‘My daughter and I both have birthdays in November, so I never forget hers, and we always end up celebrating them together,’ Kongzi replies.
Meili and the women are sitting beside them on cardboard boxes, eating rice and braised tofu. The smell of the duck stew simmering on the gas stove outside the shelter makes the breeze feel a little less cold.
‘Have some more, Xixi,’ Meili says, tapping the bowl of tofu with her chopsticks. ‘You’re eating for two, now. And try some of this liver. It’s full of vitamins.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ Xixi says, buttoning up her angora jerkin and rubbing her small bump. She turns to Yiping and asks, ‘So, when’s your one plopping out?’
‘Not for another four months. But look, my belly’s already so big I can’t see my legs any more. Dai said our padded quilts are too hot for this town. He wants us to go into the mountains and see if we can sell them there.’ Yiping is sitting cross-legged on a mat. With her large belly bulging from her tiny frame, she looks like a sweet potato freshly pulled from the ground.
‘Wait until your baby’s born before you leave,’ says Bo’s wife, a scruffy woman called Juru. ‘You can give birth in the backstreet clinic behind the Family Planning Centre. The midwife only charges three hundred yuan.’ Juru pulls out her breast from under her shirt and stuffs it into her baby’s mouth. When Meili visited her shelter she was shocked by the sodden, mouldy straw on the ground, and advised Juru, for the sake of her baby’s health, to replace it more frequently.
‘Yes, if you set off now, the authorities might arrest you and give you a forced abortion,’ Meili says. ‘Dai should forget about selling quilts and try to find work on the rubbish dump. I’m thinking of buying a hundred more ducks and building a large pen on the beach. I reckon I could make ten thousand yuan a year from a flock that size.’ Meili feels that now that she no longer has to worry about falling pregnant, she can concentrate on building a comfortable life for themselves here.
‘Admit it – you’ve had an IUD fitted, haven’t you?’ Yiping says in the thick mountain accent Meili finds hard to understand.
‘No, no,’ Meili replies, glancing nervously at Kongzi. ‘I considered it, but then realised that if I wanted another child I’d have to bribe a nurse a hundred yuan to remove it.’
‘I’m so stupid,’ Yiping laughs. ‘All I’m good for is making babies. First time I saw a condom, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might be a piece of tripe, so I plopped it into a soup and ate it!’
‘I wouldn’t dare let anyone put an IUD inside me,’ says Xixi. ‘A neighbour back in our village tried to remove one from his wife. He stuck his hand inside her and groped around for hours, but couldn’t find it. In the end, he got so frustrated he exploded her womb.’ Xixi cringes at the memory, then spits a shard of chicken bone onto the ground.
‘Exploded it?’ Meili says, her mind returning to the dead face of Happiness.
‘Yes, he bunged a firecracker up her vagina and set light to it,’ Xixi says, crossing her legs and wriggling her toes.
‘Men get so obsessed with carrying on the family line, they lose all reason!’ Meili says, glancing at Kongzi again. He’s banging his fist angrily now, shouting: ‘Those fucking officials, turning up here and bombarding us with bloody condoms.’ Two days ago, officers from the County Family Planning Commission came to the island to hand out floating population fertility registration forms and bags of condoms printed with photographs of movie stars.
‘Hope you didn’t swear at them like that when they came,’ Chen says, then licks his teeth. ‘When my brother was locked up in a detention centre last year for entering a city without permission, he swore at an official, and they cut half his tongue off.’
‘I’ve been detained for vagrancy as well,’ Bo says, scratching his bald scalp. ‘If you have money and connections, they let you out after twenty-four hours. But I had nothing. They forced me to labour in the fields for two months, and beat me viciously every day. By the time I was let out, I was skin and bone.’
‘So, what documents do you need to avoid arrest?’ Dai asks, brushing some white cotton fluff from his jumper.
‘Identity card, health certificate, temporary urban residence permit, temporary work permit, birth permit, marriage licence . . .’ Kongzi says, rattling off the list. ‘But even if you have them all, if you are in a big town or city and you look like a peasant, they’ll still arrest you. And once you’re in handcuffs, they’ll squeeze as much money from you as they can.’
‘They call us the “Three Nos”: no documents, no homes, no income,’ says Bo. ‘When our son’s a bit older, I’ll go and work on a building site. Start living a normal life.’ Bo is in his late forties. A rumour has circulated the island that he spent time in jail for abducting his neighbour’s wife and selling her to a widower in the countryside.
‘No, what they really call us is “blind vagrants”, aimless drifters,’ says Chen, a foolish smile spreading across his face. The Western suit he’s wearing is thin and torn. He’s making good money now, hauling cargos of oranges up the river several times a week.
‘To think that it’s now a crime for us to live in our own country!’ Kongzi cries out, his face red from alcohol. ‘Where do they expect us to go?’
‘Keep your voice down – you’re not in a classroom now,’ Meili says. She looks over towards the town. An old warehouse behind the rubbish dump has been renovated and turned into the Earthly Paradise Nightclub. Its bright neon lights outshine the ones of the Eastern Sauna House above. People walk past and gaze up in wonder. A motorbike stops outside the entrance, and a smartly dressed couple climb off the back seat and become engulfed by children selling roses and chewing gum. Nearer the jetty, a crowd is wandering aimlessly outside a second-hand stall which is lit by a bright bulb. Meili suddenly remembers the CD player she bought from the stall and gave to Kongzi for his birthday. She rushes into the tent, brings out the CD of the ‘Fishing Boat Lullaby’ she also bought him, slides it into the CD player and turns the volume up. The melancholy notes of the zither ripple out like water. She closes her eyes and pictures fishing boats moving through an empty night, their sails gleaming above cresting waves. As plucked notes quiver, rise and fade, she imagines the sun setting in the west, waves lapping against a riverbank, willow branches softly swaying, a heron soaring into the sky. Slowly, the willows, waves, sails, river and sky turn the same brilliant gold, then the light fades and darkens. In a brief moment of silence, she remembers lying on the deck of their boat, wailing a funeral song for Happiness as the infant spirit flickered above her. After a final dissonant strain resolves into a sad chord, Kongzi raises his head to the moon and sighs, ‘Ah, can you feel yourself dissolve into the landscape? It’s just like the poem: “Scoop water from the river and the moon is in your hands. / Pick blossom from a tree and its perfume infuses your clothes.” Thank you, Meili, for my wonderful presents. I will treasure them.’
‘Yes, it’s a beautiful song,’ Chen says. Everyone else remains silent and begins to help themselves to more food.
As they’re surrounded by water on all sides, at dusk the air becomes cool – especially now in winter – and the island feels more spacious.
‘How much grain do you feed your ducks every day?’ Juru asks Meili, picking a piece of straw from her jacket. Seeing the children come running up waving branches in the air, she shields her bowl and shouts, ‘Careful not to kick sand into the food!’
‘Here, one for each of you,’ Meili says, handing a meatball to each child.
‘Rub your hands on your trousers first, you grubby girl!’ Juru says to her daughter. ‘Look, they’re covered in mud.’
Nannan wanders out from behind a tree and watches the children scurry into the bushes.
‘Don’t tread in the poo!’ Chen calls out to them.
‘I wish people wouldn’t shit in those bushes,’ Meili says, staring pointedly at Juru. ‘When there’s no wind blowing, the island stinks to high heaven. You asked how much we feed the ducks? We only have twenty-three left now. We give each bird a cup of grain a day, or two cups if they’re laying eggs.’ She sees Nannan pick up a tiny dead chick and says, ‘Drop it!’
‘Why is it dead, Mum?’ Nannan asks, studying its face closely.
‘It got sick, probably.’
‘Why it wants to leave its mummy and daddy?’
‘Huh, always asking questions! Come here and have another meatball!’
‘I’m full up,’ Nannan says, frowning. ‘My tummy’s tired.’
‘Why not bury the little creature in the ground to keep it warm?’ Meili says, and looks down at the ducks in the small pen Kongzi wove from branches and twigs. Nannan puts the chick down next to the stove and presses it into the sand with her foot.
‘You’re lucky to be able to have fresh eggs every day – my ducks seem to have stopped laying,’ Xixi says, taking a fried pickle from the plate Juru is passing round.
‘I’ve heard you’re not producing enough breast milk, Juru,’ Meili says. ‘You should give your baby a formula top-up before you put him down to sleep.’ The baby is sucking Juru’s left nipple now, his little nose and hands red from the cold.
‘The formula they sell at the market is fake,’ Juru says. ‘It’s just ground rice and sugar. No protein.’
‘I would’ve been lucky to have been fed rice and sugar at his age!’ Meili says. ‘Come on, let’s taste the duck soup. Pass me your bowls.’
‘“Condemned to the same life of wretched vagrancy, / At our first encounter, we laugh like old friends . . .”’ Kongzi intones, his gold spectacles glinting under the strip light. ‘So, who wrote that poem? If you can’t answer, you must drink a shot!’
‘We’re peasants,’ Bo protests. ‘What do we know about poetry?’ Bo never washes when he returns from the rubbish dump. As soon as any alcohol reaches his stomach, a smell of rot rises from his skin.
‘How about a game of rhyming couplets, Kongzi?’ says Dai, tossing his stub on the ground. ‘Let’s fill our glasses and have a go.’
‘No, play with him first,’ Kongzi says, pointing to Chen with his chin.
‘All right,’ Dai says, raising his glass to Chen. ‘You and me, then. If you can’t complete the couplet, you must empty your glass in one gulp. Here goes: Men who drift down the river . . .’
Chen pauses for a moment then blurts: ‘End up getting stabbed in the liver . . .’
Dai rolls his bulbous eyes. ‘Stabbed in the liver? When have any of us been stabbed in the liver?’
‘Help me out, someone!’ Chen whines.
‘No, I’m afraid you’ve lost, my friend. Drink up!’
The infant spirit sees that these lives have now vanished from the island. All that remains is a smell of darkness and wisps of Mother’s breath blowing from the bushes that have grown over the sandy beach. The reflections of the town’s neon lights stretch right across the river into the reeds below. Mother and Father’s plastic bag is still hanging from a branch. Inside it are some yellow flyers, a pocket mirror, three condoms, a stick of cinnamon, some star anise and a mouldy stub of ginger. Sounds from the evening return once more.
‘Come on, Master Kong. My turn to challenge you.’
‘All right. I’m ready.’
‘A man who doesn’t drink . . .’
‘Lives a life more tedious than you could think.’
‘A man who doesn’t smoke . . .’
‘Lives more miserably than an ox in a yoke.’
Father’s efforts receive loud applause. ‘What a scholar! It’s clear you’re a chip off Old Confucius’s block. Such learning! Come, Master Kong, let’s fill our glasses again and have another go . . .’
KEYWORDS:
inferior breed,
Mount Yang Guifei, merry-go-round, trampoline, bandages.
LAST MONTH, AFTER
two days of torrential rain, the sand island flooded. Some families retreated to their boats, others moved over to the opposite bank and built temporary huts near the rubbish dump. When the floodwaters receded, they all returned to the island and rebuilt their shelters. At Spring Festival, Kongzi wrote rhyming couplets for every family to hang outside their doors. Bo and Juru didn’t have a door, so they hung their couplet –
IN THIS GOLDEN AGE
,
EVERY FAMILY WILL PROSPER / IN THIS NEW YEAR
,
EVERY HOUSEHOLD WILL REJOICE
– from the branches of a nearby tree.
Kongzi has released the ducks back onto the island. He lets them forage under the trees for water weeds, fish and slugs left behind by the flood, so only has to give them a full meal – usually a cabbage and cornmeal gruel – after he returns them to their pen at dusk. The pale brown hens scuttling about in the sunlight are squealing like children running home from school. Meili’s favourite bird is the large white drake that is double the size of the female ducks. Since she was forbidden to renew her lease on the market stall, she has spent most of her time on the island, looking after the birds. Every morning, she collects five or six luminous eggs from the cardboard boxes in which the egg-laying ducks roost.
Kongzi bought a hundred little ducklings yesterday for just two hundred yuan. Meili suspects that at such a cheap price they must be an inferior breed. She tears a cardboard box into pieces, scatters them over the beach and ladles boiled rice onto each one.
‘Get up now, it’s lunchtime!’ she calls out to Kongzi, watching the yellow ducklings wander off towards a bush littered with plastic bags. It’s noon already, but Kongzi is still fast asleep, his legs draped over his blanket and peony-printed sheet. The new shelter he built from scavenged tarpaulin, wooden planks, tiles and old doors is finally, after many repairs, waterproof. It’s taller than their last one, and wider than the cabin of their boat, so the three of them are able to sleep quite comfortably. On the inside of the door Meili has nailed a coat rail, and on the outside a kitchen rack in which she keeps ladles, spatulas, chopsticks, spoons, and bottles of soy sauce and vinegar. Next to the pile of shoes beside the entrance is a coil of rubber hose which Kongzi found on the rubbish dump. He was going to take it to Time Square to water his plants, but last week the police discovered his vegetable patches and destroyed them, so it’s useless to him now.