That interview sealed her growing reputation in more ways than one. Her image hardened into this: a bold businesswoman, certainly, but also a superefficient, humorless automaton who would coldly plunge a knife into you, except she wouldn’t bother to do it in your back, she’d stick it in your chest. She saw this written in a “joke” email circulating in her office, copied to her by mistake. Ultrawoman, Dragon Queen, Terminatress, Rambo — these were some of the nicknames for her that she discovered as she scrolled down the email chain, which was full of comments on her boring suits and severe hairstyle. Like a rural Party official dressed for an interview with Hu Jintao, someone joked. Some months later, at a cocktail party thrown by an American law firm, she heard one Western man say to another, “Hey, look, there’s that Chinese lesbian.”
She had gotten used to having her hair short — it had been her style for almost twenty years, ever since university days. There was a time when people found the look charming and gamine, like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle, from which Yinghui first got the idea. She didn’t think she’d changed much since then — she didn’t look very different from the Yinghui she saw whenever she looked at her college photos — but she wondered if she was getting a bit old for the hairstyle now. No woman in Shanghai had short hair — they all seemed to have long glossy locks that fell to their shoulders or gathered in a dramatic pile on their heads in the style of air hostesses. She began to grow her hair out and was frustrated by how long it took. At first it became thin and shabby, like a scarecrow’s, then thicker but still messy, like a schoolboy’s. When finally it reached a decent length, her hairdresser said, “Don’t expect me to perform miracles.”
She began to dread the social functions that were becoming an increasing necessity in her professional life: A thrusting entrepreneur had to go out and be seen, but a single, always-unaccompanied woman of thirty-seven was, in Shanghai, an invitation for people to comment. The locals had names for women like her, whom they considered sadly past their prime. Shengnü, baigujing—that sort of thing. Sometimes she wondered if she were really that: a leftover woman, the dregs, or a shaggy monster waiting to be slayed by the Monkey God.
“Style issues.” This was the phrase her friends used to describe what her new priorities should be. She needed to find a look that projected an image: someone effortlessly successful, who had accomplished all that she had while remaining gentle and feminine — a real Asian woman. She wanted to ask what a real Asian woman was, whether, in some way, she differed fundamentally from a real African woman or a real American woman. And if she wasn’t a real Asian woman, what was she — a fake one?
These new concerns—style issues—were not a welcome addition to her list of considerations. She woke at 6:00 A.M., had a glass of fruit juice, and then went for a forty-five-minute run on the treadmill. After a breakfast of soy-protein and mixed-berry fruit shake, she would head down to the office and begin to deal with phone calls and emails, before her daily meetings began to force their way into her day. In a city where lunch breaks began religiously at 11:30 A.M., she rarely had lunch, unless she had arranged a business meeting at a restaurant. Most of the time she would work through midday and simply forget to eat. Afternoons were reserved for visiting her various businesses, spending time chatting to the staff in the stores, gauging their morale and energy levels — the little human touches that made her a good employer. The evenings were nowadays taken up with entertaining or being entertained, which she neither enjoyed nor disliked. She would get home at eleven and answer any outstanding emails on her BlackBerry while in bed, in the few moments that other people might have spent reading glossy magazines to wind down. At precisely midnight, she would put the light out and swiftly fall asleep, rarely allowing the thoughts of her day to overspill into her sleep.
Three times a week she went for power yoga at a studio in Xintiandi, never speaking to the other women, who had time to hang around and chat in the corridors. At the end of her practice, when she lay briefly on her mat, blinking at the pistachio-green ceiling, her mind would still be racing, energized by the thought of all the things ahead of her. Empty your mind and be still, her teachers would say, enjoy being in the present: Let go of all that has happened in the past. Do not think about what lies ahead but stay in the stillness of this moment. But this was not possible for her. There was too much for her to do, too many thoughts spinning and clashing in her mind. She needed to look ahead, map out her future, every minute of the day — like a constantly moving ocean creature that would drown if ever it stopped swimming, forward, forward.
She could never stand emptiness, and stillness was even worse.
She had a small group of friends, a mixture of local and expat women, with whom she tried to meet up for dinner once every other week — the last semblance of her dwindling social life. They usually met at a Hunan restaurant on the top floor of a Japanese department store on Nanjing Lu, not far from Yinghui’s office. Recently she had begun to notice during these get-togethers that they would casually mention male friends of theirs, all of whom seemed to be single or divorced men in their late thirties and early forties. Discussion of these men seemed innocent enough at first; Yinghui tried to shrug it off as merely catching up on gossip. But after a while she could no longer ignore the fact that her (securely married) friends were taking pity on her, particularly as the men in question were almost exclusively Western — for everyone knew that once a woman was past thirty-five, there was little point in even trying to hook up with a local guy: Westerners were so much more accepting of age.
“Are you trying to matchmake me?” she challenged them jokingly one day as the double-chili fish head arrived. She expected them to be embarrassed by the exposure of their scheming ways, but instead they were up front about it. “Let’s face it,” one of them said, beginning to pluck the meat from the fish cheeks with her chopsticks, “you can’t be happy in a place like Shanghai if you’re single. We’re all feminists, blah blah blah, but this is not London or New York, you know, this is China. Without a husband, you won’t be successful in your work. You can’t expect to work the hours you do and come back to an empty apartment. Besides, if you want children, you have to get moving. We know it sounds cruel, but … get real.”
Yinghui stared at the dull-eyed fish, its eyes opaque and porcelain-white. She reached for it with her chopsticks and prodded it slightly without great enthusiasm. “I’m too busy for a relationship,” she said.
“Listen, where do you want to be in ten years’ time? Still hustling panties to rich women?”
Yinghui could not hide her annoyance, but nonetheless she allowed herself to be persuaded to go on a couple of blind dates — friends of friends of friends. The first was held in a Mexican restaurant near Tianzifang, the next in a Xinjiang restaurant at the far end of Hengshan Lu. On both occasions the men were polite, professionally successful, and dull. Toward the end of the second date, Yinghui decided that it would be her last. As she watched the man (Michael? Mark? A nice American lawyer) pull the leathery pieces of lamb off the skewer, she realized that she wasn’t able to summon any energy to be witty or flirtatious, to behave as she knew she should on a first date with a perfectly okay man. It wasn’t, as her friends claimed, that she was out of practice: She doubted she had ever known how to do so. The small talk left her feeling bewildered and exhausted, and she was constantly afraid that the conversation would turn toward more-personal things, toward the past: how and why she had first come to Shanghai — the normal things foreigners asked each other. She tried to seize control of the conversation, filling it with lengthy explanations of how each dish was prepared, what bizarre Xinjiang ingredients each one contained. The man listened politely and asked questions with the requisite level of cultural awareness, which made the transaction less painful for Yinghui. At one point, as she felt the evening slipping dangerously into the “tell me about your family” territory, Yinghui changed the subject abruptly by turning to the waitress, who had fortuitously arrived with more tea. She began to engage her in idle chat, hoping to glean insights on her exotic homeland, which she would then translate as conversation fillers, which would make it impossible for Michael/Mark to ask more-personal questions. The waitress’s name badge read ALIYA. Such a beautiful Xinjiang name, Yinghui remarked; tell us about where you are from. The waitress giggled and shrugged — she was actually from way down south, Fujian province; she wasn’t an exotic Muslim at all. Mercifully, the lights suddenly dimmed for the entrance of the Uighur dancers. Yinghui was pleased that the music was loud and that the dancers yelped and shrieked all the way through their performance, for it meant that no further conversation was necessary. She smiled at Michael/Mark, and he smiled back.