by Cai Jun
He Qingying cried, too. She was weak and tried to open her eyes under the white light, saying, “Let me see.”
Crying and barely cleaned of blood, his face seemed murky. His eyes opened a bit to stare at his mother. He Qingying had a strange thought. What was he thinking about? Why was he crying so hard? Was he born already holding an unspeakable grudge?
Though he was born premature, he didn’t need to stay in the NICU for too long. All the nurses said the kid was fortunate to be so healthy. Si Mingyuan, Wang Er’s father, couldn’t stop kissing his newborn son. He registered his son’s residency at the police precinct. He Qingying chose the name. She looked out every day while pregnant, as there seemed to be a voice calling her, so she picked Wang, which meant “lookout”: Si Wang.
The three of them moved in with Si Mingyuan’s parents, where there was just enough room for them to squeeze in. Her maternity leave lasted four months, and then she went back to work at the post office. She earned more than her husband. She dressed well and was smart. The row of Zhang Ailing books on her bookshelf wasn’t simply for decoration.
Si Mingyuan worked at the Nanming Steel Factory. Each day he left for work at 7:30 a.m. and came home right before dark. He had few social engagements other than drinking with coworkers. He only smoked Peony brand cigarettes. He read nothing but the newspaper. His tall, muscular build could seem brutish. He Qingying wondered whether it would be inherited. They had a domestic color TV and a Japanese VCR, which he used to watch violent and explicit movies from America and Hong Kong.
He Qingying didn’t bother much with him; all her attention was on her son. She rarely contacted her side of the family. She seemed to have become part of her husband’s family and had a pleasant relationship with her in-laws.
Wang Er was a cute, healthy boy. When he was three, He Qingying sent him to day care. The new kids always cried, and she was reluctant to drop him off. But he adjusted, and the day care teacher, a young woman, often complimented Wang Er. He liked being held by the teacher, lying on her soft shoulders and smelling her fragrant hair. She occasionally complained to He Qingying about how much he kissed her, embarrassing her.
The locust tree in front of their house dried up and grew robust again several times over. The inhabitants of the hidden nests woke them up every morning. Si Mingyuan grew night-blooming cereus on the windowsill, which only bloomed for a few hours every year. The precious petals were tucked under their son’s pillow, helping him sleep. His small bed was in a corner of the living room. Around it the floor was littered with toys and children’s books. He rarely read and didn’t like watching cartoons—except for Slam Dunk. He Qingying was puzzled about why a young kid loved watching that show. He also liked a vintage cartoon called Legend of Sealed Book; he cried uncontrollably every time Yuan Gong was recaptured by Heaven.
In 2000, Wang Er turned five. He was over a meter tall and his face grew even more handsome. He still looked like a young boy, but everyone said he was gorgeous. He wasn’t a picky eater, which was rare among kids his age, though He Qingying always tried to make him food she knew he liked.
Si Mingyuan’s factory filed for bankruptcy that same year. His severance was only about 30,000 yuan. He was now one of the many laid-off workers. He was happy at first, day-trading and watching movies. But soon his stocks fell from eighteen to eight yuan. With a much thinner wallet, he could only afford to window shop toy cars with his son. Someone got him a job working security. He only worked a few days before quitting, saying it was too embarrassing. He went out every night to play mah-jongg and didn’t come home until early morning. He’d wake up his son and start yet another fight with his wife.
Her husband had no income, and her in-laws’ health worsened. Every expense was now He Qingying’s responsibility. Her postal worker’s salary was barely enough to live on.
Si Mingyuan frequently took Wang Er to ride a bike in Jingjiang Park. He’d always been patient with him, even playing games with Wang Er, who excelled at chess and beat everyone. But after a time, Si Mingyuan began to alienate his son little by little. Instead of holding him, he’d chain smoke alone by the window, not even bothering to clean out the ashtray. When he’d had a job, he never drank at home, but now he did, downing liquor with every night’s dinner. When he shouted in a drunken stupor, staring at his son with an icy gaze, He Qingying was disgusted.
Did he see his son as an enemy? Was he afraid of him?
Maybe he’d seen too many American horror movies. One movie starring Gregory Peck was about a normal family discovering that their son had extraordinary abilities that no adults could match. They became slaves to their child. The kid was a mutant born with such evil inside him that he could summon endless power, causing tragedy for his parents, and all of humanity.
One rainy night, He Qingying was working late. Si Mingyuan went out to drink and play mah-jongg. When he came home, his son was watching The Shawshank Redemption. He slapped the boy.
Upon her return, He Qingying saw the red fingerprints on Wang Er’s cheek. Si Mingyuan stood off to the side, dejected. She slapped her husband and clutched her son, rubbing his swollen cheek. Saying nothing, Si Mingyuan ran out, loudly slamming the door behind him. She cursed him as she watched him run away into the rainy night, and he shouted something unintelligible under the streetlights.
When her son was seven, something terrible happened.
Si Mingyuan went missing. It happened before dawn on Chinese New Year, ruining the holiday. He Qingying reported it to the police. Her father-in-law’s hair went white, and he had to go to the hospital. She took good care of her in-laws. People thought she was the daughter, not the daughter-in-law.
Endless debt collectors visited. Her husband had accumulated debts she had no idea about, many of them owed to loan sharks. It would take many lifetimes to repay them all.
Si Mingyuan never came back.
September 2, 2002—Monday. Wang Er’s first day of school.
It was raining. He Qingying held a big umbrella and tightly held her son’s hand on their way to Number One Elementary School on Longevity Road. Her hand was soft and warm and she carried his backpack, inside of which was a new Disney pencil case. Most of the parents were there with their children for the opening ceremony and to meet the teachers. She didn’t leave until she saw Wang Er sit down in class.
Two weeks into first grade, He Qingying found a slip of paper in Wang Er’s backpack. Li Yu’s “Joy in Meeting” was written on it: “Silently going to the Western pavilion. The moon like a hook. Loneliness locked inside a fall courtyard. Parting sorrows can’t be contained. Unspeakable feelings in my heart.” The words were in pencil, but the handwriting was neat, even for an adult’s. She asked him about it, and Wang Er told her he’d found it on the street and kept it because he liked the way it looked.
The following summer, the SARS crisis was the big news. He Qingying sent her son to a drawing class at the Feifei Art Academy. The teacher was a man with long hair and an artistic temperament. He taught Wang Er to sketch and to paint with watercolors. He recognized the boy’s talent.
To reward this talent and his matriculation into second grade, He Qingying bought him a computer—an Intel Celeron. Wang Er excitedly played with the keyboard and mouse while watching the Windows XP flag fly by and installing all the programs. Broadband wasn’t widespread yet, so they relied on a modem. He Qingying noticed how quickly her son became addicted to going online. He would sit in front of the computer all day. She rarely scolded him for anything, but she did for this, until she herself was crying. The boy actually comforted her.
One day while Wang Er was out with his grandparents, He Qingying turned on the computer. She’d added child-monitoring software and saw that her son was using Google and Baidu to search for very specific information:
1995. Nanming Road murder case.
1995. Nanming High murder case.
1995. Body fo
und at Nanming Steel Factory.
1995. Murder victim Shen Ming.
When He Qingying turned on the computer a few days later, Wang Er had already reformatted the desktop and deleted everything.
Wang Er’s grandfather died that fall. His death was sudden. By the time they got him to the hospital, his heart had stopped. His wife was traditional and insisted on bringing the body back to the house to have it lie in state for a few days. With the family crammed in to the narrow space, his grandfather lay on the bed, dressed in the burial clothes his uncle had bought.
He Qingying got time off work for the memorial. Her son sat with her the whole time, and Grandma and the other relatives took shifts sitting with the deceased patriarch. Sometimes it was just the two of them watching a dead body at 2:00 a.m. Worried about the smell, she didn’t let her son get too close to the body. But Wang Er just stared at the corpse, unafraid of the flies. His eyes scared her.
Everyone thought the missing Si Mingyuan would be back for the funeral since he was the eldest son. But he didn’t show, not even when the body went into the cremation chamber.
The next year, He Qingying’s mother-in-law died, too. As her health had declined, her own kids rarely helped. He Qingying was the one who changed her and gave her baths. She also helped the most during the funeral, yet all the relatives hated her and made snide comments.
Wearing a mourning sash around his arm, hearing the things being said about his mother, Wang Er said, “How dare you?”
The memorial fell quiet.
He Qingying no longer owed the Si family anything, and her son had nothing more to do with them.
This was at about the same time that Wang Er began to change.
There was no hot water at home, so He Qingying always took her son to the bathhouse at work. One day, after coming out of the bath, her still-wet hair made her look more tantalizing than usual. A middle-aged man leered at her, eliciting a sinister glare from Wang Er.
The man said with embarrassment, “Is this your son?”
“Yes, chief.” He Qingying squeezed out a smile. She pulled her son’s sleeve. “Wang Er, stop looking at him like that. He’s the Post Office chief. Call him Uncle!”
Wang Er shook his head stubbornly. “Tell him to control his eyes.”
Not wanting to cause a scene in front of her boss, He Qingying just sighed and hurriedly ushered her son away. From that moment on, Wang Er didn’t allow anyone to get close to his mother.
During the October First holiday, He Qingying had to work. One night, the chief made her stay late and go to dinner with him. He got her drunk, saying that he knew how hard her life was: missing husband, single mom, loan sharks at her door. He claimed he wanted to promote her to the leader of the counter team—and that her income would go up. Maybe she could pay off some debts. He complimented her beauty. She didn’t want to refuse right away. She was dizzy. He suggested that they go to a hotel to rest. When she tried to leave him, he stopped her.
She didn’t get home until midnight. Her hair was a mess, and her clothes reeked of alcohol. Her lips were bruised and her face pale. Wang Er had stayed up, anxiously waiting for her. He helped her into bed and brought a cup of warm water.
“Mom, what happened?”
“I’m OK. Just go to bed.”
He covered her with a thick blanket. He was about to turn out the lights when he noticed one of the bruises on her face.
“Was it that bastard?”
“It’s grown-up stuff. You’re a kid. Don’t worry.” Tears filled her eyes.
“Mom, anything that happens to you happens to me.”
He held his mom so tight that she almost couldn’t breathe.
“Wang Er, it’s not what you think, I didn’t—”
He kissed her forehead. “Mom, don’t worry. I will make money to support us!”
He Qingying lay in bed with a fever all the next day. She didn’t know about the incident at work until the day after that. Her coworkers told her that Wang Er had charged into the post office, demanding to see the evil chief. When he found him, Wang Er grabbed an abacus and hit the man in the head, making him bleed all over the place.
At first she yelled and hit her son with a broom. But then she held and kissed him.
“Wang Er, I know you love me the most. But don’t you ever do anything like this again!”
Of course she was forced to resign from the post office.
Soon after, Gu Qiusha paid her a visit, stealing her son.
Now it was Christmas Eve, and for the past three hours He Qingying had been hiding in front of the mansion. Her legs were numb, her cheeks frozen.
A curtain suddenly parted on the second floor. Her son’s young face appeared, reflecting light like a ghost’s. The scene would have scared anyone, except He Qingying.
After seeing him, she rushed off. Like a ghost escaping back into the grave.
CHAPTER 27
In 1995, when Shen Ming and Gu Qiusha’s new apartment was almost ready, they tested their new water heater. The two of them squeezed into the tub and painted each other’s faces with bubbles. They watched the steam rise around them, wanting the moment to go on forever.
“Qiusha, what is desperation?”
“Desperation?” She stroked her fiancé’s whiskers, which had been softened by the hot water. “Why are you asking? Our future is full of hope.”
“I had a nightmare last night. It felt like a bad omen.”
“Shen Ming, the worst thing is losing the person you love.” Qiusha kissed him deeply. “For me, that’s you.”
A month later, Shen Ming was dead.
When Wang Er first came to live in her home, Gu Qiusha gave the boy baths. She’d found a pale mark on the left side of his back and carefully cleaned it with a washcloth. Its shape was odd: a two-centimeter slit that looked like a knife wound. Gu Qiusha remembered a myth she’d heard when she was young about how a birthmark is the mortal wound from a previous life.
Her heart started to hurt, enough to make her clench her teeth and want to scream. She held Wang Er, stroking his chest and pressing an ear to his heart, listening to his rapid heartbeats.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
Enjoying his relaxing bath, Wang Er had looked at her foamy face with confusion.
Gu Qiusha held him tight and said, “I want you to live for a long time!”
Half of her body was submerged in water. She was in a daze, remembering the way she and Shen Ming had taken a bath in the apartment they never got to live in.
January 2006.
It was a chilly morning. Wang Er got up at 6:00 a.m. and turned on the entertainment system to play a DVD. The gloomy prelude started, the symphony reverberating in the mansion like dark tides. The repetitive bowing of the cello sounded like moving oars, like the rowers were risking their lives to get close to a barren island.
The music woke Gu Qiusha, and she rushed downstairs in a robe. Wang Er sat alone in the living room, staring at the TV; five paintings rotated on the screen. Each one showed a small desolate island—oddly shaped rocks protruding out of the water. Under the steel-gray skies, a small boat rowed by a mysterious man in white neared the island.
“Wang Er,” she screamed, blocking his view and shaking his shoulders. “What are you listening to?”
“The symphonic poem Isle of the Dead.”
“This early in the morning?” She touched his clothes. “Aren’t you cold?”
The boy shook his head.
She wanted to turn off the music, but she couldn’t find the remote. The sounds of it pulsed throughout the house, piercing the air like a knife. She searched for the power cord so she could unplug it.
“The man on the boat represents death.”
“Turn that off!”
“Qiusha, do you know what Hades is?” Before she could reply, the boy a
nswered his own question. “When someone dies and wants to enter the underworld, he needs to pass Hades, but he needs to pay or be tossed in the river by Charon. The water of Hades is lighter than water in regular rivers. Humans need their boat to cross. Even ghosts would melt in the Hades, according to Greek myths.”
“What are you saying?” Gu Qiusha said, a shudder wracking her body.
“In the painting Island of the Dead, Charon in the boat represents men, and the isle represents women. The sea is the womb that nurtures all. The cypress trees are used to make crosses. Between 1880 and 1886, the artist Arnold Böcklin did five paintings about this. He was obsessed with death.”
“Wang Er, stop talking like this.”
“The music you’re hearing was inspired by the Island of the Dead painting—it’s from the Russian composer Rachmaninoff.”
Finally, she found the power and unplugged it.
A few hours later, Gu Qiusha went to work with trepidation. She’d wanted to call the doctor but found her account had only a few hundred yuan in it.
The procuratorate had sent people to raid her company and seal all the accounts and files. The next day, all their training centers shut their doors. Newspapers reported Erya Education Group being involved in insider trading and bribery.
Seven days later, Erya Education Group filed for bankruptcy.
All of the Gu family properties became frozen as bank assets. Lu Zhongyue asked Gu Qiusha for a divorce, which she agreed to right away. After the divorce, she learned about his shell company in Hong Kong. In the two months before the crisis, he’d arranged for 50 million yuan to be transferred as investments to his company via many offshore accounts.
As Lu Zhongyue was leaving the mansion, Gu Changlong grabbed his collar. “How did I miss seeing you for what you really are?”
“I’m sorry, President Gu, but you’re not my father-in-law anymore.”
The older man had stopped dyeing his hair, and his silver hair and haggard face made him look elderly. He slapped Lu and said, “You ungrateful bastard!”