banks of Dark Water River. Every day she’d watch boats moor at the jetty and offload cargos of bricks, tiles and lime. Sometimes a motorboat would draw up, and peasants in festive clothes would disembark and set off on pilgrimage to Nuwa Mountain. She never liked going near the river, especially after she learned that it flowed from Nuwa Cave and bestowed fertility on any woman who touched it.
The woman wearing crimson lipstick looks Meili in the eye. ‘There’s one place in China where you can live in complete freedom, though: Heaven Township. It’s in Guangdong Province. I worked there for a while. No one checks how many children you have. And it’s almost impossible to fall pregnant there.’
‘Not if you have a husband like mine!’ says Meili, thinking of how Kongzi insists on making love to her every night, leaving her feeling like a heap of tangled string.
‘No, the town’s air contains chemicals which kill men’s sperm. The newspapers call it pollution, but I wouldn’t go that far. The air has a slight tang to it, that’s all.’
‘Heaven Township, you say – where is it, exactly?’ Meili asks excitedly, as though hearing of a promised land, then glances down at Kongzi to check that he’s still asleep.
‘It’s near Foshan in the Pearl River Delta, just an hour from Guangzhou. It used to be a small village, but it has tripled in size in the last five years. It has a large lake in the middle called Womb Lake, and its streets are piled with mountains of foreign televisions and telephones, and electronic devices you never see in the countryside. The machines are brought in by the truckload. You work sitting by the lake, watching television, and get paid eight hundred yuan a week, with free food and lodging. There are children scampering about everywhere. No one comes to check your birth permits, or drag you off to a clinic for an IUD insertion.’
‘But you said it’s impossible to fall pregnant there, so how come there are so many children?’ Meili asks, tucking her hair inside the hood of her down jacket and wiping the snot from Nannan’s nose.
‘You have to inhale a lot of those chemicals before they can take effect. They’re called dioxins, apparently. The family planning officers there are very relaxed, because they know that however hard a man tries, he’s unlikely to get his wife pregnant.’
‘What a wonderful place it sounds!’ Meili feels wide awake now. She imagines herself sitting on a stool beside the lake, scrubbing vegetables, watching her children paddle in the shallow water, and seeing Kongzi return from teaching at the local school, wearing a suit and tie and gold-rimmed glasses.
‘It’s full of workshops that dismantle the electronic goods. It’s a Special Economic Zone now, like Shenzhen. But to reach it, you must travel through many large cities. If the police catch you, you’ll be slammed in a custody centre and booted back home.’
Meili pictures herself in Heaven Township again, sitting in a safe and peaceful yard, knitting quietly while inhaling deep breaths of the chemicals that prevent women conceiving. She doesn’t know how long it will take to travel from the fertile mountains of Nuwa to the sterile fields of Heaven Township, but at least she now has a sense of where happiness lies.
She closes her eyes and sees her mother’s jabbering mouth always admonishing her for wasting food, and her father’s cowardly soot-engrained face. She’s heard that after people work in the mines for a while, even their lungs turn black. Her brother is a coward, too. As a child, he was always too scared to go outside alone when he needed to piss in the night. Although Meili had to leave school when she was eight to help her grandmother in the fields, she still dreams of leading a modern life. She may be registered as a peasant, but she will do everything in her power to ensure that her children go to university and find work in a city. She is not untalented. She has perfect pitch, and learned the art of funeral wailing from her grandmother. At the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel, she’d sing ‘On the Fields of Hope’ every night, finishing on a high C that would receive rapturous applause. Even before she married, she was determined to achieve happiness and success, and avoid the monotonous peasant existence her parents have led. At another bend in the river, the boat’s engine splutters noisily. Nannan rouses from