A Baby Girl : Into the Ashes

Female infanticide was still rife when my maternal grandmother was stranded for about 4 years in China during the Japanese War. From her and many other relatives, we heard of  stories of how grandparents would immediately smother a new born baby girl in wood ash, or drown the poor baby in a near by river. Sometimes in the still quiet hours of the night, a new born baby girl would simply be thrown into the urinal. The next day, an adult would throw the dead child into a swift river. No one would ever question such an act then.

In Sarawak, as a first born baby girl in those days, my Ngie mah would always tell me that my fate was rosy and I should be grateful that I was born in the new era and given the opportunity to live. I was born the year China was liberated. So I am as old as the New China and that I cannot forget. 50 years into the 20th century, Chinese baby girls started having a better fate.

My late cousin, Lang Ing, had a horrible birth story to share with our group when we got together one time during Chinese New Year in Miri a few years ago.

She was born in Minqing,  before China was liberated in 1949. In 1949 she was 14 years old. So by a simple calculation, she was born in 1935.

When she was born to a family of two girls and one boy, her grandmother had the duty to smother her in a pail of wood ashes at the back of the house. But fortunately a compassionate woman who was passing by saw the evil act, waited for a while and saved the new born baby.

The woman had probably some Methodist background and took pity on her. She gave the new born to a friend from another village not far from where she was born. In those days, no one would go looking for a missig baby girl because life was hard. The woman just had a baby boy and so she had some breast milk to spare.

Perhaps it was Lang Ing's fate that she did not grow big enough to be the child bride of the boy because the superstitious grandmother of the boy said that she was not "correctly born" in terms of the day of birth. She was instead given away again to another family.

Thus Lang Ing grew up in a third family as a free spirit. She was often in the hills looking for vegetables, catching snakes and trapping rabbits. She was very small in size (due to lack of food). One day, a Nangyang relative came by looking for a daughter in law.

This mother was pretty proud of her because she saw the abilities of Lang Ing. Perhaps the political awakening had also helped Lang Ing and her new mother to face the new fate of China. Lang Ing and her adopted mother learned all the songs of New China and sometimes they would sing from the hill tops as they went looking for fire wood. Perhaps it was also the change in the Chinese government that made her adoptive mother let her go off to Nangyang.

She could not remember if she did volunteer to go. And courageously she offered herself to the winds and travelled to Sibu with her father in law. She was only 16 years old then.

About 40 years later, Lang Ing did make a return visit to Minqing to find her adoptive parents, but unfortunately they had both passed away and she reunited with some of their children and grand children.  She told us that her fate was really "harsh" but she was proud that she survived all the challenges thrown at her.

But in all honesty, at times when she was suffering too much from heartaches, she did wonder why the wood ashes did not smother her to death when she was newly born.

Lang Ing was one Foochow lady who could sing all the wailing songs for funerals in Foochow, but unfortunately I was not at that time, interested in recording her songs. She moved away from us and many years later passed away in one of the small villages near Sibu.