Frog

My cousin pulled up and parked outside my father’s gate. He was waiting for us. With him were my second sister-in-law and some young women, probably nephews’ wives. Second Sister-in-law grabbed the baby as the young women carried Little Lion out of the car and into the yard, and from there into the room we’d prepared for her convalescence.

Second Sister-in-law opened the bundle to let Father set eyes on this late arriving grandson. Wonderful, he said over and over, tears in his eyes. And when I saw the dark-haired, ruddy-faced infant, my heart filled with emotions, my eyes with tears.

Sensei, this child helped me recapture my youth and my inspiration. While the gestation and birth might have been more difficult, more torturous than most, and while issues concerning his status might create some thorny problems, as my aunt said, Once it’s seen the light of day, it’s a life and will become a legal citizen of the country, entitled to all the rights and benefits of the country. If there is trouble, that is for those of us who permitted him to come into the world to deal with. What we have to give to him is love, nothing more.

Sensei, tomorrow I will spread out some writing paper and complete the laboured birth of this play. My next letter will include a play that might never see the stage:

Frog.

Book Five

~ ~ ~

Dear Sensei,

I finally finished the play.

So many things in real life are tangled up in the story told in my play that when I was writing I sometimes could not tell if it was a true-to-life record or a fictional work. I finished it in a period of five days, like a child who can’t wait to tell his parents what he’s seen or thought. I know it’s a bit of an affectation to compare myself to a child, but that is exactly what I was feeling.

This play ought to constitute an organic part of my aunt’s story. Though some of the incidents did not actually occur, they did in my mind, and that makes them real to me.

Sensei, I used to think that writing could be a means of attaining redemption, but when the play was finished, instead of lessening, my feelings of guilt actually grew more intense. Although I can trot out an array of rationalisations to absolve myself of responsibility for the deaths of Renmei and the child in her womb — my child, too, of course — and place the blame on Gugu, the army, Yuan Sai, even Renmei herself — that is what I did for decades — now I understand with greater clarity than at any other time that I was not just the chief culprit, but the only one. For the sake of my so-called ‘future’, I sent Renmei and her child straight to Hell. I tried to imagine that the child carried by Chen Mei was the reincarnation of the unborn child, but that was nothing but self-consolation. It served the same function as Gugu’s clay dolls. Every child is unique, irreplaceable. Can blood on one’s hands never be washed clean? Can a soul entangled in guilt never be free?

I long to hear your answers, Sensei.

Tadpole

3 June 2009

Frog: A PLAY IN 9 ACTS

Dramatis Personae

GUGU, a retired obstetrician, in her seventies

TADPOLE, playwright, Gugu’s nephew, in his fifties