Chapter 5: Spending the Night in the Graveyard

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At ten in the morning, Jiang Fan awoke. Discovering that Hao Meng and her luggage were gone, he hurried to find the innkeeper and learned she had left in the middle of the night.

Holding the note Hao Meng had left behind, confusion gnawed at him. If they couldn't be companions, couldn't they at least be friends? Why did she have to leave without saying goodbye?

And why did she stress that he shouldn't call her unless absolutely necessary?

Jiang Fan couldn't understand.

He gathered his luggage and left the inn, pausing at the doorway to look back wistfully at the place where, for the first time in his life, he had shared a bed with a woman. In his heart, he whispered, "Respect is the greatest blessing. Hao Meng, I wish you lifelong happiness and joy."

From Shegang Village to Shangsha Village in Chang'an Town, where Jiang Fan was headed, was only about ten kilometers. Along the way, factories of all kinds rose up on either side of the road.

Guided by the address in the envelope Li Jiuguan had given him, Jiang Fan rode a minibus, weaving his way to the Jilong Toy Factory in Shangsha Village, arriving just as the factory's lunch break began.

Jilong Toy Factory stood beside the main road, and as lunchtime struck, tens of thousands of workers poured out, most of them young women.

At that time, it was common to call them "migrant boys" and "migrant girls"—a unique scene in frontier cities during the reform era of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

All manner of people gathered at the factory gate. Besides workers from Jilong, most were drifters with no fixed home. Among them lurked those with ill intentions, there either to prey upon young women or to engage in petty theft.

The cries of street vendors, the exuberant laughter of youth, and the endless chatter mingled together, weaving a symphony of wandering lives.

The air was thick with the scents of rice noodle soup, fried vermicelli, roasted meats, baked sweet potatoes, and stuffed flatbreads, mingling with the fragrances of floral water and the pungency of sweat, all of it painting a vivid portrait of Dongguan's bustling prosperity.

Faces in the crowd varied—some smiling, some frowning, some filled with resolve, others blank with confusion. Though the scene appeared vibrant and lively, beneath it all was the unspoken hardship of a life in flux.

Jiang Fan approached a few kind-looking girls with Jilong Factory badges around their necks, asking if they knew his senior, Li Haiyong.

Some shook their heads; others, wary, simply ignored him.

Only one girl, with large eyes, dimples when she smiled, and a lively disposition, kindly reminded him, "There are over twenty thousand people in our factory. Just a name isn't enough. You need to find out which department he works in."

The lunch break was only an hour, and soon enough, the vendors who had been hawking their wares packed up and left, while all that remained at the factory gate were the rootless, still searching for work.

In Dongguan, the only person Jiang Fan knew was Hao Meng, and she had made it clear he was not to disturb her unless absolutely necessary.

He found a relatively flat stone near the factory entrance, sat down, and resolved to wait until the factory's six o'clock shift ended to try his luck again.

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Unbuttoning his shirt pocket, he reached for a cigarette to ease his boredom. As he pulled out the pack, a fifty-yuan bill slipped out and fluttered to the ground.

Except for paying tuition each year, it was rare for Jiang Fan to even touch a fifty or a hundred yuan bill; he almost never carried that much cash.

He picked up the bill, dusted it off with his fingers, and, looking in the direction of Humen, muttered, "Hao Meng, you won't let me contact you, but why do you keep doing things that make me worry about you?"

With a sigh, he placed the bill together with the nine yuan in his pants pocket, carefully tucking them back into his shirt pocket and buttoning it securely.

In truth, Jiang Fan had never met this senior before, didn't know what he looked like or how tall he was—only that he had been taken on as a disciple by Li Jiuguan back in their hometown of Cangzhou.

By the time the afternoon shift ended, he still hadn't found any trace of his senior.

Learning that Jilong Factory would work overtime until eleven-thirty that night, he decided to use the interval to find a place to stay.

Though he now had an extra fifty yuan, he was reluctant to spend five or ten yuan on a night at an inn.

From Hao Meng, he knew that all Dongguan villages checked temporary residence permits, and that the security patrols were as rude and unreasonable as bandits. Jiang Fan wandered about, searching for a place where the patrols might overlook him.

Circling the outskirts of Shangsha Village, he finally settled on a hill far from the village.

The hill was a graveyard, overgrown with weeds, the reeds taller than a man.

Spending the night alone in a graveyard was not something everyone had the courage to do.

Secretly proud, Jiang Fan thought, "Surely they won't come checking for residence permits in a graveyard. And if those bandits do show up, I'll scare them half to death by pretending to be a ghost."

Having found his shelter, Jiang Fan returned to the village for a serving of fried vermicelli for dinner, then went back to the factory gate to wait once more—again, to no avail.

When the factory closed and the surrounding area fell quiet, Jiang Fan left the toy factory in dejection, making his way to the graveyard by moonlight.

In a patch of reeds beside a burial mound, he found a reasonably flat spot, pressed his palms together, bowed to the grave, and said, "My apologies for this intrusion—it's out of necessity. I beg your pardon for borrowing this spot for the night."

Fortunately, it was winter, and there weren't many mosquitoes in Dongguan's wilds. After two days of travel and a restless night in Humen, Jiang Fan soon drifted off to sleep.

He dreamed of two women.

One was Hao Meng, who had just departed—her slender yet shapely figure, her enchanting face, filling his dreams with longing.

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The other was a girl Jiang Fan tried not to think about, yet who had visited his dreams for three consecutive nights.

As Jiang Fan lay in the graveyard, a smile curling at the corners of his mouth, lost in his dreams, he was suddenly awakened by a kick. A harsh, unfriendly voice with a thick Guangdong accent barked in his ear, "You can still smile, sleeping among the dead? Get up! Do you have a temporary residence permit?"

Jiang Fan opened his eyes, rubbing the sleep from them, and saw two men in security uniforms standing before him in the gray light of dawn—one tall, one short.

Inwardly, he cursed, "Just my luck. Even here, you bandits have managed to sniff me out."

The one who spoke was the shorter of the two, no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, under 1.65 meters tall, his skin stretched over bone with no hint of muscle, and paler than a healthy person ought to be.

His emaciated frame resembled a dried-out mummy, his skeletal hands folded across his chest like an old man's.

The smallest security uniform seemed oversized on him, as if a child had donned an adult's clothes.

Jiang Fan's first impression was that, with such a natural appearance, the man could play a zombie without any makeup at all.

The other, much taller, stood at least 1.85 meters, with the build of an ox, yet hovered at the short man's side like a lapdog. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, handed one to the short man, then lit it for him with practiced deference.

He fawned, "Brother Qiu, leave these little things to us. Running errands like this is our job."

The hill, overgrown with weeds, might have been a tranquil resting place for the dead, dotted as it was with dozens of graves in a small area.

For the living, spending the night in a graveyard was born not only of hardship but, above all, of the need to avoid the security patrols' checks for residence permits.

Yet even in such dire straits, in such a desolate place, the patrols were not willing to let people be.

At a time when the average worker earned barely two hundred yuan a month, the cost of a one-year temporary residence permit exceeded a month's hard-earned wages.

Those who could afford permits rented rooms; those who slept outdoors were the rootless, those who had yet to find work, struggling just to eat—let alone pay for a permit.

The short man had been at this job for years. He knew all too well the hardships involved, yet still asked for permits, just as pointlessly as pulling down one's pants to fart. The real aim was simply to find a pretext—a righteous-sounding excuse to squeeze a few coins from these pitiable drifters.