The Gift
Allison Hong Merrill
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2020 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
火葬 Cremation
The fire devoured Mama whole, ate everything: her silky black hair, her willow leaf-shaped eyes, her almost-amputated, diabetes-swollen legs.
洗澡 Bath
In Taiwan, when I was little, my family lived in a traditional Japanese house—a minka—that had been a government official's compound during the Japanese Occupation Era (1895-1945 A.D.) There's no way for me to comprehend the rationale behind the floor plan. Upon entering the house, one stands in a wood-plank hallway that separates the kitchen and the washroom. On the right side of the hall were two sliding wood panels like a farmhouse door. Behind it was an immediate three-foot drop to the washroom floor.
The washroom was a sacred space dedicated to cleansing and purifying: an all-tiled-in, underground structure that looked like an empty swimming pool, as big as three king-sized mattresses combined. A faucet on one wall remained on, icy groundwater cascaded into a kiddy-pool-sized tin tub, about a foot deep, that sat right under it. It overflowed, causing the tiny floor drain to make a perpetual sucking noise.
Up until I was three, Mama performed the nightly ritual of bathing me. She carried a bucket of boiling water from the kitchen to the washroom, poured out some cold water from the tin tub, and then filled it back up with the boiling water. Her hand circled the tin tub wall, as if stirring soup in a pot, until the bathwater turned lukewarm. I undressed myself and sat at the washroom entrance, my bottom on the cold wood floor, my legs dangled over the edge of the three-foot drop, hyperextended. There was no ladder for getting down to the sunken water world. It required a leap of faith: I aimed to jump, and hoped to land, on the footbridge that was a wobbly, moldy, wooden shop stool.
One time, the shop stool slipped from under me and I nosedived right into the tin tub. Never having learned to swim, the asphyxiating-like sensation terrified me. Frantically I swung my arms, trying to grab anything to hold myself up. In that brief moment of panic, fright, and physical pain from being out of breath, I thought I was alone at the silver tub bottom, surrounded by nothing but outward-expanding rippled reflection.
Mama pulled me up and patted me on the back. My nose was blocked with water and it stung. I couldn't stop crying and coughing. Surprisingly, Mama couldn't stop cry-laughing. I had never seen her so delighted; it stopped my tears. Admiring her amusement over my misfortune, I immediately wanted to fall again to keep her laughing. After a few moments, she said, "You're doing it wrong. Climb down into the washroom with your back to it, like going down a ladder."
Mesmerized by her rare, soft tone of voice, I didn't have the heart to break her mood by asking, "What's a ladder?"
In the following nights, even with the best intention to please her, and no matter how hard I tried, I didn't have the courage to make myself fall. Instead, I cautiously reached for the stool with my toes, carefully climbed down to the washroom floor, my back to it, and safely arrived by Mama's side. I wiggled my toes, rubbed my tummy, and waited for her nod to get wet. She didn't look at me or talk to me and I wondered if I had disappointed her.
孝順 Filial Piety
One night, while splashing, kicking, and giggling in the tub, I tapped at the hole in my tummy with my index finger and asked, "What's this?"
"Belly button," Mama said. "There's a cord that ties your belly button to a place in my tummy. You can't see it, but it's always there."
I looked down but there was no cord. I didn't understand.
Another time as she bent over to scrub my face, I noticed a bead-like mole on her right brow. "What's that?" I asked, pointing.
"A gift from my Baba and Mama."
Ah, a gift. On the face.
To honor their parental love and to show her fierce gratitude, Mama vowed to keep all her organs. No extraction of cavity-tooth. No laser removal of moles. No hysterectomy. She chowed down painkillers for the never-ending toothache; let hair grow out of the brown mole hanging on her brow; tolerated decades of heavy bleeding, menstrual pains, and bloating. A thankful daughter, she said, makes a virtuous woman. And what would a woman be if not virtuous?
On her forty-seventh birthday, at the annual check-up, Mama fought her doctor's advice and insisted on keeping her uterus—The Child's Palace, as it's called in Chinese. "I carried my girl in water here. A special gift." Her argument shocked me. Did I cause her pain and sorrow?
子宮The Child's Palace
I sit on the examination table in my OB/GYN's office in Salt Lake City, waiting for my test results. Even if the doctor speaks my native Chinese, I'll still be lost with the medical term he uses.
"What's—fib? What? That word you just said."
"Fibroids."
I stare at him. Tension rises between my brows, a headache. I wish someone were here with me. There's enough space in this room for an interpreter and a trusted friend. They can each take a chair under the poster of fetal development. One of them can talk comforting words while the other holds my hand. Some women say their mother is their best friend, who accompanies them to their OB/GYN appointments. Mama died when I was twenty-four, before I married. Before I knew what it was like to have a cord connecting my baby's belly button to my Child's Palace. She passed away on her fiftieth birthday. On a rainy night. On an ambulance. Alone.
The doctor pulls out a pen from his shirt pocket and draws an upside-down triangle on my patient file folder. "Uterus." And then he adds small circles along the perimeter. "Growth. Fibroids."
"Can—uh—cancerous?" I know that word. It stings my tongue to say it.
"No. But I strongly advise that you get a hysterectomy. Your fibroids are HUGE."
I stare at him again, my mind blank.
"Take out your uterus." He yanks an invisible object out of his abdomen. "You're done having kids, right?"
I nod, thinking of my three teenage sons.
"Well, the uterus only serves one purpose. Yours has done its job. Take it out. Throw it out."
Take it out?
I look at the drawing on the file folder: three simple lines touching one another to represent something that's not simple at all. This is where, for twenty-seven months of my life, I carried my boys in water. Where they splashed and kicked and—maybe—giggled. Where I became a mother. My uterus isn't three simple lines touching one another; it's where three precious lives touch mine.
Throw it out?
I'm not afraid of surgery, even though I've never had one before. I'm afraid that if Mama were in this room right now, she would leap out of the chair and slap me unconscious. "How dare you!" she might yell. "I gave you that Child's Palace. My gift to you!"
A gift. In my tummy. How can I throw it out? Am I an ungrateful daughter?
I've always wanted to live a long and prosperous life. But mostly, I want to be healthy. I want to be around for my children. Go on family vacations. Go to superhero movies together. Cook them dinner. Watch them graduate from college. Get married. Have children of their own. Spending time with them is my way of loving them. My gift to them. There's no treachery in being a mother who gives her children time.
詛咒死者 Curse the Dead
When I was fourteen, my parents divorced. Mama moved out and lived alone. Ten years later when the doctor sent her home to die, Mama tearfully begged the men in her family, her younger brothers, the decision makers, "Give me a soil burial. No fire. Being burned is dying twice. Who would curse the dead like that?"
忘恩負義 Ungratefulness
The only day the surgeon is available to operate on me is the day my husband goes on a business trip to San Jose. I drive myself to the hospital before the sun rises, my children still sleeping.
I sit on the edge of a stainless steel table, my stocking feet dangling. The open-back hospital gown exposes my spine for the anesthesia injection. When the surgeon asks if I have any questions before the procedure, I plead, "Show me my uterus when you take it out. Please don't throw it out. I want to say a proper good-bye."
The surgeon smiles. The nurses chuckle. "That's cute," they say in one voice.
"I'm serious. It's called The Child's Palace in Chinese. A gift—"
Someone rubs my bare back with what feels like a piece of moist cotton. And then a cold liquid sensation pinches my lower back. I glance at the wall clock. Seven-thirty. My boys...my boys are driving...themselves...to school while I sleep...for the surgery.
Take it out.
Throw it out.
I wake up in a white room, wondering why I'm alone. The wall clock reads nine-ten, I grow impatient and push the call button for a nurse. When a middle-aged lady in a blue scrub comes to my bedside, I ask when the surgery will start.
"Oh, it's done. You in pain?"
"No. The surgery is over?"
She nods, and then checks my IV.
How is it possible? I was—what was I doing? How did I get here?
"I didn't get to say good-bye to my uterus," I say. "I asked—"
"Well, we showed it to you. You just don't remember. Want morphine?"
"NO! Where is my uterus?" My voice shakes a little, I can't help it. "I didn't get to see it. It was part of me. A gift—"
"We showed it to you. If you must know, it looked sick."
I roll over, my back to the nurse. I'm nauseous. A migraine is coming up. My ears ring with the raging pulse in my head.
We showed it to you. You just don't remember.
Ridiculous! How can I ever not remember saying thank-you and good-bye to my Child's Palace?
安息Rest in Peace
In the hospital's dark, damp basement, Mama's body was placed in a stainless steel freezer, water droplets dangling from the glass lid. It looked like she lay at the bottom of a tin tub. Her eyes closed. Her breath gone. For months leading to her passing, Mama's failed kidneys had caused her internal organs to submerge in her bodily waste. Which forced her to sit on the bedroom tatami floor every night, leaning against a wall to fall asleep. Her head drooped, her breath labored. She wept and whimpered. "I'm so tired. When will I be able to lie down on my back again?..."
Finally, finally, finally, she could rest in peace.
塵歸塵土歸土 Dust to Dust
Mama's brothers denied her a soil burial. Cremation was quick and cheap, they said.
I flew back to Taiwan. In the crematorium, the funeral director led me into a wide open lobby with a marble floor that looked like it could be used for a dance hall. There were six furnaces along one wall. Plenty of natural light flooded into the lobby through the huge windows on two opposing walls. Six young muscular men in white shirts carried Mama's casket in and rested it in front of one of the furnaces on a chain conveyor belt. They were quiet. The room was quiet. The only audible human sounds were a group of Buddhist monks' chanting in the back of the room and the undertaker's instructions:
"Kneel!"
I knelt and sprawled into the Child's Pose on the floor, before the furnace.
"Kowtow!"
I kowtowed.
"Second kowtow!"
I kowtowed again.
"Third kowtow!"
I was jetlagged. I was nauseous. I felt a migraine coming up. There was a fierce roar of a metal door opening on squeaky hinges, followed by the sound of a conveyor belt rolling. I was in the same lobby with Mama's body, repeating the kowtow motion while she burned. Each time my head touched the cold, hard marble floor at the command of the funeral director, the monks chanted more energetically, louder, faster.
Suddenly the chanting stopped. The monks bowed their courtesy, respect, and condolences, and then walked away. The funeral director gestured for me to get up from the floor. Pointing at a spacious alcove off the lobby, he said, "Go rest."
The architectural pattern of the crematorium lobby continued into the alcove. A sand box was on a rectangular table at the center of the alcove, and a row of chairs was pushed against one wall. I sat for a few minutes in silence and then dozed off.
When the funeral director woke me, the undertaker was pushing a metal cart toward us. On the top tier of the cart was a metal box and an urn. The undertaker set them on the table, and then bent over to fetch a hammer from the bottom tier of the cart. He put on a pair of gloves, as if preparing to do a live demonstration. With horror, I watched him do what he did for a living—handling the dead.
He reached into the metal box and picked out a piece of white bone and laid it on the table. He was gentle with the hammer. With a soft blow to the bone, it shattered. With a few soft pounds to the shards, they pulverized. He sifted the bone powder slightly in his cupped hands and poured it into the urn. Finally, he lifted a skull in the air and studied it with interest. "Aw, so beautiful. Your mama was a beauty."
The skull!
I had seen plastic skulls at Walmart during Halloween season, but never a real one. Now I was looking at Mama's skull, perfectly intact and pure white. A dome. Hollowed eye sockets. Upside down heart-shaped hole for the nose. High cheek bones. Teeth. This was her head, where her brain and mind were shielded. Where her lifelong thoughts and memories were stored. It was in a stranger's hand now. He held it like a volleyball. I could almost hear my heart drop.
He hammered the skull. Once, twice, thrice. The sound of the pounding reminded me of the sound I made when I repeatedly knocked my forehead on the marble floor earlier, each time with belated gratitude for each thing Mama had done for me: changed my diapers, washed my dirty clothes, breastfed me, bathed me.
The skull was destroyed. What was left didn't resemble a human life. No flesh. No bones. No blood. Being burned is dying twice. Who would curse the dead like that?
喪母Motherless
The fire devoured Mama whole, ate everything: her compass-drawn round face, her heart-shaped smiling lips, her elephant-leg-like arms, her thick waist, her flooded lungs, her hairy moles, her cavity-teeth, and the diseased Child's Palace she dutifully, painfully, respectfully kept all her life.
Gone.
All gone.
Behind my closed eyelids I saw the washroom in our minka. My three-year-old self splash and kick and giggle in the tub. Tapping at the hole in my tummy with my index finger, I asked, "What's this?"
"Belly button," Mama said. "There's a cord that ties your belly button to a place in my tummy. You can't see it. But it's always there."
That cord that tied me to her Child's Palace, I saw it now, and I understood. She gave me a gift. In my tummy.
Gone.
I opened my eyes and caught my reflection in the stainless steel furnace door.
Motherless...
