1.
The first time we exchanged words a bird died. It had been limping
up and down the same short stretch of pavement outside the Little Lamb hotpot restaurant
on Shaftsbury Avenue with both its wings clearly broken. Most likely it had
been hit by a car. I would’ve helped it; carried it home in a box or called a
vet, if it hadn’t been for the fact that my friends had arrived and our table
was ready. When I sat down to order I could still see it from the corner of my
eye, through the glass door, about five feet from where I was sitting. By the
time I left the restaurant it was motionless in the gutter.
The walls of the Little Lamb are covered
in mirrors and there is one small TV attached to the wall. The mirrors give the
effect that there is not one but ten or twelve screens, depending on where you
happen to be sitting. The mirrors also give the impression there are more
customers in the restaurant than there are in reality and that the restaurant
itself is much bigger than it actually is. A lot of places use this trick but
the TV in the Little Lamb breaks the illusion with its reflected, backwards
subtitles which, to be completely fair to the restaurant, probably aren’t that
noticeable unless you happen to be able to read Chinese. I can’t read Chinese.
But I have a friend who can and one time during a meal in the Little Lamb he told
me he was confused about why the subtitles on the TV were back to front. I
explained that it was a reflection of the actual TV positioned above our heads
and he slapped his forehead like a cartoon character and told me he was stupid
and also a little drunk.
On the night the bird died the TV was again
positioned above my head. As my friends slid into place around me I watched the
report reflected in the mirror. Any thoughts I had about the injured pigeon
were soon forgotten in the face of the news with its images of sprawling
residential towers shrouded in haze, intercut with seemingly endless crowds of
Chinese citizens walking with white ventilation masks strapped across their
mouths. These images were nothing new. I’d seen them before and had grown to
expect them in pretty much every news item I ever saw about China. Anytime
China was mentioned on the news it could be expected to be alongside images of
crowds and towers. Only the cookery programmes showed a different side, with
misty mountains and temples and old men making noodles in ways that would soon
be forgotten when they died. What held my attention on that night wasn’t the
news, it was the image of a bright orange circle that for a few seconds took up
the whole of the TV screen, reflected on all of the walls of the restaurant.
I’d never seen the sun look so circular, and I said this aloud to my group of
friends. In response they each turned in various directions to see what I
meant. The sun was a uniform deep orange. It was beautiful and it shone over interior
of the Little Lamb.
There was one other customer in the
restaurant on that night and he too looked up from his table at the many
circular reflections. Me, my friends, the waiters and this man all stared in
silence at the sun before the report carried on, cutting to an interview with a
woman in a suit standing in front of a forklift truck gesturing to some
scaffolding. My friends started talking about their workdays and the waiters
went back to chatting behind the counter. The man at the other table turned to
look at me and he was still looking at me when I raised my eyes again from the
menu.
I had in fact seen the man several times
before that night. He tended to sit at the same table, often alone, with enough
meat and vegetables for one person to dip into the simmering pot of stock. I
recognised him because, although he didn’t look at all Chinese, he seemed to be
able to speak the language with complete, masterful fluency; something that had
made my own clumsy jabbing at the menu seem infinitely cruder by comparison.
The other non-Chinese customers I’d observed during the few times I’d been to
the restaurant occasionally attempted to speak Mandarin but this generally
resulted in the waiters asking them again what it was they wanted, to which
they would coyly mutter in English and point at the menu.
I’d been tempted on several occasions to
compliment the man on his Mandarin, or at the very least the convincingness of
his Mandarin to someone who didn’t know the language, but whenever I’d thought
about speaking to him the food had arrived and I was soon occupied with dipping
strips of meat in boiling water. The eye contact made on that night was the
first time that the man had showed any sign of registering my presence and I
wondered then if he too recognised me from my previous trips to the Little
Lamb. These thoughts, like those of the injured bird limping to and fro metres from
where I sat, were soon submerged in the spicy stock as I tipped first the
sliced potatoes and then the balls of beefs into the water.
One of my friends had been on a disastrous
date and she was telling us the details. She had recently visited Iceland and,
coincidentally, so had the man she’d been on the date with. You’d assume that
this would be a good point of conversation but her date had been violently sick
the entire time and hadn’t enjoyed it one bit. She’d told him about the natural
beauty of the Blue Lagoon and he’d told her about the unsettled bowel movements
he’d had from eating a bad piece of fish. Apart from this he refused to say
much else for the entire date, which, we all agreed, was unfortunate. The news
had finished and the TV was now showing a Chinese historical drama with a group
of men dressed in elaborate period costumes. I watched the drama as my friend
continued to talk about her date’s fluctuations between awkward silence and ardent
confessions of diarrhoea. The men on the TV were in a forest, squatted down in
the bushes. Whatever they were talking about seemed to be important and there
was a lot of nodding. I noticed that the man on the other table was also
watching the TV, his mouth open and his chopsticks frozen in place, inches from
his face. There was a mushroom between his chopsticks that slipped from place
and landed on the table with a small splat. When this happened the man awoke
from his reverie and moved the fallen piece of food to the side of his table. With
the mushroom cast aside he looked in the mirror to see if anyone had noticed
his lapse in concentration. This was the second time we made eye contact.
At one
point the man got up and, after speaking to the waiter, went into the back
room. I started to talk about China. I told my friends that although I’d never physically
been there and although I knew little to nothing about its history, I was
certainly a fan of the food. It’s a big place, someone told me. They have many
different types of dishes. I agreed with this and waved my hand at the hot pot,
explaining that hot pot is popular in Beijing but lots of Chinese food in
London is Cantonese because of the connection to Hong Kong. One of my friends changed
the subject and started talking about how there’s a great deal of construction
work going on in China. They are always building so many buildings. Lots and
lots of buildings. I responded that there are lots of buildings in London as
well, waving my hand to the street. There are new skyscrapers and new apartment
complexes being built all the time. What about The Shard? The Gherkin? Is it
really all that different? The man who had been sat at the other table must
have been listening from the back room because he emerged at this point and
walked towards us.
It is not the same, he told me.
London is locked down. It is fixed. There may be new buildings but they are growing
like moss on a turtle shell. In China the ground is moving. It shifts beneath
your feet.
We didn’t
know what to say to this and after standing in silence for a few seconds the
man went back to his table. We continued to eat and then I asked him from
across the room if he was from China. He nodded. He said he had lived there as
a boy. I didn’t know what to say to this either, so I smiled and finished my
meal. He was still sat at the table when we collected our coats and paid the
bill. I tried to make eye contact with him again when I moved towards the exit
but he kept his eyes fixed on the reflected TV screen, still showing the men
dressed in historical costumes. I closed the glass door and, parting ways with
my friends, stepped over the corpse of the bird.
