in the fields, Meili gains the respect of her fellow inmates. While most of the women plant sugar cane, she helps the men with the back-breaking job of digging and filling irrigation channels. At dusk, when Suya collapses with exhaustion, she heaves her onto her back and carries her to the barn. Suya desperately wants to escape, but the nearest public road is thirty kilometres away. Two Sichuanese inmates attempted to flee three weeks ago, but as soon as they reached the road they were arrested, and were beaten so violently on their return to the camp that they’re still unable to walk.
‘That lecherous Instructor Zheng has got his eyes on me,’ Suya tells Meili. ‘I’m afraid to go out at night here. It gets so dark outside, you can’t see a thing.’ She and Meili have returned to the barn and are sitting on a tattered quilt, their backs against the wall. The ground is littered with laminate flooring offcuts and the scarves, underwear and broken flip-flops left behind by previous inmates. ‘Bloody Communist Party,’ Suya continues. ‘How dare they lock us up in this dump! Once I’ve made enough money, I’ll go and study abroad, and I’ll never come back.’ She grabs a scrap of flooring and wedges it behind her aching back, then puts a blanket over her legs.
‘I haven’t slept in a brick building like this for years, so it doesn’t feel like a dump to me,’ says Meili. ‘If you’re afraid of the dark, you should try sleeping on a boat at night. It’s not only pitch black, it rocks from side to side. You feel yourself floating in mid-air, with no idea where you might land . . .’ Then she rubs the mud from her hands and says, ‘So, has Inspector Zheng done anything to you?’
‘He took me aside today and said if I spent the night with him, I could leave the camp next week. I’d rather die than let that sleazy bastard put his hands on me. Besides, he’s a minor official – he has no authority to release any inmates.’
‘When you go to the latrines, I’ll go with you, and if he dares come near, I’ll sink my teeth into his shoulder!’
‘You’re so brave. Is there nothing you’re afraid of?’
‘Yes – the land. As soon as my feet touch firm ground, my heart starts pounding, because suddenly I’m a peasant again, a nobody who the government can arrest at will. I always feel safer on the water.’
‘Earth is man, water is woman, as the saying goes,’ Suya says. ‘Grains of soil are seeds of the masculine spirit; rivers are dark roads to the eternal female.’
Meili combs Suya’s hair and braids it into plaits. Since her milk began to dry up, her maternal feelings have grown stronger. She yearns to hold Waterborn and Nannan in her arms, and can’t bring herself to contemplate where Waterborn might be now.
‘How pretty you are,’ Meili says, stroking Suya’s face. ‘Such large eyes – you could almost be mistaken for a foreigner.’
‘To tell you the truth, I belong to the Wei Minority, so I suppose I am a bit foreign. Beauty can make a woman rich, but if she relies solely on her looks to get by, she’ll always remain under a man’s thumb. I believe that every woman should strive to achieve something. Self-respect can only be gained through hard work.’
‘Well, as it happens, I’m not pure Chinese either. My mother told me that my grandfather had light brown hair and a big nose. A rumour has passed down that, after he was born and the umbilical cord was cut, his mother smashed a bowl onto the ground, grabbed a shard and slit her throat with it. Apparently, she’d been raped by a foreign missionary and was terrified her parents would beat her for bringing shame on the family. I’ve never dared tell anyone that before – not even my husband.’
‘You’ve no need to tell him. Now that I look closely, there is a foreign air about you. You have the wholesome look of a peasant girl, but in your eyes, there’s a wildness. They slant upwards in the Chinese phoenix style, but the pupils are so black and shiny they almost look blue. If you educated yourself and read widely, you could become a formidable woman. And with just a little grooming and sprucing up, you’d have men falling at your feet.’
Feeling her cheeks colour, Meili lowers her head and says, ‘How can