into the cabin. Meili follows him inside and says, ‘I can’t stand the smell any longer, and I’m getting bitten to death by the mosquitoes. Let’s get out of here.’
‘We should give him a bit more time,’ Kongzi replies, lighting a cigarette.
‘No, I’ve had enough. I don’t care about the money. This place is a floating graveyard. Who knows how many corpses are bobbing under the rubbish?’
‘Be quiet – you’ll upset him,’ Kongzi whispers, peeping round the door curtain at Weiwei, who’s still leaning overboard staring down at the floating debris. ‘Do we have any beer left?’ Kongzi asks.
‘No,’ Meili snaps. She wants to scream out in anger, but doesn’t dare open her mouth too wide in case the insects swarming around her fly inside.
‘Anything to eat?’ Kongzi asks tentatively.
‘No, nothing!’ Meili shouts.
Kongzi goes out onto the deck and pats Weiwei’s trembling shoulders. ‘Shall we get going, my friend? If we don’t leave this wretched place soon, we’ll have to spend the night here.’
‘Yes, let’s sail upstream and find a better place to anchor,’ Meili says, joining them outside. ‘It’s too late to go home now. Don’t worry, we won’t charge you any extra for the night.’
Weiwei reluctantly nods in agreement. Meili goes to the stern, presses a towel to her mouth and starts the engine. As the boat sets off, the breeze becomes cooler and fresher. But the backwater’s stench has infused her skin, and whenever it drifts up to her nose, she gags. They sail upstream in the dying light, and her eyes fill with tears as she wonders whether Happiness’s body is still lying on the bed of the Yangtze, or has been swept down to this backwater as well, and is decaying under the floating rubbish along with all the other rotting corpses.
‘After our second child was ripped out of Meili’s womb and murdered by the authorities, we gave him a water burial in the Yangtze,’ Kongzi tells Weiwei, crushing out his cigarette. ‘At least I know now that if he’d washed up here, the corpse fishers would have left him alone.’
Weiwei looks at him, his face seized up in horror, then buries his head into his folded arms and weeps like a child.
Meili steers the boat towards a distant mooring place below a cluster of brick shacks. In the deep dusk, the water’s surface has become as smooth as skin, tearing open as the bow cuts through it then sealing up again behind the stern.
KEYWORDS: tortoiseshell glasses, greatest good, wet dress, preserved mustard greens, peace of mind.
KONGZI TIES THE boat to a small wooden jetty that is coated in fine cement dust. He looks up and sees a brick shack with a wooden sign that says GOOD FOOD RESTAURANT. A child is squatting down for a shit next to a telegraph pole. In a shed close by, an engine is loudly chugging.
They enter the restaurant. Kongzi studies the menu and orders sweet and sour fish, spicy spare ribs, fried string beans and a bottle of rice wine. On a television in the corner, a woman in a flowery dress is singing, ‘Your tenderness bewilders me. My fate is loneliness . . .’ The food is brought to the table. Meili stares at the darkness outside the window, glancing occasionally at Kongzi and Weiwei whose faces soon turn red from the alcohol.
‘Don’t give in to despair,’ Kongzi tells Weiwei. ‘Death is merely a turning off of the lights. Come on, have another drink. And you too, Meili.’
Meili raises her glass and looks into Weiwei’s bespectacled eyes. She assumes he’s abandoned the search, but knows that the thought that his mother’s corpse may be lying undiscovered in the river must be torturing him. She notices his filthy collar and wishes she could pull off his shirt and scrub it clean.
Kongzi lifts his eyes to the ceiling and sighs. ‘The ancient philosopher, Laozi, said: “The greatest good is like water: it gives life to the ten thousand things, but does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao . . .” But this Xi River doesn’t give life. It’s a flowing cemetery of bodies, pollution and waste . . .’
‘The Taoist philosophers were attempting to come up with principles to govern human conduct,’ Weiwei replies. ‘But who’s interested in principles now? When his mother passed away, the Taoist sage, Zhuangzi, beat his drum and laughed. His mother died a natural death, so he could regard it with equanimity. But my mother was