Scrap
Translated from the Chinese by Jacqueline Leung.
Scrap: a governmental policy implemented in City No. 9 during the mid-1960s to alleviate overpopulation. Each household was to have at most nine children. The tenth child, or any other subsequent child, must be assigned to a surplus children detention centre (also known as a ‘scrap site’) immediately after birth to be processed.
‘City No. 9 was nothing like you’d imagined,’ Mr Decimo said, lighting his first cigarette of the day. It was Friday morning, the day the smoking ban came into effect. He said only the smell of tobacco could invigorate his senses, especially if he was to recall what happened many years ago. I and the photographer who came with me put on obliging, delightful expressions – I’d heard that powerful, high-status smokers are always thrilled to see ecstasy on the faces of those who had no choice but to endure the smoke they exhaled.
‘It was pristine.’ Mr Decimo’s eyes gleamed with an unusual intensity as he took another drag. He dismissed all the critical reports asserting the city’s rot. ‘Rich in investment potential and opportunity. City No. 9 was a place where people with a good head on their shoulders survived.’
In the 1960s, long before I or the photographer came into the world, the ‘scrap sites’ City No. 9 was so famous for bustled with crowds every Sunday. These sites spread across several country parks, beaches, hunting grounds, farms, and even golf courses, drawing two distinct groups of people: those who went to abandon their surplus children and those who wished to collect them, like couples struggling to conceive, same-sex partners, and single men and women.
For women who had already given birth to their ninth child, discovering a halt in their monthly cycle and a familiar, surreptitious swell in their belly brought nothing but distress, which snaked across their faces like premature wrinkles. Fortunately, the Scrap Policy helped smooth over any remorse they might feel. It was wonderful news for mothers living on shoe-string budgets or mentally wrecked by their numerous children – finally, a compelling reason to ditch their kids. The policy was also in step with the advice the city elders often gave to pregnant women in despair: ‘A child’s fate is determined by heaven’s will, not by human hands.’
And so clusters of women with surplus pregnancies were often seen gathering in public parks and outside shopfronts, eagerly discussing which sunny morning would be best to abandon their babies together.
After all these years, Scrap Policy officers still insisted the work that they did was humanitarian. To ease the mothers’ anguish over parting from their own flesh and blood, they’d draw a white line on the ground at each scrap site, and women about to abandon their children would stand in a row and participate in a baby-throwing contest. Rumour had it that the mother who threw her baby the farthest would be the quickest to forget the pain of childbearing. Carrying their newborns, the mothers would close their eyes and toss their soft bundles away, much like pitching a heavy bean bag. Once the babies landed on the lush grass, people desperate to scavenge a child would rush in like ball boys, snatching up those who hadn’t yet perished.
As a child, Mr Decimo visited the scrap site where he’d been abandoned – a golf course in the northern part of City No. 9 – every Sunday, spending endless afternoons by himself. The miner who picked him up never tired of telling him how he scavenged him there, still wrapped in his swaddling clothes. The miner hadn’t intended to adopt any children, but one early morning, after an overnight shift, he walked past the expansive golf course and saw a sky full of babies cocooned in all sorts of colours, more striking than umbrellas blooming on a rainy day. The babies fell in a parabola like a meteor shower, and one happened to drop right at his feet. At that moment, a thought flashed across his mind – it might not be so bad to have a kid at his beck and call to help him make ends meet.
Contrary to the miner’s assumptions, Mr Decimo didn’t harbour any hate for his mother. In fact, he felt proud that she’d proven herself capable of making calculated decisions. (Later in life, Mr Decimo profited year on year from his stock and real estate investments. He dodged two stock market crashes with inscrutable insight, while other investors still flinched at their mere mention. Surely, he’d inherited his sensitivity to numbers and investment acumen from her.) It’s important to know that back in the 1960s, City No. 9’s economy had yet to flourish. The fine for a surplus child was equivalent to the annual income of an average household, and for homes already cluttered with children, every child was more or less the same. Getting rid of one was the decision most likely to ensure more comfortable lives for everyone else while causing minimal harm – so Mr Decimo came to this conclusion, discerning the logic behind his mother’s choice, even though he’d never met her.
Since he’d inherited this amazing talent for making calculated decisions as a toddler, it goes without saying that Mr Decimo would never let time slip away. When he spent his childhood afternoons on the golf course, he was fixated not on his origins but on the babies that landed on the grass, carefully selecting the strongest and most handsome to market to wealthy childless couples.
The moment young Mr Decimo became more aware of the matters of the world, the miner told him, ‘No one has the right to eat for free, not even children.’ Mr Decimo roamed the shopping and commercial districts every day before nightfall, collecting discarded aluminium cans and cardboard boxes to sell. He handed over the money to the miner – ‘Here are my living expenses for tomorrow’ – before he ate, went to school and slept as usual the next day. But he was often ravaged by hunger as he stepped into puberty, and his clothes and bed kept growing smaller and smaller. The miner didn’t say anything, only stared at him with his tiny little eyes, and Mr Decimo knew it was impossible to make ends meet with his meagre earnings from selling soda cans and abandoned babies.
Still, luck was on Mr Decimo’s side – that same year, City No. 9 introduced a free education policy, allowing him to spend eleven years in school. During those eleven years, he studied maths and worked out a more realistic blueprint for his future. To afford transport and food, he sold his scavenged items while studying for his diploma, which was going to be his ticket to getting a job. But as inflation in City No. 9 escalated, he realised time and again that he could be hardworking and frugal with a regular pay cheque his entire life, and his apartment would still be cramped, his car would still shrink and an insatiable nothingness would keep gnawing at his stomach. To live comfortably in the long run, he must acquire appreciating assets while quickly selling off those likely to lose value over time.
After high school, he joined a securities trading firm, as was his plan, and worked while waiting for investment opportunities to come his way. When one at last arrived, he paid his entire annual salary minus daily expenses to purchase shares. Two years later he sold them, and his wealth skyrocketed several dozen times with the value of gold.
‘This had nothing to do with luck. It was all because I foresaw the workings of society and found a chance to invest,’ Mr Decimo said emphatically, pulling from his tenth smoke of the day.
By the mid-1980s, he already sensed the city was undergoing a subtle shift. Fewer and fewer babies were getting born each year. Soon, this city will be swarming with old people, and the youth will become as precious as endangered beasts, he thought. He hired ten scavenging children to visit multiple scrap sites every Sunday to collect healthy abandoned babies, then he smuggled his hoard into a dilapidated hut in City No. 11, where an illegal immigrant nanny cared for them. And when the children turned eight, they also paid Mr Decimo a monthly fee for their living expenses.
After that, he spent the entire next decade waiting – patience being essential to investment – until one day, City. No. 9’s aging problem became so critical, the government began to scramble day and night for solutions to fix the declining birth rate.
It was time. Mr Decimo divulged the hut’s existence to a population planning official – that inside this wooden hut under his name lived many young children waiting to be purchased. All the government had to do was make a reasonable offer, and these abandoned youth, some of whom hadn’t even reached puberty, would belong to them.
On a clear Monday, growing children lined up in an orderly row and streamed out of the wobbly hut to relocate to a dorm the government had assigned for them. Neither Mr Decimo nor the children spared a glance for each other – after all, the children were as numerous as sheep, and he couldn’t discern one blurry face from the other. The other thing that was difficult to discern was the amount of money Mr Decimo earned from this transaction. No one knew how much he made exactly, only that he had become a famous tycoon in town ever since.
Mr Decimo checked his watch and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Time’s almost up,’ he said. He’d shared everything he had to say about City No. 9. I transcribed his last words onto a final sheet of paper, then I gathered my things and left his apartment with the photographer.
Before the door closed, I asked him, ‘What’s worth investing in these days?’
Mr Decimo said nothing and only gave an equivocal smile.
I didn’t tell Mr Decimo that, as someone born in the early eighties, I’d spent a whole year unemployed before landing my current job – a producer for a compilation of oral stories from City No. 9 at the Urban Development Bureau. The bureau was underfunded, so the people we took accounts from were all enthusiastic donors. Our supervisor, a white-haired man around Mr Decimo’s age, always said to us, ‘Imagine your brains are books without words, waiting for donors to fill you up with content.’ This was our only requirement as staff.
I typed out Mr Decimo’s interview word for word into a transcript: CITY NO. 9 THROUGH MR DECIMO’S EYES. Then I fell into a deep sleep where I couldn’t tell night from day.
I dreamed, but it was a dream that felt indistinguishable from reality. In it, the streets teemed with freshly old men and women. Their bodies emanated the sour odour of age but their skin was smooth and rosy, more supple than our younger skin. They owned cars, houses, businesses, servants, pets and fortunes, while we had nothing.
‘Other than your brains, white as snow and blanker than any paper, nothing else you own will appreciate in value,’ their eyes seemed to say as they all looked in our direction.