The Rice Mother Read online

  I hope that in the youthful arms of your new happiness you have not forgotten your responsibilities. The children are growing fast and need new clothes, new shoes, and good food. As you know, I am alone with no husband to lean on and now I have two new hungry mouths to feed. I hope you will send some money urgently as the situation is getting quite dire for me.

  I stopped reading. The rest of the letter from Aunty Pani was a blur. My legs suddenly weak, I sat down heavily on the bed. Then I understood why she had come for me that day, the speculative look in her sly eyes. She had wanted to keep the children as her means of income for many years to come. She had come to a poor woman’s house looking for a malleable young wife. One she could manipulate. At that moment I felt as if I hated her. How hateful her demanding tone. Did she fancy my husband’s head a footstool? It made my blood boil with anger. I had barely had a good meal since the day I got married, and for the next eight months, if my plan was to work, I would have to save and scrape to get by, let alone send more money. Wouldn’t it be a good lesson for her if we simply didn’t send the money? But then in my mind rose the picture of two small children, their eyes barren and hopeless, their dark skin stretched tight over wide cheekbones, the innocence and stupidity indisputable for all to see. Even their teeth, so bored with sitting inside such empty heads that they jutted out in two uneven yellow rows to stare at the world outside. Doubtless the children were nothing more than slaves to the crafty woman.

  I closed my eyes and experienced profound defeat and the first flash of real anger that I had been so spectacularly used. Had it not been for Pani’s pretty lies, I could still have been at home with my beloved mother. But the truth, no matter how horrible it makes me look, was that I didn’t want my stepchildren to live with me.

  We would have to send the money. We had no choice.

  Then the beauty of youth stepped in. As spring touches new leaves on withered branches, youth decided that my plan could stretch to an allowance for my stepchildren. My mother and I had suffered because my father did not bother to send us money. I would do better than my father. We simply wouldn’t have meat until all our bills were settled. We would live on our vegetable patch outside and the eggs our hens laid when we had our chicken coop installed. By the time I went into the kitchen to stir the meat, the bounce was back in my step.

  That evening my husband returned with cash that he had borrowed from the moneylender to send to his children, a newspaper-wrapped present for me, and a piece of wood that he wanted to carve with. He put my present beside me on the bench and waited. I looked at his expectant face and then at the unwanted newspaper-wrapped present, and I wanted to scream with pure frustration. At this rate we would never climb out of our snake pit of debts. How to explain that I’d rather starve for a month than endure a line of moneylenders outside the house every payday? I took a deep breath, bit my tongue, and untied the string. The newspaper tore open, and my animosity died in my throat. Inside was the most adorable pair of high-heeled gold slippers adorned with colored beads that I had ever seen in my life. With something akin to reverence I placed them on the gray concrete floor. They were absolutely the prettiest things I owned, and enchanted, I slipped my feet between the dainty gold ropes. They fitted perfectly. The heels would take a bit of getting used to, but already I loved my new acquisition.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, my head bowed with humble gratitude.

  He was a good man, my husband, but we were still doing it my way. First he had his sumptuous meal, and then I told him of my plan. He listened in silence. Finally, taking a deep breath and looking him directly in the eye, I told him that from now on I would be the only one paying the bills. He would receive a small allowance to buy a newspaper or a cup of coffee from the canteen at work, but he could borrow no more money and was to refer to me on anything pertaining to our financial health. He nodded and tenderly stroked my hair with his big hand, but his dull eyes were ravaged. “As you wish, my darling wife,” he agreed.

  “And one more thing. Will you teach me to speak Malay?”

  “Boleh.” He smiled at me.

  I knew that word. It meant “yes.” I smiled back.

  “Terima Kasih.” Thank you, in Malay.

  By the end of that week, my vegetable garden was planted. A man from across the main road built me a chicken coop, and I filled it with soft yellow chicks. As I stood under my dulang washer’s hat proudly surveying my new plot of cultivated land, my uncle, the mango merchant, arrived groaning under the weight of a huge sack of mangoes. At the sight of his familiar brown face I dashed away tears of joy and ran to hug his round figure. I didn’t know how lonely I was until I saw him. He had brought the money I had requested, heartily laughing away as ridiculous my idea of collateral. After he left I ate six mangoes in quick succession and then, inexplicably, walked to the stove, picked up a piece of charcoal, and began to nibble at it.

  That was when I knew I was pregnant.

  The weeks were swallowed by the hungry months that lay waiting in my garden. My little plot prospered. I ran my fingers down the velvety skin of a new crop of okra, was surprised by the redness of my bird’s-eye chilies, and grew especially proud of my shiny purple eggplants. And my chicken coop was a success even before my belly filled out the space in front of me. I was happy and satisfied. The debts were taken care of, and I had even begun to save a modest amount inside a small tin that I hid in the rice sack.

  At night, after all the human voices died down, after the plates had been washed, light switches turned off, and the neighborhood put away to sleep, I lay awake. Sleep refused to rest awhile upon my eyelids. He crossed his arms and looked at me wickedly from afar. So I spent many hours lying flat on my back, staring out of the window at the star-filled night sky, learning Malay, and filling my head with impatient dreams of my unborn baby. I imagined a cherubic baby boy with gorgeous ringlets and sparkling eyes. Always in my day-dreams he wore clever, large eyes that darted about in alert intelligence, but always in my nightmares a thin, emaciated infant with small, dull eyes and stretched shiny skin would stare beseechingly at me, begging for a little love. I would jerk awake suddenly. Guilt for my abandoned stepchildren like a small furry bee inside my heart lifted its furry front legs and tapped a soft little reminder. My young heart would miss a beat in pure shame. Before dawn I would bathe and make my way to the temple. There I would make offerings and earnestly pray that my child would look nothing like the waif of my nightmares.

  My husband was solicitous to a degree that made me want to scream. He would worriedly inquire after me every morning and every night, and wait for my answer expectantly as if I might say something other than, “I’m just fine.” For nine months it never crossed his mind not to ask worriedly and wait expectantly for my reply. He refused to let me walk to the market and would insist on going himself. At first he came home with stale fish, gray meat, and rotting vegetables, but after a few false starts and cold sulking silences from me he made friends with a kind stallkeeper who felt sorry for his predicament. He returned with fish, whose silver-bright eyes were still bloody with freshness, fruit ripe with color, and choice pieces of meat that I myself would have been pleased to have chosen.

  One day he brought home some strange fruit called durian. I had never before seen a fruit covered with such menacing-looking long thorns. A durian falling off a tree onto a man’s head can kill him, he told me. I had no trouble believing him. He carefully prised open the prickly skin, and inside lay rows of flesh-covered seeds. I fell in love with the creamy taste of the golden flesh instantly. I even loved its astonishingly unique smell, which prompted an English novelist to describe it as eating a sweet raspberry blancmange in a lavatory. I am perfectly capable of finishing five or six fruit in a single sitting.

  By the time I was eight months pregnant, I was so uncomfortable that I would lumber out of bed as quietly as possible and lie on the hard coolness of the bench in the kitchen. Through the window the inky blackness of the Malayan night would re
ach in and caress me, its touch heavy and moist. Sometimes my husband would come in to peer worriedly in the gloom and inquire after me. And on those wretched nights I would swallow my nasty spurt of irritation and remind myself that he was a good man.

  At least I did not have little Mui Tsai’s terrible sorrows. She was also pregnant. Her stomach bulged through the thin high-necked blouse she wore to denote her status as a “little sister.” She tied her loose black trousers underneath the smooth bulge. In the shadows cast by the oil lamp, little by little I heard her story. It had its sad beginning in a little village in China when a strange fever brought death to her mother. Mui Tsai was eight years old. In less than a month, a new silk-clad mother came to live with them. In the tradition of good Chinese omens, a small red mouth flowered in her pale round face. The Chinese favored brides with small mouths, believing that women with big mouths were harbingers of ill fortune. A woman with a large mouth spiritually swallowed her husband and caused his early death.

  The new bride’s mouth was reassuring, but the thing that made Mui Tsai’s father’s heart swell with pride was his bride’s bound feet. They were smaller than her eight-year-old stepdaughter’s feet, for Mui Tsai’s mother had been too softhearted to bind her daughter’s feet. The new wife sat in her bedroom, quite helpless to heed the calls of ordinary housework. Mui Tsai ended every long, arduous day with the task of taking off her stepmother’s restraining bandages and bathing her feet in warm, scented water. So many years later, Mui Tsai’s elongated shadow shuddered on my kitchen wall with the memory of her stepmother’s bare feet—a sight wisely denied to all men and especially husbands, for the stark deformity without the dainty little shoes was unbearable. Twisted, bruised, and reeking of decaying flesh, they had the power to repel the most ardent suitor. Every day some dead skin and ingrown nail had to be clipped away before the ugly things were rebandaged with rose petals.

  For three years Mui Tsai fetched, cleaned, and cooked for her new mother. After her thirteenth birthday her stepmother’s gaze turned from ill-concealed dislike to one of calculation. Mui Tsai’s sister had just turned eight and could now take over her duties. If the elder girl remained in the household, there would be the worry of a marriage. Marriages meant dowries. One morning while Mui Tsai’s father was at work, her stepmother made the young girl dress in her best and sit in the front room. She sent word to the market, and a passing merchant came to the house. A document, legal and binding, was drawn up on thin red paper. From the moment her stepmother’s soft white hands signed the paper, Mui Tsai became the exclusive property of the merchant. For the rest of her life she would have no will of her own.

  The merchant with the hard eyes and long yellow fingernails paid for her, and she was taken away with nothing but the clothes on her back. He caged her. In the same room there were other cages with other crouched, frightened children. For weeks she lived like that, a sullen maid passing bowls of food and receiving containers of waste through the same hole in the cage. In that dark room, together with girls from other villages, they cried and moaned with fear and sickness although none of them could understand each other’s dialect. Then they were all thrown on a junk set for Southeast Asia. The old boat tossed wildly on the South China Sea, made turbulent by strong monsoon winds. For many days the wretched children screamed in terror. The sour smell of ocean sickness plunged them into the sure belief that they would all perish at sea to become food for the sons and daughters of all the white-fleshed fish that they had unthinkingly consumed during their lifetimes. Miraculously they survived. Still wobbly from the miserable voyage, they were efficiently disposed of in Singapore and Malaya, sold as whores and domestic slaves at a handsome profit.

  Old Soong, Mui Tsai’s new master, paid the princely sum of two hundred and fifty ringgit for her. She was to be a gift for his new, third wife. Thus little Mui Tsai came to live in the grand house at the top of our cul-de-sac. For the first two years she did the housework and lived in a tiny room at the back of the house, but one day the master, who had until then concentrated on running his chubby hand up his wife’s ivory thighs and teasing morsels of food from the ends of his chopsticks into her sulky mouth, suddenly smiled at Mui Tsai in a manner not quite wholesome. Then, about the time I moved into the neighborhood, his greedy eyes began to follow her at meal-times with an intensity that was frightening to the young girl, for he was a repulsive creature.

  On my way to the market I sometimes saw him sitting in the cool of his living room reading the Chinese newspaper under a whirling fan, sweating profusely, his extra-large singlet stretched across his bulging belly. The tightly packed fat reminded me of his insatiable penchant for dog meat. He often brought home the flesh of puppies wrapped in waxed brown paper, for the cook to make into a stew laced with expensive ginseng imported specially from mainland China.

  Every evening the master played the same game. With both his pudgy hands covering his mouth, he picked his teeth while his hot eyes like fleshy hands roved over Mui Tsai’s youthful body. Her eyes carefully averted, Mui Tsai pretended not to notice. She did not realize that that was her role in the game. Reluctance. The wife, her eyes downcast, saw nothing. She sat in her fine garments, and poised like an eagle with elbows on the table waiting patiently for the arrival of each new dish, whereupon her waiting chopsticks moved with quick-silver speed, spearing the choicest morsels with unerring accuracy. Once the best pieces were in her bowl, she proceeded to eat with alluring daintiness.

  Soon Old Soong was finding occasions to let his fingers accidentally brush his wife’s “little sister,” and once his fat hand slid up her thigh while she was serving the soup. The soup spilled on the table. Still the wife saw nothing. “Stupid wasteful girl,” she muttered angrily into her bowl of tender suckling pig.

  “Tell her,” I urged, horrified.

  “How can I?” Mui Tsai whispered back, aghast, her almond eyes shocked. “He is the master of the house.”

  As his attentions grew bolder, Mui Tsai began to leave her room at night. She only slept there when her master was at one of his other wives’ homes. When he came to visit her mistress, Mui Tsai curled up under one of the beds in one of the rooms in the large sprawling house, and in this way for many months she managed to evade her master’s sweaty grasp. Often she climbed through my kitchen window, and we sat on my bench talking about our home-land into the wee hours of the morning.

  I couldn’t believe that what was happening to Mui Tsai was legal, and I was determined to report the matter. Someone had to do something to end her suffering. I told Ayah about it. He worked in an office—surely he knew someone who could help. But he shook his head. The law could do nothing as long as the domestic slave was not abused.

  “But her mistress slaps her and pinches her. That’s abuse, isn’t it?” I demanded hotly.

  He shook his head, and the words that walked onto his thick tongue appeared like uncouth foreigners who entered a temple with their shoes on. “Firstly that is not considered abuse, and secondly, although Mr. Soong himself does not come to collect the rent, he is our landlord. He owns every house along this curving road.”

  “Oh,” I said, giving up my revolutionary ideas of marching into strange offices to denounce Old Soong. The problem really was much bigger than me.

  One night when the trees were silvery with ghostly moonlight, Mui Tsai’s mistress called her into her bedroom. She wanted a massage. Her back, she said, ached from eating too many cooling foods. She took off her satin garments and lay facedown on the bed. Mui Tsai began to massage her, running her firm brown hands down the soft white skin of her mistress’s back. Without her clothes, the mistress was inexorably running to fat.

  “You have such an excellent way with your hands,” Third Wife complimented Mui Tsai, gathering up her satin robe. “I shall let you massage the master tonight. He is very tired.” As if choreographed beforehand, the master walked into the bedroom in his silken yellow robes with the black embroidered dragons on them. The robe whispered aga
inst his flabby white legs. Mui Tsai froze in shock. Her mistress did not meet the master’s eyes; instead she fixed Mui Tsai with a warning stare and admonished in an irritated voice, “Ai yah, don’t make such a fuss.” At the sound of her soft slippers dying on the terrazzo tiles, the master sat on the slightly ruffled bedspread. Mui Tsai, kneeling on the floor by the bedside, looked up at him in disbelief. After months of hot looks, the game was about to be won. The winner sat in a yellow robe. The robe parted further, and his belly was large and hard in front of him as he reached over and switched off the little bedside lamp. In the moonlight his face with its sheen of moisture was suddenly masklike. Mui Tsai was filled with terror. Intoxicated by the forbidden excitement implicit in the situation, the eyes deeply buried in pale folds of flesh glittered hot. He stank of liquor. She felt the first small prick of loathing.

  “Come, come, my dear,” the master invited gently, patting the bed beside him, his voice quickening. She knew his thoughts as if he had spoken them. The girl was not destined to be a great beauty but in the first charming flush of youth undoubtedly pretty, and a virgin would give him much-needed vitality. Always good for a man of his age to take the first drink of a girl’s essence. Her purity and innocence was like a flower waiting to be picked. And in that garden he was master.

  He smiled an encouraging smile and disrobed his rotund body.

  Poor girl, she was still staring at the wrinkly worm nestled between his legs in frozen disbelief when his hot hand fell upon her shoulder. Something hard entered her painfully, and to her surprise loose wet flesh jiggled all around her. He grunted like a wild pig and groaned very close to her ear until without any warning his whole weight suddenly collapsed on top of her. Crushed, she gasped for breath. He rolled over and panted for a glass of water.

  It was over. In a daze she pulled her trousers back on and went to get water for the master. Tears stung the back of her eyes, and her chin wobbled with the effort not to cry. When she returned with the water, he made her disrobe completely. While he drank his water, the hot dark slits in his face studied her with unsmiling intensity. She felt his sticky passion running out of her and down her bloodied inside thighs. She stood naked and vacant in the pale moonlight until he reached out a fat hand and pulled her down once more. When he fell asleep, snoring heavily, Mui Tsai stared up unseeing into the silver shadows on the ceiling until quite suddenly and with a start she found herself staring into the disgusted face of her mistress. Barefoot, the woman had come into the room so stealthily that Mui Tsai had not heard her footsteps.