I waited for my father to think of a plan that would reunite us in our village, but, incapable of understanding that time was not on his side, he left me waiting.
You must appreciate that time is always against you. It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. Therefore, if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you.
Four years. They passed so quickly.
5
Reinvent Yourself
The first rule of success is, you must look beautiful. No one taught Phoebe this secret, but she could tell by simple observation that successful people always looked good. Just by looking at the women hurrying along Henan Lu, running for buses, or reading their magazines in the metro at rush hour, she could spot the few who were on life’s upward curve. At first she did not really think about the connection between appearance and achievement; she could not even imagine such a link. But then she kept noticing more and more women who looked immaculate in their dress, and what’s more, that they often carried bags that looked as though they contained serious life items instead of mere beauty accessories. Often, these impressive-looking women would take out papers or a book from their sleek bags and read them on the bus with an air of purpose, and even if they were reading mere novels, Phoebe could see that they were absorbing the words the way high-achieving people do. All the time working, working, in a way that was steely yet elegant. It reminded her of a girl at school who always came first in class, the way that girl read books with a determination no one else had. All the teachers said she would go on to great things, and sure enough, she got a job as a quantity surveyor in Kuantan. Gradually, Phoebe realised that the reason these women looked so beautiful was that they had good positions in life; she could not deny that the two things were inseparable. Which one came first, beauty or success, she did not know.
She started taking notes on the type of clothes they wore, how they styled their hair, even the way they walked. When she compared these to her own way of dressing and behaving, it became clear why she had not yet been able to find a decent job in Shanghai. No one would look at her and think, that woman is going to astound the world with her abilities, we should give her a job. No, she was not someone you would even look at twice on the bus, never mind give a job to.
She knew she was not a mediocre person, but she looked like one to the outside world. This was not her fault, she thought; it was also because of where she lived. Every day she was surrounded by mediocre people who dragged her down into their sea of mediocrity. She had found a room in an apartment block not far from the river, which she had thought would be beautiful and prestigious. A girl she had worked with in a mobile-phone keypad factory in Guangzhou had a childhood friend who had gone to work in Shanghai, and she had a good job working in an office. The girl’s apartment was just one room, but it had a small washroom and a space to prepare simple meals. Her name was Yanyan, and in her text message she said that Phoebe could stay there for free until she got a job – surely it wouldn’t be long before Phoebe found a good position. When Phoebe looked at the address she saw that it was close to the centre of town, a nice area near some famous attractions that foreign visitors loved, and by the bank of the river, about which people wrote love songs. The apartment was on the tenth floor, so she imagined magnificent views of this great metropolis that would inspire her with the spirit of high achievement. Every day she would wake up and breathe the intoxicating air of excellence.
But when she came out of the subway station she found herself in a low-class shopping centre full of small shops that sold everything in bulk – clothes, mushrooms, teapots, pink plastic hairclips, fake trainers. She stood for a minute trying to work out the right direction. In front of her was a row of shops with makeshift beds outside them – there were people stretched out on each one, getting tattoos. She walked past them, looking at the huge rose being tattooed on a man’s arm, its petals reaching around his biceps; an eagle on the nape of someone else’s neck; a manga kitten on a young woman’s ankle. Outside, the pavement was black with grease from the dozens of stalls selling skewers of grilled meat and squid. It was hard to walk properly because of all the discarded skewer-sticks, which made her feel unstable in her heels.
In the entrance hall to the apartment block there was a cramped wooden booth where two watchmen sat, drinking tea from plastic flasks. They did not even look up when Phoebe walked in; they did not care who came into the building. The floor was pale, with a covering of dust and streaked with black marks that Phoebe could not identify, and on the walls were patches of cement where the crumbling brickwork had fallen away and been hastily filled in. The wooden noticeboards and the metal pigeon-hole letterboxes were old and had not been changed for at least fifty years – their green paint looked almost black. The place was dirtier than some of the factory hostels she had lived in. As she waited for the lift to take her up to her new life, she felt the heavy weight of dread descend upon her shoulders. There were hundreds and hundreds of apartments in the building, and only one lift, and as she waited a crowd began to gather around her, everyone pushing forward. These people were not the sort of neighbours she had imagined. She had envisaged herself surrounded by the kind of women she saw on TV, well-dressed modern Shanghainese, but instead she found a crowd of old-age pensioners dressed in revolutionary clothes, stern padded jackets and shapeless trousers that matched their expressionless faces, which seemed to have crumpled inwards. No light shone from their eyes, no feeling sprang from their gazes, and when Phoebe looked at them she felt a shiver of fear run down her neck. It was like looking at an abandoned house where everything had been kept as it was in the past, the clocks ticking, the furniture clean and shiny, the plants watered, only there was no one living there; they had long since gone away. Even the younger people seemed old and worn down by unknown cares, their clothes as uninspired as their faces.
They shuffled past Phoebe as the lift neared the ground floor, their shoulders and arms jostling her. She watched the numbers light up on the counter, and as she did so she felt as though her life was also descending: 4, 3, 2, 1. Soon it would be zero. As the lift doors opened she saw that it was tiny and filled with cigarette smoke, so she decided to take the stairs instead. She only had a small bag with her – she had learnt to travel light. Even so, she was soon out of breath because the stairs were steep and the windows that lined the stairwell were open and let in the dust and pollution from outside. There were pipes everywhere, and some of them were leaky. Where they dripped onto the floor there were crusted brown patches that looked like mushrooms sprouting from the concrete.
As she climbed the stairs she could see a giant construction site taking shape right next to the apartment block. Huge steel columns jutted out from the hole being dug for the foundations. Beyond it was a shopping centre, painted in coral pink and blue. In the daytime its neon signboard looked like scaffolding, and it was hard to read what it said: Shanghai Liteful Fashion Shopping Market. The signboards that covered its entire length advertised cheap clothing brands that Phoebe had never heard of, the colours gold and bright green and yellow. Nothing matched. The streets below were dark with a mass of people waiting for buses or emerging from the shopping centre – it must have been a wholesale market where you could buy anything from skirts to electronic goods to dried food very cheaply. Even from where she was she could hear the thumping of music