The Answer Handed Down

by Huina Zheng

“I’ve always treated you and Ming exactly the same,” my mother said. “I’ve never favored him over you.” She seemed taken aback. She looked at me the way she used to when, as a child, I denied stealing fruit candy, sugar still clinging to the corners of my mouth.

The day before the Mid-Autumn Festival, I went home to see her. She was sitting on the custom-made brown sofa in her living room. I brewed a pot of Tieguanyin and poured a cup for each of us. She liked tea, strong tea. I told her strong tea was bad for her stomach and that she should brew it weaker. She did not agree or disagree, but she still drank the tea I had made, slowly.

“When I was pregnant with Ming,” she said, “I hid in the mountains so the family-planning officers wouldn’t find me. I was a wife, a daughter-in-law. I had to give your father’s family a son to continue their family line. That was my responsibility.”

“But when Ming did something wrong, you hit me,” I said. “He didn’t do his homework, and you beat me with a broom until you broke my arm.” When I said this, my right arm twitched involuntarily and began to ache faintly.

She pressed her lips together. Her expression was like the one she had worn when she looked at my brother’s failing exam paper and tried hard not to scold him, because scolding him would be useless and would only make him hate studying even more.

“You were the older sister,” she said. “An older sister has the responsibility to take care of and manage her younger brother. I was an older sister, too. When I was little, I had to carry my younger brother on my back when I was sent out to gather firewood, herd cattle and wash the whole family’s clothes by the river. That was my responsibility.”

She always liked to compare her childhood with mine, trying to make me understand that my childhood had already been much luckier, that I should not complain but be grateful. I wanted to say, “That was different,” but the words reached my mouth and were swallowed back down, as if a fish bone were stuck in my throat.

Rather, I said, “What if Ming had been the older brother and I had been the younger sister? Would you still have beaten him because I made a mistake?”

She did not answer immediately.

“Ming never needed to do housework,” I continued. “Even if he were the older brother and I were the younger sister, he still wouldn’t have needed to take care of me. When you say the older one should give way to the younger one, what you really mean is that older sisters should give way to younger brothers and sisters. This rule was never meant for sons.”

“That’s different,” she said. “You’ll marry. You’ll raise children. You’ll take care of your in-laws. Ming will support the family and become the head of the household.”

“But Grandma still kept scolding you later,” I said. “You — not Dad — were the one who took care of her. You were the one who cleaned up after her. And until the day she died, she still thought everything about you was wrong.”

She lowered her head, blew across the tea in her cup, and took a sip. “I was her daughter-in-law, she said. That was my responsibility.”

That was the third time she had said it.

I suddenly noticed that every time she said the word “responsibility,” her tone did not change at all. It was not an explanation, nor a complaint, and even less a grievance. It was not an answer but more like a formula she had memorized to explain her whole life.

I thought: Who taught her to say that?

The certainty of “responsibility” was still stubbornly welded onto her face. I realized that the reason I had argued with her almost every day during my teenage years and the reason that now, at the age of thirty, every time I came home, we still circled back to these topics, had to do with that certainty on her face. I had always thought that if I gave enough examples, one day she would admit that some things should never have been this way. But her face had always worn this expression.

“Don’t think Mom doesn’t love you,” she said softly. “We’re women. What else can we do?”

I looked over at her. She had grown old. The lines around her mouth looked like two shallow channels washed out by rainwater. I thought of an old black-and-white photograph at home. In the photo, her hair was tied into a ponytail, and she was smiling shyly, still only a teenage girl. Did that girl know whose wife, whose daughter-in-law, whose mother she would become? She probably didn’t. She probably also didn’t know that a person could first ask, “What do I want?”

She picked up her teacup and once again blew at the tea leaves floating on the surface.

I finally understood that the whole afternoon, I had been asking her what she had wanted. But what she had answered was never “I wanted.” She said:

I was an older sister.
I was a wife.
I was a daughter-in-law.
I was a mother.

She wasn’t giving wrong answers. It was just that no one had ever taught her any other way to answer.

I lowered my head and looked at my cup of tea. The tea had gone cold. The Tieguanyin leaves had sunk to the bottom of the cup.

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[Editor’s note] Huina Zheng’s essay “Why I Am Proud of My Daughter” appears in issue 1130.