Ma Jian: The Dark Road

‘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.’

‘But my bulge is definitely noticeable now. And when I was walking through the village yesterday, I had a bout of morning sickness and vomited in the lane. Kong Dufa’s wife passed me and gave me a suspicious glance.’ Meili shines a torch on Nannan, who is still outside, squatting beside the low wall that runs between their house and the home of Kongzi’s parents.

‘You idiot! What if she’s reported you to the police? They pay a hundred yuan for public tip-offs now.’ Seeing Nannan walk in and sidle up to him, he says, ‘Off to bed now, or you’ll catch cold.’

‘My bottom did big pee, Daddy,’ she says, treading over a bundle of cables. ‘Me thirsty.’

Kongzi looks away and flings his hands in the air. ‘Abortions, sterilisations, IUDs! What has this country come to? Confucius said that of the three desertions of filial duty, leaving no male heirs is the worst. Now, two thousand years later, I, his seventy-sixth generation male descendant, am forbidden to perform my sacred duty to bring his seventy-seventh generation male descendant into the world.’

‘I don’t want to be dragged to the school tomorrow,’ Meili says. ‘I’ll hide in the dugout.’

‘The rabbit breeder in Ma Village hid in her secret dugout for two months, but the family planning officers found her yesterday. They pulled her out, took her off to be sterilised and confiscated her three hundred rabbits.’

Meili feels a sickening, rotten taste fill her mouth and her nose, and wonders if it comes from the darkness outside or from the depths of her own body.

‘Look, Daddy, my tummy can go big too!’ Nannan says, lifting her jumper and sticking her belly out.

‘Bed! Now!’ Father shouts.

Nannan bursts into tears and rushes into Mother’s arms. ‘Me hate that daddy,’ she cries. ‘Me want different one!’

Mother carries Nannan to her bed, tucks the quilt around her and brushes out her thin plaits.

Travelling in reverse motion, the infant spirit has retraced Mother and Father’s journey, floating upstream along the watery landscapes down which they drifted for nine years. Now, it has finally reached its place of origin. This is the rightful home of Mother’s second child, whom the infant spirit was assigned to inhabit until it achieved a successful birth.

Only scenes that took place in the darkness are now clearly visible to the infant spirit. It sees shadows tremble, as though stirred by the wind, and hears echoes from the past drift through the now windowless and roofless house, and linger near a patch of mosaic still stuck to a crumbling wall. The yard is pitch black, and empty, apart from a date tree which lies bent over the ground, a few leafless branches rising from its trunk… Father said that when he found out that Mother was pregnant for the second time, he planted a date tree in the yard to ensure the child would be a son, and buried a longevity locket in the soil beneath to grant the child a safe birth. Mother said that before the date sapling was planted, she took it to Nuwa Cave and rubbed it across the sacred crevice so that, in years to come, all her children would be born under the tree and receive Goddess Nuwa’s blessing. Father also mentioned that in the secret dugout under Nannan’s bed there is a red lacquer chest containing an ancient edition of Confucius’s Analects and a bound volume of the Kong family register. The red chest is still there, buried now under the smashed bed and the thick rubble of a bulldozed wall. Piercing black eyes of mice glint through the weeds and broken roof tiles above.

In the lane behind, a willow tree rises from a mound of singed cobs like a graceful fairy frozen mid-dance. Further away, beyond a red compound wall, are two small osmanthus trees and the public road that leads out of the village.

KEYWORDS: IUD, Fucking Communists, flames, fallopian tubes, Kong the Second Son, class enemy.

DISTRAUGHT RESIDENTS OF the village sit crammed on Meili and Kongzi’s bed, on the sofa opposite and on the floor. Almost every one of them is, like Kongzi, a member of the Kong clan, direct descendants of the most celebrated Kong: Confucius. Meili is perched on the end of the bed, her hands carefully crossed over her belly. She suspects that Kongzi’s parents have guessed that she’s pregnant. His father is sitting by the headrest, shooting furtive glances at her as he sucks on his cigarette. He was village head for twenty years, and although he retired recently, he still commands respect, which explains why so many villagers have gathered here tonight to vent their anger.

Kong Qing, a former artillery soldier, is slumped in the corner, weeping and cursing, a bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head. ‘Fucking Communists,’ he cries, ‘depriving me of my son. My branch of the family has been extinguished…’ When the family planning squad came banging on his gate yesterday, he and his wife, who was heavily pregnant with their third child, escaped through a secret tunnel and fled to the tall reeds near the reservoir. In the evening, his father took them food, unaware that the police were trailing him. He quacked like a duck — their usual secret signal — and as soon as Kong Qing and his wife emerged from the reeds they were pounced upon by the police. The wife was dragged to the school, where family planning officers strapped her to a wooden desk and injected two shots into her abdomen. The aborted fetus is now lying at Kong Qing’s feet in a plastic basin. It has its father’s flat nose and small eyes. Scraps of congealed amniotic fluid are still stuck to its black hair.

‘Former Village Head, you must stand up for us,’ says Kong Zhaobo, a prominent member of the clan who attended high school in Hexi and now owns the only motorbike in the village. ‘Filial piety demands that we produce sons and grandsons. The male lines must continue. We can’t let the Party sever them.’

‘And anyway, the authorities said that we peasants can have a second child if our first one is a girl,’ says a man nicknamed Clubfoot, who is sitting by the television clutching his walking stick. ‘So why are they bunging IUDs in women who’ve only had one child? If this carries on, we’ll become a village where the children have no brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts. What kind of future is that?’ Clubfoot is always searching for ways to make money. Last year he bought a desktop computer, surfed the internet and informed everyone that a fortune could be made rearing a breed of wild duck that lays golden-yolked eggs. His house stands on the site of an ancestral temple to Confucius which was built by Kongzi’s grandfather and demolished in the Cultural Revolution.

A frail, spindly woman, whose third daughter, Xiang, Kongzi once taught, speaks up. ‘The family planning squad came to our house today and demanded a 10,000-yuan back payment for Xiang’s illegal birth. She’s twelve years old now, for God’s sake! I told them we didn’t have any cash on us, but they searched our house, and found the two thousand yuan my eldest daughter sent us after slaving in a Shenzhen factory for a year. They took the cash, our bags of rice, our pots and pans, even our kitchen clock, and they want us to pay them the rest of the money by the end of the week.’