Throwaway Daughter (12 page)

Of course Dong-mei has a right to know, to search out her birth parents, find closure—a word I hate. She’s entitled to have a relationship with them if she wants to. It’s up to her. I know all that. Haven’t I said it enough times? But it’s different when it happens to you. I don’t want to share her with a stranger. She’s ours.

D
awn broke in unmoving air, threatening yet another hot and sticky day. As I helped Dad load my luggage into the van after breakfast, our street was already filled with the tuneless buzz of air conditioners.

I said goodbye to Megan in the driveway. She stood in her pyjamas and slippers, hair in a tangle, half asleep. “See you in a few weeks,” she said. She’d be joining me after my classes for the cultural tour.

I half expected to see Frank when we walked into the departure terminal, even though we had said our goodbyes the night before. He had left our house near midnight after going through my travel plans with me for the third time. Inside
my backpack was a piece of paper listing four contacts in China that he had set up for me. Dad had made two extra copies, one in each suitcase, “just in case.” In the past few weeks, Frank and I had spent hours bent over the map of China spread across our dining-room table. He had come up with a plan.

Ms. Song, a classmate of Frank’s from his university years, would meet me at the airport.

“Don’t worry,” he repeated endlessly. “She knows who you are.”

He had sent Song my graduation photo. A little anxious about getting lost in an airport in a strange city, I was grateful for Frank’s help, but I had always known that with him everything was complicated.

“If Ms. Song isn’t there when you arrive,” Frank urged, “don’t wait for her. Take a taxi to the Dragon Gate Hotel downtown. Your room is booked.”

I would be staying there for a few days until the college dorms were available.

“But I should wait for her. What if she gets caught in traffic? She’ll arrive expecting to find me and I’ll be gone.”

“No, no, that’s not in the plan. Go to the hotel right away. If she doesn’t show up by eleven
o’clock the next morning, phone Mr. Kang, the second name on the list.”

“Shouldn’t I call Ms. Song first? It would be rude to ignore—”

“No, you can’t. Song didn’t give me her phone number. Kang gave me his.”

Mr. Kang was the brother-in-law of Frank’s cousin.

My stomach leapt when Dad said, “Well, Grace, I think it’s time.” Mom, who had been silent since we had pulled out of our driveway, seemed to wake from a dream.

“Now, remember, Grace, you’re to call us every Saturday night.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“That’s Sunday morning our time.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Frank says you can buy long-distance cards in China.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“If not, call collect.”

“Mom, we’ve been through this.”

She pointed with her chin towards the security gate and gave me a tearful smile. “The longest journey begins with the first step,” she said with a lame attempt at light-heartedness. It was an old Chinese proverb.

I hugged my parents, feeling an unexpected lump in my throat and a sudden twinge of anxiety. If the flight had been cancelled at that moment I would have sighed with relief and gone home.

Through the window of the departure lounge I watched airplanes come and go. I thought about a classical Chinese novel,
Journey to the West, a
four-volume set in English that my parents had bought for my birthday. I laughed at the cover, which showed a shabbily dressed priest on a horse, accompanied by a monkey, a guy with a pig’s face, and a bearded friar, all on foot. And I don’t mean the guy had a face
like
a pig; it
was
a pig face. This is a five-hundred-year-old classic? I had thought. I had plowed through all four volumes, though, skimming along and skipping over bits. The book is about a quest to find the place where a sacred Buddhist book is located. Although there were no guns or explosions, I half expected Indiana Jones to pop up at any moment.

I wasn’t looking for hidden treasure or sacred writings. All I wanted were a few answers, and the older I got, the stronger was my desire to know. Whatever happened, at least
I’d be able to tell myself, and my kids if I had any, that I had tried.

Frank had a boyhood friend in Yangzhou named Xu who had recently been laid off by the textile factory where he had worked for more than twenty years. Xu may have been unlucky in his job but he was a terrific detective. He had hunted down Mrs. Xia, the woman from the orphanage whom my parents had met. She was retired, in her seventies, Xu had written. He had also said Miss Canada—me—had better come soon before Xia was “summoned by the clouds.” I had her address among the other contacts Frank had provided.

I had read lots of articles about ordinary people—as well as celebrities—who had reunited with their birth parents. The reunions seemed to make them all famous. I had no illusions about a Disney-style ending for myself, though. I wanted to see Chun-mei’s face, and her husband’s too. If she refused to answer my questions, I would walk away.

Journey to the West, I said to myself as my plane taxied down the runway. I would be entering China from their east. But I would be referred to as a Westerner. Although there were no mountains of knives for me to climb, as described in the
novel, no burning sea to sail across, knowing that didn’t make me feel any better.

The roller-coaster landing at Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai left me nauseated even after I had cleared the passport check and collected my luggage, so when I heard a voice asking in Mandarin, “Are you Grace? From Canada?” it didn’t register at first. I stopped, and the rushing stream of travellers flowed around me as people hurried for the exits, calling out and getting in each other’s way.

“Grace?”

A small middle-aged woman smiled as she opened a wallet and held it up. The scene reminded me of the old spy movies my dad loved so much. Inside the clear plastic pocket a fresh-faced girl in a borrowed gown smiled at me. It was my graduation photo.

“Yes, that’s me.”

Hot and sweaty, no doubt smelly, in a crumpled shirt and shorts, I didn’t remotely resemble the girl in the picture. I had been on the road for more than twenty-four hours by then, and I was jet-lagged and exhausted.

Ms. Song tried to wave off a cluster of porters who offered to carry my luggage even though I had already piled it on a cart.

“Two U.S. dollar,” one said, holding up two fingers and grabbing at my backpack with his other hand.

“One dollar only!” another shouted.

“Gun-kai!”
Song said brusquely. “Go away! We don’t need you.”

“We are not talking to you, woman,” the younger one snapped. “She’s rich. What do you care if we make a little money?”

“Xiang-xia-ren!”
Song shot back, leading me and my cart through the crowd.

Xiang-xia-ren
meant country folk, I knew from my Mandarin lessons, but it obviously suggested more than that, judging from the men’s reaction and the way Song spat out the words.

Outside, the air was sticky and oppressive. Song hailed a taxi and chatted away to the driver in Shanghai dialect, which I couldn’t follow. It was near midnight by the time I checked into the Dragon Gate Hotel. Although my body felt like a limp rope, my mind was racing with excitement, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep for a while. Song went to a table near the window and made tea from a large thermos.

“Guess how old I am,” she asked shortly after we settled into the two large armchairs.

“Um, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. It’s sort of dark in here. Thirty?”

She laughed. “Be serious.”

“Thirty-five?”

Song was barely five feet tall, with a slight build. Her straight black hair was cut short at her earlobes. Behind her square-framed glasses her face was unwrinkled. But Frank had told me they had been classmates at university, so I knew she must be older.

“Forty-five!” she crowed. “I’m old enough to be your mother, although my own daughter is only fifteen. How old is your mother? Is she a blonde?”

“She’d kill me if I told her age. She’s older than you. She used to be blond, like my sister Megan, and both have blue eyes. But Mom’s hair is salt-and-pepper now, more salt.”

“Salt-and-pepper! What a vivid description. In China we have only three hair colours—black, grey, and white. Very boring.”

“I guess that’s what’s in store for me,” I said.

“But you have choices. I heard that in your country people dye their hair any colour they want. Even orange or green. And in a movie I saw that you identify one another by hair and eye colour. It’s so strange.”

We chatted for a while about clothing, make-up, and other stuff that Song was interested in. She wanted to know if it was true that all Western women were overweight.

“I’m not,” I said.

“But you’re Chinese!”

I laughed. I knew we’d get along fine.

I said goodbye to Song before she got into her taxi, and watched the tail lights move out of sight, then walked back up the steps to the hotel. At the top, I turned towards the din of traffic and human voices at the Shanghai train station, with its bright red neon tower. The wide space before the front doors was packed with people, standing, sitting, laid out on thin rush mats—thousands of people in the middle of the night, caught between home and somewhere else.

I would have slept the whole day through if Ms. Song hadn’t knocked on my door. My watch said five past five in the afternoon, and I thought instantly about the argument I’d had with my parents, telling them I was too young to suffer from jet lag. I pulled on my clothes, ran a comb through my hair, and let Song in. She drew open the curtains to reveal a hazy sky.

“I’ve come to take you sight-seeing!”

Though still half-asleep, I did some mental calculations. Song had been up half the night taking care of me and then had put in a full day’s work. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble, Ms. Song,” I said.

“Call me Julia. I may not be able to visit you tomorrow or the next day. I have a crazy schedule at the office.”

“Julia?” I hesitated.

“I’ve been called Julia for two years now. At work. Choosing an English name is part of the package. I used to teach English at a textile college in the suburbs. After eighteen years, I quit. I’d finally had enough, the unfair treatment from my colleagues and leaders at the college. Now I work for Eastern Wing Airlines, a Hong Kong company with a busy branch here. I’m a ticket agent.”

“You quit college teaching to be a ticket agent?” I said tactlessly. Song’s openness was infectious.

“Believe it or not, I make more money now than I used to, with a bonus at the end of the year if the boss is happy with the profits. That never happened at the college. I got this job because I could read and speak English. If I
didn’t have English, the boss would have tossed my application out the window without blinking an eye.”

Remembering my manners, I set about making two cups of tea.

“In today’s market,” Song said, “women my age, anyone over forty, are unemployable. Those who work in state-owned factories are forced to retire, to make room for younger ones who need jobs. But of course the new policy doesn’t apply to men.”

“I wish my mother were here to hear this,” I put in. “In Canada a company with this kind of policy would be in deep trouble for sex discrimination. And age discrimination.”

“Ha! Go tell that to my turkey-neck boss. He is over seventy but he demands that all the women he hires be twenty-five or less, with fair skin and fine features.”

“You mean a pretty face is what they want.”

“Yes. I feel lucky, compared to most women my age.”

I still wasn’t clear why selling airline tickets was better than teaching at a university. “So what’s this about getting the cold treatment you mentioned earlier?” I asked.

“It’s a bit complicated,” she said, taking a sip
of her tea. “Your family friend, Frank, and I are what we call WPS—Worker-Peasant-Soldier university graduates. We went to university during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Workers, peasants, and soldiers then were considered the most politically pure people in the country, while intellectuals, businesspeople, and so on were persecuted. During those years, entrance exams were abolished because they were condemned as favourable only to the non-working classes. People like me and Frank, who didn’t complete high school because we were forced to work in factories or on farms, could apply for university with no exam, as long as our political record was clean.

“We were the last wave of WPS students before Deng Xiao-ping brought entrance exams back. So our time at university, particularly in our last year, was not happy, because all the students who came in after us criticized and mocked us. We were not ‘real academics.’ The WPS label followed us after we graduated and were assigned to jobs. Like the ‘children of concubines,’ we were discriminated against all through our careers.”

“Interesting expression,” I said, “the children of concubines.”

“Yes. It’s from the old pre-liberation days, when the emperors and high officials were entitled to have one wife but as many concubines as they pleased. The children of their wives were much higher in status than the kids the concubines produced. Anyhow, no matter what I did in my new teaching job, I couldn’t wipe out the past. I took extra courses on weekends and in the evenings. I postponed marriage and starting a family. My daughter was born when I was thirty. Still, nothing satisfied my boss or the university administration, and I got no respect from my co-workers or students. I was given all the worst classes and the junior students. No promotion, no research assignments. I wasn’t ashamed of being WPS and I made that clear, which didn’t help me. So finally, I left. And as you know, Frank went abroad. But enough lecturing! I sound like a teacher again.”