Miss Chopsticks by Xinran

Author:Xinran
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407065748
Publisher: Random House

8

Diagrams and Dialects

Five’s vision of the great dragon at night had stayed with her during the weeks that followed the day off with her sisters. The moment she had seen its glittering scales shining through the dark, her feelings about her job had changed. It seemed to her that she was living and working in a truly magical place, and she was sure that it must contain some secret that would help her, a mere chopstick, become something better.

She continued to see her sisters on her free day, but she didn’t always enjoy their outings. Sometimes Three couldn’t join them, and said that Five and Six were now familiar enough with the city to cope without her. However, without Three as their guide, the two younger sisters argued about what to do. Five wanted to spend the day looking at the thin people in shop windows, while Six insisted on meeting up with students from the university. When they were with Six’s friends, Five felt desperately uncomfortable. The bignoses jabbered away in their ‘foreign language’ and she could do nothing but sit silently and watch. Things weren’t much better when the conversation was in Chinese. None of Six’s friends, not even the Chinese ones, could believe that she didn’t know how to read, and when she tried to talk to the university students about farming, they didn’t understand a word. This was partly to do with the Anhui dialect that Five spoke, and partly because Six wasn’t very interested in ‘translating’ what Five had to say. How Five wished she had the courage and the knowledge to go off on her own, but she was tied to Six by her ignorance. Things were better when Three came out with them. They would visit big shopping centres or shopping malls with food courts. There Six could meet her friends, and Three could go for a walk with Five nearby, so that all of them could enjoy their time in their own way.

Five thought a lot about how she could find the secret hidden in the Dragon Water-Culture Centre. She dreamed of returning to the village for Spring Festival having proved that a stupid girl can be clever in the city. She thought about how relieved Uncle Two would be when he came back from Zhuhai for the festival and saw that she had heeded all his warnings. But Three and Six both said that, if you wanted to live your life in comfort, you had to earn serious money – and if you wanted to earn serious money, you had to go to school. Was this really the only way? Engineer Wu repaired the machines just by looking at pictures, and Auntie Wang never so much as glanced at a sheet of paper. Mei Mei was the only one who got up early in the morning to read books, and yet she was just a humble worker rather than a manager. Six had read a lot more books than Three, but she was still no good at arranging vegetables.

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