The Concubine's Daughter Read Free Page A

them all.
    Yik-Munn was wrenched from this reverie as the screaming changed to a choking moan, and the first lusty cry of his son reached out to him like a hand from above. He fell to his knees and kowtowed deeply three times. Seconds later, a wail of despair wrapped the house in loud lament, the words of the midwife clearly heard echoing among the rafters, filling the joyless rooms, and spreading out across the fields: “ Aaaeeeyah … lui, ahhh … lui, aahhhh … luiiii … luuiiii, ahh… . A girl, a girl. It is a girl… .”
    Only then did he know that his preparations and offerings had failed to appease the eight immortals. The dried penis of the wild horse, which he had paid for dearly each week and consumed to increase his issue and assure him of a son, had not been enough. The two duck eggs he had placed so carefully in her chamber pot to attract the precious testicles of a boy had made a mockery of his faith. All gods had turned from him and allowed the beggar spirits to snatch away his son. There would be no new boy child to join the others, to create greater wealth for the House of Munn and add filial piety to a deserving father’s old age, to care for his soul in the afterworld. Why had he been cursed with a female?
    For a family of wealth and nobility, to have a daughter could bring great luck. She could be tutored in ladylike skills and arts and married into a wealthy house for all to profit. But to a farmer, a girl was just another bowl to fill.
    Moments later, carrying a small bundle, Yik-Munn left the house, which was sheltered by the towering pine that gave the farm its name. It was a monkey puzzle pine, the only one of its kind in the district and said to be as old as three centuries. He gazed up into thickly clustered branches spread wide above the house. So tall that its crown could not be seen except from the center of the mustard field, its girth took five long strides to walk around; its bark had the texture of weathered steel with great goutsof golden sap that ran like open wounds. For all his life, the great pine had been a monument to prosperity and strength, the protector of his land, the center of his earthly luck. Now it had failed him.
    It has grown too tall , he told himself. Its energies have turned against me. It casts yin shadows over the house, attracting the shady cool of the female spirit. Perhaps he would have it taken down, whatever the cost, to bathe his house in the yang of sunlight, brighten his spirit and give heat to his energy. He could give the girl a few weeks to recover and straddle her again. By all gods, he would fill the bitch with sons.
    At almost seventy-three years of age, he fought bravely for his potency, paying the village doctor regularly and well to keep him filled with the abundant juices of youth. But his body had never recovered from a boyhood of crippling work and meager nourishment, and the medicines he took were rare and costly.
    His backbone curved like a bent shovel, his large head nodded with every plodding step, and what hair remained upon it was dyed the flat black of chimney soot. He was tall and painfully thin, his distended belly, stooped shoulders, and long neck giving him the look of a tired but angry rooster. His face, jaundiced by opium, was beset by moles that dotted his sunken cheeks like beetles. Only his eyes, almost hidden by sagging lids, still shifted as cunningly as ever.
    Most prominent in his efforts to remain young and to keep face in the village was his commissioning of a set of perfect teeth from Hong Kong, which kept him forever smiling within an elder community of rotted stumps and shrunken gums, shining proof of his good fortune.
    “There are too many women in my house, yet I am cursed with another,” he said aloud for the ducks to hear, lighting a cigarette, drawing hard on the acrid smoke with a deep hiss of relish. How unfairly this moment brought back unwanted memories, clear as painted pictures before his eyes. Memories of