‘Did you read about the child-trafficking gang that was busted in Guangzhou last week? The men hung around train stations, tricked young girls into boarding their vans, then sold them to brothels in neighbouring cities.’
‘The police said they won’t open a case on Nannan until she’s been missing for a month,’ Kongzi says, his anger rising again. ‘But by that time, she might have been carted off to a nightclub a thousand kilometres away, or sold as a wife to a peasant in some mountainous backwater. Well, I’m not budging from here. I’ll stay on these steps until the police agree to help find her.’
Tang’s phone rings. ‘Thanks for returning my call, Director Wu,’ he says. ‘Yes, it’s my friend’s daughter . . . Eleven years old . . . We’ve just spoken to them – I’m outside the station right now. I asked if we could see Sergeant Zhang, but they wouldn’t let us. I know he’s a good friend of your brother’s, so I was wondering if you could give him a call and persuade him to open a missing person’s case and send out a search party . . . Wonderful. Thank you so much.’ Tang hangs up and says, ‘That’s promising! Sergeant Zhang is second in command at that station. I’ll go and get us something to drink. You two wait here.’
‘I’ll wait here, but Kongzi – you go to the bus station,’ Meili says, placing her mobile phone on her lap, yearning for it to ring with news. She still can’t accept that Nannan has disappeared, that this is really happening to her. Apart from her four-week absence, she and Nannan have never spent a day apart . . . If I lose Nannan, it will be like losing an arm, she says to herself. No, it will be worse than that, much worse. If I lose her, I will die. As this thought sinks in, she almost passes out, then her head begins to throb as she remembers the sound of Nannan wailing as a baby. When Nannan was three months old, she cried inconsolably for two days. Meili couldn’t work out what the problem was. At last, her neighbour Fang came round, checked Nannan’s ears, mouth and bottom, then lifted the folds of her neck and discovered that they’d become raw and infected from drops of breast milk that had collected inside.
Tang returns with bottles of Coca-Cola, but Meili doesn’t want any. She remembers her father giving her a bottle for Spring Festival one year, and not wanting to be so selfish as to drink it all herself, she fed half of it to Nannan in small spoonfuls. Nannan was only five months old at the time, and ended up with severe diarrhoea.
‘Go on, have a sip,’ says Tang, kneeling down beside her. ‘Don’t cry, Meili. I’m sure Nannan’s just wandered off to play by herself and will turn up at home this evening. I have noticed that the papers have been full of stories about missing children recently, though. Last week, I read that the police stopped a coach travelling from Guangxi Province and discovered twenty-eight baby girls in the boot, tied up in black plastic bags. They were all under three months old. The police suspected they were going to be sold to restaurants in Foshan. One of the poor babies had suffocated to death.’
‘Nannan is eleven years old – no restaurant would want to make soup out of her. It’s far more likely that she’s been abducted and sold to a brothel. Will you search all the nightclubs round here? She wouldn’t dare take a bus to another city. Since I was caught in Wuhan, she’s known how dangerous it is for peasants to enter cities and large towns.’
‘Yes, it is dangerous. Did you read about that young migrant called Sun Zhigang? He had a college education, a respectable job. He was stopped by the police on the streets of Guangzhou, taken to a Custody and Repatriation Centre for not having the right documents, and ended up being beaten to death. It’s all over the internet.’
‘She’s too young to be locked up in a custody centre. Oh God, why is it that as soon as we leave the polluted backwaters, something terrible happens? Are we migrants forbidden to breathe clean air?’ She stares across the road at the long red wall and the blue sky above that appear to be pressed against each other as uncomfortably as two lovers who’ve