The next morning, GaoLing told me Mother needed to talk to me right away. I had noticed that since Precious Auntie had died, Mother no longer called me Daughter. She did not criticize me. She almost seemed afraid I, too, would turn into a ghost. As I walked toward her room, I wondered if she had ever felt warmly toward me. And then I was standing in front of her. She seemed embarrassed to see me.
“In times of family misfortune,” she began in a sharp voice, “personal sadness is selfish. Still, I am sad to tell you we are sending you to an orphanage.” I was stunned, but I did not cry. I said nothing.
“At least we are not selling you as a slave girl,” she added.
Without feeling, I said, “Thank you.”
Mother went on: “If you remain in the house, who can tell, the ghost might return. I know the Catcher of Ghosts guaranteed this would not happen, but that’s like saying drought is never followed by drought, or flood by flood. Everyone knows that isn’t true.”
I did not protest. But still she became angry. “What is that look on your face? Are you trying to shame me? Just remember, all these years I treated you like a daughter. Would any other family in this town have done the same? Maybe your going to the orphanage will teach you to appreciate us more. And now you’d better get ready. Mr. Wei is already waiting to take you in his cart.”
I thanked her again and left the room. As I packed my bundle, Gao-Ling ran into the room with tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’ll come find you,” she promised, and gave me her favorite jacket.
“Mother will punish you if I take it,” I said.
“I don’t care.”
She followed me to Mr. Wei’s cart. As I left the courtyard and the house for the last time, she and the tenants were the only ones to see me off.
When the cart turned down Pig’s Head Lane, Mr. Wei began to sing a cheerful tune about the harvest moon. And I thought about what Precious Auntie had told the beggar girl to write:
A dog howls, the moon rises.
In darkness, the stars pierce forever.
A rooster crows, the sun rises.
In daylight, it’s as if the stars never existed.
I looked at the sky, so clear, so bright, and in my heart I was howling.
DESTINY
The orphanage was an abandoned monastery near Dragon Bone Hill, a hard climb up a zigzag road from the railway station. To spare the donkey, Mr. Wei made me walk the last kilometer. When he let me off and said good-bye, that was the start of my new life.
It was autumn, and the leafless trees looked like an army of skeletons guarding the hill and the compound at the top. When I walked through the gate, nobody greeted me. Before me was a temple of dried-out wood and peeling lacquer, and in the bare open yard stood rows of girls in white jackets and blue trousers, lined up like soldiers. They bent at the waist— forward, side, back, side—as if obedient to the wind. There was another strange sight: two men, one foreign, one Chinese. It was only the second time I had seen a foreigner so close. They walked across this same courtyard, carrying maps, followed by a troop of men with long sticks. I was afraid I had stumbled upon a secret army for the Communists.
As I stepped over the threshold, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Dead bodies in shrouds, twenty or thirty. They stood in the middle of the hall, along the sides, some tall, some short. Immediately, I thought they were the Returning Dead. Precious Auntie had once told me that in her childhood some families would hire a priest to put a dead body under a spell and make it walk back to its ancestral home. The priest led them only at night, she said, so the dead wouldn’t meet any living people they could possess. By day, they rested in temples. She didn’t believe the story herself until she heard a priest banging a wooden bell late at night. And rather than run away like the other villagers, she hid behind a wall to watch. Kwak, kwak, and then she saw them, six of them, like giant maggots, leaping forward ten feet into the air. What I saw I can’t say for certain, Precious Auntie told me. All I know is that for a long time afterward, I was not the same girl.
I was about to run out the door when I saw the glint of golden feet. I looked more carefully. They were statutes of gods, not dead people. I walked toward one and pulled off the cloth. It was the God of Literature with his horned head, a writing brush in one hand, a valedictorian’s cap in the other. “Why did you do that?” a voice called out, and I turned around and saw a little girl.
“Why is he covered?”
“Teacher said he is not a good influence. We should not believe in the old gods, only Christian ones.”
“Where is your teacher?”
“Who have you come to see?”
“Whoever arranged to take Liu LuLing as an orphan.” The girl ran off. A moment later, two lady foreigners were standing before me.
The American missionaries had not been expecting me, and I had not expected them to be Americans. And because I had never talked to a foreigner, I could not speak, only stare. They both had short hair, one white, the other curly red, and they also wore glasses, which made me think they were equally old.
“Sorry to say, no arrangements have been made,” the white-haired lady told me in Chinese.
“Sorry to say,” the other added, “most orphans are much younger.”
When they asked my name, I was still unable to talk, so I used my finger to paint the characters in the air. They talked to each other in English voices.
“Can you read that, can you?” one of them asked me, pointing to a sign in Chinese.
“‘Eat until full, but do not hoard,’” I read.
One of the ladies gave me a pencil and a sheet of paper. “Can you write those same words down?” I did, and they both exclaimed: “She didn’t even look back at the sign.” More questions flew at me: Could I also use a brush? What books had I read? Afterward, they again spoke to each other in foreign talk, and when they were done, they announced that I could stay.
Later I learned I had been welcomed so that I could be both student and tutor. There were only four teachers, former students of the school, who now lived in one of the thirty-six rooms and buildings in the compound. Teacher Pan taught the older girls. I was his helper. When he had been a student fifty years before, the school was for boys only. Teacher Wang taught the younger girls, and her widowed sister—we called her Mother Wang—took care of the babies in the nursery, as did older girls she assigned as helpers. Then there was Sister Yu, a tiny woman with a bony hunched back, a hard hand, and a sharp voice. She was in charge of Cleanliness, Neatness, and Proper Behavior. Besides scheduling our baths and our tasks for the week, she liked to boss around the cook and his wife.
The missionary ladies, I found out, were not equally old. Miss Grutoff, the curly-haired one, was thirty-two, half the age of the other. She was the nurse and headmistress of the school. Miss Towler was the director of the orphanage, and she begged donations from people who should have pity on us. She also led our Sunday chapel, conducted dramas of Christian history, and played the piano while teaching us to sing “like the angels.” At the time, of course, I did not know what an angel was. I also could not sing.
As for the foreign men, they were not Communists but scientists who worked the quarry where the bones of Peking Man had been found. Two foreign and ten Chinese scientists lived in the north end of the monastery compound, and they ate their morning and evening meals in the temple hall with us. The quarry was nearby, about a twenty-minute walk down and up and down a winding path.
Altogether, there were seventy or so children: thirty big girls, thirty little girls, and ten babies, more or less, depending on how many grew up and how many died. Most of the girls were like me, the love children of suicides, singsong girls, and unmarried maidens. Some were like the entertainers GaoLing and I had seen on Beggars Lane—girls without legs or arms, a cyclops, a dwarf. And there were also half-breed girls, all of them fathered by foreigners, one English, one German, one American. I thought they were strangely beautiful, but Sister Yu was always mocking them. S
he said they had inherited haughtiness in the Western part of their blood and this had to be diluted with humility. “You can have pride in what you do each day,” said Sister Yu, “but not arrogance in what you were born with.” She also often reminded us that self-pity was not allowed. That was an indulgence.
If a girl wore a long face, Sister Yu would say, “Look at Little Ding over there. No legs, and still she smiles all day long.” And Little Ding’s fat cheeks rose and nearly swallowed her eyes, she was that glad to have buds instead of limbs. According to Sister Yu, we could find immediate happiness by thinking of someone else whose situation was much worse than our own.
I acted as big sister to this same Little Ding without legs, and Little Ding was big sister to a younger girl named Little Jung who had only one hand. Everyone had a relationship like that, being responsible to someone else, just like in a family. The big and small girls shared the same living quarters, three rooms of twenty girls each, three rows of beds in each room. The first row was for the youngest girls, the second row was for the in-between girls, and the third row was for the oldest girls. In this way, Little Ding’s bed was below mine, and Little Jung’s was below Little Ding’s, everyone positioned by her level of responsibility and respect.
To the missionaries, we were Girls of New Destiny. Each classroom had a big red banner embroidered with gold characters that proclaimed this. And every afternoon, during exercise, we sang our destiny in a song that Miss Towler had written, in both English and Chinese:
We can study, we can learn,
We can marry whom we choose.
We can work, we can earn,
And bad fate is all we lose.
Whenever special visitors came by the school, Miss Grutoff had us perform a skit and Miss Towler played piano music, very dramatic to hear, like the kind in silent movies. One group of girls held up signs that were connected to Old Fate: opium, slaves, the buying of charms. They stumbled around on bound feet and fell down helpless. Then the New Destiny girls arrived as doctors. They cured the opium smokers. They unbound the feet of the fated ones and picked up brooms to sweep away the useless charms. In the end, they thanked God and bowed to the special guests, the foreign visitors to China, thanking them as well for helping so many girls overcome bad fate and move forward with their New Destiny. In this way, we raised a lot of money, especially if we could make the guests cry.
During chapel, Miss Towler always told us that we had a choice to become Christians or not. No one would ever force us to believe in Jesus, she said. Our belief had to be genuine and sincere. But Sister Yu, who had come to the orphanage when she was seven, often reminded us of her old fate. She had been forced to beg as a child, and if she did not collect enough coins, she was given nothing but curses to eat. One day when she protested she was hungry, her sister’s husband threw her away like a piece of garbage. In this school, she said, we could eat as much as we wanted. We never had to worry that someone would kick us out. We could choose what we wanted to believe. However, she added, any student who did not choose to believe in Jesus was a corpse-eating maggot, and when this unbeliever died, she would tumble into the underworld, where her body would be pierced by a bayonet, roasted like a duck, and forced to suffer all kinds of tortures that were worse than what was happening in Manchuria.
Sometimes I wondered about the girls who could not choose. Where would they go when they died? I remember seeing a baby even the missionaries did not think had a New Destiny, a baby that had been fathered by her own grandfather. I saw her in the nursery, where I worked every morning. No one gave her a name, and Mother Wang told me not to pick her up, even if she cried, because something was wrong with her neck and head. She never made a sound. She had a face as flat and round as a large platter, two big eyes, and a tiny nose and mouth stuck in the middle. Her skin was as pale as rice paste, and her body, which was too small for her head, was as still as a wax flower. Only her eyes moved, back and forth, as if watching a mosquito drift across the ceiling. And then one day, the crib where she once lay was empty. Miss Grutoff said the baby was now a child of God, so I knew she had died. Over the years that I lived at the orphanage, I saw six other babies that looked the same, always fathered by a grandfather, born with the same “universal face,” as Mother Wang called it. It was as though the same person had come back into the same body for someone else’s mistake. Each time, I welcomed that baby back like an old friend. Each time, I cried when she left the world again.
Because I came from a family of inkmakers, I was the best calligraphy student the school had ever had. Teacher Pan said so. He often recounted to us the days of the Ching, how everything had become corrupt, even the examination system. Yet he also spoke of those old times with a sentimental fondness. He said to me, “LuLing, if you had been born a boy back then, you could have been a scholar.” Those were his exact words. He also said I was a better calligrapher than his own son, Kai Jing, whom he taught himself.
Kai Jing, who was a geologist, was actually a very good calligrapher, especially for someone whose right side had been weakened by polio when he was a child. Lucky for him, when he fell ill, the family spent a great deal of money, their entire savings, to hire the best Western and Chinese doctors. As a result, Kai Jing recovered with only a small limp and a drooped shoulder. The missionaries later helped him get a scholarship at the famous university in Peking where he studied to become a geologist. After his mother died, he returned home to take care of his father and work with the scientists in the quarry.
Every day he rode his bicycle from the orphanage to the quarry and back, pedaling right to the door of his father’s classroom. Teacher Pan would perch sideways on the back of the bicycle, and as his son pedaled off to their rooms at the other end of the compound, we students and teachers called out, “Be careful! Don’t fall off!”
Sister Yu admired Kai Jing a great deal. She once pointed him out to the children and said, “See? You, too, can set a goal to help others rather than remain a useless burden.” Another time I heard her say, “What a tragedy that a boy so handsome has to be lame.” Perhaps this was supposed to comfort the students as well. But to my mind she was saying Kai Jing’s tragedy was greater than that of others simply because he had been born more pleasing to the eye. How could Sister Yu, of all people, think such a thing? If a rich man loses his house, is that worse than if a poor man loses his?
I asked an older girl about this, and she said, “What a stupid question. Of course! The handsome and the rich have more to lose.” Yet this did not seem right to me.
I thought of Precious Auntie. Like Kai Jing, she had been born with a natural beauty, and then her face was ruined. I heard people say all the time, “How terrible to have a face like that. It would have been better if she had died.” Would I have felt the same if I had not loved her? I thought of the blind beggar girl. Who would miss her?
Suddenly I wanted to find that beggar girl. She could talk to Precious Auntie for me. She could tell me where she was. Was she wandering in the End of the World or was she stuck in the vinegar jar? And what about the curse? Would it find me soon? If I died this moment, who would miss me in this world? Who would welcome me in the next?
When the weather was good, Teacher Pan took us older girls to the quarry at Dragon Bone Hill. He was proud to do so, because his son was one of the geologists. The quarry had started as a cave like the one that belonged to Precious Auntie’s family, but when I saw it, it was a giant pit about one hundred fifty feet deep. From top to bottom and side to side, the walls and floor had been painted with white lines, so that it looked like a giant’s fishnet had been placed inside. “If a digger finds a piece of an animal, a person, or a hunting tool,” Kai Jing explained to us, “he can write down that it came from this square of the quarry and not that one. We can calculate the age of the piece by where it was found, the eighth layer being the oldest. And then the scientists can go back to that spot and dig some more.”
We girls always brought thermoses of tea and smal
l cakes for the scientists, and when they saw us arrive, they quickly climbed up from the bottom, refreshed themselves, and said with grateful sighs, “Thank you, thank you. I was so thirsty I thought I would turn into another one of these dried-up bones.” Every now and then, a rickshaw made its way up the steep road, and a pipe-smoking foreigner with thick glasses stepped out and asked if anything new had been found. Usually the scientists pointed this way and that, and the man with glasses nodded but seemed disappointed. But sometimes he became very excited, and sucked on his pipe faster and faster as he talked. Then he got back in the rickshaw and went down the hill, where a shiny black car would be waiting to take him back to Peking. If we ran to a lookout point on the hill, we could see to the far end of the flat basin, and there was the black car, running along the narrow road, sending up streams of dust.
When winter came, the scientists had to hurry before the ground grew too hard and the season of digging came to an end. They let some of us girls climb down and help put the dug-up dirt in boxes, or repaint the white lines on the quarry floor, or carefully sift what had already been sifted ten times. We were not allowed in any of the places where there were ropes—that was where human bones had been found. To an inexperienced eye, it was easy to mistake the bones for rocks or bits of pottery, but I knew the difference from all those times I had collected bones with Precious Auntie. I also knew that Peking Man was the bones not just from one person, but from many—men, women, children, babies. The pieces were small, not enough to make even one whole person. I did not say these things to the other girls. I did not want to show off. So like them, I helped only where the scientists said we could be, where there were mostly animal bones, deer horns, and turtle shells.