Tiananmen Square E-Book

Lai Wen

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 717

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'An extraordinary book. Truly important' William Boyd 'Outstanding ... Intimate as well as epic' Sunday Times 'Poignant and powerful' Daily Mail 'Utterly gripping' The Spectator 'Beautiful and devastating' Irish News Sunday Times Best Summer Reads 2024 Longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2025 Shortlisted in the British Book Awards 2025 A STORY OF UNBREAKABLE FRIENDSHIP AND THE PRICE OF FREEDOM Beijing in the 1970s. Lai lives with her parents, grandmother and youngerbrother in a small flat in a working-class area. Her grandmother is a formidable figure, while her ageing beauty of a mother snipes at her father, a sunken figure haunted by the Cultural Revolution. As she grows up, Lai comes to discern the realities of the country she lives in. But she also goes through the ebbs and flows of friendships; troubles and rewards at home and at school; and the first steps and missteps in love. A gifted student, she attends the prestigious Peking University; while there she becomes involved in the student protests that have been gathering speed. It is the late 1980s, and change is in the air . . . 5 STAR READER REVIEWS - 'Captivating, intimate and so moving, I finished it in tears' - 'Wow! This was a stunning novel' - 'Probably one of the most memorable, poignant, emotional books I've ever read … This will crawl for a while under my skin. Can I give a 6th star?' - 'A brilliant and important read' - 'Beautifully written. I read it slowly as I wanted to savour every word' - 'There is something so deeply touching, tender yet powerful in the writing … This coming-of-age story is compelling, haunting, emotive and written beautifully. By the end, it left me in tears. It is a book I will long remember'

Leseprobe

For all the children of the revolution

A flame burns brightest in the moment before it perishes.

Part I

One

My earliest memory is of my grandmother. I remember the smell of her. Somewhere between the scent of jasmine and the more earthy odour of the leather oil she used, working up the material to fashion slippers for neighbours on our landing. Her breath was the same: warm and sweet against the side of my face, but with the slightest tang of sourness. Most of all I remember her hands. The fingers gnarled but clever, still able to move deftly across the leather of the shoes she was tailoring, or quick to scatter rice in a boiling pot without being scalded by the billowing steam.

I remember too – perhaps I was no more than two or three – being fascinated by the bulging purple and green veins which ran like vines across the back of those mottled, burnished hands. They seemed so different from my own. Sometimes my grandmother would take my small hand – much lighter and smoother – and cup it in hers, and that would fascinate me. But more than anything I would feel the warmth which emanated from her leathery skin, I would feel that warmth on my own hand. And I would feel safe, protected.

The lines which creased her forehead, the jowls which hung from her cheeks – these details never repulsed me in the way old age can sometimes frighten children. Rather, my grandmother’s face, her body, her being, were like an ancient map, both familiar and strange, to be read over and over by my eyes, and my fingers too. For I would often reach out for her face, running my tiny fingers across her thin grey eyebrows, playing with the thicker hairs which sprouted from her chin and which, for some reason, always delighted me. Sometimes I would pull on them and my grandmother would sneeze involuntarily. This would delight me all the more, and I would be reduced to the joyful and unending giggles of a toddler. My grandmother would watch me convulse – herself solemn and composed – only the slight curl of her lips and the twinkle in those grey-blue eyes betraying the beginnings of a smile.

My parents were a different proposition. They were devoted to me, in the way that a Chinese family in the 1970s was devoted to a daughter: a devotion tinged with a certain reluctance (my brother had not yet entered the world at that point). But more than that, we were, perhaps, incompatible. My father was a kind man – and a moral one. But throughout my childhood he remained a distant presence even though I would encounter him every day: in the morning when I was awoken for breakfast, in the evening when he returned from work.

Sometimes, I’d be wandering through the hallway of our small but noisy apartment, lost in my thoughts, having conversations with imaginary friends and doing battle with imaginary foes, when suddenly I’d be pulled back into reality, having run up against him. My father. He was, I realise now, rather small for a man, both lean and compact, but as a small child you inhabit a land of giants. And fathers are the tallest giants of all. My father was so large in my eyes perhaps because of the size of his severity; he would blink down at me, having encountered me in the hallway, and he would frown as though he had come across some midget-stranger rather than an emanation of his own flesh and blood.

My father would peer and squint at me, as though he was not quite sure what I was; then, as the silence between us unfolded, he would manage a brief, mumbled question: ‘Have you … have you … done your homework?’; ‘Have you finished your chores?’ As a five-year-old I had no homework to speak of, but I would nod my head furiously, for it was in my mind that if I didn’t acquiesce I might well be expelled from the apartment that same night. Nothing my parents ever told me, by the way, had in the least bit implied I might be ejected from the family home for failing to complete the non-existent homework my father was so concerned I finish. But somehow I’d got it into my head that such a thing could happen. It was one of the many fears I had.

Looking back, I think my father was as terrified of encountering me as I was of him. So he said the first thing that came into his head. He was an academic, a cartographer in fact – he worked with maps and geology. A rather nondescript occupation, perfectly suited to the precise and harmless man that he was. And yet, he and people like him had been subject to persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. A good number of teachers, technicians and intellectuals lost their lives as a result of being branded ‘bourgeois degenerates’, and I suppose the fear and uncertainty he inherited from that period never left him. It crossed into every element of his life. Even his relationship with his daughter.

I grew up in the aftermath of Maoism – after the death of the Great Helmsman – so that fear wasn’t real to me, at least not until the events which took place some fifteen years later. But my father was never able to step out from that fear, from its shadow.

Perhaps my father alleviated that fear by allowing himself to grow faint, to retreat into the vague and abstract world of the graphs and charts that populated his study. A place where he would not be bothered by the hectic messiness of family life: the dirty diapers and detritus of toys strewn across the carpet; the bawling loudness of a toddler’s tantrums; the slickness of small upturned faces, both expectant and outraged, lathered with snot and tears.

My mother handled her fears in a different way. She was hands-on, seeking to police every aspect and inflection of her family’s life. She’d make sure we were all gathered around the table at precisely six, that the napkins we used were open on our laps. During the meal itself, we would be informed of the goings-on of our neighbours who lived on our landing: of the achievements they had laid claim to, and the scandals which took place behind closed doors. Most of all, the scandals. My mother was possessed of a shrill energy; like a tsunami, it could batter and overwhelm any structure that stood in its way. Local gossip was something she used to set herself in motion, to make sure we were all fed and watered, that our clothes were clean and our respective paths in life were cleared. It wasn’t until much later that I realised this, however. At the time she just seemed oppressive and annoying.

At the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, my father had been demoted, but had managed to survive. He had been incarcerated for a short period but returned to full employment. He was, I suppose, one of the lucky ones. To this day I don’t know what indignities, or worse, he suffered. It was something he would never have considered disclosing to his family, especially a family of women. My mother, however, was convinced that the source of his woes – the source of all our woes – was simply a random error on the part of an otherwise flawless bureaucratic machine. For her, the government was hard at times but fair, and its authority and power had always worked in the best interests of the people themselves. As a child I shared my mother’s belief that the Chinese government was best; that it was ahead, in every respect, of the Western imperialist powers that sought to do it down. Every radio broadcast suggested that we, the Chinese people, were the flagbearers of humanity as it entered a more humane and free classless society. Such things we imbibed from an early age in the same way the children of America stood to attention each morning at school in order to pledge allegiance to their flag.

But again, looking back, I wonder how much my mother’s credulous and enthusiastic devotion to the powers that be had further reduced my exhausted father, someone who had been battered by life and by the state he sought to serve. The relentless enthusiasm for the status quo on my mother’s part surely must have grated. Perhaps, on occasion, he even bridled with anger. A rare flash of the type of emotion he had spent a lifetime learning to suppress. But he was never harsh to her.

On our corridor, husbands would occasionally beat their wives. Sometimes you could hear their arguments; you could even make out the sudden deadening silence before a hand met the side of a woman’s face, and then the high-pitched yelp which followed. But even the battered women on our corridor retained a sense of decorum, a sense that there were certain things respectable people did not talk about, things that should not be acknowledged before neighbours.

On these occasions, the whole floor entered into the same strange and surreal charade; that everything was fine, that sometimes the corners of doors simply leapt out, like monsters in an ancient Chinese scroll, surprising a woman, striking her as she busied herself with the mundane details of everyday life. The sides of cupboards, the edges of beds – these things could be equally dangerous, equally provoking. The men they shared their lives with, however, were beyond reproach.

A child understands and absorbs such things as she goes along without ever framing them in terms of a conscious set of ideas. I understood that, on occasion, wives would be beaten, and I knew this was no good thing. I knew that the adults around me frowned on such behaviour but did not speak of it. And yet, it happened. And even as a young girl, I remember feeling that perhaps the stark brightness of my mother might in some way be dimmed – that her compulsion to regulate every detail of our lives with her shrill sense of etiquette and respectability might in some way be offset – if, just once, my father struck her across the face. If, just once, he interrupted the never-ending flow of salacious gossip and hectoring demands.

He never did, thank god. But what remained was in some ways worse: a grey shell of a man who seemed old to me even though he couldn’t have been more than in his early thirties. A man who’d had the stuffing beaten out of him. Or perhaps he had simply learned to drift away. To absent himself from the world around him. To feel only truly at home in his solitary study, musing over the graphs and reports. To this day, I don’t know what happened to him during that period of time before Mao’s death. He was detained. But was he physically hurt? Was he tortured? All I know is that he was reduced somehow, as a person. And, after all these years, and despite his absence, I still feel great pity for him.

But if my father remained a passive presence before the overwhelming furore of my mother, my grandmother was someone else again. Different from the daughter she had given birth to. It seemed to me that if my mother gravitated towards respectability, my grandmother was a natural rebel.

She had been born in 1921. Her birth coincided with a period of modernisation in China, after the last dynasty had ended, but my grandmother had lived in the countryside where the past still exerted its strange and spectral grip. Her parents had stuck to the ways they themselves had inherited – they’d had their daughter’s tiny toes broken and bent inwards in the process of ‘foot binding’ – but my grandmother had rebelled, screaming night after night, resisting the ordeal, until eventually her mother and father lost their resolve. When my grandmother eventually sneaked those bandages off her feet altogether, her parents pretended not to notice.

But now my grandmother was in possession of freakish feet. They were larger than the ideal of bound feet, yet they were smaller than feet that had developed normally. So my grandmother found it almost impossible to get nicely fitting shoes. And that’s why, eventually, she took to making her own. She was unaware of it at the time, but there was a whole generation of girls who had resisted the practice of foot binding with exactly the same courage and determination she herself had shown. A whole generation of girls whose feet were too big to be bound, but too small to be considered normal.

In the years which followed, my grandmother would become adept at making shoes for those women who were described as having ‘liberation feet’ – feet, just like hers, which had resisted the consequences of the binding. My grandmother’s ability in what is considered the most traditional of things for a female – the ability to manoeuvre a needle and a thread in order to weave and create clothing – was at the same time bound to an act of feminine rebellion. Her life was cluttered with lots of smaller acts of rebellion that were often expressed in more uncouth and unladylike ways. A splutter of hawking laughter, a salacious wink, or even an almighty …

‘BUUUUURRRRPPPP!!!’

I am in the process of manoeuvring a lump of egg-fried rice towards my mouth, my chopsticks raised in the air, but the sound of my grandmother’s belch is so loud, so violent, that for a few moments all five of us are frozen in place around the table. My father has a look on his face that I have never seen before, his mouth slightly open, somewhere between puzzlement and consternation. My mother – who had been babbling furiously about a neighbour’s daughter known to go around in sandals without socks (a sure sign of deviant youth in my mother’s book) – is so flummoxed by my grandmother’s belch that she is left momentarily lost for words, her eyes blinking rapidly, trying to assimilate the ramifications of such a sudden and obscene intervention.

My brother Qiao – who was then not yet two years old – also stopped the sticky sound of his enthusiastic munching to allow a little of the food to go dribbling from the corner of his mouth. His face lit up with the grin of a baby who sensed that something in his world had suddenly changed – and though he was not quite sure what that change might have been, he was nevertheless delighted by it. And last, but by no means least, was the figure of my grandmother, whose large squat body and generous face had relaxed, her wrinkles creasing in the beginnings of a smile, reclining in her chair like a great toad. She watched my mother with a gleam in her eye.

My mother’s face went red. In as much as she was controlled when it came to regulating timetables, the clothes her children wore and the kind of words her family used – when it came to regulating the emotions on her own face, she was often lost at sea, subject to sudden and intensely personal squalls of emotion. She blinked at my grandmother, trying to calm her rising indignation. Eventually she managed a few shocked syllables:

‘You did that on purpose, muqin, I know you did!’

My grandmother looked back, sphynx-like and unflinching, but perhaps touched with a hint of dark amusement.

‘My dear, my sweet, when you get to my age, you come to realise that the body is much like a car. It erodes over time, and sometimes its emissions really can’t be helped!’

My grandmother fluttered her eyelashes ever so slightly, her face assuming an expression of wounded dignity.

‘Oh, save it,’ she snapped. ‘Your “emissions” almost always happen just when I am in the process of making some kind of point, just when I am trying to—’

‘Buuuuurrrrppppp.’

Again, everyone was frozen in a kind of temporary paralysis. Except for my brother, who had unleashed the belch and was now grinning wickedly, still dribbling from the corner of his toddler’s smile, happy as Larry that he had been able to get in on the fun.

My mother looked at my little brother with genuine horror before turning to my grandmother, the redness in her face blanched in an instant to a shocked, curdled white.

‘You see, this is what you do! You are … corrupting my child!’

For the first time my grandmother’s face lost all trace of amusement.

‘Oh, don’t be so dramatic. He’s not yet two years old. Monkey see, monkey do!’

‘Monkey … monkey?’ my mother spluttered. ‘How … how dare you! And I do not consider the moral development of my children … something to be mocked!’

She had raised herself out of her seat by that point, was looming over us, gesticulating towards an audience we could not see.

All at once she focused on my father, hard.

‘And you! You! Why don’t you ever do anything to defend me?’

My father was suddenly shocked into the room. Whatever thoughts he had been mulling over that had shielded him from such tempestuous family strife were vanquished under my mother’s intense and accusatory stare. The poor man tried to pull himself together, tried to marshal some kind of response – I could see him doing it – but even before he was able to utter the words, my mother gave a sudden helpless gulp and flounced from the room.

My grandmother’s sardonic eyes turned on my befuddled father.

‘She seems a little tense today. Is it perhaps time you attended to your husbandly duties with a little more frequency?’

If my father’s anxiety had been provoked by my mother’s sudden assault on him, it was nothing to the horror which crossed his face when my grandmother addressed him with this particular recommendation.

With as much dignity as he could muster, he stood up from the table and followed my mother from the room.

My brother was sat in his high chair and for the first time a shadow crossed the smoothness of his chubby face and those full dark eyes widened in a moment of unfathomable grief, for he understood that things had changed, though he knew not how or why. He knew that only moments ago there had been people around him and now they were there no longer – and perhaps he felt the type of terrifying loneliness that arrives so suddenly and with such abandon and is particular to the youngest of children. Moments later his face was slick with warm tears.

My brother would often irritate me. He could be so loud and demanding. His presence was such that it seemed to suck all the conversation from the room, to draw everyone’s focus into his orbit by the sheer gravitational pull of his need. But my irritation sometimes blinded me to just how helpless he was. In that moment, I felt his vulnerability as if it were my own, his loneliness and his bemusement as though they belonged to me. For a few moments it was as if I were in his head, blinking out at those who shared his world, somewhere between bafflement and fear. I got up and uncoupled him from his highchair as gently as I could. He was really screaming now, abandoning himself entirely to the welter of feeling which had swelled so suddenly within. I tried to ‘coo’ in his ear, the way I had seen my mother do. I held him up and nuzzled my lips against the softness of his belly – the way I sometimes would in order to get him to shiver and giggle – but the violence of his emotion rolled over my every attempt.

My grandmother gesticulated from her chair. Wordlessly, I handed her Qiao. He was still crying, but when she moved him to her massive bosom she was able to enfold him with her size, her stillness and her warmth. Although his pudgy body was still heaving with sobs, at once it began to slacken, and he turned into her, nuzzling against her bulky softness, as she began to rock him up and down – a tiny vessel cocooned by the rhythm of the waves. Instinctively, automatically, he put his thumb in his mouth. Moments later, I could hear the soft gentle sounds of his snoring – his large closed eyes like smooth marbles, the tiny nub of his nose peeking out. Just like that, he was insensible.

All at once, my feelings were coloured with a less virtuous motivation. My mother would rarely let me play with the neighbourhood children, but my grandmother was not so strict about such things, so when my mother wasn’t around, my grandmother became an excellent means to such an end.

‘Po Po! May I go and play outside for a little bit?’

My grandmother didn’t look up but she gave a small nod of her great turtle’s head. She continued to rock my brother in her arms. I felt a shiver of illicit delight as I quietly opened the front door and slipped out onto the landing. I was hit by a wave of heat. It was summer then and the possibility of air conditioning in most places was still years away. People left their balcony windows open and often the doors to their apartments too – so that there was a constant flow of air which might ameliorate the sticky heat of cramped conditions, especially during the early evening when stoves boiled and frying pans sizzled. There was a strange communality to life on our floor: the open doors and thin walls meant that the private lives of others were always within touching distance, and while this generated a certain camaraderie, it was also a source of gossip and competitiveness.

My mother was not one to scrimp on either. One of our close neighbours, who I always called Aunty Zhao even though she was not my real aunty, had come from the rural areas and had a thick accent that I sometimes struggled to understand. But she’d married a Beijinger – more than that, a factory manager – so she received the type of perks that weren’t available to our own family. For instance, Aunty Zhao was the first one on our landing to own a freezer. I can still recall the day the men came to deliver it. It was almost twice as tall as they were, and they struggled with it up the stairwell and into the corridor, while the residents gathered to watch the spectacle in awe.

I remember the expression on my mother’s face as she looked out through the crack of our door; the way her lips were curled down, pinched in resentment, the dull anger at work in her eyes. Aunty Zhao was one of our closest friends; I had known her for as long as I could remember, and I knew my mother liked her. My mother’s reaction caused my throat to tighten. I felt the type of unease I did when I was in class and being made to decipher a letter or symbol whose meaning was just outside the borders of my comprehension. I saw my mother’s face sour and twist only for a moment before she closed the door and began to busy herself with housework. But it was something I never forgot.

Now, as I am assailed by the odours of fried chicken, fish, satay sauce and sea cucumber, along with the starch scent of drying fabrics and the mustier tang of body heat, I catch a glimpse into Aunty Zhao’s apartment. I see figures in the kitchen sitting at the table, the wide freezer door flung open, encasing them in its cool blue light, but I don’t stop. Instead I move faster – children are not supposed to run in the corridors – but I have this sense of bursting excitement as I get to the stairwell, clattering down the stairs, before pushing open the door and exiting into the street. The heat outside is strong and oppressive even at this time; I can feel it squeaking in the small of my back, its vapours forming beads of liquid along the nape of my neck, but now I am outside, and it is as though I can breathe again.

Two

I look for them. I see them almost straight away. They are gathered in an abandoned lot just off the main street and, as the sun goes down, the long slats of evening light catch the dust which has been thrown up from the powdery ground, forming streaks of glittering gold in the air above. Through this gold-flecked haze I can see into the distance. I can see the shape and outline of the buildings in the city centre, and, on the edge of the horizon, looking towards the Forbidden City, I glimpse the forms of the great monuments that guard the entrance to Tiananmen Square. It seems to me as far away as some distant and mythic land, and its image – diaphanous and faint – shimmers momentarily, before it is lost to a plume of rolling cloud. My thoughts are back in the moment, in the neighbourhood, and I force myself to concentrate as I approach this group of children, allowing my walk to become slack, my face to become expressionless. I saunter up to them with a well-practised nonchalance.

‘All right, what are you up to?’

It is clear what they are up to, as Zhen, a small boy with delicate features and big eyes, is running his tongue along a border of crisp paper. The others are watching him like hawks, for his quick hands always manage to fabricate the most beautiful and effective paper planes and they want to discover his secret. I know what they are up to, but nevertheless I have to ask the question because it’s something you have to say.

Jian’s eyes don’t leave the paper Zhen is folding, but he responds with a good-humoured mumble as though they have hit upon a unique strategy to pass the time.

‘We are making paper aeroplanes today!’

I nod, go to say something else, then fall silent. I play with my hands. I catch Al Lam watching me. When I meet her eye, she glances away, embarrassed. Even though we are in the same group, we rarely talk to one another. I think it’s something to do with the fact that we are the only two girls. We know we are different from the others and if we were to hang out together perhaps that difference would be emphasised. Or something. Either way, we tend to regard one another warily.

Zhen has finished his paper plane. With a quick flick of his wrist, he sends it curling up into the air. We watch it, our faces craned upwards against the full evening light, until the plane is no more than a dark outline. All at once it peaks, and – almost as though it were alive – jerks downwards, plunging to the ground in a giddy swoop some yards from where we are. Automatically, we all burst into a run.

Jian picks up the flattened plane gently.

‘Pretty good,’ he says, examining the plane in his hands, his broad clean features lit in a pleasant open smile.

I don’t think our group had a leader exactly, but Jian was the closest to it. He was nice-looking with thick black hair which spiked upwards; he had a smooth but strong voice, he was good at sports and could run faster than all us others. Also, he was the tallest. When you are a kid, being tall counts for a lot.

‘Let’s play a different game!’

Gen looks at us with a strange smile. He is much smaller than Jian, he is not much taller than me. But everyone in our group has something. Jian is the strong one. Al Lam is the sensible one. Zhen is the one who is great at making paper aeroplanes. Gen … is the clever one. It occurs to me that perhaps I am the only one of our group not to be defined by any single quality. Maybe that’s why people don’t notice me all that much. The teachers don’t seem to see me at school, and since Qiao was born, my mother and father don’t pay me the same type of attention they once did (unless it’s my mother telling me that I have yet again ruined my dress by rolling around in the mud – something that is very ‘unladylike’, apparently). My grandmother sees me, of course. Her gaze seems to register every secret nestling inside your body, inside your mind. But that’s not quite the same thing. Nevertheless, I know when I leave the house and come to play with my friends – even though there is nothing special about me – they accept me into their ranks without a whisper. It is as though we are all separate parts of a jigsaw puzzle that were always meant to be brought together.

But Gen is different again. Even though he is small, everyone listens when he speaks. He is confident somehow – not loud, but rather he says stuff that none of us others know. That’s what makes him clever. There is something about him that seems more adult, maybe even more adult than Jian even though Jian is the oldest and tallest of all of us. Also, Gen never gets into the type of arguments the rest of us have.

One time Fan – who is fat and smelly – accused me of picking my bum! He only said that because everyone knows he picks his own bum – and he was giggling and dribbling while he said it, as though it was the funniest thing in the world. I felt my face go red; it was the strangest thing, because I would never, ever pick my bum. And yet he had shouted it with such glee, and even though I would never do what he had said, I felt my cheeks burn and I felt my eyes water with tears. But not because I was sad. Because I was angry. And yet, to everyone else it must have looked like I felt bad about what he had said because it was true.

So I exploded.

‘You stupid bloody retard!’

I punched Fan as hard as I could on the arm. At once his own eyes began to water, and then he began to scream. We watched as he ran home, as fast as his pudgy legs would carry him.

‘That wasn’t nice,’ said Jian, looking at me with an expression of disappointment.

He spoke softly, his gaze was mild, and yet it was as though he had slapped me across the face as hard as he could. I was suddenly indignant, panicked.

‘He lied. Wang Fan lied. He said I scratched my butt, but I didn’t do it.’

I looked around in appeal. I looked to Gen, because he was known to be intelligent, rational. I was certain he would hear the voice of reason.

‘I didn’t do it, Gen!’

He looked down at his feet for a few moments and then raised his head, his brown shimmering eyes meeting my own.

‘Yeah, I know, but that’s not the point.’

‘So what is? What is the point?’

I almost shouted that question at them, but they had gone back to what they were doing. Nobody told me to leave but I knew I had to. The next day I came back. Wang Fan was there, dribbling and laughing as they played. I rejoined them and it was as though nothing had happened. But from that moment on I got what Gen had said: ‘Yeah, I know, but that’s not the point.’ In school they all called Wang Fan a ‘retard’. Because when he ate his lunch, he would dribble much of his food over his shirt, and sometimes he would burst out in giggles for no reason anyone could fathom. But that was the point. Just as the group accepted me, even though I had nothing much to offer, so they accepted Wang Fan, because he was there, and he was ready to play. For us kids, at that moment, at that particular time, the best thing in the world was to play together even if you were a little goofy or different, or you had cross eyes, or a funny belly. That was the point.

‘Let’s play a different game!’ announced Gen.

When he said that, everyone took notice. Gen and I went to the same school but we were in different classes. Nevertheless, I’d seen him take to the stage in assembly to receive an award for his high scores in calligraphy. We also knew that his father was someone important, but how we knew this was unknown because Gen rarely talked about his parents.

‘What game?’ Jian asked seriously.

‘Cat Catching Mice!’ responded Gen at once.

Jian nodded his approval.

‘Okay,’ Jian said. ‘Let’s begin.’

He looked at me.

‘Mouse!’ he exclaimed.

I giggled involuntarily, everyone was looking at me, but I was especially happy that Jian had chosen me.

Then my blood cooled.

‘Wang Fan – cat!’

At once the whole group began to chant:

‘What time is it?’

‘Just struck nine.’

‘Is the cat at home?’

‘He’s about to dine.’

The aim of the game was for the cat to run after the mouse once the chanting had stopped, but unfortunately Wang Fan had not fully grasped this and he launched himself onto me before the chanting was finished. I felt myself falling to the ground, almost in slow motion, and then time seemed to speed up, and I was lying on the dusty floor, baffled, an array of sounds collapsing inwards, and the rustling noise of Wang Fan’s enthusiastic breaths hot against my ear. I felt a warm spool of slobber touch my cheek.

I looked up at his big pudgy face giggling over me, and I had a sudden electric feeling of rage; I wanted to stick my nails into his eyes, I wanted to rip those moist quivering lips from his mouth. He was a kid, he was probably the most kid-like of all of us, and yet his body on top of me felt like something different; I could feel the heat that emanated from the flabby layers of skin surrounding his face and belly. I was aware of the sour scent that arrived from the creases on his body, his armpits, his flabby thighs.

He kept giggling, his whole body vibrating, but this time I didn’t yell, I didn’t call him a ‘retard’, and I didn’t spit at him (which was the worst thing one child could do to another). Instead I managed to swallow my disgust, concentrate, and with a lithe twist I was able to manoeuvre his flabby body to tilt it to one side, so that he toppled over and I was able to release myself.

I staggered to my feet. I looked at everyone else. And they were all laughing. I was shocked for a moment. I could still scent Wang Fan’s odour in my nostrils. He was rolling about on the floor giggling as though it was the funniest joke in the world, as though he was being tickled by some invisible presence. I felt their gaze on me. And then I felt my own laughter. Forced. Strange. A sound that took place outside myself. Everyone else returned to the game. Except Gen. He remained watching me for a few moments longer, his expression quizzical, appraising.

The sun had slipped beneath the horizon. The floor was wreathed in shadow. At some point, we gradually began to disperse, to wander home in our separate directions. All at once it started to rain. But I lingered. And I felt Gen’s gaze on me again. Curious, inquisitive.

‘Do you wanna go see something?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’

Darkness was coming and I knew I had to be inside before it arrived. That was the rule my parents had. Sometimes I would make an argument of it, but it was always half-hearted, because the truth was I didn’t want to be in the streets when it got dark. But, in that moment, something held me in place, stopped me from returning home right away. Gen spoke softly, but there was an insouciance in his voice, and his eyes shone with amusement, as though he found me faintly ridiculous. If I had refused to go with him, it would have been like rejecting a challenge. As though I were afraid. And Gen would have smiled all the more. If I had just walked away, I would have felt those sardonic and amused eyes on my back.

Instead, I puffed up my chest and walked alongside him. The rain fell in soft grey lines and a murkiness arose from the streets, a misty vapour through which the outline of the buildings appeared shadowy and indistinct. The sound of the pattering rain seemed all there was as the shadows grew and the darkness took shape. I could feel the rain squeaking against the fabric of my shoes, stealing inside, making my socks soggy, and I could feel its droplets clinging to my eyebrows and hanging from the tip of my nose. I started to feel weary, as though the grey dampness had settled in my head.

‘Where are we going? Is it much further?’

‘Not much further,’ said Gen, that same whisper of a smile playing faintly on his lips.

I felt a prickle of irritation. My legs were starting to hurt. I was about to tell Gen this was boring, that I had better things to do. But then he stopped.

‘Here we are,’ he said.

I followed the direction of his gaze. There was a large building many storeys high. Its concrete walls were shadowy in the gloom, but there was a series of high arched windows running across each floor and from within came the faint glow of a pale orange light. The roof sloped upwards in a hard metallic arc, so high above, riddled with piping and wires. Even from where we stood, we could hear the low hum generated by the building – its machinery turning over from deep within. In the darkness, it seemed both ordinary and monstrous, and yet I knew there was nothing to fear. I knew now where we were. The building had a great chimney which pushed out like a giant finger. I recognised that chimney because I could see it from my bedroom window at night. But gazing up at it now, the way its hard black outline seemed to jut so high into the dark vault of sky above, I felt so small, dizzy in my insignificance as it belched its ghostly steam into the black.

I looked at Gen. He was watching the building with a strange solemnity.

‘Do you know … what this place is?’ he asked, his voice so soft that I barely caught the question.

‘Of course I know,’ I said. ‘It’s the Beijing Children’s Hospital.’

I had tried to make my voice contemptuous. But the sound died in the gloom, muffled by the night.

Gen turned slowly to face me.

‘That’s what everyone thinks.’

‘What do you mean?’

His expression became grave.

‘My father. He works for the government. So he knows things not many people know.’

‘Like what?’ I demanded fractiously.

‘Like the fact that there are children in the building. But they are not there to get better. They will … never get better.’

His voice was almost a whisper.

‘What does that mean?’

Despite myself, I was drawn in by the soft, austere sound of his voice. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck begin to prickle, the heat of the day evaporating before the first chilly tendrils of the night.

‘It means that this place … it’s not a hospital … it’s a crematorium.’

‘A crema … what?’

He smiled sadly.

‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’

‘I know enough,’ I said. I was ready to defend my honour.

‘Okay, listen,’ he said. ‘A crematorium is not a place where they make children better. It’s a place where they burn the bodies of all the children who have died!’

I looked at him, incredulous.

‘You’re a liar!’ I spat. ‘Why would they do that? Why would anyone do that?’

Gen’s expression was blank. He spoke tonelessly, in a matter-of-fact voice, but in the way of one who has been burdened with all the secrets of the world.

‘Because … that’s what they do!’

‘I don’t believe you. You are making this up.’

He looked at me. He didn’t disagree. He didn’t say a word. He just watched me with that same strange solemnity. It looked odd on a kid’s face; I remember thinking that, even back then. And the truth was I did believe him. I didn’t want to. But I did. My heart was thrumming, a trippy electric fear pressing against the papery carapace of thin, fragile skin. But I still had the feeling he was trying to get the better of me. So I kicked back.

‘If that’s what they are doing, you try and prove it. But you can’t, can you? Because you’re just a big fat liar!’

Again my insult failed to provoke him, again he retained that infuriating calm.

‘I can prove it,’ he said softly.

Whatever response I had anticipated, it certainly wasn’t that. I was shocked. And behind my shock was a creeping sense of fear.

‘Go on then,’ I managed weakly.

He craned his head upwards, gazing into the darkness.

‘The chimney, the smoke!’

‘So what?’

His voice lowered again, imparting the most sinister of secrets.

‘Each time they burn a dead kid, the chimney opens in order to let out the smoke. But the thing is …’

‘Yeah …?’ I asked, craning my head upwards, a feeling of clammy dread rising within me.

‘The thing is, the spirit never really dies. You know that, right?’

I did. My grandmother often talked of such things. I nodded my head.

‘If you look into the smoke, as it goes upwards you can see …’

‘See?’

‘You can see the spirit of the dead kid … or sometimes the dead baby … as it flies up into the night!’

My body was humming with adrenaline and fear. The dark seemed to draw in everywhere around me, clenching, smothering.

‘No, you can’t. That’s not true. I don’t believe you.’

‘Well then. Why don’t you … just look?’

I didn’t want to but my head rose higher as if pulled by some invisible force. As I watched the ghostly strands of vapour curling into the vast dome of blackness above, those furls of silver seemed to thread together momentarily – smoke curling around the blackness of unseeing eyes, vapour outlining the gaping dark of a mouth frozen in its scream. I blinked rapidly as the tension in my body and the thrumming of my heart reached their zenith, and then I jerked away, tears of fear and shock hot in my eyes.

I felt Gen’s hand on my shoulder. I pulled away from him and broke into a run.

The sound of my clattering footsteps was loud in the emptiness. I turned down one street then the next. Gasping, I came to a halt. My hair was lank from the rainwater and I’d run so hard that each breath I took caused a sharp pain to rip across my abdomen. For a few moments I struggled to breathe. Once again tears stung my eyes. But they were tears of humiliation now. I had allowed my imagination to get the better of me.

After my mother had screamed hysterically at me for what felt like several hours, I was sent to bed early. I sat in my room wearing a grim smile in the darkness. Gen had been able to frighten me by telling me a story fit for little children, and I’d swallowed it hook, line and sinker. I promised myself I’d get him back, I’d exact my revenge somehow, but behind those thoughts was a deeper and more elemental sense of unease. Lying in my bed, the familiar objects of my room seemed changed. They appeared as ethereal, alien shadows across a plain of dark – the outline of a teddy bear suddenly assumed sinister and sharper proportions, a pool of darkness seemed to spill out from the gap beneath my wardrobe in a black tide.

I lay in the dark, listening to the sound of my breathing, and the softer, deeper throb of my heart. I retained the traces of a memory from years before and it came to me as I lay there. The death of my grandfather. I couldn’t have been much older than Qiao, my little brother, was now. Everything is a bit disjointed; images arrive in fragments rather than as a smooth unfolding set of events. Glimpses and impressions: the smell of candles burning, the sense of lots of people pressed together in a room, a vague outline of a stranger’s face peering down at me. I know these are all snatches from the day of my grandfather’s funeral. Years later I discovered both my parents wanted to mark his passing with a more secular celebration, but my grandmother would not have it.

My grandfather was laid out in an open coffin in the main room of our apartment in the way of a traditional funeral that would deliver him to the Ancestors. Neighbours flowed in to pay their respects as the evening faded into night. There was noise, chatter. It was probably quite cheery – the traditional ceremonies are often about joy as much as grief – but from the little I remember I don’t recall it being that way.

I remember the sound of chanting. I remember being afraid. I recall clinging to my blanket, my natty little blanket, pressing its frayed edges into my mouth in my anxiety. Stepping into the room with all those bodies, gradually nudging my way through a forest of long legs towards that point – the point where the light from the candles was concentrated in a single glowing circle at the centre of the room, illuminating the rich hue of the wood. The place where my grandfather was. I had a sense that he was there – that much I knew – so if I kept moving I knew I would see him, but at the same time I didn’t want to. A dread had risen up inside me, only I couldn’t stop moving, moving with all the inevitability of a dream, closer and closer until …

Until what? I remember the dread building until I found it hard to breathe. I remember being close enough to catch a glimpse of the profile of a head, its waxen, pallid skin, the shape of a nose – and yet now I think these are elements my mind might have added in retrospect, filling in the blanks. Had I actually seen him? Lying there in bed some years later, being pulled back into the strange haze of my earliest beginnings, I found I could no longer picture my grandfather’s face, either living or dead. What I remembered was a number: he had departed the world aged seventy-three. That was older than I could possibly fathom, it was an age that went on and on, which climbed like a mountain into the misty heights of the clouds.

But Gen had talked about children. Children who had died. Children who were then burned to become smoke. He had even mentioned babies. Children who had reached no number at all. I began to turn the issue over in my mind, again and again. I couldn’t stop. Why had they died? What had caused them to die? My heart began to race faster even though I was lying so still. Could it be happening to me? Could I die right then and there? I closed my eyes tightly, the darkness at once drawing in. Was this what my grandfather had felt?

I opened my eyes again. I looked across the room. Gen was a sly one, he had been making it all up, I told myself. And I was a fool for believing him. And yet, nothing could calm the disquiet inside me. I put my feet out of the bed. The floor of my room felt cold. I crept carefully towards the window and looked out. In the distance I could just about make out the thin trail of vapour snaking up from the chimney of the hospital building, ghostly and white, melting into the darkness above. I returned to my bed, pulling the covers up around me. At some point I fell asleep.

Three

But in the morning, the feeling was still there. Like some burgeoning sickness. I went to breakfast and I found myself watching Qiao, who giggled while he ate. It wasn’t as if there was anything for him to laugh about, and yet the haphazard business of eating was enough to raise a smile from him, especially considering he was the messiest eater of us all (my grandmother came a close second). He would stuff sweet-sticky rice into his mouth, his fingers shiny with honey dip, and he would smile delightedly, perhaps because we, all of us, seemed a tad ridiculous to him or maybe because the food tasted so sweet and warm. My mother batted at him with her hands, trying to avoid the debris which would inevitably slick his chops and cascade down his grubby top, but this made him laugh all the more, as though the whole performance was one put on exclusively for his entertainment.

‘Mama … Qiao go “munch munch”,’ he enunciated delightedly, as miniature boulders of food avalanched out of his mouth. He turned to me and grinned, flicking his chubby toddler’s fingers in my direction, a display of happy triumph on his part.

I looked at his face – shining with mirth and newness – and whereas I usually felt irritation towards my brother because his boisterousness was overwhelming, now I experienced a desperate and fearful sense of love for him. I looked at his face and his big open toddler’s smile, and in his innocence he seemed both oblivious and vulnerable. What Gen had said about the dead children seemed ridiculous – something designed to rankle me – and yet I realised that I had in fact heard of children dying. A girl in the year below had been hit by a car. A boy in the year above had become ill. Their names eluded me, and the details of the illness, or the circumstances of the accident, were also invisible to me.

I’d heard about the events at the time, perhaps through second-hand conversations, or something said at a school assembly, but I’d never really taken in the specifics. Now, though, it was more real. I looked at my brother with his glistening dark eyes and his full cheeks bulging with food and felt my breath catch. All it would take was for some of that food to get lodged in his throat, or perhaps when our mother had helped him down from his high chair, his belly swollen, he might stumble, cracking his head smartly against the corner of a door. Or he could …

The infinite variety of ways in which my brother might suddenly be taken from this world ran across my mind, and all at once it seemed to me there was no way he would survive the day. I reached out to him instinctively; I squeezed his nose and he blinked and laughed, and I had to fight back tears. Nobody else noticed the sudden change in my behaviour (before this day I was more likely to pinch my brother’s cheeks to make him cry). But perhaps my grandmother realised something was different, for I felt the wrinkled darkness of her eyes upon me, curious, tinged with mysterious amusement.

But the situation for me was anything but funny. As my mother herded me out of the apartment that morning, as I felt the door close behind me, I was convinced I would never see my brother again. That something would happen to him while I was gone. I imagined his face no longer bright-eyed and shiny, but shut-eyed and grey, his body suspended within the strange orange glow inside that great building; then I imagined my brother being belched out from that tapering chimney, his dull death mask outlined in a smoke-filled scream. More than anything I wanted to tell my mother not to make me go to school – to let me stay at home – but the words wouldn’t come. At that age there is such a gulf between your childhood certainties and the adult world your parents inhabit; even though I was certain my brother was in great danger (though I knew not from what), nevertheless I couldn’t change the course of my routine, I couldn’t give voice to my fears, for I knew I would never be able to make my mother or father understand what I felt.

So I sank into a wretched state. I sat at my desk in class with a feeling of dread broiling in my belly. Every minute passed as an inscrutable agony. At lunch I couldn’t help but wander up to one of the other girls – Fulin – who always seemed amiable and sensible.

‘Hey, Fulin!’

She seemed friendly but I would have to approach this with a great deal of caution and tact.

‘Fulin?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you think that it is possible something really awful could happen at any moment, and that we could … die … at any point, and that when that happens they would take our bodies and burn them and our spirits … would end up coming out as smoke?’

She looked at me, blinking in much the same way my brother had done when I tweaked his nose.

‘I can’t chat right now. I have to … get started on my homework.’

The rest of the afternoon was equally excruciating. By the time I returned home, my thoughts had rolled over and over in my brain, and I was certain my brother was already gone. When I stepped into the living room and saw him being bounced on my grandmother’s lap, for the second time that day I found it difficult to breathe. He looked up at me and gurgled cheekily, before returning to the intriguing topography of my grandmother’s face, pressing his hands against her in the way I had once done myself. But my grandmother’s eyes remained on me, curious and penetrating.

I went to my room. Qiao was okay, that was the important thing. Only then another thought arrived. A week before, I had been running with my friends after school and I had cut my knee clambering over a wooden gate. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, even though I noticed a slight yellowing around the thin lip of red. The skin there tingled. It occurred to me that it had got infected – my mother was always talking about such things. Perhaps it was not Qiao who was the vulnerable one, but me.

And then, another thought came. Perhaps we were all vulnerable. Perhaps any of us could die at any time. But how could people live like this? With such an awareness? My eyes felt heavy but at the same time the tears wouldn’t come.

I felt a great sadness. It was a feeling which seemed to separate me from my family, from the world. I watched my mother jostle with my little brother. I watched my father retreat into his study deep in thought. They all continued as usual. Had they never experienced such thoughts? Would we all end up in the place Gen had described? Would we all end up as the dark smoke pushed out from some strange chimney?

I found myself wandering into my grandmother’s room.

Her large turtle-like eyes fixed on me.

‘Are you ready to let it go?’

‘Let what go?’

‘Let go of whatever it is you have been keeping inside you. It’s like a volcano, you know. And eventually, all volcanoes must explode.’

Something in me seeped out in a rush of feeling. I felt tears forming in my eyes.

‘There is this boy.’

‘Ah yes, I thought you were a bit young for that. But if he is handsome and you really like him, and you are feeling these warm sensations in your belly every time you look at him, then perhaps …’

‘Eww, no! I don’t like him at all. I hate him, in fact!’

‘Well love often begins with hate …’

She smiled her great toad’s smile.

‘Po Po – be serious. He … he told me something horrible.’

Her expression became gentle.

‘What did he tell you?’

‘He told me that there is a building where they burn …’

Suddenly I was overcome by the rawness of my emotion. I felt my body heave in a single silent sob.

‘Burn what?’ my grandmother asked.

‘Burn … burn the bodies of … dead children. And that their spirits come out in the smoke. But that’s not true, is it, Po Po?’

‘Where is this building?’

‘The Beijing Children’s Hospital.’

My grandmother sucked her bottom lip. She was concentrating. Generally speaking, that was what I loved about her. Most adults never take what children say seriously. They just respond with an uninterested and anodyne answer. But my grandmother really seemed to consider what I said. Only on this occasion, I wished she hadn’t. Eventually she began to speak.

‘I think what your friend said may be true.’

Something in me sank. It was one thing for such a story to arise in the world of children. But for an adult – and an ancient one at that – to give credence to what Gen had said made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

She smiled, a soft melancholy smile that caused the wrinkles on her forehead to become ravines, deeply etched into the skin. As I got older, I thought about ageing more, as we all do. I came to think of old age as a fallibility akin to illness, something that left a person weak and in some way less than themselves. But I never used to think of my grandmother that way. Her hands with veins running across them like vines, the lines which criss-crossed her forehead, the full softness of her belly, the solidity of her arthritic shoulders, and those ancient, timeless eyes – to me these things spoke not of fallibility but of permanence. Of implacable strength, like an old gnarly tree that had been battered by wind and weather, but remained stubbornly set into the soil.

Indeed, while my father worked, my mother bustled and shopped, and my brother and I were at school each day, it was as though my grandmother had taken root in our apartment. And the awareness of her – her presence, the rich odour of leather oil which emanated from her – was something I sought to breathe in, for it brought me comfort. My grandmother could be wicked, and she had an acid tongue – my father had been lashed by it, and it was enough to turn my mother’s face a crimson blush before sending her scurrying from the room. But although my grandmother sometimes slapped my wrists hard in a moment of pique, her attitude to me and Qiao was one of gentle amusement. Now, however, she looked serious; she thoughtfully stroked the hairs which protruded from her chin and began to speak.

‘Do you remember much of your grandfather?’

I was suddenly anxious. I did not wish to displease my grandmother.