Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung Read Free Book Online

grandmother. “How could you still go on and on about that, reciting past wrongs like a Buddhist mantra!”
    “Indeed,” scoffed my grandfather, “bundling up our baby like that and setting off to sell him for a useless daughter!”
    My grandmother sighed. “Ah, when will you ever forget that?”
    “Never! You tried to swap our son for someone else’s daughter! I should have given you a thrashing! Trying to get rid of a healthy boy!”
    The entire story was true, my grandmother was ashamed to admit, but it was also true that she pined for daughters above all else. “I did it for the money,” she had cried when my grandfather found out. “After all, daughters are easier to feed!”
    “Such shame on our family if anyone were to find out what crazy things my wife does!” railed my grandfather, wishing my grandmother was an uneducated country girl instead of this strong-jawed communist.
    “Well, I got him back!”
    “After making me lose so much face you might as well paint a new pair of eyes on my neck!”
    *
    My grandfather had stopped living with my grandmother after the birth of the fourth son. He had two wives, and returned to his first. The first wife was a marriage arranged by his father. Marrying for love was a luxury, yet when he met my grandmother he could afford few luxuries in his life, being a teacher with two daughters to support. But he did it anyway. And now he wondered whether he had any regrets, whether what he did was a wise thing, considering the crazy things this second wife did. Yet he did not doubt that any child my grandmother took on as her own ended up being obedient to her, filled with such filial piety and respect that they became members of her little army. His sons obeyed him because they were afraid of him, but they followed her because she commanded them. The children seemed no longer theirs, but hers alone, for she alone held power over them.
    He did not like this.
    My grandfather saw that after her third son was born, people began to look at my grandmother with more respect. After her fourth, with admiration. After her fifth, with awe. “So blessed Huyen Thai is!” Then, when it came to her sixth, it was too much. She bore too much luck and success. The five sons were making her powerful beyond the understanding of my grandfather. She controlled these five little boys who were going to grow into men, and it made my grandfather anxious. They did exactly as she told them. She taught them songs about the homeland, China of course, the communist homeland. The Motherland. “One day I will send you all back,” she vowed, “to become Chinese. This barbarian land is crazy. We have a moonfaced maniac prince who stars in his own movies while there is a civil war going on!”
    So when my grandmother was pregnant with her sixth son, my grandfather made a plan to recruit his own army. She was getting too powerful, this woman, with too many people calling her “Ma” this and “Ma” that.
    “Tell us a story, Ma!” cried my three-year-old father, “tell us a story!” And tell them stories she did, with each character coming to life as she stretched her face and contorted her mouth, furrowed her brow and brought to life people she liked and people she loathed to battle it out between the heaven and the earth. My grandfather suspected that she made him into one of the characters, perhaps the main one, the main foe with the ferocious face and the ability to startle little children into peeing on the bed.
    Back in his first house things were not so interesting. His first wife could not tell stories, at night she went to bed early, and she slept with her mouth dry and open. His two daughters were dull things, they were good and obedient and took in sewing work at home, but they lived to see themselves married where their obedience and goodness would be better appreciated. It was more peaceful in this house than in the house of his second wife, if peace could be defined as absence of