I wish I could confide in Ci-teh, but she might let my secret slip by accident. I can’t seek advice from my sisters-in-law, because it would be their duty to tell their husbands, who would tell A-ba. When girls find themselves in my condition they go to one person for help. This is the one person I absolutely cannot tell. A-ma would be so angry with me; I’m too afraid and humiliated to consider confiding in her. I do my best to hide the evidence of my pregnancy under my day wear: plain leggings and a tunic designed to hide a woman’s procreating status. I don’t know what will happen. I can’t think what will happen.
For the next three cycles, everyone in Spring Well Village goes about their daily tasks—preparing the paddies for planting, pulling weeds from vegetable plots, and, for the women alone, spinning thread and weaving cloth to have material to sew and embellish when the rainy season starts. In addition, we have new responsibilities: to care for the tea trees so they’ll be improved when Mr. Huang returns. A-ma shows Third Brother how to prune his previously insignificant trees, straightening branches and trimming diseased or withered twigs and leaves. My first and second brothers ignore their bushed terraces and pollarded gardens, instead turning over and feeding the soil at the base of the old tea trees that dot their allotted lands. I go to my hidden grove—sometimes with A-ma, sometimes alone—to do the chores I inherited from the generations of women before me. Sometimes I sit under the mother tree and stare across the mountaintops. San-pa is out there somewhere. He must return soon.
* * *
A day comes when the sisters-in-law are inside weaving and A-ma and I are outside dyeing cloth in vats. A-ma is poking at the cloth with a stick, not even looking at me, when she says, “I see you’ve come to a head.”
“A-ma—”
“Don’t try to deny it. I may be your a-ma, but I’m not a fool. The three child-maker spirits that live in all women have released your water from the lake of children. You have a baby budding within you.”
All the worry I’ve held inside now pours out with my tears.
A-ma pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Girl. I have a potion to help you.”
I shake my head. “It’s too late for that.”
A-ma sighs. “How long?”
“Thirteen cycles.”
She accepts my assessment. “You’re not the first girl to have this happen. You’ll marry the boy. All will be fine.”
But when I reveal the father is San-pa, her eyes go as black and opaque as tar. “I told you . . . You were forbidden . . .” She purses her lips. “And he’s not even here to fix it . . .”
I’m crying hard now.
“You can still marry Law-ba,” A-ma suggests. “Take him to the Flower Room. Take him to the forest. Let him steal love. He’s not so clever, and you wouldn’t be the first girl I’ve advised to do such a thing—”
“But I love San-pa, and he loves me,” I sob. “He’ll come back. We’ll get married.”
“You’d better hope so,” A-ma says darkly. “Otherwise . . .”
She doesn’t need to say it: a human reject.
* * *
I stop going to school. No point.
Teacher Zhang himself comes to Spring Well to talk to my a-ma and a-ba. “She’s been my brightest student. She’s been the light that kept me going—”
But A-ba crows, triumphant. “At last she’s ready to prepare for being a wife.” Ha! What he means is he needs me to be here next spring and every spring after that when Mr. Huang returns to Nannuo Mountain.
Teacher Zhang doesn’t give up so easily. “She could still go to trade school. It’s a four-year program. I can secure a place for her at any time. She could become a secretary, typist, or clerk.”
Those are all jobs I’ve seen in school materials, but A-ba crushes the idea when he asks, “What use are those skills here?”
“Besides,” A-ma adds, “we cannot bear the idea that we would lose our daughter to the outside world. If she went away, she might never come home.”
By the time Teacher Zhang leaves, I’m fully back to helping A-ma.
* * *
The months pass. Every day I hope I’ll hear San-pa’s voice call to me in song across the mountain, reaching me long before I see him walk through our spirit gate.
“The flowers bloom at their peaks, waiting for the butterflies to come—”
I’ll sing back, “The honeycombs wait for the bees to make honey—”
But the melody never reaches me.
A-ma carries the burden of my secret. During our meals, she complains loudly to the rest of the family in an effort to explain my weight gain. “Girl thinks she’s risen above the rest of us now and eats all she wants. Look how fat she’s getting. When her tea benefactor returns they can act as two fat pigs together.” Later, she sneaks me extra vegetables. She also watches to make sure I don’t eat anything I shouldn’t. When First Brother comes home with a porcupine—a forbidden pregnancy food—he caught in a trap, A-ma orders me to help my sisters-in-law serve the meal instead of eating with my natal family. “If Girl is to become a proper wife,” she explains to A-ba, “then she should start learning what it means to be one.” When Second Brother butchers a barking deer he shot with his crossbow and discovers two forming fawns, A-ma sends me to Ci-teh’s house to visit for two days and nights for fear I too might have a litter. I gain very little weight. No more than five kilos. But should that minuscule weight gain spark the sisters-in-laws’ curiosity, despite everything A-ma has done to point them in other directions, she provides me with bloodied rags at the appropriate intervals. Where she gets the blood she doesn’t tell me.
Some taboos I cannot avoid. Under no circumstances may a woman return to her father’s home when she’s pregnant, since the other term we use for pregnancy—one who is living under another—clearly spells out I should be with my husband. It’s also forbidden for a girl’s a-ma to be present at the birth of a grandchild. If I were to give birth here attended by A-ma, then the men in my family would die for three generations and the rest of the family would suffer tragedies for nine generations. So A-ma and I have begun making plans for the birth in case San-pa doesn’t return in time.
“The killing of a human reject is a father’s responsibility,” A-ma whispers to me one night. “It is his duty and his sorrow, which is why he must always show anger at the baby for making him do such a terrible thing. But in cases such as yours, it falls to the mother to remove the human reject from the world of the living.”
This knowledge is crippling. I’m so numb with foreboding that I mix ash from the fire with ground rice husks as though I’m in one of the nima’s trances. A-ma uses her finger to swipe the paste out of my bowl and into a little box, which she tucks away with her other potions and medicines. From that moment, not a second goes by that I’m unaware of its presence. The box and its contents are tiny—just enough to fill the nostrils and mouth of a newborn—yet it looms, a growing shadow over everything I do.
Sometimes at night, lying on my sleeping mat with my palms spread underneath my tunic against my bare belly, I feel my baby jut its elbows and knees, as though it’s trying to touch my fingers. Deh-ja, Ci-teh’s ill-fated sister-in-law, used to chant, “Let it be a son. Let it be a son. Let it be a son.” My chanting is simpler. “San-pa, San-pa, San-pa.” No matter how far away he is, surely he must hear the call of my heart.
* * *