The Seventh Day (15 page)

By the time I returned to the city from my father’s village, Li Yuezhen was no more. As she was crossing the road in the evening, she was knocked off her feet by a speeding BMW, and as she lay sprawled on the road she was run over first by a truck and then by a delivery van. In the three short days that I was away, I had lost the mother figure so dear to me.

Hao Qiangsheng was overwhelmed by shock and grief, and his daughter was in transit back from the United States. When I arrived at their house, Buddhist priests were conducting a service to ease the passage of the departed soul. Incense swirled around the room and a yellow cloth lay on the table, with fruit and cakes laid out on top, along with a tablet inscribed with Li Yuezhen’s name. Several priests stood in front of the table with their eyes half closed, chanting a sutra in a constant hum, like that of mosquitoes. Hao Qiangsheng sat off to one side with a dull look in his eyes, and I sat down next to him.

The priests perhaps knew that Li Yuezhen had been planning to emigrate to the United States, for after reciting the sutra they told Hao that during the service Li Yuezhen’s soul had clambered over his knees and over his shoulders, up and into heaven. The fee for the funeral service was three thousand yuan, they said, but with the outlay of another five hundred yuan they could ensure that Li Yuezhen would be reincarnated in a new body in the United States. Hao Qiangsheng nodded woodenly, so the priests closed their eyes once more and resumed their recitation. This time the reading was short, and though I couldn’t make out most of the words I did hear references to America—not the regular Chinese term for it, but the English abbreviation, “U.S.A.” The priests said that Li Yuezhen had already begun the journey to U.S.A. and would be there shortly, even faster than if she traveled on a Boeing jet.

Hao Qiangsheng didn’t seem to register my arrival, and I had been sitting there for quite some time before he realized who I was. Now he burst into tears and grasped my hand. “Yang Fei,” he cried, “you’ve got to go and see your mom!”

Three days before her death—on the morning I went to the village to look for my father, in other words—Li Yuezhen had stumbled upon a scandal. As she crossed a bridge on her way back home from the market, she saw a number of human fetuses floating in the river below. At first she thought they were dead fish, but couldn’t understand why they seemed to have arms and legs. Wondering if her eyes were playing tricks on her, she asked a couple of young people nearby to come over. They said it didn’t look like fish, but like babies. When Li Yuezhen hurried down the steps to the riverside, she could see that they were right. Tiny babies were floating downstream amid a tangle of sticks and leaves, and soon several more babies emerged from the shadows underneath the bridge and bobbed on the sunlit surface. As she strained to make them out, Li Yuezhen stumbled over an obstacle underfoot. She looked down to find three fetuses snagged on the bank.

Li Yuezhen felt it her duty to report this find. Instead of going home, she proceeded directly to the offices of the local newspaper, her basket of groceries under her arm. The guard at the entrance, noting her unpreposse
ssing appearance and suspecting she might be coming to lodge a complaint against the authorities, told her that she needed to go to the Letters and Visits Office of the city government. So she waited outside, and managed to intercept two reporters just arriving for work. They rushed to the scene, by which time both bridge and bank were crowded with people and some were using bamboo poles to maneuver the dead babies ashore.

In the course of that morning the two reporters and a dozen or so locals found twenty-seven babies, both infants and fetuses. The eight infants wore, around their feet, tags on which the name of the city hospital was printed; the nineteen fetuses had no such identifica
tion. After taking photos with their mobile phones, the reporters paid a visit to the hospital. They were received warmly by the hospital director, who assumed they had come to interview him regarding new hospital procedures designed to alleviate the difficulty and expense of securing medical treatment. One look at the photos of the dead babies, and the director’s smile disappeared. He announced that he had to head off to an important meeting immediately, and he called in a deputy to deal with the reporters. After seeing the photos, the deputy director informed the reporters that he had a meeting at the public health department; he turned them over to the hospital’s office manager. After glancing testily at the photos, the office manager identified the foot tags. These infants, he said, had died after failing to respond to treatment; their parents had fled because they couldn’t afford to pay the medical expenses. Patients’ families were always trying to get out of paying their bills, he groused, generating losses of over a million yuan for the hospital every year. The nineteen fetuses, without tags, had been aborted at the end of the second trimester in order to comply with population-control guidelines. Population control is a national policy, after all, he reminded them condescend
ingly. The twenty-seven babies were medical refuse, he declared, and the hospital had done nothing wrong: trash has to be dumped, after all.

A directive came down from above, and the newspaper pulled the report that the two journalists had filed. But they wouldn’t take this lying down: they posted the story and the photos on the Internet. Public opinion was outraged, and on social media criticism hailed down on our city authorities like a spray of bullets. Only now did the hospital admit it had made a mistake, conceding that it had not done a good job of disposing of medical refuse and saying it had already punished those responsible. For the hospital to repeatedly refer to the dead babies as “medical refuse” enraged the netizens, and in the face of even more virulent commentary the media spokesperson for the city government issued a statement that the twenty-seven medical-refuse objects would be disposed of appropriately. They would be treated as human and cremated, and their ashes would then be buried.

I went to the morgue to pay my respects to Li Yuezhen. The reception room was lined on all sides with wreaths of flowers, a white ribbon inscribed “In deep mourning for Liu Xincheng” pinned to each wreath. I didn’t know who Liu Xincheng was, but with so many people dropping off wreaths, this person clearly had to be either of great wealth or of high rank. I did not see Li Yuezhen, and the rows of wreaths somehow made the reception room look bare and empty. I began to wonder if I had come to the wrong place.

At this point I noticed a small chamber off to one side. When I entered its doorway, I found that a large white cloth had been laid on the floor, and the uneven contours of the cloth made me suspect there was a body underneath. I squatted down and pulled the cloth aside: there was Li Yuezhen. She lay in a white dress with a crowd of dead babies around her, as though she were their mother.

Tears streamed down my face. This woman who had mothered me during my formative years lay there peacefully, her face still maintaining its familiar air. I gazed forlornly at her now-frozen expression and inwardly cried “Mom!” as I wiped away my tears.

Late that night, a sinkhole suddenly opened up. Hospital staff on duty at the time, along with some patients and local residents, heard an almighty roar, and people rushed out in panic, thinking there had been an earthquake, to discover that the morgue had been sucked down a huge hole. The sudden appearance of this gaping pit inspired widespread panic. Fearful of being trapped indoors, patients and local residents crowded onto the streets; only those critically ill remained in their sickbeds, leaving their fate to the hand of providence.

The evacuees, though still shaken, began to feel grateful to Old Man Heaven, saying he had a good eye, letting the morgue collapse but sparing the taller buildings nearby—if that sinkhole had moved a few hundred feet to one side or the other, a big building would have collapsed and the death toll would surely be horrendous. “Oh, thank you, Lord!” people mumbled, and one tearful old man added, “What could collapse did, and what couldn’t collapse didn’t. Old Man Heaven is really on our side.”

Panic, after spreading the whole night through, began to recede with the light of day. The city government attributed the sinkhole—m
easured as a hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep—to excessive pumping of groundwater. Five inspectors were lowered into the hole by ropes, and an hour later they emerged to report that the interior of the morgue was still intact, but the walls and ceiling had developed cracks.

Spectators arrived in throngs. They stood next to where the morgue had once been and admired the hole. “It’s practically a perfect circle,” they marveled, “as though drawn in advance with a compass! Even old wells are not this round.”

It was a couple of days before people remembered that Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies had been laid out in the morgue, but the inspectors said they had not found a single corpse. Li Yuezhen and the dead babies had mysteriously disappeared.

A reporter interviewed the hospital staff member responsible for cleaning the morgue, and he said that when he left work that afternoon they were all still lying in that chamber. Had they been cremated? the reporter asked. The staff member said no, that the funeral parlor did not operate in the evening and no cremations would have been done. The reporter then went to the hospital office, and the people there could not explain how Li Yuezhen and the babies had vanished. It’s just too peculiar, they said: surely corpses can’t climb out of a hole and slip away by themselves.

Hao Xia, just off the plane and in the throes both of grief and jet lag, came with her father to the hospital, hoping for a last glimpse of her mother, but the staff had to tell her they did not know where she was.

News of the mysterious disappearance of Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies spread throughout the city and appeared on the front pages of several websites. As interest grew, rumors flew, and on the Internet people freely speculated that there must be some awful secret lying behind all this. Although the local media kept silent, having been ordered to refrain from any reporting, media outlets based elsewhere were eager to make the most of this story, sending their reporters in by plane and train and car, and getting all set to provide saturation coverage.