By Huina Zheng
I went to the reproductive medicine department to have my eggs retrieved. The doctor told me to spread my legs and rest them on the stirrups. I bit the inside of my cheeks, forcing myself to expose the most private part of my body in front of a strange man. All I could see was the pale blue of the surgical gown. The anesthesiologist pushed the drugs into my vein.
I stared at the ceiling and felt myself float above the operating room, looking down with the doctor at my legs, parted. I know there are things you don’t tell even your closest friends, but my mouth was no longer mine. I heard myself telling the doctor that infertility was the fate of the women in my family. My great-grandmother had been barren. My grandmother was bought as a daughter. My mother was my grandmother’s stepdaughter; her biological mother starved to death during the famine. And me? My mother says she found me in a trash bin.
I want to believe it’s a joke. But I was the only only-child in my village, during the one-child policy, when pregnancies were hidden and women disappeared into the mountains, all for the chance of a son.
The doctor told me to close my eyes and relax. His voice came from far away, like from underwater. I had studied every step of the procedure online, but I still turned my head toward the monitor beside me. On the black-and-white ultrasound, the dark circles were my follicles.
“Good follicles,” the doctor said. “Eight on the left, six on the right.”
Then the needle came in. I had seen pictures of it online, as long as a forearm. When it appeared on the screen, my body should have tensed, but instead it went slack, like a wet rag. The tip of the needle was a thin line of light. It aligned with one of the dark circles and pierced it.
I didn’t feel pain, but I could feel its length, as if someone were digging a well inside my body, and at the bottom of the well an eye blinked.
I smiled at the black-and-white version of myself on the screen. I said that one of them was my daughter.
“Which one?” the doctor asked.
“The one on the far left,” I said.
The circle blinked at me, lashes long, almost smiling. When the needle withdrew, I could hear her humming to me, Mama is the best in the world, her voice soft and sticky, like rice cake. “She can’t wait to meet me.”
The doctor didn’t respond. His eyes stayed fixed on the screen.
The needle went in again. This time, the nurse pressed harder on my abdomen. I lifted my head and looked at her eyes. Single-lidded, clear, a young face hidden beneath the mask. The curve of her eyes told me she was smiling. She told me it would be over soon. The coolness of her latex gloves felt like a fish just cut open, still twitching, against my skin numbed by disinfectant. She began telling me about another patient. A woman who had spent eight years going from one fertility clinic to another, across Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou. She had taken over a hundred injections; her abdomen was mottled with bruises, like it had been kicked. She tried herbal medicine; the bitterness stayed in her throat, people could smell it when she spoke. Later, her husband had an affair. The other woman got pregnant. He said it was her fault, that he had no choice but to find someone else to give him a child. The day they divorced, she drank half a bottle of baijiu, and slept with a stranger in a bar. A month later, she found out she was pregnant.
“In the past, people would call it fate,” the nurse said. “Modern medicine calls it immunological infertility, the sperm and egg attacking each other.”
I wondered whether the hands inside her gloves were warm, whether her nails were neatly trimmed. I imagined her slender fingers moving across my chest and abdomen, the way my mother used to, telling me that we all have breasts and a uterus, that our bodies are made to carry life.
There was a dark mole on the nurse’s neck, a long hair growing from it, out of place against her pale skin.
“This is fly droppings,” she said. “When I was six, I didn’t wash it off in time. It sank into my skin and fed on my blood.”
I thought she was trying to distract me. How could fly droppings grow? But as she spoke, the mole trembled, like a fly beating its wings.
“Those three days when the embryos are in the dish,” she said, “whatever you eat, they can smell.”
“So should I eat spicy?” I asked. “Sweet? Sour? Salty?”
“Anything,” she said. “Think about the tastes you want them to have when they’re born. Then you won’t mind if they’re different from you.”
That night, I went back to the apartment my husband and I had just bought and opened the fridge to see what I could cook. Everything inside was something my mother had told me to buy, foods that were supposed to help with conception. Black chicken, fish maw, pig stomach. They made me nauseous. Red dates, longan, lotus seeds. I was sick of them. Even pomelo and pomegranate tasted like nothing.
In the end, I made a pot of porridge, adding salt, sugar, vinegar, and soy sauce.
When I set it on the table, my husband stared at me.
“It has every flavor it’s supposed to have,” I told him. I took a spoonful and swallowed it without chewing. Warm, sliding down my throat, like the length of the needle inside my body.
My husband said nothing. He just watched me as I reached into the pot with my hand and stirred. I pulled my fingers out and licked them.
It had every taste.
It had none.
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Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.