Free Miss Chopsticks by Xinran

husband, treating Three more like a little sister who needed help, and never mocking her for asking foolish questions or making mistakes. True, the couple’s tolerance had been tested the first time Three came to their house. The only toilets Three had ever known were holes in the ground, so she had been bemused by the porcelain in her employers’ bathroom. After spending several minutes pondering what to do, desperation overcame her and she jumped up on to the seat and squatted down. Not knowing where the flush was either, she simply closed the bathroom door and hoped for the best. That night when the Guans arrived back at their small apartment after the evening shift, they were struck by the bad smell. Opening the bathroom door, they discovered two dirty footprints on the toilet seat and a large turd in the bowl. Guan Buyan’s reaction was one of anger. How could Wang Tong not have shown the girl how to use a toilet? But Wang Tong was more forgiving. She simply gave the toilet a good clean and, the next time Three came to her home, showed her how to sit on the seat. It was only then that Three realised how much she had embarrassed herself on her first visit.

4
The Water Dragon
    Five’s new employers were great talkers. They didn’t stop chatting from the moment they left the job centre to the moment they got off the bus that had taken them into the heart of Nanjing. This put Five at her ease. She realised that city women gossiped just as much as country women. However, it didn’t make her any the wiser about her new job because she couldn’t understand a word they were saying. When they first got on the bus, she listened carefully to their conversation, but realising it wasn’t going to help her, she gave up. Instead she stood on tiptoe and craned her neck so that she could look out over the heads of the other passengers at the city streets.
    Many of the buildings reminded her of the tall houses she had seen in Uncle Three’s photographs of the local town. They were covered in porcelain tiles on the front, but the brick on the side walls was left bare. These Nanjing buildings looked newer though, and were cleaner and prettier. Even the best brick building in her village would look shabby next to them. There were lots of people hurrying about on the streets and Five spotted many women. They were all carrying bags of different shapes and sizes, and their faces were thickly daubed with paint like the actresses from the opera group who sometimes came from the town to perform in the village. Uncle Two had told her how city women had soft and delicate skin, but Five couldhardly see a single face that had been left without paint. The old ladies were an exception to this but they shocked Five still further with their figure-hugging clothes. Aunt Two said that dressing like that in middle age was disgusting. In fact, Aunt Two never had a good word to say about city people. She had made one trip to visit Uncle Two in Zhuhai and had come back full of criticism. Uncle Two, on the other hand, never said anything against the city: it was as if they had both been to different places.
    Five was surprised not to see any children playing on the streets. In her village there were always runny-nosed little children dashing around. In summer, the smaller children were outside from dawn to dusk while the older boys and girls helped the adults in the fields. When the colder days of late autumn and winter came, and there was not so much work in the fields, the older boys would join in the noisy games, played with sticks and clods of earth; of course, winter was the season when peasant women did needlework, and the girls had to stay in and learn from their mothers how to keep house and practise handicrafts. This was why Five had almost no memory of playing.
    As the bus made its way through the crowded streets, Five was puzzled by the large glass doors – or were they windows? – with very thin men and