front step. His drenched clothes seem to be weighing him down, because though he’s not a heavy man, Meili is unable to lift him onto her back. She tries dragging him along the pavement, but his bare feet become bloody as they scrape against the concrete. The girls in the massage parlour stare mockingly at her through the window. Summoning all her energy, she grabs his hands, swings them over her shoulders and with a flick of her hips manages to shift him up onto her back. Like a farmer carrying a pig to market, she lugs him to the end of the street and hails a taxi home. It’s her birthday today. Tang wanted to invite her to a French restaurant in Foshan, but she persuaded him to take her for a simple dim sum lunch in Heaven instead. She knew Kongzi would forget that it’s her birthday, so she’d planned to tell him she wasn’t up to cooking supper, and suggest that they go to a Cantonese restaurant called Lured by the Fragrance, You Dismount your Horse. She thought she’d be brave and order dog hotpot, and ‘tiger and dragon fight to the death’, a local speciality of fried cat and snake meat which is believed to help rebalance the body’s yin and yang.
Back in the house, the room fills with a sickening stench as she removes his vomit-soaked clothes. When she pulls off his trousers, she sees his shrivelled penis is sheathed in a condom. She freezes in horror and her scalp tightens. Her first impulse is to chop off the penis or set fire to it. She screams and pounds his head and chest until his cries become an echo of her own.
Kongzi pushes her off, sits up and sees the condom lying on the ground. Sperm has escaped and formed a yellow stain on the white mat. Meili grabs her shoe-cutting knife and, as her mind returns to the nightclub boss who raped her, she shouts: ‘You depraved bastard! You ugly, festering lowlife! If you have any balls left, show them to me, come on, pull them out and let me chop them off!’ She raises the knife high in the air then swings it down straight onto her left hand, severing her entire index finger. Her blood splashes onto the mat near the pool of sperm. She drops the knife, flings the door open and rushes blindly out into the rain.
For an hour she walks round the lake in utter despair. Then, feeling that the sky is falling on her head and the earth crumbling beneath her feet, she makes up her mind to go to an empty graveyard and hang herself from a tree. I’ll never trust Kongzi again. The fraud! Going to work in a suit and tie, pretending to be a man of virtue . . . She sees a telephone booth and steps inside to shelter herself from the rain. The bloodied stump of her index finger hurts so much she’s tempted to chop off the whole hand. Listening to the rain smashing onto the plastic roof, she picks up the receiver and considers phoning Weiwei, or Tang, but every man seems tainted to her now. She puts the receiver to her ear and imagines Suya picking up on the other end. Do you hear the rain here in Heaven Township, Suya? It’s pelting down. You celebrated my birthday with me, and the next day you vanished into thin air. You too were attacked and defiled. But I set fire to the man who raped me, to avenge that crime, and all the crimes that other men committed against you. You were right – this is no country for women. It’s pointless forgiving men and expecting them to change. They never do. They’re filthy scum, every one of them. Where are you now? Can I come and stay with you? I’ve nowhere left to go . . . Noticing a figure standing outside waiting to use the phone, she puts down the receiver and leaves, concealing her left hand in the crook of her right arm. The rain washes the blood from her wound. What hope is there left? she mutters as she wanders down the deserted street. She feels she’s been born into the wrong time and the wrong place, and is descending into a spiral of misery where the only escape is death.
By the time she reaches the graveyard, the rain has stopped. Through tear-filled eyes, she stares