It had changed Li’s life. The child’s father, a farmer in Sichuan, refused to take her back, saying she was her mother’s responsibility. Li had become, in effect, a surrogate father, and for almost a year Margaret was her surrogate mother. He had never married, never felt the urge to father children, and yet here he was, the sole adult responsible for a young child. His blood. His life. And he loved her with every last part of himself.
Her mother had just abandoned her. Her own mother! In selfish pursuit of some outmoded superstitious Chinese need for a son. He felt his anger rising again as he thought about it. ‘Why?’ seemed like the most reasonable question in the world. A question he had every right to ask. And then he replayed Xiao Ling’s answer. Even if I could tell you why, you probably wouldn’t be happy with the answer. And he knew that, in truth, it wasn’t an answer he sought. It was an outlet for his anger. A focus for his rage. Two slow-burning years of it.
And then, when he had seen her in the massage parlour, painted and pouting, a common prostitute, his anger and astonishment had been quickly eclipsed by shame and humiliation. Now they all simmered together in his head and in his heart, and she sat before him defiant and, apparently, quite unrepentant.
He turned his hands palm down in an attempt to control his feelings. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Never mind the why’s. Just tell me what happened. You owe me that much.’
She flicked him a look. ‘It’s a long story. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’
‘How about the night you abandoned your child.’ He had tried very hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but it hung in the air, like the smoke from her cigarette.
If she was aware of it, she gave no indication. She sat, concentrating on her tube of tobacco, squinting her eyes against the smoke. ‘You probably think it was easy for me,’ she said, ‘leaving my little girl.’ She paused. ‘It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.’
The ‘why’ question immediately pushed its way back into Li’s mind, but he forced himself to stay silent. He lit another cigarette.
Almost as if she had read his mind, she said, ‘When I look back, I don’t really know what drove me. But that’s what I was. Driven. By hormones maybe, or by the weight of five thousand years of Chinese culture. You know that the orphanages in China are full of little girls who’ve been abandoned. I wasn’t the only one, Li Yan.’ There was almost an appeal for understanding in this. Li stayed stony-faced. She stubbed out her cigarette and helped herself to another.
‘You remember my friend from school?’ she said. ‘Chen Lan? She gave herself an English name, Christina, and made us all call her by it. She married a man from Annhui Province and went to teach there at a school in a remote hill community. I went to stay with them to have my baby. I told them my husband and my little girl were killed in a road accident in Sichuan. Everyone was very supportive. The chairman of the local committee even arranged to have a car on standby to rush me to the hospital when the time came. The nearest town was almost an hour’s drive away. My contractions started during a rainstorm, and the car skidded off the road on the way to the hospital. No one was badly hurt. But when they finally got me to the maternity unit, my baby was born dead.’
She relayed her story, with an apparent lack of emotion, as if something more than her baby had died inside her. She had sacrificed everything. Her husband, her child, her brother, only to see the reason for it all washed away in a rainstorm.
She turned glazed eyes on her brother. ‘I stayed with Christina and her husband for nearly six months after that, but I could not rely on their charity forever. I knew I could not go back home. And I did not have the courage to face you. Or Xinxin. So I went to Fuzhou in Fujian Province. I had heard it was part of the new economic miracle and that there were jobs to be had. I thought maybe if I had a little money I could get to Taiwan and start a new life there.
‘Christina gave me the address of a friend so I had somewhere to stay when I arrived. They were a young couple. Very friendly. They took me under their wing. He had several market stalls and gave me a job running one of them. I told them it was my plan to try to get to Taiwan when I had enough money. I worked there for nearly a year.
‘Then one day he came to my stall and told me they had a chance to go to America. He had made contact with a snakehead who could arrange it all for a small deposit. He said I could use the money I was saving for Taiwan to pay my deposit, and I could earn enough money in America to pay off the rest when I got there. It was $58,000 dollars.’ Her eyes still shone with awe at the recollection of the figure. ‘It seemed to me like the biggest fortune I could ever imagine. I did not know how I could possibly pay it off. But he said in America you could earn that kind of money very quickly. It was like a dream. In my head I could really see myself in the Beautiful Country. I wanted it to be true. So I said yes.
‘We met with the shetou one night and handed over our money. He told us to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. But it was a month before we had word to meet the next night outside a fishing village north of Xiamen. There were nearly twenty of us. They gave us false papers and put us on a fishing boat that took us across the Straits of Taiwan. We landed somewhere near Tainan. Then they took us in vans to Taipei, and we stayed there in an apartment for about three weeks before they put us on a flight to Bangkok. We stayed there in a filthy place for another ten days, and then I was split up from my friends. I pleaded with the local shetou to let us stay together, but she said it was not possible. I was put on an airplane with some other people I did not know, and we flew to Panama City. We were given new papers there, and they put us on a farm where the ma zhai came every night for sex. If you refused they beat you and forced themselves on you anyway.’
Still there was no emotion. The words came from her mechanically, as if it were someone else’s story. Oddly, it made it all the more vivid for Li. He felt the skin on his face prickle with shock and anger. This was his sister that these ma zhai had beaten and raped. He remembered her as a child, forever laughing, full of mischief, a pretty little girl for whom his friends had always had a fancy. Days of innocence. Innocence long since gone. To be replaced by a hard, unrelenting cynicism, reflected in the granite set of her features.
‘Eventually they took us north in the backs of trucks,’ she said. ‘Twelve, fifteen hours at a time. Through countries I can hardly remember. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Guatemala…Finally into Mexico. So close now. You could smell the Golden Mountain, see it gleaming in the sunshine across the border. If you closed your eyes you could imagine touching it.’ She curled her mouth, and blew out the last of her smoke in disgust. ‘Only there was no Golden Mountain. Just a filthy basement in Houston, and more ma zhai telling me I owed the shetou, and that if I didn’t pay they would beat me until I did.’
Li stood up and walked across the windowless room, trying to contain his anger and frustration. It was almost more than he could bear to hear. The story was so familiar to him, he could tell her what would happen next.
‘They wanted me to work in a massage parlour. They said it was the only way I could make enough money to pay off the shetou. At first I refused.’ She shrugged listlessly. ‘But you can only resist for so long. There comes a time when you must accept the inevitable. In a way I was lucky. One of the boys thought I was pretty. Too good for massage, he said. So I started work at a club in Chinatown. The Golden Mountain Club.’ A jet of air escaped her lips and she shook her head. The irony was still not lost on her. ‘They called me a “hostess”, which meant that anyone with enough money could have sex with me. All the big shetou came to the Golden Mountain Club, and the shuk foo from the tongs. There were gambling rooms in back, and private rooms upstairs where they took the girls for sex. The other girls said I was lucky because I was prettier than them, and all the really important people wanted to sleep with me — the ones who paid the most money. I didn’t care. They were all the same to me. But sometimes they would give me five hundred dollars, more if they had won at the card table. And I was able to start paying off my debt.’