Chapter 6
A woman stepped out of the crowd as though in a daze, crouched down, and stroked my body.
“I remember when this child first came here. She called me her mother.”
“I drove her away. Could she be my eldest girl, the one who never got a chance to see the world?”
Another woman came forward and knelt beside the first.
“My husband took a baby to Hundred Flowers Ravine too. I never even saw her. If we hadn’t already had two daughters, how could I have borne to throw a healthy child away for the dogs?”
Then came a third, a fourth…
One by one, so many of my mothers gathered around Granny and me that no one could get through.
They cried. They cursed.
They explained their difficulties, the things they’d had no choice but to do.
They draped their ugly souls in beautiful excuses.
But to me, it all amounted to a single sentence.
“We wanted sons!”
I floated in the air, feeling as though my whole being would boil.
“What are we going to do? If those children have built up so much resentment that they won’t let girls be reborn here anymore, are more than half our young men supposed to stay bachelors?”
The women wept. The men worried.
The women weren’t weeping for the girls they had so ruthlessly abandoned.
The men weren’t worrying about a future in which no daughters would be born.
They were worried that their sons couldn’t find wives.
Without wives, they couldn’t produce more sons!
Ha. So stubbornly stuck in the past!
Filled with bitter anger, I returned to Hundred Flowers Ravine.
There were two more baby boys there.
Someone from some village had come to throw them away. They were no longer breathing.
I sighed and tried to bury them.
Only when my translucent hands passed through their bodies did I remember that I was dead.
Now there was nothing I could do.
And nowhere I could go.
My soul was imprisoned in Hundred Flowers Ravine. Unless I was released, I could only drift around this place.
I lay down beside those two pitiful children, occasionally turning into a gust of cold wind to frighten away stray dogs looking for food.
That was the last little thing I could do for them.
We were all unwanted children. If we couldn’t keep one another warm, we would truly have no memory of warmth at all from this human world.
The surrounding villages and towns pooled some money, hoping to find a master who could dispel the resentment in Hundred Flowers Ravine.
For several years, they tried one thing after another.
They met plenty of frauds, but not a single person with real ability.
Every year, children were born. Every year, children were aborted. Every year, children fell into eternal sleep in Hundred Flowers Ravine.
The few baby girls who survived became the center of everyone’s world.
Here, the positions of boys and girls seemed to have been turned upside down without anyone quite noticing.
Among those spirit mediums and shamans, there was one who wasn’t entirely useless.
At least he said something that sounded reasonably sensible.
“Those little girls harbor deep resentment. They refuse to be reborn here, and they prevent other female spirits from being reborn here as well.”
“Perhaps they’re simply too disappointed. Just how much wrong did you people do in the past?”
The villagers begged him to resolve it.
But he kept shaking his head. “It’s remarkable enough that I can see this much. If you truly want it resolved, the people who tied the knot must untie it.”
“The most I can do is break the binding of the name Hundred Flowers and let them leave freely to be reborn. Whether they choose to go is up to them.”
He burned incense, chanted prayers, and went through a whole elaborate ritual.
Many women knelt, palms pressed together, looking devout as they muttered under their breath.
“Hundred Flowers depart! Eternal Peace come!”
At his shout, I was about to laugh at his presumption.
Then my body suddenly felt light, as though the bonds of all those years no longer existed.
“From now on, this place shall be Eternal Peace Ravine. May it be forever safe and peaceful.”
Everyone present thanked him again and again.
In truth, they had grown numb. They were grateful to everyone who came to perform a ritual, regardless of whether it worked.
The man left, then returned.
“Just now, I seemed to sense not only the angry spirits of baby girls in that ravine, but quite a few baby boys as well. What? Have you been throwing boys in there too?”