Ma Jian: The Dark Road

Meili pulls a bunch of bananas from her bag and offers one to the woman. Kongzi is lying fast asleep at her feet, a whiff of alcohol rising from his mouth. A few minutes ago, he stirred from his drunken slumber and bellowed a line from Confucius’s Analects : ‘If my path comes to an end, I will board a raft and drift towards the sea…’ A group of migrant workers are crouched beside him gulping down bottles of beer.

‘No, no, I’m not hungry,’ the woman says, taking a banana nevertheless. Meili breaks one off for herself, tosses the peel overboard and watches it disappear into the white waves that cut through the centre of the black river. ‘I have an eighty-year-old mother at home to support, and a two-year-old child as well,’ the woman says. ‘The wages I bring back to them vanish in a day.’

Meili shifts Nannan’s head further down her lap, wriggles her numb toes, then stares at the woman’s careworn face and contemplates her own predicament. I’m only twenty, she says to herself. I won’t let myself age as badly as her. I’ll get a job, earn some money and buy myself a nice dress and leather shoes. Kongzi once said that my toes are the most attractive part of my body, and since then, I’ve kept them covered. But one day I’ll buy some elegant leather sandals and paint my toenails red…

‘Come on, tell me — you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ the woman says. ‘You’re on the run from family planning officers.’

‘How did you guess? Yes, I’m over three months gone. Nuwa County is clamping down on family planning violators. We would’ve been allowed to have a second child when our daughter is five, but I’ve fallen pregnant sooner by mistake.’

‘You want a son, don’t you? To continue the family line.’

‘My husband is a Kong, so of course he wants a son. He keeps quoting that line from the Analects that goes, “Of the three desertions of filial duty, leaving no male heirs is the worst,” or something like that.’

‘How did you avoid getting fitted with a coil? Your family must have a lot of influence. I bet you’re the only woman in this boat who doesn’t have an IUD inside her.’

‘No, my parents are ordinary peasants. My father works in a coal mine now, and my mother looks after the fields. But my husband’s father is a war hero and a former village head, so he was able to pull a few strings.’

‘He must be a teacher, your husband — quoting from the classics like that. Just look how thick his glasses are!’

Meili smooths her hair back and smiles. ‘Yes. Everyone in the village calls him Kongzi, after the great sage. Our neighbours often ask him to choose names for their children or write rhyming couplets to hang outside their doors.’ The two women stare down at Kongzi, who is now flat on his back, snoring loudly.

‘If we edged our way over there, we’d be able to see the television in the viewing lounge,’ the woman says, pointing behind her with her chin. Then, looking over at the migrant workers swigging beer, she murmurs a Cantonese song: ‘ As the night grows darker, I drink myself into a daze. Softly you approach my broken heart. Be careful what you say, because as everyone knows, I’m a woman who’s easily hurt… ’ The boat approaches a bend in the river and the engine’s growl deepens.

‘You speak Cantonese, then? Have you been to Guangzhou?’ Meili knows the song. She sang it at her interview at the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel, and impressed Teacher Zhou so much that he gave her the job on the spot.

‘Yes, I’ve been to Guangzhou a couple of times. You need to speak Cantonese to find a job there, especially in the hair salons. But the men in Guangzhou are loaded. I can earn more in a day there than I do in a year back home. You could make a fortune there. Such smooth skin, delicate features, long neck. What man could resist you? I’d move there myself, but it’s too far away. I have to go home every week to give money to my family and see my child. If it were up to me, I’d never go back to that damn village.’

‘I’d much prefer to be at home. The thought of travel frightens me.’ Meili remembers seeing Yuanyuan hobbling back from the school the day they left. Her mother-in-law was beside her, one hand supporting her round the waist and the other gripping the aborted fetus by the arm. Yuanyuan went into labour as soon as she was strapped to the school desk, but by the time the baby was born the disinfectant had already killed it. The family planning officer dropped the dead baby into a plastic bucket, but it was so big it toppled out. It lay sprawled on the ground for hours. No one bothered to pick it up. When her mother-in-law came to fetch her, she scooped it up from the floor and refused to let go of it.

‘My village is surrounded by beautiful mountains,’ says the woman wearing crimson lipstick. ‘The soil is so fertile, anything will grow. But the family planning officers make life there unbearable. They grab women in the middle of the night. They took me once and locked me up in an army office for nine days. I was with nineteen women and children, in a room that was just twelve metres square. We didn’t even have space to lie down. There was a four-year-old girl there who they’d taken hostage to force her mother to return from Shanghai. One poor woman had just had an abortion and was still bleeding. But on her second night, Officer Zheng and his colleague pulled her out into the corridor and raped her.’

‘It wasn’t so bad in our village — the officers demolished a few houses and made arrests, but they never raped anyone,’ Meili says, afraid to talk openly about the true nature of the brutal crackdown. She glances over to the migrant workers beside her. The boiled frogs they’re eating remind her of tiny fetuses.

‘I detest that Officer Zheng,’ the woman continues. ‘I fell pregnant again last year. He promised he’d make sure I could keep the child, but I still ended up being dragged to the clinic for an abortion. He’s the reason I left the village. The filthy bastard!’

‘Did you tell your husband about it?’ Meili asks, suspecting that the officer forced her to sleep with him.

‘What for? He wouldn’t have had the balls to beat him up — he would’ve just beaten me instead. Take my advice: never rely on a husband for your happiness. The government persecute men, then men persecute their wives in return. And what do the wives do? If they have a child, they slap it to let off steam. If not, they drown themselves or swallow bottles of pesticide.’

Meili thinks of the women who leave the village to find work in the south and return a year later, laden with cash. Yuanyuan told her that women who can’t find jobs in factories work as prostitutes in hair salons. Meili doesn’t dare ask the woman whether she sleeps with men for money, but remembers her saying she could earn a year’s salary in a day, so presumes that she must.

The conversation unsettles Meili and brings to her mind the time a man almost tricked her into sleeping with him when she was fifteen. She looks into the night sky and suddenly becomes aware of the infant spirit animating her fetus, making it quiver and sink lower in her womb. Hunching her shoulders and squeezing her thighs together, she whispers, ‘Don’t be afraid, little one. Just stay where you are.’

That night, Mother looks into the darkness, as though wanting to converse with the infant spirit. Moonlight falls on the narrow bridge of her nose. Her mouth appears to be smiling. A woman wearing crimson lipstick is saying to her, ‘Take care in train stations, town squares, hotels. Agents prowl those places. If they see a women they suspect of being illegally pregnant, they pounce on her and drag her to a clinic for an abortion. They’re paid fifty yuan for each woman they bring in. And be especially careful in the big cities. Peasants aren’t welcome there. The authorities think we give foreign tourists a bad impression, so they round us up, lock us in custody centres and charge us an “urban beautification tax”, which is really just a fine for entering the city. The only way to avoid arrest is to live on the water.’