Throwaway Daughter (19 page)

I can hardly express my shock and heartache when I learned recently that while the Chairman had called upon the people of China to pull down the remnants of the rotten bourgeoisie, he himself went through one marriage after another, with more wives than I had pairs of shoes. Worse, it was said that for two decades before he died he had kept a pretty young country woman in his chamber, day and night, while his new wife lived only feet away. My jaw dropped when I saw the recent photo of her in the newspaper. Yet Chairman Mao wasn’t the only one of my idols to be toppled like a tombstone. Premier Zhou En-lai and his wife were once widely admired as a childless couple who sacrificed family life to serve the Party and socialist China, who claimed that the children of China were their own. It turned out that Zhou had fathered a daughter with another woman. Loyal showed me a book written by that daughter. Her photo was on the cover. She was the image of the Premier. The daughter as well as her mother had been visited many times by the Premier and his wife.

Lies piled on lies. White turned to black, black became red. In my village, families of Bad Elements, a class defined and attacked by the government for more than three decades, were praised by the same government when they got rich investing in non-farming business. They made so much money that they were able to hire poor labourers from Anhui Province to work on their land while they bought themselves cars. In the country where we peasants had thrown off cruel landlords and made a revolution, now the landlords were back!

But I couldn’t complain, not when bourgeois attitudes could be found in my own family. When Loyal’s scandal came to light he thought I would kill him for sure, but I didn’t make much fuss. I even surprised myself.

I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. I had been fooled and played with for so long that I excused myself for what I did to Chun-mei and the child. If that’s a sin, so be it. No, I suppose I am no better than the next man, but I am no worse either. Or so I had convinced myself after these many bitter years, until my granddaughter came all the way from Canada to look for her mother. In her determination I see the spirit of the Chen family, the spirit I thought I had thrown away.

C
hun-mei and I had never been lovers like the ones in those Hong Kong movies. We married first and fell in love later. At least, that’s how I felt about our relationship.

We had planned that our baby was going to be delivered in the county hospital. It was Chun-mei’s idea and I agreed, even though it was unusual in both her family and mine. My stodgy father accused me of seeking change for its own sake, but I thought, if my wife is more comfortable in the hospital, why not?

During her pregnancy, while I referred to the unborn child as our son, Chun-mei always called it our baby. Once I asked her why, considering that Old Fu had made a clear pronouncement on
the matter. She gave me the first and only superstitious answer I ever heard from her. “You can spit out a mouthful of rice because you took too much, but you can’t unsay the words you’ve uttered.” It was her way of saying, if you call the baby a boy you will tempt Fate to fool you. She sounded like my mother, not my wife.

The night of the birth I noticed the fear, almost horror, on Chun-mei’s face when Father sent for Sister Liu. Chun-mei begged me to take her to the hospital, to stick to our original plan, never mind the ice storm raging outside, and the cold, and the prediction that we would have snow after the freezing rain. She ignored Mother’s warning that she was well into her labour, that the water had come, whatever that meant. I saw no cause for her fears, but I had also learned that pregnant women were not the most logical creatures in the world.

Even to this day I can recall with dread the screams passing through that closed door. Each one tore my heart. I wanted to be with Chun-mei, but tradition strictly forbade it. I wanted to go outside and walk the paths of the village, but the weather made it impossible. I felt as if I was trapped in a pen. My father was no help. He paced around, upstairs and downstairs, inside
his room and out again. When his hands weren’t fidgeting, scratching his forehead or rubbing the back of his neck, they found brief refuge in his sleeves.

When the baby’s cries echoed in the house, his eyes lit up like lanterns and my heart soared. I forgot my wife’s discomfort. My father clapped me on the shoulder. “Listen to his lusty bawling!” he said with a laugh. “A chubby little boy for sure!” But there were no sounds of celebration behind that door. When the baby quieted there was only silence.

“What’s going on?” Father shouted, pounding the door with his fists. “Bring out my grandson.”

There was no response. The light left my father’s face, and I myself was overcome with the dreadful feeling that something had gone wrong. Then the door cracked open, revealing my mother’s drawn features and desperate red eyes. No baby lay in her arms. Behind her, my wife wept weakly among tangled sheets, as if the screams I had heard only moments before had drained the life from her.

“There is no son, my child,” Mother murmured, sadly shaking her head. “It’s a girl.” Then she closed the door.

“It has to be a mistake,” I said, pushing open the door. Sister Liu, her shoulders hunched as if she expected a blow, scuttled behind me out of the room. I heard my father’s angry words.

I walked around the bed and stared down at Chun-mei and the tiny bundle resting in her arms. I reached out to the blankets to see for myself the gender of the child, but Chun-mei hissed, “No! Don’t touch her!” Her words were like knives; her face twisted with—what? Not hatred. A kind of animal defensiveness that made it clear she would die before giving up that child.

Numb with confusion and guilt and grief, I ran up and down the stairs all night carrying messages between two strong-willed people who had become enemies. Each time I entered the room Chun-mei clinched the child closer. Though she was so tired that opening her eyes was an effort, her head was as clear as spring water and her voice was firm as she stated her conditions. If she could keep her baby, she would indebt herself for life to pay the fine when she became pregnant again; she was willing to have her allotment of land taken from her; and she would go away, stay in hiding, until the second child was due and safe.

My father would not agree to anything she suggested. He sat on the edge of his bed, smoking, shaking his head. She must hand over the child. That was his bottom line. I carried his threats to my wife. I couldn’t believe how her beautiful eyes had turned so cold, how her sweet modest voice had grown so hard.

“If you harm my little girl I swear I will give you and that old man no peace until I die. In case you have forgotten”—she let her words out one at a time—“I am the daughter of a landlord, a survivor. There is not much for me to lose. Leave us alone, and give me two more days. I promise Dong-mei will disappear from your lives. Go tell that to your old man. There will be no more talk.”

She closed her eyes then and turned her back to me. She had called the child Dong-mei, as if she had known all along it would be a girl. Winter Plum-blossom fit with her own name, Spring Plum-blossom.

Chun-mei kept her promise. Two days later, when the snow and ice had melted away, she left the house before dawn and returned after dark, without the child. She walked in the door and went straight to our room without saying a word. No one dared to ask her where
she had gone and what she had done with the baby. My father’s relief was visible on his face. My mother was silent and glum. For my part, I tried to look ahead to the future.

Next day, my father sent Sister Liu to Chun-mei’s village to make quiet inquiries. She reported that there was no sign of a baby living in her parents’ household. “From what I could gather,” the old midwife and matchmaker said, “the Mas have no knowledge of the newborn. They are preoccupied with their business as well as caring for the King of the Salted Egg, who is ailing. Badly, they say,” she added. Chun-mei’s father had suffered a stroke three months after our marriage, losing his ability to speak. He had been bedridden ever since.

When he received the news from Sister Liu, my father smiled for the first time in days. “It’s better this way,” he said to me. “Time will pass and heal the wounds. Then you and your wife can try again.”

Meanwhile, the whole family, especially me, had to put up a front. It wasn’t a matter of pulling the wool over others’ eyes. For the past couple of years people in the village had stopped asking questions when a newborn died, especially if it was a girl, as if an understanding
had formed among the villagers. There seemed to have been a sharp increase in the number of stillborn girls. Some choked on their own vomit, some were accidentally strangled by the cord, some just stopped breathing, as simple as that. In the cities, I had heard, a doctor had to be present, a death certificate made out. Not in Liuhe Village.

So when it was my turn to put together a small wooden box and bury it in our vegetable plot, I received the usual condolences and sympathy. The strange thing was, I did feel as if my child had been born dead.

My wife endured her one-month confinement without me, keeping to the room, sleeping or staring out the window. Her meals were taken up to her by my mother. Often the food went untouched. I slept in the storage room at the back of the house, alongside the farm tools, sharing a wall with chickens and pigs.

On the day when the monthly confinement was over, Chun-mei emerged from her room. Her clothing was twisted and wrinkled, she gave off a sour odour, and her once shiny hair was a mess. She walked straight to the village barber and had it cut off shorter than mine. When she saw the three of us staring at her,
goggle-eyed, she laughed. But it wasn’t her old laugh. It was cold and bitter. The next day she went back to work.

My father had said that time would heal her loss, but for my wife time offered no solace. A month later, just after the Lunar New Year, which marked our first wedding anniversary, Chun-mei’s father passed away. I accompanied her to Poplar Tree Village and helped with funeral arrangements. Her family knew no more about what had happened that December night in the Chen household than anyone else. So far as I could see, the whole thing was behind us, or buried in that wooden box.

This time, it was Chun-mei who had to put up a front. She sat beside me on a bench during the funeral service, next to her mother. Once, she took my hand during the eulogy. It had been a long time since I had felt the touch of her skin. When the three-day mourning period came to an end she told me, to my surprise, that she was going home with me, not staying with her mother. I had been worried that she might use the funeral as an excuse to stay away from me and my family.

But when it came time to leave, her grief broke my heart. She was in tears before we stepped out of the house, and every two steps
she took, she ran back three. She wailed and cried and fell on her knees in the middle of the road, asking forgiveness from her dead father.

“There is nothing to be forgiven, my dear child,” her mother comforted her. “Your father knew you were busy with your work and family duties.”

She didn’t add “and your pregnancy and dealing with your own loss.” But the words hung in the air.

That night, back home, was the first that Chun-mei allowed me to lie beside her. But she kept silent with her back to me. I heard her weeping in the dark and mumbling in her sleep. We both tossed and turned until dawn broke.

When spring arrived, my wife’s spirits lifted somewhat. Her pallid skin took on some colour and she walked with a lighter step. She grew her hair out a bit, although it was still short, and some of the girls in the village copied her style. One day, on my way home from the market, I passed her workroom at the factory and saw her laughing with a co-worker, her head bent back, her face up to the late afternoon sun and her hair catching the light. I swore she was the most beautiful woman on earth. I would have given anything if she would share that laugh with me.

To everyone in the village, Chun-mei was herself again. When the May Day Fair was held in the town market, I wasn’t surprised that she was chosen as Queen of the Fair. She was dressed in red robes with a metal crown on her head, and paraded through the streets in a wooden cart pulled by a donkey festooned in red bunting. Young girls, lined up to be “received” by her, the Queen, shrieked with excitement, and new mothers with babies in their arms chatted while waiting their turn. When one of them pushed her baby girl onto Chun-mei’s lap, saying she hoped her child would grow up to be as beautiful as the Queen, Chun-mei blanched, thrust the child into her mother’s arms, yanked off the metal crown, and ran away.

Half a year passed before Chun-mei and I became husband and wife again. I dared to be happy again, but gladness is never pure. I couldn’t stop thinking about my duty to plant a child. Around that time I read in a magazine that it was the husband, not the wife, who determined the gender of the baby. I could hardly believe it. Our tradition was to blame the mother for a girl, praise her for a boy. What an awful discovery that was!