by Ma Jian
‘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.
KEYWORDS: cruise ship, wawa soup, kitten-heeled shoes, Three Gorges Resettlement Programme, boat puller, two dragons, bulldozer.
THE MAY SUNLIGHT gleams over the Yangtze, soaking up the river mist and spreading it about the deck. As the damp seeps into Meili’s skin, she feels her body soften and warm blood course through her veins into her unborn child and its infant spirit. In a relaxed stupor, it extends a leg. Don’t kick so hard, Meili whispers. She’s leaning on the deck railing wearing a white shirt and a long flowery skirt. When the breeze drops, her skirt becomes still. She’s finished washing Kongzi’s dirty work clothes and has hung them out to dry. Whether you’re a boy or a girl, you’re my flesh and blood and I’ll make sure you have a good life, she whispers, stroking her belly. You’ll go to university, then find a job in a tall building. Every morning, you’ll take a lift to your office on the top floor.
Kongzi’s white vest and her white bra flap in the wind. Meili sees a tall cruise ship glide slowly upstream like a floating skyscraper. Against the blue sky, the tourists on the front deck resemble party balloons tethered to the white railings. They turn their cameras to her. One man smiles broadly and waves. Meili raises her hand, about to wave back, but feels her face redden and quickly lowers her head. Inside her womb, the fetus squirms like a fish in a net. A foreigner, she says to herself, regretting her uncouth appearance. Kongzi told her that foreign men travel to China with the sole intention of sleeping with Chinese girls.
The ship’s large wake rocks the boats and barges moored at the bank. Meili stares at the white clouds sliding across the blue-green water, and the spray hovering above the wake’s splashing waves. Time seems to slow down. She looks up at the river town and through the corner of her eye sees the cruise ship slip away. Beyond it, where the river becomes enclosed by two bulging precipices, a small raft appears to sway towards a place beyond river and sky.
What am I doing, lazing in the sun like an old woman? she says to herself, then remembers that this morning she must go into town to buy mosquito coils and fresh vegetables. It’s her third wedding anniversary today. Kongzi has given her a pair of kitten-heeled shoes as a present, and she’s eager to try them out. They’ve been away for almost three months now, and this evening she wants the three of them to enjoy a celebratory meal. Although the barge hotel is foul-smelling and shabby, there’s a television in the meeting room, which Nannan is happy to watch for hours, so the days go pleasantly by. Meili also wants to phone her brother, who’s working in a coal mine with her father fifty kilometres from Nuwa, and tell him to go home and assure her mother that all is well. As it’s the second week of May, he’ll need to spray the sesame plants with insecticide. Her grandmother is eighty years old and too frail to help in the fields.
‘Me want jump in river, Mummy!’ Nannan cries, rushing
out onto the deck and stepping onto the lower railing. ‘Me want see King Crab’s palace.’
‘Get down!’ Meili cries. ‘That palace only exists in the television – it’s not real.’
‘It is real! Me saw it. It has ice cream and big bed.’ Nannan is wearing a long green dress, and has her hair in two small bunches.
‘Come on, let’s go and buy some vegetables,’ says Meili. She pulls a pair of socks over her nylon tights, steps into her kitten-heeled shoes, grabs Nannan’s hand and leads her across the gangplank. As soon as her feet tread onto the bank, her muscles tense with apprehension. ‘Remember, if anyone asks you whether your mum is pregnant, just shake your head. Do you hear me? Don’t babble a load of nonsense like you usually do, or the family planning officers will give you a nasty injection.’ Meili thinks of her primary-school friend Rongrong who was the prettiest girl in the class. Two years ago, she went to hide up in a mountain hut to give birth to an unauthorised child, but when her baby boy was just two weeks old, three family planning officers tracked her down and gang-raped her. She only narrowly escaped with her life, and still has to take herbal medicine for the pelvic disease she contracted.
‘Shh!’ Nannan says, pointing to Meili’s mouth. ‘Give me hot hat!’
Meili pulls a yellow sun hat from her bag and claps it on Nannan’s head.
‘Hurray!’ Nannan cries. ‘Let’s go!’
They ascend the steep stairs to the old town and stroll through the street market. The air reeks of fish. Everyone is shouting. Meili sees dozens of silver carp writhing in the shallow water of a polystyrene box, waiting to be pulled out, slit open and gutted. Bright green mustard tubers and pungent-smelling preserved sprouts lie scattered on the wooden counter above. The stallholder reaches into a large bucket and pulls out the black, mottled tail of a giant salamander. ‘Fancy this wawa fish? I caught it today. It makes wonderful fish stew. Just the thing for pregnant women.’
Fish stew would be nice, Meili thinks to herself. A bit of garlic to bring out the flavour. But that creature would cost at least eight yuan. Too expensive. She remembers the wedding feast she attended last Spring Festival. The steamed fish were still alive when they were served to the guests. Displayed on the centre of each table were two roast chickens, the male mounted on the female, mimicking the position the married couple would adopt later that night. She hasn’t been able to eat chicken since.
‘I want wawa fish, Mum,’ Nannan says, looking down at the wriggling black tail.
‘No, it smells bad,’ says Meili, staring at the guts, fish scales, spinach leaves and noodles trampled onto the ground. She goes to a fruit stall, buys a jin of oranges, peels one and puts a segment in Nannan’s mouth. Nannan wrinkles her nose and says, ‘Too sour! Me no want orange. Me want wawa. If me eat wawa me be wawa too.’
‘Come on, lady, buy this one,’ another fish seller says, walking over with a large bucket. ‘Wawa nourishes the yin and fortifies the yang. It’s a nationally protected species, unique to the Yangtze River. We’re only able to catch them now because of the chaos caused by the dam project. Usually, you’d never get a chance to taste one.’ He leans into the bucket and pulls out a slippery beast that is twice the size of the wawa at the other stall. Its arms and legs flailing wildly, it opens its wide mouth and takes a gulp of air.
‘Why called wawa fish, Mummy?’
‘Because when it mates, it cries “wa-wa”, just like a baby.’
‘Why it called fish? It no look like fish.’
‘It just is. Don’t touch it. It’s very expensive.’ Meili remembers reading that women are given wawa soup during their one-month postpartum confinement to restore their energy and encourage lactation. ‘All right, I’ll buy it,’ she says. But as she digs into her bag for her purse she looks up and sees the words RATHER RIVERS OF BLOOD THAN ONE MORE UNAUTHORISED CHILD sprayed in red paint onto a wall that is splattered with chicken shit and blood. Struck with panic, she abandons the purchase, grabs Nannan’s hand and runs away down a side lane, turns left into another and stops outside a row of half-demolished buildings. ‘Why your face red, Mummy?’ asks Nannan.
‘I’m hot, that’s all.’ Meili pulls off Nannan’s yellow hat and fans her face with it. Her new kitten-heeled shoes are covered in dust.
The deserted lane is littered with broken bricks and refuse. An old man passes through the ruins behind, dragging a bundle of flattened cardboard boxes. Nannan climbs a heap of rubbish and picks up a plastic duck.
‘Drop it, it’s filthy!’ Meili shouts. She thinks of their house in Kong Village. Before Spring Festival this year, she and Kongzi painted the front door and window frames dark red and began re-cementing the yard. She’d wanted to plant an osmanthus tree beside the date tree so that when she opened the windows next spring the house would be filled with its fragrance.
‘Me wash it,’ says Nannan, smiling at the dirty plastic duck. On the broken window frames and doors behind her is an empty can of almond juice and some smouldering charcoal briquettes.
They walk down another lane, climbing over toppled telegraph poles. The segments of wall on either side are still pasted with flyers advertising the services of lock-breakers and door-menders. On a broken bulletin board next to an abandoned shop is a list of women of childbearing age drawn up by the local residents’ committee. Around the next corner they find themselves in a large demolition site from which there appears to be no way out.
‘Mum, that dog poo is dead,’ Nannan says, pointing to two dry turds.
Meili takes Nannan’s hand and enters a roofless building which was once a restaurant. On one of the greasy walls are a photograph of a roast duck on a white platter and a laminated menu featuring Sliced Beef in Hot Chilli Oil and Fish Poached in Pickle Broth.
Meili has lost all sense of direction. She climbs over the rubble and heads downhill, searching for a path. As long as she makes her way down to the river, she’ll be able to find her way back to the barge hotel.
‘Me can’t walk, Mum,’ says Nannan, her floppy sun hat slipping off her hot head.
Meili squeezes her hand and leads her across the shattered tiles and bricks. In the distance she sees a red car speeding past. Assuming it’s driving along a proper road, she walks in that direction, and soon comes to an ancient brick house that’s in the process of being torn down.
A large crowd has gathered to watch. A bulldozer is ramming into the remains of the ground floor. Workers with hammers are pounding the compound walls. The owner of the house bellows a curse, picks up a wooden bed leg and charges at a man dressed in the uniform of a judicial cadre. But before he can strike, three policemen jump on him and throw him to the ground. The cadre shouts, ‘If you continue to put up a fight, you’ll be charged not only with endangering state security but with political crimes as well, and will get three years in jail.’
‘I’m just a simple boat puller,’ the man shouts back, his face contorted with rage. ‘I can’t read or write. What would I know about politics?’
‘We have all the evidence we need. We found the business card of a Hong Kong journalist in your drawer, so we can have you for “resisting the Three Gorges Dam Resettlement Programme” and “divulging state secrets to foreigners”.’
‘What state secrets do you imagine I know? I warn you, if you upset it enough, even a timid rabbit will bite! I’ll take this to the higher authorities. Just wait and see!’ He’s kicking his legs wildly now, as the policemen press his face onto the floorboards and twist his arms behind his back.
An old man in a straw hat, presumably the owner’s father, scrapes some loose plaster from a wall into a paper bag then holds it close to his chest.
An elderly woman beside him wraps her arms tightly around a wooden chair and sobs: ‘The Japanese bombers didn’t manage to flatten our house in 1941. Who would have thought that you Communists would end up destroying it!’
Two demolition workers pick up the old woman and carry her to the pigsty, her arms still clutching the chair. Meili won
ders whether this is the demolition team Kongzi belongs to. The team manager has a limp. He hobbles over to the owner and shouts angrily: ‘I warn you, if you petition the higher authorities we’ll bury you alive. We offered you land to build a new house on, a weekly allowance, but you turned it all down. You dare resist the edicts from the Party Central Committee?’
‘The land you offered was in the mountains, a hundred kilometres away,’ the owner says. ‘What would I do there? I’ve spent my life working on that river.’ He looks down over the compound wall. Although the view of the sky and river is intersected by tall emerald peaks, one can still sense the sweeping expanse beyond – the warmth of the sunlight on the boats and barges, the coolness at the base of the gorge, the giddiness one feels when disembarking onto the riverbanks.
‘Shut up and go, and take your parents with you,’ the team leader yells to the man. ‘There’s no need to worry about your future. The authorities are going to pay boat pullers like you to tug rafts up a tributary as a spectacle for foreign tourists.’ He then knocks off an elm door lintel carved with two dragons leaping through turbulent waves. After a brief glance at the intricate design, he stamps on it, breaking it in two. The two children squatting on a sofa cushion behind him look younger than Nannan.
Spluttering clouds of diesel fumes, the bulldozer knocks over the last section of wall, then trundles back and forth across the rubble, until all that remains of the house is a flat expanse of crushed wood, glass and brick. The old woman is cowering behind the toilet hut now, a finger in each ear. The heady fragrance of the lilac tree beside her scatters onto the ground.
Meili feels the fetus give a sharp kick and tug its umbilical cord. Afraid that someone might notice the juddering of her belly, she turns away and runs, forgetting for a moment Nannan, who was crouched at her feet playing idly with the dirty plastic duck.
KEYWORDS: glossy magazine, peach blossom, azure, barge hotel, deep-fried meatballs, black children.
AFTER DUSK HAS fallen the crowds and buildings disappear and the riverside becomes tranquil. Scraps of polystyrene criss-cross the dark green river like flecks on an antique mirror, making one forget the watery world that extends a hundred metres below the surface. A song drifts from a cassette player on a nearby boat: ‘I give you my love, but you always refuse it. Did my words sadden you that much? . . .’