Father looked at her in disbelief, apparently wondering whether Grandmother was serious. He had been fighting superstition in the countryside, but here it was, rampant in his own home. Suddenly he thumped the table.
‘What nonsense are you talking?’ he yelled. ‘To hell with all your superstitious crap. What is so good about your gods up there? If they’re as good as you boast, how come they let people live in such misery before? How come they were so useless in protecting your children? You know what? They are not worth a dog’s fart.’
Grandmother was shocked by the anger in Father’s voice – they were the harshest words she ever heard from him. She picked me up and went quietly back to our room.
From very early years, I had felt I was the unwanted daughter in my family. The one person who always cared for me was Grandmother. I shared a bed with her, head to toe, until I went away to university. My earliest and most enduring memory was of her bound feet in my face. The first thing I learned to do for her, and continued doing right up to my teens, was to bring her a kettle of hot water every evening to soak her feet. The water was boiling and her feet were red like pigs’ trotters, but she did not seem to feel it – she was letting the numbness take over from the pain, the pain that had never gone away since the age of seven when her mother bound her feet. It was done to make her more appealing to men. The arch of her foot was broken, and all her toes except for the big one were crushed and folded underneath the sole, as if to shape the foot like a closed lotus flower. On these tiny, crippled feet, she worked non-stop every day from five o’clock in the morning: making breakfast, washing clothes in cold water, cleaning the house and preparing lunch and supper seven days a week – both my parents were too busy with their work and the endless struggle meetings they had to attend. The only time she gave to herself was this daily ritual of foot-soaking to soothe the pain, restore her strength and prepare her for another day. She took her time. She massaged her feet gently and slowly, unbent the crushed toes one by one, washed them thoroughly, and carefully cut away the dead skin. After I took away the dirty water she would lie down and we would chat for a while. She would say to me sometimes, pointing at her feet: ‘It is tough to be a woman. I’m glad you did not have to go through this.’ Then she would add: ‘Life will be hard for you too. But if you can take whatever life throws at you, you will be strong.’
I was not sure what she meant. Father was very harsh with me; he would slap my face if I reached for food at table before everybody else, or had a fight with my sisters. I thought she was sympathizing with me for what he did; she was powerless to protect me, however much she wanted to. I was too young then to be able to imagine the trials life might hold – I knew no real pain, nothing like that Grandmother had suffered.
She was born in 1898 in a small village in Shandong, a great centre of Buddhism on the eastern coast. There were three temples in her village; the biggest one, the temple of Guandi, the God of Fortune, was only a hundred metres from her house. She saw it every morning when she woke up. It was tall; the statue alone was three metres high, carved by the village men in stone from the nearby mountain. It was always bustling with people who came to pray that Guandi, with his indomitable power, would help them to make a fortune. But it had no place for women; the temples for the God of Earth and for Guanyin were where Grandmother went and prayed, for rain and sunshine, for a good harvest, for sons instead of daughters, and for evil spirits to stay away. April, October and the third day of the Chinese New Year were particularly busy in these two temples. People came with clothes, carts, horses, cows, boats, money and anything else you could think of, all made of paper. They were burned to commemorate the dead. In April you changed your summer clothes and in October your winter outfit; and nobody should go without money for the New Year, particularly the dead.
Grandmother was married at the age of seventeen to a boy of thirteen; such was the custom in that part of China. The boy’s family gained a daughter-in-law, a servant, a labourer and a child-minder all at once. Grandmother cooked for the whole family, did all the chores in the house and helped with work in the field. She took over from her mother-in-law the responsibility of looking after her child-husband. She dressed him in the morning, took him to school, washed his feet in the evening and made sure he did not wet the bed. She cuddled him at night and told him about things between men and women. Occasionally he tried to put this information into practice but it did not come to much. In Grandmother’s words, ‘It was more water than sperm.’ But she was not annoyed because her husband really was a child. Bringing him up and making him a man was expected of every woman in Grandmother’s world. And then, when their husbands were in their prime, the women were often old and exhausted, which gave the men the perfect excuse to take concubines. It was a rotten deal for women but Grandmother did not feel it that way. She accepted it. When her young husband finally acquired the knack of lovemaking at the age of sixteen, they had their first child, and then eight more in the next seven years. With one acre of land, two donkeys and a mule, nine children and one ‘big child’ – her nickname for Grandfather – life, as Grandmother said, was ‘sweet as moon-cake’.
Then terror struck. Within a week, three of her children caught smallpox. There was no doctor, and an old woman in the village told Grandmother to mix ashes with cow’s urine as a medicine. The eldest son and two of his sisters died, choking on the mixture. The village had a custom that if you placed mirrors on your roof, the devils would be too dazzled by the light to come in and trouble your family. She did that and also put peach branches under her children’s pillows to ward off any hungry ghosts. But none of it worked. In the following two years, dysentery took away another four of her children. She cried for days on end; her hair turned white and she became almost blind. She wanted to take her own life but she had to live on for her remaining two children. She was so scared of losing them that she had them adopted. My uncle went to a family of eight boys and three girls, and my mother to a family of five girls and two boys. Grandmother hoped that the sheer number of healthy children in those two households would give her son and daughter some protection. If the others could survive, hers would too. Her children spent most of their time with their adoptive families, playing, eating and sleeping in their houses and giving a hand in their fields. They were hardly hers any more. She was heartbroken, but they were alive and she was happy for them.
As if she had not suffered enough, my grandfather died of an unknown disease, probably stomach cancer, when Grandmother was still young – she lived well into her nineties. A good-looking woman with seven dead children and a dead husband could not be a good omen. People in the village began to shun her, as if contact with her would bring them bad luck. They would go the other way when they saw her coming; the foster-parents of my uncle and mother forbade their children to visit her house; even farm labourers did not want to work on her land. She was half blind; now she hardly spoke.
Grandmother was desperate to know what crimes she had committed to deserve such harsh punishment and what she should do now to make sure her son and daughter would survive. One day she met an itinerant monk who was passing through her village. He told her that she must have done something terrible in her previous life and now it had caught up with her. He took out a small statue of Guanyin and gave it to her. If she prayed hard and recited the name of Amitabha, her son and daughter would be safe and she would unite with all her children in the Western Paradise. From that day on, Grandmother was a changed woman. She no longer burst into tears when she saw children playing in the street. She stopped reminiscing about the deaths in her family to anyone who cared to listen. To support herself and her children, she spun silk from cocoons for a local middleman who sold it to the big cities. And she prayed and recited Amitabha’s name day and night.
Even