by Ma Jian
‘Cheer up, Sacred Mother. You’ve been fortunate enough to experience the dual realms of life and death. Your blessings have protected countless expectant mothers and granted their babies safe births.’ Sensing Heaven begin to writhe and kick again, Meili straightens her back to give it more room to move.
‘Yes, I’ve tried to comfort myself with that thought. Although I’ve never been loved by a man, I’ve watched baby girls being born into the world, grow into women and then prostrate themselves before me, asking me to grant their own babies a safe birth. Seeing the joy that each new life brings to a family consoles my sad heart, but can’t fill the void of having no children of my own.’
‘Being a mother in this country isn’t easy, Sacred Goddess. If you returned to the world and fell pregnant, you’d soon start thinking you were better off dead.’
‘Mortals may feel no shame slaughtering innocent life, but if they force us gods to endorse their barbaric acts, what will become of the world? Praise be to Amitabha, Buddha of Infinite Light. I have said enough. It’s time for you to go.’
Just as Meili is about to get up and leave, she pauses and says to the statue, ‘Just one more thing, Sacred Mother. Six months after we fled our village, my second baby, Happiness, was murdered by family planning officers. But the baby’s spirit has followed me ever since, and has reincarnated a second and now a third time. It’s a peculiar spirit that seems to have no gender or fixed identity. Sometimes it seems to be lodged inside the fetus in my belly, sometimes it seems to be looking down at me from above. Sometimes I feel it’s looking back at me from a future realm, as though my present is its past. And on some occasions, I’ve felt that it exists in a completely separate realm that somehow overlaps with ours. But when I try to put these feelings into words, my mind spins and time seems to go into reverse. This third reincarnation has been the strangest. I should confess to you now: the baby has been inside me for five years. I’ve read of a woman whose pregnancy lasted sixty years, but when she finally gave birth, the baby was dead and as hard as stone. I can’t bear to think that I’ll never hold this child in my arms. Please help me, Sacred Mother.’
‘The infant spirit will follow you until it achieves successful reincarnation. If it can’t reincarnate before you die, it will return to your place of birth upon your death and reunite with your soul. Remember, the universe is in perpetual flux, changing constantly from yin to yang and from yang to yin, from being into non-being, then back again. If, through the cycle of deaths and reincarnations, you accept the flux and do not oppose it, eventually you will achieve a state of perfect peace and happiness . . .’
A crowd of pregnant women has gathered behind Meili, waiting to light their incense sticks before the Golden Flower Mother statue. Wiping tears from her eyes, Meili rises to her feet and kicks her numb legs about until the feeling returns. She pushes her way through the crowd, but when she reaches the entrance, there is no sign of Nannan. She remembers that Nannan has one hundred yuan on her, and presumes she’s gone to buy something to eat. She walks out onto the front steps and scans the food stalls below.
Her mobile phone beeps. Tang has sent her a text: Through your beautiful dark eyes I saw straight into your heart. A smile hovers around her mouth. The thought that her physical appearance is appreciated lightens her mood. From her fake Louis Vuitton handbag she takes out her pocket mirror and retouches her lipstick. The red looks too garish in the daylight, so she presses a handkerchief to her lips to soften the effect. Against the lipstick, her teeth gleam like ivory. Her eyes are still red from crying. She wishes she’d brought her kohl with her and could draw a dark line along the lashes ending in an upward flick . . . The Golden Flower Mother has never experienced love or affection, Meili thinks to herself. I too have endured many hardships, but at least I have a husband and a daughter. Happiness is within reach. Now that Golden Flower Mother has bestowed her blessing, I will ask Kongzi to consult his almanac and select an auspicious date for Heaven’s birth. Do you hear that, little one? Next time I come to this temple, I’ll bring a jacket for the pretend baby in Golden Flower Mother’s arms, and she’ll make sure that you’re born quickly and safely and that our family will at last be complete.
Wondering whether Nannan has gone to the toilet, Meili goes back into the temple to look for one. On her way, she sees a canister of fortune sticks, and leans down, selects two and tosses them onto the ground. They both land painted side up. Knowing this augurs bad luck, she picks up the sticks and throws them down again. This time they both land the other side up: calamity. Beginning to panic, she goes back to the entrance to look for Nannan. As she studies the faces of every girl in sight, she is suddenly hit by the horrifying thought that Nannan may have been abducted. With a sick feeling of dread in her stomach, she widens her scrutiny to include a man’s leather jacket, a boy’s woollen jumper, a woman’s cropped hair and large earrings. Spotting a red collar peeking out over an orange sweater, she shouts, ‘Nannan! Where are you going? Nannan!’ The girl turns round, but it isn’t her.
She phones Kongzi and tells him to leave his meeting and come at once, then she goes to scour the surrounding streets. After the heavy rainfall, the whole of Foshan appears to have turned dark green. Beneath a line of distant trees, motorbikes in waterproof covers stand parked like forest creatures waiting in ambush. Again she returns to search the temple, then comes out once more and sweeps through the crowded streets, her head darting from left to right like a mother eagle in anxious flight. She questions every hawker outside the temple, asking each one if they’ve seen a girl of Nannan’s description, but they all say no.
Kongzi and Tang turn up and help with the search, but by duskfall there’s still no sign of her. At last, they decide to report her disappearance to the police. When they leave the station an hour later, Meili is in despair. She staggers down the steps, her tear-soaked hair hanging over her face, with Kongzi and Tang supporting her on either side. Clenching her maimed left hand, she turns to Kongzi and says, ‘Think, think – which other friends might she have gone to?’
‘Her only friend now is Lulu. I’ve phoned Cha Na six times, but she says they haven’t seen Nannan all day.’
‘The police refuse to help us,’ Meili moans. ‘What if she got onto a long-distance bus? Three buses leave Foshan every hour.’
‘But she hasn’t any money to buy a ticket,’ Kongzi says, loosening his tie.
‘She was given a hundred yuan today for Spring Festival. Oh God, I must sit down . . .’ Her belly tight and aching, she places a hand on the concrete step and gently lowers herself onto it. The coconut tree on the other side of the road stabs the upper air like a green umbrella.
‘I’ll phone my mother tomorrow to see if she’s made her way there,’ Kongzi says, sitting down beside her and struggling to stay calm.
‘Does Nannan know her address?’ Tang asks.
‘Yes, she’s posted four letters to her. I made her address the envelopes herself. Last week she sent her a copy of the photograph I took of her class in front of the Ming theatre.’
‘Well, let’s check the long-distance bus station, then,’ Tang says. ‘Did you read about the child-trafficking gang that was busted in Guangzhou last week? The men hung around train stations, tricked young girls into boarding their vans, then sold them to brothels in neighbouring cities.’
‘The police said they won’t open a case on Nannan until she’s been missing for a month,’ Kongzi says, his anger rising again. ‘But by that time, she might have been carted off to a nightclub a thousand kilometres away, or sold as a wife to a peasant in some mountainous backwater. Well, I’m not budging from here. I’ll stay on these steps until the police agree to help find her.’
Tang’s phone rings. ‘Thanks for returning my call, Director Wu,’ he says. ‘Yes, it’s my friend’s daughter . . . Eleven years old . . . We’ve just spoken to them – I’m outside the station right now. I asked if we could see Sergeant Zhang, but they wouldn’t let us. I know he’s a good fri
end of your brother’s, so I was wondering if you could give him a call and persuade him to open a missing person’s case and send out a search party . . . Wonderful. Thank you so much.’ Tang hangs up and says, ‘That’s promising! Sergeant Zhang is second in command at that station. I’ll go and get us something to drink. You two wait here.’
‘I’ll wait here, but Kongzi – you go to the bus station,’ Meili says, placing her mobile phone on her lap, yearning for it to ring with news. She still can’t accept that Nannan has disappeared, that this is really happening to her. Apart from her four-week absence, she and Nannan have never spent a day apart . . . If I lose Nannan, it will be like losing an arm, she says to herself. No, it will be worse than that, much worse. If I lose her, I will die. As this thought sinks in, she almost passes out, then her head begins to throb as she remembers the sound of Nannan wailing as a baby. When Nannan was three months old, she cried inconsolably for two days. Meili couldn’t work out what the problem was. At last, her neighbour Fang came round, checked Nannan’s ears, mouth and bottom, then lifted the folds of her neck and discovered that they’d become raw and infected from drops of breast milk that had collected inside.
Tang returns with bottles of Coca-Cola, but Meili doesn’t want any. She remembers her father giving her a bottle for Spring Festival one year, and not wanting to be so selfish as to drink it all herself, she fed half of it to Nannan in small spoonfuls. Nannan was only five months old at the time, and ended up with severe diarrhoea.
‘Go on, have a sip,’ says Tang, kneeling down beside her. ‘Don’t cry, Meili. I’m sure Nannan’s just wandered off to play by herself and will turn up at home this evening. I have noticed that the papers have been full of stories about missing children recently, though. Last week, I read that the police stopped a coach travelling from Guangxi Province and discovered twenty-eight baby girls in the boot, tied up in black plastic bags. They were all under three months old. The police suspected they were going to be sold to restaurants in Foshan. One of the poor babies had suffocated to death.’
‘Nannan is eleven years old – no restaurant would want to make soup out of her. It’s far more likely that she’s been abducted and sold to a brothel. Will you search all the nightclubs round here? She wouldn’t dare take a bus to another city. Since I was caught in Wuhan, she’s known how dangerous it is for peasants to enter cities and large towns.’
‘Yes, it is dangerous. Did you read about that young migrant called Sun Zhigang? He had a college education, a respectable job. He was stopped by the police on the streets of Guangzhou, taken to a Custody and Repatriation Centre for not having the right documents, and ended up being beaten to death. It’s all over the internet.’
‘She’s too young to be locked up in a custody centre. Oh God, why is it that as soon as we leave the polluted backwaters, something terrible happens? Are we migrants forbidden to breathe clean air?’ She stares across the road at the long red wall and the blue sky above that appear to be pressed against each other as uncomfortably as two lovers who’ve fallen out of love.
KEYWORDS: murky water, skeleton, crumbling balcony, Womb Lake, CD drive, fountain, faintly visible.
ON THE AFTERNOON of the fifth day of Nannan’s disappearance, Kongzi waits at Heaven Township Long-Distance Bus Station to check the last bus from Guangzhou, then sets off for Womb Lake down a rubbish-strewn path lined with willows, his long thin shadow trailing behind him. When someone approaches, he runs up to them, lifts a photograph of Nannan and says, ‘Comrade, have you seen this girl? She was wearing an orange jumper with a red collar. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she had a red Lucky Dot here, between her eyebrows . . .’ When he senses they’re not registering what he’s saying, he repeats his words louder and more insistently. But the elderly residents he approaches don’t understand his accent. Most of the migrant workers shake their heads, and tell him that dozens of children go missing in Heaven each month, and he should give up hope of finding her. Before returning home, Kongzi always walks round the lake, as he’s afraid that Happiness’s ghost might have dragged Nannan into it. Last night he did see a girl standing in the water, but when he ran towards her she disappeared. He remembers how, aged about ten months old, Nannan used to like hiding in a cardboard box in her bedroom, and as soon as he found her, she’d burst into peals of laughter and crawl away at top speed. On the first night they spent on the boat, she ran to the edge of the deck, stepped into thin air and plunged into the river. If he hadn’t heard the splash, she would have drowned. By the time he shone his torch on the water, all he could see was a small tuft of her hair. A year later, when she was leaning overboard shaking water from her hair, she fell into the river again, but this time was able to grab hold of the side of the boat and clamber back onto the deck all by herself.
Kongzi leaves the path and walks towards the lake over a stretch of broken printers. The sky is not yet black. On the left is a Qing Dynasty stone house with carved lintels and eaves, whose front half has toppled into the lake. Migrants occupying the back half have hung their laundry out to dry on the crumbling balcony. On a small stone jetty that juts out from the house, ducks are pecking at leftover scraps. The dark red water below smells of dung and rotten fish. Kongzi stares at the ducks and thinks of the birds he used to keep in the cage on the side of their boat. The rooster that each dawn would shake the dew from its wings, peer at the river and let out a piercing yodel became chicken stew the night of Nannan’s third birthday. Its meat tasted of fresh sweetcorn. But the ducks that feed on Heaven’s chemical waste taste of sulphur, and their stomachs are filled with plastic screws and nylon string. To his right is a swathe of rubbish which the lake’s tide has pushed up into a mound. As he begins to climb, his eyes fall on the wooden skeleton of an overturned boat. He goes over, squats down, rubs the soft wood and thinks about their old boat. In the early days, he had no idea how to look after it. The first two times it leaked, he had to pay a fellow boatman to mend the cracks. Then, in spring, when the sun was warm but the river still cold, he decided to buy some tung oil and try to seal the exposed wood himself. While he lacquered the decks, Nannan kept him company, lacquering her doll, her shoes and her pillow. He gets up and examines the vessel more closely. My God, he whispers. This is our boat, Meili! You don’t believe me? Look. Ten steps from bow to stern. The length of our boat exactly. If I dig through this timber, I’m sure I’ll find the cabin in which we slept and raised our child. Now that Nannan has gone, the government won’t dare charge us any fines. Let’s leave Heaven Township and sail home. Phone your mother and tell her we’ll be there soon . . .
When he finally reaches the shore, he stares out at the lake’s maroon surface and says, Nannan, your daddy loves you. If you come back, I promise I’ll never get angry with you again or make you recite Tang poems or the Analects. Then glancing down he sees, to his amazement, Nannan’s plastic doll, its blue eyes staring up at him through the murky water, its flesh-coloured limbs only faintly visible beneath.
Don’t pick it up, he hears Meili say to him. It’s not Nannan’s doll. Her one had a red dress.
The chemicals in the water would have dissolved the dress long ago.
But, don’t you remember – she lost the doll when we moved into the shack, not out here by the lake.
It could have fallen into a channel and been swept down by the current. The rivers flowing out of the lake are choked with refuse, so it’s not surprising that it should end up floating by the shore.
You sound like a professional corpse fisher! Listen, Kongzi. That doll is called a Barbie Doll. My shop sells hundreds of them. There are probably more Barbie Dolls in this world than there are real people. You can find them scattered over every rubbish dump in this town. It’s filthy. Just leave it where it is.
Kongzi reaches into the water and fishes out the doll by its leg. When he sees that the red paint on its mouth is unchipped, he flings the doll onto the mound behind.
After he returns to the path, a girl who looks about three
years older than Nannan calls out, ‘Would you like to buy a CD drive? We’ve got Sony and Samsung.’ She’s standing at the end of a road that leads to the market. Kongzi knows that round the corner is a shop that sells sugar cane, dried tangerine peel and ground ginger.
He walks up to her, takes the leaflet she offers him, then passes her the photograph of Nannan and says, ‘Have you seen this girl? She has a large burn scar on her left foot.’
‘No, I haven’t seen her, but I have a dress like that.’ The last light of the sun is reflected in her dark eyes. The small shed behind her is surrounded by stacks of computer drives.
‘Have you worn it recently?’ asks Kongzi, remembering someone telling him he’d seen Nannan near the lake a couple of days ago. He catches a chemical smell as sweet as osmanthus drifting from the trees or from the crushed components on the ground. His mind turns to Meili, who for the first four days after Nannan’s disappearance wandered through Foshan holding a missing-person placard. When she returned to the shack in the evening, she’d slump onto the bed and chant: ‘She has two rotten molars and a burn scar on her left foot . . . She likes milk and sweets . . . When I took her to the baby clinic for her first jabs, she soiled her trousers and I had to wash her in the fountain outside . . . When she was learning to walk, she’d struggle up onto her feet hugging her big toy rabbit, take three steps, then topple to the ground, still holding her toy tightly in her arms . . .’ But last night, Meili didn’t return home.
He wonders what he will do after he phones his parents again tomorrow and is told once more that Nannan hasn’t turned up. A shiver runs down his spine. She hasn’t gone back to Kong Village, she hasn’t drowned herself in the lake, so she must have been kidnapped and sold to a peasant in the mountains. He often reads about the police rescuing abducted women who’ve been sold to men in the remote countryside. But Nannan is only eleven – too young to be anyone’s wife. She must have been sold into the sex trade, then. The papers often report on police efforts to crack prostitution rings. Yesterday he read about three teachers who pimped their pupils to corrupt officials, personally escorting the teenage girls to the officials’ private homes.