Ma Jian: The Dark Road

Meili isn’t smiling any more. The wreck has completely disintegrated, and she’s lying in the water, her long black hair extending behind her like a boat. Slowly, her body sinks below the surface, and her hair sinks too and wriggles about her face like a shoal of fish.

As Mother’s body descends towards the riverbed, the infant spirit breaks free and begins to retrace its long journey backwards through three incarnations, travelling upstream along the many rivers and waterways towards its final place of rest.

Holding his child close to his chest, Kongzi climbs the bank and heads out into a grey expanse of waste that seems to stretch to the horizon. He treads across corroded circuit boards that poke up from the ground like excavated tiles, across graphic cards stripped of their memory chips, and over the copper and silver shells of mobile phones. He crunches over Intel microchips and bullet-shaped audio connectors, then, his legs shaking from exhaustion, he struggles up a hill of stripped scanner motherboards and lifts the motionless child up to the first light of dawn.