‘How much compensation are they offering you?’ my mother asks.
‘3,000 yuan a square metre. So all I’ll get is 18,000 yuan, which isn’t nearly enough to buy a new flat around here.’
‘Why don’t you move to Tongxian?’ An Qi says. ‘It’s only an hour away by bus. Our block is dilapidated. I keep asking the neighbourhood committee if it’s going to be pulled down, but they tell me there are still no plans.’
‘Don’t worry. You live inside the second ring road. The government said that everything inside the third ring road will be demolished, so they’ll get to you eventually.’ My mother comes over to check whether the enamel basin my urine tube empties into is full. Although her constant jabbering is infuriating, I know that no one else would have had the patience to look after me like this for all these years.
‘I hope I can move into a flat like this, with central heating and running water,’ Gui Lan says. ‘My room in the courtyard house gets so cold in winter. And I hate having to use the dirty communal toilets at the end of the lane.’
‘We used to live in a traditional courtyard house,’ An Qi says. ‘We had to share it with eight other families. It was so cramped.’
‘At least in those single-storey houses you don’t have neighbours above you or below you,’ my mother says. ‘And there are no stairs to climb. When I get older and my joints seize up, I don’t know how I’ll make it up these six flights of stairs.’
‘I’d like to live in one of those modern apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows, like the ones you see in the television adverts.’
‘I read in the papers that the authorities are going to tear down all the ancient buildings in Beijing apart from the Forbidden City, and replace them with high-rise tower blocks made of concrete, steel and glass. It will look just like New York.’
It’s dark outside by the time the two women leave the flat. The sound of them shuffling paper and cracking pumpkin seeds between their teeth still hovers in the air, together with the smell of the cucumber omelette my mother fried yesterday.
Your conversations with the past stir your muscles from their sleep.
In the evening, my mother sits on a chair at the end of my bed and rubs my clenched toes. Then she takes out my father’s journal again. After flicking through a few pages she begins to read out loud. ‘“People who have beds to lie on are so lucky. They can dream their lives away…” Huh, that sounds just like him. Your father was very cocky as a young man. He kept bragging that he’d be a famous violinist one day. But look what a frightened little mouse he became in the Cultural Revolution. “People who have beds to lie on are so lucky!” Ha! He wouldn’t say that if he could see you lying here now!’
The mirror frame my father never finished making is underneath this bed, together with a broken wooden chair he picked up on the street. I remember him saying it was a Ming Dynasty chair, and that people in America would pay a lot of money for it.
‘“. . Everyone is sent to work in the fields, irrespective of age or rank. I’m so frail, I collapse from exhaustion after a couple of hours. The officers award flags at the end of the day, depending on how much soil we dig. We get an entire steamed roll for a red flag, half a roll for a yellow one, a quarter of a roll for a blue one, and only an eighth of a roll for a black one. We have to dig four cubic metres of earth to get a red flag. Very few people can manage it. If you dig all day, hoping to get a red flag, but end up with a yellow one, you faint from hunger. If you’re very unlucky and only get awarded a blue flag, you could end up dead. The rightist Old Zhang died of starvation while sucking the tiny piece of roll his blue flag got him. He didn’t even have the energy to swallow it…”’
My mother goes to shut the window. An insect on my shoulder flies into the air, settles back down again then crawls up my neck. I imagine lifting my hand and swatting it.
‘No wonder he was like a hungry ghost when he returned from the camps, scavenging scraps of food from the rubbish bins,’ my mother mumbles, as she picks up the journal again. ‘“Beethoven had a passion for life, and felt disgust for mundane, worldly affairs…” He insisted the orchestra play Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony when the American conductor visited. It was so reckless of him… “Everyone should have the right to choose their own path in life…” Did you hear that? That’s enough to get us branded “relatives of a counter-revolutionary” all over again!’ She slams the journal shut. ‘Why did your father never speak to me of these things?’
Perhaps tomorrow she will reach the page where he describes having to resort to eating human flesh. When she reads it, maybe she’ll understand at last why he returned from the camps a broken man.
There’s a knock at the door. My mother invites the visitor inside and asks him his name.
‘My surname is Huang,’ the man answers. ‘Master Yao told me your son is ill, and asked me to see if I can help.’
‘Oh, you’re Old Huang. Yes, Master Yao told me about your special gifts. I’ve heard you can speak the Language of the Universe.’
‘So many buildings around here are being demolished. Most of the roads are blocked off. It took me ages to find this compound… I studied medicine when I was younger. My ancestors were all doctors. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far… Let me take a look at the patient.’ He and my mother walk into my room.
‘His temperature is very low…’ he says, turning my hand over. ‘So many horizontal lines.’
‘That’s the sun line you’re pointing at,’ my mother says brusquely.
‘This is his health line. He’s clearly suffering from a serious case of exhaustion.’
‘He’s slept solidly for six years, and he’s still exhausted?’ my mother laughs coldly.
‘He has a black line along the middle of his forehead.’
‘That’s just the light. There are no black lines on his face.’
‘No, there’s definitely a dark line. That signifies calamity is about to strike.’
‘Well, he managed to survive a bullet in the head, so I guess he could probably survive anything.’
‘But his complexion is quite good.’
‘He looks worse than my husband did when he was lying dead in hospital.’ My mother is losing her patience.
‘What does he eat?’
‘Nothing. I pour a glass of milk into him every day, and give him three bottles of glucose solution. He’s barely more alive than a corpse.’
The man sits down, and I feel the metal springs of the bed contract.
‘Look at the colour of this!’ he says, holding my urine bottle up to the light. ‘That is very fine quality urine.’
‘Since I’ve been giving him the vitamin fluids, his urine has turned golden yellow.’
‘I’d like to have a taste. Will you fetch me a cup?’
‘What?’ my mother gasps. ‘That’s too peculiar. If you’re thirsty, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve been drinking urine for ten years. I’ve tasted all kinds, but I can tell that his is top-quality stuff.’
‘What do you mean, “top quality”? This is piss you’re talking about, not alcohol.’
I chuckle inwardly to myself. Perhaps the three bottles of glucose solution that I’m fed each day have turned my urine into a sweet beer.
My mother continues to express reservations about his strange request, but is finally won over when he tells her that Chinese emperors used to drink the urine of infant boys for medicinal purposes. He says he drinks his own urine last thing at night and first thing in the morning, and that after years of doing this, his hair has become blacker and his mind more alert. He advises my mother to pour some of my urine into a glass of fruit juice and take a sip. He points out that, in the womb, foetuses drink some of the urine they pass out into the amniotic fluid. He says that urine is the body’s vital essence, and has the power to cure a thousand diseases.