The Dark Road (45 page)

After Kongzi pours himself a glass of beer, Nannan challenges him to an arm wrestle. She grasps his fist and forces it onto the table. Kongzi retaliates, slamming hers down with greater force. ‘Calm down, Kongzi,’ Meili says, ‘and serve out this steamed pork.’

‘I thought you’d given up meat,’ Kongzi says.

‘I had, but I think I should eat some for the baby’s sake. The pickles and raw vegetables I’ve been living on this week can’t have provided much nutrition.’ Meili downloaded a vegetarian diet drawn up by a Taiwanese nutritionist, hoping it would help her lose weight.

‘I don’t like meat, either, Mum,’ Nannan whines. ‘I want a toffee apple.’

‘Why didn’t we ever take a photograph of Waterborn?’ Meili asks Kongzi. ‘Who did she look like?’

‘She had my face shape and your features,’ Kongzi says. He fumbles in his pockets for his cigarettes, then remembers he’s given up, and wraps his hands around his glass of beer instead.

‘No, Waterborn was my sister, so she must have looked like me,’ says Nannan. ‘I remember when you came back after giving her away, Daddy. You said: “Don’t be sad, Nannan. From now on, I’ll only love you.”’

‘Nonsense, don’t lie: I’d never say such a thing!’

‘I heard you say it countless times!’ Meili retorts. ‘Kongzi, there’s something I’ve never told you before: Waterborn was born with a sixth finger on her left hand. Sister Mao chopped it off in the delivery room.’

‘So that’s why her hand was bandaged!’ Kongzi says. ‘You told me Sister Mao accidentally cut her with the forceps.’

‘Dad, why did you call me Nannan? It sounds like “boy-boy”. My classmates said you chose the name because you wished you’d had a son.’

‘No, what I’ve always wanted is a son and a daughter: one of each.’

‘Don’t lie to me. You two are always arguing about wanting a son. Now I’m older I understand. It’s because of me that those family planning officers killed Happiness and that you gave Waterborn away. The government only allows parents to have one child living with them.’

‘That may be the rule, Nannan,’ Kongzi says. ‘But still, your mother and I are doing our best to make sure you have a little sibling to keep you company once we’re gone.’

‘If you wanted me to have a sibling, why did you sell Waterborn?’ A fly darts off Nannan’s hand and settles on the table.

‘Don’t touch the fly – it’s filthy!’ Meili says to Kongzi, as he’s about to swat it, then she turns to Nannan and says: ‘Your father, he – he just wasn’t thinking straight that day. He and I are working hard, saving up money so that you can go to university when you’re older. Kongzi, I’m still hungry. Order a yellow croaker steamed with salted vegetables.’

‘No, you’re saving up money to buy little Heaven a residence permit,’ Nannan says.

‘Yes, that too,’ Kongzi says. ‘We want our family to have a bright future, Nannan. That’s why we came here: to make money and give you a better life . . . A yellow croaker, please, waitress, and . . . mm, let’s see, a “chicken of the immortals” as well.’ Kongzi closes the menu and pushes it to the centre of the table.

‘No, you came here to escape the family planning officers. All my classmates’ parents are on the run from them. I understand everything now. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have left the village. If I hadn’t been born, Happiness would be alive today. I hate myself.’ Nannan stands up and leaves the table.

‘
Mere mortal that I am, I can’t join you in the sky. The Heavens weep in sympathy, but are powerless to end my thousand autumns of longing
. . .’ Kongzi warbles, then thanks the waitress as she puts another dish onto the table.

‘Stop singing, Kongzi,’ Meili says. ‘Listen, Nannan is growing up. Her body’s starting to develop, and she’s become very sensitive. We must be careful what we say in front of her. You must stop making her recite the
Three Character Classic
and
Standards for Being a Good Pupil and Child
. You’re putting too much pressure on her.’ She rests her elbows on the table and rubs her throbbing temples. Last night she took Tang and six members of their staff to the Princess Karaoke Bar to celebrate his birthday, and she had far too much to drink.

‘I read Nannan’s diary,’ Kongzi confesses. ‘She wrote that she doesn’t have a home to go back to and that she’s like a stream flowing to nowhere.’

‘The other day she asked me what “despair” means. I said it’s when you feel there’s no hope.’

‘Don’t talk to her about matters you don’t understand. The Confucian Doctrine of the Mean says that we should neither cling to life nor throw it away, and should avoid extreme emotions of joy and despair. We should learn to be happy with our lot.’

‘You just want an easy life. Where’s your ambition gone? When my brother’s released from the labour camp, I’m going to ask him to come and work for my company.’ Meili looks down at her left hand and rubs the shiny scar tissue on the stump of her index finger. The nails of the four remaining fingers are painted with sparkling red varnish.

Kongzi picks up a slice of pork smothered in sticky rice. ‘But your brother has no skills. What would he do?’

‘I didn’t have any skills either, but I still managed to help set up a company and become general manager, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, but you and he have different personalities,’ Kongzi says, pouring himself some more beer. The restaurant is only half full. On the next table a man wearing a wig and a smart grey suit is serving himself and his elegant guest some vintage Five Grain Liquor.

‘Did Nannan go to the toilet?’ Meili says. ‘This toffee apple should be eaten hot.’ She looks up at the laminated menu of Hunanese food on the wall:
CHILLI
-
STUFFED PEPPERS
,
HOT
-
SOUR DOG MEAT
,
CRISPY DUCK IN SESAME SAUCE
. . . then stares at the goldfish swimming about in a dirty fish tank on the counter, next to a ceramic fortune cat that is continually raising and lowering its left paw.

‘How I’d love to eat one of my grandmother’s sticky rice cakes right now,’ Mother says, gazing into her pocket mirror as she retouches her lipstick, ‘or one of those deep-fried sesame twirls she used to make . . . I wasn’t always this confident. All those years you made me travel across the country with you, barefoot and pregnant, my personality was crushed. It’s only here, in this electronic dump of a town, that I’ve finally gained a sense of direction. Once Heaven is born, I want to open a chain of shops across the country, then buy ourselves a Foshan apartment and resident permits so that Nannan can go to a government middle school. My parents have no income now. They hired someone to help out on the fields, but the price of fertilisers and seeds has risen so much that they didn’t make any profit. The five thousand yuan I sent them this year kept them afloat, but it wasn’t enough to cover all my mother’s medical bills. Who knows how much more treatment she’ll need?’

When they have both eaten their fill, the conversation peters out. Father cleans his teeth with a toothpick while Mother checks the messages on her phone. The infant spirit watches the fetus shift position inside Mother’s womb. Nannan still hasn’t returned to the table.

‘Where has Nannan gone to?’ Mother says. She and Father look over their shoulders at the dark doorway.

‘Look, she’s over there, by the lake, under the willows . . .’ Father says.

‘Stop kicking me, little one – a family planning officer might see you!’ Mother says, rubbing her belly.

‘Don’t speak to the fetus like that – you’ll frighten it to death,’ Father says, wiping his glasses with a paper napkin.

‘Fetus? The baby’s four and a half years old. By the time it comes out it will be able to recite the
Analects
to you.’

KEYWORDS:
Spring Festival, ghostly figures, firecrackers, Sacred Father of the Sky, stone baby, yellow mud.

SEEING MEILI STRUGGLE
to stuff dumplings with her maimed hand, Kongzi puts down his chopsticks and offers to take over. The table is already laden with dishes of sliced pork tongue, braised trotters, stir-fried chilli prawns and drunken chicken.

‘I wish we still kept ducks, but the Heaven rivers are just too polluted,’ Meili says. ‘Those birds you reared in our last place tasted foul. Do you remember how wonderful it was back on the sand island when we could eat roast duck every day?’

‘Yes, it doesn’t feel right not being able to kill our own bird at Spring Festival.’

‘Don’t say the word “kill” on the eve of Chinese New Year. It’ll bring us bad luck. Here, have some of this Five Grain Liquor my assistant gave me. Let’s hurry up with these dumplings, or the food will get cold. Nannan, turn down the television and join us at the table.’

‘What about that sweet garlic you pickled?’ Kongzi says. ‘I’d love to try some.’

The room is clouded with cigarette and incense smoke. On a side table, three fat incense sticks are propped up in a bowl of rice, in front of three small paper tombstones on which Kongzi has inscribed the names of his father and his father’s parents. Around the bowl are offerings of cigarettes, boiled sweets and king prawns. Nannan ignores Meili and stays on her small bed, smiling and frowning at the televised Spring Festival Gala. She’s wearing the red nylon jacket and white scarf Meili bought her yesterday. Nannan had wanted a purple jacket but Meili managed to persuade her, after a heated argument, that red suited her better. On the studio stage, a Han Chinese woman is belting out a love song while girls in Tibetan and Uighur costumes dance around her in a circle. Nannan is only eleven years old, but this morning she got her first period. Meili was sitting in the yard plucking hairs from the pigs’ trotters when Nannan rushed out from the toilet pit with blood running down her leg. Meili presumed she’d cut herself, but when she removed her stained skirt and underwear, she discovered she was menstruating. She placed plastic bags and towels over her bed and made her lie down. She told her not to worry, that this is what happens to every girl when they become a woman. But it was no use. Nannan was inconsolable. She burst into tears and said she didn’t want to be a woman, and that she hated Meili for making her a girl. Kongzi went out to sweep the yard, came back to make Nannan a cup of brown-sugar tea and then went out again to buy her a hot-water bottle. Before the television gala started this evening, she burst into tears again, saying she wished little Heaven would come out so that she could go away and die. Afraid that Nannan might do something rash, Kongzi has decided to stay in all night. Every couple of hours, Meili gives her a glass of water and a fresh sanitary towel.

Meili looks at the dumplings Kongzi has made. Each one is long and thin, just like him.

‘Oh yes, I haven’t told you yet,’ he says. ‘I bumped into the manager of the Hunan restaurant the other day, and we fell into conversation. When I told him my name, he said a guy went to his restaurant some time ago, asking for us. A tall guy, well spoken, with round glasses. Do you think it could have been Weiwei – you know, that man who lost his mother?’

‘When did this happen?’ Meili asks, her heart pounding, certain that it was her who Weiwei wanted to see.

‘Two years ago, just after Spring Festival.’

That was around the time my shop was ransacked by the inspectors, Meili thinks to herself as she drops the stuffed dumplings into a pot of boiling water. And when I had lunch at the Hunan restaurant with Tang that day, I saw a man who looked just like Weiwei. No wonder my eye kept twitching.

‘Daddy, what is happiness?’ Nannan asks, after watching a man in a white suit sing ‘
Your happiness is my joy
. . .’

‘Happiness is when you forget yourself,’ Meili says, watching the dumplings bob to the surface of the boiling water, holding a slotted spoon in mid-air.

‘Happiness, my daughter, is you coming back from school with a good mark. It’s the nation at peace, our family united.’

‘Here, come and have your dumplings, Nannan,’ Meili says, spooning some onto a plate for her. ‘And I’ll pour out some vinegar for you to dip them in.’

‘I hate dumplings. Mum, I want to go home.’ Nannan leans back against the small headrest. Beside her pillow is an opened packet of rice cakes.

‘But this is your home, and your bed,’ Kongzi says, pointing to the large collection of dolls lying by her feet. Cha Na has given Nannan almost every doll that’s sold in the shop, but Nannan’s favourite is still the plastic doll with the red dress that Kongzi gave her many years ago, even though it’s old and dirty, and the red paint on its mouth has chipped. To her great sadness, however, she hasn’t seen it since they moved into this tin shack.

‘No, what I mean is I want to go back to Kong Village,’ Nannan says. ‘This place doesn’t feel like home. I miss Grandma.’ On her crumb-strewn quilt is a copy of the school textbook,
Cultivating a Moral Character and Forging a Successful Life
, and a spiral-bound songbook. Since the beginning of winter, Nannan has become moody and withdrawn. In a lunch break last week, she pushed Lulu onto the ground, and since then none of the children in her class will play with her.

‘You were only two when we left – how can you miss her?’ Meili says, as she and Kongzi stare at the television screen and tuck into the hot dumplings.

‘Besides, your home is wherever your parents are, so right now, this is your home,’ Kongzi says. He takes a sip of Five Grain Liquor and smiles contentedly. As well as being deputy head of the migrant school, he’s also been given a two-year contract to work as a supply teacher at Red Flag Primary, thanks to Tang putting in a word for him with the Education Department.

‘I can’t remember what Grandma looks like but you told me she was always nice to me,’ Nannan says. ‘Why didn’t you bring any photographs of her, or of our old house? I want to phone Grandma and Grandpa and wish them Happy New Year.’

Nannan still hasn’t been told that Kongzi’s father has died. As soon as she mentions him, the contented smile vanishes from his face.