Throwaway Daughter (15 page)

“I can’t believe that you kept such a secret from me, Mother,” Yong-fang complained. “I would never have known if Dong-mei hadn’t come today.”

“You ought to know that the best way to keep a secret is to tell no one,” Mrs. Xia said. “I learned that lesson more than once in my life.”

Later, Lao Zhang and Yong-fang insisted that I stay with the family while I was in Yangzhou.

“You’ve travelled thousands of miles, just like Dr. Bethune when he came from Canada to help China’s revolution,” Lao Zhang said, his chin quivering. “Staying in a hotel will be an insult to us.”

“Thank you, but the man at the hotel desk will be looking for me,” I said. “I told him what time I’d be back and I’m already late.”

Besides not wanting to impose on the family, I was anxious to get to my room so I could
phone home. Finally, Lao Zhang gave in, but insisted on taking me back to the hotel. I sat behind him on his bike, balanced on the rat-trap carrier as I had seen many others do on the streets. It was kind of fun. He let me into the hotel only after I promised once more to return the next day.

Mom answered the phone on the first ring. I talked to everyone, her, Dad, Megan, repeating the good news: I had found Mrs. Xia. I didn’t tell them that my attitude to the family hero had changed completely.

I was ready to hit the road shortly after breakfast, but I had to wait until the hotel’s gift shop opened. I bought a pair of fur-lined gloves for Mrs. Xia even though the radio had warned that the temperature would climb to 35 Celsius. Next winter they would warm her swollen fingers, I hoped. At the suggestion of the shop clerk, I bought a bottle of mao-tai, a strong rice wine, for Lao Zhang. “It’s the best gift for a man,” the clerk said, eyeing the bottle enviously. For Yong-fang I picked out an olive-coloured silk blouse. As for Dan-yang, I ended up buying a large backpack with a waist belt. I hoped my present wouldn’t result in her
taking more courses because she would have more room for books.

Before I headed out, I put Chun-mei’s note in my pocket, promising myself that, somehow, I would get all the answers to all my questions by the end of the day.

“Chi-fan-le-ma?
” Mrs. Xia greeted me when she opened the door. “Have you eaten yet?” is a Chinese way of saying hello. Soon we were back in the rattan chairs, sipping tea from large cups with lids on them. Yong-fang and Lao Zhang had taken the day off, in honour of my visit, but they were nowhere to be seen. Dan-yang had gone to school. I waited for a polite time to put my questions to Mrs. Xia, but she beat me to the punch.

“So, Dong-mei, I know you want to talk more about your mother and you didn’t get the chance yesterday.”

I took out Chun-mei’s note, laminated between two plastic sheets to protect it from dirt and damp. “Mrs. Xia, I want to find Chun-mei.” I didn’t say “my mother.” “For most of my life, when I thought of her at all, I hated her. I don’t any more. Now I need to get some answers from her.”

PART FIVE
Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province

S
omehow I knew that the woman who had left the note with her baby would come back. I had seen it happen before. Sometimes the mother would come alone, sometimes with a friend or relative. Mostly they walked around the block, circling the building. The bolder ones would approach the off-duty staff, asking for details, pretending to inquire for someone else, but their eyes, empty and desperate, gave them away.

The government’s one-child policy has the same iron-fisted punishment for any who abandon their children. Both parents face a jail sentence of up to five years, not to mention the penalties their families will suffer. But in my
twenty years of working in various orphanages, only once did I see a parent caught. The police were called in by one of our staff members. The mother was arrested, and the child was taken back to live with the family that hadn’t wanted her in the first place. The child would have been safer if she had been left with us. I doubt very much that she is still alive.

I’m wandering. I do it more and more lately. Yong-fang gets impatient with me sometimes.

Unlike the others, Chun-mei walked straight through the front doors of the orphanage. It was the first day of winter by the lunar calendar. Winter in our region was usually mild, but not that year. It had been cold and dreary for weeks, and even when the sun finally showed its face, so did the bitter northeast wind. All we had for warmth were three wood stoves, but most of the heat went up the chimneys. We hung heavy cotton quilts over the doors to keep out the icy drafts. Every child was bundled to their eyebrows. I swear that if you had lain one on the floor she would have rolled away like a tumbler.

Luckily, it was I who saw Chun-mei come in, shoving the quilts aside and looking around frantically. She stopped as soon as she noticed me. She had a wild, distracted look about her.
She wore a thin, oversized padded jacket. No scarf, no gloves. Her shoulder-length hair was a bird’s nest. She carried herself as if crushed under a heavy weight, as if her soul had left her.

She rushed up to me, wringing her hands, looking this way and that. “I want my daughter back,” she whispered. “Please.”

The next thing I knew she had dropped to her knees in front of me as if I were a buddha statue in a shrine. Her shoulders shook as she began to sob. I grabbed her and hauled her to her feet, then pulled her into a laundry room nearby and closed the door behind us.

“Be quiet! Someone will hear you!” I warned her.

It was near feeding time and as usual “the choir” had already begun as the children cried for their dinners. Inside the laundry room, with its pipes wrapped in straw, it was chilly and damp.

“My name is Chun-mei,” the distraught woman said, fighting back her sobs. “I brought my baby here one year ago. Her name is Dong-mei. I made a mistake. I’m here to take her home.”

No one can imagine how I felt as I stood there, shivering, with that pitiful wretch. How could I tell her the truth, even if I were allowed? The baby had been adopted by a couple from
another country. She was far away, as beyond the reach of her mother as if she had been on the moon. And, I admit, my pity was mixed with fear. If the woman revealed her story I would be in deep trouble with the authorities. The whole thing might come out, the note I failed to report, my falsifying the girl’s health record, my secret visit to the Canadian couple’s hotel room. I’d be finished.

So I told a lie. I cupped Chun-mei’s tear-stained chin with my hand and said that the baby she was describing to me had never lived at our orphanage. She pulled free of my grasp.

“I don’t believe you! You’re lying!”

“Listen, you’ve got to keep your voice down! Do you have any idea what will happen to you if someone finds out why you came here? That you left your child on our steps? Do you realize what kind of trouble you and your family will be in?”

The word
family
was like magic. Chun-mei instantly went limp. Her arms fell to her sides. Her weeping and begging ceased, as if someone had turned a key.

“Believe me, your baby isn’t here,” I repeated. “You’d better leave now, before someone comes.”

I led her out of the laundry room and down the hall to the main entrance. Before she went out, she turned, giving me a look that would melt stone. Then she disappeared behind the quilt. I followed her out to make sure she went away. I wanted to tell her the truth, to comfort her, but I couldn’t. All I could manage were banal questions.

“Where are you from? Do you have far to go? Is there someone who can be with you?”

“Liuhe Village.” That was all she said before she made her way across the busy street, towards the bus station.

I told this to the girl from far away. We were both in tears by the time I had finished. Lao Zhang, my son-in-law, had been silent all through my telling, squatting on his heels against the wall, beside the rooster he had been plucking for our dinner. He and my daughter had taken the day off and had spent most of the morning shopping and preparing the food. Fish, shrimp and sliced eel, and green leaf vegetables lay ready for the wok.

Yong-fang was weeping too. “That poor woman,” she whispered.

“All this time,” Dong-mei said, “she thought I might be dead.”

“There was nothing more I could do.”

“I understand.”

“I have a few friends who are long-distance bus drivers,” my son-in-law cut in. “They are familiar with the surrounding area, better than anyone else. It may take a while, but we’ll find this Liuhe Village. That’s a father’s promise.”

It was not the first time that my heart swelled when my son-in-law spoke.

Two days passed. Lao Zhang worked with one of his closest friends, Lao Huang, making quiet enquiries about Liuhe Village. Dong-mei was impatient as young people are; she was not old enough to have learned how to wait. My son-in-law, after the first day, tried to explain to her that, because Dong-mei was a foreigner, he had to make his inquiries discreetly to protect everyone involved, his family and friends, and me, as well as Chun-mei herself. Where foreigners are involved, our nation’s history and our personal experiences have taught us to be extra-careful and to keep things below the surface.

So I asked Dan-yang to take a few days off school and go sight-seeing with Dong-mei. There were some Tang dynasty ruins nearby, a wasteland of toppled tombstones, broken
columns, and traces of fountains sticking out of the weeds, with a few statues still standing. One of them has become very popular in the past few years, I am told. I never go there myself.

On the second day, while my son-in-law continued his search, we four women made preparations for another feast. Yong-fang, who gets nervous at such times, anxious that everything turn out well, was running in and out of the kitchen like a chicken whose head has been chopped off, while the real chicken with its head still on marinated in our small refrigerator. Dan-yang was assigned to remove the pin feathers from a duck, grumbling to herself as she sat on a low stool, holding the duck under water in a basin as she plucked. Ordinarily I would have done the work, but my eyesight fades more every year.

Dong-mei seemed squeamish. When I asked her what was bothering her she told me quietly that she didn’t like to see dead animals. I laughed. “Where do you think your food comes from?”

“From the supermarket,” she answered, staring at the fish that swam in circles in a basin at her feet.

“What about fish?” I asked her.

“Well, I like it. But when we buy it, there’s no head or tail or skin or bones. I remember one time when I was little. We were having fish and I found a bone in mine. I thought it was a miracle.”

So I set Dong-mei to shelling peas. She seemed to find it fun and chatted away to the three of us, giggling like a child when a pea or two leaped from her fingers and rolled across the kitchen floor. As she worked, the light from the window fell across her figure. She was a beautiful girl, much taller than her mother, but her eyes were Chun-mei’s. Her clothing was as bright as a bird’s feathers, and new. I wondered once more what had become of her mother, whether Chun-mei had had a son, and, if so, if this lovely young woman from Canada was prepared for what she might find in Liuhe Village.

It was late afternoon. The food was ready to cook and we sat outside on a bench by the door, sipping tea and trying to catch the breeze from the canal. Passersby nodded to us, and stared without comment, probably wondering what on earth was going on in my household. We were laughing, smiling, chattering to each other in Mandarin. Among us was a stranger in stylish clothing. Our neighbours probably thought she was a long-lost relative.

“Dan-yang,” Dong-mei said to my granddaughter, “why do the
hu-tongs
around here have such funny names?”

“Remember Emperor Yang Di, the cruel tyrant who was dragged from his throne?”

“The one who completed the Grand Canal?”

“That’s him. The legend says when he was captured his enemies wrapped him tightly in the skin of a freshly killed leopard. As the skin dried, it slowly suffocated the emperor.”