Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Once. Twice. Three times…

After the third swing of the hoe, the woman stopped making a sound too.

Half her face had been smashed in by my father. The other half was streaked with blood, her eyes still wide open.

My father panted hard. Then, as if suddenly coming back to himself, he flung the hoe away and collapsed to the floor, looking no more alive than the two corpses on the ground.

I held the bewildered Ah Yun in my arms and turned to look out the window.

It was still snowing outside. That deep winter, I was ten years old.

In my last life, my father fed that mother and son until they were full, then politely saw them out.

As soon as they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had food, that we could still afford to cook steaming hot rice.

That very night, refugees crazed with hunger came with torches in hand and smashed open our rotting wooden door.

They turned our home upside down. In the end, all they found was an empty rice vat, and they stared at one another in confusion.

When I held my little sister Xia Yun and sobbed, begging them, telling them there was nothing left in the house, my father only curled up in the corner and said nothing.

The refugees had already been starved beyond human shape. They refused to believe me. They were convinced we must have hidden the grain somewhere.

In their furious shame, they snatched Ah Yun from my arms.

“If you won’t give us rice, we’ll take the child in trade!”

I clung to their legs and refused to let go. “Don’t take my sister… I’m begging you. If you want to trade someone, take me instead!”

They kicked me to the ground.

They looked at my father, who was still huddled in the corner, spat in contempt, and shouted at me:

“You little wench, if you want your sister back, bring grain to trade! If we don’t see food by tomorrow, this little brat of a sister of yours has tender meat too!”

But they never waited until “tomorrow.”

That night, I went up the mountain to dig up grass and wild vegetables. Before dawn, I ran to the ruined temple where they had taken shelter.

There was no one in the temple.

Only a fire pit still glowing with a few sparks, with a broken iron pot set over it.

Beside the fire lay scraps of torn cloth. I recognized that floral fabric. It was from Ah Yun’s clothes.

Ah Yun…

Ah Yun was gone.

I held those scraps of cloth and looked around. Above me, a bodhisattva statue as tall as a person lowered its eyes in silence.

I stumbled home in a daze. My father was sitting by the doorway, his soul seemingly gone. When he saw me, he opened his mouth timidly. “…Ah Yun? Where’s Ah Yun?”

I shoved the torn fabric into his hands. “Here.”

My father burst into loud sobs. “My girl, don’t blame your father! Your father was trying to save people!”

…Save people?

I cried as I questioned him. “If you hadn’t insisted on giving that rice to those two people, how would the bad people have come? When they took Ah Yun, why didn’t you say anything? Why, Father?”

My father clutched his head and curled into a ball. “No, that’s not right. How can you blame me? I really was trying to save people!”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I snatched the torn floral cloth from his hands and forced it in front of his eyes. “Look at it! You saved other people, but you didn’t save Ah Yun. Ah Yun was taken by them and… Father, you didn’t save her!”

“That was her fate…” My father’s eyes went blank as he murmured, “Yes… People’s lives are all destined. Ah Yun just… just had a bad fate. It wasn’t my fault…”

His neck stiffened, and he looked as if he were both crying and laughing. “Ah Yu, isn’t that right? Ah Yun’s fate was to let those people live a few more days, wasn’t it? They… they lived a few more days because of Ah Yun. That was Ah Yun’s blessing, wasn’t it?”

He was a madman.

He couldn’t save anyone.

When my mother had a difficult labor giving birth to Ah Yun, he couldn’t save her. When Ah Yun was taken away, he couldn’t save her either.

And in the end, after he gave the last rice in our home to that mother and son, when he and I were both on the brink of starvation, he discovered he couldn’t save me either.

A dozen or so li outside the village was the town. In town, traffickers from elsewhere had heard there was a famine here and had set up early to deal in human lives.

He carried me, half-unconscious from hunger, to town and sold me.

In exchange, he got a few bags of rice.

The trafficker later sold me to a brothel.

I stayed in that brothel for five years. When I finally breathed my last, there wasn’t a single patch of good skin left on my body.

Until the day I died, I never saw my father again.

And now, I sat on the bed, coaxing the sleeping Ah Yun in my arms, quietly watching as my father brought in basin after basin of water and scrubbed the blood clean from the floor and the table.

He even wiped the hoe clean.

In the barren vegetable patch out back, he dug a pit just big enough to bury the bodies of that mother and son.

Good.

No one would go out and spread rumors that my family had grain.

The disaster victims would not be drawn here. Ah Yun would not be taken away.

And my father…

I looked at him and slowly began to smile.