Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

Women with pretty faces but flat chests know the importance of flicking their hair back flirtatiously. Some even learn to wiggle their bottoms when they walk past a man, expose some thigh when crossing their legs, or whisper suggestive words between their pink lacquered lips. Women who are neither pretty nor buxom have to rely on their intelligence, wide reading and refined manners if they want to arouse a man’s desire. But before she had even left university, this girl was already aware that her soft, pale breasts were destined to be the overriding reason for men’s interest in her, and the source of her future happiness. Having felt ashamed of them in the past, she now regarded them as mysterious and fascinating objects.

After she graduated from university, she moved to this town and took up the job assigned to her by the Party. She was to spend every day in an office with the same four women and one man. Had she not suffered the problems she encountered during her first month, she could have retained her post until she was sixty-two years old, then retired peacefully. It was a secure job. The first day she arrived in the office, the two cactus plants that had been hovering between life and death suddenly burst into a blaze of white flowers. The atmosphere immediately relaxed. She knew she was brimming with youth, and that each breath she exhaled filled the air with the scent of spring. Although her female colleagues felt secretly threatened by her arrival, they gave her a courteous welcome. But as soon as she left the room, they would start discussing whether her pale complexion was the result of an application of the imported ‘Snowflake’ cream, or whether her seemingly slender waist was in fact held in by a corset.

‘Her stomach looked a little wobbly,’ the elderly book-keeper informed the others after following the girl into the women’s toilets.

The middle-aged translator looked up from her typewriter. ‘Her face is so plump she has dimples in her cheeks already,’ she said. ‘When I turned forty, the skin on my face was still tight and smooth.’

‘Not yet twenty years old, and she’s already got the breasts of a matron,’ Chairwoman Fan, the fifty-five-year-old virgin smirked. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s had an abortion.’

The young secretary who had recently married joined in and said, ‘Maybe she’s injected them with something.’

‘It looks to me like she’s been rubbing them with cream,’ the old virgin opined, returning to her seat by the window. ‘Or else, she’s let too many men squeeze them. Why else would they be so big?’ If you had been observing Chairwoman Fan closely, you would have noticed a malicious spark in her eyes. She had worked at her desk by the window in the corner of the room for the last thirty years. Before the girl with big breasts arrived in the office, she had never bothered to engage in idle chatter with her colleagues. No one ever dared approach her desk, or even so much as glance out of her side of the window. She always ensured that the half of the window that her desk touched was kept immaculately clean. She stuck a ‘No Smoking’ sign over the top pane, and hung a length of cloth over the two lower panes to block out the sun’s rays that hit her desk in the afternoon. Her corner of the room always smelt of wet galoshes and moth balls. The girl with big breasts was assigned the desk opposite her. From the old virgin’s vantage point, the girl’s bosoms did indeed look extraordinarily large. They protruded so far, they seemed as though they were about to attack the desk.

When the girl walked back from the toilets and returned to her chair, the four other women fell silent. They savoured this moment of secret complicity — they felt united by their shared opinion concerning the new girl’s unusually large breasts. After that, when the girl strode into the office every morning, her eyes full of the joys of spring, the other women would assume fixed grins and exchange knowing looks.

Before she had received her first month’s pay cheque, the girl had already made friends with the secretary, who was the youngest of her four female colleagues. The secretary revealed stories of her husband’s violent temper in exchange for the girl’s descriptions of university love affairs; she offered her a piece of nougat her husband had brought back from a business trip, and the girl gave her a plastic key-ring. Soon they started making jokes about the older colleagues, and were even on the point of sharing secrets about their friends’ private lives.

The atmosphere in the office became strained. After the secretary broke ranks with the three older women, a cold war set in and the solidarity among the ‘old guard’ collapsed. If someone happened to bang a cup on the desk, a minute later, another colleague would slam a cup down more loudly. One morning, the translator walked in wearing a new flowery dress and announced that her chickens had stopped laying eggs and were only fit for the chopping board. Knowing that this was a veiled joke at her expense, the old virgin glanced at the translator and sneered, ‘Did your daughter buy you that dress? It really takes years off you.’ Their battles rolled over into the political study sessions. When the elderly book-keeper finished reading out a report about a local hero who had tragically drowned trying to save the life of a state-owned pig, the translator and the secretary appeared unmoved. They didn’t even attempt a show of grief. Chairwoman Fan noticed their behaviour, and made a record of it in her notebook.

‘They seem to have something against me,’ the girl told the secretary one day after work. By this time, they were already so close that they were sharing snacks at lunchtime. Relations in the office had entered the stage of ‘second-degree combat preparations’. Although one of the cactus plants was still blooming, the other had lost its flowers, and its needles had turned red and hard.

They walked towards the bus stop. For the last two days, they had taken to holding hands when walking outside together. The secretary led the way, and the girl allowed herself to be led. Every woman needs this kind of relationship. The secretary appreciated the intimacy, it compensated for all the domestic misery she had suffered since her wedding day. She enjoyed revealing the secrets of the bedroom to the girl who hadn’t commenced sexual relations (or ‘jumped into the sea’, as the new saying went). In return, she experienced pleasures she had never enjoyed before: the sensation of the girl’s innocent, warm hand in hers; the feeling of pity, similar to the pity a cat might feel before it strikes its prey; the knowledge that she had the power to control what might, or might not, happen to the girl. Her life suddenly seemed more interesting. She had tried to hold herself back time and again, but now she could contain herself no longer and she revealed at last the secret that she shared with her colleagues. ‘They have fallen out with each other because of you,’ she said.

‘What?’ The girl drew in a sharp breath of air. ‘Why?’

The secretary didn’t want to jeopardise her friendship with the girl. So, keeping the girl’s hand firmly in her grip, she said in a comforting tone, ‘Haven’t you noticed what’s been going on?’

The girl with big breasts had no idea what the secretary was talking about.

‘Tell me what you know,’ she cried. ‘Tell me now!’

‘Try and guess first.’

‘Don’t play games.’ The girl’s face turned red.

‘It seems Chairwoman Fan was right.’ The secretary was deliberately dragging things out.

‘Please, sister, I beg you. Tell me.’ The girl shrank back into the role of someone who needs to be protected.

This wasn’t the first time the secretary had been called ‘sister’, so her expression didn’t change. ‘She’s jealous of you — that stupid old hen who can’t lay any more eggs.’