The Incarnations

7. Year of the Rat

‘WHAT ARE YOU reading, Driver Wang?’

Wang blinks up at her. Rain, her name is Rain. Seventeen years old. ‘Hip-hop baby’ T-shirt and acid-washed, hip-hugging jeans. One of the not-so-pretty ones, but not from lack of lip gloss and efforts with the curling tongs. Rain taps her foot. Her eyes are so bored and vacant they verge on hostility. The transition from past to present disorientates Wang. Reading? He looks down at the pages he has spent the last two hours shuffling in his hands.

‘A story,’ he says.

‘What kind of story?’

‘A Tang Dynasty folktale.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not interested in history?’ he asks.

Silver earrings jingle as she shakes her head. She has a dish cloth in her hand. ‘I need to wipe the table.’

Rain is from the same Sichuan village as all the kitchen girls, and came to Beijing to take over from her pregnant cousin, knocked up by Driver Li. Recently graduated from junior high, Rain’s cheeks had dimpled on her first working day, as she smiled at the drivers, full of good cheer. But four months in Beijing have changed her. Now during the lunch rush Rain has the same attitude of the other sourpusses. Humourless and efficient. Sullenly dragging her heels against the fate of marrying a driver.

‘You’re here late, Driver Wang,’ Rain says. ‘It’s three o’clock. Don’t you have a job to do?’

Wang curses. Three o’clock. Scraping back his chair, he stands to leave.

‘Happy New Year,’ says Rain.

‘Happy New Year,’ he says.

The other girls are chattering in Chongqing dialect, humming Taiwanese pop songs and dreaming of brighter futures than being stuck in the kitchen of a taxi-driver canteen. They see Driver Wang is leaving, but don’t wave goodbye.

The story is a work of plagiarism, Wang is certain of it. Stolen from a book or printed off the internet. But by who? Someone from boarding school? University? Wang has lost touch with everyone he knew back then — mostly out of pride, because he knows they will pity what he has become. But he ought to track a few people down anyway, and find out if the hoax has been perpetuated amongst others too. Wang swigs bitter tea from the flask, planning this in a hazy way, doubting he will follow through.

Through the taxi windscreen he watches scavengers picking over the rubble of a demolished building, looking for bricks, wiring and pipes to sell. A recycling collector pedals by, wobbling beneath a two-metre-high stack of polystyrene, like an ant carrying a huge leaf. Skyscrapers loom in the distance, casting no shadow under the smoggy sky. Wang stares at the corporate monoliths of glass and steel, the multimillion-RMB deals taking place within them a mystery to him. The Beijing of street level is what he knows best. The Beijing of hawkers and hustlers, where the have-nots scrabble over the scraps of the haves.

Fireworks. The explosions began around noon. Bright flashes, showering golden sparks. Through the window recently cleaned by her father, Echo watches the day fireworks, her fingers pressed against the pane. Lightning in reverse, shooting from earth to sky. The fuses ignited by Beijingers too impatient to wait for darkness to detonate their gunpowder hoard. Echo awaits the booms and bangs with suspended breath. Evil spirits, she thinks, the fireworks are scaring the evil spirits away. She breathes on the glass and watches the flashes of creation through the steam.

Yida is cleaning. Every lunar New Year’s Eve she capitulates to superstition and sweeps and dusts the previous year’s bad luck out of Apartment 404. She borrows one of Wang’s ragged old shirts, bundles her curls into a red bandana and gathers cleaning sprays and dusters, like weapons for a battle to be fought. Rubber-gloved, she scours the kitchen, clattering pots and pans as she purges the cupboards of past-the-sell-by-date tins. She scrubs the counter as if it is a guilty conscience she is determined to purge with scalding water and bleach.

When she has finished, she strips and stands under the shower, the hot spray needling her scalp. The last of the purification rituals, the soaping of dirt from every pore.

In the evening Wang prepares drunken empress chicken, steamed sea bass with ginger and spring onions and stewed pork belly with aubergine. Fireworks blast like heavy artillery as they eat. Car alarms wail like the sirens of war. The TV is dominated by the snowstorms in central and southern China. Millions of migrant workers travelling back home for the Spring Festival, to see family not seen all year, are stranded in crowds of tens of thousands outside railway stations. Wang flips between TV channels. Wen Jiabao making a patriotic speech outside a train station in Changsha, birthplace of Chairman Mao. A montage of scenes of People’s Liberation Army troops bounding heroically through the snow. A stranded migrant worker unable to return to Hunan to see his wife and child, who says, ‘This is a natural disaster. We Chinese have more than our fair share of natural disasters, but we always rise up and overcome.’

‘One hundred million stranded,’ Yida murmurs. ‘Or was it two hundred million?’

A newscaster says the death toll so far is one hundred.

‘Not so many. .’ Yida says. ‘Echo, eat your fish!’

At ten to midnight the Wangs go out into the freezing cold, to detonate their 200 RMB of fireworks. The night blazes with light, as though all of Beijing has banded together to fight an enemy in the sky. Sneezing at the gunpowder smoke and watching in excitement as the rockets whiz-bang up to the sky. Wang is in charge of lighting the fuses. Amid the carnage of exploded fireworks, charred red paper tubes, trampled and flattened underfoot, he crouches, sparks a lighter, steps back. Yida stands behind Echo, her arms protectively around her, her hands covering Echo’s small ears as she screams in delight.

The pandemonium of midnight comes and goes. Kneeling to light another fuse, Wang realizes that he is completely and utterly numb. That the empty and mechanical state of mind he lapses into behind the wheel has stayed with him hours after leaving the taxi and spending time at home with Echo and Yida.

New Year’s Day will be the same as last year. Firecrackers at dawn as the neighbours’ kids rush out to celebrate the first day of Spring Festival. The lion dance at the Dongyue Temple Fair, candyfloss and games. Then a visit to his father, punctually at four o’clock, the time they agreed. Wang Hu dribbling in his wheelchair, and Lin Hong wrinkling her powdered nose as she hands them hongbao and expensive gifts in department-store bags. Chocolates from a Belgian chocolatier. A red-and-gold stuffed toy rat for Echo. They will stay and make polite small talk for twenty minutes, then leave. Back home they will fill dumpling dough with minced pork for New Year’s jiaozi. They will watch more song-and-dance extravaganzas on TV.

When they go to bed, Wang’s ears are ringing hard, the inside of his eyelids incandescent with eruptions of light. He can feel it dragging him down again. The lethargy and apathy and ebbing of desire to be in the world that broke him down years ago.

‘Yida?’ he whispers.

Beside him, Yida mumbles but does not wake.

Sleep won’t come, so he stares into darkness as the city explodes.