daughter-in-law if you didn’t have a grandchild? Fang Min’s parents became very displeased that I wasn’t getting pregnant, and we started having big fights.
“I don’t know how I managed it, but I convinced Fang Min to move us to our own apartment. And that’s when things turned into a living nightmare. Without his parents under the same roof to check on him, my husband suddenly lost interest in me. He went out drinking and gambling every night and started seeing other women. It was as if he were still single, and he would come home late at night, completely drunk, and sometimes he wanted to have sex, but other times he just wanted to beat me up. It excited him. Then he would bring home other women to have sex in our bed, and he forced me to be with them. It was terrible.”
Rachel shook her head in dismay, making eye contact with her mother for the first time. “I don’t understand how you put up with that.”
“Hiyah, I was only eighteen! I was so naïve and afraid of my worldly husband, and most of all I was too humiliated to tell my parents what a mistake I’d made. After all, I had run away and abandoned them in order to marry this rich boy, so I had to make the best of it. Now, right underneath our apartment lived this family with one son. His name was Kao Wei, and he was a year younger than me. My bedroom happened to be right over his, so he could hear everything that was happening every night. One night, Fang Min came home in a rage. I’m not sure what made him so angry on this night—maybe he lost some money gambling, maybe one of his girlfriends got mad at him. Anyway, he decided to take it out on me. He began to break all the furniture in the apartment, and when he broke a chair and started coming after me with the jagged chair leg, I fled the apartment. I was so afraid that in his drunken rage he would accidentally kill me. Kao Wei heard me leaving, so as I ran down the stairs, he opened his door and pulled me into his flat, while Fang Min ran outside of the building and began screaming in the street. That is how Kao Wei and I met.
“For the next few months, Kao Wei would comfort me after every bad fight and even help me devise tactics to avoid my husband. I would buy sleeping pills, crush them up, and put them into his wine so that he would fall asleep before he could get violent. I would invite his friends over for dinner and make them stay as late as possible, until he passed out drunk. Kao Wei even put a stronger lock on the toilet door so that it would be harder for Fang Min to break through. Slowly but surely, Kao Wei and I fell in love. He was my only friend in the building, in the whole city, actually. And yes, we started to have an affair. But then one day we were almost caught, and I forced myself to end it, for Kao Wei’s sake, because I feared Fang Min would kill him if he ever found out. A few weeks later, I realized I was pregnant with you, and I knew Kao Wei was the father.”
“Wait a minute. How did you know for sure he was the father?” Rachel asked, uncrossing her arms and leaning back against the window.
“Trust me, Rachel, I just knew.”
“But how? This was back before DNA testing.”
Kerry shifted in her chair awkwardly, searching for the right words to explain. “One of the reasons I had such a hard time getting pregnant was because Fang Min had peculiar habits, Rachel. Because of his drinking he had trouble getting erect, and when he was excited, he only liked to have a certain type of sex, and I knew I could not get pregnant that way.”
“Oh … oooh,” Rachel said, turning crimson when she realized what her mother meant.
“Anyway, you look so much like Kao Wei, there is no mistaking that he is your father. Kao Wei had beautiful, angular features like you do. And you have his refined lips.”
“So if you were in love with Kao Wei, why didn’t you just divorce Fang Min and marry Kao Wei? Why did you have to resort to kidnapping?” Rachel was leaning forward now with her