The Concubine's Daughter Read Free Page B

his first daughter, the one he had kept to serve her brothers, until one bitter winter’s day when a party of soldiers sent by the local warlord to gather taxes had ridden across his fields with banners streaming. Times were hard, and Yik-Munn had nothing to pay them and little to offer in the way of food. They had beaten him andordered him to catch the doves in his barn, then cook them with the last of his winter rice and bring them to the camp on the riverbank. They had taken his daughter, then ten years old, for their amusement, and as his wife prepared the doves, they could hear her screams, like the cry of a curlew on the wind. She had died a week later. He sighed; such were the problems of a girl child.
    The bent figure of the midwife scuttled like a spider from the house, the pot containing the placenta—the only payment required for her services. She would sell it in the village to fortify the old ones who needed to digest the essence of the newly born. From the rice store, a tumbledown shed beneath a peppercorn tree, he took the big iron hoe to which he owed all things and waded knee-deep into the field of ripening mustard. He stopped, gazing out across his fields of fennel, hemlock parsley, angelica, chili, and garlic. In their midst was a snow-white field of flowering ginger; closer to the house, a silver sea of foxtail millet beside the rice paddies. The wide hats of his sons and grandsons were dotted among them, his sons’ wives stooped along the rice terraces.
    How hard he had worked to make all this possible, yet how little his efforts were appreciated. Why had the gods betrayed him? Had he not kowtowed at the feet of Kuan-Yin, the goddess of mercy, and laid gold leaf on the knee of the Buddha? What had he done to displease them so? He dropped the hoe, and proclaimed his misery to unfriendly skies: “Bad rice … Bad rice. My fields are bare and my family is hungry. My buffalo no longer pulls the broken plow and pestilence descends upon my crops.” He wrung his hands.
    “I am a poor man, my harvest is dust, and I cannot fill the rice bowls of my hungry family. Why have you sent me a girl—one who will cost much and return nothing but sons to another clan?”
    The bundle under his arm squirmed and kicked; a muffled cry told him that it still lived. He had wrapped it tight as Pai-Ling fought him like a wildcat. She had clawed so hard to save her baby that the wives would not enter the room, afraid of one as possessed as she. He had struck her hard across the face, flung her to the floor, and locked her in. Even now he heard her shouts from the open window of the upper floor,beseeching all gods to save her child. He felt the pain of fresh scratches welling on his face and neck as he waded farther into the field to escape her wailing, cursing the day he had traveled to Shanghai.
    When the soil underfoot was soft to his heel and far enough from the house, Yik-Munn dropped the bundle, unnerved by this puny life he had hoped to stifle without the striking of a blow—this uncanny will that jerked and twitched like a silkworm shedding its cocoon. This would be the fifth female baby he had buried in the thirty years since he first acquired the land, sleeping beneath the stars with his hoe as a pillow to guard it from thieves.
    The first he had drowned in the rice paddy, but her tiny bones had been unearthed with the spring planting, to be fought over by squabbling ducks. That could bring bad luck, but here in the middle of the mustard field, he could dig deep. He spat on the callused palms of his hands. A dozen times, the broad iron blade bit into yielding earth.
    Pai-Ling sprawled exhausted where she had fallen beside the bed. She heard the distant thud of iron digging deeply into sodden earth, striking fragments of shale with great force. The thuds grew louder, reaching through the open shutters. She struggled to her feet in frantic haste, dragging herself upright to stare in terror from the window.
    The sound