by Samuel Shem
“What happens if it’s a lower tooth?”
“We bury it in the ground. You hold it, and I’ll just wash my shirt and then I’ll throw it for you.” She went to the bucket to wash the blood off, and when her back was turned, Jiwei’s mother took Xia outside. Xiao Lu rushed out after them, and got there in time to see her mother-in-law throw the tooth up onto the roof. Xia screeched with delight, clapped her hands, and screeched some more.
“Why did you do that?” Xiao Lu screamed, furious. “I am her mother. I am to do it!”
Xia stared at her, stunned by this side of her mother that she had never, ever, seen before, this fierceness and anger. Her eyes got big.
Jiwei’s mother just smiled.
“You witch!” Xiao Lu screamed. “Stay away! Stop it! I won’t allow it!”
Xia stared.
Jiwei’s mother mimicked her to Xia and laughed, and Xia broke out of her surprise and fear and laughed too. They both stood there laughing, until Xiao Lu snatched up Xia in her arms and, carrying her on her hip, started walking up the path to the guava tree.
“No, no, let me down!” Xia cried, struggling against her.
Xiao Lu held on until they got to the ancient guava tree, and then, still holding her, sat down in her usual place, her back against the rough old trunk.
“Why are you laughing at your mother?” she asked.
“I don’t know! I want to go back to Grandma.”
“What is Grandma telling you about me?”
“That you don’t want to give me a brother.”
“But I do, I really do.”
“Why don’t you then?”
“I can’t, not yet.”
Xia seemed to calm down, and with a puzzled look in her eyes, she said, “They say you are sick. Are you sick?”
“Who says?”
“Grandma.”
“Anybody else?”
“I want to go back.”
“Tell me if anybody else?”
“I want to go back.”
She knew then for sure that Jiwei had been converted to his mother’s cause. “No, Xia dear,” she said, taking her hand, “I am not sick. Not sick at all.”
“Then why do you act sick?”
“How?”
“I don’t know!” She tried to pull her hand away. Xiao Lu held tight. “Let me go!”
Xiao Lu forced her daughter to look at her, and saw, in her eyes, not her anger with her, no, but a distance from her, and a wish not to be there with her right then, right there. She let her go.
Freed, Xia started to run down the path to the house. Xiao Lu thought to call out to her, but held back. As if hearing her hesitation, Xia stopped, and turned around. Her spindly legs were slightly bowed, her arms sticks, her little chest sunken. Maybe her body is telling her the truth.
“Momma?”
“Yes, Xia?”
“Will you come back?”
Xiao Lu smiled, thinking, It is still possible, yes. She got up, patted the trunk of the tree once for comfort, and walked to her. “Yes.”
The next day she was awakened by distant sounds she’d never heard before, thunck thunck thunck. She left Xia asleep, and went outside. The sounds were coming from up the path. She realized it before she saw it. It was the sound of an ax, of axes. The men were chopping down her tree.
Year after year Xiao Lu struggled, made the best of it, and yet year after year she saw ever more clearly the trap that would destroy her: to risk being pregnant again. The ridicule and laughter spread from the family compound to the village down the hill. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t produced a son—many of the families had only a daughter—but that she would not decide what to do. The word was that she had not said no to trying for a son, but that she would not say yes either. People said she was stubborn, or maybe crazy—wasn’t there a rumor that her father had gone crazy?—or that she was emotional, and not reasonable. But not yet so emotional as to be locked up with the insane ones, in the hospital in Tienja. And the worst that was said about her? “She is putting herself first.”
At times she seemed on the verge of making the choice to try once again. For all his dull obedience to his mother, Jiwei tried to respect her. They went through a stretch of time when Xia was about six when she was on the verge of deciding to try again. But it was just around that time that she got word that her dear mother had died, suddenly, of a burst heart.
She traveled alone down the mountain, across the several valleys to the river, and then, by a narrow fisherman’s boat, upriver to her parents’ house in the village on the shore. The journey took nine hours. She had not been back there since she’d left to marry Jiwei. She had wanted to bring Xia, but they would not allow it, thinking that if she took her child, she might never come back. At the funeral she was stunned to see just how crazy her father was—crazy but not willing to leave the land, insisting he could still farm it, although it hadn’t been properly taken care of for years. The village boss felt sorry for him and said he would let him stay.
The only other people at the funeral were Second Sister and her husband, daughter, and son. After First Sister had disappeared, Second Sister had begun fighting terribly with their mother, and had soon left the family and married the policeman’s son, and moved all the way to Tienja. Like Xiao Lu, she hadn’t seen anyone in the family for many years, and the two sisters hadn’t seen each other since Xiao Lu’s wedding. Now, to Xiao Lu, she was almost unrecognizable—her face made-up like a movie star, her manner sophisticated—they had nothing in common anymore. Her children were dressed like royalty, little emperor and empress. “I have discovered the pleasures in life,” she said. “No, I have heard nothing about First Sister, not a word.” No one had.
The funeral was horrible. There had been no money for proper transport of the body to the monks who did the cremation, several hours away. They loaded the corpse into a wheelbarrow and took turns helping to wheel it up the harrowing hilly path to the run-down temple. At each bridge, as was the old custom, Xiao Lu said a prayer to the gods and sent a leaf of paper money into the stream below. Thinking, It is what my mother would have done at my funeral, or if the body of First Sister had ever been found. If she is dead.
The only thing she took back with her when she returned home was her mother’s little box of gods.
Back in the family Xiao Lu limped on for about another year, until finally one day she found that she had been replaced. The rumor was that Jiwei had been seen talking to another young woman, in the shack that served as a bar down in the village. He began to drink rice wine after work, and sometimes it put him to sleep, and sometimes it awoke in him cruelties toward her and, to her amazement and fear, toward Xia. Xia took refuge—from both of them, Xiao Lu realized, for she herself had become a picture of gloom, now that her mother was dead—took refuge in her grandparents’ bed. His mother had won.
What to do? She thought of killing herself. Some women who had given away their babies did. It was easy. You drink fertilizer, get drunk, lie down, and you are dead. But she could not do that, because of Xia and Chun, at least not yet. She thought of doing the unheard-of, the thing that no one she knew had ever done—leave. Thinking, over and over, I can’t stay, but I have nowhere else to go.
Before dawn one spring day she tiptoed into the grandparents’ room. Xia was almost nine, and slept on a cot at the foot of their bed. Xiao Lu put a note—of the most careful calligraphy, like the note she’d put in Chun’s swaddling clothes—into a fold of Xia’s sleeping gown.
“I love you and will always love you and know that you love me. For now, dear one, it is best for you and Daddy that I go away. When I find a place to live, I will send word, so you can come to me for a visit or to stay. Or I will come to you. If I do not come back in body, I will always be with you in spirit. Love, Mother.”
She left without saying goodbye to anyone else. The only things she took with her were her mother’s jade Buddha and little box of gods, her work clothes, some soap and a toothbrush and her rice bowl and chopsticks, combs for her hair, and the pink plastic sandals she had worn on the trip to Changsha City.
Where would she go? In the western distance, across the valley, was a mountain range. The tallest of the mountains was Emei Shan—Hundred Mile Mountain. When she and Jiwei had rested with their backs against the old guava tree, the two of them alone and then with their daughter, when they had been happy and hopeful, they had always been drawn to the ragged outline of Emei Shan. Some said it was a sacred mountain, but some were always saying that about mountains they could see but not reach. Not that she was looking for sacred, but she had heard that there were protected temples there, and a wild expanse of land protected from farming and people.
She had heard that sometimes people could find a place to live on that immense wild mountain, live alone among the trees and streams and rocks and caves and friendly animals—mountain deer, monkeys. This was her craving. To embrace her shyness, to be alone. Life with people was too hard. She was defective with people, always had been—except with her mother—and couldn’t be with them anymore.
Starting out in that crisp spring morning, she felt at every step a shock of pain, but it was also a shock of surprise, and a shock of relief at her new sense of—what? yes, freedom!—for her pain had less to do with any of the family she was leaving—even Xia, right then—and had more to do with that robust little girl she had abandoned in Changsha, now almost seven years ago.
16
We’re going back to the place where she was born. Clio, sitting next to Pep in the van, realizes this suddenly, about an hour into their horrendous journey. The trip has been unreal—no seat belts, terrible roads, the driver seeming intent on killing them all. She keeps picturing the fragile little head of her daughter hitting the steel side of the van. Pep has a bandage on his head, secured under his chin, which makes him look like a man with a toothache in one of those old Dürer engravings you see in your dentist’s office.
How could she not have realized this before? Of course she would have been born there, probably in the farmhouse. Clio feels excited, hopeful. To actually meet Katie’s blood family, her grandparents, father, big sister Xia—she’s sky-high, super alert, sharp. She imagines them as simple, kind people, close to the earth and wise to the seasons, the sky, the rainfall, and the sun—of course the sun. She can almost see their faces, stretched with amazement as the three of them walk in. A sister! And they can tell us all about her birth mother, all the reasons why she left. A hard bounce jolts her. Carter and Sue and Tulku and her other friends in the Columbian meditation class would call this a sacred journey, to be treated with care and concern. Like the placement of the keystone at the apex of an arch—in itself, ordinary, but in the moment of placement, of extraordinary import.
Thinking, What is sacred? To find what you have never lost.
She checks on Katie. Despite the jolting, she’s curled up asleep two seats behind. Shirty is clutched in her fist against her cheek, her mouth is open a little so that a sliver of drool stains her soft cheek and her braces emit silvery flashes when the bright sun sweeps across them, like a powerful little lighthouse, like Annisquam Light. During the first part of the ride they played the game of “counting animals,” and counted thirty-four water buffalo before she fell asleep.
Ming Tao. Clio simply can’t believe that she’s sitting next to Katie’s aunt. She never expected to have the opportunity to encounter any blood relative. The time is so short. Rhett says they’ll be in Chindu in about fifteen minutes.
All during the bone-jolting ride in the van from Tienja, she has talked and listened to Ming Tao. Clio and Pep have been sitting across the narrow aisle from her, and Rhett, leaning in between them from the seat behind to interpret, chain-smoking Chinese cigarettes, seemed really into the conversation, so that she felt she was speaking directly to her. For a while Katie listened to what her aunt was telling them about the family. She too was in great spirits, really attentive to what was being said, at one point looking at Pep and Clio wide-eyed, saying, “I can’t believe I’m going to see my sister, my big sister.” Clio made sure to ask her more about her birth mother, Xiao Lu. It seemed a strange name, but Rhett said it is common, means “Winding Path.” Entrancing, Clio thought, the spiritual names given to many Chinese.
As she spoke, Clio took notes, all the while watching how Katie was reacting. She said that Xiao Lu was a shy, studious girl of firm opinions—even, under the surface, a rebellious streak. She loved swimming in the river that passed by their house, and playing in the paddies and fields. As Third Sister, she was their own mother’s “baby,” closest to her of all three sisters. Like Katie, though shy, she always seemed sure of herself. Her main passion and talent were much like Katie’s—she loved animals, and was a gifted artist; her great talent was calligraphy. She had won a prize in school, and studied with a master who lived as a hermit an hour’s bicycle ride from them, upriver toward the Yangtze.
Hearing this, Katie said, “That’s an ‘amazing’! So I’m a lot like her?”
“In those two ways,” Ming Tao answered, “yes.”
“When she was ten,” Pep asked, “did she look like Katie?”
“A little. She too has a double crown of hair. But Katie is more beautiful—Katie looks like me.” She laughed gaily and, glancing at Rhett, threw her long hair back over one shoulder and readjusted the scooped neckline of her long silk dress.
At this, Katie looked uncomfortable. Her lips, Clio noticed, were set in a familiar, firm, protective way that signified embarrassment. She yawned. “Mom, I’m taking a nap.”
“Fine, dear. Do you want Shirty?”
“Yeah.” Clio is the caretaker of Shirty, and dug into her knapsack. “Be careful taking him out.” She felt nervous about Shirty being so torn and tattered, so worn that he couldn’t even be re-sewn. “This trip isn’t too easy for him.”
Clio and Pep smiled at each other. Shirty stood for Katie.
“We’re all so pumped up,” he said, “it makes it a little scary, eh?”
“Yeah.” She took Shirty two seats back and lay down.
Now, with Katie asleep, Clio and Pep feel freer. Since the mention of “birth father,” Pep has been obsessed with images of the guy. He sees him sometimes as a burly, rough, tough peasant, honest and plain but totally unaware of the bigger world, and other times as a slim, graceful young man barely old enough to be his own biological son—after all, he’s probably between twenty-eight and thirty-five—trying to educate himself as best he can in this rural backwater, keeping up by reading and traveling long distances to see movies and maybe even having a pen pal. These are the two extremes of his vision. And the vision of each of them and all the fleeting visions in between are colored by the fact that this guy produced a baby, and he didn’t. Like sometimes in the locker room, naked, feeling like I’ve got a big scarlet letter on my chest: F for Failed.
Pep is amazed at how quickly his images of the birth dad bring up his vulnerability, his sense of failure that he thought Katie’s arrival had obliterated, or at least blunted. But the more he tries to push it down, the more it pops up. He needs to get a grip on it, and now, with Ming Tao, seizes his chance.
“So,” he says, his voice pitched a little higher—something he knows Clio notices, “what is Xiao Lu’s husband like?”
“Very handsome,” she says, “I like him very much.”
“What does he look like?”
“He is as tall as me, and has beautiful eyes—like mine!” She laughs at this.
“But, um, what color hair—and is he thin or, you know, bulky, muscular?”
“Black hair, and no, he is not fat, he is thin.”
“Good.” Pep is relieved that the guy is not a hunk. “What kind of person is he?”
Rhett and she go back and forth on this. Clearly Rhett is trying to individualize, and she is having difficulty. “All she can say,” Rhett says, “is that he is a ‘normal’ person who is a hard worker. Nothing else comes to mind. She only saw him once, at her sister’s wedding in the village.” Ming Tao speaks insistently to Rhett. “She asks why you don’t want to know his name.”
Pep is startled that he hasn’t asked his name. “Okay, what is it?”
“William Tu.”
“William?” Pep is surprised. “William? What’s his Chinese name?”
“Wei. His name is Tu Jiwei, but he wants to be called William.”
“Not Bill?” Pep asks. “Not Billy?”
“No. Always William. At the wedding he was always Jiwei William.”
Pep turns this over in his mind. The formal “William,” not the familiar “Bill”? Does this show a social yearning, a striving to better himself, to leave the farm for college?
“Tao Ayi,” Clio is asking, “did you ever meet Xiao Lu’s daughter Xia?”
“No. After a Chinese girl goes off to live with her husband, the family does not see her much. I was not so close to Third Sister because soon after First Sister left, I left and went to Tienja and got married. My husband’s father was assistant chief of police. We have not been lucky in making money. A prison guard does not make much. The shop is not doing well because the big stores come to Tienja now. The owners are in Hong Kong. I make little money. Our children—my husband will bring them to see you later at the train—they need better food, medicine. The boy is wild! Gets into trouble in school. He has attention deficit. He takes Ritalin. Very expensive drug from America. I am sad about all this.”
“Yes,” Clio says, “boys in America are wild too. Tell us more about Xiao Lu?”
“What is there to tell? She was shy, and always, I don’t know, different.”
