The Secret Mother

“Full of vibrant scenes of the realities of Chinese life, Victoria Delderfield’s debut novel explores the complexities of growing up in a different culture with sensitivity and heart.”

Deborah Swift

Mai Ling is chasing the Chinese dream. She’s escaping to the city, seeking a new life, running away from the old customs of arranged marriage and domestic drudgery.
The Secret Mother
puts a face to the label
‘Made in China’.
It tells the bittersweet story of a girl – like millions of others – willing to risk everything.
The Secret Mother
uncovers the life of Mai Ling, a sixteen year old who follows the Chinese dream and pays the highest price.

In loving memory of Cynthia, my nan

Then the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So they brought a sword for the king. He then gave an order: “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”

The woman whose son was alive was deeply moved out of love for her son and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!”

1 Kings 3 v24-26

Falling leaves return to their roots.

Chinese Proverb

He hangs it by the ankles, its blue hands splayed, the small kidney-shape of its body crowned with my blood. I open my arms, but the
yīshēng
shakes his head.

“Look away, you hear? Look away.” He plunges my baby head first into a waiting bucket of water.

Pain roars in my haunches. I push hard, my womb emptying like a blanket thrown into the air. Between my legs … so much blood.

“Stop pushing, another one’s coming,” he bawls and discards the limp newborn beside the bucket. He pulls at the second head – half in, half out – and it slips from me, screaming.

A girl.

He grabs a knife from his work block and hacks at the knotty cord that binds her to me. I snatch her. Rock, rock, rock …

“Sshhh, little one.”

Her lips quiver. Birth has rippled the puddle of her features; a child that has lived ten lives already.

“Here, take her as well.” He picks my firstborn from the mat and thrusts her onto me. She seems almost to be choking. I tap her back and she spews up water. Her chest heaves with life. How neatly she is packed in skin!

But the
yīshēng
returns. In his hand, a syringe. “Straight to the brain. They won’t feel a thing,” he says.

My heels dig into the mat. “Get away from us!” I seize some rags and the envelope containing Manager He’s money. “I’ll kill you, I swear. Get away from my babies.”

“Women here never keep their babies.”

I smell his empty breath and gag. His laugh is sour. I scramble to my feet and stagger towards the door, the cords still swinging from inside.

He catches me by the shoulder, ripping my birth gown and pins me to the wall. The liquid in his syringe drips over my babies. I try to push him off.

“What the hell was He-Chuan thinking? Sending me a mad woman? Those little maggots don’t stand a chance. The placenta’s still inside. It has double
qi.
I must have it! Now give me the money. Give me – the killing money.” He squeezes my wrists until I drop the envelope.

I knee him with all my strength and the
yīshēng
crumples, spewing the bucket across the floor.

“Come back,” he groans.

But I am already half way down the wooden staircase that leads to the back door. Outside, the clinic’s sign clacks on its hinges, rain runs down the alley.

“You’ll never survive,” he cries from an upstairs window. “You’ll all be dead by dawn.” His pallid, scale-marked face is yellow in the streetlight; a gloating man in the moon.

I swaddle my babies and lurch into the rain. A few of the streetlights blink and flicker. The night sky grumbles.

Where to?

I claw my way to the end of the alley where a flooded street opens out in front of me – Shengli Road. The rain bites my face. My firstborn gnaws at the night air, wailing. She is pale, barely there. I put my face to hers. Maybe he is right, maybe we won’t survive?

Be brave, little ones. For Mama.

Then suddenly I see him up ahead, in the deserted street. A solitary figure. His head is cocked low, shoulders hunched, collar up. He runs and walks, stops, then runs again. He peers at me through the rain as if looking at the ghost of some long-dead relative. I turn tail. He lopes after me, with a briefcase for a makeshift umbrella.

The pain is searing, far worse than my period cramps.
Got to hold on tight, got to protect …
Suddenly a doorway. I slump onto its hard ledge. Rock, rock, rock my babies.

Hong ching-ting …

Ching ching ting
…

Shui shang ching ching ting
…

Feel drowsy. Singing or dreaming or drowning, it is all the same. The man with the briefcase is pulling on my arm.

“Get up, get up!” He shouts something about a hospital.
Hospital. Hospital. Hospital
. The whites of his eyes are like halos.

“Leave me alone,” I mutter.

“I’ll not leave you,” he says. Then that word
hospital
again.

I cannot fight.

“It’s Yifan. Don’t you recognise me?”

“What?”

He hunkers in the doorway. The rain hisses and dances along the guttering, slanting into rivulets across his back, his hair, his face. His fingers press against my neck. He stares at the crimson puddle on the doorstep.

“We don’t have long. Can you make it to the square?”

In the distance, lasers jitter over the Uprising Monument. As the colours change, so do my thoughts – as mechanical as the factory line. I expect to hear the klaxon. The sooty rain tastes bitter. Blue neon shop signs blink.

“I want to tell you a story,” Yifan garbles, “about double happiness – do you remember it? The student gets sick on the way to his finals. A herbalist and his daughter look after him. The girl is beautiful – they fall in love. She writes down half a couplet …”

Yifan clutches my arm to steady me. My mind wanders around his story, only half understanding.

“The student comes top in the exam. The Emperor is delighted and sets a greater challenge. He writes down half a couplet for the student to complete. Straight away, he knows what to write: the words of his true love.”

Yifan’s voice is in the faraway. I hear the beginnings and ends of his sentences. I glimpse two babies wrapped in a bundle and wonder who they belong to? Where am I going with this man? He is telling me about his marriage. He is a student, a minister in the Emperor’s court. Or is that the student?

“… And that’s why we put
happiness
couplets on the door at Spring Festival,” says Yifan.

I double over in pain. “Why?”

It is the last thing I remember saying to the man with halo eyes.

Nancy barely noticed the faint pulse of an ambulance as it turned uphill towards the Fairweather Golf Club. The first she knew about the accident was when a receptionist tapped her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, Mrs Milne. I’m sorry to interrupt your celebrations, but I need you to come with me, there’s been an accident.”

“Accident? What kind of accident?”

“The Chinese lady that was here earlier – she’s been hit, by a car.”

May had been in the garden. Her mood strange, morose and yet excitable, garbling about Jen and what a talented student she was, how she could go far if she wanted to pursue her Chinese. But Nancy knew that already.

“Mrs Milne, she’s in the ambulance now. She’s asking for you.”

Jen hurried to her side, “Shit, Mum, you’d better go.”

“I’ve been looking for you – where’s Stuart?”

“Mrs Milne, I think you ought to come straight away.”

“She’s right, Mum. Should I come too?”

Jen’s cheeks were flushed with … guilt! It was that darn boy again.

“Mrs Milne, please, if you don’t come now …”

“Alright. Alright.”

The ambulance was parked further down the golf club driveway, past the poplar trees. The back door was open, she could see two paramedics: one putting a splint on May’s leg, another holding an oxygen mask in place.

“May!”

“Are you Mrs Milne?”

She nodded.

“Get in, love.”

Nancy perched on the fold-down chair inside the ambulance and watched as the paramedic gave May an injection.

She groaned, her face drained of colour, her head held rigid by a neck brace.

“Don’t worry, this will help take the edge off her pain.” She turned to Nancy. “She’s had a nasty bump to her head. We think her leg’s fractured. We’re taking her to A & E, they’ll see to her properly.”

A graze on May’s forehead was studded with grit. Her eyes were open, but unfocused. She mumbled in Chinese.

“I’m here, don’t worry, you’re going to be fine,” said Nancy. “We’ll get you to hospital.” She searched for May’s hand beneath the blue emergency blanket.

“Best not touch her, love,” said the male paramedic.

The ambulance pulled away, siren warping. Through the darkened glass of the ambulance doors Nancy saw her twins, Ricki and Jen, and some of the guests on the driveway, looking like characters from a Cluedo set. She scanned the crowd for Iain, but the faces of friends and family grew blurry. Her daughters’ birthday ruined. Her sixtieth too!

It felt unreal – grown-up – to be in the ambulance as the paramedics talked in that
everything is going to be alright
voice. The same voice people used the day her mother walked into the sea and didn’t come out alive. A memory of the emergency crew wrapping her mother’s water-logged body like a FedEx package made Nancy feel light-headed. She gnawed at her thumb nail from its wick.

May croaked from beneath her oxygen mask. Something that sounded like “case”.

Nancy didn’t dare lean in too close. “What is it, May? What do you want?”

“
Keys
,” she said again, more clearly. “Take keys.”

The paramedic reached into her overalls and handed Nancy a set of house keys that belonged to May. “If you could let her relatives know? Are you in contact?”

May had talked about her family, about her fiancé – what was his name? Yifan? “Her family are all in China. I’ll search for an address book, there’s bound to be one at her place.”

The paramedic checked May’s oxygen mask. “That would be best.”

May held out a hand. “Please, forgive me Mrs Milne,” she said weakly.

“Ssshh, now. Save your strength. We’re nearly there,” Nancy replied.

“That’s right, keep breathing steady. You’re doing really well,” said the female paramedic.

At Hope Hospital, Nancy waited in the foyer and sipped on a cup of weak vending machine coffee. It tasted empty and burnt her lips. Two and a half hours had passed since the nurses wheeled May through the swing doors at the end of the corridor. She wished Iain were there; he would be worried. As she rummaged in her handbag for her mobile, a nurse called out her name.

“That’s me,” said Nancy.

“Would you like to come with me?” The nurse looked reassuringly robust, yet spoke softly. “My name’s Alison, I’m one of the team taking care of May. I understand you’re her next of kin?”

“Friend, actually. She teaches my daughter.”

Alison ushered her into a nearby room. “It’s more private in here.”

This wasn’t good: the Family Room, Kleenex on the coffee table, a hush that went on for centuries. Nancy’s lips throbbed where she’d burnt them on the coffee.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Alison sat down tentatively as if she might hurt the chair. “No. But I’m afraid she is very poorly … May sustained a severe injury to her head and bleeding into her brain, which is causing the pressure in her skull to increase.”

“Oh God.”

“We’ve done some CT and MRI scans that show widespread swelling and nerve damage.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’re taking her up to theatre now for an operation to try and relieve some of the pressure.”

“Can I see her?”

“I’m afraid the medical team need to be alone with her.”

“But she needs me – please …”

“She’s in good hands, Mrs Milne. The doctors are doing everything they can.”

“How long will it take?”

“It could be some time. The best thing would be for you to go home and get some rest. We’ll contact you as soon as she’s out of theatre.”

Nancy couldn’t believe it. A few hours ago, May was explaining how to make Chinese wantons to a bunch of their friends at the buffet table. Now her brain was swelling out of her skull. How could she tell that to May’s fiancé? And where was the fucking driver who’d done it?

“Will she be alright?”

The nurse gave a non-committal smile. “We’ll let you know as soon as there’s any news. I know it’s hard, but try not to worry.” The black cab smelt sickly and Nancy covered her nose with a silk scarf.

“D’you say Burden Road, love?”

“No, Burton. Ninety-two
Burton
Road.”

“Sorry, it’s your accent, couldn’t quite catch it. Which part are you from? The Big Apple?”