Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  “Wei-Sheng! Take a bath!” I heard someone yell.

  The Boy had stripped down naked, and his bare butt was streaking through the house. He was screeching and laughing, while Ba scolded him, urging him to get back into the bathroom. Ba was readying himself for a shower, too. (In Taiwan, parents and even aunts and uncles often take showers with young children. It is not considered strange among families, but Wei-Sheng seemed too old for this.) Ya-Ling and Ma joined in the chorus prodding him back into the tub. Ya-Ling’s two boys were howling because Wei-Sheng was trying to scare them. The house filled with the noise of protest.

  I sat in the living room, impatiently waiting for the disorder to settle down, and for us to head out to the restaurant. After they had bathed, Ba and Wei-Sheng joined me in the living room, and the three of us sat and pretended to watch television.

  Ba asked me: “How do you say ‘big sister’?”

  “What?” I said, looking up, not quite understanding.

  “Jiejie shenme jiang?” How do you say “big sister” in English?

  “Oh, oh,” I said. “Big sister.”

  “Ni shou,” he demanded of Wei-Sheng. You say.

  The Boy stared at him.

  “NI SHOU,” Ba commanded again.

  “See-ah,” Wei-Sheng said.

  “Big sister,” I said again, awkwardly.

  Ma was nearby. She said: “Bee-ah Su-sa.”

  “Beega See-sta,” Wei-Sheng said.

  “Hao,” I said. Good.

  I smiled tentatively, oddly, and uncomfortably. Ba was making his point, over and over again, that he had won, that this Boy was part of the family, and that I had accepted him, even if I hadn’t.

  I DID RESOLVE to be extra sweet to Big Brother.

  Min-Wei had told me stories of Nian-Zu’s innocence, of the times she defended her older brother from bullies. She told me he still gave her a red envelope with a little bit of Taiwan money for Chinese New Year, even though he barely made any.

  “I’m sorry it isn’t much,” he’d tell her. Giving red envelopes is a tradition usually reserved for children, but he relished the role of big brother. Min-Wei had to accept.

  Nian-Zu was the only sibling that called Wei-Sheng Little Brother, but it was obvious that the older son was now secondary. Ba was pushing Nian-Zu to marry a Chinese woman who had been staying in Taitung. My sisters were terribly suspicious of this woman and her motives; they said many poor Chinese women marry Taiwanese men for their money. This woman, my sisters told me, already had married and run away from one husband and seemed to care little for our brother and showed little respect for our mother. Later we would find out that Ba may have had a history with this woman, an accusation he scorned.

  Nian-Zu slipped discreetly into the house around 5:30 p.m., after finishing his day at the Taitung market, weighing and loading fruits and vegetables.

  “Ni hao ge-ge!” Hello, Big Brother, I exclaimed brightly when I spotted him. “How was work?”

  He was wet from a perpetual layer of sweat and from the rain, but I gave him a big hug anyway. Despite the fact that it had been eight years since I’d seen him last, he seemed the same—same size, same slowness. He acted as if he didn’t want to be noticed, but he clearly longed for affection. He seemed to have two expressions: smiling and not smiling. When he wasn’t smiling, he looked sour, even ogrelike. When he was, his whole face lit up and his eyes glittered. His eyes became small half-moons and he looked like a child trapped in the body of a giant.

  “Oh my God!” he exclaimed in English. He embraced me heartily but let go quickly and headed to his bedroom on the second floor. He returned with a present, a necklace made of amber-colored quartz, which he explained was special to Taitung.

  “This is for my meimei,” he proclaimed. The charm was shaped like an obelisk and filled with tiny bubbly imperfections.

  “Xiexie!” Thank you, I said. “Deng yixia.” But wait. I fetched a yellow alpaca cap from Peru and an Argentina key chain.

  “You brought gifts for me?” he said with genuine surprise.

  “Of course. You’re my gege,” I said.

  And this time we both walked away pleased.

  AT MY REQUEST, Ba told me again the story of our family, how he had to support his mother and brother, and then how he and Ma met. He described the isolation of Taitung then, and how they climbed out of poverty into the middle class. He talked about that first trip to Taitung and about my adoption. Ba told me that his older brother, an alcoholic, chastised him for giving me to a foreign family instead of to him, a thought that made my skin crawl. Ya-Ling translated this time, and Ma sat nearby.

  While Ba talked, the more difficult questions played over and over in my brain. By then, I assumed a lot about him and his desires, but I wanted to hear him actually say the words. So I just asked: “Ba, why you do like boys more than girls?”

  I asked him directly, though gently, using the overly controlled and calm tone I use during tough interviews—not unlike my mom’s principal voice. Ma snorted and laughed aloud. I glanced sideways at her, unable to suppress a smile.

  Ba looked at me blankly. Then he answered, “I need someone who will worship me after I die. Girls belong to someone else.”

  We sat for a minute in silence. I wanted to ask him more, to ask questions about Wei-Sheng or the illegitimate daughter he kept somewhere, or if he even cared about his daughters or his wife or about Wei-Sheng’s mother. I didn’t want to brew tension so early in my visit, so I smiled and changed the subject. We talked like this for an hour or so, until everyone got tired and Ya-Ling got up to put her children to bed. Then Ba moved closer to me and lowered his voice. He began to complain about Ya-Ling, about how she didn’t like Wei-Sheng, and about how she even hit him once. I imagined she was disciplining him in the way most of my sisters disciplined their kids.

  “She doesn’t treat Wei-Sheng right,” Ba hissed. “She is not good.”

  I stared at him. I remembered how badly Ya-Ling had once wanted his love, how she had tried so hard. How dare you talk like this about your daughter, I thought. The heat of anger started to build in my face and neck. I was about to boil over. We are not on the same side, you and me.

  “I don’t understand what you are saying,” I told him coolly, even though I did.

  He continued his harangue.

  I stopped him.

  “No, Ba.” I said. “Ting budong.” I don’t understand.

  I quietly stood up, and walked out of the room.

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, while Ya-Ling’s boys napped, their mother and I escaped to the seaside for tea. It was a welcome break for both of us. Ya-Ling was both a loving and frantic mother. Her two boys at eighteen months and three years old were normal boys, chasing each other around the house, warring over toys, screaming with joy and calamity. I adored them, but they could be a handful. The older, Yuan-Zhen, was an affectionate and handsome child, with a wide grin and dewy eyes, but he was at a whiny stage, in which the smallest provocation elicited a ear-shattering squeal followed by dramatic tears. The younger boy, Kai-Quen, was a sweet child, mischievous and tough; he could bump his head into a wall and not flinch. Ya-Ling was trying to teach them English from a very young age. She played tapes with English childhood songs such as “ABCs” and “Bingo” hoping they would absorb the language.

  It kept raining, but we went to a beachside teahouse anyway. The gray beach matched the gray sky. We sat next to a large bay window on the second floor and ordered sweet fruit tea. Ya-Ling wondered aloud what would have happened if she, too, had been adopted. She said that when she was a baby our grandmother had believed that the rash on her head, the same suffered by a great emperor, was a fortuitous sign.

  “Grandma believed that I would be lucky,” she said, laughing. “But it was only a skin disease.”

  Ya-Ling had changed so much from when we had met a decade before. First, there was her name. Both Ya-Ling and Min-Wei had changed their names completely, hoping for a fresh start on their live
s. Plus, all of my Chinese sisters had English names as well, which they also changed. Min-Wei was known as Vanessa, Jin-Hong was Jenny. Jin-Qiong was once Joanna, though I wasn’t sure if that was the name she presently used. Ironically, I think I was the only one of my sisters who didn’t have a Western name. For my family, names were changeable and interchangeable, and identities seemed almost as fluid.

  I was relieved to see that Ya-Ling and my other sisters seemed to have shed their need to convince me that our family was normal. Our father’s obsession had worn them down until all they could do was try to live their own lives, mostly in Taipei and Kaohsiung. Ya-Ling was the only daughter who stayed in Taitung—because she could not bear to leave Ma alone. She said Ba paid little or no attention to his wife. For example, he took Wei-Sheng to the doctor if he barely had a cough, but if Ma was sick he did nothing.

  “She is very poor,” she said. “If I not there, nobody care for Mother.”

  “Do you think it is because of the Chinese culture that Ma doesn’t leave Ba? Because it’s tradition?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, offering a different opinion from other sisters. “It’s just Mother.”

  She told me one of our aunts left a bad man, too.

  “Do you think she loves Ba?” I asked. “She must, right?”

  “Maybe. I just don’t know.”

  Perhaps what happened in our family wasn’t so exotic or foreign. Ma was like so many women who can’t leave men who cheat, maltreat, or even abuse them. They are women who become entangled inextricably in a net of conflicting emotions, who believe these men are the best they can find. Yes, the very strong backdrop of culture and history helped dictate Ma’s beliefs about her role in the family, but she could leave. I watched in awe as Ma continued to take care of Ba and and his son. She made Ba’s favorite seafood soup. We went to the market and she searched for a new pair of shorts for Wei-Sheng, fussing over sizes and what color he might like. She cooked and cleaned up after both without thanks or complaint. My sisters had said she didn’t love the Boy, but she clearly tolerated him and then some. I could hardly believe that she did this purely out of an old-fashioned sense of duty.

  I asked Ma if she loved Ba, now or at any other time.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Whether you love or not, it’s not important. You just have to deal with it.”

  BA CONTINUED TO push Wei-Sheng to spend time with me. He told his son to ask me to teach him how to type on the computer and speak English. At one point, I heard Ba ask Wei-Sheng if he wanted to go to America with me.

  I sat up straight, shocked, listening for the answer.

  “I don’t want to go,” the child said.

  I breathed deeply, relieved, but I wondered what the heck I’d have done if the kid had said yes.

  Ba had pulled the same thing with my sisters. He had told Ya-Ling that he would give her money for a new car if she accepted his son. He asked our oldest sister to take him into her home, and my second-oldest sister, the nicest of all of us, almost did. He fought passionately with sisters no. 3 and 4 over his constant failure to discipline or educate the Boy. My sisters seemed to feel sorry for Wei-Sheng but refused to recognize him as their brother all the same. Doing so would be an affront to Ma and everything they believed in.

  Ya-Ling clearly did not want the Boy around us. Wei-Sheng liked to annoy her sons, working them into a crying frenzy by scaring them and taking away their toys, but Ba got angry at Ya-Ling when I went anywhere—a museum, a car ride, out to eat—and Wei-Sheng didn’t go, even though Ba himself disappeared from the home quite often. I urged Ya-Ling to at least invite the child, hoping to avoid a full-scale war.

  Wei-Sheng did not make accepting him any easier. He was mischievous and badly behaved. He threw balls in the house, broke things, and never picked up after himself. He was not a terrible child—he seemed bright and eager to be loved—but he was spoiled. If he wanted something, Ba promised to give it to him. As a result, Wei-Sheng did not respect or obey Ba either. Ba was constantly calling after him to do things, and Wei-Sheng rarely listened. But Ba hardly ever punished him. If he did, he made sure to make a show of how he was disciplining him.

  Once Wei-Sheng tossed a bunch of paper carelessly in Ba’s face. Ba said nothing, but I did.

  “Wei-Sheng,” I said sharply. “You should not do that. He is your father.”

  More than one sister wondered aloud, including to Ba, whether these children were actually his offspring. After all, Ba was almost sixty years old when this Boy and another girl were born. To me, the Boy did not look particularly like or unlike Ba, no more than some of my sisters. I couldn’t tell.

  Ba had rewritten his will so that everything he had, almost, would go to Wei-Sheng, according to my sisters. Nian-Zu would get some rental property that Ba owned, which my sisters said was worth very little. The girls and Ma would get nothing.

  More than once, Wei-Sheng tried on his own to approach me. He held out a stack of cards and asked me if I wanted to play.

  “Later,” I told him.

  I, too, did not want to be around him. I could barely understand him, I reasoned. Really, I felt the same inner conflict that my sisters did, feeling both sorry for the child and disgusted with Ba. My instinct was not to do what Ba wanted, because he had so little regard for our wishes and feelings. I reached into my heart, but I couldn’t bring myself to call Wei-Sheng didi, little brother, or to go out of my way to make him feel like family. It would take more time, time I didn’t have, time I wasn’t ready to spend.

  The closest I came was on the final afternoon in Taitung, when Ya-Ling asked me to help my nephews with their English homework. I pointed to the letter and the corresponding picture.

  “A is for?” I asked, pointing to the red fruit.

  “Apple,” my nephew said.

  “T is for?”

  “Train.”

  “Z is for?”

  “Zebra.”

  Wei-Sheng slunk up nearby, approaching tentatively but hungrily. At first he tried to butt in and answer before my nephews could.

  “No,” I told him. “They are younger. You wait until they are done and then it’s your turn.”

  He did. He eagerly sat at the corner of the table and waited his turn. I let him respond as well. And all of us went round and round, reciting the alphabet together.

  ON MY LAST NIGHT in Taitung, Ba presented me with more photos of our family. I had seen many of the pictures of my sisters, posing with each other and with our family in their 1970s and 1980s clothing, their big glasses and long hair. Ba handed me a new stack of pictures, mostly of Wei-Sheng.

  Two particularly caught my eye. One was a picture of the girl. Until now, I had been fully concentrating on Wei-Sheng, but I had a half sister out there somewhere, too. I examined the picture. She must have been about six or seven. She was perched on the edge of a beige dresser next to a giant aquarium. She was pudgy and her legs peeped out of a maroon velvet dress. She was wearing white tights, dark socks, and shiny pink shoes. I doubted I would meet this girl. I bet my mother and sisters would not want that.

  The other photo was of Wei-Sheng. He also must have been about six. Ba had taken him to a studio. The Boy was dressed as a Chinese emperor, in a blue, yellow, and red silk costume, complete with a crown adorned with strings of white pearls. He sat on a miniature throne against an imperial red backdrop. I shook my head.

  Ba has gone mad, I thought. He might have been a good father at one time, but he had gone over the edge at some point. He had lost all perspective and reason, and he believed—or at least had convinced himself—that he had done nothing wrong.

  “We have another sister?” I asked him then.

  Ba paused, unsure. Then he reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. He pulled out a Taiwan medical card with a picture of that chubby girl.

  “Uh.” He grunted yes, pointing to her. He then took out Wei-Sheng’s health insurance card, and held them both out to me.

  Her name was Li
n Ruo-Lan, and she was born in 1986 in August, like so many of us. She was being taken care of by her mother’s relatives temporarily. They wanted Ba to care for the girl but Ma wouldn’t let her come into the home. Another potential casualty of Ba’s mania.

  “Where is their mother?” I asked him.

  “Dead,” he said. “Cancer.”

  I paused.

  “Weishenmen ta de mama bu shi women de mama?” I asked, playing innocent. Why is his mom not our mom?

  He froze again, his eyes narrowing. I sensed some doubt for a split second, doubt that I would approve of his response.

  “Bu hui jiang,” he said hoarsely. I can’t say.

  I pushed a little more, pointing to the pictures.

  “You like Wei-Sheng best?” I asked him, meaning many things.

  He stared at me.

  “Bu hui jiang,” he said again.

  But we both knew the answer to that question.

  BA DROVE MA and me to the airport at the end of my Taitung visit. Ma was coming to Taipei, too, because Jin-Hong had asked her to come back to spend some time with her children. Ba urged her to travel with me so I wouldn’t be alone. The truth was, I didn’t care either way. I just wanted to leave.

  I woke up early that morning to talk to my husband via Skype. Wei-Sheng peeped his head around the stairwell, “Goodbye, Big Sister. We hope you come back. I’m going to school now.”

  I continued to play nice until Ba dropped us off. Ba told me to tell Irene to take care of her mother, who was suffering from stomach cancer (she would soon pass away, a heartbreaking loss for my Swiss sister). I promised that I would give her the message. Ba told me to say hello to my mother, and I told him I would.

  “Take care of yourself,” he told me in a low voice.

  “You, too,” I told him, brightly, with a hug.

  Ma and I took the escalator to the gate, and Ba headed quickly toward the airport exit and disappeared from sight.

  A DAY OR SO LATER, Ma told me the truth about the boy. The Other Boy.

  The story I had been told back when I first met the family had been vague. They had had a baby boy, long ago, but he was sick and died shortly after he was born. That was all I knew. I had put the tragedy in the back of my mind.