‘The doctor said she’s not mentally handicapped – she just has something inside her brain that needs to be removed,’ Father says into the dark.
The light from the lamp inside the hut splays through the bamboo wall onto Mother’s face. Smells of soy sauce and spring onion briefly veil the stench of duck shit drifting from the enclosure. At night, everything melts into the darkness and becomes equal: water and earth, father and mother, ducks and disposable nappies. On that night many years ago, Waterborn stares at the black sky, or at her strange birthplace, and with all the strength that her four-week-old life can muster, lets out a piercing cry.
‘She needs her nappy changed,’ Mother says.
‘We’ve run out of clean water,’ Father replies, rubbing an unlit cigarette.
‘I want to cuddle Waterborn, like you cuddle Mummy,’ Nannan says to Father, skipping about restlessly.
Along the distant public road, a few lights twinkle in the concrete houses while closer by the fluorescent strips of the village restaurant and night stalls shine through the dust raised by passing trucks.
NAKED FROM THE waist up, Meili sits on a concrete brick beneath the porch and stares out at the enclosure. In the midday sun, the pond and the white ducks look blindingly bright. A small bird darting across the creek faints from the heat and falls into the water with a loud splash. The sky and earth seem paralysed by the sun’s burning rays.
The dead fish Kongzi scooped from the floodwater and laid out to dry were washed away in a torrential downpour last week. Kongzi and Meili have bought thirty new ducklings and cordoned off a section of the pond to protect them from the adult ducks. With any luck, they’ll be able to sell them next month for two hundred yuan. Waterborn is eight weeks old now, and still does nothing all day but eat and sleep. Meili is afraid to put her down for naps inside the hut in case she’s attacked by stray dogs, so she carries her around all day wrapped to her chest with a long cloth, as is the custom in Guangdong Province. Now, all she wants is to find a job and start making some good money. There’s an agricultural market in a town four kilometres downstream, and she’s considering going there to ask if she can hire a stall. The feeling of emptiness in her flat belly is reassuring. If family planning officers were to catch her now and insert an IUD into her or even sterilise her, she wouldn’t put up a fight.
The two sisters, Gu and Hua, who rent out this plot to them, turn up after lunch. They drop by once a week to collect rent, buy ducks from Meili and pick fruit from the lychee trees. Gu is tall and thin, and is wearing a conical straw hat. Hua, shorter and stockier, is holding a dainty black parasol.
‘Nannan, bring the beer crate over here for the aunties to sit on,’ Meili calls out, picking up the paper fan that Kongzi made.
‘No need,’ says Hua, as she and her sister squeeze into the remaining shade beneath the porch. ‘Look how the baby’s grown! She must be a good feeder.’
‘You don’t mind if I don’t put on a vest, do you? It’s just too hot today.’ The sweat streaming down Meili’s cleavage has soaked Waterborn’s face and the piece of cloth in which she’s wrapped.
‘Your ducks are selling well in the village. They taste just like the ones I used to eat as a child.’ From her smooth pale hands, one can tell that Hua has never worked on the fields.
‘We feed them a pure grain diet, and don’t let them touch the dead fish that wash up on the beach.’ Meili’s heart always beats faster when she lies. ‘Give the aunties some fizzy orange,’ she calls out to Nannan, who’s standing naked beside the pond, spraying water onto an ant nest.
‘Yes, your baby’s a sturdy little thing, but look how her feet curl inwards,’ says Gu, sneering under her conical hat. ‘I heard your husband say that there might be something wrong with her.’
‘Think about your future, Meili,’ says Hua. ‘Bringing up a handicapped child is expensive, and exhausting too. All that money and effort, and you won’t even be able to marry her off in the end!’
Meili crosses her legs, rests a foot on a burnt tin can and