him to Changsha, promising them jobs in a Sino-foreign pharmaceutical company with monthly wages of a thousand yuan and free food and accommodation. But when they arrived they discovered that he’d sold them to work as hostesses in a nightclub. The next morning, they escaped out of the nightclub’s kitchen window and went straight to the police, who put them in handcuffs and bundled them off to the Custody and Repatriation Centre.
An hour or so later, as she lies down listening to the wind rustle through the trees outside, she suddenly remembers Suya mention that prostitutes are sometimes transferred from labour camps to specialist penitentiaries that examine women for sexual diseases. But if she’d been transferred, surely they would have let her take her handbag? Meili quickly reaches for the handbag, pulls out the red journal and hides it under her blanket. The lights are turned off, but Meili is too upset to sleep. She stays awake all night, tossing and turning, only managing to doze off a few minutes before dawn . . .
In her dream, she is swimming towards her womb along a dark channel, pursued by thousands of babies. When she reaches the end, she rubs the walls but is unable to find any entrance. The babies come closer, mouths wide open. With a jolt, she wakes, rolls onto her side and notices that Suya’s handbag has gone. She has a vague memory of torchlight flitting across her face a few moments ago and of the sound of receding footsteps. She closes her eyes again, but can’t return to sleep. She wonders whether Instructor Zheng has dragged Suya off into the woods. As she rubs the red journal under her blanket, she remembers the day her grandmother took her to a market stall beneath a large tree in the centre of Nuwa Village. Among the earth-coloured felt and the bobbins of black thread, she spotted a white cotton scarf and white hairclip that seemed to her immaculate and other-worldly. From that moment on, white became her favourite colour. She remembers the first white van she saw enter the village, with revolutionary slogans blaring from the speakers on its roof and posters of Chairman Mao and Premier Hua Guofeng stuck to the side windows. Then she remembers, when she was about five years old, watching a man daub onto a village wall the words CARRY OUT THE FOUR MODERNISATIONS; IMPLEMENT THE ONE CHILD POLICY. As soon as he was finished, her friend pushed her against the slogan, staining her clothes with chalky-smelling whitewash. Her grandmother shouted at her and told her to go straight home.
Meili thinks of Waterborn and wonders how she’s survived these past two weeks without her milk. She thinks how Nannan always kicks off her blanket in the middle of the night, and if it’s not wrapped over her again, her arms and legs become stone cold. She thinks of Kongzi’s obsessive desire for a son and feels angry, then consoles herself with the thought that at least he’s never stolen anything or slept with a prostitute. He may have watched a few porn films and forced her into some of the lewd positions he picked up from them, but compared to the depraved men Suya described, he’s pretty respectable and honourable. If only he was willing to talk to her and listen to her more, everything would be fine.
When the wind outside drops, she hears fresh cement being stirred in the construction site beyond the latrines. The male inmates are building a factory. Next year the camp will receive official permission to accommodate four hundred inmates, and to take advantage of this expansion of free labour, the Party Secretary has decided that the camp should manufacture Christmas crackers for export to Europe and America. Suya told Meili that Christmas is the foreigners’ equivalent of Spring Festival and that an old man with a white beard squeezes down your chimney at night with a bag of presents and waits for you to wake up. Meili rubs Suya’s red journal again and tries to think of a place where she can keep it safe.
KEYWORDS: sewage, second wife, handjob, visiting Miss Five, grey cheongsam, dead shrimp.
AS SOON AS Meili walks out of the tiny lift and is hit by a vulgar smell of cheap perfume, she knows that she’s been duped. Her legs start to shake. This morning, a genial-looking woman arrived at the camp, offering the female inmates jobs as hotel cleaners. Meili jumped at the