Midwife
Sunday night in the living room
my grandmother reads The Chinese Times
with a cracked magnifying glass
and one lamp. She does this every Sunday
when my mother and the other children
are not around, and I lie on the couch,
quiet so as not to disturb her contemplation.
Today, she will think back to a time
when at eighteen, delicate,
useless for the village,
she is married off
to a country herb doctor.
In his village, she could not carry
a child in her arms and two buckets
of water from her shoulders,
did not know how to walk
through a rice field without slippers.
But she delivered children, house to house,
even after she had seen her brother-in-law
kneel on broken glass, and beaten
so brutally with a steel rod, that afterwards,
he hanged himself from an iron gate,
or even after she had heard the news
that two evenings before, during a curfew,
a Japanese soldier had shot
a pregnant woman
crawling across a wide dirt road
because he thought she was a pig.
The babies, hard births—
the urine, blood, and waste
so thick on sheets, she had to smoke
to keep from retching—
she delivered for a bunch of dried vegetables,
a bag of rice, even nothing.
Priscilla Lee
My Grandfather, Grandmother, and Father around 1941
My Grandfather and My Grandmother in the 1950's.
Photo my Grandma sent to my Grandpa when he was in the US and she was in China or Hong Kong. It took 7 years before they were reunited.
My Grandmother in Las Vegas with her favorite slot machine in 1997.