by Karoline Kan
On a government-owned farm a mile from Chaoyang, people from nearby would sneak into the field to steal apples, corn, and whatever was growing that season. Nobody paid attention to this type of theft until the Strike-Hard Campaign. One young man was caught and sentenced to three years in prison for picking five ears of corn.
In the midst of such uncertainty, villagers in Chaoyang grasped onto an ancient rule: Silence is golden. To Nainai, to even say the name of Deng Xiaoping became taboo. I couldn’t understand it, and, as a four-year-old, I enjoyed playing tricks on her by repeating things she had forbidden me from saying.
I surprised her one day by asking: “Will Mengmeng be given away?”
“She’s safe now.”
“Will I be given away?”
She burst into laughter. “You’re too expensive.” Nainai always called me a “costly girl,” and it made me feel guilty. I did not know why it was funny, and my expression said so.
“Maybe. If you don’t behave well,” she added. Nainai pulled me over to face Grandma Liu. “In our time, who would have spent so much for a girl?”
“Girls are born to be unlucky,” Nainai mumbled as she plucked a piece of reed and folded the flat, boat-shaped leaves into a pinwheel for me.
I nodded, not sure if I understood. I held the pinwheel up high and ran along the edge of the pond.
Her words haunted me for a long time. Why did she value boys over girls, even though she was a girl? She died before I was old enough to ask her.
Nainai was orphaned at three years old and never went to school. Sadly, she was the sort of woman who did all the housework, but whom nobody ever bothered to thank. At night, she always sat under a dim lamp, darning our socks. She had cataracts, and worked with the needle so close to her eyes that I worried she would poke one of them out. This is one of the reasons why Nainai didn’t get along well with my mom, who had career ambitions. As far as Nainai was concerned, my mom’s teaching job would give our family a bad reputation. Nainai, who had five daughters herself but was considered lucky because she had two sons, always saved the fine rice and noodles for her husband and sons, while she and her daughters ate coarse bread made from corn flour.
She used to say that girls were useless. I hated this, but eventually managed to melt the icy barrier around her heart. One day, when I helped her to peel green beans and build a fire for dinner, she took a blue-and-white handkerchief from her gray cotton coat. In the handkerchief were hard candies. “Open your mouth!” she said, picking one piece out for me. “When my little girl grows up and marries someone with a lot of money, will you still remember Nainai and take care of me?”
“Yes, Nainai,” I’d said. She couldn’t imagine that I would ever be able to take care of her myself.
Many times after Mom would come home, I’d tell her that I didn’t want to be taken by the police, or thrown into the dustbin like Nainai teased me. Mom would reassure me, holding me in her arms, and sing to me. Years later, I still hear this song in my dreams:
The moon is bright, the wind quiet;
The leaves’ shadows fall on the windowsill;
The crickets are crying, making sounds
like stringed instruments;
The music is soft, bright,
The tone is pleasing;
The cradle gently swings;
My baby closes her eyes
and dreams her sweet dreams.
I would always be happy in the evenings when everyone was finally at home after a long day’s work, and Mom’s singing always brought extra comfort. What I remember most vividly about being five years old in Chaoyang is the rain, when my parents and grandparents would stay home from work. I loved watching the water trickle down the glass and collect on the windowsill. Hooks, hanging from the sills, would sometimes blow in the wind, chiming softly. Those were the days I most enjoyed, and when I felt the safest. On those rainy days, I didn’t worry about being taken.
Chapter Three
A Home of Our Own
Caiyuan, 1995
In Chaoyang village, houses were connected to each other in a row without any space between them and always at the same height. To be polite, neighbors discussed the height of their homes before any renovation or construction, and if somebody planned for their house to be taller, it was not regarded well. There were also practical reasons for them to be the same height: Otherwise, if it rained, the water would collect on the roofs of the shorter homes and damage them over time.
My parents had finally built their own house next door to my grandparents—at the same height—but Mom and Wengui, whose relationship since my birth had reached a kind of uneasy peace, finally exploded when she refused to pay for a new house to celebrate my uncle’s marriage. Wengui had insisted that the family come together to pay for Uncle’s house, and because Wengui was still the head of the family, Baba and his siblings were expected to oblige. But Mom would not. She and my dad made their own money, and she believed it should be theirs to keep.
Their inflamed arguments over the proposed building lasted for a few months, and neither my mom nor Wengui would give in. Then, a few days before Chinese Lunar New Year, my grandfather announced that he was going ahead with construction, and that the new house would be in the same row and next to my parents’, but three feet higher.
A few days after the festivities, when the sun hadn’t fully risen, my mom and I were suddenly awoken by a drilling sound. When she opened the curtain, she saw two tractors pulling wagons filled with soil parked in front of my grandfather’s house. Wengui stood in his yard, instructing the two drivers on how to lay foundations.
Mom quickly dressed and rushed out the door.
“Both are your sons,” she yelled at him. “How can you be so unfair to us? We’ve only had our house for a few years. Why are you so evil?”
“You refused to talk to me about this,” Wengui responded matter-of-factly and took a puff of his pipe, “so now I’ve done what I think is best.”
Mom went into my grandparents’ kitchen and sat down. Wengui walked over and stood in front of her. She began to hammer away at the details: “We paid for his college tuition. For years we’ve handed in half our earnings to you. Now we have a house but a lot of debt. I have treated Chengtai’s sisters like my own. Tell me, what have we done wrong?”
If my mother had shown weakness by crying, like other women in the village when they wanted something, Wengui would have been less angry. But her strong will—her own ideas, opinions, her strength—was exactly what he didn’t like about her.
“You know what’s wrong”—Wengui raised his voice—“you never listen to us! You want to keep working as a teacher, yet you’re a married woman. You had a second child, you don’t wash my son’s clothes, and now you encourage my son to turn his back on his family. If this were the old days, you would have been returned to your parents long ago!”
“But it’s not the old days anymo—”
Before she could finish, Nainai came out from her room, shouting in her raspy voice, “Chengtai, if you don’t control your wife, you’re not my son anymore! Who is this woman? She shows no respect to us!” She then sat on the ground and cried over and over again, “I will die today. Chengtai, if you don’t teach your wife a lesson, I will die today!”
My mother stood up and kicked the chair toward Nainai. The glasses and teapots crashed to the floor. She slammed the door and rushed out, yelling, “I can’t live near you people anymore.”
“Stop, woman!” Wengui shouted. “Who permitted you to leave this house?”
Hearing his mother’s wailing, my father ran inside. He first pulled up his mother from the floor. As he was about to walk out to my mother, Wengui hit him in the shoulder with his walking stick and shouted, “You pathetic son! You’re going to her?”
The workers, still on the tractors, which by now had been switched off, looked at each other and didn’t know what to do. Nainai was crying on a stool in front of the window. Neighbors stood around outside, enjoyin
g the scene; family drama was the best entertainment a village could have. Otherwise there was just farming, cooking, and caring for children.
Mom came at Wengui with her fist. He grabbed her. She forcefully tried to free her hands to pound him and punch him, but he held on tightly and squeezed her so hard that it hurt. Four neighbors tried unsuccessfully to pull them apart.
In all the screaming, crying, and chaos, my father sneaked out through the yard.
By lunch, he had returned with his siblings and their spouses, but they only defended my grandparents, adding fuel to the flames.
Among the onlookers, an old man from my mother’s village, who happened to be in Chaoyang selling candies on his bicycle, had seen the fight and sped back to inform my mother’s family. Her siblings soon arrived to help. By mid-afternoon, there was no turning back.
To the neighbors watching, it didn’t matter what the fight was about. A daughter-in-law disobeying the parents? She was wrong. Terrible. A monster. My mother knew this was not simply a matter of losing face. It meant she would not have a friend in the village tomorrow. The elders would despise her, and the young would be pressured to avoid associating with her.
That day in the chaos, I ran from here to there in our yard and then sneaked out and sat on the street until the evening. When people passed over me, talking, I suspected they were whispering about all the craziness in my yard. I kept my face buried in my arms so they couldn’t see I was Shumin’s daughter.
Suddenly my mother’s older brother Shouchun appeared in front of me and told me to get in his car, where my mother and Yunxiang sat waiting. Uncle Shouchun drove us to Caiyuan. I knew it wasn’t a usual visit to my other grandparents’ because, on the way, my mother didn’t say a word. Her swollen eyes remained fixed on the road for the entire drive.
My father did not come to Caiyuan that night, or the next one. He would not dare disagree with his father. It worried me. The sour relationship between Mom and Grandfather Wengui negatively affected my parents’ marriage. I had heard the word divorce often from them both. After many days with no Baba I began to worry even more, and didn’t want to leave either of them.
Eventually, after a few weeks when things calmed down, Baba came to see us. Initially he stayed only one night a week, then two nights, then three, until finally he moved in. That was my father’s style. When he met with difficulty, he preferred to wait it out or escape rather than put himself in front of it. My mom would rather be run over by a truck than wait. With his way, Baba managed to keep the hearts of both sides, but his parents still blamed him for being disloyal, and his wife and children trusted him less.
We all remained living together in Caiyuan with my mother’s parents. The two villages were close, and Yunxiang could still attend the same school. I liked the new village, playing with my cousin Chunting, and making new friends. Mom returned to teaching that year at her old school, and Baba continued driving his tractor to sell bricks and, now, also fertilizer. But they were unhappy. Baba would smoke in the yard for hours, and Mom’s otherwise easy laughter had become rare. A married daughter returning home to live with her parents was a big no-no. Her parents tried to reassure Mom that she could stay as long as she wanted, never mind the busybodies, but the knowing looks and whispers whenever she walked by made Mom feel too self-conscious.
There is an old Chinese saying that a married daughter is like spilled water: “Once she is out, she is out.” After marriage, the only times daughters were truly welcomed in their parents’ homes were during a few major festivals or for weddings and funerals. It had been that way for many years. Customs and societal norms shift, but in the countryside in the 1990s married daughters seldom visited their parents, so a woman who returned too often was considered disrespectful to her in-laws.
What’s more, my mother’s fight with her in-laws had been public; only a delirious or insane woman would openly challenge her father-in-law.
Then, to make matters even worse, Grandfather Wengui died of cancer a few months after we had moved out.
And so my mother’s sins doubled in the eyes of his friends and relatives. His medical records said he had succumbed to lung cancer, but they were sure he had died of humiliation and anger at my mother.
We went to Grandfather Wengui’s funeral, all of us dressed in traditional white from head to toe. Baba’s siblings refused to talk to Mom. My aunt insisted that I follow her closely and not walk with my mother to the cemetery.
Many Kans whom I had never met attended. A band of musicians followed the long procession of mourners and played gongs, trumpets, and drums. I looked for my mom the entire time; she was always at the front of the line. As the wife of the deceased’s oldest son, Mom was expected to cry all the way to the cemetery, whether she missed him or not. She also had to hold a pottery bowl filled with the ashes of “ghost money”—fake bills printed with images of the gods, which when burned would be used in the afterlife. She had to scatter the ashes at the entrance to the village. I knew Wengui would be happy to see Mom giving away the “cash” in his honor. He managed to win, even in death.
As we approached his coffin, I grew especially scared. Spooky characters from traditional Chinese tales were embroidered on the decorative cloth covering the coffin. There were gods’ messengers with their green faces, and the judge who decided whether somebody would be sent to heaven or hell, surrounded by long-eared black ghosts. The entire funeral freaked me out.
I was happy when evening arrived and the sun settled into sleep. At night, before the actual burial the next day, it is customary to play music in front of the deceased’s home. When the music played, it felt as if the entire village was in our yard for Wengui’s send-off. We stood around drinking soda and watching a female singer belt out pop songs. It was bizarre to me that she had chosen such happy music. I asked Mom about it, and she said if an old man died in bed, it was a blessing and deserved celebration. I started to think about how I would never see my grandfather again, and I cried. However grumpy he was, I missed him. He was always smoking and worried, but I still loved him. Though I could not let Mom see me cry, for I feared she’d feel betrayed.
* * *
Despite my friendship with Mengmeng, my cousin Chunting was more like the sister I had always wanted. She and I were always together—sleeping, eating, playing, and watching TV. But as much as I liked Caiyuan, I knew it was not my home. In the villages, family names mattered more than blood. Chinese culture differentiates the children of sons from the children of daughters. Because Yunxiang and I didn’t share the same family name with Laoye, my mother’s father, we were his waisun, meaning his “outer-grandchildren,” while Chunting, Uncle Lishui’s daughter, was a neisun, an “inner-grandchild.” It was in our grandparents’ best interest to focus on and take care of the neisuns first; we waisuns were always second. My mother hated to burden her parents with caring for Yunxiang and me, and didn’t want to cause arguments between her parents and sisters-in-law.
My mother warned Yunxiang and me that, when she was not around, we were to behave as best as we could. We were never to fight with our uncles’ children, and were to try not to eat at our uncles’ houses. If we needed pocket money, we were never to ask our uncles or grandparents. If our socks or gloves were torn, we were to wait for Mom to fix them, and not ask my grandmother.
Uncle Lishui teased Mom, and said she was thinking too much about it. “You sound like one of these paranoid old ladies,” he said, but my mother insisted that since we were living in her parents’ village, it was best to be careful and avoid more trouble.
The villagers did not openly give Mom a hard time, but they didn’t hide their opinions either. One day as I was walking in the street with Chunting to my uncle’s house, we met a group of grannies sitting on the curb in front of the village chief’s office, in an open area used for hanging out. With nothing better to do, these old ladies spent most of their time getting into other people’s business. One narrow-eyed old woman pointed out Chunting to the ot
her ladies. “That girl is Lishui’s daughter, but who’s the one beside her?” She waved her hands to Chunting, beckoning her. “Come here!”
Chunting and I looked at each other, then obediently went over to them.
Another lady, a little younger, said: “This one is Shumin’s daughter. You know Shumin? Lishui’s sister who had the fight with her in-laws?”
“Ah,” they said. One turned her head to me and said with a sneering smile, “You don’t belong here. Why are you here all the time?”
The group laughed. To them it was harmless teasing, but I took it seriously. I was angry, but too shy to argue back. I bit my lip and lowered my head, avoiding eye contact. I hated these awful old women with their loose yellow teeth and gray clothes. I pulled Chunting’s sleeve and could still hear them laughing as we walked away.
In the evening when my mom came back from school, I told her about what had happened.
“Don’t listen to them,” she said too simply. I didn’t understand why she kept quiet about people teasing us, and why she seemed extra anxious lately. Even the music she used to like now bothered her. Her tape collection gathered dust on the shelves and she had stopped singing around the house.
Her status in Caiyuan was not easy for her to accept emotionally, but she had to live with it. It wasn’t the snickering women who bothered her though. What really disturbed my mother was living with what she had done to me.