The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  New Year’s Day will be the same as last year. Firecrackers at dawn as the neighbours’ kids rush out to celebrate the first day of Spring Festival. The lion dance at the Dongyue Temple Fair, candyfloss and games. Then a visit to his father, punctually at four o’clock, the time they agreed. Wang Hu dribbling in his wheelchair, and Lin Hong wrinkling her powdered nose as she hands them hongbao and expensive gifts in department-store bags. Chocolates from a Belgian chocolatier. A red-and-gold stuffed toy rat for Echo. They will stay and make polite small talk for twenty minutes, then leave. Back home they will fill dumpling dough with minced pork for New Year’s jiaozi. They will watch more song-and-dance extravaganzas on TV.

  When they go to bed, Wang’s ears are ringing hard, the inside of his eyelids incandescent with eruptions of light. He can feel it dragging him down again. The lethargy and apathy and ebbing of desire to be in the world that broke him down years ago.

  ‘Yida?’ he whispers.

  Beside him, Yida mumbles but does not wake.

  Sleep won’t come, so he stares into darkness as the city explodes.

  8

  The Wedding Photo

  ‘WHAT WAS YOUR mother like?’ Yida asked, back when they were newly-weds and her desire to know him kept her awake throughout the night. Wang pulled a photograph of his parents’ wedding day from a bundle of documents bound with an elastic band. Bride and groom and Ministry of Agriculture work-unit colleagues, sternly attired in Mao suits of utilitarian grey. A solemn gathering, as though not celebrating a marriage but mourning a death. On the wall above them is a portrait of the Great Helmsman, omnipresent throughout China back then. The Chairman overseeing the proceedings, ensuring that no one so much as smile.

  The date on the photograph’s reverse is 3 May 1975. An anniversary, Wang told Yida, not once acknowledged in the thirteen years of marriage to come. On the wedding day the bride was not in love with the groom. Love, she told her son years later, was not such a priority back then. In the photo they look an ill-matched couple; the bride, to put it bluntly, not pretty enough for the tall and handsome groom. Straining her eyes at Wang’s 25-year-old mother, Yida remarked, ‘She’s so innocent and wide-eyed.’ But Wang knew better than that. The bride was not as submissive as she appeared. Studying the photo two decades later, Wang could detect the shadow of a smile on her lips. ‘What was she like?’ asked Yida, elbow on pillow, tousled head propped in hand, lovely and naked under the sheets. Possessiveness over his past, as well as curiosity, glinted in her eyes. Rivalry of her predecessors in her voice. ‘Tell me about her . . . Go on . . .’

  Childhood. First come the images, like the weave of smoke from one of Shuxiang’s menthol cigarettes, spiralling, amassing into the shape of the past. Apartment 404. Dishes in the sink. Curtains pulled over the rails. A message to the day: Keep Out. Shuxiang’s round, childish face, and her narrow range of sloe-eyed expressions. Deceptively ingénue, for an innocent his mother was not. She knew the truth about what people are like. A truth from which she did not protect her son. Kneeling by him, pouring cups of water from the basin over his head, rinsing away the suds of shampoo, she said, ‘Don’t be fooled, Little Bear, by the so-called civility out there. All our morality could blow away tomorrow like a fart in the wind. I saw it happen before.’

  The boy blinked, the shampoo stinging his eyes. He believed everything his mother said, when he was only a single digit in age.

  The days of Wang’s early childhood were as unstructured as a dream. Days of waking at any hour. Days of pyjamas, Shuxiang’s pale agoraphobic complexion and sweet, musky scent. Not ruled by the tyranny of clocks, they ate when hungry and slept when sleepy (her metabolism slow, Shuxiang was often sleepy). Absent-minded in her child-rearing, for her the boy was often a dazed afterthought. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘When were you last fed?’ She sniffed at him when a rankness stirred her nose. ‘Are you dirty?’ she asked. ‘Do you need a bath?’

  She called him Little Bear, and said this was because Wang was born as a bear cub, and later shed his fur. Shuxiang had a wicked sense of humour. Sometimes when he tapped her shoulder to wake her from a nap, she stilled her breath, pretending to be dead beneath her shroud of hair. He shook her and wailed ‘Mama!’, on the brink of tears, until she smiled, her sentience betrayed by the curve of her lips. Cruel jokes are the funniest jokes, she once told him; the jokes that, before the punchline, stop the heart. She creaked her eyelid open a crack: ‘Leave me alone. I want to sleep.’

  ‘Mama, I’m bored . . .’

  ‘So?’

  When Shuxiang cradled her son in her arms, he could smell the cigarettes and baijiu on her breath. Tobacco and cheap liquor were habits she’d acquired as a Sent-down Youth, seeking comfort during the frozen winters in the Great Northern Waste. Habits she hid from her husband, who though a drinker and smoker himself, considered the vices deplorable in women (‘Only prostitutes smoke,’ Wang Hu said – and he should know). Shuxiang hid her illicit substances under the mattress of Little Bear’s cot. When he asked to smoke one of her cigarettes, Shuxiang lit one for him, creasing up with laughter as her five-year-old spluttered and choked. ‘Practice,’ she said. ‘That will go away with practice, Little Bear.’

  Shuxiang often disappeared into the books stacked around her bed. ‘Read to me,’ Little Jun begged. But reading was a solitary pleasure for Shuxiang. ‘These are grown-up books, not for bear cubs,’ she told him. But sometimes Shuxiang narrated her own invented tales, in which her son was the hero. A warrior during the Warring States era, or a labourer building the Great Wall. Sometimes, when she was in the mood, they played together, knotting bedsheets to climb the Tibetan Plateau, or cantering on horseback in an army of two. He adored his mother during these games. Shuxiang did not play like a bored adult indulging a small child, but acted out every role with gusto. Throughout these adventures her son was her sidekick, following the twists and turns of her imagination. They were co-conspirators. A gang of two against the world.

  Shuxiang didn’t like to go outdoors, which often led to encounters with other people and the narrowness of their minds. But they had to go out sometimes, to shop for weekly rations of vegetables, meat and cigarettes. Passers-by greeted her. They commented on the paleness of her little boy. ‘He is white as a glass of cow’s milk,’ they’d say, mentally tutting and thinking, He needs more sun. Shuxiang was not deaf to the mental cluck of tongues. ‘Cow’s milk?’ she said to Little Bear. ‘Well, who’d know better than one of the lowing herd?’ They lived in a housing compound where all employees of the Ministry of Agriculture were housed. The wives of her husband’s co-workers did not like Li Shuxiang. They did not invite her to be part of their gossipy clique, with a hierarchy based upon their husbands’ positions and salaries. They shunned her and, offended by her indifference, condemned her as mentally deficient and strange.

  Yida’s eyes widened in fascination, pupils swallowing the dark.

  ‘What about your father? Tell me about him.’

  She shifted slightly on her side. He stroked a hand along the curved length of her body, from shoulder to hip, under the sheets.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Anything. Go on.’

  Throughout Wang’s childhood, his father was promoted through the ranks of the Ministry of Agriculture, his status rising annually. Socializing was part of his job. Banquets, baijiu and beer. He was home in the evenings only once or twice a week. Bleary-eyed from overwork, alcohol and forty cigarettes a day, rubbing broodingly at the stubble the razor never completely banished from his jaw. His wife and son were not used to him. Both preferred it when he was not there. Wang Hu was critical of them, his lip curling at his wife as he chastened her, ‘You are lazy as a goat, Shuxiang. Look at this fucking mess. What do you do all day?’

  Little Jun was nervous of him. Though his father hung up his suit jacket and loosened his tie, he never stopped being a stranger. Sometimes he rumpled his son’s head and smiled with tobacco-tawny teeth. But mostl
y he was polite and distant, as though the boy was someone else’s child. He scowled at Shuxiang’s meals. Accustomed to banquets hosted by contract-seeking agribusinesses, he grumbled about Shuxiang’s cooking. ‘This is prison slop,’ he told her. ‘Worse than what they serve in Labour Reform camps.’

  ‘Don’t eat here then,’ she replied.

  Wang Hu complained that his son was not like other boys his age. Not boisterous and rowdy enough. Not enough rough and tumble in him. A Mama’s boy. ‘Send him to play outdoors more,’ he ordered Shuxiang. ‘The kid needs to get into some scrapes.’ The closeness of mother and son bothered him. ‘You spoil the boy,’ he said. ‘Eight years old and his breath still smells of mother’s milk.’

  Little Jun’s bed was in the corner of his parents’ bedroom. Mama went to bed the same time as him, but Baba came home much later. Sometimes he slipped in quietly. Sometimes he slammed doors, cursed and spat. Unzipped his fly and pissed around the rim of the squat toilet. He broke things accidentally. He broke things on purpose. He knocked an ashtray on to the floor. Shattered the teapot in the sink. Mama and Little Jun did not investigate these destructive fits of rage. They stayed in bed, wakeful and tense, until Baba staggered in and was snoring drunkenly. Some nights when Baba came to bed, he turned into a beast that devoured Shuxiang. Wide-eyed in the dark, Little Jun watched from the other side of the bedroom as the hump-backed ogre reared up. Panting, out of breath and shuddering the bed frame, until he grunted and collapsed. (‘A bad dream,’ Mama said when Little Jun asked about Baba the morning after. ‘You were having a bad dream.’) Little Jun sometimes woke from nightmares. Mama stroked his brow, brought him to her bed and cuddled him back to sleep. One night she dozed off before carrying him back, and Baba pulled back the bedcovers to find mother and child in a sleeping embrace. He dragged his son out of bed, nearly pulling his shoulder out of its socket as he threw him across the room. ‘It’s time he crawled out of your womb,’ he shouted at his wife. ‘Or he’ll be stuck up there for the rest of his life.’

  Wang Hu was gone when they woke in the morning. Washed, shaved and out the door. His career was founded upon his ability to be drunken and sociable at night, then resurrect himself from the ruins of a hangover and be first in the office the next day. Once he was gone, mother and son trod carefully about the apartment. They cleaned up. Soaked up the puddles of urine with old newspapers. Swept up the shards of glass. ‘Love for a man must extend to the crows on his roof,’ Shuxiang intoned flatly. But neither of them loved him to start with, thought her son. Never mind with crows.

  ‘I am Lin Hong.’

  The girl blocked their path in the street. Mean-looking in stilettos and a little black dress. Rouged lips. Fight-picking eyes rimmed in electric blue. Mother and son were walking home from the supermarket. They stared at the girl, standing with a hand on her hip, proud of her beauty and height. She smiled at Shuxiang.

  ‘On the nights your husband doesn’t go home to you,’ she said, ‘he is with me. In the apartment he rents for us both. I thought you ought to know.’

  Wang Hu’s mistress paused to measure the effect of her words. Shuxiang blinked as though a gust of wind had blown up in her face, but was otherwise impassive. The young boy at least had the sense to look intimidated. Lin Hong patted her brand-new corkscrew perm (she had gone to the beauty parlour that morning, with a photo of her favourite Cantopop star clipped from a magazine). She smiled again. She then announced to Shuxiang that not only was her husband cheating on her, but she (the mistress) was now pregnant with his child. Wang Hu had a new family now, and Shuxiang should expect her husband to leave her any day soon. The girl waited, expecting tears and devastation. Denial and rage. But there was none of that. Calm, and not flustered in the least, Shuxiang said, ‘Congratulations. I wish you the best of luck.’

  The malicious look faded from Lin Hong’s eyes. Thrown, she had wobbled away on her high heels, looking very silly and young. Wang looked at his mother after the girl was gone. He could tell Shuxiang’s mind was now turning away from the confrontation, to other things.

  ‘Is Ba going to leave us?’ he asked.

  ‘No. He will force that girl to have an abortion.’

  They had continued walking home.

  August 1988. Twelve-year-old Wang cycled home from his middle school in Dongcheng every afternoon, the wheels of his Flying Pigeon spinning, his satchel thumping his side. He locked his bike up in the shed, rushed into Building 16 and up four flights of stairs, blinking as he entered the smoky apartment. Shuxiang had been on her own all day. Sitting at the table, littering her ashtray with filters. Wang pulled the curtains wide and Shuxiang flinched in the daylight. He opened the windows to let the smoke escape. Though Shuxiang was thirty-eight now, her face was obstinately childish and round.

  ‘What did you do today, Ma?’ Wang asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  Wang resented her. He resented her for sooting up her throat and the recesses of her lungs with cigarettes. He resented her when she murmured, ‘What they teach you at school is a pack of lies, Little Bear. Every lesson is to brainwash you.’ Wang resented her for the fact he did not fit in, which he knew to be the fault of his isolated childhood. He rolled up his sleeves and washed the dirty crockery in the sink. He bought meat and vegetables from the stall, and cooked them shredded cabbage in sesame oil and pork dumplings. Shuxiang rarely had an appetite. She prodded at the pork dumplings with her chopsticks.

  ‘What are you thinking, Ma?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  For years, Shuxiang had been a recluse, her one companion her young son. But as the heat of the summer faded away, she changed her agoraphobic ways and roamed the communal yard. Everyone was surprised to see her out and about, with her cardigan buttoned up wrongly over her frock and her hair in need of combing. Her hectic eyes and purposeful stride prompted people to ask, ‘Where are you going in such a hurry, Li Shuxiang?’ But she behaved as though she had neither seen nor heard them. She charged out of the housing-compound gates with a sink plunger in her hand, deaf to the laughter in her wake. (‘A plumber now, is she? Whose toilet is she going to unblock?’)

  One afternoon Wang returned to an empty apartment, then rushed back out to look for her. She was in none of her usual haunts, so Wang returned home to wait for her, scared that something bad had happened. Half an hour later there was a knock at the door. It was Shuxiang and two men from the Residents’ Committee. Grey-headed, retired factory workers now volunteering to protect the harmony of the community. Shuxiang was drenched, the hem of her coat dripping puddles about her bare feet.

  ‘Your mother was wading in the Liangma River,’ one man said. ‘Up to her waist.’

  ‘The river is dirty and polluted,’ said the other. ‘Not for swimming.’

  ‘My shoes are missing!’ Shuxiang blurted. ‘I put them on the riverbank and a thief stole them.’

  She was outraged, as though the theft of her shoes was the scandal here. ‘Your mother is not well and needs to see a doctor,’ the grey-headed men told Wang. ‘She needs supervision during the day.’ Did Wang’s father know about her eccentric behaviour? Wang lied that he did. Shuxiang nodded, and they continued to discuss her as though she was not there, which was partly true.

  They travelled backwards in time, mother and son, back to the days before Wang was of school age, though now the roles were reversed. Wang stayed home from school to care for her, his world shrinking to the shadowy, curtained rooms of Apartment 404. He cooked her rice porridge for breakfast, then rubbed a damp flannel over her face and brushed her teeth over the sink. Though she was a distracted listener, he read passages out of her old classic novels to her, wanting to occupy time in a meaningful way.

  Wang came to understand the tedium of caring for a small child. How thankless children are. How slow the passage of time when punctuated only by repetitive tasks. He resented Shuxiang for what she had become, but caring for her exaggerated his love for her too, into a fierce, prot
ective breed. He brushed her hair before bed every night. He covered her with blankets when it was cold. His mother was his burden and sorrow now.

  When Wang had to go to the market he locked her in, so she couldn’t escape. But one day in December he returned to the compound and discovered that this was not precaution enough.

  ‘There he is. That’s her son.’

  Entering the gate with a bag of shopping, Wang saw the crowd by Building 16 and, sensing the atmospheric disturbance, the thrum of something out of the ordinary in the air, hastened over. Heads turned towards him. Security guards, the man from the vegetable stall, old women with dogs on leashes and mothers jiggling babies on hips. ‘She needs to see a doctor,’ he heard. ‘Wrong in the head.’ The crowd parted for Wang, and he looked up at the object of the communal gaze. Shuxiang was standing naked in the window of the fourth-floor balcony. The pale winter sunlight fell through the glass, illuminating the thickness of her hips, her dangling breasts and the dark pubis that reminded him of documentaries about primitive tribes. But Wang knew the most obscene thing about Shuxiang was her smile. She smiled as though her indecent exposure was for exhibitionist kicks, but Wang knew this was not the case. There was no provocation or perversion in her stance. Lost in her own world, Shuxiang had no idea of her effect on the crowd gathered four storeys below. But the crowd did not know this. They flattered themselves that her nakedness was for them. Wang muttered an apology and rushed into the building. After he was gone, the crowd neither dispersed nor stopped gawking up at the nude woman behind the glass. ‘Outrageous,’ they whispered. ‘Ought to be locked up.’ They stared on and on. They could not drag their eyes away.

  Wang ran into the bedroom and threw a bedsheet over her shoulders, as though putting out a fire that threatened to burn the apartment down. He pulled her back from the window, out of public view, not caring when she lost her footing and stumbled. He was angry enough to slap her.