“I don’t know how I managed it, but I convinced Fang Min to move us to our own apartment.
And that’s when things turned into a living nightmare. Without his parents under the
same roof to check on him, my husband suddenly lost interest in me. He went out drinking
and gambling every night and started seeing other women. It was as if he were still
single, and he would come home late at night, completely drunk, and sometimes he wanted
to have sex, but other times he just wanted to beat me up. It excited him. Then he
would bring home other women to have sex in our bed, and he forced me to be with them.
It was terrible.”
Rachel shook her head in dismay, making eye contact with her mother for the first
time. “I don’t understand how you put up with that.”
“Hiyah, I was only eighteen! I was so naïve and afraid of my worldly husband, and
most of all I was too humiliated to tell my parents what a mistake I’d made. After
all, I had run away and abandoned them in order to marry this rich boy, so I had to
make the best of it. Now, right underneath our apartment lived this family with one
son. His name was Kao Wei, and he was a year younger than me. My bedroom happened
to be right over his, so he could hear everything that was happening every night.
One night, Fang Min came home in a rage. I’m not sure what made him so angry on this
night—maybe he lost some money gambling, maybe one of his girlfriends got mad at him.
Anyway, he decided to take it out on me. He began to break all the furniture in the
apartment, and when he broke a chair and started coming after me with the jagged chair
leg, I fled the apartment. I was so afraid that in his drunken rage he would accidentally
kill me. Kao Wei heard me leaving, so as I ran down the stairs, he opened his door
and pulled me into his flat, while Fang Min ran outside of the building and began
screaming in the street. That is how Kao Wei and I met.
“For the next few months, Kao Wei would comfort me after every bad fight and even
help me devise tactics to avoid my husband. I would buy sleeping pills, crush them
up, and put them into his wine so that he would fall asleep before he could get violent.
I would invite his friends over for dinner and make them stay as late as possible,
until he passed out drunk. Kao Wei even put a stronger lock on the toilet door so
that it would be harder for Fang Min to break through. Slowly but surely, Kao Wei
and I fell in love. He was my only friend in the building, in the whole city, actually.
And yes, we started to have an affair. But then one day we were almost caught, and
I forced myself to end it, for Kao Wei’s sake, because I feared Fang Min would kill
him if he ever found out. A few weeks later, I realized I was pregnant with you, and
I knew Kao Wei was the father.”
“Wait a minute. How did you know for sure he was the father?” Rachel asked, uncrossing
her arms and leaning back against the window.
“Trust me, Rachel, I just knew.”
“But how? This was back before DNA testing.”
Kerry shifted in her chair awkwardly, searching for the right words to explain. “One
of the reasons I had such a hard time getting pregnant was because Fang Min had peculiar
habits, Rachel. Because of his drinking he had trouble getting erect, and when he
was
excited, he only liked to have a certain type of sex, and I knew I could not get
pregnant that way.”
“Oh …
oooh
,” Rachel said, turning crimson when she realized what her mother meant.
“Anyway, you look so much like Kao Wei, there is no mistaking that he is your father.
Kao Wei had beautiful, angular features like you do. And you have his refined lips.”
“So if you were in love with Kao Wei, why didn’t you just divorce Fang Min and marry
Kao Wei? Why did you have to resort to kidnapping?” Rachel was leaning forward now
with her chin in her hands, completely transfixed by her mother’s harrowing tale.
“Let me finish the story, Rachel, and then you will understand. So here I was, eighteen
years old, married to this violent drunkard, and pregnant with another man’s child.
I was so frightened that Fang Min would somehow realize the baby wasn’t his, and he
would kill Kao Wei and me, so I tried to hide my pregnancy for as long as possible.
But my old-fashioned mother-in-law recognized all the telltale signs, and it was she
who declared to me a few weeks later that she thought I looked pregnant. At first,
I was terrified, but you know what? The most unexpected thing happened. My in-laws
were overjoyed that at last they were having their first grandchild. My evil mother-in-law
suddenly transformed into the most caring person you could possibly imagine. She insisted
that I move back into the big house so that the servants could look after me properly.
I felt so relieved, like I had been rescued from hell. Even though I didn’t really
need to, she forced me to stay in bed most of the time and made me drink these traditional
brews all day long to boost the health of the baby. I had to take three types of ginseng
every day, and eat young chicken in broth. I’m convinced this is why you were such
a healthy baby, Rachel—you never got sick like other babies. No ear infections, no
high fevers, nothing. At that time, there wasn’t a sonogram machine in Xiamen yet,
so my mother-in-law invited a famous fortune-teller over, who divined that I was going
to have a boy, and that the boy was going to grow up to become a great politician.
This made my in-laws even more excited. They hired a special nursemaid to take care
of me, a girl who had natural double eyelids and big eyes, because my mother-in-law
believed that if I stared at this girl all day, my child would come out with double
eyelids and big eyes. That’s what all the mothers in China wanted then—children with
big, Western-style eyes. They painted a room bright blue and filled it up with baby
furniture and all these boy clothes and toys. There were airplanes and train sets
and toy soldiers—I had never seen so many toys in all my life.
“One night, my water broke and I went into labor. They rushed me to the hospital,
and you were born a few hours later. It was an easy labor—I’ve always told you that—and
at first I was worried they would see that you looked nothing like their son, but
that turned out to be the least of my worries. You were a girl, and my in-laws were
extremely shocked. They were outraged at the fortune-teller, but they were more outraged
at me. I had failed them. I had failed to do my duty. Fang Min was also terribly upset,
and if I hadn’t been living with my in-laws, I’m sure he would have beaten me half
to death. Now, because of China’s one-child policy, all couples were banned from having
a second child. By law, I could not have another, but my in-laws were desperate for
a boy, a male heir who could carry on the family name. If we had lived in the countryside,
they might have just abandoned or drowned the baby girl—don’t look so shocked, Rachel,
it happened all the time—but we were living in Xiamen and the Zhous were an important
local family. People already knew that a baby girl had been born, and it would have
been disgraceful for them to reject you. However, there was one loophole to the one-child
rule: if your baby had a handicap, you were allowed to have another.
“I didn’t know this, but even before I had come home from the hospital, my evil in-laws
were already hatching a plan. My mother-in-law decided that the best thing to do was
to pour acid in your eye—”
“WHAAAT?” Rachel shrieked.
Kerry swallowed hard, before continuing. “Yes, they wanted to blind you in one eye,
and if they did this while you were a newborn, the cause of the blinding could look
like it was just a birth defect.”
“My God!” Rachel clasped her hand to her mouth in horror.
“So she began to devise a scheme with some of the older servants, who were very loyal
to her, but the special maid they had hired to take care of me while I was pregnant
did not share the same unwavering loyalty. We had become friends, and when she found
out about their plan, she told me about it on the very day I arrived home from the
hospital with you. I was so shocked—I could not believe anyone could think of harming
you in this way, much less your own grandparents! I was beside myself with rage and
still weak from childbirth, but I was determined that nobody was going to blind you,
nobody was going to hurt you. You were my beautiful baby girl, the baby from the man
who rescued me. The man I truly loved.
“So a couple of days later, in the middle of lunch, I excused myself
to go to the toilet. I walked down the hallway toward the downstairs toilet, which
was across from the servants’ quarters, where you were being kept in a cot while the
family ate. The servants were all having their lunch in the kitchen, so I went into
their room, scooped you into my arms, and walked straight out the back door. I kept
walking until I came to the bus stop, and I got on the next bus. I didn’t know any
of the bus routes or anything—I just wanted to get as far away from the Zhou house
as possible. When I thought I was far enough, I got off the bus and found a phone
to call Kao Wei. I told him I had just had a baby and was running away from my husband,
and he came to the rescue immediately. He hired a taxi—in those days it was very expensive
to hire one, but somehow he managed—and came to pick me up.
“All that time, he was already devising a plan to get me out of Xiamen. He knew that
my in-laws would have alerted the police as soon as they discovered that the baby
was missing, and police would be searching for a woman and her baby. So he insisted
on coming with me so that we could pretend to be a couple. We bought two tickets on
the six o’clock train, which was the busiest train, and we sat in the most crowded
car, trying to blend in with all the other families. Thank goodness no police ever
came on board the train. Kao Wei took me all the way to my home village in Guangdong
Province, and made sure I was safely with my parents before he left. That was the
kind of man he was. I will always be glad that your real father was the one who rescued
us, and that he at least had the chance to spend a few days with you.”
“But didn’t he mind leaving me?” Rachel asked, her eyes welling up with tears.
“He didn’t know you were his, Rachel.”
Rachel looked at her mother in shock. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
Kerry sighed. “Kao Wei was already far too mixed up in my problems—the problems of
another man’s wife. I didn’t want to burden him with the knowledge that you were his
child. I knew he was the type of man who would have wanted to do the honorable thing,
that he would have wanted to take care of us somehow. But he had a bright future ahead
of him. He was very smart and was doing well at school in science. I knew he would
get into university, and I didn’t want to ruin his future.”
“You don’t think he suspected he was my father?”
“I don’t think so. He was eighteen, remember, and I think at that age, fatherhood
is the last thing on a boy’s mind. And besides, I was now a criminal, a kidnapper.
So Kao Wei was worrying about us getting caught more than anything else. My awful
husband and my in-laws used the situation to blame me for everything and plaster my
name in all the newspapers. I don’t think they really cared about you—they were glad
the baby girl was out of their lives—but they wanted to punish me. Usually the police
didn’t get involved in family matters like this, but that politician uncle of Fang
Min’s put pressure on the police, and they came looking for me in my parents’ village.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, they put my poor mother and father under house arrest and subjected them to
weeks of interrogation. Meanwhile, I was already in hiding. Your grandparents sent
me to a distant cousin of theirs in Shenzhen, a Chu, and through her, the opportunity
came up for me to bring you to America. A Chu cousin in California had heard about
my situation—your uncle Walt—and he offered to fund our way to America. He was the
one who sponsored us, and that is how I came to change your name and my name to Chu.”
“What happened to your parents? My real grandparents? Are they still in Guangdong?”
Rachel asked nervously, not sure she wanted to know the answer.
“No, they both died rather young—in their early sixties. The Zhou family used their
influence to destroy your grandfather’s career, and it destroyed his health, from
what I know. I was never able to see them, because I never dared to return to China
or to try to make contact with them. If you had flown to China this morning to meet
Zhou Fang Min, I would not have dared to follow you. That’s why when Nick found out
about your China plans and told me, I flew straight to Singapore.”
“And what happened to Kao Wei?”
Kerry’s face clouded over. “I have no idea what happened to Kao Wei. For the first
few years, I would send him letters and postcards from America as often as possible,
from every town and city we lived in. I always used a secret name we had devised together,
but I never got a single response. I don’t know if my letters ever got to him.”
“Aren’t you curious to find him?” Rachel asked, her voice cracking with emotion.
“I’ve tried my hardest not to look back, daughter. When I got on
that plane with you to come to America, I knew I had to leave my past behind.”
Rachel turned to face the window, her chest heaving involuntarily. Kerry got up from
her chair and walked toward Rachel slowly. She reached out to put her hand on her
daughter’s shoulder, but before she could, Rachel leaped up and embraced her mother.
“Oh Mom,” Rachel cried, “I’m so sorry. So sorry for everything … for all the terrible
things I said to you on the phone.”
“I know, Rachel.”
“I never knew … I never could have imagined what you were forced to go through.”
Kerry looked at her daughter affectionately, tears running down her cheeks. “I’m sorry
I never told you the truth. I wanted so much never to burden you with my mistakes.”
“Oh Mom,” Rachel sobbed, clinging to her mother ever more tightly.