The Child's Past Life

by Cai Jun

  Twenty years had passed since then, and she’d never again mentioned what happened.

  Their secret.

  June 19, 2011—almost dusk.

  Ouyang Xiaozhi returned to the scene of the fire. Brand-new buildings stood behind her, Nanming High sat across from her, and the Demon Girl Zone lurked a few hundred meters away.

  Just as she was about to head to the bus stop, she saw a teenage boy. He didn’t look like he belonged at Nanming High.

  His face seemed familiar, like someone she’d seen two years ago at the Rice Dumpling Festival.

  CHAPTER 45

  June 9, 2011.

  Yi Yu arrived at the bus stop across from Nanming High. Dressed in a white school uniform and wearing a black backpack, she looked like a tomboy who could no longer hide her femininity.

  Sixteen-year-old Si Wang was waiting for her.

  Yi Yu casually strolled toward him. “You looking for me? How did you do on your high school entrance exams?”

  “I’m waiting for the results. I hope they’re high enough for Nanming High so I can be your classmate.” Passing girls checked him out as he leaned against the bus stop, his open collar fluttering in the wind. “What’s up with you?”

  “Just had my college entrance exams a few days ago. Think I’ll go to Hong Kong soon.”

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I applied to Hong Kong University. I already passed the interview.” She swept back her short hair, looking like a wanderer, someone who’d never fit in. “I’m not suited to colleges here. Even if I got into Beijing or Tsinghua University, I’d be forced to drop out. Might as well go to Hong Kong where there are fewer rules.”

  “Then I can’t see you anymore?”

  “I’ll come back and visit plenty,” she said, patting his shoulders. She leaned next to him and let the sun shine on her face. More and more of the passing students, especially pretty girls in dresses, looked at them with curiosity. How did a famous tomboy get together with a good-looking teenager?

  He lowered his voice. “Ever been to the Demon Girl Zone?”

  “Please! Let me tell you, this was one big cemetery back in the day. Ruan Lingyu’s grave was right under the Demon Girl Zone. She was Cantonese and buried at the Guangdong Public Cemetery. It was called the Lianyi Cemetery then, though it was so luxuriously landscaped it was more like a park. There was a bridge after the gate and a lot of classical Chinese architecture. Some of the burial plots had coffins, some had offerings to gods. Most graves were made of stone and really classical. There were stone tables, benches, horses, and sheep, and the round graves were surrounded by a stone wall. Some tried to look like emperors’ graves, some had secret passages. Luckily, it was the Republic of China era, or they would have been in trouble. Ruan Lingyu’s grave was the shabbiest. The tombstone was just a meter high. The whole cemetery was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and schools and factories were built in its place. All those precious lots for rich families with good feng shui—gone! Nanming High’s library was where people made offerings to the dead.” Yi Yu was proud having rattled off the history.

  “Did you say that someone died there?”

  “That’s normal! Who doesn’t die? I don’t want a lavish funeral myself. Much better to toss my ashes into the sea.”

  “How do you know so much about Ruan Lingyu’s grave? Only someone who was there would know. Didn’t you say it was all destroyed during the Cultural Revolution? How did you see it? Were you at her funeral?”

  “Yes.”

  “And another thing—you said that in your past life you lived on Serenity Road in 1983. There was a murder across the street—and that house is still empty today?”

  “Yeah, what’s it to you?”

  “Remember a kid? He was around thirteen. His grandma was the maid. They lived in the basement of your house.”

  “Aunt Yun’s grandson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aunt Yun was my maid. I wasn’t rich, just eighty-something and really sick. The government assigned her to help me with day-to-day stuff. She was in good health and did everything. She only had a daughter who was killed a few years earlier. Left a son. I took pity on them and had them stay in the basement. I forgot his name, I just remember he was really good at studying and actually got into a good high school.”

  Si Wang listened quietly as Yi Yu kept talking.

  “I watched him go from elementary school to junior high. No parents around to nag him, yet he was disciplined. I often saw him in the basement doing homework by the lamp. He loved to read. I lent him a set of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. No kid on Serenity Road liked to play with him. He was beat up a lot. Aunt Yun was superstitious and always worried he wouldn’t live a long life because his face didn’t seem blessed.”

  This conversation depressed Si Wang, so he changed the subject. “I’ve been cramming science books lately. I don’t think reincarnation exists. It’s just that some people are born with supernatural abilities, like having all the memories that once belonged to someone who’s passed on.”

  Yi Yu’s face changed, showing an elderly person’s skepticism. “Fine, let’s say I have a man’s memory. Someone who was born in 1900.”

  “Did you say 1900? When the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded Beijing?”

  “Yes, the twenty-sixth year of the Guangxu era—the Gengzi Incident.”

  “You still remember it?”

  “C’mon, now, I was just born that year.” She watched the deepening dusk. Nanming Road was about to be covered by shadows from the towering buildings. With closed eyes she recited, “Where did the old powers go, here I am back again.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “It was from A New Account of the Tales of the World by Liu Yiqing. Two men called Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao went up to Tiantai Mountain. In a valley they met two young women who invited them home. The men felt like they’d found paradise. They stayed the night and the women made them forget all their troubles. They remained there for six months and finally went back after missing their hometown. When they returned to it, their village was nothing like they remembered. No one knew them. It was already the Jin dynasty, about two hundred years later. Their families were in their seventh generation. It was rumored that they got lost in the mountains and didn’t return. Later on, they left and were never seen again.”

  “Sounds like a Washington Irving story.”

  Yi Yu patted his shoulders. “Kid, you know me so well. Liu Yuxi was demoted to the borderlands in the Tang dynasty. When he returned to Xuandu Temple in Chang’an for the second time, everything was different. That’s why he was saying ‘here I am back again.’ ”

  “You’re an exile, too?”

  “I was born into a poor intellectual’s family in the early twentieth century. Luckily, I had a businessman uncle who gave me tuition money. On May 4, 1919, I was on that square. I helped set fire to the Zhao Mansion. But I went to Japan the following year.”

  Yi Yu laughed at the confused look on Si Wang’s face. “Hey, have you ever heard of Sola Aoi? I’m a woman now and not interested in these things anymore. But in my past life, I had a doomed relationship with a Japanese girl. There was a girl called Anna from my Nagasaki school days. She actually died for me. I don’t remember her original name. She was Catholic, so I just remember her given name.”

  “You were quite the womanizer!”

  Yi Yu blushed, lowering her head in shame. “I left Japan after that and went to school in France. First to Paris, where I stayed in Montmartre, and then Provence, in the lavender-scented Grasse. I was friends with Sartre in Paris. I ran into Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. Ever read The Sun Also Rises? I read the first draft in front of Hemingway. I stayed four years in France. What a crazy place. I didn’t want to waste my life there, however. So I
made the trendiest and most hot-blooded choice for back then. I went to frozen Moscow. I crossed Europe to get there. I saw Lenin’s memorial on Red Square, and I was so excited to see the red star on top of the Kremlin. I was awed and so inspired. I got into Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University and met my idol. In the 1930s, I was involved in an incident and was deported. The university closed because of that, too.”

  “So you came back to China?”

  “Yes, but I had to stay anonymous. I lived in the concession zone. If the Nationalist Party had caught me, I’d have been jailed or shot. I couldn’t join the revolution, either. They thought I was a traitor and a lap dog for Chen Duxiu. I could only hang out with the intellectuals and artists and spend my time writing poems and drinking. I worked as a teacher, reporter, and editor—and I wrote martial arts serial novels for newspapers. I edited Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death. I also read her Tales of Hulan River. We only met a few times, but I really liked her. She was a real Northeastern girl. I’ve always wanted to write a book called The River of Life and Death.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, plus The River of Forgetfulness and Meng Po Soup! When civil war broke out, I went all over the country: Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu, even the remote Kunming. I was like the exiled Liu Yuxi. Southwest Associated University didn’t want me, because I was too much of a rebel. So I went over the hills to the Tibet region. I lived in the real wilderness for years before coming back to inland China. I was already in my forties. Then I met her.”

  “Miss Cao?”

  “She was extremely smart. That’s why I fell for her. But she was married to a bureaucrat. She didn’t love him. In 1949, her husband abandoned her to go to Taiwan. She had a chance to find him via Hong Kong, but she chose to stay here.”

  “Because of you?”

  “I was a so-called traitor. She was the wife of a Nationalist Party official. She stayed for me, but we were apart for thirty years. When we met again, she was in her eighties. Her father had left her that house, and the government gave it back to her. We stayed on the same street but hardly saw each other. It’s just as well—less heartache. I’ve loved a lot of people and hated a lot of people, but I married no one and had no children. That was my biggest regret from my past life.”

  “You want a kid?”

  “It’s better than being reincarnated. A kid can carry your genes to your children’s children. Your life never ends. My old age was sad and long. Miss Cao was the only one I could talk to. Some foreign reporters would interview me to gossip about people I knew from back in the day. But I was sick of it. I wanted to die early. I lived to ninety-two and died in bed.”

  “Living too long made you desperate? What if you’d died young?”

  “Si Wang, you wouldn’t understand!”

  “Last question. Did you ever finish writing The River of Life and Death?”

  “I wrote it when I had lots of free time in Qinghai. It took me thirty years. Then I burned it.”

  “Why?”

  “I was writing this book with every minute of my life. So are you!”

  The young man thought a while before relaxing. He pressed his hands together like an ancient scholar. “Brother Yi Yu, I may not know your name from your past life, but we became friends anyway. We were fated to meet somehow. I don’t know when I’ll see you again, but please take care.”

  She also made the same gesture. “Brother Si Wang, I’ll go back and pack. Until we meet again.”

  “If only we had two shots!”

  “Ninety years ago, when I was leaving home, Li Shutong had just become a monk at Hangzhou’s Hupao Temple. My uncle was his good friend. Before we left, Li Shutong came to see us off. He’d written a song.”

  Yi Yu sang:

  By the temple, next to the road, grass connected with sky

  Night wind, sounds of the flute, setting sun on the mountains

  Corner of the world, end of time, so many friends leaving

  One cauldron of wine marks our good-byes, dreams get colder

  The song ends, and we part.

  She said nothing else, just gave a smile. She looked beautiful.

  Yi Yu walked toward Nanming High but stopped to turn around and look once more at Si Wang.

  He shouted in alarm, “Watch out!”

  A dump truck barreled toward her like a bull. The brakes screeched, but the truck didn’t slow down at all.

  It was as though the dust cloud picked up Yi Yu and flung her through the air until she landed right in front of Si Wang.

  Students screamed. He was in a daze but knelt to pick up her soft and distorted body.

  Blood spurted out of her mouth, covering her beautiful, knowing face.

  PART 4:

  MENG PO SOUP

  CHAPTER 46

  The last day of July, 2011. The hottest day of the year.

  The sun was up at 7:00 a.m. Cicadas chirped loudly from the locust tree. Using bookstore earnings, He Qingying had bought a new shirt for her son from a Taobao designer store. She straightened his collar and forced him to shave his long hair. She took his new wallet and put in it the money for tuition, room and board, and handling fees—a total of 2,990 yuan. She nagged him about being sure not to lose it.

  Ever since kindergarten, she’d always accompanied her son to the first day of school, but not today. She just walked him to the nearest subway station.

  Si Wang had been accepted to Nanming High.

  Last night, she reminded him that because of all the work being done to the natural gas lines along Nanming Road, buses had been rerouted, and the easiest way would be to take the subway.

  Watching his descent into the station, she shouted, “Wang Er, I’ll be at the parent-teacher meeting.”

  He had to change lines to get close to the school, which left him with a ten-minute walk. He was already running late.

  A sedan drove up, and the driver rolled down his window. “Hey, you going to Nanming? Ten yuan each, flat price.”

  He got into the back seat of the gypsy cab and covered his wallet. Just as the car was about to pull away, a girl in a white dress opened the door. Si Wang scooted to the left, making room for her.

  “Nanming High.” Her voice was soft as she apologized to Si Wang. “Sorry, can I share this ride with you?”

  He was speechless when he got a good look at her face. She wasn’t a girl but a woman in her thirties. The years had left no marks on her. She could have passed for a college student. She must have been growing younger, like some mythical creature.

  Ouyang Xiaozhi.

  She recognized the sixteen-year-old young man.

  “Are you a new student?”

  He nodded clumsily.

  “Are we leaving, or what?” the driver said, eager not to be ticketed for idling in front of the subway station.

  “I’m sorry,” Xiaozhi said, looking at her white ceramic watch. “Just seven minutes left—we really can’t be late!”

  She lowered her head awkwardly, her pale face kind of flushed. Sweat beaded below her hairline, thanks to having rushed out of the subway station.

  Si Wang avoided her gaze and said nothing. He looked everywhere but at her.

  Five minutes later, the car arrived at Nanming High via a shortcut.

  Xiaozhi paid the driver before he could. He followed her out of the car and said, “Hey, I still owe you five yuan!”

  “Don’t worry about it. Thanks for sharing the cab.”

  Summer morning. There was construction dust everywhere on Nanming Road. Her smile accelerated the heart rates of many male students.

  Luckily, they weren’t late. New students accompanied by their parents gathered at the gates. Si Wang was the only one alone. Whole families showed up, many of them arriving in private cars. It didn’t take long for the road to look like a parking lot.

 
; The sports field had been converted to an admissions office, and signs showed where the new students needed to go to pay the various fees. Xiaozhi walked past the oleander bush. The red flowers bloomed even brighter now.

  She walked into the teachers’ building. At the floor-length mirror by the staircase, she ran her hands over her hair and clothes. Her makeup was light, and her conservative outfit seemed indifferent to the steamy weather. Her skirt covered her knees, and she wore flats.

  Xiaozhi noticed the student with whom she’d shared the taxi.

  All the new students either stood on the sports field or went to first-floor classrooms. All of them except for the young man following her.

  She turned, wearing a serious expression. She was used to the attention from male students. She needed them to see her as untouchable.

  Si Wang stood in the corridor until his cell phone rang. It was his mom making sure he got to school on time. He told her everything was fine, then he went downstairs and out onto the field to pay his fees.

  An hour later, the new students and their families went to the assembly hall for a ceremony. Si Wang stood away from the crowd. He was exposed under the bright sun, and sweat drenched his new shirt.

  Looking at the school library, where Lianyi Cemetery’s memorial hall once stood, he uttered, “I’m back.”

  CHAPTER 47

  The sun was fierce.

  It was as hot as the Sahara—at least 40 degrees Celsius. Heat waves crushed the young students standing on the playing fields. Girls and boys alike made up excuses to escape the heat, everything from menstrual cycles to fainting. Only he stood straight under the sun and watched the training instructor. His pale skin was now so tan it looked ready to peel.

  The military training lasted five days, ending before Indian Summer. The instructor complimented his willpower. No one would dare pick on him now.

  When the new students finally moved into the dorms, He Qingying insisted on helping her son settle in. He got his school uniform, a number of black tracksuits. The girls clearly admired him and He Qingying teased him about that.