Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  In the 1960s surgery was available to correct cleft lips and palates and other birth defects in the modern world, but my family lived a different reality, one in which they could barely feed themselves. They could not imagine paying for the plastic surgery or the medical care that this boy might need. Within a few days of his birth, the boy died.

  “He was sick,” Ma and Ba would tell their daughters, relatives, and friends. Ma did not discuss the tragic details behind the child’s death until many years later.

  MY THIRD-OLDEST SISTER, Jin-Xia, was born in November of 1966, the Year of the Horse. The fourth, Jin-Hong, arrived in August 1968, the Year of the Monkey.

  Ba and Grandmother were exasperated. He wanted to give his fourth daughter away; he tried to arrange a trade with another family, for a boy.

  Grandmother said that they should keep her because she was flesh and blood. Jin-Hong stayed, but she got a special nickname, Awan, meaning “no more girls.”

  A fifth girl, Jin-Zhi was born in January 1971, the Year of the Dog, and Ba wanted to give her away, too, but Grandmother pointed out that the baby had a red rash on her head. A Chinese emperor long ago had the same kind of mark, and he became a highly successful leader.

  “This child will be lucky for the family,” Grandmother said.

  Still, Ba believed that they could not afford another girl. He knew a tailor who wanted to adopt and took the baby to that man’s home. Grandmother brought the child back.

  “These are our children,” she said. “They are our duty.”

  A gaggle of geese and no swans. The same destitution. The same life. My family worked from sunrise to sunset. Summers were fierce, and winters were harsh. They could hardly scrape the bare necessities from the soil. They still sold vegetables and tofu to soldiers and washed their clothing to earn extra coins. Then, in 1972, a man from Taiwan approached Ba.

  He told them he had acres in Taitung. “You can live there, work in the fields, earn a better living, build a better life. Your family is big. You are barely able to feed your girls each day.

  “Come to Taiwan,” he said.

  Ba agreed to scout Taitung to see what it was like. He traveled to Taiwan and stayed for three months in a small, lonely two-room hut in the fields of his new boss. The work was endless, but he could acquire land. The boss also promised to build Ba’s family a several-room home.

  I will bring my family here and our fortunes will be better, Ba thought. Despite having little more than a couple thousand Taiwan dollars in savings, he returned to Kinmen to move the family across the Taiwan Strait. They closed up their home, hoping to return better off one day. Standing before their shrine to Guanyin and the other gods, they held the bottom end of the burning incense with both hands and bowed their heads.

  Please watch over us. Our fate is in your hands once again.

  3

  TWISTING FATE

  On an army ship headed to Taiwan from Kinmen Island, August 1972

  I imagine men in green khaki fatigues, armed and attentive, patrolling the immense deck. Soldiers and businessmen gather around makeshift tables, playing cards and drinking rice liquor. They are boozed up, cussing in Taiwanese and Mandarin, and laughing too loudly. Families, wary and tired, faces pale green with seasickness, huddle between luggage and giant crates.

  My father is pacing, mingling with fellow passengers. He barely rests, even at night. He can’t. He is too nervous, always anxious. The others try. Ma, a mother of five at twenty-nine years old, holds a baby to her breast.

  This is her second trip to Taiwan. Last time it was her father dragging them across the sea, fleeing war. This time it is her husband who is searching for a new future. Ma is resigned to this move; it is beyond her power. She thinks only a little about their abrupt change in course and about what’s behind and ahead. A moment between things.

  Four girls ranging in age from nine to two run and play together in their small space on the deck floor. As the day stretches into night, the rolling sea is restless and passengers are vomiting. They also fear that China or Taiwan will mistakenly attack their boat. Most of my sisters sit on the floor and moan, trying not to think about throwing up. Jin-Hong, who is almost five with long braided hair and the only sister who is not sick, is excited by the adventure. She runs to the edge of the deck and looks out at the endless dark water rumbling beneath them, and it seems to go on forever and ever and ever. She thinks of falling through the empty air and the crash of the water around her, and her arms and legs flailing. She runs back to her family, suddenly frightened.

  At some point, when all the play and the sickness has exhausted them, the girls curl up on the floor together near their mother and grandmother. Sweaty and small. Shoulders touching legs touching arms under heads on backs. Kicks, protests, tickles, giggles. Twitches and delicate snores. A pile of sisterhood.

  After nearly twenty hours at sea, they see white sand and rocks rise up before them like the sun. The shore of Taiwan.

  A Ilha Formosa. The Beautiful Island.

  TAIWAN WAS BORN more than four million years ago, when the mammoth Eurasia and Philippine Sea tectonic plates collided. The seething earth rose like a serpent, and became the Central Mountain Range, the heart of the island, the source of the peaks and rivers that would fortify the land. In prehistoric times, Taiwan was connected by a land bridge to what would be Mainland China. The shifting earth and the rise and fall of the ocean caused the two land masses to crash and separate over and over, perhaps omen to their turbulent future relationship.

  Since its frothy birth, Taiwan has been a constantly unquiet soul, a thrashing whale cradled by the Pacific Ocean and balanced precariously on the “rim of fire,” the Asian continental shelf. Surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the East and South China seas, the Luzon and the Taiwan straits, the Taiwan of today measures about 245 miles at its longest point and 90 miles at its widest. The Tropic of Cancer cuts the island through its middle; thus it straddles the Eastern and Northern hemispheres.

  More than fifty fault lines zigzag across its face, throat, and belly, constantly pushing and heaving, folding and toppling, shaking and stirring the land. Those tremors have sculpted a tropical landscape that includes soaring limestone mountains, belligerent volcanoes, eerie valleys and basins, winding rivers and coral reefs, dramatic cliffs, rocky coastline, and terraced flatlands. Each year an average of four typhoons sweep across Taiwan. These storms and more frequent monsoons ply rice paddies and mangrove forests, as well as trigger deadly floods and mudslides. It was the island’s mythical splendor (born of turbulence) that prompted Portuguese sailors in the 1500s to proclaim it formosa, which means “beautiful.”

  The dusty and tired Wang family arrived in Taitung, City of the East, in August of 1972, after enduring the long boat ride to the port city of Kaohsiung, and then a meandering five-hour bus ride, sea to sea, traversing miles of rice paddies and the mountains.

  The town that welcomed them was barely a spot on the map, with the sierras at its back and the Pacific Ocean foaming at its feet. The gray sand and rock coastline of Taitung county is almost 144 miles long, but few people lived there, thanks to its penchant for typhoons and earthquakes. The Chinese did not establish themselves in the region until the late nineteenth century, and even by the 1970s few Mandarin-speaking Nationalist Chinese had made their way south to Taitung. Most people spoke Holo or the languages of aboriginal tribes such as the Atayal, Saisiyat, Paiwan, Rukai, Puyuma, Thao, and Yami.

  Taitung was a sprinkling of government buildings, shops, and a Catholic hospital called St. Mary’s. Local officials had built one train station, an overly optimistic project that they hoped would connect the region with the rest of Taiwan and create an economic boom. Few roads were paved. In America, men in bell-bottomed pants were wooing ladies with flipped hair and liquid eyeliner and parking their Ford Mustangs in suburban garages. In Taitung, autos were a luxury. Almost everyone walked or rode bikes, hoisting their wares on their shoulders or on the backs of water buffalo.
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  Mostly, there was land. Miles and miles of rice paddies, cornstalks, and soybeans to be watered and picked. The sweaty future of my family stretched out in shades of brown and green.

  They stayed in a cramped hut until their patron built them a house, a solid structure of steel and concrete, with a living room, dining room, kitchen, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a courtyard where Ma could wash and hang clothes and keep a garden. No more sleeping one atop the other. I bet my sisters were ecstatic, running through the house, their bare feet slapping on the cold tile, their shrieks echoing through the halls. They might have installed themselves in the rooms they wanted and bickered with each other over who would sleep where. On the top floor, Ma and Ba re-created their ancestral shrine and hung a picture of Ba’s father on the wall.

  Our family was still dirt poor. Each month they earned about twenty-five hundred Taiwan dollars, or the equivalent of less than sixty-five U.S. dollars. Every day Ma and Ba dedicated themselves to working their patron’s land, digging in the dirt, baking in the sun, raising rice, corn, sweet potato, and eggplant.

  My sisters were becoming a handsome group, with shiny hair and round faces. They were all bright and strong-willed like our father, but each girl was developing her own distinct personality. On the eve of 1973, the oldest, Jin-Feng, was ten. She was dajie, big sister, and acted like it, tough and knowing. Because of her age, she would be forced to spend more of her time in the field with our parents, but she would be the first woman in our family to graduate from high school and later college. Jin-Qiong, sister no. 2, was the most gentle in nature of all the sisters, caring and unusually patient. She was the most forgiving of her family’s faults, always fussing over her sisters, buying them things, covering for their bad behavior.

  Third sister, Jin-Xia, was almost a carbon copy of Ba: strong and passionate. She was his favorite as a child. If she had a cough, he excused her from housework. He fawned over her and she adored him, though she developed his temper. Arguments between the two would become legendary, characterized by high-pitched yelling and the occasional object hurled through the air. Jin-Hong, sister no. 4, was pretty, smart, and responsible as a child. She was popular with friends and boys and became a phenomenal cook. The fifth, Jin-Zhi, was still a baby, chubby and happy. She would grow into a class clown, funny, but especially sensitive to our mother’s plight and our father’s manic behavior.

  When they were old enough, the girls were recruited to help their parents work. At 6 a.m. their wake-up call would fill the house.

  Get up! Grandmother would shriek. Get up!

  If her shrill voice failed to rouse them, if my sisters lingered for too long in the sleepy haze of childhood, they would feel a sharp yank on their ear or a digging pinch to their thigh or arm that snatched them violently from their dreams. They would screech in protest, wiping tears from their eyes and would sit up, not wanting to be scolded again. They pulled on their clothes and trudged the thirty-minute walk to Beinan School. On the weekends, they worked in the fields with their parents. Each specialized in a different task, picking rocks out of the soil, planting seeds, or pulling weeds.

  I had a cushy childhood in comparison. Each morning my parents woke me up by gently opening my bedroom door and calling to me, “Rise and shine, sleepyhead!” My dad poured milk in my cereal or carefully sliced a half grapefruit so I could easily spoon out the tiny triangles of pulp with a serrated-tip spoon. My mom braided or curled my hair while I would sing. A yellow bus picked me up and drove me barely two miles to Holland Elementary School. After school, I had Brownies or T-ball or some other fun activity. Later, I would spread my homework on our round kitchen table and then draw, read, write, or play until I went to bed.

  For my sisters, there were no after-school activities. The girls walked home from school, set down their schoolbags, and cleaned, swept, and washed or did their homework. The only way they could get out of their chores was if they had a test the next day.

  TAIWAN GAVE THE WANGS a son but not in the way my parents had expected or hoped.

  Shortly after they arrived, they met a couple from the south-central city of Chiayi who were even poorer than they were and could not feed their only son. They were afraid the boy would die from hunger and offered their child to Ba and Ma.

  My parents could not afford more children; they could barely support the girls they had. Each time a girl had been born in recent years, they had considered giving her away, but this was different. This boy could be the One—or act as a backup until another One was born. Ba and Ma took the baby into their home, named him Nian-Zu, and he became their chosen son.

  They did this in secret. In Taiwan the inability to have children is considered humiliating for many families and adoption is thought of as a last option for the infertile. Likewise, the idea that parents would give away their precious children—boys or girls—is embarrassing. In 2005, according to the Child Welfare League Foundation of the Republic of China, only 10 percent of approximately five thousand abandoned children could find homes, and officials blamed prejudice against adoption. Many of the adoptions that do exist are private arrangements, father to brother, mother to sister, friend to friend. Many adopted children are never told they are adopted, and Ba and Ma would never tell their son that his “real” parents gave him up, even if everyone else in his family knew. They would not want him to feel bad about himself.

  Our parents and grandmother obviously favored Nian-Zu, my sisters recalled. He was handsome, with a tussle of dark hair and a sweet and mischievous smile. Grandmother, who took care of the children while our parents worked, gave Nian-Zu an extra egg or piece of meat. My parents fawned over his every coo and need. Ma was pregnant again—with me this time—but her attention was focused squarely on her boy.

  The Wangs would pour their hopes into their son, unaware that he would not complete them.

  MA GAVE BIRTH to me in the Year of the Ox, the Chinese year of 4670–4671, on August 26, 1973. She cried out in pain as a fierce labor consumed her, frightening my sisters. Ba rushed her to St. Mary’s Hospital.

  I was born a Water Ox. Another girl.

  My parents had just adopted a boy, and they had five girls already.

  “We cannot afford another,” Ba said once again. He asked the nurses if they knew of anyone who might want to adopt me.

  A pretty, young American nun happened to be working as a midwife in the hospital. Sister Maureen Sinnott had been corresponding with a couple in America who wanted to adopt a child. The meeting seemed fortuitous. She told Ma and Ba about the couple.

  “They are good people,” she said, “and they are well equipped to educate, love, and care for your baby.”

  Ma did not want to give up her daughter. She wondered: How do we know that she would go to a good place, to a good family? How could we send this child so far away, so far from her flesh and blood? Is it not our obligation as parents to care for her?

  Ba said, “She has the chance for something better.”

  “Then why couldn’t we give the baby to a family in Taiwan?” At least she would be able to visit her daughter. At least she would be able to see that her child was okay and not lost somewhere in a country she could never visit, could not even imagine.

  “What kind of Chinese family would want to adopt a girl?” Ba said.

  He asked Sister Maureen, “Are these people good?”

  The nun assured him, “Yes, and they will love your daughter.”

  Despite her doubts, Ma deferred to Ba’s resolute judgment, ever the dutiful wife and mother. She had not been able to give the Wangs a blood-born son, so what right did she have to complain? It was decided. The sixth daughter would go to America. The nun gathered me into her arms and took me away.

  “Do you want to receive the medicine, the injection to dry up your breast milk, now that you will not have to nurse your daughter?” Sister Maureen asked Ma.

  “No,” Ma said, “I have a one-year-old son I can feed.”

  Maureen noted
her response in my medical charts.

  Ma went home and I stayed in the care of the hospital staff. The nurses named me Mei-Ling, Sister Maureen’s Chinese name, breaking the family tradition of naming daughters after Kinmen Island. I grew fat and happy, lugged around on the backs of nurses and in the arms of nuns, and my laughter and cries filled the hospital corridors.

  Ba visited the hospital occasionally to bring the priest, nuns, and nurses gifts of appreciation, such as a live chicken. Ma would not go because she could not bear to be reminded of what they had done.

  She had hoped that I would leave as soon as possible, but the brutal bureaucracies of both Taiwan and United States prolonged the adoption process. Ba and Ma had to appear in court with the nun to sign any necessary paperwork and to assure the Taiwan judges that this was what they wanted.

  Ma did not see me again until the day I left Taitung for good in April 1974. The whole family came to the hospital to say goodbye: Ma, Ba, Grandmother, aunties, and daughters. Ma was pregnant, her belly rising into familiar curves. She and Ba were hoping, once again, for a boy. The nuns and nurses chattered like swallows, flitting about in front of the hospital as they assembled to take photos. Cameras in that time and place were somewhat of a novelty and the Chinese loved to be photographed. Everyone was teary, too, because they all had had some part in caring for me.

  Sister Maureen had grown attached to me. She held me close in every photo, even the ones that included my relatives. I probably would not have even known my birth mother from the dozens of warm bodies who had acted as my surrogate parents during those months after my birth, so when it was time for Ma to pose for the cameras, she did not try to hold me or assume for a minute the role that she had given away. She did not believe that it was her place to change the course of events, as much as she might have longed to. A pact had been made and the papers were signed. To turn back now would mean losing face, something Ba would not risk. I belonged to another mother, another father, another destiny. Ma could only hope this was the right decision.