Grace Chan Read online

  “Does it really last for five years?”

  “Ten years,” said Suyin. “That’s what the nurse said. When the hormones run out it squirts a blue dye under your skin. Then you go to the doctor, and they take out the old one and put in a new one.”

  “Do you feel different?” I asked her.

  She screwed up her nose. “Not really. It was a bit scary. It felt like a tummy ache, and then I thought I wet my pants. And I had to change into spare underwear in the nurse’s station—yuck.”

  “You won’t bleed again, though,” said Chao. “The implant stops that, right?”

  Jingfei jumped away from Suyin’s desk and flicked her ponytail. “I don’t want to have an implant. I won’t let them put one in me.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want one?” another girl said incredulously. “Do you want to bleed every month?”

  Jingfei shrugged. “So what if I do?”

  “You’re so weird,” said another boy.

  “It’s for the best,” said Meixiu, in her falsely mature way.

  “What if I want to have a baby the old way?” Jingfei declared.

  A chorus of voices shushed her, mine included. “Don’t say things like that! Don’t you know that’s forbidden talk? Do you want to go to court?”

  Jingfei giggled and leaped up onto a chair, a skinny little figure of impudence, and flicked her school skirt to give us a flash of her pink briefs. “Maybe the old ways were the good ways!”

  A few of the girls shrieked, and the boys yelled at her to get down. “That’s gross, Jingfei! Get down! Stop being so dirty!”

  Jingfei got down, smirking to herself.

  “They’ll make you do it,” I told her, shaking my head. “Even if you say no.”

  She put out her lower lip. “We’ll see.”

  I was right, and Jingfei was wrong. Over the next few years, we all got our periods, and one by one we were taken to the nurse’s station. I remember taking my school shirt off and sitting on a medical bed covered with a plastic blue sheet, legs dangling, shivering in my thin singlet. I remember the lurid yellow antiseptic rubbed onto my inner arm, and then the wide-bore needle, pushed under the skin. A sharp pressure; a small ache. The nurse asked me if I felt dizzy.

  I shook my head.

  The nurse didn’t ask me anything else. There must be a mountain of unsaid words, in the corridors of the nurse’s station.

  Jingfei was one of the last. She came to my room one night, crying. I’d never seen her cry before, or again. She didn’t say anything, just crept in sideways through the door, and stood there, trembling and sobbing, mopping her face with her pajama sleeves. I watched her for a moment, unable to reconcile this Jingfei with the brazen, snarky Jingfei who jumped onto desks and flashed her panties. Then I pulled back the corner of my blanket.

  She lay down next to me on the narrow bed. I put my arms around her and felt the gauze bandage chafe against my cheek. The smell of antiseptic filled my nostrils.

  In the morning, I woke to see Jingfei standing at the window, arms pinned to her sides, hands balled into fists. Against a backdrop of gleaming skyscrapers, she was a flat silhouette. She let out a short, furious howl and slammed her fist into the windowsill. It must have hurt like hell, but she didn’t even flinch.

  When she finally turned to me, all the anger was gone. Her expression had become calm, renewed—beatific.

  “I’ll see you in maths class,” she said, and left my room.

  * * *

  Gene splicing changed the definition of family.

  Most countries tried to preserve the nuclear family by imposing rules. For instance, the two main donors had to be in a relationship and had to agree to raise the child in their home. Homosexual couples and heterosexual or homosexual trios and quartets had already been accessing the technology surreptitiously for years before their partnerships were recognized.

  Negotiations about privacy laws and donor visitation rights grew into a complicated legal system based largely on precedent. As surrogate mothers were used more often to carry the baby to term, the working rights of these women had to be carefully established. Even language was affected: some chose to forgo the words “mother” and “father,” replacing them with variants of “primary donor,” “secondary donor,” et cetera.

  China was one of the first countries to relinquish the family unit. It had become too complicated; surely there was a better way. The first Children’s Center was founded in New Beijing in 2075, by a group of doctors, psychologists, and scientists. This gave donors the freedom to become parents whenever they wished, individually and autonomously, through an application to the government. Government scientists would examine the genomes of applicants and match them up to create embryos with low levels of risk mutations. The embryo would be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother, or birth mother, in the Children’s Center closest to the primary genetic donor.

  Many other countries followed in China’s footsteps when initial psychological and physical testing demonstrated the well-being of children raised in the Centers. These children were humanity’s future: remarkably healthy, persistent, bright, and inquisitive. The main issue, now, was how to maintain this upward trajectory—how to keep humanity from falling back into old ways.

  2102 AD

  When the boys were thirteen, they all went on a special excursion.

  “What’s going on?” Jingfei asked the teacher. “Why is it so exclusive? Why can’t we go too?”

  Schoolteacher Leng, whom we secretly called Lucky Ears, for his impressive earlobes, told her to sit down and start working on her planetary orbits. The boys were going to the hospital for a day procedure, he explained curtly. That was all he would say of it for now, because it was time for physics, not chatting.

  A hospital procedure! Jingfei turned and raised her eyebrows at me and Suyin. We both shrugged.

  “Well, if that’s the case, we should get a day off lessons too—that’s only fair,” said Jingfei cheekily, but Lucky Ears ignored her.

  It was a stale day in the middle of summer. Hong Kong was suffocating beneath a thick blanket of smog. Even after sunset, there was little relief from the heat. I pushed my bedroom window open. Nothing stirred. The air was a warm, stagnant kiss against my face, dense with the smells of fried food and exhaust fumes. I lifted my damp hair, coiled it into a bun, and knotted it at the nape of my neck.

  The hum of an engine floated up to my ears. I put my palm-computer down and poked my head out of the window. My room was on the seventh floor. The boys looked like toy figurines, filing out of the omnibus. As far as I could tell, they didn’t look any different. None of them were missing limbs or sporting extra growths.

  I thought about calling her using my wristband communicator, but I suspected those conversations were recorded by the Center. If I went in person, they might be able to see me on the cameras, but they could only guess what I was saying.

  I padded down the corridor to Jingfei’s room. She answered immediately.

  “I’m going to Chao’s room,” I said. “I want to know what happened.”

  “I’m coming.”

  We knew the hidden paths to the boys’ dormitories. Chao wasn’t alone in his room. His friend Gen was sitting on his desk, swinging his legs wildly. Chao lay on the bed, still fully dressed in his linen trousers and shirt. Jingfei pushed Chao’s legs aside and sat on the bed too. Her pajama top barely hid the shape of her growing breasts, and her loose hair tumbled in a sleek fall to the small of her back. I felt a stab of jealousy. She was becoming a pretty young lady, and she still had the brazenness of her childhood. She crossed her slim legs on top of Chao’s and prodded him. “So, what happened? Where did you guys go today?”

  Chao glanced over to where I was leaning against the wall. I slid to the floor in an awkward perch, hugging my arms around my knees.

  “Thought they would’ve told you,” piped up Gen, a small-sized boy who liked to wear a cap pulled low over his brow.

  “No,” I sa
id. “They didn’t say anything, except you had to go to the hospital for a procedure.”

  “I guess we got old enough,” said Chao. “I thought they wouldn’t do it ’til we turned sixteen. I mean, do they really think we’re going to be having sex here in the Center?”

  “I’ve heard stories,” said Gen.

  “Oh—they sterilized you?” Jingfei gasped.

  “God, don’t say it like that,” said Gen. “They cut our vas deferens.”

  “Oh.”

  Jingfei and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. She started giggling uncontrollably.

  “Shut up, Jingfei.” Chao rolled away from her. “Basically, we can still do it without accidentally making a baby. And we still make sperm. All men in China have it cut nowadays. And in heaps of other countries too. It’s fair. It’s not just on the women.”

  “That’s true,” I said, thinking of the asterisk-shaped scar on my inner arm. “Did it hurt? Was it scary?”

  “Nah,” said Chao. “They inject a local anesthetic, and a machine does it. The error rate is less than 0.02 percent, and the whole thing took less than a minute. A human surgeon would take fifteen minutes,” he added, and I caught a glimpse of the debrief they must have received before the procedure.

  We were silent for a while. I looked around Chao’s room. His desk was piled with empty packets of fish crackers. In one corner loomed an ominous heap of unwashed socks and T-shirts. His room smelled like mud, sweat, and food.

  I ventured, “It’s permanent, right?”

  “Yeah, more or less. I’ve heard there is a procedure to reverse it, but it wouldn’t be available at any reputable hospital.”

  Gen pulled off his cap, rubbed his hands through his hair, and replaced the cap more firmly.

  “You never think about what it would be like to make a baby the old way?” asked Jingfei, breaking the mood with a mischievous grin. She prodded Chao again, several times in the thigh, until he yelled and pushed her away.

  “Nah, I don’t really care about that,” he replied. “You can still have all the fun. When I have a baby, I’m definitely applying to be a spliced donor. I don’t want my baby to turn out a freak.”

  “Our grandparents weren’t freaks,” I said bluntly, and although I hadn’t meant it as a joke, both Gen and Jingfei chuckled.

  “True.” Chao rolled onto his side and propped his head up on one arm. “But they wouldn’t be able to survive in our world, you know? Our brains need to be faster and sharper, to process all the information that comes at us. Plus, it would be unethical to bring a natural baby into the world, when we have the tech to get rid of diseases.”

  Unethical. That was a strong word. A moral judgment. Had he come to that conclusion himself, or was he spouting an opinion he’d heard on a webcast?

  “Maybe,” I said. “Are you saying that jigsaw babies have better lives?”

  “Yeah, of course. Think about what Schoolteacher Mun was saying in biology class last week. Life without things like Fragile X and Down Syndrome is better than a life of illness. Just look at the studies done on the Children’s Centers. Every other country wants to copy China.”

  I shrugged and put my chin on my knees. “I don’t know. You sound sentimental, Chao. We’ve grown up in a Center, so of course we want to think that our way is best, and that we’re the best. Who knows what sort of studies they show us? Don’t you ever think about the countries out there that do things differently? Maybe there are natural-born children living in family homes, just as happy and smart as we are.”

  “Well, why don’t you travel overseas and look at these other places, and come back and tell me what you see? I’ll bet you a thousand yuan that in a few years, the splicing tech will be everywhere. Other countries just haven’t caught up to us yet, Lian. You’d be blind to deny that genetic engineering is the future.”

  We were both irritated.

  “Relax, both of you,” said Jingfei.

  I went to the window, breathing heavily. The city looked so big. We were four little people in a little box of a room, inside the bigger box of the Center, in a city of boxes. Suddenly, it seemed so funny that we no longer bled or ejaculated, and we could reproduce with our minds rather than our bodies. An odd laugh welled in my belly, bubbling like broth from my lips.

  2106 AD

  I was seventeen years old when I left the Children’s Center.

  Shortly before I moved away, they arranged for me to meet with my birth mother. I did not really want to do it, but it was customary: a chance to say thank you, to hand over a token gift. It seemed garish and meaningless. Here, have a jade figurine, to repay you for carrying me in your womb for nine months, letting me deform your body, and pushing me out of your vagina.

  I’d seen the birth mothers around the Center, although they usually kept to their own wing. Simple women, some Chinese, some immigrants from the Philippines or Indonesia or Bangladesh, they drifted around in groups of two or three.

  My birth mother’s name was Deepa. She was Pakistani, and thirty-six years old. She would have borne me when she was nineteen. She looked nothing like me. She sat across from me, her coarse black hair pulled into a braid, her deep-set eyes gazing hesitantly at me from above a high nose. Her hands, which were the warm brown of coffee, were folded tightly on the table. I realized she was nervous.

  I glanced over my shoulder helplessly as the office administrator closed the door, leaving the two of us alone in the meeting room. There was a pot of tea on the table, and two china cups. I sighed.

  Deepa continued to glance at me, furtively and wondrously, in a way that made me feel halfway between a princess and a specimen.

  I reached for the pot of tea and filled the two cups. I lifted mine to my lips—too hot. I blew on it impatiently.

  Deepa took the other. “Thank you,” she said, in a foreign lilt. Her Cantonese intonations were all wrong. “Congratulations on your university placement. I’m very proud of you.”

  I suppressed an automatic thought: you had nothing to do with it. “Thank you, Deepa.”

  “What will you study?” she asked.

  “Anthropology.” Seeing her perplexed expression, I searched for simpler words. “Studying the different ways that humans lived, in the past and the present.”

  “That sounds very interesting,” said Deepa. “Will you study in Hong Kong?”

  “Yes, the university campus is on the northern outskirts of Hong Kong, not far from Shenzhen. In our final year we have the chance to study overseas.”

  “That’s very exciting.”

  We sipped our tea. It was a rich Tieguanyin tea from Fujian province with complex, nutty layers. I noticed that Deepa was struggling with the tiny cup. The fingers on both her hands splayed outwards, and her knuckles were swollen and knobbly. She had rheumatoid arthritis. Immediately, I wondered if she was a jigsaw baby or a natural-born. Almost as soon as the question came to me, I knew I could never ask her.

  The silence became unbearable.

  “Your dress is beautiful,” I said, gesturing. Her garment was made of thick silk in a brown hue, edged with gold embroidery. “Is it from your home country?”

  Her face brightened. “Thank you, but no. One of my friends here at the Center made it for me.”

  “Oh, I see.” I wondered briefly what sort of friends she had. Then my mind raced ahead to other matters—I had to move out in a week, and I hadn’t found furniture for my new dormitory; I was already behind on pre-reading for my course; and Jingfei wanted me to help her with an overdue assignment . . .

  Deepa was saying something about her hometown. “ . . . rural area in the northern part of the country, north of Islamabad, close to the border with Afghanistan. It was a long drive to the nearest city. Big mountains looked over our village. In winter, the mountains wore gowns of ice. The boys in our village grew up to be either farmers or soldiers. The girls . . . ” She hesitated and trailed off.

  I tried to recall a map of Pakistan, to place Islamabad somewhere on it.
But I only knew it as a shapeless land, somewhere southwest of China, beyond the Himalayas.

  “Do you miss your home country?”

  She finally met my gaze. Her eyes were thickly fringed with lashes and oddly flat. “No,” she replied.

  Was she lying? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to sit in this tepid room with a strange woman, pretending to share a bond with her. She didn’t understand me, nor I her.

  I glanced surreptitiously at my wristwatch. Less than ten minutes had passed.

  I withdrew a velveteen pouch from my pocket.

  Deepa’s face fell for a split second, before she concealed it behind a soft smile. Handing over the gift signaled the end of the meeting.

  I’d chosen the jade and gold bracelet with care, visiting two merchants before selecting one that was simple and tasteful, with high quality stones. It had cost nearly two thousand yuan.

  My birth mother accepted the pouch without opening it, aware that it is impolite to examine a gift in front of the giver. Our fingers touched. I flinched involuntarily from her gnarled hands. I noticed that she had several large paper cuts on her palms, and I wondered what sort of work she did, now that she was likely too old to bear more children without significant risk. Packing boxes? Sorting files?

  We stood and bowed to each other. Deepa wished me success in my studies.

  “Thank you,” I said, and hesitated, wondering if I should clarify what I was thanking her for. But I didn’t. I bowed my head again and slipped out of the room.

  * * *

  My second-mother was an entrepreneur; my third-mother, a professor of linguistics. My first-father was a tax accountant. My second-father was a homemaker.

  My relatives often commented that I was most similar to my first-mother, who was a chemist. Secretly, I relished the comparison. My first-mother was coolheaded, brisk and practical. Whenever we spoke, she would tell me exactly what was on her mind. She did not mince words.

  After I left the Children’s Center, I saw less of my mothers and fathers. I moved onto the university campus near the border of Shenzhen. Once a year, at Chinese New Year, I would catch the monorail back to Hong Kong City, and go about my duty of dinners. Five family dinners, one after another, with five different parents. Updating my mothers and fathers on what I’d achieved in the previous twelve months. Mingling with siblings that weren’t really brothers or sisters.