“How do you feel?” I asked in Mandarin.
“Good.”
“Sorry for my Chinese.”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“You should learn English,” I said, smiling, joking.
“Buhui,” she said. I can’t. She shook her head and waved her finger in the air. “Atou. Atou.” Stupid. Stupid. She touched her temple. “Hen ben.” Very dumb.
“Don’t say that, Ma.”
She laughed at me.
Ma never finished the first grade—my sisters said that because she would take candy to her classmates from her father’s shop, she was seen as too playful and not serious enough for school. So she never learned to read or write. Still, Min-Wei remembered that she was quick with numbers. My sister used to accompany Ma to the vegetable market and said our mother could price out in a few heartbeats a bushel of carrots, a head of cabbage, and a pound of onions using just a rudimentary scale and her head. Ma always said that her daughters got their smarts and business sense from Ba, but Min-Wei said she was good at math because of Ma. I wondered if I, too, could have gotten my talent for numbers from her.
I asked Ma if she could read at all.
A little, she said. She could recognize and scribble her name. She could read the most simple of characters, for example, heaven . Most of her life, she had relied on her husband and children to translate for her.
Then, in the 1990s, Ma had a severe accident.
My sister had had a premonition. Jin-Zhi was at school in Taipei, and her eye began to pulse uncontrollably; some Chinese believe that when your eye twitches, something bad is about to happen. Her friends said she was being overly superstitious, but she was sure something terrible was afoot. Then they got the call.
Ma and Ba had fought over his attending dance classes, where he held other women close. She had begged him not to go. She got on her knees and pleaded.
But Ba said he wouldn’t stop, ever.
Ma was enraged. She walked out, and got on her scooter without putting on a helmet. After that, she just didn’t remember. She drove blinded by anger, trying to escape the pain of realizing that she had suffered for a marriage that would never be happy. Her husband was never going to change. Her mind was full of despondent fury.
She hit loose gravel on the road, and she and her bike went flying. Those who saw the skid marks, which seemed to go on for a few hundred yards, wondered how she lived. Actually, Ma almost died. When she awoke, she didn’t know who she was. Ma suffered a severe concussion. She didn’t recognize anyone and lost her short-term memory for a time. Eventually, after excruciating treatment and therapy, Ma recovered, but she would never be the same, or at least she would never believe that she was the same. She had never considered herself smart, but after the accident, she believed she was even more stupid. Atou. Hen ben.
Ma went back to school for about a year to try to learn more characters, but she stopped because she couldn’t find anyone to drop her off and pick her up each day. Ba, apparently, was too busy with whatever he was doing. Ma told Min-Wei and me that not being able to read was a burden she was glad her daughters had escaped.
“When you don’t understand, it’s like you are blind,” she said. That, I understood perfectly.
GETTING FROM TAIPEI to Guilin required two plane trips, two border crossings on foot, and four bus rides.
Chinese poets through the centuries have celebrated the otherworldly beauty of Guilin, the capital of the autonomous and mystical region of Guangxi. Thousands of years of acidic rain and pounding winds have sculpted a wonderland carved into limestone and carbonic mountains, with sinkholes, pounding rivers, and more than three thousand caves. Angular karst formations protrude sharply against the blue sky taunting the imagination into perceiving the shapes of camels, elephants, bridges, Chinese unicorns, and old wise men. Underground, miles and miles of stalagmites and stalactites form fantastical cities, which the ever-entrepreneurial Chinese have turned into virtual amusement parks by lighting them up with multicolored spotlights. Guilin is the kind of place that can haunt your dreams, if not for the evocative landscape, for the hordes of tourists and street vendors that swarm every attraction. I was torn between being absolutely amazed by the physical beauty of the place and wanting to jump off of our cruise ship on the Li River for the constant barrage of commercialism. I had been here before in 1999, so I knew this was coming. Thankfully, Ma seemed to love everything she saw.
“How precious,” she would mumble, patting the wet wall of yet another cave and tipping her head back to stare upward.
Throughout our trip, our guide—whose name I only knew as Miss Linn—described in depth the myths of the region and the backstory of each attraction and tradition. I continued to understand very little, so I often ended up staring morosely out the window of the bus. Min-Wei deciphered what she could, but she struggled to balance taking care of Ma, translating for me, and maintaining her hypersocial ways. She was incredibly chatty, like I might normally be, and befriended many of the other passengers. She would flit from person to person joking and charming them. I could only watch and smile, enclosed in my dark box of ignorance. Once, after listening for a long time to the guide’s talk and not translating a word, Min-Wei turned to me and explained her silence.
“This is history,” she said. “Not very interesting.”
I NORMALLY LOVE Chinese food, but on our China trip I practically grew to dread eating. I got sick quickly of the breakfasts of greasy noodles, soggy Chinese broccoli and chewy bread, warm soy milk, diluted tea, and watery Nescafé. I longed for a glass of cold orange juice, a scrambled egg, or a piece of bacon. I barely touched the fatty spareribs and spiny fish from the local rivers. We did partake in a few remarkable meals, such as a lunch of different kinds of mushrooms from the Yangshuo region, or a buffet spread in a restaurant owned by a Taiwanese man. But after a couple days, my appetite became uncharacteristically unenthusiastic.
Min-Wei would spoon up portions, and like a good mother, motion to Ma and me, saying: “Lai, lai, lai.” Come, come, come.
I put my bowl forward half-heartedly and let her fill it, but I usually ended up leaving much of it to the side.
“You eat like a bird,” said the woman next to me.
That’s funny, I thought. Most of the time people were astonished with how much such a little person could put down.
Our table company did not make the meal any more appetizing. One relatively sweet little old man routinely around midday developed a case of body odor that could knock you over. Another couple was a caricature of the crudest Chinese people. They burped, snorted, coughed, hacked, sneezed, spit, and farted all through mealtime. Then they lit up their cigarettes while the rest of us were still eating. I knew that these were normal behaviors in many Chinese and Asian cultures. I grew up with two brothers who used to burp and fart and who recently had started to make more noise when they chewed than a dog gumming on a rawhide bone. Yet this couple’s bodily expressions were exceptionally loud. They hoarded the best dishes. They picked—or shall I say dug—into their noses in public. I tried to throw them nasty looks when they burped so loudly that I thought that something other than sound had come out of their guts, but they ignored me. They could have cared less what the foreign girl thought.
Ma had her mealtime quirks, too. She let out some pretty impressive belches midmeal and loudly slurped up noodles or soup, as if it enhanced the flavor. Min-Wei reminded her at first to use the chopsticks that had been designated for serving, rather than reaching into the plate with her own as they might do at home. My own mom had monitored our table manners with vigilance when we were kids. We always chewed with our mouths closed, kept our elbows off the table, covered our mouths when we yawned or sneezed and were expected to say “excuse me” if we burped. Loud belching, in general, was frowned upon. We ate mostly healthy foods—we were never allowed to eat sugar cereal growing up and were given candy only once in a while. We brushed our teeth two or three times
daily. I suspected that my mom would have been horrified by the lack of etiquette at our daily banquets in China.
Ma didn’t worry about being delicate. She basked in the glory of unlimited food, even if she didn’t particularly like it. She was a marathon eater. She started out slow but kept on going until the second we stood up to leave the table. She also was a food hoarder. During breakfast, she always helped herself to the buffet after she finished eating, carefully wrapping and stowing away in her purse stuffed buns, sweet bread, croissants, and even hard-boiled eggs. “Just in case,” she said.
After almost every meal, Ma and the other members of our group gleefully bargained with Chinese vendors who hounded us, negotiating for fruit and vegetables. Everyone bought huge stems of lychee—which were in high season and deliciously sweet—plums, peaches, and entire melons. They waved their bounty in the air when they entered the bus, grinning and chattering away about how much they had paid. So ten minutes after finishing a meal, we were eating again. When we checked into our hotels at night, many people left their remaining bounty on the bus. So come morning, the vehicle smelled of overripe produce. I pinched my nose to endure the stink. No one else seemed to mind.
MIN-WEI’S FIRST PRIORITY was looking after Ma. She got her documents in order and held on to Ma’s money to be sure that our mother wouldn’t be tricked into buying false goods for high prices. She vetoed souvenirs that she thought were a waste. She walked Ma to her hotel room each night—Min-Wei and I stayed together while Ma shared a room with a single Taiwanese woman who was traveling with friends—and reminded her over and over which room we were staying in.
The task that consumed most of Min-Wei’s attention—and mine, too—was meeting Ma’s bathroom needs.
I had my first encounter with Chinese bathrooms during my 1999 six-week cross-country tour. On that trip, we frequented all types of bathrooms, ranging from holes in the ground to Western toilets with fold-down seats. The most challenging and disgusting bathrooms were merely long troughs, over which you squatted with your feet precariously placed on the slick, wet floor on both sides. You and all the other women lined up in a row, butts bared and hung low, the pee and excrement flowing below. Other “public” bathrooms were no more than holes in small wooden huts at the side of the road. Sad to say, that part of China—despite an edict from the government in light of the approach of the Beijing Olympics to clean up public toilets—seemed to have evolved little.
We had no choice but to endure because Ma used the bathroom just about every hour, a need that had vexed her ever since she’d had her operation for cervical cancer. Min-Wei was especially astute at perceiving when our mother might need to go and made sure Ma went before she got on the bus or took a long walk. We became the super-sister bathroom tag team. During the early days of our trip, we three were always the stragglers, the last to join the group, enter the attractions, or board the bus. We soon learned to plan ahead, with one of us running ahead to reserve a good spot on the bus and the other accompanying Ma.
I eagerly threw myself into the role of Min-Wei’s humble assistant, escorting Ma to the bathroom, helping her up and down stairs, making sure she didn’t wander or spend her money unwisely. I may not have been able to communicate with Ma, but these simple caretaking tasks I could do. Ma was sixty-three years old (or sixty-four in Chinese years because they say babies have entered their first year when they are born). I wondered if she expected or wanted the help we insisted on giving her. Did she think we were patronizing her? My American mom certainly would have.
Whatever the case, I followed my sister’s example. At least it helped me feel a bit more like a real daughter.
THE TOUR WAS so rushed and Ma and Min-Wei were so distracted that I had to sneak questions to Ma whenever I could. Min-Wei almost always had to translate because after Ma said a sentence or two in Mandarin, she would switch to her native Taiwanese.
On the plane to Macau: What did you do as a child, growing up?
On the bus between guide speeches and catnaps: How did your family end up in Kinmen?
In the room as we were getting ready: When did Ba first see you? What did you think of him?
After dinner, one night before bed: What was the war like?
I obsessed more about when the next opportunity for questions would be than what attraction we were visiting. I was worried that time would run out, and I wouldn’t have asked all the things I hoped to ask. I apologized to Min-Wei and my other sisters who were forced to channel my curiosity and questions and confront, in some cases, very unpleasant situations. In the end, Min-Wei reassured me that she was learning about our history, too. So often we live with our parents and never ask where they are from and what their childhood was like. I regretted not writing down the details of the stories my dad or my grandparents told. I wish I had paid closer attention to their lives when they were living.
So I peppered Ma with questions, and she answered as well as she could. Translation was a constant challenge, and her memory was fading and jumbled. She would tell the same stories twice or a few times, and change key details. (I was in the mountains when the bombing started. But later: No, I was in my vegetable patch.) Min-Wei often had to ask several questions to my one in order to figure out what she meant. In the end, much of what I learned about both Ma and Ba came from recollections from Min-Wei and my other sisters, and I was sure I was not being told everything.
One night before bed, Ma told me that she and Ba had disagreed about my adoption on many levels, despite what both of them had told me during our first reunion. This was Min-Wei’s approximate translation:
“Ba believed that if the girls are adopted in Taiwan, the Taiwanese parents will feed the kids, but they will grow up and then get sent to be prostitutes. Not good to be with Taiwan parents, Ba say. They will want the daughter to make money for them. He think foreigner is better. My and Ba’s opinion opposite. I think it better to give to Taiwan parents, not foreigners so I can see the kids and I can see that the kids are okay.
“If the kid is sent to a foreign place I don’t know what happened to her. Is she have a good life? How does the parent treat kid? I don’t know. If we gave you to Taiwan parents, I could have seen you.
“The leader was Grandmother,” Ma said. “She say, ‘Give her away.’ And Father say okay.”
Grandmother. I thought of Ba’s mother and the few pictures I had seen of her. She seemed small and frail, but she was omnipresent in my family’s history. I got the sense that this woman, who bore nine boys—three of whom survived—was the mastermind behind the family madness. She had the final say behind so many key decisions: when to give and not to give a child away, when to adopt one. She was the screech that woke my sisters most mornings, the reproach that cut through Ma’s heart, and the whisper in Ba’s ear.
Grandmother died in 1996, the year before I was reunited with the family, so I never met her. I didn’t know a lot about her, though she received mixed reviews from my sisters. Some said she was mean and told me about how she smacked or pinched them. Others said she was caring, and loved them very much. For sure, both Ma and Ba demanded their children respect her. One sister told me that at her funeral all the girls were made to crawl on their hands and knees around our grandmother’s body, crying out in grief. I wondered if Grandmother had been alive and I had met her, how I would have felt about her. I bet she would have seemed amusing and eccentric at first, a sweet and sassy old Chinese lady. Yet, just as my patience eroded with Ba, I suspect it would have with her. And in the end, I would have had to hide my disdain for the things she had done.
Ma said she believed she had no right to challenge her mother-in-law—always a higher position in any traditional Chinese family—so she let Irene and me go.
“I think if you stay we can still go on, we are not really, really poor. If you were here, you would still have food. We are still here. We survived. We had to eat rice and vegetables, and we couldn’t eat a lot of meat. It was not so good, the food, but we could
eat.”
Min-Wei stopped translating and added her own editorial comment. “I think it was better to send you to another country,” she said.
DURING THE THIRD NIGHT of our tour, we stayed in a three-star hotel with 168 rooms in the township of Lupu. The hotel sits above the Feng Yu cave, at the “Fenyu Yanwenoquan-shanzhuang,” according to the hotel’s badly translated English promotional material. This hot-spring mountain villa is “a good resort for tour, convalescence, having meetings, dining, lodgment and shopping, which is your best choice.”
It was indeed pretty, but being a wet mountain resort, it was also a mosquito paradise. We covered ourselves with repellent and pulled our clothes tightly around our bodies in any public room. I covered the crack at the foot of the hotel room door with a towel and sprayed my floppy hat with repellent, which I then wore to bed.
I hate mosquitoes. I despise them with a violent passion. If one is buzzing around my bedroom at home I will bolt up straight out of a dead sleep, switch on all the lights, and stomp around the room with crazed eyes hunting the beast while my poor husband grumbles into his pillow.
Ever since I was little, mosquitoes have stalked me. If there was one insect among twenty people, it would bite me, and the welt would swell to superhuman sizes and leave a scar that would last the summer. When my husband and I traveled to the rain forest in Thailand, he didn’t wear insect repellent because I was with him, and they always bit me instead. During my first trip to China, mosquitoes bit almost every part of my body, and the bites swelled into giant red bumps. I slathered DEET-laced lotion on my arms when I went to sleep, and then they bit me on the forehead and chin. The next night I put repellent on my face, disregarding the dire warnings against doing so. A mosquito bit me on the eyelid, the only place I missed. For three days I looked like the elephant woman. During a recent safari in a Brazilian swamp, I received more than one hundred bites from mosquitoes and flies. My friend counted sixty welts on my arms and back; I told her to stop before I had a nervous breakdown.
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