The Rice Mother Read Online Free PDF Page A

chopping block glinted crazily. Men, colored midnight blue by the sun, swept the drains by the road with long brooms.
    At a set of traffic lights in the middle of town, two old women squatted in the shade of a tree and gossiped, the loose skin on their faces wobbling. On the other side of the road a creature more glorious than any I could have imagined alighted from a car. She was delicate of bone and fair, so fair she was almost white. Dressed in a bright red Chinese costume, she had pinned her midnight hair with jeweled combs and trailing beads. Her eyes were almond-shaped and large but slanting and coy, and her mouth was shaped like a tiny rosebud. She had painted it very red, and it glistened in the sun. Everything about her was perfect and doll-like until she took a small tottering step forward. Suddenly it seemed as if all the richness of her costume and her startling beauty would swoon into the large monsoon drain by the side of the road. Immediately, one of her minders shot out a steadying hand. Ungratefully she cracked her fan on the helping hand, pulling away haughtily. It was then I realized that her feet were no bigger than my balled fist. And I have small hands. I blinked and stared at her misshapen feet, clad in black silk shoes meant for a very small child.
    “Her feet were bound when she was a little girl,” my husband said in the terrible heat inside the car.
    I whirled around in shock. “Why?”
    “So they wouldn’t grow big and clumsy like yours,” he teased lightly.
    “What?” I cried in disbelief.
    “It is the custom in China to bind a girl’s feet. The Chinese consider bound feet beautiful and desirable. Only the poor peasants who have a need for an extra pair of hands in the rice fields have daughters with unbound feet. As early as the age of two or three the best families bind the feet of their young girls so tightly that the growing bones mangle into a painful arch. Once bound their feet can never be unbound again, or they grow into deformed shapes that would make even their strange rocking steps impossible.”
    I had left my innocent village behind forever.
    Instantly I decided that the Chinese race was barbarous. To bind one’s own daughter’s feet as she howled in agony, to watch her through the years hobbling along painfully, must take a particularly cruel heart. What depraved taste had first hankered for a deformed foot? I looked down at my sturdy feet in their brown slippers and was glad for them. These feet had run free through forests and swum in cool water and had never even considered the possibility that somewhere in the world little girls sat helplessly in pain all day and wept softly all night.
    Soon our car was making its way out of the bustling town. A man in muddy clothes led a water buffalo by the nose along the side of the road. Small huts dotted the flat landscape. My husband relaxed back into the hard seat, and his small eyes closed into sleep. In the blazing midday sun the road stretched out like a silvery gray snake, twisting through rice-paddy fields, through spice plantations, and eventually through the bright orange soil of virgin forests. On either side rose walls of tangled dark green vegetation. Giant ferns threw their fronds out into the yellow light, and fat creepers swung untidily from tree branches in an effort to snatch at pieces of dappled sunlight, like children reaching for birthday cake. And here and there in the rough bark peered shapes like old faces frowning with worry. Between the flat leaves all was still and quiet. Mile after mile. Water mirages appeared and disappeared on the road. In the terrible heat the forest wisely slept, but I couldn’t even blink for fear of missing something momentous.
    The two hours of constant vigilance paid off.
    On the horizon I saw first one then two and then a whole line of people on bicycles. They were dressed from head to toe in black. And every single one of them was frighteningly faceless, lurking inside the