Lava & Fern

Girl-Child Slave

Over the years, my mother says to me, "Don't be his girl-child slave."

In the Chinese movies I saw with my mother, sometimes a mother dies and the girl-child is sold to another family as their slave. She becomes the docile servant of the young misses or the plaything of their fathers and brothers. I knew those movies were of old China, of a faraway place and a time long gone, and that girl-child slaves did not exist in America.

So I resist as best I can each time my father says to me "fetch me my slippers,” “get me the newspaper,” “peel me an orange,” or “come here and help me pull out my white hairs." I hate that the most. Standing behind my father, smelling his greasy hair and pulling out his white strands, as if each strand pulled would slow his aging.

Sometimes, he sends me out to buy dim sum for him. I smell the delicious shrimp dumplings that he pops into his mouth while I watch and swallow only the saliva that fills mine. Sometimes he brings steaks home and fills the house with the wonderful aroma of frying meat. Dinner for us sisters comes later when our mother returns from the sewing factory to cook us rice, a dish of vegetables, dried fish so salty we could only eat a few bites, and a can of Campbell vegetable soup diluted with five cans of water to feed seven mouths.

I didn't want to become his girl-child slave. But I couldn't always stand up to my father.

(c) Lora Jo Foo 2008. All Rights Reserved.