Katherine by Anchee Min

their hands, listening to them curse the weather and the animals.
    I told Katherine that I had always believed that circumstance made me who I was and I believed firmly that humans were born evil. I believed it was a universal truth because I lived through it. Survivors were people who took only what was useful for the moment and abandoned the rest. They refused to understand shame. Did the parents who abandoned their infant feel ashamed? They got rid of that baby just like they got rid of pus on their faces. They thought the pain was worth enduring. Hope was reborn when they laid the sleeping infant on the village road. They refused to hear her cries. They believed that when the sun rose everything would be forgotten. That was my China, not Katherine’s.
    I began to cry. Katherine was shocked at how emotional I’d become. She did not know what to do.
    I told her that I did not appreciate her sentimentality. “You American, you lived a sugary life. What do you know about survival? Starving kids steal, cheat, and murder—they will do anything to fill their stomachs. This was my life. I gave up trying to reconcile with fate. It was not a baby I killed—it was me! Me!”
    Katherine looked at me; slowly her eyes became gentle. She sat down beside me and took my hands in hers. She hugged me and I felt her tears on my cheek.
    “I was seduced and raped,” I began. I told her about my Party boss at Elephant Fields, Mr. Kee, a man of sixty. He tortured me when I started working there. He assigned me to the most dangerous jobs. After a year he called me in and told me that he was removing me from the fields and making me his personal secretary. He took me to Party meetings and would touch me while we rode on tractors. He promised that he would send me back to Shanghai if I let him have his way with me. I was just twenty and far from home, but I didn’t want to sell myself.
    Mr. Kee sent me back to the fields to work with dynamite. I witnessed several fatal accidents on the job and I began to feel very scared. Mr. Kee invited me to a peasant’s house during the Chinese New Year to “talk about my future.” The peasant was a blind man. We sat on a big clay platform that was both the table and the bed. The house was lit with candles. I drank the wine Mr. Kee offered and I passed out shortly after. He had put drugs in the drink. Before I realized what was happening, I was raped. I could feel him undressing me, but I had no strength to move my limbs or make a sound. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, Mr. Kee was gone and the blind man said that there had never been anyone but me in his house. I confronted Mr. Kee. He was eating dinner with his wife and family celebrating New Year’s Eve. Wiping his oily mouth, he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said that he had no such meeting with me. He accused me of insulting him and trying to ruin his reputation.
    “Don’t try to pull a hair from a tiger’s head,” he warned me.
    I missed my period for two months. I couldn’t stand the idea of being pregnant with Mr. Kee’s beast inside me. I was tooashamed to go to a doctor. In China, any woman who got pregnant before marriage destroyed her future. I didn’t know what to do about my growing belly. I ran, jumped, drank dirty water, worked overtime trying to get rid of it. But still I could not stop the little heart from beating. Mr. Kee saw what was happening and took me to see a relative of his who was a village witch. She made me drink Chinese medicine to poison the fetus.
    The moment I drank down the medicine I realized that I would never be able to escape this fate. I was a mother who was murdering her child minute by minute. After work one day, I went to lie in the wild reeds. It was a cloudy and windy evening. I began talking to my dying baby. I asked for its forgiveness. I said I could not imagine what it felt like to have such a mother. I cried because it was too late, I had already taken the medicine. I