day, she remains at her desk flicking through journals and magazines and talking quietly to little Heaven. Since Kongzi begged for forgiveness and vowed on bended knees never to visit a massage parlour again, she has felt that it’s now safe for Heaven to be born. She knows Kongzi will be disappointed to discover the baby is a girl, but is confident that as he’s in such disgrace, he wouldn’t dare attempt to give the baby away. She’s told Heaven that it can come out as soon as it wants. Everything is ready.
Their new home is directly opposite the illegal migrant school. It’s an ugly tin shack, but at least it’s watertight and windproof. In the yard outside is a barren durian tree whose bare branches are hung with damp laundry and bags of washing powder. Nannan found a dusty felt flower on the road the other day and has stuck it on the end of a branch. If it were an osmanthus tree, Meili would almost feel she were back in her parents’ house. She has discovered from the red journal that osmanthus was also Suya’s favourite flower. The shack and school are surrounded on three sides by abandoned fields fenced with the redundant glass interiors of dismantled televisions. Ten years ago, before the farmers turned to the e-waste business, these were well-irrigated rice fields, but apart from a few scattered plots cultivated with celery or taro, they are now overgrown with wild grasses and morning glories. Heaven Township can be seen to the north, its squat houses dwarfed by ancient trees. The air smells mostly of manure and grass, and the chemical odours are much less pronounced.
The migrant school is in a fertiliser warehouse at the other end of Meili’s washing line. The rent is cheap, as the area is low-lying and liable to flood. Last year in the rainy season, waters from Womb Lake flowed through here towards the sea, laden with timber and burnt plastic. Meili hopes that after one more year of hard work, they can move to an apartment in the centre of town, bring her parents to live with them and pay for her mother to be treated in Heaven Hospital. Her cancer has spread, and the rural hospitals are unable to perform the complicated operation she needs. The warehouse is only just large enough to seat the school’s fifty pupils. If government inspectors turn up, the children escape through the back door and hide in the fields. During the nationwide clampdown on illegal schools last year, the teachers put the students on a rented bus and drove them into the countryside, giving lessons as they went.
At eight in the morning, the children stroll into the warehouse singing a Hong Kong pop song: ‘Neither fragrant like a flower, nor tall like a tree, I’m just a blade of grass that people walk past. Nobody knows it’s me . . .’ Meili drops her mobile phone into her bag, looks into the mirror hanging from the durian tree, applies a coat of lipstick, then steps into her kitten-heeled shoes and heads off to work up the road that runs along the river. It’s Spring Festival next week, and before the holiday starts, she wants to sell off the company’s excess stock of transistors, inductors and resistors. A small factory in Hubei has become an important client. The manager is one of the Wang Suyas with whom she formed an online friendship. This woman always sends cash payment before consignments are dispatched, and has even promised to travel down to Heaven with her five-year-old daughter to pay Meili a visit.
Through the morning mist rising from the river, Meili sees a Bureau of Industry and Commerce van parked further ahead. She turns on her heels, goes to a nearby kiosk and tries to phone the headmaster of the migrant school, Mr Sun, but he’s teaching an elementary maths class and has switched off his mobile phone. She phones Kongzi, but he’s asleep, so she pulls off her shoes, returns to the school as swiftly as she can and tells Mr Sun to take the children out into the fields and hide them in the irrigation channels. As the children file out, she pushes the school bags, exercise books and lunch boxes into a corner and covers them with a black sheet. Then she goes into the yard and rakes out a pile of plastic granules so that the inspectors assume this is an e-waste warehouse. When