The Incarnations

The Incarnations interweaves several historical stories – the first set during the Tang Dynasty in AD 632, the last during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 – with a story set in Beijing during the run-up to the 2008 Olympics. The two central characters in each of these stories are successive incarnations of two souls.

In contemporary Beijing, one is incarnated as a taxi driver, Wang Jun. Driver Wang begins to receive menacing letters, claiming both to recount his previous lives, and to be from his soul-mate, whose own life stories have been linked with his over a period of 1000 years. An ex-lover, Zeng Yan, reappears in Wang's current life. Is he the letter-writer? If not him: who?