breasts the size of small dumplings. The papers also mentioned that foreign scientists had created a breast-enlarging technique that entails stuffing sacs of sticky translucent fluid inside the skin above the ribcage.

It seems that breasts play a very important part in our lives.

The young woman who had recently been assigned to the town’s Cultural Propaganda Department owned the type of breasts that signify a good wife and able mother. When she was at university, the sight of her breasts caused male students to walk straight into the trees and lampposts by the side of the road. When she entered the cafeteria, the male students dropped their chopsticks, overcome with lust and awe. She realised that she was one in a thousand, the owner of two priceless treasures. But she also knew that she would have to spend the rest of her life worrying about when to hide them and when to show them off. She could close her eyes and be able to guarantee that her figure was more attractive and shapely than that of any of the girls surrounding her.

She had not always been so proud of her breasts. When the two lumps of flesh started protruding from her chest, she assumed she had contracted some disease, and was too afraid to tell her mother. When she understood that she was in fact becoming a woman, she felt guilty and ashamed. She sensed the eyes of the crowd focus on the breasts that stuck out so visibly from her tight shirt and wobbled from side to side as she walked down the street. She found it hard to get used to the scrutiny of the crowd, and spent her early teenage years with her shoulders hunched.