The Dark Road A Novel

KEYWORDS: birth permit, Dark Water River, family planning office, propaganda van, Sky Beyond the Sky, subversive slogans.

JUST AS DAWN is beginning to break, Kongzi creeps back into the house, collapses on the bed and pulls off his grimy glasses. ‘The county authorities are sending a thousand riot police to the village and a truckload of Alsatian dogs. We must escape at once.’

‘Where to?’ Meili says. ‘Why don’t we just hide in the dugout?’

‘No, Kong Guo knows about it. He’s been arrested, and is bound to give us away.’

‘Why are you wearing that black armband?’ She has only just managed to doze off, and her eyes are heavy with sleep.

‘The police beat two villagers to death last night. We were so outraged, we hitched rides to Hexi and joined the protests outside the Party headquarters. There were thirty thousand peasants surrounding it. Can you imagine? They’d come from villages all over the county to protest against the crackdown. The police cordon was four-men thick, but we still managed to set light to the building. The Family Planning Commission nearby had already burnt to a cinder. If the One Child Policy isn’t repealed soon, there’s going to be a revolution.’

‘Is that blood on your hands?’ asks Meili nervously.

‘No, red paint. I wrote some slogans on the wall. If you weren’t pregnant, I would have gone to the county police station today and tried to rescue Kong Guo and the others.’

‘Subversive slogans? Are you mad?’ Meili runs her fingers through the tangles of her hair which still smell of the musty quilt.

‘All I wrote was: “Bring Down the County Party Secretary and Execute the County Chief”. I didn’t dare write “Bring Down the Communist Party”.’

‘Trying to show off your talent for calligraphy again! How could you be so stupid? You could get five years in jail for that.’

‘They won’t be able to pin it on me. The whole county is in revolt. But we must leave today, or the baby won’t survive. The officers are prowling the village with bloodshot eyes, carrying out abortions in broad daylight. I’ve just been told about Yuanyuan. She left our dugout last night and went to hide near the reservoir, but the family planning officers hunted her down. They pushed her against the bank, pinned her arms down with their knees and injected her belly with disinfectant . . . My parents have guessed that you’re pregnant. They would want us to leave. Did Nannan sleep at their house last night? Well, we can collect her on our way, then. Let’s pack our bags. We’ll return once the baby’s born. Hurry! We’ll need our residence permits, the birth permits, our marriage certificate, cash . . .’

‘But where shall we go? To your brother in Wuhan or your sister in Tibet?’ Kongzi’s older brother works for a construction team in Wuhan and his younger sister runs a souvenir shop outside a monastery in Lhasa.

‘No, we’ll go to Dark Water River, sail down to the Yangtze and stay with my cousin in Sanxia. The town’s being pulled down to make way for the Three Gorges Dam project. The place is in chaos, so the family planning policies won’t be strictly enforced. We’ll be safe there. Quick, get our things ready.’ He feels behind the wooden cabinet and pulls out a large hemp sack.

There’s still no scent of spring shoots in the cold February air. The young poplars growing in the roadside ditch seem like railings driven deep into the earth. The icy breeze blowing down the concrete road to Hexi raises no dust, but when a truck or bus drives by, the shreds of plastic bags littering the ground fly up and swirl about.

A passing cyclist stops to tell them that a police checkpoint has been set up on the road ahead.

Kongzi has pulled his blue cap low over his face. His glasses steam up when he exhales. His right hand is thrust into his trouser pocket, gripping Meili’s forged birth permit.

Squinting into the distance, he sees a police car approach with a red light flashing on its roof. He jumps into the ditch, taking Meili with him, and they crouch on all fours until the car has passed.

‘What did you put in there?’ Kongzi asks, glaring at the huge sack Meili has brought.

‘Not much. Just a few clothes, two flannels, a bar of soap, Nannan’s shoes and pencils—’

‘Nannan! Oh God, we forgot to pick her up. I must go back to my parents and fetch her. You wait for me here.’

‘While you’re about it, pop back to our house and get my address book, and my sewing patterns in the top drawer of the cabinet, and your woollen long johns as well . . .’ In her clean white down jacket and red scarf Meili looks like a tour guide, not an illegal mother on the run.

After Kongzi climbs back onto the road and disappears into the village, Meili feels a spasm of morning sickness. She leans over, retches and, like a cat, covers the vomit with soil. Then she cautiously rises to her feet and looks around. On the snow-covered field to her left she sees the grave of one of Kongzi’s distant relatives. Only a few paper petals remain on the bamboo wreath that was laid during the Festival of the Dead. Behind it, dry stalks arch down onto the snow like strands of black hair on a man’s white scalp.

On the other side of the road is a fodder-processing plant. The huge white slogan – RATHER TEN NEW GRAVES THAN ONE NEW COT – which Kongzi was commissioned to paint last year is still visible on the red compound wall. The two osmanthus trees in front are smaller than the one in her parents’ garden in Nuwa Village, but they produce beautiful white blossom in spring. She picked a few branches last May and arranged them in a green bottle with some bamboo leaves, and they stayed fresh for two weeks.

So, I’ll be leaving Kong Village now, Hexi Town, Nuwa County, she says to herself. Apart from their brief honeymoon in Beijing, Meili has never travelled more than ten kilometres from her place of birth. On television, she’s seen images of southern Nuwa, with its forested mountains and prosperous towns where the men dress like high-level cadres and women like hotel receptionists, but she has no idea what lies beyond the county’s southern border. There’s no need to worry, though. Kongzi will lead the way. As long as they can find a safe place for the baby to be born, everything will be fine and she’ll make sure she never falls pregnant again.

In the distance, she can just about make out the two-storey building where she and Kongzi first met. Teacher Zhou came down from Beijing to build it and named it the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel. Four years ago, Meili travelled from Nuwa Village for an interview, and soon became not only a room attendant but the wife of Kongzi, who was working as hotel manager at the time. She remembers Teacher Zhou turning up with a busload of tourists from a distant town who were dressed even more smartly than the people of southern Nuwa. On the first evening, the guests swam in the pond, and two of the women dared strip down to their underwear . . . She notices smoke rise from a village on a hill to the east and wonders whether its residents have set fire to their family planning office as well.

Looking to the north again, her gaze follows a line of telegraph poles that become shorter and shorter until they vanish into the ground. Beyond them, Nuwa Mountain stretches along the horizon. At its foot is Nuwa Village, where Meili’s parents still live. Meili knows she is a mother now only because three years ago she climbed to Nuwa Cave and rubbed the sacred crevice of Goddess Nuwa. A few days later she fell pregnant with Nannan. After Nannan was born, Kongzi said that their next child must be a boy. When he found out that she was pregnant again, he paid a Taoist priest to write an ancient spell on a piece of paper, which he then placed inside a longevity locket and buried beneath the date sapling, saying, ‘This is where the seventy-seventh generation male descendant of Confucius will be born.’

A propaganda van draws near. From the large loudspeaker strapped to its roof a voice blares out: ‘The County Family Planning Commission has dispatched officers to our village. This morning they will visit every household to fit women of childbearing age with an intrauterine device, and to provide information on reproductive health and fertility management . . .’ A truck follows closely behind, its open back packed with pregnant women whose legs are tightly bound with rope. Meili spots an old friend from primary school among them and looks away. A minute later comes the purple minibus which Kongzi’s cousin Shan uses to deliver materials to local factories and ferry villagers to the county town to sell their vegetables and eggs. His fares are half the price of the public buses, so his service is very popular. Meili clambers back onto the road and waves him down. The minibus stops briefly, drives on, then reverses and screeches to a halt. Justice Wang, the corpulent president of the Hexi law court, steps out followed by two policemen who seize Meili by the arms. ‘Let go of me!’ she shouts, kicking at the door as they try to shove her inside. ‘I have a birth permit! I’m allowed to fall pregnant so I don’t need an IUD!’

‘The family planning officers will want to check whether you’ve conceived yet, then,’ says the taller of the two policemen.

‘He’s my husband’s cousin,’ Meili says, pointing at the driver. ‘Shan, tell them I’m not pregnant!’

‘She can’t be pregnant, Justice Wang,’ says Shan, hunching his shoulders against the cold. ‘She had a daughter two years ago and had an IUD inserted straight after the birth.’

‘Well, the officers will need to confirm that the IUD’s still in place,’ the other policeman says. ‘Now, get inside.’

Suddenly Kongzi reappears, with Nannan following behind him. ‘Let go of my wife or I’ll set fire to the minibus!’ he shouts, flicking his lighter and holding the flame to a cotton shirt he’s pulled from his sack. ‘You can’t go around arresting people for no reason. Have you no knowledge of the law?’

Shan sticks his head out of the window. ‘Don’t set fire to my minibus, cousin,’ he implores, the wind blowing his fringe right back.

‘Me want to pee, Daddy,’ Nannan whines, tugging at Kongzi’s trousers. The red quilted jacket she’s wearing is three sizes too big and almost reaches her ankles. ‘Do it yourself in that ditch,’ Kongzi snaps.

‘Family planning efforts aren’t bound by the law,’ the tall policeman says, switching on his electric baton and staring at the blue sparks dancing over the tip.

‘Bloody traitor,’ Kongzi snarls, eyeing Shan coldly.

‘Meili flagged me down,’ Shan replies, his face colouring. ‘I wouldn’t have stopped otherwise. The Hexi family planning squad has commandeered every vehicle in the county. They’re paying us sixty yuan a day.’

‘We’ll let her go for the time being,’ Justice Wang says, then he turns his fiery gaze to Kongzi. ‘As for you, Kong Lingming – if you attempt to obstruct our efforts again, I’ll slam you in jail, and not even your revered ancestor will be able to save you then.’

The three uniformed men climb back into the minibus. As it drives off, children who’ve run out from the village hurl clods of earth at its windows, and a scruffy yellow dog chases after it until it disappears from sight.

Seconds later, a man called Scarface marches onto the road, one hand waving a kitchen cleaver and the other gripping a rope which is tied to the wrists of his three crying daughters. Kongzi tries to stand in his way, dodging his swinging cleaver. The two elder girls are his pupils.

‘Out of my way!’ Scarface shouts, the burn mark on his forehead turning bright red. ‘I’m taking my three daughters to the County Chief. Let him tell me which one is surplus, and I’ll kill her there and then, right in front of him.’ His youngest daughter is only three years old. Noticing that her shoes have fallen off, her older sisters stoop down and try to pick her up with their bound hands.

Nannan crawls out of the ditch. As Meili crouches down to hug her, her face suddenly creases with alarm. ‘Oh God, Kongzi, I’ve wet myself. I’ll have to go home and get changed.’

On a cold night, nine years ago, following a failed morning escape, Father leads Mother and Nannan out of Kong Village and across the snowy fields to the banks of Dark Water River. Here, they board a small boat and, leaving whirlpools and diesel smoke in their wake, head south in search of a safe place for their second child to be born. The infant spirit drifts away from them and continues along Dark Water River, following it upstream all the way to its sacred source in Nuwa Cave.





KEYWORDS: seasickness, testicles, tangled string, crimson lipstick, boiled frogs, custody centre.

THE PITCH-BLACK Yangtze River lies supine along the base of the steep limestone gorge, curving round the sinuous banks. The passenger boat moves over the water, leaving a trail of white foam which stretches hopelessly into the distance. Juddering violently, the diesel engine spews out fumes that fill each corner of the boat then leak into the night sky. Most of the passengers have come out onto the top rear deck to escape the stench of vomit and excrement in the cabins below. Meili is squashed against the railings, next to a woman wearing crimson lipstick who comes from a town only ten kilometres from Nuwa Village. When she came onto the deck and saw how ill Meili looked, she gave her a seasickness pill. She’s travelling to Fengjie, a town downriver where she works in a hair salon. She tells Meili that the river towns along this stretch of the Yangtze are being torn down before the dam is complete and the valley flooded, so demolition work is easy to find. She confides that her husband has just had a vasectomy. ‘Three days after he was snipped, the wounds became infected and now his testicles are the size of carrots. He spends all day drinking liquor, moaning about the agonising pain, saying he wishes he could murder the family planning officers who botched the operation.’ The woman is smoking a cigarette. When she speaks, her white teeth sparkle.

‘Men hate the idea of losing their manhood,’ Meili says. ‘You should press the Family Planning Commission for compensation.’ She has grown used to this woman’s high-pitched voice, and is now staring at the gold ring on her finger, wondering whether it’s real or gold-plated. Meili has a wedding ring as well, but she keeps it inside her bag as since she fell pregnant her fingers have swollen and it no longer fits.

‘He did demand compensation, but they gave him only 1,200 yuan – not enough to pay for even a week of hospital treatment. We asked for a copy of the follow-up examination report, but they refused to give it to us in case we lodged an official complaint. We tried to sue them, but the district judge told us that family planning authorities are above the law. If we took our case to Beijing, we’d be arrested for “illegal petitioning”.’

Meili pulls a bunch of bananas from her bag and offers one to the woman. Kongzi is lying fast asleep at her feet, a whiff of alcohol rising from his mouth. A few minutes ago, he stirred from his drunken slumber and bellowed a line from Confucius’s Analects: ‘If my path comes to an end, I will board a raft and drift towards the sea . . .’ A group of migrant workers are crouched beside him gulping down bottles of beer.

‘No, no, I’m not hungry,’ the woman says, taking a banana nevertheless. Meili breaks one off for herself, tosses the peel overboard and watches it disappear into the white waves that cut through the centre of the black river. ‘I have an eighty-year-old mother at home to support, and a two-year-old child as well,’ the woman says. ‘The wages I bring back to them vanish in a day.’

Meili shifts Nannan’s head further down her lap, wriggles her numb toes, then stares at the woman’s careworn face and contemplates her own predicament. I’m only twenty, she says to herself. I won’t let myself age as badly as her. I’ll get a job, earn some money and buy myself a nice dress and leather shoes. Kongzi once said that my toes are the most attractive part of my body, and since then, I’ve kept them covered. But one day I’ll buy some elegant leather sandals and paint my toenails red . . .

‘Come on, tell me – you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ the woman says. ‘You’re on the run from family planning officers.’

‘How did you guess? Yes, I’m over three months gone. Nuwa County is clamping down on family planning violators. We would’ve been allowed to have a second child when our daughter is five, but I’ve fallen pregnant sooner by mistake.’

‘You want a son, don’t you? To continue the family line.’

‘My husband is a Kong, so of course he wants a son. He keeps quoting that line from the Analects that goes, “Of the three desertions of filial duty, leaving no male heirs is the worst,” or something like that.’

‘How did you avoid getting fitted with a coil? Your family must have a lot of influence. I bet you’re the only woman in this boat who doesn’t have an IUD inside her.’

‘No, my parents are ordinary peasants. My father works in a coal mine now, and my mother looks after the fields. But my husband’s father is a war hero and a former village head, so he was able to pull a few strings.’

‘He must be a teacher, your husband – quoting from the classics like that. Just look how thick his glasses are!’

Meili smooths her hair back and smiles. ‘Yes. Everyone in the village calls him Kongzi, after the great sage. Our neighbours often ask him to choose names for their children or write rhyming couplets to hang outside their doors.’ The two women stare down at Kongzi, who is now flat on his back, snoring loudly.

‘If we edged our way over there, we’d be able to see the television in the viewing lounge,’ the woman says, pointing behind her with her chin. Then, looking over at the migrant workers swigging beer, she murmurs a Cantonese song: ‘As the night grows darker, I drink myself into a daze. Softly you approach my broken heart. Be careful what you say, because as everyone knows, I’m a woman who’s easily hurt . . .’ The boat approaches a bend in the river and the engine’s growl deepens.

‘You speak Cantonese, then? Have you been to Guangzhou?’ Meili knows the song. She sang it at her interview at the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel, and impressed Teacher Zhou so much that he gave her the job on the spot.

‘Yes, I’ve been to Guangzhou a couple of times. You need to speak Cantonese to find a job there, especially in the hair salons. But the men in Guangzhou are loaded. I can earn more in a day there than I do in a year back home. You could make a fortune there. Such smooth skin, delicate features, long neck. What man could resist you? I’d move there myself, but it’s too far away. I have to go home every week to give money to my family and see my child. If it were up to me, I’d never go back to that damn village.’

‘I’d much prefer to be at home. The thought of travel frightens me.’ Meili remembers seeing Yuanyuan hobbling back from the school the day they left. Her mother-in-law was beside her, one hand supporting her round the waist and the other gripping the aborted fetus by the arm. Yuanyuan went into labour as soon as she was strapped to the school desk, but by the time the baby was born the disinfectant had already killed it. The family planning officer dropped the dead baby into a plastic bucket, but it was so big it toppled out. It lay sprawled on the ground for hours. No one bothered to pick it up. When her mother-in-law came to fetch her, she scooped it up from the floor and refused to let go of it.

‘My village is surrounded by beautiful mountains,’ says the woman wearing crimson lipstick. ‘The soil is so fertile, anything will grow. But the family planning officers make life there unbearable. They grab women in the middle of the night. They took me once and locked me up in an army office for nine days. I was with nineteen women and children, in a room that was just twelve metres square. We didn’t even have space to lie down. There was a four-year-old girl there who they’d taken hostage to force her mother to return from Shanghai. One poor woman had just had an abortion and was still bleeding. But on her second night, Officer Zheng and his colleague pulled her out into the corridor and raped her.’

‘It wasn’t so bad in our village – the officers demolished a few houses and made arrests, but they never raped anyone,’ Meili says, afraid to talk openly about the true nature of the brutal crackdown. She glances over to the migrant workers beside her. The boiled frogs they’re eating remind her of tiny fetuses.

‘I detest that Officer Zheng,’ the woman continues. ‘I fell pregnant again last year. He promised he’d make sure I could keep the child, but I still ended up being dragged to the clinic for an abortion. He’s the reason I left the village. The filthy bastard!’

‘Did you tell your husband about it?’ Meili asks, suspecting that the officer forced her to sleep with him.

‘What for? He wouldn’t have had the balls to beat him up – he would’ve just beaten me instead. Take my advice: never rely on a husband for your happiness. The government persecute men, then men persecute their wives in return. And what do the wives do? If they have a child, they slap it to let off steam. If not, they drown themselves or swallow bottles of pesticide.’

Meili thinks of the women who leave the village to find work in the south and return a year later, laden with cash. Yuanyuan told her that women who can’t find jobs in factories work as prostitutes in hair salons. Meili doesn’t dare ask the woman whether she sleeps with men for money, but remembers her saying she could earn a year’s salary in a day, so presumes that she must.

The conversation unsettles Meili and brings to her mind the time a man almost tricked her into sleeping with him when she was fifteen. She looks into the night sky and suddenly becomes aware of the infant spirit animating her fetus, making it quiver and sink lower in her womb. Hunching her shoulders and squeezing her thighs together, she whispers, ‘Don’t be afraid, little one. Just stay where you are.’

That night, Mother looks into the darkness, as though wanting to converse with the infant spirit. Moonlight falls on the narrow bridge of her nose. Her mouth appears to be smiling. A woman wearing crimson lipstick is saying to her, ‘Take care in train stations, town squares, hotels. Agents prowl those places. If they see a women they suspect of being illegally pregnant, they pounce on her and drag her to a clinic for an abortion. They’re paid fifty yuan for each woman they bring in. And be especially careful in the big cities. Peasants aren’t welcome there. The authorities think we give foreign tourists a bad impression, so they round us up, lock us in custody centres and charge us an “urban beautification tax”, which is really just a fine for entering the city. The only way to avoid arrest is to live on the water.’

‘What do you mean, live on the water?’ Mother stares out at the wide river. She can see no land, no people, only flowing water, and this seems to bring her comfort.

‘Have you no idea how dangerous this country is? If you’re unlucky enough to have been born with a cunt, you’ll be monitored wherever you go. Men control our vaginas; the state controls our wombs. You can try to lock up your body, but the government still owns the key. That’s just women’s fate.’ The woman’s eyes start to redden.

‘Do you mean that people who live on the river don’t get their residence permits checked?’ Mother asks.

‘Yes, because every day they’re in a different place. They become part of the floating population. In Guangdong they’re called the “egg families” because they live on boats that look like half eggshells and float from one town to the next.’

Meili thinks of her childhood on the banks of Dark Water River. Every day she’d watch boats moor at the jetty and offload cargos of bricks, tiles and lime. Sometimes a motorboat would draw up, and peasants in festive clothes would disembark and set off on pilgrimage to Nuwa Mountain. She never liked going near the river, especially after she learned that it flowed from Nuwa Cave and bestowed fertility on any woman who touched it.

The woman wearing crimson lipstick looks Meili in the eye. ‘There’s one place in China where you can live in complete freedom, though: Heaven Township. It’s in Guangdong Province. I worked there for a while. No one checks how many children you have. And it’s almost impossible to fall pregnant there.’

‘Not if you have a husband like mine!’ says Meili, thinking of how Kongzi insists on making love to her every night, leaving her feeling like a heap of tangled string.

‘No, the town’s air contains chemicals which kill men’s sperm. The newspapers call it pollution, but I wouldn’t go that far. The air has a slight tang to it, that’s all.’

‘Heaven Township, you say – where is it, exactly?’ Meili asks excitedly, as though hearing of a promised land, then glances down at Kongzi to check that he’s still asleep.

‘It’s near Foshan in the Pearl River Delta, just an hour from Guangzhou. It used to be a small village, but it has tripled in size in the last five years. It has a large lake in the middle called Womb Lake, and its streets are piled with mountains of foreign televisions and telephones, and electronic devices you never see in the countryside. The machines are brought in by the truckload. You work sitting by the lake, watching television, and get paid eight hundred yuan a week, with free food and lodging. There are children scampering about everywhere. No one comes to check your birth permits, or drag you off to a clinic for an IUD insertion.’

‘But you said it’s impossible to fall pregnant there, so how come there are so many children?’ Meili asks, tucking her hair inside the hood of her down jacket and wiping the snot from Nannan’s nose.

‘You have to inhale a lot of those chemicals before they can take effect. They’re called dioxins, apparently. The family planning officers there are very relaxed, because they know that however hard a man tries, he’s unlikely to get his wife pregnant.’

‘What a wonderful place it sounds!’ Meili feels wide awake now. She imagines herself sitting on a stool beside the lake, scrubbing vegetables, watching her children paddle in the shallow water, and seeing Kongzi return from teaching at the local school, wearing a suit and tie and gold-rimmed glasses.

‘It’s full of workshops that dismantle the electronic goods. It’s a Special Economic Zone now, like Shenzhen. But to reach it, you must travel through many large cities. If the police catch you, you’ll be slammed in a custody centre and booted back home.’

Meili pictures herself in Heaven Township again, sitting in a safe and peaceful yard, knitting quietly while inhaling deep breaths of the chemicals that prevent women conceiving. She doesn’t know how long it will take to travel from the fertile mountains of Nuwa to the sterile fields of Heaven Township, but at least she now has a sense of where happiness lies.

She closes her eyes and sees her mother’s jabbering mouth always admonishing her for wasting food, and her father’s cowardly soot-engrained face. She’s heard that after people work in the mines for a while, even their lungs turn black. Her brother is a coward, too. As a child, he was always too scared to go outside alone when he needed to piss in the night. Although Meili had to leave school when she was eight to help her grandmother in the fields, she still dreams of leading a modern life. She may be registered as a peasant, but she will do everything in her power to ensure that her children go to university and find work in a city. She is not untalented. She has perfect pitch, and learned the art of funeral wailing from her grandmother. At the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel, she’d sing ‘On the Fields of Hope’ every night, finishing on a high C that would receive rapturous applause. Even before she married, she was determined to achieve happiness and success, and avoid the monotonous peasant existence her parents have led. At another bend in the river, the boat’s engine splutters noisily. Nannan rouses from her sleep, crawls back onto Meili’s lap, rests her head on the hemp sack and returns to her dream.

When dawn breaks, Meili wakes from her doze and sees Nannan’s face bathed in the early rays of sun and the reflected glow from her red quilted jacket. The mosquitoes that buzzed noisily all night have left small bites on Nannan’s neck, but her face is as smooth and unblemished as an egg. Meili’s own dream slowly dissipates as the boat continues downstream. All she retains of it is a vague sensation of swimming as freely as a fish through the deep waters of Womb Lake.





KEYWORDS: river towns, stray dog, contraband, happiness, spring earth, civilisation, toes.

‘WHY WE LEAVING boat, Daddy?’ Nannan asks, waddling up to him.

Kongzi lifts her up with one arm and joins other passengers, laden with bags, across a rickety boat and onto the steps of the wharf. Following closely behind, Meili scans the crowd nervously, trying to hold back another wave of nausea. Instinctively she places her hands over her belly, feeling like a woman she saw in a television drama who concealed contraband drugs inside her body. The red backpack she has filled with biscuits, milk powder and dried sausages drags on her shoulders as she climbs the wharf’s one hundred stone steps, dodging out of the way of travellers who are scrambling down to catch the boat.

At the top of the wharf, Kongzi cranes his neck back to take a look at the town clinging to the side of the steep mountain, the black plastic bag swung over his shoulder scraping the ground. ‘So this is Sanxia,’ he says. ‘In a few months, the water level will rise 150 metres, and all of the old town will be flooded. Look, they’re pulling it down now, and will move everyone into those newer buildings higher up the slope.’

The air is thick with charcoal smoke and the scent of boiled corncobs. A stream of people jostles past. ‘Looking for a hotel?’ a man calls out. ‘See that barge down there? You can get a bed in it for just five yuan a night. You won’t find cheaper accommodation in the whole county.’

‘Should we trust him?’ Meili whispers to Kongzi, folding her arms over her belly, convinced that everyone is staring at it, especially the men wearing blue caps. ‘That man over there looks like a policeman. He might try to drag us to a custody centre.’

‘No, he looks like a tax collector to me,’ replies Kongzi. ‘And only large cities have custody centres. Sanxia is smaller than Hexi. Look, that department store is only two storeys high, and there are hardly any cars about. So stop worrying.’

A young man on a motorbike passes them, then looks back and shouts to Kongzi, ‘Hey, my friend! Five yuan a ride. How about it? I’ll take all three of you.’

Kongzi shakes his head. ‘Dad, me want motorbike!’ Nannan cries as it speeds away. ‘Me want sit on motorbike!’

‘We’ll walk,’ Kongzi says, setting off down the dirt road.

‘You horrid!’ Nannan says in a huff. ‘Me hate you.’

Kongzi doesn’t understand how I feel, Meili says to herself. If the police arrest us, I’m the one who will be punished. The condemned fetus is hidden in my belly.

They pass houses and billboards smothered in dust then, further along, the gloomy skeletons of gutted and abandoned buildings. Wooden beams, floor tiles, glass panes and revolving chairs have tumbled onto the dirt road. The rows of ancient houses clinging to the steep slopes above appear to have subsided into a layered heap.

‘Look at all those houses squashed together up there,’ says Meili. ‘None of them have doors. How do people get inside?’

‘Don’t you know? In river towns, all the windows face the river, and the doors are at the back,’ says Kongzi. They come to a pathway of stone steps that leads endlessly up the mountain. Kongzi takes Nannan’s hand and begins to climb.

‘So many steps,’ Meili says, struggling up behind, sweating and puffing. ‘How high are we going? What if I faint and fall down? Kongzi, will your cousin still remember you?’

‘Of course. We ran through the village together as kids, stealing peanuts and dates from the neighbours’ yards. We grew up eating from the same cob of corn!’

‘Daddy, you got your energy?’ Nannan says, lifting her sweaty face to his, her ponytail skewed to one side. Her red quilted jacket is far too hot for this town.

‘No, I left it at home,’ Kongzi says, knowing she wants him to carry her.

‘Me tired. Carry me.’

‘I told you, I haven’t brought my energy,’ he says, squeezing her hand. ‘Keep climbing. Don’t look up.’

Halfway up they reach a narrow lane. Kongzi leads them to the left and stops outside a dark entrance. Rows of rusty letter boxes are nailed to the cement walls inside. Some have been smashed open, others are stuffed with flyers offering to buy unwanted television sets.

‘Look at that slogan on the wall,’ says Meili, still catching her breath.

Kongzi turns to the crumbling wall and reads out loud: ‘“After the first child: an IUD. After the second child: sterilisation. Pregnant with a third or a fourth? Then the fetus will be killed, killed, killed!” Don’t worry. That’s an old one. Look, the paint is flaking off. Yes, this is definitely the right place. Here’s his letter box. Flat 121.’ He dumps his plastic bag on the ground and opens the door to the communal stairwell.

‘Daddy, careful, big bad wolf in there,’ Nannan whispers.

‘I’ll wait here with Nannan,’ Meili says. As he disappears, a smell of boiled mutton blows out from the stairwell and makes her stomach churn. She falls to her knees and vomits. Nannan jumps back in disgust.

‘Quick: cover it with some of that rubbish,’ Meili tells her, pointing to the dusty newspapers and orange peel in the corner.

Kongzi returns a few minutes later. ‘He’s not there. The woman in the flat next door said he moved to another town two months ago.’

‘I need to pee,’ Meili says in a panic.

‘You can’t do it here – we’re not in the countryside any more. Let’s go back down to the wharf and find you a toilet.’

So they pick up their bags, tramp back down the steep steps and book into the stationary barge hotel.

At night, the newly built apartment blocks jutting from the mountain top resemble featureless planks of wood. A few have lights on, but most are still dark.

‘Look at that block up there: it must be twelve storeys high,’ Meili says. ‘If the top windows were opened, birds could fly straight in.’ Now that Nannan is asleep, she and Kongzi have come out to sit on the barge’s open deck. The hotel is mostly occupied by migrant workers. The cabins reek of mould and the toilets are so squalid no one dares to use them.

Kongzi wraps his down jacket over his shoulders and looks out at the river. ‘What a fine view! It reminds me of that Tang Dynasty poem: “In spring the river swells to the height of the sea. / The bright moon lifts from the surface of the water and rises with the tide.”’ He takes a drag on his cigarette then exhales slowly, clouding his thick glasses.

‘I’d like to go up one of those blocks and see the view from the top,’ Meili says, still staring at the lights twinkling on the mountain.

‘What a philistine you are! How can you look at apartment blocks when we have the eternal Yangtze to gaze upon? Our greatest poet, Li Bai, sailed down this river a thousand years ago and immortalised it in his verse. The Yangtze is our nation’s artery of life. It’s by these banks that the Chinese people first settled and cultivated the arts of civilisation.’

‘You think I haven’t heard of Li Bai? “I bid farewell to Baidi Town in the rosy clouds of dawn. / By nightfall, I’ll be back in Jiangling, a thousand miles away. / On both sides of the gorge, apes cry unceasingly. / My light raft has already passed through ten thousand mountain folds.”’ Meili smiles proudly, then, as she always does when Kongzi accuses her of being uncultured, says, ‘I can’t be too much of a philistine, or you wouldn’t have married me, would you?’

‘I taught you that poem,’ says Kongzi, his white teeth gleaming in his thin, dark face.

‘Nonsense! I learned it at primary school.’

Kongzi takes another long drag. ‘What a crime it is to destroy this beautiful ancient town!’ he says, and after a long sigh recites: ‘“Against the river’s jade waters, the birds appear whiter. / Against the blue mountains, the flowers appear aflame. / Yet another spring ends. / How many more will pass before I can return home?”’ Then taking Meili’s hand, which she’s been keeping warm in the sleeve of his down jacket, he says, ‘I’d love to hear the “Fishing Boat Lullaby” now. It’s an ancient zither song. Do you know the words?’

‘Stop testing me,’ she says, stuffing her hand back into his sleeve. ‘You know I only like pop songs.’

‘Well, sing “In the Village Lives a Girl Called Xiao Fang”, then.’

‘No, we’ve left the village behind. I want to sing songs from the city. Listen to this one: . . . You say you’re mine, but still I’m not happy. What is love? What is pain? I don’t know any more . . .’ Before she reaches the end of the chorus, Mother looks up, takes off Father’s glasses and says, ‘Kongzi, promise me that once this baby is born, you and I will get sterilised. I don’t want to go through this again.’

‘Only if the baby’s a boy. I have a duty to my ancestors to carry on the family line. Huh! Since time began, the Chinese people have been able to procreate in freedom. Just my damn luck to be born in an age of birth control!’

‘But I’m your wife – you have a duty to protect me,’ Mother says, resting her head on Father’s shoulder. ‘It would be reckless to have a third.’

‘What is a wife for if not to produce sons? Besides, now we’re here, you’ve no need to worry. The family planning officers of Sanxia leave boat people alone. The hotel didn’t even ask to see our marriage certificate when we booked in. It’s full of fugitives like us. We’re safe.’

‘Why are you so obsessed with having a son? It’s so feudal! Don’t you know that men and women are equal now?’

‘My brother has no sons, so it’s my responsibility to continue the family line. Our daughters will join their husbands’ family when they marry, and their names won’t be recorded in the Kong register. So they serve no purpose to us.’

‘Still clinging to those outmoded Confucian beliefs! I warn you, the modern world will leave you behind.’

‘Huh! Just a few days on the road and already you’ve become worldly-wise! Don’t forget, you left school at eight while I graduated at sixteen, so I’ll always be cleverer than you.’

‘Stop being so patronising. We’re both fugitives now. Let’s see how far your male chauvinism gets you here.’

‘Oh God! I’ve just remembered. I left our Kong family register in the dugout.’

‘Was it wrapped in newspaper, on top of that old edition of the Analects?’

‘Yes. It dates back to Emperor Qianlong’s reign. It’s the twenty-second volume in the series, and proves that I’m a seventy-sixth generation descendant of Confucius in the direct patrilineal line.’

‘Look how you gloat at being his successor!’ Mother says, pinching his ear.

‘Well, Confucius had to wander through the country like a stray dog after he was banished from the State of Lu. So I’m happy to become a stray dog as well for a while, as long as I have you, my little bitch, to keep me company!’

‘You rascal!’ says Mother, running her hand further up Father’s sleeve to pinch his chest. In the darkness surrounding them, all that can be perceived is their laughter and warm breath. Someone wanders out on deck to have a smoke. Another figure leans out of a porthole to drop an empty orange crate into the river.

‘We’ve been away two weeks now,’ says Meili, nuzzling her face against his jacket. ‘I still haven’t dared write to my mother. What are we going to live on now?’

‘Don’t worry. I signed up to join the demolition team. They pay thirty yuan a day. So we can stay here until our son is born. In a year’s time, I’ll have saved enough money to pay the fine for his illegal birth, and we can all go home.’ He slides his hand up onto Meili’s breast. She feels her face grow warm. He hasn’t touched her for days.

‘It frightens me to think how little we have now,’ she says.

‘Yes, we’re starting from scratch, but we’ll soon have everything settled.’

‘I mean, I feel empty, cut off . . . You won’t leave me, will you?’

‘Never. Let me feel our baby.’ Kongzi lifts Meili’s jumper, undoes the lower buttons of her shirt and places both hands on her belly.

‘What if it’s a girl?’ she says, her heart thumping.

‘Well, she won’t be recorded in the family register with the boys of her generation who’ve been assigned “Righteousness” as the first character of their name.’

‘Never mind, let’s call her “Happiness” then.’

‘Yes, that’s good. And we can still add “Righteousness” to the name when we register her with the government.’

‘You really think we’ll be able to get this baby officially registered?’

‘Absolutely! Once it’s born, I won’t rest until I’ve made enough money to pay the fine . . .’

‘Your hands are freezing. Let’s go back to the cabin.’ As soon as Meili pushes Kongzi’s hands off her belly, he slides them between her thighs.

‘Don’t touch me there, it hurts . . .’ she says, sensing herself losing control.

‘It hurts? Let me make you feel better then . . .’

Meili feels her blood vessels prickle as though filled with scuttling spiders. She stretches out and lets the waves of pleasure sweep through her . . . ‘Don’t press on my belly. Keep going, keep going . . .’ Her thighs tremble against the metal bench; inside her leather shoes her ten toes clench.

With his hand still inside her, Kongzi puts a cigarette to his mouth and lights up.

‘Put that out!’ Meili says, tugging his hand out of her and wiping his middle finger on her sleeve.

A cruise boat sails past, a Viennese waltz pouring from loudspeakers on its rear deck. The breeze blowing across the river smells of spring earth and new growth.

‘As long as we stay together, I don’t care how many children we have. I just want us to be happy.’

‘Didn’t I make you happy just now?’

‘Be serious for a minute! If you loved me, you wouldn’t want to put me in danger. But it’s strange: the river does feel safer than the land . . .’

The infant spirit notices that there are fewer people walking along the bank now. The lights shining near the wharf sink the distant buildings into a deeper darkness.