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 reach 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 against 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.
“Get up, you shameless hussy,” she hissed angrily. Her envious eyes roved the youthful body on her bed. Humiliated, Mui Tsai tried to cover her breasts.
“Get up and cover your itchy body and don’t ever dare fall asleep in my bed again,” she spat. Mui Tsai stumbled to the back of the house to wash. She lay awake and ashamed in her tiny back room until the pale morning came. After that it was often that the master required a massage. Sometimes the master had a need for a massage twice in the same night. On those dreadful days she would hear the soft slapping sounds of his footsteps outside her door and the creak of it as it opened in the dark. For a second in the secret light of the moon and stars she would glimpse the richness of his yellow robe. Then the door would close, and in the darkness of her windowless room she would hear only the soft slapping sound of his silk slippers on the concrete floor and his labored breathing. Then a hand chilled with sweat fell upon her small breasts. In no time she would be enveloped in damp flesh and her nostrils filled with his hot stale breath. The odd jiggling movement would begin all over again.
Very soon Mui Tsai was with child.
The master was extremely happy, amazed for his three wives were childless. For a long time now it had been whispered that he was to blame, but now it was obvious that the old hags were the barren ones. Ecstatically he ordered that Mui Tsai be fed with the best so his seed would grow strong and healthy. The mistress was forced to be kind to Mui Tsai, though deep within those slanting eyes lay grievous envy. Often Mui Tsai hid some of her very expensive but horribly bitter special herbs for me.