‘I’ve got some delicious steamed pork with sticky rice and hot-sour noodles for you.’
‘But I only want fish and chocolate.’
Meili pulls the table over to the bed, opens the cartons she brought back from the restaurant, empties the contents into two bowls and calls out to Kongzi. ‘Come inside and eat . . . Are you still sulking about your sister’s baby? Don’t worry, his name won’t be entered in the Kong Family Register. And anyway, she can’t be the only Kong in China who’s had a child with a foreigner. You should learn to move with the times.’
‘Mum, how come your baby still hasn’t come out?’ Nannan asks, swaying from side to side as she tucks into the food.
‘Perhaps it’s afraid it will be as unlucky as Happiness was, and be strangled before it takes its first breath.’
‘When I grow up I want to live in a country that doesn’t kill babies.’
‘Well, if I make enough money, you can go and study abroad when you’re eighteen,’ Meili says. ‘Look, even your little green caterpillars know they need to find the right place to live. When we’re all tucked up in bed, they’ll climb out of the cup, crawl over to that nice bush out there, weave themselves into chrysalids, then ten days later they’ll turn into butterflies and fly away.’
‘If I lie down on this bed long enough, will I turn into a boy?’ Nannan asks.
‘It’s not so bad being a girl. When you grow up you can wear earrings like mine, and necklaces and nice long dresses.’
‘Mum, Daddy said that after Heaven is born we can go home. You’ll have a son and a daughter, and everyone will be happy.’
‘But we don’t have a home to go back to,’ Meili says. ‘That’s the price we had to pay to bring Heaven into the world.’ Meili feels a sudden sense of pride that for three years, her belly has given Heaven a safe refuge. She wants to blurt out that Heaven is a girl, but stops herself. During the day, she pushes Heaven to the side so that it hugs her hips, making her bump much less visible.
After Nannan falls asleep, Meili pours herself a glass of beer and lies down on the bed. A man on the television sings, ‘Let the moonlight bring you peace, let the sunlight bring you joy . . .’ and is then abruptly interrupted by an advert for Wahaha children’s sausages. She switches off the television, lies in the dark, and suddenly sees an image of Weiwei’s tortoiseshell glasses. That encounter happened years ago. How come her thoughts still return to it? All he did was stroke her in the dark. She remembers the sudden downpour that fell that night as they lay in the cabin, and the sound of the rain battering against the canopy, then forming a swishing pool above her that crashed onto the stern when the boat rocked to the side. But she knows that memory can’t be right. The canopy always leaked, so if it had been raining, water would have dripped down the rusty pipes of the cabin’s frame and seeped across the wooden deck all the way to her thighs . . . In her dream, she sees a banana tree tilt under the weight of its heavy fruit. She runs towards it and dissolves into a swarm of butterflies. She enters a desert cave, climbs up a sand dune and hears a voice whisper, ‘You’ve returned to your place of birth . . .’ Then she raises her head and sees herself looming above like a steel tower, her iron legs planted firmly in the ground and her vagina arching through the blue sky like a rainbow.
KEYWORDS: deep well, foreign blood, index finger, telephone booth, pink blossom, tiger and dragon, paper women.
AS MEILI IS about to kick off her high-heeled shoes after returning home from a long day at the shop, Cha Na rushes in and says: ‘I’ve just heard that Kongzi’s lying blind drunk outside the Beautiful Foot Massage Parlour. You’d better go and rescue him. Nannan can spend the night with us.’ Meili grabs an umbrella and heads for Hong Kong Street where, sure enough, Kongzi is lying conked out in the rain below the massage parlour’s entrance, his head resting on the