‘Good,’ says Echo. ‘I don’t want a husband.’
‘You will,’ Wang says. ‘Finished your homework?’
‘Yes,’ she fibs, knowing he is too lazy to check.
After dinner, Wang opens his laptop and scrolls through blogs online; mentally fidgeting, his attention span narrowing with every click. Yida curls up on a cushioned chair, her baggy, holey jumper tugged down over her knees, her wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on her nose and a best-selling paperback on Confucianism on her lap. Yida has started misquoting The Analects, and Wang can’t wait for her to move on to something else.
On the living-room wall is a framed photograph of Wang and Yida, nine years younger, posing in the marble foyer of a five-star hotel. Yida is in an ivory wedding dress and Wang in suit and tie selected randomly from the photography studio’s clothing rails. They don’t look like themselves in the photo. Their smiles are forced and unnatural and may as well have been pulled off the rack with their clothes.
The actual marriage had been months earlier. Wang was twenty-two and Yida twenty, and they had been together for six weeks. Wang remembers how young Yida looked that day at the registry office, her hair scraped up in a ponytail, not a scrap of makeup on her joyful face. Afterwards they had ordered steaming-hot bowls of Lanzhou noodles at a nearby stall. ‘This is our wedding banquet,’ Wang had told the noodle-maker, and he had poured out shots of baijiu and they’d all drunk a toast. Wang and Yida had drunkenly kissed, and an old woman had scolded them. Yida beamed and waved the marriage certificate at her: ‘We got married today. Here’s the evidence. I’m allowed to kiss my own husband, aren’t I?’
They were proud of their wedding day. It was proof they were far more in love than the couples with dowries and guest lists and parental approval. Which was why, when Yida later confessed her regret that they’d not had a traditional ceremony, Wang was disappointed. They went to a photography studio for some professional wedding portraits, to make their marriage seem more conventional. They were nowhere near as ecstatic on the day of the photo shoot as the day they were married. A miscarriage and many late-night fights had brought about a loss of innocence; the sadness of romantic expectations fallen short. Yida is pregnant with Echo in the photo. Queasy with morning sickness and holding a bouquet to hide her bump. The fact that she is also in the photo, as a foetus in the womb, fascinates and delights Echo. Every so often she points at the slight bump visible under the bouquet and cries, ‘There I am. Tucked away in Ma’s belly! Guest of honour on your wedding day!’
Echo is sleeping when they go into the bedroom at ten, in her narrow bed against the wall. Her cheeks are flushed as though she is overheated, and Wang tugs down her heavy duvet and strokes her brow, thinking how lovely she looks when she sleeps.
Wang and Yida go to the larger bed they share by the window. Yida pulls her baggy, holey jumper over her head and, standing in her thermal underwear, massages almond lotion into her arms, calves and thighs. Once moisturized, Yida bends at the waist so her hair sways upside-down and drags a wide-toothed comb through curls so abundant you could lose a hand in them. Sometimes Wang hears the comb teeth ping as they break.
Wang reaches for her as she slides between the covers beside him. He pins her down beneath him and reacquaints himself with the parts of her body that he loves: the hollow at the base of her throat, the curve of her hips, and her breasts that he cups and squeezes in his hands. He kisses her in that generous, wet and open-mouthed way they kiss now only when in darkness and in bed. ‘Shuuush,’ she whispers in his ear, though he hasn’t yet made a sound. Wang longs for the abandon she used to have, back when they were newly-weds. Back before Echo was born. Now she is rigid and tense beneath him. But when he parts her thighs, his fingers slide inside her with ease, and he knows she is ready. ‘Shuuush,’ she says again as he thrusts up inside her. And Wang moves as silently as he can, stifling his moans in her hair.
Wang forgets time and place, until Yida digs her fingers in his shoulders. ‘Echo,’ she whispers. He pauses, hears a mattress creak and a child’s hollow cough from the other bed. ‘That’s enough, Wang Jun,’ Yida whispers. ‘She’s awake.’ Wang pretends not to hear. He waits for a few moments, then starts up again. Silently. Stealthily. He does not last for much longer, and as he comes feels Yida’s eyes spitting at him in the dark. He sheepishly kisses her damp forehead, then peels himself away.
Wang remembers a line from the letter. Something about Yida satisfying the needs of the flesh and little else. Whoever wrote that knows nothing about his love for his wife, he thinks. He reaches out and sets the alarm for six o’clock. He falls asleep pretty much straight away.
3. The Second Letter
AS BIOGRAPHER OF our past lives, I recount the ways we have known each other. The times we were friends and the times we were enemies. The times lust reared its head, and we licked and grazed on each other’s flesh. Once you were a eunuch. Your mother bound your wrists behind your back, laid your pubescent organs out on a chopping block, and severed you from the ranks of men. Once you were a Jurchen. The Mongols invaded our city, charging in on horseback, raping, beheading, and capturing slaves. They reduced Zhongdu to ruins, and cluttered our gutters with cadavers and severed limbs. They drove us forth across the Gobi Desert, and we fled during a sandstorm and sheltered behind rocks smooth as prehistoric eggs, jutting up to the sky.
Once you were a Red Guard, rampaging through Beijing, intent on destroying the Old Culture, Old Society, Old Education and Old Ways of Thinking. You raided the homes of class enemies, carting the ‘Ill-gotten Gains of the Exploiting Classes’ off in wheelbarrows, after beating the rightists in a gang of teenage girls.
Months later, I aided and abetted your suicide. You bared your thin, blue-veined wrists to me in the school toilets, and shouted, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ as I slashed each one with the blade. Then you plunged your wrists into the mop bucket, and your patriotic blood turned the water red as our national flag. I wanted to rip tourniquets out of my shirt and staunch the flow. But a promise is a promise, and I severed my own wrists with the stinging blade. Once. Twice. And the darkness roared, like the Great Helmsman’s fury, that I had taken my fate into my own hands.
Can you guess where I am as I write this, Driver Wang? Hint: Baldy Zhang’s Mao Zedong pendant hangs from the rear-view and in the map-holding compartment of the door is a wallet of family snapshots. Echo aged three in Mickey Mouse ears. Yida on your lap as you smile together in a photo booth. That’s right. I am in your taxi, outside Building 16.
A security guard patrols your housing compound. Three times he has passed your cab, shining his flashlight into the bushes and startling the stray cats. Three times he has failed to see me in the driver’s seat, straining my eyes under the dim overhead light. There are a thousand fading scents here; cheap perfume, nylon tights, cigarettes, the man-made fibres of winter coats and, beneath all this, your distinctive odour of hormones and sweat. Other remnants of you remain here too. Follicles, and scales of dead skin on the headrest. Molecules of breath.
Building 16 is in darkness. There is no one at your window now, but I have seen your wife and daughter there during the day. Yida hanging machine-damp laundry on the balcony rail. Echo fogging the glass with her breath, then dragging her finger through the condensed steam. Last week I saw you washing the windows. Sleeves rolled up to the elbows, splashing soapy water on the pollution-smeared panes, squeezing out the excess from the sponge. Ephemeral rainbows glistened in the soap bubbles; spectrums of colour that imploded against the glass. Your cigarette smoke billowed in your eyes as you worked. Washing windows you have washed a hundred times before and will wash a hundred times again.