back, I promise I’ll never get angry with you again or make you recite Tang poems or the Analects. Then glancing down he sees, to his amazement, Nannan’s plastic doll, its blue eyes staring up at him through the murky water, its flesh-coloured limbs only faintly visible beneath.
Don’t pick it up, he hears Meili say to him. It’s not Nannan’s doll. Her one had a red dress.
The chemicals in the water would have dissolved the dress long ago.
But, don’t you remember – she lost the doll when we moved into the shack, not out here by the lake.
It could have fallen into a channel and been swept down by the current. The rivers flowing out of the lake are choked with refuse, so it’s not surprising that it should end up floating by the shore.
You sound like a professional corpse fisher! Listen, Kongzi. That doll is called a Barbie Doll. My shop sells hundreds of them. There are probably more Barbie Dolls in this world than there are real people. You can find them scattered over every rubbish dump in this town. It’s filthy. Just leave it where it is.
Kongzi reaches into the water and fishes out the doll by its leg. When he sees that the red paint on its mouth is unchipped, he flings the doll onto the mound behind.
After he returns to the path, a girl who looks about three years older than Nannan calls out, ‘Would you like to buy a CD drive? We’ve got Sony and Samsung.’ She’s standing at the end of a road that leads to the market. Kongzi knows that round the corner is a shop that sells sugar cane, dried tangerine peel and ground ginger.
He walks up to her, takes the leaflet she offers him, then passes her the photograph of Nannan and says, ‘Have you seen this girl? She has a large burn scar on her left foot.’
‘No, I haven’t seen her, but I have a dress like that.’ The last light of the sun is reflected in her dark eyes. The small shed behind her is surrounded by stacks of computer drives.
‘Have you worn it recently?’ asks Kongzi, remembering someone telling him he’d seen Nannan near the lake a couple of days ago. He catches a chemical smell as sweet as osmanthus drifting from the trees or from the crushed components on the ground. His mind turns to Meili, who for the first four days after Nannan’s disappearance wandered through Foshan holding a missing-person placard. When she returned to the shack in the evening, she’d slump onto the bed and chant: ‘She has two rotten molars and a burn scar on her left foot . . . She likes milk and sweets . . . When I took her to the baby clinic for her first jabs, she soiled her trousers and I had to wash her in the fountain outside . . . When she was learning to walk, she’d struggle up onto her feet hugging her big toy rabbit, take three steps, then topple to the ground, still holding her toy tightly in her arms . . .’ But last night, Meili didn’t return home.
He wonders what he will do after he phones his parents again tomorrow and is told once more that Nannan hasn’t turned up. A shiver runs down his spine. She hasn’t gone back to Kong Village, she hasn’t drowned herself in the lake, so she must have been kidnapped and sold to a peasant in the mountains. He often reads about the police rescuing abducted women who’ve been sold to men in the remote countryside. But Nannan is only eleven – too young to be anyone’s wife. She must have been sold into the sex trade, then. The papers often report on police efforts to crack prostitution rings. Yesterday he read about three teachers who pimped their pupils to corrupt officials, personally escorting the teenage girls to the officials’ private homes.
As always after the sun sinks out of view, the sky becomes bathed in reflected light, the lake turns gold and the town shimmers like burnished glass. When they lived in the metal hut on stilts, Nannan would come to this part of the lake, wade in up to her knees and fling things in the water. She flung Kongzi’s straw hat in here, a thermos mug she’d burnt her lips on, a satchel with a broken strap, a pair of shoes that pinched her toes and a battery-operated car that wouldn’t stop