The Cooked Seed (42 page)

“Lloyd! Lloyd, are you having a bad dream?”

The expression on his face terrified me. Lloyd opened his eyes and stared at me as if he didn’t know who I was. I could see him struggling to recognize me, but he could not. His eyes showed fear and horror.

“I am Anchee, your wife!”

The thought that Lloyd might be experiencing a flashback scared me. After all, I looked like a Vietcong.

“I am Anchee. I am your wife,” I repeated. “We are at home. Wake up, Lloyd!”

Instead of coming out of his trance, he rolled over to his side of the bed and reached under the mattress for the knife he had concealed there.

I had less than a second to react. I reached for the light. The sudden brightness jolted Lloyd from his spell. He recognized me. He was breathing heavily and was sweating.

“Were you fighting the Vietcong in your dreams?” I asked.

Lloyd didn’t reply. He got up and went into the bathroom. He was in the shower for a long time. The next day he moved the pistol he kept in a drawer to a high shelf in the closet. Later in the day, he apologized for disturbing my sleep.

I didn’t tell him that there were moments his high nose scared me.

Over the next ten years of our marriage, Lloyd experienced the occasional flashback. For example, he would tell me that someone was in our yard trying to harm us.

“It’s two A.M.!” I said. “What makes you think that someone is in our yard?”

“The crickets!”

“Crickets? What about the crickets?”

“They’ve stopped singing.”

Lloyd got up and picked up his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. “Someone could be hiding in the bushes. I have to check.”

So began my husband’s two-in-the-morning house-patrol pattern. There was no way I could convince him that it was just his imagination.

We moved several times as Lloyd approached his retirement from teaching. We tried to find a home that fulfilled his security requirements. He preferred a dead-end street, with the property high up and fortress-like. Lloyd wanted to be able to set up a one-man defense. We eventually located a property in northern California near Mount Diablo with the features he had been looking for.

“Now there really is somebody in our yard every night.” I drew Lloyd’s attention to a family of deer presided over by a five-hundred-pound
buck with antlers as tall as small trees. The deer ate everything I planted and anything green in sight. I didn’t need exercise because I had to go up and down the slope to chase them off. They uprooted my tomato plants and stripped the lawn. They sat next to my kitchen window, sunbathing. I was awestruck by their beauty, but I didn’t like them killing the trees when they chewed off the bark. The only thing they couldn’t destroy were the three-hundred-year-old oaks, the roosting place for a flock of wild turkeys. Thirty or forty of them flew in every day at dusk like soundless black helicopters. They alighted in the canopy of the oak trees and settled in for the night. Each dawn, the turkeys silently glided off from their high perch into the surrounding forest. It was an incredible sight. Wild turkeys were my natural alarm clock. Precisely at daybreak, both the males and the females started their courting songs. It was a magnificent orchestra, though unwelcome if one had gone to bed late.

Sometimes in the middle of the night we would wake up to the sounds of a battle, of someone thrashing around in the bushes. The male deer would be fighting each other in the yard. The engagement was intense and brutal. The loud slashing sound came from the deer as they crashed through the woods, the colliding sound from their antlers hitting. It was not unusual the next day to see a young buck strolling by with an antler missing.

I hired a fence company to build a six-foot-high fence around the property so that we could sleep. The deer now lived outside the fence, but the wild turkeys took their place almost immediately. They moved inside the fence and combed the slope, looking for worms. Squirrels dug for nuts along the side while the deer observed enviously from across the fence.

Lloyd built himself a bunkerlike basement office that faced the driveway and the street and from which he could see anyone coming onto the property through a small one-way window. He also built secret drawers where he hid his weapons. Locks were Lloyd’s favorite things, and he installed them everywhere. Each of our doors had three different types of locks. As time went by, Lloyd upgraded the locks. He got rid of doors and windows when he thought the locks were worn-out, too old-fashioned, or poorly designed. He replaced doors and windows with
stronger lock designs. He followed the newest technology on locking devices. He would not hesitate to spend the money. He convinced himself that it was absolutely necessary for our security. I grew sick of getting locked out of the house all the time. The moment I stepped out to the yard or went to pick up the mail or simply went to get a breath of fresh air, Lloyd would lock the door behind me. He didn’t mind running up the stairs to reopen the door for me with an apologetic grin on his face. Eventually I started to carry a key when I left the house for any reason.

“It’s a man’s world,” I had been telling Lauryann since she was in the cradle. “Being a girl is a disadvantage, but it doesn’t mean you’re destined for a sad life. Being an American girl means that you are entitled to reverse your ill fate.”

While we were visiting China, I could not prevent Lauryann from hearing the negative remarks about her “bad looks.” Her relatives, especially her grandma, Nai Nai, didn’t like her sun-kissed dark skin. “Why does Nai Nai wish that my skin was milky white?” Lauryann asked. She also told me that neighbors gathered around her and sang “The Sorry Kid from a Divorced Family,” which upset her. I had to tell her that people in China believed that a kid from a divorced family was “cracked porcelain.”

It made me feel fortunate that Lauryann did not live in China. A divorced family was not an issue in American society. Lauryann was proud of her natural olive-colored dark skin. It was considered attractive in America—some of her schoolmates even paid tanning salons to darken their fair skin.

When Lauryann was in Shanghai one summer, Nai Nai took Lauryann to be measured by the “height predictor.” The machine predicted that Lauryann would grow up to be a dwarf. Nai Nai was crushed. Lauryann’s height had always been her concern, because Nai Nai was less than four feet. Nai Nai feared that she had passed her “short gene” to Lauryann. She begged me to “beef up” Lauryann’s diet to help break the “curse.”

Believing that America was number one in the world in every aspect of life, I decided to change Lauryann’s diet to a high-protein one:

Monday – McDonald’s

Tuesday – Burger King

Wednesday – Kentucky Fried Chicken

Thursday – Domino’s Pizza

Friday – Jack in the Box

Saturday – Wendy’s or Fatburger

Sunday – Bagels, cheese, and ice cream

Lauryann developed plump cheeks and a double chin. It made Nai Nai happy. But I noticed that Lauryann was frequently tired and had to lie down. Her colds wouldn’t go away. Every time she had a fever, she had to be put on antibiotics or the fever wouldn’t come down. The intervals began to shorten between illnesses. Every two months she got sick enough to need antibiotics. What frightened me was that Lauryann seemed to fall ill again right after she had recovered.

Lauryann was a bag of antibiotics, and the drugs were losing their effect. Her doctor warned me that the antibiotics had reached their limit. The next time Lauryann became sick, there would be no effective medicine for her.

If it hadn’t been for Lloyd, I would never have linked the “super-diet” to Lauryann’s poor health. Lloyd asked me to stop feeding Lauryann American junk food. He pleaded, “Trust me, there is nothing nutritious about this superdiet!”

I could see Lloyd’s point. I grew up playing with Chinese peasant children who were too poor to afford meat, yet they were never sick. They ate yams, soybeans, and vegetables, and they were extremely healthy and full of energy.

I went back to Chinese home cooking. Lloyd became our in-house food policeman. “We’d better fill Lauryann up before the school soda machine gets her!” Every morning, Lloyd made smoothies with fruit and nuts, which he called “sunshine for the brain.”

Before Lloyd came into my life, I had been fond of the way Americans cared for their children. I never doubted that the children’s movies broadcast through public TV promoted goodness. It wasn’t until I saw
Beavis and Butt-Head
that I realized that Americans didn’t always protect their children. The government turned a blind eye to TV commercials that targeted the young. The sponsors and producers seemed to have only ratings on their minds. Like food with additives, the movies
were designed to prey on the vulnerable. Beavis and Butt-Head became new role models for the young. Children loved to watch the characters challenge authority. They insulted the president, showing that he was a fool.

I witnessed the powerful effect on Lauryann. The show led her into a wonderland where children lived to defy adults. Lauryann began to show signs of disrespect. She adopted the cartoon characters’ language and started to speak to me in sentences such as “My life is my life, and my life is not your life.”

Like the fast-food industry, American popular culture grabbed its children by their aesthetic taste buds before they developed a taste for real food. It was simply “so much fun,” in Lauryann’s words. If I let these shows raise my daughter, I saw myself that I would lose her in no time.

I made Lauryann watch what I believed were quality shows.
People’s Court, Judge Judy, 60 Minutes, 20/20,
and
The Magic School Bus
. Only on Lauryann’s birthday did I allow her to choose whatever she wanted to watch.

Just as I believed that I had taught Lauryann right from wrong, I received a call from her school one day informing me that my six-year-old daughter was sick with stomach pains. I put down my writing for the day and went to pick her up.

Lauryann’s “pain” magically disappeared the moment we walked out of the school gate. For the rest of the day, Lauryann played around the house and did whatever she liked. The next morning, soon after I dropped Lauryann off at school, I received the same call from the same nurse telling me that my daughter was having stomach pains again.

“May I come in the afternoon?” I asked.

“No. We are not responsible for keeping a sick child. You have to pick her up.”

I had a feeling that Lauryann was lying. She had seen how I suffered from stomach pains. I decided to test her.

“Lauryann, honey, what happened? Stomach pain again? Oh, you poor thing! Let’s go home and you have a good rest.” Holding Lauryann’s hand, we headed home.

It didn’t take long for Lauryann to expose herself. She forgot that
she was supposed to be in pain and started to sing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” I sang along with her until we crossed the street.

I dropped my happy mask, and locked both of my hands on Lauryann’s shoulders. Looking straight in her eyes, I said, “You don’t have stomach pain, do you?”

Like a deer caught in headlights, Lauryann froze. She then admitted her guilt.

After we arrived home, I told her that I must perform a mother’s duty. “This is not the first time you lied.” The first time was when she didn’t like the lunch I made for her. She threw her peanut butter sandwich in the trash and stood in line for the school lunch. Lauryann told her teacher that her mother didn’t pack a lunch for her.

Ten days later, I received a call from her teacher. “Are you having financial difficulties? You should apply for the free lunch program so that your daughter can eat.”

“I pack a lunch sandwich for Lauryann every day,” I replied.

When Lauryann returned from school, I conducted an interrogation. She promised never to lie again.

“A spanking will help you remember,” I said. “My mother spanked me when I lied as a child. I stole three pennies from her to buy a pancake because I was starving. Unlike you who had a sandwich, I had nothing to eat. I got up at four every morning, rain or shine, to go to the market. By the time I carried the food basket home, I was starving. My mother said to me, ‘Hunger shouldn’t be a reason to steal. Honor is what differentiates humans from animals.’ My mother had to beat me with a rubber tube that she pulled off the faucet.”

I told Lauryann that I passed out in the middle of my mother’s discipline. I remembered waking up surprised to see a cup of milk placed next to my pillow. When my mother told me to drink the milk, I cried. I knew the milk was not something my mother could afford.

Lauryann let me know that she was ready for the spanking. I closed the curtains while Lauryann leaned over on my bed on her stomach. The moment I hit Lauryann’s behind, a handprint appeared. I broke into tears.

Lauryann felt sorry for me. She said, “Mom, why don’t you get a towel and lay it over me so that your fingerprints won’t show?”

I laid a towel over her butt. My heart ached.

Lauryann didn’t move as she waited quietly for me to continue.

I forced myself to go on. With each stroke, Lauryann let out a muted cry. I told myself that I had to go through with it and accomplish my mission.

After I was done with the spanking, I hugged her. We both cried. I understood at that moment how my mother must have felt and how much she had to overcome in order to set me right.

When Lauryann became a young woman, she would remember the spanking. She would tell me what I had told my mother, that she was grateful that I had performed my duty.

“It was harder on you than on me,” Lauryann would say. “I knew you loved me so much that you couldn’t bear not to do the right thing.”

Lauryann had no interest in discussing my divorce from Qigu, but she wanted to know what I remembered the most about my life with him.

“I remember our visit to the dental office in Chicago’s Bridgeport,” I began. “It was the first time we had anything leftover after paying all the bills, sixty dollars. We decided to take care of our teeth and see a dentist for the first time in our lives. We didn’t want to end up like our parents, who lost all their teeth, and thirty dollars each would pay for a dental cleaning.”