I follow San-pa on mountain path after mountain path. Up. Down. Up. Down. My mind is deadened from heartbreak. San-pa keeps his thoughts to himself. He’s barely spoken to me since I fainted in the Social Welfare Institute. A few times a day, he wordlessly flicks his fingers at me—Stay!—before disappearing off the path and leaving me alone with my anguish. I’m a wife now, and I must grow accustomed to his male ways, but I worry he won’t come back and I’ll be lost out here, alone, forever. While I wait, I mark a tree or build a stack of rocks, just in case. But he always returns, jittery and anxious or sleepy and lethargic. I’ve been married only a few days, so what do I know? Maybe A-ba was like this to A-ma when they first wed.
We reach Daluo, on the border between Yunnan and Myanmar. San-pa asks some men if there’s been any recent movement along the border because we don’t have papers, but nothing has changed since he last passed this way. After we make our camp back in the jungle, he sits down across from me.
“Wife, we must forget the human reject. We’ll have more children.”
He’s trying to be kind and soothe my pain, but how can I forget Yan-yeh? I lost her once, and suffered. I had hope, and then I lost her again. She’s so far away now, it’s as if she’s dead. That knowledge—sharp as a knife—twists in my heart, doubling, tripling, the pain I had when I abandoned her.
When San-pa says, “We should start right now, trying to make another baby,” I turn away from him and weep into the crook of my arm. When I recite, “No wife should deny her husband in the first cycle of married life,” he wordlessly accepts the depth of my guilt.
The next morning, “Wake up! Wake up! Let’s go!” We traverse thick jungle—reeking with rot, heavy with humidity, and empty of people. At some point we pass an unmarked border and travel on to our first Myanmar village, where San-pa leaves me to buy supplies. I’m standing in the path that divides the village, staring at nothing, my mind with my baby and her “new parents in America,” when a woman’s voice speaks my name. “Li-yan.” My eyes try to focus. I see a woman in filthy rags. Her face is thin and worn. It’s Deh-ja, and it’s been eight years since she and Ci-do were forced out of Spring Well for having human rejects.
“Are you real?” I ask. “Is it you?”
“I shouldn’t have spoken.” She lowers her eyes, humiliated for me to see her in such abysmal circumstances. “Forget you saw me.”
“Forget?” My body surges with sudden urgency. “Destiny—my a-ma would call it coincidence—has brought us together, for only you can understand what I’m feeling now.” I glance down the path that separates this hideously poor village. “Where is Ci-do?”
Instead of answering, she takes hold of my arm—more forcefully than is necessary—and pulls me with her to the right, past a few molting chickens and a single house, and into the jungle, where ruthless greenery instantly swallows us. Above us, a thick canopy of branches blocks the sky. Mosquitoes whine, and tropical birds screech. We reach a lean-to made of bamboo and thatch. A fire pit is dug in the ground before it. Trash has been tossed here and there. A few pieces of clothing hang from low branches. The person who lives here has no respect for nature or herself, and that person is Deh-ja. Together we squat on our haunches. How long will it be before San-pa wonders where I’ve gone?
“Did Ci-do go back to Spring Well?” Her eyes gleam with an unsettling combination of desperation and loyalty. When I tell her we have not seen him, she remains silent for a long while. “I hoped he’d gone home,” she says at last.
“What happened?”
“Where do I start?” she asks. “When my monkeys were born”—I wince at the euphemism for her human rejects—“no one would look at us. You know that Ci-do wasn’t allowed to wear his turban nor I my headdress. He didn’t carry a crossbow, and I had milk leaking from my breasts. It wasn’t hard for people to guess we’d been banished for having human rejects. We kept walking until we reached Thailand.”
“San-pa says life is good there.”
“You’re here with him?” she asks, surprised. Of course she’d remember the incident of the stolen pancake. “But how—”
“Finish your story, and I’ll tell you mine.”
She sighs. “Life for the Akha is bad in Thailand—”
“But San-pa says—”
“We circled back to Myanmar. We never entered a village, but we kept looking for one where we might be accepted. We built this place between this village and the next. The people here are all Akha, and I began to barter with them. My embroidery skills have always been praised, so I made pouches and kerchiefs, which I traded for eggs. Eventually, I was able buy Ci-do a crossbow—not as good as his old one, but he was always a good hunter and we no longer went to sleep hungry.”
In the distance, San-pa shouts, “Wife! Wife!” I don’t respond. A part of me hopes he’ll come looking for me, and yet I need Deh-ja’s advice.
“Tradition demanded we could not speak to anyone for twelve months,” she continues in a monotone, “so we gestured and grunted to make ourselves understood. One morning I woke up, and he was gone. That was seven years ago.”
I should offer comforting words. Instead, I weep at the inescapable brutality of fate. “I also had a human reject. I didn’t perform the rite. I took her to Menghai. Now San-pa and I are married, but she’s gone. To America.”
Deh-ja draws the back of her hand across her mouth. How can I know which part of the story shocks her most? That the little girl she once knew had a baby without marriage? That I didn’t rid the world of my human reject? That I gave her away?
“Wife! Wife!”
I ignore San-pa. I’m less than one full cycle married and already I’m disobedient.
Now it’s my turn to grab Deh-ja’s arm. She doesn’t pull away, but her muscles tense under my fingers. I’ve been through too much already. Leave me be.
“What do I do?” I ask. “How do I go on?”
Her laugh carries weariness and despair. “All you can do is live,” she says. “You don’t have a choice. Life continues whether we want it to or not. The sun will rise despite our suffering.” She pauses. Her eyes take in the meagerness of her surroundings. “Maybe this is better than nothing. Maybe this is all we deserve. No nima can find a cure for us. No ruma can mix a potion. But isn’t this better than no life at all? Isn’t it better than hearing the tree that represents me in the spirit world crash to the ground?”
I don’t want to accept her words, but a part of me knows she’s right. I remember that woman who had multiple stillborn babies but kept trying until one lived. And Deh-ja has been through the very worst that can happen to a woman and yet she’s still scraping by.