One day the wretch called me to his office. Other women who worked in the hospital were afraid to be in his office. But not me. I kept a little dagger handy, and wouldn’t have hesitated to use it on the bastard. Well, he poured tea, smiled, and laid it on thick. What did you want to see me about, Director Huang? Let’s get to the point.
Heh-heh. He grinned. Great Gugu – damned if he didn’t call me Great Gugu – you delivered me the day I was born, and you’ve watched me grow into adulthood. Why, I could be your own son. Heh-heh . . .
I don’t deserve such an honour, I said. You’re the director of a big hospital, while I’m just an ordinary obstetrician. If you were my son I’d die from the honour. So, please, tell me what you have in mind. More heh-heh-hehing, before he got around to revealing the shameless reason he’d summoned me. I’ve made the mistake all leading cadres make sooner or later – through my own carelessness Wang Xiaomei got pregnant. Congratulations! I said. Now that Xiaomei is carrying your dragon seed, the hospital is guaranteed leadership continuity. Don’t mock me, Great Gugu, I’ve been so upset the past few days I can’t eat or sleep. Can you believe the bastard actually said he had trouble eating and sleeping? She’s demanding that I divorce my wife, and if I won’t she’s threatened to report me to the County Discipline Commission. Really? I said. I thought having second wives was popular among you officials these days. Buy a villa, install her in it, and you’ve got it made. I asked you not to make fun of me, Great Gugu, he said. I couldn’t go public with a second or a third wife. Besides, where would I get the money to buy a villa? Then go ahead and get a divorce, I said. He pulled that donkey face longer than ever and said, Great Gugu, you know full well that my father-in-law and those pig-butcher brothers-in-law of mine are violent thugs. They wouldn’t hesitate to butcher me if they found out about this. But you’re the Director, an official! All right, that’s enough, Great Gugu. In your old eyes the director of a hospital in a piddling, out-of-the-way town is about as important as a loud fart, so instead of mocking me, why don’t you help me come up with something! What in the world could I come up with? Wang Xiaomei admires you, he said. She’s told me that many, many times. You’re the only person she’ll listen to. What do you want me to do? Talk her into having an abortion. Melon Huang, I protested through clenched teeth, I’ll never again soil my hands with that atrocious act! Over the course of my life I’ve been responsible for more than two thousand aborted births, and I’ll never do it again. Just wait until you’re a father. Xiaomei is such a pretty girl, she’s bound to present you with a lovely boy or girl, and that should make you happy. You go tell her that when the time comes, I’ll be there to deliver the child.
With that, I turned on my heel and walked out of the office pleased with myself. But that feeling lasted only till I was back in my own office and had drunk a glass of water. My mood turned dark. No one as bad as Melon Huang deserved to have an heir, and what a shame it was that Wang Xiaomei was carrying his child. I’d learned enough from delivering all those children to know that a person’s core – good or bad – is determined more by nature than nurture. You can criticise hereditary laws all you want, but this is knowledge based on experience. You could place a son of that evil Melon Huang in a Buddhist temple, and he’d grow up to be a lascivious monk. No matter how sorry I felt for Wang Xiaomei, I would not put ideas in her head; I simply couldn’t let that fiend find an easy way out of his predicament. If the world had another lascivious monk, so be it. But in the end I helped her abort the baby she was carrying.
Xiaomei herself came to me, wrapped her arms around my legs, and dirtied my trousers with her tears and snot. Gugu, she sobbed, dear Gugu, he tricked me, he lied to me. I wouldn’t marry that bastard if he sent an eight-man sedan chair for me. Help me do it, Gugu, I don’t want that evil seed in me.
So that’s how it was. Gugu lit another cigarette and puffed on it savagely, until I couldn’t see her face for all the smoke. I helped rid her of the foetus. Once a rose about to bloom, Wang Xiaomei was now ruined, a fallen woman. Gugu reached up and dried her tears. I vowed to never do that procedure again, I couldn’t take it any longer, not for anyone, not even if the woman was carrying the offspring of a chimpanzee. The slurping sound as it was sucked into the vacuum bottle was like a monstrous hand squeezing my heart, harder and harder, until I broke out in a cold sweat and began to see stars. The moment I finished I crumpled to the floor.
You’re right, I do digress when I’m talking – I’m old. After all that chatter, I still haven’t told you why I married Hao Dashou. Well, I announced my retirement on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, but that bastard Melon Huang wanted to keep me around and urged me to formally retire but remain on the payroll at eight hundred yuan a month. I spat in his face. I’ve slaved enough for you, you bastard. You have me to thank for eight out of every ten yuan this hospital has earned all these years. When women and girls come to the hospital from all around, it’s me they’ve come to see. If money was what I was after, I could have made at least a thousand a day on my own. Do you really think you can buy my labour for eight hundred a month, Melon Huang? A migrant worker is worth more than that. I’ve slaved away half my life, and now it’s time for me to rest, to go back home to Northeast Gaomi Township. He was upset with me and has spent much of the past two years trying to make me suffer. Me, suffer? I’m a woman who’s seen it all. As a little girl I wasn’t scared of the Jap devils, so what made him think I was scared of a little bastard like him now that I was in my seventies? Right, right, back to what I was saying.
If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends hosted a restaurant banquet on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk – I hadn’t drunk much, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ’63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye – to honour me, he said – but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.
Gugu said she staggered out of the restaurant, headed for the hospital dormitory, but wound up in a marshy area on a narrow, winding path bordered on both sides by head-high reeds. Reflected moonlight shimmered like glass on the water. The croaks of toads and frogs sounded first on one side and then on the other, back and forth, like an antiphonal chorus. Then the croaks came at her from all sides at the same time, waves and waves of them merging to fill the sky. Suddenly, there was total silence, broken only by the chirping of insects. Gugu said that in all her years as a medical provider, travelling up and down remote paths late at night, she’d never once felt afraid. But that night she was terror-stricken. The croaking of frogs is often described in terms of drumbeats. But that night it sounded to her like human cries, almost as if thousands of newborn infants were crying. That had always been one of her favourite sounds, she said. For an obstetrician, no sound in the world approaches the soul-stirring music of a newborn baby’s cries. But the cries that night were infused with a sense of resentment and of grievance, as if the souls of countless murdered infants were hurling accusations. The liquor she’d drunk, she said, left her body as cold sweat. Don’t assume I was drunk and hallucinating, because as soon as the liquor oozed out through my pores, leaving me with a slight headache, my mind was clear. As she walked down the muddy path, all she wanted was to escape that croaking. But how? No matter how hard she tried to get away, the chilling croak–croak–croak sounds of aggrieved crying ensnared her from all sides. She tried to run, but couldn’t; the gummy surface of the path stuck to the soles of her shoes, and it was a chore even to lift a foot, snapping the silvery threads that held her shoes to the surface of the path. But as soon as she put her foot down, more threads were formed. So she took off her shoes to walk in her bare feet, but that actually increased the grip of the mud, as if the silvery threads created suckers that attached themselves to the
bottoms of her feet, so powerful they could rip the skin right off. Gugu said she got down on her hands and knees, like an enormous frog, and began to crawl. Now the mud stuck to her knees and calves and hands, but she didn’t care, she just kept crawling. It was at that moment, she said, when an incalculable number of frogs hopped out of the dense curtain of reeds and from lily pads that shimmered in the moonlight. Some were jade green, others were golden yellow; some were as big as an electric iron, others as small as date pits. The eyes of some were like nuggets of gold, those of others, red beans. They came upon her like ocean waves, enshrouding her with their angry croaks, and it felt as if all those mouths were pecking at her skin, that they had grown nails to scrape it. When they hopped onto her back, her neck and her head, their weight sent her sprawling onto the muddy path. Her greatest fear, she said, came not from the constant pecking and scratching, but from the disgusting, unbearable sensation of their cold, slimy skin brushing against hers. They drenched me in urine, or maybe it was semen. She said she was suddenly reminded of a legend her grandmother had told her about a seducing frog: A maiden cooling herself on a riverbank one night fell asleep and dreamed of a liaison with a young man dressed in green. When she awoke she was pregnant and eventually gave birth to a nest of frogs. Given an explosion of energy by that terrifying image, she jumped to her feet and shed the frogs on her body like mud clods. But not all – some clung to her clothes and to her hair; two even hung by their mouths from the lobes of her ears, a pair of horrific earrings. As she took off running, Gugu sensed that somehow the mud was losing its sucking power, and as she ran she shook her body and tore at her clothes and skin with both hands. She shrieked each time she caught one of the frogs, which she flung away. The two attached to her ears like suckling infants nearly took some of the skin with them when she pulled them off.
Gugu screamed and ran, but could not break free of the amphibian horde. And when she turned to look, the sight nearly drove the soul out of her body. Thousands, tens of thousands of frogs had formed a mighty army behind her, croaking, hopping, colliding, crowding together, like a murky torrent rushing madly towards her. As she ran, roadside frogs hopped into the path, forming barriers to block her progress, while others leaped out of the reedy curtain in individual assaults. She told us that the loose-fitting black silk skirt she was wearing that night was being shredded by the sneak attack. Frogs that swallowed the strips of silk were thrown into a frenzy of cheek-scraping from choking before they rolled on the ground and exposed their white underbellies.
She ran all the way to a riverbank, where she spotted a little stone bridge washed by silvery moonlight. By then hardly anything remained of her skirt, and when she reached the bridge, nearly naked, she ran into Hao Dashou.
Thoughts of modesty did not enter my mind at that moment, nor was I aware that I’d been stripped naked. I spotted a man in a palm-bark rain cape and a bamboo coned hat sitting in the middle of the bridge kneading something that shimmered in his hands. I later learned he was kneading a lump of clay. A moon child can only be made from clay bathed in moonlight. I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t care. Whoever he was, he was bound to be my saviour. She rushed into the man’s arms and crawled under his rain cape, and when her breasts came into contact with the warmth of his chest, in contrast to the damp, foul-smelling chill of the frogs on her back, she cried out, Help, Big Brother, save me! She promptly passed out.
Gugu’s extended narration called up images of frog hordes in our minds and sent chills up and down our spines. The camera cut to Hao Dashou, who still sat like a statue; the next scenes were close-ups of clay figures and of the little stone bridge, before returning to Gugu’s face, focusing on her mouth as she continued her story.
I awoke to find myself on Hao Dashou’s brick bed, dressed in men’s clothes. He handed me a bowl of mung bean soup, the simple fragrance of which cleared my head. I was sweating after a single bowlful, and was suddenly aware that I felt painfully hot all over. That cold, slimy feeling that had made me scream was fading. I had itchy, painful blisters all over my body, I spiked a fever, and was delirious. But I’d passed an ordeal by drinking Hao Dashou’s mung bean soup; I’d shed a layer of skin, and my bones ached dully. I’d heard a legend about rebirth, and I knew I’d become a new person. When I regained my health, I said to him: Big Brother, let’s get married.
When she reached this point, Gugu’s face was awash with tears.
The program continued with an account of how Gugu and Hao Dashou together produced clay dolls. With her eyes closed, she said to Hao, whose eyes were also closed and who was holding a lump of clay in his hands: This child’s name is Guan Xiaoxiong. His father is five feet, ten inches tall, has a rectangular face with a broad chin, single-fold eyelids, big ears, a fleshy nose tip, and a low bridge. His mother is five feet ten, has a long neck, a pointed chin, high cheekbones, double-fold lids, big eyes, a pointed nose tip, and a high bridge. The child is three parts father and seven parts mother . . . In the midst of Gugu’s verbal portrait, Guan Xiaoxiong was born in Hao Dashou’s hands. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. His features were crisp and clear, but he wore a hard-to-describe doleful expression that brought me to tears.
5
I accompanied Little Lion on a visit to the Sino-American Jiabao Women and Children’s Hospital. She had wanted to work there, but had no one to open the door.
My first impression as we stepped into the lobby was that it looked more like an elite private club than a hospital. Cool breezes from the air-conditioning system took the bite out of a midsummer day. The background music was pleasant and relaxing, the fragrance of fresh flowers surrounded us. Inlaid in the wall facing us was the hospital’s logo in light blue and eight oversized words in pink:
Say Yes to Life, Embrace Trust and Hope.
Two lovely young women in nurse’s outfits with little white caps welcomed guests with broad smiles, bows and soft voices.
A middle-aged woman in a nurse’s outfit, wearing a pair of white-framed glasses, walked up to us. May I help you, sir, madam? she asked cordially.
No, thank you, we’re just here to look around.
She invited us into a waiting room to the right of the lobby. The room was furnished with a large wicker table and chairs, a simple bookshelf filled with glossy obstetrics-related magazines, and a tea table on which fancy brochures introducing the hospital were laid out.
After filling two glasses from a water fountain for us, she smiled and left us alone.
As I thumbed through the material, I came across the image of a middle-aged female doctor with a bright forehead, long curving eyebrows, friendly eyes, frameless glasses, white, even teeth and a beatific smile. A photo ID was pinned to her breast. Text above her left shoulder read: The Sino-American Jiabao Women and Children’s Hospital is the modern obstetrics hospital of your dreams. The cold atmosphere of other hospitals is absent here, replaced by warmth, harmony, sincerity, and a sense of family. You will experience true royal treatment . . . text above her right shoulder read: We abide strictly to the international medical standards set forth in the Geneva Convention of 1948, practising medicine with scruples and dignity. Our patients’ health takes precedence over everything else, and we take pains to maintain patient confidentiality. We strive to protect the lofty reputation and noble traditions of the medical field . . .
I sneaked a look at Little Lion, who seemed to be frowning as she skimmed a hospital brochure.
I turned the page. An obstetrician whose look inspired confidence was measuring the mounded, shiny abdomen of a pregnant woman. She had long lashes, a high nose bridge, lovely lips, and a ruddy face; absent was the gaunt, weary look of most pregnant women. A line of text across the doctor’s arm and atop the woman’s abdomen read: We maintain the deepest respect for life beginning at the moment of conception.
A man of medium build and thinning hair, dressed in brand-name casual wear, stepped briskly into the lobby. His self-assured airs and slight paunch told me that he was a
person of position, if not a high official, then a man of wealth. Of course, he could have been both. He had his arm around a tall, slim young woman whose goose egg yellow silk skirt swished back and forth as she walked. My heart skipped a beat. It was Xiao Bi, the office manager at the bullfrog farm run by Yuan Sai and my cousin, the multi-talented Xiao Bi. I quickly lowered my head and held the brochure up to cover most of my face.
I turned to the next page, where, in the white space to the right and below a beautiful swollen abdomen, five naked infants sat in a row. Their heads were all turned to the left, a hint that someone off the page was playing with them. Round heads and puffy cheeks formed an adorable arc. Though their expressions were hidden, the arc itself formed an innocent smile. The hair on three of the heads was thin, the other two thick and full, black on two, golden yellow on one, and light yellow on the other two. All had large, fleshy ears, a sign of good fortune. Having their photographs in the brochure was a blissful sign of being favoured. They looked to be about five months old, barely able to sit up, their waists still sort of twisted. They were fat and round as little piglets, their protruding belly buttons visible under the folds of their arms. Their bottoms were flattened out, the two cheeks squeezed together, separated by a cute little crack. A dozen lines of text appeared to their left: