The furious slam of the bedroom door shuddered through the apartment. Wang knew Lin Hong well. He knew she was shaking with anger, shame, indignation and disappointment. Rejected by father, now rejected by son. She would never forgive him for this. Wang couldn’t go on living there. He went back to the guest room, packed two suitcases, wrote Lin Hong a note, and was out of his father’s apartment at dawn. He stayed at a friend’s place until late August, when he moved into his new dormitory room at Beijing University. Then the first semester started and Wang threw himself into lectures, hanging out with new friends and dating girls his own age. The incident with Lin Hong became a distant, embarrassing memory. And, like his father, he seldom thought of her at all.
Thirteen and a half years later, they sit on a bench in Tuan Jie Hu Park, watching his daughter play. In the years that have passed, what happened that summer night has not once been mentioned or alluded to. Wang suspects that if he brought it up, Lin Hong would deny it and laugh in his face. But he knows it’s there, like an acrid odour in the air between them. Wang has forgotten what it was like ever to be attracted to his stepmother, whose chemically pale skin and surgically tightened forehead have given her a permanently startled look. Bitterness has ruined her looks too. Her dissatisfaction with the days of caring for her invalid husband, and the nights of alcohol and sleeping pills.
‘Echo needs a proper winter coat,’ Lin Hong is now saying. ‘That cheap jacket your wife bought won’t keep her warm. . I can take her shopping to buy a new coat next weekend, and replace the one your wife picked out. .’
‘The coat Yida bought her is fine.’
Wang has had enough of Lin Hong and the freezing park and is ready to go home. He stands up to call Echo, but before he can shout for his daughter, she rushes over. She is bawling like she hasn’t done in years, her screwed-up face a tight ball of angst. Wang strides over to her and holds her shoulders firmly with his gloved hands.
‘What’s the matter, Echo? What’s wrong?’
He looks her over. She seems unscathed, though the fleece-lined boot is missing from her left foot. The boy from Echo’s elementary school stands behind her and looks sheepishly at Wang.
‘What’s going on?’ Wang says sternly to the boy. ‘Why is she crying? Where’s her boot?’
Lin Hong stands up in her spike-heeled boots and looms over the boy.
‘You son of a turtle!’ she shouts. ‘What have you done to make her cry?’
The boy backs away. ‘Nothing,’ he says defensively. ‘Bye, Rabbit,’ he calls to Echo. ‘See you in school.’ And he turns and runs off.
Leaving Lin Hong to comfort Echo, Wang rummages about in the shrubs where the children had been playing. He pokes about for several minutes, but there’s no sign of the missing boot. He sighs. The boots had cost fifty renminbi and were meant to last another couple of winters. Yida had bought them a size too large and stuffed cotton wool in the toes.
Wang goes back to the bench and interrogates Echo: ‘What did that boy do to your boot? Did he throw it somewhere?’
But Echo shakes her head tearfully and won’t say what happened. She can’t walk home with only one boot, so Wang lifts her up, troubled to see his daughter in such a state. She wraps her arms around his neck and hides her face in his coat.
Quarter past seven, Monday morning. Beneath one of the taxi’s windscreen wipers is a brown package. Wang lifts the parcel out from under the wiper and rips the adhesive flap to see what is inside.
‘My boot,’ Echo says.
She stands behind her father, and does not sound pleased to see her boot again. There is a letter in the parcel too, folded up. Wang knows he should rip the letter up and throw it away. But he doesn’t. ‘C’mon,’ he says to Echo, holding open the passenger-side door. He slides the letter in his pocket, knowing he’ll be reading it the minute she is in school.
5. The Third Letter
HISTORY IS COMING for you. Do you hear it, coming up behind you in the dark? Dragging its iron chains and shackles, up the concrete stairs of Building 16? History taps you on the shoulder, breathes its foggy thousand-year-old breath down your neck. ‘Here I am, Driver Wang. Why don’t you turn around? Look me in the eyes?’ But you pretend not to hear. You whistle. You fumble the key in the keyhole. You slam the door of 404, turn the lock and hook on the security chain. There was nothing in the stairwell. Nothing but the dark.
There are others like us in Beijing. Once I bought a ticket from an attendant in Wangjing station, who was formerly a servant to the Empress Dowager Cixi (blinded in one eye when the Empress lashed out with her long nails in a fit of pique). Once at the National Library, the due date was stamped in my book by a librarian who was a graverobber during the late Ming (a depraved man who had carnal relations with the cadavers he dug up).
Some of the past incarnations rise up from the depths. They crawl up the throat of the host and peer beguilingly out from behind the eyes. They manoeuvre the host’s mouth, taking over the vocal chords and tongue.
‘I was a Peking Opera singer, who had his feet bound at the age of six to play female roles. I became addicted to the opium I smoked to ease the pain.’
‘I was an eighteenth-century Urumqi camel herder, with a goitre and three wives.’
Then, having made themselves known, they sink back down, leaving behind the host stunned by the temporary possession by the other selves within.
When I encounter one of our kind, I tally the former incarnations as a woodcutter counts rings within a tree. I date the soul as a Geiger counter dates carbon. Last week I met a shoe-shine boy in Wangfujing, who was first made flesh during the Neolithic era, when men were cave-dwellers and dragged their knuckles on the ground. When men danced around fires and had no language other than violence and grunts. The higher reincarnates, who have lived hundreds of times, tend to live as hermits far from the human fray. To meet one in the hustle and bustle of Wangfujing was rare. But there he was, beckoning me over to the wooden box where he crouched, a rag in his polish-blackened fingers. As he buffed my boots, I told him who I was and of my hopes of reunion with you.
‘Patience is a tree with bitter roots that bears sweet fruit,’ he opined.
He shone my boots to perfection and charged me five kuai.
Many of our kind go from cradle to grave ignorant of who they are. Some are now confined to asylums, and subject to medication, electroconvulsive therapy and round-the-clock supervision by white-coated medical professionals. Those who have known fame and notoriety in their former lives often struggle with anonymity. They roam the streets, bragging of the feats they accomplished back when they were Mencius or Li Bai or Sun Yat-Sen, until they are arrested and locked up, or heckled and beaten by drunks.
Fantasist. Mythomaniac. Liar. What names do you call me in your mind? No matter how scathing, I am not offended or deterred. My undertaking, as biographer of your past, is not one I take lightly. I work hard for your enlightenment. I am patient, diligent and devoted to the role.
I came back to Beijing to find you, Driver Wang, gusting back to the city with the Gobi sands. Once I knew your whereabouts, I rented a room nearby, on the eleventh floor of a run-down tower block. The room is a tomb of cement, with a mattress, a table and chair. The windowpanes are myopic, grimy with the polluted breath of Beijing. The melancholy glass weeps in heavy rain, and stagnant pools of tears leak on to the inner sills. The central heating is broken, so though I come from a region of China thirty degrees colder than the capital, I suffer the cold more here. Migrant workers from Henan province live above. They gamble and chatter and scrape chair legs over the ceiling throughout the night. Living here is often unbearable. But I remember my higher purpose and I endure.