village is surrounded by beautiful mountains,’ says the woman wearing crimson lipstick. ‘The soil is so fertile, anything will grow. But the family planning officers make life there unbearable. They grab women in the middle of the night. They took me once and locked me up in an army office for nine days. I was with nineteen women and children, in a room that was just twelve metres square. We didn’t even have space to lie down. There was a four-year-old girl there who they’d taken hostage to force her mother to return from Shanghai. One poor woman had just had an abortion and was still bleeding. But on her second night, Officer Zheng and his colleague pulled her out into the corridor and raped her.’
‘It wasn’t so bad in our village – the officers demolished a few houses and made arrests, but they never raped anyone,’ Meili says, afraid to talk openly about the true nature of the brutal crackdown. She glances over to the migrant workers beside her. The boiled frogs they’re eating remind her of tiny fetuses.
‘I detest that Officer Zheng,’ the woman continues. ‘I fell pregnant again last year. He promised he’d make sure I could keep the child, but I still ended up being dragged to the clinic for an abortion. He’s the reason I left the village. The filthy bastard!’
‘Did you tell your husband about it?’ Meili asks, suspecting that the officer forced her to sleep with him.
‘What for? He wouldn’t have had the balls to beat him up – he would’ve just beaten me instead. Take my advice: never rely on a husband for your happiness. The government persecute men, then men persecute their wives in return. And what do the wives do? If they have a child, they slap it to let off steam. If not, they drown themselves or swallow bottles of pesticide.’
Meili thinks of the women who leave the village to find work in the south and return a year later, laden with cash. Yuanyuan told her that women who can’t find jobs in factories work as prostitutes in hair salons. Meili doesn’t dare ask the woman whether she sleeps with men for money, but remembers her saying she could earn a year’s salary in a day, so presumes that she must.
The conversation unsettles Meili and brings to her mind the time a man almost tricked her into sleeping with him when she was fifteen. She looks into the night sky and suddenly becomes aware of the infant spirit animating her fetus, making it quiver and sink lower in her womb. Hunching her shoulders and squeezing her thighs together, she whispers, ‘Don’t be afraid, little one. Just stay where you are.’
That night, Mother looks into the darkness, as though wanting to converse with the infant spirit. Moonlight falls on the narrow bridge of her nose. Her mouth appears to be smiling. A woman wearing crimson lipstick is saying to her, ‘Take care in train stations, town squares, hotels. Agents prowl those places. If they see a women they suspect of being illegally pregnant, they pounce on her and drag her to a clinic for an abortion. They’re paid fifty yuan for each woman they bring in. And be especially careful in the big cities. Peasants aren’t welcome there. The authorities think we give foreign tourists a bad impression, so they round us up, lock us in custody centres and charge us an “urban beautification tax”, which is really just a fine for entering the city. The only way to avoid arrest is to live on the water.’
‘What do you mean, live on the water?’ Mother stares out at the wide river. She can see no land, no people, only flowing water, and this seems to bring her comfort.
‘Have you no idea how dangerous this country is? If you’re unlucky enough to have been born with a cunt, you’ll be monitored wherever you go. Men control our vaginas; the state controls our wombs. You can try to lock up your body, but the government still owns the key. That’s just women’s fate.’ The woman’s eyes start to redden.
‘Do you mean that people who live on the river don’t get their residence permits checked?’ Mother asks.
‘Yes, because every day they’re in a different place. They become part of the floating population. In Guangdong they’re called the “egg families” because they live on boats that look like half eggshells and float from one town to the next.’