by Chen Qiufan
His heart tightened again as he thought of his son, as though his chest cavity were connected to some powerful vacuum pump.
The lohsingpua seemed to detect some unusual scent and abruptly turned to his son’s desk; the character for “edict”—chi—on her forehead flashed green as though she was receiving data at a rapid pace out of the ether. She was looking at an elegant photo frame. A line of golden text in regular script was inscribed in the cream-colored mat underneath the photograph: First Prize, “Green Island Cup” Student Photography Contest, Silicon Isle First Elementary School: Luo Zixin.
“It’s the waste girl.” The lohsingpua pointed at the person in the black-and-white photograph, her tone absolutely certain.
“Her?” Luo Jincheng picked up the frame. The background in the picture seemed familiar, but to tell the truth, the shacks of the waste people all looked pretty much the same. “What do we have to do to make Him-ri better?” He used the affectionate diminutive for his son.8
“You have to find this girl and, on the eighth day of the next lunar month, perform the ‘oil fire’ ritual.”
Luo Jincheng shuddered. He had heard of the ritual in the reminiscences of elders but never witnessed it. It was said to be a rite of last resort reserved for wealthy families with dying loved ones after having tried everything else. The witch had to paint her face with colored tung oil, strip, put on a varicolored skirt, hold an oil-filled porcelain bowl charged with a spell, light it, and then run through the alleyways and streets at midnight while wailing loudly, like some corpse candle wandering in the dark. If any frightened passerby cried out, the witch was supposed to smash the flaming bowl of oil against the nearest wall and let out a great shriek. Then the person who had screamed from terror would die in place of the afflicted as a “holler proxy.”
It’s dusk; the westering sun is about to set,
All the families shutter their doors.
Chickens, geese, even the crows are roosting;
Little child, please come home.
The lohsingpua began the chant to retire the spirits, set to the classical tune of “Suo Nan Zhi.”9 The dreary music was tinged with sorrow, and Luo Jincheng felt a chill down his spine. The eerie green glow over the lohsingpua’s forehead finally went out, and Luo hurried to turn on the bright incandescent lights to return everything to pragmatic reality.
* * *
Mimi was running, but her legs seemed mired in quicksand: the more she struggled, the harder it was to make any progress.
She didn’t know how long she had been running, nor where she was. A sense of urgency tugged at her nerves, making it impossible for her to give up the desire to run, but there was no one after her. There was no concrete threat, only a formless, unnamed foreboding that swept over the sea at her from the distant horizon. Out of the corners of her eyes, she seemed to glimpse some indescribable glow, a complex iridescence found in the sheen of metal coating or the luster of crystals, fluctuating in the manner of waves or racing clouds, devouring the dim, black-and-white space behind her.
Mimi felt the glow touch her body. Abruptly, the world incomprehensibly turned sideways. A moment earlier, she had been running on flat ground, but now she was climbing up a vertical cliff. The source of gravity shifted from beneath her feet to behind her, and swung to some vanishing point on the horizon. She fought to hold on to something, anything, but everything around her was as flat and smooth as the surface of a mirror. She screamed, but there was no sound.
There was only the fall, an endless fall.
Help me!
The free-falling sensation was replaced by the impression of something unyielding. She realized that she was still lying on the musty wooden bed. The blurry light through her eyelids reminded her that a new day had begun. She had been in the Chen clan’s territory for a week.
After a man from her home village had lured her to Silicon Isle with lies more than a year ago, Mimi was finally starting to feel that life here wasn’t so bad.
Every morning, around seven o’clock, the eight women who lived in this shack woke up within five minutes of each other. There was no need for alarm clocks, crowing roosters, or any other instrument—they woke up as though a beam of light activated the biological clocks buried in their bodies. They lined up, washed, and brushed their teeth in front of the stone trough covered with green moss, and the white foam, following the inclined trough, slowly collected in a square pool, from where it flowed into a waste pond covered by an iridescent oil film, and then, combined with the industrial and residential wastewater from elsewhere on this island after many twists and turns, plunged without hesitation toward the open sea.
It was just like what that swindler had told her mother: Go south! She has to go south! All the migrant workers are heading south. Why are you even hesitating?
But it was his next line that had really hurt Mimi:
Look at how much money other families’ working kids are sending home every month. What, are you still hoping her dad would strike it rich and come home?
Mimi forced down her rising rage. Even she couldn’t tell whether she was angry because the man had mercilessly held up the truth or because the illusion her mother had polished and maintained with such care had been shattered in a moment, like a cheap clay pot.
She had not left home at the age of sixteen like the other girls in the village because her father had said that he was going to earn enough to pay for her to go to college. But over time, letters from her father had grown scarce, and there was no sign of any money. Other villagers told her mother that many men who went to the big cities for work found other women and started new families. It was best for her to accept the truth and get on with her life. Her daughter was already eighteen, and she needed to go out and learn to make her own way in the world.
Her mother had said nothing as she helped Mimi pack—tucking a large jar of homemade chili paste into her bag—and then cut her hair until it was shorter than her little brother’s.
Remember, Mimi, keep your hair no longer than this, her mother had said. If you get homesick, eat a spoonful of my chili paste.
Mimi had hugged her mother and cried until her mother’s sleeves were soaked.
Utterly exhausted after two days and two nights on the train and several bumpy rides on illegal coolie-shipping trucks, she and six others finally arrived on Silicon Isle. Everything here was new and strange, like the future: the air was humid like a saturated sponge—the slightest exertion resulted in sweat all over her body; the night, lit by rainbow-hued neon lights, was bright as day; countless glowing screens filled the streets like disembodied spirits; posters for nightclubs competed for attention side by side with ads for venereal disease cures; pedestrians on the street dressed in such funny clothing that it seemed surreal, but their eyes stared through Mimi and the other outsiders into the void.
None of this, of course, belonged to them. Their place was Nansha Village, three kilometers away, where another world held sway, a world that they couldn’t have imagined.
The man had told her such convincing lies: You’ll be working in plastics recycling, the core industry of Silicon Isle. Boss Luo has the biggest workshops and treats his workers the best. Work hard and the sky’s the limit. After that, she never saw him again. Mimi imagined him appearing at some other remote village in the interior, where he repeated his pitch to another mother: Go south! She has to go south!
This was how the poor endured.
* * *
In front of Mimi was a pile of plastic fragments of various colors, like bones picked out of the carcass of some animal—so what did that make her? A scavenging mutt? The women workers sorted the plastic with practiced ease: ABS, PVC, PC, PPO, MMA … if some fragment couldn’t be easily identified, they burned it at the edge with a lighter to ascertain the type of plastic by smell.
Mimi widened her nostrils and gave a light whiff—she didn’t dare to breathe in too much of the fumes—the smell was sweet, pungent, irritating to the nose, and she fe
lt as though maggots were wriggling in her throat. Mimi quickly dunked the lit plastic piece into water, and a column of smoke rose up. Gagging, she tossed the piece into the bucket labeled “PPO.” Here in Nansha Village, Mimi was required to process tens, even hundreds of buckets of plastic trash like this daily. After a full day’s work, it sometimes seemed that she threw up more than she ate.
She’d heard rumors of a device called an electronic nose, which could be used to automatically sort different types of plastic based on their odors. However, the price of a single electronic nose was enough to hire a hundred young workers like her, and the machine was unlikely to be as efficient. Moreover, the instrument might break down and require repairs, while workers could simply be sent home with a few yuan if they fell sick, not even requiring medical insurance.
Human lives are so much cheaper than machines, Mimi thought. But honestly, if the bosses switched to using only machines, where would she and the others find jobs? Here, she earned more in two months than her parents did in a year back in their home village, and as long as she lived frugally, she could save a lot. After working for a while, she planned to go home with enough savings to open a store and set up the whole family for a comfortable life. She clung to a vision in which her father reappeared at the door of their home, and she took the heavy luggage from his hands. The whole family then sat down around the table to share a peaceful, comforting meal, a meal that seemed to never end.
Besides, she had gotten to know so many interesting people here in Silicon Isle, to see so many fantastic inventions and gadgets. It was so much better than life back in her remote village, where even the dogs were too bored to emerge from their kennels. Experience determines how far one can go in life, Brother Wen always told her and the other workers. She would nod and blink whenever he said that, as though she knew exactly what he meant.
As Mimi lingered over these thoughts, the fumes didn’t seem so bad anymore.
“Take a break!” one of the other girls called to her. With a start, Mimi remembered that she was no longer working in the territory of the Luo clan. Since she was here on Boss Chen’s orders, everybody was extra solicitous of her and didn’t assign her too much work.
Among the waste people, it was commonplace to say that all the natives of Silicon Isle were the same. They think we’re all stinking trash, and they have to hold their breath and get to the other side of the street as soon as they see one of us. But Mimi didn’t quite agree with this opinion. Some natives were different from others. The Luos, for instance, were not like the Chens. However, she couldn’t tell if this was because members of the Chen clan really were kinder or if a clan elder had told everyone to be nice to her. Still, an old native man would sometimes grin at her and offer her bottled water, something completely unimaginable in the territory of the Luo clan.
A bit embarrassed at how little she was being assigned to do, she watched as the others cleaned the sorted plastic junk, removing paper labels with metal brushes and carrying the pieces to a nearby work shed, where machines sliced and pulverized them. Mimi hated being near those machines, because they made so much noise that her innards felt on the verge of being rattled out of her throat. The fine white powder generated by the machines stuck to her skin, where the grains seemed to embed themselves deep in her pores, irritating and rash-inducing, and she could neither wash the particles away nor scratch out the resulting itch.
It was said that the crushed plastic would then be melted down, cooled, formed into pellets to be sold to coastal factories, where they would be turned into cheap plastic products the bulk of which were exported to countries around the world so that people everywhere could benefit from the affordable “Made in China” merchandise; when those wares broke down or became stale, they turned into trash to be shipped back to China, and the cycle began again.
The world ran on such cycles, which Mimi found fascinating and marvelous: the cycles kept the machines roaring and the workers busy.
* * *
The third day after her rescue, Kaizong appeared outside her shack. He acted awkwardly and spoke stiffly, as if deliberately maintaining some distance from her. He introduced himself formally and explained that he hoped Mimi would cooperate with him by agreeing to answer some elementary questions he had about the lives and working conditions of the migrant workers under the Luo clan’s management.
But the very first question he posed was something that Mimi didn’t know how to answer. “How do you feel about Silicon Isle?”
“I don’t know…” Mimi tried to figure out the meaning behind this question. She decided to ask him the same thing. “How do you feel about it?”
Kaizong looked to the sides to be sure no one was nearby. “What I mean is: do you want to change your life?”
The superiority implied by his tone angered Mimi. She glared at him. “I work hard for my money. How I live my life isn’t any of your business!”
Kaizong looked embarrassed and waved his hands in a gesture of denial. “That’s not what I meant—”
Mimi pressed harder. “Then what did you really mean?”
For a while, Kaizong pondered seriously how to express himself properly, but gave up in the end. “I guess I don’t know what I meant, either.”
“Idiot.” Mimi couldn’t stop herself. She regretted it immediately. She was too used to talking that way.
Kaizong was taken aback. In his limited social experience, people were not so direct—even rude. But somehow, he wasn’t annoyed with her.
Mimi turned and noticed her roommates eavesdropping at the door of the shack. Inspired, she said, “I was talking to them.”
Crisp peals of laughter erupted from the shack. The awkwardness between them was broken, and the hard shell around Kaizong seemed to have been pried off, revealing the soft nutmeat inside. He looked at Mimi, and half joking, half serious, said, “You’re much kinder than my classmates. They usually call me a freak.”
Mimi giggled. Looking at the handsome face of the young man, she felt her heart quicken. “They’re right. You’re a bit of a freak.”
Before coming to Silicon Isle, the number of men she had come into contact with numbered no more than a deck of cards. Everything she knew about romance had been learned from TV dramas. Her mother had obsessively muttered to her like a mantra, All men are the same. When they’re pursuing you, you are a goddess. But when they have you, they step all over you. While Mother went on in this fashion, Father would smoke his cigarettes silently in their hut.
How do they get you? Mimi would ask, holding back laughter.
Mother would hem and haw without presenting any specifics, but in the end, she would offer herself as an example of a failure for Mimi to avoid emulating. She told Mimi that it was best to avoid dating, to delay marriage as long as possible until she had found the right one.
Without dating, how am I supposed to find the right one? Mimi would ask.
Mother would then holler and bellow, while Father, unable to hold back any longer, guffawed. Those were some rare moments of mirth in their home. Every time Mimi remembered those times, she would get a lump in her throat and wish she could go home soon.
* * *
Mimi began having that odd dream of desperately fleeing from an unknown danger after her injury, and she always suspected that the strange helmet had something to do with it. The iridescent glow that chased her in the dream started at the horizon but eventually expanded to cover the surface of the sea, like a variant of the seasonal red tides in which billions of tiny lives bloomed and multiplied, out of control, until the light caught up to her shadow, to her running footsteps, corroded her body—she felt disturbed and unsettled after waking, even though she knew it was just a dream.
She wasn’t sure if she should bring up the dream with Kaizong. He asked so many questions and seemed genuinely interested in her answers. He wanted to know everything about her, it seemed, with no detail being too small or too silly. But if she told him of the dream, she’d have to tell him
everything, including what happened with that little boy. Was Kaizong going to think that she was like Brother Wen, harboring hostility toward the natives? She had always regretted not stepping in to stop the boy from getting hurt, and she didn’t feel ready for Kaizong to know about what had happened, at least not now.
Why do you care so much what he thinks about you? Mimi shook her head and tried to chase away the chaotic thoughts. You are nothing but a part of his investigation for his project, an interview subject, a specimen of the waste people. You’re nothing. She thought she understood the source of her own foolish feelings. It was like those cookie-cutter Hollywood films and soap operas: a hero saves a beauty, and the beauty falls in love. However, she wasn’t a beauty, and he was no hero—the most one could say was he was a self-righteous rich boy. Yet Chen Kaizong came to see her every few days, inquiring after her safety and posing questions that she found hard to answer—and, after she tossed those questions back at him, he endeavored to give her meaningful answers.
He told Mimi many of the sights and customs on the other side of the Pacific, things that she would otherwise never have known for the rest of her life; to repay him, Mimi took him to secret sights of Silicon Isle that even the natives didn’t know about: the coming and going of the tide, the pink-hued sunset, the black, polluted wastewater discharging into the sea, the mechanical spasms given off by the carcasses of chipped dogs as new signals stimulated them.
* * *
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll talk?” Mimi asked Kaizong.
“What about?”
“That you’re spending all your time with the waste people, bringing dishonor to the Chen name.” Mimi lowered her eyes as she said the last few words. The tide gently lapped the beach, giving it little bites; the water surged over her ankles, encircling them with white foam; there were no shellfish or crabs in the water, only trash, the trash that had been tossed into the sea and then brought back by the tides, giving off a heavy stench.