Wang shuts his eyes and grips the steering wheel with all his strength. He thinks of Echo in the hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask so she can breathe. The nearness of Zeng in the taxi is unbearable. Wang can’t release the steering wheel from his white-knuckle grip, out of fear of what his hands would otherwise do.
‘Did you get another letter? Is this what this is about? I swear, it wasn’t me. .’
Wang opens his eyes. Zeng is stroking his scarred forearm as he looks at him, as though his fingers are unconsciously drawn to his past self-destruction and pain. Wang is sure Zeng knows why he has come for him. Where is his sense of self-preservation? His sense of threat?
‘I worry about you, Wang Jun,’ Zeng says. ‘I know you are under a lot of stress. If you want to talk, I am here for you. .’
Wu Fei comes flying out of the barber’s. Barefoot. Naked from the waist up. His underdeveloped chest and pale adolescent nipples make him appear younger than Wang had first thought. Seventeen, or even sixteen.
‘Yanyan! Stop!’
Wang hits central locking. The boy won’t let Zeng go without a fight.
‘Roll up your window,’ he tells Zeng.
Wu Fei dashes in front of the taxi, to the passenger side. He pulls uselessly on the door latch then thrusts his fingers through the narrow gap above Zeng’s window, tugging on the glass.
‘Don’t go with him, Yanyan!’ he yells at Zeng. ‘He’s dangerous! He will beat you again. He only wants to hurt you.’
‘Feifei,’ Zeng says firmly, ‘we are just going for a drive. There’s something Wang and I have to talk about.’
Clinging with his fingers, the boy shouts into the gap above the window glass. ‘Please, Xiao Yan. Please get out of the taxi. Don’t go with him. Get out of the taxi now!’
Zeng Yan sighs. ‘Feifei, go back to bed. I’ll be back soon and we’ll get breakfast together.’
‘No.’ Wu Fei shakes his head. ‘Let me come with you. I will sit in the back seat and be quiet. You won’t know I’m there, I promise. I just want to make sure you are okay.’
‘Feifei, stop acting like a child!’
But he is a child, Wang sees that now. He is a boy in a dark adult world, and Zeng is his protector; the one person he has. Wu Fei clings to him with a child’s fear of abandonment.
‘Please, Yanyan, don’t go! He’s crazy and wants to hurt you! Why can’t you see that?’
Zeng turns to Wang, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry about this.’
He turns back to Wu Fei, and Wang waits as they quarrel. The boy presses his forehead to the passenger-side window, desperately pleading with Zeng through the glass. Frustrated tears well in the boy’s eyes and Wang feels sorry for him then. It must hurt to love someone so much. Wu Fei shouts over the passenger seat at Wang, ‘Let me in, or I’ll send more photos to your wife! I’ll send the worst ones I have!’
Wang turns the key in the ignition. At the sound of the engine starting up, the boy dashes to the front of the car and leans over the bonnet. For a moment Wang is afraid he will climb on the taxi and cling on to the windscreen. But Wu Fei stares him down instead. He spits on the windscreen, vicious and hard. Saliva slithers down the glass and Wang fights the urge to turn the windscreen wipers on.
‘I know your taxi company!’ the boy shouts. ‘I know your licence-plate number! If Zeng Yan doesn’t come back soon, I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them you’ve kidnapped him, and they’ll go after you!’
He thumps the bonnet, the vibrations passing through the chassis to the driver’s seat. Wu Fei glowers at Wang. But he is conceding defeat. Backing off.
‘If you hurt him, I will kill you,’ he shouts. ‘I’ll kill you, Driver Wang!’
Wang doesn’t doubt it. He lowers his foot to the accelerator and the car lurches forwards. The boy moves aside, and as they drive away Wang watches him recede out of sight in the rear-view. Wu Fei stands in the alley, watching them, desolate and grief-stricken as Wang drives his lover to an unknown fate. You are still young, Wang thinks. You’ll get over him.
‘He has problems with his temper,’ Zeng says. ‘His father used to beat him a lot. .’
Wang shakes his head and mutters, ‘I should’ve run him over for sending those photos to my wife.’
28. The Anti-Capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls
People’s Republic of China, 1966
I
THE PEASANT IS old and shrunken, his clothes sewn out of Plentiful Harvest rice sacks. He hawks and spits on the classroom floor, and rows of fifteen-year-old girls in padded-cotton jackets and trousers wrinkle their noses at their desks. Most of my classmates are from good Beijing families, and some are daughters of the Communist elite. Their fathers use spittoons.
The peasant shuffles up on to the teaching platform, and Teacher Zhao introduces him as Comrade Po.
‘Comrade Po is from a village outside Beijing,’ Teacher Zhao says, ‘and in today’s lesson, “Recalling with Bitterness the Exploitation of the Peasant Classes by Evil Landlords”, Comrade Po will tell us about his suffering during the Nationalist era.’
Comrade Po grins with overcrowded, never-been-brushed-looking teeth, and starts lecturing us in his guttural, rural dialect. A quarter of an hour goes by before Teacher Zhao realizes we can’t understand and translates:
‘One year the sorghum harvest was so bad, Comrade Po couldn’t pay the rent. He begged the landlord not to evict him, as he and his wife and children would freeze to death. The landlord told Comrade Po that he could stay if he gave him his eldest daughter. Well, what choice did Comrade Po have? To save his wife and eight other children, he gave his eldest daughter away. The landlord raped her, and Comrade Po’s daughter was so ashamed she drank insecticide and died. She was eleven years old.’
The tragedy of Comrade Po’s life under the Nationalists reduces our class to tears. Red Star weeps on to her desk lid, and Soviet Chen shakes with her head in her hands. My eyes remain stubbornly dry, and I panic because I don’t feel sorrow for Comrade Po as he stands on the teaching platform, wiggling a finger about in his nose. So I think of my father, sent to a labour camp in Qinghai because his department had to expel a quota of rightists in the latest Anti-Rightist campaign. Ma and I haven’t had a letter from Father in over a year. Though we daren’t say it, we fear he is dead. Tears drip on to my desk and I am relieved. Now in the eyes of others my conscience is politically correct.
A spinster devoted to Communism, Teacher Zhao is deeply moved by Comrade Po’s tales. Behind the thick magnifying lenses of her glasses, her eyes well up.
‘Comrades!’ Teacher Zhao cries. ‘Let Comrade Po’s tragic story remind us why we must be revolutionary and fight!’
Teacher Zhao punches her fist to the ceiling, a damp patch of revolutionary fervour in the armpit of her chalk-dusty Mao jacket, and our class applauds. Comrade Po grins and flicks his nose pickings and, above the blackboard, Chairman Mao watches approvingly from his gilded frame.
The winter sun is setting, the alley shadows lengthening into dusk. I walk briskly, my satchel bouncing at my side, my breath fogging in the freezing air. I am nearly home and out of the cold when a shout turns my head.
‘Yi Moon! Stop!’
Red Star, Long March, Patriotic Hua and all their hangers-on stride down Vinegar Makers Alley towards me. Hair in braids. Padded-cotton jackets buttoned up. Trousers long and grey. They crowd around me, exhaling white clouds of contempt and backing me up against a wall.
‘Why were you smirking during Comrade Po’s story?’ Long March asks. ‘You thought he was smelly and backward, didn’t you? You thought his daughter’s suicide was funny.’