‘Drink, drink!’ his scalp and bony shoulders gleaming under the strip light. His fingernails are black and broken from scavenging the rubbish dump. He and his wife have three daughters and a four-month-old son.
Kongzi has fried some chicken wings and Meili has made a salad of wild wood ear fungus. Smells of garlic and sesame oil drift from the men’s faces as they tuck into the food. A gaggle of children run up, grab some chicken wings, then go to chase each other along the river’s edge. Chen arrives in his boat, tethers it to a rock and climbs the sandy beach. ‘So you still manage to remember birthdays on this island!’ he says to Kongzi, clapping his hands. ‘Ha! We haven’t remembered our kids’ birthdays for years.’ He puts a bag of deep-fried meatballs onto the wooden crate. When he laughs, exposing his black and yellow teeth, he looks like a monkey.
‘My daughter and I both have birthdays in November, so I never forget hers, and we always end up celebrating them together,’ Kongzi replies.
Meili and the women are sitting beside them on cardboard boxes, eating rice and braised tofu. The smell of the duck stew simmering on the gas stove outside the shelter makes the breeze feel a little less cold.
‘Have some more, Xixi,’ Meili says, tapping the bowl of tofu with her chopsticks. ‘You’re eating for two, now. And try some of this liver. It’s full of vitamins.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ Xixi says, buttoning up her angora jerkin and rubbing her small bump. She turns to Yiping and asks, ‘So, when’s your one plopping out?’
‘Not for another four months. But look, my belly’s already so big I can’t see my legs any more. Dai said our padded quilts are too hot for this town. He wants us to go into the mountains and see if we can sell them there.’ Yiping is sitting cross-legged on a mat. With her large belly bulging from her tiny frame, she looks like a sweet potato freshly pulled from the ground.
‘Wait until your baby’s born before you leave,’ says Bo’s wife, a scruffy woman called Juru. ‘You can give birth in the backstreet clinic behind the Family Planning Centre. The midwife only charges three hundred yuan.’ Juru pulls out her breast from under her shirt and stuffs it into her baby’s mouth. When Meili visited her shelter she was shocked by the sodden, mouldy straw on the ground, and advised Juru, for the sake of her baby’s health, to replace it more frequently.
‘Yes, if you set off now, the authorities might arrest you and give you a forced abortion,’ Meili says. ‘Dai should forget about selling quilts and try to find work on the rubbish dump. I’m thinking of buying a hundred more ducks and building a large pen on the beach. I reckon I could make ten thousand yuan a year from a flock that size.’ Meili feels that now that she no longer has to worry about falling pregnant, she can concentrate on building a comfortable life for themselves here.
‘Admit it – you’ve had an IUD fitted, haven’t you?’ Yiping says in the thick mountain accent Meili finds hard to understand.
‘No, no,’ Meili replies, glancing nervously at Kongzi. ‘I considered it, but then realised that if I wanted another child I’d have to bribe a nurse a hundred yuan to remove it.’
‘I’m so stupid,’ Yiping laughs. ‘All I’m good for is making babies. First time I saw a condom, I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might be a piece of tripe, so I plopped it into a soup and ate it!’
‘I wouldn’t dare let anyone put an IUD inside me,’ says Xixi. ‘A neighbour back in our village tried to remove one from his wife. He stuck his hand inside her and groped around for hours, but couldn’t find it. In the end, he got so frustrated he exploded her womb.’ Xixi cringes at the memory, then spits a shard of chicken bone onto the ground.
‘Exploded it?’ Meili says, her mind returning to the dead face of Happiness.
‘Yes, he bunged a firecracker up her vagina and set light to it,’ Xixi says, crossing her legs and wriggling her toes.
‘Men get so obsessed with carrying on the family line, they lose all reason!’ Meili says, glancing at Kongzi again. He’s banging his fist angrily now, shouting: ‘Those fucking officials, turning up here and bombarding us with bloody condoms.’ Two days ago, officers from the County Family Planning