Throwaway Daughter (5 page)

The key point of the whole issue is that Loyal and his wife won’t get a second chance to have a son if the child is a girl. A family-planning policy that allows only one child to each married couple was laid down by the government, and two years ago the policy was made a strictly enforced law, bearing severe consequences for anyone who doesn’t obey. Since then, bad news keeps blowing in my direction. So-and-so was stripped of Party membership for violating the law; such-and-such family lost their precious
vegetable plot for breaking the rule. And each lawbreaker is no stranger to me, for I used to be their leader. I would be the one to mete out the punishment if I were still in office.

I’m in a unique situation, being the only Chen among the Liu clan. Every household in our village has Liu as the surname, after the river that runs through the east end. At the age of sixteen, skinny as a rope, I left my native village after my family perished in the flood, and begged my way from Shandong Peninsula to the north shore of the Yangtze River, where a family adopted me and renamed me Liu. I changed it back to Chen soon after I started my own family. I am the only survivor in my original family, the only root of Chen. I can’t bear to see my family tree cease growing.

Last night I had the worst nightmare of my entire life. In the dream, the Yellow River had burst through its banks again and flooded our fields and village. I was tied down on a plank door. While one surge of waves dragged me into the current, the next surfed me up. I struggled as hard as I could, trying to locate my family in the dark, but the raging flood pushed me farther away from them. I was clearly aware that if I lay still, remained on the board, let the
waves take me, I might live. But live alone. I was so torn apart in making a decision that my head hurt even after I woke up. My body ached too. I haven’t had this kind of nightmare for years. The only difference is that in my previous dreams I was a young man, but in the one last night, I was old, more helpless than ever. I didn’t share the dream with anyone, as I usually do. Not even with my wife.

Yes, I am retired, and no one comes to ask for my advice or seeks my approval any more, but I haven’t stopped trying to keep up-to-date with government rules and Party lines. I feel I owe the government that much, but my family doesn’t agree. Not long ago Loyal remarked to me that my brain has been washed by so much propaganda for so long that it’s like a slab of granite. He was joined by my wife, who has, since we were married more than forty years ago, never contradicted me. The argument started as soon as the three of us stepped into the house after the village political meeting. The new Party secretary, whom I didn’t recognize, re-emphasized the family-planning law and announced yet more severe penalties for any violation. His voice was firm and loud, tainted by an accent unfamiliar to my ears. But it was no way as powerful as the
silence that followed. When the villagers were asked to stand up and voice their support and make personal promises, there was no response. Half an hour must have passed before I got to my feet and did my duty. That was the fuse that lit the home battle.

“You’re retired,” my wife, usually soft-spoken, shouted at me before the door was closed, tapping my temple with her fingers to suggest that I had lost my mind—a gesture she had never before made to me. “Why couldn’t you keep your mouth shut like the rest? Haven’t you learned that the lead bird takes the first bullet? What are you thinking, old man? Loyal is getting married in three months.”

As if her words were not enough to teach me a lesson, she, for the first time since I took her for my wife, refused to cook me breakfast. She didn’t get up the next day until lunchtime. As for Loyal, he didn’t speak to me for a whole week.

I understood my wife’s concern, and knew where Loyal’s anger came from. I am a farmer, a peasant, good at planning crops. As for family planning, I find it even difficult to say these words. It’s hard to follow, like many other rules and regulations. But I am aware that each year we have more and more people to feed. The
statistics read to us at the meeting were no good to me. They are pushed into one ear and leave right away through the other. All I need is to walk around our village, go through our fields, and make comparisons. In our area, the land is not as rich and fertile as our southern neighbours’, nor are our lakes and rivers as generous. Still we try to grow three crops a year instead of two, if weather permits. As soon as we bring in the spring wheat, we plant rice seedlings. When the harvested rice bundles are on the way to the threshing ground, the land is made ready for winter wheat to be sown. There is no spare season and our fields are never empty of labourers. Yet for the past two decades, our brigade, which I know the best, sometimes has to bring in grain grown somewhere else. We all work harder but in the end we still can’t feed ourselves every year. And that’s a bitter pill for a farmer to swallow. Over the past fifteen years the population in our village has doubled, but the arable land hasn’t grown one inch.

I don’t mind having fewer children around, to respond to the government call. But I must have a grandson of my own so that the spirit of the Chen family can live on. As long as I’m around, my family tree is not going to die.

M
y father has told me often enough that he doesn’t dislike
all
the changes that have taken place over the last two years, although some of them make him uneasy. I welcome them, because they have made my life a lot better than I ever imagined. For the first time I have come to realize that a farmer’s standard of living doesn’t have to be as tough and bitter as I was used to. And, believe me, I know what I’m talking about in that regard. Just look at the house we are living in now: a two-level building of real bricks, not a hut made from hard-packed mud mixed with chopped rice straw. It’s true, we still have a thatched roof. We could have had clay tiles if
my pathetic stab at private enterprise hadn’t gone down the drain.

I grew up hearing about “Old Man Yu Moves the Mountain.” In grade two I had to memorize the story for a school assignment. After that my father would ask me to tell it over and over again, to him alone and in front of guests, even to strangers. It didn’t take long for me, my mother, and everyone else in our village to conclude that he was obsessed with the stubborn and unrealistic Yu. One thing has become clear to me: no matter what kind of spirit Old Yu was praised for, he could never build a house like ours by relying on his bare hands. He would have needed money. Moving dirt around wouldn’t have brought him a cent, nor a piece of brick, with or without the god of heaven’s generals. And that’s the bottom line.

Nowadays, money means everything, much more than “correct thought;” even my old mama understands that. One of her favoured expressions is that the most capable wife can’t make meals without a grain of rice. That’s my mama, all right. She’s an old-fashioned woman. I don’t bother to tell her that not everyone in the world eats rice. Rich foreigners, I have learned, eat bread and meat
instead. Mama would never believe me, particularly the daily meat part. She loves to reason things out by citing old sayings, which are plentiful in our region.

One of the first I came to know when I was a little kid at village school stated that if you had enough money, you could hire a ghost to do your work for you. At the time, our teacher, an old fragile man who didn’t have any front teeth left, warned us that the adage was a “stinking bourgeois habit of thought.” He had to write the saying on the blackboard because most of us couldn’t understand what he tried to say, so confusing were the hisses and slurs mixed in with his words as he spoke through the wide space where his teeth had been. At home, my father told me sternly that there was no such thing as ghosts. Superstition and nonsense, he declared. I never repeated the saying again, but it stuck in my head.

Ever since the death of Chairman Mao, we have entered an era in which what was once right has become wrong, and previous error has turned to truth. The old adage began to make sense to me. Over a year ago our new leader, Deng Xiao-ping, declared to the whole nation that to be rich is glorious and so is making money on your own, the more, the faster, the better.

Since then I have often dreamed of getting rich. But I don’t know how. One of my old man’s mottoes is that being poor will make a person a better revolutionary. That particular gem, plus his madness over Old Man Yu, was the cause of his nickname, Old Revolutionary Chen. At sixty-five, he ought to enjoy what’s left of his life, which anyone who has eyes can see is a lot better. But he had to involve himself in things that are no longer his concern. My wife, Chun-mei, claims that my father has too much time on his hands, that he is inventing his own way to kill it: first, to wind himself up tight over some issue, then unwind slowly. Mama says that the old man is looking for trouble with a lit lantern. She doesn’t spell out what kind of trouble.

Lately, my father has become quiet, which is totally unlike him. He sits alone, his head hanging, his shoulders stooped, in the front room, our family’s sitting and eating place. One long sigh is followed by a couple of short ones after he squeezes the lit end off his cigarette. His sudden mood change came after I told him that Chun-mei is pregnant, or as the locals would say, “bearing happiness.”

How can I not know the reason behind his odd behaviour, being the only boy in the family?
My father doesn’t have wealth or property to pass on to me as foreigners do. He’s never had a bank account. The purpose of his life, the struggles he has gone through, have been for one thing and one thing only: to have his name continue. He did his part, but because of the new government law allowing only one child per family, he is worried on my behalf. Yet he doesn’t want to tell me what’s troubling him, as if admitting his concern will cause Chun-mei to have a girl for sure.

Since Deng Xiao-ping’s economic reforms began—I have adored Deng the way my father worshipped Chairman Mao—Father and I have been like opposite electric charges: when one touches the other, an explosion is the result. We argue over everything, like rebuilding our house and adding a second floor as most village families have done, after I was able to borrow money from the commune’s credit union. All in all, he has been against almost everything I want to do.

“This same building has housed four children and two adults,” he shouted when I first mentioned the renovation. “Your sisters left home with no missing legs or arms. How can you say now we need more space?”

We started construction anyway because my father is retired and the responsibility for the house and loan is mine, though the land where the house stands remains the property of the government. My father nearly choked when I told him that all three rooms on the second level were for the use of my new family. We would have a bedroom, a sitting room, and a nursery.

“Even
you
can’t be in two places at the same time, can you?” he railed, following me from room to room. “When you sit in your
living room
you can’t be lying in your bedroom. So, educate me. What’s the need of three rooms? If this isn’t wasteful, what is?”

He calmed down a bit only when my mother dragged him into the nursery where I had painted the walls sky blue instead of pink, like the other rooms. He seemed pleased by that, declaring an end to that round.

My original plan was that my parents would live downstairs. I heard that’s what foreigners and city people preferred. But my father insisted that he and Mama needed only one room, and that his decision was absolutely final. So their living room became a warehouse and storage area for tools, and the third room at the front turned into an eating and gathering place, with
an eight-person square table in the centre, four wooden benches around it. To fill up the empty spaces, I added more benches against the walls. It reminded me of our village’s meeting place, where the government documents are read to us and its policies are passed on. There is only one kitchen in our house, at the back, on the ground level. Among all my upgrades, the kitchen has scored poorest. I won’t dare to compare it with the photo I saw in a magazine when I was buying paint in the town market. I know quality when I see it. Everything in the picture was smooth, shiny, and stylish. I would be laughing in my dreams if we could afford the city folks’ gas burners and running water all in one room.

Half our kitchen is taken up by a brick stove, waist-high, with a back wall that rises to the ceiling. Behind the wall is a small chamber, big enough for one person to sit on a low stool and feed knotted rice or wheat straw into the fuel channels in the back of the stove. There is no shining cookware in sight. The smoke changes everything to the colour of ash. We use pig-iron woks for every task: cooking rice, stir-frying vegetables, making soup, boiling water.

In the past, to devote space to a bath hut would have been an outrageous extravagance. A
chamber pot was all we had. We bathed in a wooden tub placed in the room where we ate and slept. When I was a kid, the Liu River was my bathtub as soon as summer arrived, but in winter, even thinking about washing in the river gave me goosebumps. I would stop having baths altogether. Only those who had money to burn, as my old man would say, could afford to have a soak in the public bath pool six miles away. I myself have never set foot in the place.