“For the next few months, Kao Wei would comfort me after every bad fight and even help me devise tactics to avoid my husband. I would buy sleeping pills, crush them up, and put them into his wine so that he would fall asleep before he could get violent. I would invite his friends over for dinner and make them stay as late as possible, until he passed out drunk. Kao Wei even put a stronger lock on the toilet door so that it would be harder for Fang Min to break through. Slowly but surely, Kao Wei and I fell in love. He was my only friend in the building, in the whole city, actually. And yes, we started to have an affair. But then one day we were almost caught, and I forced myself to end it, for Kao Wei’s sake, because I feared Fang Min would kill him if he ever found out. A few weeks later, I realized I was pregnant with you, and I knew Kao Wei was the father.”

“Wait a minute. How did you know for sure he was the father?” Rachel asked, uncrossing her arms and leaning back against the window.

“Trust me, Rachel, I just knew.”

“But how? This was back before DNA testing.”

Kerry shifted in her chair awkwardly, searching for the right words to explain. “One of the reasons I had such a hard time getting pregnant was because Fang Min had peculiar habits, Rachel. Because of his drinking he had trouble getting erect, and when he was excited, he only liked to have a certain type of sex, and I knew I could not get pregnant that way.”

“Oh … oooh,” Rachel said, turning crimson when she realized what her mother meant.

“Anyway, you look so much like Kao Wei, there is no mistaking that he is your father. Kao Wei had beautiful, angular features like you do. And you have his refined lips.”

“So if you were in love with Kao Wei, why didn’t you just divorce Fang Min and marry Kao Wei? Why did you have to resort to kidnapping?” Rachel was leaning forward now with her chin in her hands, completely transfixed by her mother’s harrowing tale.

“Let me finish the story, Rachel, and then you will understand. So here I was, eighteen years old, married to this violent drunkard, and pregnant with another man’s child. I was so frightened that Fang Min would somehow realize the baby wasn’t his, and he would kill Kao Wei and me, so I tried to hide my pregnancy for as long as possible. But my old-fashioned mother-in-law recognized all the telltale signs, and it was she who declared to me a few weeks later that she thought I looked pregnant. At first, I was terrified, but you know what? The most unexpected thing happened. My in-laws were overjoyed that at last they were having their first grandchild. My evil mother-in-law suddenly transformed into the most caring person you could possibly imagine. She insisted that I move back into the big house so that the servants could look after me properly. I felt so relieved, like I had been rescued from hell. Even though I didn’t really need to, she forced me to stay in bed most of the time and made me drink these traditional brews all day long to boost the health of the baby. I had to take three types of ginseng every day, and eat young chicken in broth. I’m convinced this is why you were such a healthy baby, Rachel—you never got sick like other babies. No ear infections, no high fevers, nothing. At that time, there wasn’t a sonogram machine in Xiamen yet, so my mother-in-law invited a famous fortune-teller over, who divined that I was going to have a boy, and that the boy was going to grow up to become a great politician. This made my in-laws even more excited. They hired a special nursemaid to take care of me, a girl who had natural double eyelids and big eyes, because my mother-in-law believed that if I stared at this girl all day, my child would come out with double eyelids and big eyes. That’s what all the mothers in China wanted then—children with big, Western-style eyes. They painted a room bright blue and filled it up with baby furniture and all these boy clothes and toys. There were airplanes and train sets and toy soldiers—I had never seen so many toys in all my life.

“One night, my water broke and I went into labor. They rushed me to the hospital, and you were born a few hours later. It was an easy labor—I’ve always told you that—and at first I was worried they would see that you looked nothing like their son, but that turned out to be the least of my worries. You were a girl, and my in-laws were extremely shocked. They were outraged at the fortune-teller, but they were more outraged at me. I had failed them. I had failed to do my duty. Fang Min was also terribly upset, and if I hadn’t been living with my in-laws, I’m sure he would have beaten me half to death. Now, because of China’s one-child policy, all couples were banned from having a second child. By law, I could not have another, but my in-laws were desperate for a boy, a male heir who could carry on the family name. If we had lived in the countryside, they might have just abandoned or drowned the baby girl—don’t look so shocked, Rachel, it happened all the time—but we were living in Xiamen and the Zhous were an important local family. People already knew that a baby girl had been born, and it would have been disgraceful for them to reject you. However, there was one loophole to the one-child rule: if your baby had a handicap, you were allowed to have another.

“I didn’t know this, but even before I had come home from the hospital, my evil in-laws were already hatching a plan. My mother-in-law decided that the best thing to do was to pour acid in your eye—”

“WHAAAT?” Rachel shrieked.

Kerry swallowed hard, before continuing. “Yes, they wanted to blind you in one eye, and if they did this while you were a newborn, the cause of the blinding could look like it was just a birth defect.”

“My God!” Rachel clasped her hand to her mouth in horror.

“So she began to devise a scheme with some of the older servants, who were very loyal to her, but the special maid they had hired to take care of me while I was pregnant did not share the same unwavering loyalty. We had become friends, and when she found out about their plan, she told me about it on the very day I arrived home from the hospital with you. I was so shocked—I could not believe anyone could think of harming you in this way, much less your own grandparents! I was beside myself with rage and still weak from childbirth, but I was determined that nobody was going to blind you, nobody was going to hurt you. You were my beautiful baby girl, the baby from the man who rescued me. The man I truly loved.

“So a couple of days later, in the middle of lunch, I excused myself to go to the toilet. I walked down the hallway toward the downstairs toilet, which was across from the servants’ quarters, where you were being kept in a cot while the family ate. The servants were all having their lunch in the kitchen, so I went into their room, scooped you into my arms, and walked straight out the back door. I kept walking until I came to the bus stop, and I got on the next bus. I didn’t know any of the bus routes or anything—I just wanted to get as far away from the Zhou house as possible. When I thought I was far enough, I got off the bus and found a phone to call Kao Wei. I told him I had just had a baby and was running away from my husband, and he came to the rescue immediately. He hired a taxi—in those days it was very expensive to hire one, but somehow he managed—and came to pick me up.

“All that time, he was already devising a plan to get me out of Xiamen. He knew that my in-laws would have alerted the police as soon as they discovered that the baby was missing, and police would be searching for a woman and her baby. So he insisted on coming with me so that we could pretend to be a couple. We bought two tickets on the six o’clock train, which was the busiest train, and we sat in the most crowded car, trying to blend in with all the other families. Thank goodness no police ever came on board the train. Kao Wei took me all the way to my home village in Guangdong Province, and made sure I was safely with my parents before he left. That was the kind of man he was. I will always be glad that your real father was the one who rescued us, and that he at least had the chance to spend a few days with you.”