Free Katherine by Anchee Min

learn to do cartwheels, and who was her master.
    She laughed, then she told us about how her hometown was “surrounded by oak trees.” “We sold our old house and bought a new one with a big backyard in the sixties. My parents preferred the suburbs to the city . . .” The lake, she said, was called Lake Michigan. “The lake was the real reason our family chose to move there. I love to smell the air and listen to the sound of waves at night . . .”
    Her words were incomprehensible to us. We had no notion of such phrases as “preferred,” “chose,” or “bought a house.” We believed that we were wild seeds; we grew and died where the wind dropped us. It never occurred to us that we had a choice in life, that one could do what one “loved” to do. We were never asked what we “preferred” or what we would like to “choose.” We never thought that a house could be “sold” and “bought.” We began to see what we had missed in our lives and understand what it meant to sacrifice individualism to serve the ideals of the group.
    As we learned about Katherine’s life in Michigan, America, we began to taste something that had a sweet-sad taste.
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    S he said that she did not know her biological father, had never seen him. Her mother was born blind and deaf. When Katherine was six weeks old, her mother was told by a neighbor that the childhad been crying for hours; the mother could not hear a thing. The mother was afraid that the baby might fall ill at night and she would be helpless. She made the decision to give her up for adoption.
    Katherine was two months old. No one could be sure whether she would turn out to be deaf in the future. But she was a healthy baby, strong-limbed, with a pair of clear, dark brown eyes. She would raise her little hand and watch it with fascination. She turned when the nurse clapped her hands. She seemed to have perfect senses.
    A Jewish family adopted her. The family already had a handicapped child. If Katherine turned out to be blind or deaf, she would not feel too isolated. Her adopted father was an auto-factory worker and her mother was a grocery-shop clerk. With both parents working, she spent most of her spare time in the backyard garden rocking her dolls, observing the growth of flowers, and chasing lightning bugs, forever waiting for her parents to come home.
    A little girl, playing with her dolls in a garden. I began to see the picture. I could also picture myself, wearing shoes with the soles falling off, walking the streets on a rainy day, collecting pennies for starving American children. I could see the young Katherine singing songs, visiting an imaginary zoo in her backyard, and I remembered how I had to kill my only pet—a hen with the reddest crown—to heed Mao’s call to abolish disease in the city and prove one’s loyalty. I listened to Katherine talk about her loneliness as a child, and I thought of how many nights I was left waiting at the gate of my daycare school, the last one to be picked up, waiting for my parents to finish their shifts, and the times they never showed. The images mixed, superimposed themselves on each other, and her tears became mine, and mine hers.
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    K atherine spoke about forbidden subjects, about Christmas, and the American tradition of family gathering; about her idealistic dreams of a peaceful world—she once filed an application to join the humanitarian Peace Corps; about desire, love, and passion—her fascination with a neighborhood boy when she was sixteen, he seventeen.
    On a full-moon night, under a big oak tree, the young man and woman found their passion unstoppable. They fell in love. The young hearts cared not about money, class, boundaries. Be together or die, this was their only thought. The boy secretly climbed into Katherine’s room and they took each other in their arms and their bodies became inseparable. “He was so tender and so gentle. We kissed and kissed, held each other all