Ma Jian: The Dark Road

‘What do you mean, live on the water?’ Mother stares out at the wide river. She can see no land, no people, only flowing water, and this seems to bring her comfort.

‘Have you no idea how dangerous this country is? If you’re unlucky enough to have been born with a cunt, you’ll be monitored wherever you go. Men control our vaginas; the state controls our wombs. You can try to lock up your body, but the government still owns the key. That’s just women’s fate.’ The woman’s eyes start to redden.

‘Do you mean that people who live on the river don’t get their residence permits checked?’ Mother asks.

‘Yes, because every day they’re in a different place. They become part of the floating population. In Guangdong they’re called the “egg families” because they live on boats that look like half eggshells and float from one town to the next.’

Meili thinks of her childhood on the banks of Dark Water River. Every day she’d watch boats moor at the jetty and offload cargos of bricks, tiles and lime. Sometimes a motorboat would draw up, and peasants in festive clothes would disembark and set off on pilgrimage to Nuwa Mountain. She never liked going near the river, especially after she learned that it flowed from Nuwa Cave and bestowed fertility on any woman who touched it.

The woman wearing crimson lipstick looks Meili in the eye. ‘There’s one place in China where you can live in complete freedom, though: Heaven Township. It’s in Guangdong Province. I worked there for a while. No one checks how many children you have. And it’s almost impossible to fall pregnant there.’

‘Not if you have a husband like mine!’ says Meili, thinking of how Kongzi insists on making love to her every night, leaving her feeling like a heap of tangled string.

‘No, the town’s air contains chemicals which kill men’s sperm. The newspapers call it pollution, but I wouldn’t go that far. The air has a slight tang to it, that’s all.’

‘Heaven Township, you say — where is it, exactly?’ Meili asks excitedly, as though hearing of a promised land, then glances down at Kongzi to check that he’s still asleep.

‘It’s near Foshan in the Pearl River Delta, just an hour from Guangzhou. It used to be a small village, but it has tripled in size in the last five years. It has a large lake in the middle called Womb Lake, and its streets are piled with mountains of foreign televisions and telephones, and electronic devices you never see in the countryside. The machines are brought in by the truckload. You work sitting by the lake, watching television, and get paid eight hundred yuan a week, with free food and lodging. There are children scampering about everywhere. No one comes to check your birth permits, or drag you off to a clinic for an IUD insertion.’

‘But you said it’s impossible to fall pregnant there, so how come there are so many children?’ Meili asks, tucking her hair inside the hood of her down jacket and wiping the snot from Nannan’s nose.

‘You have to inhale a lot of those chemicals before they can take effect. They’re called dioxins, apparently. The family planning officers there are very relaxed, because they know that however hard a man tries, he’s unlikely to get his wife pregnant.’

‘What a wonderful place it sounds!’ Meili feels wide awake now. She imagines herself sitting on a stool beside the lake, scrubbing vegetables, watching her children paddle in the shallow water, and seeing Kongzi return from teaching at the local school, wearing a suit and tie and gold-rimmed glasses.

‘It’s full of workshops that dismantle the electronic goods. It’s a Special Economic Zone now, like Shenzhen. But to reach it, you must travel through many large cities. If the police catch you, you’ll be slammed in a custody centre and booted back home.’

Meili pictures herself in Heaven Township again, sitting in a safe and peaceful yard, knitting quietly while inhaling deep breaths of the chemicals that prevent women conceiving. She doesn’t know how long it will take to travel from the fertile mountains of Nuwa to the sterile fields of Heaven Township, but at least she now has a sense of where happiness lies.

She closes her eyes and sees her mother’s jabbering mouth always admonishing her for wasting food, and her father’s cowardly soot-engrained face. She’s heard that after people work in the mines for a while, even their lungs turn black. Her brother is a coward, too. As a child, he was always too scared to go outside alone when he needed to piss in the night. Although Meili had to leave school when she was eight to help her grandmother in the fields, she still dreams of leading a modern life. She may be registered as a peasant, but she will do everything in her power to ensure that her children go to university and find work in a city. She is not untalented. She has perfect pitch, and learned the art of funeral wailing from her grandmother. At the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel, she’d sing ‘On the Fields of Hope’ every night, finishing on a high C that would receive rapturous applause. Even before she married, she was determined to achieve happiness and success, and avoid the monotonous peasant existence her parents have led. At another bend in the river, the boat’s engine splutters noisily. Nannan rouses from her sleep, crawls back onto Meili’s lap, rests her head on the hemp sack and returns to her dream.

When dawn breaks, Meili wakes from her doze and sees Nannan’s face bathed in the early rays of sun and the reflected glow from her red quilted jacket. The mosquitoes that buzzed noisily all night have left small bites on Nannan’s neck, but her face is as smooth and unblemished as an egg. Meili’s own dream slowly dissipates as the boat continues downstream. All she retains of it is a vague sensation of swimming as freely as a fish through the deep waters of Womb Lake.

KEYWORDS: river towns, stray dog, contraband, happiness, spring earth, civilisation, toes.

‘WHY WE LEAVING boat, Daddy?’ Nannan asks, waddling up to him.

Kongzi lifts her up with one arm and joins other passengers, laden with bags, across a rickety boat and onto the steps of the wharf. Following closely behind, Meili scans the crowd nervously, trying to hold back another wave of nausea. Instinctively she places her hands over her belly, feeling like a woman she saw in a television drama who concealed contraband drugs inside her body. The red backpack she has filled with biscuits, milk powder and dried sausages drags on her shoulders as she climbs the wharf’s one hundred stone steps, dodging out of the way of travellers who are scrambling down to catch the boat.

At the top of the wharf, Kongzi cranes his neck back to take a look at the town clinging to the side of the steep mountain, the black plastic bag swung over his shoulder scraping the ground. ‘So this is Sanxia,’ he says. ‘In a few months, the water level will rise 150 metres, and all of the old town will be flooded. Look, they’re pulling it down now, and will move everyone into those newer buildings higher up the slope.’

The air is thick with charcoal smoke and the scent of boiled corncobs. A stream of people jostles past. ‘Looking for a hotel?’ a man calls out. ‘See that barge down there? You can get a bed in it for just five yuan a night. You won’t find cheaper accommodation in the whole county.’

‘Should we trust him?’ Meili whispers to Kongzi, folding her arms over her belly, convinced that everyone is staring at it, especially the men wearing blue caps. ‘That man over there looks like a policeman. He might try to drag us to a custody centre.’

‘No, he looks like a tax collector to me,’ replies Kongzi. ‘And only large cities have custody centres. Sanxia is smaller than Hexi. Look, that department store is only two storeys high, and there are hardly any cars about. So stop worrying.’