My father loved books and flowers. When I was a little girl I would slip into my parents’ bedroom and run my fingers along the spines of the books, history, literature, and philosophy, lined up on the three shelves beside the big rosewood bed. And when I was old enough, five or six, I can’t remember, he would tell me the stories he had read while we were tending the peonies and planting them in big pots by our door. My brothers had no time for books, so my father read only to me at nights, before I went to bed. I was glad my brothers were uninterested. It made our time special.
My favourite was a novel called The Scholars, and the part I liked best was the poem at the beginning.
In our lives
we walk different paths.
Generals, statesmen,
saints, even the Immortals
start out as ordinary people.
Dynasties rise and fall,
morning fades to evening.
Winds off the river
blow down trees
from former reigns.
Fame, wealth, and rank
vanish away.
So do not crave these things,
Wasting your days.
Drink up and be merry!
Who can tell
where the waters carry blossoms
cast upon them?
During the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, flowers were declared bourgeois trash, and people caught growing them or displaying them in their windows were hauled away to struggle-meetings and publicly criticized. I remember the day my mother watched horrified as Father tore the peonies from the pots and threw them on the compost heap. “What will you do?” she asked him. “We’ll keep the seeds,” he said.
Books, especially novels from the old days, were labelled “poison weeds” and burned. My father was forced to turn over all his precious volumes and watch as they were tossed into a roaring bonfire the Red Guards lit on the threshing ground. This time I was the one to ask, “Dad, what will you do without your books?” He managed to put up a smile and tapped his temple. “We’ll keep the seeds,” he told me.
So I tried to hold in my head as many of the stories he had read to me as I could, but as I grew most of them faded away. But not that poem.
Long before I was married I thought I had learned what human beings could do to one another. All through my childhood and young womanhood my family was spurned and spat upon because of the government policy. The campaigns against landlords, capitalists, and rightists seemed never to end, and my family’s “dirty blood” put us on the wrong side every time. There were things that went on during the Cultural Revolution that would curdle a person’s blood, dirty or not.
But I was still shocked when I became aware that some people would do away with innocent babies, get rid of them because they were not boys. More than once I wondered why the gods didn’t enable us women to keep girl babies inside us long enough that they could not be so easily hurt when they left our wombs. One time I found a dead baby on the roadside near our village, wrapped from head to toe in paper, like an undelivered parcel; another time, I saw an infant floating in the water, bumping against the foundation of the arched stone bridge over the Liu River. Both were girls. Yet they were not the worst.
Throughout the village were clay-lined pits, one for each family, where, because chemical fertilizer cost money, we composted our night-soil until it was ready to be spread on the paddies or vegetable plots. I was twenty-one the day I was coming home from the paddies, sore and exhausted from working all day knee deep in chilly water, bent at the waist, transplanting row after row of rice seedlings. My pole rested on my aching shoulder as I walked, and my calves and feet were numb from the cold. I passed the compost pit of a family that lived on the edge of the village. Something in it caught my eye and I stopped and looked in. A baby was half submerged in the dark liquid, its umbilical cord trailing from its distended belly.
When I told my mother what I had seen, my voice shook. I expected a shadow of shock and horror to cross her face, but she took it calmly. It was nothing new, she told me; “an old trick in a new time” were her exact words. No matter who was in power, she went on, nothing changed much when it came to making babies and giving birth. A baby was like property, a personal belonging. “In the old days girl babies were put away because of poverty, shame, or some other reason,” Mother said. “Now, if you want a son and you have a daughter …”
“But in a cesspit?” I shouted, slapping the tabletop. “It’s as if they were punished for being the wrong gender. If anyone should float in shit it’s the people who would do that to a baby!”
My mother sighed. “Believe it or not, Daughter, in my day ‘chamber-pot death’ was well understood and accepted. And sometimes it was an accident. You’ll find out, when you are married and pregnant, that when it’s time to deliver and the contractions start it does feel like you have to relieve yourself. And it was also used as a lame excuse for killing unwanted babies.”
“But the ‘accidental’ ones were always girls, weren’t they?”
Mama said nothing. She nodded.
When my time came and my baby was on her way into the world, all those memories rushed back to me. It would have been different if Loyal and his father held the same attitudes to the gender of children as my father did. So I worked out a plan to deliver my child in the town hospital, where getting rid of a baby would be very hard. I pretended to be afraid of a home delivery, showing false faith in modern facilities and doctors. Loyal agreed. After frowning and letting it be known that the decision should have been his, so did his father.
The truth was I never liked the hospital, and felt sick to my stomach after my visit to the maternity ward, which was just a huge room filled with beds, thirty altogether, where the moans and cries of mothers-to-be competed with the wails of babies, and the air smelled of bodies and disinfectant. I also took a look into a delivery room, even though the sign forbade it. It was a much smaller room, four beds on each side. Five of them were occupied by screaming, sweating women. Their legs hung in stirrups, spread wide, their private places visible. I quickly walked away. I almost changed my mind right there and then about having my baby in that horrible place. But I reminded myself that if my baby was a girl, the more people who saw her arrive, the safer she would be. So I vowed that I would go through with it, even if the delivery room was as big and accessible as the threshing ground.
But like a straw roof rotted with age, my plans fell in on me and I had my baby at home. When my father-in-law sent Loyal for Sister Liu, not the tractor and wagon that would take me to the hospital, I panicked.
At work, I had heard other women talking about the pains that came before delivery, how intolerable they were, tearing your insides, and how quickly they left you and were forgotten once the child emerged from your body. That night, I experienced the opposite. After the contractions started, I worried so much I was numb to the pain. Not a word could get through my clenched teeth. Loyal’s mother was upset and confused. “Breathe,” she urged. “Shout, Chun-mei. Yell your heart out, as every woman does.”
When my baby began to crawl into this world, my body half wanted to comply with what Sister Liu and my mother-in-law urged me to do. Push. Push again. Push harder. Endless pushing. The amount of strength I spent could have toppled a mountain. I was exhausted, but my mind was clear. On the one hand I wanted to end it. On the other, knowing Loyal and his father were waiting like crows outside, ready to celebrate or to murder, I wanted to keep the child inside me, protected. I wished Loyal could have been with me. Maybe if he witnesses my agony he would understand better. But he kept to the old tradition.
With one last push, I lost my baby to the world. Sister Liu let out a cry: “The child has come!” Though deadly tired, I raised myself up on my elbows and watched every movement my mother-in-law and Sister Liu made as they worked on my baby. Their silence told me everything. Loyal’s father pounded on the door, demanding to see his grandson right away. Sister Liu looked down at me, then averted her eyes. My mother-in-law’s hands shook as she wiped the baby with a cloth soaked in warm water, tears streaming down her face. Sister Liu wrapped my child in blankets, but it was my mother-in-law who picked her up, her eyes on the door that echoed with the knocking that grew louder with every blow.
“Bring me the baby!” my father-in-law demanded. “Let’s see him.”
Loyal’s mother hesitated. Sister Liu held out her arms. I knew what was to happen. As soon as my baby was out of the room I would never see her again.
“Please,” I begged. “Let me hold my baby. Just once.”
“Not a good idea,” Sister Liu said firmly.
I shrieked. “Give me my daughter! It’s not her fault! Let her live!”
My mother-in-law pushed Sister Liu away from the bed and placed Dong-mei in my arms. Clutching the tiny bundle, I turned my back on the door, where the pounding rose like thunder.
My baby’s perfection filled me with wonder—ten tiny tapered fingers and ten button-like toes, a head full of black hair, large eyes clamped shut as if she was shy. If I had hoped for only a second that her appearance would win her father over to our side, that hope faded with the departing darkness. I didn’t dare let him near her. Once again Loyal slunk into the room, not to ease my pain or defend his daughter but to demand she be turned over to her fate. After hours of coming and going up the stairs to listen to his father’s commandments at one moment and my distraught demands another, he and the old man came to realize that Dong-mei would not be given into their hands. The negotiations began. The husband I had grown to be fond of and could have come to love became an outsider, bargaining over his own daughter’s welfare and survival. By dawn a deal was finally struck. If they would leave me and my child alone, I would make her disappear within three days.
I look back on those hours, wondering how other mothers would judge me. Not as harshly as I judged myself. I was at the end of my rope, alone and trapped. The only ally I had in the household was Mother-in-law, but she was on the sidelines, already in trouble for disobeying her husband. How could I protect my child when the two men were set in their plans, like dried clay? The minute my back was turned, I knew, something would “happen” to my baby girl.
Nor was running away an option. In my native village I would be easily found. My parents no longer had a home of their own. As was the custom, they lived with my three married brothers, one year in each household. They would all be shamed eternally if I returned to the village with a child. I would have to go far away, but where? The farthest I had ever travelled in my life was to the city of Yangzhou, thirty miles distant. If I escaped to the city I would be arrested and sent home because I had no residence papers. Nowadays people are more free to travel from one place to another. Not so when Dong-mei was born. Where you had no residence papers you had no status.
Maybe I didn’t make the best judgment. But lying in my damp and soiled bed, exhausted and disheartened, I decided I had one choice and one choice only: to get Dong-mei far away from her father and grandfather, so that they would never find her. In order to save her, I had to give her away.
My only first-hand knowledge of an orphanage was what the name means: a place filled with unfortunate children who had lost their parents. Nothing more, nothing less. On my shopping trip to Yangzhou before my wedding I had passed the place, a derelict and forbidding redbrick building close to the bus station. Of course at that time I never thought I’d ever pass through the big double wooden doors with the peeling green paint, although I did wonder whether my brothers and I would have ended up there if my parents had been executed like so many other landlords in the early years.
One day in the workshop, long before Dong-mei was born, one of my co-workers mentioned that since the new family policy had come into effect, orphanages all over the country had become dumping grounds, or “collection houses,” for children who had been abandoned by their parents because they were deformed, disabled, retarded—or female. Police were usually involved trying to locate the parents but often failed, and the numbers of “orphans” had been rising rapidly. But the thought that one day I would be one of those parents didn’t cross my mind then.
On the third day I crept down the stairs long before dawn and let myself out into the freezing dark. My baby was bundled so thickly with so many layers of blankets that she was truly a “candle parcel” as we say in our part of the country, and her little face was covered with a thin scarf. She hung in a sleeping sack around my neck, her head resting under my chin.
Not a single light shone in the village as I slowly made my way down the path, between the houses of my sleeping neighbours. Most of the snow had melted but the air was frigid and damp, and my breath soon formed a layer of frost along the edge of my cotton scarf.
I was light-headed, as if walking on clouds. At twenty-four years of age I was a healthy woman, and strong, thanks to a lifetime of hard labour in the fields. But the last few days had worn me down. The birth itself would have been enough, but the cut between my legs, which still burned and bled, and the strain of keeping Loyal and his father away from my child for the last three days, had taken a heavy toll. Only my decision to save my daughter kept my legs moving, but after a half-hour of walking, I began to fear that determination might not be enough to carry me through the journey.
If there ever was a god, something I had never believed because he hadn’t been there when my family and I needed him most, I found him that morning. Thin, pale light was seeping into the landscape, revealing the forlorn paddies with frost-covered brown stubble and the black, naked branches of the trees reaching into a grey sky. I heard a truck behind me, and when it drew abreast of me, it stopped.
The driver, a young guy with a few wisps of hair on his chin, leaned out of the cab and asked me where I was going.
“To Yangzhou,” I said simply.
He pushed his cap with the red star on it back on his head. People hadn’t worn caps like that for years. “Hop in. I can take you there,” he said.
Circumstances make us do things we would ordinarily push away. Accepting a ride from a strange man on an empty road was unthinkable. But I climbed awkwardly into the truck, relieved and grateful, for I couldn’t have gone ten more steps. The young man drove silently, making no attempt to start a conversation. Occasionally he glanced at me and the quiet bundle resting on my lap. Only the engine made a sound throughout the trip. He let me off at the city’s bus station shortly before seven o’clock.
My plan was to spend the day in the dingy waiting room of the bus station until darkness fell and I could leave my baby at the orphanage unseen. The fewer people who saw me, the better. But I had to be careful. I couldn’t just park myself on a bench and doze off, or I would be noticed. I got up once in a while, walked around as if I was waiting for someone. I could hardly stay awake, even though the station was noisy with blaring announcements over the loudspeaker and busy with the tramp of feet going to and fro, the roar of bus engines outside the walls, the incessant din of chattering mouths.
In the late morning I had to go to the washroom. I had tried to put it off as long as I could. I got up off the bench and went through the door to the toilets. The stench was so overpowering my eyes began to water. I noticed right away that the doorless cubicles were so narrow I couldn’t possibly take Dong-mei with me.
I returned to the waiting room, to the corner where I had been sitting, and reluctantly put my baby down on the bench, knotting her blankets to the slats. I rushed into the toilet, found an empty cubicle, and squatted over the ditch, trying not to breathe, hurrying myself. But my dressings were blood-soaked and I had to rummage in my pockets for the fresh strips of cloth I had brought with me. Moments later I heard yelling. I looked up and caught my breath. A woman stood in the doorway, holding up my baby, demanding to know who she belonged to.
A man’s voice came from behind her. “It’s one of those again, isn’t it?”
“Looks like it.” Another man.
“They’re everywhere nowadays. In bus terminals, train stations, even in ditches. The poor baby girls. We got to educate these country people better!”
The woman marched in and stood in front of the cubicles. “Whose baby is this?” she asked again.
I don’t know why I didn’t call out immediately, but I had spent the day trying not to attract anyone’s notice. I was squatting over a foul-smelling ditch, layering rags inside my underpants. I stood and pulled my clothing into place. “She’s mine. I had to use the toilet.”
The damn woman insisted on making an announcement. “I found the mother. The baby wasn’t abandoned after all.”
That evening, after dark, I made my way to the orphanage, left my daughter on the steps, and ran into the deepest shadows beside the building, weeping.
I would never have done what I did if I had known Dong-mei was going to disappear. My thinking when I placed her on the steps that night was that she would be in the care of a government facility. I had heard that some city folks sent their children to boarding nurseries and schools, seeing them once a week or so. I hoped that in a few years the government might change its rules, as it had so often in the past, reversing this policy or that. I had less hope, but still some, that Loyal and his father might have a change of heart.
But when none of my wishes came true I lost my courage. I went back a year later to reclaim my child, ready to take whatever punishment the police might pile up on me as long as I could have her back. When I was told by a woman at the orphanage that my baby girl was not there, I broke down. She refused even to acknowledge that Dong-mei had lived at the orphanage. She looked distressed when I mentioned the piece of paper I had tucked into Dong-mei’s blankets. I had the feeling she wanted to say more, but how could I read her mind when I was losing my own?
It was disgusting and hypocritical but no surprise to me when the commune leaders used my father’s funeral as a show for the living. Such dishonesty was typical of our rulers at all levels. It was the government that carried out the political campaigns that almost killed my father and gave the rest of us a life filled with poverty and misery and ridicule. It was the same government that reversed things after Deng Xiao-ping came along with his talk of white cats and black cats, how it didn’t matter what colour a cat was as long as it could catch mice. Suddenly men like my father, who had been cast down for their business sense and experience, were now praised and encouraged to do business, to catch mice.
As soon as the news came that Mr. Wang, my father’s former business partner, was coming from Hong Kong to pay his respects, two officials turned up to take charge of the funeral ceremony. Even I knew that Mr. Wang and his father had fled to Hong Kong to escape Chairman Mao’s government, and throughout my youth men like them had been called enemies of the state and capitalist traitors.
Now, here were the officials from the commune, spending hours gluing pieces of paper with names on them to the benches, then changing their minds, ripping them off and regluing them to different spots. They were trying to get the ranks in order. The hotshots ended up perching on their own names in the front rows, while behind them sat the mourning relatives and friends. The bosses turned my father’s funeral into a monkey show. Nothing personal, everything businesslike.
While they were playing their political chess, I mourned not just the father I had lost but the child I had abandoned. I grieved for the evils I had committed, a mother who didn’t stand up to protect her own child. Staring at the small wooden box that held my father’s ashes, I recalled the bad years when he’d been forced to kneel on a pile of broken bricks for hours, hands tied behind his back, his head weighed down by a tall hat made of sheet metal. Eventually he fell forward and lay on the ground, but they didn’t set him free even then. No matter how inhumanely he was treated by the kind of men who now took over his funeral, he never lifted a hand to his wife or children, or lost his love for us. His memory was like a reproach for what I had done to my own daughter. His death was my punishment. Everyone at the funeral took my overwhelming sorrow as grief for the loss of both my father and child. How right they were, and how wrong. But I couldn’t share with anyone the truth, not even my mother.
The saying goes that time cures all wounds. “Eases” was more like it in my case, for my wounds could never be healed. I tried my best to take up my life again, knowing nothing could be the same but willing to do my best. That was what Loyal and his father had expected. The day after I got back from Yangzhou, Loyal had already dug the phony grave and buried the “stillborn” child. It’s there yet, I hear, covered with tall grass. It was his father’s idea and as usual Loyal went along. Loyal would tend the grave occasionally, weeding the mound and adding dirt after heavy rains. I often wondered what he was thinking when he engaged himself in that stupid task.
When my one month’s confinement was over, I went back to the factory. I had my hair cut off like a man and neglected my appearance. I couldn’t care less if Loyal or any man ever found me attractive again. When I did return to Poplar Tree Village to see my mother, it was difficult. No matter which of my three brothers’ houses I sat down in, the question was the same. Was I pregnant again yet? Each time I heard that word I could have jumped out of my skin. But how could I explain to my family that I didn’t want to have another child? What if I gave birth to another girl?
I got the pills as soon as I could. I was well aware of the close relationship between the doctor at the clinic and the old man, so I went to a drugstore in Yangzhou after telling Loyal I was going to visit my mother. The pills there were free and nobody asked any questions.
It was just a matter of time, I suppose, before Loyal discovered my secret. In a way I was relieved. By then we had resumed the life of a husband and wife. He was disappointed each time my period came, but he tried to be patient. Yet when he found the pills he gave me no time to explain. His palm was too ready.
If the marriage could not go down the road he had planned, then for him it wasn’t worth having. Shortly afterwards he began to spend hours away from home, then whole nights. By then I had moved into the nursery.
I don’t remember anything about the night when I lost my mind, but I’d already felt that I was drifting away, as if sanity was a shore and I was in a rudderless boat carried out to sea by currents I didn’t understand. I recall going home to Poplar Tree Village, and my stay in the hospital, and long days of confinement in the houses of my brothers. I drifted for I don’t know how long. Then one spring I began to feel myself growing strong again.
From time to time news would reach me about my former life. I learned that I was divorced, and that Loyal had remarried and his new wife had fulfilled her assignment. Good for her. I never laid eyes on her or the boy, although people said she had a tongue as sharp as a sickle and just as hard. No matter. She’s Empress Dowager now. She provided the Chens with an heir.
Sometimes hard labour is a blessing.
For the first few years after my brother brought me home, the people in our village shunned me, whispering behind their hands as I passed by, as if mental illness was contagious. Even my brothers regarded me as a woman who might fall back into madness at any time. They would not allow me to care for my niece or nephews for fear I’d hurt them. When she changed dwellings each year, moving from one brother’s house to another’s, my mother carried me with her like a damaged suitcase.
So I lost myself in the intense rhythms of farming. In winter we sowed wheat in the dry paddies. In spring we harvested the wheat, sending the bundles to the threshing ground, then flooded the paddies before transplanting the rice seedlings. I stood bent at the waist, knee deep in brown water, thrusting seedlings into the mud. We took two crops of rice off the paddies through the hot months, then drained them for the winter wheat.
I went to the fields every day. Afterwards, as the light faded, I chopped weeds in our vegetable plot and watered the melons, beans, and cabbages. The only break came with the Lunar New Year’s celebrations, when the wheat in the fields and turnips in the gardens needed less attention. Gradually, as the years blended into one another, I was accepted again by the villagers, though never completely. I watched my brothers’ kids grow as my mother declined. Before I knew it I was well into my middle age.
Then came the day when the village bristled with talk about a young foreign woman who had showed up in Liuhe Village, causing an uproar. More startling were the rumours about who she was, and her intention to come to Poplar Tree Village.
I dismissed the gossip. I had long since stopped being surprised at the nonsense some people would believe. Nor did I want to open old wounds with speculation. But in spite of myself I mulled over the words the woman at the orphanage had said to me. She had pretended Dong-mei had never been there. Was it possible my daughter was sold to a foreigner?
It made no sense, but the questions dogged me on the way to the paddies and all through the day and then on the walk home to my brother’s house. So just like my silly neighbours, I, too, waited for the foreign woman to show up.
Nearly twenty years dissolved in one second. She arrived, standing in front of me, tall, healthy, and beautiful. Our eyes met and the empty place inside me filled with joy and happiness. My daughter. My lovely Dong-mei.
Before she left that first day to go back to the place she was staying, I showed her a water-colour that my father had given to me as a wedding present. The painting shows a black branch heavy with blossoms.
“But where are the leaves?” she asked in her strange accent. “There are flowers but no leaves.”
“That is what makes winter blossoms unique,” I told her. “They bloom while surrounded by ice and snow.”