Throwaway Daughter Read online

  As soon as I emerged from the station into the square I was swarmed by four women who plucked at my sleeves and the back my shirt, demanding something. Each of them had a long-handled cotton bag hanging around her neck and each strove to shout louder than the others.

  A small crowd quickly gathered to watch the show as the two loudest women attempted to drag me in opposite directions.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled back in Mandarin, startled by the assault. “Let go of me!”

  They switched from local dialect to Mandarin after they heard me yell, and I soon realized that they were looking for customers for the taxis waiting nearby. The tallest one snatched my suitcase from my hand, hooked her arm in mine, and pulled me towards a white minibus whose engine rattled as if it would die at any minute.

  Her competitors had gone off to attack other prey. Inside the minibus, a few passengers, sweating and wrinkled, sat watching the driver yell at an old man behind him.

  “No money, no ride! I am not running a buddha temple! Get off the bus!”

  The old man hawked loudly and spat out the window before he climbed out slowly. He spat again, this time onto the floor of the vehicle, then shuffled away.

  “Where you go, young miss?” the woman asked me again, pushing her hair back from her sweaty brow.

  I explained that I wanted to go to the central station to catch a bus to Yangzhou.

  “No need,” she said. “We can take you to Yangzhou, direct and cheap. Ten yuan.”

  “Okay.”

  I got in and took the old man’s place, wrinkling my nose at his gamey odour. The woman shoved my suitcase beside me and took her seat next to the driver, who rammed the gear shift forward and moved off.

  She turned and asked, “Where in Yangzhou?” She sounded friendly now.

  “Yangzhou Hotel,” I said.

  The minibus pitched and jumped along the road, the engine protesting, the air inside oppressively hot. Each time I opened the window, clouds of choking dust and more hot air swept in. When we arrived at the station, an hour and a half later, two of the passengers got out.

  “Stay on,” the woman said to me. There was a quick exchange between her and the driver before the bus was under way again. “We will drop you off at the hotel. It’s on our way.”

  In my room, I made myself a cup of tea. The hotel, like the one in Shanghai, provided a large thermos of boiled water, cups, and a few packets of jasmine tea. I stood at the window, enjoying the relatively cool air, looking down into the street and watching the blazing sun sink behind a cluster of two-storey buildings. I was a step closer to my goal. I had a room in the city that my parents had not been allowed to visit, where Chun-mei had abandoned me. Right this moment, I realized with a shiver, I could take a taxi to the orphanage and walk up those same steps.

  Instead, I locked my door, stripped off my clothes, turned on the shower and stood under it for a long time. I put on loose-fitting pants and a fresh T-shirt and combed my hair back with my fingers. With a fresh cup of tea before me, I sat at the desk and thumbed through my tour book.

  Yangzhou had been an imperial retreat for the court of the Qing dynasty more than a hundred years before, with pavilions hung with famous paintings, performances by storytellers and opera stars, libraries filled with the works of renowned scholars. But nothing of that remained. What the Taiping Rebels hadn’t destroyed in the early nineteenth century, the Red Guards burned and smashed in the twentieth. The ruins of the old town in the northwest part of Yangzhou were all that was left.

  Checking a local map I had picked up at the front desk, I found Mrs. Xia’s street. I intended to visit her first thing in the morning.

  After a hasty breakfast of toast and tea—the waitress gave me a curious look when I turned down the delights of rice gruel, pickled vegetables, deep-fried dough sticks, and boiled eggs—I threw a couple of bottles of water and my guide book into my backpack and took the stairs down to the lobby.

  The old man who had given me a good room at a good price the day before because I had “come home from across the sea” was behind the desk, reading a newspaper spread out before him. His bald spot, encircled by a monkish fringe of grey hair, reflected the overhead light.

  I asked him the quickest way to the ruins. I was confident that, once in that area, I could easily find my way to my true destination. He spread out my map on top of the newspaper. “It’s two blocks from Guanyin Hill,” he said cheerfully. “The ruin is all we have left. It’s a miracle it survived. But there are still a few statues standing.” He looked up at me over his glasses. “Do they have Guanyin where you come from? The Goddess of Mercy? She’s really hot these days. Worshipped by everyone. Go see her. She’s the one with a baby boy in her arms. That’s why she is so popular, you see. That’s why so many young women pray to her.”

  He gave me an exaggerated wink and then drew a route on the map with his fingernail.

  The area near the ruins provided the most peaceful streets I had experienced since stepping onto Chinese soil. And the sky was actually blue, unlike Shanghai and Zhenjiang. I walked along the canal that I had spotted from my hotel window. The caramel-coloured water stank of sewage and rotting vegetation. The banks were lined with single-storey houses roofed with grey tiles and separated by narrow alleys. Barges poled by skinny, bare-chested men moved up and down the canal, sending geese and ducks scurrying.

  I thought about the story that I had been told and retold as a kid. Mrs. Xia was a heroine in my parents’ eyes.

  “She’s normal height, but short,” my mother had described her, typically unclear. “She’s not big, even by Chinese standards,” Dad had added. Both of them had agreed that Mrs. Xia must have been in her late forties or early fifties when they met her. She had come back to their hotel under the cover of darkness, clutching the piece of paper with my name and Chun-mei’s on it. At this point in the story one of my parents would speculate on the risks that Xia took, the conspiratorial look in her eye as she left the hotel room.

  But I had never seen it as kindness. To me, she had delivered not a piece of paper but a curse. How much simpler my life would have been without that note and the four characters written on it. I had wished that Xia had minded her own business.

  I turned away from the canal. The hu-tongs, or alleys, twisted and curved, lined with houses whose plank doors were set back only a couple of feet from the cobblestones. The street was quiet and empty. It was siesta time, I guessed. According to Frank, the afternoon nap was an “unshakable unwritten bylaw in China.” He even joked that if you woke an official from his or her nap you would guarantee failure in your mission. As I walked, my cork sandals flip-flopping on the cobblestones, I tried to calm myself, but my stomach twisted itself into a knot. What if Mrs. Xia knew nothing more than what she had passed on to my parents so long ago? Would she refuse to help me? Was she too old or sick to remember anything?

  I soon lost my way in a tangle of alleys with names like Duck Feet, Swallow’s Tongue, and Silver Ears. If I walk far enough, I thought, will I reach stomachs or intestines? Three times I found myself back at the canal, hot and frustrated, my map clutched uselessly in my hand. It had looked so easy back at the hotel, with the crisp new map spread out before me. At random I picked another narrow street that led back into the maze of animal-part hu-tongs. Then I saw the blue and white sign mounted on the grey brick of a building at an intersection. Yu-chun-xiang—Fish Lip Lane, Mrs. Xia’s street.

  I stopped in front of No. 34 and took a deep breath. Out-of-date red posters plastered on the double door offered Happy New Year greetings. I looked around one more time, then knocked. The door squeaked open a couple of inches on its own.

  I could see a cramped, dimly lit room with a square table and a few benches in one corner. Closer to the door stood two rattan chairs. A plastic bead curtain with a fish design hung in the doorway leading to the back of the house. A figure appeared, holding aside the strands of the curtain, squinting into the bar of sunlight that
fell through the door where I stood. She was a small, elderly woman, and with her free hand she tucked her short silver hair behind her ears. I pushed the door open further.

  In a quiet, sleepy voice she said something that I couldn’t make out. Meanwhile, she looked me over. I guess my foreign-looking outfit had taken her by surprise. She spoke again, louder this time but in local dialect. I shook my head.

  “Mrs. Xia?” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure why I kept my voice low. “Are you Mrs. Xia?”

  “Nin-shuo-shen-ma?” she replied in heavily accented Mandarin this time, her hand cupped behind one ear. “What did you say? My ears are giving up on me.”

  I felt like an idiot. The problem wasn’t the old lady’s hearing. I had spoken in English.

  “I’m sorry, Old Comrade,” I answered in Chinese, feeling sillier at using such an outdated term. My nerves had taken over my brain. “I am looking for Xia … Xia …” I fumbled, searching hard for the right word.

  I wasn’t sure how to address Mrs. Xia properly. It was a cultural problem. In formal Chinese, “Mrs.” translated as Fu-ren, man’s person, a respectful title, although I found it pretty offensive. Or Tai-tai, which means wife, but it was an old-fashioned term. I didn’t know if Mrs. Xia was married, so Tai-tai was out of the question.

  “I am trying to find Xia Mama,” I said.

  “My name is Xia,” she answered. “I am the only Xia in Fish Lip Lane, but I can’t imagine I’m the one you’re looking for.”

  I was as certain as the hard cobblestones under my feet that I was looking at the woman who had altered the course of my life soon after I was born. She began to fidget. When she touched her collar I noticed the swollen knuckles, the rough skin.

  “You are …,” she said, walking towards me.

  “Xia Mama,” my lips began to tremble, “my name is Dong-mei. I am from Canada.” I repeated Jia-na-da when she failed to react.

  “I don’t know anyone from Canada,” she replied. “You say your name is Dong—” Her eyes searched my face. “My dear heaven,” she murmured, her hand covering her mouth. “Is it possible? How could—?”

  She reached out and brushed my cheek with her rough fingertips. “It’s you,” she whispered. “The Tearless Girl. My old eyes are not cheating me. Oh, look at me, letting a guest stand in the doorway.” She threw open the door, allowing sunlight to flood into the room. “Come in and sit down, Dong-mei. You must be thirsty.”

  She pointed to the rattan chairs, then the bead curtain rattled and clicked as she slipped through. I heard water poured and the poof of a propane flame coming to life. Sitting by myself in the tiny room, I wished there was a phone handy so I could call home and share my news.

  A few minutes later, Mrs. Xia appeared with a tray bearing a small earthenware teapot, two cups, a glass, and a bottle of orange pop.

  “You probably prefer pop to tea,” she said. “It’s very hot today.”

  I would have preferred tea to the sugary orange water that was so popular in China. Instead I poured half the bottle into the glass and handed it to Mrs. Xia.

  “Oh, no.” She waved the glass away. “That stuff makes my teeth ache. The ones I have left.”

  We both laughed, more than her joke deserved.

  In the small house in Fish Lip Lane, words flowed and ebbed all afternoon, pausing only when Mrs. Xia went into the kitchen to replenish the teapot. I struggled with my Chinese, hunting my mental vocabulary lists for the words I wanted. At one point Mrs. Xia reached over and took my hands in hers, kneading my fingers one by one. Her skin felt like sandpaper.

  “This is what I did each time after I changed your diaper,” she said. “I don’t know where I got this peculiar habit, but it became a comfort to me, and if I didn’t do it, I felt that things were not right.”

  “Your hands seem, well, tired,” I observed.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “That’s old age showing itself. Doctor says I have arthritis. My daughter blames it on washing bedding and clothes and diapers in cold water every day for twenty years.”

  “You washed everything by hand?”

  “Of course. We didn’t have a machine until after you went away. It was bought with your parents’ donation. People said that it was so generous that we could buy all the washing machines in the People’s Department Store downtown! What a godsend! We had a meeting to learn the dos and don’ts of running the machine. Also in the meeting we decided to use it to wash only heavy and bulky stuff and to keep washing the diapers by hand. Every time I used it, I thought of your parents. And you.”

  Mrs. Xia’s husband had died eight years before. The house on Fish Lip Lane belonged to her daughter and son-in-law. Her daughter’s name was Yong-fang—Forever Fragrant.

  I was sure that it was customary for a widow to live with her son. As if she’d read my mind, Mrs. Xia explained that she had lived for two years with her son’s family in Zhenjiang, but things didn’t work out with her daughter-in-law.

  “It’s better here, near the canal,” she said. “Quieter, and my granddaughter is a delight. Sometimes,” she added, “she reminds me of you.”

  Mrs. Xia insisted I stay for dinner with the family, and Yong-fang sent her husband, Lao Zhang, a city bus driver, to the market. After he returned laden with packages, I stood in the kitchen doorway watching the three of them busily preparing food. They chatted and gave each other advice and got in each other’s way. But as soon as Dan-yang—Red Sunbeam—walked in the door, everything came to a stop. While Lao Zhang helped his daughter out of her worn and tattered backpack, Mrs. Xia handed her a slice of watermelon. Yong-fang disappeared and came back just as the introductions were winding up to announce that Dan-yang’s bath was ready. Dan-yang left the room smiling, as if she was entitled to all the attention.

  She returned just as the sizzle of meat in the wok and the fragrance of fried garlic crept in from the kitchen. Dan-yang’s hair was cut short. She had changed into a light blue sundress and white sandals, a totally different style from her parents, who favoured dark trousers and white shirts. I warmed up to her a little when she began to tell me about herself. Three years away from university entrance exams, she was already worried.

  “My parents remind me about the exams almost every day, since I started kindergarten,” she complained. “Neither of them had a chance to finish high school because of the Cultural Revolution, which I am sick of hearing about. They want me to have what they missed.”

  She pointed to the stack of dog-eared books she had left on the table when she came home. “Those are extra studies. I take after-hours classes in math, Chinese, chemistry, and English. My parents want me to be a doctor, so I can take care of them when they become old like Wai-po.”I switched to English. “Is that what you want—to be a doctor?”

  “I not want that,” she replied awkwardly. “I hate the chemistry and never good at the math. I want to be teacher in elementary school.”

  “So, why don’t you—?”

  She switched back to Mandarin. “But I am the only child and they have high hopes for me. My parents gave me life and they saved money to pay for the extra programs like academic clubs, interest groups, and private tutoring to improve my English. I hated it at the beginning, but my resentment only made them sad.” She stopped and cast a glance towards the kitchen. “Maybe being a doctor won’t be so bad. Our universal medical system is falling apart. In the old days, going to the doctor used to be called begging medicine. Beg is what you have to do now in the hospitals unless you’re rich. Wai-po has stopped going to get treatment for her arthritis. It costs too much. Don’t tell her I told you.” Dan-yang sighed. “I just hope I won’t disappoint my parents. It’s very hard to get into medical school.”

  Parental guilt trip, I thought. I know about that.

  The meal went on for two hours. My Chinese held up fairly well. Mrs. Xia’s Mandarin was hard to follow, but that of her daughter and son-in-law was clearer. Dan-yang’s was precise.

  Yong-fang and Lao Zhan
g found it hard to understand that I had been accepted by a university and I had made up my own mind as to what to study. “But is that what your parents want you to do?” Lao Zhang kept asking. I told him my mother and father left the decision to me.

  Later on, when we were slurping away at bowls of thin soup, Mrs. Xia told her family about how she had met my parents, but only because I had mentioned it.

  “But I still don’t understand why you changed the records to show that Dong-mei was deaf,” Yong-fang said.

  Mrs. Xia looked at me, then back to her daughter. “For some reason the Tearless Girl won my heart more than the others. She was such a quiet baby. I decided to help fate. Most of the girls would spend their lives in the orphanage. Only a few would be taken by foreign parents. If Dong-mei was ‘imperfect,’ the officials would try to place her. Many of the adopting parents had a child, and the policy said that these people must accept a less perfect baby. It was easy to make up the false document. But there were so many others I couldn’t help. I hated being in that position, playing god. Who gave me the right to pick and choose?”

  “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.