‘Woman and son make a good pair,’ Nannan says. Her eyes drift towards the television set. Meili quickly reaches over and turns it off.
After Kongzi slumps onto the bed in a drunken heap, Meili starts prodding her belly, trying to see if the tablet is taking effect. According to the leaflet, she should experience cramping, bleeding, and within a few hours see ‘products of conception appear on the sanitary towel like a lump of red congee’. She is certain she doesn’t want the baby. Indeed, her desire not to have any more children was the sole reason she came to this town. She wants to get on with her life, achieve something and become financially independent. Before she reaches thirty, she wants to open her own shop and make enough money to eat out in restaurants, live in a brick house, sleep on a sprung mattress and send Nannan to university. She’s a modern woman, and should have the right not only to be a mother, but also to enjoy some of life’s pleasures. The weather will be getting hot soon, and the metal hut will become infested with mosquitoes. This is no place to bring a baby into the world. She sits on a plastic stool and sees Nannan hiding beneath the table, playing with a Mickey Mouse ball.
‘Get back on your chair and finish writing your diary,’ Meili says, her nerves on edge. Remembering suddenly that she brought some electric plugs back from work today, she places them in the wok, adds some river water and lights the stove.
‘The ball hit my hand and broke my nail…’ Nannan mumbles to herself as she draws a picture in her diary.
Might as well stay busy while I wait for the pill to take effect, Meili says to herself, popping some haw flakes into her mouth, hoping that they too will help encourage a miscarriage. The work isn’t too difficult. All she has to do is wait for the plugs to melt, then pick out from the black gloop the brass prongs which the workshop manager will sell tomorrow for three yuan a jin. Once Nannan is asleep and her work is finished, she scrubs the wok, pours half the bottle of castor oil into it, fries an egg and swallows it, then mops up the oil with a dry piece of bread. By midnight, she’s so tired she can hardly keep her eyes open. She turns on the television and sees the Qing Dynasty Empress Cixi tuck into a lavish banquet, then she picks up Nannan’s diary and reads today’s entry: ‘Mummy told me to brush my teeth. I told her my gums hurt, but she looked at me with angry eyes, so I had to brush them. Red-Dress Doll was very naughty today, but after I gave her one of my angry looks, she sat quietly at my feet and let me flick her head…’
KEYWORDS: gritted teeth, sprung mattress, tiled roof, bathed in glory, abortion, Workers’ Day Procession.
AFTER TWO TABLETS failed to bring about a miscarriage, Meili was worried that if she changed her mind and decided to continue with the pregnancy, the drugs might damage the baby’s brain, so she didn’t dare take any more. When her belly became visibly enlarged, Kongzi was so happy, he stopped playing mahjong with the neighbours in the yard, and instead stays indoors all evening, serving Meili hot meals and cups of tea. Meili feels stifled by his affection, especially now that they’ve moved into a new home with a soft double bed, and he insists on making love to her every night. Meili endures this nightly torment with gritted teeth, hoping that it might cause a miscarriage. Go on then, she says silently when he enters her. As long as there’s a chance the fetus will perish. As Suya wrote in her diary, ‘The fleshy channel between a woman’s legs doesn’t belong to her…’ But when she feels Kongzi pressing down on her belly and begin to thrust with force, she often pushes him away and grunts, ‘Stop it. Get off me. Enough…’
‘Why do you always push me off just as I’m about to come?’ Kongzi says to her tonight. ‘You’re already knocked up, so what are you afraid of?’
Meili shudders and wipes the sweat from her face as images she knows she can never wipe away return to her mind. She’s surprised that Kongzi hasn’t noticed the change in her. The truth is, since she was raped she has lost all ability to feel pleasure. When Kongzi is approaching climax, she often looks up at him and says blankly, ‘The prenatal handbook said that men shouldn’t penetrate too deeply when a woman’s pregnant,’ then she rolls over and folds her arms over her chest.
‘The baby’s a girl,’ she says to him, staring up at the ceiling. ‘I dreamed about her last night.’
Kongzi is lying on his back, dripping with sweat. Now that his penis has left her body, it has shrivelled up like a snail that’s lost its shell. ‘It can’t be a girl!’ he says. ‘I paid a feng shui expert to examine the dates, and he assured me that it’s a boy. I will call him Kong Heaven, and register him later as Kong Detian, the seventy-seventh generation male descendant of Confucius.’
‘But when have I had a dream that hasn’t proved to be correct?’ she says. Kongzi doesn’t know that, this morning, she summoned up the courage to visit a government hospital. A doctor in the Department of Gynaecology and Obstetrics told her that a free abortion could be arranged for her straight away. A pregnant woman would pay for the procedure on condition that the abortion certificate was made out in her name so that she could carry her own child to term. Meili paced the corridor. If the fetus turned out to be a boy and Kongzi discovered she’d got rid of it, he’d beat her to death. She’d have to tell him she suffered a miscarriage, but what reason could she give? The wrong dose of pills, too much sex, a fetal abnormality? She was certain the truth would come out in the end. Then she thought now that they’re living safely in Heaven, the baby should be given the chance to take a look at the world. She thought how nice it would be for Nannan to have a little brother or sister to play with. Then she thought of Happiness lying on the riverbed, and of Waterborn begging on some street corner in Shenzhen or eating cakes in a house in California, and it occurred to her that the birth of this fourth child might diminish the pain of losing her last two. So, still undecided, she left the hospital and went home.
Kongzi lights a cigarette and stares at Meili’s belly. This one-room house has not only a proper bed with a soft, sprung mattress, but also a table, two chairs, a cupboard and an electric fan, and the rent is just two hundred yuan a month. It may be damp, stuffy and infested with mosquitoes, but it’s a solid brick structure with a proper tiled roof that shelters them from the elements.
‘Get a scan,’ Kongzi says. ‘If it’s a girl, you can have an abortion. My brother and his wife have just had a second daughter, and they won’t be trying again for a son, so it’s all down to me now to carry on the family line.’
‘No, I will not have an abortion,’ Meili says, sensing suddenly that she was wrong ever to contemplate the idea. She glances at Nannan, who’s lying asleep on the long narrow bed Kongzi made for her with scrap timber, and feels a wave of maternal love. ‘Whether it’s a girl or a boy, it’s here through the will of Heaven,’ Meili continues. ‘Look at Nannan. Do you wish I’d had her aborted?’
‘Listen, there’s no need to make up your mind now. Have a scan, then see how you feel.’ Kongzi stubs out his cigarette and drops it into a bowl. Meili gets out of the bed, puts on her underwear and looks outside. The concrete yard is softly lit by beams of light from the surrounding windows. The folding stools have been toppled to the ground, and maggots and flies are crawling over watermelon peel in the corner. The three other one-room houses around the yard are also occupied by migrant families. In the evening, the adults take turns to wash themselves and clean vegetables at the outside tap while the children wrestle with each other or play catch. Today an older child threw a toy truck at Nannan which left a deep cut on her forehead. Meili was furious, but since she couldn’t hit the culprit, she released her anger by slapping Nannan instead.
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