Jade was a small peasant girl in China’s deep mountains.
Exceptionally bright, beautiful, and healthy,
She was valued only as a piece of roof tile
In the eyes of her parents.
They sent her dull-brained brother to school
And force-bound her feet into a pair of 3-inch “golden lily” stubs when she was five.
“Suck it in, my daughter,” cried her teary mother, as Jade screamed in pain.
“So, a good man will want to marry you.”
Born in 1912, Jade was the last of the victimized girls aged three to five all over China
Brutalized and crippled for life by the barbaric 1,000-year-old foot-binding.
For the rest of her 86 years on earth,
Jade toiled in commune’s cornfields.
Growing up illiterate
Jade cooked, cleaned, stitched, and waited on her parents and brothers.
Mother herself, Jade once threw her newborn daughter into urine pot to drown
And watched another die.
Worshipping gold-valued male child
Jade doted on her firstborn, my father.
When she saw me born a worthless girl, her first grandchild,
Jade put on a long face and didn’t speak a word for two days.
Magnolia, my mother, was an orphaned peasant girl as a small child.
Exceptionally bright, she excelled in her mountain village’s primary school.
“Whoever sends me back to school, I’ll marry their son!”
14-year-old Magnolia cried out to the world for help.
Magnolia, my mother, never smiled at me as a child.
My untimely birth had destroyed her dream to go to college and become a writer,
And stuck her for life in her miserable marriage
To the man she learned to despise, my father.
I grew up a child servant cooking and cleaning for my parents and brothers
With my father yelling that I was a stubborn dumb knucklehead like an elm tree stump
I held on tight to my only joy:
School, books, earning highest grades, my teachers’ praises, my peers’ respect.
At age ten, I lost my only joy when Mao unleashed his monstrous Cultural Revolution
Schools were shut down, books burned, teachers beaten and many tortured to death
For the next ten years of chaos, knowledge became useless, and learning poisonous.
But nothing stopped my hungry search for knowledge and books.
At age 21, I grabbed the first opportunity that came my way.
A peacock flying out of a crammed chickencoop in the blue-collar dirt yard,
I competed my way against thousands into college
And became a famous elite high school English teacher.
At age 33, I escaped the female genocidal culture to America,
Earning my master’s degree, determined to create a bright future
Especially for my small daughter, whom my father-in-law had pressured me
To have her lethally injected and try for a gold valued boy.
Pioneering alone in America,
I won the battle of achieving my American dream
But lost the war of earning my daughter’s understanding.
Five years of separation had made me a stranger in the eyes of my own flesh and blood.
Who wrote that famous story, The Gift ( O’Henry? )
Husband sold his prized gold pocket watch to buy his wife a beautiful comb for her luscious hair
Wife sold her long hair to buy a gold chain for her husband’s gold pocket watch.
O, the heart-quivering gift.
I gave my daughter the gift of America,
Woven with her lonely mother’s weeping, broken heart
Only to long for my daughter’s gift of love.
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