“He has a new wife and two children. Times change, but the stain on him from fathering human rejects will never be completely erased,” Ci-teh confides in an offhand manner. “It’s best for everyone that he and his family spend most of the year visiting the great sights our country has to offer.”
But for all her money, success, and power, she’s been unable to control or influence the child-maker spirits. She and Law-ba have three daughters and have broken with Akha naming practices to show their disappointment: Mah-caw (Go Find a Brother), Mah-law (Go Fetch a Brother), and Mah-zeu (Go Buy a Brother).
“Why haven’t you remarried?” she asks me another day when we sip tea in the bamboo pavilion she’s built to entertain her international buyers. “If a wife dies, a man can remarry in three months. When a husband dies, a woman must wait three years, but that has come and gone for you.”
Does she spout these old-fashioned aphorisms just to goad me? She’s obviously let go of many traditions herself, but our loving but contrary relationship is the same as ever. I give a bland answer. “I want to get ahead in life.” The reality is something murkier. I’ve been alone and lonely for eight years. I’ve blinded myself to the advertisements for online dating. I’ve also learned how to walk through parks and ignore the middle-aged mothers who approach me with photos of their sons and lists of their accomplishments and possessions: a bicycle, a motorcycle, or a car; living with parents, renting an apartment, or owning a condo. “You’re too old not to be married,” more than one mother has told me. Unasked, by the way. Then, “Please consider my son.” But I can’t allow myself to repeat the mistakes of the past. If I were ever to fall in love again, it would have to be with someone who’d be accepted by my family. Otherwise, too much heartbreak.
“Do you date?” Ci-teh persists, using the Western word. “Do you go to the movies and have noodles with men?”
“Most men don’t want to go out with an Akha,” I say, hoping to end the subject.
She nods knowingly. “You look so young, and you’re too quiet. You are tu, and not in an admirable way. What about stealing love in the forest while you’re here? Surely our men will overlook your faults, and you can have fun too.”
“I don’t want to steal love.”
She ignores that and asks, “What about a foreigner? You work in a hotel. Maybe you could marry one of them and move to America.”
I couldn’t do that either. It’s hard to explain to Ci-teh how it feels to be separated from the mountain, my family, and our customs—even though so much has changed.
She cocks her head, appraising me. “Have you become one of those women who hates men?”
As I look back at my years in Kunming, I can be grateful that, despite everything, I’m not bitter. I’m not like Deh-ja—wherever she is—either: crippled by Ci-do’s abandonment. But I must protect my heart, even if that means being alone.
“I’ll never hate men,” I answer. I’d never confide all that happened to me, but I add, “I just don’t want to make another mistake.”
She waves off my words as though they mean nothing. “Look at me. I’m fat, but you’re still beautiful. I could find someone to marry you by nightfall.”
She could too, but I’m not interested.
Ci-teh’s inquisitiveness spreads to others. The sisters-in-law, A-ba, my brothers, even some of the nieces and nephews buzz their noses at me like persistent gnats, asking why I haven’t remarried, giving me advice, and trying to prove how much they care for my well-being.
“We don’t want you to be lonely,” Third Brother says.
Second Brother takes a more practical approach. “If you don’t get married, who will look after you when you get old?”
First Brother is even more frank. “If you don’t get married, who will care for you when you go to the afterlife? You’ll need a son to make offerings to you.” He shakes a warning finger at me. “You can only be a leftover woman for a limited time. After that, it will be too late for you. No one will want to marry you.”
A-ba, who shouldn’t speak directly to me on such matters, sends messages through the sisters-in-law, as is proper.
Third Sister-in-law speaks to me one morning as we gather firewood: “You can’t act too picky.”
Second Sister-in-law passes on the following: “No man wants to marry a woman who is overly ambitious or wants to outshine him.”
A-ba has First Sister-in-law deliver the bluntest caution: “People will say you don’t like to do the intercourse, but it is your duty to the nation and to the family to have a child.”
Their talk leaves me feeling both irritated and insecure.
During the third week, I walk to Shelter Shadow Village to pay respects to San-pa’s parents, only to find they died five years ago in a typhoid epidemic. I also visit Teacher Zhang at the primary school, where the same old maps and posters hang on the bamboo walls as when I was a girl. I confide in him my concerns that I failed my interview and will let my family down again. Here’s what he says:
“There’s nothing you can do about it now! But if you ask me—and I guess you are—I believe you will get in. Who is more qualified than you, after all?”
Which lifts my spirit.
I don’t get to see or talk to A-ma much at all. She’s the only person, apart from Teacher Zhang, who seems unchanged—from the way she dresses to the way she moves to the way she ignores the spiraling world around her. She’s as busy as ever, though, cooking for the family, settling arguments between the sisters-in-law, washing clothes by hand, spinning thread, weaving cloth, embroidering and decorating caps for her grandchildren, delivering babies, and mixing potions for those who come to her ill or injured. She’s so busy that I’m alone with her only once—when we visit the mother and sister trees on my last day. As we wander through the grove, she stops here and there to stroke a branch, clip a few leaves, or pick some of the parasites that cling to the mother tree for medicinal concoctions. The last time we were here together . . .
“Nothing will take away the pain of a lost child,” A-ma says. “My feelings for your daughter are always strongest here. In nature. In the atmosphere. Because that’s where Yan-yeh has gone. Into the ether.”
“For me, my grief is like a huge hole. Everything flows around that hole. I have forced myself to move forward, but I can never move on.”
A-ma regards me, weighing so much. When she finally speaks it’s to drive forward the theme that has come at me from every direction since I’ve returned home.
“You shouldn’t be alone. You cannot let memories of what happened in the past turn you into someone you wouldn’t recognize. Be who you are, Girl, and the right person will find you and love you.”
While I still don’t think love will happen for me again, her words give me strength—to say goodbye, walk alone back to Bamboo Forest Village, board the minibus to Menghai, and travel on to Kunming.
* * *