Other refugees crowded the restaurant, fleeing the storm to order pots of tea and watch the red lanterns swinging wildly from the awning in the wind. In the kitchen, visible through a hatch in the wall, the chef pulled noodles from strands of dough and dumplings steamed in baskets of woven bamboo. Yida’s clothes were drenched. When Wang suggested she dry them, she shrugged. ‘They’ll dry eventually.’ So Wang offered her his jacket and was relieved when she accepted, covering her see-through wet T-shirt, clinging to her bra-cupped breasts. When the beer came she poured it out carelessly, frothing the glasses up with spilling foam.
‘Ganbei! To the Beijing Subway Authority!’ she cried, holding up her glass.
She knocked it back, then poured another. She wrinkled her nose at Wang’s offer of a cigarette, denouncing the brand as ‘filthy-tasting’, then lit one, and over the course of the evening chainsmoked most of the pack. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she insisted as Wang ordered. ‘All I want is to drink enough to fall down drunk.’ But when the dishes arrived Yida stuffed herself like a starving peasant. Wang ate a bowl of noodles then lit a cigarette, leaning back in his chair to watch her eating dumplings. The stark fluorescent lighting stripped away the shadowy mystery she’d had in his taxi, exposing the odd pimple, chapped, flaking lips and other imperfections that in no way diminished her looks. She had arresting eyes, mostly brown, but with splinters of jade glinting in her irises. Spirals of curls sprung up about her head as her hair became drier, and Wang wanted to reach out and touch them. When she went for napkins, heads turned in appreciation of her pretty face and bare legs in a short skirt. And though he’d known her for less than two hours, Wang felt a mixture of possessiveness and pride.
When the dishes were empty, Yida put a hand on her stomach and groaned, ‘I’m stuffed!’ Then she lit a cigarette and began to talk. Wang liked the low, husky pitch of her voice. He liked her strong Anhui accent and flawed command of Mandarin. There was a hint of performance in her outpourings, the theatricality of a lonely girl keen to keep her audience captive, now someone cared enough to listen.
‘Girls don’t matter as much as boys,’ she told him. ‘That’s why my parents didn’t care that I went so far away. They have my younger brother. Married couples in our village are allowed two, if the first-born is a girl.’
She had failed the high school entrance exams — not that her parents could afford to send her anyway.
‘They are saving all their money for his education,’ Yida said. ‘I bought a fake high school certificate once, but never used it. Who needs qualifications anyway? Eating bitter, that’s the only qualification I need in life.’
Ma Yida’s first job was in a factory when she was fifteen, attaching plastic blond hair to pink dolls. She moved to Beijing at seventeen. ‘I sent money home for a year or two, and I used to call them too. But now my family and I are out of touch.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll go back there one day. Not now, though. Unfilial, aren’t I?’
Yida had worked two years of jobs that native Beijingers don’t want to do. She’d been lied to, tricked and exploited, cheated out of her wages and abused. She’d left her job as a lift attendant after spending a night trapped in a lift which had ground to a mechanical halt (the caretaker, to save on the night call-out fee, had waited until the morning to call a repair man). She’d left her job as a waitress when the boss groped her in the storeroom, amongst the rice sacks and aluminium drums of oil.
‘I kicked him in the balls,’ Yida said, stabbing the air with her lit cigarette. ‘He never fucked with any waitresses ever again.’
Wang nodded, not sure whether to believe her. Yida slept on a mattress in a room shared by six migrant workers, all of them from Anhui province, all of them dirt poor. When it came to workers’ rights, they had none at all.
Yida had been a toilet attendant in Dongzhimen subway station for six weeks. The toilets were on the underground platform, between the tracks and the trains rumbling north and south. Yida’s supervisor was an overweight, overbearing man in his fifties. ‘All men are equal, everyone has to take a shit’ was his motto. It was supposed to make them feel better about the job.
‘He hated me on sight. Accused me of having a bad attitude. Tell me, Driver Wang, what kind of attitude would you have being around all that pissing and shitting, day in, day out? Every night I go home and stand under the shower for half an hour, but I can’t rinse off the filth. That’s why I was standing in the rain: to get clean.’
Working in the subway, Yida got to know the beggars who worked the circular line tunnelling clockwise and anticlockwise beneath Beijing, shaking their money-collecting tins as they limped through the carriages, frightening commuters with their deformities.
‘The cripples. The burnt ones. The blind ones. Some are so disgusting they made me want to puke. But when you get to know them, they are just like us. Some are mean bastards, of course, but some I get on really well with. Some of them are really funny. You need a sense of humour when your legs are amputated and you are dragging yourself about by your hands.’
Her supervisor had seen the beggars hanging about by the hand-washing sinks, chatting with Yida as she mopped the floor. ‘They smell bad,’ he told Yida. ‘They scare the commuters.’ He warned her that if he saw the beggars loitering by the toilets again he’d fire her, and Yida hadn’t had the heart to tell them to go away.
It was close to midnight when they left the restaurant, the waitresses stacking chairs and sweeping around them. The streets were still after the storm, with only the odd drip of rainwater falling from the branches of trees. They swayed with drunkenness, laughing and splashing each other in puddles. Then they got into Wang’s taxi and drove to his apartment in Maizidian, where Yida finally removed her damp clothes and Wang got to run his fingers through her long and tangled curls. The next morning they drove to Yida’s place for her things. It took her ten minutes to pack everything she owned into two woven-plastic bags and bring them down to his cab.
Back then, she was a miracle. She moved into his lonely bachelor apartment and her laughter chased out the bad memories and ghosts. She sang along to Faye Wong cassettes, smoked cigarettes and painted her toenails on the bed. She strolled out of the shower wearing nothing but glistening beads of water running down her skin, and it stopped his heart. Yida was not a housewife. She let the dishes pile up in the sink and burnt the pan when cooking rice, covering the stove top with starchy, boiled-over scum. But under her spell of chemicals and lust, Wang couldn’t care less. Every night he held her lithe and slender body in his arms, and never once thought of Zeng Yan.
Yida turned her back on the migrant community she had lived amongst. She threw herself at Wang with every molecule of her being. Wang was her salvation, though she pretended otherwise.
‘When you get sick of me, just tell me to go away,’ she said breezily. ‘I’ll pack up my things and you’ll never see me again. It will be as if I never even existed. No hard feelings, I swear.’
Wang didn’t believe her for a second. Yida was fooling nobody. Yida had come to stay.
The first time he took her to meet his father, he was surprised by how intimidated Yida was by the foyer of his building, with its doormen, faux-crystal chandeliers and marble floor. In the lift, on the way up, she was quiet. The wind had blown her curls into messiness on the walk there, and she frowned in the mirrored lift walls, combing them through with her fingers.
‘I wish I’d brought a hairbrush,’ she fretted.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Wang. ‘They’re idiots. You’ll see. Once we get what we want out of him, we’ll get out of here.’