Throwaway Daughter Read online

  also by Ting-xing Ye

  A Leaf in the Bitter Wind

  Three Monks, No Water

  Weighing the Elephant

  Share the Sky

  White Lily

  also by William Bell

  Crabbe

  Absolutely Invincible

  Death Wind

  Five Days of the Ghost

  Forbidden City

  No Signature

  The Golden Disk

  River My Friend

  Speak to the Earth

  Zack

  Stones

  For my daughter, Qi-meng

  Who can tell

  where the waters carry blossoms

  cast upon them?

  —Wu Qing-zi, The Scholars

  Marrying off a daughter is like throwing away a bucket of water.

  —A Chinese saying

  PROLOGUE

  No one seemed to understand what it was like to have no real birthday. Even Blackie, our Shih-Tzu, had one, noted on the form given to me when Mom put my name down as his adoptive “parent” when I was five years old. Never mind how that affected my understanding of the word adoption. Blackie’s registration form even recorded his family history, the whole pedigree.

  Lucky me. I had a made-up birthday—December 8, 1980, the day I was found on the steps of the orphanage. I could have been weeks old or a couple of days young; I didn’t know and neither did anybody else. I might as well be a lake discovered by an explorer.

  My name is Grace Dong-mei Margaret Parker, but don’t call me anything but Grace Parker, without initials. Grace is my nanna’s name, and Margaret is the first name of Grandmamma, my mother’s mother. When I came along I ended a silent battle between my two grandmothers that had smouldered ever since my sister was born. Megan was Grandmamma’s middle name, but Nanna only won a spot as my sister’s middle name, Carole. It became a bigger deal, I guess, after my mom had a hysterectomy.

  My name has Chinese in it thanks to my pig-headed parents. I did everything I could to change their minds. I begged, argued, and threw tantrums. All I wanted was to have my Chinese name, Dong-mei, removed. “I promise I’ll never, ever ask for anything else,” I pleaded. But my pathetic begging failed. So I tried playing dumb and deaf, with my mother especially, refusing to respond when she called me Dong-mei. I made fun of the sound, saying “done-mine” or, once, “dung-may” because I thought it was a dirty word.

  My mother applied her teacher’s patience and reasoning like sticky ointments. “It’s not just a name, Grace; it means much more. Your dad and I promised Mrs. Xia that we would bring you up in touch with your culture and your roots. The name is a good place to start.”

  “I don’t know any Mrs. Whatever,” I shouted. “Why do I want their roots? I don’t want to be Chinese, and I don’t want a Chinese name.”

  Finally, Mom came up with one of her “reasonable” compromises. Up ‘til then, she had called me Dong-mei only at home. If I didn’t stop fussing, she said, she’d use my Chinese name outside our house as well. My resistance crumbled.

  As if there wasn’t enough repeating or reusing names, my confusion deepened when my grade three teacher, Miss McKerrow, taught us a new word, junior. She used a boy’s name in my class as an example.

  “Robert Smith Junior,” she said loudly before she wrote the name on the blackboard, “because Rob’s father is also called Robert.”

  Rob, who always needed a haircut and smelled bad, beamed at the attention he was getting. He stood up and told the class that in his family there were three Robs and two Juniors. “My grandfather is the first Robert. My dad and I are Juniors. Whenever my grandfather stays with us there’s a mix-up.”

  That evening I told my mother that I wanted to be a junior, too. I didn’t have much idea what the term meant, even after Miss McKerrow’s little lesson, but I was pretty sure I was missing out on something, and that it wasn’t fair. After the dishes were done Mom sat me down and said that only boys could be Juniors. It was a sort of tradition that boys were named after their fathers or grandfathers. It seemed to me that boys enjoyed a lot more choices than I did.

  My parents insisted on feeding me memories of the misery in my life before I came to Canada, which, to me, was no misery at all because I didn’t remember it. They told me about my abandonment, my life in an orphanage, their journey to China to adopt me. Little by little they let the details out, as if they were rehearsing a well-directed play, every scene written with extra care and consideration.

  But it was as if these tragic events had happened to someone else. I hated my parents’ narratives about a stranger, even if the stranger was me. I was sick of seeing the sacred scrap of paper on which there were some marks in faded blue ink. According to my father, it had been hidden between the layers of blankets I was wrapped in when I was found outside the orphanage.

  “Dong-mei,” my mother pronounced awkwardly, pointing at the second line. “Mr. Wu says it means Winter Plum-blossom.” Her finger then moved up and she spoke again. “Chun-mei, Spring Plum-blossom, is the name of your birth mother. Mrs. Xia from the orphanage told us that.”

  Since I was born in the winter, probably at the time when winter plum trees were in flower, Chun-mei must have been born in the spring. In China it was traditional to name girls after flowers, Mom went on, adding that the note must have been written and tucked into my blanket by my birth mother. “Obviously the names are very important to her or she wouldn’t have taken such a risk.”

  “It’s a stupid name,” I snapped. “I don’t want to be named after some dumb flower. Why didn’t this Chun-mei keep the baby and throw away the note?”

  As far as I was concerned, the note as well as my Chinese roots could wither in hell.

  PART ONE

  Milford, Ontario

  GRACE

  As well as being a “tearless girl,” according to what Mom and Dad had been told when they took delivery of me like a FedEx package, I was born deaf. I did not react to sound or show emotion. It was my sister who claimed credit for uncovering the truth.

  Megan’s story, which changes a bit every time she tells it, is this: On my first night in my new home, Megan insisted that Mom bring me to her room and put me down on her bed for a while. She wanted to get an early start on being Big Sister. Mom turned her back for a moment to pick up some clothes my new sister had left lying on the bathroom floor. She heard a pop! followed by a wail.

  “I didn’t mean it!” Megan shouted.

  My mother rushed from the bathroom and the two of them stood at the side of the bed staring down at me. I lay on my back, holding a potato chip in each hand, giggling and making other baby noises. When Megan had popped open the bag of chips my eyes had bugged out and I let out a cry. She had given me the chips to shut me up.

  My supposed birth defect had been a mistake.

  For years, especially when my family invited Mr. Wu over, I wished that I had been born deaf.

  I was seven when I met Frank Wu for the first time. He had been introduced to Mom through another teacher in her school. Mom and Dad became friends with him, talking to him often on the phone. His name was frequently brought up at our house. Frank said this, Frank suggested that—as if he were some kind of encyclopedia on my “culture and heritage.” I already disliked him.

  One Sunday morning before March break, the four of us drove to the city and met Mr. Wu in front of a Chinese restaurant downtown. He shook hands with my parents and Megan, but when he got to me he patted me on the top of my head, smiling and letting out a goofy laugh, shee-shee-shee.

  “I am so glad to see you, Glace,” he said, squatting so he could talk to me at eye level, his face inches from mine. I didn’t appreciate being patted like a dog, or the way he pronoun
ced my name. He smelled like mothballs, and dandruff sprinkled the shoulders of his shabby coat.

  “It’s Gr—” I began but shut up when I saw the stern look my mother was giving me. “Nice to meet you, too,” I mumbled, wondering if he called himself “Flank.”

  The New and Bright Restaurant should have been called Crammed and Smelly. As we followed Mr. Wu in single file though the crowded, noisy waiting room, Megan pointed to a gigantic fish tank. She whispered that all the sad-looking fish, half-dead lobsters, and spidery crabs were going to end up, cooked, on people’s plates.

  “Don’t be gross!” I hissed.

  “If you don’t believe me, ask Mr. Wu, Glace.” When we were seated at one of the many large round tables, surrounded by strange smells and hundreds of people talking at once, I looked about. The red walls were covered with paintings of pine trees and cranes, tigers and pandas, mountains and waterfalls. At one end, a dragon hung opposite some kind of bird, both in bright gold. Waitresses walked up and down the aisles, pushing carts of food from table to table, reflected in the mirrors that covered the entire left wall, making the room look ten times bigger than it was. I had never been to a place where people who looked like me made up the majority—a sea of Asian faces, brown eyes, black hair. At most of the tables, everyone in the family had the same complexion and colouring. Just then I realized I had never been as close to a Chinese person as I was to Mr. Wu at that moment.

  “They fooled me, too,” he said, smiling at me. “The mirrors, the first time I came here.”

  “Oh?” I answered, uninterested in anything he had to say. Then I remembered my mother’s repeated commands to be polite to Flank. “It’s neat,” I quickly added.

  Megan was doing her big sister act, on her best behaviour, trying to act like one of the adults and butting in on their conversation. Mr. Wu and my parents were having a good time, yakking away as small plates of food were put on the table—weird-looking stuff that I’d never seen before in my life. Even my dad looked panicky when a plate of chicken feet appeared. They looked gross but I had to admit they smelled tasty. I picked at my food, nibbled at some steamed rice mixed with soy sauce. I already planned to ask if we could stop at a fast-food joint on the way home for a bag of fries. Maybe a burger, too, depending on my mood.

  Since I didn’t have much else to do, I listened in on the conversation. I learned that Mr. Wu had been born in China and that he had come to Canada five years after I had. His family was still back in China. China is not a good place to live, he told my parents. There is no freedom, and your life is not your own. Now he lived above a grocery store near the restaurant.

  I wondered why he would have given up a teaching job in China to bus tables and wash dishes in a restaurant at night and stock shelves in a grocery store on the weekends. Occasionally he made some extra money by giving private Chinese lessons. He looked poor, yet he didn’t look unhappy.

  I nibbled some more rice and looked around. I noticed the family gatherings all around me included at least three generations—babies, teenagers, parents, grandparents whose hair had gone white, enough adults to mean uncles and aunts, enough kids to mean cousins. It struck me for the first time in my life that I had a whole bunch of relatives in China. And did they know they had a relative in Canada named Grace?

  JANE

  (1981)

  When I asked Megan, who was turning seven in a few weeks, what she would like for her birthday, she piped up, “A sister!” Her words struck my heart like stones.

  Kevin and I were from small families. We knew when we got married that we wanted a big family, but it didn’t turn out that way.

  There had been a time when I began every day wishing evening would come quickly so I could lose myself in sleep. I spent the day in my housecoat and slippers. I didn’t bathe or comb my hair. Sometimes, when he came home from the office at noon to check on me, Kevin found me where he had left me, sitting on the couch, staring at nothing.

  I didn’t feel sorry for myself; I didn’t feel anything. I changed my dressings with the disinterest of a cop writing a traffic ticket. Sometimes I wandered from room to room in the empty house, aimlessly picking up toys, knickknacks, books, magazines, turning them over in my hands and setting them down again. I yearned to be interested in things.

  Kevin phoned from work every hour or so. I let the machine pick up. After the first sympathy call from the school where I taught, I wanted no more. I couldn’t bear the honeyed tone of voice, the soft concern, the kindness that grated like broken glass. The solicitations of Kevin’s and my parents set my teeth on edge. When they came over I screamed silently for them to go away, to ease my burning nerves. Megan, bewildered by the woman her mother had become, avoided me. Kevin understood. He left me alone, but seemed to know where I was every second.

  When the anger came, seeping into me the way spilled blood soaks a paper towel, I welcomed it. For a time, rage was my friend. Unable to rail against god or fate, I cursed the doctors. The operation left me empty and barren as sand. The thought of the hospital churned my fury. On one floor people in white smocks struggled to bring another day’s life to a premature infant in an incubator, while on the floor below others casually performed abortion after abortion. The absurdity was cosmic. I was somewhere in the middle. My baby lost through miscarriage, what they clinically called my reproductive system damaged beyond hope. And removed, leaving me empty and bitter for a long time.

  Megan must have overheard conversations between Kevin and me, and the phone calls with adoption agencies. A few wouldn’t even give us appointments after they learned that we already had a girl of our own. Those who had finally agreed to interview us marked us down on their long waiting lists with little hope.

  We eventually stopped talking about adopting altogether. Until Megan brought it up again.

  It was a typical fall day. The sky was a vast sea of blue, embellishing a forest of coloured leaves. I was in the staff room at lunchtime, waiting for my lunch to heat up in the microwave, when I noticed a newspaper clipping pinned to the bulletin board. It was a brief report on China’s family-planning law. As a grade four teacher, most of my reading was confined to student projects on insects and reptiles, or spelling tests and arithmetic quizzes. When I did get a chance to branch out, I settled down with something refreshingly literary, so I knew very little in detail about China. But I had a husband addicted to his three newspapers a day and a father who was a retired head librarian, so I had picked up a bit of information. China was changing, opening up more and more to trade and tourism. By the end of the week, after talking to both Kevin and Dad, I had a good grasp of China’s attempts at population control. And the more I learned, the deeper I was drawn into what I came to call China’s baby policy, which allowed only one child per family and strictly punished parents who broke the rule. They were subject to fines, demotions, and ejection from the Communist Party, and a cruel second-class citizenship awaited the forbidden second child. But one thing we discovered with delight: people outside China were allowed to adopt Chinese babies.

  I called the Children’s Aid Society in Toronto. An agent advised me to get in touch with the federal government’s International Adoption Desk in Ottawa. They in turn told me to write to a certain private adoption agency in Vancouver, which had in the past couple of years brought back overseas children to homes in Canada; a few of them were from China. The woman who answered the phone informed me that the agency had no problem accepting applicants who already had kids. But I would have to take an older child, she told me, or one with a disability or questionable health. Or a girl, if the child is Chinese, I said to myself.

  After months of phone calls and tons of paperwork, a letter arrived with a photo of a little girl named Dong-mei. The poor thing looked too small for a six-month-old. Along with the picture came instructions to apply for a Chinese visa, and more documents and forms to be filled in by our family doctor, employers, and banks. Megan was delighted by all the official forms, and we watched her go
through them page by page as we looked at each other across the kitchen table. Suddenly it had all become real.

  The colour photo showed me nothing about the child who, if all the bureaucrats could be satisfied, was going to be our daughter. How could a baby’s face be so grave and blank?

  On Tuesday afternoon when I got home from school, there were three phone messages from a reporter at The Milford Daily, asking us to return his call as soon as possible.

  “Mrs. Parker, this is a fascinating story,” he pressed me when I called back. “A Red Chinese baby is coming to Milford and—”

  “Mr. Jenkins, I understand that you have a job to do. But at the moment I have nothing to say.”

  A few days later, on the front page of the paper, was the headline “Milford’s First Chinese Citizen.” I read the article, trembling with anger. At least he hadn’t brought politics in; there was no mention of “red.”

  But I had more on my mind than a newspaper story. In a letter we received a day earlier, via the adoption agency, we learned for the first time that Dong-mei had been born deaf. That surely explained her sad face in the photo. But why had we not been told until two weeks before we headed across the Pacific to get her? I went through every single letter sent to us and failed to find even a hint about the child’s disability. A phone call to Vancouver didn’t help much. All I got was an earful of apologies from Ms. Chow, who promised to look into the matter as soon as she could. I wasn’t interested in who was responsible or where to lay the blame. It was no one’s fault if Dong-mei was deaf. What would matter to me, and to Kevin and Megan, was whether or not her disability would change our decision.

  Ms. Chow called me back three days later. She related that Chinese government policy dictated that if the adoptee was a second child as in our case, the adopting family must accept an “imperfect” baby. The rule also applied within China but in reverse. Only couples whose first child is deformed are allowed a second. Chow added that if I changed my mind about adopting Dong-mei I should let her know as soon as possible.