how her great-grandmother slashed her wrist after giving birth to a fair-haired child, and wonders whether a tendency for suicide runs in her family . . . Her brother has been slaving down the mines seven days a week, leaving her father to look after the fields on the weekends, but between them they still can’t afford to pay for the imported drugs that have been prescribed to her mother to keep her cancer at bay. Her brother was considered to be the clever one, and Meili had to leave primary school early so that her parents could afford to send him to high school. But he failed his exams and never made it to university, so their sacrifices were in vain . . . If she dies in this graveyard, where will she be reincarnated next? All she knows is that if she does hang herself, she’ll never see her parents or Nannan again, and little Heaven will die as well . . . My baby is still growing inside me. I can’t let it die. I should at least wait until it’s safely born before I end my own life. Oh, this is all Kongzi’s fault! Why should I have to condemn myself to another reincarnation because of his sordid infidelity? Her muddled mind begins to clear. Yes, he’s the one who should be hanging himself from a tree, not me.
On a weed-covered grave below, two mice stare up at her, reminding her of the two children she has lost. If she gives birth to Heaven, she will leave Kongzi, save enough money to pay the family planning fine, then move back to Nuwa Village with her two daughters. But if she wants to make enough money to have a comfortable life, she must never fall pregnant again, and the best way of ensuring that is for Heaven to curl up tight and stay where it is. She must become an independent woman, a person who not only has a body, but also a mind capable of thought. She shouldn’t have to punish herself for her husband’s crimes. She can sense that there is a woman asleep inside her who is slowly coming to life. She stands up and wraps her arms around herself . . . Yes, Kongzi can go to hell! I’m twenty-eight today. My best years are still ahead of me. I’ll struggle on and make my way back to my place of birth, like the sturgeon that swim up the Yangtze. I won’t let you die, Heaven. Whatever the future holds, we will withstand it together . . .
Meili staggers out of the graveyard. The long road stretching through the darkness before her shimmers like a river of shattered ice.
KEYWORDS: wild grasses, urinal, escalator, complex characters, fast food, worm-like, missing girl.
FOUR MONTHS LATER, Meili, now with only nine fingers, is still living with Kongzi, but they’ve moved to a place further away from the hair salons of Hong Kong Road. Misfortunes always seem to come in pairs. The day Meili was hospitalised for blood poisoning when her unhealed stump became infected, she heard that her brother had got into a fight with the coal mine director over unpaid wages and had been arrested and sentenced to two years of reform through labour. Her family has sunk to rock bottom. Her mother’s cancer has returned and her father has had to give up his job in the mine to look after her. Meili is now her family’s only lifeline.
Meanwhile, Kongzi’s temporary position at Red Flag Primary has come to an end, and he’s taken up a permanent post as deputy head of the migrant school Nannan attends. In the evening, he puts on his glasses with an even greater air of authority as he sets about correcting homework. A few hours before he made his fateful visit to the Beautiful Foot Massage Parlour, he went online and read a telegram the Red Guards sent to Chairman Mao after they’d destroyed the Temple of Confucius. They told their leader that they had burned ten thousand ancient books, smashed six thousand engraved stone tablets and a thousand gravestones, and toppled the statue of ‘Kong the Second Son – that so-called Teacher of Ten Thousand Generations’, so that the radiance of Mao Zedong Thought could shine over the temple grounds once more. Kongzi told Meili that the telegram threw him into such a frenzied rage that he swallowed a full bottle of rice wine, and he has no