Ma Jian - The Dark Road

A girl in a black-and-white-checked jacket gets up and says, ‘Teacher Meili, I miss my mummy. She works in Zhuhai. After I speak to her on the phone, my grades always go down.’

‘Teacher, why are we peasants?’ asks a girl in an orange jacket with a white collar.

‘Because we were born in the countryside,’ Meili replies. ‘And if we’re born there, our fate is sealed: the authorities deny us free education, housing, medical care and all the other privileges city dwellers enjoy, and through the household registration system and family planning laws they bind us for ever to the land. But we mustn’t despair, students. There are 900 million of us. We make up two-thirds of China’s population. We can’t be kept down for ever. Look how many millions of peasants have already dared to ignore the laws and move to the cities. We’re on the move and no one can stop us. I’ve heard the police no longer bar peasants from boarding trains to the cities. Soon, pregnant women will be able to walk through the streets without fear of being dragged off for an abortion, and peasants will be able to move to any place they wish. The cages that have imprisoned us for so long will topple to the ground, and we will all be treated as legal citizens.’

‘Please, Teacher, what is the countryside like?’ asks a boy with a flat nose and thin, sparse hair. He is the youngest child in the school, and the only one who was born in Heaven Township.

‘Look, that’s the countryside,’ the boy next to him says, pointing his dirty finger at the window.

‘Do those farmers have residence permits?’ asks the flat-nosed boy.

‘Probably,’ says an older girl behind him. ‘It’s just us kids born without permission who aren’t allowed to have residence permits — we can’t even get rural ones.’

A police car overtakes them and screeches to a halt, blocking the road ahead. Two officers step out and climb onto the bus. ‘Who’s the teacher here?’

‘I am,’ Meili says, confident that she’ll be able to handle the conversation better than Kongzi.

‘SARS has broken out in this county,’ says one of the officers, whisking a fly from his face. ‘Didn’t you receive the notification?’

‘No,’ Meili says, then remembers reading about the disease on the internet. ‘Oh, you mean the acute respiratory disease? Yes, of course we were informed. We were told not to go into school, so we’ve taken the children out on a trip.’

‘A strict curfew has been imposed. The instructions were clear. Return to your school immediately. A team from the World Health Organisation is touring China to make sure we’re in a fit state to host the Olympics. If they find out we’ve got SARS here, it will be a disaster, so no one must wear a face mask.’

‘Fine, thank you, officers, we’ll let everyone else at Red Flag Primary know,’ Meili calls out to them as they return to their car.

‘Auntie Meili, I need to go to the toilet,’ a little boy says, frowning in discomfort.

The boys at the back laugh. ‘He’s always asking to go to the toilet in class, Miss! He never stops drinking — that’s why. He’s always thirsty.’

‘Says if he doesn’t keep drinking water, he’ll die!’

‘Be quiet! OK, get out and go behind that tree.’ It occurs to Meili that the toilet pit behind the school hasn’t been scooped out for months. Back in the village, excrement from the pits was removed regularly, dried and used as fuel, but in Heaven it all goes to waste.

‘Why won’t the government let us go to their schools?’ Nannan asks as the bus sets off again. She’s wearing a pink jumper and has her hair scraped back in a tight ponytail. When Kongzi took her to Red Flag Primary on his last day there, she took one look at the orderly rows of desks and bright posters in the classrooms and said she wished she could stay there for the rest of her life.

‘After the Education Department grants us authorisation, our school will be just like their ones,’ Kongzi replies. ‘We’ll get ourselves a tall flagpole, a big entrance lobby, flushing toilets and a canteen. Hey, have you at the back finished writing out the vocab?’

‘I thought you wanted us to do the sums,’ says the naughtiest boy in the class. Kongzi found him smoking in the toilet pit yesterday and gave him a sharp kick in the shins.

‘No, I told you to copy the new words from Lesson 17. Rivulet, ocean…’

‘We’ll be back in time for lunch, I promise,’ Meili tells a child. ‘There’ll be rice, vegetables and a soup.’ She reaches into her pocket and answers her phone: ‘Hi, Cha Na… Yes, those Disney DVDs have been selling well. You’d better order some more.’

‘Turn over your sheets of paper, everyone,’ Kongzi says. ‘I’ll read out some keywords from the text. Write them down then copy them out ten times. Ready? Illuminate. Green meadows. Serene. Verdant…’

Meili stares at the picture of the little girl in pigtails on the cover of the textbook she’s holding, then looks outside and sees a large photograph of a missing girl stuck to the side of a passing van. On the van’s boot is a notice with a telephone number and the message IF YOU FIND OUR DAUGHTER, WE WILL GIVE YOU ALL OUR SAVINGS AND BELONGINGS. Meili feels a stab of sympathy, and instantly thinks of Waterborn.

‘I’ve seen lots of notices like that recently,’ says Kongzi, watching the van speed off into the distance. ‘I read in the papers that 200,000 children go missing in China every year, and that very few are ever found.’ The eucalyptus trees along both sides of the road bask in the midday sun. The pale green leaves at the top look as soft as babies’ hands. Kongzi turns round and shouts: ‘Dong Ping! How dare you throw that carton out of the window!’

‘But I picked it up outside,’ the boy in the blue tracksuit says, kicking his legs about, ‘so it belongs out there.’

‘Oh, just stay still,’ Kongzi says impatiently. ‘If Confucius were here, he’d slap your hands with a wooden ruler.’

Boys in the seat behind get up and cheer. ‘Hit him, Teacher!’ one of them shouts. ‘Here, you can use this ping-pong bat!’

‘Use my hat!’

‘No, whack him with my trainers!’

Meili puts her phone away and says, ‘Quieten down. Now, listen, children. Spring Festival is coming up. If your parents haven’t decided what to give you yet, tell them to visit my shop. It’s called Fangfang Toy Emporium. It’s packed with wonderful toys and games. If they bring one of these business cards I’m handing out to you, they’ll get a 20 per cent discount…’

At the southern outskirts of town, the bus picks up speed and hurtles past lines of shacks with aluminium rain barrels glinting on the tin roofs.

KEYWORDS: Ming Dynasty theatre, face shape, toffee apple, swaddled, jewel-encrusted, sensitive.

AT THE END of the dancing policemen act, Nannan weaves her way back through the crowd of spectators with three bottles of Coca-Cola, and reaches her seat just as the curtains rise again. The instrumental prelude of a Cantonese opera begins to pour from the large loudspeakers flanking the stage. Meili, Kongzi and Nannan are sitting at the back. A group of scruffy workers who’ve wandered out from their nearby dormitory house in shorts and flip-flops are standing behind them, smoking. Local officials are seated on the front rows, dressed in freshly pressed trousers and short-sleeved shirts. ‘We’re in the birthplace of Cantonese opera,’ Kongzi shouts over the din. ‘This theatre is even older than the Confucius Temple and the Town God Temple. It’s the perfect place to watch The Seventh Fairy Delivers her Son to Earth !’

‘Is the opera based on the weaver girl and the cowherd story?’ Meili asks, putting her arm around Nannan. She cracks a sunflower seed between her teeth and spits the shell onto her bulge. ‘Here,’ she says, offering some seeds to Nannan.