The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(42)
“Wife!”
When I turn, I expect to see San-pa with our baby in his arms. Instead, he anxiously shifts his weight from foot to foot. Next to him, the woman has puffed her cheeks in anger.
“Did you leave a baby here?” she demands shrilly. “Do you know that is against the law? I’m going to call Public Security!”
“Wife!” San-pa calls again. “We must go! Hurry! Now!”
But I can’t move, because a couple of the toddlers have latched onto my legs. But even if I could move, would I? I came here for Yan-yeh.
San-pa crosses the floor and grabs my hand. The babies and small children startle at his abrupt action. Two begin to wail. Then another two. And more after that. Caretakers in pink smocks come running from other rooms. In a different situation, San-pa and I would look comical the way we tiptoe in and around and over the babies. The woman in charge crosses her arms indignantly as we approach.
“We have a child here,” I confess, my voice coming out as breathless as if I’d raced Ci-teh up a mountain. “We’ve come to get her.” Only the truth will help me, and maybe this woman will have a kind heart. “We’re just married. We’re beginning our lives together at last, but we need our daughter with us. If we take her, you’ll have one less mouth to feed. And”—I pull one of my new silver wedding bracelets off my arm and offer it to her—“we can pay.”
Babies howl. The caretakers scoop up the loudest screamers. San-pa glances apprehensively from the woman’s face to the door, ready to bolt. I hold the woman’s gaze. “I want my baby, please.”
“My name is Director Zhou, and I prefer that bracelet,” she says, pointing to the one A-ma gave me just days ago. It’s my most valuable possession, but I readily give it to her. “So tell me,” she asks, slipping the bracelet onto her wrist, “what day did your baby come to us? Does she have any scars or a birthmark?”
“She was wrapped with a tea cake—”
Director Zhou instantly brightens. “I remember that one!” But as memories of Yan-yeh return, her face falls. “We sent her in a caravan with other infants to Kunming two months ago.”
I reach for San-pa. “We can go there—”
Before San-pa can respond, the director continues. “She’s been adopted. She’s no longer in China. She has new parents in America.”
The world around me goes black, and I feel myself falling to the floor.
* * *
I follow San-pa on mountain path after mountain path. Up. Down. Up. Down. My mind is deadened from heartbreak. San-pa keeps his thoughts to himself. He’s barely spoken to me since I fainted in the Social Welfare Institute. A few times a day, he wordlessly flicks his fingers at me—Stay!—before disappearing off the path and leaving me alone with my anguish. I’m a wife now, and I must grow accustomed to his male ways, but I worry he won’t come back and I’ll be lost out here, alone, forever. While I wait, I mark a tree or build a stack of rocks, just in case. But he always returns, jittery and anxious or sleepy and lethargic. I’ve been married only a few days, so what do I know? Maybe A-ba was like this to A-ma when they first wed.
We reach Daluo, on the border between Yunnan and Myanmar. San-pa asks some men if there’s been any recent movement along the border because we don’t have papers, but nothing has changed since he last passed this way. After we make our camp back in the jungle, he sits down across from me.
“Wife, we must forget the human reject. We’ll have more children.”
He’s trying to be kind and soothe my pain, but how can I forget Yan-yeh? I lost her once, and suffered. I had hope, and then I lost her again. She’s so far away now, it’s as if she’s dead. That knowledge—sharp as a knife—twists in my heart, doubling, tripling, the pain I had when I abandoned her.
When San-pa says, “We should start right now, trying to make another baby,” I turn away from him and weep into the crook of my arm. When I recite, “No wife should deny her husband in the first cycle of married life,” he wordlessly accepts the depth of my guilt.
The next morning, “Wake up! Wake up! Let’s go!” We traverse thick jungle—reeking with rot, heavy with humidity, and empty of people. At some point we pass an unmarked border and travel on to our first Myanmar village, where San-pa leaves me to buy supplies. I’m standing in the path that divides the village, staring at nothing, my mind with my baby and her “new parents in America,” when a woman’s voice speaks my name. “Li-yan.” My eyes try to focus. I see a woman in filthy rags. Her face is thin and worn. It’s Deh-ja, and it’s been eight years since she and Ci-do were forced out of Spring Well for having human rejects.
“Are you real?” I ask. “Is it you?”
“I shouldn’t have spoken.” She lowers her eyes, humiliated for me to see her in such abysmal circumstances. “Forget you saw me.”
“Forget?” My body surges with sudden urgency. “Destiny—my a-ma would call it coincidence—has brought us together, for only you can understand what I’m feeling now.” I glance down the path that separates this hideously poor village. “Where is Ci-do?”
Instead of answering, she takes hold of my arm—more forcefully than is necessary—and pulls me with her to the right, past a few molting chickens and a single house, and into the jungle, where ruthless greenery instantly swallows us. Above us, a thick canopy of branches blocks the sky. Mosquitoes whine, and tropical birds screech. We reach a lean-to made of bamboo and thatch. A fire pit is dug in the ground before it. Trash has been tossed here and there. A few pieces of clothing hang from low branches. The person who lives here has no respect for nature or herself, and that person is Deh-ja. Together we squat on our haunches. How long will it be before San-pa wonders where I’ve gone?