Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘If you want to be free, you must become resourceful, independent,’ Suya replies. ‘Divorce Kongzi and marry a man from the city who’ll be able to give you an urban residence permit. Or set up your own business and buy the permit yourself, and an apartment too. Go to Shenzhen. It’s full of businesswomen driving around in their private cars, negotiating business deals on their mobile phones. If you buy a villa in the city, you’ll get three residence permits thrown in. You’ll be able to live in peace for the rest of your life.’

Meili understands that the root of all her problems is poverty. If she had money, she wouldn’t be afraid of falling pregnant — she could simply pay the fine. One thing is certain, though: she will never divorce Kongzi. However monstrously he’s behaved, she still believes that marriage is for life.

‘What’s happened to the pregnant woman the officers attacked yesterday?’ Suya says. ‘Do you think she’s escaped?’ The pregnant woman is a member of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. After responding gruffly to a policeman’s command in the sugar-cane field yesterday, the policeman knocked her to the ground and kicked her face until it bled. Meili and Suya begged him to stop, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, she won’t die — the Falun Wheel in her abdomen will save her!’

‘Yes, I wonder where she’s gone. She wouldn’t dare run away with a belly that size, and the guy from Jiangxi has been locked up in the prison hut, so she can’t be there.’ Meili thinks of the yellow shirt hanging on the washing line outside which no one has dared remove. When the wind blows it flaps like a ragged sail. A rumour has gone around that it belonged to an inmate from Shandong who hung herself in the latrines.

At the name call after supper, Suya is nowhere to be seen. Meili searches the fields, the latrines and the construction site behind, and returns to the barn in floods of tears. Last night, when Meili told her it was her birthday, Suya took off her earrings and gave them to her as a present.

Two sisters, who know how close Meili has become to Suya, walk over and sit down beside her. A man came to their village last month and persuaded them to travel with him to Changsha, promising them jobs in a Sino-foreign pharmaceutical company with monthly wages of a thousand yuan and free food and accommodation. But when they arrived they discovered that he’d sold them to work as hostesses in a nightclub. The next morning, they escaped out of the nightclub’s kitchen window and went straight to the police, who put them in handcuffs and bundled them off to the Custody and Repatriation Centre.

An hour or so later, as she lies down listening to the wind rustle through the trees outside, she suddenly remembers Suya mention that prostitutes are sometimes transferred from labour camps to specialist penitentiaries that examine women for sexual diseases. But if she’d been transferred, surely they would have let her take her handbag? Meili quickly reaches for the handbag, pulls out the red journal and hides it under her blanket. The lights are turned off, but Meili is too upset to sleep. She stays awake all night, tossing and turning, only managing to doze off a few minutes before dawn…

In her dream, she is swimming towards her womb along a dark channel, pursued by thousands of babies. When she reaches the end, she rubs the walls but is unable to find any entrance. The babies come closer, mouths wide open. With a jolt, she wakes, rolls onto her side and notices that Suya’s handbag has gone. She has a vague memory of torchlight flitting across her face a few moments ago and of the sound of receding footsteps. She closes her eyes again, but can’t return to sleep. She wonders whether Instructor Zheng has dragged Suya off into the woods. As she rubs the red journal under her blanket, she remembers the day her grandmother took her to a market stall beneath a large tree in the centre of Nuwa Village. Among the earth-coloured felt and the bobbins of black thread, she spotted a white cotton scarf and white hairclip that seemed to her immaculate and other-worldly. From that moment on, white became her favourite colour. She remembers the first white van she saw enter the village, with revolutionary slogans blaring from the speakers on its roof and posters of Chairman Mao and Premier Hua Guofeng stuck to the side windows. Then she remembers, when she was about five years old, watching a man daub onto a village wall the words CARRY OUT THE FOUR MODERNISATIONS; IMPLEMENT THE ONE CHILD POLICY. As soon as he was finished, her friend pushed her against the slogan, staining her clothes with chalky-smelling whitewash. Her grandmother shouted at her and told her to go straight home.

Meili thinks of Waterborn and wonders how she’s survived these past two weeks without her milk. She thinks how Nannan always kicks off her blanket in the middle of the night, and if it’s not wrapped over her again, her arms and legs become stone cold. She thinks of Kongzi’s obsessive desire for a son and feels angry, then consoles herself with the thought that at least he’s never stolen anything or slept with a prostitute. He may have watched a few porn films and forced her into some of the lewd positions he picked up from them, but compared to the depraved men Suya described, he’s pretty respectable and honourable. If only he was willing to talk to her and listen to her more, everything would be fine.

When the wind outside drops, she hears fresh cement being stirred in the construction site beyond the latrines. The male inmates are building a factory. Next year the camp will receive official permission to accommodate four hundred inmates, and to take advantage of this expansion of free labour, the Party Secretary has decided that the camp should manufacture Christmas crackers for export to Europe and America. Suya told Meili that Christmas is the foreigners’ equivalent of Spring Festival and that an old man with a white beard squeezes down your chimney at night with a bag of presents and waits for you to wake up. Meili rubs Suya’s red journal again and tries to think of a place where she can keep it safe.

KEYWORDS: sewage, second wife, handjob, visiting Miss Five, grey cheongsam, dead shrimp.

AS SOON AS Meili walks out of the tiny lift and is hit by a vulgar smell of cheap perfume, she knows that she’s been duped. Her legs start to shake. This morning, a genial-looking woman arrived at the camp, offering the female inmates jobs as hotel cleaners. Meili jumped at the opportunity, and boarded the minibus together with the two sisters. Although she signed a one-year contract, she made up her mind that she’d leave after a few weeks, once she’d earned enough money to buy a ticket to Guai Village.

I’m done for, this time! she says to herself as she moves down the red-carpeted corridor. Glancing over her shoulder she sees the woman’s face becoming sterner with each step she takes. ‘Stay inside and wait,’ the woman says gruffly, ushering them into separate rooms and shutting the doors behind. Meili pities the sisters, who’ve escaped one brothel only to be sold to another. She decides that if she’s forced to sleep with a man, she’ll follow him into the room, strangle him and escape. So long as the police don’t find her, she’ll make her way back to the bamboo hut, even if she has to walk all the way.

The door opens and a dumpy girl in a grey cheongsam tells her it’s time to eat. Meili follows her through a windowless bathroom stinking of sewage to a room where her contract has been placed on a round dining table.

‘Sit down,’ says a man in a sky-blue shirt sitting by the window. His hair is blow-dried and his lips have a purple tinge. ‘I’m the boss of this nightclub. I won’t ask where you’re from or check your documents. But I paid eight hundred yuan for you, so I must make myself clear. If you work hard and do as we ask, I’ll let you go in three months — I’ll even pay for your bus ticket home. But if you don’t cooperate, if you attempt to escape, well, you’ll only have yourself to blame for what might happen. No one knows you’re here, and no one will know if you disappear. Do you understand what I’m saying?’