The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  ‘This costs a week of my mother’s wages,’ I gasp, reading the menu. ‘I can’t afford this!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ you say casually. ‘My father has an account here. He has accounts in most places in Haidian.’

  The delicious aroma of beef rises from the noodles. The last time I ate meat was during the Spring Festival, nearly a year ago, and I bury my head and chopsticks in the bowl, slurping up the noodles and broth. When the bowl is empty, I belch and wipe my mouth, and am ashamed to see that you have been watching me. How greedy I must have looked. Your own noodles are untouched.

  ‘We can’t be friends at school, Moon,’ you say. ‘You understand why, don’t you?’

  I understand why. You are as red and glorious as our national flag, and I am as black as the grime under a convicted rightist’s fingernails. Of course I understand why. But I still feel slapped.

  ‘Then why be my friend at all, Liya?’ I ask. ‘Why bother with a friendship that must be kept secret?’

  You widen your eyes in surprise at my question. ‘How could I not want to be your friend, Moon?’ you say. ‘When I am with you I’m so at ease. It’s as though I have known you all my life . . .’

  Your praise makes me blush, and I forgive you at once. Your request is understandable, and it’s selfish of me to take offence.

  ‘I understand, Liya,’ I say. ‘It’s important that you maintain your red status, so you can one day fight for Chairman Mao and our motherland. I don’t mind if we can’t be friends at school. I am lucky to get to be your friend at all.’

  You smile at me, your deep-set eyes wells of gratitude. And I smile back, hoping that my understanding will last. Hoping resentment won’t creep back in.

  The next weekend, when your father is away on Party business in Beidaihe and your stepmother visiting relatives in Tianjin, you invite me to stay at your home. You live in a courtyard like me, but whereas six families are crowded into our ramshackle building, the Zhang family have the entire property to themselves. You show me around, and I sigh with envy. The furniture in every room is elegant and skilfully crafted, and as well as portraits of Chairman Mao, delicate bird and flower paintings by a famous Hangzhou artist decorate the walls. But what I envy most is the privacy. Never do you have to listen to your neighbours rowing, or making noisy love, weeping or sneezing, or beating their kids in the next room. You even have your own private bathroom, with a flushing toilet, hot and cold running water, and a wooden bathtub – sparing you trips to the stinking public convenience and the lice-ridden communal bathhouse, crowded with other people’s naked bodies.

  ‘You bath in your own home?’ I ask.

  ‘Every night,’ you say. ‘Let’s have a bath now.’ And you turn on the hot tap and strip.

  The water is cleaner and hotter than in the communal baths, and we steep at opposite ends of the wooden tub, speechless with pleasure. Submerged in water, I hug my knees to my chest, conscious of how skinny I am. The Three Years of Natural Disasters, and the food shortages that ensued, stunted my growth. The hundreds of meals I went without during those hardscrabble years have left me as underdeveloped as a child. One look at your healthy, womanly body, however, flushed a radiant pink, tells me you were never kept awake at night by a growling stomach. You smile at me through the rising steam, then surprise me by wistfully saying, ‘Moon, you have such lovely long hair. Can I wash it for you?’

  I turn my back to you, slide up the tub and sit between your legs. You unbraid my hair and comb it out with your fingers. You lather up a bar of soap.

  ‘Your hair is like silk . . .’ you praise, fingers massaging my scalp. ‘So lustrous and soft.’

  ‘Why don’t you grow your own hair?’ I ask, thinking of your short bob, cut to the earlobes.

  ‘No way,’ you laugh. ‘Long hair is bourgeois.’

  I hear the shudder in your voice, and I say, ‘Well, in that case, I ought to cut mine short like yours.’

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ you joke in a warning tone. ‘Don’t touch a strand!’

  I slide down the tub and slip underwater, swishing my hair about to rinse out the soap. How strange and contradictory you are, I think, to admire my hair and condemn it at the same time.

  After a meal of pork dumplings, cooked for us by your servant, we go to spend the evening in your bedroom. The room has a bed, a desk and chair, a white bust of Chairman Mao and no character to speak of. Though you must sleep there every night, the room has a bare and utilitarian air, as though purged of your girlhood things to prepare for life in the Liberation Army barracks. I sit by the record player and flip through the collection of vinyl. ‘The East is Red’. ‘Ode to the Motherland’. ‘The Night-soil Collectors are Coming Down the Mountain’. Revolutionary anthems with rosy-cheeked workers holding their hoes and scythes aloft on the cardboard sleeves.

  ‘You can listen to any record you like,’ you say.

  ‘Um . . . that’s okay.’

  Sensing my boredom with your record collection, you ask hesitantly, ‘Do you want to hear a different kind of music?’

  I look up from ‘Raise the Red Flag for the Soldiers, Peasants and Workers’. ‘All right.’

  You go to your bed and grope under your bedding for a screwdriver. You then use the screwdriver to pry up a loose floorboard and reach beneath to pull out a battered cardboard box.

  ‘A servant was cleaning out a store cupboard a few years ago,’ you say, ‘and found some of my mother’s things. My father said they were decadent trophies of the Nationalist era and threw them out. But I sneaked out in the night and got them out of the bin.’

  You tilt your chin and say defensively, ‘My mother died when I was six. This is all I have of her.’

  You pull the lid off the cardboard box and lift out a scarlet qipao, embroidered with golden flowers. I gasp and stroke the qipao, my fingers enjoying the sensation of pure silk.

  ‘This was my mother’s dress,’ you say. ‘Here is a photograph of her when she was twenty.’ You show me a black and white photo of a beautiful woman, posing with her hand under her chin. She has an enigmatic smile on her lips and a white gardenia in her hair.

  ‘Your mother looks like a movie star,’ I sigh.

  You modestly brush my compliment aside, though I can tell you are pleased. ‘Of course,’ you say sternly, ‘my mother would never doll herself up like a woman of loose morals if she was alive today. This photograph was taken in the Nationalist era, when women were exploited and oppressed by the shackles of beauty.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Thanks to Communism, women are now emancipated from the tyranny of lipstick and hair-curlers.’ Though, gazing at your lovely mother, I can’t help but think that lipstick and hair-curlers weren’t all bad.

  There’s one more object in the cardboard box: a record with not a worker, peasant or soldier on the sleeve but a glamorous woman with her hair in the stiff waves of a permanent and the same hand-under-chin pose as your mother.

  ‘This is a love song from Hong Kong, where my mother grew up. She used to play it to me when I was little. I listen to it sometimes, when my father and stepmother aren’t home . . .’ Another hard and defensive stare. ‘It helps me remember her.’

  You lower the record on to the turntable and drop the needle in the groove. There is hissing and crackling, then a singer warbling in Cantonese to a big band. The melody is joyful, but with a hint of melancholy. You translate the lyrics for me.

  ‘“I will make you mine . . . I will love you until the end of time . . .” The song is about a shop girl in love with the mail boy.’

  Though it’s just a simple love ballad, it sends shivers down my spine and I realize it’s been years since I heard a song without a militant marching-band beat, rallying the masses to fight for the Socialist motherland. It has been years since I heard a woman singing of love for a man who is not Chairman Mao.

  I take a deep, steadying breath. This record is from Hong Kong, the prison island where the British devils have enslaved our Chinese b
rothers and sisters. A Marxist–Maoist analysis of this song would most certainly reveal its hidden anti-Communist agenda, that the song intends to lure us from the path of socialism by corrupting us with bourgeois longings for romantic love. Oblivious, you sway to the music, your eyes shut.

  ‘Zhang Liya . . .’ I say, in a quiet but urgent tone, ‘maybe we shouldn’t be listening to this anti-Communist Hong Kong music . . .’

  You snap out of your trance and there’s a warping sound as you stop the music, dragging the needle across the vinyl. You snatch the record from the turntable and shove it back into the sleeve. You seem shaken and upset.

  ‘Thank you, Yi Moon,’ you say. ‘I will stop listening to this Hong Kong record. I will overcome my sentimental attachment to my mother’s things. I will destroy these shameful, decadent possessions first thing tomorrow.’

  You put another record on the turntable, and the strident marching beat of ‘The Night-soil Collectors are Coming Down the Mountain’ fills the room. You avoid my eyes, and I know that you won’t destroy your mother’s things tomorrow. You will continue to hide them under the floorboard and cherish them with all your heart.

  Later, under thick bedcovers on your coal-heated bed you ask, ‘Do you miss your father?’

  Our heads share a pillow, and your breath is warm and tickling on my cheek. At the mention of my father, my heart clenches with the fear he has died in the labour camp. But I don’t speak this fear. I open my mouth and a well-rehearsed, politically correct answer comes out.

  ‘He’s no longer a father to me,’ I say. ‘Only when Class Enemy Yi Liang has been fully rehabilitated as a loyal citizen of the People’s Republic of China will I accept him as a father again.’

  You are silent and doubtful in the darkness. Then you ask, ‘What was he like? Before he went away?’

  When I was a child, my father read folktales to me. He gave me calligraphy lessons in the courtyard, writing on stone with a long brush dipped in a pail of water. He taught me to ride a bicycle, holding the saddle from behind (‘Keep on pedalling, Little Moon! I’m here to catch you if you fall!’). He named me Little Moon because I was born with a ‘face as bright and round as the moon’.

  ‘He was a good father,’ I whisper. I squeeze my eyes shut, but tears squeak out. You hear my sniffles.

  ‘Don’t cry, Moon.’ You put your arms around me, holding me closer to the heat and pulse of your body. ‘Don’t cry. Your father will be reformed and released soon.’

  You kiss my eyelids with light butterfly kisses that flutter down into the pit of my belly. It’s so unexpected, I stop crying immediately. The last person who kissed me like this was my mother, and not since I was a little girl. You stop kissing me, but don’t move away. Your breath is humid on my face.

  ‘What about your father?’ I whisper. ‘What’s he like?’

  You laugh and say, ‘One-eyed Zhang gave me a good Communist upbringing. He was reading passages of The Communist Manifesto to me when I was still in the womb. When I was old enough to read he made me memorize People’s Daily editorials and recite them back to him. If I made too many mistakes, that one-eyed bastard would beat me.’ You laugh again. Bitter and without mirth.

  ‘I should be grateful to Comrade Zhang, I suppose,’ you say. ‘Thanks to his strict ideological training, political speeches are effortless for me . . . My father wanted to call me Soviet Zhang –’ you pause ‘– but my mother insisted on the name of Liya. She was much gentler than him. Not a day goes by when I don’t miss her . . .’

  You stroke my hair, your fingers tickling my scalp. It’s past midnight, much later than I am used to. My eyelids are drooping, the tempo of my blood slowing down.

  ‘You were looking at me in the bathtub,’ you say.

  Your words shake me back to wakefulness.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My breasts,’ you say. ‘You were looking.’

  I laugh in surprise. ‘You were naked. How could I not look?’

  I hear the muscles in your throat contract. ‘You can touch them if you like.’

  I laugh again, embarrassed, not sure whether you are joking. I don’t move, so you grab my limp hand and place it on your pyjama top, over your left breast. I rest my hand there awkwardly for a moment, then I squeeze. ‘Much bigger than mine,’ I comment.

  ‘You’ll catch up, in a year or two,’ you say kindly.

  I remove my hand, and it feels different somehow, as though the fullness of your breast has left an impression in my palm.

  ‘Have you started yet?’ you ask.

  ‘Last year,’ I say, ‘but they aren’t regular. Every three months or so.’

  ‘Mine came when I was twelve,’ you say. ‘I thought I was dying. I ran to the school nurse in tears, and she gave me some rags and explained what it was.’

  ‘I can’t believe . . .’ I nearly say, your mother didn’t tell you, then I remember your mother is dead, ‘. . . you didn’t know.’ There’s a tickling in my throat so I turn my head and lightly cough. Then I ask the question I wanted to ask when you put my hand on your breast: ‘Do you ever touch yourself?’

  ‘Touch myself?’

  ‘You don’t ever touch yourself . . . ? Down there?’

  ‘No.’

  You sound appalled, and I regret mentioning it. But then you ask, ‘What’s it like?’

  I hesitate, then say, ‘It starts when I think of a man, like Teacher Wu, kissing me, and down there feels good. So I rub and rub and the feeling grows stronger, until this spasm comes . . . I sleep in the same bed as my mother, so I usually wait until she is snoring . . . Sometimes I stop halfway through, scared I have woken her . . .’

  You don’t say anything. What are you thinking? That I am a pervert? A sexual degenerate?

  ‘I . . . I feel bad afterwards,’ I stammer. ‘So I will stop this bad habit. I will keep my thoughts Socialist and pure, and loyal to the motherland.’

  You remain silent and I start to panic. What was I thinking? You are Zhang Liya, leader of our school’s detachment of the Communist Youth League. You will report me on Monday, and I will be ordered to write a confession of my bourgeois self-pleasuring and read it in assembly. Teacher Wu will be disgusted. I will be expelled and perhaps even sent to a prison for juvenile sex offenders. My mother will hang herself in shame.

  ‘What do you rub?’ you whisper. ‘What is this spasm?’ You reach for my hand, resting on the pillow, and tug it down under the bedcovers. ‘Show me how.’

  At the Beijing No. 104 Middle School for Girls, you behave like a stranger to me. But though you shun me in the classrooms and halls, I know that I am your closest friend. Though you and Long March walk arm in arm in the yard, I know she is your rival and wants your position as leader of the Youth League. (‘Long March would push me off a cliff if she had the chance.’) Though you and Resist America share a bowl of noodles in the dining hall, you have never bathed with Resist America, or washed her hair with your stepmother’s expensive shampoo. Though you and Patriotic Hua plan the agenda for Youth League meetings together, you have never shown Patriotic Hua the black and white photograph of your mother, or turned the white bust of Chairman Mao to the wall before dancing cheek to cheek with her to ballads from Hong Kong. Though you praise Soviet Chen’s singing of the latest revolutionary opera, you have never hooked your leg over Soviet Chen’s under the bedcovers and whispered, ‘We are like a pair of chopsticks. We belong together.’

  Though you ignore me, I know I am your most intimate friend. Though at school I am as ostracized as ever, the spring of 1966 is the happiest of my life.

  We spend every Saturday night together until May, when I don’t see you for three weekends in a row. There are rumours that the Party has handed down directives to the student leaders to be more revolutionary. There are rumours of a coming political storm. And I know these Party commands are keeping you away.

  The first Saturday in June you knock for me, exhausted after a ten-hour Youth League meeting. The evening is hot, and w
e go to Ironmongers Lane and soak in a tub of tepid water. When I ask you about the rumours, you say, ‘There’s going to be a reform of the education system. I am prohibited from saying any more than that. But don’t worry, Moon. I will keep you safe.’

  After dinner, we lie on your bed and go to sleep. Hours later I am woken by the floorboards creaking as you pace up and down, lost in thought. The moon-cast shadows of the tree outside the window reach across your body, the branches stroking your breasts and hips and reaching as though to strangle your neck. I drift off again, and wake before daybreak to see you kneeling by the loose floorboard and staring at the black and white photo of your dead mother. Are you too excited to sleep? Or too scared?

  I am scared. In every political campaign, it’s the rightists who suffer most.

  II

  On Monday when I arrive at school the playground is crowded with girls gazing up at large sheets of paper dripping with black ink pasted to the gate and the school walls.

  Long Live the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

  Time for a Revolution in Education.

  The Rightist Intellectual Headteacher Yang Must No Longer Dominate Our School with Her Capitalist Agenda.

  We stare at the posters, confused. Who vandalized the playground? Where are the teachers? Why hasn’t the bell rung for lessons? Only the Youth League members look as though they know what is going on. You and Long March, Red Star and Patriotic Hua stand with authority, watching your classmates’ reactions to the slogans in black ink.

  ‘Why hasn’t the bell rung?’ someone asks.

  ‘Lessons are cancelled,’ Long March says.

  ‘But the high school entrance exams are next month,’ complains Ying Le, who wants to go to medical school and train to be a doctor. ‘How are we supposed to study for them?’

  ‘The high school entrance exams have been abolished!’ Long March snaps. ‘The education system is being reformed. The teachers have been teaching the revisionist anti-Party line for long enough!’