Wang Shu has also come up with an interesting recipe which produces a variant of tofu out of water chestnuts. Wang Shu (and her sponsors) firmly believe that this new foodstuff will revolutionise Western vegetarian cuisine (although the prototype currently contains goose fat).

As she was talking on the phone in Chinese by the front door (early on in the viewing) Wang Shu was actually telling her business partner, Li Qiang (and in no uncertain terms, either), ‘You can’t replace the goose fat! The goose fat is key! Every inch of fucking flavour is contained in the goose fat you big shagua!’fn1

Wang Shu invested £17,000 sterling shortly after she first entered Charles’s kitchen in a small, independent Chinese film provisionally entitled Blue Shadows (Lan se Yinying) about a woman’s passion for her water buffalo. The water buffalo is rescued from a fighting circuit. The woman is a talented calligrapher. The calligraphic sign for water buffalo is very pretty and plain in Chinese: a kind of double K followed by a kind of double T. Obviously there is much more to the plot of Blue Shadows than this (an alcoholic father who manufactures exceptional calligraphy brushes out of wolf hair being just one strand), but little will actually be served by describing its various twists and turns in detail here.

Sorry about that.

Even as I type Wang Shu is telling a bossy, well-educated Chinese girl currently occupying a private birthing room at a hospital in Bangor that a recently delivered baby is a bastard. And no, Fei Hung will not undertake a paternity test.

Forget it.

Get lost.

Had de?

(Okay? In Chinese.)

Lan fu!

(Slut! In Chinese.)

In thirty seconds’ time, Wang Shu will initiate a deal with Charles’s main creditor in regard to the house. She will make a daring cash offer of 20 per cent under its estimated market price. This offer will be impossible for Charles/his creditors to resist.

Wang Shu supposes the place will make a perfectly good home for Ying Yue and that over-sized, over-sensitive, patently deranged finger-tapping chump once they are wed.

Wang Shu has been paying scant attention to either Ying Yue or Charles over the past seventeen minutes, but she has, nonetheless, detected CHEMISTRY between them.

Wang Shu is actually one of the most horribly subtle unsubtle people who has ever walked the earth.

Wang Shu is actually one of the most horribly sensitive insensitive people who has ever walked the earth.

Wang Shu is actually one of the most horribly intuitive …

etc.

(no, that last one doesn’t quite work).

Because:

Good enough is always enough. For Wang Shu.

Wang Shu has not even seen the bedrooms, yet, but she espied the teddy bears while walking through to the kitchen and firing the accountant currently in charge of overseeing an extremely lucrative export business that she has run for the past twelve years shipping Heinz Baked Beans, Heinz Salad Cream and Heinz Mushroom Soup to the burgeoning Chinese market in Shanghai.