The Dark Road A Novel

KEYWORDS: newly hatched carp, water heaven, red dress, frozen blood, funeral song.

KONGZI STARES AT an object floating down the river, wondering whether it’s a dead fish, a piece of straw or a chopstick. He’s turned off the ignition and allowed the boat to be dragged downstream by the current. Grassy embankments and scatterings of mud houses slide swiftly by. The side winds nudging the boat off course smell of the factory effluent flowing into the river from large waste pipes.

Meili is lying on her front on the side deck, staring at the passing hills and bamboo forests, her left leg trailing in the water. The deep still river is as blue and transparent as the sky. Nannan splashes some water onto Meili’s head and cries, ‘Look, Mum! You have flowers on your hair!’ Then she ties a piece of string around her plastic doll and lets it trail in the water as well. The doll’s red dress fans out like a pool of blood. Meili closes her eyes and hears her grandmother wailing a funeral song: ‘My darling child, like a newly hatched carp that leaps from its pond for the first time only to fall into the jaws of a cat, you have entered the netherworld before your first tooth has appeared. The mother and father you’ve left behind weep in misery . . .’ Meili grew up listening to her grandmother’s grief-stricken wails. They planted inside her a seed which has grown into a tree that supports her spine, pelvis, ribs and every fibre of her flesh. She wants to sing a line from the lament, but all she can do is cry: ‘Mother, Mother, oh Mother . . .’ She puts her arms around Nannan and, unable to cry out, breaks into sobs, her back rising and falling, rising and falling, like a rag tumbling over a wave.

‘Your face has too much crying, Mummy,’ Nannan says, edging away. Against the green shorts she’s wearing, her tanned legs look as dark as soy sauce.

A long time later, Kongzi puts on his black vest, steers towards the middle of the river and drops anchor. Then he picks up the plastic bag containing Happiness’s corpse, places a brick inside and ties the top with string.

‘Wait!’ Meili says. She opens her cloth bag and takes out the little hat, vest and pair of shorts she knitted for Happiness. ‘Put these inside too,’ she says to Kongzi, handing them to him.

‘Why my brother dead, Mummy?’ Nannan asks, pressing her small hand on Meili’s sunken belly.

‘The bad people took him out before he was ready,’ Meili answers. She thinks of the anxiety and nightmares she’s endured since their flight from Kong Village, and realises that in this country there is not one roof under which she can live in safety. In the past, she ignored Kongzi whenever he described the horrors of the Tiananmen Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Campaign against Lin Biao and Confucius. Only now does she fully understand that, in the eyes of the Communist Party, she is but a criminal whom they can torture as they please, a woman who doesn’t even have the right to be a mother to her unborn child.

‘But I not want him dead, Mummy,’ Nannan cries, pointing to the plastic bag. ‘I want him moving. You said you give me brother.’

Against the pallor of her face, Meili’s lips are the colour of dark plums. After returning to the boat, she slept for two entire days, still leaking clots of blood. In her sleep, she could hear Nannan crying out to her and feel Kongzi place fresh wads of paper inside her knickers or pieces of banana into her mouth. When she woke, she saw blood on her dress, on the bamboo mat, and even under Nannan’s fingernails.

A swarm of flies crouch on the canopy like a squad of family planning officials.

In the twilight, a sand-dredging vessel sails past, leaving a trail of gleaming foam that makes the surrounding water appear wetter and heavier.

‘I finished,’ Nannan says, lifting her bare bottom in the air and peering down into her potty.

Mother wipes Nannan’s bottom and hugs her tightly. ‘Your brother had a sad fate, Nannan. He must go to heaven now. Say goodbye to him.’ Her eyes are two narrow slits between lids red and swollen from crying.

‘But heaven in the sky. Why you put brother in water heaven? He can swim? He going swim to Sea Dragon’s palace?’

‘No, your brother just wants to have a long sleep,’ Mother says. ‘Kongzi, put Happiness into the river.’

Mother flops onto her stomach again and lies on the deck with her long hair over her eyes, her swollen left arm outstretched towards the bow. Two ducks stick their heads out of the bamboo cage below and stare at the darkening water and sky. ‘Wait,’ Mother calls out. ‘Drive back to the bank and pick some osmanthus.’

The infant spirit can hear the sounds from that evening, but can’t see the images clearly as the sky is not yet pitch black. The river is calm. All that can be heard is the dull thud of the propeller churning through the water. After a short absence, Father returns to the boat holding three branches of osmanthus. He drives the boat back to the middle of the river, threads the branches through the string knot of the plastic bag then gently lowers the bag into the water. The infant spirit plummets to the riverbed and watches the bag descend.

‘Look at that leaf, Mummy,’ Nannan says. ‘It swimming.’

Once the water burial is finished, Kongzi sails back to the bank and drops anchor. ‘Let’s spend the night here,’ he says, crouching down and staring out at the smooth surface of the river.

The night thickens and the river turns black. Happiness and the osmanthus flowers have vanished. The flies have gone. In the candlelight, Meili sees Nannan’s doll floating in the river, one arm outstretched. After soaking in the water all day, its red dress has turned the colour of frozen blood, and its eyes a more intense blue. Its yellow hair streams and scatters around the shiny plastic face.

Meili feels milk begin to leak from her breasts. She leans over the side of the boat and squeezes it out. Drip, drip, drip . . . The river opens its mouth and swallows.





KEYWORDS: sand island, National Day, forced abortion, blood clot, potassium permanganate.

BEFORE NIGHTFALL, KONGZI anchors the boat near a jetty that juts out over the river beneath a municipal rubbish dump. Other ramshackle boats and barges are tethered nearby, each one crammed with scavenged plastic crates, sofa cushions and lampshades. Chickens, ducks and children are scampering over the muddy shore while above them foragers pick their way over the dump’s broken bricks and tiles. The buildings on the hill behind are festooned with National Day celebration banners and flags. It looks like a sizeable county town.

Meili sees a woman in the next boat washing spinach, and reminds Kongzi that they’ve run out of rice.

‘I’ll go up to the town and buy some,’ he says. ‘And I’ll buy some soap as well, so you can wash in the river this evening.’ Kongzi hasn’t earned any money since he paid the abortion fee, and only has fifty yuan left.

‘No, I don’t want to wash.’ Meili still can’t bring herself to touch the river in which Happiness is buried. Her body is filthy and covered in insect bites, but at least the swelling on her left arm has subsided, and she can now bend it again.

‘I want play with them, Daddy,’ Nannan says, pointing to some children in a cabbage field who are poking a flock of chickens with bamboo sticks. The ducks in the cage on the side of the boat ruffle their wings, desperate to be let out onto the river.

Kongzi ties the boat to a broken slab of concrete, picks Nannan up into his arms and crosses the dump, heading for the town.

Meili turns round and sees a long sand island in the middle of the river. A jumble of houseboats, as dilapidated as theirs, lie anchored by the shore. Children are playing hide-and-seek among the bushes and babies are lying asleep on car tyres. Colourful laundry hangs from cables strung between trees, giving the place a homely air. She can tell at a glance that the islanders are fellow family planning fugitives and, suspecting that they club together to bribe local officials into leaving them alone, thinks it might be safer if they joined them. She wouldn’t want to stay long, though. Once they’ve crossed Guangxi Province, they’ll reach Guangdong, and be able to make their way to Heaven Township. For the first time since her abortion, she allows her hand to touch her hollow belly. A taste as foul as rotting vermin rises into her mouth. She senses that death is lurking somewhere deep within her, cold and implacable. Her abdomen cramps as another blood clot is expelled from her womb. She remembers her friend Rongrong’s sallow face wince as she swallowed the bitter herbal medicine for her pelvic disease, and feels frightened and far from home.

At night, the river is tranquil, apart from the occasional dog bark or squealing of a baby. The roar that flows from the distant motorway makes the trees tremble but doesn’t stir the boats. Meili rests her head on a baby mattress she found on the dump and hugs a hot-water bottle, her breasts beneath her white shirt drooping to either side. The kerosene lamp casts an orange light over her neck and face. ‘Let’s moor by the sand island for a few days, Kongzi,’ she says. ‘This river is so broad and winding I’ve lost track of where we are.’

‘We’ve left the Yangtze and have followed the Gui River into Guangxi Province. This town is called Xijiang. Guangdong is just over there in the east. All right, let’s stay here and rest for a while. I can pick up some work and we can search the dump for things to sell. The shops here aren’t expensive. Peanut oil is four yuan a bottle, and rice is just 3.2 yuan a jin. Diesel and kerosene are quite reasonable too.’

Although Meili can eat now, she still suffers bouts of acute abdominal pain. ‘The days are like water,’ she says to Kongzi. ‘They stretch out before me but I can’t hold them in my hands.’ Before supper, Kongzi poured some boiled water into a basin for her. She scrubbed her hands and face with soap and, for the first time since the abortion, washed between her legs as well then disinfected the area with potassium permanganate.

‘You mustn’t give way to despair,’ Kongzi says to her. ‘We’ll have another child. We won’t give up.’ He opens the bottle of rice wine he bought at a stall near the motorway and pours himself a glass. A white cruise ship passes in the distance, a red flag tied to the mast. A couple on the back deck stand locked in an embrace beneath a loudspeaker blaring out ‘Ode to our Motherland’: ‘Our beloved nation is rich and powerful. Signs of prosperity are all around us . . .’

‘Why don’t we just go home and hand ourselves over to the authorities?’ Meili says. ‘If we show them the abortion certificate, perhaps they’ll drop the fine. Life here is no safer than anywhere else. I’ve had enough . . .’

‘The certificate wasn’t stamped, so it’s not valid . . . Oh, it’s all my fault. We should have left Sanxia as soon as we bought the boat. Rivers are our country’s arteries. As long as we keep following them, we’ll eventually reach the heart – a mystical haven where we can live in peace.’

‘You think we’ll find anywhere more mystical than Nuwa Cave? As soon as I placed my hand on it, I fell pregnant with Nannan. Women from Nuwa aren’t destined to have sons. You’d better accept our fate.’ Happiness’s asphyxiated face suddenly flashes before her eyes. She leans over and extinguishes the lamp. ‘Besides, I can’t go through another illegal pregnancy and forced abortion. Do you want to see me die?’

‘Of course not. You’re my wife. But we have a right to try again for a son.’ Kongzi slaps his arm, trying to swat a mosquito. Then he stares into the darkness, at the mosquito’s fluttering wings, perhaps, or a remembered image of Happiness’s corpse.

‘We have no rights, you stubborn fool! Only the state can decide whether I have another child or not. Pull the curtains down. I’m cold.’ As the darkness thickens around her, Meili feels her heartbeat slow down and her hearing become more acute.

Kongzi takes a last drag from his cigarette and says, ‘The bloody Communists have destroyed Confucius’s legacy. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom – all the values he upheld have gone. If a panda gets pregnant, the entire nation celebrates. But if a woman gets pregnant she’s treated like a criminal. What kind of country is this?’ He tosses his stub into the river then sits silently, his eyes darting about. When it becomes too dark to see a thing, he lowers his head and lets out a guttural cry of misery. ‘My son, my son! Make your way back to us. “Summer wildfires cannot destroy the grass, For in spring, soft winds will restore it to life . . .” I cannot believe that in this immense country there is no space for my male descendant.’

Kongzi’s brother, three years his senior, also has one daughter, but didn’t register her in Kong Village in case they had a second child before she turned five. But a fellow villager who worked on his construction team in Wuhan reported him to the village police, so now neither his daughter nor any second child they might have will be granted a residence permit. Kongzi and his brother look almost identical. The brother left home ten years ago to work in Wuhan, and when he returned every Spring Festival with bundles of cash, Kongzi, the poorly paid school teacher, always felt inferior. The village school had so little money that parents had to buy the children’s desks and Kongzi had to provide his own. His brother paid for their wedding, spending five thousand yuan on a banquet for eighty guests and entertainment provided by the local song-and-dance troupe. He doesn’t enjoy conversation or reading books. When he returns to the village, he sits in front of the television all day, chain-smoking. Kongzi would love to talk to him now, but knows that if he mentioned the family’s need to produce a male heir, he’d be met with a blank silence. Kongzi is still convinced that only a son will bring him happiness. If his brother fails to produce one, the responsibility to continue the family line will fall on him. His brother’s wife is almost forty, so time is running out. Kongzi hasn’t dared phone his father and tell him that Meili was subjected to a forced abortion, and that the baby was a boy. Nor has he dared tell Meili that after they fled the village, his father was arrested and locked up for a week, and that because Meili didn’t turn up for her mandatory IUD insertion, his mother was forcefully fitted with one instead.

Nannan rouses from her sleep, kicks off her blanket and crawls blindly onto Kongzi’s lap.

‘Go back to your mat, Nannan,’ Kongzi says, pushing her away.

‘I frightened of Sea Dragon – he hiding here,’ Nannan says, pointing to her head. Before she went to sleep, Kongzi told her a story about a fairy called Flower Girl who was imprisoned by the Sea Dragon and rescued by the Bodhisattva of Mercy.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Kongzi replies. ‘The Sea Dragon died a long time ago.’

‘You said after my brother dead, he wake up again.’

‘Come and sleep next to me,’ Meili says. She pulls her down onto her mattress. The boat rocks from side to side. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Kongzi? Lower the curtains – I’m shivering. Now go back to sleep, Nannan.’

‘I like sleeping next to daddies, not mummies,’ Nannan says, rolling back towards Kongzi who’s lying on a folded blanket, his head resting on three magazines.

‘The nights are so cold now,’ Meili says, tucking a jumper around Nannan. ‘If we don’t withdraw some cash from the bank tomorrow and buy a generator and an electric heater, Nannan will come down with a terrible illness. We can’t live like animals any longer.’





KEYWORDS: deep-fried dough stick, sperm, mandatory sterilisation, shiny leather shoes, scorched poultry.

MEILI IS WOKEN by distant voices shouting, ‘There’s a man in the town who’s threatening to leap from a five-storey building. Quick, everyone, go and have a look!’ As Meili sits up, a stream of Kongzi’s sperm leaks out from her and runs down her thigh. Grimacing with anger and disgust, she pulls some tissues from a box and stuffs them inside her knickers. That bloody condom must have split last night, she says to herself. If I fall pregnant, I’ll become an enemy of the Party again. During the eight months since the abortion she has fended off Kongzi, but last night she relented, and let him push his way inside her.

Kongzi rolls over and says, ‘If you’re going over to take a look, buy me a deep-fried dough stick. I’m starving.’

‘Why would I want to watch a stranger jump to his death?’ Meili says. ‘I’m not far off from jumping into the river myself. You want a dough stick? What about those noodles left over from yesterday?’ Kongzi’s cigarette smoke rises straight into her nose. She stands up and coughs.

They’ve set up home on the sand island. Meili has reared almost thirty ducks, and Kongzi has bought two egg-laying hens and a rooster which he keeps in the bamboo cage. When he isn’t hauling cargos of smuggled or fake goods, he scours the town and rubbish dump for junk he can sell. There are twelve other families living on the island, most of them fellow family planning fugitives.

Meili dips a flannel into the river and rubs it over her face and body, flinching from the cold. Their neighbours Xixi and Chen are about to sail over to the town. They were the first family to arrive on the island. Last year, the river police pulled down all the shacks, but the islanders soon built themselves new ones with tarpaulin and wooden planks scavenged from the dump. A strong sense of community has formed among the families. Everyone rears chickens and ducks, so the air is always filled with the scent of roast meat.

‘Want a lift, Meili?’ Chen calls out. Meili says yes, but quickly changes her mind. ‘No, if a big crowd has gathered to watch the man jump, the town will be swarming with police. I don’t want to get dragged off to a family planning clinic and have some stranger push an IUD inside me.’ Meili has developed a fear of crowds, and has only visited the town three times.

‘Stop worrying,’ Kongzi says. ‘I told you, the head of the County Family Planning Commission is a reasonable man. We wouldn’t be allowed to stay on this island otherwise. You go into town, and take Nannan with you.’ Kongzi picks up lots of local information from other scavengers on the rubbish dump. Last week, he was told that a professor from Guangxi University was giving a lecture on Neo-Confucianism and Modernity at the County Cultural Palace, which he made a special effort to attend.

‘No, I won’t take Nannan,’ Meili says, stepping onto Xixi and Chen’s boat. ‘There might be child snatchers in the crowd.’

‘But those gangs only snatch boys,’ Kongzi says.

‘I don’t care. You look after her.’

Once the boat pulls away, Kongzi wades into the river and feeds yesterday’s leftover noodles to the chickens in the cage.

Up in the centre of town, after walking past the covered market and newly built Eastern Sauna House, Meili sees a large crowd staring up at a construction worker who’s threatening to jump from the top of a half-finished office block. When he waves his hands about he reminds her of an old school friend who now works for the governor of Nuwa County. Anxious to escape the crowd, she skirts its perimeter and enters a wide, empty street. In the clear morning light, the family planning banners strung overhead appear even larger. One side of the street has been recently covered with cement; the other side remains potted with holes. She walks on, following smells of dough sticks and fried dumplings which lead her to a small food stall outside a restaurant with blue-glass windows.

Meili buys three dough sticks. Unable to resist, she opens the newspaper wrapping straight away and bites into one. Delicious. She sits on the restaurant’s concrete step and reads the slogan daubed on the opposite wall: ANY PERSON FOUND TO HAVE EVADED MANDATORY STERILISATION WILL BE ARRESTED AND FINED. For the first time since the abortion, she is able to read this familiar slogan without her stomach knotting with fear.

She studies the blank expressions of the people passing by on their way to work, and feels frustrated. She too would like to stroll to work every day wearing a smart dress, shiny leather shoes, holding a handbag containing a hairbrush and make-up. But peasants are banned from entering tall office buildings which are warmed in winter and cooled in summer, and where staff are paid high salaries for sitting at their desks all day. Although Meili was born into a peasant family, she longs to live like the rich women in television dramas who own air-conditioned flats and air-conditioned cars and never have to set foot in a field. Once she has joined their ranks, she too will dress herself in a tailored suit, paint her nails red, fasten elegant sandals to her feet and stride into an air-conditioned jet or the carpeted foyer of a luxury hotel. She may be inadequately educated, but she has confidence and determination. She is able, after all, to perform a song in public having heard it only twice. She still dreams of becoming a pop star, and of travelling the country singing ballads in satin ball gowns. Before she married, she and six friends from Nuwa Village formed a group called the Nuwa International Arts Troupe, and toured local coal mines and rural markets, performing pop songs and belly dances. But she quit after a week when the manager of one village hall told her that unless the girls danced naked on the stage, no one would pay money for tickets. She’s always believed that women should be respectable and modest. Since marrying Kongzi, she has dedicated herself to their family and endured their poverty without complaint. But she feels now that the time has come to pull herself together, find a job and start earning some money. Even if they never manage to live in a city, she must at least make sure that they can build themselves a new house back in Kong Village equipped with all the latest electronic appliances.

She walks back past the five-storey block from which the construction worker is still threatening to jump. The crowd has swollen. A man who’s set up a makeshift stall shouts through a megaphone: ‘For the best viewing experience, buy one of my telescopes and folding stools!’ People impatient to get to work cry out: ‘Hurry up and jump, will you? We can’t wait around all day.’ Without glancing up, Meili pushes her way through the crowd, managing to reach the covered market with the two remaining dough sticks intact. The smell of scorched poultry in the air is familiar to her. Since she got married, she has always been the one to slaughter the chickens, pluck them, then scorch the soft down from their skin. Glancing around at the busy stalls of the market, she thinks to herself, perhaps I could set up business here too. At least it’s sheltered from the elements.

She turns to a stallholder and asks, ‘How much are the ducks today, sister?’

‘Three yuan a jin, and an extra yuan if you want it killed, plucked and gutted.’

‘I can pluck. Are you looking for assistants?’ Meili’s already contemplating selling their flock of ducks to raise money to rent a space and buy stock.

‘No, that guy over there is, though,’ the stallholder replies, raising her eyebrows in the direction of a tall skinny man who’s standing beside a fish stall.

Meili approaches him and asks for a job. He fixes his large, protruding eyes on her and says: ‘I need someone who can gut and scale. I pay one jiao a fish. If you want to see how it’s done, sit here and watch.’

Meili pulls over a wooden crate, sits down on it, and sees on the wall opposite her a notice that says: MILK POWDER WARNING ISSUED BY THE MUNICIPAL HYGIENE DEPARTMENT. TO SAFEGUARD INFANT HEALTH AND PREVENT DAMAGE TO THE WIDER POPULATION, A BAN HAS BEEN PLACED ON INFERIOR-QUALITY MILK POWDER . . . She remembers Kongzi mentioning that he delivered a cargo of counterfeit milk powder to some businessman who’d bought them wholesale for three yuan a bag and was planning to sell them on the streets at triple the price. At the time, she reasoned with herself that whether the powder was fake or genuine, it would at least provide more nourishment than the rice gruel most peasant women feed their babies. Infant formula is always in demand. She is sure that if she opened a stall selling baby products in this market she could make a good profit.

After watching the fishmonger gut and scale for several hours, Meili realises that Kongzi must be hungry for the dough stick and is probably wondering what has taken her so long. She goes out into the sunlight and runs downhill. The June sun is scorching the dust on the pavement and the clumps of withered weeds growing along the kerbs. A hot wind chases her all the way to the river. She wades into the water, panting for breath, and scans the distant sand island, but sees no sign of Kongzi or their boat. Then, turning to her right, she spots their boat emerge from a huddle of rafts tethered to the jetty. The rooster stretches its head out of the cage and stares at her. Wiping the sweat from her face, she waves to Kongzi who’s standing behind the wheel wearing a vest and shorts and muddy flip-flops.

He helps her onto the boat with the bamboo pole, frowning disgruntledly. ‘What took you so long?’ he barks.

Nannan’s dress is sopping wet. She sticks her leg out, points her bare toes and says, ‘Dad said I can’t dance, Mummy!’

‘I was in the market, learning how to gut fish,’ Meili tells Kongzi. Sensing his disapproval of her independent attitude, she quickly changes the subject. ‘So, did that man jump in the end?’

‘I thought that’s what you went to see. No, no. He didn’t jump. The police dragged him away an hour ago. I withdrew a hundred yuan from the bank. There was no problem. It’s not connected to our branch in Hubei Province. We still have a thousand yuan left in our account.’

Nannan hugs Meili’s thigh. ‘Mum, our rooster called Red. His long chin called Little Worm. Dad called Snake in Glasses. You called Big Eyes. You like my names?’

‘We need a stable income, Kongzi. I want a job. I want to work, even if it’s just on a market stall.’ Meili sits at the bow, her damp forehead and shoulders glistening in the sun.

‘Mum, this pee or sweat?’ Nannan asks, stroking Meili’s perspiring thigh.

‘So what do you plan to do?’ Kongzi sneers. ‘Sell fish?’

‘I’m a capable woman. You said yourself: I can do anything I put my mind to.’

‘Mum, my pee look like orange juice, but I no eat orange today.’





KEYWORDS: shelter, happy birthday, wanton activities, Empress Yang Guifei, condom, red-fried lion heads.

AS SOON AS the rooster crows at dawn, Meili gets dressed, crawls out of the shelter and checks that their boat is still anchored by the shore. A boat was stolen from the island a few days ago, so she and Kongzi have taken turns to sleep in theirs, but last night they both forgot. They’ve lived on the sand island for a year now, and although they haven’t made much money, life has taken a turn for the better. Kongzi has bought himself a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, a gas stove, an electric fan and a tricycle cart which he uses to make local deliveries. He’s attached an extension lead from the mini generator on the boat, so the shelter has electricity as well. Meili’s bought a watch, a small black-and-white television and a singing cloth doll for Nannan. Although their shelter is a humble affair cobbled together from old doors and decking, it has a chipboard bed Kongzi made which is covered with foam cushions, so at least their nights are comfortable.

Through the bamboo trees and willows on the opposite bank, Meili can see the outline of the town. The illuminated signs of the Eastern Sauna House, still shining at dawn, suggest the wanton activities of the previous night. A junk-laden truck is driving towards the rubbish dump. Once the dump has encroached ten more metres into the river, the Xijiang authorities will cover it with cement and erect a statue of the Tang Dynasty beauty, Empress Yang Guifei, who they claim was born in this town. The central government has urged authorities around the country to develop tourism by erecting monuments and statues honouring local icons. Here in Xijiang, the authorities have already built a mock Tang Dynasty temple on a mound where they claim Empress Yang Guifei was buried, dug a Yang Guifei Well from which they say the beautiful empress once drank, and at the summit of a nearby hill have built a Yang Guifei Pavilion with a dressing table where they claim she sat and combed her long hair. They’ve also granted protection to the house of a hitherto unknown revolutionary martyr, and charge admission fees priced at ten yuan. Within three years, they hope the county will become Guangxi Province’s main tourist destination.

Meili no longer works at the fish stall. She took over a spice stall from a woman who left to have a baby, then, once she’d saved enough money, she bribed the market manager into letting her open a stall of her own. She’s also wheedled the job of cleaning the market at night, and is able to scavenge from the discarded produce enough food to feed her family and sell to the islanders as well. Kongzi likes to clean the fish heads, tripe, pig skin and giblets she brings back, then stew them for hours with eight-spice powder to eat as a snack with his beer. Meili has persuaded him to grow vegetables which other stalls don’t stock. Discovering that Time Square, a large paved area built hurriedly to impress visiting leaders, is deserted both day and night, he removed a few of the concrete paving stones and planted spring onions in the soil underneath. After checking the patch daily for two weeks without encountering a soul, he lifted some stones under an ornate street lamp that has never been lit, and planted spinach, chives and tomatoes. At the beginning of autumn, when everyone likes to eat hotpot flavoured with fresh greens, he started growing crown daisy leaves for Meili’s stall, which have proved very popular. Last month he printed three hundred yellow flyers offering free home delivery of Meili’s produce, and distributed them around the market. Meili has realised that, when choices are limited, happiness can only be achieved by striking out on new paths, and that while they wait to set off for Heaven Township, this river town can provide them with sufficient opportunities for a successful life.

She fetches the wok from the shelter and starts preparing breakfast, heating up the fermented rice congee she bought yesterday, adding two raw eggs and a few osmanthus flowers. As she stirs the bubbling mixture, she turns her back to Kongzi and slips two contraceptive pills into her mouth. Although she’s checked the dates and is confident that she wasn’t ovulating the last time they made love, she doesn’t want to take any chances. She has also secretly decided to have an IUD fitted. She’s fed up with Kongzi refusing to wear a condom, and having to wash out her vagina with soap and water as soon as he falls into a post-coital sleep. She couldn’t endure a second forced abortion. She wants to work hard and make enough money to be able to treat herself now and then. She especially deserves a treat today: it’s her birthday. She’s decided that after she finishes at the market, she and Kongzi will have an evening out in the town.

At dusk, after she’s packed up her stall, Kongzi arrives in his tricycle cart, having left Nannan with Chen and Xixi. Meili jumps cheerfully onto the back of the cart. As he pedals off, she picks up some yellow flyers lying at her feet and tosses them into the air, then she unties her cotton scarf and holds it up, letting it trail behind her in the breeze. The street widens as they head for the town centre. They pass rows of drab grey buildings, a merry-go-round with brightly painted wooden horses, rabbits and tigers, then the tall red edifice of the County Cultural Palace, where kung fu movies and foreign films are shown. Meili has already chosen what to order at the restaurant tonight: steamed silver carp, red-fried ‘lion head’ meatballs and hot-sour soup – dishes she can’t easily cook on the island. So when the food is brought to the table, she’s able to remain composed, taking small delicate mouthfuls, while Kongzi wolfs the food down with embarrassing haste. It’s not the food itself that Meili appreciates most, it’s the joy of sitting in comfort in a clean restaurant, with waitresses purring, ‘Red-fried lion heads, madam, I hope you enjoy them,’ as they lower the dish onto the table. How wonderful to be treated with respect, to be able to pay others to do the cooking and washing-up. As long as she continues to work hard, she’ll be able to sit at cloth-covered restaurant tables like these several times a year. When Kongzi raises his glass and wishes her a happy birthday, she feels transported back to her honeymoon.

‘We must celebrate your birthday like this as well, next month,’ she says. She’s already decided to buy Kongzi a CD player and a CD featuring his favourite song, the ‘Fishing Boat Lullaby’. For a moment, she forgets that they’re vagrants, illegal fugitives who don’t own a house, a table or even a proper bed. She forgets that she has a daughter back on the sand island, and is even uncertain how old she has turned today. As a child, the only difference between her birthday and any other day was that there would be a few more noodles in her bowl. When she was fifteen, her father gave her a nylon fleece jacket when he returned home for Spring Festival, three months after her birthday. Although she and Kongzi ate at a restaurant during their honeymoon in Beijing – Teacher Zhou took them to a famous Beijing Duck emporium – Meili was so shy during the meal, she never once lifted her eyes from her plate. So, this is the first birthday she has celebrated properly. Swept up in the excitement, she helps Kongzi finish a whole bottle of rice wine. Only when he raises his last cup and makes a toast to their future son does she finally wake from her happy daze and see the infant spirit flit before her eyes once more.





KEYWORDS: balloons, uterine walls, work permit, vegetables, vaginal speculum.

AS KONGZI BOARDS the ferry holding a bag of rape seeds he plans to sow in Time Square, Meili asks Xixi to look after Nannan for the morning and prepares to go into town. She’s determined to prevent the infant spirit re-entering her womb, the fleshy prison in which it would be doomed to await another execution.

Standing at the edge of the river brushing her teeth, she watches Kongzi disembark on the other side. The colourful rags and plastic bags caught in the trees above him remind her of the balloons that were hung above their front door on their wedding day. It suddenly occurs to her that this view is unfamiliar. The river level must have fallen, exposing the rubbish-festooned trees. In the bright morning sun, the rags and plastic bags sparkle like jewels. The river has dropped and the days are getting colder. Meili remembers Kongzi say that they should start trying for a baby before winter sets in, so that by the time her bump shows it can be concealed under thick jumpers. He ejaculated twice last night onto the entrance gate of her state-owned womb. Get on with it, she tells herself. No time to waste.

The street is dusty and scattered with broken bricks. Workers with greasy hair push past her. When she catches sight of the forbidding sign of the Family Planning Centre, she hesitates. Installing a security device at the entrance of her womb would enrage Kongzi, but the thought of falling pregnant again and being bound to the surgical table of an abortion room fills her with greater dread. Happiness’s motionless face flashes through her mind.

She walks in and goes to the reception. ‘Comrade, I want an internal examination and an IUD insertion,’ she says to the young nurse sitting behind the counter.

The nurse’s eyes narrow. ‘I’ll need your identity card, marriage certificate and migrant workers’ fertility record.’

Meili’s mouth goes dry. ‘I only have an identity card and an abortion certificate,’ she replies. The nurse gives her invoices for a forty-yuan pelvic examination and a fifteen-yuan disposable vaginal speculum, then takes her to the Family Planning Management Room at the end of the corridor and hands her a married woman’s gynaecological and fertility assessment report form.

A female doctor wearing a white face mask palpates and prods Meili’s breasts and abdomen, then tells her to lie on the bed and let her legs flop apart. The nurse tears open a sachet, pulls out a plastic speculum the shape of a duck’s head, inserts the device’s cold beak into Meili’s vagina and opens it. A smell of disinfectant wafts into Meili’s body.

‘You say you just have one, three-year-old child, but it’s clear you’ve given birth much more recently,’ the doctor says, shining a torch onto Meili’s cervix. Then she turns to the nurse and says, ‘Write: smooth, no cervical erosion or polyps.’

‘Yes, look – you can tell these red nipples have just been sucked,’ the nurse says, resting her pen in her mouth and squeezing Meili’s left breast.

‘There’s no milk in there!’ Meili says. ‘I have no baby, I promise, just one daughter who’ll be four next month. I had an abortion last year. Why would I lie to you? I came here to have an IUD inserted because I don’t want to fall pregnant again.’ Meili is embarrassed by the redness of her nipples. It’s Kongzi’s fault: he insists on sucking them every night as he drops off to sleep.

‘Why didn’t you have one fitted after your first child?’ asks the doctor, glancing at Meili’s abortion certificate. ‘And what does your husband do?’ She clearly assumes that Meili is a hair-salon prostitute.

‘He’s a boatman, and grows some vegetables on the side,’ Meili answers, feeling ashamed of Kongzi’s diminished status. She winces with pain as the speculum continues to stretch open her cervix.

‘All right, we’ll give her an IUD,’ the doctor says, pulling on rubber gloves. ‘You’re lucky the director isn’t here today. If he were, we’d have to take you straight up to the third floor and get you sterilised.’

‘But women are only supposed to be sterilised after their second child, and I only have one.’ Meili looks at the door, unconsciously preparing for an escape.

‘How do we know how many children you have? You said you were at the end of your cycle, but look how much blood there is on your sanitary towel. Are your periods usually so heavy? When did this one start?’

‘Ten days ago. They’re very irregular.’ She wonders whether the doctor has seen traces of Kongzi’s sperm inside her. A wad of surgical gauze is pushed into her vagina and twirled around. She grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut. Beads of sweat run down her face.

A cold pair of forceps yanks Meili’s cervix forward, then a long needle is inserted into her womb, extracted and measured against a selection of IUDs.

‘I suggest this oval one,’ the nurse says to Meili. ‘It’s a domestic product, and only costs eighty yuan. The Sino-foreign joint venture ones cost two hundred. Go for the cheaper one. With the procedure fee, it will come to 180 yuan.’

‘Oh no! I don’t have that much money on me,’ Meili says, wishing she could close her legs. ‘I thought the IUD would be free.’

‘It’s only free for local residents,’ the nurse replies.

‘Exactly how much money have you got?’ the doctor asks brusquely.

‘Check my pockets,’ Meili says, pointing to her trousers.

The nurse pulls out the cash from the pockets and counts it. ‘Only a hundred yuan,’ she says. ‘Are you sure this is all you’ve got on you?’

‘Haven’t I seen you in the market?’ the doctor says. ‘Do you run a stall there?’

‘Yes. I sell vegetables, herbs and pickles. Look out for me next time you go. All my produce is free from pesticides.’ Meili’s lease on the stall will soon expire, and the market’s manager has informed her that since she doesn’t have an official work permit it can’t be renewed.

‘Well, we’ll do it for a hundred yuan then. I hope you appreciate our leniency. Bring me the oval one, nurse.’ The doctor picks up the IUD with long blunt tweezers, opens the speculum even wider and slides the device inside. As her warm uterine walls tighten around the cold metal object, Meili stares at the two red gulls painted on the wall above the radiator.

The nurse hands Meili an appointment form. ‘You’ll have a follow-up examination three months from now, to check that the IUD hasn’t fallen out or been deliberately removed,’ she says. ‘Any woman who attempts to take out their IUD, even if it’s causing them pain, will be fined five hundred yuan.’

‘You may suffer cramps, nausea and light bleeding, but these side effects are usually only temporary,’ the doctor says, removing her face mask and revealing her brightly painted lips.

The nurse continues to fill in the examination report. ‘Did you say her vaginal ridges have flattened out?’ she asks, glancing up at the doctor.

Meili watches the bloodstained speculum being tossed into the bin and hears her cervix release a last thread of air before closing its entrance gate.