The Twelve Dinner Guests of Shengxiao - Part Three

Tuzi was alone on a rooftop, smoking. Behind him, the sun was setting; at his feet, a battered radio blared a trebly melody. The golden light set his ears burning at their pointed tips; they glowed like traffic lights. The music stopped. A muffled, fuzzy voice recounted its message. His nose twitched. He licked his lips. He flicked his cigarette off the roof’s edge and leapt after it, his body cutting a lean silhouette against the orange sky. He landed softly on the adjacent rooftop, as nonchalantly as one might step over a crack in the pavement. He broke into a loping run, leaping from one rooftop to the next. Soon he was little more than a small black shape against the skyline, hopping like a flea on a rabbit’s back.

Pang Zhu wiped his chubby fingers on his apron. His puffy cheeks glistened greasily and were flushed red with heat and shame. He ‘worked’ in the kitchen of his father’s restaurant (‘slaved’ would be a more appropriate term), and for the umpteenth time he had caught him eating on the job and had whipped him with a wet dishcloth.  Embarrassment had become an almost permanent psychological state; it enveloped him to such an extent that on some days, he felt like he had become its human embodiment. Obese since childhood, due in part to his overindulgent (now deceased) mother, he was full to the brim with blinding hatred, furiously directed both outwards at his father and inwards at his own pathetic state. His father had a strict ‘no eating’ policy; this was due, in part, to the fact that it was bad for business, but as far as Pang Zhu was concerned, it was a personal form of subjugation, designed specifically to deprive him, demean him, humiliate him for his failure as a son. Hot tears formed on his face; he felt he could faint with hunger and he was tired, burnt out, from constant deprivation and hard physical labour.

Then the kitchen radio spoke its blessed gospel, words from the lips of the gods themselves. Pang tore off his apron, threw his dishcloth to the ground, blundered through the back door and out into the cold air, grunting defiantly.