“You have to force her,” Luo said over the phone. “You’re too softhearted.”
“How do you force a grown-up to eat when she doesn’t want to?” Yilan said in a frustrated voice. She had told Fusang to take a nap in her bedroom when she picked up Luo’s phone call, but now she hoped that Fusang would hear the conversation and understand their displeasure.
“There should be a clause somewhere in the contract. You could tell her that we will not pay her the full sum if she doesn’t cooperate.”
“You know the contract doesn’t protect anyone on either side,” Yilan said.
“She doesn’t know. You can frighten her a little,” Luo said.
“Wouldn’t a frightened mother send some toxic signals to our baby?” Yilan said, and then regretted her sarcastic tone. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be so cross with you.”
Luo was quiet for a moment. “Think of a way to improve,” he said. “I know it’s hard for you, but it’s harder for me to stay here, doing nothing.”
Yilan imagined her husband coming home every night to an empty house, the hope of the reunion with his wife and child the only thing that kept him working hard. She should be more patient with him, she thought. It was not like she herself was pregnant and had a right to throw a tantrum at a helpless husband.
THAT EVENING, WHEN
Fusang returned to the table with a hand on her mouth, Yilan said, “You need to try harder, Fusang.”
The young woman nodded, her eyes swollen and teary.
“You’re a grown-up, so you have to know the baby needs you to eat.”
Fusang glanced at Yilan timidly. “Do you think I can eat some really spicy food?”
Yilan sighed. Spice would give the baby too much internal
fire
, and the baby would be prone to rashes, a bad temper, and other problems. Yilan wondered how she could make Fusang understand her responsibility to have a good and balanced diet. “Did you also crave spicy food last time you were pregnant?” Yilan asked.
“Last time? For three months I only ate fried soybeans. People in the village all said I would give birth to a little farting machine,” Fusang said, and giggled despite herself.
Yilan watched Fusang’s eyes come alive with that quick laugh. It was what had made her choose Fusang the first time they met. Yilan realized she had not seen the same liveliness in the young woman since she moved to the provincial capital. “So,” Yilan said, softening her voice, “did you end up having a baby like that?”
“Of course not. Funny thing is—his dad worried so much that he would cry at night and say that people were laughing at our baby. Isn’t he a real dimwit, with a brain full of lard?” Fusang said, her voice filled with tenderness.
It was the first time Fusang had talked about her previous life, full of mysteries and tragedies that Yilan had once wanted to know but that had been made unimportant by the baby’s existence. Yilan thought that Fusang would just remain a bearer of her child, a biological incubator, but now that Fusang had mentioned her husband with such ease, as if they were only continuing an earlier conversation, Yilan could not hide her curiosity. “How is your husband? Who’s taking care of him?”
“Nobody, but don’t worry. I asked the neighbors to keep an eye on him. They won’t let him starve.”
“That’s very nice of them,” Yilan said.
“Of course,” Fusang said. “They’re all thinking about my twenty thousand yuan.”
Yilan thought of telling Fusang not to underestimate people’s kindness, that money was only a small part of a bigger world. She would have said so, had Fusang been her own daughter, but Fusang had lived in a world darker than Yilan could imagine, where a girl could be stolen from her family and sold, and a son could disappear into other people’s worlds. “Are you going back to your husband?” Yilan asked.
Fusang studied Yilan for a moment and said, “I’ll be honest with you, Auntie, if you don’t tell this to others. Of course I’m not going back to him.”
“Where will you go, then?”
“There is always someplace to go,” Fusang said.
“It would be hard for a young woman like you,” Yilan said.
“But I’ll have the twenty thousand yuan you pay me, right?” Fusang said. “Besides, what do I fear? The worst would be to be sold again to another man as a wife, but who could be worse than a dimwit?”
Yilan thought about the husband who had enough feeling and intelligence to save Fusang from his parents. She could easily end up with someone with much more to be feared, and twenty thousand yuan, barely enough to cover two years of rent for a flat such as the one they lived in, was far from granting her anything. Yet Fusang seemed so sure of herself, and so happy in knowing that she had some control of her future, that Yilan had no heart to point out the illusion. She thought about her Chinese friends in America, a few divorced ones who, even though much older than Fusang, could still be a good choice for her. But would it be a wise thing to make that happen, when the best arrangement, as her husband had said, was to conclude the deal after the baby’s birth and never have anything to do with Fusang again?
They became closer after the conversation. Fusang seemed more settled in the flat and in her own body, and she no longer followed Yilan around like a frightened child. Despite her husband’s phone calls reminding her about nourishing both the baby’s body and her brain, Yilan stopped filling every moment of Fusang’s life with tasks. They found more comfort in each other’s absence. In fact, Yilan enjoyed reading and listening to music and daydreaming alone now, and a few times, in the middle of a long meditation, Yilan heard a small voice from Fusang’s bedroom, singing folk songs in a dialect that Yilan did not understand. Fusang’s singing voice, low and husky, was much older than her age, and the slow and almost tuneless songs she sang reminded Yilan of an ancient poem that kept coming to her since Jade’s death: a lone horse of the Huns running astray at the edge of the desert, its hooves disturbing the old snow and its eyes reflecting the last hopeful light of the sun setting between tall, yellow grasses.
Twice a day, Yilan accompanied Fusang to a nearby park for an hour-long walk. Yilan told strangers who talked to them that Fusang was her niece. Nobody doubted them, Fusang’s hand grasping Yilan’s arm in a childlike way. Yilan did not let Fusang go with her to the marketplace for groceries—there were many things Yilan wanted to protect Fusang and the baby from: air and noise pollution from the street crowded with cars and tractors, unfriendly elbows in front of the vendors’ stands, foul language of vendors arguing with customers when the bargaining did not work out.
FUSANG’S BODY SEEMED
to change rapidly within a short time. By the tenth week of the pregnancy, the doctor prescribed an ultrasound, and half an hour later, Yilan and Fusang were both crying and laughing at the news of a pair of twins snuggling in Fusang’s womb, their small hearts big on the screen, pumping with powerful beats.
Yilan and Fusang left the hospital arm in arm, and on the taxi ride home, Yilan changed her mind and asked the driver to send them to the restaurant that had the best spicy dishes in town. She ordered more than they could consume, but Fusang had only a few bites of the spicy dishes. “We don’t want the twins to get too hot,” she said.
“It may not hurt to let them experience every taste before they are born,” Yilan said.
Fusang smiled. Still, she would touch only the blander dishes. “I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to have twins,” she said. “To think we’ll have two babies that will look just the same.”
Yilan hesitated at Fusang’s use of “we” and then explained that the twins came from the implantation of multiple embryos and that they would not be identical. They might not be the same gender, either.
“Let’s hope for a boy and a girl, then,” Fusang said.
Yilan gazed at Fusang. “At my age, I wouldn’t want to bargain.”
“Auntie, maybe you hate people asking, but why do you want a baby now?”
Yilan looked at Fusang’s face, which glowed a soft peach color. The news of the twins seemed to have transformed Fusang into an even more beautiful woman. This was what Yilan was going to miss, a pregnant daughter sitting across the table from her, sharing with her the joy of a new life.
“Are you angry, Auntie? I shouldn’t have asked.”
“I had a daughter and she died,” Yilan said. “She was five years younger than you.”
Fusang looked down at her own hands on the table and said after a moment, “It’s better now. You’ll have more children.”
Yilan felt the stinging of the tears that she tried to hold back. “It’s not the same,” she said. Luo had been right—nobody would be able to replace Jade. For a moment, she wondered why they would want to take pains to get more children, whose presence could be taken away as easily as Jade’s; they themselves could disappear from the twins’ lives and leave them among the orphans of the world. Weren’t they the people in the folktales who drank a poisonous fluid to stop a moment of thirst? But it was too late to regret.
“You should stop thinking about your daughter,” Fusang said. “It’s not hard at all if you try.”
Yilan shook her head and tried hard not to cry in front of the young woman.
“Really, Auntie,” Fusang said. “You’ll be surprised how easy it is to forget someone. I never think about my son.”
“But how can you forget him? He came from your own body,” Yilan said.
“It was hard at first, but I just thought of it this way: Whoever took him would give him a better life than his own parents. Then it didn’t hurt to think of him, and once it didn’t hurt, I forgot to think about him from time to time, and then I just forgot.”
Yilan looked at the young woman, her eyes in the shape of new moons, filled with an innocent smile, as if she were not talking about the cruelest truth in life. Illiterate and young as she was, she seemed to have gained more wisdom about life than Yilan and Luo. Yilan studied Fusang: young, beautiful, and pregnant with Luo’s children—who could be a better choice to replace her as a wife than Fusang? Such a thought, once formed, became strong.
“Have you ever thought of going to America?” Yilan said.
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
“No,” Fusang said. “My tongue is straight and I can’t speak English.”
“English is not hard to learn,” Yilan said. “Take me as an example.” Take Jade, she thought.
“Are you matchmaking for me, Auntie? If possible, I want someone younger this time,” Fusang said, laughing at her own joke.
Yilan could not help but feel disappointed. Indeed Luo was too old for Fusang—her father’s age already. It did not feel right, Yilan thought, to marry someone your daughter’s age to your husband. “Where are your parents?” she asked Fusang. “Do you want to go back to them after this?”
“My mother died when I was two. I’ve never known her.”
“What about your father? Do you remember him?”
“He leased me to a beggar couple for ten years so I could support myself by begging with them. They were like my own parents and raised me from the time I was eight. They promised to return me to my father when I was eighteen, with the money I made as my dowry, so he could marry me off, but then they died and I was brought to my husband’s village and before I knew it, aha, I was sold.”
“Who sold you? Why didn’t you report it to the police?”
“The man said he could find me a job, so I went with him. The next thing I knew, I was locked in a bedroom with a dimwit. And when they finally let me free, my son was already born,” Fusang said, shaking her head as if intrigued by a story that did not belong to her. “What’s the good of reporting then? They would never find the man.”
YILAN AND FUSANG
left the restaurant and decided to take a long stroll home. They were the reason for each other’s existence in this city, and they had no place to rush to. Fusang’s hand was on Yilan’s arm, but it was no longer a hand clinging for guidance. Their connection was something between friendship and kinship. When they walked past a department store, they went in and Yilan bought a few maternity outfits for Fusang, cotton dresses in soft shades of pink and yellow and blue, with huge butterfly knots on the back. Fusang blushed when the female salesperson complimented her on her cuteness in the dresses. Yilan found it hard not to broadcast the news of the twins. An older woman passing by congratulated Yilan for her good fortune as a grandmother, and neither Yilan nor Fusang corrected her.
When they exited the store, Yilan pointed out a fruit vendor to Fusang. It was the season for new bayberries, and they walked across the street to buy a basket. As they were leaving, a small hand grasped Yilan’s pants. “Spare a penny, Granny,” a boy dressed in rags said, his upturned face smeared with dirt.
Yilan put the change into the boy’s straw basket, which held a few scattered coins and paper notes. The boy let go of Yilan’s pants and then grabbed Fusang’s sleeve. “Spare a penny, Auntie.”
Fusang looked at the boy for a moment and squatted down. “Be careful,” Yilan said, but Fusang paid no attention. She put a hand on the boy’s forehead and he jerked back, but Fusang dragged him closer and said in a harsh tone, “Let me see your head.”
The boy, frightened, did not move. Fusang stroked his hair back and gazed at his forehead for a moment. “What’s your name?” she said, shaking the boy by his shoulder. “How old are you? Where are your parents? Where is your home?”
Before the boy could answer, a middle-aged man ran toward them from the street corner. “Hey,” he said in a dialect not of the province. “What are you doing to my son?”
“But he’s not your son,” Fusang said. “He’s mine.”
The boy recoiled from Fusang, his eyes filled with trepidation. The man pulled the boy away from Fusang and said to Yilan, “Is she your daughter? Can’t you see she’s scaring my child? Don’t think we beggars do not deserve respect and that you can shit on our faces.”
Yilan looked at the man, his yellow crooked teeth and big sinewy hands bearing the threat of a lawless wanderer. He could easily hurt the twins with a mean punch to Fusang’s belly. Yilan held Fusang back and said in a placating tone, “My niece lost a son, so please understand that she might make a mistake.”