Authors: Aisling Juanjuan Shen
So all the beating, yelling, and abuse was just my illiterate parents disciplining their child. My entire childhood had been twisted and ruined because my parents had been raised in the same way by their parents. So I had been wrong all these years, thinking that my mother didn’t love me?
“Silly child!” my mother continued. “Are there any parents who don’t love their children? Both you and Spring are my children. Why wouldn’t I love you?”
Her words made sense. My mother loved me. She and my father were just peasants who hadn’t known any better. I didn’t know if I fully believed it, but for the first time I began to allow for the possibility that my parents really did love me.
We kept flipping through the photos. I saw a large picture of my mother and myself leaning together and smiling happily on Gulangyu Island. I held it up in the air. “Mama, why don’t I look like Dad at all?” I joked.
“What are you talking about? Nonsense.”
“I’m serious. I can see that you and I have similar noses, but Dad and I look like total strangers. My face is meaty; his face is flat—”
“Stop it,” she snapped.
“Mama, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Why are you so nervous?” Suddenly some dim thoughts that I had had before flew into my mind. Why had the villagers always joked that I didn’t resemble Dad at all? “Is Dad not my father?” I blurted out.
“Don’t be crazy. Of course your Dad is your father.” She clasped her hands tightly in her lap.
“No, Mama.” I tucked my knees under my chin. “Why are you avoiding me, Mama? Dad isn’t my father, is he?”
“I’m not going to talk to you any more.” She turned her back to me, got up, and walked to the other side of the room.
“Mama, talk to me. Please, talk to me. I want to know. Dad isn’t my father, is he?” I sputtered.
“I told you not to talk about this. Why are you being so stubborn?” she yelled at me angrily.
Nervous and flustered, I ignored my mother’s temper and kept pressing her. “Dad isn’t my father, is he? Who
is
my father, then?”
“Stop this nonsense,” she said harshly. “Of course your Dad is your father. He raised you.”
My mind was rattled. “Who is my father, then? Who?” I thought quickly, images of all the men in the Shen Hamlet running through my mind. One seemed to fit. “It’s him, isn’t it? That son of a bitch Beiling!”
She didn’t budge, glaring at me like a warrior. My stomach turned. The man I had hated in my childhood was my biological father.
Mama moved closer and sat down on the bed. Eventually she began to speak. “That bastard. He sent your father away to guard the boats for the commune and then . . . it was only a month after your father and I got married. . . . He sneaked into our hut at night. . . .” Slowly she explained, twisting her fingers in her lap. She looked like she was being forced to swallow a bowl of sour medicine.
“He raped you?” I cried out. “Why didn’t you tell the commune and the police?”
“Silly, he
was
the commune. He
was
the police. He was the head of the commune. He decided how much you were going to eat, what kind of work you were going to do. Would anybody listen to me? Every woman in the commune, as long as she was not ugly, was raped by that son of a bitch. Look at him today. Isn’t he still the most powerful and rich?”
“So you gave birth to me? And then you never loved me? Why did you bring me into this world and let me suffer?”
“No!” She looked at me with anxious eyes and said, hastily, “Don’t think like that. Every mother loves her child. This has nothing to do with that. Really, we were just too poor for love.”
“Does Dad know this? Does anyone else know this?” I murmured.
“I’ve never told anyone except your aunt Jasmine. When you were young, your father once joked that you didn’t look like him at all, but he never asked anything.”
But maybe he did know, and that was why he had never loved me.
“Does that son of a bitch know?” I asked her tensely, feeling all the muscles in my body cramping.
“After you went to college, once he came into our house. Your father wasn’t around. The bastard smiled and asked who I thought Juanjuan resembled—him or your father. I didn’t say anything. He grinned and said of course you were more like him since you were such a smart kid. I threw him out.” Staring into the air, she spoke without emotion, but her eyes were full of shame and anger.
“Is this why he always smiled to me when I ran into him on the asphalt road? Is this why he always peeked into our house when passing by? Is this why his wife always glared at me as if she wanted to eat me alive? Is this why you never liked me?” I rambled angrily.
“No. I told you I love you as much as I love Spring, and your Dad is still your father,” she said in a flurry.
Before she could say more, I fled the bedroom. I ran to the iron anti-thief gate, opened it, and stormed out of the apartment.
I walked out of the elevator with a crowd of people and exited the building. The sun hugged me with its warm arms, but I couldn’t think or feel anything. Everything my eyes could see seemed to be mixed up and blended together, the sky, the earth, the trees, the shops, the buses, the people, the bikes, the air, the breeze. I looked back on my life, and it seemed like a dream. In this dream, I ran and ran with all my might to find an oasis. I walked across rivers, climbed mountains, trekked through deserts, and finally I got to my oasis. I lay down under a lush apple tree, but as soon as I closed my eyes, I woke up to find that none of it had been real.
The dream had lasted twenty-three years. I felt so exhausted, cheated. I wanted to drop to the ground and howl loudly. I wanted to laugh to the world hysterically. So I walked along, laughing for a while and then crying for a moment, and then I paused, staring into space, feeling lost because I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry.
It is said that fairness always prevails, that the truth is always better than a false reality. But it wasn’t fair that my life was doomed to be miserable just because I was conceived during a rape. It wasn’t fair that my mother didn’t love me just because of the way my father was chosen when I’d had no chance to refuse. It just wasn’t fair. I laughed dryly to myself. What should I do now? I wondered. How was I supposed to live my life from then on, having just discovered that my entire life up to then had been nothing but a big lie?
Hours later, I dragged my feet back to the apartment and went straight to my computer. Fortunately, Ethan, the American friend who I knew only through Yahoo chat windows, was online. He had become the only person I could share my thoughts with since Steven and Xiao Yi had disappeared from my life.
“I am very sad at this moment. I have just found out my father is not really my father, and my real father is a rascal who I hated my whole life.” I typed out my message of despair and hit send. My mind was buzzing like a swarm of June beetles.
“Oh, I am sorry, Caroline,” Ethan responded right away. “It must be very hard on you, the truth.”
“I don’t know what I should do now. My whole life is a dream. I hate my mother. She should’ve told me this a long time ago. Instead, she just didn’t love me.” Warm tears poured down my face. Twenty-three years of grievances were bursting out.
“Maybe she didn’t tell you because she wanted to protect you. You shouldn’t hate her. Every mother loves her child, in different ways. Maybe your mother loves you in a way she thinks right. Perhaps she did her best under the circumstances.”
I pondered Ethan’s words. They weren’t genius, but they magically cleared my head. Maybe my mother didn’t know how to love because she had never been loved herself. She never smiled when I was little, but I remembered she had always tried her best to either make or buy me a new piece of clothing every New Year. She had made me a bag for my first day of school. She had visited me at college. She had cried both times I left for the South. She had never hugged me or said she loved me before, but since the day I was born she had been like an octopus wrapping around me with her endless and seamless care.
My mother loved me and perhaps always had. And even if she hadn’t, it didn’t matter any more, because I knew I had her love now. Why should I blame her for the past? And it didn’t matter any more whether my real father was a criminal guilty beyond forgiveness or a man without emotions either. That only determined where I had come from, not who I was today.
I left the living room and gently pushed open the bedroom door. In the dim light, I saw my mother curled up under the covers like a shrimp. I saw her gray-haired head on the pillow. She was barely fifty, but the beautiful, tempestuous woman of my memory was gone. Now she was just an old, frail mother who needed love and caring.
She sat up when I entered the room and looked at me, concerned. “You’re back?”
“Yes, Mama. Don’t worry. Everything is fine. Go back to sleep. When you wake up, I’ll bring you congee again,” I told her gently and then closed the door.
EVENTUALLY I GOT
my passport, but I didn’t go the UAE. The agency returned my money after months of trying to obtain a visa for me. I was spared a life in a robe. I was actually relieved.
My mother returned to the hamlet with two big suitcases of gifts and souvenirs. She had told me that she hardly ever saw Honor any more, but, nonetheless, I put two cases of cigarettes in the suitcase for him, something I knew he would like. I will never forget what that man did to my family, and for my family.
Spring visited me subsequently. I sent her to a beauty school, where she could learn all the advanced techniques of hairdressing that she wished. A month later, after she had finished the lessons, she decided to go back to the hamlet. City life was not for her, she said. Soon my mother called and said that Spring had opened a small barbershop in Zhenze, and my mother was very worried about several male customers who frequented it. Sure enough, the next time she called, she told me that Spring was seeing a divorced man in his forties.
My life continued in Xiamen, a life filled by shopping in the daytime and barhopping at night. I consumed cigarettes and alcohol every day, but not strange Westerners any more. That was not the right way to find love, I told myself. Through the Internet, I had become incredibly close to Ethan, the Saab mechanic who might have had grease under his fingernails but who seemed to be the person who was born to understand me. For months, we chatted for five or six hours a day. One day he told me that he had bought a ticket to China to come see me, but a week before his scheduled departure he suddenly told me that he couldn’t talk to me any more and then cut off all contact.
It was surprisingly painful to get the message. I had fallen in love with Ethan without knowing it. I dealt with this blow by drinking and sleeping around again. At this point, I was willing to marry anyone in order to get out of China. I even considered a sixty-year-old man from California who knew me through the Internet, but he eventually disappeared just like the men before him.
Six months later, just when I thought I would rot in Xiamen, Ethan started talking to me online again. I forgave him instantly. He flew to China, and we finally met face to face at Xiamen airport. This time I knew I had found my love.
In 2000, a year after our lavish wedding in the hamlet, which would remain a legend for a long time, Ethan took me to America, the land of freedom that I had dreamed of for years.
Before we left, I gave some of my money to my parents and put the rest into a condo on an island close to Xiamen. This proved to be a disastrous investment, and there is very little hope of its being recovered.
In America, reality soon settled in. Ethan had closed his garage. Neither of us had a job with a steady income. The struggle to live an American life began.
I realized that the first thing I needed was a formal college education. Fortunately, the inexpensive University of Massachusetts at Boston accepted me. For two years, I traveled from one end of Boston to another to attend classes while adapting to life in America. With Ethan’s love and nurturing, I gradually developed self-respect and learned to think of myself as a human being just like everyone else.
In 2002, Ethan got an entrepreneurial opportunity in Shanghai that he couldn’t pass up. I didn’t want to go back to China, a place of nightmares for me, so I remained in Boston and learned how to survive alone in America, how to call the phone company, how to go grocery-shopping, and how to deal with life without my husband.
I never felt settled at UMass. Living in Boston, I saw Harvard with my own eyes. If I could go to Harvard, then I could finally prove to the world that I was the best, I thought, still like a competitive child. So I applied to transfer to Harvard and also to a school called Wellesley College that my English professor strongly recommended as a backup.
Wellesley quickly sent me a package offering the warmest welcome and generous financial aid. I visited the school, and the gorgeous campus and the friendly people I talked to all appealed to me strongly. Two months later, the rejection letter from Harvard made my choice easy. I went to Wellesley, and my life was forever changed.
I put my hair up in a ponytail and joined all the eighteenyear-old girls around me in receiving the greatest education a woman can get. Only after so much suffering and so little guidance in life could I truly appreciate a place like Wellesley. I felt like a fish put back into water, as I told people. I absorbed everything like a sponge, the knowledge, the atmosphere, the sisterhood, and the self-empowering air floating around the campus. In my second semester at Wellesley, I started to write this memoir in an attempt to come to terms with my past.
But peeling off the layers around the wound was so painful that it immediately threw me into a depression. I often wrote with tears and ended up drinking a lot of hard liquor and then sobbing like a baby. I suffered through many nights of insomnia. At this time, my long-distance marriage with Ethan was floundering. We were still best friends to each other. However, all these chaotic and unstable elements in my life and the enormous fear of not being able to make ends meet every month only added to my depression. During our numerous fights, Ethan and I often screamed at our computers on opposite sides of the world that we wanted a divorce. I thought of ramming my car into a cliff many times, and finally I walked into the counseling office at Wellesley.
By then, Spring had chosen to marry an uneducated and stupid young man. He hit my mother during a minor fight, but, after begging on his knees, he was let back in the house. My mother was extremely distraught. As usual, my father was not protective of her. Spring, who had found herself pregnant, decided to continue with her rushed and unhappy marriage. She had suffered three miscarriages already. There was little I could do from such a distance except comfort my mother on the phone. I could only tell her that I would work really hard to finally bring her to America one day. “I want you to come back to China,” she said. I couldn’t possibly say yes to her. I had no intention of going back to China, the land of constant struggle. I asked her angrily why she and my father had let this man back into the house. “I don’t want the villagers to say I broke up their marriage,” she told me. It still amazes me how backward the Shen Hamlet is. As I move farther away from it, the distance between my family and me grows too, both physically and mentally. No matter how much education I receive, I will never learn to truly communicate with my family.
In 2004, things finally turned around. I became a U.S. citizen and graduated
magna cum laude
from Wellesley, and I was offered a research job by one of the best economics consulting firms in the country. In January 2005, I started my career of being a professional woman in America. It might not have been a big deal to most people, but for me it was momentous enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Later that year, Ethan finally decided to end his fruitless business in Shanghai and come back to America. In the summer we purchased a small but beautiful house in a suburb of Boston. Finally I had a home in America.
I went back to the Shen Hamlet in early 2006 to see my little nephew Tiantian. He is a healthy and naughty boy who finally brings smiles to the family. He has become the focus of everyone’s attention, especially my mother’s. I love him with all my heart. In my eyes he is innocent and pure, with no history or flaws, someone I can love completely. I hope his fate will be different from everyone else’s in the family, that it will include less suffering and struggle. Spring is clearly not happy with her incompetent and sometimes even feebleminded husband, yet she stays with him because of societal pressure and out of concern for Tiantian’s happiness. No matter how much I try to encourage her, she won’t leave him. But I know it will not last forever. China is changing so rapidly, and one day my sister will be brave enough to stand on her own. After all, we were born into the same peasant family in the same tiny village in rural China, and if I can change my own fate, so can she.