Throwaway Daughter Read online

  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

  MRS. XIA

  (1999)

  Somehow 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-caref
ul 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.”

  “Yuck. You didn’t tell me that part. But what’s that got to do with the street names?”

  “I’m getting to that,” answered my granddaughter, who, like her father, loved to drag out a story. “It was one of Yang Di’s officials who decreed that the streets in this area should be named after delicacies that were served to the emperor at court, like bird’s nest, shark’s fin, swallow tail—”

  “And fish lips,” Dong-mei cut in, giggling. “I don’t think I’d like to try those!”

  I began to regret the special dish we had planned. But I had no time to warn Dong-mei, for Lao Zhang careered down the lane towards us and hopped off his bike, red faced and excited. “I have news!” he called.

  Yong-fang hurried into the house, returning with a cool glass of beer. It was unusual for men in our area to drink beer, but Lao Zhang had been introduced to it by his friend at the bus station. My son-in-law was like a small boy who had been promised a new toy.

  “I had no idea there is more than one village named after the Liu River,” he began, taking a swallow of his beer. “At least four of them. Lao Huang and I agreed that two look promising. Between the two of them, which are about thirty miles apart, the one to the northwest of here looks best. There is no bus stop at either village, which is one reason why it took so long to locate them.”

  “When can I go?” Dong-mei interrupted.

  My son-in-law was proud of his work for Dong-mei. He wouldn’t be rushed.

  “You probably wonder why we think the northwest one looks like the best bet,” he said, smiling.

  Dong-mei was a clever girl. Visibly hanging on to her impatience, she asked, “Why?”

  “The one to the northeast, though closer to Yangzhou, is on the other side of the river, so villagers have to take a short ferry ride before they can catch the bus into the city. Your moth—Chun-mei had just given birth and it wasn’t easy to travel in her condition, not to mention carrying the child with her. Besides, Lao Huang has mentioned the ferry terminal is right at the entrance to the village, so she would have been spotted by other passengers. Too much of a risk, see?”

  Dong-mei nodded. “You should have been a detective instead of a bus driver,” she said.

  Lao Zhang grinned. “Anyway, my friend and I agree we should try the northwest Liuhe Village first. Lao Huang estimated it’s less than two hours’ bus ride, then about twenty minutes’ walk from there to the village. If that’s not the one, we’ll go to the others, one after another. But remember, Dong-mei, it’s a long shot.”

  “Can I go tomorrow?” Dong-mei asked. “I can take a taxi and get there faster.”

  “No, you can’t,” my son-in-law said firmly. “If you beat the grass, you’ll frighten the snake.”

  “Daddy, stop talking in riddles!” Dan-yang said. “Dong-mei isn’t familiar with all your old-fashioned expressions.” Turning to Dong-mei, she added, “He likes to read old novels, and they are hurting his brain.”

  “If you go by taxi, you’ll bring too much attention to yourself,” my son-in-law explained. “It’s better to enter the village on foot and make quiet inquiries. Even then you’ll cause a stir.”

  “Okay, I’ll take the bus. I leave early in the morning,” Dong-mei said thoughtfully.

  “No, no. That’s not a good idea,” I cut in. “We’ll go with you. We don’t want anything to happen—”

  “But if all six of us barge in on the place,” Dong-mei said with a smile, “that will be beating the grass, won’t it?”

  The determination on her face allowed no opposition. While she and Yong-fang and Dan-yang chattered excitedly about her trip the next day, I went into the kitchen to begin the meal. Lao Zhang followed me. He had planned a special dish for Dong-mei, whom he was already very fond of. Watching him busy preparing, humming tunelessly, I didn’t have the heart to stop him.

  GRACE

  (1999)

  It was one of the best times I had ever had, and my stomach bulged from a feast of chicken, duck, vegetables, shrimp, steamed rice, and sweet cakes. Mrs. Xia’s family treated me as one of their own. I sensed she felt some sort of obligation to me. But I think she liked me, too.

  The big meal had gone slowly, with lots of conversation, jokes, and toasts that made my head light. Lao Zhang told a story from a Ming dynasty novel, using a high-pitched Beijing Opera style of voice that hurled Dan-yang and me into fits of laughter. And then Yong-fang, who I had thought was kind of shy, sang while everyone except Mrs. Xia tapped their chopsticks on the edge of their bowls. When Lao Zhang got up from the table and disappeared into the kitchen, Dan-yang insisted that it was my turn.

  So I sang a twangy country-and-western tune, the-crops-failed-and-my-wife-left-me-and-my-pickup-truck-broke-down kind, making fun of the song. They looked at each other with raised eyebrows, probably wondering, What kind of music do they have in Canada? It was at that moment that Lao Zhang rushed into the room, carrying yet another platter steaming with the delicious aroma of ginger and garlic. God, I groaned inwardly. Not more food! He plunked it down on the table, right in front of me.

  “What the hell is that?” I
screamed.

  I was staring into the wide, startled eyes of a live fish. It gazed back at me, opening and closing its mouth and pumping it gills, as if it had been rudely awakened from a nap. The body had been cooked and sliced into bite-sized morsels and piled behind the head. I realized with horror that it was the fish that had swum around in the basin earlier that day, and that its head was alive though its body was ready to eat.

  “Am I hallucinating?” I exclaimed, again in English.

  Confusion at the banquet table. Mrs. Xia said something sharply to Lao Zhang in local dialect and his face turned red. Dan-yang burst out laughing, her hand covering her mouth. Yong-fang looked frightened—for me or for the fish, I wasn’t sure.

  “It’s called Still-alive Fish,” Yong-fang said quietly. “It’s a delicacy.”

  I had committed the biggest faux pas of my life. Lao Zhang had cooked a special dish in my honour, and I had ruined everything. Yong-fang reached across the table and turned the oval platter so the fish’s head was no longer facing me. “It used to be served only at the imperial court,” she added lamely.

  “In ancient times,” Lao Zhang put in, desperately trying to salvage the situation, “the cook would be beheaded if the fish arrived at the table and its mouth was not moving.”

  As if that helped.

  Mrs. Xia rose and lifted up the platter. Before she could turn to take it away, I touched her arm. “Please, I want to try it. I bet it’s delicious.”

  Mrs. Xia hesitated before putting the plate down. My eyes welled up. “I can never thank you all enough for your hospitality. I wish my dad were here. He would finish this dish all by himself.” I picked up my wine cup, the old way I had learned from Frank, in both hands. “To my new-found friends in China,” I said. “Gan-bei!”