The Dark Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

petitioning”.’
    Meili pulls a bunch of bananas from her bag and offers one to the woman. Kongzi is lying fast asleep at her feet, a whiff of alcohol rising from his mouth. A few minutes ago, he stirred from his drunken slumber and bellowed a line from Confucius’s
Analects
: ‘If my path comes to an end, I will board a raft and drift towards the sea . . .’ A group of migrant workers are crouched beside him gulping down bottles of beer.
    ‘No, no, I’m not hungry,’ the woman says, taking a banana nevertheless. Meili breaks one off for herself, tosses the peel overboard and watches it disappear into the white waves that cut through the centre of the black river. ‘I have an eighty-year-old mother at home to support, and a two-year-old child as well,’ the woman says. ‘The wages I bring back to them vanish in a day.’
    Meili shifts Nannan’s head further down her lap, wriggles her numb toes, then stares at the woman’s careworn face and contemplates her own predicament. I’m only twenty, she says to herself. I won’t let myself age as badly as her. I’ll get a job, earn some money and buy myself a nice dress and leather shoes. Kongzi once said that my toes are the most attractive part of my body, and since then, I’ve kept them covered. But one day I’ll buy some elegant leather sandals and paint my toenails red . . .
    ‘Come on, tell me – you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’ the woman says. ‘You’re on the run from family planning officers.’
    ‘How did you guess? Yes, I’m over three months gone. Nuwa County is clamping down on family planning violators. We would’ve been allowed to have a second child when our daughter is five, but I’ve fallen pregnant sooner by mistake.’
    ‘You want a son, don’t you? To continue the family line.’
    ‘My husband is a Kong, so of course he wants a son. He keeps quoting that line from the
Analects
that goes, “Of the three desertions of filial duty, leaving no male heirs is the worst,” or something like that.’
    ‘How did you avoid getting fitted with a coil? Your family must have a lot of influence. I bet you’re the only woman in this boat who doesn’t have an IUD inside her.’
    ‘No, my parents are ordinary peasants. My father works in a coal mine now, and my mother looks after the fields. But my husband’s father is a war hero and a former village head, so he was able to pull a few strings.’
    ‘He must be a teacher, your husband – quoting from the classics like that. Just look how thick his glasses are!’
    Meili smooths her hair back and smiles. ‘Yes. Everyone in the village calls him Kongzi, after the great sage. Our neighbours often ask him to choose names for their children or write rhyming couplets to hang outside their doors.’ The two women stare down at Kongzi, who is now flat on his back, snoring loudly.
    ‘If we edged our way over there, we’d be able to see the television in the viewing lounge,’ the woman says, pointing behind her with her chin. Then, looking over at the migrant workers swigging beer, she murmurs a Cantonese song: ‘
As the night grows darker, I drink myself into a daze. Softly you approach my broken heart. Be careful what you say, because as everyone knows, I’m a woman who’s easily hurt . . .
’ The boat approaches a bend in the river and the engine’s growl deepens.
    ‘You speak Cantonese, then? Have you been to Guangzhou?’ Meili knows the song. She sang it at her interview at the Sky Beyond the Sky Hotel, and impressed Teacher Zhou so much that he gave her the job on the spot.
    ‘Yes, I’ve been to Guangzhou a couple of times. You need to speak Cantonese to find a job there, especially in the hair salons. But the men in Guangzhou are loaded. I can earn more in a day there than I do in a year back home. You could make a fortune there. Such smooth skin, delicate features, long neck. What man could resist you? I’d move there myself, but it’s too far away. I have to go home every