The Incarnations Read online

  At noon Wang wakes Yida, props her up with pillows and places a bowl of chicken broth on a magazine on her duvet-covered lap. He and Echo have lunch at the table, slurping out of the bowls and stripping the carcass of meat. On TV, camouflage-smeared Communists run through a twig-snapping forest, pursued by Japanese soldiers. ‘The TV is a time-machine,’ Wang says. ‘Every day you can travel back to the War of Resistance against the Japanese on one channel or another.’ Echo nods and picks at a chicken bone. Then she asks, unexpectedly, if he will take her to the park. Unexpected, because Echo is not a child who likes to play outdoors. Wang prepares his excuses. Beijing is submerged in a heavy fog and a temperature five below zero. He wants to potter about the centrally heated apartment and click about online. But Yida has overheard and calls out weakly from the bedroom, ‘Take her, Wang. She’s been cooped up indoors all morning.’ So Wang and Echo pile on jumpers, button up coats and wrap on scarves, and Echo pulls on a bobble hat with flaps that hang over her ears. They call goodbye to Yida, but she has lapsed back into fevered sleep, and doesn’t reply.

  They walk to the park through fog as dense as descended clouds. They walk past skeletal cranes jutting into the sky, and tall plywood walls surrounding a construction site; a photoshopped utopia of villas and trees hiding the pit of mechanical diggers within. ‘How’s school?’ Wang asks. Echo tells him about the Hygiene, Homework and Politeness Monitors; eight-year-old bureaucrats-in-training, who deducted points from her Young Pioneers passbook this week because she forgot to wash her hands and has been ‘separating from the community’ during break. Echo is one of the few students not yet invited to join the Young Pioneers, and Wang, suspecting that he has passed his inability to fit in down to his daughter, feels responsible for this. ‘How are your friends?’ Wang asks, knowing full well Echo has only one friend, a chubby and awkward boy called Xiu Xing. Echo tells him the girls in her class won’t sit near her because she is ‘ugly and has rabbit’s teeth’. ‘I hate my teeth,’ Echo confides to her father, and her small voice pierces his heart. ‘Don’t listen to those girls. You aren’t ugly!’ he says. ‘When your teeth are fixed you’ll be very pretty!’ It pains him that Echo has to go to school and suffer the bullies, and the teachers, drilling her into becoming a loyal, obedient citizen of the PRC. But Echo needs an education. He has no choice.

  They reach the south end of Chaoyang Park Road and Wang tells Echo that they have to call on her grandfather and Lin Hong and invite them to the park too.

  ‘Do we have to?’ Echo asks.

  ‘Yes we do.’

  Wang is firm and resolute, though he feels exactly the same way.

  Before motor aphasia slurred Wang’s father’s speech, making him sound permanently, paralytically drunk, he liked to remind his son of the money he’d wasted on him over the years. Hundreds of thousands of yuan in boarding-school fees, and then tuition for the university Wang never graduated from.

  ‘Such a privileged education,’ he laughed, ‘and what do you end up as? A taxi driver!’

  Wang Hu’s government official’s perks meant he could more than afford the expense, but he liked to remind his son of what a failure he was. So when he married Yida and started a new life, Wang resolved not to see his father again. They had barely been on speaking terms since his mother had died anyway, and had already had a long period of estrangement, stretching five years. The second time around, Wang had expected the rift to last for good.

  Then one day in 2004, when Wang was twenty-eight and hadn’t seen his father in four years, his stepmother Lin Hong called to tell him Wang Hu had had a stroke. He was now paralysed on his left side and had reduced motor function on the right. The doctors said the damage was irreversible. ‘Your father wants to see you,’ Wang’s stepmother had said, and Wang went to their apartment the next day. His father was crippled now, slumped in a wheelchair, with a bib to catch dribble tucked into his collar and an incontinence pad bulging under his pyjamas. His once-commanding speech had deteriorated to a garble only his wife could understand. Wang had looked at his father, struck down at the age of fifty-eight, and felt conflicting emotions. He had expected to feel vindication – that his father had suffered the fate he deserved. He hadn’t expected to feel so sad.

  Wang would never love his father, nor even like him much, but his stroke stirred his sense of filial duty, and he began to visit him again. He brought Echo, then aged four, to meet her grandfather for the first time, and Echo had cowered behind Wang’s legs. ‘Say hello to your grandfather,’ Wang had urged. ‘Go on, say hello.’ Upon hearing this, Wang Hu, with evident physical strain, opened his fist to reveal some glitteringly wrapped sweets. Echo shrank further back. ‘Don’t want to,’ she whispered. ‘He smells funny.’ The old man looked so hurt by this that Wang understood the stroke had changed him. That his once-domineering mind, moulded by quotations from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, had become mushy as the mashed-up peas and carrots Lin Hong spoon-fed to him. That Wang Hu was harmless now.

  The stroke transformed Wang Hu’s relationship with his second wife too. They had been married for nineteen years, and for the first fifteen Lin Hong had had no say over how her husband lived his life. She had no say over how much he smoked and drank, or how many whores he fucked and mistresses he financially supported. ‘I’ll have my lawyer prepare the divorce papers’ was Wang Hu’s response to her complaints of marital neglect. He’d made her sign a prenuptial agreement and, should they split, Lin Hong would be left without a fen.

  But now her husband can barely wipe his own backside, Lin Hong has the final say over everything. She is his primary carer, and ‘for his own good’ exacts her revenge for fifteen years of misery. She scolds her husband for soiling his incontinence pad, for drooling and other mishaps he can’t control. Cigarettes, alcohol and coffee are banned. She forbids his favourite Sichuan cuisine and feeds him over-boiled vegetables. She turns off the TV at the first hint of any gunfire or sex or anything that could raise a man’s heart rate (claiming the overstimulation would trigger another stroke). She ‘puts him down’ for his nap at two o’clock every afternoon.

  When Wang and Echo call on them to invite them to the park, Wang sees a new framed photograph on the sideboard. ‘We had it taken at a studio,’ Lin Hong tells her stepson when he asks, ‘to celebrate our wedding anniversary.’ In the photo Lin Hong grips the handles of her husband’s wheelchair as he slumps beneath her. Incarcerated in his semi-functioning body, Wang Hu looks downright suicidal. But Lin Hong, in contrast, is smiling and radiant. At forty-one she has outlived Wang Hu’s first wife by three years. Tough as nails and in her prime, Lin Hong beams at the camera, confident she won’t suffer the same tragic fate.

  As they enter the east gate of Tuan Jie Hu Park, the fog hangs over the lake and bridges and paths, and breathes sparkling drops on their coats and scarves. The fog is breathed in by them and resides for a few moments in the warm dark living cavities of their lungs. They have not brought Wang Hu in his wheelchair. Though Wang’s father had been shut in all week and wanted to come on the outing, Lin Hong insisted he was overtired and ‘put him down’ for his nap. She regards the park and the fog critically. She tugs her fur stole closer around her and stamps her spike-heeled boots.

  ‘Why do you want to go to the park on a day like this?’

  Why do you want to go to the park? Wang is tempted to remark. But he knows why. Though Lin Hong is not a blood relation, she regards Echo as her granddaughter, showering her with affection, gifts and inappropriate ‘how to be a woman’ advice.

  Though the weather is freezing, there are other park-goers strolling around. Only children, bundled up like little Eskimos, wander around the park’s fairground – the roller-skating rink, trampoline and merry-go-round – with an entourage of parents and grandparents following close behind. Most of the rides are nearly empty. A solitary boy steers about the dodgems as his father documents his progress with a clicking digital camera. A girl straddles a horse, holding a candy-striped pole as it
goes round, a lone rider on the carousel of empty-saddled horses. The boating lake is translucent with ice.

  ‘Echo, why don’t you go on a ride?’ suggests Lin Hong.

  Echo stares up at the Ferris wheel, the top carriages lost in the mist. She shakes her head, but Lin Hong eventually persuades her to go on the trampoline. Wang and Lin Hong stand shivering as Echo jumps up and down with a wobbly smile, her pigtails bouncing under her bobble hat and her woolly-socked feet barely straying from the cross marking the centre of the canvas sheet. Though she wears a duffel coat over her sweater and dungarees, Wang thinks his daughter looks cold, and he regrets not having made her put on another layer before leaving home.

  When the allotted time is over, Echo stumbles dizzily down and pulls her fleece-lined boots back on.

  ‘Wasn’t that fun! Another ride?’ asks Lin Hong.

  Echo says no and wanders ahead down the foggy path. The amusement-park rides don’t interest her. Instead she gathers frost-veined leaves and blades of grass, razor-edged with ice, and inspects them in her palm. At the lakeside she taps at the ice floes with her boots so they fissure and crack. She kneels and lifts a thin sheet of ice out of the water, holding it up, staring at the bubbles trapped in the translucent white. ‘Careful!’ cautions Lin Hong. ‘That’s dirty!’ Echo slides the ice back in the lake, floating it on the surface like a raft.

  A boy appears out of nowhere, underdressed for the cold in tennis shoes and a zipped-up tracksuit. No coat or hat or gloves or scarf. ‘Little Rabbit!’ he calls to Echo. ‘Little Rabbit!’

  ‘He goes to my school,’ Echo says, waving at him.

  ‘Where are your parents?’ Wang asks the boy.

  ‘At home,’ the boy answers.

  ‘And they let you come to the park on your own?’ Wang asks. The boy nods. Wang and Lin Hong sit on a park bench as Echo and her friend chase each other about. The boy lifts an ice sheet from a puddle, shatters it with a headbutt, and Echo covers her mouth and giggles.

  ‘Feral child,’ remarks Lin Hong. She asks Wang where Yida is. Wang tells her she has the flu.

  Wang’s teeth are chattering, his toes numb. Conversing with Lin Hong on the park bench is not so much an exchange of words but of icy gusts of air. She has a personality like fingernails on a chalkboard, setting his nerves on edge. Wang watches his daughter and the boy poking about in the shrubbery with twigs, gathering frost-baubled spider’s webs. He thrusts his hands deeper in his coat pockets as Lin Hong continues with her scathing remarks. He hopes Echo will soon want to go home.

  Wang was fourteen when he first got to know Lin Hong. He had been at boarding school since his mother’s death and hadn’t seen his father in over a year. Wang Hu hadn’t bothered to let his son know he’d remarried, so when a beautiful young woman came to his all-boys boarding school one Sunday and announced she was his stepmother, Wang was very surprised. Lin Hong was twenty-three and desperate for Wang to like her. A botched abortion had left her infertile and, devastated to learn that she would be childless, she sought out her stepson as the next best thing to a son of her own. The first time they met, Wang was wary of Lin Hong and her low-cut blouse, gold-hoop earrings and flirtatious ex-hostess manners. Out of loyalty to his mother, Wang was sullen and mute. So Lin Hong laughed and tossed her auburn-highlighted bob about, compensating for Wang’s hostility with chatty exuberance until visiting hours were up.

  Determined to make friends, Lin Hong visited again and again, presenting her new stepson with a Nintendo Game Boy, Nike Air Max, imported junk food and other trophies coveted by China’s richest children. Lin Hong enhanced Wang’s status in other ways too, as boys crowded around him after visiting hours with smutty questions about his striking, provocatively dressed stepmother. Year after year, Lin Hong visited his boarding school at weekends and public holidays. And gradually, Wang Jun came to trust and like her, and stepmother and stepson forged a friendship of sorts.

  When Wang Jun was eighteen he was offered a place to study history at Beijing University. His father, who had barely finished middle school, was proud of his son’s achievement and invited Wang to spend the summer holidays in the guest room of his brand-new apartment. Wang had spent every summer since he was thirteen in the boarding-school dormitory, but was no longer allowed to stay there after graduation. He thought about his father’s offer and decided he didn’t care about the years of paternal rejection. He needed a place to stay. So after a five-year absence, Wang went back to his father’s home.

  At high school Wang had studied punishingly hard, depriving himself of sleep and friends in his single-minded preparation for the gaokao. To recover from this, he spent most of the long hot summer of ’94 lazing about, reading paperbacks and playing video games. Wang’s father was never home. Weekdays he worked until late and slept elsewhere, and weekends he was away at the beach resort of Beidaihe. Wang’s stepmother, however, who had no job or social life, was in the apartment day and night. Whenever Wang slipped out of the guest room for a glass of orange juice, or to grab some food from the kitchen, Lin Hong would be there, flipping through a fashion magazine in one of her floaty summer dresses, strands falling loose from her piled-up hair. Or lounging on the balcony overlooking Chaoyang Park, her long slim legs stretched out in her denim cut-offs, her crimson-painted toes wiggling in the shade as she nibbled slices of watermelon and spat the pips over the rail. Though the east wall of the living room was entirely glass and the apartment heated up like a greenhouse, Lin Hong never turned on the air conditioning. The soles of her bare feet kissed the marble flooring as she wandered aimlessly from room to room. ‘I like to sweat,’ she told Wang, pulling her hair up from her perspiration-damp collar bone.

  In the evenings Lin Hong mixed pitchers of cocktails, and she and Wang stayed up drinking until late on the balcony, gazing out at the tenth-floor view of thousands of lights twinkling in the city, as burning coils of mosquito repellent scented the air. Though the vodka and gin went some way to lessening Wang’s awkwardness, he was still very shy, and Lin Hong dominated the conversation most nights. Lin Hong liked to talk. About her lonely sham of a marriage. About how her romantic life was over at the age of twenty-seven. About how worthless she was. Wang nearly fell out of his chair reassuring Lin Hong she was beautiful and clever. All she needed, he assured her, was the courage to live her life. Every night he listened sympathetically to her monologue of sorrows. Every night he was aroused and confused by her flirty little games.

  ‘Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Wang Jun?’ she asked. ‘You’re a handsome, eligible bachelor, right? I bet you could screw any girl you wanted.’

  Wang said nothing and blushed.

  ‘You must da feiji all the time,’ she added with a knowing smile.

  Da feiji. Beat the aeroplane. Wang wanted to spontaneously combust with shame. Did Lin Hong know it had become his habit to do this, twice a day, while stripping her of her sundress and cotton bikini briefs in his mind? His stepmother smiled.

  ‘One day you’ll do it for real. Why don’t we wait and see . . .’

  One evening in August Wang’s father showed up at the apartment. He called his son out of the darkened lair of the guest room.

  ‘Shower! Shave! Put on a clean shirt. And you can borrow a pair of my shoes. I’m taking you for a night out on the town. You can’t spend the whole summer holed up playing computer games.’

  As Wang went to take a shower he saw, out of the corner of his eye, Lin Hong flounce into her bedroom and slam the door. But he put it out of his mind. His father was a stranger to him, and the opportunity to visit his shady nocturnal world was too interesting to pass up.

  The nightclub, the first one Wang had been to, had a dance floor of pulsing neon and a lounge of faux-brocade-upholstered chairs and velvet curtains. Father and son sat at a table and a waiter immediately brought over a bottle of whisky and a tray of sashimi, sliced Kobe beef and other gourmet snacks. Wang’s father stuffed a Vietnamese spring roll in his mouth and nodded approvingly at the
hostesses in spangly dresses on the dance floor. The teenage girls had white gardenias tucked behind their ears, and the way they wobbled in their stilettos reminded Wang of little girls dressed up in their mothers’ shoes.

  When his colleagues arrived, Wang Hu introduced his son with pride. ‘He’s going to Beijing University this year. Graduated first in his class at high school. Inherited his old man’s intellect, eh?’ Other work associates joined them. Some CEOs of agribusinesses, one of whom Wang Hu jokingly introduced as a Dirt Emperor, a billionaire of peasant origins who’d made his fortune manufacturing fertilizer. The Dirt Emperor wore a brick of gold on his finger and when he congratulated Wang in his thick Shanxi accent, nuggets of gold winked in his teeth.

  After the introductions, Wang sank back with a beer and watched his father. Now forty-eight, Wang Hu had aged remarkably well. His hair, dyed politburo black, was thick as ever, and the lines on his face, instead of diminishing his handsome looks, lent them a distinguished air. Wang Hu was in his element in the company of other powerful men. He was outgoing and charismatic, with a deep and easy laugh that rumbled up from his belly, and a natural ability to strike up a wise-cracking, back-slapping camaraderie with just about anyone. Wang was bewildered by how different he was from the cold and distant stranger he had known as a child. Noticing his son watching him, Wang Hu leant over and grinned. ‘Do you like those girls dancing? Pick one. I’ll invite her over to talk with you.’