Ma Jian: The Dark Road

‘And you know where all that money will go?’ Clubfoot says, rubbing the handle of his walking stick. ‘Straight into the mouths of the corrupt bureaucrats in Hexi Town. Have you seen the new District Party headquarters they’ve built themselves? It’s vast. As grandiose as Tiananmen Gate. And after they’ve guzzled our money, they come to murder our babies. Well, this time, we can’t let them get away with it. We must fight back!’

‘No, that would be madness,’ says Kongzi’s father, stubbing out his cigarette and smoothing back his white hair. ‘The road out of the village has been blocked and a police boat is patrolling the reservoir. We’re trapped. If we put up a fight, they’ll crush us.’

‘The squad officers have the names of the one hundred women of childbearing age in the village,’ says Kong Wen, chair of the village family planning team. ‘We had to send them the list last week. Forty of the women will be subjected to an IUD insertion, and the sixty who have two or more children will be sterilised.’ Kong Wen worked in a Guangzhou clothing factory for three years, sewing zips into trousers. Almost every woman in the village is now wearing a pair of the Lee jeans she brought back with her. When she was informed that this crackdown was imminent, she gave her pregnant sister a letter of introduction stamped with an official seal and told her to escape to Beijing. As a result, she’s been given the minor role of record keeper during this crackdown, and once it’s over will probably be sacked.

Yuanyuan pushes her way into the house, reeking of rotten cabbage. She’s eight months pregnant. Her home doesn’t have a dugout, so she’s been hiding in her neighbour’s vegetable hut. Squeezing down next to Meili, she announces: ‘I’ve just seen a woman halfway up a tree. She’s out of her mind! Refuses to come down. She says her baby’s up in the branches.’ Yuanyuan went to Guangzhou with Kong Wen and found a job in an Apple computer factory, where she plans to return after the birth of her child. She looks at her now and says, ‘You sucked up to the cadres when you came back here, hoping they’d make you village head. Well, are you happy now, helping them kill our babies? We’re women of Nuwa, descended from Goddess Nuwa, who created the Chinese people from the yellow soil of this plain. And now the government wants to stop us having children! Are they trying to eliminate the Chinese race?’ Yuanyuan is the only woman in the village to own a pair of knee-high leather boots. Meili longs for the day when she too can own a pair.

The villagers in the yard who’ve been unable to squeeze into the house poke their heads through the open windows. ‘Even dogs have the right to bark before they’re slaughtered!’ one of them calls out. ‘Kongzi: why don’t you take the lead and speak out on our behalf?’

‘Yes, Kongzi!’ Kong Zhaobo agrees, running his hand along the turtleneck of his black sweater. ‘You’re eloquent and well read, and you’ve always had a rebellious streak.’ Kongzi’s defiant nature was recognised at the age of nine. When the entire school sang ‘ Lin Biao and Confucius are scoundrels ’, Kongzi dared change the words to ‘ Confucius was a gentleman and a sage ’, and was taken to the district police station. Thanks to his father’s back-door connections, he was released the next day, on condition that he sing the song correctly one hundred times. Kongzi’s real name is Kong Lingming, but after his courageous expression of support for his ancestor, everyone began to call him Kongzi — Confucius’s more common name. Sometimes they call him Kong Lao-er, meaning Kong the Second Son, the derogatory nickname given to the sage during the Cultural Revolution, or just Lao-er for short, which also means ‘dick’. As he grew up, his interest in his ancestor deepened, and he became the village authority on the sage’s life and works.

‘You’ve studied Sunzi’s Art of War ,’ says Kong Dufa, a po-faced Party member who is married to the village accountant. ‘Just choose one of the thirty-six strategies and write out a plan.’

Kongzi raises his palms. ‘No, no, I may be a teacher, but I have no formal training. I’m just a simple peasant, a farmer who’s read a few books. I can’t come up with any ideas…’

Desperate to prevent him from becoming involved in a political protest, Meili throws Kongzi a meaningful look. He fails to notice. So, to attract his attention, she leans over to Nannan, who’s curled up in the lap of Kongzi’s mother, and gives her a sharp pinch.

‘Ouch!’ Nannan shrieks. ‘A mouse bit me, Grandma.’

‘Shh, little one,’ Kongzi’s mother says, rubbing Nannan’s arm. ‘Here, have a malt sweet.’

‘No, me want chocolate.’ Nannan hates the way malt sweets stick to her teeth. Villagers traditionally offer them to the hearth god at Spring Festival to make sure that when he meets the Lord of Heaven he’ll be unable to open his mouth and utter any inauspicious words.

‘I’ve heard peasants have poured into Hexi Town to protest against the crackdown,’ says Li Peisong. ‘They’ve stormed the Family Planning Commission and smashed all the computers and water dispensers. We should sneak out of the village tonight and go and join them.’ During the Cultural Revolution, Li Peisong was head of the village revolutionary committee and in 1966 was sent to Shandong Province to help Red Guards destroy the Temple of Confucius in the sage’s native town of Qufu. While swept up in the revolutionary fervour, he changed his name to Miekong — ‘Obliterate Confucius’. But by 1974, when the Campaign against Lin Biao and Criticise Confucius was in full swing, he’d undergone a change of heart. Not only did he fail to denounce Confucius at public meetings, he changed his name back to Li Peisong and married a member of the Kong clan. They now have two sons. The second son, Little Fatty, is two years old, but they still haven’t paid off the fine for his unauthorised birth.

‘What’s a water dispenser?’ asks Scarface, a man whose forehead is badly disfigured by a childhood burn. He is destitute, and can only pay for the education of his three daughters with beans adulterated with sand.

‘You know — those large plastic canisters that cadres have in their offices, filled with mineral water that’s supposed to cure a hundred illnesses. It works out at one mao a cup!’ This burly man, Kong Guo, went to Wuhan last year to work on a construction site but was arrested for not having the necessary temporary urban residence permit, fined two thousand yuan and escorted back to the village by the police.

‘So, they’re just drinking all our money away,’ says a mild, gentle man who cycles around the village every morning collecting eggs to sell in the county market. His fists are resting on the metal table, tightly clenched.

A dishevelled peasant called Wang Wu stands up, unable to contain his rage any longer. ‘They wanted twenty thousand yuan for the illegal births of my two younger daughters. I told them I don’t have enough money even to buy seeds. So they tied one end of a metal cable to the central eave of my house, the other half to their tractor. When the tractor reversed my entire roof came off. Where do those bastards expect us to live now?’

Suddenly, loud clanging thuds can be heard, the front gate swings open, and district policemen sweep inside followed by members of the family planning squad. The women in the house scurry into the kitchen and the men rush outside. Before Wang Wu gets a chance to launch into a tirade he’s bashed to the ground. Kongzi’s father steps onto a bamboo stool and shouts, ‘No fighting. No violence!’

Clutching the plastic basin containing his aborted son, Kong Qing yells, ‘Fascist slaughterers! I’ll have my revenge! A life for a life!’