The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(34)
I have a duty, a responsibility, but I don’t move.
Then, completely unexpectedly, A-ma flicks the nail of her middle finger against the baby’s foot. The little thing startles, and her first cry cuts through the stillness of the grove, surprising the birds out of the trees, the flapping of their wings stirring the air around us. There is no recitation of the customary words.
A second cry, irritated to have been disturbed.
A third cry, desperate to be held.
Inside my body, a part of me so deep I didn’t know it existed stirs, jolts, wakes. Before A-ma can stop me, I scoop up my baby and hold her to my chest. The cord pulls on my insides. A-ma—she cannot be thinking either, but also moving from some buried part of herself—gently dabs the baby’s face with a cloth. A-ma has a look I’ve never seen at a birth—not even at those for my nephews and nieces. The baby eerily returns the gaze. Tears glisten on A-ma’s eyelashes, then overflow down her cheeks.
“A long, long time ago,” A-ma begins, following a custom as old as the Akha people, but her voice is unsteady, “a vicious tiger prowled the mountains, searching for the blood-perfumed scent of newborns. The tiger snatched these unfortunates to eat before they could receive their permanent names. One gulp. Nothing left. The ruma tried to cast protective spells. The nima went into trances, searching for the cause of the tiger’s ceaseless hunger. Mysteriously, whatever remedy the ruma and the nima implemented only emboldened the animal. He became hungrier and hungrier. It could have been the end of the Akha people.”
A-ma should not be telling this story to a human reject. I should not be opening my tunic and exposing my breasts. Neither of us should have touched her. I can’t imagine a cleansing ceremony exists strong enough to erase our offenses.
A-ma presses on, never hesitating in telling the traditional story. “Then, in a village so remote the people did not yet have clothes to wear and protected themselves from the elements with only palm fronds and kneaded bark, a woman like me—a midwife—gave the child the temporary name of No-food-no-tiger. From that day forward, that tiger—and all tigers born from the creature—have been repelled by the strength of temporary names carefully chosen: No-bite, Mildewed-rice, Soured-tofu.” She puts a fingertip on my daughter’s forehead. “Your temporary name is Spiny-thistle.”
The baby nuzzles my breast and finds my nipple, seeking the healthy drops of yellow fluid that will nourish her until my milk arrives. How serene she is. How small and perfect. The pulls of her mouth are surprisingly strong, and they trigger a spasm that pushes the friend-living-with-child out of my body. I loosen my arms so A-ma can reach my baby’s stomach, cut the cord, and tie it. We cannot take the friend-living-with-child home to bury under the ancestor shrine, so A-ma buries it under the mother tree.
A-ma hands me a jug of water and walks to the edge of the grove, leaving me alone with my daughter. I suck some of the liquid into my mouth, spray it on Spiny-thistle’s body, and use the corner of a piece of cloth to clean the birthing muck from her skin. How can this tiny bundle of flesh be so precious to me already? I understand in all my sore and aching parts, including my pathetic little heart, that this is why the mothers of human rejects may never touch or hold them.
A-ma returns and squats next to me. She peels the heart-forget egg and hands it to me. Numb, I take a bite. It may help me forget the physical pain of childbirth, but I’ll never lose the agony of this. A-ma searches my eyes. I search hers. What are we going to do? My emotions are jumbled. Love for my daughter. Terror that A-ma will insist I use the ash and rice husk mixture on my baby. Concern that A-ma is going to remove Spiny-thistle from my arms and do what I cannot. I don’t have the strength to fight A-ma for my daughter when I just gave birth. And even if I fought her and won . . .
I say to A-ma the obvious thing. “I can’t keep the baby—not without a father.”
“If you take her back to Spring Well, your a-ba or one of your brothers will need to complete . . . the ceremony. The headman, ruma, nima, and village elders will see to it.”
Tears course down my cheeks, fall from my chin and onto my daughter’s face. She blinks at the interruption of her sucking.
“Maybe for once the Han majority laws can help,” A-ma goes on. “The One Child policy doesn’t apply to us, but suppose you give her away—as so many Han women must do when they birth an unwanted daughter. I have heard it happens.”
Yes, we’ve heard it happens, but is it so? Could a mother abandon her baby? Look at me. I couldn’t do what Akha Law told me to do. Maybe Han majority women can’t do what Chinese law tells them to do either.
But when I say this to A-ma, she responds, “It is the only hope for you or the baby. We must try.”
“But where can I leave her?” My voice trembles. If someone on Nannuo Mountain found an infant abandoned in the forest, he would immediately recognize it as a human reject with a father too weak to do what needed to be done. It would be up to that stranger to make sure the rite was carried out. Akha Law is immutable when it comes to human rejects.
“There’s a place I’ve heard the family-planning women talk about at the tea collection center.” A-ma takes her time to pronounce the Mandarin word. “Orphanage. You will find one in Menghai—”
“Menghai?” It’s the nearest big town, where the tea factory is, and where I begged San-pa to take me. The only people I know who’ve been there are the mountain traders who bring goods to us; Teacher Zhang, who passed through when he was sent here to learn from the peasants; and Mr. Huang, his son, and their driver.