The Noodle Maker(57)
His elder daughter looked similar to most children of the world who share her disability. She had a small flat head covered with thin downy hair, a broad and wrinkled forehead, tadpole like eyes set deep into sallow sockets, a flat nose, and large nostrils that flared with each intake of breath. Her mouth was always open. Saliva and scraps of food would fall from it, drip down her small chin and collect in the creases of her thick neck. Her existence caused him only trouble.
During her seven years of life, she had acquired a few skills. For example, she knew to cry out when she felt the need to relieve herself, and had learned never to refuse any food or medicine. But she never lost her fear of being removed from the family’s dank room and taken out into the fresh air. Whenever her father grabbed her in his arms and carried her to a place where an open expanse of sky could be seen, her hair stood on end, and her jaws clenched so hard it was impossible to wrench them apart. She had already spent a whole weekend alone in the woods, a night on a stone bench, six days in an orphanage in the countryside, and forty-eight hours on a train bound for the capital. Before each of these unhappy experiences, she would suddenly lose sight of her father and find herself alone. But in the end, she always managed to be rescued from danger and returned safely to the dark room that smelt of mud and rotten cabbage.
At the beginning of each journey, he had no idea whether he would succeed in abandoning her, but he was determined to continue his war against fate. For the sake of his future son, for the sake of the successful fertilisation of his wife’s next egg cell, he would go ahead with his plan. He told himself that the only reason he looked after his daughter was to wait for an opportunity to get rid of her. For her, each journey they took together into the outside world was an opportunity to prove the resilience of her life force.
Although he had entered the Party in 1958, and had worked conscientiously for the following thirty years, he was still only a middle-ranking accountant. In the Cultural Revolution, he joined a political cell that failed to keep up with the changing times, and became outlawed by a rival cell. He ended up marrying an activist from the cell that had outlawed his. He made love to his wife in their dormitory room as the bullets pelted through the sky outside. Neither of them had much knowledge of sexual matters, other than the little they’d learned from various swear words, so the wife didn’t become pregnant until their second year of marriage. The doctor told her that the child’s defects were caused by excessive sexual activity during her pregnancy.
When he reached fifty, he resolved to focus more of his energies on the task of abandoning his elder daughter. He started taking his work less seriously. The fortune tellers had told him that considering the year in which he was born, he would only succeed in getting rid of his daughter if it was certain that someone would take her home and look after her. So he never abandoned his daughter if he thought there was any danger she might starve to death, or come to any harm. His failure in abandoning her was clearly linked to the year in which he was born. He was convinced that if he had been born in the Year of the Tiger or of the Chicken, he would be holding a baby son in his arms by now.
One morning, he left her alone in an open field outside town. He hid himself behind a bush in the distance, and observed her for an entire day. When the sun was setting in the west, he gave up hope of anyone coming to her rescue, so, faint with hunger, he ran over to her, grabbed her in his arms and carried her back home. He endured all kinds of hardships for her. One day he read an article about an orphanage in a neighbouring town. He took a day off work, travelled to the town and deposited his daughter at the reception desk of the orphanage, claiming he had found her on the street. The director of the orphanage told him the child was not necessarily an orphan, and that she would have to be handed over to the public security bureau. In a panic, the father explained that he had wanted to perform a good deed and emulate Lei Feng, but could do no more, as he had a train to catch. So the director agreed to take the child to the public security bureau herself. The next day, when he was gazing out of the window by his desk, the police of the neighbouring town telephoned him and asked him to collect his child from their bureau. So he took another day off work, much to his leader’s consternation since it meant missing the department’s weekly Party meeting. That afternoon, he waved goodbye to his wife and his younger daughter, who was now two years old, and set off on a journey to bring his elder daughter home.
(‘You live in your own small universe,’ the blood donor tells the writer. ‘You’re stuck inside your mind, and this suitcase-like flat of yours. We’re growing further and further apart.’