Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘Stop biting your nails, Nannan, you’re a big girl now,’ Meili admonishes, then turns to Kongzi, and says, ‘After Heaven is born, we must work hard and buy ourselves Foshan residence permits so that our children can go to school and university. Then we can go back to Kong Village and build a house in our children’s rightful birthplace. Do you hear that, little Heaven? With your mother looking after you, everything will be fine. Nannan, sing me a song, will you?’

‘No, I’m hungry,’ Nannan says, her face pressed against her open diary.

‘Please, sing me the nightingale song I taught you last night…’

‘All right: Little Nightingale, in your colourful robe, you come here every spring. We’ve built a large factory with brand-new machinery, so this spring will be even more lovely … Mum, I want to learn Xinjiang dancing, like Rongrong.’

‘Read out what you’ve put in your diary today.’

‘This is all I’ve written so far: “I was afraid the gecko was poisonous, but I still went over and looked at it. It had yellow eyes, and stripes like a tiger. When it crawled, it looked like it was riding a bicycle very fast, trying to escape a nasty enemy…”’

KEYWORDS: pleasant breeze, open-crotch trousers, plucking feathers, separate ward, life rod, hand-held heaters.

‘I HAVE TO DRINK American ginseng all day, or these fumes give me terrible migraines,’ says Meili’s workmate Ah-Fei. ‘Bitter tea just isn’t strong enough to wash all the poisons out of my system.’ Ah-Fei is disfigured by vitiligo. She wears a large surgical mask, to protect herself from the fumes and to conceal the unsightly white patches on her face.

Meili started this job three weeks ago. She had to leave her last job because the plastic granulating machines in the yard created such a deafening noise that when she went home in the evening, she couldn’t hear a word Nannan or Kongzi were saying. The salary here is only thirty yuan a day, and the fumes make her eyes water, but at least when the front and back doors of the workshop are left open, a pleasant breeze flows through.

At first, Meili sat with the other eight women at the long metal table, heating and dismantling circuit boards, but leaning over her bulge and inhaling the toxic vapours made her sick, so she swapped jobs with a woman called Xiu, who is only five months pregnant. Now she sits on a bamboo stool gutting cables, which requires her to pull a cable from the tangled mound beside her, nail it to the wall, run a sharp knife down the length of its plastic casing and rip out the precious copper wires within.

‘Heaven Hospital is the best place to give birth,’ Xiu says, pausing to rub her belly. ‘They let you go home with your baby after twenty-four hours. At Compassion Hospital, the nurses snatch your baby from you as soon as it’s born, put it in a separate ward and feed it on formula for a week. They say it’s because breast milk isn’t nutritious enough, but the truth is they put the babies on the bottle to earn commission from formula companies.’ Xiu always has the most up-to-date information on hospitals and childcare.

‘Scams like that are the least of our worries,’ Cha Na chips in from the end of the table. ‘If the authorities decide to crack down on family planning criminals like us, things will get really ugly.’ Cha Na has a daughter, Lulu, who’s the same age as Nannan, and a three-month-old baby at home, whom she goes back to feed during the lunch break. She’s witty and good-natured, and Meili gets on well with her.

‘A woman once told me it’s impossible to fall pregnant here,’ Meili says. ‘None of us seem to have had any problem, though!’ She thinks back to the woman with crimson lipstick she met on the boat to Sanxia, and wonders whether or not she should feel grateful to her for telling her about Heaven Township.

‘I tell you, Meili, a few more years in this place, and you’ll be a barren old hen and your husband will be a limp cock!’ Ah-Fei sniggers behind her face mask.

Nannan runs inside with Lulu to drink a glass of water. They’ve been in the backyard, clambering over a heap of computer carcasses and gutted video machines. In the front yard, workers are breaking open television sets and computer monitors with kitchen cleavers and extracting the circuit boards. The thick glass interiors are shaped like huge light bulbs, with the flattened screen at one end. They are of no use any more, and are placed in a pile in the corner.

‘The family planning officers in this town only take bribes — they don’t bother enforcing the law,’ says Cha Na. ‘So we’d be stupid not to take advantage of the situation and have as many children as we want.’ Noticing her engorged breasts begin to leak onto her shirt, she turns to the side, pulls them out and squeezes the milk onto the ground.

‘My husband never took bribes when he was head of the village family planning team,’ says Pang, a middle-aged woman whose wiry black hair is braided in tight plaits. ‘Everyone looked up to him. He’d come home at night, open a beer and sing: Armed with violation notices, through every village we scout. When we find a pregnant woman without a permit, we rip her baby out. ’ Pang has poor eyesight, and can often be heard yelping as she burns her fingers on the molten lead.

‘The mere mention of family planning officers sends shivers down my spine,’ Meili says, feeling Heaven’s arms jerk about inside her womb. ‘Those bastards have blood on their hands. They’ll get their just deserts in the end.’ Pang gets on Meili’s nerves. Her husband has visited the workshop a few times. Last year he was sacked from the family planning team after fracturing his pelvis in a road accident, and moved to Heaven with Pang and their daughter hoping to pick up some work.

‘You’re right there, Meili. Pang’s husband’s certainly got his just deserts in that car crash, didn’t he? It knocked the life out of his “life rod”! Ha!’

‘You may snigger, Cha Na, but your husband’s dick will go limp too, one day, mark my words,’ Pang says, then coughs into her sleeve. ‘Anyway, I don’t miss him sticking his dirty sausage into me every night. Never gave me much pleasure…’

‘Well, I suppose you can at least get a good night’s sleep these days,’ Cha Na says, her breasts pressing against the metal table as she reaches for another circuit board.

‘You really think her husband’s gone limp?’ Ah-Fei says with a grin. ‘I bet when he goes to a hair salon, his hard-on hits the front door before he does!’

‘Mind your language, please, there’s a young girl at the table,’ Xiu says, pointing at the fifteen-year-old girl with shoulder-length hair, dark skin and large anxious eyes. A few years ago, this girl was playing hide-and-seek under the table, just like Nannan and Lulu are doing now.

Yes, one day all those family planning officers will be punished for their crimes, Meili thinks to herself, staring blankly at the eight women as they shake their hand-held heaters over the circuit boards. The fluorescent light above them shines on their hands, the boards and the blue vapours rising from them. Once the lead solder has melted, the women grip a copper wire, a chip, a capacitor or an electrode with their tweezers, wobble it to loosen the hold, then gently pull it out and place it into one of the thirty tea cups arranged before them. When all the components have been removed, they drop the empty boards into the red plastic buckets on the ground… Yes, those doctors and nurses who murdered Happiness will receive their punishment one day, Meili says to herself, kicking an empty cardboard box lying by her feet into the corner.

Old Shao, who’s responsible for buying and distribution, has taken off his shirt, exposing his round belly and small flabby breasts. He’s squatting in the doorway now, picking up the copper strands that Meili has extracted from the cables. He looks up at her and says, ‘If you don’t buy a fake birth permit soon, Meili, your baby won’t get a residence permit. I’ve heard you can pick one up in Hong Kong Road for five thousand yuan.’ Meili likes Old Shao. She always sits next to him at lunch. He’s the only person in the workshop who knows that she is now twelve months pregnant. Six weeks after her initial due date passed, she went for a check-up in a backstreet clinic, and the doctor told her she must have got her dates wrong, and that she should relax and let the baby come out when it’s ready. Although Meili was certain that her dates were correct, when she applied for this job, she was worried the boss wouldn’t hire her if he knew how long the pregnancy had lasted, so she told him she was only six months gone. Old Shao has worked in electronic waste for years. He knows how many jin of lead each brand of computer contains, and the function of every component on a circuit board. He told Meili that there are over seven hundred different chemicals in most electronic machines, and three hundred of them are harmful to the human body. He’s always reminding her to wear her face mask.