GOLDEN FLOWER

Wang Yang (Central Daily News July 10/11,1973)

Published in Reader’s Digest April 1976

How blind I was to the truth! I was awake as Dr. Chou Taoahsiang operated to give me a corneal transplant. They had deadened the nerves around the eye, but I could hear metallic instruments clanking and Dr. Chou speaking.

My right eye had been inflamed and swollen for more than three years. When I checked into Taiwan’s Tri-Service General Hospital in Taipei, I could hardly see out of it, and my left eye was severely hyperopic. Doctors discovered that I was suffering from keratitis (inflammation of the cornea).

“You could have picked it up from towels or from swimming pools,” I was told.

“I’m a swimming instructor at an Army Officers’ School,” I said.

“That’s probably how you caught it,” the doctor said.About a year later, I learned that a corneal transplant could restore sight to my blind right eye. When I told my wife, she brought out her savings deposit book. She had managed to save $500 after years of hard work.

“If this isn’t enough, we’ll try to get more,” she said, adding, “You’re not like me. An illiterate person is blind though he can see. A man who can read needs both eyes.”

I put myself on Dr. Chou’s waiting list. A month later, he phoned me. “A driver was involved in a bad car accident,” he said. “Before he died, he told his wife to sell parts of his body to help support their children. Could you spare $250?”

The operation and hospital expenses would come to a further $200. I agreed, and was told to check into hospital the following day. I was extremely lucky. People waited for years before a cornea becomes available, and I told my wife how grateful I was to her for making the operation possible.

As I was being wheeled out of the operating room, my daughter Yung put her lips close to my ear and said, “Everything went well. Mother wanted to come, but she was afraid.”

“Tell her not to come,” I said. “But tell her I’m all right. She is not to worry.” I was 19 when I married on my parents’ orders. My father and my wife’s father were close friends and had pledged that if their wives gave birth to a boy and a girl, the children should be married.

I had never set eyes on the girl who was to be my wife until the day she was carried to our house in a bridal sedan chair. After bowing to heaven and earth, she was led to my bedroom. When at last I lifted the red brocade of her bridal headdress, I gasped with horror. Her face was cruelly covered with pockmarks, her nose was a deformity, and beneath sparse eyebrows, her scarred eyelids made her eyes swollen. She was 19, and looked 40.

I fled to my mother’s room and cried all night. My mother told me that I must accept my fate. “Homely girls bring good luck; pretty ones court sorrows.” But nothing she said reduced my anguish. I would not share a room with my wife, and I did not speak to her. I lodged at school. When summer vacation came, I refused to come home until my father sent a cousin to fetch me.

My wife was cooking supper when I arrived and raised her head in a smile when she saw me. I walked right past her. After supper, my mother said to me privately, “Son you are being very cruel. Her face is unattractive, but she does not have an ugly heart.”

“No, it must be beautiful,” I stormed. “Otherwise, how could you have made me marry her?”

My mother’s face grew pale. “She is an extremely good girl, understanding and considerate,” she said. “She has been in this house more than six months now and works from morning to night in the kitchen and at the mill. She has not uttered a word of complaint about the way you have treated her. I have not seen her shed a tear. But she is shedding them inside. Do you want her to live like a widow although she has a husband? Put yourself in her place.” My wife and I began to share the same bedroom, but nothing changed the way I felt. She always kept her face down and spoke softly. If I argued with her, she would raise her head to give me a submissive smile, and then quickly lower it again. She’s like a ball of cotton wool, I thought. No will, no temper.

In the 30 years of marriage that followed, I seldom smiled at my wife and never went out in her company. Indeed, I often wished her dead.

And yet, my wife proved to be endowed with more patience and love than anyone I know. When we first came to Taiwan, I held a low rank in the army, and my income was barely enough to pay for rent and food. The baby was often ill, and we had to cope with medical expenses as well. When my wife was not looking for after the household, she wove straw hats and mats to earn a little money. When we moved to a fishing harbour in the east, she darned fishing nets and when we moved north, she learned to paint designs on pottery. We never lived in army quarters because the truth was, we both feared her meeting people I knew. I was often away from home, but I knew that needn’t worry about our two children or the household, with her looking after everything.

After the operation, my daughter Yung brought me a transistor radio to occupy the long hours while the bandages remained on my eyes. But I had plenty of time to think, and my thoughts kept returning to my wife. I was somewhat ashamed for telling her not to come to see me.

After two weeks, I learned that the stitches would soon be removed. I could not contain my happiness. “When I recover,” I told Yung, “I want to pay a visit to the grave of the man who gave me his cornea.”

But I was nervous, for I knew there was a chance that the transplant would not take. When they removed the bandages from my right eye, I scarcely dared open it. “Do you see any light?” Dr. Chou asked.

I blinked. “Yes, from above.”

“Yes, that’s the lamp,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder.

“It’s a success. You can go home a week from today.” During that week, he tested my eye every day. First, I could see shadows, then the number of fingers on his hand. On the day I was going home, I could see the window, the bed, and even the teacups on the table.

“Mother’s making your favourite dishes to welcome you home,” Yung said when she came for me.

“She’s a good wife and a good mother,” I replied, words I could never say before. Yung and I climbed into a taxi. She was strangely silent all the way home. As I walked into the house, my wife was coming from the kitchen with a plate of food. When she saw me, she lowered her head immediately. “You’re back,” she murmured.

“Thank you for letting me see,” I said. It was the first time I remembered ever thanking her for anything.

She walked past me abruptly and put the food on the table. Leaning against the wall with her back toward me, she began to sob. “It is enough to hear you say this. I have not lived in vain.” Yung burst into the room in tears.

“Tell him!” she cried. “Let father know you gave the cornea for his eye!” She shook her mother. “Tell him!”

“I only did what I should,” my wife said. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and looked closely at her face. Her left iris was opaque, as my right one had been.

“Golden Flower!” It was the first time I spoke her name.

“Why…why did you do it?” I demanded shaking her hard.

“Because…you are my husband,” she said, burying her head in my shoulder. I held her tight. Then I got down and knelt at her feet.