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

villagers behind my parents’ back. Out of old-fashioned superstition I was raised as a girl until I was eight. The belief was that a boy child attracted devils, and a sickly boy made the allure much stronger. Accordingly, throughout my childhood I was dressed in a girl’s outfit, wearing clothes of printed fabric; my hair was let grow long and braided in two pigtails. All this was to pull the wool over devils’ eyes, although I wondered many times even then how the devils could be so stupid, unable to see what ordinary farmers could. But in the eyes of my parents the plan worked because I lived and the devils took the lives of my two sisters instead. I had long stopped thinking that my survival and my sisters’ death was a deadly see-saw game. As I got older I came to understand that sometimes in life sacrifice is necessary. My parents did their part so our family tree wouldn’t cease to grow, and I was their hope, the seed. Now my wife ispregnant, and I, for the first time in a long, long while, find myself thinking once again about my two dead sisters. I can’t bear to let their death mean nothing, and I won’t.

CHUN-MEI

(1980)
    I f Chairman Mao were still alive, I could never have become the daughter-in-law of a Party official like Old Revolutionary Chen. In Mao’s time our two families were as different as water and fire. Even if we had both been water we would have come from separate sources, as my mother would say. Loyal’s family would be well water, sweet and pure, while mine would be muddy, black ditch water. Black was the colour that stained us. In the years of absurdity—my term for the Cultural Revolution—our doors and window frames were painted black by the Red Guards, in contrast to those of the pure “red” families like Loyal’s.
    The government included my family in thehated landlord class five years before I was born. The Land Reform movement in 1950 confiscated all private land, including ours, the Ma family’s, and redistributed it among the farmers in our village.
    My father should never have accepted his inheritance when his father died. He had said it so often that, as a child, I wished Grandfather, who died one year before the Communists took power in 1949, would come out of his grave and take the land back with him. At other times, my father murmured that if only the family’s land had been one-third of an acre less, we would have fallen into the rich peasant class, which was less contemptible. His regret was contagious. More than once, I desired with all my heart that somehow the government had made a mistake in measuring our land, and because of the error, before the entire village, the official would declare that we Mas were no longer members of the landlord class. When my wish didn’t come true, I, too, stopped hoping and dreaming altogether.
    I was the third child of four in my family, my parents’ only girl. From the day I was born everyone in our village called me “the landlord’s daughter,” as if that was my name. I do have a real name, a very beautiful one according to mymother, because she chose it. Chun-mei means Spring Plum-blossom. My mother also said that it was not just a proper name for a girl but a true reflection of the time of my birth. “Spring had arrived,” she recalled, “and the plum trees were in bloom.”
    But that was not what my father remembered. He claimed that the spring of 1956 was the coldest season he had ever experienced. “The temperature dropped so low that two cows belonging to the village’s cooperative froze to death in the barn. If there were any blossoms, they were
dong-mei
, flowers on winter plum trees. Since you are our first girl, I let your mother pick a name for you as we had agreed earlier. Your mother has always hated the winter. Besides, to give her credit, the calendar did say that spring had officially arrived.”
    In my life, controversies such as this are like wheat ears after a harvest: they can be found everywhere.