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 out 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.
‘I just got out of a mental hospital,’ I explained. ‘I look unwell.’
And the sentimental man shook his head and smiled. ‘Yi Moon, you look exactly the same as the day we first met.’
Secretary Lin rented a room for me on the outskirts of the town. Then, at my request, he bribed his friend at the local Public Security Bureau to contact your father with news of my passing and to forge a death certificate for Li Shuxiang, which I posted to Beijing. Your father accepted the lie. He didn’t bother to make further enquiries, or send for the ashes. I had escaped his punishment and I was free.
I lived in Langxiang as I had lived in Beijing before my breakdown. Baijiu, cigarettes and novels. Solitude. But I was not free.
At night I dreamt of you. I dreamt of you at the age of two, crouching in split pants to peer at a dead spider in a drain. I dreamt of you aged four, standing on a stool and watching me stir a pot on the stove. I dreamt of you aged twelve, chewing on a pencil, doing your homework in your pyjamas. I had been an indifferent mother. But now, hundreds of kilometres north of Beijing, I woke from dreams of you, aching with loss. But what could I do? I had died in Langxiang, and couldn’t come back from the dead. I had no choice but to stay beyond the grave, out of your life.
I had been in Langxiang for ten years when Secretary Lin was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors didn’t even prescribe chemotherapy, the prognosis was so bad. In desperation, I went to a shaman I knew of near Three Ox Village, a toothless old man with skin loosened from the bones of his face, rumoured to be over two hundred years old. After selling me some herbs to ‘fight the demons’ in my official’s lungs, the shaman asked me if I knew I was a ‘reincarnate’. Suspecting that he just wanted to sell me more medicine, I snapped, ‘I can’t afford to buy more of your herbs.’ The shaman laughed, toothless and sly, and gave me a potion free of charge. ‘Drink it,’ he said, ‘and you will dream of your past lives.’ I put the bottle in my bag then rushed back to Langxiang and my dying official, who over the years I had come to care about a great deal.
I forgot about the 200-year-old shaman and his herbal potion until after Secretary Lin’s funeral. It was late at night, and I was drinking in my room when I ran out of spirits. Searching for more alcohol, I found the shaman’s bottle in my bag, pulled out the stopper and drank it down, hoping it contained some intoxicating herbs that would knock me out, or at least numb my sadness. I passed out shortly afterwards and woke hours later from a dream so strange and disquieting that I had to turn on the light for reassurance that it wasn’t real. I had dreamt I was being chased out of a hut by a fierce-eyed woman with a knife. I had run into a forest and hidden in the trees, my heart thudding with the conviction that the woman would find me and slit my throat. The dream was too powerful to not be of any significance. So, later that day, I found a notebook and wrote it down.
The next night, without imbibing any potions, I dreamt I was in a boat out at sea with a wrinkled old man, casting out fishing nets. This time, the dream was peaceful and serene, and I woke up with the taste of saltwater in my mouth and waves crashing in my blood. Though it was still dark, I went and sat at my desk and wrote what I remembered down in my notebook, and by the time I had finished the sun had risen in the sky.