Chapter 2

After that, I often went to Ah Ping’s home.

Her mother had changed. She said she would teach Ah Ping to read, and since I was always with Ah Ping, she taught me too.

Ah Ping asked her, “Mother, Father says I’ll be sold when I’m ten. What use is reading?”

Her mother stroked her head and sighed. “My child, I’m helpless. I can’t protect you. I used to think perhaps it would be kinder if you never understood anything. But then I thought, if you go through your whole life understanding nothing, you won’t even know who you are, or what you live for. Even pain is better than feeling nothing forever.”

At the time, I still thought: Ah Ping was Ah Ping, and I was me. How could we not know who we were?

A year or two passed. Ah Ping and I learned many characters and heard many of her mother’s stories. We could not remember the complicated words, but faint impressions began to take shape in our hearts.

I did not fully understand the ideas behind them. But I found myself beginning to hate Taozhuang, to hate Father, and to hate myself.

I was seven that year. Two years after my last visit, I hid a few wild fruits I had picked in the mountains and crept into the cellar again.

I set them on the ground a safe distance away. When I met her eyes, even more empty and hopeless than before, I lowered mine. A long silence passed. Then I heard my own voice. “Shall I help you get home?”

She did not move. It seemed a very, very long time before I heard the chains stir. I lifted my head and saw, at last, something different in her eyes.

One bright moonlit night, Father and Ah Ping’s father lay drunk in the courtyard. Clutching my little bundle, I ran toward the mountain behind the village.

Ah Ping and her mother went with me. Her mother had begun planning two years earlier. After a long and painful struggle, she had decided to try to escape for her own sake. That was why she had taught Ah Ping to read. If she succeeded in getting away, it would be the only thing she could leave her daughter.

But over those two years, the bond between mother and daughter had become impossible to sever. She resolved to take Ah Ping with her. Ah Ping told me the secret, and I told her about a dangerous little path behind the village that I had stumbled upon while gathering fruit.

In my bundle was a bloodstained garment. Down in the cellar, I had taken off my underclothes, and she had bitten her finger open to write on them.

Her legs were broken. I could not take her with me.

I promised to deliver it to the capital, a place I had never even heard of before.

For days we fled through mountains that seemed to go on forever. When we were hungry, we gnawed bark. When we were thirsty, we drank from streams. We did not dare look back.

Ah Ping’s mother said this was the first time in all those years that she had seen a little hope.

Thorns, brambles, lashing wind, and driving rain could not stop us. Our shoes wore through. The soles of my feet were bloody, but I no longer felt the pain. Ah Ping developed a fever, and we lost our way in the dense forest. Even then, we dared not take the main road.

Women from the village had escaped before. They had clearly got away, but they had taken the main road, and somehow they had been caught and brought back.

Perhaps Heaven finally chose to help us. When we were lost and did not know what to do, a hunter appeared and saved us.

He took us to his home in the mountains: a few small bamboo huts, kept clean and tidy.

He said he knew a little medicine. Ah Ping was unconscious with fever. It would take several days for it to break and for her to recover.

At first we were frightened and wary. But with nowhere else to turn, we accepted his kindness. He asked nothing about where we had come from.

A little boy lived with the hunter, presumably his son. He looked about my age, with rather dark skin and a pair of bright, beautiful eyes. It was he who dressed the wounds on my feet.

Like the hunter, he hardly spoke. I was grateful and wanted to ask his name. Then I remembered that I had no name myself, and did not ask.

The three days in the bamboo hut were the safest days I knew during that time.

When Ah Ping recovered, the hunter offered to take us to the nearest landing. He knew the owner of a trading firm there who could arrange for us to go home safely.

I asked him whether that would be possible if I needed to go to the capital.

He paused. He seemed to hesitate for quite a while before answering, “Yes.”

Still, he asked no questions.

At the ferry landing, Ah Ping, her mother, and I knelt and knocked our heads to the ground three times before him.

His kindness was more than we could repay, our gratitude more than we could say.

When we rose, the boy beside him handed me a little clay jar. “Your feet haven’t healed completely. This will ease the pain.”

I looked into those beautiful eyes, took the jar, and said a dazed thank-you.

Afterward, I always kept that little clay jar with me. It was the first time in my life that someone had cared whether I was hurting.

I never stopped treasuring that rare kindness.