The offerings were ready, and I thought that my lion cat must be hungry.
It was a blistering summer day. Inside our family home, everyone was bustling around the stuffy parlor, which was filled with the fragrance of cooked meat and fried garlic. In front of the mahogany shrine box, tangerines were piled up on a small plate. A red grouper had been placed on a larger plate, its head scarlet and tail crooked. Following Grandma’s direction, Cousin Mei placed the censer in the middle of the table, and lit the two red candles on either side of it.
When nobody was looking in my direction, I dropped a piece of fish down underneath the table, and secretly enjoyed the flopping sound as it hit the bottom of my bag below me.
This feast was an offering for the dead, and for Gods and Goddesses up in Heaven, but for whom exactly I did not know. Neither did Mei, I assumed. Grandma might know, but she would say, no need for you zi niang to question so much.
Anyway, I never found it a treat — this twice-a-month ritual, in which people prayed for crap like more money or more children.
For the latter, however, there was no need for any more prayers. Three days earlier, Grandma had come back from the town clinic with an unwanted baby boy in her arms, and declared him a new family member. Consequently I was sent to sleep in my mother’s room, while my old room was cleaned out and stuffed with baby products.
We are going to raise him ourselves, declared my grandparents. Though aged eighty-two and seventy-nine, no one dared to ask them how they were going to foster a three-month-old.
The arrival of the baby solved my grandparents’ marital crisis. Nowadays they took turns lifting the baby’s chubby legs to help him shit. They had begun to smile at each other again, and even at me once or twice. Thanks to the arrival of the baby boy, they totally forgot that several days earlier, after Grandma had thrown a tantrum, Grandpa announced that he was going to divorce, in his own words, “that fatty shrew”.
“Divorce? At his age?” I was about to say, if they really wanted to do it, they’d have to move fast. But I swallowed my words. Even though they’d never liked me much, they were still my grandparents. Nineteen years ago, at the news of having a granddaughter with heart valve problems, they had checked my underpart in disbelief before storming out of the hospital without a word, taking away two bags of dates, two bags of brown sugar, and a set of blue clothes for a baby boy.
But I was not jealous of the baby boy. I really didn’t give a damn about him. The only thing I cared about was my lion cat.
I found the cat in a muddy ditch along the paddy field near our family home one day after school. I had never seen a lion cat before, but I identified her breed by her odd-colored eyes— one turquoise, another azure. A rotten odor clung to her matted coat.
I gently lifted the lion cat from the soggy ditch.
“Hey,” I said, “you okay?”
She looked at me and quietly licked her nose.
I checked her body. Her long white fur was matted with brownish stains and clots of blood. Several wounds oozed with smelly pus. On her round belly, maggots wriggled. I used a stick to flick them away, hoping that they hadn’t consumed her blood and flesh.
I put the lion cat into a foam box and decided to take her home. But where to keep her? Grandma hated cats. She said they were family thieves — “always carrying away food and only bringing back fleas” — and she used the hanging stick to beat away the stray cats that crept into our kitchen to steal our cured meat. If I got caught, she would either kick me or the cat out of the house — most likely the both of us.
The only person in our family who would care for a stray cat was my mom, but that day she had gone back to the hospital for a check-up. Even if she were at home, I wouldn’t seek her assistance. Asking Mom to go against her mother-in-law was too much — she already had enough weighing on her body and mind.
Mom worked at a little warehouse near the city’s outskirts. The warehouse stored brown sugar in bags and molasses in plastic containers from the sugar mill where Dad was in charge. Every day, my mom sat in her office with two coworkers, answering Taobao customers’ inquiries about the quality of the products, and when their parcels would be dispatched. At night, she often stayed with Dad at the mill to avoid commuting, while I lived with my grandparents in our family home in town.
I still missed those days — I was about six then — when she sat by my bedside and sang me a lullaby. But I would never tell her how much I longed for them.
Holding the foam box, I wandered along the dirt road, unsure of where to go. Eventually, I found myself near the fishmonger’s shop, where Mei and her husband worked.
I was fifteen, and Mei was four years older than me. She gave birth to her first kid at my age, and was now a mother of three. An early start did not make her an expert mother, though. One of her children was hit by a motorcycle while catching grasshoppers along a roaring country highway, and ended up with a limp; another ate colorful grains of rat poison which he mistook for candies and nearly killed himself.
All of her children were talented troublemakers. They stained the newly washed sheets, played with the goldfish to death, and stole Grandma’s stretchy bras to make a large catapult. If not closely supervised, they would tear our family home to pieces.
Once, when Mei was busy running around the house trying to catch her scuttling children, I asked her whether it was tiresome to be a mother.
“I’ve gotten used to it,” Mei said, while pulling her daughter down off the cupboard before she climbed up again, trying to knock over some pickle jars.
“Do you love your children?”
She stared at me. So I rephrased my question. “Why did you give birth to one kid after another? Do you find them adorable?”
Mei gave me a strange look. “What do you mean?” she asked hoarsely. Her eyes spoke better than her words: wasn’t I supposed to give birth to children, the more the better?
Then the kid’s scream came from the table. She had cut her fingers with the sharp rim of an opened tin can. Mei rushed to her child.
When I got to the shop, Mei was holding up a shining butcher knife in the air. Her eyes fixed with a calm exactness. She chopped. Once, twice. Out came the detached fish head, filet, the tail. Some blood squirted out, staining her cheeks. I had never seen Mei like this, and a wave of discomfort washed over me.
Mei ran the wide blade across the chopping board, collected the pieces, and dumped them into a bucket. She shook away a strand of hair that stuck to her lips. Then she looked up and saw me, standing there with the foam box.
“What’s that?” She pointed her chin at the box.
It was too late for me to come up with a lie. “A stray cat. She was hurt.”
Mei shook her head. “You’re not gonna take it home.”
“I know,” I said swiftly, trying to ignore the jarring disapproval in her voice. “But please, just give me some cooked fish. And some antiseptic if you have any.”
In the end, I did take the cat home. I cut off her hair, tangled with dry blood, and cleaned her stinking wound with hydrogen peroxide. While doing this, I scratched her chin gently to prevent her from licking the wound.
After the cleaning, I placed her on the rooftop, in a large crate that was supposed to store sweet potatoes. It was an ideal place to hide her, because the trap door to the rooftop was too narrow for my chunky grandma, and the only two who would go up there were Mei and I — we were often sent to air the laundry.
Every time, after climbing up with an armful of wet clothes, I’d stand close to the crate, using my body to shield it from Mei’s view. When she turned around, I would secretly drop a few pieces of fish into the crate, which I had stolen either from the offerings or our meals.
The lion cat was eerily quiet. She never moved much, and I thought she had problems with her legs. Sometimes I had to open the crate cover a crack to see if she was still alive. One day, I heard some weird noises coming from the crate. Mei was not with me, so I opened the cover.
The lion cat stared at me with her sparkling eyes. She licked her nose. Under her glossy belly, which was once round and festered, wriggled a cluster of pink, hairless creatures that looked like freshly peeled sweet potatoes.
I began to drop more food down under the table to feed my lion cat and her babies. Each time I did this, I would steal a nervous peek at the mahogany shrine box. Under the roof of the shrine, a clay idol stared silently back at me. The figure was a serene woman, a pair of eyes painted black on her chalky face.
It was the Domestic Goddess, the only deity I knew. This spooky goddess always haunted me when I groped my way to the toilet every night. She looked different in the dark: in the center of her dark mahogany house she stood, flanked by two tiny lamps flickering eerily out of their crimson shades. Her peaceful complexion dimmed; her lips, once smiling a motherly smile, seemed red with blood.
Whenever I stole from her offerings, I would apologize in my heart. Please don’t punish me. I’m doing this for a mother. So it is for you to some extent.
My increasing appetite did not escape my grandma’s notice.
“Why have you been eating so much recently?” The old lady furrowed her brows after l reached out my chopsticks to nab my third yellow croaker.
“I feel peckish,” I said. Mei squinted at me.
Grandma snorted: “You make it sound like we’re abusing you.”
But the tubby old lady had a morbid desire for food herself. She had developed diabetes due to gluttony. I heard that when Grandma got married, she could not produce a da bao gia to carry on the family line. She gave birth to one zi niang after another. So her husband’s family deprived her of her restoratives, just like she and Grandpa took away all the dates and brown sugar from my mom.
In her eighth labor, Grandma finally delivered a da bao gia. Once again, she was surrounded by dates and brown sugar. But it was too late — she could not produce enough milk for the baby. A year later, the only boy, weakened by malnutrition, died after a sudden bout of illness.
Grandma never gave birth again after that, but two habits have endured since then.
Firstly, she would gobble everything within her reach on the dining table.
Secondly, she was ready to beat the shit out of any young woman who couldn’t produce a da bao gia.
Grandma said the abandoned baby boy looked like one of her own. Look at those eyes! she exclaimed. But for me, it was hard to see any similarity between my grandma’s slanted eyes and the baby’s almond-shaped ones.
Still, I had to take care of him. All of us had to attend to our grandparents’ new pet. Mei was even asked to feed him with her breast milk. Although she said that, compared to her own baby boy, that bastard was easier to feed.
“My da bao gia doesn’t suck. He bites like a dog.” Mei told me once after nursing. She unbuttoned her blouse to give her nipples some rest — they were circled by a ring of purple bruises. “That little leech. Sometimes it makes you wonder whether he wants the milk or you.”
The sight of those savage teeth marks was very unsettling. It reminded me of a documentary we watched at school, about a lamprey, a creature that looked like an eel, feeding on a fish. I didn’t realize that anything was wrong with that scene — a smaller fish attached to a bigger one — until a hand pulled the lamprey’s sucker off the fish. There, inside the lamprey’s open mouth, I saw rows of sharp teeth circling down its throat, a bloody tunnel. After that, I paid no attention to the teacher’s explanation of that hemiparasitic creature. All I could see in my mind was that graphic image: the razor in its mouth spinning and rasping, like the sugarcane shredder I had seen in Dad’s mill.
The next time I was up on the rooftop, I took the kittens away and carefully checked the lion cat’s nipples. To my relief, her nipples were still soft and pink, like the rice cakes on our table.
“Be careful,” Grandma said before she handed her baby boy to me. “Your little brother has heart problems. His valves are malfunctioning. Don’t let him choke.” Then she went to shower.
As I sat by the baby’s sleeper (which used to be mine), I thought about his future — a boy with a heart valve problem like me. It was always fascinating to imagine someone’s future, especially for those whose lives hadn’t really begun.
I pictured that he was going to be a doctor so that he could cure the diabetes of Grandma and the illness of my mom. Maybe he would be able to cure our heart problems as well. But I had been told that to become a doctor one had to spend five years in college. After that came probation; after probation came internship; after internship came standardized training… not to mention that he had to enter a university in the first place.
So I started again with something easier this time. I decided to entrust him with the care of my lion cat and her babies.
Mom said that I could be admitted into a university when I grew up if I was lucky and diligent enough. I felt sure I could get into one. Maybe I could even get a master’s degree in the future. To become a university student, however, means to be away from our town. In that case, I was a bit worried about my lion cat. Who would watch over her after I was gone?
Now I had the baby boy. In him I saw infinite possibilities: maybe I could teach him how to love and care for a cat; maybe I could tell him how one should treat both people and animals well; or perhaps I could train him to question everything that had been taken for granted in this house for decades.
As I was having these fantasies, some white liquid seeped out of the corner of the baby’s mouth, stinking up the room with half-digested milk.
Oh crap — this was my first thought — he’s gonna die. Then a new horror occupied my mind — what if Grandma accuses me of murdering him?
Sheesh, I tried to comfort him, wiping away the oozing guck of saliva and milk. But he would not stop making that choking, whining noise, which freaked me out.
Sheesh! I whispered threateningly. I lifted the baby awkwardly. I held him flat like a dictionary. I made faces. But I was doomed — the baby drew his brows together and let out a long shriek.
The old lady emerged, blocking the door frame with her backlit figure. She strode in, shoved me aside, and bellowed: “Damn you dupe! He’s choking!”
Mei appeared by the door, patting her youngest boy in her arms. She looked at me pathetically, or perhaps derisively.
I’m not gonna have kids, I wanted to shout, and I don’t care a damn bit about tending one. But I kept still. I felt sad for my grandma and Mei. I felt sad for myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
But Grandma would not let me go.
“You should know how to take care of your little brother! I told your mom a thousand times — sending a zi niang out to school, what’s the use of it? You don’t even know how to change his diaper, useless idiot!”
That was when Mom entered the room. She was skinnier than the last time I had seen her returning from the hospital, and she looked like a fruit someone had left on a table, slowly drying out. Seeing her like this made me want to cry.
Grandma glanced at Mom. “I will leave this to you”. Then, she stormed out with Mei and her boy. The two of us were left with the baby boy.
After a long silence, Mom said: “You know they’ve always wanted me and your father to have a second child.”
My grandparents always insisted that my well-off parents give birth to a son. So Mom and Dad tried for years before turning to IVF. Twice they tried and failed. The surgeries made my mom sick. Now she needed to rest a lot.
“Grandma may want us to adopt this baby.” Mom paused a little before she went on. “She asked about the apartment your dad invested in together with your grandpa.”
I felt something lodge in my throat as I nodded. When I was admitted to the most prestigious high school in the city, Mom was extremely proud of me. “That flat,” she said at that time, “we are gonna save it for your future education.”
Mom always knew how much I wanted to go to university, and then graduate school. I could see she was sorry. I turned my face away.
“I understand,” I finally said, and, without meeting her eyes, walked out of the room.
When I sneaked up to the rooftop to feed the lion cat, something was wrong.
The white cat was still lying quietly at the bottom of the crate, her colorful eyes shining. But underneath her belly, there were no kittens.
“Where are your babies?” I asked her.
The lion cat licked her nose.
I took the lion cat out of the crate and scoured every inch of it, but the kittens were not there. Then, I hurried around the rooftop to see if they had fallen into the crevices between the bricks. But there was nothing between those bricks.
Eventually, I returned to the crate in bewilderment. Then I spotted a small chunk of flesh, which I assumed to be the fish I had fed her.
However, it was something else — pink, smooth, with a tiny protruding tail.
I stared at it. It took me some time to recognize what it was. Then I turned around and ran away. In a daze, I hastily climbed down through the trapdoor, leaving it open. I sprinted through the corridor, heading directly to the mahogany shrine. Under the roof of her little house, the clay goddess smiled at me with her crimson, angelic lips.
I had no time to apologize — I grasped a handful of offerings and, as the greasy gravy dribbled down through my fingers, I scooted up the stairs in tears. I never left my lion cat starving.
Why, I asked her in my mind, why did you do that? But she didn’t answer.
As I rushed up to the rooftop, I heard Grandma’s furious roar. The old lady was standing near the opened trapdoor, her left hand holding a white furry figure. I wanted to scream, but I could produce nothing other than a throttled whimper.
It was my lion cat.
I dashed toward Grandma. But it was too late. The next second the old lady pulled back her arm and hurled the lion cat out of the window.
For the next few days I refused to talk. Mom tried to comfort me by saying that a cat had nine lives. I knew that was not the case. I saw it clearly: the punishment had been dealt.
Every night after that, I would close my eyes and picture my lion cat falling through the bluish air, her legs stretched out, her long white fur floating with the ethereal beauty of a goddess.
But my imagination had to stop here. Then, I would recall the colors of her eyes. One turquoise, the other azure.
On those sticky summer nights, I would dream of her. Under the gloomy red light of the mahogany shrine, my lion cat’s body lay motionless on a plate. Behind her, the creepy goddess idol was smiling, her lips stained with blood.
I approached the shrine box and leaned down to touch the cat. She rolled over. Her dazzling eyes were gone, with only two dark holes left. Her once-rounded belly was empty, and inside her ribs was a swarm of maggots, wriggling and sucking on her remains.
The lion cat raised her head. She stared at me through those two black holes and opened her bloody mouth. Why, she asked me, why?
A month later, on my night trip to the toilet, I heard the baby boy crying in his room. Fearing that the noise might wake up my mother, who was already sleep-deprived, I stopped, switched on a night lamp, and crept into the room.
The baby boy’s tender face was again covered in creamy puke. He was choking on milk again. I picked up his napkin, drew the cork out of a hot water bottle, and filled a basin with scalding water. When the napkin had cooled down a little bit, I cleaned his face with it. He stopped crying, looked at me, and giggled. His thin skin radiated a tender pink in the murky light.
I heated the napkin again with the searing water, accidentally dropping it on his face. The boy gave out a little squeal, but I was in no hurry to pick the napkin back up. Instead, I let it smother the baby’s face as his chubby legs kicked in the air. The napkin, steamed with the smell of infant skin and milk powder, made me gag.
It was past midnight. On the ceiling a small hanging fan whirred, churning through the thick, sultry air. My pajamas were sweaty, and they stuck to my back like a second skin. The house was quiet. Grandma was asleep. Everyone in this house was asleep, except for me. My heart raced.
You don’t belong here. You won’t be happy. I whispered to him. Think of what you’ll go through when you grow up. Think of Mei’s children. Think of me. You will suck out another woman’s blood, you little mosquito. You will hurt people. And you will get hurt. You will become a tyrant, just like everyone else in this family.
The hot wet napkin was jerking more violently than before. From underneath it came mumbling whines.
I kept talking to him through the wafting hot wind. I spoke until I was pumped and dizzy, and I thought, maybe the heart valve inside me is malfunctioning. Maybe I was going to die. In a dreamy panic, I stood up and turned around. Mei was leaning on the door frame. Her eyes were shining like two snowy blades in the pitch-black night.
I jolted up. The hairs on my back bristled. As I backed up, my elbow hit the basin and knocked it over. I gasped, jumping away from the spilling hot water. At the same time Mei hissed, moving closer. In the middle of the chaos, I dashed towards the door.
Mei grabbed me by my shoulder.
“Relax. I won’t tell anyone,” she cooed. Then, as if to assure me, she added hastily, “I know you kept your cat on the rooftop. I knew it way back.”
I stared at her red lips, trying to figure out what was happening..
Through my bare feet, I felt the piping hot water cooling. I shuddered. I felt Mei’s heartbeat deep in the liquid. It was as if her veins were flowing under the floor, thumping and breathing and echoing with mine.
Finally, I asked her why she had decided not to tell on me.
Mei fixed her eyes on the baby boy. Her face was dark. Recalling the day I saw her at the shop, I studied her cheek, imagining the blood stain that had once been there. As if sensing my gaze, Mei shifted her eyes to meet mine. Then I felt her slender, rough fingers land on the back of my hand.
She murmured softly: “Because sometimes I’ve thought about it too.”
We held each other’s hands in silence and turned to look at the baby boy. His chubby white legs were kicking slower than before, as if he was getting weary. The smothered whine was dying down. Now it had become almost a low, feathery purr.
We stood there for a long time, until Mei said, “You know what I did before my da bao gia went to bed? He won’t sleep until I do this”. Then she began to sing a lullaby — the sweet, motherly song she sang every night for her dear baby boy.
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(Photo: Toshihiro Gamo/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- The Lion Cat by Avery Lin - February 29, 2024