Chapter 2

Or tell a teacher and ask for help.

But then it seemed as though everyone already knew.

No one helped me.

No one pitied me.

Perhaps Grandma was right.

They would point, sneer and curse me.

In the closed-off village where I lived, I could imagine nothing more shameful.

By the time school ended that evening, I scarcely knew how I’d got through the day.

My stepfather wasn’t at dinner.

My brother ate quickly, then went to his room to play computer games.

Usually Grandma would go visiting the neighbors after eating.

That night, she sat beside me and never took her eyes off me.

Until I went to bed, she made sure I never had a moment alone with Mother.

I hid beneath the quilt, shaking.

What if my stepfather came home drunk and hurt me again?

By midnight, I still hadn’t heard him return.

Outside lay the deep country darkness and the steady chirping of insects.

At some point, I fell asleep.

I don’t know how long I slept before waking suddenly.

It was still dark.

Someone was attacking me.

I tried to scream. A hand covered my mouth.

A face horribly like my stepfather’s loomed over me.

His eyes gleamed in the darkness.

“Shh. Make a sound and I’ll kill you.”

My brother.

His low, vicious threat terrified me.

He tried to assault me.

I fought desperately.

Even with my mouth covered, even afraid to cry out, I wouldn’t stop resisting.

He slapped me twice.

My head reeled.

But this time I didn’t give in.

The blows only stirred a fiercer hatred.

One after another.

All of them hurting me.

I kicked, hit and bit like someone possessed. I wanted to tear him apart with my nails.

He grew furious too.

Perhaps the animal had never imagined that the girl who’d come here at five with her deaf mother—the girl who’d always endured beatings without a word—would fight back.

After I scratched him several times, he seized my throat.

I couldn’t breathe.

My head felt ready to burst.

Gradually, I lost consciousness.

When I woke, I was bound and gagged.

My stepbrother sexually assaulted me.

When it was over, he subjected me to a further humiliation before dressing and leaving.

He didn’t untie me.

Didn’t remove the gag.

Didn’t even cover me.

Tears of shame and despair poured down my face.

I struggled toward the quilt.

Before I reached it, my stepfather burst in.

He reeked of alcohol.

He dragged me by the hair and struck my face repeatedly, until the gag came loose.

He beat my body, screaming all the while.

“You filthy bitch! Seducing my son! You little whore!”

Dazed and numb with pain, I curled up instinctively, trying to protect my head.

I don’t know how long the beating lasted.

Then he assaulted me again.

The nightmare had no end.

I wanted to cry for help, but could no longer make a sound.

Soon he left.

A crash came from Mother’s room.

Now he was beating her.

5

Things smashed next door.

I could hear Mother crying.

The dark memories of my early childhood flooded back.

Before I was five, when we lived with my birth father, he had beaten her terribly too.

He’d been so poor that he couldn’t find anyone else to marry. He married Mother, who couldn’t hear or speak, then resented her for humiliating him.

Whenever anything displeased him, he took it out on her.

I’d seen her bruised and battered more times than I could count. Sometimes her injuries were severe.

In my hazy memories, I ran to tug his trouser leg, begging him to stop.

Then the blows fell on me.

Mother held me to protect me.

He only beat her harder.

“Useless hen! Couldn’t give me a son, only a money-wasting girl. Still protecting her? Let’s see how you protect her! I’ll kill you both!”

Then he went away to work.

He came back with money.

And a tall, healthy woman who was pregnant.

He forced Mother to divorce him and threw us out.

We left with an old fertilizer sack holding a few ragged changes of clothes.

Mother took me to her mother’s home.

They didn’t like us either. They let us stay just inside the gateway, while my aunt treated Mother as a servant.

Later, my grandmother married Mother to my current stepfather, Tao Jianguo.

His first wife had supposedly despised his looks and poverty. She’d left her son behind and run off with another man.

Tao Jianguo was short and fat, with protruding teeth. No woman nearby wanted to marry him and raise his son.

So he paid my grandmother a thousand yuan.

It was little different from buying Mother.

After that, I saw none of my other relatives.

From the day we arrived, Mother did all the housework and all the farmwork.

Grandma was spiteful. She spent her days visiting neighbors and gossiping with a group of women.

My stepfather was lazy and drank heavily. Every day he played cards and drank at the shop at the village entrance.

My brother, Tao Hua, never cared about Mother. He bullied me in secret, pinching and hitting me.

But at least my stepfather beat Mother less often than my birth father had.

Sometimes, drunk, he would strike her because she brought his water too slowly or the water for his feet was too hot.

Never as terribly as my birth father.

This time, though, he seemed to have lost control.

Heavy thuds came through the wall.

The old memories wouldn’t stop.

I was terrified for Mother.

I struggled out of my bonds, hurriedly dressed and ran to her room.

She was on the floor, arms over her head.

My stepfather raised a chair to strike her.

“Mom!”

I threw myself over her.

The sight of me seemed to enrage him further. He kicked me aside, and my head struck a table leg.

Mother rushed to shield me.

He kept beating her.

“Shameless woman! Thinking of nothing but men! Seducing men! Why don’t you die?”

Among the curses, he shouted another name.

His former wife’s.

My stepbrother’s mother.

The woman who’d abandoned them.

Then I understood his sudden fury at us both.

He was thinking of her.

Mother’s hair fell over my face. Even beneath his blows, she tried to protect me.

I pulled out of her arms, crawled aside, seized a thermos and hurled it at him.

Startled, he faltered.

I dragged Mother to her feet and ran.

6

There were no streetlights.

The village was pitch-black, broken only by insects and the occasional barking dog.

We ran from its western end to its eastern end and hid behind a haystack, trembling.

Mother lifted my face from her lap and examined it in the moonlight.

Seeing the swelling and bruises, she looked alarmed.

She signed quickly.

“How did you get hurt like this? Did he hit you too?”

I began to cry, but made no sound.

I was afraid the neighbors would hear.

“Mom, let’s leave,” I signed. “Anywhere. I don’t care how hard it is. I’ll collect rubbish if I have to!”

She hugged me and cried.

Her crying sounded so loud in the quiet night that I grew more frightened.

What if Tao Jianguo came looking?

I covered her mouth and signed for her to stop.

She sobbed a few more times.

“My good girl. It’s my fault. I brought you into this world and made you suffer with me.”

I shook my head and kept pleading.

“Let’s go. Just the two of us. Don’t live with them anymore. They’re cruel to us. They beat us.”

Tears fell as she shook her head.

“We have nothing. Where could we go? I can’t support you. You’re still young. You need school.”

“I can leave school. I’m eighteen. I can work and earn money. We can live together.”

Yes.

I was only in ninth grade, but I was eighteen.

I was a girl, and not his own child, so my stepfather and Grandma hadn’t wanted to send me to school.

They thought I could work at home for a few years and be married off when I was older.

Mother had toiled for the whole family and begged day after day for years before they finally let me attend.

I started at nine.

Though older than my classmates, years of too little food, inadequate clothing and malnutrition had left me smaller and thinner than they were.

I looked thirteen or fourteen.

Mother signed urgently.

“No. You must go to school. You’re so young. What work could you do? The villagers say it’s dangerous for girls outside. There are bad people. You must study. Then you can have a good life and won’t suffer like I have.”

Her expression hardened with resolve.

“I’ll protect you. I won’t let him hit you again.

“Don’t worry about me. He doesn’t usually hit me. He was drunk today. If I work harder, he won’t do it again.”

Pain filled me.

She wouldn’t leave.

How could I persuade her?

Tell her what they’d done?

I didn’t dare.

I felt too ashamed even to say it to myself.

And what if she couldn’t bear it? What if she confronted them?

They would hurt her.

The world felt like a deep well I couldn’t climb out of.

I longed to escape.

I had no means of doing it.

And the outside world, of which I knew nothing, frightened me too.

I’d never set foot beyond this poor, isolated town.

If outside was full of people like my stepfather, how would we survive?

At that moment, I wished desperately that I were a strong man.

Then I could take Mother away.

And I wouldn’t have to fear the bad people outside.