In Memory of a Mother | Part 1

1987, a young woman found herself pregnant. She panicked. Disgust and regret got the best of her. Pregnancy out of wedlock was deemed shameful, and she was too proud to feel anything towards the father of the thing she was carrying. The solidity of his character, the shyness of his manner, and the spirit of patient diligence, all seemed to be bad jokes mocking and maddening what she had been dreaming of. He came from an impoverished family in a rural backwater, while her father was a technician in a state-owned factory, and her mother a respectable obstetrician.

There was a man who had knocked her off her feet but married one of her friends. Her pride had rendered her unable to tell him anything in the window of opportunity.

"I deserve better," she consoled herself.

Several disappointing blind dates couldn't reduce her into blinding herself. But soon she turned 29 and was slapped on a label as being a leftover. For some reason she wouldn't care or dare to know, she was now burdened with this thing from a rube, blindly.

"I never met someone that truly excited me", she said to her son many years later. He knew she was lying at that moment, as most women would be when they talk about love. Instead of debunking her lie, he replied:

"I understand. A woman will never love a man for his virtue."

She gritted her teeth and decided to have an abortion. The father didn't agree, because a veteran practitioner of TCM revealed to them that the foetus was a boy. During the 80s, selective abortion of female foetuses was practised widely in the countryside of Sichuan Province.

Without a proper ceremony or any bride price, she wedged her way into marriage with the man, whom she managed to live with for the rest of her life.

A few months later, she pushed out of her a pile of bloody filth, teeny, weedy, hairy, and smelly. She was brave enough to cut the umbilical cord all by herself in the same breath, and somehow survived the hemorrhage afterwards.

"You had a younger brother, but I aborted that child. That was the only way to keep my job and I had to raise you." She confided to her only son in 2020, the year right before she embraced her death. "Giving birth to a second child was strictly prohibited in a state-owned enterprise. I would've been expelled from there. I dream about that child every now and then. He is sobbing his resentment at me: mama doesn't love me…mama doesn't want me…"

As was case with many women, she hid some secrets in a time-proof casket and sank it into the abysmal recesses in her memory. If it had not been she herself that reopened the casket in the last days of her life, the secrets within would have vanished into absolute nothingness forever.

Stumbling upon her confession, the son suddenly sensed a strange mix of pity, fear, loathing and gratitude spontaneously arising from within. A smile flickered across his face:

He was born to die some day and that was why he was staggeringly lucky. Wasn't it because his aborted brother never had the chance to be born in the first place nor to see the light of day so this unborn ghost could never be offered the chance to die? Wasn't it possible that this murdered sibling could be healthier, stronger, and smarter? The vast majority of children who could potentially be thrown up by the combinatorial lottery of his parents' DNA far outnumbered the bacteria on a toilet lid, and in the teeth of these stupefying odds, it was he who inherently suffered from mediocrity that had to be born, instead of some siblings greater than Einstein or Shakespeare.

1988, breast-feeding her baby virtually killed her, because of her blocked breast ducts. Her mother knew a thing or two about the ailment, so the best medical advice she could receive was nothing more than to immerse her breasts into a basin of searing water every night to force those ducts open. She kept thinking about her beloved boy so that she could go through the excruciating pain.