Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

If the relatives had trouble deciding what to choose from the list, the entrepreneur would stick his chin out, sidle up to them and whisper, ‘I have some more tapes in reserve. But you will have to pay for them in Foreign Exchange Certificates.’ This secret stash of music included tapes of English rock, American country music, erotic French disco music and the original Hong Kong recordings of the Taiwanese pop star, Deng Lijun. ‘The central authorities have started to confiscate Deng Lijun tapes,’ he told them authoritatively. ‘Anyone found in possession of one will be given a five-year prison sentence and have their urban residency permit revoked.’

His customers often followed his recommendations. Some of them found it hard to reach a decision because they had very little idea about the dead person’s musical tastes.

‘Trust me,’ he told one family. ‘I can tell at a glance that your daughter would like “Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Mistress Meng Weeps on the Great Wall”.’

‘But she was still a virgin,’ the relatives whispered.

The entrepreneur looked again at the photograph on the form. The woman was well into her forties.

‘Well, you decide. I have “Ave Maria”, or “Disco Music for Making Love”. The musical styles are different, but they will both do the same job. You can send her off to the Old Man in the Sky in whatever manner you please.’ Since the relatives had a low level of education, he used the term ‘Old Man in the Sky’ instead of ‘God’.

‘You can choose to give her a virgin’s cremation, or not. It’s up to you,’ he added, smiling at them as smugly as a matchmaker at a wedding.

‘She always wanted to join the Party,’ the mother confessed with a sly smile.

‘Wanting to join the Party and joining the Party are two quite different things.’ As far as politics were concerned, the entrepreneur was mature beyond his years. ‘But if you like, I can play “The Party has Given Me a New Lease of Life” and “Socialism is Good” and she will die with no regrets.’

Soon, news of the entrepreneur’s excellent service spread throughout the town. People discovered that being dead was not much different from being alive.

A constant din boomed from the entrepreneur’s shack. He had bought the cassette player from the first batch of goods imported from Japan following the launch of the Open Door Policy. It had four speakers. He would always try to play the music the relatives had requested, if time allowed. But the only real audience were the stray dogs in the yard outside who were drawn to the shack by the smell of burning swooners. The hounds would lie on the ground and sunbathe, or riffle through the discarded burial clothes. Sometimes the delicious smells wafting from the shack drove them into a frenzy, and they would run about the yard, chasing each other’s tails.

Occasionally the entrepreneur spent the night in the shack. We should examine his professional conduct and analyse his immoral behaviour. A thirty-year-old bachelor must have something to hide. The grief he feels at the sight of female corpses is most unnatural. If we practise our Qigong, and use our ‘eye of wisdom’ to observe him through the walls of his shack, we will see this self-appointed leader pace the room, then stop at the feet of a certain leading cadre and glare at him like a man about to avenge the death of his father. With his death register in his hand, he subjects each swooner to ruthless interrogation, pausing now and then to give them a sharp kick in the shins.

One day, he had lying at his feet: a policeman, the municipal Party secretary, the deputy head of the local housing department, a retired second-grade Party cadre and the chairwoman of the neighbourhood committee. Not one of them posed a threat to him though. They lay on the ground, next to the intellectual, the doctor and the pianist, and in one breath, the entrepreneur cursed the lot of them.

Everyone is equal in death. Had these important people known they were going to be abused in this way, they would have sorted the rascal out while they were still alive. But now the swooners could only lie back silently as he passed his final judgements on them. He swore at the cop for not observing the traffic regulations and for unjustly confiscating his motorbike licence. He cursed the deputy head of the housing department for failing to help him with his accommodation problems. ‘You even wanted to have me thrown out of my shed in the entrance passage,’ he hissed. He berated them for their corruption saying, ‘I could have bought myself a villa in the country with all the money I wasted on your bribes.’ Then he walked back to the deputy head of the housing department and kicked him in the stomach. ‘You had the cheek to accuse my shed of spoiling the look of the city. But when the Albanian prime minister came here on his state visit, it was you who decided to cover the town with those huge ugly hoardings.’

The entrepreneur was settling old scores. The year the Albanian prime minister, Mr Shehu, was due to visit, the local government decided that the tatty buildings on the most important streets should be covered with hardboard and painted with a mural of a long row of neat houses. Shehu would be driving past in a flash, so an impression was all that was required. One of these hardboard fronts was attached to the apartment block in which the entrepreneur was living with his mother at the time. It blocked all the light and air from their flat. The windows of the hardboard fronts were spaced at five metre intervals, and as luck would have it, they missed their apartment and ended up on his neighbours’ flat. The local government issued the neighbours with a length of curtain, and as long as they hung it up for the five minutes when Shehu’s car was expected to pass, it was theirs to keep afterwards. The entrepreneur thought this was very unfair, as the neighbours’ class origins were similar to his own — they both belonged to one of the ‘Five Black Categories’ who were denied state-allotted jobs. In the end, missing out on the piece of curtain was the least of his troubles. While the ‘hardboard mansions’ were being dismantled, the entrepreneur took advantage of the general chaos and stole a section of hardboard and two planks of wood to make furniture with later on. Someone saw him and reported him to the police. He was taken to the public security bureau and interrogated for hours. He was just fourteen at the time.

As night fell, the municipal Party secretary took on a magical air. The entrepreneur felt a sense of pride as he gazed at the line of dead bodies. At last he could enjoy the kind of authority that everyone deserves in life. The dead lay below him, eyes agape, mere witnesses to their own humiliation.

After the entrepreneur saw the play The Ninth-Grade Sesame Seed Officer about the altruistic Communist cadre, he was moved to act with a keener sense of social justice. He sent proletarians into the incinerator without exploiting them once. He didn’t even check their teeth. (A gold tooth is worth an average family’s yearly income in this town.) It was a case of ‘Levelling out the rich and poor’ or ‘The sun shines after the rain’. That was how he saw it, anyway. As his own father’s death was still fresh in his mind, he was always especially kind to rightists, or to anyone who had been run over by a car.

When he walked through the streets and saw people queuing up for the bus or stopping for a chat, scenes from the crematorium would flash through his mind: the oily vapours rising from charred skin, the slowly contracting skeletons. He would think about the difference between the yellow and orange skin of the roast chicken on the street stalls, and the tender white skin of a little girl’s face before it enters the furnace. He would think about the difference between the living, who could move and talk, and the dead, who could neither move nor make excuses for themselves any longer.