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.’
‘I’ve told you, we don’t have a local residence permit, so you can’t. But with Daddy teaching you at home every day, you’ll learn much more than you would at any school. Now, lie down, there’s a good girl.’ Mother strokes Nannan’s head, puts a blanket over her and gives her a small sausage to chew on. ‘When you’ve finished eating it, close your eyes.’
‘Nannan, you have your whole life ahead of you,’ Father says, ‘so stop talking about death all the time.’
Fallen willow leaves and polystyrene scraps drift under the metal hut. The infant spirit sinks into the river’s blank water and momentarily loses all sense of time . . . ‘Even after I’ve washed, I still stink of burnt plastic,’ Mother says, running her fingers through her wet hair, a towel wrapped around her waist. She lifts her arm to smell her skin, exposing the tuft of black hair in her armpit.
‘You used the bottle of tap water your workmate gave you, didn’t you?’ Father says, letting his gaze rest on Mother’s bare breasts. ‘I’ve told you: it’s no use. All the water in this town smells the same.’
‘Well, at least the smell of sulphur puts me to sleep at night.’ Mother pulls on a sleeveless nightdress and takes a sip from Kongzi’s bottle of beer. Nannan is asleep now, her mouth wide open and her hand still clutching the sausage.
‘Come and sleep with me on the boat. We can have a nice roll around.’
‘Why do you insist on having sex every night?’ Mother says, applying varnish to her toenails. ‘Can’t you give me a night off?’
‘Fine. If you’re not in the mood, I’ll go to a hair salon. The girls there only charge ten yuan for a full service.’
‘You dare! You have me to torment every night – that should be enough for you. And why would you want another woman, anyway? Once we take our trousers off, we’re all the same.’
‘No, every woman has her own particular scent. And I’ve always wondered what it would be like to do two women at the same time.’
‘What? You listen to me, Kongzi! I let you watch those porn films in the grubby video halls. I let you flip me onto my front, shove my legs in the air and enter me from all angles. But I will never, ever tolerate you sleeping with a prostitute. Try it once, and you’ll never see me again . . .’
Another patch of fallen leaves drifts along the moonlit river. Inside the boat’s cabin, Father presses Mother onto the bamboo mat, pushes into her and rocks back and forth. The boat gently sways, creating waves that expand in concentric circles then softly break against the black reeds along the banks.
KEYWORDS:
toenails, win–win, rustic wine, red congee, fetus soup, yellow hair, castor oil.
AS SOON AS
Kongzi has sailed off with Nannan, Meili pulls out the red journal. Finding Suya’s handwriting much easier to decipher now, she opens a page at random and reads a passage out loud, smoothly and with expression. ‘“Women should be learned and erudite, able to talk about the sciences and arts with authority and grace. What man could tire of such a woman? . . . Her face may not be the most refined, but there’s an air about her that’s pleasing both to the mind and the eye. She knows nothing about fashion, but has flair and a sure sense of style. She’s subtly intoxicating, like a mellow, rustic wine . . .”’ Meili opens a dictionary and looks up a few words she doesn’t know: ‘erudite’, ‘mellow’, ‘intoxicating’. I remember Kongzi complimenting me once on my mellow voice, she says to herself. Intoxicated: inebriated, drunk. Drunk? But my face turns red when I drink alcohol. Is that considered attractive? Meili’s heart beats faster. Yes, this is exactly the kind of woman I want to be: unique, independent, worthy of admiration. She imagines herself as a company director, strolling down a corridor in a white tailored suit, a Louis Vuitton handbag swinging from her gold-braceleted hand.
Bloody liars, telling me it’s impossible to fall pregnant here! It must have happened that first night we arrived, which means this little Kong is more than four months old now. The thought that the infant spirit has once more descended into her womb terrifies Meili. Now that she thinks about it, she realises she’s had to loosen her belt two notches in the last month. She closes her eyes and tries to decide what to do. She wishes she could tear her womb out and throw it away. She’s twenty-four years old. She wanted to work hard, make lots of money and enjoy herself while she was still young, but now she’ll have to put everything on hold and go back to raising another child. Her scalp tightens. The baby must not be born. She must harden her heart and end the pregnancy at once. And Kongzi must not know a thing.
She puts on her straw hat, buckles her sandals and sprays her neck with the perfume she brought back from the landfill site. Then she leaves the hut, locks the door behind her and walks to the backstreet clinic she passed the other day. The lane is filled with heaps of scrap computers, broken phones and televisions. Men sit bare-chested among the waste, smashing, chopping, sawing and smelting. At the end of the lane she sees outside three front doors, small tables stacked with empty pill boxes – the secret sign of an unauthorised clinic. She chooses a door and enters.
The room is bare, and smells of bitter medicinal brews. No surgical appliances are on display. A middle-aged woman clears away a mahjong set from the desk in front of her and brings out some abortion tablets to show Meili. ‘These are called Dynotrex. They’re made by a Sino-American company. They cause fetal expulsion within three days. One course costs only 250 yuan. But before you take your first dose, I’ll need to take some blood from you in order to confirm your pregnancy and assess your health. Roll up your sleeve.’
‘Three days?’ Meili says, wincing as the needle enters her arm. ‘Is there an operation that can be done instead?’
‘Well, since you say you’re only four months gone, I could do a simple forceps extraction without having to dilate the cervix.’ Once the vial is filled, the woman labels it then picks out a piece of sweetcorn skin from between her two front teeth.
‘How much would that cost?’ Meili asks.
‘Five hundred yuan, including two post-operative uterine suctions. A government hospital would charge 1,500 yuan, plus ninety yuan a day for the bed.’
‘What’s a uterine suction?’ Meili picks up the box of tablets. She suspects that they’re counterfeit, but since the words printed on the packet are foreign, she can’t be sure.
‘It gets rid of anything that wasn’t scraped away during the extraction. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing. I used to work in a proper hospital. From your accent, I can tell you’re a southerner. What’s your name? I’m Dr Wu.’
‘Yes, I’m from the south,’ Meili lies. ‘My name is Lu Fang.’
‘You don’t look like a salon girl, so you probably haven’t heard about the fetus trade. Let me tell you then: a few restaurants round here buy aborted fetuses. If the salon girls discover from the scan that the baby is a girl, they continue the pregnancy until the third trimester, then have a late termination and sell the fetus to a restaurant. They can get three thousand yuan for it, or four thousand if the toenails have hardened. So, if you wait two more months, I’ll do the abortion for free, then take a cut of what the restaurant pays you.’
‘Are you mad? How could I dream of letting a stranger eat my own flesh and blood?’ Meili remembers seeing a painted sign above a restaurant she passed on her way here showing cats, dogs, snakes, anteaters and civets peeping out of a large hotpot, and wonders if there’s any creature on this planet that Guangdong people would refuse to eat.
‘I understand your disgust, my dear. I’m a woman too, after all. I eat human placenta now and then, but I wouldn’t eat anything that has eyes and a nose, especially not a live fetus. Huh, some clinics on this lane have no scruples. If a woman gives birth to a baby girl and says she doesn’t want it, the clinic will take it from her and promise to get it adopted, but as soon as the woman’s gone, they’ll wrap the poor creature in a sheet and sell it to the nearest restaurant. I’d never do that. But we live in the Age of Money. If someone has cash to buy something, someone else will sell it to them. The restaurants simmer the aborted fetuses for six hours in a broth flavoured with ginseng and angelica. Fetus soup is said to build up male strength and sexual prowess. You don’t believe me? I assure you, it’s a prized delicacy now. It’s brought out at the end of banquets to impress important guests.’
‘I believe that whether a baby is inside the womb or outside, it has a soul. And if a baby’s life is taken without good reason, its soul will return in another incarnation and exact revenge. Those cannibals! Aren’t they afraid of retribution?’
‘Those rich bastards couldn’t care less! As long as fetus soup is on the menu, they’ll keep ordering it.’ Dr Wu opens the freezer. ‘Look, I have a fetus right here, waiting to be sold. But frozen ones don’t fetch such high prices.’ Meili peers down at the tiny corpse. She has a full head of yellow hair, a deep crease between her eyebrows and an ice-covered nose. ‘How come she’s blonde?’ Meili asks.
‘The mother is a prostitute from Guangzhou. The father was an English client of hers. She didn’t want to have the abortion in Guangzhou in case the family planning officers fined her, so she came to me for a salt-water termination. She said the English client always refused to wear condoms.’
‘Well, I’ll try the tablets first. If they don’t work I’ll consider having a surgical abortion.’ As soon as Meili utters the word abortion she feels a need to urinate.
‘Does the surgery strike you as too expensive? I can imagine money must be tight. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing shameful about trying to make a little cash from this situation. The government makes a fortune from the family planning policy. A million fetuses are aborted each year – just think how much money they rake in from that! Shouldn’t the common people share some of the wealth, in a win–win sort of way? A rich couple from Guangzhou came here and asked me to help find them a surrogate mother, so I set them up with a girl from Chongqing who works in the salon two doors down, and now she’s pregnant with their child. She came for a scan the other day, and I told her it was a girl. The couple promised to pay her twenty thousand yuan if it’s a boy, but said that if it’s a girl, they’d want her to have an abortion and would only pay her expenses. The Chongqing girl knows that if she has an abortion now, all she’ll get is the expenses from the couple and three thousand yuan from a restaurant, so she asked me to put “gender uncertain” on the scan report, and she’s going to carry to full term. If the couple really don’t want the baby once it’s born, she’ll sell it to a Welfare Office for five thousand yuan. See what a good head for business she has!’
‘But surely your clinic will get closed down if you falsify a scan like that?’ Meili says, sensing her swelling womb press against her bladder.
‘I have no licence, so I don’t need to stick to any rules.’ Dr Wu has a pudgy, slightly masculine face and appears to be in her late fifties.
Meili considers visiting the government hospital to see whether any doctors have targets to meet and would be willing to give her an abortion for free, but is afraid that Kongzi would be notified. ‘Well, I must go away and think about it,’ Meili says, turning to leave.
‘We also sell castor oil, by the way,’ Dr Wu adds, breaking into a light sweat. ‘It helps soften the cervix. It’s just thirty yuan a bottle. Only drink two spoonfuls, though. Any more and you’ll vomit. Come back tomorrow afternoon for the results of your blood test. If everything’s all right, you’ll be able to take the first Dynotrex tablet.’
As Meili leaves the clinic, the dark clouds overhead open and release a heavy rain onto the asphalt lane, the heaps of electrical waste and the tarpaulin shelters under which the workers are retreating. Meili thinks of the infant spirit curled up safely in her womb, protected from the storm, while she herself has no safe place to hide. She wonders whether she’ll find herself bound to the steel table of an abortion room again. Heaven Township may be the safest place in this country, but it’s still under the Party’s control, with bright red family planning slogans festooned across every street. The rain streaming down her face feels like tepid broth.
In the evening, unable to contain her impatience, Meili kneels down behind the table and slips a Dynotrex tablet into her mouth and a sanitary towel into her knickers. Then she pours Kongzi a large mug of rice wine, sits next to Nannan and watches her trace over characters in a calligraphy book: mountain, rock, sun, moon. Meili turns the page and says, ‘Look, you have to find a friend for each of these characters: woman, mouth, birth, grain, bird, axe, fire, ten, horse, son, wood, sheep, middle. So, see which of them you can pair up.’
‘Woman and son make a good pair,’ Nannan says. Her eyes drift towards the television set. Meili quickly reaches over and turns it off.
After Kongzi slumps onto the bed in a drunken heap, Meili starts prodding her belly, trying to see if the tablet is taking effect. According to the leaflet, she should experience cramping, bleeding, and within a few hours see ‘products of conception appear on the sanitary towel like a lump of red congee’. She is certain she doesn’t want the baby. Indeed, her desire not to have any more children was the sole reason she came to this town. She wants to get on with her life, achieve something and become financially independent. Before she reaches thirty, she wants to open her own shop and make enough money to eat out in restaurants, live in a brick house, sleep on a sprung mattress and send Nannan to university. She’s a modern woman, and should have the right not only to be a mother, but also to enjoy some of life’s pleasures. The weather will be getting hot soon, and the metal hut will become infested with mosquitoes. This is no place to bring a baby into the world. She sits on a plastic stool and sees Nannan hiding beneath the table, playing with a Mickey Mouse ball.