Blood of the Rainbow

THE BLOOD OF THE RAINBOW

My grandmother’s name hong is the Chinese word for rainbow, which sounds the same as the Chinese word for red, hong.

As her blindness came on, I threaded her needles. I read for her the expressions of foreign faces. I held her hand as she stepped off the escalator.

Summers, I bathed her once-bound feet in a plastic basin, the rotted skin the texture of a week-old turnip, her arches crooked and maimed.

You see, she stared down the sun—a rabid, burning dog. She believed it gave her strength.

**

Once, coming down an escalator at the mall, my grandmother tripped halfway down and fell, knocking me down with her.

She landed on me. My body broke her fall.

In the flurry of commotion and concern afterward, everybody checked on her and somehow forgot about me. As a child I didn’t understand her frailty, so I concluded my own body must have been invincible.

Young women, I thought, must break the fall of older women. We must absorb their pain.

This is what it means to be a woman. To love the women who endured a generation of pain for you.

To love my grandmother who had been savaged by life, by her own mother, by men.

My grandmother who could not even walk without anguish.

**

For years, I also concluded that hong and hong, “rainbow” and “red,” were homonyms because red contained all the colors of the rainbow.

The way my grandmother contained all the colors of life.

When she was a young communist activist in her rural village in China, she was captured by the Kuomintang and thrown into jail. There she was tortured on a stretching rack.

I don’t know what other atrocities she suffered.

She never spoke of this time in her life, but whenever she stretched before doing her morning Tai Chi, she liked to impress me with how flexible she was. She would place her palms flat against the ground with ease when she bent over and challenge me, Can you do that?

After years of excruciating pain, no pain—

**

I was wrong, of course. It is white, not red, that contains all the other colors of the rainbow.

Curious, isn’t it? In Chinese culture, red is the color of luck, and white is the color of death.

But this symbolism makes so much sense to me.

It makes sense that death, in its totality, would contain every aspect of life, every color, every hue. Because what, after all, is luck?

Luck is just a flicker of gold in a river, a magical twist of fate, a sublime aberration.

Luck is just being born at a particular time, a young girl who narrowly escapes her tormentors—

**

My grandmother belonged to the last generation of Chinese girls who were subjected to the practice of foot-binding. Her feet were bound for a few years, and then they were freed, as the culture—and its ideals of femininity—began to shift. As a result, her feet never achieved the tininess of peppers, which was long considered the ideal, because feet that small forced a woman to walk in a gingerly, precarious wobble.

The years in which her feet were bound, however, did result in repeatedly broken bones, which forced her arches to jut upward at a sharp angle. Size-wise, her feet eventually did reach a somewhat normal length—an American women’s size 5—but shoes, unsurprisingly, remained a lifelong source of frustration and discomfort for her. No shoe ever fit her correctly, and no shoe could ever provide her with the support she needed.

The word burns in my mouth as I say it: support.

**

My father had told me young, so it would stick, You were supposed to be a boy. We were told you’d be a boy.

He said it as if I had betrayed him on purpose, being born a second daughter.

As if I had been male in utero up until some decisive moment, and then I said, No more.

After my grandmother died, my father told me that when I was born, she too had lamented, I didn’t come all the way to America to raise another girl!

I remember being stunned at the betrayal—my grandmother and I having been so close.

My whole body refused to believe him.

My whole, invincible body, red as a rainbow.

But I knew it was true, because he laughed as he said it, remembering.

And who would laugh at a memory if it wasn’t true?

**

In English, red is the color not of luck, but of anger—or of debt one owes. It’s a warning. It’s the red marks that strike through your errors.

There’s the expression “seeing red” which means you’re blinded with rage.

With pain, with ferocity.

And then there’s the red, red rose, of true love.

There’s the afterimage of the world my grandmother saw once she turned away from the sun, every visible contour bleeding red—then white, then black, and then every other color of the rainbow.

And then there’s the unborn child still wrapped in blood, waiting to live, deciding—yes, deciding—who she will become.