‘You love Nannan, so there’s no reason you can’t learn to love Waterborn as well. I’m sick of your male chauvinism. No wonder Confucius wasn’t welcomed during his travels – jabbering on about male superiority all the time!’ Meili stares out at the heat haze above the pond, and at the large banyan tree on a hill far behind that is blotting out the setting sun. Then she goes to the stove and puts some water on to boil.
‘She needs the operation,’ Kongzi continues. ‘The doctor said she might have a brain tumour.’
Meili wonders if the IUD did indeed become embedded in Waterborn’s brain, and is the cause for all the problems. She decides to get Waterborn’s head X-rayed, no matter how much it costs.
Kongzi pulls a cigarette from his pocket and sniffs it longingly. ‘It’s nothing to do with her being a girl. We just don’t have the resources to look after her.’
‘I don’t trust that doctor. We should get a second opinion. If she does have a tumour, we’ll have it removed.’ Meili has rolled her white vest up to her neck. When she bends over, her bare breasts hang down like two long gourds.
‘Huh – women: long hair, small brains,’ Kongzi mutters under his breath. He turns to Nannan. ‘You haven’t recited the
Three Character Classic
for days. Come on, give me the first lines.’
‘“People at birth. Good by nature. Mother of Mencius. Chose good home. Son didn’t study. Broke loom’s shuttle . . .”’ Nannan walks towards him, swinging her hips in time with the chant.
‘Stop – you missed at least six lines,’ Kongzi says, then blows out a long stream of air in a useless attempt to cool himself. The hills surrounding this swampy marsh block off all the wind, so in summer the heat is unbearable.
‘Ugh, your mouth farted, Dad,’ Nannan says, catching a whiff of Kongzi’s rancid breath. She turns and runs off into the reeds to look for grasshoppers and cockroaches to feed to the ducks.
‘If Confucius came back to life now and discovered that it’s illegal to set up unofficial schools, he’d die of despair.’ Kongzi still dreams of returning to teaching. Sweat is streaming down his suntanned neck onto his pale chest. He’s built a small porch for the hut out of bamboo and plastic sheeting, and laid plantain leaves on the ground underneath, hoping it would provide a refuge from the heat. At midday, it does offer some shade, but when the sun shines obliquely in the late afternoon it turns into a heat trap.
Waterborn is lying naked between Meili’s breasts, panting for breath like a wawa fish freshly scooped from a river. When the sun’s rays hit her red swollen eyes, she turns her head and wails. Nannan rushes up and says, ‘Stop crying, you naughty girl!’ then, just as Kongzi used to do to her, she raises a palm and shouts, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll hit you!’
‘Waterborn will get heatstroke if we don’t cool her down,’ Meili says. ‘I can’t bathe her in that filthy creek. Let’s take some towels and sail to the Xi River.’
‘You need a permit to sail during a flood. If the river police caught us, we’d get a huge fine.’ The truth is, Kongzi sailed along the Xi River all morning without being stopped once. He just doesn’t want to have to go out on the boat again. He looks at Meili and says, ‘If we don’t pay off the 4,000-yuan fine for Waterborn’s birth soon, we’ll be in deep trouble.’
‘But now that she’s born, we’re safe,’ Meili replies. Seeing that the water in the pan hasn’t come to the boil yet, she goes to crouch in the shade of a willow and pushes her nipple into Waterborn’s mouth. ‘The officers are rolling in money – they won’t bother trekking down here just to collect our miserable cash.’
‘Didn’t you hear about that woman called Cui who lives at the edge of the village? When she couldn’t pay the illegal birth fine, the officers drowned her six-month-old baby in a pigs’ water trough. It’s true – I promise.’
‘That was years ago. You weren’t afraid of the officers when I was pregnant. If you’re so terrified of them now, why don’t you dig yourself a deep hole under the hut and hide from them?’
‘Confucius lay in a deep hole for two thousand years, but the Communists still yanked him out in the end. I tell you, these days, there’s nowhere left to hide.’
‘You were desperate to have a second child, and now, because she’s a girl, you want to get rid of her. Has a dog eaten your conscience?’ Meili goes back to the stove, drops some dried pulses into the boiling water and kicks an empty liquor box lying at her feet.
‘I don’t care what you say – I’m still determined to have a son . . . We must lie low next week. Dexian leaders are coming to inspect the flood zone, and they’re bound to bring family planning officials with them.’ This morning, the village Party Secretary paid Kongzi thirty yuan to take the tramp who loiters outside the village restaurant downriver and drop him in a neighbouring county. He also asked Kongzi to stay away during the leaders’ visit, as he’ll need to assure them that there are no illegal migrants in the village.
Nannan comes running up with a can of insect killer, points the nozzle at Kongzi and says, ‘Waterborn’s my sister! You can’t sell her!’
‘The ground’s burning hot, Nannan, put those on,’ Kongzi says, pointing at the two, unmatched flip-flops he found in the floodwater today. The sun starts to sink below the distant mountain and the ducks on the pond begin to squawk.
‘See, you
are
able to feel compassion for a daughter!’ Meili says with a sarcastic sneer. She pulls off her wet vest and turns off the stove. Then she sits down beneath the porch, squeezes both nipples, and crams the one that produces most milk into Waterborn’s mouth. ‘Don’t touch those filthy flip-flops, Nannan,’ she says. ‘After I sell the eggs at the market tomorrow, I’ll buy you a new pair.’
‘If we give Waterborn to the Welfare Office, we’ll get four thousand yuan to pay her illegal birth fine,’ Kongzi says.
‘That’s not giving, it’s selling! I tell you, Kongzi, if you try to get rid of her, I’ll leave you and I’ll never come back . . . Look how bad her heat rash has become. You said you’d buy some powder for it in Dexian.’ Meili wipes the sweat from Waterborn’s face. The blood-filled bulge on her crown is now as large as a shallot, and its purple stain has spread down over her forehead and right eye. In the sunset’s rosy light, her skin has turned the colour of a rotten mango. She lifts her tiny hands and rests them on the breast she’s sucking.
‘We’ve hardly any money left. If we don’t sell her, what will we live on?’ Kongzi says, staring with bloodshot eyes at the stubborn flood. He once said that his aim in life was to own a motorbike, a fridge, a rice cooker and a colour television. But now, as he looks at the filthy waters and the new baby, this goal seems like a distant dream.
As the last strip of pale light at the horizon is pressed into the earth, the infant spirit sees Waterborn open her eyes. Father goes into the bamboo hut to light a mosquito coil.
‘I’m fed up with this useless junk you keep bringing back, Kongzi,’ Mother says, stroking Waterborn’s cheek. ‘Look: scraps of timber, plastic buckets, broken shoes. This is supposed to be a home, not a rubbish tip. If we were back in the village now, I would have spent the last month confined to my bed, with nutritious food brought to me on a tray. But since the baby was born, you haven’t bothered to make one nice meal for me.’
‘You’re right. You should be drinking chicken soup to build up your milk supply. I’ve no money to buy a chicken, but I’ll make some duck stew for you instead. Once we give Waterborn away we’ll be able to eat whatever we want.’
‘Even if I were dying of hunger and my milk had run dry, I wouldn’t let you take her from me!’ Mother says, squashing a mosquito that’s sucking Waterborn’s arm. ‘Come on. Let’s get on the boat and sail to the Xi River for some fresh air. My one-month confinement would end tomorrow. I want to wash myself with clean water and soap.’
‘The doctor said she’s not mentally handicapped – she just has something inside her brain that needs to be removed,’ Father says into the dark.
The light from the lamp inside the hut splays through the bamboo wall onto Mother’s face. Smells of soy sauce and spring onion briefly veil the stench of duck shit drifting from the enclosure. At night, everything melts into the darkness and becomes equal: water and earth, father and mother, ducks and disposable nappies. On that night many years ago, Waterborn stares at the black sky, or at her strange birthplace, and with all the strength that her four-week-old life can muster, lets out a piercing cry.
‘She needs her nappy changed,’ Mother says.
‘We’ve run out of clean water,’ Father replies, rubbing an unlit cigarette.
‘I want to cuddle Waterborn, like you cuddle Mummy,’ Nannan says to Father, skipping about restlessly.
Along the distant public road, a few lights twinkle in the concrete houses while closer by the fluorescent strips of the village restaurant and night stalls shine through the dust raised by passing trucks.
KEYWORDS:
win–win situation, egg lady, amino acids, orphanage, fermented hair, motherwort.
NAKED FROM THE
waist up, Meili sits on a concrete brick beneath the porch and stares out at the enclosure. In the midday sun, the pond and the white ducks look blindingly bright. A small bird darting across the creek faints from the heat and falls into the water with a loud splash. The sky and earth seem paralysed by the sun’s burning rays.
The dead fish Kongzi scooped from the floodwater and laid out to dry were washed away in a torrential downpour last week. Kongzi and Meili have bought thirty new ducklings and cordoned off a section of the pond to protect them from the adult ducks. With any luck, they’ll be able to sell them next month for two hundred yuan. Waterborn is eight weeks old now, and still does nothing all day but eat and sleep. Meili is afraid to put her down for naps inside the hut in case she’s attacked by stray dogs, so she carries her around all day wrapped to her chest with a long cloth, as is the custom in Guangdong Province. Now, all she wants is to find a job and start making some good money. There’s an agricultural market in a town four kilometres downstream, and she’s considering going there to ask if she can hire a stall. The feeling of emptiness in her flat belly is reassuring. If family planning officers were to catch her now and insert an IUD into her or even sterilise her, she wouldn’t put up a fight.
The two sisters, Gu and Hua, who rent out this plot to them, turn up after lunch. They drop by once a week to collect rent, buy ducks from Meili and pick fruit from the lychee trees. Gu is tall and thin, and is wearing a conical straw hat. Hua, shorter and stockier, is holding a dainty black parasol.
‘Nannan, bring the beer crate over here for the aunties to sit on,’ Meili calls out, picking up the paper fan that Kongzi made.
‘No need,’ says Hua, as she and her sister squeeze into the remaining shade beneath the porch. ‘Look how the baby’s grown! She must be a good feeder.’
‘You don’t mind if I don’t put on a vest, do you? It’s just too hot today.’ The sweat streaming down Meili’s cleavage has soaked Waterborn’s face and the piece of cloth in which she’s wrapped.
‘Your ducks are selling well in the village. They taste just like the ones I used to eat as a child.’ From her smooth pale hands, one can tell that Hua has never worked on the fields.
‘We feed them a pure grain diet, and don’t let them touch the dead fish that wash up on the beach.’ Meili’s heart always beats faster when she lies. ‘Give the aunties some fizzy orange,’ she calls out to Nannan, who’s standing naked beside the pond, spraying water onto an ant nest.
‘Yes, your baby’s a sturdy little thing, but look how her feet curl inwards,’ says Gu, sneering under her conical hat. ‘I heard your husband say that there might be something wrong with her.’
‘Think about your future, Meili,’ says Hua. ‘Bringing up a handicapped child is expensive, and exhausting too. All that money and effort, and you won’t even be able to marry her off in the end!’
Meili crosses her legs, rests a foot on a burnt tin can and pushes her nipple back into Waterborn’s mouth. ‘What does your husband do, Hua?’ she asks.
‘He works at the Radiance Hair Factory. I believe your husband’s delivered some stock to them.’
‘What do they do with the hair?’ Meili asks, coiling her own hair into a bun then securing it with a twig.
‘If it’s long, they make wigs out of it. If it’s short, they ferment it.’ The two sisters are now sitting down on the beer crate, cooling themselves with the paper fans Nannan has just made.
‘Ferment it? To make shampoo?’ Meili closes her eyes briefly and imagines sailing upstream to a clean stretch of the Xi River, then jumping in and washing herself with soap. Although according to custom she is allowed to bathe now that her confinement is over, she still wouldn’t dare enter the filthy creek. Kongzi brings back bottles of clean river water from his trips, but never enough to wash more than her hands and face.
‘See that brand of soy sauce you have there?’ says Hua, pointing her fan at the bottle. ‘It’s made from fermented hair. Hair is amazing stuff: it’s full of nutritious protein and amino acids, and it never rots. A corpse’s hair can survive thousands of years.’
Waterborn frowns nervously. She has very little hair on her scalp, and small scratches on her eyelids and forehead. Although she’s in the shade, she doesn’t dare open her eyes. Her damp face glistens like a peeled lychee.
‘I’ve heard that parents in the village mutilate their babies then rent them out to illegal gangs,’ Meili blurts, unable to restrain her curiosity.
‘Nonsense!’ exclaims Hua, the gold wedding ring glinting on her chubby finger. ‘Only a couple of families have done that. They may have nice houses now, but no one will speak to them. They’ve ruined the reputation of the village.’
‘She’s got your ears, I see,’ says Gu, ‘and your upward-slanting eyes.’
‘Thank goodness the family planning officers are relaxed here, or I would have got into deep trouble,’ Meili says.
‘They used to be much stricter,’ Hua replies. ‘When the Fujian couple’s third daughter was just three days old, the officers came down here and drowned her in the pond.’