My ancestors were among the many immigrants from neighboring Fujian Province who moved to Kinmen, importing their language, culture, and customs. They spoke Holo, a dialect from Southern Fujian that is now more commonly known as Taiwanese because of its pervasiveness there, and built colorful concrete housing complexes with open-air courtyards. Red-tiled roofs were shaped like swallow tails, sloping gently downward in the center but curving sharply upward to two opposing peaks. The islands were a place of tradition and strict Confucian values, thanks to scholars who proselytized there during imperial times.
During the earliest years of my parents’ childhood, Kinmen was the peaceful and poor domain of farmers and fisherman. The people lived off of every root, seed, and crop that the soil would yield and every kind of fish and crustacean their nets could snag. They accented their meals with fiery rice liquor that instantly flushed faces and seared nasal membranes. Their hands were rough and their language coarse. They laughed and talked loudly, often sounding as if they were fighting. Children rarely finished school because they were needed in the fields. Life was hard but straightforward: a blunt knife against stone.
Throughout history, Kinmen had attracted its share of pirates, explorers, aspiring and deposed dictators, and gallant rebels. Emperors built walls and moats and set up a hundred-household garrison post there during the early Ming dynasty, hoping to protect China from Japanese marauders. Thus the islands earned the name Kinmen, the Golden Gate or the “impenetrable gateway.” Kinmen’s main claim to fame was its role as the last piece of Chinese land that the Nationalists were able to hang on to when the Communists drove them out of Mainland China in 1949.
My father was eleven and my mother six when Mao Zedong and his Communist revolution chased Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his millions of Kuomintang followers out of China and into Taiwan. On his way, Chiang grabbed hold of Kinmen and refused to let go, converting the islands into his last stand and the final line of defense for the Nationalists.
Soldiers overran the place. They hollowed mountains to hide their ships and constructed fierce steel barriers offshore. They buried mines in the beaches and dug a maze of bunkers and tunnels beneath the soil. They covered rocks on the coast where children once climbed with jagged multicolored glass, hoping invading amphibious Communist warriors would be sliced to pieces. The military opened hospitals, brothels, and cemeteries and was the industry, customer, protector, and destroyer of Kinmen. Still, the people adapted. They learned to fold violence and uncertainty into everyday life, to recognize the sound of the approaching bombs. Narrow escapes became part of the local lore, and the men puffed out their chests in pride when they told stories about cheating death. The people of Kinmen started making their living off the conflict, selling vegetables, tofu, cigarettes, rooms, sex. A soldier’s money was as good as any.
Sometimes life even felt normal. And so it did, even in the predawn hours of August 23, 1958, when my father arose to make the day’s batch of tofu.
Ma recalled working happily in a vegetable patch she had planted roadside. She had quit school after she finished first grade. Her job, as the second-oldest daughter in a family that would eventually include four sons and five daughters, was simple, cut from the Confucian mantra. She would be a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, and she would follow what was expected of her to the end.
I like to picture Ma as she might have been on Kinmen, a teenager with thick hair pulled back out of her face, the first whispers of morning light kissing her ruddy cheeks and forehead. Her feet would be damp from dew and her nails dark from planting and picking. Kinmen, despite its poverty, could be a sublime place, a green oasis in the shadow of the Red Kingdom. The islands were a maze of plateaus, lakes, mangrove forests, wetlands, and waterfalls. Just offshore, granite rocks jutted out of the crashing ocean. Blue-tailed bee eaters and magpie robins flitted among the violet and white flowers in full summer bloom. Ma might have enjoyed this daily escape, away from the demands of her parents and the prattle of her siblings, lost in her own patch of dirt. On the morning of August 23, she and a neighbor friend were working together in her garden, laughing, gossiping, and enjoying the fresh air and each other’s company.
Around 6:30 a.m. the whistle, scream, and roar of what seemed like a million bombs shattered the serenity of their morning. The blue sky ripped into fiery shreds. Ma started to run. She ran and ran and ran as explosions disintegrated the trees and gorged the land around her. The Communists were attacking. On Ba’s home, in Ma’s quiet patch, everywhere.
Whole villages were destroyed and burned. She ran to a bomb bunker, fearing for her life, but in the end her whole family managed to survive.
A thousand civilians and soldiers died in that barrage of 475,000 shells that locals call the forty-day war, but like her future husband, somehow Ma lived. The gods had looked favorably upon her, too.
“THE FIRST THING you have to know, the most important thing you must know,” my Chinese tutor proclaimed, “is food.
“Mifan,” she said, soft then hard, as if starting a song. “Rice.” She drew a little bowl of rice on her notepad.
“Mifan,” I babbled, forgetting it as soon as I said it. I jotted a phonetic, Romanized translation in a notebook. Mee-fahn.
I knew only the barest basics about the Chinese people from my American parents who had tried to expose me to Chinese culture. What I knew I mostly learned from books, movies, and Chinese American friends. I had read Asian American classics, such as Joy Luck Club and Woman Warrior. I could use chopsticks and say “hello.” I knew that many Chinese parents put an incredible amount of pressure on their children to succeed in school. I knew bowing was a sign of respect and that red was an auspicious color.
I also knew I would need to learn a lot more if I wanted to really connect with my birth family. As soon as I began corresponding with my sisters, I studied as much as I could about Chinese history, customs, and language. A couple of St. Louis University students from Taiwan agreed to be my tutors, and we met once every week in their apartments, which always seemed to smell of warm tea and simmering garlic. They were friendly, kind, and funny, always offering me food and drink and never charging me for a class.
During my first lesson, Chia-Ling explained the importance of knowing about food. She served me tea and Pepsi because she had learned that Americans like to drink cold drinks (unlike the Taiwanese) and was eager to put this knowledge to use.
Chinese culture revolved around food, she explained. It expressed love, hospitality, generosity, gratefulness, reverence, modesty, despair, and so forth.
“You should learn how to say, ‘I’m full,’” she said. “That’s very important. Wo chi baole.”
Oooh. That one’s harder.
“Wo …” I began.
“Wo chi baole,” she prodded.
“Whoo sure bow-la.” I felt like I was speaking with a mouthful of marbles.
She shook her head.
“Wo CHI baole”
“Wo chi baole,” I managed. Little did I know how useful that sentence would be.
I should have studied Mandarin during college, I thought. I had chosen Spanish instead, flown to Mexico, become infatuated with the warmth of Latin families, and sizzled on the beaches of Mazatlán and Puerto Vallarta. I remember, before choosing my study abroad program, seeing the red flyers for a two-year language program in China next to the green Mizzou-to-Mexico brochures. I deliberately passed over the red ones. I always hated then how people assumed I should speak Chinese just because I looked Chinese. I spent so many years trying to defy stereotype that I all but ignored my heritage. Now I was paying for it.
Thank goodness my tutors were patient. They taught me to say the essentials, such as “thank you,” “I have to go to the bathroom,” and “I want a cup of beer.” They served me rich and immaculately wrapped pineapple cakes, and we practiced Mandarin inflection by saying the name of that delicacy.
“Fenglishu.” Pineapple cake.
I moved my h
ead in exaggerated motions trying physically to force my voice to imitate the tones. Feng: head down abruptly, cutting short the syllable. Li: tip head back while voice climbs upward. Shu: move head side to side while voice stays suspended on high note. I asked my tutors to teach me specific sentences, such as “I am your daughter” and “I am glad to be home” and “I love you.” I made lists of words, and rewrote those lists. I tried to summon some deep-seated recollection of my first days alive, when I lived in St. Mary’s hospital and the nurses cooed to me. Nothing.
I knew I couldn’t recover a lifetime of language in a matter of days. I didn’t even realize that because my parents were from Kinmen, they spoke Taiwanese first. Nor did I consider that although they spoke Mandarin, the barriers that separated us went far deeper than language. I would have to be content with stumbling my way through this experience, depending on others to tell me what was happening and hope that nothing important got lost or hidden in translation.
Father said you were very beautiful when he saw the pictures of yours. We all believe that, because your mother are also a beauty.—E-mail from Jin-Zhi, February 16, 1997
BY 1960 KINMEN was a safer place to live, though China still shelled the islands on odd-numbered days. Mostly, the Communists would drop propaganda bombs, fierce words stuffed in a metal shell. Instead of blowing people to bits, the containers exploded into a confetti shower of leaflets urging the Nationalists to surrender and telling the people of Kinmen that China was great and Taiwan was miserable. The shrapnel from these shells could blind eyes, scar faces and hands and scald necks, but usually the villagers could escape death. When the dust settled, they brushed themselves off and checked their limbs and those of their loved ones, and went back to farming or drying peanuts on the walkways outside their homes. The Kinmenese would collect the shrapnel and make knives; the metal was strong and sharp enough to cut through almost anything.
Ma and her family briefly moved to Taiwan to escape the bombings, but after about a year, my grandfather decided to return. This was the cycle of my ancestors. They were always running to and from things: seeking peace during war, a job when their children had nothing to eat, a piece of land to farm when drought sucked the life from the earth or when floods saturated it, a luckier mahjong table. Most were never able to escape the poverty that had dogged them like a birth defect passed down from generation to generation. They moved many times chasing dreams of money or a better life, but they almost always returned to Kinmen.
Thus, Ma was in her village of Guan Ao on the fateful day that my birth father came to sell vegetables there. He was twenty-three, and she was eighteen. Someone pointed her out: She is single and of marrying age.
Ba did not speak to her, and she did not notice him. Decades later, he would not remember that first encounter, or at least chose not to acknowledge that any enchanted moment passed between them. He would not even admit to any attraction, but something must have drawn him to her because he asked a matchmaker to arrange a meeting. Ma was blossoming into a curvy young woman with long black hair, smooth skin, and a contagious smile. Most of all, she was docile and a hard worker, essential qualities in a future wife. Ba decided he liked her and asked her father’s consent for marriage.
Ma told me that she thought that Ba was handsome, with a lean, strong face. He was charismatic, though serious, with a charming smile. (She shakes her head now as she recounts her infatuation with qualities that today seem meaningless to her.) Ba seemed to be a good, responsible man: a good Confucian. At the time, he was shouldering the difficult role of being head of his household because the year before his father died from a horse kick to the stomach and his older brother had moved to Singapore. Thus, the responsibility of caring for his mother and younger brother fell to him. He and his mother agreed that he needed a wife who could help out.
Ma’s father was anxious to marry off his daughter: a son-in-law (i.e., the dowry) was a potential windfall. Ma’s father liked Ba’s cleverness and ambition, though Ba would never provide the money his father-in-law hoped for. My grandfather consented to their marriage. No one asked Ma what she wanted, and though she could have protested, she did not. Silent acquiescence was her response and, many decades later, her regret.
Ma wore a simple white dress when she married Ba in 1961 in his family home in the village of West Garden, before a small audience of family. Ma must have been a gorgeous bride, the glow of promise flushing her face. As she bowed before the ancestral shrine of her new family, she might have prayed that she would be a good wife who would meet the expectations of her husband and her mother-in-law, that they would work hard together and be rewarded with money and plenty of children, especially boys. Maybe she would even be happy. Indeed, within months of their marriage, Ma became pregnant, and her belly grew round and taut.
Why our parents gave you up. There are many reasons. First, all of the traditional Chinese consider that to have a boy is better than a girl. Our father is very traditional man, and he was affect deeply by Chinese culture and socity. If you do understand the past culture of Chinese, you will find that girls had being considered, “Nothing.”—Letter from Jin-Zhi, spring 1997
Ba and Ma had their first child, my eldest sister, in the Year of the Tiger, November 1962. They used the first character from the word Kinmen, to create her name: Jin-Feng. (Kin and Jin are different Romanizations of the same Chinese character , which means gold.) Less than two years later, in April 1964, the Year of the Dragon, came the birth of a second daughter, Jin-Qiong. Both girls were healthy, born in auspicious years, but what Ba wanted more than anything was a son.
Ba himself had been one of nine sons—though only three survived childhood—and believed that the survival of the family depended on the birth of a male heir. Only a son could be counted on to support the parents when they were old. Only a son should inherit any family business, the family home, and the family fortune. Only a son could perpetuate the name and bloodline, and worship and care for a father’s spirit properly.
In China, male superiority has been handed down dynasty after dynasty, reinforced by the teachings of Confucius, Mencius, and countless other scholars, then perpetuated by fathers and mothers alike. Common Chinese were incredibly adept at finding spectacular new ways to reenforce the patrilineal belief system and destroy female self-worth for generations. Men have married and remarried and taken extra wives all in pursuit of this goal. At worst, they even have raped, abused, kidnapped and killed, all with the nod of both legal and social acceptance. Not to be outdone, women have conducted atrocities almost as often as the men; the social constructs of society encouraged it. Women ruled households when they bore boys and became worthless wives and concubines if they did not. They abused daughters-in-law who did not produce sons and sold away their daughters. They have been killed and have committed suicide. They have abandoned, drowned, and suffocated their children to punish themselves and get back at their husbands.
True, time has many hearts, and today plenty of Chinese families value girls as much as boys, but for millions of others—including my birth father—wanting a son is like believing in God: it is unquestionable. Limited by the one-child rule (a law that does not apply to the renegade republic of Taiwan), rural families in China still abandon, abort, and even kill their female offspring, even though Chinese leaders have outlawed ultrasounds and published propaganda promoting the value of girls. Mainland Chinese officials in 2007 predicted that the country would have an excess of fifteen million men by 2020, thanks to gender selection. The parents of thousands of little emperors soon will be forced to run around Asia begging and bargaining for brides. Even in modern Taiwan, divorce law still dictates that children belong to their father.
I had always known that one of the main reasons I had been given up was that I was a girl. It was always the most scandalous part of the why-Mei-Ling-came-to-America lore. I thought—thought—I understood it. I felt appropriately infuriated when I read the books and heard the sayings: No sons, no happiness
. A family with only daughters is a dead end. Geese are more profitable than girls. Girls are maggots in rice. I had seen fat baby boys bounce on wedding beds and newlyweds drink lotus soup and eat grapes to invoke male offspring. One such tradition even slipped into my wedding ceremony in 2000, by accident. I asked a Chinese American friend to find a traditional Chinese prayer to read during our service. She could only find one that ended in “a wish for many boys,” which made my husband and me and all our guests burst out in laughter.
I had every right to feel personally aggrieved by this belief, but thanks to the careful nurturing of my American parents, I thought I had risen above the whole Chinese male superiority thing. It seemed almost inconsequential, a backward third-world ideology that thrived in a place that I had escaped. I was now of liberated and educated mind, and I could laugh at this idea and discount it as a relic. It was part of my distant past, and I thought that’s where it would stay. It did not come to life for me until the day I met my sisters.
MA AND BA had a boy in 1965, the Year of the Snake. When they heard the baby’s cries, they hoped their prayers had been answered.
But once the child emerged, Ba, Ma, and Grandmother were horrified. The boy’s lip was bent up into a cleft. Euphoria disintegrated to despair. Some Chinese believe that if a pregnant mother puts a sharp object such as a knife or scissors on her bed, the child’s lip in the womb may be cut. Ma believed that because Ba made some changes in their house during her pregnancy and knocked a hole in one wall, he had hurt the baby somehow.
The Chinese can be cruel to people who look or act differently. Even those who mean no harm are quick to ask about or point out your most negative traits, your fat stomach, your small, slanted eyes, or your dark skin. Not so long ago, the disfigured were outcasts, discriminated against and even beaten or killed. The intolerance continues today. As recently as the 1990s, Gansu Province had a law that called for the sterilization of people with hereditary deformities. In 2007 China declared that the country would not allow adoption of its orphans to foreigners who had “severe facial deformities.” I’m often stunned at how often prejudice and superstition can overrule logic, love, and mercy.
Lucky Girl Page 3
