The Yellow Papers Read Free

of rice.
    â€˜How can they understand each other,’ he once asked the teacher, ‘when they barely open their mouths to speak?’ But the teacher just smiled.
    English lessons were followed with classes on how things were done in the West, and Chen Mu learned how to use a knife and fork, and how their position on a plate indicated whether or not you’d finished your meal. He learned that making a noise when eating was not – as in China – a sign that one was enjoying a meal, but a sign of being uncouth and rude. But what amazed him most was the way Western men treated their women, and he wondered how his mother would react if a man ever allowed her to go through a doorway before him.
    He was the youngest of the boys destined for America – most being three or four years older – but he soon befriended Xi Tang, a boy from a neighbouring village, and the two became inseparable. ‘You’re no bigger than a mouse,’ Xi Tang had said on that first day, and from then on this became Chen Mu’s nickname.
    When school was out Xi Tang and Chen Mu would explore Shanghai. Sometimes the boys went to Frenchtown, as the French Concession was called, where there were more Chinese than foreigners and where the air was pungent with the smell of opium, and they hunted for brothels in the hope of seeing one of the girls, but they never succeeded.
    â€˜ Aiyah ! These are not worth our attention anyway,’ Xi Tang would say each time, forgetting that he’d been the one to suggest the hunt. ‘You want the ones in the British section – so exclusive that you can even find First Night Virgins. No older than twelve, every one of them.’
    â€˜Have you ever gone there?’ Chen Mu always asked.
    â€˜Their feet are perfect three-inch Golden Lilies,’ Xi Tang continued, always ignoring the question, ‘with an aroma so rich that a man can come from that alone.’
    Chen Mu remembered the smell of his mother’s feet when she unbound them at night to soak in water, before cutting away the dead skin and rebinding them, and he didn’t think he’d come from such a smell, but then concluded the feet of twelve-year-old virgins probably smelt differently.
    Some days they preferred the Huangpu and the Bund, which once had been no more than a muddy towing path but was now a wide, magnificent thoroughfare. They’d wander streets teeming with energy and noise, where the air always smelt of smoke and decomposing rubbish, and they’d watch boats unloading cargo. Other times they searched for streetwalkers known as ‘pheasants’ because of their elaborate, gaudy dress, and xianrou zhuang , or ‘salt pork shops’. Unlike the higher-class changsan brothels, where the women specialised in singing songs from operas and hosted elaborate banquets for rich merchants and officials, and where patrons had to undergo long courtships and pay exorbitant fees before gaining any sexual favour, these lower grade brothels were devoted to instant sexual gratification. And though everyone knew that salt pork was no longer fresh meat, these premises still enjoyed a brisk business catering to the needs of labourers and rickshaw drivers, and sometimes Xi Tang and Chen Mu sneaked into their courtyards only to be chased straight out again.
    But it was the Chinese City, hidden behind its high circular wall pierced by narrow gateways and surrounded by a moat, that Chen Mu loved most because it reminded him of home. Along its dark crowded streets that smelt of rotting rubbish, cooking meats and fried onion pancakes they roamed, exploring alleyways made even narrower by restaurants and tea houses, shops and stalls selling porcelains and bronzes, brocades and embroideries, and stands displaying cooked and raw meats.
    And so days blended into weeks and months, and Chen Mu lost his fear of the barbarians. He understood that their women were not barrel-bodies, but that it was simply