Sunday night in the living roommy grandmother reads The Chinese Timeswith a cracked magnifying glassand one lamp. She does this every Sundaywhen my mother and the other childrenare not around, and I lie on the couch,quiet so as not to disturb her contemplation. Today, she will think back to a timewhen at eighteen, delicate,useless for the village,she is married offto a country herb doctor.In his village, she could not carrya child in her arms and two bucketsof water from her shoulders,did not know how to walkthrough a rice field without slippers. But she delivered children, house to house,even after she had seen her brother-in-lawkneel on broken glass, and beatenso brutally with a steel rod, that afterwards,he hanged himself from an iron gate,or even after she had heard the newsthat two evenings before, during a curfew,a Japanese soldier had shota pregnant womancrawling across a wide dirt roadbecause he thought she was a pig. The babies, hard births—the urine, blood, and wasteso thick on sheets, she had to smoketo keep from retching—she delivered for a bunch of dried vegetables,a bag of rice, even nothing.
The Kenyon Review.
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