The Dark Road A Novel

KEYWORDS: shady willows, tiger descending the mountain, god and goddess, electronic waste, seedlings, plastic granules.

THEIR NEW HOME is across the river from the former residence of a Qing Dynasty scholar. Above its high perimeter walls, they can glimpse ancient trees and yellow-tiled roofs. Kongzi has rented a tiny metal hut on stilts which juts out into a river flowing from the lake. It’s sheltered by a willow, has a window from which they can see their boat, and the rent is only thirty yuan a month. Unfortunately, the river itself is as red and rancid as mouldy Oolong tea. After they wash any clothes or vegetables in it, they have to rinse them in tap water.

The river should flow eastwards into the sea, but its passage is almost entirely blocked by the electronic waste and household refuse dumped into it daily. Along the banks are shady willows and ancient courtyard houses which a century ago belonged to prosperous merchants. These quadrangle compounds are built in the traditional style locally known as ‘tiger descending the mountain’, with rear quarters taller than the front quarters. Now damp and crumbling, most of them have been rented out to migrant workers, while the owners have moved to new residential estates far from the filth of the lake. The willow tree beside the metal hut is two hundred years old. At its foot are statues of a local god and goddess. Nannan is terrified of them because they have no legs. Last week, villagers came here and ceremoniously slaughtered a pig, then placed it before the statues, along with other offerings of fish, chicken and fruit. Large red scented candles were lit, and as the fragrant smoke coiled up into the willow’s branches, the villagers knelt down and prayed for good harvests, happiness, a baby son or success in their children’s high school exams.

Meili works in a recycling workshop on the ground floor of a house next to the Qing Dynasty scholar’s residence. Every day there are new heaps of transformers for her to dismantle and plastic film to melt. Nannan usually accompanies her, and plays hide-and-seek by herself among the baskets of electric cables and copper wires.

In the morning, after Kongzi drops them off on the opposite bank, he sails to a neighbouring town to fetch clean tap water to sell to Heaven’s residents. Although he makes only forty yuan a day – which is slightly less than Meili is paid – he enjoys being his own boss and sailing through the backwaters at his leisure. When he returns in the afternoon, his boat loaded with barrels of tap water and a passenger or two he’s picked up along the way, he feels happy to be living in Heaven Township, despite its sour, acrid stench.

‘So, where are you from, captain?’ a migrant worker asks, stepping aboard the boat one morning.

‘Hubei Province,’ Kongzi replies, starting the engine again and watching a vessel dump a load of televisions and scanners onto the muddy bank upstream. ‘We arrived here a few months ago. How about you?’

‘Oh, I’ve been here eight years. See those white villas up there? Our team built them last year in just six months. It’s getting harder to find work now, though, what with all the new migrants flooding in.’

Kongzi glances up at the villas that, with their cladding of white tiles, resemble a row of public toilets. They’re on a hill high above the lake, near the municipal government building. The concrete road running past them leads to a dilapidated Confucian temple where, in the Guomindang era, locals would make offerings to the great sage and his eighteen disciples. Until recently, Heaven was a sleepy, impoverished lakeside town. During the flood season, the lake would inundate the Ming Dynasty theatre close to its shore, and sometimes the whole town as well. In the 1960s, half the population left, many of them setting off on foot, their belongings on shoulder poles, to scrape a living collecting scrap in Guangzhou. But ten years ago, after the first British ship docked at the nearby Pearl River port of Foshan and unloaded a mountain of electronic waste, Heaven’s economy took off. An entrepreneurial family hauled some of the waste back to their home in Heaven Township, took it apart and sold the scrap plastic and metal to a local toy factory. As the mountains of European waste grew in Foshan, other families in the township followed their example, opening workshops on the ground floors of their homes and hiring migrant labourers to help out. Today, the front doors of every house are surrounded not by bales of wheat, but bundles of electric cables, circuit boards and transformers. In just one decade, Heaven has transformed from a quiet backwater into a prosperous, waste-choked town.

‘I know I could pick up a job dismantling e-waste, but it’s dangerous work,’ the man says to Kongzi. ‘Extracting lead and silver is the worst. The sulphuric acid you have to use produces fumes that can make men impotent. I much prefer working on a building site.’

‘Most of the migrants here seem to be family planning fugitives,’ Kongzi says. ‘I always see loads of kids scampering outside the factories and workshops.’ Despite all he’s heard to the contrary, Kongzi is confident that Heaven’s pollution won’t prevent Meili falling pregnant again.

‘Those children are the lucky ones, the survivors. What you don’t see are the deformed and handicapped ones that are abandoned by their parents and left to die. I once saw a dead baby with two heads floating in that canal down there.’

‘The One Child Policy’s responsible for that,’ Kongzi says. ‘Don’t blame the parents – they just want to make sure they’ll have a healthy child to look after them in their old age. Why else would anyone abandon their own flesh and blood?’ Kongzi looks away, conscious that he’s trying to justify to himself his own abandonment of Waterborn. ‘So, where do you want me to drop you off?’ he asks. In his mind, he pictures Heaven’s waterways coursing through the human body: the oesophagus to the north, a large stomach in the centre and a long winding colon to the south. He’s now sailed through every polluted one of them. They are fed by clear streams that flow from a distant mountain, on whose summit stand an ancient temple, a bathing house and a convalescent home.

‘Drop me at Chen’s Nurseries,’ the man says. ‘I’m going there to buy rice seedlings. A county leader is visiting the township next week, and we need to plant rice on the barren fields along the road that he’ll be driven down. It’s only a temporary job, but they’re paying us fifty yuan a day.’

‘But rice only grows in paddy fields. How will you irrigate all that dry land?’

‘It’s only for show, you fool! We’ll plant the seedlings in the fields the night before he arrives, and with any luck they’ll stay upright until the next morning. He’ll be gone by the afternoon.’

‘So you’ve been here eight years? You must have made a fortune by now.’ After only three months in Heaven Township, Kongzi and Meili have saved four thousand yuan. Last week, they sent a thousand yuan to both their families. After he and Meili fled Kong Village, his parents and close neighbours were heavily fined. One neighbour was given a double fine, and when she was unable to pay it, her house was demolished. She took to the road, apparently, and is now begging on the streets of Kashgar.

‘These days, for a man to be considered wealthy he must have a nice house, a private car and a mistress on the side,’ the man says. ‘I’m a long way from that. I have made a lot of money, it’s true, but I’ve spent it all in the hair salons.’ He laughs broadly, showing his teeth like a monkey.

Kongzi smiles, and presses the accelerator. On the banks above, migrant workers are raking out red, yellow and green plastic granules over square bamboo mats, like farmers raking rice left out to dry in the sun.

‘Good idea of yours to start a water-delivery business,’ the man says. ‘The tap water in Heaven is disgusting. Someone tried digging a well once to see if he could draw clean water, but it came up as red as Oolong tea. I’ve heard that the groundwater’s polluted with toxic chemicals to a depth of ten metres.’

Kongzi proceeds up a river flanked by telegraph poles and empty fields. Casting a backward glance over the boat’s gurgling wake, he sees Heaven reflected in the green waters of Womb Lake, shimmering like a city of carved jade that appears more exquisite and unearthly the further it recedes.





KEYWORDS: Tang poem, deep-fried sparrows, feng shui, armpit, petals, clamour of wind.

THE INFANT SPIRIT sees Father perched on a plastic stool, sipping green tea and listening to Nannan chant a Tang poem in her high-pitched voice.

‘Terrible!’ Father shouts, rolling his eyes in frustration. ‘Recite it again, and if you forget one word this time I’ll slap your hand!’

‘Daddy’s so nasty,’ Nannan says, turning to Mother.

‘You know what they say, Nannan,’ Mother replies, ‘“Hitting means hate, cursing means love.”’

Father reaches down to pick some sleep dust from the corner of Nannan’s eye, and says: ‘All right then, just give me the two last lines.’

‘“Who knows how many . . . petals fell?”’

‘And the line before that?’

‘You only asked for the last two!’ Nannan says, stamping her feet.

‘But that was one line, not two. Never mind. Just start again from the beginning.’ Father is drinking Oolong tea in the Guangdong style. After steeping the leaves briefly in a small earthenware pot, he pours the tea into a thimble-sized porcelain cup and takes tiny sips.

‘“Spring Dawn” by Meng Haoran,’ Nannan announces, then throws her shoulders back and takes a deep breath. ‘“Slumbering in spring, I missed the dawn, / Everywhere birds are singing. / Last night in the clamour of wind and rain, / Who knows how many petals fell?”’

‘Wonderful!’ Mother says, spooning some deep-fried sparrows onto a serving plate. ‘Now come and finish your supper.’ Meili bought the birds from a stall this evening as the vendor was packing up and selling his produce for half price. When she chopped them up before frying them, she found plastic granules, screws and metal caps inside their stomachs.

The two front stilts of the metal hut are planted in the riverbed, so whenever a boat passes everything sways from side to side and bottles topple off the table. The interior of the hut looks quite homely now. Meili has covered the floor with a white plastic mat which she found on the banks and keeps scrupulously clean, and has papered three walls with magazine pages and stuck a poster of Niagara Falls on the fourth. The only unsightly part of the room is by the door, where the food is cooked and the bags are stored. In the light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, the brightly coloured plastic objects in the room shine out.

Father takes a swig of beer. Feeling a sparrow bone slip from the corner of his mouth, he quickly spits it onto the floor. Mother picks it up with her chopsticks and puts it on the table. ‘Where are your manners?’ she says. ‘We’re not eating in the fields now. To think you were once a respected teacher!’

‘Stop putting on airs. You want us to behave like people from the towns? Heaven might look urban, but officially it’s still categorised as rural.’

‘No, it’s a development zone,’ Mother replies. ‘I’ve seen foreigners walking down its streets. From now on, you must wear shoes whenever you go out. It’s so uncivilised to wander around in bare feet.’

Nannan is staring at the television in the corner, watching three children follow a blue alien onto a flying saucer. ‘I wish I could get on it too!’ she cries, and points her tongue at the screen.

‘I haven’t had a period since we arrived in Heaven, Kongzi,’ Mother says quietly. ‘That’s almost four months. But I can’t be pregnant. I haven’t felt sick at all.’

‘Four months? You must be pregnant, then. I told you: if I plant enough seeds, one of them is bound to sprout! This time, make sure you give me a male heir. Ah, the vitality of the Kong bloodline is indestructible! I put it down to the feng shui of the Temple of Confucius in Qufu. Think about it: the sage’s tomb is in the centre, his sons’ tombs to the left, his grandsons’ to the right. Exactly as the saying goes: “Surrounded by offspring on either side, in prosperity your descendants will always abide.” No wonder there are now three million Kongs scattered around the world.’ Smiling proudly, he waves his chopsticks over the dog-eared astrology books stacked beside him.

‘What superstitious nonsense! If the feng shui was so good, how come the temple was destroyed by the Red Guards? Besides, you may be a Kong, but you don’t exactly abide in prosperity, do you? Hah! If it turns out that I am pregnant, you wouldn’t even be able to find a safe place for the child to be born.’

‘What are you talking about? Heaven must be the safest place in the whole country! There are eighty thousand migrant workers living here. The family planning officers wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up too early. I’ve gone six months without having a period before. Perhaps the chemicals in the water have affected my hormones.’

‘How did you get pregnant, Mum?’ Nannan asks, turning round to look at her.

‘I ate some Kong family seeds and one of them has sprouted inside my tummy.’

‘And it will get bigger and bigger until you explode?’

‘No, when it reaches the right size it will come out, just like Waterborn did.’

‘Well, I won’t eat any more sunflower seeds from now on! Daddy, I miss Waterborn. I want to let her play with my dolly.’ Nannan picks up the plastic doll in the red dress and cradles it in her arms.

‘Waterborn won’t be coming back,’ Father says, scratching the sole of his foot, his flip-flop dangling from his toes.

‘Is it because of me you got rid of her?’ Nannan asks.

‘It’s time for bed now, Nannan. Mummy and Daddy will be going to sleep, too.’

‘But you and Daddy always sleep in the boat and leave me here on my own.’

‘The bed’s too small for the three of us. All right, I’ll squeeze in with you tonight, then. Quick, put on your nightdress.’ Mother pours some water into a plastic bowl, dunks a flannel into it and says, ‘Let me wash your feet, Nannan.’

‘When people die, do their brains still have thoughts, Mummy?’ Nannan asks, perching on the edge of the bed, her large red flower hairclip drooping over her forehead.

‘She hasn’t written her diary, yet,’ says Father, opening the brown notebook. ‘See what she wrote yesterday? She couldn’t remember the characters for “car” and “crash” so she wrote them in roman letters.’

Mother takes the diary from him and reads the passage out loud: ‘“Today, I opened the umbrella and ran down the street. I couldn’t see where I was going and I was afraid a car would crash into me. Daddy held my hand and Mummy walked behind me really quickly . . .” Not bad, Nannan. When I was your age I couldn’t even write my name, let alone recite the Three Character Classic. If you went to school, I’m sure you’d be top of your class.’

‘I want to go to school, Mummy.’

‘I’ve told you, we don’t have a local residence permit, so you can’t. But with Daddy teaching you at home every day, you’ll learn much more than you would at any school. Now, lie down, there’s a good girl.’ Mother strokes Nannan’s head, puts a blanket over her and gives her a small sausage to chew on. ‘When you’ve finished eating it, close your eyes.’

‘Nannan, you have your whole life ahead of you,’ Father says, ‘so stop talking about death all the time.’

Fallen willow leaves and polystyrene scraps drift under the metal hut. The infant spirit sinks into the river’s blank water and momentarily loses all sense of time . . . ‘Even after I’ve washed, I still stink of burnt plastic,’ Mother says, running her fingers through her wet hair, a towel wrapped around her waist. She lifts her arm to smell her skin, exposing the tuft of black hair in her armpit.

‘You used the bottle of tap water your workmate gave you, didn’t you?’ Father says, letting his gaze rest on Mother’s bare breasts. ‘I’ve told you: it’s no use. All the water in this town smells the same.’

‘Well, at least the smell of sulphur puts me to sleep at night.’ Mother pulls on a sleeveless nightdress and takes a sip from Kongzi’s bottle of beer. Nannan is asleep now, her mouth wide open and her hand still clutching the sausage.

‘Come and sleep with me on the boat. We can have a nice roll around.’

‘Why do you insist on having sex every night?’ Mother says, applying varnish to her toenails. ‘Can’t you give me a night off?’

‘Fine. If you’re not in the mood, I’ll go to a hair salon. The girls there only charge ten yuan for a full service.’

‘You dare! You have me to torment every night – that should be enough for you. And why would you want another woman, anyway? Once we take our trousers off, we’re all the same.’

‘No, every woman has her own particular scent. And I’ve always wondered what it would be like to do two women at the same time.’

‘What? You listen to me, Kongzi! I let you watch those porn films in the grubby video halls. I let you flip me onto my front, shove my legs in the air and enter me from all angles. But I will never, ever tolerate you sleeping with a prostitute. Try it once, and you’ll never see me again . . .’

Another patch of fallen leaves drifts along the moonlit river. Inside the boat’s cabin, Father presses Mother onto the bamboo mat, pushes into her and rocks back and forth. The boat gently sways, creating waves that expand in concentric circles then softly break against the black reeds along the banks.





KEYWORDS: toenails, win–win, rustic wine, red congee, fetus soup, yellow hair, castor oil.

AS SOON AS Kongzi has sailed off with Nannan, Meili pulls out the red journal. Finding Suya’s handwriting much easier to decipher now, she opens a page at random and reads a passage out loud, smoothly and with expression. ‘“Women should be learned and erudite, able to talk about the sciences and arts with authority and grace. What man could tire of such a woman? . . . Her face may not be the most refined, but there’s an air about her that’s pleasing both to the mind and the eye. She knows nothing about fashion, but has flair and a sure sense of style. She’s subtly intoxicating, like a mellow, rustic wine . . .”’ Meili opens a dictionary and looks up a few words she doesn’t know: ‘erudite’, ‘mellow’, ‘intoxicating’. I remember Kongzi complimenting me once on my mellow voice, she says to herself. Intoxicated: inebriated, drunk. Drunk? But my face turns red when I drink alcohol. Is that considered attractive? Meili’s heart beats faster. Yes, this is exactly the kind of woman I want to be: unique, independent, worthy of admiration. She imagines herself as a company director, strolling down a corridor in a white tailored suit, a Louis Vuitton handbag swinging from her gold-braceleted hand.

Bloody liars, telling me it’s impossible to fall pregnant here! It must have happened that first night we arrived, which means this little Kong is more than four months old now. The thought that the infant spirit has once more descended into her womb terrifies Meili. Now that she thinks about it, she realises she’s had to loosen her belt two notches in the last month. She closes her eyes and tries to decide what to do. She wishes she could tear her womb out and throw it away. She’s twenty-four years old. She wanted to work hard, make lots of money and enjoy herself while she was still young, but now she’ll have to put everything on hold and go back to raising another child. Her scalp tightens. The baby must not be born. She must harden her heart and end the pregnancy at once. And Kongzi must not know a thing.

She puts on her straw hat, buckles her sandals and sprays her neck with the perfume she brought back from the landfill site. Then she leaves the hut, locks the door behind her and walks to the backstreet clinic she passed the other day. The lane is filled with heaps of scrap computers, broken phones and televisions. Men sit bare-chested among the waste, smashing, chopping, sawing and smelting. At the end of the lane she sees outside three front doors, small tables stacked with empty pill boxes – the secret sign of an unauthorised clinic. She chooses a door and enters.

The room is bare, and smells of bitter medicinal brews. No surgical appliances are on display. A middle-aged woman clears away a mahjong set from the desk in front of her and brings out some abortion tablets to show Meili. ‘These are called Dynotrex. They’re made by a Sino-American company. They cause fetal expulsion within three days. One course costs only 250 yuan. But before you take your first dose, I’ll need to take some blood from you in order to confirm your pregnancy and assess your health. Roll up your sleeve.’

‘Three days?’ Meili says, wincing as the needle enters her arm. ‘Is there an operation that can be done instead?’

‘Well, since you say you’re only four months gone, I could do a simple forceps extraction without having to dilate the cervix.’ Once the vial is filled, the woman labels it then picks out a piece of sweetcorn skin from between her two front teeth.

‘How much would that cost?’ Meili asks.

‘Five hundred yuan, including two post-operative uterine suctions. A government hospital would charge 1,500 yuan, plus ninety yuan a day for the bed.’

‘What’s a uterine suction?’ Meili picks up the box of tablets. She suspects that they’re counterfeit, but since the words printed on the packet are foreign, she can’t be sure.

‘It gets rid of anything that wasn’t scraped away during the extraction. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. I used to work in a proper hospital. From your accent, I can tell you’re a southerner. What’s your name? I’m Dr Wu.’

‘Yes, I’m from the south,’ Meili lies. ‘My name is Lu Fang.’

‘You don’t look like a salon girl, so you probably haven’t heard about the fetus trade. Let me tell you then: a few restaurants round here buy aborted fetuses. If the salon girls discover from the scan that the baby is a girl, they continue the pregnancy until the third trimester, then have a late termination and sell the fetus to a restaurant. They can get three thousand yuan for it, or four thousand if the toenails have hardened. So, if you wait two more months, I’ll do the abortion for free, then take a cut of what the restaurant pays you.’

‘Are you mad? How could I dream of letting a stranger eat my own flesh and blood?’ Meili remembers seeing a painted sign above a restaurant she passed on her way here showing cats, dogs, snakes, anteaters and civets peeping out of a large hotpot, and wonders if there’s any creature on this planet that Guangdong people would refuse to eat.

‘I understand your disgust, my dear. I’m a woman too, after all. I eat human placenta now and then, but I wouldn’t eat anything that has eyes and a nose, especially not a live fetus. Huh, some clinics on this lane have no scruples. If a woman gives birth to a baby girl and says she doesn’t want it, the clinic will take it from her and promise to get it adopted, but as soon as the woman’s gone, they’ll wrap the poor creature in a sheet and sell it to the nearest restaurant. I’d never do that. But we live in the Age of Money. If someone has cash to buy something, someone else will sell it to them. The restaurants simmer the aborted fetuses for six hours in a broth flavoured with ginseng and angelica. Fetus soup is said to build up male strength and sexual prowess. You don’t believe me? I assure you, it’s a prized delicacy now. It’s brought out at the end of banquets to impress important guests.’

‘I believe that whether a baby is inside the womb or outside, it has a soul. And if a baby’s life is taken without good reason, its soul will return in another incarnation and exact revenge. Those cannibals! Aren’t they afraid of retribution?’

‘Those rich bastards couldn’t care less! As long as fetus soup is on the menu, they’ll keep ordering it.’ Dr Wu opens the freezer. ‘Look, I have a fetus right here, waiting to be sold. But frozen ones don’t fetch such high prices.’ Meili peers down at the tiny corpse. She has a full head of yellow hair, a deep crease between her eyebrows and an ice-covered nose. ‘How come she’s blonde?’ Meili asks.

‘The mother is a prostitute from Guangzhou. The father was an English client of hers. She didn’t want to have the abortion in Guangzhou in case the family planning officers fined her, so she came to me for a salt-water termination. She said the English client always refused to wear condoms.’

‘Well, I’ll try the tablets first. If they don’t work I’ll consider having a surgical abortion.’ As soon as Meili utters the word abortion she feels a need to urinate.

‘Does the surgery strike you as too expensive? I can imagine money must be tight. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing shameful about trying to make a little cash from this situation. The government makes a fortune from the family planning policy. A million fetuses are aborted each year – just think how much money they rake in from that! Shouldn’t the common people share some of the wealth, in a win–win sort of way? A rich couple from Guangzhou came here and asked me to help find them a surrogate mother, so I set them up with a girl from Chongqing who works in the salon two doors down, and now she’s pregnant with their child. She came for a scan the other day, and I told her it was a girl. The couple promised to pay her twenty thousand yuan if it’s a boy, but said that if it’s a girl, they’d want her to have an abortion and would only pay her expenses. The Chongqing girl knows that if she has an abortion now, all she’ll get is the expenses from the couple and three thousand yuan from a restaurant, so she asked me to put “gender uncertain” on the scan report, and she’s going to carry to full term. If the couple really don’t want the baby once it’s born, she’ll sell it to a Welfare Office for five thousand yuan. See what a good head for business she has!’

‘But surely your clinic will get closed down if you falsify a scan like that?’ Meili says, sensing her swelling womb press against her bladder.

‘I have no licence, so I don’t need to stick to any rules.’ Dr Wu has a pudgy, slightly masculine face and appears to be in her late fifties.

Meili considers visiting the government hospital to see whether any doctors have targets to meet and would be willing to give her an abortion for free, but is afraid that Kongzi would be notified. ‘Well, I must go away and think about it,’ Meili says, turning to leave.

‘We also sell castor oil, by the way,’ Dr Wu adds, breaking into a light sweat. ‘It helps soften the cervix. It’s just thirty yuan a bottle. Only drink two spoonfuls, though. Any more and you’ll vomit. Come back tomorrow afternoon for the results of your blood test. If everything’s all right, you’ll be able to take the first Dynotrex tablet.’

As Meili leaves the clinic, the dark clouds overhead open and release a heavy rain onto the asphalt lane, the heaps of electrical waste and the tarpaulin shelters under which the workers are retreating. Meili thinks of the infant spirit curled up safely in her womb, protected from the storm, while she herself has no safe place to hide. She wonders whether she’ll find herself bound to the steel table of an abortion room again. Heaven Township may be the safest place in this country, but it’s still under the Party’s control, with bright red family planning slogans festooned across every street. The rain streaming down her face feels like tepid broth.

In the evening, unable to contain her impatience, Meili kneels down behind the table and slips a Dynotrex tablet into her mouth and a sanitary towel into her knickers. Then she pours Kongzi a large mug of rice wine, sits next to Nannan and watches her trace over characters in a calligraphy book: mountain, rock, sun, moon. Meili turns the page and says, ‘Look, you have to find a friend for each of these characters: woman, mouth, birth, grain, bird, axe, fire, ten, horse, son, wood, sheep, middle. So, see which of them you can pair up.’

‘Woman and son make a good pair,’ Nannan says. Her eyes drift towards the television set. Meili quickly reaches over and turns it off.

After Kongzi slumps onto the bed in a drunken heap, Meili starts prodding her belly, trying to see if the tablet is taking effect. According to the leaflet, she should experience cramping, bleeding, and within a few hours see ‘products of conception appear on the sanitary towel like a lump of red congee’. She is certain she doesn’t want the baby. Indeed, her desire not to have any more children was the sole reason she came to this town. She wants to get on with her life, achieve something and become financially independent. Before she reaches thirty, she wants to open her own shop and make enough money to eat out in restaurants, live in a brick house, sleep on a sprung mattress and send Nannan to university. She’s a modern woman, and should have the right not only to be a mother, but also to enjoy some of life’s pleasures. The weather will be getting hot soon, and the metal hut will become infested with mosquitoes. This is no place to bring a baby into the world. She sits on a plastic stool and sees Nannan hiding beneath the table, playing with a Mickey Mouse ball.

‘Get back on your chair and finish writing your diary,’ Meili says, her nerves on edge. Remembering suddenly that she brought some electric plugs back from work today, she places them in the wok, adds some river water and lights the stove.

‘The ball hit my hand and broke my nail . . .’ Nannan mumbles to herself as she draws a picture in her diary.

Might as well stay busy while I wait for the pill to take effect, Meili says to herself, popping some haw flakes into her mouth, hoping that they too will help encourage a miscarriage. The work isn’t too difficult. All she has to do is wait for the plugs to melt, then pick out from the black gloop the brass prongs which the workshop manager will sell tomorrow for three yuan a jin. Once Nannan is asleep and her work is finished, she scrubs the wok, pours half the bottle of castor oil into it, fries an egg and swallows it, then mops up the oil with a dry piece of bread. By midnight, she’s so tired she can hardly keep her eyes open. She turns on the television and sees the Qing Dynasty Empress Cixi tuck into a lavish banquet, then she picks up Nannan’s diary and reads today’s entry: ‘Mummy told me to brush my teeth. I told her my gums hurt, but she looked at me with angry eyes, so I had to brush them. Red-Dress Doll was very naughty today, but after I gave her one of my angry looks, she sat quietly at my feet and let me flick her head . . .’





KEYWORDS: gritted teeth, sprung mattress, tiled roof, bathed in glory, abortion, Workers’ Day Procession.

AFTER TWO TABLETS failed to bring about a miscarriage, Meili was worried that if she changed her mind and decided to continue with the pregnancy, the drugs might damage the baby’s brain, so she didn’t dare take any more. When her belly became visibly enlarged, Kongzi was so happy, he stopped playing mahjong with the neighbours in the yard, and instead stays indoors all evening, serving Meili hot meals and cups of tea. Meili feels stifled by his affection, especially now that they’ve moved into a new home with a soft double bed, and he insists on making love to her every night. Meili endures this nightly torment with gritted teeth, hoping that it might cause a miscarriage. Go on then, she says silently when he enters her. As long as there’s a chance the fetus will perish. As Suya wrote in her diary, ‘The fleshy channel between a woman’s legs doesn’t belong to her . . .’ But when she feels Kongzi pressing down on her belly and begin to thrust with force, she often pushes him away and grunts, ‘Stop it. Get off me. Enough . . .’

‘Why do you always push me off just as I’m about to come?’ Kongzi says to her tonight. ‘You’re already knocked up, so what are you afraid of?’

Meili shudders and wipes the sweat from her face as images she knows she can never wipe away return to her mind. She’s surprised that Kongzi hasn’t noticed the change in her. The truth is, since she was raped she has lost all ability to feel pleasure. When Kongzi is approaching climax, she often looks up at him and says blankly, ‘The prenatal handbook said that men shouldn’t penetrate too deeply when a woman’s pregnant,’ then she rolls over and folds her arms over her chest.

‘The baby’s a girl,’ she says to him, staring up at the ceiling. ‘I dreamed about her last night.’

Kongzi is lying on his back, dripping with sweat. Now that his penis has left her body, it has shrivelled up like a snail that’s lost its shell. ‘It can’t be a girl!’ he says. ‘I paid a feng shui expert to examine the dates, and he assured me that it’s a boy. I will call him Kong Heaven, and register him later as Kong Detian, the seventy-seventh generation male descendant of Confucius.’

‘But when have I had a dream that hasn’t proved to be correct?’ she says. Kongzi doesn’t know that, this morning, she summoned up the courage to visit a government hospital. A doctor in the Department of Gynaecology and Obstetrics told her that a free abortion could be arranged for her straight away. A pregnant woman would pay for the procedure on condition that the abortion certificate was made out in her name so that she could carry her own child to term. Meili paced the corridor. If the fetus turned out to be a boy and Kongzi discovered she’d got rid of it, he’d beat her to death. She’d have to tell him she suffered a miscarriage, but what reason could she give? The wrong dose of pills, too much sex, a fetal abnormality? She was certain the truth would come out in the end. Then she thought now that they’re living safely in Heaven, the baby should be given the chance to take a look at the world. She thought how nice it would be for Nannan to have a little brother or sister to play with. Then she thought of Happiness lying on the riverbed, and of Waterborn begging on some street corner in Shenzhen or eating cakes in a house in California, and it occurred to her that the birth of this fourth child might diminish the pain of losing her last two. So, still undecided, she left the hospital and went home.

Kongzi lights a cigarette and stares at Meili’s belly. This one-room house has not only a proper bed with a soft, sprung mattress, but also a table, two chairs, a cupboard and an electric fan, and the rent is just two hundred yuan a month. It may be damp, stuffy and infested with mosquitoes, but it’s a solid brick structure with a proper tiled roof that shelters them from the elements.

‘Get a scan,’ Kongzi says. ‘If it’s a girl, you can have an abortion. My brother and his wife have just had a second daughter, and they won’t be trying again for a son, so it’s all down to me now to carry on the family line.’

‘No, I will not have an abortion,’ Meili says, sensing suddenly that she was wrong ever to contemplate the idea. She glances at Nannan, who’s lying asleep on the long narrow bed Kongzi made for her with scrap timber, and feels a wave of maternal love. ‘Whether it’s a girl or a boy, it’s here through the will of Heaven,’ Meili continues. ‘Look at Nannan. Do you wish I’d had her aborted?’

‘Listen, there’s no need to make up your mind now. Have a scan, then see how you feel.’ Kongzi stubs out his cigarette and drops it into a bowl. Meili gets out of the bed, puts on her underwear and looks outside. The concrete yard is softly lit by beams of light from the surrounding windows. The folding stools have been toppled to the ground, and maggots and flies are crawling over watermelon peel in the corner. The three other one-room houses around the yard are also occupied by migrant families. In the evening, the adults take turns to wash themselves and clean vegetables at the outside tap while the children wrestle with each other or play catch. Today an older child threw a toy truck at Nannan which left a deep cut on her forehead. Meili was furious, but since she couldn’t hit the culprit, she released her anger by slapping Nannan instead.

‘I admit, it’s not great timing,’ Meili says. ‘After four years of aimless travelling, we’ve finally got our lives in order and moved into a proper brick house. I wanted to open my own shop – I know I could have made a success of it. I hoped that in a few years’ time we could buy a car and drive home bathed in glory. But once this child is born, none of that will be possible. I wanted to be a modern woman with a briefcase full of documents and one of those credit cards that you swipe over machines.’ Meili is lying down on the bed again, staring at her swollen feet.

‘Have you forgotten that we’re family planning fugitives? Our residence permits have been annulled. When the whole country becomes linked by computers, every institution will be able to see our criminal records, and no one will issue you with a credit card or a shop licence. So you’d better give up your pipe dream of living a modern life.’

‘I’ll buy fake licences then. In Hong Kong Road, you can buy any fake document you want: ID cards, birth permits, shop licences, degree certificates.’

‘You think I don’t dream of achieving something great, of returning home with my head held high? I’ve always hoped that one day I could open Confucian primary schools in every town and city in China. But no ambition is more important to me than producing a male heir. Once our son is born, we can do whatever we like.’

‘Have you lost your mind? Not content with breaking the family planning laws, you now want to spread Confucianism around the country!’ Meili glances at Nannan again to check that she’s still asleep. ‘Fine, I’ll have a scan. But whether it’s a girl or a boy, it’s my flesh and blood and I will give birth to it. I tell you now, though: this one will be my last.’ She sits back against the pillow, drapes a nightie over her legs and looks Kongzi in the eye. ‘I need to ask you,’ she says gravely. ‘Where did you take Waterborn? I’m her mother. I have a right to know.’

Kongzi throws his hands in the air. ‘Huh! Confucius was right! Of all people, women are the hardest to deal with! You have a “right to know”, you say? There you go again: spitting out words you don’t understand, like a mouse chewing through a dictionary! All right, I’ll tell you. I gave her to the Welfare Office in Dexian. When I went back a week later, they told me a man from Hunan had taken her away.’

‘So she’s still in China. As soon as the One Child Policy is repealed, you must go to Hunan and bring her back . . .’

Rain splatters on the tiled roof and mosquitoes flutter around the ceiling. The infant spirit watches the echoes from the house shake raindrops from the cobwebs in the yard.

‘Congratulations, Kongzi!’ Mother says loudly. ‘For a few grubby coins, you consigned our baby daughter to a life of begging! You know very well that those child traffickers break children’s limbs! You evil bastard! One day you will have to find her. You will have to search for her high and low and bring her back to me.’ Mother puts on a black nightdress and takes a red journal from under her pillow.

‘Write down the Welfare Office’s address and telephone number in here,’ Meili says, handing Kongzi the red journal.

‘So you think the One Child Policy will be repealed soon? Are you planning to start a revolution with Kong Qing? Well, he’s still in prison with three other Kongs from our village. We’re lucky we left when we did.’

‘What other news is there from the village?’ Meili asks, staring at a gecko crawling across the ceiling. A few months ago, Kongzi learned that his sister had married a Pakistani trader she’d met in Tibet, and was so angry he said he’d never speak to her again. He didn’t even send any money to her for the wedding. Since then, Meili hasn’t dared ask him about his family.

‘Kong Wen’s been sacked from the village family planning team, apparently, and has returned to Guangzhou to set up her own business. And that spindly woman, the mother of my old pupil Xiang, has contracted a serious illness. Her husband’s sold all their possessions to try to pay for the medical treatment. Xiang’s dowry wasn’t enough to cover the cost.’

‘What, Xiang’s got married? But she’s only twelve years old. No, of course, we’ve been away so long, she must be sixteen now. Still, that’s very young.’

‘You were only sixteen when you married me,’ Kongzi says proudly.

‘Seventeen,’ Meili corrects him. She remembers the colour photograph of herself aged sixteen, standing arm in arm with her friends Qiu and Yang in the municipal park. All three had their hair in neat ponytails, and she was wearing a cream-coloured jacket and red headscarf, Qiu a blue jumper and Yang a long yellow coat. Meili hadn’t joined the Nuwa International Arts Troupe then, but was already dreaming of being a famous singer. She and her friends had travelled to the county town with a group of Nuwa villagers to take part in the 1 May Workers’ Day Procession. In the evening, the three of them wore lipstick for the first time, and went to a karaoke hall with the village Party Secretary. Meili never saw Qiu again after that night – apparently she stayed on in the town and found a job as a backing singer in another karaoke hall. A year later, she returned to Nuwa Village with ten thousand yuan and bought a house and fifty pigs, but by then Meili had left home and started work at the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel.

The rain is still falling. It streams over the bowed heads of the birds in the straw nest on the roof, runs down the tiles and gushes over the eaves. Inside the four small houses around the yard, everyone is asleep. The infant spirit watches Mother lying on the bed, her hands resting on her belly, and little Heaven floating in the amniotic fluid inside. For a moment, the silence is broken as Nannan’s electronic toy sings out, ‘I’m a beautiful angel, a beautiful angel . . .’ Then everything goes quiet again until all that can be heard is the sound of falling rain.





KEYWORDS: dismantle, frightened and sick, bitter-sweet, ultrasound, twins, tenderisers, gel.

WITH AN ENVELOPE of cash in her small backpack, Meili leaves the workshop and on her way home returns to the lane filled with makeshift shelters and rumbling machines where the illegal clinics are located. In her white shirt, low-cut jeans and sandals, she picks her way over piles of scrap computer monitors. Bare-chested men smeared in black ash stare blankly at her breasts, belly and thighs. Beyond a parked truck loaded with broken printers, she sees the street stall her workmate told her about. She walks around the crates of soft drinks and enters the small house behind. The doctor sitting at the desk is wearing a face mask. At first glance, she looks just like Suya. ‘Your surname isn’t Wang, is it?’ Meili asks her, before she’s even sat down.

‘Yes, it’s Wang, spelt with the water radical.’

‘You look just like a friend of mine – same large eyes and high forehead. She’s from Chengdu in Sichuan. Her surname is Wang, but it’s spelt the usual way.’

‘I’m from Sichuan too, but from Fengjie, on the Yangtze River.’

‘I travelled down there a few years ago. I suppose most of the towns have been demolished by now.’ Meili’s feet are sweating in her tight sandals.

‘Yes, they’ve all been torn down. We could see the Yangtze from the backyard of our old house. Now we’ve been relocated to a village high in the mountains. It’s in the back of beyond and there’s nothing to do . . . So, you’ve come for an ultrasound? How many months gone are you?’

‘About six, I think. But I didn’t have any symptoms during the first three months.’

Dr Wang opens a cupboard and brings out a computer, a probe and a tube of gel, then she lifts Meili’s shirt, lubricates her belly and slides the probe over it. ‘Look, that’s the head,’ she says, pointing at the image on the computer. ‘The eyes. The spine. If there’s one dot here, it’s a girl. If there are two, it’s a boy.’

‘How come?’ Meili asks, her eyes darting from her taut, slippery belly to the grainy image on the screen.

‘Because boys have two testicles, of course! Hah! The baby’s laughing!’ A pregnant woman walks in through the door. Dr Wang looks over her shoulder and says, ‘You’ll have to wait a minute, I’m afraid. Sit by the electric fan over there.’ Meili glances at the woman’s huge bump and muddy shoes then returns her eyes to the screen. ‘But it’s just a tiny skeleton – are you sure you saw it laugh?’ she says to the doctor. She moves her face closer to the screen. ‘You’re tricking me, aren’t you? That’s not my baby. It’s just an image stored on your computer. I dismantle machines like that every day. When I open the memory cards, all sorts of moving images pop up.’

‘But look, when your belly moves, the image moves as well. Are you a complete fool?’

‘I may not be well educated, but my husband is a schoolteacher,’ Meili says indignantly, wiping her damp face.

‘Well, hold the probe and slide it around. See how the image changes?’

‘All right,’ Meili says, reassured. ‘Just tell me if it’s a boy or a girl.’

‘A girl! No doubt about it. But I can put that it’s a boy on the form, if you want. Just don’t tell anyone I filled it out.’ She turns to the other woman and says, ‘If you’ve decided to have the abortion, I can do it straight away,’ then pulls down her face mask and whispers to Meili, ‘That woman’s expecting twins. She’s booked for an induction next week.’ Without her face mask, she looks ten years older.

‘Are they boys or girls?’ Meili asks the woman, sitting up on the bed.

‘One of each,’ the woman answers proudly. ‘Is this your first pregnancy?’

‘No, my fourth. And you?’

‘My third. I used to have two girls, then I got pregnant with twins as soon as I arrived in Heaven.’

‘What happened to the girls?’ Meili asks in the condescending tone she reserves for peasants less sophisticated than her.

‘The eldest lives with my parents, and Dr Wang helped get the second one adopted. We can’t afford to bring up daughters.’

Dr Wang looks down at Meili and says, ‘If you don’t want your baby, I can arrange for her to be adopted as well. They’ll pay you four thousand yuan.’

‘How much do I owe you for the scan?’ Meili answers, wanting to leave at once. ‘Please write that it’s a boy on the form.’

On the way home, Meili feels her belly become heavier and the small of her back begin to throb. When I give birth to the baby girl, Kongzi might sell her to a Welfare Office, she says to herself. And if I tell him now that it’s a girl, he’ll force me to have an abortion. The only safe option is for me to keep quiet and for the baby to stay exactly where it is. She remembers how her belly shuddered when the needle pierced her skin and entered Happiness’s skull. She remembers the smile on Happiness’s face as he lay dead in the plastic bag below her. She remembers Waterborn staring at a lock of her hair as she suckled at her breast. My womb is your refuge, little Heaven, she whispers softly. As long as I’m alive, I will protect you. As she approaches the front gate, she hears barking and quacking, and knows the neighbour’s Labrador must be attacking the duck pen again. Mayflies are hovering outside their front door. A few dead ones are lying on the ground, being devoured by beetles. Kongzi has raised seven ducks. He never lets them out on the river, because except for the plastic rubbish and rotten leaves, there’s nothing in the polluted water for them to eat.

‘It’s a boy,’ Meili announces, surprised by her nerve. Her legs tense as she imagines Kongzi flying into a rage when the baby is born and he sees it’s a girl.

‘A boy!’ he cries out with joy. ‘Wonderful news! My darling wife, everything is in order now! This is the right time, the right place. Hope is in sight. Tonight, I will cook dinner.’ Kongzi grabs the scan results and wraps his arms around Meili. The chemicals in Heaven’s rivers have corroded their boat so badly that he’s had to abandon his water-delivery business and join Meili dismantling machines, so now, like her, his sweat smells of burnt plastic.

‘Well, I won’t be doing any more housework from now on,’ says Meili, lying down on the bed and stretching out her legs. Feeling the baby’s weight press on her main artery, she rolls onto her side, then kicks off her tight sandals and watches Kongzi slice some beef into chunks. ‘I’m not hungry, Kongzi. Besides, I shouldn’t eat beef. The preservatives and tenderisers aren’t good for the baby.’

‘This is a country where everyone is poisoning each other. It’s a game: whoever dies first, loses. Still, this beef cost me a fortune, so you’d better at least try some.’ He pushes his glasses onto his head, drops the chopped beef into a bowl and douses it with soy sauce.

‘There are specific foods women should eat each month of their pregnancy. If you cared a little more, you’d find out what they are and give them to me. You were much more thoughtful before we married.’ Meili is thinking of the time Kongzi bought her her first packet of sanitary towels. Until then, she’d made do with attaching wads of folded toilet paper to a sanitary belt that used to belong to her mother.

‘Daddy, why have you made Mummy’s tummy grow bigger again?’ Nannan asks. ‘Rongrong said it’s because you piss into Mummy’s bottom every night.’

‘What a brat! Don’t listen to her. Hurry up and write your diary. If you want to live in a house that has carpets when you grow up and not a dirt floor like this, you must study hard.’

‘Mummy, can you give Daddy a baby boy and me a baby girl?’

‘Whether it’s a boy or a girl, you’ll be its big sister – that’s all that matters,’ Meili says. The loving embrace Kongzi gave her a few moments ago has left her with a bitter-sweet feeling. ‘I should be drinking prenatal herbal tonics for my sore back and swollen ankles,’ she says in a supplicating tone she hasn’t used since she returned from her one-month absence. ‘I don’t think I’ll go to work tomorrow. Buy me some pork kidneys in the morning. I need to build up my strength.’

‘Whatever you say, my beautiful wife. I’ll look after you. I’ll work my back off to make sure you and little Heaven have everything you need.’

Meili senses that the baby has given their family a new future. What miseries we’ve endured in our quest to find happiness, she thinks to herself. She feels an urge to put her arms around Kongzi and burst into tears. Instead, she stares up at the magazine photograph she stuck to the wall showing a slender woman with glossy blonde hair, a white leather bag slung over her shoulder and large gold earrings sparkling in the shadow of her long neck. Then she looks at the photograph next to it of herself, Kongzi and Nannan standing in front of the Ming Dynasty theatre with Womb Lake in the background. In the room’s dim light, her wide grin shines out like a strip of cloud torn from the sky. Through the open front door she can glimpse a small section of the lake, which conjures up memories of their years on the river. Their corroded boat now lies abandoned on a muddy riverbank. She remembers how frightened and sick she felt the first few days they spent aboard, and how, after just one month, she was able to jump into the water with confidence, and even swim around a little. During those years, the boat rocked her from side to side, and Kongzi rocked her back and forth, until her body flowed like the river. If she hadn’t been constantly afraid of falling pregnant, she would have been able to relax more and enjoy the pleasures of the floating days and undulating nights, the dizzying, watery limbo between sky and land. She thinks of Weiwei and his hand moving over her body. To help erase him from her mind after he left, she made Kongzi make love to her so often that, for a few days, it was painful for her to walk. But since she escaped from the violent assault and arrived in Heaven, she has cast off her former submissive self, and is now determined to become the independent, modern woman Suya told her she could be. She will learn how to type and use a computer, then she’ll enter the complex world of circuit boards where you can find out anything you want and dismantle the entire universe into its constituent parts.

‘Stop biting your nails, Nannan, you’re a big girl now,’ Meili admonishes, then turns to Kongzi, and says, ‘After Heaven is born, we must work hard and buy ourselves Foshan residence permits so that our children can go to school and university. Then we can go back to Kong Village and build a house in our children’s rightful birthplace. Do you hear that, little Heaven? With your mother looking after you, everything will be fine. Nannan, sing me a song, will you?’

‘No, I’m hungry,’ Nannan says, her face pressed against her open diary.

‘Please, sing me the nightingale song I taught you last night . . .’

‘All right: Little Nightingale, in your colourful robe, you come here every spring. We’ve built a large factory with brand-new machinery, so this spring will be even more lovely . . . Mum, I want to learn Xinjiang dancing, like Rongrong.’

‘Read out what you’ve put in your diary today.’

‘This is all I’ve written so far: “I was afraid the gecko was poisonous, but I still went over and looked at it. It had yellow eyes, and stripes like a tiger. When it crawled, it looked like it was riding a bicycle very fast, trying to escape a nasty enemy . . .”’