acrid vapours drift into the workshop causing everyone’s eyes and throat to burn. As dusk approaches, all the machines and bamboo baskets of sorted components are dragged back into the workshop and stacked up into tall piles. Meili sorts the red, white, blue, black, green and grey plastic casings at her feet into separate hemp sacks, then goes to help Old Shao label some white boxes.
At this time every evening, in the final minutes before they clock off, the women at the metal table stop chatting and concentrate on their work, their hands darting back and forth, tweezing out tiny square, circular, two-pronged, three-pronged components as though they were plucking feathers from a duck. Through the haze of blue fumes, the hot circuit boards in their hands look like miniature demolition sites.
‘KONGZI, I THINK my belly’s contracting! My God, I’m bleeding! Quick, take me to Dr Tao’s clinic.’ Meili holds her bloodstained hand up to the light then climbs out of the bed. The clinic is in a village a few kilometres away. Xiu gave birth to her baby son there and recommended it to her. Meili visited it two months ago, by which time Heaven had been inside her belly for a year and a half. Dr Tao examined her and said that she only looked about eight months pregnant, and that the fetus probably needed more time in the womb. Since then, she’s suffered occasional cramps, but this is the first time that Heaven has shown any sign of wanting to emerge.
‘All right, let’s go!’ Kongzi says, raising his head sleepily from the pillow. While surfing the Web in an internet cafe late last night, he was delighted to learn that the China Institute of Confucian Studies held a conference in Beijing recently to celebrate its sixth anniversary. He has learned to type, and plans to post an article online recommending that study of the Confucian-inspired Qing Dynasty text, Standards for being a Good Pupil and Child, be reintroduced into the school curriculum.
The sky is still dark. Kongzi opens the front door. The air outside is slightly cooler and tastes poisonous.
‘We’ll have to leave Nannan here,’ Meili says. ‘Take five hundred yuan from my handbag. Look, my belly’s going tight again.’
‘Today is August the 18th. The date Chairman Mao addressed a million Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. How could little Heaven choose such a rotten day to be born?’
‘Stop blabbering. Is there enough diesel in your water-delivery van?’ Meili leans against the wall waiting for a contraction to subside, then she pulls on a short-sleeved dress and picks up the plastic bag she’s prepared for the birth. A few months ago, Kongzi removed the outboard motor from their crumbling boat and sold it for eighty yuan, and with a further eight hundred yuan he’d saved, bought a small van, which is in fact a rusty wreck that he found lying in the back of a car-repair workshop. It has no bonnet, bumpers or windscreen. When he drives it through town, it resembles the tattered coat of a homeless beggar, with its oil pipes, exhaust pipes and electric cables fluttering behind it in the wind.
The infant spirit watches Father, in the darkness before dawn four years ago, drive through narrow lanes, with a cigarette in his mouth and goggles over his eyes. Mother is sitting beside him groaning with pain. As her temperature soars, she unbuttons her shirt, while in her womb, which is hotter still, the fetus writhes. Father’s cigarette smoke pours into Mother’s lungs and bloodstream, then flows through the umbilical cord into the fetus’s brain. At last they arrive at the clinic. Father jumps out and bangs on Dr Tao’s steel security door. ‘Who’s there?’ a voice eventually replies. ‘Don’t you know how to use a doorbell?’
Mother lies on the doctor’s bed, hunched up in pain as the contractions become more intense. When the cervix is fully dilated, the fetus descends but its head becomes stuck between Mother’s pelvis. ‘I can see its hair!’ Dr Tao exclaims. ‘One more push and it will be out . . .’ Mother grits her teeth and pushes with all her strength. The fetus thrashes about, and its neck becomes so constricted that for a few seconds no oxygen reaches its brain. ‘Oh, the pain . . .’ Mother screams. Fighting for its life, the fetus grips Mother’s pelvic bone and propels itself back into the womb. Dr Tao shines