SERVER: No it's not. What we're doing here is allowing the best-quality goods in the world to mingle with Chinese traditional culture.
GIRL A: How do you know that your dad has a lover?
GIRL B: I bumped into them, yuck, they were all over each other.
GIRL A: Did you tell your mum?
GIRL B: What would be the point? She said it herself a long time ago, all men eat what's in their bowl while eyeing up what's in the wok!
GIRL A: Not necessarily, not my dad.
GIRL B: That's because you don't know. My mum says, what man with money doesn't keep a mistress these days?
GIRL A: So what're we going to do when we have men?
GIRL B: If they can keep lovers, so can we!
MANAGER: Why is this paper dispenser so loose?
CLEANER: I thought that it would make it more convenient for the customers.
MANAGER: You can't do that, it has to be tight, or it's easy for the customers to pull out a lot all at once, and we're the ones who have to pay for it. Have you wiped down all the pictures?
CLEANER: Yes, all of them, even the new ones they've just hung up. It's just that one over the soap dispenser, there's a mark on the man's face, I can't get it off.
MANAGER: Don't you scrub that off, I put that tape over the man's eyes myself. Whatever were they were thinking of, hanging a picture of a man in a ladies' toilet? How come the floor in that cubicle isn't shiny?
CLEANER: I've just mopped it.
MANAGER: Not hard enough, you should mop the floor until you can see the face of the person in the next toilet!
When I heard this, I congratulated myself that there was no one in the cubicles on either side of me; I could hardly imagine performing my private natural functions 'face to face' with my neighbours.
–
YOUNG WOMAN: This brand's no good!
YOUNG MAN: It looks really great on you.
YOUNG WOMAN: What do you know about it? Nobody takes this brand seriously, I'll crash and burn in the interview, for certain!
YOUNG MAN: Well, can't you wear that one from Next?
YOUNG WOMAN: That brand's too old-fashioned – as soon as the boss sees it he'll know that I'm behind the times.
YOUNG MAN: Things are really expensive here, and money's tight for me this month.
YOUNG WOMAN: So do you really love me?
YOUNG MAN: Of course I love you!
YOUNG WOMAN: Do you? Then you couldn't let me show up in clothes that aren't even brand names and lose face in front of a foreign boss, now, could you?
MAN A: Aren't you going to buy her that necklace?
MAN B: It's too expensive. I can't very well claim the money back at my work unit.
MAN A: Get the attendant to write you two receipts, one for books, one for souvenirs, and that'll be the end of the matter!
MAN B: That brain of yours is good for something, anyway!
MAN A: Oh, we all do it. You tell me, are there a hundred honest officials in our China, officials who've never used public funds to pay for private expenses?
MAN B: Officials who've never claimed on expenses? A hundred? Not that many.
On 16 May 2007 I was in the departure lounge of Shanghai International Airport, reading a Chinese newspaper and waiting for the plane for New Zealand, where I was going to start the launch tour for my fourth book,
The most noticeable pictures in the illustrated part of the news were of the Chinese stock market, full of beaming faces after a series of rapid rises, juxtaposed with the gloomy faces of car salesmen; people were putting all their funds into the stock market. Many of the stock owners' faces were worn by the years, but the car dealers were all healthy young people who looked tasty enough to eat. By the side of a group of photos of ostentatious and extravagant 'International Labour Day' marriage ceremonies was an old woman's face, full of grief and rage – another 91-year-old woman in Jiangxi province had made public her humiliating status as a Japanese 'comfort woman'. The old lady in the photograph looked agonised: why did they humiliate so many of us girls, and how can they still not admit it?
I put down my newspaper, and a song that was being played on the loudspeakers drifted into my ears. This song, 'Dyed with my Blood', was written for the soldiers who died in the China-Vietnam War in the 1980s, and it had been forgotten by many people, before international politics had once again painted it with fresh colour:
I was thinking: is not the flag of today's China dyed with the blood of our forebears in the same way? Do China's young people understand this? Will the flourishing crown of leaves and branches that has grown up from their roots, watered by China's violent storms and rains of blood, retain any memory of the roots?
The 'Beijing Olympic torch storm' had been going on for three days in April 2008 when I did my final editing of
