Other Books by Ruthanne Lum McCunn
Fiction
Chinese Yankee
God of Luck
The Moon Pearl
Wooden Fish Songs
Nonfiction
Sole Survivor
Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories 1828–1988
Young Adult
Pie-Biter
There is no history,
only fictions of varying degrees of plausibility.
—Voltaire
Author’s Note
In my mother’s large, extended Hong Kong family, I felt cherished when called “thousand pieces of gold,” a Chinese term of endearment for daughters. Noticing the preferential treatment given sons, though, I found the term ironic. And when dreaming of becoming a writer, I imagined my first book would be Thousand Pieces of Gold, the story of my beloved great-grandmother, who’d been born in Northern China and sold into slavery during the turmoil of the Tai Ping Rebellion.
By the time I began writing seriously, I’d been living in America for over a decade. My preoccupations were becoming increasingly trans-Pacific, and stumbling upon Idaho’s legendary Polly Bemis, whose life began as Lalu Nathoy in Northern China, I felt an instant connection.
To write a book about her, however, I’d have to research her life, and I had no training, very little experience.
“Don’t worry,” a psychic assured me. “She’s holding your hand.”
Ruthanne Lum McCunn
San Francisco, 2015
ONE
Outwardly they acted the same as any other evening. In the courtyard, between the outhouse and manure pit, Lalu crouched over the wooden tub, washing the pots and bowls from supper. At the opposite corner, near the door to the kitchen, her father, with his queue neatly coiled above his sun-bronzed face, leaned against the crumbling brick wall smoking his pipe. Seated on a stool beside him, her mother nursed the baby while A Cai, her younger brother, showed off, scratching out new characters in the hard dirt beneath her feet. But Lalu, scrubbing and rinsing as quickly as her fingers allowed, knew nothing was the same.
There was the unusual number of bowls and pots to wash, the delicious dinner she could still taste in the linings of her mouth, the sure knowledge that her stomach would know no hunger in the coming year, the hushed expectancy they shared. For the harvest had been exceptional. The best in all Lalu’s thirteen years.
Inside the house, the platform suspended above the brick bed curved from the weight of stored sweet potatoes. The huge earthen jars in the kitchen brimmed with salted vegetables. All the baskets overflowed with dried string beans and turnip and sweet potato slices. Bundles of peanut and sweet potato vines and stalks of millet covered half the kitchen in piles higher than Lalu could reach. And, best of all, in the hiding place behind the stove . . .
Lalu leaped to her feet, frightening the chickens that pecked and scratched in the dirt around her, setting them to a loud squawking. For a moment she tottered on her little four-inch bound feet. Then, regaining her balance, she returned the bowls and pots to their proper shelf in the kitchen, emptied the tub of dirty dish water into the open drain behind the outhouse, and perched herself on the stool across from her father.
“Baba, the autumn breeze is chilly. It must be getting late,” she prompted.
Her mother smiled and her father’s eyes twinkled as he inhaled deeply, then forced the smoke out of his ears in little puffs.
Laughing, but refusing to be sidetracked, Lalu continued, “Look, the first star is out, and I hear mosquitoes.”
She signaled A Cai who, arms whirring, began prancing around them in wild circles. Bewildered by the sudden noise and activity, A Fa stopped nursing and looked around. Lalu scooped him up and circled her father, humming and swinging the child until the baby’s puzzled frown became delighted laughter.
Chuckling, her father put down his pipe. “Enough! Enough!” he said, swatting A Cai playfully. We’ll go in.”
Lalu, tossing the baby triumphantly, followed her father, mother, and brother into the kitchen.
“Let me dig it up!” A Cai demanded.
His mother handed him the metal scoop. “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t break the pot.”
Lalu jiggled the baby. She rested all her weight on one foot, then the other. “What if someone stole it while we were at the threshing grounds?”
Her mother clapped a hand over Lalu’s mouth. “Don’t even say such a thing.”
“Then where is it?” Lalu mumbled through her mother’s fingers.
Her father peered over A Cai’s shoulder. “A little to the left,” he said. “Good. Now up a bit.”
“I feel it,” A Cai shouted.
He bobbed up, face flushed and streaked with soot, triumphantly cradling the pot of hoarded coins.
“Let me count it,” Lalu asked.
“No, me. I go to school, you don’t,” A Cai said.
“I’m older.”
“Shh,” their mother said. “No squabbling or tears to bring bad luck.” She took the pot from A Cai. “If you want the family to have a big ox, a strong mule, two donkeys, three or four good houses, and many large and good pieces of land, you must learn to work hard like your father. It was his skill and labor that earned these coins. He will count them.”
Her face glowing with excitement and pride, she handed the pot to her husband. His large brown hands which fit so comfortably around a plow fumbled with the coins as, one by one, he counted them into little piles of ten. A Fa reached out and toppled the piles.
“No, no,” their mother said, taking him from Lalu. “This money is not to play with. We will use it to buy two more mu of land.”
“And a cow too so I can go to the meadow with the other boys?” A Cai asked.
“Yes, and a cow too,” their mother laughed. “But not so you can go to the meadow. A farmer with twelve mu of land should not have to borrow a cow for plowing.”
“Is it true, Baba?” Lalu asked. “Do we really have enough for a cow as well as land?”
Her father, his eyes fever bright, scooped up the coins and held them in his upturned palms, like a person testing their weight.
“We will buy no land and no cow,” he said. “Not yet. With this money, I’ll lease all the land I can get and plant winter wheat. The money from that will make us rich.”
Lalu gasped. Only the big land owners, the ones who could afford risks, planted winter wheat.
Her mother’s arms tightened around A Fa until he began to cry. “No,” she breathed. “You can’t mean it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s crazy. We have pinched and hoarded for four years to get this money, and now you want to gamble it away.”
Lalu wrapped her arms around A Cai who had begun to whimper. Together they backed away as their father shouted above the baby’s plaintive wail.
“Four years of hard work and doing without to save enough for two mu of land and one small cow. And six years before that for just one mu. And two before that for a donkey! Winter wheat is the best crop there is. One good harvest and we can buy five, maybe six mu. And an ox besides.”
“What if the harvest is bad?”
“It won’t be. I feel lucky.”
“That’s what the gamblers in the taverns say while their wives and children beg in tatters on the street.” She pulled A Cai from Lalu and thrust him and the wailing baby up before their father. “Think of your sons. What will you leave them?”
“The farm is my concern, not yours. I will hear no more about it.”
At home no one dared speak of what her father and Chen, his newly hired laborer, did each day in the fields. But it seemed to Lalu that in the shops, down by the levee
walls, at the wells, and in the fields, the villagers spoke of little else.
There was no escaping their talk. Even here, on the river bank where she had come to wash the baby’s soiled diapers, she could hear the men’s voices drifting from the square where they gathered to smoke, knit straw raincoats, weave baskets, and mend tools.
“Have you heard about Nathoy?”
“You mean that fool that leased all that land for winter wheat?”
“Used up all his savings and mortgaged his own farm besides.”
Lalu pounded the rags against the rocks, wishing the slap of wet fabric would drown out their voices.
“What kind of a turtle’s egg would stake his farm on such a gamble?”
“Who can say? Maybe he’s got the right idea. Already his fields are green with newly sprouted seedlings.”
“Yes, and yesterday’s rain was perfect. Not heavy, but generous. Just the kind seedlings need to grow strong before the first snow.”
“But what if there isn’t another rain like the one yesterday? If it stays dry and the seedlings don’t grow enough before the first snow?”
“Or if they do grow and the snow doesn’t come?”
“Or if there isn’t enough snow to cover the wheat and keep it safe until spring?”
“Or if it rains instead? Cold, sleety rain, the kind that kills unprotected seedlings.”
The possibilities, one worse than the other, hurtled down on Lalu, pushing her back on her haunches, and all at once she felt paralyzed by the same fear that had gripped her when her father had told the story of Guo Ju, the filial son.
“Guo Ju was poor,” her father had said. “Too poor to support his mother, his wife, and his child. So he told his wife, ‘The child is eating food my mother needs. Let us kill the child, for we can always have another, but if my mother dies, how could we replace her?’
“His wife did not dare contradict him and Guo Ju began to dig a grave. Suddenly, his spade struck a deeply buried vase which shattered, spilling hundreds of gold pieces, a gift from Heaven to Guo Ju, the filial son.”
“What if there were no gold?” Lalu had asked.
“There was gold. More than enough for the rest of their lives,” her father had said.
“But what if there wasn’t?” Lalu insisted. “Would Guo Ju have killed his child?”
“It’s just a story from the Twenty-Four Legends of Filial Piety,” her mother said. “To teach us we must honor our parents and do whatever we can to make their lives happy and comfortable.”
“Would you kill me?”
Her father put down his half woven basket and pinched her cheek. “Of course not. Aren’t you my qianjin, my thousand pieces of gold?” he asked.
And he had tickled her until she had laughed, “Yes, yes, yes.”
Lalu splashed the rag she had just wrung out back into the icy water. She was being silly. What did that old story have to do with what was happening now? And anyway, hadn’t the farmers just admitted that her father could be right? That he might succeed?
One farmer’s voice rose above the others. “I can see Nathoy taking a chance with his savings, but to mortgage his farm too!”
“Good thing his daughter is so pretty.”
“Mmm. Just the right age to fetch a good price.”
“Don’t be absurd. Nathoy wouldn’t sell her. When his oldest girl died from small pox, he mourned her like a son.”
“And when Pan lost all his pigs last year and wanted to sell his youngest girl to buy a new brood sow, Nathoy tried to talk him out of it.”
“No, he would never sell his Lalu, his thousand pieces of gold.”
“Did you ever think he would risk everything he has on a crop of winter wheat?”
TWO
The winter storm, which had raged for almost a week, continued to rattle the paper that covered the windows. Rain, forced through the roof of straw and pine branches, pitted the dirt floor with little mud puddles. In the only lamp, a dish almost empty of bean oil, the flame sputtered, casting strange shadows.
Lalu, seated on her parents’ heated brick bed, shivered. Her eyes were red and weepy from the smoke which filtered through the tunnels connecting the kitchen stove with the chimney, and she dropped her sewing to rub them.
Across the room, her mother knelt, stiff as stone, before the red gilt altar of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. “Can the Goddess really save my father’s wheat?” Lalu wondered.
Earlier, when her mother was lighting yet another stick of incense, Lalu had suggested that perhaps their village was too small and too far north for the gods to hear their prayers. Her mother had quickly knocked her head against the dirt floor, calling loudly on Heaven to ignore her daughter who should know better than to question the gods’ supremacy and knowledge of everything that went on, even in the most faraway corners of China.
Then she had turned to Lalu and said, “We depend on Heaven and the Goddess Guanyin knows that. After all, it was she who took pity on the Han people when they were still living by hunting and gathering. When she saw how they suffered starvation because their ears of rice were empty, she went secretly into the fields and squeezed her breasts so her milk would flow into the ears of rice plants. Near the end, she had to press so hard that a mixture of milk and blood flowed into the plants, yet she did not stop until all the ears were filled.”
Lalu stretched, careful not to disturb her two younger brothers who slept on either side of her. If she were a goddess like Guanyin, she would have filled the empty ears of rice with a mere flick of her wrist, and she would stop this storm at once and replant all of the wheat that had been destroyed or washed away. Then she would make the wheat harvest so plentiful that her father would be the richest man in the whole village. No, not just the village, but the whole district!
The door flew open, letting in a blast of wind and rain that gutted out the last glow of light. In the darkness, Lalu heard her mother rise and move, swift and sure-footed as a cat, into the kitchen. She felt a sudden sprinkle of water as her father shook off his straw rain cloak, letting it fall with a sodden rustle to the muddied floor. The smell of damp clothes mingled with the pungent odor of incense. Lalu sniffed. There was another smell, one of hot gaoliang wine. The kind her father offered to his dead parents and grandparents on feast days. The kind disappointed gamblers used to forget what they had lost.
Her mother returned and the room flared into light. Lalu blinked. Her father stood dripping in the middle of the room, his queue unraveled, his padded jacket and pants covered with mud and bits of wheat, broken twigs, and dead leaves.
“It’s all gone,” he said.
“Gone?” her mother echoed.
“Everything. Even what was set aside for the land tax.”
“What will we do?” she whispered.
From where she huddled under the quilt, Lalu could see her mother’s frightened whisper had shocked her father as much as herself. For until this moment, not once, even during the worst of times, had they glimpsed a shadow of doubt in her mother’s belief that they would somehow survive.
Years ago, when her father had left for Manchuria, hoping to come back like Old Man Yang with a money belt full of gold, it was her mother who made her believe he would return even though every street in the village had at least one house where a husband, father, or son had gone into the barbaric North with hope, only to disappear forever. Then, during the year of famine after he returned, ragged and disappointed, her mother had quieted their terrible, gnawing hunger with little round bits of yeasty dough which swelled in their stomachs, giving them the illusion of fullness. And when they went into debt for a flock of brood hens and the bandits stole every one, her mother had merely pinched their solemn faces and said, “Heaven gave us life, Heaven will give us succor. We’ll manage.”
In every crisis, her mother’s confident, “We’ll manage,” had brought them through. Why was she silent now?
“Mama?”
For a moment, before her mother turned
and sank before the altar, their eyes locked, and in that brief instant, Lalu suddenly understood the reason for her mother’s silence.
Before, they had somehow always scraped together the land tax. This time, with the farm so heavily mortgaged and the extra fields her father had leased, they could not. Unless. What was it the farmers had said? “Good thing his daughter is so pretty.” “Just the right age to fetch a good price.” Her father was going to sell her, and like Guo Ju’s wife, her mother dared say nothing, for if her father did not pay the land tax, he would be sent to prison, and without him, the family would starve.
All Lalu’s training in the four virtues of a woman told her she must accept the inevitable. She must be sold so the family could live. Nevertheless, her mind raced like a cornered rat searching for escape. There had to be some other way.
She crawled out from under the quilt. “We can sell the donkey,” she suggested hopefully.
Her father sighed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If that’s not enough, you can borrow the balance from Shi.”
“Shi the Skin Tearer?” her father snapped bitterly. “How would I ever repay that blood sucker?”
Lalu swallowed. It was her life she was fighting for, and her father knew it. Why else was he allowing her to speak?
“You can let Chen, the laborer, go,” she said.
“With all the extra fields I’ve leased? Impossible.”
“A Cai can leave school to help.”
“He’s only eight, too small to do anything except children’s work.”
Lalu slipped off the bed and stood in front of her father. “I’m not too small. I’ll work with you.”
Her father brushed loose strands of hair from her forehead, his touch full of tender regret. “Qianjin, in this district women don’t work in the fields. You know that.”
“They do during harvest.”
“That’s different,” he said heavily. “Only sons become farmers.”
“I won’t be a farmer, just your helper, and only until A Cai is bigger.”
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