Katherine

by Anchee Min

  Sometimes I could not follow her at all, but I would keep listening to her. I was in rapture, for she stimulated me in such an unfamiliar way. I watched her when she spoke. Sometimes I felt like I was dreaming. She was my window, and through its frame, I saw another world.

  She laughed with such directness. When she learned that I was embarrassed about what happened with Lion Head at Wolf Teeth, she laughed. She kept saying to me, “Look, you are twenty-nine years old. If you were in America, you’d probably have been married and divorced by now. Big deal.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “You have missed my point . . .” I tried to explain. “You must understand the differences between East and West.”

  She said, “Oh, come on, underneath it all, people are the same.”

  She said that I was a nut, that Chinese were nuts in a lot of ways. “You’re driving me crazy, and unfortunately I like it,” she said, smoothing her hair with her hand. “You want to know something? I think you are wild. Just like me. Nobody can really tie you down. You know, you don’t live with the foot-binding cloth anymore.”

  I looked at her. I nodded. I found her so beautiful. I wanted to be like her.

  She laid out my thoughts for me. She was a sickle and I a rake. I was amazed at her logic, the way she tallied her thoughts, pro and con, on a piece of paper with a pencil, how she made decisions. She said life was a process of making choices. One had to prepare for the inevitable deaths that came with change. She asked me to remember that there would be no choice that did not mean loss. She liked to sing, “You gotta win a little, lose a little . . .”

  She made me learn from myself. She turned me into a sponge. I sucked the water of her knowledge. She told me that in America there were many psychotherapists, people who earned a living by discussing with people whatever was on their minds. “It’s very expensive. Yet many Americans can’t do without it. The more they pay, the better they feel. Some people believe the only way they’ll be cured is if they pay too much.”

  Looking at my confused expression, she said: “Gee, you’re so serious, you don’t get my jokes at all, do you? That scares me, because I can’t help kidding around. If you can’t tell what’s a joke and what’s not, you’ll be all messed up. Talk to me, don’t give me that bull’s face.”

  * * *

  Katherine told me her secret wish was to adopt a child. I had a hard time comprehending her. I sat on her bed and looked at her. I had just finished telling her a story of a village family in my aunt’s province who’d abandoned their baby just because it was a girl child. Katherine was in tears. “How could any parent possibly have the heart to do that?”

  Katherine made me want to ignore her. She did not know that this type of story was not news to me. It happened in China too often.

  Katherine refused to accept reality. I told her that she was drowning herself in other people’s tragedy. She went silent. I saw her fury.

  “You are cold,” she said to me. “Cruel, you people.” Her lynx eyes opened wide in anger, her pupils became big question marks.

  I don’t know how it happened, but at that moment, my heart felt a sudden tenderness. Her way of thinking touched me. It was something I had forgotten or maybe had never known. She unfolded the petals of my dry heart. A flower I did not know existed began to bloom inside me. It had been too long that my spirit had been paralyzed. I couldn’t recall when I stopped feeling for my own people. Katherine stretched my life beyond its own circumstance. It was the kind of purity she preserved that moved me. She had a child’s power. She pinned me to the wall and incited a revolution in my heart.

  We sat by the window in her hut, facing the rice paddies. Watching farmers spread pig shit with their hands, listening to them curse the weather and the animals.

  I told Katherine that I had always believed that circumstance made me who I was and I believed firmly that humans were born evil. I believed it was a universal truth because I lived through it. Survivors were people who took only what was useful for the moment and abandoned the rest. They refused to understand shame. Did the parents who abandoned their infant feel ashamed? They got rid of that baby just like they got rid of pus on their faces. They thought the pain was worth enduring. Hope was reborn when they laid the sleeping infant on the village road. They refused to hear her cries. They believed that when the sun rose everything would be forgotten. That was my China, not Katherine’s.

  I began to cry. Katherine was shocked at how emotional I’d become. She did not know what to do.

  I told her that I did not appreciate her sentimentality. “You American, you lived a sugary life. What do you know about survival? Starving kids steal, cheat, and murder—they will do anything to fill their stomachs. This was my life. I gave up trying to reconcile with fate. It was not a baby I killed—it was me! Me!”

  Katherine looked at me; slowly her eyes became gentle. She sat down beside me and took my hands in hers. She hugged me and I felt her tears on my cheek.

  “I was seduced and raped,” I began. I told her about my Party boss at Elephant Fields, Mr. Kee, a man of sixty. He tortured me when I started working there. He assigned me to the most dangerous jobs. After a year he called me in and told me that he was removing me from the fields and making me his personal secretary. He took me to Party meetings and would touch me while we rode on tractors. He promised that he would send me back to Shanghai if I let him have his way with me. I was just twenty and far from home, but I didn’t want to sell myself.

  Mr. Kee sent me back to the fields to work with dynamite. I witnessed several fatal accidents on the job and I began to feel very scared. Mr. Kee invited me to a peasant’s house during the Chinese New Year to “talk about my future.” The peasant was a blind man. We sat on a big clay platform that was both the table and the bed. The house was lit with candles. I drank the wine Mr. Kee offered and I passed out shortly after. He had put drugs in the drink. Before I realized what was happening, I was raped. I could feel him undressing me, but I had no strength to move my limbs or make a sound. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, Mr. Kee was gone and the blind man said that there had never been anyone but me in his house. I confronted Mr. Kee. He was eating dinner with his wife and family celebrating New Year’s Eve. Wiping his oily mouth, he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said that he had no such meeting with me. He accused me of insulting him and trying to ruin his reputation.

  “Don’t try to pull a hair from a tiger’s head,” he warned me.

  I missed my period for two months. I couldn’t stand the idea of being pregnant with Mr. Kee’s beast inside me. I was too ashamed to go to a doctor. In China, any woman who got pregnant before marriage destroyed her future. I didn’t know what to do about my growing belly. I ran, jumped, drank dirty water, worked overtime trying to get rid of it. But still I could not stop the little heart from beating. Mr. Kee saw what was happening and took me to see a relative of his who was a village witch. She made me drink Chinese medicine to poison the fetus.

  The moment I drank down the medicine I realized that I would never be able to escape this fate. I was a mother who was murdering her child minute by minute. After work one day, I went to lie in the wild reeds. It was a cloudy and windy evening. I began talking to my dying baby. I asked for its forgiveness. I said I could not imagine what it felt like to have such a mother. I cried because it was too late, I had already taken the medicine. I tried not to think about which part of its body the poison had reached. I couldn’t help but envision the process of deformation, I could see the medicine chewing up the heart, the limbs, the brain. I felt its struggle for life. I screamed up at God, asking why I was made to do this.

  Three months old. Was it a girl or a boy? I felt part of me dying with it. I touched my swelling breasts. I thought she or he would never have my milk. The witch had told me about other women with unwanted children she had received. Most of them took her prescription and killed the fetus, but a few had delivered deformed babies. She gave me the address of an orph
anage and told me to drop the baby secretly at night if I failed to abort it. Would the fetus die from the poison or come through me deformed? Every moment I wished for it to die. My mind was at the point of bursting.

  Two weeks later, as I was pushing a cart filled with stones, I felt a warm stream gush out of my bottom parts. I ran toward the bushes. I could feel blood dripping down my legs. I hid myself in the bushes, I squatted down, and a bloody tissue dropped. It looked like a fish, a black-red fish. It was my half-formed baby.

  I broke down. I couldn’t touch it. I took off my blouse and tried to stop the blood from running. My hands were soaked in blood. I had no tears. My breath was short. I heard dynamite explode nearby as the world turned upside down. I fainted.

  I woke up. It was early evening. I wanted to bury the “fish” but I had no strength. I laid reeds on top of it and ran away from it with all my might.

  * * *

  Katherine tightened her arms around my shoulders. She stroked my back tenderly. Holding her, I fell asleep in exhaustion.

  Katherine stayed up all night.

  I woke at dawn. Katherine was outside, sitting on a wooden stool, writing in her notebook. I walked toward her and she asked how I felt. I told her that every time I thought of Elephant Fields I despised life and hated the world.

  Katherine gazed at me in the rising sunlight. “I don’t know how to make you see life in another way. It’s possible that we can never truly understand each other. But this is what I always say to myself in rough times: Life is not about giving up after a string of disappointments. Giving up is much easier than carrying on.

  “Because my biological mother was blind and deaf, I used to think I might become blind and deaf at any moment. I still don’t want to take the risk if there is even the slightest chance that a child of mine could turn out to be blind or deaf. But I don’t allow myself to be bitter. I don’t think life is unfair. We have this saying in America, it’s actually a cliché: ‘A pessimist sees a glass half-empty, an optimist sees it half-full.’ It all depends on how you look at things. You see what I’m saying?”

  I sat down next to Katherine. She handed me her notebook. I turned the pages. I couldn’t read her flying handwriting. I turned to face her. She was in her brown sweater; her face was pale. She was looking at the sun.

  Our two lives merged. I thought, Katherine who had every reason in the world to be cruel and cynical, who could have been a thief, a robber, a cheater, a drug user, a murderer, chose not to be. I saw how her spirit won out over fate. She woke me from my world of nightmares and brought me into the world of hope. She took away my bitterness, and a new mind began to take shape in me, a mind both wild and tame.

  At the edge of the rice paddies, the sun jumped over the gray horizon like a giant fireball. I reached out for her. Without turning her head, she took my hands in hers. “Tai-yang-nee-zao!”—Good morning, Sunshine! she said, smiling, with tears glittering in her eyes.

  Jasmine was furious. She made voodoo pictures with my name on them and burned them to ashes. It scared Lion Head, he told me one evening as we had tea at his grandmother’s house. We were surrounded by antiques, a little ivory emperor and empress, fancy boats carved from redwood, copper horses, old embroidered draperies. Lion Head said that he hadn’t slept well for days. Something was bothering him. He said, “I need to get my mind together.” He tried not to tell me what was bothering him, but he could not keep his fears to himself. He finally admitted he was afraid of Mr. Han, Jasmine’s father. And it killed our good time. We sat in silence, with Jasmine’s curse upon us.

  * * *

  I decided to help Katherine adopt a child. I felt that it was a way to atone for my misdeed. I wrote all my relatives and asked them to help me contact orphanages and collect information.

  Katherine spoke about her future child with determination. “I imagine her with single-lid slanting eyes, straight black hair, and a little cherry mouth. She will be standing behind a fence waiting for me.”

  My parents and my brother couldn’t understand Katherine. “Why carry an extra load when one’s own load is heavy enough?” they asked. I couldn’t explain to them what this meant, that it was way beyond carrying loads. No one in my family knew what happened to me at Elephant Fields. No one would understand that saving a child would help break the spell of bad memories that had been cast over me.

  My father had me invite Katherine to the house for tea that Sunday. It surprised me that my father was not afraid of a foreigner. He treated Katherine like a daughter. When she stepped through the door, he pointed to a chair and said, “Sit,” the way he would to me or my brother. He didn’t say please. My mother was nervous and guarded the door to make sure no one was spying on us.

  My father asked Katherine whether she was sure the adoption was what she wanted of her life, and whether she had considered the consequences if the child turned out to have birth defects in the future. Katherine told him that one could never really prepare for such things. She was indeed nervous, but determined to go forward.

  My father turned to me. “I assume you understand your responsibility?” he asked. I nodded. “Be a wolf,” he said, “when necessary.” I nodded again.

  “No, not a wolf,” my mother protested. “How can you ask your child to act like a wolf? She should believe that morality wins in the end.”

  “I say be a wolf when you must!” my father said. Pointing a finger at Katherine, he continued, “Zebra will protect you. And I want your heart in one piece when it’s done.”

  Katherine couldn’t speak when she left my house. She said she would never forget my father.

  On the way back from seeing Katherine off, I thought about my father. I knew he adored me, but he never showed his feelings. He was sent to jail when I was still a child. We never had the chance to be close, so we no longer tried. But today he showed me his love by treating Katherine as his own daughter.

  * * *

  Lion Head told me that he went to see Jasmine and spoke vicious words to her. He called her a “mad witch.” He told her to stay out of his life. I asked how Jasmine reacted. Lion Head said that she was in a state of terror because he made her destroy the voodoo pictures.

  But Jasmine didn’t give up. Her eyes still said, “I love you, Lion Head,” in every class. She stared at him, as if to say, I’ll keep praying. I’ll go on loving you until I die. She couldn’t help it. She accepted the humiliation. She took it on as if it were her fate.

  Though Lion Head walked out with coldness, he felt guilty. He believed that no one would ever love him as deeply as Jasmine. But he could not love her back. “I just can’t touch her body,” he’d say to me. Then: “She’ll die for me, she will.”

  “What exactly did you tell her?” I asked.

  “I told her that I loved differently,” he replied. After a moment he sighed. “What else could I say? ‘Go smell your farts, you bitch’? She would report me to her father and he would strangle my future.”

  * * *

  Katherine asked me if Lion Head loved me. We were walking from school to her hut. Bicycles and buses passed us by, their bells ringing and horns blowing, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The world around us did not exist. I told her that Lion Head said he loved me, but it was only words.

  “Do you believe his words?” Katherine asked. I said that I had been trying to figure that out, but it was not the most important thing to me. What was important was why I was with Lion Head instead of anyone else. I asked Katherine if she thought there was a true definition of love.

  “Don’t ask me,” she replied. “I wish I knew. I’m not as experienced as you seem to think.” She told me she’d had many boyfriends, especially in Chinese terms. She’d had sweet times. “In America everything is easy, to the point of being boring. It’s actually disgusting. Are you with me?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine easy things could be disgusting.

  “Okay. Let’s say I’m lonely. I meet a relatively attractive man at school or at a pa
rty, I enjoy his company, I flirt with him. No Party boss is looking over our shoulders, right? He comes on to me, and I encourage him. Maybe we go to the movies, have a nice dinner afterward, some nice wine, and things get looser. He offers to take me home. Tells me he thinks I’m beautiful and . . . Bam! There you have it. Could anything be more boring?

  “I don’t consider myself particularly lucky on the subject,” she added. “Americans really have a surplus of everything except capital P for passion and capital L for love. Maybe I’m wrong. But beer and wine do not magical love make! After those kinds of encounters you inevitably feel lonely again, even if the person is still there. Oh God, I think about all the time I wasted. Move on, always tell yourself to move on.”

  I listened closely, immersing myself in her words.

  “I did everything I could to ‘find myself.’ Like they say: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And maybe some politics thrown in for good measure. My generation.” Katherine sang these last words and laughed. “I can’t even remember some of the things I’ve done. You can’t outlive your generation, can you? Could you say no to Mao?”

  “Of course not. I was part of Mao’s growing tree,” I said.

  “Look, America is a free country, so free it’s empty, nothing matters. No standards, no rules. I came to China because I had this fantasy. I thought China would be different. With its long history the people must be better rooted. I used to believe that Chinese people lived their philosophy, they sought the true meaning of life. Taoism, Zen, Buddhism all made great sense to me. But look at you, you’re as confused as I am.”

  I was speechless. Katherine had a fantasy about China, I had one of America. Maybe the truth was there was no such “safe place” at all. Maybe we could only find this place, or create it, in our own hearts.