By Lan Fang
“Good morning, Mrs. Lan Fang! Your baby’s so beautiful,” said the nurse as she came in pushing the glass bassinette for newborns and placed it next to me. “If you’re feeling more comfortable would you like to feed the baby?” she said as she opened the window.
I noticed a man trimming the clumps of bougainvillea in the garden and said, “Sister, is that the man who takes care of the garden here at the hospital?”
“What number baby is this, Madam?”
“How late does he go on working?”
“Your husband must be delighted to have such a beautiful baby.”
“Sister, please take the baby away,” I finally said crossly.
“But it’s time for the baby’s feed.”
“Just give it some formula. I want to enjoy the garden.”
“But…”
“I’m sure the nurses here at the hospital can take good care of the baby.”
This time she said nothing further and pushed the bassinette out of my room.
I feel a bit dizzy and sore in my lower tummy, reminding me that four days ago I gave birth to my baby by caesarean. Actually this is the umpteenth time I’ve experienced this dizziness and pain, so by now I oughtn’t feel it at all. Don’t I feel like this every time I have my babies?
This is my seventh baby.
I married at the age of twenty and have been with my husband for seven years. He has a degree in computers and business from America. When he was still fairly young his parents entrusted him to run part of the business of their flourishing company. You could say my husband was the ideal man of every girl’s dreams. Heaven knows I struck it lucky when his large family chose me to be his wife.
I knew that my in-laws were still a very traditional family. They weren’t going to choose just anyone to be their daughter-in-law. If they’d just been looking for a pretty girl who was rich and well-educated, then surely they’d have been able to find someone far superior to me. From any point of view, I was the least likely winner in the contest to become the daughter-in-law of this family. Highly likely I’d have been eliminated in the first round.
But they chose me! And of course I wanted to be chosen!
And the reason for this victory was that I was born on an auspicious day, month, year and hour. According to feng shui, my horoscope fitted with my husband’s. After everything was taken into account by my mother-in-law, out of all the prospective girls, I was the one who’d bring good luck, harmony, long life and lots of children. Lots and lots and lots of children.
Those words droned like the sound of a swarm of bees attacking my ears. I had certainly given birth to lots of children for my husband. Six children. Wasn’t this enough?
The pain is getting worse. It’s more than mere dizziness. My head feels like it’s exploding with a nuclear bomb. My brain is like a milkshake being shaken. My skull feels like shattered glass. On top of all this, my breasts have gone rock hard with the build-up of milk. They hurt right into my armpits. The lower part of my belly is cramping to contract the enlarged uterus back to its normal size. The skin of my belly is slack like the wrinkly neck of a cow. When I lean over to the left, the skin folds over to the left. If I lean to the right, it hangs over to the right. And if I’m lying down on my back all the soft wrinkled skin spreads out over the whole area of my belly.
Actually none of this is really a problem.
As on all the other occasions, once the forty-day lying-in period is over, I’ll spend a lot of time at the salon doing a program to get slim again and get my body back into shape. I’ll have the fat around my arms, thighs, back and belly suctioned. My breasts will be made taut again. I’ll go on a strict diet and do aerobic exercises for tightening slack muscles.
And then—abracadabra!—my body will be like a Balinese wood carving again. I’ll have a perfect body with a lovely flat stomach and taut breasts. I won’t even need to bother with the baby because it’ll go straight into its own wallpapered room, complete with nursery furniture decorated with cartoon characters. It will have the most expensive brand of formula milk and a twenty-four-hour-a-day babysitter to look after it.
I don’t need to worry about living expenses or the cost of my children’s education. With my husband’s wealth every kind of delicious food, sweet and ice-cream is always at hand. There’s no problem buying clothes and toys to fill the cupboards of my six daughters. It’s highly likely my daughters will study overseas one day. So my giving birth to lots of children doesn’t present the slightest problem for my husband or my in-laws.
A few months after I’d given birth to the last child—naturally another girl—my mother-in-law began to force feed me with herbal preparations to stimulate the fertility of my womb. I would sometimes ask her, aren’t I fertile enough? Haven’t I already given you enough grandchildren?
“But so far no grandson,” she’d answer calmly as if I were a jelly mold and all she needed to do was mix a packet of jelly crystals with sugar and water, heat it up in a pot and pour it into a plastic mold.
I wanted to tell her I’m fed up with being a jelly mold. I’m fed up with giving birth. I’m fed up with having a bloated belly, swollen feet and having to go through labor or have a caesarean. I’m fed up with having the skin on my stomach all loose again like a pair of jeans that needs taking in.
“You’re the eldest daughter-in-law in this family. Look at your sisters-in-law—they’ve all produced grandsons! Why can’t you, with your fine horoscope? You have to have a son to inherit the business and continue the line,” my mother-in-law would insist accusingly. Do I have to tell her that according to medical science the sex of a baby is determined by the Y chromosome which is carried by her son’s sperm at conception? The female ovum only contains XX chromosomes, right? So it’s not my fault if I go on having girls. I may not be a medical student and most of my exam grades were only Cs, but I’m not so stupid that I don’t remember my biology classes.
“You ought to see a doctor,” I said to my husband. “We could use IVF, have all test tube babies. Choose all the Y chromosomes from your sperm so all of them will be boys.”
I couldn’t face being a jelly mold any longer. My husband, a graduate of an overseas university, ought to be able to see things from my point of view. At least he could stand up for me in front of his mother when she blamed me for continuing to have girls.
“Go to the doctor? Just to make male babies I have to go to the doctor? Then my parents and siblings would know I’m incapable of producing male babies! What are you on about? All that’d come of it would be to shame me, you know that, don’t you?”
“If that’s the case then there’s no point in having any more children. We already have six!”
“Six daughters! All my siblings have sons. We have to have sons too.”
“So?”
So when my husband started fondling me again with the aim of making a future boy baby, I told him to turn out the light. Not because I was embarrassed about the shape of my body after its repeated alterations but because I felt this was no longer an act of love which required us to be able to gaze at the expression pouring from each other’s eyes. This was nothing but an implantation activity as with a hen for egg-laying, an oven for baking a cake, or an injection molding machine in a plastics factory for churning out umbrellas.
And so I fell pregnant for the seventh time.
“The more children, the greater the blessing. Especially if they’re sons. It looks like you’re carrying a boy this time,” said the healer who’d been giving me the fertility preparations. Mama also consulted the soothsayer who practiced feng shui, and by his reckoning, this time it was a son.
“And the shape of your belly looks different too. It’s not round like it usually is. If it’s a bit pointy it means it’s a boy,” my mother-in-law was at pains to point out right from the first month of my pregnancy.
She made me eat chicken rice, green beans, oxtail soup and other nourishing foods every day. And Chinese herbs which made me want to vomit more than ever, they were so bitter. She forbad me from eating rawon and kecap so my baby wouldn’t turn out dark like beef gravy or soy sauce. And she made me increase my intake of eggs and milk to ensure the baby would turn out just as white and smooth.
She made me feel more and more anxious to the point where I became increasingly lethargic. I was very worried that this baby might be another girl. The fear and worry made this pregnancy very difficult. I threw up and felt nauseous and dizzy. Actually these were normal symptoms of pregnancy but, because the feelings which haunted me were so overwhelming, everything was awful. I let myself go because I knew that nothing would be different from all the previous times.
When I looked in the mirror I saw a witch reflected there. I looked twenty years older. The skin on my face was worn and old, with oily pores, a sullen mouth, sunken circles around dull eyes, and tangled hair. And on top of all this my belly was getting more bloated by the day.
“That means you’re carrying a boy. If the mother gets more beautiful usually she’s carrying a girl. But if she gets uglier then she’s carrying a boy,” theorized my mother-in-law.
This was her theory! But facts can differ from theories.
I shut my eyes, not just because of the glare from the shards of sunlight creeping through the window of my room, but because the whole room is rolling up and down like a roller coaster.
I press the buzzer over and over and a nurse comes rushing in.
“What can I do for you, Madam?” she asks.
“I don’t want any visitors. Especially my parents-in-law and my husband”.
Translated by Toni Pollard