rotten cabbage. She’s eight months pregnant. Her home doesn’t have a dugout, so she’s been hiding in her neighbour’s vegetable hut. Squeezing down next to Meili, she announces: ‘I’ve just seen a woman halfway up a tree. She’s out of her mind! Refuses to come down. She says her baby’s up in the branches.’ Yuanyuan went to Guangzhou with Kong Wen and found a job in an Apple computer factory, where she plans to return after the birth of her child. She looks at her now and says, ‘You sucked up to the cadres when you came back here, hoping they’d make you village head. Well, are you happy now, helping them kill our babies? We’re women of Nuwa, descended from Goddess Nuwa, who created the Chinese people from the yellow soil of this plain. And now the government wants to stop us having children! Are they trying to eliminate the Chinese race?’ Yuanyuan is the only woman in the village to own a pair of knee-high leather boots. Meili longs for the day when she too can own a pair.
The villagers in the yard who’ve been unable to squeeze into the house poke their heads through the open windows. ‘Even dogs have the right to bark before they’re slaughtered!’ one of them calls out. ‘Kongzi: why don’t you take the lead and speak out on our behalf?’
‘Yes, Kongzi!’ Kong Zhaobo agrees, running his hand along the turtleneck of his black sweater. ‘You’re eloquent and well read, and you’ve always had a rebellious streak.’ Kongzi’s defiant nature was recognised at the age of nine. When the entire school sang ‘Lin Biao and Confucius are scoundrels’, Kongzi dared change the words to ‘Confucius was a gentleman and a sage’, and was taken to the district police station. Thanks to his father’s back-door connections, he was released the next day, on condition that he sing the song correctly one hundred times. Kongzi’s real name is Kong Lingming, but after his courageous expression of support for his ancestor, everyone began to call him Kongzi – Confucius’s more common name. Sometimes they call him Kong Lao-er, meaning Kong the Second Son, the derogatory nickname given to the sage during the Cultural Revolution, or just Lao-er for short, which also means ‘dick’. As he grew up, his interest in his ancestor deepened, and he became the village authority on the sage’s life and works.
‘You’ve studied Sunzi’s Art of War,’ says Kong Dufa, a po-faced Party member who is married to the village accountant. ‘Just choose one of the thirty-six strategies and write out a plan.’
Kongzi raises his palms. ‘No, no, I may be a teacher, but I have no formal training. I’m just a simple peasant, a farmer who’s read a few books. I can’t come up with any ideas . . .’
Desperate to prevent him from becoming involved in a political protest, Meili throws Kongzi a meaningful look. He fails to notice. So, to attract his attention, she leans over to Nannan, who’s curled up in the lap of Kongzi’s mother, and gives her a sharp pinch.
‘Ouch!’ Nannan shrieks. ‘A mouse bit me, Grandma.’
‘Shh, little one,’ Kongzi’s mother says, rubbing Nannan’s arm. ‘Here, have a malt sweet.’
‘No, me want chocolate.’ Nannan hates the way malt sweets stick to her teeth. Villagers traditionally offer them to the hearth god at Spring Festival to make sure that when he meets the Lord of Heaven he’ll be unable to open his mouth and utter any inauspicious words.
‘I’ve heard peasants have poured into Hexi Town to protest against the crackdown,’ says Li Peisong. ‘They’ve stormed the Family Planning Commission and smashed all the computers and water dispensers. We should sneak out of the village tonight and go and join them.’ During the Cultural Revolution, Li Peisong was head of the village revolutionary committee and in 1966 was sent to Shandong Province to help Red Guards destroy the Temple of Confucius in the sage’s native town of Qufu. While swept up in the revolutionary fervour, he changed his name to Miekong – ‘Obliterate Confucius’. But by 1974, when the Campaign against Lin Biao and Criticise Confucius was in full swing, he’d undergone a change of heart. Not only did he fail to denounce Confucius at public meetings, he changed his name back to Li Peisong and married a member of the Kong clan. They now have two sons. The second son, Little Fatty, is two years old, but they still haven’t paid off the fine for his unauthorised birth.