Grace Chan Read online

  Jigsaw Children

  — by Grace Chan —

  Hong Kong, China – 2098 AD

  I was nine when my second-mother’s mother died.

  Shortly before her death, Schoolteacher Shumin took me to visit her. We took the monorail and got off at the last stop, on the northern outskirts of Hong Kong. The sky was gray and low. Damp air drew beads of sweat from my neck.

  I sniffed.

  “It smells like leaves up here, Shumin!”

  Shumin didn’t reply. She waved down a car. Gripping my hand painfully tight, her ragged nails digging into my skin, she ushered me into the back seat.

  “Tuen Mun Hospice for the Elderly,” Shumin told the car.

  She pressed me close to her side as the car wended through dusty streets. I tried to lean as far away from her as I could. Shumin was too warm and smelled like mothballs.

  The car let us off in front of a set of white gates embossed with the name of the hospice. Shumin spoke to someone through a speaker. I ran my fingers along the edges of the hard gold characters. Traditional Han Yu and English, one on top of other: the same thing, written two ways. I closed my eyes, memorizing the sharp, unwavering shapes, mouthing the words as I touched them.

  The speaker replied to Shumin, and the gates rolled back. We struggled up a steep driveway to the entrance.

  The hospice smelled like bleach and urine and flowers. A man in a white gown came forward to shake Shumin’s hand, and mine too. He gave us plastic gloves and plastic shoe coverings, explaining that they were to protect us from infections.

  “Is he a nurse?” I asked Shumin in a loud whisper.

  “Yes. Shh.”

  “Why do we need protection? Aren’t we supposed to be stronger than them?”

  “We keep our germs with us, and they keep their germs with them.”

  She tugged me along impatiently.

  We walked through a common room. The far wall was lined with square windows that let in big beams of wan light. There were old people slumped on couches wearing augmented reality visors, old people sitting in wheelchairs staring at the wall, and old people sitting at tables being fed by nurses. I looked down at the floor. The wooden boards were speckled with hundreds of little whorls: black, beady, unblinking eyes. I tried to tread on as many as possible with my squeaky plastic-covered sneakers.

  We went down a darkened corridor. Ambient lights flicked on and off as we passed. The nurse touched a panel on the wall and a glass door slid back with a hiss.

  A gush of stale air fanned my face. The room was stifling.

  My second-mother’s mother was almost invisible beneath a mountain of blankets and pillows. In the dimness of the room I could only make out her small, clawlike hand, and the outline of her broad nose. She was snoring gently.

  “Lian,” said Shumin. “Go and greet your Erma.”

  I walked to the side of the bed. Now I could see that there was a plastic tube running into her left nostril, and another tube plugged into her arm, and several stickers on her temples and chest. All the tubes and lines ran into an electronic console on the far side of the bed.

  I bowed my head. “Good morning, Erma.”

  She didn’t stir.

  I looked at Shumin. She was standing against the far wall, her back stiff, her mouth in a flat line. I turned back to my Erma and touched her hand. Papery skin, a sallow ash-brown, stretched over bird bones. I remembered my Erma as I’d seen her last year, at my second-mother’s fortieth birthday dinner. Then, she had been a stout woman in brightly dyed linens, her skin like roasted chestnuts, her gray hair braided away from her crinkled face.

  I rubbed the back of her hand with my gloved fingers. “Good morning, Erma. It’s Lian.”

  Her eyelids lifted, and milky irises found my face. A light lit them from within. “Lian,” she said in a hoarse voice. “How good of you to visit your Erma here.” She dissolved into a fit of coughs. I filled a cup of water from a jug by her bedside and lifted it to her lips. She could only manage one sip before she lay back, wincing, and shook her head. “No more.”

  “Are you in pain?” I asked nervously.

  “Just a little, Lian.” She exhaled through cracked lips, fanning my face with the smell of sour plums. “It’s good of you to come. Does it frighten you to be here?”

  I shook my head, even though the hospice did make me feel uneasy. “I know everyone must fall sick and die.”

  “Everyone must die one day, that is true,” murmured Erma, her eyes flickering under drooping lids. “But I think you will never have to know this sort of pain. This deep pain that only comes from your body betraying itself. That’s why they first started making jigsaw babies, you know, Lian. To cut out the cancer genes and stop us from passing them on to our children.”

  She had used a taboo phrase, but it seemed insignificant in this stale, dark room where everything was slowly ending.

  “You are different from me,” I said, tentatively. “You are not a . . . a . . . you were born the old way.”

  “Oh, yes. My parents made me in a bedroom, not a lab.” A brief cackle escaped her lips, and I caught a glimpse of the old Erma—the Erma who hid lollies in her sleeves and pulled funny faces behind her husband’s back. I didn’t like this withered, sour-smelling Erma. My eyes grew hot with unshed tears, but I fought them back. Shumin would scold me later if I cried.

  I tried to imagine Erma’s conception. We’d learned about it in elementary science. Her father would have put his sperm inside her mother, and a baby would have seeded and formed naturally, spontaneously.

  Some of the other kids at school said the old ways were wicked ways, but I didn’t think Erma’s parents or the rest of the old generations had been evil—just different. Primitive. Clumsy.

  “Did you grow up with your mother and father?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. We lived in an apartment in Kowloon, with my older sister and my two younger brothers. Children’s Centers hadn’t been invented yet.” She glanced at Shumin, who was a statue in the corner. Erma had always been vocal about her dislike of Children’s Centers. She’d even sent a couple of letters to the local newsblog. Children should be raised in homes, not reared like mice in labs and churned out like spare parts on a production line . . . !

  My second-mother had tried to explain to her the benefits of the Children’s Centers—healthcare, nurturance, socialization, education. It took the role of parenting away from amateurs and gave it to professionals. “Besides,” my second-mother had added, “Who would raise a girl like Lian? Her first-mother, second-mother or third-mother? Or one of her fathers?”

  “They’re all gone now,” Erma continued. “My father died of throat cancer when he was eighty-nine. My mother’s brain faded, and we took her off life support the day after her one hundredth birthday. My sister had ovarian cancer—she died in her sixties. One of my brothers died of an antibiotic-resistant infection, five years ago. The other committed suicide. Do you know what that word means?”

  “Yes.” Some of my classmates would shout “suicide!” when they were too tired to run any further in a game of cat-and-mice. I saw a stern look pass between Shumin and Erma.

  Erma’s fingers fluttered against my plasticky palm. “Are you learning lots of things in school, Lian?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “I got into Advanced Programming this year, because I scored really well in Basic Programming. I’m second out of all the nine year olds at the Center. I can’t beat the number one guy though. Someone told me his primary donor is a robotics professor—she programmed the latest generation of splicing machines!”

  Erma was staring at the ceiling, so I pushed on.

  “In Applied Tech, we’re learning about bioengineering. Did you know they’ve made trees that can grow into t
he shapes of tables and chairs, really fast, so you can grow a whole table in one week? Also, we’re watching a program about the Mars missions. Once we finish, we get to design our own spaceships! I don’t like Social Studies—it’s boring. We’re studying the European Union. Did you know there are some countries that choose not to use modern technology? Why would anyone do that?”

  Erma continued to blink up at the ceiling. I thought maybe I’d said too much and she’d stopped listening. But then she wet her lips and said, “I’m not sure, little pea. Maybe they thought they could be happier that way.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t really understand. How could they be happier if they didn’t have the technology to fight off dangerous infections, or to make themselves smart enough to understand the world? They would always be one step behind everyone else.

  “You’re a very clever girl, Lian,” Erma said softly. “Cleverer than I ever was. You’ll become a very clever woman, and you’ll achieve great things. But do not be proud. We are clever for many reasons: our genes, our nutrition, our caregivers, our schools. Sometimes, our hard work.”

  I frowned. Confusion and hurt knotted in my chest. “I’m not boasting. Second-mother always says I can be anything I want to be, if I work hard enough.”

  “Yes,” muttered Erma. “Just remember to be humble.”

  Spittle pooled in the corner of her lips. She was pushing words out of her crumbling body, trying to leave something of herself in this world. Suddenly, I loved her and pitied her and reviled her, all at once.

  I stepped back from the bed.

  “Are you ready to leave now?” asked Shumin, her voice cutting through the bloated air.

  I nodded.

  “Soon we will all die.” Erma’s thin voice piped up from her nest of blankets. “All of us old, foolish folk. Why do I feel so afraid?”

  My shoulders shook.

  “Quiet, old aunty,” said Shumin. “You’re upsetting the girl.”

  “Can’t an old granny speak her mind? She’s my granddaughter, not yours. Let her hear something different from her lessons. Lian, come back and see me again, and I’ll tell you even more interesting things.”

  Shumin led me out of the room, her fingers digging hard into my shoulder. Then she ducked her head back in and said a phrase, sharply.

  A sour taste stayed in my mouth all through the car ride back to the monorail station. My head felt hot and dizzy, as though I was still standing in my Erma’s stifling room, breathing recirculated air.

  Shumin talked and talked. “There’s a rule of human nature, Lian—and you’ll see this—that the older generation always thinks their way is best. My grandmother lamented the good old days to me, and I’ll no doubt sing the same tune to my grandchildren. This is an evolutionary flaw that I’ve never understood, for it impedes progress. We must rise above this instinct. We’re told that we must listen to our elders, but no one ever said that we must do what they say.”

  I was hardly listening. I sat with my hands clasped in my lap, watching the nav-screen on the dashboard flicker with quiet intelligence, selecting the least congested route back to the Center. A short, sharp phrase echoed in my ears: “You are a disgrace to China.”

  My second-mother’s mother died two weeks later. I never spoke to her again.

  * * *

  I have three mothers and two fathers. I’ve examined my genome sequence, on the supercomputers in the National Laboratory in New Beijing. The computer shows you exactly which gene belongs to which parent, and where the DNA was cut and reattached. You can analyze your risk profile for diabetes, cancer, dementia, addiction, and mental illness. If you want, you can look at the genomes of your mothers and fathers, too. Privacy law forbids you from looking at just anyone’s, though. If you want to examine other genomes, you must put in an application to the National Laboratory, citing research, legal, or procreation purposes.

  I think I’m reasonably lucky, only having five parents. I guess my donors didn’t have too many risk mutations. Some of my classmates have been spliced together from eight, nine, even twelve donors. I don’t envy them the task of juggling their Chinese New Year dinners.

  I grew up in the East Hong Kong Children’s Center. Since the expiration of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 2047, political and economic boundaries between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China have dissolved. The Chinese government places a quota on how many babies are born in the country each year. Too many and the population trends toward unsustainability. Too few and the workforce won’t be strong enough to support its elders.

  At my Children’s Center, there were roughly eight thousand children under the age of sixteen. Once you turn sixteen, you’re expected to apply for university or work. If you don’t get a placement by the time you turn eighteen, your future is looking dim. Some of those left behind simply stay on in the Children’s Center for years, eventually taking on menial roles like kitchen worker, or toilet cleaner, or birth mother.

  My Erma used to say, “Remember your family.” But the word itself is nebulous and nonspecific. My genetic ancestors are my family. So are my nurses, schoolteachers, and classmates. We refer to royal families; a family of peptides; a family of biological genera; a family of mathematical curves. If you stare at the word long enough, you realize it’s redundant.

  From the moment of creation, we were given every chance to succeed. Our birth mothers imbibed a cocktail of folate, thiamine, calcium and magnesium. We were nurtured on a formula of breast milk and immune-boosting supplements. Our nurseries played classical music; our toys taught us colors, numbers, characters and letters.

  Sometimes, I pass a nurse in the corridor and a strange feeling wrings my gut, and I wonder if he might’ve been one of them. Had he ever pressed me, as a baby, to his chest, and hummed a wordless song? I’ve combed my memories for any trace of my early caregivers, but all I can cling to is that tuneless, calming hum that makes all the world seem safe.

  When we turned five, the nurses passed us on to the schoolteachers. We didn’t like or hate school. It was more that we couldn’t like or hate it, because we didn’t know anything other than it. This was our world: the Center, the teachers, the classes, the supervised breaks.

  I wouldn’t say the environment at the Center was cold. There was love there. A restrained, practical love, but not any less for being so. The sort of love that a Chinese father has toward his daughters: unaffectionate but steadfast. A moon orbiting a planet, always keeping a measured distance from what lies at the true center of its movements.

  In the same way, we, the children, were the sole purpose of the Center. Everything was done in order that we might prosper, flourish, and become greater than the preceding generation.

  2101 AD

  Suyin was the first girl in our class to get her menstrual period. We were eleven years old.

  It was the middle of world history class. Schoolteacher Pang was explaining that in Japan, today was a special day. The 12th of August was Hana Day, to commemorate the creation of the first genetically spliced baby in 2028.

  A laboratory at the University of Tokyo had designed the experiment to overcome a homozygous autosomal recessive trait carried by both parents, explained Pang, drawing a genetic tree on the projector. A third individual donated a gamete with a section of healthy genome, which was stitched by nanorobots into the DNA of the parent sperm and egg. The birth of a healthy baby girl astounded and terrified the world.

  “I thought splicing started in the United States,” said Chao, one of the confident boys.

  “You’re partly right,” said Schoolteacher Pang. “The US bought the nanotechnology from Japan, but it wasn’t until the 2060s that genome splicing became a proper form of reproduction. Does anyone know why?”

  “All the oldies had to die out,” said Chao, and a snicker went around the room.

  Pang suppressed a smile. “Yes, there were a lot of dissenters. Religious groups warned that this unnatural reproduction was blasphemous and tragic. Conser
vatives called it grotesque. Politicians argued about whether it might lead down a slippery slope of genetic enhancement. Sociologists wondered about the impact of genetically engineered humans on parenthood and class systems. Philosophers debated whether Hana could be truly regarded as homo sapiens, or whether she represented the next branch of the evolutionary tree.”

  “I don’t think cutting out diseased genes is the same as evolution,” piped up another girl. “It’s just getting rid of the bad stuff, like cancer and diabetes.”

  “Tell me how that’s different from evolution, Meixiu.”

  Meixiu shrugged. “It’s even better than evolution. It’s not random.”

  Pang nodded. “Yes. That’s what many thought too. The mid twenty-first century was the Scientific Golden Age. Research was shared freely amongst the global community. Soon, scientists in the US, China, Japan, Australia, India, Scandinavia, and Canada were setting up programs for genome splicing.”

  As Schoolteacher Pang talked, I heard someone sobbing. I glanced at the desk beside me. Suyin was hiding her flushed face in the crook of her elbow.

  I whispered, “What’s wrong?”

  Suyin gazed miserably down at her lap, but I didn’t understand. Before I could ask again, a nurse entered the classroom and took her away.

  “What happened?” I murmured to Jingfei, who sat behind me and always knew what was going on. But Schoolteacher Pang banged a ruler on his desk and threatened us with extra homework if we didn’t stop talking right away.

  Fifteen minutes later, the nurse brought Suyin back. She had a gauze bandage around her upper arm, and her cheeks were pink. When the lesson ended, we gathered around her desk.

  “So you really got it?” Jingfei demanded.

  Suyin nodded.

  “Did it hurt?”

  She shrugged. “A little. The implant hurt more, but it was very quick.”

  “Can we see it?”

  She obediently unwound the bandage. In the soft part of her inner arm, there was a small red mark, shaped like an asterisk. The skin puckered up like a kiss.