Ma Jian - The Dark Road

On a weed-covered grave below, two mice stare up at her, reminding her of the two children she has lost. If she gives birth to Heaven, she will leave Kongzi, save enough money to pay the family planning fine, then move back to Nuwa Village with her two daughters. But if she wants to make enough money to have a comfortable life, she must never fall pregnant again, and the best way of ensuring that is for Heaven to curl up tight and stay where it is. She must become an independent woman, a person who not only has a body, but also a mind capable of thought. She shouldn’t have to punish herself for her husband’s crimes. She can sense that there is a woman asleep inside her who is slowly coming to life. She stands up and wraps her arms around herself… Yes, Kongzi can go to hell! I’m twenty-eight today. My best years are still ahead of me. I’ll struggle on and make my way back to my place of birth, like the sturgeon that swim up the Yangtze. I won’t let you die, Heaven. Whatever the future holds, we will withstand it together…

Meili staggers out of the graveyard. The long road stretching through the darkness before her shimmers like a river of shattered ice.

KEYWORDS: wild grasses, urinal, escalator, complex characters, fast food, worm-like, missing girl.

FOUR MONTHS LATER, Meili, now with only nine fingers, is still living with Kongzi, but they’ve moved to a place further away from the hair salons of Hong Kong Road. Misfortunes always seem to come in pairs. The day Meili was hospitalised for blood poisoning when her unhealed stump became infected, she heard that her brother had got into a fight with the coal mine director over unpaid wages and had been arrested and sentenced to two years of reform through labour. Her family has sunk to rock bottom. Her mother’s cancer has returned and her father has had to give up his job in the mine to look after her. Meili is now her family’s only lifeline.

Meanwhile, Kongzi’s temporary position at Red Flag Primary has come to an end, and he’s taken up a permanent post as deputy head of the migrant school Nannan attends. In the evening, he puts on his glasses with an even greater air of authority as he sets about correcting homework. A few hours before he made his fateful visit to the Beautiful Foot Massage Parlour, he went online and read a telegram the Red Guards sent to Chairman Mao after they’d destroyed the Temple of Confucius. They told their leader that they had burned ten thousand ancient books, smashed six thousand engraved stone tablets and a thousand gravestones, and toppled the statue of ‘Kong the Second Son — that so-called Teacher of Ten Thousand Generations’, so that the radiance of Mao Zedong Thought could shine over the temple grounds once more. Kongzi told Meili that the telegram threw him into such a frenzied rage that he swallowed a full bottle of rice wine, and he has no memory of what happened next, or how he ended up lying on the steps of the massage parlour. The girls in the parlour told Meili that he asked for a ‘fast food’ service. When they’d finished, he said he didn’t have any money on him, so they had no choice but to throw him onto the street. Meili had concealed a hammer in her jacket, and was planning to smash the parlour up, but when she saw the girls in the back room lying asleep on camp beds, she felt sorry for them and changed her mind. She imagined all the days Suya spent on a bed in a similar, sour-smelling room, being treated like a human urinal as one nameless man after another pulled down his trousers and emptied himself into her.

She’s had little time to think about her injured hand. When she returned home from the graveyard, she picked up her severed finger and wrapped it in a cloth, telling Kongzi, ‘I’ll keep it until we go home, then bury it in my parents’ garden where I too will be buried one day. A body must enter its grave complete, after all.’ After the turn of the year, her spirits lifted, and she felt that at last her run of misery had come to an end. The sight of Kongzi consumed by his work, reading and marking late into the night, has allowed her to recapture the pride she used to feel as the schoolteacher’s wife in Kong Village. Although the migrant school is as illegal as the children who attend it, and his salary is miserable, Nannan is now able to study there free of charge. Their lives are back on track. Meili has asked Cha Na to run her children’s shop, and has started work as general manager for Hugo Electronics. She no longer allows Tang to hold her hand. While she was in hospital, he visited her every day and warned Kongzi that if he ever dared sleep with a prostitute again, he’d have him arrested. He lent Meili a laptop so that she could surf the internet from her hospital bed, and when he appointed her general manager, he not only gave her half the shares in the company, he set up its bank account in her name. She knows that she can’t give him anything in return other than friendship and support.

Tang has rented an office in a smart block near a components warehouse in the centre of town. Since Meili first stepped on the escalator that leads to the first-floor office, her joy has been tinged with anxiety. She is not afraid that the company won’t make money. The success of her children’s shop has convinced her that her business instincts are good. She has helped to create a website which has attracted great interest from traders in the north, and has researched the latest developments in electronic machinery. Last month, she happened to hear that computers made in China will soon be installed with CD drives that can record as well as play, so she immediately slashed the price of their soon-to-be-defunct drives and managed to get rid of them in one day. Her anxiety stems from insecurity over her peasant background. She often feels like a scruffy partridge that has wheedled its way into a modern chicken pen. She has bought herself many clothes, but is never sure which ones to wear. (Fortunately, when she’s in the office, little Heaven curls up so tightly that her belly shrinks to half its size.) She is self-conscious about her appearance, and also her lack of culture. When Tang showed her his extensive collection of CDs and foreign novels, she felt like an ignorant child, and was determined to fill some of the huge gaps in her knowledge. She’s bought pirated discs of Beethoven, Puccini, Gershwin and Miles Davis which she listens to through earphones late at night, and is reading her way through translated editions of Les Misérables,A Christmas Carol, Light in August and A Brief History of Time which were selling for half price at a government-run bookstore. She feels that there’s so much to discover, she has no right to remain ignorant. Every day she tries to increase her vocabulary, but when she comes across text on the internet from Hong Kong or Taiwan which is written in complex characters, she still has to ask her colleagues for help. When everyone has left the office at the end of the day, she remains at her desk flicking through journals and magazines and talking quietly to little Heaven. Since Kongzi begged for forgiveness and vowed on bended knees never to visit a massage parlour again, she has felt that it’s now safe for Heaven to be born. She knows Kongzi will be disappointed to discover the baby is a girl, but is confident that as he’s in such disgrace, he wouldn’t dare attempt to give the baby away. She’s told Heaven that it can come out as soon as it wants. Everything is ready.

Their new home is directly opposite the illegal migrant school. It’s an ugly tin shack, but at least it’s watertight and windproof. In the yard outside is a barren durian tree whose bare branches are hung with damp laundry and bags of washing powder. Nannan found a dusty felt flower on the road the other day and has stuck it on the end of a branch. If it were an osmanthus tree, Meili would almost feel she were back in her parents’ house. She has discovered from the red journal that osmanthus was also Suya’s favourite flower. The shack and school are surrounded on three sides by abandoned fields fenced with the redundant glass interiors of dismantled televisions. Ten years ago, before the farmers turned to the e-waste business, these were well-irrigated rice fields, but apart from a few scattered plots cultivated with celery or taro, they are now overgrown with wild grasses and morning glories. Heaven Township can be seen to the north, its squat houses dwarfed by ancient trees. The air smells mostly of manure and grass, and the chemical odours are much less pronounced.