Throwaway Daughter (7 page)

But no controversy in the entire world would be as big, as shocking, and as unexpected as having Loyal and me tie the knot.

He and I were put together by a matchmaker. The revival of matchmaking had very little to do with the sweeping changes blowing across the country. The matchmaking business, though criticized as old-fashioned and banned by the government for as long as I could remember, never really vanished. Even as a child I knew that if the political wind got stronger and the waves became higher, the matchmakers just went underground, and once the political storm passed over, they were back in business. To replace the practice, the government called upon young people to pursue freedom in love and marriage. Our village was sent a few propaganda
posters. One of them, which I still remember vividly, showed a smiling young man and woman holding hands and looking up into an empty sky. In real life such freedom didn’t exist, not when China was ruled by the emperors, nor under the thumbs of the warlords, the Nationalists, or the Communists. My great-grandfather didn’t meet his bride, a daughter in the court of the Qing dynasty, or even see her face until his wedding night. The union of my parents, a landowner’s son and a daughter of an equivalent family, was the product of the tradition in their time. When it was my two elder brothers’ turn, a few years ago, they, too, had no choice but to marry girls of equal social status. There was nothing they could do or say. I spotted tears of joy in my father’s eyes after the matchmaker confirmed that my second sister-in-law-to-be was from a rich peasant-class family. On their wedding day, my father congratulated Second Brother, calling him a lucky young man who had “landed on a higher branch.”

Until the doughy-faced matchmaker showed up at our door on Labour Day, May the first, 1979, the thought of leaving my home and parents had little room in my mind. I had long since learned to
appreciate the walls of our house. They might not have looked like the strongest barricades in the world, made from mud mixed with chopped hair and straw, but in my eyes they were my Great Wall, dividing the world into two parts. The world of yin, outside the wall, treated me and my family with endless humiliation and insult. It was a world of bullies who exercised “the dictatorship of the proletariat” over us, under which both my parents and my brothers were as powerless as I. The world of yang was behind our closed doors, when my parents became our mom and dad and we were their dear children. And being the only girl alongside three boys, I had more than my share of their love and care. Though I had passed the marriage age set by the government, I was not in a rush to leave my world of yang behind. For every girl, her final destination, whether she likes it or not, is the home of her husband. In our region and culture, marriage doesn’t have a good reputation among brides. A daughter-in-law’s life is described as suffering “under the thumb of her mother-in-law.” As one saying has it, on her wedding day, the new bride is already looking forward to the moment eighteen years later when, if she is lucky enough to have a son, she
herself becomes a mother-in-law so that she is able to terrorize her daughter-in-law.

My parents had never said one word, not so much as a hint about trying to get rid of me as most parents in the village would do as soon as their daughters turned twenty. Some parents are in such a hurry you’d have thought that if their daughters stayed at home one day longer they would spoil, like vegetables. It’s particularly so among the families where, if they can find a way to spend one penny twice, they will: their daughters are heavy burdens. We girls, from the time we are born, are called
Pei-qian-huo—
money-losing items, or bad investments, a term I often hear Loyal mimic. Our parents feed us and bring us up, but in the end it’s the families of our husbands who reap the benefit. The earlier we are matched and married off, the more money and food can be saved. In the past few years, as I eyed the matchmakers darkening my neighbours’ thresholds and watched girls my age and younger leave the village one after another, I pictured myself, “the girl of a landlord,” as a high mountain that sat on my parents’ shoulder, heavier than the ones that blocked Old Man Yu’s house. I doubted there were any young men around who wanted me for a wife.

The unexpected appearance of Sister Liu changed all that. The chubby woman, with one eye bigger than the other, charged into our house, smiling and obsequious. “Your girl must have done something virtuous in her former life,” she crowed.

My parents stood inside, at the doorway, dumbfounded.

“You will never guess who has sent me to talk about the happy matter of your daughter.” She paused, not for an answer, only to suck in a mouthful of air. “Not in one hundred years!” she declared, letting out a hoarse laugh, pushing past my parents. “It’s Secretary Chen! The Party bigwig!” Her voice dramatically went up one scale. She marched towards my father’s old rattan chair and sat down, looking up at my parents. I stood at the back of the house, leaning against the kitchen door, watching the developments with great interest.

“Secretary Chen has chosen Chun-mei to be his son’s wife. His only son, Loyal.” The matchmaker suddenly held up her hands, forming a chubby knot in front of her lumpy chest, her eyes half closed, the smaller one a thin line. She appeared drunk on her own words.

“Oh, god of heaven, I’ve been in this business
for many years but I never have pulled off a match like this. Nor did my mama, I’m sure. Not since the Emperor Qin united China. You can only imagine how shocked I was. At first I thought I had heard him wrong. I had to ask Secretary Chen twice to make sure that it was your girl he was talking about. Times must have changed!” So saying, she gave such a whack on her raised knee that I was certain she hurt herself.

Secretary Chen was no stranger to me and my family. He had been one of the most important and powerful men in our area, as I had been reminded most of my life. After his retirement, we saw less of him, but once in a while his name was still mentioned. Liuhe Village is about four miles south of us. I had never paid any more attention to him than I did to other higher-ups, but my father had a different opinion. He once said that, unlike some of the Party bosses, Secretary Chen had earned his glory by the calluses on his palms.

In the years when political rallies and meetings were as numerous as hairs on an ox, Secretary Chen made frequent visits to our village, which was a part of his jurisdiction. On each occasion, he reminded us of his importance, not by making long and boring speeches as most
leaders did but by his physical appearance. He was the tallest man I had ever seen. On the stage, he always sat in the centre seat of the front row, so his six-foot-two frame and door-wide shoulders could not be missed. It was an open secret that Secretary Chen had “word blindness.” In other words, he was illiterate. Thus, making speeches and reading documents or newspaper articles to the audience was something he avoided. I had never talked to him, and was glad for it. I feared almost all officials. The bigger ones made me even more afraid. I had no idea Chen had known about me.

From the moment Sister Liu descended on our home, I didn’t know what to think. Was I supposed to feel flattered, not just remembered by such an important person but sought after? When I had calmed down, there was only one question left. “Why me?”

Throughout her visit, Sister Liu had ignored me. I was standing no more than five feet away from her and caught her looking in my direction a few times. But it appeared my parents didn’t feel slighted. After they saw the matchmaker off, they seemed to be relieved.

If my mother and father had ever harboured worries that their only daughter was going to be
an old maid, the clouds had parted. I examined my father’s thoughtful face as he headed to the bedroom, and I wondered what was going through his mind. Was he imagining my climb up a ladder with the possibility of becoming the daughter-in-law of a Party official? Would he tell me that unlike my brother, who only got on a higher branch, I was going up all the way to the treetop?

I had learned at an early age that hoping makes life hard to live. But sometimes I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t get as much education as I would have liked. I was in grade four when the Cultural Revolution shut down every school across the country. In opposition to government policy, my parents taught me and my younger brother to read and write at home after darkness fell, when our front door was closed and braced with a tree post so that no one could barge in as they did so often during the day. When it came to educating us children, my parents seemed to have bundles of energy. Among the many things I learned, one thing stood out remarkably well in my understanding: human beings searched relentlessly for other people to look down upon.

In a country as large as China, it appeared to my young mind that there was no room for
peace—never mind love and care—for my family, particularly my father. The constant political movements left no harmony. We were at the bottom of the social ladder. On a wider scale, city folks ridiculed farmers, even though we counted for eighty percent of the population. Yet the discrimination didn’t stop there. Among city people, those living in big urban areas like Shanghai or Beijing felt superior to the ones in smaller cities. Among the farmers in our village, the poor peasants despised those who were rated as middle class, who in turn looked down upon the upper-middle class. Geography also came into play. The farmers who made homes on the southern shore of the Yangtze River, the region known as the land of fish and rice, jeered at us on the northern side of the river. When it came down to our region, every inch became accountable. The farther north we were, the less valuable we became. If a young woman married into a family south of where she had lived, her social status was elevated, but if a young man ended up with a wife who came from even a few miles to the north, he and his family would lose face.

So by noon on the day of Sister Liu’s visit, the news of my proposed match had spread across the village. Those who came to see my
parents all said one thing. “Your girl has hit a double jackpot.”

According to a local saying, a perfect couple possesses
lang-cai-nui-mao
—groom’s intelligence and bride’s good looks. Loyal and I met once before our wedding day, six months after Sister Liu’s first visit, so I had little opportunity to find out the quality of his brain. But he seemed to like my looks, and told me so. I am not beautiful, not even close, but I have very pale skin, which is considered beauty itself by the locals. My eyes are large, like my mother’s, and I have folded eyelids. They too are a much-sought-after feature in females. In the years of chaos, my pale skin, believe it or not, was cited as a bourgeois trademark. The propaganda posters said so. All the heroes and heroines held up to us as models had bronze-hued skin, while discredited leaders and the American imperialists had a white, ghost-like look. Many times, my skin was burned and even blistered after working in the paddies under the scorching sun, yet I wasn’t allowed to wear a straw hat like the rest. The village leaders wanted my skin to darken. But there was nothing they could do when I turned pale again as winter arrived. Nowadays, though, my natural colour is prized again.

Loyal is a pleasant-looking man. But he sure is a chatterbox. I didn’t tell him that. During our first meeting, all he did was talk, about the weather, crops, his plans, and his family. He must have taken after his mother. Unlike his father, who is tall and strong, a typical man of Shandong, Loyal is no more than five foot four, a bit shorter than I. He complained that his “under-development” was caused by years of shouldering heavy loads. I enjoyed his frankness, and his sense of humour was rare to my ears.

From him I also confirmed my lingering suspicion that my becoming the object of his father’s attention might have had a lot to do with duck eggs.

Around that time, a Hong Kong businessman named Wang had paid a visit to my father. Wang, a middle-aged, stiff-necked man, turned up in a fancy car, accompanied by the important leaders of our commune. For days it was the most talked about event in the village. To me, the whole thing was as surprising as a thunder on a cloudless day.

In the book of the government, my family had been marked down as the landlord class for three generations. The truth was that my
ancestors had become rich first and landowners later. Their wealth came not from crops but from producing the area’s most famous salted duck eggs. The highly saline-alkaline soil in our region was one of the reasons for their success.

My great-grandfather had started the business. By the time my grandfather passed away, the salted eggs were not only well known locally, they were shipped all over Southeast Asia. In the 1940s, when the Nationalists were in power, there were regular shipments to President Chiang Kai-shek, whose love for salty food was no secret.

“Our business was the envy of every farmer on the south bank of the Yangtze,” my father had once told me. “The ones who look down on us as ignorant northerners. In fact, they were working for us. Since they have more lakes and rivers than our roads, they raised the ducks and sent the eggs to me. For years, they tried to copy our recipe and produce the eggs themselves, but with no success.” That all happened before I was born. When I was growing up, I hardly saw any ducks or eggs around. The government had denounced and banned all non-farming practices in the countryside. Any kind of business was “growing a capitalist tail.”

From what I had gathered from my father, high-quality salted eggs must come from ducks; chicken eggs are no good. Each egg had to be washed before it was dipped in a thick paste, a mixture of dirt, vermilion dye, and spices. The spices were the key ingredient and my family’s closely guarded secret. The coated eggs were then placed in clay jars, sealed, and stored for a certain period of time, depending on the season. The warmer the temperature, the less time it took for the eggs to cure. When they were ready, the paste was washed off and the eggs were boiled or steamed. Most people liked to cut the cooked egg in half, still in the shell, serve it as a cold dish, or eat it with rice porridge.