wandered from state to state for thirteen years, an exile in his own country. Now two thousand years later, I’m also on the run, but unlike him, I’m not free to travel across the land, so all I can do is drift down the Yangtze.’
At noon, before Nannan has woken from her morning nap, Meili goes to the tiny galley area in the stern, lights the kerosene stove and puts a pan of water on to boil. Beside her is a mound of spinach leaves she cleaned earlier. Whenever she needs to wash vegetables or clothes, she simply leans overboard and scoops up a bucket of water. Thrilled to have a place of their own at last, she has already scrubbed the boat from stern to bow, torn off the mouldy bitumen canopy and replaced it with new tarpaulin. Now when they sleep in the cabin at night, they’re no longer disturbed by a musty smell of rot. Meili has also tied a rope from Nannan’s waist to the cabin frame, short enough to prevent her leaning overboard to dip her hands in the water. But Meili can’t stop the boat rocking. Although she feels more free on the water than she did on the land, she knows it will take time for her to become used to this fluid substance that adapts its form to the contours of the earth and exists in constant flux. The river is a moving landscape which flows in directions she can’t always determine.
After becoming pregnant with Happiness, the earth no longer felt solid underfoot. Not even their house or the dugout Kongzi created beneath Nannan’s bed could provide a safe refuge. The land belongs to the government. Whether it’s rented or borrowed, every patch of soil in this country is controlled by the state; no citizen can own a single grain. If she’d stayed planted in the village like a maize stalk waiting to be trampled on, she too might have had her belly injected with disinfectant like Yuanyuan, or been bundled into a cart a few weeks after childbirth like her neighbour Fang, milk leaking from her bare breasts. Ever since they left the village, her muscles have clenched with fear as soon as her feet touch the ground. Although the barge hotel was on the river, it was in effect an extension of the town. But this wavering fishing boat has liberated her. She will learn to drive it and survive on the little they possess. She told Kongzi that in Guangdong Province there’s a place called Heaven Township where people can have as many children as they wish, making sure, of course, not to tell him that its polluted air renders men sterile. Kongzi said that this was just the kind of enlightened place where Happiness should be born.
‘Cooking lunch?’ Meili calls out to the pregnant woman in the houseboat moored a few metres away. ‘It smells good.’
The woman is sitting at the bow, her toes like chicken claws gripping the edge of the boat. She and her husband already have a baby, and two daughters who are old enough to go into Sanxia and buy provisions on their own. Meili glanced at the baby when the woman held it over the river to defecate, and saw that it was a girl. The woman’s boat is twice the size of Meili’s. It has a tall control room and a shorter cabin behind with a bitumen-coated felt roof held down with bricks. When the boat is stacked with polystyrene panels the husband hauls to construction sites, it looks like a sparkling iceberg. While he’s away on a trip, the woman and her daughters often wander around the wharf, hawking home-made snacks, shaking plastic bags of eggs boiled in tea, spiced tofu and marinated broad beans below the windows of buses waiting to board the ferry.
‘It’s imported Thai rice,’ the woman calls back to Meili. ‘I bought it in the supermarket. What are you having?’
‘Fried celery and some reheated chicken soup.’
‘You shouldn’t drink hot liquids in the middle of the day,’ says the woman, hoisting up a bundle of garlic shoots she’s been soaking in the river. ‘And with a belly that size, you should move more slowly around the boat.’
‘Let those soak a little longer if you want to wash off the chemicals. I planted half a field of garlic shoots last year and had to spray pesticides on them twice a week to keep the insects away.’