Throwaway Daughter (21 page)

T
he towering poplars that gave the village its name lined a straight dirt road that led to a cluster of houses in the distance. Under an overcast sky, the leaves of the trees quavered in the sultry breeze. In the branches, the cicadas buzzed rhythmically, and at my feet puffs of dust rose as I walked.

Farmers in the paddies straightened their backs, their eyes following me. As I approached the buildings, men and women and kids began to gather. News of my journey to Liuhe Village the day before must have reached here. There were no camera crews and nobody pushed a microphone into my face, but they had been waiting for me. Behind and beside me voices
called out,
“Ta-lai-le! Ta-lai-le!
She’s here! She’s here!”

Loyal had given me directions—grudgingly, as if it had cost him money—to my uncle Gen-fa’s, house. A larger group of villagers blocked a narrow path that wound its way to a dwelling that stood apart from the others. They stared at me as they silently stepped aside, allowing me to pass. In my mind I heard myself say to Mrs. Xia the night before, “I wonder if Chun-mei is still alive,” and her reply, “I’m sure she is. Otherwise Loyal would have said something.” But I had learned already that Loyal couldn’t be relied on too much.

A tall man stood at the door of Gen-fa’s house, formal, almost at attention. Despite the heat he was wearing a Mao jacket over a white shirt buttoned to the neck. His hair was neatly combed straight back from his forehead.

“Are you Ma Gen-fa?” I asked.

He nodded. His adam’s apple bobbed once.

“My name is Dong-mei. I’ve come to find my mother.”

He said nothing. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it. His eyes never left my face. He stood motionless, as if making a decision.

It had all come down to this moment, my
long journey from the little girl who hated all things Chinese, through the hours of language lessons, through the growing yearning to find out where I had come from, to meet and challenge the woman who had thrown me away. I had walked the paths of the village where I had been born, met some of the family and neighbours I would have grown up with. And now I stood at the door of a house, speaking to a man who was my uncle, and I knew as sure as the harsh buzzing of the cicadas in the trees that he held the last piece of the puzzle.

He pointed to the door. “Please,” he said.

Inside, a woman sat on a low stool with her back to me. As I came closer, I saw that she was spooning porridge into the mouth of an old lady sitting in a wide bamboo chair. The woman feeding her was younger. She was wearing a yellow shirt that showed her thin arms, and black pants with the legs rolled up a few inches over her ankles. Her long hair hung down her back in a single braid.

As if she sensed my presence, slowly she turned. Our eyes met and locked. The hair at her temples had turned grey. Lines creased the corners of her eyes, but I knew them right away. They were my eyes.

My lips began to tremble and my throat thickened. I felt weightless. The woman stood up and the bowl and spoon fell from her hands.

“It’s you,” she said quietly.

I nodded. She murmured something to herself, something about flowers and water, but I couldn’t make it out. Then she raised her voice.

“You’ve come back to me. I’ve been waiting.”

“Me, too, Mom,” I said. “Me, too.”

M
y father loved books and flowers. When I was a little girl I would slip into my parents’ bedroom and run my fingers along the spines of the books, history, literature, and philosophy, lined up on the three shelves beside the big rosewood bed. And when I was old enough, five or six, I can’t remember, he would tell me the stories he had read while we were tending the peonies and planting them in big pots by our door. My brothers had no time for books, so my father read only to me at nights, before I went to bed. I was glad my brothers were uninterested. It made our time special.

My favourite was a novel called
The Scholars,
and the part I liked best was the poem at the beginning.

During the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, flowers were declared bourgeois trash, and people caught growing them or displaying them in their windows were hauled away to struggle-meetings and publicly criticized. I remember the
day my mother watched horrified as Father tore the peonies from the pots and threw them on the compost heap. “What will you do?” she asked him. “We’ll keep the seeds,” he said.

Books, especially novels from the old days, were labelled “poison weeds” and burned. My father was forced to turn over all his precious volumes and watch as they were tossed into a roaring bonfire the Red Guards lit on the threshing ground. This time I was the one to ask, “Dad, what will you do without your books?” He managed to put up a smile and tapped his temple. “We’ll keep the seeds,” he told me.

So I tried to hold in my head as many of the stories he had read to me as I could, but as I grew most of them faded away. But not that poem.

Long before I was married I thought I had learned what human beings could do to one another. All through my childhood and young womanhood my family was spurned and spat upon because of the government policy. The campaigns against landlords, capitalists, and rightists seemed never to end, and my family’s “dirty blood” put us on the wrong side every time. There were things that went on during the Cultural Revolution that would curdle a person’s blood, dirty or not.

But I was still shocked when I became aware that some people would do away with innocent babies, get rid of them because they were not boys. More than once I wondered why the gods didn’t enable us women to keep girl babies inside us long enough that they could not be so easily hurt when they left our wombs. One time I found a dead baby on the roadside near our village, wrapped from head to toe in paper, like an undelivered parcel; another time, I saw an infant floating in the water, bumping against the foundation of the arched stone bridge over the Liu River. Both were girls. Yet they were not the worst.

Throughout the village were clay-lined pits, one for each family, where, because chemical fertilizer cost money, we composted our night-soil until it was ready to be spread on the paddies or vegetable plots. I was twenty-one the day I was coming home from the paddies, sore and exhausted from working all day knee deep in chilly water, bent at the waist, transplanting row after row of rice seedlings. My pole rested on my aching shoulder as I walked, and my calves and feet were numb from the cold. I passed the compost pit of a family that lived on the edge of the village. Something in it caught
my eye and I stopped and looked in. A baby was half submerged in the dark liquid, its umbilical cord trailing from its distended belly.

When I told my mother what I had seen, my voice shook. I expected a shadow of shock and horror to cross her face, but she took it calmly. It was nothing new, she told me; “an old trick in a new time” were her exact words. No matter who was in power, she went on, nothing changed much when it came to making babies and giving birth. A baby was like property, a personal belonging. “In the old days girl babies were put away because of poverty, shame, or some other reason,” Mother said. “Now, if you want a son and you have a daughter …”

“But in a cesspit?” I shouted, slapping the tabletop. “It’s as if they were punished for being the wrong gender. If anyone should float in shit it’s the people who would do that to a baby!”

My mother sighed. “Believe it or not, Daughter, in my day ‘chamber-pot death’ was well understood and accepted. And sometimes it
was
an accident. You’ll find out, when you are married and pregnant, that when it’s time to deliver and the contractions start it does feel like you have to relieve yourself. And it was also used as a lame excuse for killing unwanted babies.”

“But the ‘accidental’ ones were always girls, weren’t they?”

Mama said nothing. She nodded.

When my time came and my baby was on her way into the world, all those memories rushed back to me. It would have been different if Loyal and his father held the same attitudes to the gender of children as my father did. So I worked out a plan to deliver my child in the town hospital, where getting rid of a baby would be very hard. I pretended to be afraid of a home delivery, showing false faith in modern facilities and doctors. Loyal agreed. After frowning and letting it be known that the decision should have been his, so did his father.

The truth was I never liked the hospital, and felt sick to my stomach after my visit to the maternity ward, which was just a huge room filled with beds, thirty altogether, where the moans and cries of mothers-to-be competed with the wails of babies, and the air smelled of bodies and disinfectant. I also took a look into a delivery room, even though the sign forbade it. It was a much smaller room, four beds on each side. Five of them were occupied by screaming, sweating women. Their legs hung in stirrups, spread wide, their private places visible. I quickly walked
away. I almost changed my mind right there and then about having my baby in that horrible place. But I reminded myself that if my baby was a girl, the more people who saw her arrive, the safer she would be. So I vowed that I would go through with it, even if the delivery room was as big and accessible as the threshing ground.

But like a straw roof rotted with age, my plans fell in on me and I had my baby at home. When my father-in-law sent Loyal for Sister Liu, not the tractor and wagon that would take me to the hospital, I panicked.

At work, I had heard other women talking about the pains that came before delivery, how intolerable they were, tearing your insides, and how quickly they left you and were forgotten once the child emerged from your body. That night, I experienced the opposite. After the contractions started, I worried so much I was numb to the pain. Not a word could get through my clenched teeth. Loyal’s mother was upset and confused. “Breathe,” she urged. “Shout, Chun-mei. Yell your heart out, as every woman does.”

When my baby began to crawl into this world, my body half wanted to comply with what Sister Liu and my mother-in-law urged me to
do. Push. Push again. Push harder. Endless pushing. The amount of strength I spent could have toppled a mountain. I was exhausted, but my mind was clear. On the one hand I wanted to end it. On the other, knowing Loyal and his father were waiting like crows outside, ready to celebrate or to murder, I wanted to keep the child inside me, protected. I wished Loyal could have been with me. Maybe if he witnesses my agony he would understand better. But he kept to the old tradition.

With one last push, I lost my baby to the world. Sister Liu let out a cry: “The child has come!” Though deadly tired, I raised myself up on my elbows and watched every movement my mother-in-law and Sister Liu made as they worked on my baby. Their silence told me everything. Loyal’s father pounded on the door, demanding to see his grandson right away. Sister Liu looked down at me, then averted her eyes. My mother-in-law’s hands shook as she wiped the baby with a cloth soaked in warm water, tears streaming down her face. Sister Liu wrapped my child in blankets, but it was my mother-in-law who picked her up, her eyes on the door that echoed with the knocking that grew louder with every blow.

“Bring me the baby!” my father-in-law demanded. “Let’s see him.”

Loyal’s mother hesitated. Sister Liu held out her arms. I knew what was to happen. As soon as my baby was out of the room I would never see her again.

“Please,” I begged. “Let me hold my baby. Just once.”

“Not a good idea,” Sister Liu said firmly.

I shrieked. “Give me my daughter! It’s not her fault! Let her live!”

My mother-in-law pushed Sister Liu away from the bed and placed Dong-mei in my arms. Clutching the tiny bundle, I turned my back on the door, where the pounding rose like thunder.

My baby’s perfection filled me with wonder—ten tiny tapered fingers and ten button-like toes, a head full of black hair, large eyes clamped shut as if she was shy. If I had hoped for only a second that her appearance would win her father over to our side, that hope faded with the departing darkness. I didn’t dare let him near her. Once again Loyal slunk into the room, not to ease my pain or defend his daughter but to demand she be turned over to her fate. After hours of coming and going up the stairs to listen to his father’s commandments at one moment
and my distraught demands another, he and the old man came to realize that Dong-mei would not be given into their hands. The negotiations began. The husband I had grown to be fond of and could have come to love became an outsider, bargaining over his own daughter’s welfare and survival. By dawn a deal was finally struck. If they would leave me and my child alone, I would make her disappear within three days.