KONGZI STARES AT
an object floating down the river, wondering whether it’s a dead fish, a piece of straw or a chopstick. He’s turned off the ignition and allowed the boat to be dragged downstream by the current. Grassy embankments and scatterings of mud houses slide swiftly by. The side winds nudging the boat off course smell of the factory effluent flowing into the river from large waste pipes.
Meili is lying on her front on the side deck, staring at the passing hills and bamboo forests, her left leg trailing in the water. The deep still river is as blue and transparent as the sky. Nannan splashes some water onto Meili’s head and cries, ‘Look, Mum! You have flowers on your hair!’ Then she ties a piece of string around her plastic doll and lets it trail in the water as well. The doll’s red dress fans out like a pool of blood. Meili closes her eyes and hears her grandmother wailing a funeral song: ‘
My darling child, like a newly hatched carp that leaps from its pond for the first time only to fall into the jaws of a cat, you have entered the netherworld before your first tooth has appeared. The mother and father you’ve left behind weep in misery . . .
’ Meili grew up listening to her grandmother’s grief-stricken wails. They planted inside her a seed which has grown into a tree that supports her spine, pelvis, ribs and every fibre of her flesh. She wants to sing a line from the lament, but all she can do is cry: ‘Mother, Mother, oh Mother . . .’ She puts her arms around Nannan and, unable to cry out, breaks into sobs, her back rising and falling, rising and falling, like a rag tumbling over a wave.
‘Your face has too much crying, Mummy,’ Nannan says, edging away. Against the green shorts she’s wearing, her tanned legs look as dark as soy sauce.
A long time later, Kongzi puts on his black vest, steers towards the middle of the river and drops anchor. Then he picks up the plastic bag containing Happiness’s corpse, places a brick inside and ties the top with string.
‘Wait!’ Meili says. She opens her cloth bag and takes out the little hat, vest and pair of shorts she knitted for Happiness. ‘Put these inside too,’ she says to Kongzi, handing them to him.
‘Why my brother dead, Mummy?’ Nannan asks, pressing her small hand on Meili’s sunken belly.
‘The bad people took him out before he was ready,’ Meili answers. She thinks of the anxiety and nightmares she’s endured since their flight from Kong Village, and realises that in this country there is not one roof under which she can live in safety. In the past, she ignored Kongzi whenever he described the horrors of the Tiananmen Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Campaign against Lin Biao and Confucius. Only now does she fully understand that, in the eyes of the Communist Party, she is but a criminal whom they can torture as they please, a woman who doesn’t even have the right to be a mother to her unborn child.
‘But I not want him dead, Mummy,’ Nannan cries, pointing to the plastic bag. ‘I want him moving. You said you give me brother.’
Against the pallor of her face, Meili’s lips are the colour of dark plums. After returning to the boat, she slept for two entire days, still leaking clots of blood. In her sleep, she could hear Nannan crying out to her and feel Kongzi place fresh wads of paper inside her knickers or pieces of banana into her mouth. When she woke, she saw blood on her dress, on the bamboo mat, and even under Nannan’s fingernails.
A swarm of flies crouch on the canopy like a squad of family planning officials.
In the twilight, a sand-dredging vessel sails past, leaving a trail of gleaming foam that makes the surrounding water appear wetter and heavier.
‘I finished,’ Nannan says, lifting her bare bottom in the air and peering down into her potty.
Mother wipes Nannan’s bottom and hugs her tightly. ‘Your brother had a sad fate, Nannan. He must go to heaven now. Say goodbye to him.’ Her eyes are two narrow slits between lids red and swollen from crying.
‘But heaven in the sky. Why you put brother in water heaven? He can swim? He going swim to Sea Dragon’s palace?’
‘No, your brother just wants to have a long sleep,’ Mother says. ‘Kongzi, put Happiness into the river.’
Mother flops onto her stomach again and lies on the deck with her long hair over her eyes, her swollen left arm outstretched towards the bow. Two ducks stick their heads out of the bamboo cage below and stare at the darkening water and sky. ‘Wait,’ Mother calls out. ‘Drive back to the bank and pick some osmanthus.’
The infant spirit can hear the sounds from that evening, but can’t see the images clearly as the sky is not yet pitch black. The river is calm. All that can be heard is the dull thud of the propeller churning through the water. After a short absence, Father returns to the boat holding three branches of osmanthus. He drives the boat back to the middle of the river, threads the branches through the string knot of the plastic bag then gently lowers the bag into the water. The infant spirit plummets to the riverbed and watches the bag descend.
‘Look at that leaf, Mummy,’ Nannan says. ‘It swimming.’
Once the water burial is finished, Kongzi sails back to the bank and drops anchor. ‘Let’s spend the night here,’ he says, crouching down and staring out at the smooth surface of the river.
The night thickens and the river turns black. Happiness and the osmanthus flowers have vanished. The flies have gone. In the candlelight, Meili sees Nannan’s doll floating in the river, one arm outstretched. After soaking in the water all day, its red dress has turned the colour of frozen blood, and its eyes a more intense blue. Its yellow hair streams and scatters around the shiny plastic face.
Meili feels milk begin to leak from her breasts. She leans over the side of the boat and squeezes it out. Drip, drip, drip . . . The river opens its mouth and swallows.
KEYWORDS:
sand island, National Day, forced abortion, blood clot, potassium permanganate.
BEFORE NIGHTFALL, KONGZI
anchors the boat near a jetty that juts out over the river beneath a municipal rubbish dump. Other ramshackle boats and barges are tethered nearby, each one crammed with scavenged plastic crates, sofa cushions and lampshades. Chickens, ducks and children are scampering over the muddy shore while above them foragers pick their way over the dump’s broken bricks and tiles. The buildings on the hill behind are festooned with National Day celebration banners and flags. It looks like a sizeable county town.
Meili sees a woman in the next boat washing spinach, and reminds Kongzi that they’ve run out of rice.
‘I’ll go up to the town and buy some,’ he says. ‘And I’ll buy some soap as well, so you can wash in the river this evening.’ Kongzi hasn’t earned any money since he paid the abortion fee, and only has fifty yuan left.
‘No, I don’t want to wash.’ Meili still can’t bring herself to touch the river in which Happiness is buried. Her body is filthy and covered in insect bites, but at least the swelling on her left arm has subsided, and she can now bend it again.
‘I want play with them, Daddy,’ Nannan says, pointing to some children in a cabbage field who are poking a flock of chickens with bamboo sticks. The ducks in the cage on the side of the boat ruffle their wings, desperate to be let out onto the river.
Kongzi ties the boat to a broken slab of concrete, picks Nannan up into his arms and crosses the dump, heading for the town.
Meili turns round and sees a long sand island in the middle of the river. A jumble of houseboats, as dilapidated as theirs, lie anchored by the shore. Children are playing hide-and-seek among the bushes and babies are lying asleep on car tyres. Colourful laundry hangs from cables strung between trees, giving the place a homely air. She can tell at a glance that the islanders are fellow family planning fugitives and, suspecting that they club together to bribe local officials into leaving them alone, thinks it might be safer if they joined them. She wouldn’t want to stay long, though. Once they’ve crossed Guangxi Province, they’ll reach Guangdong, and be able to make their way to Heaven Township. For the first time since her abortion, she allows her hand to touch her hollow belly. A taste as foul as rotting vermin rises into her mouth. She senses that death is lurking somewhere deep within her, cold and implacable. Her abdomen cramps as another blood clot is expelled from her womb. She remembers her friend Rongrong’s sallow face wince as she swallowed the bitter herbal medicine for her pelvic disease, and feels frightened and far from home.
At night, the river is tranquil, apart from the occasional dog bark or squealing of a baby. The roar that flows from the distant motorway makes the trees tremble but doesn’t stir the boats. Meili rests her head on a baby mattress she found on the dump and hugs a hot-water bottle, her breasts beneath her white shirt drooping to either side. The kerosene lamp casts an orange light over her neck and face. ‘Let’s moor by the sand island for a few days, Kongzi,’ she says. ‘This river is so broad and winding I’ve lost track of where we are.’
‘We’ve left the Yangtze and have followed the Gui River into Guangxi Province. This town is called Xijiang. Guangdong is just over there in the east. All right, let’s stay here and rest for a while. I can pick up some work and we can search the dump for things to sell. The shops here aren’t expensive. Peanut oil is four yuan a bottle, and rice is just 3.2 yuan a jin. Diesel and kerosene are quite reasonable too.’
Although Meili can eat now, she still suffers bouts of acute abdominal pain. ‘The days are like water,’ she says to Kongzi. ‘They stretch out before me but I can’t hold them in my hands.’ Before supper, Kongzi poured some boiled water into a basin for her. She scrubbed her hands and face with soap and, for the first time since the abortion, washed between her legs as well then disinfected the area with potassium permanganate.
‘You mustn’t give way to despair,’ Kongzi says to her. ‘We’ll have another child. We won’t give up.’ He opens the bottle of rice wine he bought at a stall near the motorway and pours himself a glass. A white cruise ship passes in the distance, a red flag tied to the mast. A couple on the back deck stand locked in an embrace beneath a loudspeaker blaring out ‘Ode to our Motherland’: ‘
Our beloved nation is rich and powerful. Signs of prosperity are all around us . . .
’
‘Why don’t we just go home and hand ourselves over to the authorities?’ Meili says. ‘If we show them the abortion certificate, perhaps they’ll drop the fine. Life here is no safer than anywhere else. I’ve had enough . . .’
‘The certificate wasn’t stamped, so it’s not valid . . . Oh, it’s all my fault. We should have left Sanxia as soon as we bought the boat. Rivers are our country’s arteries. As long as we keep following them, we’ll eventually reach the heart – a mystical haven where we can live in peace.’
‘You think we’ll find anywhere more mystical than Nuwa Cave? As soon as I placed my hand on it, I fell pregnant with Nannan. Women from Nuwa aren’t destined to have sons. You’d better accept our fate.’ Happiness’s asphyxiated face suddenly flashes before her eyes. She leans over and extinguishes the lamp. ‘Besides, I can’t go through another illegal pregnancy and forced abortion. Do you want to see me die?’
‘Of course not. You’re my wife. But we have a right to try again for a son.’ Kongzi slaps his arm, trying to swat a mosquito. Then he stares into the darkness, at the mosquito’s fluttering wings, perhaps, or a remembered image of Happiness’s corpse.
‘We have no rights, you stubborn fool! Only the state can decide whether I have another child or not. Pull the curtains down. I’m cold.’ As the darkness thickens around her, Meili feels her heartbeat slow down and her hearing become more acute.
Kongzi takes a last drag from his cigarette and says, ‘The bloody Communists have destroyed Confucius’s legacy. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom – all the values he upheld have gone. If a panda gets pregnant, the entire nation celebrates. But if a woman gets pregnant she’s treated like a criminal. What kind of country is this?’ He tosses his stub into the river then sits silently, his eyes darting about. When it becomes too dark to see a thing, he lowers his head and lets out a guttural cry of misery. ‘My son, my son! Make your way back to us. “Summer wildfires cannot destroy the grass, For in spring, soft winds will restore it to life . . .” I cannot believe that in this immense country there is no space for my male descendant.’
Kongzi’s brother, three years his senior, also has one daughter, but didn’t register her in Kong Village in case they had a second child before she turned five. But a fellow villager who worked on his construction team in Wuhan reported him to the village police, so now neither his daughter nor any second child they might have will be granted a residence permit. Kongzi and his brother look almost identical. The brother left home ten years ago to work in Wuhan, and when he returned every Spring Festival with bundles of cash, Kongzi, the poorly paid school teacher, always felt inferior. The village school had so little money that parents had to buy the children’s desks and Kongzi had to provide his own. His brother paid for their wedding, spending five thousand yuan on a banquet for eighty guests and entertainment provided by the local song-and-dance troupe. He doesn’t enjoy conversation or reading books. When he returns to the village, he sits in front of the television all day, chain-smoking. Kongzi would love to talk to him now, but knows that if he mentioned the family’s need to produce a male heir, he’d be met with a blank silence. Kongzi is still convinced that only a son will bring him happiness. If his brother fails to produce one, the responsibility to continue the family line will fall on him. His brother’s wife is almost forty, so time is running out. Kongzi hasn’t dared phone his father and tell him that Meili was subjected to a forced abortion, and that the baby was a boy. Nor has he dared tell Meili that after they fled the village, his father was arrested and locked up for a week, and that because Meili didn’t turn up for her mandatory IUD insertion, his mother was forcefully fitted with one instead.