by Ma Jian
‘You may live apart, but at least you’re still married.’
Kongzi has sunk into a deep sleep and is snoring his head off.
‘Doesn’t feel like we’re married. When I phoned her to tell her my mother had killed herself, she didn’t offer to come down and see me. She doesn’t care about me any more.’
‘Marriage is for life. Perhaps you should show her more affection, try to win her round. Persuade her to move back in with you.’ Meili is embarrassed by the smell of alcohol on Kongzi’s breath. She knows that town people brush their teeth twice a day.
‘No, she wouldn’t give up her job for me. She didn’t want to go to Dunhuang at first, but we needed the money to support our family. Now she’s so used to it there she doesn’t want to come back.’
‘You don’t know how important something is until you lose it. You mustn’t let her slip away. Even if a woman flies off for a while, she’ll always want a nest to return to.’ Meili remembers the woman with the crimson lipstick she met on the boat to Sanxia, and suspects that her husband in the countryside had no idea she worked as a hair-salon prostitute.
Suddenly Meili wishes she could put her arms around Weiwei. Her body feels as hot as beans frying in a scorching wok. She picks up a jacket lying beside her and drapes it over Kongzi’s chest, letting her hand brush against Weiwei’s. Immediately, he grasps hold of it, and she feels the heat inside her explode. His hand then slides over her body, moving slowly, then fast, then slowly again. She curls up and lets him caress her to sleep, as she rocks dreamily back and forth inside the dark cabin . . .
At dawn, Weiwei leaves his address, telephone number and two packs of cigarettes on the bamboo stool beside her, and stands at the stern, his face looking slightly calmer than yesterday.
Meili goes out to join him. ‘You should give up your search and go home now,’ she says. ‘Your mother will be more at peace in the river than she would be buried in the earth.’
‘No, I must keep searching until I find her, for my own peace of mind,’ he replies, then without saying goodbye, he steps onto the jetty, climbs up the bank and walks away.
Meili grabs a bag of preserved mustard greens from the galley area, runs up the bank after him and tosses it into his hands. ‘Soak them in water overnight, then simmer them with beef and tomatoes – the longer the better.’
‘I’m a terrible cook,’ Weiwei says.
‘But you must eat them. I preserved them myself.’
He turns and continues along the path. As she watches his departing figure, her stomach churns as though a mudfish were writhing inside it. Without stopping to think, she chases after him, grabs the tortoiseshell glasses from his face to keep as a memento and runs back to the boat with them.
KEYWORDS: metallic, marshy beach, handicapped, groping hand, rotten shrimp paste, cross-infection.
‘THERE’S GOING TO be an almighty downpour any minute!’ Kongzi says, pointing to the leaden sky above Dexian. Seconds later, the dark clouds crack open and unleash torrential rain. ‘The deck’s too slippery,’ Meili cries out to Kongzi. ‘Quick, come into the cabin.’ The rain crashes against the bow then streams into the river. Inside the bamboo cage, the ducks shake their wings and hoot.
‘Look, the rain’s so polluted, it’s almost metallic,’ Kongzi says. ‘The boat will get corroded if we stay any longer. Let’s lift anchor and get going to Guai Village. Pass me my straw hat and raincoat.’
‘But you won’t be able to see a thing through this rain,’ Meili says. ‘What if we crash into something?’ Kongzi transported a cargo of quicklime this morning, and when the rain makes contact with the powder that’s fallen into the cracks of the deck, white fumes reeking of rotten eggs rise into the air. Nannan vomited last night and has eaten nothing all day apart from a dry biscuit and a cauliflower floret. She’s lying on her back in the cabin, gazing out at the pelting downpour through a gap in the door curtain.
Kongzi wipes the lenses of the metal-rimmed glasses he bought last week, then shoves away from the bank. For hours they sail through heavy rain along a bewildering maze of waterways. Occasionally, Meili calls out: ‘Be careful, the water smells muddy here – we’re probably too close to the bank. Steer to the right a little.’ When they pass beneath a bridge and she hears the engine’s rumble echo against the concrete arch, she feels anxious and locked in.
After taking Weiwei to Yinluo, they returned to the sand island to find the river police knocking down their shelter. They grabbed a handful of ducks from the pen, collected Nannan from Xixi, then sailed downstream, picking up and delivering cargos as they went, until they reached the dirty industrial town of Dexian in Western Guangdong Province, where they anchored for the last week. Although Kongzi was able to pick up delivery jobs there, it was not a pleasant place to stay. At night the paper factories would spew into the river foul waste water that smelled of rotten shrimp paste and caused the three of them to cough and gag in their sleep.
On their second day in Dexian, Meili bought a pregnancy test in a dockside pharmacy. After she dipped the test stick into her urine and saw the plus sign appear, she wondered why her IUD hadn’t worked. Forgetting that her period was already three weeks late when she met Weiwei, she presumed that his groping hand had dislodged the device, allowing Kongzi to impregnate her during the following days. Weiwei’s touch awakened feelings she had never known before. In the week after he left, she no longer pushed Kongzi away when he wanted sex, but instead pulled him close to her and told him to move harder and faster. She suspects that it was on one of those nights, between a moan of pleasure and a sharp intake of breath, that Kongzi’s sperm penetrated her egg, and the infant spirit once more descended into her womb.
When she told Kongzi she was pregnant, he said that they must find a safe place to live until the baby is born. He asked around and found out about a village called Guai, thirty kilometres downstream, where the family planning policies are not strictly enforced. But the village is set a kilometre back from the river, so for the last few days, he’s been wondering how he’ll be able to make a living there.
‘Look, that must be Guai Village!’ Kongzi says, seeing beyond the dust-covered trees on the left a distant huddle of houses spiked with satellite discs.
‘It’s larger than I expected,’ Meili says. ‘Are you sure we’d be safe living there? If this baby’s ripped out of me, I won’t have another. The village looks depressing. I’d prefer to stay by the water and have the baby on the boat. You did say we’ll call this one Waterborn, after all.’ She glances at the litter-strewn bank and a dusty stack of cabbages on the field above, and feels a wave of revulsion.
‘All right, we’ll stay on the boat, but we must find a safe place to settle. Happiness died because we chose the wrong place. We can’t make that mistake again.’
From under a blanket, Nannan says sleepily, ‘I’m hungry, Daddy. I want some nice food. No more dirty fish.’ Last night, Kongzi cooked a fish he’d caught in the polluted river, and he can still taste its foul odour in his mouth. It was Meili’s birthday. She spent the whole day sulking in the cabin. Kongzi went into Dexian and bought her plates, pans, an electric heater and a pocket mirror, to replace the ones they had to leave on the sand island, but she didn’t show any gratitude. Kongzi complained about the Weiwei trip, moaning that not only did they receive no payment, they lost their home as well. Meili is angry that she allowed Weiwei to fondle her that night, and hates him for taking advantage of her.
An oily film of pollution hovers on the river’s surface. Along the bank, the willow’s branches bend under the weight of litter while their tips struggle upwards towards the sun. Kongzi drives the boat under another bridge, steers left down a narrow creek and stops below a flight of steps leading to what he thinks must be a path to Guai Village. Dogs, ducks and chickens watch them from the bank. ‘I heard the village sells handicapped children to criminal gangs,’ Meili says. ‘Apparently most of the crippled kids you see begging in train stations around the country come
from round here.’
‘That’s just hearsay,’ Kongzi replies. ‘See those children up there? They look fine to me . . . So we’ve made it at last! What a journey it’s been. It reminds me of that poem: “Mountain after mountain, river after river, it seems there is no way out. / But beyond a shady willow and a tree in bright blossom, another village finally appears.” I’ll go up and have a look around.’ He fetches the gangplank and slides it onto the lowest concrete step.
‘Dad, I wait here for you,’ Nannan says, peeking round the door curtain at the unfamiliar surroundings outside.
Rising onto her toes, Meili sees, on the large field above, patches of unharvested crops, two tarpaulin shelters, a duck pen, a coiled black hose lying beside an empty ditch and a storehouse with bricked-up doors and windows. Painted in white on the red walls is a notice that says TO AVOID COMMON GYNAECOLOGICAL COMPLAINTS AND VENEREAL DISEASES, IT IS IMPORTANT TO MAINTAIN GENITAL HYGIENE, WASH PUBIC AREA FREQUENTLY AND CHANGE UNDERWEAR DAILY. TO PREVENT CROSS-INFECTION, REFRAIN FROM SITTING ON TOILET SEATS . . . The reflection of the red walls and the blue sky above them waver on the creek’s oily surface. Scraps of white plastic float by like a raft of ducks.
Kongzi soon returns with a fisherman who leads him onto the bridge and says, ‘See that marshy beach further down the creek? No one’s renting it now. It has a pond where you can keep your ducks.’ On a road far behind them, a red car drives slowly past.
Meili sits at the bow and begins to remove dead leaves from a bunch of spinach.
‘If I wash the spinach in that water, the spinach get clean but I get very dirty,’ Nannan says, pointing to the muddy creek.
‘Oh, stop talking nonsense,’ Meili says irritably.
Kongzi jumps aboard and drives the boat towards the place the fisherman indicated. The banks here are so darkened by dust and pollution that, compared to them, the fumes billowing from the far-away factories look clean. Sickened by the scenery, Meili stares down at her shoes and reflects on her predicament. To protect what might be Kongzi’s precious male heir, she’ll have to spend another eight months lying low. When she discovered she was pregnant, she suggested they go straight to Heaven Township, where she knew they’d be safe. But Kongzi said the journey would be too long and arduous, and insisted they find a hiding place closer by. Meili’s only hope now is that she’ll suffer a miscarriage before the government has a chance to tear the baby out. Inside her wet shoes and socks, her feet feel cold and pinched.
The boat draws up onto the marshy beach of mud, coarse grass and dirty pools. Above it are a large swampy pond enclosed by a bamboo fence, and a small bamboo hut. Kongzi jumps ashore. ‘This is a perfect place for us to hide until Waterborn is born!’ he says excitedly. ‘We’ll be safe. We could rear a hundred ducks inside that enclosure, easily. And the creek seems to have life in it. The fisherman back there said the rent is only five hundred yuan a year. Look, it’s surrounded on three sides by hills. Ideal feng shui for a home!’
Meili looks up at the dry gravelly hills. Villagers have carved terraces into the slopes. Some are cultivated with corn, but the rest have gone to seed. There are a few banana and papaya trees around the enclosure and some lychee trees behind the hut.
‘This isn’t a creek,’ Meili says. ‘It’s a waste gutter! “Untamed rivers, barren hills . . .”’ She’s been short-tempered ever since she took the pregnancy test. She’s terrified by the thought that the IUD might still be inside her and that the fetus is now growing around it. As soon as she told Kongzi that she was pregnant, she immediately regretted it. In bouts of anger since then, she has been tempted to take Weiwei’s tortoiseshell glasses out from under her pillow and fling them into the river. She knows that when his hand moved over her body that night, it was really his mother that he was searching for, and she wishes she could forget him. But part of her longs to talk to him again about matters that still confuse her. Kongzi never has the patience to listen to all the things she wants to say.
‘Dad, a snake in the water – look!’ Nannan says, pointing to a submerged stick. ‘It’s dead. No, it’s moving!’
So the three of them set up camp on the marshy beach below Guai Village, and wait anxiously for the birth of the seventy-seventh generation male descendant of Confucius.
KEYWORDS: flood diversion area, bamboo hut, blood donating, tightly stuffed, yellow foam, severe deformities.
THE PUBLIC ROAD that winds out of Guai Village leads to Dexian, but only two or three cars drive along it each day. The creek connects the Xi River to factories along the Huai River, but it’s too shallow for large boats to navigate. In the afternoon, the sunlight lingers on the marshy beach for a while, then disappears behind a distant mountain that is surrounded by fields of yellow rape. Guai Village is in a flood diversion area. At times of emergency, the sluice gates upstream are raised, and the entire village becomes inundated. When the pollution from the factories is severe, yellow foamy waters flow into the creek, carrying dead chickens and dogs.
Guai villagers used to take water from the swampy pond to irrigate the paddy fields behind. But ten years ago, a villager sold his club-footed son to a criminal gang who made the boy beg on the streets of Anhui Province. In one year, the boy was able to send his parents ten thousand yuan. Envious of their good fortune, other parents in the village have sought to get rich through similar means. They mutilate their babies at birth, twisting or snapping their limbs, knowing that the severer the handicap the more money they will earn, then they sell or rent their maimed children to illegal gangs who bundle them off to beg in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Within months the parents are able to buy colour televisions, refrigerators, imported cigarettes, electronic alarm clocks and mobile phones. The village’s economy is booming from the deformed infant trade, and the mud houses have been replaced with three-storey villas. Eager to claim their share of the wealth, the local government has hiked taxes, and to promote the production of the village’s valuable commodity, has turned a blind eye to family planning violations. But just to be safe, Kongzi has bribed the village family planning team five hundred yuan to allow Meili to carry her pregnancy to term. The team’s chairman told him that if the baby is a girl and they decide not to keep her, the Welfare Office would take the baby off their hands and pay the 4,000-yuan fine for the illegal birth. It’s common knowledge that the Welfare Office sells children in their care to foreigners for a 30,000-yuan profit.
Kongzi, Meili and Nannan have moved into the bamboo hut. A Fujian family who lived here before reared turtles in the pond, and made enough money to pay a human trafficking gang to smuggle them into England. Most of the mud plaster has now dropped from the hut’s bamboo walls. At dawn, sunlight breaks through the cracks and falls in splinters on the floor. As Meili gets dressed, she remembers the blue tracksuit with two white stripes running along the sides which she wore to primary school. Her uncle who lives in the county town bought it for her. She was the only girl in the village to own one, and it always made her stand out from the crowd.
The rooster in the bamboo cage pops its head out, yodels loudly at the dawn, then draws it back again. Nannan is on the marshy beach, tossing twigs and old batteries into the creek. As the water splashes up, flies resting on a floating banana peel dart into the air.
‘We’ll never make much money rearing ducks,’ Kongzi sighs, watching Meili drop shredded cabbage leaves into the bucket of slops.
‘We’ve sold the first batch and thirty-three from the second,’ Meili says. ‘That’s not bad. But now that winter’s set in and the nights are getting colder, the breeding seems to have slowed down.’
‘I spoke to your brother when I phoned your parents yesterday,’ Kongzi says. ‘He can’t lend us any money. If we don’t raise four thousand yuan to pay the birth fine by the time the baby arrives, I dread to think what will happen.’
‘Feed these slops to the ducks, Nannan!’ Meili calls out. Her belly is so large now that she can’t see her feet. When the flea bites dotted over her to
es itch, she has to rub them against a tree.
‘No, that bucket’s too heavy,’ Nannan says, biting her nails.
Kongzi picks up the bucket, takes it into the duck enclosure and pours the slops into two bowls. The ducks ruffle their wings and jostle their way to the feed, quacking and grunting. Downy white feathers flutter into the morning sunlight.
‘I’ll look after the ducks today,’ Meili says. ‘You have a cargo to deliver this afternoon. Don’t worry, I’m sure if we work hard, we’ll be able to make four thousand in the next two months. And if we don’t, we’ll just have to run away to Heaven Township.’ Meili is wearing Kongzi’s blue cotton trousers and a white shirt she’s left unbuttoned over her bump.
‘You think you can run, with a belly that size? No, we’ll stay here until the baby is born. A cousin of mine travelled the country giving blood for two years. He’s just returned to the village, apparently, and built himself a four-bedroom brick house.’
‘Giving blood too often can be dangerous,’ Meili says, sitting on a pile of old fishing nets. The willows along the creek sweep their branches across the water as though trying to catch her long shadow.
‘It’s no more dangerous than having a piss. Once the bladder becomes empty, there’s always more urine to fill it up.’
‘So you’re going to sell your blood, now? You think you have any left after these mosquitoes and fleas have sucked on you all night?’ Meili is terrified of needles, and the thought of giving blood revolts her.
‘Blood donating is a great career! It doesn’t need any investment – the natural resource is inside one’s own body. Why didn’t I think about it before?’ He pulls off his shirt, turns it inside out, picks off a flea from the sleeve and squeezes it. A drop of blood stains his nails red.
‘How can you dream of getting rich, when you know we’ll soon have another baby to look after?’ Meili takes long, deep breaths. Her belly feels as full and hard as a tightly stuffed pillow.