The Scavenger's Daughters (Tales of the Scavenger's Daughters, Book One) (14 page)

“And bring her that bag of plastic bottles from last week. She can peel the labels as she sits and they’ll be ready for me to take to town tomorrow.” Benfu knew Maggi didn’t like to feel useless and peeling labels would be a welcome diversion from her usual job of ironing the papers. He once again thought about the vendor on the corner who sold puzzle boards and he hoped to be able to get Maggi one for Chinese New Year. She needed something other than meaningless tasks to combat her boredom.

After checking the spot where Poppy had been found, as well as a few other places abandoned girls had been discovered over the years, Benfu pedaled his bicycle toward the edge of town. As was usual for a Sunday, he passed
many people out shopping or strolling about, enjoying the day off from their usual responsibilities. In front of one merchant stand he smiled when he saw a man holding his daughter on his shoulders as they waited in line to buy one of the bright red candy sticks. The small girl saw him looking and gave him a friendly wave. After the initial jolt of regret it brought, the sight warmed Benfu’s heart to see a father appreciating the joy of his daughter, instead of bemoaning that she was not born a male. China was changing and would do so faster if only more of the older generation would get on board with fairness for girls instead of trying to manipulate their grown children to strive for the male heir. It still infuriated him that most girl baby abandonment was the result of pressure from old-fashioned grandparents. He shook his head, also shaking off the negative memories that threatened to invade his day.

Farther along, he marveled at the number of young people he saw walking along with mobile phones in their hands—pecking away at the buttons, oblivious to everything around them. It amazed him how they could walk and reach their destination almost without looking up at the path ahead of them.

Mobile phones. Laptops, fancy televisions, bahh!
He didn’t see what all the fuss was about and why everyone felt the need to waste their money on fancy gadgets. Why couldn’t everyone go back to using face-to-face contact and letters? Even if he could afford his own mobile phone, he wouldn’t want one. He felt technology was one of the biggest reasons for the chasm between family members. In his younger days, he went to visit his grandparents every week no matter what was happening in his life. When he had married, he and Calli even lived with her parents until their early deaths. And they did it with pride and joy at the long evenings spent as a family. These days the younger generation thought a weekly phone call or note through a computer was sufficient to show their loyalty and respect. It was a travesty, Benfu thought as he pedaled on.

Just outside of the busiest part of town he passed a park and gazed at the rolling green hills that held colorful patches of blankets. Families all around sat eating or napping or were up and about chasing kites. Benfu could see more than one affectionate couple and smiled at the heart-warming scene,
feeling content that some things never changed. He wished he could stop and ramble up the path and across the bridges, maybe even find a spot to rest under a weeping willow tree and reminisce about when he and Calli used to spend their weekends there so many years ago when they were newly married. But alas, he had to get moving. He started to take off, when he thought he saw a familiar face in the crowd. He paused and stood up on the pedals, making himself taller to see over the many couples.

Yes, he was right. It was Linnea. And if his old eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, his daughter was strolling along the sidewalk with a boy, not holding hands but definitely closer than they should be.

Benfu sighed. So it was her turn to grow up. It made him sad but he knew it was inevitable, just like with his other girls who had left the nest. He just wished Linnea would not try to hide it. If she wanted to start seeing someone, she needed to come forward and talk about it. For a second he thought about calling her name. Then he dismissed the idea. She would be mortified and he didn’t want to embarrass her. He decided he’d keep it under his hat for a while and give her a chance to tell him herself.

Benfu pedaled on and finally made it to the outskirts of town. Ahead of him he could see the line of blue trucks, waiting their turns to dump their loads. He thought being a Sunday it might be a quiet day at the landfill, but already he could see other collectors with arms looped through the handles of baskets on their backs, searching through the piles. Others poked at the trash with pitchforks and tossed empty cans, jars, and paper into bags set around their feet.

Benfu shook his head at the scene before him.
“Aiya…,”
he mumbled. He had gone from heaven to hell in an instant.

He had not been there in years and had no idea the site had grown to such proportions. He shook his head. There was a time that the piece of land held acres of bountiful crops tended by him and others—though most of what they reaped was trucked to Shanghai to feed Mao’s officials and troops. While they worked the land, the cadres had watched over them to ensure nothing would be stolen, looking past their haggard faces and skeletal frames
to pretend they didn’t realize how hungry the people were for fresh vegetables. And when the rice coupons were no longer valuable because all the rice had run out, there were many days Benfu had survived off only one stolen potato cooked and split among at least a half dozen others. And that was on a good day—a day they weren’t subsisting on grass and plants cooked like a stew. But that was before the people in his collective had turned on him. The memories came pouring back and Benfu felt the old rage surge up inside. He looked over the heaps of trash to the place where the tiny outhouse once stood and he remembered the beatings and the isolation. All because of who he had been born to. People who had claimed to be his friends, even his new family! They’d turned on him like a lynch mob because of his
bad family background
.

Toward the end of the revolution, the crops had eventually shriveled to nothing and were abandoned, and the land was used for the people in the outskirts of town as a landfill. Obviously they were now getting all of their village trash, as well as the Wuxi city trash transported there. The dump was huge, appearing to go on for miles with tall mounds of rubbish every few feet. Not only were the piles an unseemly sight, but the smell that hit him was worse than putrid. All around, mountains of waste sat decomposing, much of it consisting of unrecognizable items from a distance.

Benfu could see children, like shadows against the hazy landscape, following along behind their parents, mostly migrant families joining in the task of searching for salvageable items among the tons of trash. He felt a wave of pity for the kids forced to live such a life but also felt relief that thus far he had never had to resort to recruiting his own daughters to such a place. In his opinion, other than the mines, there couldn’t be a worse situation to make a child work than in the horrid landfills.

He paused to pull his handkerchief from his pocket and tied it around his face, then pedaled his bike to a place away from the line of trucks—he didn’t want to lose his only transportation to a careless truck driver.

Pulling his own basket from the cart on the back of his bike, Benfu struggled to work his arms through the handles and balance the basket on his
back. He took his trash stick from the cart and made his way closer to the site. He looked around and, choosing a huge pile of junk, began to look for anything he could use to make a yuan. He shook his head at the evidence of the new generation of disposable items. Microwave food boxes, instant noodle bowls, wooden chopsticks, paper slippers—so much trash made from the desire to move ever faster in the modern world. He wished again for the older, slower pace of life where less was more. At least in his home they hadn’t felt the pull to succumb to—or keep up with—the new ways.

As he searched the littered ground below, he swatted at the hundreds of mosquitos that swarmed around him. He had only stabbed a few soiled newspapers and dropped them into his basket when he had to stop and straighten himself, the gases from the piles of waste making him more than a little dizzy.

An hour later, besides a few soiled papers, Benfu had only been lucky enough to find a dozen or so plastic bottles and a few cardboard boxes. Each time he spotted something more valuable and began toward it, another collector would beat him and snatch it right out from under him. He was really disappointed when he saw the remains of a computer and a petite woman beat him to it. Though years younger than he, the others had no mercy for his age and didn’t give him a second glance as they competed for each scrap. With the combination of being away from his usual route through his beloved town and missing the interaction with familiar neighbors, he conceded that the depressing atmosphere of the landfill slowed him down more than usual. He felt as if he were wading through water in slow motion.

Even so, he pushed on but eventually stopped his hunting when he was interrupted to bandage the cut foot of one of the migrant children. The child, just a toddler, had stepped on a shard of glass and sat crying and holding his bloody foot as his preoccupied mother ignored him. Benfu made his way over the hill of trash between them and comforted the boy. He took the handkerchief from his face and after using his only bottle of water to clean the wound, he wrapped the child’s foot and made him promise to stay in a safer area until he healed. His mother didn’t even stop her collecting to thank him,
but he didn’t blame her. It was people like her family who, if they didn’t find anything that very day, just wouldn’t have the money to eat. Theirs was a desperate situation and his wasn’t. Not yet, anyway.

Benfu walked toward his bicycle, his shoulders hunched as he coughed violently from the assault on his senses. His chest hurt terribly and he grasped it with one hand, willing it to behave. Unable to continue without his handkerchief to filter the stench, he decided to call it a day and come back later in the week.

Through watering eyes, he looked around at the rest of the people still fighting to gain a closer spot to the latest load dumped by a truck and his heart felt heavy. It was a shame that some of China’s people were so desperately poor, especially when it was well-known that anyone working for the government lived a posh life full of benefits. All of his adult life he’d hoped he would see major changes and reform that would unite the people. He hoped the government would step in and set up a welfare system. They had barely done anything about the problem in all his years; what was done was all fluff and propaganda. In China, the poor were like dung on the bottom of the rich man’s shoe.

He shook his head in disgust. Benfu had survived the atrocities of the so-called Cultural Revolution only to see even more of a gap between the rich and poor, instead of the classless society Mao had aimed for during his reign. Benfu was thankful that Mao had backed down and called a cease to the revolution when his prospective rival, Liu Shao-chi, was expelled from the party back in the late sixties. Even though the
Chaos
—as most of the locals tended to call the revolution—lasted at least ten years, things finally settled down and they’d begun the long road to recovery. With that, Calli and her family had struggled to regain the hope and sense of security that had been so callously snatched from them. And Benfu still didn’t regret his choice to stay by their side. They’d been loyal to him and nursed him back to health—even given him refuge during his darkest moments. How could he possibly abandon them? His parents hadn’t been happy, to say the least, but
he’d chosen to remain with his new family rather than return to the life he’d known before the nightmare had begun.

With another look at the people on the hills rummaging through piles of stench, Benfu marveled that only a few miles away people were living in new high-rise apartments with luxuries such as those he’d never seen and probably never would. It proved that despite it all, there was still a huge gap between the classes. He wondered if Mao was pleased looking down from his place in the afterworld. His legacy of hardship may have been interrupted, but it still refused to be broken.