These exciting ventures made people in the retail industry take notice of Yinghui, and the expatriate community was especially interested to learn that a foreigner was able to negotiate the complex world of Chinese retail. She began to give talks to the various foreign Chambers of Commerce, speaking to budding entrepreneurs about the pressures of being a foreigner and a woman in a male-dominated world. As she became more visible she did an interview with the Shanghai Daily – a brief article, nothing more – in which she was asked to reveal the key to her success at a time when many businesses were experiencing difficulties due to the global recession.
‘I smile every day while coolly evaluating my business model,’ she replied, smiling coolly. ‘I remain 100 per cent optimistic even in a crisis while being decisive enough to act as required.’
Was she ruthless? the interviewer asked.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You have to be tough to succeed.’
Even as she said it she regretted the way she sounded – matter-of-fact, unthinking, as if nothing bothered her. She tried immediately to laugh and find common ground with the interviewer, a young woman in her mid-twenties. But as Yinghui joked about things in the news – celebrity gossip, cute pop singers, the latest films – she could feel the journalist withdrawing behind the safety of a polite smile, the gulf between them widening. She felt old, her laugh sounded fake and robotic; the girl merely smiled and listened as Yinghui’s jokes became more and more risqué.
That interview sealed her growing reputation in more ways than one. Her image hardened into this: a bold businesswoman, certainly; but also a super-efficient, humourless automaton who would coldly plunge a knife into you, but she wouldn’t bother to do it in your back, she’d stick it in your chest. She saw this written in a ‘joke’ email circulating in her office, copied to her by mistake. Ultrawoman, Dragon Queen, Terminatress, Rambo – these were some of the nicknames she discovered as she scrolled down the email chain, which was full of comments on her boring suits and severe hairstyle – ‘like a rural Party official dressed for an interview with Hu Jintao’, someone joked. Some months later, at a cocktail party thrown by an American law firm, she heard one Western man say to another, ‘Hey, look, there’s that Chinese lesbian.’
She had got used to having her hair short – it had been her style for almost twenty years, ever since university days. There was a time when people found the look charming and gamine, like Jean Seberg in À Bout de Souffle, from which Yinghui first got the idea. She didn’t think she’d changed much since then – she didn’t look very different from the Yinghui she saw whenever she looked at her college photos – but she wondered if she was getting a bit old for the hairstyle now. No woman in Shanghai had short hair – they all seemed to have long glossy locks that fell to their shoulders or were gathered in a dramatic pile on their heads in the style of air hostesses. She began to grow her hair out, but was frustrated by how long it took. At first it became thin and shabby, like a scarecrow’s, then thicker but still messy, like a schoolboy’s. When, finally, it reached a decent length, her hairdresser said, ‘Don’t expect me to perform miracles.’
She began to dread the social functions that were becoming an increasing necessity in her professional life: a thrusting entrepreneur had to go out and be seen, but a single, always unaccompanied woman of thirty-seven was, in Shanghai, an invitation for people to comment. The locals had names for women like her, whom they considered sadly past their prime. Shengnü, Baigujing – that sort of thing. Sometimes she wondered if she really was that: a leftover woman, the dregs; or a shaggy monster waiting to be slain by the Monkey God.
‘Style issues.’ That was the phrase her friends used to describe what her new priorities should be. She needed to find a look that projected an image: someone effortlessly successful, who had accomplished all that she had while remaining gentle and feminine – a real Chinese woman. She wanted to ask what a real Chinese woman was, whether in some way she differed from a real Indian woman or a real American woman. And if she wasn’t a real Chinese woman, what was she – a fake one?
These new concerns – style issues – were not a welcome addition to her list of considerations. She woke every morning at 6 a.m., had a glass of fruit juice, then went for a forty-five-minute run on the treadmill. After a breakfast of soy protein and mixed berry fruitshake she would head down to the office and begin to deal with phone calls and emails before the first meetings began to force their way into her day. In a city where lunch breaks began religiously at 11.30 a.m., she rarely had lunch unless she had arranged a business meeting at a restaurant. Most of the time she would work through midday and simply forget to eat. Afternoons were reserved for visiting her various businesses, spending time chatting to the staff in the stores, gauging their morale and energy levels – the little human touches that made her a good employer. The evenings were nowadays taken up with entertaining or being entertained, which she neither enjoyed nor disliked. She would get home at eleven and answer any outstanding emails on her BlackBerry while in bed, in the few moments other people might have spent reading glossy magazines to ‘wind down’. At precisely midnight she would put the light out and swiftly fall asleep, rarely allowing the thoughts of her day to overspill into her slumber.
Three times a week she went for Power Yoga at a studio in Xintiandi, never speaking to the other women who had time to hang around and chat in the corridors. At the end of her session, when she lay briefly on her mat blinking at the pistachio-green ceiling, her mind would still be racing, energised by the thought of all the things ahead of her. Empty your mind and be still, her teachers would say, enjoy being in the present: Let go of all that has happened in the past. Do not think about what lies ahead but stay in the stillness of this moment. But this was not possible for her. There was too much for her to do, too many thoughts spinning and clashing in her mind. She needed to look ahead, map out her future, every minute of the day – like a constantly moving ocean creature that would drown if ever it stopped swimming, forward, forward.
She could never stand emptiness, and stillness was even worse.
She had a small group of friends, a mixture of local and expat women, with whom she tried to meet up for dinner once every other week – the last semblance of her dwindling social life. They usually met at a Hunan restaurant on the top floor of a Japanese department store on Nanjing Lu, not far from Yinghui’s office. Recently, she had begun to notice during these get-togethers that the other women would casually mention male friends of theirs, all of whom seemed to be single or divorced and in their late thirties or early forties. Discussion of these men seemed innocent enough at first; Yinghui tried to shrug it off as merely catching up on gossip. But after a while she could no longer ignore the fact that her (securely married) friends were taking pity on her, particularly as the men in question were almost exclusively Western – for everyone knew that once a woman was past thirty-five, there was little point in even trying to hook up with a local guy: Westerners were so much more accepting of age.
‘Are you trying to matchmake me?’ she challenged them jokingly one day as the double-chilli fish head arrived. She expected them to be embarrassed by the exposure of their scheming ways, but instead they were upfront about it. ‘Let’s face it,’ one of them said, beginning to pluck the meat from the fish cheeks with her chopsticks, ‘you can’t be happy in a place like Shanghai if you’re single. We’re all feminists, blah blah blah, but this is not London or New York, you know, this is China. Without a husband, you won’t be successful in your work. You can’t expect to work the hours you do and come back to an empty apartment. Besides, if you want children, you have to get moving. We know it sounds cruel, but … get real.’
Yinghui stared at the dull-eyed fish, its eyes opaque and porcelain-white. She reached for it with her chopsticks and prodded