chapter 3

chapter 3

She sat on the windowsill, swinging her chubby legs. “You found the way. If I see light in the midst of night, I can live!”

When heaven’s light pierces the endless night, the spirit fruit blooms and rises from death.

If smothered in darkness, a ginseng fruit remained mere produce, helpless beneath the teeth of whoever chose to eat it. But let a single ray of heaven’s light split the night and fall upon it, and the fruit could speak, run, leap, and return freely to life.

“But the male fruit bought with you was eaten by Madam,” I said. “It never saw heaven’s light, yet it lives now.”

The female fruit pouted. “You call that living? Just wait and see.”

She told me that if a ginseng fruit remained on its mother tree until it ripened and fell naturally, it became a sacred thing that blessed an entire family.

But if someone tore it forcibly from the mother tree, it became an evil thing that would plunge its buyer’s household into chaos.

Now that Madam had swallowed the male fruit, his blood was in hers and her flesh in his.

They could never part for as long as they lived. One would drag the other down, and the struggle would not end until both were destroyed.

“This family faces terrible retribution,” the female fruit said. “If you do not run, you will be caught in it.”

“Madam holds my bond of servitude. If I flee, I’ll be sentenced to death!”

“Who sold you?”

“A trafficker sold me first. After that I changed hands several times. I can’t remember them all.”

When I was eight, I went with my family to see the lanterns. The streets were packed. All I remembered was a great hand clamping over my mouth and carrying me away.

The hand was huge and rough, its five fingers dry and callused like dead twigs.

Of the girls sold with me, the pretty ones became prostitutes and the young ones became maids. Those who were older and plain-looking were led away separately by the trafficker to a large, square, empty room.

I did not know what was kept in there.

I knew only that the women in that room were given eggs. The rest of us did not deserve them.

They ate eggs and did no work. They lay there all day for ten months.

At the end of those ten months, the empty room filled with screams fit to wake ghosts. When the noise stopped, the trafficker went inside and soon emerged carrying a basket.

Sometimes the basket was covered with red cloth, sometimes white. The red-covered baskets moved. The white-covered ones did not.

“Damn it! Ate my eggs for ten months, and this is what I get? Worthless trash!” The trafficker always cursed like that when he carried out a basket draped in white.

Sometimes what lay inside the room would not fit in a basket.

Then two men went in and carried it out rolled in a reed mat. I never knew where they took it.

Once the room was empty, the trafficker would hold up two eggs and ask us, “Who wants eggs?”

I was so hungry then, so greedy for food that the sight of an egg made me wild as a weasel.

I thrust up my skinny hand. “I do! Give them to me!”

“You?” The trafficker calculated my age, then pulled down my trousers in front of everyone to inspect me. “You haven’t even grown hair yet. What makes you think you deserve eggs? You think eggs are free?”

Eat one egg, and you owed him a whole basket.

What went in was a hen’s egg. What came out was an egg of gold or silver.

He pointed carelessly at someone behind me. “You. Come out. You eat these.”

I turned. The woman he had chosen was a few years older than me. I had never spoken to her because she was not normal.

Of all of us, she was the strangest. None of us understood the things she said.

“The idea of women’s liberation is a scattering of sparks,” she would say. “Gather them, and they will set the eternal night ablaze.”

Liberation. Ideas. The trafficker demanded to know what those words meant, but she only clenched her teeth and laughed coldly.

He told us that anyone who reported her for speaking such nonsense would receive an extra ladle of rice water that day.

The first person to inform on her knocked a hornet’s nest to the ground. After that, everyone rushed to denounce her.

At first the trafficker merely beat her. She wept and screamed beneath his blows, but still shouted about women’s liberation.

Later, he used some method I never learned. She stopped crying and shouting. Occasionally I heard her panting, whimpering, moaning in broken waves…

At last she went mad.

And now, in a fit of mercy, the trafficker was willing to give this madwoman eggs.

Her eyes shone. She shoved me aside and limped forward. She took one egg, crouched down, and cracked a tiny hole in its shell against a stone. Clear egg white dripped from the opening. She tilted back her head, pressed her mouth to the hole, and sucked the raw egg dry.

Then she finally grinned.

She had no teeth. Her mouth was a red, fleshy hollow, her gums dark and empty.

Where were her teeth?

She was only a few years older than I was. How could she already be so old that all her teeth had fallen out?

In any case, she became the next woman to eat eggs. She moved silently into the empty room.

Ten months later, I carried eggs to her. At the door, the soles of my feet suddenly felt hot and wet.

Blood—dark, black-red blood—seeped beneath the door and stained my shoes.

I cried out and jumped back, dropping the eggs. They shattered on the ground.

The trafficker heard the noise, came running, and beat me until I fell into the pool of blood. “Filthy little wretch! You can’t even do this much right! Wasting my eggs!”

“Blood!” I screamed. “There’s blood!”

He ignored me and unlocked the door.

It opened like the gate of a river of blood.