The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  My breath shuddering, I reach for your left hand. I click out the blade and slash your inner wrist as hard as I can. You gasp, and your eyes go wide. I let your hand go, and we both stare as the thin line of red widens and drips, the cement darkening as your blood escapes. You breathe in sharp intakes of breath.

  ‘The other one,’ you say. ‘Hurry.’

  You hold out the other wrist, and I reach for it and slash again. This time you don’t gasp. This time you turn your head up, as though to God in Heaven, and yell, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’

  You crawl to a metal bucket of stagnant water and plunge your wrists in. As you crouch there I want to rip my shirt up for tourniquets, to staunch death’s flow. But I betrayed you once. I can’t betray you again.

  When you lose consciousness, you slump and the bucket capsizes, spilling a tide of red across the floor. I kneel over you and the mess of your wrists. You have stopped bleeding. Your heart has stopped beating.

  ‘Sorry,’ I hear myself sob. ‘Sorry.’

  In the distance, a teenage girl shrieks through a loudspeaker and hundreds of schoolgirls chant. I touch my fingers to your bruised and battered face. I deserve to die, Yi Moon. I am a murderer, you said. Now I am a murderer too, and cannot live with my conscience either.

  The knife is within reaching distance. I grasp the handle before I lose my nerve, and turn the blade on my own wrists. Once. Twice. Shock numbs the pain. Struggling for breath, I lay down beside you and hold your hand. There’s a roaring in my head. The roaring of our Great Helmsman, furious that I have betrayed him. The roaring of the masses, furious that I have taken my fate in my own hands. Then there is silence, darkness and reprieve.

  29

  Rebirth

  UNFORTUNATELY, I DID not die. I woke in a hospital bed, my head throbbing, and my wrists aching beneath thick bandages. When she saw I was awake, the patient in the next bed yelled for the nurses, who rushed to my bedside and started chanting, ‘Down with Yi Moon! Down with Yi Moon!’ Big-character Posters condemning my suicide attempt covered the walls. I saw one that said, The Masses Rejoice in the Death of the Counterrevolutionary Zhang Liya. And I was relieved that you were spared the persecution I was about to suffer.

  I went back to school with my bandaged wrists and spent the first months of 1967 on the brink of another suicide attempt. Then the Red Guards of the Anti-capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls split up into rival factions; one headed by Comrade Dare to Rebel, the other by Comrade Martial Spirit, and, caught up in the civil war, they neglected the black-category students entirely. When I stopped going to school, none of the Red Guards bothered to come and get me. So every day I stayed at home with my mother and waited to see what the Party had in store for us next.

  A year later I was sent to Repair the Earth in the countryside. My mother came to see me off at Beijing railway station. She gave me a box of rice and vegetables prepared for the long journey to Heilongjiang and wept as she hugged me goodbye.

  ‘Be revolutionary!’ she urged. ‘Love Chairman Mao and the Great, Glorious and Correct Communist Party with all your heart!’

  By then I had lost my faith in Communism and willed the Great Helmsman dead, but I smiled and promised my mother I would. The train of Sent-down Youth pulled away from the platform and the crowds of parents wailed to be losing their children to the Great Northern Waste. My waving mother receded into the distance and I started to cry. I had a premonition that I would never see her again.

  The train journey was forty-seven hours long and every carriage was crowded with Sent-down Youth, excited to be going ‘Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages’ to be educated by the peasants. They sang jubilant revolutionary songs all the way to Heilongjiang. The train moved us further into exile, and the Beijing students chorused, ‘I’ll Go Where Chairman Mao’s Finger Points!’ and ‘Long Live our Sickles!’ in joy.

  I was one of twelve Sent-down Youths sent to Three Ox Village, a few tumbledown shacks a six-hour hike from the town of Langxiang. During the day we laboured in the sorghum fields with the peasants, the wind and rain lashing away our youth. At night we slept in a barn so cold our tears of homesickness froze on our cheeks. The idealistic Beijing students organized political classes for the peasants of Three Ox Village and meetings for ‘Recalling with Bitterness the Exploitation of the Peasant Classes by the Evil Landlords of the Pre-liberation Era’. Unfortunately, the illiterate villagers, far away from the sloganeering of the People’s Daily, had not learnt the correct political script. The hardships they recalled – the deaths from starvation, the corrupt Party officials and crippling taxes – were from Mao Zedong’s era. The Beijing students were shocked by the ignorance and backwardness of the villagers and the extent of political re-education they needed. But as the Educated Youth slowly came to understand the real reason they had been exiled in the Great Northern Waste – that the ‘rebellious youth’ had served their political ends and Repairing the Earth was the Party’s way of getting rid of us – the curriculum planned for Three Ox Village was abandoned. Consumed by hopelessness and loss of faith, the Sent-down Youth went through a re-education of their own.

  Year after year, I slaved in the fields, suffering chronic backache, stiff, inflamed joints and wind-chapped skin that cracked and bled. In the evenings I drank sorghum spirits to numb the ceaseless pain. One day in 1969 a letter came from my mother, informing me of my father’s death in the Qinghai labour camp. Weeks later another letter came from Granny Xi, to tell me my mother had died. I requested permission to return to Beijing, but it was denied. Then the Sent-down Youths started dying. One girl caught pneumonia and, by the time we had hiked to Langxiang and back to get her antibiotics, she had passed away. Another Sent-down Youth died of rabies when bitten by a wild snarling dog. Another died of unknown causes in his sleep. The deaths were a warning to me that I had to get out of Three Ox Village and back to civilization. That if I continued stoically to ‘eat bitterness’ and endure, I wouldn’t last another year.

  To leave Three Ox Village, I needed a local-government connection. Most of the local Party officials were no more than scruffy peasants themselves, but I remembered a regional Party secretary from Langxiang, who had come to Three Ox Village to inspect the Sent-down Youths when we first arrived. The official was bald and fat, but well dressed and rumoured to own a car. I was twenty-three and had wasted six years of my life in Three Ox Village. I decided to go to him for help.

  On my day off I got up before dawn, hiked three hours to the nearest road then hitchhiked to Langxiang. I went to the town hall and requested an appointment to meet with Party Secretary Lin. His secretary turned me away and, frustrated that I had spent over four hours travelling for nothing, I lost my temper with her, and Secretary Lin stepped out of his office to see what the commotion was. He knew at once what I had come for, and what I had to offer in exchange. The labouring and harsh weather hadn’t quite robbed me of my looks, and I had bathed and washed my hair the night before to make myself presentable. He invited me into his office and locked the door. There was no discussion or negotiation of the terms – we just lay down on the floor behind his desk. Secretary Lin’s round cheeks turned very red during the act, and as he climaxed he grunted like a hog. I remember he was very pleased by the blood, and that it was my first time.

  I was Secretary Lin’s mistress for a year before he got me the residence papers and job in Beijing, a year of his sweaty hands groping my breasts and cunt, a year of pretending not to care what the other Sent-down Youth and villagers thought. The official eventually arranged for me to swap papers with a red-category girl my age, willing to sacrifice her life and status in Beijing to move to Langxiang to be with her repatriated fiancé. I was to take her name, Li Shuxiang, and she was to take mine, Yi Moon.

  Secretary Lin nearly didn’t let me go. He had fallen in love, and got it into his head to divorce his wife and marry me instead. To become Secretary Lin’s second wife was the last thing I wanted, and I begged him to stay with his
wife ‘for the sake of his family’ until his sense of duty was restored. The official said I could come back to him if I was unhappy in Beijing. He said he would welcome me back to Langxiang with open arms. Lying through my teeth, I promised to return one day, and the lovesick man threw his head against my breasts and wept.

  Seven years after leaving Beijing, I returned. Secretary Lin had found me a job as a tea lady in the Ministry of Agriculture, and I spent my days pushing a tea trolley about dreary government buildings and pouring hot water out of a thermos for the cadres. At night I slept in a workers’ dormitory in Maizidian. I was only twenty-four, but an old woman inside. I had none of the spark and vivacity of other girls my age.

  Your father was just a clerk back then, but ambitious and clever, and certain to rise through the ranks. He was handsome and could have had any woman he wanted, so what did he see in me? Your father saw subservience in the meek way I served him tea. He saw compliance in my diffident smile. I was the only tea lady who didn’t flirt with the cadres, and this led to the expectation that I would be a loyal wife. He saw that I wouldn’t be controlling or demanding and would stay out of his affairs. He saw that he wouldn’t have to sacrifice his womanizing or late nights. And he was correct. I couldn’t have cared less who he slept with or what time he came home. But I was not the sweet and deferential wife he expected.

  Pregnancy. The birth of a son. When you were born I was convinced there was something strange about you, that there was a cognizance in your eyes, as though you had been born with prior knowledge of the world beyond my womb. Yet, at the same time, you were defenceless and tiny. You couldn’t stand up, or walk, or do anything for yourself. You were constantly crying for milk, or to be cradled in my arms, or for your vomit or shit to be wiped up. I was twenty-six. I went through the motions of being a mother, but had no maternal instinct or feeling. Your needs were endless and I couldn’t meet them. I was an inadequate mother. I saw this judgement of me in your eyes. Your father knew it too.

  ‘Shuxiang, you are an unnatural woman!’ he barked on the rare occasions he was home. ‘Pick the damned child up when he cries!’

  Was it my lack of maternal instinct that led to the otherness I sensed about you? Or was it your otherness that corrupted my maternal instinct? I told myself the post-natal anxiety was because of my inexperience with babies and, the more time I spent with you, the less strange you would seem. But, instead, time exaggerated my feelings of disquiet until they became an irrational fear that you weren’t my own flesh and blood.

  Once, I was breastfeeding you, and as you were suckling I had the uncanny sense that someone other than my four-month-old child was staring out at me from behind your gaze. I pulled you from my nipple, and milk and spittle dribbled from your mouth as I held you at arm’s length. ‘Who are you?’ I asked, my voice shaking, half expecting the imposter behind your eyes to speak. You spoke back in baby babble and I was as embarrassed as I was relieved. Four months earlier I had pushed you out of my own womb. I had seen the umbilical cord being cut with my own eyes. How could I suspect that you weren’t my child?

  The next time it happened you were six months old, and we were rolling a ball back and forth on the floor. You smiled and gurgled at the colourful ball, unaware of your mother’s deathly boredom. ‘Back to Mama,’ I said, rolling the ball to you. But a change came over you and you suddenly lost interest in our game. You stared at me with the unmistakable gaze of someone from my past, and my panic was similar to the time I was an hour’s hike from Three Ox Village and realized I was being stalked by a wild and rabid-eyed dog.

  ‘Liya?’ I whispered.

  You stared back with cold, hostile, accusing eyes, still furious that I had betrayed you to the Red Guards, still furious I had taken your mother’s possessions out of the secret hiding place. I couldn’t stand it. I walked out of the living room. I put on my coat and left our apartment. I wandered the streets for hours, thinking, It can’t be . . . It can’t be . . . It can’t be. Yet it was. How long had Liya been lurking inside you, biding her time? I shuddered to think.

  The apartment was dark when I returned, and harrowing with a small child’s crying. I went to the living room and turned on the light. You were a mess, crawling about in a puddle of urine, your cheeks and hands smeared with shit. When you saw me you threw back your head and bawled, your eyes accusing. But this time your accusation was that of an abandoned child. Liya had disappeared. Though I was wary of you still, I picked you up and washed you in a basin of lukewarm water. I towelled you dry and I fed you a bottle of formula milk. The whole time, I was nervous that Liya would reappear.

  There were incidents like this throughout your babyhood, when I was overcome by the conviction that Liya, or some other imposter, was stalking me through your eyes. I would walk away from you. I would shut myself in the bedroom or bathroom. When you scrabbled at the door and called, ‘Mama . . .’ I covered my ears. Sometimes my panic was so overwhelming I would leave you splashing in the plastic tub, or in the kitchen with pans boiling on the stove, and flee the apartment and walk the streets until my heart stopped pounding and I was brave enough to go back. Fight or flight, that was my reflex when I was menaced by others in your gaze. And though walking out on you was irresponsible, not walking out on you would have been worse. I would have screamed and shaken you. I would have beaten you and staved in your baby-sized skull.

  Fortunately, it didn’t last. As you grew up into a chattering child, with a mind and character of your own, Liya and the others went away, and I soon forgot there was ever a time I suspected you weren’t my son. My skills as a mother did not improve, though. I still forgot to cook dinner. I still forgot to tell you to go to bed. Your teachers wrote me notes, saying that your clothes needed washing, and your toes poked through the holes in your shoes. I never beat you or was intentionally cruel. But I didn’t love you as a mother should love her son. And you, who loved me as a son should love his mother, could tell.

  Life passed uneventfully, with my baijiu, cigarettes and novels (my love of ‘poisonous weeds’ had stayed with me from reading the toilet paper during the Cultural Revolution), and young son. I had no ambitions. In the eighties, as televisions and fridge-freezers and other appliances appeared in the stores, I had no desire to consume. I had no interest in men or love affairs and would have been celibate but for your father, drunkenly mounting me once in a while.

  ‘What other man would want you, Shuxiang?’ he’d grunt. ‘Not even a dog would take a sniff at you. You should be grateful you are mine.’

  But your father was wrong. I wasn’t his. His wife was Li Shuxiang, not me. Your father didn’t know who I was. He didn’t even know my real name.

  I don’t remember the breakdown. One day I was living with my son in Maizidian, and the next I was tranquillized and unable to go to the toilet without assistance. I don’t remember much about the hospital either. I remember the odour of disinfectant on the wards. I remember a kindly nurse brushing my teeth and baring her own teeth to encourage me to do the same. I remember lying on my back with a wad of cotton between my teeth and paddles against my temples. I remember lightning striking. Once. Twice. Thrice. I remember your father coming to visit me. He sat over by the window, looking formidable in his work suit. Other patients from my ward stood drooling in the doorway, staring at him in fascination.

  ‘Mister, haven’t I seen you on TV?’ one woman asked. ‘Aren’t you the prime minister of Taiwan?’

  Your father paid as much attention to them as to stray cats. He sat up straight in his chair, stiff-backed and tense with his loathing of me. ‘You deserve to rot in Hell for what you did to our son,’ he said.

  When he said this, I had only a vague memory of having a son. How old was he? A baby? A walking and talking child? What did he look like? I certainly couldn’t remember the thing I had done to him, for which I deserved to rot.

  ‘You are dead to him now anyway,’ your father went on. ‘He thinks you are ashes in an urn.’ Then he stared o
ut the window as though he couldn’t stand the sight of me. He started smoking his way through another cigarette and muttering, ‘You are the sickest woman I know . . . You are rotting . . . You stink of death . . .’ Then he looked right at me and sneered, ‘Hurry up and die, will you? We can’t wait.’

  By ‘we’ I knew he meant himself and his teenaged mistress. Whether or not I lived or died was of interest to no one but them.

  After your father had gone, I asked to borrow a mirror from a girl in my room. She opened her round powder compact and held it up, and I saw my reflection for the first time in over a year. I was not rotting, as your father had said, but I didn’t recognize the woman staring back with vacant eyes. That wasn’t me. Where had I gone? ‘Do I stink of death?’ I asked the girl. She leant closer and sniffed me. ‘No, Shuxiang, you smell nice,’ she said. Then she patted the fluffy puff in her compact and tenderly powdered my nose.

  That evening I didn’t swallow my pills and, within hours, the medicated fog was clearing. I didn’t swallow my pills the next day or the next, but was careful to keep up appearances as a dribbler who couldn’t think for herself. After a week of no pills, I stole a wallet from one of the doctors’ coats and hid it in my underwear. Two days later I was on a long-distance bus headed north to Heilongjiang.

  Secretary Lin had retired now. Though eighteen years had passed, he recognized me straight away. He was speechless for a while, tears standing out in his eyes.

  ‘Yi Moon, you came back,’ he whispered. ‘Finally, after all these years of waiting, you have come back to me.’

  He was older and fatter, and walked with difficulty due to complications from diabetes and gout. And I had aged too. I was no longer the young girl who had gone away to Beijing. I was over forty, and wrinkled with grey in my hair, and dazed-looking from all the electricity that had seared through my brain.