Title: Four extracts from a novel

Author: Alison Wong

In: Sport 23: Spring 1999

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 1999

Part of: Sport

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Sport 23: Spring 1999

The Wife — Tile Kiln

page 132

The Wife

Tile Kiln

Those who speak know nothing;
Those who know are silent.

Lao-tzu

Every woman has two faces. One a fine white porcelain—a slipping smoothness, carefully shaped, dressed for the eye. The other big and raw and strong, ingrained with the hardness of life.

I do not speak these things; I cannot think in daylight. Only at night when all is quiet, when the only sound is that of the frogs calling, when I lie awake in this room, big enough for the bed and the wooden barrel toilet.

In this bed with my husband's father and mother and his elder brother's wife—and my son.

My sons. My memory of their births and the aftermath is fragmented. Here, and not here, like reading a book where one central chapter has been reworked at random—here a full paragraph, there a full whitespace, here the end of a sentence with no beginning, there a beginning with no end.

I remember my body, squeezed by the hand of God, my innards pressed together, so that all I could do was stop breathing. I could hear deep groaning. Tearing pain. The sound of boiling water, and far away, Mother-in-law crying out, His backside, it's his backside.

When I woke, Mother-in-law was screaming. I could not open my right eye. The pain in my head, in my body.

Then my left eye closed over.

The midwife called out, It's a boy, it's a boy, but I could not see. My face was thick with pain—my forehead, my eyes, my ear.

Mother-in-law screaming at Sister-in-law. The midwife quietly saying, There's another.

page 133

Later, Sister-in-law said she had done it to waken me. I had fainted with the pain of labour. So she had picked up the lid from the pot of boiling water and put it down on my forehead.

The heat of the metal burned into me, and when she pulled it away, she took my skin also.

I could not open my eyes for nearly two days. Mother-in-law told me that my face swelled, the way dried fish stomach puffs up when put into a slow fire. My right ear stuck out from my swollen head. My lips were fatter than Father-in-law's fingers. I remember throbbing, the wound oozing into my hair and down my face, lying in bed shivering with cold, my bedclothes soaked with sweat. And I remember my sons—their thin cries like the mewls of two kittens.

I did not go out of the house for six months, and even then Mother-in-law would not let me stay in the sun. I did not wash clothes or gather firewood or shop in the market while my face and my body healed.

I have no right eyebrow now, no hair where the pot lid touched my face—just a raised, widened forehead, a sweeping arc of skin like a gibbous moon, pale and puckered, knotty, as if afflicted by tiny, colourless varicose veins. My right eye is pulled upwards, the whole of my face drawn tight by the scar.

My husband does not know—I am the only one who knows how to write.

There is an old saying: Never marry a woman from Tile Kiln. We live in a small village and theirs is large. When the sweet potato harvest is good, they come in the night, and by morning nothing remains. Never pick a fight with a man from Tile Kiln, they say. His brothers and uncles and cousins are too numerous.