Throwaway Daughter by Ting-Xing Ye Read Free Book Online Page A

the rabbits must be kept in a dust-free and noise-freeenvironment. So the “emperor’s relatives” as my father called them ended up sleeping on the new bed before Chun-mei and I had a chance to use it, protected by a mosquito net, while I made do with a mat on the cement floor. I checked them before I went to bed and looked them over first thing after I got up. With a bamboo ruler in hand, I measured the length of their hair, day after day, week after week. Everything about them grew, their bodies, their heads, their legs, but not their hair.
    When summer arrived with some days over 33 degrees Celsius, I found myself riding my bike for over a mile to get blocks of ice to cool the cages and prevent the rabbits from expiring from heat. No one in my family nor anyone in the village had ever received such royal treatment. In those days I tried to avoid my parents, my father in particular. I was tired of seeing him shake his head and roll his eyes. For the first time in my memory, he was speechless, which I would have called a miracle under different circumstances. I kept telling myself that I couldn’t risk my “investment,” a new word I heard often. If I could not make a profit, at least I was going to break even. I had to. I needed the money. That was the bottom line.
    Of the nine rabbits that escaped the weasel’s teeth, not all of them died at once. Four succumbed to the heat—a rotten irony, since they still had short hair. But the final five gave me great joy when, at the morning measuring, I noted their hair was lengthening. Although the advance was small, my hope soared and once again I saw myself surrounded by piles of money. With each passing day their hair grew.
    In my former life I must have been a fox or a weasel, the enemy of angora rabbits. One evening as I arranged the mosquito net over my little money-makers I noticed their hair was patchy and rough. Two days later they were all dead. The vet told me they died from massive blockage of their intestines. The rabbits had been chewing and eating their own hair! They preferred to die from swallowing their coats rather than give me a chance to be rich. I was too upset to harvest the remaining hair from the deceased rabbits; I buried them with their precious coats still on.
    My father would have killed me if I were not his only son. I was certain of it. I heard such an earful of I-told-you-so’s, I swore I would never utter those words as long as I lived.
    The truth was, although I was sick and tired of being poor, lately I found it harder to live an improved life while some farmers, our neighbours, who had been as poor as the rest of us, became richer. They were building fancy houses, twice as big as ours, with clay roof tiles, large windows with metal frames, and wooden floors in each room. Some could afford meat every day; some even had savings accounts in the credit union. How could I not want to be a part of it? I wanted to have money so that I could have a wedding like the one held for the son of the rabbit breeder, giving banquets, lighting off fireworks while the bride and groom paraded through the village in a motorcar. When they married, all my sisters had was a trip in a donkey cart to the registration office in the commune where the bride and groom were issued two pieces of paper, declaring them husband and wife. I wanted more for my wedding, but my dreams died with the rabbits.
    My father wants a grandson more than I want to have a son of my own. That’s pretty much all he has hoped and lived for, even though he’s never said as much. I was too young to remember the details of my two sisters who died from hunger at the age of eight and nineduring the famine years. When I was older, I had to try very hard not to think about what had become obvious to me: that my survival, as a skinny, weak five-year-old, was associated with their agonizing death from starvation.
    I had been a weak baby, said my mother, and I was called a sick duck by the