Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  This visit, my sisters told me that Ma had recently told them the truth behind that child’s death. They recounted her story with a great deal of shame. It seemed so damning, I knew I had to ask her myself. So I enlisted the help of a sister one more time to confront Ma. “What happened to the baby boy, the one that died a long time ago?”

  Without hesitation, Ma told me.

  She had given birth to this son, about a year after my second-oldest sister. He would have been the first son. He was born alive, but to their great dismay he was ill and had a cleft palate. Ma said that Grandmother and Ba decided it was a crueler fate to let the child live a cursed life, in which he would be sick and shunned and could not be a normal functioning member of society. Back then, the Chinese called these children monsters.

  They took the baby, laid him on a bed, and did not feed him. Within a few days, the boy died.

  Ma’s expression was matter-of-fact and unemotional, and her account was short and precise as if she were recounting her grocery list. She said she always would mourn for that child, but still thought she could not have stopped what was happening. She turned her back to us, went about her busy work cleaning up my sister’s kitchen, sweeping up the crumbs and hairs that accumulated constantly on the tile floor. My sister looked at me with sad eyes, then went back to her own preoccupations, her children, the housework, and the evening meal. I internalized Ma’s account quietly.

  I didn’t have a choice. Over and over I had heard this refrain, this excuse: Irene’s and my adoptions, the affairs and Ba’s son. Ma was bound by culture and tradition, my sisters said. I had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and tended to let the credit and the blame for the most catastrophic decisions fall to my birth father and grandmother. Still, it was getting harder for me to tolerate my mother’s submissiveness. She couldn’t shirk all responsibility in the family dramas that continued to rock my Chinese family. By now, Ma knew she had some power: she had refused to take in Ba’s daughter, our half sister, for example. Yet she still remained with our birth father and cared for his son. She elected to stay in a hellish situation, in a sense condoning our father’s obsession and prolonging the worry and agony of the people who loved her. While Ba’s behavior sickened me, Ma’s submissiveness, and ultimately her resignation, broke my heart.

  I realized that my sisters and I had all been lucky to be girls; the boys whom Ba had wanted so badly had all been damaged by his own obsessive desire. Who knew what would come of Wei-Sheng, whether he would live up to our father’s dreams. I wondered if Ba would repent in his old age and be proudest of his daughters. Probably not. I figured that he’d likely end his days with the same tunnel vision in which he had lived much of his life and would continue to believe that the things he had done were in the end for the greater good.

  I shuddered, imagining the days after that baby boy had been born. The child clenches his tiny fists and contorts his violet face in a silent hungry cry as he lies on an old quilt. My mother is in the other room weeping, unable to breathe. My father and grandmother are stricken with sadness, trying to go about their daily chores, convinced that they are doing the right thing but deep inside aching, dying a little, too. They would have prayed to their ancestors to care for the baby’s spirit, to forgive them for what they have done. The house trembles with the ever-weakening cries of a baby.

  I wondered if our family would pay somehow for what it had done. As the Chinese say, no debts go unpaid in heaven.

  17

  THE LUCKY EIGHT

  Taipei, June 2006

  Jin-Hong, along with Min-Wei and Patrick and their two kids, lived in an apartment in a residential area at the foot of Yang Ming Mountain. Their apartment was on the fifth floor of a building that had no elevator. Patrick cheerfully lugged our suitcases up and down the staircase. The three-bedroom apartment was spacious by Taiwan standards and quite modern. My sisters had powerful air-conditioning in every room (something I had longed for on so many other visits), and Jin-Hong even had a plush, Western-style Sharspia mattress (as opposed to the usual rock-solid Chinese bed). She also had an awesome Japanese-style toilet with a seat that warmed up with a touch of a button. Pictures of Min-Wei and Jin-Hong with their kids and friends—my family loves to pose with their index and middle fingers thrust forth in the victory sign—lined the ledge of the living room window. There were no pictures of our entire family together.

  I spent one more week with Min-Wei and Jin-Hong, and one by one my other sisters and their families came to see me. By now our visits had become rather routine, a change that I welcomed. I did very little touring in Taiwan. Mostly I just hung around the house with the girls, helping to clean and fold clothes, shopping at Carrefour, dropping the kids at school—the normal things that families do. We did sometimes go out at night or on the weekend, for example indulging at my favorite dumpling shop in the world or looking for Asian-style clothing. Min-Wei took me to her Latin/hip-hop dance class, and her husband treated us to big cups of bubble milk tea. One night, I took some of the family to the most expensive TGI Friday’s dinner I have ever bought. The price of an exotic American meal was more than double what I’d ever pay in Detroit or D.C., but after the China trip I was dying for anything familiar.

  Afterward, on our way out of the mall, my sisters and I admired a clingy, semi-see-through turquoise negligee and matching panties that hung on the rack in one of the department stores.

  “Pretty sexy,” Jin-Hong proclaimed. I laughed and turned my back to check out some shoes. The next thing I knew Jin-Qiong, my second-oldest sister, had bought the lingerie for me. We took the gift back to the apartment, and each tried on the nightie, one by one, slipping it over our own undergarments and then strutting through the living room as if we were models.

  On the night before I left Taiwan, Jin-Hong asked me about all the things I had seen and heard during this visit and visits prior.

  “How do you feel about our family?” she asked.

  “I think Ba has gone crazy,” I said. “But I was not raised here, so it is easier for me. I did not have to grow up with him.

  “I feel closest to you, my sisters,” I assured her.

  “But you feel something with Ma, don’t you?” she asked hopefully. I realized that she and the other sisters wanted me to feel the same protective kinship with our mother. I did, but I knew it was different.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “But it’s difficult because of the language.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Later, before we fell asleep in Jin-Hong’s bed, she inspected me for a minute.

  “It’s nice that we stay close even if we don’t talk that often.”

  “I think so, too,” I said before we both fell into a sound sleep.

  WE HAD TO LEAVE the apartment in the wee hours of the morning for the airport because I had an early flight. Bleary-eyed and quiet, we strapped ourselves into my sister’s Peugeot. Saying goodbye was still bittersweet despite my desperate desire to get back to the United States, Argentina, or wherever I considered home.

  We pulled out of Jin-Hong’s neighborhood, and she asked for a final time, “Are you hungry?” as we passed the store where we often bought warm soy milk, tofu, and egg pancakes for breakfast.

  “No. I can get something at the airport.”

  This time, Jin-Hong did not insist; even she was too tired for the usual formalities of being a big sister.

  At the airport, I got out of the car and slung my carry-on over my shoulder. We smiled at each other warmly, both exhausted. This would be a quick farewell, just her and me. Ma and Ba were back in Taitung. Min-Wei had gone with her kids to Australia to spend a couple months with her in-laws. My other sisters had retired to their respective homes all over Taiwan.

  “You must visit me in Argentina,” I said.

  “I will try,” she said. We kissed and hugged, and I pulled my gift-laden bags into the airport.

  This trip had been especially challenging: struggling through the China tour wi
th Ma, meeting this half brother in Taitung, dealing with Ba. I always end up asking myself why I keep reinserting myself into this complicated situation, which is so much more difficult than my own comfortable life far, far away. The truth is, I asked for this. I am the one who kept coming back for more. I put more time and energy into keeping in touch. I planned visits and begged them to come and visit me. I asked the tough questions. I could have left those first impressions smooth and untouched, but I made waves instead. Why had I needed the ugly truth, and why did I stick around once I knew? Was it a deep-seated need to be part of this family? Was it an attempt to know myself better? Was it journalistic curiosity? Perhaps it was all of the above.

  The enchantment and intimacy of sisterhood seduced me, made me stay when otherwise I might have fled. I sometimes feared that my sisters thought of my visits as a burden: translating, entertaining, cooking, finding me a bed to sleep in, shuttling me around. I know how taxing guests can be, no matter how much you love them. My visits force them to get together, and my presence and my questions call forth memories that they have tried their entire lives to forget. Thankfully, my sisters always treat me with a huge helping of patience and hospitality. They consider me one of them.

  I still wonder what it would be like to actually speak the same language, to live in the same country. These women might snipe, nag, fight, judge, or take one another for granted, but they are ultimately allies. They rallied behind each other and our mother, who they believe is an immutable product of traditional China.

  And I still sense a trace of love for Ba. From him they inherited their brains and business sense, their passion and temper, and the same stubborn strength that has helped them rise above his indiscretions. He pushed them to get educated, paid for their college. They might hate what he has done to our mother, but he is their father, the only one they have known. Almost all of my sisters converged on Taitung in 2007 to celebrate our father’s seventieth Chinese birthday because they knew it would make him happy to have all his children there. In a funny way, Ba’s lunatic behavior helps to unite us. We are all distinct products of this man’s muddled logic. I am finding that tragedy is as strong a bonding agent as triumph—maybe even stronger. As we gossip about the last unbelievable thing that Ba did, we are joined in our amusement, horror, shame, and despair. We endure him and our past, together.

  While my own feelings for my birth parents are at times ambiguous, I admire my sisters. These women changed the course of their own destinies, took the hand they were dealt and made their own full house. They transcended luck and found fortune in themselves. I can’t help but want to be a part of this circle. Sometimes I feel badly because I will never fully be part of their lives. I will not be there as my nieces and nephews grow up, learn to read, play the flute in concerts, or graduate from school. I will always be some distant and exotic auntie, sister, and daughter. That reality makes me feel nostalgic, sad, and glad all at the same time.

  “It is good,” Min-Wei said to me once. “You can visit us here, but you grow up in America. The best of both worlds.”

  I BOARDED NORTHWEST AIRLINES flight 70, physically and emotionally exhausted as only a trip to Taiwan can make me. I settled into my aisle seat and waited to hear the flight attendant’s voice direct our attention to the seat pocket in front of us and the nearest emergency exit. I scanned the movie and the music selection, cursing the airlines for growing ever more cheap. I hoped to sleep anyway.

  I thought of the many plane rides I’ve made in my life, for vacation, for school, for work, for love, and then I thought of all the trips that my family, in all of its many forms, has made, then and now, crossing land, sea, and the globe, searching for a different life, a new perspective, peace of mind, a place to call home. The list of departure and arrival cities seems endless: Kinmen, Taitung, Taipei, Taylor, Zug, Seoul, St. Louis, Honolulu, Brisbane, Washington, D.C., Guilin, Buenos Aires, and on and on. We have both chosen and been forced down so many paths and found ourselves in so many diverse destinations, but with every journey and turn each of us has woven part of a collective tapestry so intricate that one string cannot be untangled from the other. Reunified, we are a remarkable road map of fate. We are the branches of destiny starkly revealed, hilarious and heartbreaking, with our own special scars and beauty marks.

  I imagined my first trip thirty-two years before from Taiwan to the United States.

  The airline hostess is en route with me weighing heavily in her arms: a chubby, smiley, gurgling baby. A head full of black hair, cheeks round and smooth. Eyes charged with laughter and, at times, fury. I am charming and irritating my fellow passengers alternately with my giggles and shrieks. As the plane leaves Taiwan, the woman coos, rocking, singing, amusing. It’s a long ride, almost twenty-four hours, but she is used to this. The young woman often accompanies children flying solo on journeys around the world. She is paid by the anxious parents to do it. She feeds the children, changes their diapers, carries them, and holds their hands. She dries their tears and plays their games. She accompanies them to their new port and hands her tiny charges over to the appropriate responsible adult.

  The airline hostess feels a bit like the stork of Western cartoons that delivers babies suspended in a handkerchief, the ends delicately tucked into its beak. She searches my face for any recognition of the immensity of what is happening. I drool.

  The woman doesn’t know that I am the sixth daughter of a Chinese farmer and his wife. I could have grown up in the sweltering humidity of Taitung, eating rice porridge for breakfast, learning Chinese script, and toiling in the sun under my father’s watchful eye, or I could have been given to an alcoholic uncle who had no wife and no children and who desperately wanted his own family. I could have been engulfed by the secrets of my own house, burning incense in honor of my ancestors. I could have gone on to college in Taiwan, studied English on the side, and scrambled to build a life in a small apartment in the cramped city of Taipei.

  Instead, I am on a new route.

  Within hours I will belong to different parents, and I will live in a ranch home in a blue-collar suburb where being Chinese is exotic. My parents will teach me that I can do anything and I will beat myself up trying to do just that. I will speak and write English first, and the latter will become my profession. Everything I will come to believe about myself and the world will contrast with the one belief that has driven me from my native land and into a new one: that a boy is intrinsically better than a girl.

  While the twists of fate in most people’s lives are often imperceptible, or so sudden that there is no time to comprehend their impact until long afterward, this is an extraordinary, prolonged moment. I am suspended high above the Pacific Ocean, between countries, between families, between destinies.

  “Ooooh,” the tired passengers say, despite themselves. “How old is she? What is her name? Where is she from? Is she yours?”

  The woman responds, “She is Mei-Ling. She is eight months old and from Taiwan. And, no, she is not mine.

  “She is going to live in America.”

  EPILOGUE

  My husband and I wanted to find out our baby’s sex as soon as we could.

  This was not for any particular reason. Monte and I knew we would love a boy or a girl the same—we were just too curious and impatient to wait the full forty weeks of pregnancy to find out. We wanted to brainstorm possible names, to buy outfits, to have a mental picture of what parenthood might be like.

  A routine ultrasound was scheduled for April 25, 2007, when I was about eighteen weeks pregnant. Monte and I walked several blocks to the appointment, and my heart was in my throat because I had suffered a miscarriage the year before. First and foremost, we wanted to be reassured that things were going smoothly.

  The doctor-technician was an older man with a gravelly voice and a formal manner, who shook our hands and called me señora. He kept pleasantries to a minimum and told me to lie on the examining table. I unzipped my already-unbuttoned jeans, and the doctor smear
ed slimy gel all over my belly. My husband sat next to me, squinting at the ultrasound monitor. We silently waited while the doctor examined, slowly and meticulously, the head and spine of the baby and measured the heartbeat. The baby was thriving, to our relief. Then the doctor asked in Spanish, “Do you know the sex?”

  “No, no,” I said eagerly. “We want to know …”

  “Let’s see,” he said, clearing his throat. He placed the paddle on the lower left side of my abdomen. The cloudy, psychedelic images pulsed on the screen. He paused.

  “Es una señorita,” he said, definitively.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, and he repeated it again. Without a doubt.

  It’s a girl.

  Tears sprang to my eyes, even though neither my husband nor I could make out any of the female parts on the ultrasound monitor that the doctor insisted were so obvious. I immediately imagined buying our baby dresses, putting her hair in firecracker ponytails, and watching her fall madly in love with her daddy, like I did mine. I was breathless with wonder: a girl. It was one of the most pure and simple feelings of joy I have ever experienced.

  I thought later of how different that revelation must have been for Ba and Ma.

  They did not have the luxury of elective ultrasounds in 1973. My mother would have had to feel me growing, tumbling, and stretching inside her for the full nine or ten months, wondering anxiously if she would bear a boy and finally feel whole as a mother and wife. The question of gender must have loomed large in that operating room, when Ma was moaning and crying out in pain, urging me into the world. Then came the last push and the fateful announcement, the one that had been repeated to them over and over.

  “It’s a girl,” a doctor or nurse might have said overly brightly. Maybe they even called me healthy or beautiful to gloss over the news that the hospital staff knew was disappointing.