memory of what happened next, or how he ended up lying on the steps of the massage parlour. The girls in the parlour told Meili that he asked for a ‘fast food’ service. When they’d finished, he said he didn’t have any money on him, so they had no choice but to throw him onto the street. Meili had concealed a hammer in her jacket, and was planning to smash the parlour up, but when she saw the girls in the back room lying asleep on camp beds, she felt sorry for them and changed her mind. She imagined all the days Suya spent on a bed in a similar, sour-smelling room, being treated like a human urinal as one nameless man after another pulled down his trousers and emptied himself into her.
She’s had little time to think about her injured hand. When she returned home from the graveyard, she picked up her severed finger and wrapped it in a cloth, telling Kongzi, ‘I’ll keep it until we go home, then bury it in my parents’ garden where I too will be buried one day. A body must enter its grave complete, after all.’ After the turn of the year, her spirits lifted, and she felt that at last her run of misery had come to an end. The sight of Kongzi consumed by his work, reading and marking late into the night, has allowed her to recapture the pride she used to feel as the schoolteacher’s wife in Kong Village. Although the migrant school is as illegal as the children who attend it, and his salary is miserable, Nannan is now able to study there free of charge. Their lives are back on track. Meili has asked Cha Na to run her children’s shop, and has started work as general manager for Hugo Electronics. She no longer allows Tang to hold her hand. While she was in hospital, he visited her every day and warned Kongzi that if he ever dared sleep with a prostitute again, he’d have him arrested. He lent Meili a laptop so that she could surf the internet from her hospital bed, and when he appointed her general manager, he not only gave her half the shares in the company, he set up its bank account in her name. She knows that she can’t give him anything in return other than friendship and support.
Tang has rented an office in a smart block near a components warehouse in the centre of town. Since Meili first stepped on the escalator that leads to the first-floor office, her joy has been tinged with anxiety. She is not afraid that the company won’t make money. The success of her children’s shop has convinced her that her business instincts are good. She has helped to create a website which has attracted great interest from traders in the north, and has researched the latest developments in electronic machinery. Last month, she happened to hear that computers made in China will soon be installed with CD drives that can record as well as play, so she immediately slashed the price of their soon-to-be-defunct drives and managed to get rid of them in one day. Her anxiety stems from insecurity over her peasant background. She often feels like a scruffy partridge that has wheedled its way into a modern chicken pen. She has bought herself many clothes, but is never sure which ones to wear. (Fortunately, when she’s in the office, little Heaven curls up so tightly that her belly shrinks to half its size.) She is self-conscious about her appearance, and also her lack of culture. When Tang showed her his extensive collection of CDs and foreign novels, she felt like an ignorant child, and was determined to fill some of the huge gaps in her knowledge. She’s bought pirated discs of Beethoven, Puccini, Gershwin and Miles Davis which she listens to through earphones late at night, and is reading her way through translated editions of Les Misérables,A Christmas Carol, Light in August and A Brief History of Time which were selling for half price at a government-run bookstore. She feels that there’s so much to discover, she has no right to remain ignorant. Every day she tries to increase her vocabulary, but when she comes across text on the internet from Hong Kong or Taiwan which is written in complex characters, she still has to ask her colleagues for help. When everyone has left the office at the end of the