Madam & Li: surviving maids in China

There are several wonderful women my wife and I have met in China before whose teeth we stand in awe. From maids and shop assistants to teachers and restaurant managers, we have got to know some Chinese women who make us wince when their faces split into a grin. As their lips peel back in a smile the glinting treasure trove of silver and ivory jutting outwards makes me wonder about the original inspiration for arching roof corners in the East. The contents of these mouths can ward off the most ardent lover, never mind dragons.

Parents for a long time in China have put money into their children’s education, not their teeth. So some people, for some reason women in particular, have overlays of teeth, one behind the other, and the piranha effect is unnerving. Their mouthfuls give fresh meaning to castration anxiety and I am sure many courting men cringe when they watch those lovely lips reveal their formidable contents. Sometimes their teeth are so big that their closed mouths protrude as if there were a bone trapped behind their lips. Marion and I are wicked in our choice of nicknames for them. This ensemble includes Teeth the teacher, Jaws the shop assistant, Bear-trap the coffee shop manageress and a student who perhaps unwittingly calls herself Shark (many Chinese people choose their own English names, some weird).

The ayi, maid we had when we taught at a school near Shanghai, Xin Nan Zhong was no exception. Her name sounded like the Chinese word for Dong, meaning ‘understand’ or ‘East’, and she became known as the Dong. Her chops, when they opened, had several glittering items that were gold. We wondered at how she could afford this. But we also knew that some of these ayi came from extended farming families that were not at all poor, but who preferred Spartan conditions and lived frugally. Money was spent on necessities like food, amazingly cheap in China. They just did not spend cash on what Westerners would, knowing well the adage, “Less is more”. They lived simply, knowing no other way, or the destructive restlessness and craving that comes with the consumerist way.

To this day the Dong, to us, is one of those characters that are the backbone or the salt of China.

The Dong took great interest in my lunches. First there was the dazzling display of someone eating with two stainless steel utensils instead of kuazi, chopsticks. She would stop washing dishes or cleaning surfaces and walk up to our tiny dining room table and stare in awe at my awe-inspiring use of those two eating tools. The one with prongs skimmed across the plate to scoop up veggies in its curve, and then pirouetted ever so delicately across the plate to dab at some mustard. Then, somehow, I got the whole lot into my mouth without dropping anything. The closest relative in China was a pitchfork, one the Dong had often used in the fields. Now here was a miniature, which, of all things, was being used to eat lunch.

The other tool the Dong had more of a hang on. The nearest cousin in her world was a meat cleaver. But here there were no loud chopping noises to remove pig’s heads (the choicest item on a farmer’s table) or to slice up potatoes for the simmering oil. Food saturated in oil sums up most Chinese cuisine. This utensil was a miniature which whisked and scraped across the plate. At times it chiselled off a bit of meat that was a round tube in shape, or it nudged veggies or mustard onto the fork. The next wonder was that the food was going into my mouth with my left hand as I am a south paw. In China no one eats or writes with their left hand. If you had this ability you were regarded as very wise. Ahem.

Secondly, the Dong’s eyes would flicker to the actual creation on my plate. Potato made into a soft white porridge, not chopped up and thrown into a pot of oil; a brown substance oozing all over the top of that porridge; carrots and green beans on the side, almost dry, again not swimming in oil. And finally, of all things, lettuce and tomato on a side plate (in the name of Chairman Mao, why are they not cooked?), also not drowned in oil.

The Dong stood at my side, closer than a manservant, gaping at the simple scene of a large man scoffing bangers and mash.

She was only a few centimetres from my shoulder as I ate but I had by then become more accustomed to the relative non-existence of privacy in China: no “walls” between people. I liked the way my Westernised ego was diminishing, losing its hold on the alienating sense of me, mine and myself.

However, I drew the line when I saw that leathery hand of hers slowly descend and almost touch the lettuce. I think it was beyond her comprehension that I could be eating it raw. But at that point I abruptly rose, muttering “bu bu bu, no no no”, and put my hand on her shoulder to herd her back into the kitchen. She laughed either in embarrassment or confusion; her teeth somewhere between the piano keys of Teeth the teacher and the various metals in Bear Trap’s maw.

Like most ayi, the Dong did not understand drying washed dishes. We would come home to find all our plates glistening on the shelf, with a small puddle beneath them. Perhaps they just needed to dry naturally, under the slower arc of the sun, rather than a feverishly applied towel.

The Dong also needed help with learning how to switch off taps. She struggled with turning them on and I would have to show her. Sometimes we would come home to find the bath tap dribbling.

One reason, typical of most taps in China, was that the taps in our home turned on either clockwise or anti-clockwise. You didn’t know until you tried. And some were difficult to turn off or on or were just plain quirky. You had to get to know each tap’s personality.

But the main reason was that the Dong was “tap illiterate”. Often in the extended family-and-friend communities of rural China there are only one or two taps to serve the clutter of concrete-block houses they lived in on the farmland. All that is needed is mastery of the character of one tap to fill the buckets, often a simple lever that you pulled downwards, and the leaking did not matter as this flowed into the nearby crops.