The Dark Road A Novel

KEYWORDS: pleasant breeze, open-crotch trousers, plucking feathers, separate ward, life rod, hand-held heaters.

‘I HAVE TO DRINK American ginseng all day, or these fumes give me terrible migraines,’ says Meili’s workmate Ah-Fei. ‘Bitter tea just isn’t strong enough to wash all the poisons out of my system.’ Ah-Fei is disfigured by vitiligo. She wears a large surgical mask, to protect herself from the fumes and to conceal the unsightly white patches on her face.

Meili started this job three weeks ago. She had to leave her last job because the plastic granulating machines in the yard created such a deafening noise that when she went home in the evening, she couldn’t hear a word Nannan or Kongzi were saying. The salary here is only thirty yuan a day, and the fumes make her eyes water, but at least when the front and back doors of the workshop are left open, a pleasant breeze flows through.

At first, Meili sat with the other eight women at the long metal table, heating and dismantling circuit boards, but leaning over her bulge and inhaling the toxic vapours made her sick, so she swapped jobs with a woman called Xiu, who is only five months pregnant. Now she sits on a bamboo stool gutting cables, which requires her to pull a cable from the tangled mound beside her, nail it to the wall, run a sharp knife down the length of its plastic casing and rip out the precious copper wires within.

‘Heaven Hospital is the best place to give birth,’ Xiu says, pausing to rub her belly. ‘They let you go home with your baby after twenty-four hours. At Compassion Hospital, the nurses snatch your baby from you as soon as it’s born, put it in a separate ward and feed it on formula for a week. They say it’s because breast milk isn’t nutritious enough, but the truth is they put the babies on the bottle to earn commission from formula companies.’ Xiu always has the most up-to-date information on hospitals and childcare.

‘Scams like that are the least of our worries,’ Cha Na chips in from the end of the table. ‘If the authorities decide to crack down on family planning criminals like us, things will get really ugly.’ Cha Na has a daughter, Lulu, who’s the same age as Nannan, and a three-month-old baby at home, whom she goes back to feed during the lunch break. She’s witty and good-natured, and Meili gets on well with her.

‘A woman once told me it’s impossible to fall pregnant here,’ Meili says. ‘None of us seem to have had any problem, though!’ She thinks back to the woman with crimson lipstick she met on the boat to Sanxia, and wonders whether or not she should feel grateful to her for telling her about Heaven Township.

‘I tell you, Meili, a few more years in this place, and you’ll be a barren old hen and your husband will be a limp cock!’ Ah-Fei sniggers behind her face mask.

Nannan runs inside with Lulu to drink a glass of water. They’ve been in the backyard, clambering over a heap of computer carcasses and gutted video machines. In the front yard, workers are breaking open television sets and computer monitors with kitchen cleavers and extracting the circuit boards. The thick glass interiors are shaped like huge light bulbs, with the flattened screen at one end. They are of no use any more, and are placed in a pile in the corner.

‘The family planning officers in this town only take bribes – they don’t bother enforcing the law,’ says Cha Na. ‘So we’d be stupid not to take advantage of the situation and have as many children as we want.’ Noticing her engorged breasts begin to leak onto her shirt, she turns to the side, pulls them out and squeezes the milk onto the ground.

‘My husband never took bribes when he was head of the village family planning team,’ says Pang, a middle-aged woman whose wiry black hair is braided in tight plaits. ‘Everyone looked up to him. He’d come home at night, open a beer and sing: Armed with violation notices, through every village we scout. When we find a pregnant woman without a permit, we rip her baby out.’ Pang has poor eyesight, and can often be heard yelping as she burns her fingers on the molten lead.

‘The mere mention of family planning officers sends shivers down my spine,’ Meili says, feeling Heaven’s arms jerk about inside her womb. ‘Those bastards have blood on their hands. They’ll get their just deserts in the end.’ Pang gets on Meili’s nerves. Her husband has visited the workshop a few times. Last year he was sacked from the family planning team after fracturing his pelvis in a road accident, and moved to Heaven with Pang and their daughter hoping to pick up some work.

‘You’re right there, Meili. Pang’s husband’s certainly got his just deserts in that car crash, didn’t he? It knocked the life out of his “life rod”! Ha!’

‘You may snigger, Cha Na, but your husband’s dick will go limp too, one day, mark my words,’ Pang says, then coughs into her sleeve. ‘Anyway, I don’t miss him sticking his dirty sausage into me every night. Never gave me much pleasure . . .’

‘Well, I suppose you can at least get a good night’s sleep these days,’ Cha Na says, her breasts pressing against the metal table as she reaches for another circuit board.

‘You really think her husband’s gone limp?’ Ah-Fei says with a grin. ‘I bet when he goes to a hair salon, his hard-on hits the front door before he does!’

‘Mind your language, please, there’s a young girl at the table,’ Xiu says, pointing at the fifteen-year-old girl with shoulder-length hair, dark skin and large anxious eyes. A few years ago, this girl was playing hide-and-seek under the table, just like Nannan and Lulu are doing now.

Yes, one day all those family planning officers will be punished for their crimes, Meili thinks to herself, staring blankly at the eight women as they shake their hand-held heaters over the circuit boards. The fluorescent light above them shines on their hands, the boards and the blue vapours rising from them. Once the lead solder has melted, the women grip a copper wire, a chip, a capacitor or an electrode with their tweezers, wobble it to loosen the hold, then gently pull it out and place it into one of the thirty tea cups arranged before them. When all the components have been removed, they drop the empty boards into the red plastic buckets on the ground . . . Yes, those doctors and nurses who murdered Happiness will receive their punishment one day, Meili says to herself, kicking an empty cardboard box lying by her feet into the corner.

Old Shao, who’s responsible for buying and distribution, has taken off his shirt, exposing his round belly and small flabby breasts. He’s squatting in the doorway now, picking up the copper strands that Meili has extracted from the cables. He looks up at her and says, ‘If you don’t buy a fake birth permit soon, Meili, your baby won’t get a residence permit. I’ve heard you can pick one up in Hong Kong Road for five thousand yuan.’ Meili likes Old Shao. She always sits next to him at lunch. He’s the only person in the workshop who knows that she is now twelve months pregnant. Six weeks after her initial due date passed, she went for a check-up in a backstreet clinic, and the doctor told her she must have got her dates wrong, and that she should relax and let the baby come out when it’s ready. Although Meili was certain that her dates were correct, when she applied for this job, she was worried the boss wouldn’t hire her if he knew how long the pregnancy had lasted, so she told him she was only six months gone. Old Shao has worked in electronic waste for years. He knows how many jin of lead each brand of computer contains, and the function of every component on a circuit board. He told Meili that there are over seven hundred different chemicals in most electronic machines, and three hundred of them are harmful to the human body. He’s always reminding her to wear her face mask.

‘No, you’d be better off paying a snakehead ten thousand yuan to smuggle you to Hong Kong, and give birth there,’ Xiu butts in, rubbing her bulge. ‘The hospital treatment is free, and the baby would automatically get a Hong Kong residence permit, and as her mother, you could apply for one too.’

‘Or you could go to Macao,’ Cha Na suggests, tweezing the last component from a board. ‘It belongs to China as well now, and costs less to get to than Hong Kong.’

‘If I had ten thousand yuan I could pay the illegal birth fine and wouldn’t need to leave the country,’ Meili says, feeling Heaven turn a somersault and kick her in the bladder. She has got everything ready for the birth: sleepsuits, nappies, socks, bibs, even a longevity locket Kongzi bought in the market, but little Heaven still shows no sign of wanting to come out. She wonders whether she did indeed get the dates wrong, or if the pollution she’s been exposed to has delayed the baby’s development.

‘In Guangzhou, the fine for illegal births has risen to twenty thousand yuan,’ Ah-Fei says, pouring herself more American ginseng tea. ‘So it won’t be long before the fines here rise as well.’

‘Prices of everything are shooting up,’ says Cha Na. ‘Have you seen how much nappies cost these days? I’m going to have to stop buying them and put my baby in open-crotch trousers instead.’

‘Go to the market in Confucius Temple Road,’ Xiu advises. ‘You can buy a top-brand pack of thirty-two nappies for just forty yuan.’

‘No, I bought some there once for a friend,’ says Pang, waving the blue fumes away from her face. ‘They’re fake, filled with mouldy rags.’

‘Remember the family planning officer who came here last month?’ says Ah-Fei, her nostrils flaring above her face mask. ‘I bumped into her the other day. She’s been promoted to chair of Heaven Township’s Women’s Association.’

‘So they’ve set up a Women’s Association here?’ says Old Shao. ‘That means Heaven will soon be granted county status. That’s all down to the hard work of us migrants.’ Old Shao walks along the table emptying the cups of sorted components into baskets which he then takes outside and tips into bamboo crates.

‘You mean the woman with the long skinny neck who comes here before public holidays to hand out condoms?’ says Ah-Fei. ‘She’s not too bad. When she asked me when I had my last period, I told her I hadn’t had one for months, and she didn’t kick up a fuss.’

‘Spring Festival’s only four weeks away now. Will you be spending it with your family this year, Old Shao? If so, please bring me back some salted pickles.’ This woman, Yazhen, is from the same region of Jiangxi Province as Old Shao.

‘No, the trains will be packed. I doubt I’d get a ticket. I think I’ll just stay here.’ Hearing the girls shriek in the backyard he goes to the door and shouts, ‘Nannan and Lulu, get off those boxes! If you break them, the boss will blow his top.’

‘Own up, Old Shao, you’ve got a mistress here, haven’t you?’ Yazhen says, raising an eyebrow. ‘It’s always the same: when men leave home, they forget all about their wives.’

‘And if they do live at home, they just come back for dinner, then run off to sauna houses and nightclubs,’ says Ah-Fei.

‘Aagh!’ Pang yelps, burning her fingers again.

A worker shuffles into the room, takes the empty circuit boards into the yard and dunks them into basins of sulphuric acid to retrieve any remaining scraps of gold. Immediately, acrid vapours drift into the workshop causing everyone’s eyes and throat to burn. As dusk approaches, all the machines and bamboo baskets of sorted components are dragged back into the workshop and stacked up into tall piles. Meili sorts the red, white, blue, black, green and grey plastic casings at her feet into separate hemp sacks, then goes to help Old Shao label some white boxes.

At this time every evening, in the final minutes before they clock off, the women at the metal table stop chatting and concentrate on their work, their hands darting back and forth, tweezing out tiny square, circular, two-pronged, three-pronged components as though they were plucking feathers from a duck. Through the haze of blue fumes, the hot circuit boards in their hands look like miniature demolition sites.





KEYWORDS: security door, murder, difficult time, ovary, fully dilated, psychological block.

‘KONGZI, I THINK my belly’s contracting! My God, I’m bleeding! Quick, take me to Dr Tao’s clinic.’ Meili holds her bloodstained hand up to the light then climbs out of the bed. The clinic is in a village a few kilometres away. Xiu gave birth to her baby son there and recommended it to her. Meili visited it two months ago, by which time Heaven had been inside her belly for a year and a half. Dr Tao examined her and said that she only looked about eight months pregnant, and that the fetus probably needed more time in the womb. Since then, she’s suffered occasional cramps, but this is the first time that Heaven has shown any sign of wanting to emerge.

‘All right, let’s go!’ Kongzi says, raising his head sleepily from the pillow. While surfing the Web in an internet cafe late last night, he was delighted to learn that the China Institute of Confucian Studies held a conference in Beijing recently to celebrate its sixth anniversary. He has learned to type, and plans to post an article online recommending that study of the Confucian-inspired Qing Dynasty text, Standards for being a Good Pupil and Child, be reintroduced into the school curriculum.

The sky is still dark. Kongzi opens the front door. The air outside is slightly cooler and tastes poisonous.

‘We’ll have to leave Nannan here,’ Meili says. ‘Take five hundred yuan from my handbag. Look, my belly’s going tight again.’

‘Today is August the 18th. The date Chairman Mao addressed a million Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. How could little Heaven choose such a rotten day to be born?’

‘Stop blabbering. Is there enough diesel in your water-delivery van?’ Meili leans against the wall waiting for a contraction to subside, then she pulls on a short-sleeved dress and picks up the plastic bag she’s prepared for the birth. A few months ago, Kongzi removed the outboard motor from their crumbling boat and sold it for eighty yuan, and with a further eight hundred yuan he’d saved, bought a small van, which is in fact a rusty wreck that he found lying in the back of a car-repair workshop. It has no bonnet, bumpers or windscreen. When he drives it through town, it resembles the tattered coat of a homeless beggar, with its oil pipes, exhaust pipes and electric cables fluttering behind it in the wind.

The infant spirit watches Father, in the darkness before dawn four years ago, drive through narrow lanes, with a cigarette in his mouth and goggles over his eyes. Mother is sitting beside him groaning with pain. As her temperature soars, she unbuttons her shirt, while in her womb, which is hotter still, the fetus writhes. Father’s cigarette smoke pours into Mother’s lungs and bloodstream, then flows through the umbilical cord into the fetus’s brain. At last they arrive at the clinic. Father jumps out and bangs on Dr Tao’s steel security door. ‘Who’s there?’ a voice eventually replies. ‘Don’t you know how to use a doorbell?’

Mother lies on the doctor’s bed, hunched up in pain as the contractions become more intense. When the cervix is fully dilated, the fetus descends but its head becomes stuck between Mother’s pelvis. ‘I can see its hair!’ Dr Tao exclaims. ‘One more push and it will be out . . .’ Mother grits her teeth and pushes with all her strength. The fetus thrashes about, and its neck becomes so constricted that for a few seconds no oxygen reaches its brain. ‘Oh, the pain . . .’ Mother screams. Fighting for its life, the fetus grips Mother’s pelvic bone and propels itself back into the womb. Dr Tao shines a torch into Mother’s vagina and sees a tiny petal-like hand hanging out of the cervix. He reaches in and grabs hold of it, but as he tries to yank it out, he hears a small bone in the arm snap. ‘Bring me forceps and cotton wool, Qin!’ he shouts to his assistant. ‘Hurry!’

Mother’s legs are shaking uncontrollably. Trying to distract herself from the pain, she bites into her lower lip until it bleeds.

‘Relax, don’t tense up,’ Dr Tao tells her.

‘I can’t!’ Mother shouts, her whole body juddering. ‘I keep remembering my baby son kicking his legs about after he was pulled from me, then seconds later seeing the doctors strangle him to death. I can’t get those images out of my mind.’

‘I’m here to help deliver your child, not murder it. Come on, start pushing again, or I’ll have to call your husband in.’

‘No, it’s bad luck for husbands to see their wives giving birth,’ Mother says, her head swaying from side to side as another wave of contractions creeps up.

‘In foreign countries, men stay with their wives during childbirth to offer support and comfort,’ Qin says, pressing Mother’s legs down onto the bed.

‘Well, we’re not f*cking foreigners!’ Mother yells. ‘Come out, little Heaven! Don’t be afraid. No one’s going to kill you, I promise . . .’

The infant spirit watches the fetus curl up with fright. When it was expelled from Mother’s ovary and rolled down the fallopian tube at the beginning of this third incarnation, it was aware of the two previous times it had made this journey. It remembered Mother screaming: ‘Don’t come out into this world, my child! Return to me in another incarnation. Murderers! Animals! . . .’ Then, when it reached the womb and was penetrated by Father’s sperm, memories from its former lives returned with greater clarity. It recalled Father’s anger on discovering that Waterborn was a girl, and it grew fearful of its own birth. As its senses developed, it became more aware of its surroundings. It cringed when Mother sighed with disappointment after being told she was pregnant with another girl, and squirmed when the bitter pollutants flowed through Mother’s blood. It realised it would have to choose between the poisons of the womb and the hostility of the outside world. The fetus isn’t sure what lies outside, but is certain now, after taking a brief look, that this isn’t its rightful birthplace. The date tree that was blessed in Nuwa Cave when it was a sapling isn’t growing in the yard. It decides that it must stay inside Mother’s womb, like a fish in a glass bowl, and wait for her to carry it back to Kong Village.

Mother howls out again, her legs splayed open like a forked tree. ‘Don’t let me return as a woman in my next life! I’d rather be a dog or a rat than suffer this pain again!’

‘You’ve had two doses of oxytocin, but the baby still won’t budge,’ Dr Tao says, tugging the fetus’s foot with his forceps, struggling without success to pull it out. ‘I’ve never seen a Chinese fetus resist so much. Are you sure it doesn’t have foreign blood?’ Giving up at last, he releases the foot and watches it slip back into the womb. ‘If I’d pulled any harder, its spine would have broken.’

‘Foreign blood?’ Meili shouts. ‘How insulting! I’m a descendant of Goddess Nuwa. My baby’s one hundred per cent Chinese! . . . Let me squat on the floor and try pushing again.’ Mother turns onto her side and eases herself off the bed.

‘It’s no use,’ says Dr Tao. ‘I’ve delivered hundreds of babies, but this one clearly has a psychological block: it just doesn’t want to come out. There’s nothing more I can do. I won’t take any payment. You must go to a government hospital at once and ask for a surgical delivery.’

‘You think I’d let someone put a knife to my belly? Never! Fetch me some more towels.’ Mother is squatting with her back against the bed, looking as though she’s trying to shit, but however hard she pushes, nothing is coming out.

‘I promise you, I couldn’t have pulled any harder,’ Dr Tao says, perching on a stool to catch his breath. ‘That fetus has unworldly strength!’

‘Of course it’s strong!’ Mother says, mopping the sweat from her face. ‘It’s been inside me for twenty months!’

‘Twenty months now, is it? When it does finally come out, it’ll be able to jump off the bed and scamper around the room . . .’

The contractions slowly abate, the cervix closes up, and the womb becomes still. Mother topples to the floor in exhaustion. The breeze blowing from the air-conditioning unit smells of old blood and deep-fried fish.

‘Still not out yet?’ Father says, walking in with a carton of orange juice.

‘The fetus has embedded itself into your wife’s flesh. I couldn’t extract it.’

‘When I came to see you two months ago you said the fetus was only eight months old,’ Mother says. ‘How can I believe anything you say?’

‘Listen, I’ve had enough!’ Dr Tao says. ‘I don’t want your money. Just go and get a surgeon to take it out for you.’

‘So that he can then strangle it to death?’ Mother cries. ‘Never!’

Seeing Father about to light up, Dr Tao shakes his head. ‘Sorry, this room is air-conditioned. No smoking allowed.’

Father drops the cigarette back into his pocket and says, ‘I know a bit about Taoist astrology, Dr Tao. Perhaps we should pay a priest to choose an auspicious day for the birth.’

‘Don’t waste time with that nonsense,’ the doctor replies. ‘Just listen to my advice: take her to a proper hospital straight away and pay for a Caesarean.’

‘All right, all right,’ Father says. ‘Let’s go home and fetch some more cash, Meili.’

‘No, I refuse to have my belly cut open. You know how I hate the sight of knives and blood . . .’ Meili is resolute. She’s terrified not only that the doctors will murder the baby, but that Kongzi will explode with rage when, after spending a fortune on a Caesarean, he discovers that the baby is a girl. Since the baby’s determined not to come out, Meili decides that she should have another ultrasound to confirm its sex. Perhaps it will turn out to be a boy, after all. How could that woman tell that the fetus was a girl from the blurred and grainy image on the screen? She will allow little Heaven to stay inside her for as long as it wants, and they’ll get through this difficult time together. If Kongzi or the government try to force her to do otherwise, she’ll resist them with every fibre of her body.