Ma Jian - The Dark Road

‘No, you’d be better off paying a snakehead ten thousand yuan to smuggle you to Hong Kong, and give birth there,’ Xiu butts in, rubbing her bulge. ‘The hospital treatment is free, and the baby would automatically get a Hong Kong residence permit, and as her mother, you could apply for one too.’

‘Or you could go to Macao,’ Cha Na suggests, tweezing the last component from a board. ‘It belongs to China as well now, and costs less to get to than Hong Kong.’

‘If I had ten thousand yuan I could pay the illegal birth fine and wouldn’t need to leave the country,’ Meili says, feeling Heaven turn a somersault and kick her in the bladder. She has got everything ready for the birth: sleepsuits, nappies, socks, bibs, even a longevity locket Kongzi bought in the market, but little Heaven still shows no sign of wanting to come out. She wonders whether she did indeed get the dates wrong, or if the pollution she’s been exposed to has delayed the baby’s development.

‘In Guangzhou, the fine for illegal births has risen to twenty thousand yuan,’ Ah-Fei says, pouring herself more American ginseng tea. ‘So it won’t be long before the fines here rise as well.’

‘Prices of everything are shooting up,’ says Cha Na. ‘Have you seen how much nappies cost these days? I’m going to have to stop buying them and put my baby in open-crotch trousers instead.’

‘Go to the market in Confucius Temple Road,’ Xiu advises. ‘You can buy a top-brand pack of thirty-two nappies for just forty yuan.’

‘No, I bought some there once for a friend,’ says Pang, waving the blue fumes away from her face. ‘They’re fake, filled with mouldy rags.’

‘Remember the family planning officer who came here last month?’ says Ah-Fei, her nostrils flaring above her face mask. ‘I bumped into her the other day. She’s been promoted to chair of Heaven Township’s Women’s Association.’

‘So they’ve set up a Women’s Association here?’ says Old Shao. ‘That means Heaven will soon be granted county status. That’s all down to the hard work of us migrants.’ Old Shao walks along the table emptying the cups of sorted components into baskets which he then takes outside and tips into bamboo crates.

‘You mean the woman with the long skinny neck who comes here before public holidays to hand out condoms?’ says Ah-Fei. ‘She’s not too bad. When she asked me when I had my last period, I told her I hadn’t had one for months, and she didn’t kick up a fuss.’

‘Spring Festival’s only four weeks away now. Will you be spending it with your family this year, Old Shao? If so, please bring me back some salted pickles.’ This woman, Yazhen, is from the same region of Jiangxi Province as Old Shao.

‘No, the trains will be packed. I doubt I’d get a ticket. I think I’ll just stay here.’ Hearing the girls shriek in the backyard he goes to the door and shouts, ‘Nannan and Lulu, get off those boxes! If you break them, the boss will blow his top.’

‘Own up, Old Shao, you’ve got a mistress here, haven’t you?’ Yazhen says, raising an eyebrow. ‘It’s always the same: when men leave home, they forget all about their wives.’

‘And if they do live at home, they just come back for dinner, then run off to sauna houses and nightclubs,’ says Ah-Fei.

‘Aagh!’ Pang yelps, burning her fingers again.

A worker shuffles into the room, takes the empty circuit boards into the yard and dunks them into basins of sulphuric acid to retrieve any remaining scraps of gold. Immediately, acrid vapours drift into the workshop causing everyone’s eyes and throat to burn. As dusk approaches, all the machines and bamboo baskets of sorted components are dragged back into the workshop and stacked up into tall piles. Meili sorts the red, white, blue, black, green and grey plastic casings at her feet into separate hemp sacks, then goes to help Old Shao label some white boxes.

At this time every evening, in the final minutes before they clock off, the women at the metal table stop chatting and concentrate on their work, their hands darting back and forth, tweezing out tiny square, circular, two-pronged, three-pronged components as though they were plucking feathers from a duck. Through the haze of blue fumes, the hot circuit boards in their hands look like miniature demolition sites.

KEYWORDS: security door, murder, difficult time, ovary, fully dilated, psychological block.

‘KONGZI, I THINK my belly’s contracting! My God, I’m bleeding! Quick, take me to Dr Tao’s clinic.’ Meili holds her bloodstained hand up to the light then climbs out of the bed. The clinic is in a village a few kilometres away. Xiu gave birth to her baby son there and recommended it to her. Meili visited it two months ago, by which time Heaven had been inside her belly for a year and a half. Dr Tao examined her and said that she only looked about eight months pregnant, and that the fetus probably needed more time in the womb. Since then, she’s suffered occasional cramps, but this is the first time that Heaven has shown any sign of wanting to emerge.

‘All right, let’s go!’ Kongzi says, raising his head sleepily from the pillow. While surfing the Web in an internet cafe late last night, he was delighted to learn that the China Institute of Confucian Studies held a conference in Beijing recently to celebrate its sixth anniversary. He has learned to type, and plans to post an article online recommending that study of the Confucian-inspired Qing Dynasty text, Standards for being a Good Pupil and Child , be reintroduced into the school curriculum.

The sky is still dark. Kongzi opens the front door. The air outside is slightly cooler and tastes poisonous.

‘We’ll have to leave Nannan here,’ Meili says. ‘Take five hundred yuan from my handbag. Look, my belly’s going tight again.’

‘Today is August the 18th. The date Chairman Mao addressed a million Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. How could little Heaven choose such a rotten day to be born?’

‘Stop blabbering. Is there enough diesel in your water-delivery van?’ Meili leans against the wall waiting for a contraction to subside, then she pulls on a short-sleeved dress and picks up the plastic bag she’s prepared for the birth. A few months ago, Kongzi removed the outboard motor from their crumbling boat and sold it for eighty yuan, and with a further eight hundred yuan he’d saved, bought a small van, which is in fact a rusty wreck that he found lying in the back of a car-repair workshop. It has no bonnet, bumpers or windscreen. When he drives it through town, it resembles the tattered coat of a homeless beggar, with its oil pipes, exhaust pipes and electric cables fluttering behind it in the wind.

The infant spirit watches Father, in the darkness before dawn four years ago, drive through narrow lanes, with a cigarette in his mouth and goggles over his eyes. Mother is sitting beside him groaning with pain. As her temperature soars, she unbuttons her shirt, while in her womb, which is hotter still, the fetus writhes. Father’s cigarette smoke pours into Mother’s lungs and bloodstream, then flows through the umbilical cord into the fetus’s brain. At last they arrive at the clinic. Father jumps out and bangs on Dr Tao’s steel security door. ‘Who’s there?’ a voice eventually replies. ‘Don’t you know how to use a doorbell?’

Mother lies on the doctor’s bed, hunched up in pain as the contractions become more intense. When the cervix is fully dilated, the fetus descends but its head becomes stuck between Mother’s pelvis. ‘I can see its hair!’ Dr Tao exclaims. ‘One more push and it will be out…’ Mother grits her teeth and pushes with all her strength. The fetus thrashes about, and its neck becomes so constricted that for a few seconds no oxygen reaches its brain. ‘Oh, the pain…’ Mother screams. Fighting for its life, the fetus grips Mother’s pelvic bone and propels itself back into the womb. Dr Tao shines a torch into Mother’s vagina and sees a tiny petal-like hand hanging out of the cervix. He reaches in and grabs hold of it, but as he tries to yank it out, he hears a small bone in the arm snap. ‘Bring me forceps and cotton wool, Qin!’ he shouts to his assistant. ‘Hurry!’