A Big Red Island

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Christine H. Chen

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Behind the carved mahogany table Tang tai-tai the matchmaker  scanned the girl up and down before telling her to sit with a tone that cut short any form of protest. Tang tai-tai squinted behind her thick tortoise shell glasses as if to zoom in on any undesirable traits she may find. She went on to read the letter the mother had written about the girl. 

After a long silence that was unbearable to the mother, Tang tai-tai smacked her cracked crimson lipsticked-lips. 

“Well, well, born the year of the Rooster, you said?” she asked the mother as she looked up. “Might be a problem, she’s feisty like a Cock then, girls born those years are trouble, too strong-minded, men prefer gentle women for wives, you know.”

The mother pushed herself to the edge of her seat. “My Hei-Ling is—gentle. She does everything very well, she reads, her teachers say she has beautiful handwriting—”

Tang tai-tai interrupted the mother with an impatient gesture of the hand. 

“Read? Men want a woman who can cook! Can she cook?”

The girl felt the shame rise to her cheeks. To see her mother insulted that way. Who was Tang tai-tai but a lowly old unmarried woman with wrinkles on the forehead like scratch marks on the school black board. She wouldn’t have shut up the way her mother just did, she would have imposed herself to show who was from a good family. Her mother was too weak, too proper, and didn’t have a lot of sense in her. Her grandmother said so to Hei-Ling. She was the favorite grandchild.

“Oh yes, my Hei-Ling can cook, she makes—”

“Good! She’s quiet, I see that, but not too quiet I hope, men don’t want a brick for wife at home either,” Tang tai-tai continued, sending a dismissive glance at the girl, “I have a few gentlemen looking for wives, I have a good reputation, they come to me, the good ones, the ones with money.” She clicked her tongue, satisfied at her own self-aggrandizement.

“So,” the mother said, “about the gentlemen—”

“Yes, yes, I know, you want the overseas, I may have somebody, but you mustn’t be picky, understand?” 

The mother nodded with the eagerness of a hungry child when presented with a steamy bowl of rice. 

Tang tai-tai made a list of undesirable traits that might play against a good match. The girl had big eyes, didn’t have the classic beauty of the Chinese maiden with slit eyes, but that may not be a bad thing, overseas men like things ordinary Chinese men wouldn’t.The girl, barely a day over sixteen, sat quietly next to her mother. Her face was still the face of a child, the features presaging a high forehead, a haughty nose, sharp chin hadn’t quite formed yet. Her eyes shone with alertness. She noted Tang tai-tai’s smudge of red lipstick on a tooth, the freckles that dotted her hands, a chipped nail. She bit her lips to restrain herself from calling out Tang tai-tai all sorts of names she had learned from standing in line before dawn to exchange the grain coupon for the ration of rice the district officer gave to each family. The girl imagined herself shooting up from her seat and slapping Tang tai-tai across the table so her cheek would become as red as her cracked lips. But she did none of that. Instead, she sat there, waiting for her fate to be arranged. She knew for the sake of her family that she wanted to make that sacrifice.

*

The girl, Hei-Ling, was the oldest of six siblings, two sisters and three brothers, born in alternate order as girl-boy-girl-boy, a rare occurrence that elevated the mother like a demi-goddess touched by divine intervention despite the chaotic times they were living in.

Hei-Ling’s mother, Pey, was eleven years old when the Japanese bombed the Chinese East Coast by the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province in the fall of 1937. Her family was amongst the wealthy families in Guangzhou who fled the city to hide in their country farm homes. Pey remembered spending what seemed to her an eternity huddling quietly with the rest of the adults around the radio, listening to the slow but gradual Japanese aggression. A year later, Japanese troops landed some seventy kilometers southeast of Guangzhou, by mid-October 1938, they captured Guangzhou. By the end of that month, Japanese navy warships entered the harbor of Guangzhou. The Japanese Navy ensign rose on the customs buoy.

The radio shut down. The women cried silent tears. The men turned away in despair.

Pey watched the despair turn to panic. She remembered her parents hiding the family’s gold nuggets in the ground, being scolded for wanting to go outside, covering her ears when the rumbling of the bombs became too loud. When Japanese soldiers entered their village, Pey was rushed into the pig pens at the back of the farm with other young village girls to hide. The mothers smeared their daughters’ faces with coal and manure so even if the soldiers found them in the pig pens, they would be too disgusted to touch them. The girls clustered inside the pen with the pigs moving and sniffling around them. Pey was lucky because she was tiny and looked younger than twelve years old. Other girls weren’t that lucky.

When Pey became too old to hide in the pig pens, her mother shaved her head, made her wear men’s working clothes to hide her burgeoning curves, and continued smearing coal on her face and hands to look dirty and hide her girl features. Her mother let her run with the boys and climb trees to give her some semblance of freedom. The village people knew of the ruse, a common one used by the village girls. They pretended they didn’t know, didn’t understand what the Japanese soldiers were asking, shaking their heads and speaking Cantonese even when the soldiers kicked them or butted them with the back of their Arisaka bayonet. It seemed their ruse paid off as the Japanese soldiers eventually moved out of the village, leaving a few in a municipal house who spent their days drinking sake and gambling.

It was during that time that Pey took notice of Tian, the younger boy from the King’s family who also fled Guangzhou at the onset of the war. Tian was mild mannered and never abused the country house girls like boys from wealthy families tended to. Pey had grown out of her small stature as a girl, and by the age of eighteen in 1944, she had become a lithe and tall young woman with a slender face, rosy cheeks, and exuded the elegance of a tai-tai without effort once her disguise as a boy came off. She refused to let her mother cut her hair and it grew back with a vengeance, long, thick, and shiny.

Tian was a year older than Pey, and when they came of marriageable age, the families who knew each other agreed to tighten their bond together with the union of their children. The sooner Pey was married, the safer she’d be. The marriage was celebrated in secrecy for fear of raising suspicions from the few Japanese soldiers who were settled in the village. Hong pao, red envelopes of cash, were given to the groom and bride. They knelt and offered tea to the parents and parents-in-law. A pig and a few chickens were slaughtered. The wedding concluded without the usual fanfare.

Tian and Pey’s first-born were thus made in time of war, of foreign occupation, of women hiding in fear in cages with the pigs and the chickens, of fear that smelled of manure and dirt, of fear that impregnated the being who was being made in the womb of the mother who had known all these things, and reborn into fearlessness. 

Hei-Ling was born the year of the Rooster, the year that saw the Japanese aggression come to an end. She came to the world after Hiroshima, after Japan surrendered, and retreated from Guangzhou. She came as a victory against fear and was named Hei, the character that means “celebration,” a celebration of the end of World War II in Asia but the beginning of the troubles at home. Hei-Ling came into a new chaotic order at a time when clashes between the Nationalists and the Communists became inevitable. They who had united to fight together against the Japanese invaders, were now fighting against each other for political power.

Tian and Pey, still under the trauma of the war, avoided thinking too deeply about the consequence of the Nationalists’ defeat and decided to return to Guangzhou after the communist took control in 1949 where promises of rebuilding the city after the Japanese destruction could lead to better job prospects for Tian who wanted to prove he was capable of taking care of his newly pregnant wife and his two children, Hei-Ling the first born, and Chin, the second son. 

Hei-Ling’s early childhood was spent in abundance and wealth her family had built over the previous generations and hidden away during the Sino-Japanese war. She wore silk jackets and jade bracelets. Her grandmother detangled her hair with ivory combs. She ate shark fins soup and beef steak porridge. Her grandmother instilled in her a sense of grandeur, the ways of a maiden from an aristocratic family who could be traced back to an official in the Qing dynasty at the Imperial court, and to never forget her ancestry. The grandmother taught her to walk like a lady with a straight back, be clean at all times, be obedient but strong. Hei-Ling absorbed her lessons with eagerness. She carried her family name with pride and grew up with a strong sense of right versus wrong, of perfection versus sloppiness or laziness.

By the age of 12, Hei-Ling noticed the family fortune had taken a sharp and inevitable turn for the worse as the Communists continued tightening their control over all aspects of their lives. Food became scarce, there was no more meat in the porridge, and families started receiving ration coupons to get rice. The long traditional Cheong-sam dresses were cut and resewn into bedding or other less noticeable necessary items. Tian was fired from his job at the Chinese National Bank who fell into Communists control. Hei-Ling’s mother became sick often, probably from reliving the trauma endured from the war and now facing new hardships and unease with the regime. With Tian out of a job, and the family’s fortune eaten up, her migraines came with an alarming frequency that left her stay in bed days at a time. Tian was often called to meetings with the “comrades” to hear about the Revolution, the Communists’ love for the people, the evil Bourgeois from the West.

Hei-Ling took charge of her siblings, now totaling five, each born two years apart. Chin, the second son, was always at odd with her, he called her “the mean Cock” because she was born the year of the Rooster, and he, the year of the Pig, even though they fought like cats and dogs. Then came Yue-Ling, the third daughter, Tong, the fourth son, and Ying-Ling the fifth daughter and Huen the last son.

Hei-Ling took her job at mothering her siblings seriously. At the slightest infraction, she would lash out, even if she knew she’d pay the price later when her siblings reported her harsh words to the mother who favored the boys. Chin loved to rile her. Once, he purposely didn’t close his mouth when he chewed his food. Grains of steamed rice dropped onto the table. Hei-Ling picked each grain and put it back into her brother’s bowl. He shoved another mouthful of rice with his chopsticks, and again a few grains escaped and ended on the table.

“Can you eat properly?” Hei-Ling snapped. “You eat like a pig!” 

Her brother chewed harder and a few more grains fell on the floor. Hei-Ling slapped him across the table. “Stop wasting food!” she said. She picked up the grains and ate them.

“Mean Cock, mean Cock!” her brother screamed. 

Tong and Ying-Ling, nine and seven years-old, giggled, but Yue-Ling, who was eleven and had begun to understand the dynamics between her two older siblings kept quiet and watched.

From the back of the room, separated by a curtain, Pey’s voice floated into the living room. “Children, stop being so loud, I have a headache.”

“She’s a mean Cock, she hit me!” Chin said and ran to the mother.

The mother got up with a sigh. She took the father’s belt and gave Hei-Ling a few lashes on her buttocks.

“That’s for mistreating your brother!” 

The mother didn’t listen to her daughter’s explanation that Chin was sloppy, that he was wasting food, that he did this on purpose to get her in trouble. She didn’t care that Hei-Ling was the one who, since she was thirteen, got up at 4 am in the morning with her baby brother Huen in a sling on her back to queue for the ration of rice at the municipal office.

*

Tang tai-tai showed the mother the photograph. Mr. Gao was not bad looking for a Cantonese man. On the black and white photograph, Mr. Gao wore dark rimmed glasses and reverberated an air of someone educated who knew his way around the world. It was a portrait and he was posed sideways with his face turned toward the camera. He had a modest smile, a firm jaw, the kind of serious face one associated with a scholar. He had gone to Africa to do business with Africans and returned a wealthy man to find a wife. That was how Tang tai-tai presented him to the mother. 

“Africa?” the mother said. In her mind, she pictured half-naked natives running around in dusty grounds. Her daughter surrounded by Africans, her future grandchildren growing up in Africa—so far away.

“Now, uh-hum, there’s the matter of the age,” Tang tai-tai said. 

“Africa?”

Mr. Gao was 37 years old. He looked really good and healthy, Tang tai-tai assured the mother, and there wouldn’t be any worries about having grandchildren. 

“What about someone from America?” the mother asked. It was a known secret that men from America were the wealthiest and America, the dream country any girls’ mother would want their daughter to move to. In California, you could find gold nuggets in the backyard if you dug a little, that’s why the Chinese called it the Golden State. Mountains there must sparkle from so much gold.

Tang tai-tai frown. She didn’t like it when the girls’ mothers made requests such as this. They infringed on her authority as a marriage broker. She knew what was best for the families, and how to match them up according to the girls’ worth in exchange for the men’s wealth. Nonetheless, she complied. She pulled a bundle of letters from a drawer under her desk, and sifted through them, making deliberately slow movements and clacking her tongue. 

There was a Mr. Wu from America, from New York. From the photograph, he was the opposite of Mr. Gao, pudgy with a double chin, and piercing small round eyes like a fish. One could imagine him a butcher with a white apron splattered with meat blood; Mr. Gao on the other hand, could be imagined reading a book on an armchair. However, Mr. Wu had the advantage of coming from America. Every man who came from America was wealthy merely from the fact he was from America. They were very much in demand.

“I could possibly talk to him,” Tang tai-tai said, enunciating the words slowly “but I must warn you, he wants a nice looking traditional Cantonese girl, one who can obey and please. Your daughter—I can tell she’s a feisty one, she’s a Cock after all.” 

Mr. Wu was born the year of the Snake. It wouldn’t make a good match. Mr. Gao, on the other hand was born the year of the Rabbit. Would the mother prefer a harmonious match with her daughter in control of Mr. Gao or constant unwinnable fights with a Snake? 

A meeting was arranged. The mother agreed to bring her daughter to the day of the viewing.“Oh— and there’s something else,” Tang tai-tai continued with some hesitation.

*

Hei-Ling was a good student at school. She loved reading and by fourteen, she had tired of reading about the Great Revolution and the fight of the Proletariat. So when her classmate slipped an old copy of the novel Dream of the Red Chamber that had escaped from the communists purge into her book bag, she read it avidly, drinking every word, praying for her character Jia Baoyu to marry his beloved cousin, Daiyu, who later committed suicide, and not the one he was destined to marry. The world in the novel was so much like her own world: a wealthy aristocratic family falling in disfavor and losing their fortune. Pey found the novel and burned it, equally out of fear of the written words corrupting Hei-Ling mind on the notion of romantic love and of being found with the forbidden book if the communists raided their home again. She gave Hei-Ling a good scolding and reminded her of the last time their home was raided.

How could Hei-Ling forget. The raid was her own fault. She should have kept her mouth shut when the teacher told her to correct her father’s profession on her identity form.

“Write this down: Capitalist,” the teacher ordered.

“Why?” Hei-Ling said.

“Because I said so, because your father is a capitalist traitor!”

The teacher held a baton twice the size of a chopstick and she wacked it across Hei-Ling’s shoulder. 

The class was silent. Hei-Ling could almost hear the class holding their breath, though some of them, daughters and sons of the country people were probably secretly happy that the “girl from the good family” was getting what she deserved. A slap on her arrogance.

“Capitalism is not a profession!”

“You dare to contradict me?” the teacher gasped.

The teacher was livid. She was a woman from the countryside, judging from her darker skin tone. She parted her hair in the middle into a set of braids. On her gray uniform, she had pinned the red star on the gray cloth of her uniform as proof of her love for the people. Her lips trembled, and she flipped her baton across Hei-Ling’s face. Hei-Ling could feel a drop of blood squeezing out from her broken lip. She didn’t flinch. She stared at the teacher with all the hate she could muster. 

A few days later, the Red Guards stormed their apartment on Liberation avenue, and raided it. Pey had burned Tian’s stamp collections and any books that were deemed Bourgeois months before, when rumors of the raids were happening to other families. Hei-Ling couldn’t let go of the copy of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, a colored book depicting the adventures of the legends of the famed magical Monkey that her sister Yue-Ling loved. A Red Guard, a girl barely older than Hei-Ling, found it under the coal burning stove. Tian was taken away for questioning for failing to guard his children from the evils of the old feudal society that prayed on the poor people.

Hei-Ling knew she had to prove to her mother she deserved to be forgiven.

*

The girls, all seven of them, ranging from 16 to 23, were lined up and wore their best attire, dresses with big flowers, which Pey found distasteful. Hei-Ling was in the middle of the line. Her mother stayed behind a heavy wooden paneled screen at the end of the room. It was the rule. Tang tai-tai didn’t want the mothers around to affect the male’s decision. The mother peeked through the slice of space between the lacquered panels depicting scenes of the goddess of fertility. Mr. Gao was smiling and making small talk to the girls. Hei-Ling answered and gazed at Mr. Gao without a hint of shyness. “Oh, that girl!” the mother muttered. She was upset that her daughter—as usual—defied her. She specifically told her to cast her eyes down. Here she was, staring and talking at Mr. Gao who nodded slightly out of courtesy. Now, Mr. Gao would be a good match. He seemed decent. Pey wouldn’t have to worry about him mistreating her daughter. And he seemed like a man who could handle someone like her daughter.

Hei-Ling didn’t mind being in the middle of the line. She scanned the other girls. They were supposedly from good families like herself, but their demeanor and attire didn’t match up with Tang tai-tai’s evaluation. One was a little thick in the waist even though she tried to hide it with her long-pleated skirt. Another had pock marks on her face. And another was so thin she looked like a skeleton. Faces with unremarkable features. They were just girls from the countryside, peasant girls with big flowers on their dresses who thought wearing such outfit was refined. She listened to their voices. Bland, immature, subservient.

 Hei-Ling wore a well ironed short sleeve white shirt and a gray skirt, white socks and black shoes. Honest and modest. Her hair was cut short and her bang held back with a black hair pin. 

Mr. Gao stopped in front of Hei-Ling, asked what her name was. She answered and explained each character of her name, “Hei” the character for “celebration” for the end of World War II. It turned out that Mr. Gao was a history aficionado and a patriot, and they struck up a brief conversation about the war and where he was when the war broke out in China. He also liked serious and educated girls like her who knew about the Chinese classic novel, Dream of the Red Chamber.

“You know, you’ll have to tell me what you think about Daiyu if we meet again?” Mr. Gao said.

“She’s weak, she killed herself, she doesn’t respect herself or her family—”

“Is that so?”

 Mr. Gao was amused by the innocent passion of Hei-Ling’s voice. He thought she was a little head-strong, but he was intrigued by the fearless gaze she gave him when she spoke with him. Mr. Gao didn’t like women who cast their eyes down when he talked to them.

*

When Pey returned from the matchmaker after the third visit, she called her daughter to come and sit next to her in the bed.

“You know, Mr. Gao is very kind.”

The daughter stared at her mother and waited for her to continue.

“Well, it’s this way or—”

“But there’s no other way,” the daughter said. There was so much after the “or.” Or you could spend the rest of your life being vilified for your family roots; or you will have no opportunity to overturn the family fortune; or you could marry someone whose family is like yours, fallen out of favor and continue to suffer the consequences. Mr. Gao offered a door to freedom and the opportunity to take her destiny into her own hands. There’ll be no teacher whacking her across her face for disagreeing with her. There’ll be no food shortage, no getting up at the crack of dawn to line up for rations, no beatings from the mother. There’ll be no arguing with her siblings.

The mother was relieved that her first-born understood what she had to do, to marry a man out of necessity, to secure the family’s future. She was too proud to ask her daughter for this sacrifice directly, overtly. Or maybe she was just too coward, too weak to even admit that. 

Hei-Ling didn’t think of it as a sacrifice. She thought it was her duty as the eldest daughter to do what it took so the family lived on, so her own future flesh and blood would live on in a world where coming from a wealthy family wasn’t a punishable crime.

“There’s just one thing,” the mother said.

She told her daughter that Mr. Gao had lost the sight of his left eye, and that there was a high chance that he’d someday lose the sight of his other eye. 

The daughter didn’t flinch. “It will have to do,” she said.

Her mother took out her gold wedding band and a jade bracelet she had sewn into the bedding and gave them to her daughter.

“And the other thing is, you’ll move far away, some place in Africa, I can’t remember the name he said—a big red island, she’d said.”

The daughter nodded. It didn’t matter. She’d rather be anywhere but here.

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Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in The Pinch, Fractured Lit., SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. Her work was selected for inclusion in Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, and Best Small Fictions 2024. She also dabbles in genre writing and visual narratives. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Find her stories at www.christinehchen.com

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