Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Wang strides over to her. ‘Well, don’t you offer special services to your customers at the Heavenly Massage? Didn’t Zeng Yan pay you six thousand yuan to strip for him the other day?’

Yida gasps. ‘Wang, have you lost your mind? I don’t work at the Heavenly Massage. And I’ve never met Zeng Yan in my life. What are you talking about?’

‘You know exactly what I am talking about.’

Wang hadn’t believed the letter at first. He had thought the ‘exposé’ of Yida was an imaginary scenario straight out of Zeng’s perverted mind. But Wang now looks at Yida, gaping at him, lost for words, and knows the letter was telling the truth. Yida had stripped for Zeng. Not for the money, but to make a fool of him. To prove he didn’t own her.

‘You’ve been screwing your customers for years! You think you can hide it from me, but I’ve always known what you’ve been up to!’

Blood rushes to Yida’s head as she leans towards him. She stabs her finger at the door and shouts, ‘Get out of my home! Get out! You’re fucking crazy!’

Wang sets her straight. ‘It’s not your home. It’s mine. I brought you here off the streets, remember?’

Sobbing, Yida shoves him with both hands, pushing him out of the kitchen. But Wang won’t be thrown out of his own home. He grabs Yida’s shoulders and shakes her hard, with more strength than he knew he had. As he shakes her and shakes her, a strange thing happens. He somehow detaches from his body and hovers above them, watching him shaking Yida until she stops screaming, until she stops fighting him off and goes limp and insensible as a rag doll. When he stops shaking her, after a minute or two, his wife is silent. She stares at Wang as though she had glimpsed something nightmarish in his eyes.

‘Who are you?’ Yida whispers.

Wang smells the cigarette smoke on her breath. Even through his rage, he can still see how beautiful his wife is, desirable to any man. He takes her head in his hands and kisses her hard on the mouth, feeling her teeth beneath her lips. He knows he is hurting her, that later he will regret being so aggressive. But he takes her slack wrist and pulls her out of the kitchen. He is sick and tired of the dishonesty in their marriage; the time has finally come to show Yida who he really is.

Qing Dynasty, 1836

I

SLUMBERING BEAST. YELLOW slit of eye. Slobbering on the cobbles of Hog Lane, as though gnashed up in the jaws of the Sea Daemon and spewed out. Hairy-knuckled hand, sleep-scratching the crotch-rot between his legs. Yellow matted hair like trampled straw. He should have been set ablaze, he was so crawling with filth and disease.

It was the hour of the ram and Hog Lane was empty. No pole-carrying porters, tinkers, or rat-catchers, or peep-show men. Only toothless Ah Ling under the bamboo awning of his junk shop, whose sly grin said, ‘Go on, boy, fleece the barbarian!’ Jack’s Ale Tavern was rowdy with the beast’s shipmates, who’d swagger out later with bladders full of firewater, looking for a whorehouse or a brawl. But first, the drinking had to be done.

I was a young boy then, and scared out of my wits. I crept over to the slobbering beast and whispered in Ghost People tongue, ‘Mister? How do you do, old boy?’ The beast slumbered on. His breath stank of firewater — alcohol and tobacco juice, with a dash of arsenic, and something viler, as though a rat from the ship’s hold had crawled into his guts to die. My hand shook as I reached for the coin purse in the barbarian’s pocket. Blood crashed in my ears, and I was so intent on my thieving I didn’t see one of his shipmates staggering out of the tavern.

‘ Oi! ’

He shackled my wrist with his hairy hand and hauled me up so I was staring right into his snarling face, breath of firewater stinging my eyes. Coins jingled out of the stolen purse on to the ground as he walloped my backside like he was beating dust out of a rug. Whack! Whack! Whack! More beasts spilled out of the tavern to cheer as I howled. Down the lane, Ah Ling sniggered on his stool.

‘Mister! Let me go!’ I begged in Ghost People tongue.

I wriggled and kicked out backwards like a donkey with its hind leg, and struck something soft. The beast squeaked, let go of my wrist, and I ran off.

I ran up Hog Lane, past the dens of opium smoke and sinful deeds. I ran past the shophouses of Old China street, and the factories of Thirteen Hong Lane, where flags of other lands fluttered from the flag staffs. I ran past the warehouses of tea and silk, porcelain and furs, and past a foreign devil squinting through a monocle, inspecting a pocket watch on a chain. Some of the drunken beasts gave chase, but I outran them.

I was running down a narrow alley leading out of Fanqui Town when I looked back at the herd lumbering behind. The next thing I knew I’d barrelled straight into one of the sailors. He grabbed me and twisted my arms behind my back, as the rest of the beasts, furnace red and out of breath from the chase, caught up. The one I’d kicked between the legs came over. Out of his pocket he took a knife, and flicked out the blade.

‘Mister!’ I pleaded. ‘Old boy, please!’

I was done for. A Tanka boy losing his life for kicking a white man — that was fairness in the barbarian’s eyes. He leant in close, grabbed a fistful of my hair and brought the blade to my neck. The other beasts crowded round, and their calm was more chilling than the cheers in Hog Lane. I thought of poor Ma Qin in her wash boat, about to lose her only son.

But fate wasn’t to have it that way. Fate had you waving your walking cane in the air and shouting at them instead. The sailors looked over at you, limping up the alley. You were odd-looking, even by barbarian standards, with your ship’s prow of a nose and orange hair and freckles on pale skin. One of those gweilos who even on the hottest days wore a waistcoat over a stiff-collared shirt, long breeches and shiny leather shoes. You hobbled over to us, your cane tapping, lame foot dragging. The sailors, not having much respect for cripples, sneered.

A drunken sailor’s a barrel of gunpowder that can explode at the slightest spark, and so you spoke to them carefully. The barbarian with the knife yelled and stabbed the blade at you, but you stood your ground. Though thin and weedy as he was barrel-chested and burly, you had the cleverer tongue. The beast soon flipped the blade away and backed off. One last kick to my backside and they staggered back to the ale taverns of Hog Lane. You watched them go, leaning on your cane and dabbing your brow with a handkerchief.

Though you’d saved my thieving neck, I turned to run as far from Fanqui Town as my legs would carry me, without a word of thanks.

‘ Wait! ’ Cantonese, with a strong barbarian accent. ‘Are you hurt?’

I stared at you. Who knew foreign devils could speak? Most sail all the way to the Celestial Kingdom without even knowing how to say hello.

‘Stealing is wrong,’ you scolded. ‘You shouldn’t steal.’

Ah, a Jesus Preacher, I thought, edging away. But the sermon ended there. I wanted to run, but something in your green-coloured eyes held me in the alley. You stroked your beard and side-whiskers and looked at me.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ah Qin.’

‘I am Ah Tom,’ you said. Another dab of your brow with the linen in your pale, freckled hand. ‘You’re a Tanka, aren’t you? Want to make some honest money? Come with me.’

II

‘This is the British factory.’ You pointed your bamboo cane to the sagging flag on the flagpole. ‘That is the British flag.’

Your cane tapping the wooden floor, you led me through the factory, down the hall to the rear. Through one doorway I saw a dining room with silver candlesticks on a long cloth-covered table, and a portrait of the She-Emperor of England on the wall. I saw the Chinese servants, polishing silver things that I knew were called ‘forks and spoons’, though I didn’t know which were which. The servants frowned at me, the Tanka boatboy in rags, tagging after Master Tom. They frowned as though they’d seen the glint of thievery in my eyes.