by Samuel Shem
From Rhett’s tone, and his look, Pep gets it. This is a woman on the make. She sees, in them, a way out of this filthy hot room. He is on guard.
“Yes, yes,” Clio says, wanting to shift the tone away from Pep’s rude interrogation. “Yes, Tao Ayi, we were at your dress shop—a lovely, elegant shop, and you must get a great deal of pleasure from it, shay shay.” After she says these last words she realizes they mean “thank you” and wonders why she used them.
“How far is it to visit Third Sister?” Pep asks.
“A nine-hour journey, first by train, then by bus. And then you take a brand-new cable car up the mountain—but you still have to climb two hundred more steps to the Elephant Temple, and then hike up through the woods to her little house. I have never been there, but I think it will take, to go and come back, three days.”
“Can’t do it,” Pep says, relief in his voice, “We have to leave Tienja tonight, on an eight o’clock train back to Changsha, and then back to America.” He turns to Clio, praying that she will not think it’s a good idea to go.
Clio looks at Katie, who shrugs and says nothing. To Clio, this sudden possibility of meeting the birth mom is fraught. She feels she should do it, but now that it’s real, it feels too sudden, too risky. Maybe someday, when they’ve thought it all out, prepared themselves—someday when Katie’s more mature, and really prepared for it, okay. But to go nine hours up into the mountains, into the unknown, after what she’s heard about her here? “No,” she says, “there’s really no time, is there?”
“Right,” Pep says. “We’ll spend the day, find out all about Katie’s birth mom, and write her a message that someone can get to her, and then plan, next time, to visit with her.”
Clio looks at him, and again at Katie. “Honey, do you want to stay here three more days to go visit your birth mom?”
“Oh God, Clio, come on—”
“Katie?”
14
She glances up at her mother. All of them are staring at her. The room feels tight and hot, hard to breathe in. She feels confused, and flustered. So far this meeting with her birth aunt isn’t fun. It’s meeting the wrong one. Don’t they know that?
“Yeah, I do,” she says, answering her mother.
“You sure?”
“I told you I wanted to, remember? I still do.”
Clio and Pep exchange looks. “Let’s just talk a little more about it, dear, before we decide for good?” Pep groans and shakes his head. “Rhett?” Clio goes on. “Could you ask her to tell us more about Xiao Lu—how old she is, if she has other children, what happened to her husband?”
“I have only seen her twice in twelve years,” Ming Tao says. “Once, a few years ago at our mother’s funeral, and once last year. At our mother’s funeral I said to her, ‘I have discovered the pleasures in life!’” She laughs so hard at this, tears come to her eyes. “She married a farmer near a town called Chindu. She lived there with him and his parents, and had a daughter named Xia. But she left them all, went to a mountain, three years ago. She takes a big risk, to leave them. Big risk!”
“Katie,” Pep says, “You have a sister! Her name is Xia.”
“Awesome! How old?”
Rhett asks. Tao says, “Xia is a few years older than Chwin.”
“And do I have a brother too?” Katie asks. After Rhett translates, Tao shakes her head no.
“But why?” Clio asks sharply. “Why would she ever leave her first child?” She sees Katie staring at her, her eyes showing her surprise.
“Mom, she musta had to. She wouldn’t of done it except she had to. Like she had to put me in the celery, but she made sure I was safe, right?”
“Right.” As always, Clio thinks, Katie sees the glass as half-full, finds the good. No depressed Hale genes for her. “She knew you’d be found right away—it was the best place to put you, really.”
“I don’t know why she left Xia,” Ming Tao says. “She left, and never went back.”
“So,” Pep says, “Katie’s sister and birth father still live on the farm?”
“Yes. But you stay here today with me, we get my two children—your cousins—they are a little older than you, and you play with them and we have a banquet, and we take you to your train back to Changsha at eight. We go to their school. Tomorrow is the last day of school, and I will take them out today to play with you all day.”
“What kind of farm does my birth dad have?”
“Rice, like everybody else. I’ve never been there.”
“Do they have animals? Horses and birds?”
“Yes, there are many animals—water buffalo, and birds, and pigs and chickens and ducks, but no horses. There aren’t many horses around here.”
“Okay, so, Mom, if we can’t go meet my birth mom today, can we go there?”
“You’d rather do that,” Clio asks, “than stay here and meet your cousins?”
“Yeah. It’d be a lot funner to find my sister and my birth dad and his farm.”
All this talk of “birth dad” is having a strange effect on Pep. For ten years he’s listened to Clio and her friends talk only about birth mom. Now, suddenly, he’s here? The other guy? The guy who can bang out child after child, while he has to sit in the fertility doctor’s bathroom whacking off to see if there are enough sperm for maybe one of their own? Images of the other guy crowd in, and he tries to push them, and him, back out.
“What’s the matter, hon?” Clio is leaning over, whispering to him.
“I don’t know. All of a sudden I’ve got to deal with a birth dad? Another dad? Her dad? I mean, her dad? I’m her dad, aren’t I?”
“Join the crowd.”
He stares at her. “You mean this is what you’ve been going through?”
“Every day, for ten years, un hunh.”
“Shit. I don’t know if I can do it, face the guy yet. I’ve got to get ready for it.”
“I know. But if we can, we’ve got to have her meet her sister. Agreed?”
Pep stares at Katie. How could he deny her her sister? “Agreed, sure... But,” he whispers to Clio—but barely able to keep it to a whisper now, “but the thing is, is that the sister, well... the sister comes with a dad!”
“It’s the price you pay.” She can hardly suppress a chuckle.
“Okay,” Pep says to Rhett. “Ask her how long it’ll take to get to this farm.”
“Oh, it is far away, very far,” Ming Tao says, “a very long, hot journey. Many hours by bus, then bicycle, then on foot.”
Pep is sure she is lying. While looking her in the eye, he speaks to Rhett in a slow, firm tone, with a certain toughness he has learned from decades of closing insurance deals with tight-fisted Columbians. “We want to go meet Katie’s birth father and sister and grandparents. If there’s time, we’ll meet her cousins and uncle too. And tell her that even though it is too long and too hot a journey, we have a van, a beautiful nice air-conditioned van stocked with cold bottled water, which is waiting for us down at the end of the street, and maybe we can all—her too—go there today, and still get back to meet our beautiful train at eight? Do you get what I’m saying here, Rhett?”
“Pep!” Clio says. “There’s no need to speak to her that way.”
“Yeah, Daddy, I told you not to! And don’t say ‘beautiful’!”
Pep starts to burn, but hides it. “Okay.” He whispers to Clio, “She’s ripping us off. She’s lying. I don’t know what to believe now—it may not even be her sister and birth dad for all we know—I mean she’s obviously on the make—but there’s no risk to spending the afternoon in the bus, stopping off at this farm, and then we’re gone.”
“Pep, please?” Clio has seen—in the universal woman-to-woman wordless language—that Ming Tao is picking all this up.
“Fine.” He smiles at Ming Tao. “I’ll try to be more polite, Katie. Rhett? D
eal.”
“Got it, big guy.” As he translates, Pep plays a little game of eye tag with Ming Tao. She listens carefully, hearing the nuance. He sees that she gets it.
“A beautiful van!” she exclaims, acting like an innocent who has been severely mistaken and takes correction gratefully. “If so, you can get there and back in time for your train.”
“Can we call ahead?” Clio asks. “On the farm, do they have a phone?”
“No. But first we go visit my children’s school—”
“No,” Pep says. “We go right now.” In her eyes he sees a certain calculation, like a client trying to find the catch in the policy. He has to give her something. “Tell her that after we come back we will make a generous gift to her and her family.”
Rhett translates. Ming Tao smiles, and nods, and starts to clear the teacups.
“Do you have any photos of Xiao Lu and her family?” Clio asks. Tao says no. “Of your mother and father and—who did you say?—was it First Sister?”
“In those days we were too poor to have a camera.” She seems to sense Clio’s disappointment, and moves to stand behind Pep and Katie. She puts a hand on Katie’s head, and on Pep’s shoulder.
Katie doesn’t like to be touched by anyone other than Clio and Pep. She wishes she could get away.
Through Pep’s thin Hawaiian shirt, Tao’s hand feels warm. His skin tingles. He has an impulse to touch that hand. Her voice now is light, nuanced, almost lilting.
Rhett translates. “She says that she means what she says from her heart—in Chinese the saying is ‘down to earth.’ Meeting you and her beautiful niece is one of the greatest things in her life. After you leave China tonight she wants to be great friends with you and a great ayi to Katie and you must come back very soon. And next time you will all go together to visit her dear Third Sister up in the mountains. And one day she will visit you in America.” He smiles. “And me too. We’re a package.”
Despite her sensual touch, Pep discounts this—her “down to earth” reminds him of someone saying “to be honest with you,” which only means they have some reason not to be honest and might well be lying—but he feels that he’s gotten things moving in a direction that will work. He’ll need to stay on his toes in dealing with these two.
Clio fingers her Kwan Yin. She sees Ming Tao as a messenger to them, much as the Goddess of Compassion is a messenger to all. A woman who has kept her beauty and savvy and created a business in the new, cutthroat China. “Tell her,” Clio says, in a hushed tone, as if the moment is both sanctified and profaned by the stark truth of their inequality, “that we’ll try to meet her children and that she’s welcome to come to America to see us. And that we’ll come back, soon as we can.”
“I will leave a note for my husband and children,” Ming Tao says. The stick figures dance across the page, like characters onstage. She places it carefully on the table, a teacup on a corner to secure it.
Rhett hustles them out. The crowd has built. Rhett is the prow of their ship, they follow in his wake. The Chinese shout to Ming Tao. The heat clutches at them, letting go when a high shack brings a rhomboid of shade—but then knifing in again when they walk back out into the sun.
As they get closer to the van they are forced to go more slowly. The crowd is packed from the center of Mad Dog Lane all the way to the walls of the shacks, and not only is it streaming down from above but it has been drawn up from below by the snazzy Toyota van. They can see the uniformed driver holed up inside, smoking and reading the paper, ignoring the crowd and its pleas to be let in. The engine growls.
They stand there for a moment, stopped by the crush of people. Ming Tao suddenly cries out, and points to Katie.
“Look! She has the same red sheen to her hair as me.” Rhett translates. She bends down to Katie’s height. Sure enough, the red glows in the bright sun. Two russet auras of the blood.
Pep can’t help but stare down the cleft of Ming Tao’s silk dress, to the deeper, softer cleft of her breasts, coddled in a lacy pink bra. Tao looks up, sees him looking, and smiles. Ah, to be twenty years younger and a cool Chinese! Like Rhett!
“And,” Clio says, having to shout to be heard over the din of the crowd, “does Xiao Lu have the same reddish glow to her hair?”
“Not like me. Third Sister is the smart, shy, artistic sister, not the beautiful, fun-loving sister. Beautiful, lively, fun sister is me!”
Clio realizes that Pep is right—this woman is on the make, and suspect. The sudden weight of trusting her to be the source of all truth about Katie’s birth mother and father, sister, and grandparents comes crashing down. How can they trust her? They can’t, but they’ve got no one else. No DNA here, no. At least not this time around. And when would they ever come back?
With Rhett leading, they rush to the van. The door opens, and Katie, Clio, and Ming Tao step in. Pep, a bit panicked by the mass of people crowding around him, bounds up the steps of the bus and feels a blow come down on his head, and staggers on the top step as if he’s going to tumble back down. He sees stars, hears screams—“Pep!”, “Daddy!”—and starts to topple, but an iron hand from above seizes his wrist, and two hands from below smack into his butt and give a great push and he is up the three steps into the van and on his knees, then up on his feet and being lifted by those iron hands to a seat. His hat is thrown into his lap. He wipes the sweat from his face and to his horror finds it a greasy red—fresh blood.
“Shit!” he cries. “Not again!”
“Daddy, you forgot to duck!”
“Feels like I was hit with a sledgehammer. How bad is it?”
“Very bad, Dad. It’s gross.”
“Let me see, darling.” Clio takes a sterile wipe from the packet.
As she tends to Pep, Rhett barks orders to the driver to get going.
The driver, without regard for the mass of humans encircling his van like bees around their primping queen, backs up, moves forward, up, forward, and they are soon bouncing down out of the mouth of Mad Dog Lane toward the river laden with coal barges and dotted with fishermen’s boats, long thin gondola-like vessels whose necks mimic the necks of the coal-black cormorants sitting in their bows, dark birds sitting as impassively as dream warriors resting up for the next battle in an ancient blood feud which, in the grand scheme of things, of course, means nothing, nothing at all.
PART TWO
In broad daylight I dream I am with her.At night I dream She is still at my side.
—Mei Yao Ch’en, “A Dream at Night”Song Dynasty, 10th–12th century
15
Forget it, they told her, when she got home late that night, forget it.
The trip back had been like a ghost trip, she like a ghost of herself, a ghostly red thread stretching tighter and tighter away from her baby for four hours until, when she got off the train again in Tienja, got off the train in the succulent dark and walked to the bus station, it snapped. But not a clean snap, no. I am not free, she thought, no. I have made a terrible mistake, for all of us—Jiwei and Xia and me and Chun—and also for this life itself because I have added to the missing, to First Sister and to my own mother and father; I have added to the suffering.
From the moment her husband saw her again when she got off the bus at Chindu, she saw in his eyes that he knew—despite everything—that they had done the wrong thing. And she knew he would never admit it.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“I put her in a pile of celery. She was found at once.”
“Good.”
He didn’t ask her how she was. He touched her arm, but the touch seemed far away. They walked back to the bicycle. She felt like she wasn’t all there, that she should be carrying something else, someone else, in a bundle in her arms.
Forget it, Xiao Lu, they told her, have another. Try for a boy.
Xiao Lu told them, “Maybe I can forget it, but I can’t forg
et her. I see her in my mind all the time.”
They—first her mother-in-law, then her father-in-law (a kindly man, as poor farmers go), and then her husband—didn’t seem to know what to say to this, and so they said nothing. They went on with their lives and assumed that after a while she would go on with her life too.
Which she tried her hardest to do. It wasn’t that hard a life, not compared to how she had grown up—her family were so poor at one point that they owned only one pair of decent pants, and had to choose who would wear them. She had been born in 1962, the Year of Starvation. First, lack of rain had made the crops fail. Then the Chairman’s policies made it worse. Years of famine followed, when they had gone out to search for berries and mushrooms and nuts in the hill forests, and then roots and, at the end, even the sorghum grasses that animals ate.
Now on the farm the normal rains and sun brought plenty of food, and the thick clusters of persimmon trees brought shade and the rich fruit that she never tired of eating. But the fact of the abandonment of her baby was always there, like the memory of that drought, those bitter roots that burned your lips, your tongue, your throat. Another life was inside her, a hellish other life spreading out in pain from that act of abandonment, like a defective clock, ticking.
She immersed herself in little Xia, and in working the rice paddies and wheat fields and fava bean fields, and in cooking and cleaning and sewing, but it was always as if she were doing it left-handed, or at a slight distance. In the distance was not just her baby but her baby’s unknown life and fortune—where she had been taken and who she was with now. There was never a question of whether or not she would survive. Chun was a sturdy baby, much more sturdy than Xia had been, and she had seen her rescued from the celery, and knew which police station and which orphanage she would be taken to. Xia had always been frail—maybe from the hepatitis she had shortly before getting pregnant—and had caught every cold, and sometimes in the dusty seasons would have frightening attacks of wheezing. She grew up small and delicate. Xiao Lu worried more about Xia’s well-being than about Chun’s.
