It’s getting dark now. I must get back to my husband. Before leaving, I dig through my carrying basket, pull out the hidden pouch, and offer some money to Deh-ja. At first she doesn’t want to take it, but I insist.
“When—if—San-pa and I come this way again, may I visit?”
“Of course. And if you ever encounter Ci-do . . .” She juts her chin, and the light in her eyes fades.
“But we found each other,” I respond, wishing good omens for her. “Anything can happen.”
She walks me to the edge of the village. “Be careful,” she says before disappearing back into the jungle.
I find San-pa, sitting on the ground, sound asleep, his head resting on his folded arms. I have a hard time waking him. He slowly nods at me, trying to bring me into focus, as if he’s still dreaming. No. I understand now. He’s found someone to sell him opium as anyone suffering from grief might seek out my a-ma for the same dulling remedy. I don’t need to question him about it. To my eyes, he’s far more upset about Yan-yeh and the whole turn of events than I could have imagined. I love him for that, and I understand his need to numb his sorrow. I’ve had months to try to accept the loss of our daughter. He’s had days. Later, after we’ve made camp, I reach out to him. I don’t enjoy the intercourse, but it’s something I must do to quiet my emptiness and help my husband too. Bring me a baby. Let it be a son.
The next morning, we continue south. We ford what San-pa says is the Nam Loi River. He tells me we’ve gone too far east when we reach the Mekong River. We work our way back into the dense greenery, staying out of sight, but keeping the river to our right. The border into Thailand? I don’t know when we reach it. I don’t know when we cross it. We’re on just another trail snaking through the creeping vines and densely growing trees as wild animals call their indignation at our presence.
On the last day of our journey, we begin to encounter other travelers. I can’t identify the dress or language of the tribal people; and I really don’t understand the language or ways of the native Thai. At one point, San-pa, who’s walked ahead of me the entire way, abruptly stops. He’s always been a good hunter and he cocks his head, listening intently to the jungle sounds. When he sniffs the air, I’m instantly petrified. Has he caught the scent of a tiger? He turns to me, his eyes sharp, his jaw tight.
“Run!”
I bound off the path and up a steep slope. San-pa catches me, pulls me up the hill with him, and yanks me down to hide in the undergrowth. I try to swallow my panting breaths, knowing that tigers are the greatest hunters of all with their sensitive ears. But no tiger would make this much noise stalking through the jungle. Soon a group of men, talking in subdued voices, tramp down the path. Next to me, San-pa crouches, one hand pressing down on my shoulder, keeping me hidden, the other holding his knife, blade out, ready to defend me. The men cannot be hill people or they would have noticed our fresh footprints. Only when the sounds from the caravan subside does San-pa loosen his grip on me. As he does, my body rises just a little—released—and I peer down the trail to see the last of a chain of men dressed in military fatigues, some carrying baskets on their shoulders, others swinging machine guns from left to right.
“I know them,” my husband whispers, his voice rough. “You are not allowed to go anywhere near those people. You understand?”
Roger Siegel, M.D.
Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA
August 5, 1996
Sheldon Katz, M.D.
800 Fairmount Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91105
RE: HALEY DAVIS
Dear Sheldon,
Thank you again for referring the above named patient, estimated DOB 11/24/95. Records indicate that she has now been my patient since 4/20/96. To review: Family medical history is limited, as we have no prenatal or delivery information from the birth mother. The adoptive parents, Constance and Dan Davis, went through IVF and IUI, with no success. Father is an arborist, whose clients include Caltech, the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, as well as estates around Southern California. Mother is a professor of biology at Caltech. They reside at 2424 Hummingbird Lane in Pasadena. Parents chose adoption from China to minimize the risk of birth parents showing up and asking for their daughter back. Parents were told there were two hundred couples ahead of them on the China waiting list.
Parents took classes on adoption procedures and potential pitfalls. They gathered letters of reference, composed a personal essay, provided financial details and proof of employment. Parents were examined by their personal physicians, fingerprinted, and met with a county social worker on three occasions, where they detailed physical and mental health problems, thoughts about children, and their relationships to their respective parents (living and deceased), as well as past lovers. They chose Bright Beginnings as their adoption agency. They were told the patient would cost approximately $20,000, including travel expenses.
Parents received paperwork listing the baby as four months old. The adoption agency told Mother, “You get what China feels like giving you. There is no negotiating. No second chances. This one or none.” My initial examination on 4/20/96 suggested that patient was considerably younger than her reported age, as she weighed just ten pounds. As you know, patient presented as extremely malnourished and sick. She could not hold up her head or roll over by herself.
Parents were part of a group of six couples to pick up babies in Kunming, China. Parents came prepared with diapers, baby food and formula, energy bars, toys, clothing, and graham crackers. They were told to bring $5,000 in crisp $100 bills, of which $3,000 was given to the orphanage director as a cash donation. The babies were brought to a hotel and handed out “seemingly randomly.” Mother states she is unsure if she got “the right one.” Father describes all the babies as being filthy. Many had lice. (Patient did not.) Parents were instructed not to wash patient or clothes she came in, because familiar smells would be helpful for transition. This no doubt exacerbated patient’s impetigo and scabies.
From Kunming, family flew to Canton (Guangzhou) to pick up an exit visa for patient at the U.S. consulate. On the flight to Los Angeles, patient turned blue and stopped breathing. An EMT on board performed CPR and monitored her progress until landing. Baby was first seen at Centinela Hospital Medical Center near the airport. Patient’s parents had her transferred to Huntington Hospital near their home and your office in Pasadena. Patient was diagnosed with antibiotic-resistant Clostridium difficile and nearly died a second time. You referred her to me. I admitted her to our pediatric intensive care unit.
Clearly, patient had been in the presence of infected fecal matter, unclean water, and unsanitary food supply. Diagnoses of Ascaris lumbricoides, Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia intestinalis, Helicobacter pylori, Sarcoptes scabiei followed. I’m treating the roundworms with mebendazole. The other intestinal parasites have been harder to address given the limitations caused by the ongoing protocol for her C. diff. Although she has been moved down to specialized care, morbidity rates are high for each condition, especially in a patient so young and immunocompromised. While I explained to parents that I cannot be confident of recovery, I hope you will more fully prepare them for the worst.
I will keep you posted as to patient’s progress.
Sincerely,
Roger Siegel
P.S. Would you and Millie like to drive out our way one evening for dinner? It’s been ages.
PEACE, QUIET, AND SANCTUARY
This morning, as every morning, I meet neighbor women, and together—safe in a group—we forage for wild yams, mushrooms, and birds’ eggs in the mountains. I like Wife-of-Ah-joe, Wife-of-Shaw-kah, and Wife-of-Za-po. They’ve held me when I cry from homesickness and for the sorrow of my life, which has not turned out as I imagined. Recently, however, Wife-of-Ah-joe, the strongest and eldest of us, has become impatient with me. “Wife-of-San-pa, do you think your story is worse than mine? Have you suffered more than any other woman in this buffalo sputum village?” She is right, of course.
San-pa and I have been here three months. When he came to get me, he told A-ba that he’d gone away to earn money, not that he’d made much money. Only when we arrived in Thailand did he confess that he’d counted on my taking the gaokao for our future. “Now your wedding cash will have to do,” he said. I gave it and the money I earned from Mr. Huang to San-pa. He used it to rent a plot for us to build a small bamboo and thatch house barely larger than a newlywed hut, without even space beneath our floor to protect chickens and pigs, if we had them. But he hunted, keeping us well fed, and he promised to look for a job soon. He continued to lament the loss of our daughter, but we sought the remedy for that sadness by doing the intercourse almost nightly, fully naked, staring into each other’s eyes, trying to make another baby. But by the end of one Akha cycle—twelve days—I understood exactly where San-pa had brought me.
The Akha who live in Thailand have strayed so far outside our culture and so against nature that we’re under constant threat. Here, we are the poorest of the hill tribes. We aren’t allowed Thai citizenship. We can’t own property. We’re at the mercy of developers who can confiscate land we’ve slashed, burned, and planted. We can also be displaced by soldiers, businessmen, and drug runners on a whim. The first time I heard the words Golden Triangle, I understood the darkness of this place. I remembered when San-pa and I saw the men with their machine guns and mysterious baskets the day before we arrived here. He knew who those men were and what they were carrying. He tried to protect me, but I wish he had warned me of the world we were entering before we left Nannuo Mountain. How could he have ever thought this was a place to bring me or our daughter? When I asked him this question, he answered, “We had to conceal your disgrace, and I knew I could get work here.” When I asked why he didn’t have a job, he looked at the ground and turned away from me.
Over the next few weeks, San-pa stopped hunting and chopping firewood. I reminded him of old sayings: If you work hard, you will eat easy. If you work easy, you will eat hard. He responded with the words from a love song that dates back to the time of our great-grandparents: True lovers will love each other unto death. Even if both are buried alive, they will not be afraid. This did not give me confidence. Without money or food, we were, I realized, poorer than my family was when I was a little girl. Hunger, familiar as an old friend, began to gnaw at my insides. I’ve lost weight, but I’m still not as thin as my husband. “Does your stomach speak to you too?” I asked him one night as we lay together on our sleeping mat. When he didn’t answer, I believed he was in his dreams. By dawn, I thought better of asking such a question again.
No wife wants to poke at her husband’s manliness with a sharp snout, but I couldn’t help myself. Every time I ask him to pick up his crossbow, he comes back at me with inquiries weighted by two different thoughts spread apart: “Why didn’t you perform the rite?” or “Why did you abandon our baby?” With either question, he had the answer: “You cursed and ruined us.” This was his grief speaking, and I caused it. When he began to steal away into the jungle and not return for a day or two, I blamed myself for that too. Such sadness I have brought to my husband.
This morning, I asked why he’d married me. He answered, “You were supposed to change my fortune. You were supposed to grow from the number one girl to the number one woman. The first from Nannuo Mountain to go to university. The first to be a leader of women. With me standing proudly at your side.” With a chill, I remembered San-pa’s moment of hesitation when he heard that I hadn’t taken the test. As if reading my thoughts, he added, “I was trying to be honorable. I was to marry the number one girl, but I ended up the number one fool. Now all we can do is hide from your mistakes.” My mouth could not form a response. The worst part? Everything he said was true.
Now, as I dig up a mountain tuber with the tip of my knife, I try to think of ways to bring him back to the person he was. Have a son. Have a son. Have a son. Make your husband happy. He will love you again.
After our hunt for food, my friends and I return to the village, change into our wedding attire with our glorious headdresses, and meet at the spirit gate, where we join other women similarly outfitted. We’re supposed to be watching the mountain path for the arrival of our daily visitors, but we’re also casting wary looks at the skinny men who lounge before their huts. They need to disappear before our guests get here.
I grew up believing that opium was for rituals and medicine only, but on my first day in this village I saw that some men smoked it for pleasure. Many cycles later, when my friends and I were looking in the jungle for thatch to reinforce our roofs, I found a syringe. When I showed it to Wife-of-Ah-joe, she batted it out of my hand. “Don’t ever touch one of those! They’re used by men who cook opium into a liquid to inject in their veins.” I thought, Why would an Akha do such a thing? Sadly, I already knew the answer: no future. Opium and heroin had not caused our poverty and hopelessness. Rather, poverty and hopelessness had brought about an unquenchable desire to forget.
After that, Wife-of-Ah-joe took me to the village ruma. He warned me about our men working for the drug traffickers. He told me about husbands selling their wives and fathers selling their daughters into prostitution to earn money to buy drugs. He explained that after Chairman Mao took over China, the imperialist West—America—sponsored the Nationalists in the mountains of Thailand. Those men stayed and began to cultivate opium. By the time of the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied half the world’s heroin. “You are now living in the midst of that,” he told me wearily. It was nearly impossible to believe. Be grateful, I told myself. San-pa may not have a job, but at least he doesn’t work for the drug men.
The announcement of our guests’ arrival comes first through our feet—thud, thud, thud. A toothless woman helps her grown son, sick with a disease that comes from the needles, into the privacy of their hut. As the sounds of thrashing and honking reach us, followed by laughter and chatter in languages none of us comprehend, other men sidle wordlessly into the jungle. The lead elephant comes into view, his immense body swaying delicately from side to side, his trunk constantly searching. A handler, bare feet dangling, perches between the elephant’s ears. Behind him, white foreigners sit on a painful-looking platform shaded by a canopy: tourists. (The first time I saw a foreigner, I thought it must be a spirit, for no one living could be that tall, white, or fat. Fatter than pictures of Chairman Mao. Fatter than Mr. Huang. So fat that sometimes I even worry for the elephants, which is silly, I know.) Once all the elephants have been tethered and the tourists helped down—with much laughter and cameras snapping—my friends and I approach.
“You want to buy?”
“You want to buy?”
“You want to buy?”
We’ve learned the English words, which all foreigners—no matter where they’re from—understand. To tourists like these, we sell woven pouches for their sunglasses, laptops, and cellphones. Sometimes sophisticated buyers—who call themselves dealers—come, and they wheedle us to sell our wedding headdresses, embroidered tunics, silver-adorned breastplates, and our baby carriers woven and decorated with special charms and good wishes, representing all the love a mother can give.
A huge man shouts at me and waves his camera in my face. Garble, garble, garble.
“Photo five baht,” I recite in English.
I pose with him, then with a family from America with two sour-faced sons, then with an elderly couple with gray hair, sunhats, and legs so white I can see the veins under the surface of their flesh. I secretly hope that one day a tourist family will arrive with an Akha child in the wife’s arms. Yan-yeh would be almost a year old now.
I go home with fifty baht, my minuscule earnings from posing and selling, which is not enough to live on if your husband isn’t hunting or working. At least I’m not a beggar. No Akha anywhere has ever become a beggar. Always keep your pride, I remind myself as I hide half the money where San-pa will never find it—not with my clothes or even with my cookware, not anywhere he wo
uld suspect me of concealing something of value. I hide it at the bottom of his carrying basket with his belongings.
When San-pa arrives, he demands that I give him what I earned. “I need it. Give it, Wife.” When I don’t hand over what he considers should be the full amount, he makes other impossible requests. “Give me your bracelets. Give me your headdress. I’ll sell the silver.”
I try reason. “If I don’t have those, then the foreigners won’t want to take my picture. If they don’t take my picture, then how will we have money to eat?”
The look on his face tells me I’ve gone too far.
“You know what happens to wives if they don’t obey,” he says in a low voice. “It can happen this quick!” He brings his hands together for a single loud clap. I can’t believe he’d beat me, but three months ago I wouldn’t have believed I’d be as hungry as I am now. I give him the money from my pocket. I’ll use coins from his carrying basket to buy rice and oil.
Later, on our sleeping mat, he nuzzles against me. “Forgive me, dear one,” he whispers tenderly. We do the intercourse, and he’s as gentle as ever. But afterward, when he slinks out the door to smoke his pipe, I’m left with suspicions. He never tells me how he spends what I give him. Maybe he loses it gambling. Maybe he purchases rice liquor or a woman’s time. Maybe he buys opium. But he couldn’t be taking opium, because I would have noticed. Or maybe that’s why he stays away for days at a time. To recover before coming home. I reject the idea. He wouldn’t do that to me. Soon, though, my mistrust returns. He did it that time in Deh-ja’s village . . .
I go outside and ask directly: “Have you tried opium again?”
His eyes become hooded. “On rare occasions,” he admits, “when I want to get away from the misery of my life.”