‘These days, you have to pay the government nine thousand yuan to be born and two thousand yuan to die,’ says Father, taking off his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.’

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life.

For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meili’s body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

About the Author

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China in 1953. He is the author of
Stick Out Your Tongue
, which in 1987 led to the permanent banning of his books in China,
Red Dust
, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002,
The Noodle Maker
, and
Beijing Coma
which narrated the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

While writing
The Dark Road
, Ma Jian travelled through the backwaters of central and southern China. Posing as an official reporter, he visited family planning offices and hospitals where forced abortions and sterilisations are carried out. He later adopted the guise of an itinerant worker and lived among fugitives of the One Child Policy who scrape a living on the Yangtze River and the vast waste sites of Guangdong Province.

Flora Drew has translated five works by Ma Jian into English. She studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies and worked in television and film. She lives in west London with Ma Jian and their four children.

Also by Ma Jian

Red Dust

The Noodle Maker

Stick Out Your Tongue

Beijing Coma

For Flora

The Dark Road
Ma Jian
Translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew

KEYWORDS:
sterilised, dugout, breast milk, family planning squad, date tree, longevity locket, Nuwa Cave.

THE INFANT SPIRIT
sees Mother sitting on the edge of her bed, her hands clutching her swollen belly, her legs trembling with fear . . .

Meili rests her hands on her pregnant belly and feels the fetus’s heartbeat thud like a watch beneath a pillow. The heavy banging on the compound gate grows louder, the dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling sways. The family planning officers have come to get me, she says to herself. She raises her feet from the basin of warm water in which they’ve been soaking, hides under her quilt and waits for the gate to be forced open.

This afternoon, as warm sunlight was melting the last patches of snow on the maize bundles in the yard, their neighbour Fang was laying out sesame seeds to dry, her three-week-old baby suckling at her breast, when suddenly four family planning officers stormed in and dragged her off to be sterilised. Fang kicked and howled like a sow being towed to the slaughterhouse. The glutinous rice she’d left soaking in a basin on the ground in preparation for dumplings was overturned, and two mongrel ducks scuttled over to peck at the grains. Eventually they managed to tie her hands together and force her into the open back of their truck. Her white vest was ripped by then, and her shoulders smeared with blood that had fallen from the shaven-headed officer’s nose when she’d kicked him in the face. He was crouching at her feet now, binding her flailing legs with rope and firmly securing her to the metal bars. Trapped from the waist down, Fang leaned over the side and shouted: ‘I damn the eight generations of your ancestors! Have you forgotten that every one of you was nursed by your mother as a child? And now you dare tear a baby from its mother’s breast? May your families produce no sons for nine generations! . . .’ Meili climbed over the wall and scooped Fang’s baby into her arms, and pleaded with a uniformed officer to let Fang go. ‘If she’s sterilised, her milk will run dry. At least wait until her baby’s three months old.’

‘Keep out of this!’ he replied, rubbing his cold red hands together. ‘Haven’t you read the public notice? If a woman is found to be pregnant without authorisation, every household within one hundred metres of her home will be punished. You should have reported her to the authorities before the child was born. As her next-door neighbour, you’ll be fined at least a thousand yuan.’

Meili didn’t recognise the officers, and presumed they’d been drafted in from neighbouring counties. Had she not been afraid that they’d notice her pregnant bulge, she would have run to Fang with a blanket and wrapped it over her shoulders. Instead, she stood rooted to the spot and watched the truck trundle away, Fang jolting up and down at the back, breast milk dripping from her exposed red nipples.

The banging at the gate pauses then starts again. ‘It’s me – Kongzi!’ she hears her husband cry out. ‘Open up!’ Remembering at last that a couple of hours ago she wedged a spade firmly against the gate so that it couldn’t be opened from the outside, she runs out into the yard and lets him in.

Kongzi staggers into the house, his hair wild and his gaze distracted, and paces restlessly about the room. He’s just returned from a Party meeting. ‘The squad of family planning officers that arrived yesterday has been sent from Hexi Town. The village Party office isn’t large enough for their purposes, so they’ve commandeered a classroom in the school and are doing the abortions and sterilisations there. This crackdown will be merciless.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Meili says with fear in her eyes.

‘I don’t know. The officers were clear: any pregnant woman who doesn’t have a birth permit will be given an immediate abortion and a 10,000-yuan fine.’

‘Ten thousand yuan? We couldn’t raise that even if we sold our house. Thank goodness we bought that fake birth permit last month.’

‘It won’t fool them,’ Kongzi says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his face. ‘They’re examining the permits closely this time, checking for fakes.’

‘How many women did they round up today?’ Meili asks, feeling a wave of nausea.

‘Well, there were ten tied up outside the Party office. The school caretaker saw his wife among them, and tried to rescue her. But the family planning officers struck his head with a hammer, took him to the school and locked him up in the kitchen. The old seamstress who lives on Locust Tree Lane tried to hide her pregnant daughter from the squad, and got beaten to death.’

‘They killed her?’ Meili gasps. She strokes her swollen belly and watches Kongzi move around the room, the outer corners of her eyes slanting upwards like outstretched wings. He’s throwing his hands about and groaning. She’s never seen him in such a disturbed state. Abruptly, he slumps down beside her, knocking over the basin of water by her feet. A dark puddle spreads over the concrete floor. Small feathers gather on the surface, resembling flimsy boats on a lake. ‘Why didn’t you clear the basin away?’ Kongzi says, jumping to his feet. ‘Look, my shoes are all wet now.’

‘I was keeping the water for you. Come on. Sit down again.’ Meili fetches the thermos flask, pours more warm water into the basin, then kneels down, takes off Kongzi’s shoes and washes his dirty feet. After drying them in a towel, she mops up the mess on the floor.

‘Classes have been suspended,’ he says. ‘I doubt whether many pupils would have turned up anyway. Some have already been sent to stay with relatives in other counties until the crackdown is over.’

‘Will you still get your salary?’

‘Huh! I haven’t received proper payment for three months. The education bureau was only giving a measly hundred yuan a week, but now it can’t even pay me that. Last week all I got was a small can of diesel and a pad of writing paper. And the county authorities have the nerve to say that this crackdown against family planning violators has been launched to raise money for village schools! Well, you can be sure that our school won’t be receiving any cash.’

Meili looks over to the right and sees her daughter, Nannan, crouched in the corner near a muddled pile of shoes, staring at the wet floor. ‘What are you doing there, Nannan?’ she says. ‘Go back to bed.’

Nannan raises her sleepy eyes to Kongzi. ‘Me want to pee, Daddy.’

‘Go and do it yourself. You’re two years old now. You shouldn’t be afraid of the dark any more.’

Nannan moves grumpily to the front door but can’t turn the handle. Meili pushes it down for her and swings the door open. A cold draught blows in and makes the skin of her belly tighten.

Kongzi shivers and lights a cigarette. On the wall behind him is a huge mosaic mural of green mountains and blue rivers which his friend, a renowned local artist called Old Cao, created for him after Kongzi built this house three years ago. Last year, Old Cao moved to a town fifty kilometres away to live with his son and daughter-in-law, a low-level cadre, in a luxurious apartment block for government employees. On Kongzi’s left, beside the entrance to the kitchen, hangs a scroll of the Confucian text for children,
The Three Character Classic
, and a framed photograph of Kongzi and Meili, standing in Tiananmen Square during their honeymoon in Beijing. On his right is the doorway that leads to Nannan’s room where, under the bags of fertiliser and pig feed beneath the bed, lies the secret dugout Kongzi made for Meili to hide in once her pregnancy can no longer be concealed.

‘Old Huan, the district family planning chief, was at the meeting,’ Kongzi continues, after taking a deep drag from his cigarette. ‘He said it’s a countywide crackdown. Every high official has been mobilised. The squad officers are under pressure to meet targets. Tomorrow, they want to insert IUDs into every woman in the village who’s had one child.’

‘I won’t let them put one of those metal coils inside me! Yan said hers causes her so much pain, she can’t bend over in the fields.’

‘Yes, and if they did insert one, it might lead to a miscarriage. So, stay indoors tomorrow. If the family planning officers turn up, convince them that you’re not pregnant, then flash the birth permit at them and say you don’t need an IUD because you’ve been authorised to try for a second child. My father’s still well regarded by the Party, so with any luck, they’ll let you off.’

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