Free Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung Page B

He sat back down. He was inconsolable.
    “Ah sister, what are you going to name this beautiful baby girl?” the midwife asked. My grandmother was exhausted, and yes – how stupid of her, yet how was she supposed to know that a decade later she would yearn and ache for a girl-child? – she was disappointed. “Ask my husband,” she said to the midwife. She didn’t even have a name ready, such was her hope and expectation that she would give her husband what his first wife couldn’t. She lay there, waiting to see what her husband would name this girl. Finally, the midwife came back. “I know a pretty name,” she told her. “How about Ah Bo?” Precious treasure.
    It was then that she knew my grandfather couldn’t even be bothered choosing a name for his daughter. He left the job to some lowly uneducated midwife, and she couldn’t even come up with a very original name. But Treasure was such a wonder to my grandmother – her first baby. She found it hard to believe that such a tiny thing could grow and become a person. When she held the baby in her arms, she knew that it did not matter that she was not a boy. She would be educated, and my grandmother would love her so much. Ah, she was so much prettier than the children of my grandpa’s first wife.
    When a baby turns a month old, we say that they are a year old because we count the time they spend inside the mother’s stomach. But because she was not a boy, when my grandmother’s beautiful Treasure was one month old there was no huge celebration with oranges and cakes and people bearing gifts of gold.
    And then three months after she was born, she became sick. And before she could even say Mahmah she turned all tense and hard. It happened in less than a day and a night – and she was gone too soon. “Such a beautiful baby,” sighed my grandmother. And those natural curls, little curls on a Chinese baby! That was unheard of! Only Westerners had those natural curls. So before she was laid in the ground, my grandmother took out her scissors and cut off one of the little curls.
    “When someone dies, you don’t say they died, like you do here,” my grandmother told me. “You say things like that so easily here – he’s dead, she’s dead, they die. We say, they are passing through their bodies. Or their bodies have passed through. The body doesn’t matter, it is the soul that is important. And Ah Bo had a beautiful soul, so clean, so bright. Now she was going to a place where there is no more darkness.”
    Less than a year later, my grandmother knew she was going to have another baby. So soon, people said to her, so soon, sister! She thought that Buddha was kind to her to send her another one. My grandpa thought that she was cursed just like his first wife. Two girls. She wondered whether this one looked like Ah Bo. She tried to search for Ah Bo in her face, but this child was so different. And again my grandfather sat outside, and again the midwife asked for a name. Again he did not give one. So the midwife made up a name for the baby: MeiHuay she was called, beautiful flower. Every second girl is named beautiful this-or-that plant or other. These uneducated Chinese Cambodian midwives were really not very inventive with names. But my grandmother didn’t care. She had another girl.
    And anyway, her baby’s common name didn’t matter because no one called her a beautiful flower. No, when she was born, she was quite large. She had such a round face, and so much hair. “Ay sister,” Ah YuKeng would joke, “your baby was born with a hat on top of her head! Look at all that hair! Did you eat a lot of noodles when you were carrying the baby?”
    “Noodles!” scoffed my grandfather. “If it were the noodles, I would have a boy by now.”
    With babies, for the first few weeks you cannot tell what they will look like – whether they will be lovely or hideous. But as they grow, and as the hair flattens on their head, you find out. And my grandmother found out