by Ma Jian
‘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 ca
n’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!’