The Dark Road

by Ma Jian

  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.

  KEYWORDS: willow branches, dead chick, chicken wings, cotton fluffer, Three Nos, ox in a yoke.

  ‘COME AND JOIN us, everyone. It’s my daughter’s birthday. Let me fill your glasses so we can drink to her health!’ Kongzi is sitting on a broken, legless office chair he found on the rubbish dump and has tied to a tree trunk with rope. The battery-operated strip light he bought today is suspended from branches overhead, lighting up the plates of food set out on wooden crates.

  ‘Thank you, Master Kong,’ says Dai, a gentle man with large bulbous eyes and a deeply lined forehead. ‘Me and Yiping are simple peasants. It’s an honour for us to share a drink with a schoolteacher! A toast to your daughter, Master Kong!’ Dai grits his teeth and forces himself to down the drink in one. He and Yiping are from Purple Mountain in Jiangsu Province. They moved to the sand island six weeks ago, and have built a shelter under the trees just behind. Meili came across them over in the town. Dai was wandering through the streets with a pole on his shoulders, a bucket of clothes and pans on one end and a cotton fluffer for quilt-making on the other. Yiping, half his height and heavily pregnant, was waddling behind him holding their two daughters by the hand. Meili approached them and advised them to move to the island to avoid being arrested by family planning officers.

  A skinny, bald man called Bo lifts his glass and says, ‘Drink, drink!’ his scalp and bony shoulders gleaming under the strip light. His fingernails are black and broken from scavenging the rubbish dump. He and his wife have three daughters and a four-month-old son.

  Kongzi has fried some chicken wings and Meili has made a salad of wild wood ear fungus. Smells of garlic and sesame oil drift from the men’s faces as they tuck into the food. A gaggle of children run up, grab some chicken wings, then go to chase each other along the river’s edge. Chen arrives in his boat, tethers it to a rock and climbs the sandy beach. ‘So you still manage to remember birthdays on this island!’ he says to Kongzi, clapping his hands. ‘Ha! We haven’t remembered our kids’ birthdays for years.’ He puts a bag of deep-fried meatballs onto the wooden crate. When he laughs, exposing his black and yellow teeth, he looks like a monkey.

  ‘My daughter and I both have birthdays in November, so I never forget hers, and we always end up celebrating them together,’ Kongzi replies.

  Meili and the women are sitting beside them on cardboard boxes, eating rice and braised tofu. The smell of the duck stew simmering on the gas stove outside the shelter makes the breeze feel a little less cold.

  ‘Have some more, Xixi,’ Meili says, tapping the bowl of tofu with her chopsticks. ‘You’re eating for two, now. And try some of this liver. It’s full of vitamins.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Xixi says, buttoning up her angora jerkin and rubbing her small bump. She turns to Yiping and asks, ‘So, when’s your one plopping out?’

  ‘Not for another four months. But look, my belly’s already so big I can’t see my legs any more. Dai said our padded quilts are too hot for this town. He wants us to go into the mountains and see if we can sell them there.’ Yiping is sitt
ing cross-legged on a mat. With her large belly bulging from her tiny frame, she looks like a sweet potato freshly pulled from the ground.

  ‘Wait until your baby’s born before you leave,’ says Bo’s wife, a scruffy woman called Juru. ‘You can give birth in the backstreet clinic behind the Family Planning Centre. The midwife only charges three hundred yuan.’ Juru pulls out her breast from under her shirt and stuffs it into her baby’s mouth. When Meili visited her shelter she was shocked by the sodden, mouldy straw on the ground, and advised Juru, for the sake of her baby’s health, to replace it more frequently.

  ‘Yes, if you set off now, the authorities might arrest you and give you a forced abortion,’ Meili says. ‘Dai should forget about selling quilts and try to find work on the rubbish dump. I’m thinking of buying a hundred more ducks and building a large pen on the beach. I reckon I could make ten thousand yuan a year from a flock that size.’ Meili feels that now that she no longer has to worry about falling pregnant, she can concentrate on building a comfortable life for themselves here.

  ‘Admit it – you’ve had an IUD fitted, haven’t you?’ Yiping says in the thick mountain accent Meili finds hard to understand.

  ‘No, no,’ Meili replies, glancing nervously at Kongzi. ‘I considered it, but then realised that if I wanted another child I’d have to bribe a nurse a hundred yuan to remove it.’

  ‘I’m so stupid,’ Yiping laughs. ‘All I’m good for is making babies. First time I saw a condom, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might be a piece of tripe, so I plopped it into a soup and ate it!’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare let anyone put an IUD inside me,’ says Xixi. ‘A neighbour back in our village tried to remove one from his wife. He stuck his hand inside her and groped around for hours, but couldn’t find it. In the end, he got so frustrated he exploded her womb.’ Xixi cringes at the memory, then spits a shard of chicken bone onto the ground.