Nancy L. Conyers has an MFA from Antioch University and has been published in Tiferet, Lunch Ticket, The Manifest-Station, Role Reboot, Hupdaditty, The Citron Review, Alluvium, and Unconditional: A Guide to Loving and Supporting Your LGBTQ Child. ‘Wei Han’ is adapted from her novel in progress A Walk in the Mist.
Wei Han
Take the girl, I don’t want her.
This is the only thing Wei Han remembered about her father.
Take the girl, I don’t want her.
—
When Wei Han was nine she opened up a letter she found in a box in her mother’s closet. Her father had written the letter to her mother two years before when Wei Han was living in Shanghai with her father and brother. Wei Han’s parents had divorced in the US and her mother didn’t want the girl or the boy. She wanted to be free, so Wei Han, her father and her brother left and went back to live in Shanghai.
It had made no sense to the then seven year old when her mother showed up and took her on a boat to the US. Her mother never seemed as if she wanted Wei Han around. All she wanted Wei Han to do was do chores on the farm. Now I understand why I had to come back here and live with my mean mother.
Wei Han missed Shanghai. It wasn’t that she was so happy in Shanghai, but that she was so lonely on the farm in Vermont. Chores, chores, chores, that’s all she did when she wasn’t in school. She was responsible for tending to the goats but the goats were her playmates, her brothers and sisters. Wei Han felt like she was robbing them when she had to milk them so her mother could make the goat cheese they sold. What a strange pair they were, this odd Chinese woman and her daughter in Vermont in the 1930’s.
“Nobody looks like me here Mama. People look at me, but they don’t look like me. Why are there no Chinese people here?”
“What does it matter? We are better than them. Now, get your pail and get to work.”
Sometimes Wei Han pretended the goats were her siblings. She would grab the sides of their faces and pull their eyes back hoping they might look like her.
“We have to stick together. It’s just us,” she would tell the goats.
When she was finished her chores for the night, Wei Han would sit in front of her mirror, put her hands on the sides of her own face and push forward. My eyes are round now. I look like everyone else. If she were allowed, Wei Han would do this for hours, but inevitably her mother would come into her room and bark, “Wei Han, turn out that light, you are wasting electricity! Get to bed, you have chores to do tomorrow morning.”
More often than not, after Wei Han had turned off the light, she would lay awake waiting for sleep to come. As she waited she would repeat the same phrase over and over until she was carried away to her dreams.
Take the mother, I don’t want her.
Take the mother, I don’t want her.