Katherine by Anchee Min Page A

tried not to think about which part of its body the poison had reached. I couldn’t help but envision the process of deformation, I could see the medicine chewing up the heart, the limbs, the brain. I felt its struggle for life. I screamed up at God, asking why I was made to do this.
    Three months old. Was it a girl or a boy? I felt part of me dying with it. I touched my swelling breasts. I thought she or he would never have my milk. The witch had told me about other women with unwanted children she had received. Most of them took her prescription and killed the fetus, but a few had delivered deformed babies. She gave me the address of an orphanage and told me to drop the baby secretly at night if I failed to abort it. Would the fetus die from the poison or come through me deformed? Every moment I wished for it to die. My mind was at the point of bursting.
    Two weeks later, as I was pushing a cart filled with stones, I felt a warm stream gush out of my bottom parts. I ran toward the bushes. I could feel blood dripping down my legs. I hid myself inthe bushes, I squatted down, and a bloody tissue dropped. It looked like a fish, a black-red fish. It was my half-formed baby.
    I broke down. I couldn’t touch it. I took off my blouse and tried to stop the blood from running. My hands were soaked in blood. I had no tears. My breath was short. I heard dynamite explode nearby as the world turned upside down. I fainted.
    I woke up. It was early evening. I wanted to bury the “fish” but I had no strength. I laid reeds on top of it and ran away from it with all my might.
    *   *   *
    K atherine tightened her arms around my shoulders. She stroked my back tenderly. Holding her, I fell asleep in exhaustion.
    Katherine stayed up all night.
    I woke at dawn. Katherine was outside, sitting on a wooden stool, writing in her notebook. I walked toward her and she asked how I felt. I told her that every time I thought of Elephant Fields I despised life and hated the world.
    Katherine gazed at me in the rising sunlight. “I don’t know how to make you see life in another way. It’s possible that we can never truly understand each other. But this is what I always say to myself in rough times: Life is not about giving up after a string of disappointments. Giving up is much easier than carrying on.
    “Because my biological mother was blind and deaf, I used to think I might become blind and deaf at any moment. I still don’t want to take the risk if there is even the slightest chance that a child of mine could turn out to be blind or deaf. But I don’t allow myself to be bitter. I don’t think life is unfair. We have this saying in America, it’s actually a cliché: ‘A pessimist sees a glass half-empty, an optimist sees it half-full.’ It all depends on how you look at things. You see what I’m saying?”
    I sat down next to Katherine. She handed me her notebook. Iturned the pages. I couldn’t read her flying handwriting. I turned to face her. She was in her brown sweater; her face was pale. She was looking at the sun.
    Our two lives merged. I thought, Katherine who had every reason in the world to be cruel and cynical, who could have been a thief, a robber, a cheater, a drug user, a murderer, chose not to be. I saw how her spirit won out over fate. She woke me from my world of nightmares and brought me into the world of hope. She took away my bitterness, and a new mind began to take shape in me, a mind both wild and tame.
    At the edge of the rice paddies, the sun jumped over the gray horizon like a giant fireball. I reached out for her. Without turning her head, she took my hands in hers.
“Tai-yang-nee-zao!”
—Good morning, Sunshine! she said, smiling, with tears glittering in her eyes.

J asmine was furious. She made voodoo pictures with my name on them and burned them to ashes. It scared Lion Head, he told me one evening as we had tea at his grandmother’s house. We were surrounded by antiques, a little ivory emperor and