The Rat People by Patrick Saint-Paul

Author:Patrick Saint-Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

YOUTH DENIED

A plastic statuette in garish colors, mass produced by the millions in one of those countless factories in the southern reaches of the world’s workshop, in the typical kitschy style of the new Chinese Empire, occupies pride of place at the entrance to the labyrinth. We are in the first level of the basement of the Yangqiao Xili Building, located at the edge of the 3rd Ring Road in the center of Beijing. A variety of offerings, dried mandarins and used sticks of incense, honor Cai Shen, the god of wealth. Both Buddhism and Taoism acknowledge that he has the power to improve a person’s financial situation. Some less devout individuals have thrown their cigarette butts in his direction. The atmosphere of this rathole is definitely college dorm. Skateboards, scooters, and Rollerblades lie in heaps by the doors to the forty or so rooms. The hallway ceilings are crisscrossed by wires for hanging out laundry: brightly colored underwear, red, yellow, and green, some displaying Hello Kitty, still the idol of young Asians, along with T-shirts with the insignia of the local soccer team: the Beijing Sinobo Guoan.

We knock at a makeshift door, which disintegrates under our hands.

“You ren ma?” Duoyou asks—“Anyone home?”

After a few tries, a young woman with short hair sticking up in all directions, eyes heavy with fatigue, wearing Maisy Mouse pajamas, opens up. It is five in the afternoon, and Zhao Mengying was sleeping like a log. A friend, with long, well-coiffed hair and an ecru dress with lace flounces, is lying next to her. She came in from the country the day before to visit Mengying and was very much awake but didn’t dare open the door. The two young women are from the little village of Anyu, in the distant province of Henan, and they blush when we announce why we’re here. After some hesitation, they finally allow us to enter their six-square-meter (sixty-five-square-foot) room.

Unembarrassed, eighteen-year-old Mengying lies down under the pink blanket on her double bed that takes up half the room and tells us to sit on the mattress. Her village friend doesn’t know what to make of this arrangement. She hasn’t moved or made the slightest sound. Two damp towels hang from a rusty nail on the back wall next to a small cracked mirror. Leftover rice and chicken steep in an oily wok. Mengying’s message is loud and clear: in Beijing, she has found the life she always wanted.

She is a waitress in a hotel in the Beijing Nan Zhan, the Beijing South railway station. At fifteen, she left her village and the inhospitable nest her peasant parents provided for her. Her mother spent her entire life in Anyu, raising her two children. Her father, however, lived the life of a mingong for fifteen years, moving from construction sites to the factories in the big coastal cities, the leading edge of the country’s growth. In the end, he returned to the land when his eldest son left home to work in Jiangsu province, where he helps build houses.

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