fees and check licences. They don’t deal with family planning crimes.’
‘But we can’t live like this for ever. Your parents need us. They shouldn’t be having to chase pigs around the yard and rake up chicken shit at their age.’ Under the bamboo stool beside her is a bag containing a towel, two muslin cloths, and a tiny vest and pair of shorts, ready for Happiness’s arrival. Knowing that she’ll be preoccupied after the birth, she has already made the small quilt Happiness will need in the winter. She’d like to light a candle now and begin sewing a baby jacket, but fears it might attract more mosquitoes.
‘All I miss about the village is the school,’ Kongzi says. ‘I miss standing in front of my class and delivering a lesson. My throat is dry from lack of use.’
Meili feels a pang of sympathy for him. To protect their family, he’s had to give up his vocation. Scratching his bitten calves with her toes, she says, ‘Let me sing you a song to cheer you up, then. Darling husband, we shared our home and the household expenses, trod the same floorboards, slept in the same bed. My head next to yours on the pillow – how happy I was! Now, alone under my single sheet, I roll to the left and weep, then roll to the right and sigh . . .’
‘Don’t sing me a funeral lament!’ Kongzi says, flicking his cigarette stub into the river. ‘It’ll bring us bad luck. Besides, your grandmother’s songs belong to the past.’
‘It’s supposed to be bad luck to bring a woman on board a boat, so why not throw me into the river if you’re so superstitious!’ Meili’s grandmother is a small, fragile woman whose forehead is pockmarked from childhood measles. When she was thirteen, and Nuwa County was gripped by famine, her destitute parents sold her for just half a bag of rice and a bamboo lute to the aged caretaker of Nuwa Temple. A year later, the old man married her. He taught her traditional opera and let her sing at every temple ceremony. At twenty, she learned the art of funeral wailing from a singer called Old Lady Wu, and became so proficient that her fame spread throughout the county. Meili remembers watching her stand before crowds of grievers wearing a turban of white mourning cloth, and unleash agonised high-pitched laments with tears streaming down her face. It was considered a mark of prestige for a family to have her sing at a wake. ‘The songs my grandmother taught me are beautiful,’ Meili says to Kongzi. ‘Her voice has cracked, so I’m the only one in my family who can sing them now. All right, if you don’t want a funeral song, here’s a Deng Lijun ballad instead: If I forget him, I’ll lose my way. I’ll sink into misery . . .’ When she finishes the ballad, she rolls onto her back again, bends her knees and waves a fan over her face. ‘I blush with shame when I have to tell people you work on a demolition site. When you were a teacher, I could hold my head up high.’
‘It wasn’t such a great job. The salary was pitiful.’
‘But I was the wife of a teacher. I had status. I didn’t care how much you earned.’
‘Before we married you said you’d love me even if I were dirt poor. I was manager of the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel at the time. Is that what impressed you?’
‘That miserable job? Ha! One day, I’ll set up my own business and show you what a real manager is. I never did understand why Teacher Zhou closed the hotel in the end.’
‘He couldn’t attract enough people. I advised him to start breeding crabs in the hotel pond to make some money on the side, but he said if we did, the guests wouldn’t be able to swim in it.’
They fall silent. The only sound they can hear is the rumble of trucks on a distant mountain road, transporting cement to the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam.
‘I do still love you, Kongzi,’ Meili says at last. ‘But when you changed my name from “Beautiful and Pretty” to “Beautiful Dawn” you promised that our marriage would be the beginning of a wonderful new life.’
‘You regret me changing your name? But it’s so much more poetic. I promise you, Meili, a beautiful dawn is waiting for us.’