Frog

I began to sense something as I looked at the doll. Of course, I’d seen that face somewhere. But where? Who was it? Oh, my, it was Wang Dan’s daughter, Chen Mei, the girl Gugu and Little Lion took care of for nearly six months, but then had to turn over to her father, Chen Bi.

I still recall the evening Chen came to our house to retrieve his daughter — it was on the night we sent the Kitchen God off to report on the family, not long before New Year’s, with firecracker explosions and the smell of gunpowder in the air. Little Lion had filled out the paperwork to accompany me and had left her position with the commune health centre. I’d soon be taking her and Yanyan with me to Beijing. A two-room unit in a Beijing compound would be our new home. Father would not go with us, and was unwilling to move in to my older brother’s home in the county capital. He wanted to stay where he was. Fortunately, my second brother had a job in the township, close enough to take care of him.

After Wang Dan’s death, Chen Bi began to drown himself in liquor. He walked the streets, alternating between weeping and singing. People sympathised with him at first, but with the passage of time that turned to annoyance. Back when the pursuit of Wang Dan was on, Chen Bi’s savings had been used to pay the villagers’ wages. But after her death, most gave the money back to him. Additionally, the commune did not ask him to repay the money spent on him during his confinement. A conservative estimate put his savings at thirty thousand yuan, enough for him to spend on drink for several years. To all appearances, he had put out of his mind the child Gugu and Little Lion had taken to the health centre to fight for her life. In basic terms, his goal in subjecting Wang Dan to the dangers of a second pregnancy had been to produce a boy to carry on the family line, and when all the suffering and hardships in reaching that goal ended with the birth of another girl, he pounded himself in the head. The heavens have abandoned me! he wept bitterly.

Gugu named the child. Since she had a fresh, pretty face and a sister named Chen Er (Ear), she settled on Chen Mei (Eyebrow). Little Lion pronounced it to be a beautiful name.

Gugu and Little Lion thought seriously about raising the child on their own, but with the residence issue and the difficult procedures involved in adoption, when Chen Bi came and lifted her from Little Lion’s arms, she still had no resident status. In accordance with the laws of the People’s Republic of China, she did not exist, what is known as a ‘bootleg kid’. How many of those there were at the time no one could say, but the number had to be astonishingly high. The bootleg kid residence issue was finally resolved in 1990 during the Fourth Census. The income derived from fining the masses for illegal births reached astronomical heights, but how much of that money actually made it into the national coffers is too tangled an affair for anyone to sort out. And the number of bootleg kids the masses have produced over the past decade or so is certainly another astronomical figure. The fine for such births is now ten times greater than twenty years ago, and when the next census rolls around, we’ll see if the bootleg-kid parents can afford to pay the fines…

Back then, Little Lion’s motherly instincts were in full bloom. She held Chen Mei, showering her with kisses, hardly ever taking her eyes off her, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tried to nurse her, since her nipples looked funny — whether or not she could actually produce milk was hard to say, but such ‘miracles’ were said to have occurred. As a youngster I saw a play about a family in which the parents died tragically, leaving behind an eighteen-year-old daughter and her baby brother. Given no choice, she offered her virgin breasts to him, and in only a few days, milk oozed from her nipples. In the real world, such things are likely impossible these days. An eighteen-year-old girl with a nursing brother? Mother said it was common in old times for a woman and her mother-in-law to have children at the same time. Now? It could still happen. A girl in my daughter’s college class has a newborn baby sister. Her father, a coalmine owner who hires migrant workers under slave-like conditions, was immeasurably wealthy. People like that live in luxurious villas in Beijing, Shanghai, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Melbourne and Toronto with their mistresses, who produce babies for them.