More Than A Number

The perfume from the jasmine brings back memories of my early childhood. I had been playing in our small garden, the jasmine in bloom, when they came to take me and my sister. It’s one of the earliest memories I have of my real mother, as she stood there next to my father and allowed them to take us away.

How did she feel that day? How did she feel as my father showed the two women which two children should be taken? For me, I know it would have broken my heart to have a child taken so, but my parents, my real parents, they didn’t have money to keep us all, so number six and I were sold.

I don’t remember my sister and I even being given names; I was always called number five, she number six. My elder sisters I know had names as well as numbers. I expect what my father really wanted was a boy and looking back at that time when we were taken, my mother’s belly indicated that another was due to arrive soon. Number seven? Or perhaps a son, so that child would not be taken as number six and I were when the jasmine was in bloom.

We left that small home, the only place that I had ever known. These two women, one tall and skinny, the other short and fat, these strangers, they did nothing to stop our fear. There was no warmth in those women, no kind words. Perhaps it was that hardness that allowed them to take such young children from their mothers for a handful of coins. Perhaps it was what was required, a lack of heart, so that they could tear families apart.

They did not comfort us, only took hold of my arm roughly as I tried to run back and put us in the back of a cart. The skinny one sat in the back with us while the fat one sat up front with the man driving the cart. Number six was too young to understand that she was being taken. She cried for her mother and I held her as the only human I knew. 

When we reached the town, we were put in a room and made to wait. We were not fed, we were not even given water. Number six continued to cry. Soon a couple came in with the two women. The skinny women dragged number six from my arms and gave her to the couple. The young woman smiled at number six, put a finger in her mouth which she sucked at hungrily. Then, without even looking at me, they all left, and I was alone with my arms empty.

I needed a pee but there was nowhere to go, no one to ask. My mother had at least taught me to be clean, but I was desperate. I went and squatted in a corner of the room, as far away as possible from where I’d been left.

Eventually the fat woman came in with another couple. She talks and points. The woman comes and examines me, looking at my eyes, my hair, my skin.

“There’s a mark here,” she said, pointing to a mark I’d had from birth on my neck.

“That’s why she’s so cheap,” replied the fat woman, “that and the fact that she’s as old as she is.”

“And how old is she?”

“This summer will be her fourth.”

The man came forward then, smiled at me gently and bent to examine my neck. “See,” he said, “the mark is shaped like a bat. Surely a good sign. Otherwise she’s pretty enough. We’ll take her,” he continued, ignoring his wife’s stern look. “She will make a good daughter.”

“What’s her name?” the woman asked.

“She doesn’t have one. She’s just number five. You can register a name of your choosing if you want before you take her.”

“Bo Yang,” the woman said. “If I’d had a daughter, I would have wanted her to be called Bo Yang.”  Precious Lotus Flower. Her husbands mind made up that I would be their daughter, she took charge of my name. If I’d been a boy, I expect the man would have chosen my name. But if I’d been a boy, I expect my father wouldn’t have sold me in the first place, and I would already have a name.

The adults talked some more, looked at some papers, wrote on them. Then I was taken away by the man and woman to their home. It was a nice home, but it was not my mother’s home. There was jasmine in the garden, and that night I felt as though that jasmine was my only friend, the only thing familiar to me.

Over the weeks that followed, I gradually learned what the man and woman wanted from me as a daughter. I was to call them father and mother, even though I already had a father and mother. When I wouldn’t call the woman mother, she got angry, so after some weeks, I called her mother, just to see if she was still cross. She cried when I called her mother. Sometimes there’s no making people happy.

New mother, as I came to think of her, could not have children. I heard her discussing this with a friend. Maybe, she said, it was because she was so much older than her husband. This is why they had to buy me. Her husband was rich enough to buy a girl, but not a baby girl, and certainly not a boy. My life with these people was okay. They were not cruel, and although new mother was always strict, she was fair as well if I did things right. New father doted on his little girl, always playing with me in the evening when he came home from work and buying me treats at the weekend. As time passed, I mostly forgot my former life, except, that is, in spring when the perfume from the jasmine reminded me that out there somewhere I had five sisters, a mother and a father.

One day some years later I was playing with friends in the street when I noticed two girls looking at me. I was quite scared at first, they were bigger than me, but then they came up to me.

“Are you number five?” the younger one asked. “You are, aren’t you?”

“My name is Bo Yang,” I said, proud to have a name.

“Yes, but weren’t you just number five once? I remember that mark on your neck, that bat.”

And these two were my sisters, number three and number four, though of course they had names too. I looked at their sad, tired clothes, proud to have better ones bought by new mother. They didn’t seem to mind I had better clothes though, they were just happy to see me.

“We always wondered who had bought you,” they said. “How’s number six?” I had to tell them I knew nothing of number six. Number six, I told them, had been bought by a different mother and father.

“We’ll keep this a secret for now,” they said. “We’ve been told by father that if ever we saw you, we were to ignore you.”

“Yes, but we were so upset when they took you away. We sometimes wondered if they’d take us away too.”

“And at least the new baby was a boy, so father has the son he wanted, and mother doesn’t let father near her anymore.” And they laughed at that, though I was too young to understand their meaning at the time. After that, my mother and father became old mother and old father to me. New mother and new father were the ones that wanted me, the ones that had given me a home, a name. They would now be mother and father to me.

I was fifteen when mother became ill. She went to the doctor, but no matter how much money father paid, it was never enough. Despite our efforts, she eventually died. Father was very sad. Though she was not a cheerful person, and sometimes very strict, we both missed her.

But with her death, came problems. I was of an age where I should marry, something mother would have sorted out. But with the cost of the doctors, father could not afford anything for me to take to a good marriage. And father was still a young man, not yet forty. He would be expected to take another wife soon, yet again, with the cost of the doctors, he was not a good prospect, no matter how much he might earn in the future. All that could be seen is what he had now, which was very little.

As we held each other in our mutual grief of losing mother, the answer came to us. I loved my father, he loved me, his daughter. But we were not blood. He was eighteen years older than me, but that was not unusual, so we married. It was strange, that first night in his bed, the perfume of the jasmine coming in through the window as he took me for the first time. He was gentle, considerate of my inexperience. And I grew to love him as a husband as I already loved him as a father. All those years ago he had been a stranger, that man who decided to take me because my mark was that of a lucky bat. Then he became new father, then father, then husband.

In time I became good friends with all my older sisters, when they too became adults and had husbands to answer to rather than old father. I never saw old father again, though I did visit old mother once he had died. She cried when she saw me. Why do I always seem to make my mothers cry? I also met my little brother, though he wasn’t very little by the time I got to meet him. Pompous, I thought after meeting him, just like old father. So although I seek my sisters often, I don’t make a point to see the brother I never knew in the first place. 

We never did find out what happened to number six.

I gave my husband four children, two sons, two daughters, the children his first wife couldn’t give him. We have lived quite well. He worked hard and quietly prospered once his first wife, my mother, had died and he had no more doctors’ bills to pay. He laughed as he told our children they should study medicine so that when he became ill, he wouldn’t have to pay for a doctor. Our eldest son has done just that, but alas, when my husband became ill, it was sudden, too quick to call a doctor. As he lay in my arms, he said at least it wouldn’t cost any money.

I sit at the right shoulder of my husband, my eldest son at the left. My son is the head of the family now. Tomorrow we will bury my husband, but tonight we must pray for his life and his soul. And as I sit, I breathe in the perfume of the jasmine, reflecting on this constant over the thirty years I have spent with this man, first as his daughter, then as his wife, now as his widow.