Chapter Five #3
“I became very thin and frail, useless at the farm. My father declared that I was deranged and there was nothing he could do that would save me. So he decided to marry me off.” She paused.
“You think he wanted me to become a Ha because of their family name, but there are plenty of prominent houses in Guangdong. Why choose one all the way in a backwater town like Tunglam? Because he needed a family that was desperate to keep its status, a family that couldn’t afford the shame of discarding me once they found out that I was . . .”
Her voice trailed, yet I understood.
“After I met your Ah Ma, I learned what sort of woman she was and what she’d do if I brought disgrace to the Ha name.
So I kept my visions to myself. I hid them from your baba and his family, and I found my god.
” She touched her chest, rubbing the beads hidden underneath her collar.
“For a while, it became easier to pretend.” Her gaze lowered.
“Then I saw the two babies I’d lose, and . . .”
Her voice cracked. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know what to say.
“After you were born, I dreamt of a war. A terrible war that ravaged every land on this earth. It began in the West like a disease, leaving everything it touched rotten and wasted away.” Mama paled visibly.
“I dreamt that the Japanese invaded China. I saw them take your uncles in Guangzhou prisoner and burn their factories. I saw . . .” She closed her eyes. “So many ghosts.”
She wasn’t finished. “I begged your father to take us away from here,” she said.
“I told him we weren’t safe here, and we needed to move inland, maybe even go to Tibet.
He called me a raving fool. He said that Japan was a pathetic little island, and while they’d been lucky invading Manchuria, they’d been trying for years to conquer us, never succeeding. They’d never take the capital.”
“You saw the future,” I realized. My mind was reeling, trying to understand how this could be possible.
“Yes,” Mama confirmed, “and I could do nothing about it. That is my curse. Now yours begins.”
I was quiet. Being able to turn invisible didn’t seem like a curse, I thought. After all, it had saved me from the Japanese.
Mama bent her head low, holding her rosary beads. “Every night, I confess my sins and my failures to Him. He understands my pain. He forgives me.” She lifted her gaze to take me in. “Perhaps He will understand yours, too. You, my daughter, who can become nothing.”
She seldom spoke of her faith with me. She knew I didn’t believe in it, that secretly I agreed with Ah Ma and found her piousness foolish.
“Keep what you can do to yourself,” she said at last. “This is important.” A pause. “No one will believe you anyway.”
I met Mama’s gaze. There was defeat in her dark eyes, a melancholy that I’d never seen before. It moved me to see.
“I believe you,” I said.
I thought the words would bring her relief, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Mama’s dark eyes turned foreboding. “Growing up has a way of making us forget who we really are. Hold on to your secrets, Ying. Don’t let them go.”
I bit down on my lip. Mama had foreseen the death of her mother and two stillborn children, she’d had a premonition of the war and the Japanese invasion. How different would our lives have been if people had listened to her?
“Did you know Baba would leave us?” I said suddenly.
Mama looked stricken, and I wished I hadn’t asked.
To my surprise, she answered. “Yes, I knew.”
“When he left—you didn’t fight him.”
“What use is fighting when it is bound to happen?” Mama said. “I cannot change it.”
My mother, whom I had always considered the strongest person I knew, was brittle inside. A prisoner of fate because of her visions. “Then try!” I started. “Try to change it.”
“No. That is your youth speaking. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”
When I was older? I’d lost my childhood to a war. What more was there for me to learn—to understand?
“Please,” I pleaded. “Come to Hong Kong.”
“I wouldn’t be welcomed. Besides, someone has to watch your grandmother.”
“Why does it have to be you? She isn’t your mother.”
“Ying.” Mama’s voice took on an edge.
I wished that for once Mama wouldn’t simply simmer. That she’d let out her anger and burst. “Sorry.”
A muscle twitched in Mama’s jaw. “Having this curse does not make you special.”
“I know that.”
“Then hold your tongue and don’t chase wild dreams. Marry well instead. Choose a good man who will take care of you and your children.”
I was silent, but my thoughts rebelled. Now armed with the dark secret that Mama had shared with me, I made a resolute vow that I would never marry.
I’d seen firsthand what women became once they were wives.
Their husbands owned them, and they were no longer part of the household that had raised them. I didn’t want that for myself.
I didn’t want to become nothing.
“There’s one last thing I have for you.”
From under her sleeve Mama unclasped a slender gold bracelet with a peanut charm on one end.
I’d caught glimpses of it before, on the scant occasions Mama’s wrist wasn’t covered, but I’d never seen the charm up close.
Peanuts were symbolic of a long and fruitful life, and also one of my favorite foods.
I missed their satisfying crunch between my teeth.
“This bracelet has been in my family for generations,” Mama said softly, rubbing the charm between her fingers. “It belonged to my grandmother. My mother said that she could speak to spirits, and that she walked the sky with her bound feet to find a home for us.”
“Was she . . . like us?”
Mama’s face closed. “I never met her,” she chose to say instead.
She laid the bracelet over my wrist. It was made of solid gold, worth a small fortune.
“Even when times were hard, my mother kept this hidden from my father and refused to sell it. I meant to give it to you when you became a woman, but you’ll take it now”—she pinched the hook clasp tight—“for luck and protection.”
I regarded Mama, too moved to speak.
She was still holding my hand. “Don’t run after you eat, and don’t sleep with your hair wet,” she said. “Cover your neck and your feet from the wind, remember not to chew loudly when you eat, and don’t drink cold water or it’ll make you sick.”
As she let go, I looked down at the bracelet. It was thin and delicate as a string, yet its chain was strong, bonded by tiny forked links. Almost like fish bones. “Will I see you again?”
Mama rounded her lips, about to say something.
Then the look shuttered, and her eyes turned faraway.
“You haven’t been listening.” She unbuttoned the top of her shirt, showing me the birthmark on her back just below her shoulder blade.
It was the size of a large bean, slightly raised.
It matched the red spot on my collarbone.
“This is the mark of my suffering,” she said. “I carried you on my back, but it is time for me to let you go. I am your past, don’t cling to me anymore.”
“But—”
“That’s enough.” She wore a defeated look that I would never forget. “Go. Close the door behind you.”
I turned to leave, but before I could change my mind I wrapped my arms around Mama’s waist and hugged her.
Caught by surprise, she stiffened. One by one her shoulders went soft, and she pressed her cheek to my forehead. We held each other, neither speaking but both silently saying goodbye.
When finally I left Mama’s room, I heard a sob behind the door.