The Incarnations

20. Yida

CHAUFFEUR’S HAT ON head, white-gloved hands on the steering wheel, Driver Mao was proud to serve the Communist Party cadres. He was proud to lend a hand in the cadres’ messy domestic affairs and drive their clinically depressed wives to the psychiatrist’s, their homesick six-year-olds to boarding school and pregnant mistresses to the abortion clinic. One of these mistresses, escorted against her will, was Lin Hong. She had told her stepson about it, the summer they were friends. Lin Hong had wept and spat at Driver Mao, and told him his conscience had been eaten by wolves. And Driver Mao had wiped her saliva from his cheek with a white-gloved hand and calmly said, ‘I have orders to stay with you until the general anaesthetic. It’s my duty.’ This is how Driver Mao serves the nation and protects the image of the Party. He had no moral calling higher than that.

On the day Wang left the hospital, the same Driver Mao was waiting outside. He drove him to the building in Maizidian where he had grown up and handed him a set of keys. ‘Do you need assistance with your luggage?’ he asked. Wang, who had nothing but a rucksack, said he could manage.

Wang let himself in and saw that Apartment 404 was its same dark self: the furniture arranged as it was nearly a decade ago, the curtains drawn. He dropped his backpack with a thud, and breathed the stagnant air. He sensed the atmosphere shifting around him, to accommodate his human form. Uninhabited for ten years, stillness had reigned over his childhood home.

The bedroom was not the same, though, for every trace of Li Shuxiang had been removed. The hangers in her wardrobe were empty and her hundreds of novels and books of poetry missing from the shelves. Wang’s father must have arranged for a recycling collector to clear out her things. He would never dirty his own hands with the task.

In the kitchen, Wang held the tea kettle under the tap and the pipes shuddered as water came through. He put the kettle on the stove, next to the battered wok, and sparked the gas ring. Then he stared out of the window, watching the grannies and retired Ministry of Agriculture cadres in the yard as the water came to the boil. He recognized some faces from ten years ago, and the familiarity both comforted Wang and filled him with despair.

The tea kettle was whistling when the key clattered in the front door, the pressured shriek of steam, metal vibrations and rattling door coming together as one. The door slammed and a flamenco stamp of heels came across the cement floor. Lin Hong stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing large sunglasses and a cocktail dress like a throwback from her eighties hostessing days. Her perfume was so overpowering, Wang thought the only explanation for it was that it was sprayed on as a weapon, meant to asphyxiate him. She did not smile at her stepson, or remove her sunglasses. ‘You’re back then,’ she said.

Lin Hong put a shopping bag on the table and pulled out a bottle of Great Wall red wine, paper cups and a styrofoam box of noodles.

‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Your father cannot come to see you today. He has important meetings all day. He sends his regards.’

Hungry, Wang sat at the table to eat, and Lin Hong removed a corkscrew from her leather bag, uncorked the wine bottle and tipped some into a paper cup. Now that he was closer to her, Wang saw that Lin Hong had been meddling with her face, bleaching her skin and injecting collagen in her lips. She lifted her cup.

‘To your freedom! Ganbei!’

Lin Hong knocked the wine back, then reached for the bottle and poured a refill. Sipping on her second cup, she watched from behind her sunglasses as her stepson opened the styrofoam container and dug into the noodles stir-fried with green pepper and pork.

‘Tell me about the lunatics,’ she said. ‘Do they bark like dogs? Do they think they are Mao Zedong?’

‘No,’ said Wang.

Many are more sane than you, he thought. Lin Hong smiled, and asked more questions. What caused his breakdown? Academic pressures? Dumped by a lover? Or was it hereditary, from his crazy mother? Wang stuffed noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks and did not reply.

‘We heard from Dr Fu you had a little friend in the hospital.’ Wang looked warily up. Behind her dark glasses, Lin Hong’s eyes were glittering. ‘Now it all makes sense. You were so strange as a teenager,’ she laughed. ‘I knew something wasn’t right.’

‘Dr Fu doesn’t know what he is talking about,’ Wang said.

Lin Hong smirked. ‘Frankly, I find it disgusting. Most normal people do.’

Wang’s cheeks burned. He pushed his noodles away and mentally willed her to go. Lin Hong reached into her leather bag and pulled out some forms, stapled at the corner. She tossed them over to him.

‘Registration forms. Your father met with the head of your history department last week. They are going to let you repeat your final year. You can go and register in August.’

‘I don’t want to repeat my final year,’ Wang said. ‘I’m not going back.’

His stepmother laughed. ‘Not going back? What will you do instead? You can’t stay here. Your father wants to give up the lease.’

‘I will find a job,’ Wang said.

Lin Hong shook her head, her sleek bob shimmering. ‘Your father will be furious. He wined and dined the head of the history department for you. Not to mention the other expenses the arrangement incurred.’

‘I don’t care,’ Wang said. ‘Going back to university is not what I want.’

Lin Hong shrugged again. Whether or not her stepson got a degree was of no concern to her. She gathered up her bag, and said she had an appointment. ‘Do you have any money?’ she asked.

Wang looked away and said nothing. ‘Of course not,’ she smiled, and flung some 100-RMB notes on the table.

Not looking at the money, but at his stepmother’s dark glasses, Wang asked suddenly, ‘Why the sunglasses, Lin Hong?’

She removed them, exposing her swollen eyelids and the postsurgery stitches on her widened epicanthus folds. She fixed him with a defiant stare. ‘Why are you so determined to be a loser, Wang Jun? You could take advantage of being your father’s son. You could be successful like him. But instead you prefer to do nothing and be nobody.’ She slid the sunglasses back over her eyes and walked out, her stilettos clattering like shots fired from a pellet gun.

After she’d gone Wang unlatched the windows and opened them wide on hinges creaking from lack of use. The stench of her perfume had overrun the apartment like a malodorous cat scratching the furniture and pissing everywhere. It bothered him that Lin Hong had a copy of the key. It bothered him that she could come back when she pleased.

Solitude. Long, hot showers. The spaciousness of the double bed. Wang did not take for granted the simple things denied to him in hospital. He chopped vegetables and listened to the local radio station, slow-cooking soups on the hob. He swept and mopped the dust of inhabitation from the floor. The apartment had remained undecorated since the block went up in the seventies, and the walls were drab and needed a coat of paint, so he bought tins of white and painted compulsively for nine hours straight. When he finished he stood back, woozy with fumes, his joints and muscles sore, and admired the whitewashed walls. Wang had the sense that his past was contained within those walls. That his former life with Shuxiang had been absorbed by the concrete, and was interred there still, under the coats of white.

On the nights Wang couldn’t sleep, he thought of Zeng and masturbated. When he came, his remorse was immediate, and his longing to be normal again intense. But he was not normal. He couldn’t stop fantasizing about living with Zeng and sharing a bed and the rituals of everyday life. During the day the idea of him and Zeng living together was absurd. But in the hours of darkness it seemed like a chance of happiness he was foolish not to pursue.

To end the sleepless nights Wang set his alarm for six every morning, and dragged himself up when it rang. Groggy, he spread a folding map of Beijing out on the table and circled his forefinger above the districts of the city. Then Wang would bring the finger down on a random place, and that would be his destination for the day. He washed, shaved and dressed and then set out, the map folded in the back pocket of his jeans.

Tens of kilometres per day. Hundreds of kilometres per week. As he roamed across the city thousands of sensory impressions passed through him: the din of traffic, the put-put of motorized rickshaws, and strange-tasting chemicals in the air. Perceptions that entered his senses fleetingly resided in him, then vanished without a trace. At the end of each day he went home and showered, rinsing the sweat and grime away. He would cook and eat a simple meal, then tumble into bed and fall asleep without a single thought in his head.

It was on the walks across Beijing that he decided to become a taxi driver. To drive to every part of the city and meet people from every walk of life. Wang got a driver’s licence and, with his father’s string-pulling, signed up with a taxi company (vowing he’d never again ask for his help). By the end of the summer he was co-renting a Xiali sedan with another driver and supporting himself with his earnings. The next phase of his life was underway.

The day he met her, the clouds had been congregating since dawn, oppressive and tenebrous and gathering negative charge. Though it was late September, Wang had the windows rolled down, and was perspiring as he drove about the city, thirsting for a cold beer. When the city darkened as though in premature dusk, and lightning forked the sky, Wang was relieved. The tension in the atmosphere dissipated as the storm broke loose.

The girl stood near Dongzhimen subway, conspicuously still as those around her ran for shelter as though bombs were falling out of the sky. The downpour had soaked her to the skin, but she didn’t appear to care about catching a cold. Though she hadn’t flagged him down, Wang swerved over to her, his windscreen wipers slashing full speed. She pulled the latch of the passenger door and climbed in the front seat, as though his taxi was exactly what she’d been waiting for. The girl was twentyish, the same age as Wang. Her T-shirt and skirt were wringing, but she was unapologetic as her damp shadow seeped across the upholstery. She moved her feet and her canvas shoes squelched.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

She looked at him dismissively and named a street in the south. Her voice was husky and low, her accent that of someone who’d grown up far from Beijing. Wang pulled away from the kerb.

The wind shook the trees on Dongzhimen Avenue, stripping the branches of leaves. Lightning splintered the sky and water crashed on the windscreen faster than the wipers could clear it away. Wang stole glances at the girl, illuminated by the halogen arcs of street lights slanting into the car. She was wringing out her hair, both hands squeezing it into a rope that dripped on to her denim-skirted lap. Then she stared straight ahead, biting her lower lip, raindrops studding her nose, her eyelashes in wet spikes. Wang shifted awkwardly in the driver’s seat. He had been a driver for three weeks and hoped the girl wouldn’t notice his inexperience. He hoped he wouldn’t lose his way and have to consult a map.

The girl shivered beside him. A sneeze threw her towards the dashboard, and Wang turned the heater on full. Nervous of her prettiness, he asked her where she was from.

‘Anhui,’ she said. How long had she been in Beijing? ‘Two years.’

‘Why were you standing in the rain without an umbrella?’ he asked.

‘Just because.’

Her reticence had nothing to do with shyness, and they lapsed into a silence during which Wang imagined tugging her clinging T-shirt over her head and stroking and fondling her damp breasts.

The rain came down harder. It crashed down on the windscreen as though they were passing under a waterfall. The wiper blades slashed uselessly. Visibility was down to a few metres and Wang could barely see the tail lights of the car in front. He held the steering wheel steady and slowed his speed.

‘Fuck!’ cursed the girl. ‘Drive carefully. Don’t crash the fucking car!’

‘You can get out here if you want,’ Wang said.

They were driving through a desolate region of the city, a wasteland of construction sites with industrial cranes and crater lakes of rain and sand. The girl scowled and said nothing else.

Minutes later, Wang pulled up at the street of run-down buildings that was her destination. ‘Thirty kuai,’ he said, reading the meter. Then he waited for her to pay the fare and disappear back into the city of twelve million strangers. Good, he thought. He couldn’t wait for her to go. Outside, the storm raged on, battering the streets. The girl stared into her lap.

‘I don’t have any money,’ she said eventually.

Wang turned to look at her. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You can pay me another time.’

His kindness was too much for her, and the girl shuddered with a deep sob. She pressed her hands to her mouth and shook. Wang watched her awkwardly.

‘Something bad happen to you today?’ he asked.

‘They fired me from my job.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ll find another job. There are lots of jobs in Beijing.’

‘I hated it anyway. I worked in the toilets in Dongzhimen subway station. Worst job I’ve done in my life.’

Wang laughed, and the girl looked at him properly for the first time.

‘You’re young to be a taxi driver,’ she sniffed, wiping her eyes.

Wang shook his head. ‘I’m old. I’m twenty-two. I have wrinkles around my eyes.’

The girl squinted at his face. ‘So you do,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll call you lao shifu then.’

Then she smiled, but as though her heart was breaking, and Wang knew that she needed saving from more than the rain.

Her name was Ma Yida. ‘Yida,’ Wang whispered in his head, liking the sound of it. She slapped the table, leaning towards him in a conspiratorial manner.

‘Let’s get drunk,’ she suggested. ‘Let’s get so drunk we pass out in the gutter.’

The waitress, pen hovering over order pad, narrowed her eyes. Yida’s smile was beatific and wide: ‘Bring us four bottles of Tsingdao!’

Other refugees crowded the restaurant, fleeing the storm to order pots of tea and watch the red lanterns swinging wildly from the awning in the wind. In the kitchen, visible through a hatch in the wall, the chef pulled noodles from strands of dough and dumplings steamed in baskets of woven bamboo. Yida’s clothes were drenched. When Wang suggested she dry them, she shrugged. ‘They’ll dry eventually.’ So Wang offered her his jacket and was relieved when she accepted, covering her see-through wet T-shirt, clinging to her bra-cupped breasts. When the beer came she poured it out carelessly, frothing the glasses up with spilling foam.

‘Ganbei! To the Beijing Subway Authority!’ she cried, holding up her glass.

She knocked it back, then poured another. She wrinkled her nose at Wang’s offer of a cigarette, denouncing the brand as ‘filthy-tasting’, then lit one, and over the course of the evening chainsmoked most of the pack. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she insisted as Wang ordered. ‘All I want is to drink enough to fall down drunk.’ But when the dishes arrived Yida stuffed herself like a starving peasant. Wang ate a bowl of noodles then lit a cigarette, leaning back in his chair to watch her eating dumplings. The stark fluorescent lighting stripped away the shadowy mystery she’d had in his taxi, exposing the odd pimple, chapped, flaking lips and other imperfections that in no way diminished her looks. She had arresting eyes, mostly brown, but with splinters of jade glinting in her irises. Spirals of curls sprung up about her head as her hair became drier, and Wang wanted to reach out and touch them. When she went for napkins, heads turned in appreciation of her pretty face and bare legs in a short skirt. And though he’d known her for less than two hours, Wang felt a mixture of possessiveness and pride.

When the dishes were empty, Yida put a hand on her stomach and groaned, ‘I’m stuffed!’ Then she lit a cigarette and began to talk. Wang liked the low, husky pitch of her voice. He liked her strong Anhui accent and flawed command of Mandarin. There was a hint of performance in her outpourings, the theatricality of a lonely girl keen to keep her audience captive, now someone cared enough to listen.

‘Girls don’t matter as much as boys,’ she told him. ‘That’s why my parents didn’t care that I went so far away. They have my younger brother. Married couples in our village are allowed two, if the first-born is a girl.’

She had failed the high school entrance exams — not that her parents could afford to send her anyway.

‘They are saving all their money for his education,’ Yida said. ‘I bought a fake high school certificate once, but never used it. Who needs qualifications anyway? Eating bitter, that’s the only qualification I need in life.’

Ma Yida’s first job was in a factory when she was fifteen, attaching plastic blond hair to pink dolls. She moved to Beijing at seventeen. ‘I sent money home for a year or two, and I used to call them too. But now my family and I are out of touch.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll go back there one day. Not now, though. Unfilial, aren’t I?’

Yida had worked two years of jobs that native Beijingers don’t want to do. She’d been lied to, tricked and exploited, cheated out of her wages and abused. She’d left her job as a lift attendant after spending a night trapped in a lift which had ground to a mechanical halt (the caretaker, to save on the night call-out fee, had waited until the morning to call a repair man). She’d left her job as a waitress when the boss groped her in the storeroom, amongst the rice sacks and aluminium drums of oil.

‘I kicked him in the balls,’ Yida said, stabbing the air with her lit cigarette. ‘He never fucked with any waitresses ever again.’

Wang nodded, not sure whether to believe her. Yida slept on a mattress in a room shared by six migrant workers, all of them from Anhui province, all of them dirt poor. When it came to workers’ rights, they had none at all.

Yida had been a toilet attendant in Dongzhimen subway station for six weeks. The toilets were on the underground platform, between the tracks and the trains rumbling north and south. Yida’s supervisor was an overweight, overbearing man in his fifties. ‘All men are equal, everyone has to take a shit’ was his motto. It was supposed to make them feel better about the job.

‘He hated me on sight. Accused me of having a bad attitude. Tell me, Driver Wang, what kind of attitude would you have being around all that pissing and shitting, day in, day out? Every night I go home and stand under the shower for half an hour, but I can’t rinse off the filth. That’s why I was standing in the rain: to get clean.’

Working in the subway, Yida got to know the beggars who worked the circular line tunnelling clockwise and anticlockwise beneath Beijing, shaking their money-collecting tins as they limped through the carriages, frightening commuters with their deformities.

‘The cripples. The burnt ones. The blind ones. Some are so disgusting they made me want to puke. But when you get to know them, they are just like us. Some are mean bastards, of course, but some I get on really well with. Some of them are really funny. You need a sense of humour when your legs are amputated and you are dragging yourself about by your hands.’

Her supervisor had seen the beggars hanging about by the hand-washing sinks, chatting with Yida as she mopped the floor. ‘They smell bad,’ he told Yida. ‘They scare the commuters.’ He warned her that if he saw the beggars loitering by the toilets again he’d fire her, and Yida hadn’t had the heart to tell them to go away.

It was close to midnight when they left the restaurant, the waitresses stacking chairs and sweeping around them. The streets were still after the storm, with only the odd drip of rainwater falling from the branches of trees. They swayed with drunkenness, laughing and splashing each other in puddles. Then they got into Wang’s taxi and drove to his apartment in Maizidian, where Yida finally removed her damp clothes and Wang got to run his fingers through her long and tangled curls. The next morning they drove to Yida’s place for her things. It took her ten minutes to pack everything she owned into two woven-plastic bags and bring them down to his cab.

Back then, she was a miracle. She moved into his lonely bachelor apartment and her laughter chased out the bad memories and ghosts. She sang along to Faye Wong cassettes, smoked cigarettes and painted her toenails on the bed. She strolled out of the shower wearing nothing but glistening beads of water running down her skin, and it stopped his heart. Yida was not a housewife. She let the dishes pile up in the sink and burnt the pan when cooking rice, covering the stove top with starchy, boiled-over scum. But under her spell of chemicals and lust, Wang couldn’t care less. Every night he held her lithe and slender body in his arms, and never once thought of Zeng Yan.

Yida turned her back on the migrant community she had lived amongst. She threw herself at Wang with every molecule of her being. Wang was her salvation, though she pretended otherwise.

‘When you get sick of me, just tell me to go away,’ she said breezily. ‘I’ll pack up my things and you’ll never see me again. It will be as if I never even existed. No hard feelings, I swear.’

Wang didn’t believe her for a second. Yida was fooling nobody. Yida had come to stay.

The first time he took her to meet his father, he was surprised by how intimidated Yida was by the foyer of his building, with its doormen, faux-crystal chandeliers and marble floor. In the lift, on the way up, she was quiet. The wind had blown her curls into messiness on the walk there, and she frowned in the mirrored lift walls, combing them through with her fingers.

‘I wish I’d brought a hairbrush,’ she fretted.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Wang. ‘They’re idiots. You’ll see. Once we get what we want out of him, we’ll get out of here.’

The maid answered the door, and they exchanged their shoes for guest slippers and padded down the lushly carpeted hall. Glamour photos of Lin Hong, taken at a professional portrait studio, decorated the walls. There was Lin Hong posing as a thirties Shanghai movie star in a silk qipao. Lin Hong swinging a lasso as a cowgirl in jeans and gingham blouse. Lin Hong as a high-kicking showgirl, with feathers in her hair. Wang had to stifle his laughter at this photographic vanity project, which seemed to offer a glimpse into his stepmother’s fantasy lives.

Bright lamps banished the wintry gloom from the dining room as Wang’s father and Lin Hong sat at the table, chopsticks dipping Cantonese dim sum in saucers of sauce. They both looked up when Wang and his new girlfriend entered the room.

‘Driver Wang!’ father greeted son. ‘Come in. Sit! Eat! Introduce us to your new friend.’

Seats were taken, introductions were made. Wang Hu asked Yida where she was from, then spoke nostalgically of trips to Anhui, with a charm and eloquence he never used with his wife or son. Lin Hong sipped tea and watched her husband flirting with the girl. Ling Hong knew she was superior to the Anhui girl in many ways. The girl had bronze skin and wiry curly hair and was swamped in a baggy jumper borrowed from her stepson. In contrast, Lin Hong’s skin was flawless with Estée Lauder foundation, her hair sleek, and her elegant cashmere sweater dress clung in all the right places. But the girl was twenty, and Lin Hong was thirty-two. And even if she sat in the beautician’s round the clock, Lin Hong would never be twenty again. She picked up a prawn dumpling with her chopsticks and put it on Yida’s plate.

‘Please eat!’ she smiled. ‘We ordered these dumplings from the finest dim-sum restaurant in Beijing. Wang Jun could never afford to take you there on his taxi driver’s salary. Eat as much of this as you can!’

Yida smiled uncertainly and thanked Lin Hong. Wang Hu bit into an egg-custard tart. The pastry flaked and custard oozed down his chin.

‘How’s the taxi driving going?’ he asked his son.

‘Fine,’ said Wang.

In reality, the twelve-hour days behind the wheel were stressful and exhausting, and the romanticism Wang had attached to the profession was fading fast. But he kept this from his father.

‘How’s the salary? Earning enough?’

‘We get by.’

‘How much are you earning per month exactly? One thousand five hundred? Two thousand?’

‘We get by.’

‘We get by,’ mimicked his father. ‘We get by. I would never have sent you to such an expensive boarding school if I’d known you were going to end up as an urban peasant and get by.’

Wang shrugged. Love had inoculated him against his father’s jibes. ‘Actually, we came to tell you some news,’ he said. His eyes met Yida’s and a smile broke across her face. ‘Yida and I are getting married.’

Wang Hu took the news in his stride. He bared his tobacco-stained teeth in a wide and magnanimous grin.

‘Congratulations! You are a lucky man!’ Then he smiled at Yida and joked, ‘Are you sure about marrying my son? Driving a taxi is hardly the Iron Rice Bowl, is it?’

Lin Hong’s tight smile did nothing to conceal her dismay. What poor taste Wang Jun had. The Anhui girl was pretty, she had to concede, but that was all she had going for her. It wouldn’t last. She could just tell.

‘This calls for a toast!’ she said. ‘Let’s open a bottle of champagne!’ She shouted some instructions to the maid, and Wang cleared his throat, dreading what he had to ask next.

‘Ba. . we need some help with Yida’s hukou,’ he said. ‘Do you know some people who can help us?’

His father smiled and, to Wang’s relief, assured them he would take care of it first thing Monday morning. The maid came in with a bottle of chilled, imported sparkling white wine and poured it into narrow, long-stemmed glasses. They raised their drinks.

‘To your future happiness,’ said Wang Hu.

Lin Hong knocked back her glass. As soon as the alcohol was inside her, diffusing into her bloodstream, her mood lifted.

‘Do you have a job?’ she asked Yida, careful not to afford her the dignity of calling her by her name.

‘I am looking for one,’ Yida said.

‘Maybe they need cleaners or toilet attendants in this building. Shall I ask?’

‘That’s okay. I can look myself.’

Yida met Lin Hong’s eyes with a steady, level gaze. Wang Hu grinned and raised his glass again.

‘To my beautiful new daughter-in-law. May she find employment soon!’

Lin Hong glared at her husband and his open show of lust. Noticing his stepmother’s foul mood, Wang began to plan their exit. Now his father had agreed to help with Yida’s residence papers, there was no reason to stay.

‘Why don’t you look for a job in a karaoke parlour?’ Lin Hong said to Yida. ‘The Lucky Eight Club or the Executive Club?’

Yida stared at her plate, her cheeks turning red, and Wang Hu chuckled. Both clubs were notorious for whisky-soused businessmen and prostitutes. He knew them well. Lin Hong’s eyes gleamed. She reeled off the names of some more brothels, and Wang Jun looked at her sharply.

‘That’s enough, Lin Hong!’ he said.

Lin Hong widened her eyes at him.

‘Why are you so upset? If she doesn’t have a high school diploma, then she can’t be too fussy. .’

Yida pushed her chair back and stood up.

‘Wang Jun told me about your past,’ she said to Lin Hong, ‘and I’d rather be poor than spread my legs for officials the way you used to. Just because I didn’t graduate from high school doesn’t mean I have to become a whore!’

Then she turned and stormed out. Wang Hu laughed and clapped his hands.

‘You’ve picked a fiery one!’ he called after his son, now chasing after Yida. ‘Your marriage is going to be interesting, that’s for sure!’

Lin Hong sat in her chair. Ten years ago she’d have chased after the girl. Ten years ago she’d have fought her and scratched out her eyes. But Lin Hong wasn’t as tough as she used to be, and her loss of nerve dismayed her as much as her loss of youth. The front door slammed, and Lin Hong turned to her husband.

‘You should have seen how pathetic you looked! A wrinkled old man like you, lusting after his son’s girlfriend.’

Before she could finish, Wang Hu leant across the table and slapped her. He slapped her with a look of boredom and irritation, as though swatting a fly, or a minor pest he wanted to silence. Then he stood up and turned away from his wife’s tedious melodrama; the wounded look in her eyes, the hand clasped to her cheek. He walked out of the dining room, yawning as he headed to the bedroom to sleep off his lunch.

Out in the street, they were laughing so hard they couldn’t stand. Wang had a painful stitch in his side, and Yida’s eyes streamed with tears. ‘I think I just peed myself,’ she sobbed, making them laugh even harder. They started walking in the direction of Maizidian, but didn’t get far before recalling Lin Hong’s shock, and collapsing into laughter again.

‘I warned you they were idiots, didn’t I?’ said Wang. He pulled her close, his laughter dying down as he cupped her cold face between his hands. ‘Let’s get married tomorrow. I don’t want to wait any longer. I want you to be my wife.’