Ma Jian - The Dark Road

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.’