Throwaway Daughter (13 page)

The Green Villa restaurant was on Nanjing Road, which must be the most crowded street in the world. Most of the tables were occupied. We were shown upstairs to a table by the window. I sat down, grateful for the air conditioning, and Song began to chat with the waiter. He went away and returned to hand me a menu in English.

I put it aside. “I don’t need this, but thanks anyway,” I said.

“I know you don’t need it,” Song replied, “but it will help me. I don’t have enough English to describe the fancy food and cooking here. I’m hoping you’ll explain a few things to me.”

Next to us a party was in progress, with six adults and a boy of about five or six. The obnoxious little creep was anywhere but in his chair. He spent his time crawling among the other tables and roaming around the dining room, annoying other diners, all the while chased by a young woman with a bowl of rice in one hand and a spoon in the other, trying to feed the brat as he scooted from place to place.

I thought about my dad and his motto: if a kid doesn’t eat, he isn’t hungry. I had often argued with him about that, wanting to play and eat at the same time, or eat in front of the TV. Dad would have ended this little troublemaker’s travels fast. I told Song that the kid reminded me of the spoiled boy-king in the movie
The Last Emperor
.

“Yes, boys like him
are
called little emperors nowadays,” she answered in English. “Look at him, doted on by everyone. I bet his poor
mother hasn’t had a bite yet, but the ruler of the family must not be disciplined! All because he’s the only child—and a boy.”

“And the girls are empresses?”

“Oh, no. I’m afraid China still has feudal attitudes about this matter, especially in the countryside, where boys are preferred. Surprised?”

“Well …”

“Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that all girl children are mistreated or undervalued. Look, I have a daughter and I wouldn’t trade her for a dozen sons. Nor would my husband.”

“But don’t more than eighty percent of Chinese live in the country? What’s the problem there that they’re still so behind the times? They’re educated, right? They have radios, and TV?”

“I’m sorry I upset you, Grace,” Song said quietly.

“No, no, it wasn’t you,” I said. “I was thinking out loud.”

At that moment the little boy scooted under our table for the third time. I had to force myself not to boot him in his fat little ass.

I spent the next morning killing time by exploring the Bund and waterfront area. It wasn’t very
interesting. On the way back to the hotel I walked through a shopping district on Nanjing Road. Almost all the store windows were jammed with high-fashion, logo-covered clothing, cosmetics and perfume, or high-tech computer and entertainment equipment. A giant picture of the latest Western supermodel, with long blond hair and a body as thin as a coat hanger, advertised Rolex watches across the road from a fast-food stall where workers in faded denim pants and threadbare T-shirts lined up to buy fried bread. So much for the socialist workers’ paradise.

My room was cool. I kicked off my shoes and lay on the bed and fell asleep instantly. I awoke to a knocking on the door. Song was standing there with a young girl.

“Say hello,
Ah-yi,”
Song told the girl, who mumbled something.
Ah-yi
—Auntie—was a term of respect. “Speak louder, she can’t hear you. This is my daughter, Xing-xing. She has never been inside a fancy hotel like this. I hope you don’t mind that I brought her.”

“No, of course not,” I said. “Come on in.”

I made tea for Song and myself and offered a cola to Xing-xing. Like her mother, Xing-xing had almond-shaped eyes, which gave her a fragile appearance. She would have been prettier
without the blue eyeshadow, vivid red lipstick, and a thick layer of blush on her cheeks. Her long black hair was piled on her head and decorated with a red ribbon that contrasted with her tight green T-shirt. She was wearing a denim miniskirt and fishnet stockings. She looked like a wannabe hooker in a second-rate movie.

“Tell
Ah-yi
what you want to be when you grow up,” Song said to Xing-xing after we had sat down.

“You tell her, Mama.”

Song turned pink, and I smothered a laugh.

“Don’t be ridiculous, you useless girl. Look at
Ah-yi. She
is a Chinese like you, only four years older, yet she speaks English, French, and Chinese. She is going to university to get a good education. She’ll have a wonderful job and make a lot of money. Don’t you want the same things? Speak up!” Song demanded when her daughter said nothing.

“Why do you want Xing-xing to be like me?” I asked in English. “You hardly know me. And who told you I am rich? I’m just an ordinary person, Julia.”

“But you have a wonderful life in Canada,” she replied in Mandarin. “Don’t be so modest. Most Chinese girls would die to have what you have.”

To change the subject, I suggested we go to the hotel restaurant for dinner. Song happily agreed. When the three of us had sat down at a table in the busy dining room and ordered our food, Xing-xing began to play with the glass lazy susan in the centre of the table. Song talked to me in English.

“I want to ask if you can help Xing-xing to go to a Canadian university when the time comes.”

“Um, well, I could try,” I said lamely. “Are you planning to move to Canada?”

Song laughed. “Oh, no. That would be impossible. But I will send Xing-xing abroad if I can.”

“But she’d be away for a year at a time. Wouldn’t you and your husband miss her?”

“Of course we would. But it’s a sacrifice we would gladly make for Xing-xing’s future. You’ll understand when you become a mother yourself.”

“Speaking of school,” I said, “the residence at Huang-pu College opens tomorrow.”

“Yes, a pity you must move from this nice hotel,” Song said.

The Huang-pu Business College was in the old French section of Shanghai, on a wide
street lined with plane trees and free of the constant snarl of traffic that seemed to clog most of the city. The school was housed in an old mansion with a large courtyard and a new wing added to the back—the dorms, I learned soon after my arrival.

Classes were held in the original mansion, in grand rooms with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and large windows looking out over the courtyard. There were two dozen of us in the summer institute, people about my age from Canada, the United States and Europe. I was not used to the teaching style. Where Frank had an iron rule that, when he and I were together, not one word of English was to be spoken, our Chinese teacher lectured, giving us no chance to talk to her in Mandarin. That was for the language lab, she told us on the first day. Her job was to teach us grammar.

Besides the lab and lectures each day, we had calligraphy lessons that were more like an art class, taught by a skinny old guy named Lao Qin who stood over us chattering away and pointing out faults in our brush strokes. But it was the only class I enjoyed—not just because he favoured me, being the only “overseas Chinese” in the class, but because I liked the feel of
the brush in my hand and the way the jet-black ink flowed from the brush onto the newspaper we used for practice.

At night, most of the other students went out drinking at the disco bars. I went with them once. The bars were incredibly hot, pounding with tenth-rate rock music, and every once in a while they’d fire up the karaoke machine. There were hookers there, and drugs. So much for Mom’s notion that China was free of vice. We got back to the school at three in the morning, wasted and red-eyed. Once was enough for me.

In the middle of the third week, Dad called. He told me that Megan had come down with a bad case of appendicitis and had had an operation. “Don’t worry,” he said to calm me, “it was a simple procedure and she sailed through it. She’s home now, doing fine and grumping at everybody. But she won’t be able to join your tour group.”

The longer I was in China, the more I felt my birth parents pulling me towards them, as if a big question was closer to an answer if only I’d take a few more steps. I wasn’t far away. But I was afraid of what I might find out. By the last week of classes I still hadn’t made up my mind.
Then one morning I stood at the sink and looked at the face in the mirror, the black hair, the dark skin, the large eyes that were not reflected in my sister or my parents. I decided what I wanted to do.

I passed all my courses and so did everybody else. At the little graduation tea party out on the lawn under the plane trees, everyone was abuzz about the five-city tour—Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Wuxi, which were not too far from Shanghai, then Beijing and Xi’an.

I told the director of the summer institute that I’d be visiting relatives instead of taking the tour. “No refund,” was his answer.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’ve got other plans.”

After the party, I went to my dorm and called Song to say goodbye and to tell her I was going to Yangzhou. She insisted on getting my train ticket for me.

“There is no train to Yangzhou,” she said. “You have to take a train to Zhenjiang and then catch a bus. It’s very difficult for you to get a train ticket, but for me it’s as easy as cutting a piece of bean curd. My work unit and the train station are co-ordinated units, as we call it. We do favours for one another all the time. What do you say in English? We back-scratch each other.”

I laughed. “Something like that. Okay, I’ll go ahead and book a hotel room in Yangzhou.”

“There’s no need to book ahead,” Song said, “so save yourself the cost of a long-distance call. Look, this is Shanghai, and your hotel wasn’t full when you arrived, so Yangzhou will have lots of empty rooms. If you call ahead for a reservation, you will be charged full price. But if you just walk into the hotel in Yangzhou and ask if there’s a room, you can get a bargain. I wish you would stay in Shanghai a few days longer,” she went on. “My husband and I would like you to visit our home.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said. “But I have a tight schedule. My visa is only good for two more weeks and I don’t know what kind of problems or delays I might run into.”

“Then wait for my call tomorrow morning. I’ll have your ticket, possibly see you off at the station.”

By the time I boarded the train for Zhenjiang and took a window seat in the air-conditioned car, my mood was lighter and I felt kind of proud of myself. I had accomplished a lot in the past two days.

The high point in my morning had been my visit to the ticket office in the train station. Carrying my backpack and clutching my suitcase, I had felt like royalty as I walked past the long queues—or rather crowds—gathered in an unruly bunch in front of the ticket windows, greeted by hostile stares and grumbling. I had stepped into a room where I presented my confirmation number, provided by Song, paid for my ticket, and left. The whole procedure took less than fifteen minutes. The man behind the wicket even apologized to me because there were no first-class tickets left.

Hours later, the train made its slow progress out of Shanghai station. Only at that moment did I feel that my journey was finally under way.

As the train arrived at Zhenjiang station, I got my first glimpse of Frank’s hometown. It seemed to be a city of chimneys, all pumping clouds of black smoke into the hot, sticky air. The walls of the buildings were the colour of ashes. Not much concern for greenhouse emissions here, I thought as I got down from the train amid the clanging of the bell and the rumble of the bustling crowd.

As soon as I emerged from the station into the square I was swarmed by four women
who plucked at my sleeves and the back my shirt, demanding something. Each of them had a long-handled cotton bag hanging around her neck and each strove to shout louder than the others.

A small crowd quickly gathered to watch the show as the two loudest women attempted to drag me in opposite directions.

“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled back in Mandarin, startled by the assault. “Let go of me!”

They switched from local dialect to Mandarin after they heard me yell, and I soon realized that they were looking for customers for the taxis waiting nearby. The tallest one snatched my suitcase from my hand, hooked her arm in mine, and pulled me towards a white minibus whose engine rattled as if it would die at any minute.

Her competitors had gone off to attack other prey. Inside the minibus, a few passengers, sweating and wrinkled, sat watching the driver yell at an old man behind him.

“No money, no ride! I am not running a buddha temple! Get off the bus!”

The old man hawked loudly and spat out the window before he climbed out slowly. He
spat again, this time onto the floor of the vehicle, then shuffled away.

“Where you go, young miss?” the woman asked me again, pushing her hair back from her sweaty brow.

I explained that I wanted to go to the central station to catch a bus to Yangzhou.

“No need,” she said. “We can take you to Yangzhou, direct and cheap. Ten yuan.”

“Okay.”

I got in and took the old man’s place, wrinkling my nose at his gamey odour. The woman shoved my suitcase beside me and took her seat next to the driver, who rammed the gear shift forward and moved off.

She turned and asked, “Where in Yangzhou?” She sounded friendly now.

“Yangzhou Hotel,” I said.

The minibus pitched and jumped along the road, the engine protesting, the air inside oppressively hot. Each time I opened the window, clouds of choking dust and more hot air swept in. When we arrived at the station, an hour and a half later, two of the passengers got out.

“Stay on,” the woman said to me. There was a quick exchange between her and the driver
before the bus was under way again. “We will drop you off at the hotel. It’s on our way.”

In my room, I made myself a cup of tea. The hotel, like the one in Shanghai, provided a large thermos of boiled water, cups, and a few packets of jasmine tea. I stood at the window, enjoying the relatively cool air, looking down into the street and watching the blazing sun sink behind a cluster of two-storey buildings. I was a step closer to my goal. I had a room in the city that my parents had not been allowed to visit, where Chun-mei had abandoned me. Right this moment, I realized with a shiver, I could take a taxi to the orphanage and walk up those same steps.