by Ma Jian
‘Women can’t fall pregnant here?’ Kongzi says. ‘What nonsense! Let’s prove that wrong straight away.’ He takes his hands off the steering wheel and places them on her breasts. The boat turns in circles over the still water. But they don’t need to drop anchor now. This isn’t a river they have to follow upstream or downstream. They’ve reached the end: a place where Meili hopes she can rest, gather strength and live in peace.
‘Get your hands off me,’ she says to Kongzi. ‘I want to look at the lake. Can you believe how big it is? You could fit every duck in China onto it, and still have room left over.’ She and Kongzi have only had intercourse once since she returned to Guai Village last month. She was so anxious at the time, she couldn’t feel a thing, and pushed him off her before he was finished.
‘A wife’s duty is to produce children,’ Kongzi says. ‘Let’s see if I can plant another seed in your womb.’ He presses her onto the deck, causing the boat to dip forward at the bow. ‘We’ll capsize if you’re not careful!’ Meili says, breaking free and crawling into the cabin. Kongzi follows her inside and pins her onto the deck again. ‘Get off me. You’ll wake Nannan! It’s past midnight. Stop being so rough.’
‘You’ve been pushing me away for weeks. Come on, let me stroke your feet, your stomach, your soft, cushiony . . .’ Outside, the black night and the black lake sway back and forth, extending to invisible heights and depths.
‘Be kind to me, Kongzi,’ Meili says. She relaxes at last, and feels her body float like peach blossom on water. ‘All right, go ahead then. Pour your sperm into me. I’m not afraid any more . . .’ She sucks the night air deep into her lungs, and a tear falls from her eyes.
The infant spirit watches Mother drift down the narrow river and arrive at Womb Lake, then sees itself swim up the dark road between her legs towards the lake of her womb. It knows that this is where its final incarnation began. A third gestation, a third birth, a third fate.
Later that night, unable to sleep, Mother sits at the bow crunching deep-fried broad beans and stares at the multitude of stars and lights shining in the sky and on the lake, inhaling deep breaths of air and spitting out the odd tough shell. The infant spirit watches itself being carried through the cervix by fumes smelling of burnt plastic, then curl up inside a dirty uterine fold and twitch as metallic waste waters seep into its new home, along with an occasional whiff of turnip soup. Mother is not aware of its arrival yet. In her mind, she is saying: my womb is a fishbowl which these chemicals will smash into pieces. Never again will I have to carry a child inside me. I will be free . . . In the distance, near the bridge they passed a few hours ago, a heap of old circuit boards and plastic tubing has been set alight. Smoke as black as night billows from the orange flames, making the strips of tarpaulin caught in overhanging branches flap to and fro like dogs locked in combat. The plastic and metal waste shrivels and melts. When it trickles down the banks into the water, red sparks crackle and dance above the dark lake.
KEYWORDS: shady willows, tiger descending the mountain, god and goddess, electronic waste, seedlings, plastic granules.
THEIR NEW HOME is across the river from the former residence of a Qing Dynasty scholar. Above its high perimeter walls, they can glimpse ancient trees and yellow-tiled roofs. Kongzi has rented a tiny metal hut on stilts which juts out into a river flowing from the lake. It’s sheltered by a willow, has a window from which they can see their boat, and the rent is only thirty yuan a month. Unfortunately, the river itself is as red and rancid as mouldy Oolong tea. After they wash any clothes or vegetables in it, they have to rinse them in tap water.
The river should flow eastwards into the sea, but its passage is almost entirely blocked by the electronic waste and household refuse dumped into it daily. Along the banks are shady willows and ancient courtyard houses which a century ago belonged to prosperous merchants. These quadrangle compounds are built in the traditional style locally known as ‘tiger descending the mountain’, with rear quarters taller than the front quarters. Now damp and crumbling, most of them have been rented out to migrant workers, while the owners have moved to new residential estates far from the filth of the lake. The willow tree beside the metal hut is two hundred years old. At its foot are statues of a local god and goddess. Nannan is terrified of them because they have no legs. Last week, villagers came here and ceremoniously slaughtered a pig, then placed it before the statues, along with other offerings of fish, chicken and fruit. Large red scented candles were lit, and as the fragrant smoke coiled up into the willow’s branches, the villagers knelt down and prayed for good harvests, happiness, a baby son or success in their children’s high school exams.
Meili works in a recycling workshop on the ground floor of a house next to the Qing Dynasty scholar’s residence. Every day there are new heaps of transformers for her to dismantle and plastic film to melt. Nannan usually accompanies her, and plays hide-and-seek by herself among the baskets of electric cables and copper wires.
In the morning, after Kongzi drops them off on the opposite bank, he sails to a neighbouring town to fetch clean tap water to sell to Heaven’s residents. Although he makes only forty yuan a day – which is slightly less than Meili is paid – he enjoys being his own boss and sailing through the backwaters at his leisure. When he returns in the afternoon, his boat loaded with barrels of tap water and a passenger or two he’s picked up along the way, he feels happy to be living in Heaven Township, despite its sour, acrid stench.
‘So, where are you from, captain?’ a migrant worker asks, stepping aboard the boat one morning.
‘Hubei Province,’ Kongzi replies, starting the engine again and watching a vessel dump a load of televisions and scanners onto the muddy bank upstream. ‘We arrived here a few months ago. How about you?’
‘Oh, I’ve been here eight years. See those white villas up there? Our team built them last year in just six months. It’s getting harder to find work now, though, what with all the new migrants flooding in.’
Kongzi glances up at the villas that, with their cladding of white tiles, resemble a row of public toilets. They’re on a hill high above the lake, near the municipal government building. The concrete road running past them leads to a dilapidated Confucian temple where, in the Guomindang era, locals would make offerings to the great sage and his eighteen disciples. Until recently, Heaven was a sleepy, impoverished lakeside town. During the flood season, the lake would inundate the Ming Dynasty theatre close to its shore, and sometimes the whole town as well. In the 1960s, half the population left, many of them setting off on foot, their belongings on shoulder poles, to scrape a living collecting scrap in Guangzhou. But ten years ago, after the first British ship docked at the nearby Pearl River port of Foshan and unloaded a mountain of electronic waste, Heaven’s economy took off. An entrepreneurial family hauled some of the waste back to their home in Heaven Township, took it apart and sold the scrap plastic and metal to a local toy factory. As the mountains of European waste grew in Foshan, other families in the township followed their example, opening workshops on the ground floors of their homes and hiring migrant labourers to help out. Today, the front doors of every house are surrounded not by bales of wheat, but bundles of electric cables, circuit boards and transformers. In just one decade, Heaven has transformed from a quiet backwater into a prosperous, waste-choked town.
‘I know I could pick up a job dismantling e-waste, but it’s dangerous work,’ the man says to Kongzi. ‘Extracting lead and silver is the worst. The sulphuric acid you have to use produces fumes that can make men impotent. I much prefer working on a building site.’
‘Most of the migrants here seem to be family planning fugitives,’ Kongzi says. ‘I always see loads of kids scampering outside the factories and workshops.’ Despite all he’s heard to the contrary, Kongzi is confident that Heaven’s pollution won’t prevent Meili falling pregnant again.
‘Those children are the lucky ones, the survivors. What you don’t see are the deformed and handicapped ones that are abando
ned by their parents and left to die. I once saw a dead baby with two heads floating in that canal down there.’
‘The One Child Policy’s responsible for that,’ Kongzi says. ‘Don’t blame the parents – they just want to make sure they’ll have a healthy child to look after them in their old age. Why else would anyone abandon their own flesh and blood?’ Kongzi looks away, conscious that he’s trying to justify to himself his own abandonment of Waterborn. ‘So, where do you want me to drop you off?’ he asks. In his mind, he pictures Heaven’s waterways coursing through the human body: the oesophagus to the north, a large stomach in the centre and a long winding colon to the south. He’s now sailed through every polluted one of them. They are fed by clear streams that flow from a distant mountain, on whose summit stand an ancient temple, a bathing house and a convalescent home.
‘Drop me at Chen’s Nurseries,’ the man says. ‘I’m going there to buy rice seedlings. A county leader is visiting the township next week, and we need to plant rice on the barren fields along the road that he’ll be driven down. It’s only a temporary job, but they’re paying us fifty yuan a day.’
‘But rice only grows in paddy fields. How will you irrigate all that dry land?’
‘It’s only for show, you fool! We’ll plant the seedlings in the fields the night before he arrives, and with any luck they’ll stay upright until the next morning. He’ll be gone by the afternoon.’
‘So you’ve been here eight years? You must have made a fortune by now.’ After only three months in Heaven Township, Kongzi and Meili have saved four thousand yuan. Last week, they sent a thousand yuan to both their families. After he and Meili fled Kong Village, his parents and close neighbours were heavily fined. One neighbour was given a double fine, and when she was unable to pay it, her house was demolished. She took to the road, apparently, and is now begging on the streets of Kashgar.
‘These days, for a man to be considered wealthy he must have a nice house, a private car and a mistress on the side,’ the man says. ‘I’m a long way from that. I have made a lot of money, it’s true, but I’ve spent it all in the hair salons.’ He laughs broadly, showing his teeth like a monkey.
Kongzi smiles, and presses the accelerator. On the banks above, migrant workers are raking out red, yellow and green plastic granules over square bamboo mats, like farmers raking rice left out to dry in the sun.
‘Good idea of yours to start a water-delivery business,’ the man says. ‘The tap water in Heaven is disgusting. Someone tried digging a well once to see if he could draw clean water, but it came up as red as Oolong tea. I’ve heard that the groundwater’s polluted with toxic chemicals to a depth of ten metres.’
Kongzi proceeds up a river flanked by telegraph poles and empty fields. Casting a backward glance over the boat’s gurgling wake, he sees Heaven reflected in the green waters of Womb Lake, shimmering like a city of carved jade that appears more exquisite and unearthly the further it recedes.
KEYWORDS: Tang poem, deep-fried sparrows, feng shui, armpit, petals, clamour of wind.
THE INFANT SPIRIT sees Father perched on a plastic stool, sipping green tea and listening to Nannan chant a Tang poem in her high-pitched voice.
‘Terrible!’ Father shouts, rolling his eyes in frustration. ‘Recite it again, and if you forget one word this time I’ll slap your hand!’
‘Daddy’s so nasty,’ Nannan says, turning to Mother.
‘You know what they say, Nannan,’ Mother replies, ‘“Hitting means hate, cursing means love.”’
Father reaches down to pick some sleep dust from the corner of Nannan’s eye, and says: ‘All right then, just give me the two last lines.’
‘“Who knows how many . . . petals fell?”’
‘And the line before that?’
‘You only asked for the last two!’ Nannan says, stamping her feet.
‘But that was one line, not two. Never mind. Just start again from the beginning.’ Father is drinking Oolong tea in the Guangdong style. After steeping the leaves briefly in a small earthenware pot, he pours the tea into a thimble-sized porcelain cup and takes tiny sips.
‘“Spring Dawn” by Meng Haoran,’ Nannan announces, then throws her shoulders back and takes a deep breath. ‘“Slumbering in spring, I missed the dawn, / Everywhere birds are singing. / Last night in the clamour of wind and rain, / Who knows how many petals fell?”’
‘Wonderful!’ Mother says, spooning some deep-fried sparrows onto a serving plate. ‘Now come and finish your supper.’ Meili bought the birds from a stall this evening as the vendor was packing up and selling his produce for half price. When she chopped them up before frying them, she found plastic granules, screws and metal caps inside their stomachs.
The two front stilts of the metal hut are planted in the riverbed, so whenever a boat passes everything sways from side to side and bottles topple off the table. The interior of the hut looks quite homely now. Meili has covered the floor with a white plastic mat which she found on the banks and keeps scrupulously clean, and has papered three walls with magazine pages and stuck a poster of Niagara Falls on the fourth. The only unsightly part of the room is by the door, where the food is cooked and the bags are stored. In the light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, the brightly coloured plastic objects in the room shine out.
Father takes a swig of beer. Feeling a sparrow bone slip from the corner of his mouth, he quickly spits it onto the floor. Mother picks it up with her chopsticks and puts it on the table. ‘Where are your manners?’ she says. ‘We’re not eating in the fields now. To think you were once a respected teacher!’
‘Stop putting on airs. You want us to behave like people from the towns? Heaven might look urban, but officially it’s still categorised as rural.’
‘No, it’s a development zone,’ Mother replies. ‘I’ve seen foreigners walking down its streets. From now on, you must wear shoes whenever you go out. It’s so uncivilised to wander around in bare feet.’
Nannan is staring at the television in the corner, watching three children follow a blue alien onto a flying saucer. ‘I wish I could get on it too!’ she cries, and points her tongue at the screen.
‘I haven’t had a period since we arrived in Heaven, Kongzi,’ Mother says quietly. ‘That’s almost four months. But I can’t be pregnant. I haven’t felt sick at all.’
‘Four months? You must be pregnant, then. I told you: if I plant enough seeds, one of them is bound to sprout! This time, make sure you give me a male heir. Ah, the vitality of the Kong bloodline is indestructible! I put it down to the feng shui of the Temple of Confucius in Qufu. Think about it: the sage’s tomb is in the centre, his sons’ tombs to the left, his grandsons’ to the right. Exactly as the saying goes: “Surrounded by offspring on either side, in prosperity your descendants will always abide.” No wonder there are now three million Kongs scattered around the world.’ Smiling proudly, he waves his chopsticks over the dog-eared astrology books stacked beside him.
‘What superstitious nonsense! If the feng shui was so good, how come the temple was destroyed by the Red Guards? Besides, you may be a Kong, but you don’t exactly abide in prosperity, do you? Hah! If it turns out that I am pregnant, you wouldn’t even be able to find a safe place for the child to be born.’
‘What are you talking about? Heaven must be the safest place in the whole country! There are eighty thousand migrant workers living here. The family planning officers wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Don’t get your hopes up too early. I’ve gone six months without having a period before. Perhaps the chemicals in the water have affected my hormones.’
‘How did you get pregnant, Mum?’ Nannan asks, turning round to look at her.
‘I ate some Kong family seeds and one of them has sprouted inside my tummy.’
‘And it will get bigger and bigger until you explode?’
‘No, when it reaches the right size it will come out, just like Waterborn did.’
‘Well, I won’t eat any m
ore sunflower seeds from now on! Daddy, I miss Waterborn. I want to let her play with my dolly.’ Nannan picks up the plastic doll in the red dress and cradles it in her arms.
‘Waterborn won’t be coming back,’ Father says, scratching the sole of his foot, his flip-flop dangling from his toes.
‘Is it because of me you got rid of her?’ Nannan asks.
‘It’s time for bed now, Nannan. Mummy and Daddy will be going to sleep, too.’
‘But you and Daddy always sleep in the boat and leave me here on my own.’
‘The bed’s too small for the three of us. All right, I’ll squeeze in with you tonight, then. Quick, put on your nightdress.’ Mother pours some water into a plastic bowl, dunks a flannel into it and says, ‘Let me wash your feet, Nannan.’
‘When people die, do their brains still have thoughts, Mummy?’ Nannan asks, perching on the edge of the bed, her large red flower hairclip drooping over her forehead.
‘She hasn’t written her diary, yet,’ says Father, opening the brown notebook. ‘See what she wrote yesterday? She couldn’t remember the characters for “car” and “crash” so she wrote them in roman letters.’
Mother takes the diary from him and reads the passage out loud: ‘“Today, I opened the umbrella and ran down the street. I couldn’t see where I was going and I was afraid a car would crash into me. Daddy held my hand and Mummy walked behind me really quickly . . .” Not bad, Nannan. When I was your age I couldn’t even write my name, let alone recite the Three Character Classic. If you went to school, I’m sure you’d be top of your class.’
‘I want to go to school, Mummy.’