then placed it before the statues, along with other offerings of fish, chicken and fruit. Large red scented candles were lit, and as the fragrant smoke coiled up into the willow’s branches, the villagers knelt down and prayed for good harvests, happiness, a baby son or success in their children’s high school exams.
Meili works in a recycling workshop on the ground floor of a house next to the Qing Dynasty scholar’s residence. Every day there are new heaps of transformers for her to dismantle and plastic film to melt. Nannan usually accompanies her, and plays hide-and-seek by herself among the baskets of electric cables and copper wires.
In the morning, after Kongzi drops them off on the opposite bank, he sails to a neighbouring town to fetch clean tap water to sell to Heaven’s residents. Although he makes only forty yuan a day – which is slightly less than Meili is paid – he enjoys being his own boss and sailing through the backwaters at his leisure. When he returns in the afternoon, his boat loaded with barrels of tap water and a passenger or two he’s picked up along the way, he feels happy to be living in Heaven Township, despite its sour, acrid stench.
‘So, where are you from, captain?’ a migrant worker asks, stepping aboard the boat one morning.
‘Hubei Province,’ Kongzi replies, starting the engine again and watching a vessel dump a load of televisions and scanners onto the muddy bank upstream. ‘We arrived here a few months ago. How about you?’
‘Oh, I’ve been here eight years. See those white villas up there? Our team built them last year in just six months. It’s getting harder to find work now, though, what with all the new migrants flooding in.’
Kongzi glances up at the villas that, with their cladding of white tiles, resemble a row of public toilets. They’re on a hill high above the lake, near the municipal government building. The concrete road running past them leads to a dilapidated Confucian temple where, in the Guomindang era, locals would make offerings to the great sage and his eighteen disciples. Until recently, Heaven was a sleepy, impoverished lakeside town. During the flood season, the lake would inundate the Ming Dynasty theatre close to its shore, and sometimes the whole town as well. In the 1960s, half the population left, many of them setting off on foot, their belongings on shoulder poles, to scrape a living collecting scrap in Guangzhou. But ten years ago, after the first British ship docked at the nearby Pearl River port of Foshan and unloaded a mountain of electronic waste, Heaven’s economy took off. An entrepreneurial family hauled some of the waste back to their home in Heaven Township, took it apart and sold the scrap plastic and metal to a local toy factory. As the mountains of European waste grew in Foshan, other families in the township followed their example, opening workshops on the ground floors of their homes and hiring migrant labourers to help out. Today, the front doors of every house are surrounded not by bales of wheat, but bundles of electric cables, circuit boards and transformers. In just one decade, Heaven has transformed from a quiet backwater into a prosperous, waste-choked town.
‘I know I could pick up a job dismantling e-waste, but it’s dangerous work,’ the man says to Kongzi. ‘Extracting lead and silver is the worst. The sulphuric acid you have to use produces fumes that can make men impotent. I much prefer working on a building site.’
‘Most of the migrants here seem to be family planning fugitives,’ Kongzi says. ‘I always see loads of kids scampering outside the factories and workshops.’ Despite all he’s heard to the contrary, Kongzi is confident that Heaven’s pollution won’t prevent Meili falling pregnant again.
‘Those children are the lucky ones, the survivors. What you don’t see are the deformed and handicapped ones that are abandoned by their parents and left to die. I once saw a dead baby with two heads floating in that canal down there.’
‘The One Child Policy’s responsible for that,’ Kongzi says. ‘Don’t blame the parents – they just want to make sure they’ll have a healthy child to look after them in their old age. Why else would anyone abandon their own flesh and blood?’ Kongzi looks away, conscious that he’s trying to justify to himself his own abandonment of Waterborn. ‘So, where do you want me to drop you off?’ he asks. In his mind, he pictures Heaven’s waterways coursing