‘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.
8. The Wedding Photo
‘WHAT WAS YOUR mother like?’ Yida asked, back when they were newly-weds and her desire to know him kept her awake throughout the night. Wang pulled a photograph of his parents’ wedding day from a bundle of documents bound with an elastic band. Bride and groom and Ministry of Agriculture work-unit colleagues, sternly attired in Mao suits of utilitarian grey. A solemn gathering, as though not celebrating a marriage but mourning a death. On the wall above them is a portrait of the Great Helmsman, omnipresent throughout China back then. The Chairman overseeing the proceedings, ensuring that no one so much as smile.
The date on the photograph’s reverse is 3 May 1975. An anniversary, Wang told Yida, not once acknowledged in the thirteen years of marriage to come. On the wedding day the bride was not in love with the groom. Love, she told her son years later, was not such a priority back then. In the photo they look an ill-matched couple; the bride, to put it bluntly, not pretty enough for the tall and handsome groom. Straining her eyes at Wang’s 25-year-old mother, Yida remarked, ‘She’s so innocent and wide-eyed.’ But Wang knew better than that. The bride was not as submissive as she appeared. Studying the photo two decades later, Wang could detect the shadow of a smile on her lips. ‘What was she like?’ asked Yida, elbow on pillow, tousled head propped in hand, lovely and naked under the sheets. Possessiveness over his past, as well as curiosity, glinted in her eyes. Rivalry of her predecessors in her voice. ‘Tell me about her. . Go on. .’
Childhood. First come the images, like the weave of smoke from one of Shuxiang’s menthol cigarettes, spiralling, amassing into the shape of the past. Apartment 404. Dishes in the sink. Curtains pulled over the rails. A message to the day: Keep Out. Shuxiang’s round, childish face, and her narrow range of sloe-eyed expressions. Deceptively ingénue, for an innocent his mother was not. She knew the truth about what people are like. A truth from which she did not protect her son. Kneeling by him, pouring cups of water from the basin over his head, rinsing away the suds of shampoo, she said, ‘Don’t be fooled, Little Bear, by the so-called civility out there. All our morality could blow away tomorrow like a fart in the wind. I saw it happen before.’