The Stories Jenny Held (9)

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Jenny

Sarah likes to take me on outings. She is careful to make sure my hair is neatly braided and the lint-balls are picked off. I am becoming worn-in. I was only new for about a year before I got to be smoother and squishier. Sometimes we go to the refugee camps, sometimes to the Home of Loving Faithfulness. And sometimes just to the market. 

The Home of Loving Faithfulness is a big house and Sarah will go with her parents to visit the children who live there. In Hong Kong sometimes a baby is born broken and the parents don't want the baby. Then there is nowhere for the baby to go, and one day some missionary women from England thought, 'These poor children need love and care. We'll begin a home for them to be taken care of and to show them that God cares about them.' And that's what they did. Sarah will bring me to all her friends there and let me sit on their laps and say hello. 

Sarah lives in her imagination sometimes, and that's why we are such good friends. Because she has room for the real-imagined and thinks everything and everyone have a need, a hurt, a joy, a hope. She even thinks this of her dog or the mina bird that annoys her sitting on a neighbour's balcony. That mina bird is always saying the same thing and Sarah thinks she's having a conversation with it. I don't have the heart to tell her it's all in her head! When the mina bird says 'weigh-aww', Sarah will say, 'Stop-it!' with the same tones. Just in case the mina bird can understand, I suppose.

The other day she came home from the wet-market. She wouldn't take me because she didn't want me to get dirty if I fell down and got all the yucky blood-and-guts-water all over me. I asked her why she was so sad. And she told me about the chicken she wanted to adopt. Of course her Mom said no - there's no way we could have a pet chicken. And chickens are really for food, not for pets. It seems every living thing is like a person to Sarah. It's good she didn't grow up on a farm.

Sarah

One day my Mom and I were in a wet-market.  For those who did not grow up in Hong Kong in the 1980’s let me describe it for you, through 3 year-old eyes.  A wet-market is a semi-indoor place – meaning the ground floor of a building with openings on a few sides so that you can walk through it – it doesn’t seem to have doors, but probably at night some corrugated metal garage-type doors would be lowered to seal it up.  The floor is concrete, and has a constant stream of liquid running across it - only a trickle - so that your flip flops make a splat with each step.  If you brave it with sneakers, you end up with squishy sounds and soaked socks eventually.  The liquid is mostly water, the sloshing about of the open fish-tanks stored behind each stall, and occasionally run-off blood from the slaughter of chickens or geese or ducks, or the gutting of fish.  The liquid may also be the dripping ice where the fish are laid out so you can see the hearts still pumping and the one eye looking at you half-dead or alive.  So the smell is unique – and would probably turn your stomach unless you grow up going there, as I did.  To me, the stench of fresh fish guts and beheaded chickens elicits a certain nostalgia – that my kids now mock me when I go into an Asian grocery store and take a whiff and go, “Ahh, wet-market smell.  I love it.”  In fact, I take them there from early on in their lives because I want them to welcome diverse smells of foods and flesh and freshly butchered meat.  Call it strange, but I want them not merely to tolerate diversity, but to embrace it.

Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

Each stall of the market stacks their goods for shoppers to see – one specializes in fruit, another veggies, and another poultry and another, fish.  My eyes are about the height of those tables, and I gaze into the eyes of the doomed chickens caged and waiting to be chosen for someone’s dinner.  I instinctively feel sorry for those chickens.  I imagine buying one to take home as a pet – the impulse to free it, to humanize the thing, to let it lay eggs which (not knowing about reproduction) I assume will hatch chicks so that it can be a mother hen just like it must want to be.  My compassion for the chicken is short-lived as I’m rushed through the crowded walkway, holding tight to Mommy’s hand, lest I get lost in this milieu.  

Photo by Chi Hung Wong on Unsplash

I have a very brief memory of seeing a dog under one of these tables.  Perhaps I reached my hand out to pet it.  Perhaps it reached out to attack me.  I don’t remember.  All I remember is a terrifying lurch and a wail and a bite and being quickly hustled into a crowded waiting room at the hospital where I was born.  Evangel hospital – or, in real English, ‘Good News Hospital’.  It was good news that I was not going to get rabies that day.  I don’t remember if I had shots or what.  I do remember seeing children my age swung over a Grandma’s knee, bare-bottomed and wailing while receiving necessary immunizations.  I cringed in the presence of such chaos and emotional upheaval.  I still have a small scar between my right fourth finger and pinky where the dog bit me.