‘This one’s going to be tricky’, Madame Fu says to him, referring to the girl in a coat that’s too big for her, who has started to snore. ‘She’s a country bumpkin. Plucked fresh from a watermelon patch in Daxing, soil still on her. Hey there! Qianqian! You want to do this or not?’ 

Qi’s been driving Madame Fu’s girls for years now, though it means late nights. She keeps sending business his way, which is hardly surprising. Qi is a good driver; he knows the city like the back of his hand. Madame Fu looks like an auntie, not a madam. But as brothels and prostitution are illegal in China, that’s probably all for the better. She’s been wily enough to ply her trade out of this unassuming massage parlour in Chaoyang for years without being denounced by the Chaoyang qunzhong, the Xicheng Aunties or the Fengtai Advising Squad. Bands of concerned citizens who don’t hesitate to report any transgression to the Public Security Bureau. Or maybe they do report her, and she has dirt on someone high up enough in the Bureau to make it go away. 

The girl is asleep on the chair. Flat chest, slim waist. A plain, brown face. Not the type of girl Qi finds appealing. He can picture her squatting over a portable stove, stirring boiling rice in some provincial village somewhere, which is probably what she was doing, up until a few weeks ago. If not for the makeup, Qi would have thought she was 13.  

‘You changed your car’, says Madame Fu. Qi can see his Geely parked on the street; it glitters with the patina of rain. ‘Business must be good.’ 

‘Business is always good. People are always coming to the capital.’ 

‘People always come to Beijing to chase the yuan’, she laughs. Madame Fu prods the girl a second time, and the girl’s eyes open, dead and disinterested. Madame Fu gives Qi a look. ‘Oh well, what more can you expect? You have to keep an eye on this one.’ 

A driver turns into a hungry ghost in this city. A ghost with a needle mouth and a belly as vast as a mountain valley. A driver passes through every nook and cranny, restless and unseen, never stopping, always on the lookout for passengers with yuan to burn like hell money at Tomb Sweeping. In the orange methane glow of the streetlamps, as he heads towards the Ring Road, Qi checks the arms gripping the steering wheel to make sure his flesh isn’t becoming see-through, his arms aren’t fading away. 

But Qi is lucky, like his name, which sounds like ‘seven’, a lucky number, or like qǐ which means ‘to rise’. He’s lucky to be born here, to be a true Beijinger. It is one reason why old customers like Madame Fu keep hiring him. If you want to find the best antiques in the city, the real deal and not cheap knockoffs from Guangzhou, Qi knows a street full of reputable antique dealers. Gold bars or a paper car to burn to make the afterlife more comfortable for a recently departed loved one? Qi’s your man! He knows paper artisans whose families have been doing this for generations. He is lucky because he is tied to this city with human bonds that keep him tethered to the mortal realm. Unlike the poor bastards who arrive at Beijing West train station in their thousands every day – most of them illegally – with no one they know and nowhere to go. 

But driving the cab has taught Qi that being invisible has its advantages too. If he picks up a smart couple – the businessman much older than the scantily clad woman – in a bar in Sanlitun or a heavily tattooed gangster, he reserves his judgement and drives them wherever they want to go. A love hotel or a field two hours out of town in the middle of nowhere. He doesn’t ask questions. That is another reason Madame Fu likes him. Often it is better to be a ghost and stay out of other people’s business.  

The girl yawns loudly, and he looks at her in the rear-view mirror. With some of the girls, he has driven them so many times before that there is an easy rapport. They gossip about their boyfriends and what they want to do with their lives. Marry rich or finish school. Some pick up foreign boyfriends and disappear for a time. But they all come back to Madame Fu eventually, when the boyfriend’s visa expires, or he goes back home and marries the long-term white girlfriend or something else. 

But this girl is too young to know how to make small talk to lighten the mood, though when Qi thinks of his daughter, Miaomiao, she never seemed this shy at the same age. The girl is trying to ignore him by staring out the window. He feels awkward because she feels awkward.  

‘Where are you from?’ he asks, feeling sorry for her. When she turns her head to meet his eyes in the mirror, he thinks, ‘Maybe, Qi, you’ve been mistaken about her all this while.’ The girl looks bored. 

‘Yangfang’, she says, and the name conjures up a vague memory in Qi’s mind. A dead-end town beyond the Seventh Ring Road. 

‘You live in Beijing now?’ 

She nods. 

‘You like it here?’ She doesn’t say anything, so he continues cheerfully. ‘The capital can be a bit much at first, but you’ll get used to it. I’ve known Madame Fu for many years. She looks after all the girls. She’ll take good care of you.’ 

The girl shrugs like she doesn’t care. ‘I won’t be doing this for very long.’ 

‘Oh, you’ve found something else?’ 

She shrugs. ‘I met a man the other day who wants to take pictures of me. He says he knows people.’ 

Qi can imagine. A sleazy customer at the parlour. Probably a nobody, a middle manager, promising big to sniff out if anything is going for free. It will inevitably end in tears, but it is not his place to say anything. The girl will find this out soon enough for herself. 

He turns on the radio thinking it might cheer her up, and Big Day’s happy banter fills the car. 

‘Good morning, Beijing! Sun is up, air pollution not too bad. At least, we’re not choking today … We’re going to see you through your morning with a laugh and some tunes. Hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s …’ 

It’s nighttime. The programme is a repeat of the one this morning. Qi hopes it will cheer her up. But when he glances back, her face is turned back out the window. 

Qi can’t remember how long he’s listened to Big Day on the radio. At first, it was behind closed doors in the classrooms at Tsinghua University, on small transistor radios they could hold in their hands and easily hide down their sleeves. Then, listening to Big Day was risky. Foreign music was subversive, and Big Day said dangerous things. But over 30 years later, Big Day is no longer edgy, and the Bureau no longer taps his phone. He became successful, married a pop star from Hong Kong with the perfect douyin eye, and they have a kid. Now he takes up the morning slot on Hot FM, bantering with his cohost, Kino, who got his start doing crosstalk on the New Year’s Eve television spectacular on CCTV. They chat and play the same tunes they did back in the Tsinghua days, though the tunes are now ‘classic hits’. 

‘I’ve got a confession to make, Kino’, Big Day says. ‘I’m feeling a bit hung over from last night …’ 

‘Yeah … big night for Big Day?’ 

‘Very funny. But for you and me, no rest. We’re like soldiers, Kino. Come hail or shine, we’ve got a job to do to keep Beijing moving …’ 

Sometimes Big Day and Kino play Cui Jian, and it reminds Qi of 1989. He can’t go anywhere in Beijing without running into ghosts. During the protests, Cui Jian played on every radio in the hutong. He came to play for them as they camped out in Tiananmen square. Some of his classmates were on hunger strike, something that Qi could never bring himself to do. But he remembers the stark figure, standing in the floodlights under the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Cui Jian sang Nothing to My Name, and when he got to the chorus, they all joined in. He, Gaolang and the rest of the gang. Crying, hugging each other, holding hands. Oh … when will you come with me? Oh … when will you come with me? They believed by singing alone they would stop the tanks coming up Chang’an Avenue like columns of green, hard-shelled turtles.  

‘So naïve’, snaps his mother, clicking her tongue, her dead voice ringing in his ears. ‘Like father, like son.’ 

He remembers his father, a professor, an expert in Tang Dynasty poetry with a fondness for quoting Li Bai. One day a student accused him of refusing to hang the Chairman’s portrait in his home, though how anyone knew was always a mystery. His father’s name appeared in big-character posters plastered all around the city, denouncing him as a capitalist-roadster. One day Red Guards came and took him away to a re-education camp in Xinjiang. Seven years later, he seemed so much older. His black hair had turned white, like an old man. When Gaolang came to fetch Qi to join the other students in the protests and marches, his father was frustratingly impassive.  

‘I’ll see you for dinner’ was all he said and waved them off. 

His father no longer read his books. Instead, he spent his days sitting cross-legged on the ground in the middle of the courtyard house, one hand on the earth like the Buddha, looking up at the sky and muttering how much bigger the sky in Xinjiang was. 

Qi switches lanes on the Third Ring Road. Qi spends his days driving in circles along the city’s ring roads. The foreign tourists he drives, even some locals, are astonished how he can know his way around a city so vast. Beijing is a universe. But the ring roads turn like the wheels of a mandala with the Drum and Bell Towers at their core, where Mount Meru should be. The drums beat when the city gates opened; the bell rang when they closed. But that was before the Ming city walls were torn down to make space for the Second Ring Road. Now, the bell only rings for tourists. The grey, monotonous suburbs spread their greedy hands in all directions, grabbing at everything in their path. The mountains, the fields that used to grow sorghum and watermelons. As the city grows, they build more ring roads. There are seven now, and the Seventh isn’t even within the city’s limits.

But Qi needs to keep driving to earn money and has been thinking of ways of increasing his income ever since Miaomiao sent him that text a month ago. 

Daddy, I’m going to buy a flat. 

There was a link she sent too, which he opened. A flat in Pudong. Modern and sleek. With a view from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the broad, brown bend of the Huangpu and the Bund visible beyond, tiny like a toy-town. But it is expensive, even for Miaomiao on the good money she earns doing PR for the billionaire, Zhou. She is Qi’s only child, and he wants to contribute. But picking up fares is hard work and doesn’t earn the money he needs.  

But, if truth be known, he doesn’t understand the point of buying the flat. The courtyard house – the siheyuan – in the hutong close to the Bell Tower will be hers one day. It has been in his family for generations, and there is no one else left to inherit it. However, he holds his peace, though it makes him uncomfortable when she talks excitedly about the flat, how she’s going to decorate it, all the well-known people in the area. Qianzhi, his wife, clicks her tongue and grumbles to him that Miaomiao is spoiled. But then, the relationship between Qianzhi and Miaomiao was never an easy one. Tiger and Rooster do not get on. 

When she was seven, Qi tried to teach Miaomiao proper values, making her write out 30 times: 

These are the three necessities for a good life in China (in this order): 

• Honour your parents 

• Venerate your ancestors 

• Have children and grandchildren to honour and venerate you 

The lesson must have stuck: grown up, she replied with an answer of her own. 

Daddy, these are the necessities for a good life in China today (in this order): 

• Cash (preferably US Dollar) 

• Employment (in subsidised, state-owned companies with international operations) 

• Property (ideally in foreign jurisdictions, not subject to state control) 

Each time she comes back home, she’s different. Designer Western clothes, a blue streak in her hair. She is not ashamed that she is only the daughter of a driver. Qianzhi whispers in his ear: Ask the Little Empress when she’s going to get married. But he knows the answer to that already. 

This morning, he woke, like he does every day, to the sound of his neighbour, Lao Wang, flying his birds. The sound was elusive, changing with the position of the birds in the sky. At first, it was only a faint shimmer, rising in volume just within earshot. It seemed one sound, a singularity. Only when the birds appeared, swooping down over the west side of the house, did it disintegrate into a cacophony of urgent wails and laments, like mourners at a funeral, covering and uncovering their mouths. He knows it is not a natural sound. It comes from pairs of bamboo whistles attached to the birds’ tail feathers. One struck a high note, the other a low note, to produce a harmony. A unique sound that you can only hear in the hutong, and Qi misses it when he is away from home. He wonders if Miaomiao ever thinks about it in Shanghai. There are other sounds he remembers, many of which you can’t hear anymore. The brass cups of the sour plum juice sellers in summer; the twang of the change-your-hairstyle men as they scrape the inside of their metal pincers. That city only exists in his memory. 

‘Do you want to hear a joke?’ he asks the girl.  

She looks at him unimpressed, the small eyes in her narrow, brown face becoming smaller. ‘Do you know any funny ones?’ 

‘Sure.’ He takes a deep breath in, like a diver about to take a plunge. ‘Three prisoners are sitting together in a prison cell. Each explains why he was arrested. The first man says: “I opposed covid testing.” The second man says: “I supported covid testing.” The third man says: “I administered the covid tests.”’ 

‘That’s not really very funny.’ 

He nods, raising his eyebrows and scrunching his mouth. ‘Yes, you’re right. It’s not very funny.’ 

‘You’re like my dad’, she continues, sinking back into the seat so that her face becomes a void in the darkness, a negative space, illuminated only in brief flashes by the lights of the motorway. ‘He also listens to old music and isn’t any fun.’ 

Self-consciously, he turns the volume down on Big Day and Kino. 

‘Can we stop? I need to use the bathroom.’ 

There are service stations all along the ring road. Much more convenient than it used to be. He remembers a time when service stations were few and far between, and he had to carry a small jerrycan of petrol in the boot. He remembers when a private vehicle was a rare sight, and he and Gaolang would ride their Forever bikes all over the city, imagining what they wanted China to become. Freer. Happier. Richer. They never imagined this. This is like America where everything is convenient. 

He sees bright lights, red and white livery and the word SINOPEC and turns off the road and drives up to the pumps. It is like docking at a spaceship.  

‘I’ll be back in a moment’, she says, getting out quickly. And he watches as she runs, teetering awkwardly on her stiletto heels, towards the pay station. 

As Qi fills the tank, he checks, through the app, all the payments he’s received today. It wasn’t a bad day. That morning, he picked up two young women in Shuangjing, who looked like sexy schoolgirls in their short, tartan skirts and knee-high socks. Qi thought they looked very Japanese, though they spoke with him freely in a Beijing dialect. When, he dropped them off at the luxury shops on Wangfujing Street, they wanted a photo with him and posed saucily either side, with their hands forming peace signs. They pushed out their chests so their breasts brushed against his arms, and he turned bright red, which caused them to break out in raucous laughter. 

Then, there was the lao wai, the foreigner, called Robinson, whom he collected from the airport. Robinson spoke some Mandarin and took the opportunity, on the long ride back into the city, to practise it with Qi. He was a violinist who toured, mainly in Asia. ‘I like Asian audiences. Asians get classical music’, he said.  

Where Robinson was from, young people didn’t go to concerts anymore. When he mentioned casually he was famous, Qi noticed Robinson searching Qi’s reflection in the mirror for a flicker of recognition. But ever since Qi drove Michelle Yeoh to a boutique in Nanguoluxiang for a fitting, nothing impressed him.  

‘I feel like I’m at home when I’m in Beijing’, Robinson said. ‘I must have been Chinese in a previous life.’ As they drove on the overpass, his gaze trailed out at the miles of cranes and grey, concrete housing blocks. ‘They are always building something in Beijing. Aren’t you sick of all this building?’ 

When they got to his hotel, bellboys appeared from nowhere to take the luggage away. 

‘I usually have a day or two off between concert stops’, Robinson said. ‘I was thinking of going up to Badaling. Do you have a card?’ 

Perhaps he’ll call. Qi’s had foreigners like him before, who take a liking to him for some reason and want to hire him again. Mostly, the foreigners forget. His name is too strange for them to remember (was it Qi or Qing?), and these Chinese all look the same. Robinson gave him a 250-renminbi tip, and the first thought Qi had was to give it back. No one tips in China. But Robinson would offer the bellboys a little hong bao too, and they wouldn’t be so scrupulous. 

‘Thank you’, he said in English as broken as Robinson’s Chinese and went back to the Geely with Chairman Mao’s face crumpled up in his hand. 

The lock in the door clicks shut as the girl settles back into the seat, yawning. 

‘All done?’ Qi asks. 

She nods. She looks sleepy, he thinks. It’s a late night. But it is not his place to say anything. He starts the car engine and swings back out onto the road. After a while, he looks back in the mirror to see she’s nodded off again. 

But she’s awake when they get there. The house is illuminated like a lantern in the dark trees and lawns of the garden. Strangely, it looks familiar: though it is built of Carrara marble and travertine, it looks like a siheyuan. 

He parks to one side and gets out to open the door for the girl, who gawps open-mouthed at everything she sees around her.  

‘Come on’, he says, and he leads the way to the front door. He presses the bell, and they wait until a servant with a long, grey face opens it.  

The girl shoots him a look of terror.  

‘You’ll be alright’, he says, smiling to reassure her. ‘I’ll be just here if you need me.’ 

For a moment she hesitates, her wild eyes fixed on him, but to his satisfaction, slowly her fear subsides. He has a knack of making people feel comfortable. The other girls call him ‘uncle’ and say he feels like family. Evidently, the cool indifference was a trick, an illusion; this girl, too, trusts him. 

‘I’ll ring the bell in two hours.’ 

‘We’ll call you when we’re ready’, the grey servant says.  

The door closes, and he goes back to his car and turns up the volume. He doesn’t have to stay. His job is to drive the girls to the customers and bring them back safely. What happens in between is not his business. He could drive around, find a stall, drink tea, have a cigarette. He could drive back into the city and pick up more fares. But he made a promise to the girl. 

‘You know what the problem is here in China?’ Big Day is saying, and Kino chuckles in the background. 

‘What, Big Day?’  

‘China too serious. That’s what we can learn from the West. Have a little fun, man. Lighten up!’ 

Qi smiles to himself. They wanted the same things when they protested in Tiananmen square. Nike shoes, lots of free time to take their girlfriends to bars, the freedom to discuss an issue with someone and get a little respect from society. The freedom to be a little less serious. 

‘Join the march, Tiananmen square’, they said to him. He can’t remember who said it first. Someone started it, and it spread from person to person, mouth to mouth. And he and Gaolang got on their Forever bikes and rode around, saying the same thing to everyone they passed: young students, boys and girls, old aunties who peeked nervously from behind half-closed shutters, wondering what all the commotion was about.  

They said it to a lao wai journalist, who rolled down the window of his car to speak to them as they cycled past. The lao wai journalist said: ‘Why?’ 

‘Why you think?’ Qi answered back. As if the answer was self-evident. And it seemed self-evident. Everybody he knew was standing up, standing together, staking out what they wanted the future to be. It was a moment he could feel that things were changing too. Everything paused; time stood still. They had created such a disturbance that the whole nation – their huge, ancient mother— stopped for a moment and took notice of her neglected, younger children. The hated grey men, who fobbed them off as young, ignorant brats, came to talk to them. Even the Premier came. But what came of that? Nothing changed. It was naïve to think any of it made any difference. 

He wonders where the others are now. Some he knows. Like Gaolang. Struck in the head by a bullet. When he meets the others who lived through it, nobody speaks of it. And sometimes he wonders to himself: Did it happen? 

There is a rap on the glass. A grey, severe face emerges from the dark, peering at him severely. She raps again, and Qi winds the window down. 

‘There is a problem with the girl. You’d better come quickly.’ 

The servant leads him inside. Qi must walk briskly to keep up.  

‘This way, this way—’ 

Inside, the house gleams, but it feels familiar, like his house, the siheyuan. They are the same house. He passes the carved spirit screen to block out evil spirits, through the main courtyard and then into a smaller courtyard, an imitation of the first. This must be where the private rooms are; everything here is smaller and intimate. There are lights in the pavilion ahead of them, and they quickly move up the stairs and go inside.  

The first thing he sees is the girl lying on a dark, sheepskin rug in the middle of the room. Twisted and fragile. She is not moving. The strongly built man standing over her glowers at Qi when he comes in. He has a familiar face that Qi can’t place.  

‘I didn’t touch her’, the man protests irritably, like a diner who finds a hair in his soup. There is a wavering in his low voice; the man’s powerful hands are shaking. ‘She was on something when she came in. I could tell. She slurred her words.’ 

Qi looks to one side. There is white powder on the dark table. The girl’s lips are blue. 

‘We should call an ambulance.’ 

‘No—no’, the man says, and Qi suddenly recognises his voice. That voice that announces rock songs from the 1980s, the voice that tells China to lighten up. ‘They can’t come here’, Big Day says. ‘You don’t understand; I’m an important man. You have to get rid of her.’ 

‘How?’ 

‘I don’t care.’ 

It is strange to see a grown man shake like this. Strange to see him take a couple of steps in one direction and turn to take a few steps in the other, sit down and immediately stand up. It’s as if he doesn’t know what to do. Eventually, Big Day unlocks a cabinet. He takes out a metal lock box and starts counting out 100-yuan notes onto the table.  

‘You can have this now. More later if you keep your mouth shut.’ 

One hundred 100-yuan notes. Qi has never seen so much money.  

The man looks at the grey servant, who leaves, returns with a plastic bag and starts stuffing the money into it. 

‘I can’t lift her on my own’, Qi says. 

Big Day turns to the grey servant. ‘You deal with it’, he says and disappears out of sight. 

Qi takes the girl’s feet, the grey servant her head, and they carry her down to the Geely and fold her onto the back seat. Once the door is closed and securely fastened, the servant turns to looks at Qi. A grey face, impassive as the stone faces on the spirit screen. 

‘Don’t come back’, she says. 

He drives back along the empty motorway, sweaty hand on the wheel. What should he do with her? Drive her to a hospital? Bring her to a police station? No one will believe him. Maybe he should dump the body in Houhai lake. That’s what you do with dead bodies. The girl’s face is hidden behind a curtain of black hair. His heart pounds, and he tries to steady his hands. But he can imagine headlines in the paper.  

Dongchen taxi driver caught with dead prostitute in the back seat. 

In the end, he goes back to Madame Fu’s because there is nowhere else to go. It’s late but she is waiting for him. Her light is on at her desk as she sits and reads in the window. He gets out and waves frantically at her. 

‘What is it?’ Madame Fu says, coming out, and he opens the back door, moving out of the way so she can get a better look. To his surprise, she laughs. 

‘Sly bitch’, she says, ‘I wondered if she had taken something before she left.’ She straightens up. ‘She’ll sleep it off in a couple of hours. But we’ll have to have a serious talk about this when she wakes up. Come on, lazy bum.’ She slaps the girl until the girl opens her eyes, coughing and spluttering.  

‘He gave me money’, Qi says. ‘Ten thousand yuan.’ 

‘You should have asked for more.’ 

‘You’ll tell me if she’s all right?’ 

And Madame Fu frowns. ‘Qi Xiansheng, why do you care? She is not your daughter. These rubes come to Beijing every day. She’s nothing special.’ 

*

In the empty hours before dawn, he drives around aimlessly. More jobs come through on the app. None of them from Robinson. Eventually, he finds himself back in Chaoyang, at the entrance of Ritan Park just as the sun is rising. He parks the car and gets out, taking the bag of money from the front passenger seat. 

There are people already in the park. Darker shadows moving in the pale blue morning. They are all old. Only the old are up this early. Somewhere, a man is playing an erhu, and a small group of old folks, wearing face masks and rugged up against the cold, practise Tai Chi, doing White Crane Spreads Wings in unison.  

The path he walks leads him eventually to a large circular expanse of grey paving stones enclosed by a red wall. The money feels heavy in his hands. He spots a garbage bin, near to the benches on the edge of the space. At its centre, old men from the nearby hutongs stand with empty bamboo cages at their feet, their heads craned upwards to watch their birds turn and wheel in the lightening sky. 

The bin mouth stinks; there’s something rotten in there. Qi fishes a 100-yuan note out of the bag, with Chairman Mao’s smiling face printed on one side. He is smiling a Mona Lisa smile. A smile that is not quite there. Above his head, the birds circle, the sound of their whistles singing in glassy tones. He will go back to the hutong and eat the breakfast Qianzhi has prepared for him. He’ll rest today. But tomorrow, he will drive again along the ring roads, picking up passengers and taking them wherever they want to go. The yuan will keep flowing for all the hungry ghosts who pass unseen through the city without leaving a trace. He would like Miaomiao to come back home. But China will always be China. Overhead, the birds change direction, and the sound follows them, like a mirage that shimmers momentarily before disappearing into the air.

2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist: Issue 3