The Dark Road A Novel

KEYWORDS: sewage, second wife, handjob, visiting Miss Five, grey cheongsam, dead shrimp.

AS SOON AS Meili walks out of the tiny lift and is hit by a vulgar smell of cheap perfume, she knows that she’s been duped. Her legs start to shake. This morning, a genial-looking woman arrived at the camp, offering the female inmates jobs as hotel cleaners. Meili jumped at the opportunity, and boarded the minibus together with the two sisters. Although she signed a one-year contract, she made up her mind that she’d leave after a few weeks, once she’d earned enough money to buy a ticket to Guai Village.

I’m done for, this time! she says to herself as she moves down the red-carpeted corridor. Glancing over her shoulder she sees the woman’s face becoming sterner with each step she takes. ‘Stay inside and wait,’ the woman says gruffly, ushering them into separate rooms and shutting the doors behind. Meili pities the sisters, who’ve escaped one brothel only to be sold to another. She decides that if she’s forced to sleep with a man, she’ll follow him into the room, strangle him and escape. So long as the police don’t find her, she’ll make her way back to the bamboo hut, even if she has to walk all the way.

The door opens and a dumpy girl in a grey cheongsam tells her it’s time to eat. Meili follows her through a windowless bathroom stinking of sewage to a room where her contract has been placed on a round dining table.

‘Sit down,’ says a man in a sky-blue shirt sitting by the window. His hair is blow-dried and his lips have a purple tinge. ‘I’m the boss of this nightclub. I won’t ask where you’re from or check your documents. But I paid eight hundred yuan for you, so I must make myself clear. If you work hard and do as we ask, I’ll let you go in three months – I’ll even pay for your bus ticket home. But if you don’t cooperate, if you attempt to escape, well, you’ll only have yourself to blame for what might happen. No one knows you’re here, and no one will know if you disappear. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘I signed a contract to be a cleaner. I refuse to do any other work, so you’d better let me go straight away.’

‘Your job is to be a hostess, to look after our clients. The men who come here are rolling in money: shake them about a little, and coins will fall into your hands. If you do as you’re told, you’ll have hot meals and a shower every day. For a peasant like you, it’s heaven! We’ll teach you all you need to know.’

‘I’ll clean rooms, wash dishes – anything. I’m not afraid of hard work. But I won’t sell my body. I’m a simple woman with no education. I’m not suited to this job.’

‘But peasant girls like you are very popular with our clients. They’d love your simple, honest, wholesome look, and would pay good money for you. But I warn you straight away: all tips must be handed over to us. From now on your name is Ah-Fang, and you’re twenty years old.’

A girl reeking of cheap musk enters the room. She’s wearing high heels and a red skintight cheongsam. She places a bowl of noodle soup in front of Meili and sits down, the long slit in her dress exposing her bare thigh.

‘This is Ah-Fang,’ the boss says to the girl as he gets up to leave. ‘She arrived today. Show her the ropes.’

‘How can you dress like that?’ Meili says to her as soon as the boss has left. ‘What if your parents saw you? You’d bring shame to your village.’

‘Who cares – now that I’ve left that miserable dump, I’ve no intention of moving back!’ says the girl, a look of disdain darting across her young face. ‘My name is Xu, by the way. When you’ve finished your meal, have a shower, then I’ll give you a new dress, cut your hair and see you transform from a mother hen into a phoenix!’

‘Don’t boss me about, little sister – I’m a mother of two,’ Meili says, casting a condescending eye over Xu’s skinny, adolescent frame.

‘Well, I warn you, big sister: if you don’t cooperate, you’ll be treated worse than Communist martyrs were in Guomindang jails. The boss paid good money for you, so you’ll have to repay his debt. I was a bit rebellious myself, when I first arrived. See this wound on my thigh? That’s where the boss jabbed a needle into me. He never injures your face or cunt, because those are the parts that bring the money pouring in.’

‘Why haven’t you tried to run away?’ Meili asks, staring down at the bowl of noodles.

‘Run away? I’m only here because I ran away from my village. Where could I run to now? Besides, I wouldn’t get very far. The boss’s brother is head of the Public Security Bureau. He launched a crackdown on prostitution last week. The police raided every nightclub and brothel in the city, but they didn’t touch this place. If I did escape, they’d arrest me and bring me straight back.’

‘But this is such grubby, shameful work. You’re a pretty young girl. How can you bear to let all those filthy men touch you? Don’t you care about losing face?’

‘What does face matter? All I want is money. And being a nightclub hostess is less tiring than working in a salon, where you have to wash men’s hair and massage their bloody feet before you have sex with them.’

‘You’re quite a girl! Do you have a boyfriend?’ Meili stares at Xu’s straightened, shoulder-length hair and remembers Suya saying that a straightening treatment in a hair salon can cost a hundred yuan.

‘No, I’m single. I’m waiting for a rich guy to make me his “second wife” and buy me a car and a nice apartment. Many Korean businessmen visit this place. If you agree to be their second wives, in two years you’ll have enough money to last the rest of your life. Still, I’m doing pretty well already. I make a hundred thousand yuan a year. My parents have built themselves a house with the money I sent back. You’re a mother of two, so I don’t need to tell you about the sex side of things. All I’ll say is that if you don’t reach orgasm, you must pant and groan as if you have. And there are some terms you must learn. “Fast food” is no foreplay, straight in and out, and costs a hundred yuan; “playing the flute” is a blow job, and costs fifty; “visiting Miss Five” is a handjob, with some breast fondling thrown in—’

‘Shut up! I have a husband, for God’s sake.’

‘You think your husband is any different from the men who come here? I’ve seen them all in this place – from municipal government officials to foreign CEOs. I may have a flat chest and an average face, but this month I’ve slept with two British engineers and three American tourists. All of them have wives and children. These days, a man who remains faithful to his wife is either an idiot or a loser.’

‘Hah – you and I live in very different worlds, it seems,’ Meili says, remembering Suya telling her that prostitutes have to think of themselves as a commodity, not a human being.

‘You think so? Bring your husband here for a night and he will leave you within three days! I’ll never make the mistake of getting married.’

‘How do your parents imagine you make all this money? Wouldn’t they be horrified if they knew?’ Xu’s pink lipstick and turquoise eyeshadow remind Meili of the foreign women she’s seen in magazines.

‘My parents are village cadres who have to scrape by on sixty yuan a month. I told them I’m a shop manager. When I went home last Spring Festival and handed them a fat envelope of cash, they beamed with pride.’

‘I must leave this place!’ Meili looks out of the window and sees on a large billboard across the road, a little girl in a pink dress and leather shoes smiling up at her. Diesel fumes from the cars streaming past far below slide into the room through the metal bars of the open window.

‘You want to escape? The boss will hunt you down, drag you back and beat you to death. You won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you.’

Meili lowers her eyes again, picks up her chopsticks and gulps down the noodle soup.

‘You’ll see, it’s not so bad here,’ Xu says with a smile. ‘I’ll give you a health certificate in case the hygiene inspectors turn up. I promise you, in three months’ time, you’ll like it here so much, you won’t want to leave. The boss is putting you in room 303 tonight. There’s no need to be nervous. After your shower, rub some lubricating oil between your legs. When the client walks in, turn off the lights, help him off with his clothes, then slip a condom onto him straight away, before his erection wilts. Most of the men will be drunk, so don’t waste time making conversation. If they turn violent, kick the door . . .’

‘Shut up, shut up . . .’ Meili hisses, staring down at the tiny dead shrimp floating on the dregs of her noodle soup.





KEYWORDS: heaven on earth, cloud of smoke, source of life, unsheathed pillow, blazing fire.

MEILI CREEPS DOWN the dark corridor and locks herself in the toilet. All she can see are a bucket, a mop, a mirror, a rusty nail jutting out from the brick wall – nothing that she could use as a weapon. The window is open, but it also has metal bars, so there’s no escape. The steel security door is the only way out of this place, but it’s double-locked. She has no choice but to return to her room. When she enters, she sees the boss lying on the single bed, a bottle of liquor in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He puffs a cloud of smoke into the air and tells her to shut the door.

‘No, it’s too hot in here, I’ll leave it open,’ she says, her voice faltering. She decides that if he touches her, she’ll fight him off with all her strength. During the shower she took after lunch, she scrubbed off all the mud and grime from the camp, soaked her lice-infested hair in conditioner and combed out every insect. Then she sat on the bed, pulled Suya’s journal out of her bag and read the third page: ‘. . . He pushed my thighs up and stuck his head between my legs. I told him he wasn’t allowed to do that, and tried to wriggle free, but he said: “What’s your problem? I’m paying you enough money, aren’t I?” I pulled his hair and tried to yank him off, but then he pinned me down and rammed himself inside me without a condom, and pounded and pounded, first one hole and then the other . . .’ Meili couldn’t bear to read any further. Her skin, which had relaxed in the warmth of the shower, became cold and tense.

After flicking his stub onto the floor, the boss grabs Meili by her shirtsleeve and says, ‘Let me taste you before the clients have a go.’ Meili lashes out at him and digs her nails into his legs, but he keeps hold of her sleeve with one hand, and tugs her trousers down with the other. She bites his arm. Enraged, he jumps up, grasps her by the hair and flings her onto the bed. ‘So, you want me to play rough, huh, you filthy cunt?’ he shouts, and whips off his belt, loops it around her neck and secures it tightly to the steel bars of the headrest. Then with a pillowcase that he’s ripped off from a pillow, he ties her right hand to the bars as well. Meili kicks her legs about like a drowning dog. Her trousers and knickers have been pulled off. The belt is so tight around her neck, she can hardly breathe. Her heart races; she seizes up with terror. He leans over and strikes her across the face with a force that knocks her out. She raises her left arm and waves it feebly. He opens her legs and forces them up against her chest, then slaps again and again over her shoulders and face. Like a boat that’s struck a rock, she feels herself break into pieces and sink. He stuffs the unsheathed pillow into her mouth, spits onto her vagina then shoves his hand inside. ‘Mother, mother . . .’ her vagina screams in despair, but the noise is muffled by the man’s flesh. She’s suffocating now; her whole body is shaking. Her chest rises, straining for air. He’s jabbing against her womb. Gastric fluids surge into her throat. She wants to open her jaws and howl, ‘Mother, help me, help me . . .’ Feeling raw and scorched inside, she closes her eyes and shrinks back into herself.

‘Hah! You’re mine, now,’ the boss grunts, leering down at her with a lewd grin. He moves in and out, faster and faster, then turns her over, enters her from behind and gyrates like a wild dog, slapping her hard on one side and then the other. With one final thrust, he shouts, ‘Filthy f*cking bitch!’ and spurts his sperm onto the enflamed walls of her womb. Her head is twisted to the side, pressed against the bars. Now that he’s finished with her, he shoves her back down onto the bed. She clamps her legs together as tightly as she can, then huddles into a ball, rubs her stinging neck and gasps for breath.

‘You’re nice and wet now,’ the boss says. ‘I have ten more men lined up for you tonight, including a French professor.’

Meili’s body goes into spasms of shock. She wishes she could escape to a netherworld where there are no men. She wants her defiled body to enter a furnace and emerge from the other side as ash. I’m sorry, Nannan, she says quietly. The man has beaten me. I’m too weak to take my revenge. All I can do is die, then return as a ghost and drag the bastard down to hell.

The boss switches on the lamp on the bedside table and unbuckles his belt, releasing her head. ‘Good thing you’re pretty. I can never get a hard-on with the ugly ones. You’ve got a nice round arse. Work hard here, and in a few years you’ll make enough money to set you up for life.’ He lights another cigarette and stretches himself out. Meili clambers off the bed, reaches for her trousers and pulls them on.

As she squats on the floor, she has a sense that thousands of insects are crawling beneath her skin and that rancid leftovers have been stuffed into the cavity between her legs. She tears sheets of paper from a toilet roll and tries to wipe herself clean . . . The boss is shorter and thinner than Kongzi. How did he manage to overpower me? It doesn’t matter now – I’m already dead. It’s time for me to join Happiness . . . She remembers that when her periods first started, her grandmother gave her a small soot-filled cloth bag to put inside her knickers, and said: ‘You’re a woman now. The place from which the blood flows is the source of life. You must protect it, and not let any man touch it. When you’re older you will marry, and that place will bring you new life and happiness.’ Meili looks up at the wallpaper and sees her grandmother’s face. She’s crying out, ‘Meili, help me. Fire, a blazing fire! I’m burning, burning . . .’

Mother sees that the man has fallen asleep. She puts on her shoes and pulls out her bag from under the bed. Her eyes glazed and empty, she takes a cigarette lighter from the bedside table and sets light to the bed sheet. Then she picks up a half-finished bottle of liquor and smashes it over the man’s head. Within seconds, flames engulf his body. He sits up for a moment and waves his arms about, then flops back down with a thud. Mother retreats into the corridor and watches the bed burst into a ball of fire and the flames leap along the carpet and up the papered walls. Black smoke billows into the corridor. Coughing and spluttering, Mother returns at last to her senses, falls to her knees and crawls to the steel door. Someone opens it from the outside, peers round then runs away in fright. Mother swings the door open, bolts down the stairwell and runs out onto the road. Flames are pouring out from the third-floor window now, and licking the heaven on earth nightclub neon sign. Panicked, half-dressed men and women stagger out of the building, knocking into each other like insects fleeing a fire pit. Everyone is screaming and darting about. Mother detaches herself from the crowd, walks to the billboard on the other side of the road and disappears into the darkness.





KEYWORDS: convent, white chrysanthemums, purple sandals, red journal, nylon tights, mad dog.

MOTHER RUNS AS fast as she can across the city, her intense pains deadened by fear. She races past the flower market, the Chairman Mao statue in front of the government office building, the musical fountain in the main square, she sprints along broad avenues of office towers and roads lined with gated compounds of identical apartment blocks, and finally reaches an empty asphalt road that winds along the banks of a dark river. She keeps going, running, walking, then running again. When she hears a car approach, she crouches behind a tree and waits for it to pass. As the sky begins to lighten, she stops and looks up at some houses on a hill in front of her with lights already shining at the windows . . . Although she has left the city, Meili still feels nervous. She climbs over a low wall into a deserted demolition site. Alone and hidden from view at last, she falls to her knees and breaks into sobs, her whole body convulsed. She wants to go back to the bamboo hut. It may be a tiny and ramshackle hovel, but it’s her home, the place where she is both a mother and a wife. The thought of suicide frightens her, and she knows she will need to build up her courage before she can carry out the act. In the meantime, she will try to get a lift to Dexian and make her way back to Guai Village. She hears a truck rumble in the distance, and walks towards the noise, picking her way over the broken ground. Below her feet, maize leaves and burst balloons lie caught between shattered bricks. She can smell a stale, masculine scent in the dawn mist, and after scaling another low wall, she finds herself on the edge of a large landfill site. A light is twinkling in the distance. She starts to walk towards it across the refuse. The truck she heard a few moments ago has dumped a load of garbage from the city onto the ground. Workers are circling it, prodding it with spades, turning it over. Foul vapours fill the air. Meili dodges around heaps of plastic bags the workers have emptied and discarded. A woman spots her and shouts, ‘No scavenging! We’re in charge of this patch!’

‘I’m just looking for a lift,’ Meili says. Drawing closer, she sees the woman impale a plastic bag with a hooked pole, shake out the orange peel, sanitary towels and food scraps, then stuff it into a large plastic bucket.

Meili approaches the truck. Another woman notices her and says, ‘Are you looking for a scavenging job?’

‘What’s the daily wage?’ Meili asks, trying to sound casual.

‘Fifteen yuan, with free lodging and lunch. If you’re interested, go up there and speak to Mr Deng.’ The woman points to a hill behind them that has flimsy shacks crammed onto the lower slopes and black crows hovering above the peak. The prospect of free food and shelter appeals to Meili. She decides to stay for a few days until she’s earned enough money to pay for her journey back to Guai Village.

The workers have built the shacks with wooden boards and plastic sheeting below a village that was torn down to make way for the landfill site. The families live and work inside them, dismantling rubbish they retrieve from the site and sorting it into piles of glass, paper, plastic and metal, which are then taken to be weighed at the warehouse. Battered cassette recorders, motorbikes, sofa cushions and other objects the warehouse rejected lie stacked outside each doorway. Shelters occupied by families with young children are surrounded by broken prams and dirty plastic toys. Washing lines have been strung between the roofs of the shacks. The grey bras and tights flapping from them look pure white compared to the filth below. Along the path, pigs nozzle heaps of refuse, searching for scraps to eat, while ducks wade through waste-water streams, ruffling their wet and grimy feathers. On this hillside, the decaying and the living emit the same morbid stench.

On a bright morning three days later, Meili puts on her canvas gloves, sits down on a tyre and stares at the mass of tattered shoes spread before her. With her experience of gutting fish for a living, she managed to secure the job of dismantling shoes, which allows her to sit while she works. To dismantle boots, she has to slide her knife up the leg, rip it off, pull out the inner sole, extract each nail, smash off the heel, remove the rubber outsole and place the leather or synthetic upper into the correct pile. All leather, whether from shoes, gloves or sofas, is shredded and boiled to produce the protein which is added to counterfeit milk formula. Sports shoes are simpler to take apart, as the soles can be removed with one slit of the knife. When Meili finds a shoe she considers too pretty to destroy, she puts it aside in the hope that its pair might turn up. Yesterday, she thought the miracle had happened when she spotted a purple mid-heel T-strap sandal, identical to the one in her hand, lying on top of the heap. If only it was a right shoe, and not another left, it would be a perfect match.

Liu Di, the woman in the shack next to hers, is in charge of sorting through glass bottles. She gave Meili the plasters that now criss-cross her hands. Liu Di has four out-of-quota children. Right now, the three eldest are jumping about on a pile of plastic bags and the six-month-old baby is sleeping in a fly-encrusted crate, wedged between empty Coca-Cola bottles and ceramic wine flasks.

‘Get down, you brats!’ Liu Di shouts. She smashes another bottle onto the ground and shards of broken glass fly into the sunlight.

‘Be careful, children, he might bite you – agh, I’ve always been afraid of dogs!’ Meili says, pointing to the mangy grey dog that roams the landfill site like a piece of walking rubbish. Three metal springs are hooked to his frayed waistcoat. Since his owner disappeared last year, he’s become melancholy and unhinged, and no one dares go near him.

‘How come she has yellow hair?’ Meili asks, glancing at the baby’s blonde head nestled in the crate. She remembers the force with which Waterborn sucked her nipples and feels sick with longing. The baby’s head is huge, and her cheeks are so swollen that her features have become squashed together. Her hands and feet look tiny in comparison. The day she was born, her father found a watch on the landfill site and so named her ‘Little Watch’.

‘Her hair was jet black when she came out of me,’ Liu Di laughs. ‘But after my milk ran dry, I put her on Three Deers infant formula, and her hair turned yellow overnight.’ Liu Di is wearing three pairs of nylon tights to keep her legs warm. She’s leaning against the pink vinyl armchair in which she eats her meals and takes afternoon naps.

The pile of leather scraps beside Meili is now high enough to block the wind, but not the stench that wafts up from the landfill site. When her shelter’s walls flap, she can glimpse the cold light bouncing from a pile of sky-blue plastic canisters further up the path.

A week passes. The purple bruising around her neck has slowly faded, and she has tried to push memories of the rape out of her mind. But this morning, she was shaken out of her numbed state when she saw, lying on a heap of rubbish, the corpse of a tiny baby. She recoiled in horror, and went to sit under a tree far away. Her longing for Waterborn, and rage against Kongzi for getting rid of her, surged to the surface. She made up her mind to work here for another week then go back to Guai Village, making sure not to be caught on the way. Liu Di’s husband told her that the only way to avoid arrest is to dress like a city resident. Meili feels relatively safe on the landfill site. Although all the workers are illegal migrant peasants, no government official would be willing to brave the stench to come and check their documents. Meili can work in peace, and in her free moments, flick through magazines she finds on the site to study how women in the cities dress. Yesterday, she found a designer raincoat with a missing pocket which she’s swapped with a fellow worker for an imitation jade bracelet and a compact with a patch of foundation powder remaining and a mirror on the inside lid. She’s also come across handbags that were probably binned by thieves after they’d extracted the wallets. Many of them are brand new, and contain keys, combs, condoms, pills, packets of tissues and leather address books.

‘It can’t be easy bringing up four children, Liu Di,’ Meili says, wiping the flies from her mouth. She put on some lipstick this morning which she found in a handbag, and flies have been swarming around her mouth ever since. Liu Di told her that the lipstick is probably flavoured with honey.

‘It’s just a few more mouths to feed, that’s all,’ Liu Di replies. ‘That beef and bitter gourd they gave us yesterday was delicious, wasn’t it?’ When the boxed lunches are handed out at noon, Liu Di usually gives hers to her children, but yesterday she couldn’t resist gobbling it all up herself. She could never afford to eat meat back in her village, but becoming a family planning fugitive has widened her horizons. She has tasted hamburgers and Coca-Cola. Whenever she finds a bottle of Coke that is not quite empty, she sniffs it, and if it doesn’t smell too sour, keeps it aside for her children to drink later.

‘I wish I could have a shower and wash this stench from my skin,’ Meili sighs. She jabs her knife into the seam of a leather brogue, drags it around the base, pulls off the leather upper and tears out the insole which still bears the imprint of a man’s five toes.

‘Why didn’t you go with us to Sunlight Bathhouse the other day, then? It’s only two kilometres away.’

‘I didn’t want to walk that far – I was afraid police might catch me.’ Inside the bag by Meili’s feet are four pairs of shoes which she hopes will fit Kongzi and Nannan.

‘If you spray some cologne into a bowl of water and wash yourself with it, you’ll smell as though you’ve used soap. But I warn you, the nicer you smell, the more flies you’ll attract.’ Liu Di always laughs when she finishes speaking. The only time she didn’t was when she told Meili that her third baby was killed by family planning officers a few seconds after it was born.

At dusk, when the golden sky fills with fluttering crows and sparrows, the workers finish for the day and climb up the path for some fresh air. At the top of the hill, beyond the demolished village, stand the ruins of an ancient convent that was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The villagers built pig pens within the crumbling walls, using its tombstones and broken rafters. From up there, the landfill site resembles a dry lake nestled in a green forest. In a few years’ time, when the natural dip in the land has been filled, the local government is planning to cover the site with concrete and build a large sports centre to commemorate the forthcoming Beijing Olympics. On the other side of the ruined convent is a field of white chrysanthemums the site manager is growing for his own profit. As the workers return to their huts, Meili keeps climbing the path that’s still covered with old mattresses and tabletops laid down during downpours to prevent it turning into mud. She’s wearing the two left purple sandals that she’s been practising walking in for three days. Red, orange, yellow, green and blue clothes swing from washing lines tied between floor lamps and exercise machines flanking the path.

At the top of the hill, she sits down on an ancient flagstone of the ruined convent and thinks of Suya, who treated her like an older sister. She has read her journal from beginning to end, skipping the words she didn’t understand. There are no addresses inside, so she won’t be able to find Suya, or give the journal to her boyfriend as she promised. Even if Suya is still alive now, she’s unlikely ever to see her again. But she knows that if she hadn’t met Suya, she herself would probably be dead now . . . When I thought about killing myself after the rape, Suya, I knew how angry you would have been. You were raped every day for a year, sometimes twenty times in one night. What were you hoping to gain from that life? Independence? Revenge? I can feel you looking down on me now. The pink clouds above are filled with your eyes. Even without looking up, I can see you . . .

As the autumn wind begins to whistle, Meili opens her throat and sings, ‘My dearest sister! Alone you cross the Bridge of Helplessness and step onto the Home-Viewing Pavilion from which the dead may throw a last glance at their families in the living world. Before you drink Old Lady Meng’s five-flavoured Broth of Amnesia, turn back and look at me one last time . . .’ Feathers of gold light flutter through the rosy clouds like strips of satin, then, seconds later the sky becomes as murky and grey as the field of waste below. In the darkness at the bottom of the hill, the mad dog struggles out of a pool of mud and starts trudging up the path, the bra and plastic net hooked to the springs on his waistcoat trailing behind him. A glimmer of hope sparkles in his eyes. High above in the ruined convent, Mother’s lament pounds against the broken tombstones and crumbles into the sweet, fetid air.

At dawn a week later, Meili senses that she has finally emerged from her state of shock. Although her body still aches, her mind has cleared. She knows now that she won’t kill herself. She will keep the rape a secret from Kongzi, and will struggle on until she finds happiness. As Suya wrote in her red journal, ‘To survive in this world, one must have an expansive state of mind.’ She will become strong, and will use the red journal as a beacon to guide her along her path . . . I will become as strong and resilient as you were, Suya, and will carry on living, on your behalf . . .

She slips a sharpened shoe knife into her handbag and prepares herself for the dangerous journey ahead. First, she crouches down beside her basin of water, carefully washes her face and neck, combs her hair into a neat bun and fixes it in place with a silver clip. Then she steps onto a broken mini freezer, looks into the mirror and puts on the same frosty-pink lipstick and blue eyeliner she’s seen models wear in magazines. She applies some mascara, but the liquid is so coagulated that her eyelashes become glued together. Realising that she forgot to put on the foundation, she quickly presses a dampened sponge onto the small patch of pale powder in the compact and dabs it over her face, taking care not to smudge the rest of her make-up. Her ears and neck now look far too dark in comparison, but there’s no more powder left to lighten them, so her face is left looking like an oval of frost on a brown cowpat. She sighs, and tries to disguise the problem by tying a red scarf around her neck. Inside her gold handbag is a collection of business cards she found on the site, including those of the director of the Provincial Bureau for Industry and Commerce, the section chief of a large tobacco company and the president of the city hospital. These cards will be her protectors. She’s memorised the details of five of them, ready to reel off if the police attempt to arrest her. She puts on the long maroon skirt Liu Di gave her, a pair of black, undamaged nylon tights, and the two left purple sandals. She notices an ink stain on her fitted white shirt and blots it out with a piece of chalk. Liu Di walks past, catches sight of her, and jumps back in astonishment. ‘My God, you look like a prostitute!’ she blurts. ‘No, sorry – I mean like a secretary of a CEO. Who would have thought that this dump could produce such a beauty! You could get on any bus you like now. No one would think of checking your documents. Ha! If you had a cigarette dangling between your fingers, you could be a guest at a foreign wedding.’

‘I’m going back to Guai Village,’ Meili says. Last night she told Liu Di the reason she ran away.

‘Good for you! As the saying goes: “However far a hen might stray, she will always return to the coop one day.”’ Last night, Liu Di revealed to Meili that her husband often beats her up, then let out a stream of curses to release her pent-up anger.

‘I’m just worried that my smell will give me away,’ Meili says. Although she’s grown so accustomed to the stench of the landfill site that she can no longer detect it on her skin, she went to Sunlight Bathhouse with Liu Di yesterday and stood under a shower for an hour. Her clothes, however, have a rotten stench that no amount of washing could remove, so all she can do is douse them with a pungent perfume, which she also plans to spray onto her neck before entering any crowded place.

The mad dog comes to sit at Meili’s feet. She wonders what she should do with him. Since he heard her wail the funeral lament on the hill last week, he’s trailed her every step, gobbling up whatever scraps she tosses onto the ground. She has already cut off his tattered waistcoat with her shoe knife, and before she leaves today, she wants to give him a good wash and see him emerge from the dirt as spotless as a lotus from a muddy pond.





KEYWORDS: state crematorium, gates of hell, charred and mangled, earthen jar, merciless beast.

MEILI SEES KONGZI’S eyes widen in disbelief, redden, then become as vacant as still water. Nannan stays sitting on the bed chewing her fingers, not daring to look up at her.

‘Come here, Nannan!’ Meili tries to shout, but the words come out as a soft whisper. She sits down beside Nannan and wraps her arms around her.

‘You died, Mum,’ Nannan says, tears welling in her eyes.

‘No, I didn’t die.’ Meili missed the long-distance bus yesterday, so she had to spend the night in Dexian station, huddled up on a metal bench.

‘You’re dirty, and you stink,’ Nannan says, sniffing Meili’s neck. Before she left the landfill site, she took the mad dog to a petrol station and scrubbed him with soap and water. By the time she’d finished, the dog was as white as snow but she was splattered with mud. The dog waited with her by the roadside for hours. After a truck finally pulled up and gave her a lift, he chased after it for as long as he could, then gave up and shrank into a tiny white speck.

Unable to control his anger any longer, Kongzi jumps to his feet, slaps Meili across the ear and shouts, ‘So, where the hell have you been these last four weeks? We’ve all been worried sick. When your grandmother heard you’d gone missing, she had a heart attack and died.’

Meili slumps onto the floor, buries her head in her hands and weeps. ‘I was arrested,’ she cries out. ‘Taken to a Custody and Repatriation Centre. It’s a miracle I’ve made it back.’

‘And what are you doing dressing like a prostitute?’ Kongzi barks, veins bulging from his neck.

‘You merciless beast! I’ve suffered ten thousand hardships to get here, and this is how you welcome me . . .’ The only sparks of light on Meili’s drawn face are the tears in her blue-black eye sockets.

‘I sent people to check every custody centre in the county, but you weren’t there. Your brother’s been with us for two weeks, and has gone searching for you every day.’ He sits back down on the crate of beer, his temper subsiding a little.

‘When did my grandmother die?’ Meili asks, wiping snot and lipstick on the bed sheet.

‘October the 9th – your birthday,’ Kongzi replies, taking out a cigarette.

Meili bursts into tears again. Nannan jumps off the bed, crawls into Meili’s arms and starts weeping too. The bamboo hut is shaken about so much that dried mud falls from the walls.

Kongzi goes outside. The last segment of the sun is reflected on the surface of the duck pond. A car moves below the black hills in the distance, leaving a thin trail of light. Through the reeds, he sees Meili’s brother returning from the village, and waves to him. They enter the hut together and find Meili lying on the floor like a wounded creature, howling at all the miseries and wrongs inflicted on her, her cries beating through the mud, the swamp and the cold autumn wind.

A few hours later, calm finally descends. The kerosene lamp hanging from the wall lights up the four faces in the hut, leaving everything else in darkness. Meili’s brother looks just like her, but his eyebrows arch downwards, giving him a crestfallen air. ‘I should leave tomorrow,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t easy getting time off from the mine.’ Nannan is lying asleep at the end of the bed. Meili’s eyelids are swollen from weeping. She bites into a cob of sweetcorn and chews slowly. When Kongzi turns his face towards the lamp, he looks much older. The tobacco smoke streaming from his mouth makes even the darkness seem sluggish.

‘There’s a detergent factory downriver, a vinyl factory, a fire retardant foam factory,’ Kongzi says to the brother, the reflection of the lamp’s flame flickering across his pupils. ‘They’re all looking for workers. Why not stay here and get a job in one of them? I met a guy the other day who used to be a miner. He told me there was an explosion at his mine last year. The director didn’t want news of it to leak out, so he immediately sealed up the mine and refused to let rescue workers winch up the trapped men.’

‘Yes, coal mining is treacherous,’ Meili says. ‘Accidents happen all the time.’ Now that she’s washed off her make-up, she looks more awake than the two half-inebriated men.

‘No, I couldn’t live here,’ the brother says. ‘The smell is too foul. Look at the rashes that have broken out on my skin.’ He scratches the red patches on his hands. He’s wearing a blue down jacket with a grease-stained collar. His chin and neck are ingrained with coal dust. The conversation dries up. Nannan rolls onto her side, making the hut’s bamboo walls creak.

‘Dad, I need to wee,’ she says, waking up and rubbing her eyes.

‘Go and do it by yourself,’ Kongzi says.

Meili walks over to her, takes her by the hand and leads her outside. ‘Do it by that tree. I’ll stand here and watch over you.’

‘She wet her bed almost every night while you were away,’ Kongzi whispers to Meili. ‘The foam mattress stinks of urine.’

Nannan returns, holding up her trousers, and climbs onto Kongzi’s lap. ‘Go back to bed,’ he says impatiently.

‘Tell me a “Once upon a time” first. A long one.’

‘No, it’s too late for that. Go to sleep. If you’re good, I’ll catch a frog for you in the morning and roast it on the fire.’

‘You know I don’t eat meat,’ Nannan whines, snuggling against his chest. ‘Meat is pink. I like pink.’

‘Go on, let Mummy put you to bed,’ he says.

‘No, I don’t want Mummy!’ Nannan cries. ‘Mummy smells bad. I miss my grandma.’

‘You were only two and a half when you last saw her. How can you miss her?’

‘Grandma gave me peanuts. She had white hair.’

‘I thought about you every second I was away, Nannan, but you didn’t miss me at all,’ Meili says, rubbing her ear, which is still sore from Kongzi’s slap.

Nannan wraps her arms around Kongzi’s neck and nuzzles her face into his shoulder. ‘I like you, Daddy. You’re warmer than the sun.’ Meili pulls her away, carries her to the bed and tucks a blanket around her. ‘I didn’t miss you a bit,’ Nannan says to her, closing one eye angrily. ‘Give me my red-dress doll.’

‘What an unlucky year this has been,’ Kongzi says, tapping his packet of cigarettes. ‘First your grandmother died, and now this week I heard my father’s fallen ill . . .’

‘I miss home as well,’ Meili says. ‘I want to go and see my parents. I don’t care if the authorities arrest me and bung an IUD inside me.’ She remembers glancing out of the window this morning, and seeing grey sunlight fall on a tarpaulin shelter in the middle of an empty field. The desolate scene made her pine for Nuwa Village, her family and her parents’ house with the osmanthus tree in the garden.

‘The village authorities don’t just arrest family planning criminals now,’ the brother says, cracking a sunflower seed between his teeth. ‘They confiscate their cash, and all the money in their accounts, and put it straight into the pockets of the county officials. There’s a farmers’ market now, near Nuwa Temple. It attracts many visitors. The authorities have set up an inspection post at the village gates, and everyone who passes through has to show their family planning certificate.’

‘I’m not afraid of those officers any more,’ says Meili. ‘It’s the custody centres that terrify me. They round up peasants and kick us out of the cities saying we ruin their image. But not everyone in the cities is rich and well dressed.’ Her mind suddenly returns to the pregnant woman who was kicked in the fields of the labour camp for daring to speak back to a policeman.

‘Well, I saw a notice up in Guai Village today forbidding landlords from renting their property to family planning criminals, so you won’t be safe here either for much longer,’ says the brother, cupping his mug of rice wine.

‘You’re right,’ says Kongzi. ‘And besides, this isn’t a healthy place for a family to live. I don’t want Meili to give birth to another handicapped child . . .’ He turns his eyes to Meili, who stops cracking the sunflower seed between her teeth and looks straight back at him. As soon as she thinks of Waterborn, her body seizes up with rage. She longs to know where Kongzi took her, but hasn’t the courage to ask him. She feels guilty for having run away, and can’t help seeing her grandmother’s death as some divine punishment for her irresponsible behaviour.

‘What about that place, Heaven Township, you were talking about?’ the brother asks, then spits onto the floor. ‘How long would it take you to sail there?’

‘Two, three weeks, at least. And God knows how many inspection posts we’d have to pass through on the way and how many fines we’d be forced to pay.’ Kongzi spits a small bone onto the floor and wipes his mouth.

‘Where has Grandmother been buried?’ Meili asks her brother, looking up at him just like a mouse that’s fallen into an earthen jar.

‘Don’t ask him,’ Kongzi says, rubbing some dirt off the back of his hand. ‘He’s so furious about what happened, he says he wants to blow up the county crematorium. Nuwa authorities have ruled that all corpses must be cremated. So now, after someone dies, the family has to pay the state crematorium two hundred yuan for a hearse, a thousand yuan for the cremation and five hundred yuan for the urn. The authorities want to make as much money as they can from the dead before they allow any funeral to go ahead.’

The brother stares down at his feet. ‘Yes, we knew we couldn’t afford to get Grandmother cremated, so Dad secretly buried her body in the garden, under the shed where we keep the straw. We tried to keep quiet, so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear us, but Mum couldn’t stop herself from crying. A neighbour peeked over the wall, saw what we were doing and reported us to the police. All tip-offs are given a hundred-yuan reward now. The next day, officers from the municipal court turned up, searched the garden, found the grave and dug out Grandmother’s corpse. They couldn’t be bothered to take it to the crematorium, so they doused it in petrol and set fire to it, right in front of us. Then to cap it all, they demanded we pay a fine for illegally burying a body. We didn’t have enough cash on us, so they confiscated two of our pigs.’

‘Those fascists – have they no conscience?’ Mother cries out, then winces in pain as her tongue brushes against the large ulcer that’s formed on the inside of her cheek.

‘These days, you have to pay the government nine thousand yuan to be born and two thousand yuan to die,’ says Father, taking off his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.’

‘After the officers left, we wanted to give Grandmother a proper burial. Her body was so charred and mangled by the fire, we couldn’t put a white funeral robe on her, so we just laid it over her charred remains, then wrapped her in a big cloth and buried her under the peach tree.’ He wipes his eyes, spits onto the floor again, then grinds the saliva into the ground with his shoe.

‘What day did they burn her?’ Mother asks.

‘Three days after she died. October the 12th. I hadn’t returned to the coal mine yet.’

Mother feels her hair stand on end. Three days after my birthday? she mutters to herself. That’s the day I set fire to the nightclub, and Grandmother’s face appeared before me crying: I’m burning, burning . . . After a long pause, she looks up at her brother and says, ‘There’s a photograph at home of Grandmother when she was twelve, with a flower in her hair, standing in front of the entrance of Nuwa Temple. Make sure it’s put in a safe place . . .’

The brother pours himself some tea and changes the subject. ‘The Nuwa County authorities are giving tourism a big push,’ he tells Father. ‘The reservoir near Kong Village is a pleasure lake now, with three barges, a small pier and a ticket office. Cao Niuniu designed it. He’s the son of that guy, Old Cao, who did the mural for you, isn’t he? Well, Niuniu’s a successful painter now. He has a studio in Beijing’s 678 Art District. He even has an American girlfriend. He drove down to Kong Village last year in his expensive jeep, followed by TV crews and packs of journalists. He’s bought the hotel you both worked in, and has got a hundred young locals to live there and churn out copies of Western masterpieces: Lunch on the Grass, The Last Supper – or is it The Naked Lunch? I forget the names. So, Kong Village is now a famous artists’ colony!’ The brother’s eyes light up.

‘So, is Old Cao still living in his son’s apartment in Nuwa County?’ Father asks.

‘I don’t know. But I have some other news from your village. The local police uncovered a secret plot to subvert state power. It was all over the Public Security Evening Post. The ringleader was a guy called Kong Qing. He had some gall, that man. But he’s behind bars now, serving an indefinite sentence. He formed a secret cell of three hundred peasants who called themselves the China Fertility Freedom Party. Every member wore a yellow thread around their left arm. They planned to take over the County Family Planning Commission on National Day, and declare a Fertility Freedom Law which would grant the Chinese people the right to decide how many children they have.’

‘Oh, Kong Qing?’ says Father, glancing nervously at Meili. ‘I don’t know him very well. He was an artillery soldier, I think. His wife was given a forced abortion before we left, and she never got over it. Who knows, if we hadn’t escaped the village when we did, perhaps I too would have started an uprising.’





KEYWORDS: dark road, waste channel, semicircle, river dragon, Heaven Township.

‘ARE WE THERE yet?’ Meili calls out from the bow. She stands up, takes a deep breath and feels the tart, bitter, sour night air slip down her throat like a foul medicinal brew. Yes, this is just the kind of air that could kill sperm, she thinks to herself. ‘So, this must be Heaven Township, where no woman need ever worry about falling pregnant!’ she says out loud. Afraid that Kongzi might have heard her, she closes her mouth, then inhales deeply through her nose, expels the air through pursed lips and feels the toxins stream into her blood. With a rush of excitement, she gazes out at the ragged river that is leading them to their new home.

‘Careful of that wreck!’ she shouts. The crumbling frame of a boat lying half-beached among the reeds on the right looks like the skeleton of some mythical river dragon. Above it stand two dilapidated, roofless houses. Kongzi proceeds cautiously downstream, his hand over his mouth to block out the chemical stench. The river narrows sharply. There are recently built tiled villas on both sides now, interspersed with ancient grey houses. A few tall pine trees stab into the night sky like masts of a ship.

‘No, this can’t be right,’ Kongzi says. ‘This isn’t a river, it’s a waste channel. We must ask for directions before we go any further. I’ll try to stop over there.’ He turns off the engine, crouches down and shines his torch over the bank.

A girl is squatting in the mud, scrubbing clothes on a stone slab. There’s a red plastic bucket beside her. A semicircle of river in front of her has been cleared of floating rubbish.

‘Is this Heaven Township?’ Kongzi shouts out, his torchlight falling on her yellow rubber gloves. She lifts her face and lowers it again. Her gloved hands continue to dunk the clothes in the dark water and rub them against the stone.

‘This must be it,’ says Meili. ‘Look how peaceful it is – almost other-worldly.’ She takes the torch from Kongzi, lets the beam wander over the buildings then rest on a whitewashed wall with a blue notice that says: USING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY, OUR DEVICES MAKE YOUR ENERGY METER TURN BACKWARDS INSTEAD OF FORWARDS.

‘Well, I can’t moor here, there’s too much rubbish in the way,’ Kongzi says. He starts the engine again and keeps going, leaning over the side of the boat to check that the hull isn’t scraping against the riverbed.

A stone bridge appears ahead, with two boats tethered beside it. At one end of the bridge is a kiosk lit by a naked bulb. Meili sighs with relief. This must be the River of Forgetting, she says to herself, and that is the Bridge of Helplessness. Old Lady Meng is probably waiting beside it with her five-flavoured Broth of Amnesia.

Once they’ve sailed under the bridge a vast lake spreads out before them. Lights twinkle on buildings reflected around the margins. The water is as tranquil as a womb. As they breathe the sulphurous stench, Meili and Kongzi feel they’ve been banished from the sky and the earth and have slipped into an underworld city, a peaceful haven where they can safely settle down and put an end to their floating life. Meili’s face glows with joy. She coughs into her sleeve and hugs Kongzi’s thigh. ‘We’re in Heaven at last – we’ve found it!’ she cries. ‘The only place in China where women can never fall pregnant!’ As soon as these words come out, she bites her lip, taken aback by her daring.

‘Women can’t fall pregnant here?’ Kongzi says. ‘What nonsense! Let’s prove that wrong straight away.’ He takes his hands off the steering wheel and places them on her breasts. The boat turns in circles over the still water. But they don’t need to drop anchor now. This isn’t a river they have to follow upstream or downstream. They’ve reached the end: a place where Meili hopes she can rest, gather strength and live in peace.

‘Get your hands off me,’ she says to Kongzi. ‘I want to look at the lake. Can you believe how big it is? You could fit every duck in China onto it, and still have room left over.’ She and Kongzi have only had intercourse once since she returned to Guai Village last month. She was so anxious at the time, she couldn’t feel a thing, and pushed him off her before he was finished.

‘A wife’s duty is to produce children,’ Kongzi says. ‘Let’s see if I can plant another seed in your womb.’ He presses her onto the deck, causing the boat to dip forward at the bow. ‘We’ll capsize if you’re not careful!’ Meili says, breaking free and crawling into the cabin. Kongzi follows her inside and pins her onto the deck again. ‘Get off me. You’ll wake Nannan! It’s past midnight. Stop being so rough.’

‘You’ve been pushing me away for weeks. Come on, let me stroke your feet, your stomach, your soft, cushiony . . .’ Outside, the black night and the black lake sway back and forth, extending to invisible heights and depths.

‘Be kind to me, Kongzi,’ Meili says. She relaxes at last, and feels her body float like peach blossom on water. ‘All right, go ahead then. Pour your sperm into me. I’m not afraid any more . . .’ She sucks the night air deep into her lungs, and a tear falls from her eyes.

The infant spirit watches Mother drift down the narrow river and arrive at Womb Lake, then sees itself swim up the dark road between her legs towards the lake of her womb. It knows that this is where its final incarnation began. A third gestation, a third birth, a third fate.

Later that night, unable to sleep, Mother sits at the bow crunching deep-fried broad beans and stares at the multitude of stars and lights shining in the sky and on the lake, inhaling deep breaths of air and spitting out the odd tough shell. The infant spirit watches itself being carried through the cervix by fumes smelling of burnt plastic, then curl up inside a dirty uterine fold and twitch as metallic waste waters seep into its new home, along with an occasional whiff of turnip soup. Mother is not aware of its arrival yet. In her mind, she is saying: my womb is a fishbowl which these chemicals will smash into pieces. Never again will I have to carry a child inside me. I will be free . . . In the distance, near the bridge they passed a few hours ago, a heap of old circuit boards and plastic tubing has been set alight. Smoke as black as night billows from the orange flames, making the strips of tarpaulin caught in overhanging branches flap to and fro like dogs locked in combat. The plastic and metal waste shrivels and melts. When it trickles down the banks into the water, red sparks crackle and dance above the dark lake.