infant spirit curled up safely in her womb, protected from the storm, while she herself has no safe place to hide. She wonders whether she’ll find herself bound to the steel table of an abortion room again. Heaven Township may be the safest place in this country, but it’s still under the Party’s control, with bright red family planning slogans festooned across every street. The rain streaming down her face feels like tepid broth.
In the evening, unable to contain her impatience, Meili kneels down behind the table and slips a Dynotrex tablet into her mouth and a sanitary towel into her knickers. Then she pours Kongzi a large mug of rice wine, sits next to Nannan and watches her trace over characters in a calligraphy book: mountain, rock, sun, moon. Meili turns the page and says, ‘Look, you have to find a friend for each of these characters: woman, mouth, birth, grain, bird, axe, fire, ten, horse, son, wood, sheep, middle. So, see which of them you can pair up.’
‘Woman and son make a good pair,’ Nannan says. Her eyes drift towards the television set. Meili quickly reaches over and turns it off.
After Kongzi slumps onto the bed in a drunken heap, Meili starts prodding her belly, trying to see if the tablet is taking effect. According to the leaflet, she should experience cramping, bleeding, and within a few hours see ‘products of conception appear on the sanitary towel like a lump of red congee’. She is certain she doesn’t want the baby. Indeed, her desire not to have any more children was the sole reason she came to this town. She wants to get on with her life, achieve something and become financially independent. Before she reaches thirty, she wants to open her own shop and make enough money to eat out in restaurants, live in a brick house, sleep on a sprung mattress and send Nannan to university. She’s a modern woman, and should have the right not only to be a mother, but also to enjoy some of life’s pleasures. The weather will be getting hot soon, and the metal hut will become infested with mosquitoes. This is no place to bring a baby into the world. She sits on a plastic stool and sees Nannan hiding beneath the table, playing with a Mickey Mouse ball.
‘Get back on your chair and finish writing your diary,’ Meili says, her nerves on edge. Remembering suddenly that she brought some electric plugs back from work today, she places them in the wok, adds some river water and lights the stove.
‘The ball hit my hand and broke my nail . . .’ Nannan mumbles to herself as she draws a picture in her diary.
Might as well stay busy while I wait for the pill to take effect, Meili says to herself, popping some haw flakes into her mouth, hoping that they too will help encourage a miscarriage. The work isn’t too difficult. All she has to do is wait for the plugs to melt, then pick out from the black gloop the brass prongs which the workshop manager will sell tomorrow for three yuan a jin. Once Nannan is asleep and her work is finished, she scrubs the wok, pours half the bottle of castor oil into it, fries an egg and swallows it, then mops up the oil with a dry piece of bread. By midnight, she’s so tired she can hardly keep her eyes open. She turns on the television and sees the Qing Dynasty Empress Cixi tuck into a lavish banquet, then she picks up Nannan’s diary and reads today’s entry: ‘Mummy told me to brush my teeth. I told her my gums hurt, but she looked at me with angry eyes, so I had to brush them. Red-Dress Doll was very naughty today, but after I gave her one of my angry looks, she sat quietly at my feet and let me flick her head . . .’
KEYWORDS: gritted teeth, sprung mattress, tiled roof, bathed in glory, abortion, Workers’ Day Procession.
AFTER TWO TABLETS failed to bring about a miscarriage, Meili was worried that if she changed her mind and decided to continue with the pregnancy, the drugs might damage the baby’s brain, so she didn’t dare take any more. When her belly became visibly enlarged, Kongzi was so happy, he stopped playing mahjong with the neighbours in the yard, and instead stays indoors all evening, serving Meili hot meals and cups of tea. Meili feels stifled by