Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Women can’t fall pregnant here?’ Kongzi says. ‘What nonsense! Let’s prove that wrong straight away.’ He takes his hands off the steering wheel and places them on her breasts. The boat turns in circles over the still water. But they don’t need to drop anchor now. This isn’t a river they have to follow upstream or downstream. They’ve reached the end: a place where Meili hopes she can rest, gather strength and live in peace.

‘Get your hands off me,’ she says to Kongzi. ‘I want to look at the lake. Can you believe how big it is? You could fit every duck in China onto it, and still have room left over.’ She and Kongzi have only had intercourse once since she returned to Guai Village last month. She was so anxious at the time, she couldn’t feel a thing, and pushed him off her before he was finished.

‘A wife’s duty is to produce children,’ Kongzi says. ‘Let’s see if I can plant another seed in your womb.’ He presses her onto the deck, causing the boat to dip forward at the bow. ‘We’ll capsize if you’re not careful!’ Meili says, breaking free and crawling into the cabin. Kongzi follows her inside and pins her onto the deck again. ‘Get off me. You’ll wake Nannan! It’s past midnight. Stop being so rough.’

‘You’ve been pushing me away for weeks. Come on, let me stroke your feet, your stomach, your soft, cushiony…’ Outside, the black night and the black lake sway back and forth, extending to invisible heights and depths.

‘Be kind to me, Kongzi,’ Meili says. She relaxes at last, and feels her body float like peach blossom on water. ‘All right, go ahead then. Pour your sperm into me. I’m not afraid any more…’ She sucks the night air deep into her lungs, and a tear falls from her eyes.

The infant spirit watches Mother drift down the narrow river and arrive at Womb Lake, then sees itself swim up the dark road between her legs towards the lake of her womb. It knows that this is where its final incarnation began. A third gestation, a third birth, a third fate.

Later that night, unable to sleep, Mother sits at the bow crunching deep-fried broad beans and stares at the multitude of stars and lights shining in the sky and on the lake, inhaling deep breaths of air and spitting out the odd tough shell. The infant spirit watches itself being carried through the cervix by fumes smelling of burnt plastic, then curl up inside a dirty uterine fold and twitch as metallic waste waters seep into its new home, along with an occasional whiff of turnip soup. Mother is not aware of its arrival yet. In her mind, she is saying: my womb is a fishbowl which these chemicals will smash into pieces. Never again will I have to carry a child inside me. I will be free… In the distance, near the bridge they passed a few hours ago, a heap of old circuit boards and plastic tubing has been set alight. Smoke as black as night billows from the orange flames, making the strips of tarpaulin caught in overhanging branches flap to and fro like dogs locked in combat. The plastic and metal waste shrivels and melts. When it trickles down the banks into the water, red sparks crackle and dance above the dark lake.

KEYWORDS: shady willows, tiger descending the mountain, god and goddess, electronic waste, seedlings, plastic granules.

THEIR NEW HOME is across the river from the former residence of a Qing Dynasty scholar. Above its high perimeter walls, they can glimpse ancient trees and yellow-tiled roofs. Kongzi has rented a tiny metal hut on stilts which juts out into a river flowing from the lake. It’s sheltered by a willow, has a window from which they can see their boat, and the rent is only thirty yuan a month. Unfortunately, the river itself is as red and rancid as mouldy Oolong tea. After they wash any clothes or vegetables in it, they have to rinse them in tap water.

The river should flow eastwards into the sea, but its passage is almost entirely blocked by the electronic waste and household refuse dumped into it daily. Along the banks are shady willows and ancient courtyard houses which a century ago belonged to prosperous merchants. These quadrangle compounds are built in the traditional style locally known as ‘tiger descending the mountain’, with rear quarters taller than the front quarters. Now damp and crumbling, most of them have been rented out to migrant workers, while the owners have moved to new residential estates far from the filth of the lake. The willow tree beside the metal hut is two hundred years old. At its foot are statues of a local god and goddess. Nannan is terrified of them because they have no legs. Last week, villagers came here and ceremoniously slaughtered a pig, then placed it before the statues, along with other offerings of fish, chicken and fruit. Large red scented candles were lit, and as the fragrant smoke coiled up into the willow’s branches, the villagers knelt down and prayed for good harvests, happiness, a baby son or success in their children’s high school exams.

Meili works in a recycling workshop on the ground floor of a house next to the Qing Dynasty scholar’s residence. Every day there are new heaps of transformers for her to dismantle and plastic film to melt. Nannan usually accompanies her, and plays hide-and-seek by herself among the baskets of electric cables and copper wires.

In the morning, after Kongzi drops them off on the opposite bank, he sails to a neighbouring town to fetch clean tap water to sell to Heaven’s residents. Although he makes only forty yuan a day — which is slightly less than Meili is paid — he enjoys being his own boss and sailing through the backwaters at his leisure. When he returns in the afternoon, his boat loaded with barrels of tap water and a passenger or two he’s picked up along the way, he feels happy to be living in Heaven Township, despite its sour, acrid stench.

‘So, where are you from, captain?’ a migrant worker asks, stepping aboard the boat one morning.

‘Hubei Province,’ Kongzi replies, starting the engine again and watching a vessel dump a load of televisions and scanners onto the muddy bank upstream. ‘We arrived here a few months ago. How about you?’

‘Oh, I’ve been here eight years. See those white villas up there? Our team built them last year in just six months. It’s getting harder to find work now, though, what with all the new migrants flooding in.’

Kongzi glances up at the villas that, with their cladding of white tiles, resemble a row of public toilets. They’re on a hill high above the lake, near the municipal government building. The concrete road running past them leads to a dilapidated Confucian temple where, in the Guomindang era, locals would make offerings to the great sage and his eighteen disciples. Until recently, Heaven was a sleepy, impoverished lakeside town. During the flood season, the lake would inundate the Ming Dynasty theatre close to its shore, and sometimes the whole town as well. In the 1960s, half the population left, many of them setting off on foot, their belongings on shoulder poles, to scrape a living collecting scrap in Guangzhou. But ten years ago, after the first British ship docked at the nearby Pearl River port of Foshan and unloaded a mountain of electronic waste, Heaven’s economy took off. An entrepreneurial family hauled some of the waste back to their home in Heaven Township, took it apart and sold the scrap plastic and metal to a local toy factory. As the mountains of European waste grew in Foshan, other families in the township followed their example, opening workshops on the ground floors of their homes and hiring migrant labourers to help out. Today, the front doors of every house are surrounded not by bales of wheat, but bundles of electric cables, circuit boards and transformers. In just one decade, Heaven has transformed from a quiet backwater into a prosperous, waste-choked town.