Throwaway Daughter by Ting-Xing Ye Read Free Book Online

father became apoplectic when I told him my idea.
    “You’re going to spend it on
rabbits?
”
    “Yes. I have a plan. Put your heart at rest. The plan is foolproof and easy.”
    “How many did you buy?”
    “Three pairs of white, one of black, and one of chocolate brown.”
    He became hysterical “Are you out of your mind? Are the damn things made of gold?”
    That was exactly what I had demanded of the breeder after he told me the price. He reminded me airily that what I was looking at were no ordinary rabbits. “They are
English
angora rabbits, you idiot! If you can’t afford them, there are plenty of people I can sell to.”
    Although to him I was a
Tu-bao-zi
—a dirt head—I knew the weight of the word
English
. Commodities that have English letters printed on them are at a premium, no matter what the letters say. Most of us can’t read them, anyway. It costs more if undershirts are labelled as T-shirts. In the town market, I have seen people wearing sunglasses with labels full of tiny letters still glued to the lenses. They look like fools, but they’re in style.
    The rabbits might not be pure gold, but their hair was, I told my father. I also flashed him the new information I had learned hours earlier, that in the world market, where China provided ninety-five percent of the mohair, one ounce of angora-rabbit hair sold for six U.S. dollars! Although I had never seen what a U.S. dollar looked like, I knew its value. It was not just that American money was worth much more than our yuan; there was no way we could get hold of it. After labouring in the fields allyear round, with my face towards the earth and my back to the sky, I felt like dancing when I was handed more than a hundred yuan at the end of the year, and that was after deductions for my share of grain, fuel, fertilizer, and farm tools. Six U.S. dollars is what a city worker earns in a month if he’s lucky, and equivalent to twice what I make in three. As I stared down at the skinny rat-like baby rabbits resting in my palms, I visualized balls of fluffy hair rolled into stacks of ten-yuan bills.
    “One ounce of its hair is worth fifty yuan,” I announced, raising my whole hand, all my fingers open wide. “And each rabbit can be harvested five or six times a year. All we have to do is to feed them when they are hungry, let them rest when they are tired. All they are required to do is to grow hair, tons of it. Then we just laugh and sing all the way to the credit union. It won’t be long before we will join the ranks of Ten-thousand-yuan Family.”
    The ten-thousand-yuan family was one of Deng Xiao-ping’s new inventions in rural areas. Even the thought of seeing such a large amount of money made my head spin. I had no idea how anyone could be worth that much. The largest note in China was a ten, which was about onemonth’s spending money for an ordinary family. I had to use pen and paper to work out how many ten-yuan bills these families had altogether. But nothing was more shocking than what I found out later: not only were ten-thousand-yuan families rich, they were treated as celebrities in our country, publicly praised by the government. I read about them in newspapers and heard about them through radio broadcasts. They were getting the same kind of attention and glory that used to be given to the poor when Chairman Mao was in charge.
    Besides working in the fields, I had raised pigs, goats, and cows, and was rather good at it. Older and more mature, I just couldn’t see myself unable to look after ten rabbits. They only ate grass. Raising them, or rather their hair, would be as easy as eating a bowl of rice.
    After they spent the first night in a wooden cage in our backyard, I had to bring all the rabbits into the house the next day because, during the night, one of them was bitten to death by a yellow weasel. I set them up royally on the second floor, in the new bedroom-to-be. I further learned that if I wanted to have high-quality hair,