I love you better than my own life, but love can be honeyed heartache. I know what I speak of, Donghai. If I was never betrayed by love, we would not be here together.

Women neither scurry nor scamper within these courtyard walls. They totter about with mincing steps, parasols held high above their heads. I take up a bowl of melons seeds and dart ahead of the others to claim a coveted spot on the bridge pavilion overlooking the pond. I realize how boorish this appears, but my pleasures are few and fleeting—the deftness of my two good feet, a shady place in which to repose, and you.

A languid breeze wafts through the air though there is no escaping the heat. It presses down upon us like a sweaty hand. I watch steam rising from the watercourse, imagining the carp in those shallow waters slowly stewing as they swim.

Tucked into the shelter of a mulberry tree, I stir the sticky air with a rice paper fan. You clamber onto the stone bench beside me, trying to dislodge fruit with a fallen branch, though mulberries are not in season.

“Think before you strike,” I warn in my mother tongue. “An unripe berry turns bitter in the belly.”

“Red ones,” you insist in a language not my own. Grasping my shoulder to steady yourself, you swing at foliage and miss, hitting the trunk instead. “Red is always sweet.”

“Nothing is ever always.” It is painful to watch you thrashing a tree with its own broken limb. “Have pity, son, for that tree is a mother. The mulberries are her children.”

If only I had heeded my own mother’s warning. When you leave the place where you are loved, you end up in the place you are hated. Mother steeped in this sorrow most of her life. Had I been wise enough to listen, I might have avoided her fate. Whether I would still come into misery, who can say? Yet I would have suffered in my homeplace.

And you? You would not be born, at least not the part of you that is half a stranger.

I am resigned to my captivity yet random thoughts assail me in my idle hours. I know that such ideas only open the heart to evil spirits’ whisperings. Yet I torment myself with longing for the different lives I might have lived. This is my own taste of unreadiness, the fruit that turns my belly bitter.

If only my betrothed had not deceived me, but married me instead. Would you still be my son with a different name and skin? And if that unlucky courtship had ended with nothing more than smiles and flirtatious glances? Your father might have been yet another man with the wealth of perhaps a hundred camels.

Or, if I’d been captured by another would it alter my fate? If that Arabian sea captain and his sailors had left the coastal lowlands for the semi-desert. If they marched into my camp and picked out my family among the other inhabitants. If they barged into the house where my mother kept me sheltered from covetous eyes and punishing sun.

Would my father and elder brothers have cut them down where they stood? Or would I still find myself here in Guangzhou, a foreign bird in a flock of concubines?

It is all a set of lies I tell myself, for where there is a willing seller, a buyer need only meet him at the marketplace. I could not be taken by the stranger without being sold by the friend. I’d been making a wedding sarong for a man who was making fetters for me.

You may be too young to notice how peculiar I appear to others here. Have you never wondered what brought me to a place where, by rights, I should never abide?

I had committed no crime to justify my captivity. I wasn’t born without clan into any caste of slaves. No pleasure jaunt brought your mother across the seas to watch you swipe at mulberries. A poem of lamentation might have been composed about how I came to idle here in a Chinese garden with the wife of the household, a retinue of servants, seven other concubines, and you. There once had been ten of us mated to one man, but Concubine Number Eight killed herself the year after I arrived.

I hear the voices rattling around us, the laughter and gossip, the fighting and fretting. If I disregard meaning, words blur together like the buzzing of bees. When I struggle to hear it, I can decipher much of what they say. I know they speak of me. The words “Kunlun, Kunlun, Kunlun” break through their chatter like claps of thunder.

I sit with a bowl in my lap, cracking roasted melon seeds between my teeth. Now and then I slip one into your mouth, while planting words in your ear. Like a baby “go-away” bird, you part your lips to accept the food, but not the words I give you.

“I want berries,” you repeat, rising on your toes to reach them.

“I do not hear what you say,” I lie, though I always preach against lying. “You must learn to speak our language.”

It is the tongue of your mother’s mother’s mothers. Yet when I speak it, you answer in the language of your father’s father’s fathers, if you answer at all. Do you even hear me? Can you comprehend these words? I will not give up, Li Donghai. I must cover you in this language like the salt that coats these melon seeds.

Half of your blood binds you to these shores. Half of it tugs you toward desert. If we follow the delta current that surges outside these gates, it will lead us out to sea. But how would we ever find our way home, when neither of us owns a boat nor has even learned to tread water? And even if we could, the distance is unswimmable.

***

In the pecking order of this place, the wife bows to the husband, the concubines bow to the wife, the servants to the concubines, the children to their elders, but do not bow before me, Donghai. It is only to Allah that one should prostrate oneself.

Yet the people we live among, the dwellers in this city, the man that holds my freedom all see me as a barbarian, a dusky Kunlun devil to whom one’s head should not be lowered. Mother would be so offended.

I was the pride of hooyo’s womb, her last-born golden child. My marriage prospects were excellent, according to my mother. I would have never had to hide my xalwo, the sweet confection served at weddings.

My skin was once the color of unsifted sand while my sisters and brothers were brown like the earth beneath it. Anyone could see that my middle sister was the true beauty of our family, but Mother somehow believed this golden skin of mine made me rare as gold itself. I never had to gather goats in a sandstorm nor harvest any crops in the sun. I was always kept indoors, away from the punishing rays that would darken my skin.

My brothers and sisters called me cadeey, the youngest and palest among them who rarely saw sunlight. My siblings would run from me in mock fear, pretending to have seen a bat. They teased that by the time I was born all color had drained from our hooyo’s womb.

I would sit between my mother’s knees as she rubbed oils into my skin and plaited my hair. She vowed I would never be captured into marriage as she was, snatched from her father’s compound like livestock in a camel raid. “You will have the xalwo I had to hide, Ayaan. I will make it sweet with honey to serve at your wedding feast.”

I spent most of my time indoors, fighting boredom and eating food. I always had a taste for sweets though my mother warned this would rot my teeth and make me fat. “And who wants a fat and toothless woman for a wife? A cactus flower blooms but for a short time. You must preserve your beauty for the husband who will one day claim your hand.”

“But who will I marry, Hooyo?”

“With a skin so rare as yours? A man with the wealth of perhaps a hundred camels. A girl like you is worth more than all the women in this camp combined.”

My eldest sister told the story of my birth so many times, I can almost see it myself. She said that our father’s grandmother came to bestow a blessing, a name that means “bright and beautiful” or “the lucky one.” My mother asked about the jagged blue birthmark spread like a bruise across my right hip.

“That is dalmareen,” my great-grandmother declared. “This child is meant to travel out beyond these sands.”

We were nomads, people of a portable village. We roamed as a way of life, but this is not the kind of travel she meant.

“That is no sailing vessel,” my mother objected. “Anyone can see it is a crocodile with an open mouth.”

“And stranger, what if it is? Those beasts are known to swim the entire length of the Nile.”

A younger person should never oppose an elder, but my mother did so that day. Perhaps it was because the great-grandmother pointed out my hooyo’s foreignness. “You do not know crocodiles. A bull has swum the same spot along the Shebelle since long before I was born. He may even be your age, ayeeyo.”

“May you live to be as old, granddaughter-in-law.”

Whether it was alarm at an old woman’s prophesy, or a means of grooming me for a respectable marriage, my mother tried to keep me trapped at home with warnings of the Hyena Man. A devious shapeshifting cannibal, Qori Ismaris was said to any seduce young woman he found alone, or devour any man foolish or drunk enough to fall asleep out-of-doors.

I ignored her warnings, for my beloved was not a human hyena. The man I gave my heart was no hairy, red-eyed demon. He was tall, well-formed, and pleasing to the eye. I always met him in daylight, not after sundown when hyenas were known to roam.

The first time I saw Sharmaarke, my family had left me on my own. Maybe they were out watering millet, milking goats, or herding camels. My sisters were married off by then, so my parents might have been out in search of a suitable mate for me.

I remember being bored that day, hungry for something sweet whose makings we didn’t have at home. No cardamom or nutmeg for xalwo. No coconut for kashaato.

Although I had been warned not to go there alone, I went down to the marketplace. That is where I saw him standing beneath a date palm, staring directly at me. He was tall and straight as a palm tree himself, a white turban and patterned sarong setting off his smooth, brown skin. How could a man so beautiful be anything but worthy?

I saw him again a half-moon later. We were low on water that day and I wanted to wash my hair. I took a calabash and went down to the borehole. A group of strange men had set up there, forcing people to leave and return with one measure of camel’s milk for every two of water. When I shouted my indignation, Sharmaarke’s smile told me he recognized me from market day. He declared that such a pretty girl as I would not be charged for what she wanted.

I would pay for that water soon enough.

***

Sharmaarke means to “protect from evil.” Yet it was he, my intended, who under the lie of loving me, had lured me from my sleeping mat to elope with him. He lifted me onto the back of a camel and headed north with a caravan of goods he meant to sell at the seaside bazaar. He promised that when trade was done he would then arrange our wedding.

Yet he sent no male relative back home to confer with my family. My parents would receive not a single goat nor camel in bride price, for I was one of the goods he traded in. Sharmaarke did not save me from harm, but delivered me into it. The villainous Hyena Man had assumed the disguise of a bridegroom.

It was the sea at Berbera that frightened me most, a vast expanse of water stretching off into the distance like a second sky. The city itself was an unwelcoming sight after traveling so far and so long.

I saw tall stone buildings that I feared would topple, strange bearded men thronging the bazaar, creaky wooden vessels crowding the harbor. I could barely hear my own voice above the din. Market vendors haggled over merchandise in unfamiliar tongues. A constant bellowing sound was made by too many camels being herded through the narrow lanes.

Yet once I was aboard the Arab vessel, traded like so much amber, ivory, and frankincense, I watched the receding city with a yawning sense of loss.

That first night a sailor picked me out among the captives. He undid fetters that bound me to the other girls, then pushed me to the deck and tried to force my knees apart. When I screamed and struggled, he slapped me across the face. I screamed again and the captain came to pull the man from me.

Foolish, foolish me. I thought the captain my rescuer. Ilaahay khayr haku siiyo, I blubbered over and over again. “May Allah grant you good, I thanked him.”

The captain scowled and bent between my legs. He touched me ever so lightly then examined his own fingers.

My mother had done the same when she caught me out riding camels, climbing the frankincense tree, or istunka fighting with my next older brother. It was Adan, always Adan who lured me out-of-doors and into trouble.

My sister said that when I was born, he had fled to the arbor and wept. Our eldest sibling was nearly a man, too old for childhood diversions. Our sisters all but ignored him. Adan had always wanted a younger brother and he came to treat me as such. Whenever my mother found us playing fight games she tried to beat him, though Adan would twist away from her blows and run off into the open desert.

While I was valued for being dainty and fair, my brother was praised for growing sturdy and strong. When he was old and tall enough, he began training to compete in games at the Afgooye New Year’s Festival.

Those istunka warriors were our saviors, for if they didn’t come to fight, the festival wouldn’t be celebrated. And if the New Year’s Festival did not happen, our people believed that widespread famine and infertility would follow.

I usually found Adan practicing in the shady kitchen arbor outside the buul, the dome-shaped shelter we lived in. I would watch him battling thorn trees with swords, sticks, and daggers. Sometimes he gave me a cudgel and ordered me to attack him. When I raised the weapon and rushed toward him, he’d whip his shawl around it, rip it from my hands, and tumble me onto the ground. After a session in the arbor with Adan, I would often be covered with bruises and scratches.

“You mustn’t let that brother of yours ruin your marriage prospects,” Hooyo would scold. She’d rub aloe into my cuts and examine the space between my thighs. “Hard sport will spoil your virtue. Remember that you are a girl, Ayaan. Not a boy.”

Just as my mother once did, the sea captain was checking to see that my maidenhead was intact. That sailor was beaten bloody and I was locked alone in a cabin. This lulled me into the comforting lie that I might be safe in whatever place we were headed.

The aloe plant is a trickster. It may soothe cuts and burns on the body, but it also burns the throat if you swallow it. This is how bitterly lies have stung me—those told to me, told about me, and the ones I have told myself. I now know the truth and accept it. That sea captain was only preserving my purity in order to increase my sales price.

I tumbled from that slave ship into a different kind of heat than the semi-desert I had known all my life. It draped my shoulders and weighed me down like a sweat-soaked camel blanket. I came onto land with legs wobbly as an infant’s, wasted in body and spirit. I didn’t know if I would live or die, and truly didn’t care.

I was traded twice after I left home, each time my value increasing. All that had been invested in me meant I must be kept alive. A Chinese healer forced tonics of honey, herbs and crushed turtle shell down my throat. He further revived me with tinctures of poppy syrup. Servants dressed me in heavy garments of variegated silk made in a different style from the Cantonese, further marking my foreignness.

I had nearly recovered my health when I was taken to a market somewhat more refined than the one I was sold from at Berbera. Instead of clamoring to bid, a stream of single buyers were led into a room where I knelt on a silk cushion. One of them bowed deeply before an Arab trader, removing a card from his sleeve and holding it up. The merchant gave a nod, the transaction completed. I saw no taels of silver exchanging hands but I know it had all been arranged.

This was my third and final sale. I thought I now belonged to the elderly man who led me out to a waiting sedan chair. I soon discovered he was but a manservant in the household of a Cantonese nobleman.

Both of my sisters had made good marriages. And me, the “lucky one” my mother expected to marry well, would now bear the shame of a sullied woman. If there was any reason to rejoice, it was knowing she would never witness my disgrace.

Imagine my surprise at the new living quarters, a desert dweller such as I. This waterfront compound was sprawling and well-appointed, grander even than the mosques back at home. I gawked at the rooms of fine furnishings, the hall of family ancestors, the courtyard we now sit in with its gardens of potted flowers, miniature trees, stone walkways, a rippling river-fed pool, and the mulberry tree that shades us.

Yet it was also foreign and frightening: the food, the manners, the practices, the people—so much ceremony in the preparing and pouring of tea!

I was here two full moons before the man who holds my freedom finally summoned me to his bedchamber. When I was brought to him cleansed and perfumed, I never thought to resist. This was not the husband I would have preferred, though even in my own country a marriage is usually arranged without the girl’s consent.

There is no one else to talk to, Donghai. And even so, a woman should not speak of her marital relations. So what I am about to say may seem indecorous, though I doubt you understand even a fraction of it. And so engrossed in your ritual of plucking mulberry fruit, you are probably not even listening.

The man who holds my freedom had already taken his love medicines. He did not try to seduce me, but gazed with curiosity at the smooth bridge of my circumcision. When he probed and seemed to find no opening, his readiness deflated. He sat back on his haunches and muttered to himself. I didn’t know his language but I understood him well enough. He was frustrated at finding no ready entry point.

Convinced he’d been sold inferior goods, a woman who was not a woman, the man who holds my freedom personally returned me to the man who had arranged the transaction. The trader laughed at his ignorance and gave him the tools and technique to deflower a circumcised woman.

That first time he summoned me, he had unwrapped me like a khat bundle. This time he was impatient, ripping away my garments, pushing me into bed, and making the proper incision. The blood-soaked bedclothes was as if a goat had been sacrificed. A woman must not cry at her consummation but I could not hold back my tears.

I sometimes call him husband, the man who holds my freedom, though he has made no marriage contract for me. No bride price will ever be offered for my hand.

Your father has always been over fond of his luxuries and lusts, his baijiu liquor and lychee wine. He favors an array of love medicines—herbal concoctions of ginseng, reishi mushrooms, Chinese yam. He also uses animal remedies made from powdered deer antler, caterpillar fungus, the penises of tiger, oxen, and goat. But his favorite of all, and the hardest to find is the powder of pulverized rhinoceros horn.

The other women envied how often he called me to his bed. Even the ones he no longer slept with resented the attention he paid me. What must I then do when he sent for me—refuse him? I am sure I would have suffered some punishment in return.

I was neither the youngest nor the most beautiful of his eight concubines. Yet the man who holds my freedom believed me to be a magical being. I allowed him to think what he wanted. In turn, I collected my share of favors and minor freedoms.

He had once tried to keep me trapped indoors, just as my mother did before him. I may well be a concubine, but I would no longer be a prisoner. I became as agile as a sand cat. Slipping past the gates disguised as a servant, I made my way into the city.

One day I went to buy delicacies for the New Year celebration. I had not lost my taste for sweets and I eagerly set out to find them. As I searched for the mooncake seller, a Kunlun medicine merchant beckoned to me from a shop doorway. The man was dark like me but didn’t speak my language. We were forced to communicate in signs and gestures.

He showed me the entire head of a rhinoceros, stroking the horn so I would understand. He then brought out a vial of medicine made from the animal’s powdered horn. I hadn’t enough taels in my purse, yet he still insisted that I take it.

I returned from the marketplace with no mooncake in hand, but with the precious powder my husband cherished. That is when he declared me his talisman, his magical Kunlun concubine. I believe it was that very night that he planted the seed of you in me. When you were ready to meet the world, a Parsi midwife came to open me up, deliver you into life, then suture my circumcision.

The man who holds my freedom is a well-off jenshen who squanders his inherited wealth on rich delicacies, opulent feasts with hired dancers and acrobats, long nights at the opera and brothels. He collects curiosities to astonish his guests: musical instruments made from animal bones, paintings of couples disrobing in gardens, calligraphy tapestries etched in gold leaf, jadestone carvings of people with placid faces engaged in unspeakable acts.

The husband wishes to possess the rarest find. His harem reflects these tastes. Unlike home, where wealthy men might marry up to four women, here he is only permitted one wife. The rest of us are concubines.

The wife and older concubines, the servants and nannies, the cooks and wet nurses are Cantonese like him. The younger concubines are a mixed assortment— a mandarin tax collector’s daughter given to pay off a debt, a red-haired Macanese widow, a Hakka from the Fujian Province, a Manchurian woman whose feet are wrapped but not bound, and a tiny Formosan negrita almost as dark as me.

The Mandarin girl is yet a child, too young for conjugal duties. Yet she is also shrewd. She knows that her status in this household will rise when she bears a child. Away from the wife’s disapproving sight, she cuddles and pets you, pretending that you are her son. “I am your second mother, Donghai. One day I will have one like you.”

Yes, but do not hasten, I want to say. If I would hazard the humiliation of speaking this language aloud, I would tell her—Cherish childhood while you have it.

As I age, and if he stays alive, the man will tire of me, as he has of the others. The ones who come behind me may be prettier, more exotic. Perhaps one day he will have as his favorite a maiden brought down from the moon. Until then, I must stitch you into the fabric of this household. You too must become a favorite, as this will ensure a respectable life for you after I am gone. Justice knows only Allah, but Allah knows a mother’s love.

You are young, yet it is time for certain truths. You must learn what I am and where I am from. People will say that I come from Berbera, though they pronounce it “Bobali.” That is not my home at all, but the site of my displacement.

I had left the place where I was loved, ending up in the place I was hated. I will not utter the name of my last camp, though I doubt it is still there. My people are wanderers, after all. We gather our livestock and belongings, we even bundle up our houses to follow the camels and seasons.

If I ever left to find my family, would the man who holds my freedom send people after me? Or perhaps the Hyena Men and Arab traders there would only re-enslave me once my feet touched sand.

Everything about me is a cause for curiosity to the women in this house, from my daily prayers to my wayso cleansing. When I undo my plaits, they crowd around and jostle for the chance to touch my hair. They even laugh at the way I eat. I once tried to maneuver chopsticks before laying them aside to scoop up rice with the first three fingers of my right hand.

I am almost used to it now. I used to be scandalized at the way they spoke so boldly about my body, comparing it to a baboon’s backside or the rump of a draft horse. All but one of the women here hobble along on stumps that are folded over like club feet or clenched fists. They giggle behind their rice paper fans, pointing out the size of my slippers, though my free will and unbound feet free me to go where others cannot.

Just as I was once forced to stay at home, the wife and concubines spend their lives in near-seclusion. They stitch needlework, practice calligraphy, and study the teachings of Confucius. Their leisure time pursuits of singing about romances none of them will enjoy, betting on cricket fights, and writing poems about peach blossoms barely staunches their boredom. They gossip endlessly, quarrel among themselves, compete for the husband’s attentions, and tirelessly torment me.

They called my language gibberish, like the chatter of monkeys or chirruping of crickets. Yet when I tried to speak Cantonese, they mocked me, even though it is not every woman’s native tongue. This is why I rarely spoke until I had a child.

I have saved all my words for you, Donghai.

These women do not go out to meet the world, so they bring the world inside. One day the wife summoned a fortuneteller from the Taoist temple. The priest shook a bamboo tube for each of them, spilling out sticks with marks etched upon them. With these he consulted a book of stories that he used to divine their fortunes.

The fortuneteller finally looked my way. “Would the Kunlun want a reading?”

The old wife shrieked with laughter. She pointed to the wrinkled Shar Pei lying at her feet. “You may as well ask if this dog wants its fortune told. The Kunlun knows no human language.”

Yet I needed no one to predict my fortune. Allah decrees my fate.

Because I so rarely speak it, they think I do not hear their language. I understand more than they know. I’ve heard them chant the pious homilies of a wise man. Confucius says that even strangers must be loved and valued equally, without regard to family ties.

I must be the obvious exception to such teachings.

Other than you, Donghai, I have had but one friend in this house. The wife’s youngest daughter was my age mate. I wish you could have known your half-sister, Ming. The girl was bold and fearless. She defied her mother’s disapproval and treated me with kindness, helping me learn this difficult language. When Ming was sent off into marriage, I retreated into mute silences until you arrived.

The old wife is the mistress of misery here. You have surely seen her in action. She not only devises torments for me, but rouses the others to join in. No woman wants to provoke her ire, so they follow behind her like a brood of lappet-faced vulture chicks.

The wife has turned my given name, Ayaan into ayah, their word for servant. Indeed, she treats me more as slave than concubine, sending me to fetch sweet meats from the kitchen or wares from the marketplace.

What others meant as servitude, I made into my own kind of freedom. What was seen as beautiful at home was thought of as ugly here. What was once called fair was now considered dusky. With no mother to keep me trapped indoors, my skin slowly deepened from gold into bronze. No longer considered light, I went out to meet the sun.

I did not mind these errands. After living so long inside, I craved the out-of-doors. I traded my silk garments for the plain attire of a servant, summoning Adan’s istunka training to shield myself from danger.

I always wore a length of cloth over my rough dress, and kept a dagger, stick, or short sword hidden just beneath it. Just as Adan once did to me, I found that I could disarm an assailant by whipping my shawl around to trap his weapon inside.

It was just as well that the Chinese believe Kunlun to be supernatural warriors. I soon developed a reputation in the city’s marketplaces and byways. The same ruffians and pickpockets that used to plague me, soon began to avoid me.

Though I’d had no such tendencies back at home, people here expected a medicine woman of me. I made myself over into one. I began scouring the market for the best honey, almonds, papaya and lotus seeds on offer. I’d grind these ingredients into creams and ointments to make beauty treatments for the younger concubines. Each one wanted the husband to find her in his favor. Each one wanted to be more ravishing than the next.

Just as my mother once polished me with oils, I rubbed the women with beef fat and moon milk culled from caves, slathering on mung bean paste to preserve their paleness. They treat the sun as an enemy, just as my mother had. Surely you notice how they wield parasols almost as weapons when they stroll the bright areas of the courtyard.

In order to reassure myself that my former life was not a dream, I began to search the city for others like me. People of my complexion and darker, they call us all, Kunlun. It is a word with many meanings—mystical healer, coarse barbarian, formidable warrior. And yet it also means nothing. The dark-skinned people here are not of a single nation. We do not share languages. We all have our different ways of being.

I remember back at home long ago when a Bajuni fisherman wandered into our camp. A fight broke out between him and my eldest brother. We didn’t see the Bajuni as a kinsman, though he was more like us than any of the people I have discovered here.

Even my own mother was considered a stranger. When she was captured in a distant place, my father brought her home and made her his wife. The women of our camp never let her forget this. They derided her cooking, the way she spoke our language, even the manner in which she braided her hair.

Yet the darker people here do resemble one another more than we do the Chinese. I can find no name that fits us all, so this difficult word has found its way into my mouth.

So many Kunlun were trapped in misery or wrapped in self-importance—the doormen at wealthy homes, the eunuchs guarding royal harems, the slaves diving at the docks to caulk ships’ seams underwater. I once saw the body of a small brown child hunched at the end of a lane, collapsed from fatigue or sadness. No one came forward to mourn his death so I ululated for him.

Even as she sent me outside the gates, the wife would find occasions to challenge my liberties. One day when the husband was away, she told me to buy sweet egg tarts. I came back from the shop to find the man of the house had returned.

When I handed the tarts to her, the wife slapped them from my hand. “Husband, do you see how this Kunlun devil rambles so freely about the city? Is she a woman or a man, concubine or courtesan?”

I said not a word in my defense, which is what the old wife had counted on. I merely pointed to the crumpled egg tarts being swept up by a servant.

“Liar! Why would I send you out to buy a thing any one of my cooks can make?” She didn’t seem to realize she was telling on herself. “You are a cat in heat, running off to rut when the master’s back is turned.”

The wife demanded that I be driven from the house for my indiscretions. The man who holds my freedom did not comply. I was the magical Kunlun for whom he had paid most handsomely. And I, after all, am the one who cured his gout.

The husband had ignored the advice of doctors and came crawling to me, his sham shaman. “Help me, Ayaan. My big toe feels on fire.”

As well it should. All the liquor and sweet wines, the rich meats and seafood he devoured were causing attacks of pain and swollen, distended joints. I watched the man who holds my freedom crawl when he could not walk, being carried like a baby by his manservant. What would become of us if soon he sickened and died? Would we be turned out into the street by his eldest son? Sold off to another, crueler master?

I remembered how my paternal aunt treated her husband’s ailment and searched for a merchant selling aromatic coffee beans. Bun is scarcely known or used in China, the people here preferring to drink teas and infusions of all kinds.

I crushed the beans in a mortar and brewed them, straining out the hot water. At first the husband twisted his mouth at the bitter taste, but soon he learned to enjoy it.

After drinking coffee several times a day, in time his gout was gone.

***

A delegation of dark-skinned traders passed through Guangzhou the year before you were born. People thronged the wharves to see a live giraffe the merchants brought in tribute to the emperor.

I also went down to the docks, though not to catch any glimpse of an animal I already knew from home. In fact, I wish to have never seen it tied and terrified, its eyes bucked in panic as it stumbled down the narrow gangplank.

Back then I still believed I could find a way to my homeplace. I hoped to gain audience with a people who hadn’t arrived in fetters. As far as I knew, none had been castrated or made to burst his lungs diving underwater. Loaded with trade goods and treated as visiting dignitaries, these were a different kind of Kunlun.

I watched them brought ashore on pilot boats, then boarded onto sedan chairs that bore them into the city. These men were very dark with strong white teeth, richly attired in a different fashion than the way my people dressed.

I ran alongside the procession, crying out above the ruckus.“Walaalahayow, walaalahayow. Ii gurmda!” My brothers, my brothers. Please help me!

No one answered me. One of the men, young and handsome, turned his head in my direction. I snatched off my headdress and waved it at him. “Aboowe!”

The man nudged his fellow and pointed me out, then both burst into laughter. Though I had addressed them as elder brothers, they didn’t see a sister.

What a picture I must have made, bareheaded and breathless, sweating through the rough cotton garb of an ayah. Stampeding along the public way, shouting out in a language no one understood. I could feel the loosened plaits standing wild about my head. I must have seemed a mad woman.

It was foolish anyway to think my salvation lay in any man’s indulgence. Look what my betrothed had done when I trusted him for marriage. If I must invest my hope in a male, it must be you, Donghai.

The artisans here make red silk-covered boxes of graduated sizes, one that fits into another, and then again another. You are a Chinese box to hold and keep my secrets. If you would only open your ears to listen, I will store with you all my stories.

People here worship their sons like little gods. Though you are not entirely Chinese, they value you more highly than any of your full-blooded sisters. I am happy you were born a boy, though not for those same reasons. I would not want any daughter of mine to face what I have lived through.

You are my one indulgence, my concession to this place. After you were born, I found herbs at the market to keep any seed from rooting inside me. You, Li Donghai will be my only child. You will grow from the boy you are into the man you will become.

If truth does not come from one’s mouth, it will break out through one’s ribs. And here is a truth you must face. You will live among those who call you stranger, a subhuman demon. People will ask what place you are from. When you say “Guangzhou,” you will not be believed. They will not see the Chinese in you, only the Kunlun.

“And what are you doing here in another people’s country?” some may ask of you, as they have asked of me.

They will insist that you belong to a place you do not know and may never go. If you say “Berbera,” they will tell you “Bobali,” and both would be a lie. You must become a bird that plucks from two trees at once. So let me tell you of the place that made me. In this way my story may also become your own.

It is a land of sand and thorn trees, of the Juba and Shebelle Rivers, the Berbera port from which our people are plucked like fruit. You will not go there, for it is said among my people that “both the soul that has flown away and the rain that has gone to the West do not return.”

I miss the heat of my home. Although Guangzhou itself is also hot, it is a heat weighted by water, monsoons and encroaching jungle. The air of our home is a cleanly dryness, a windy heat that stirs the sand into twirling dhaanto dancers.

I miss the language of my land. Ah, but how we are a people of poetry and proverbs. Words are not just to be spoken, but to weave into a cloth of many meanings.

I also miss my people. Oh, how I miss my people! Their skin of sand and earth and midnight. I miss the brothers and sisters who teased me. I miss the father who planted the seed of me, the mother who tried to protect me, though my fate was my own failing. I was like a cricket in a cage, hopping away from its home as soon as the door is lifted.

I have had no choice but to make a way for myself. It is not so terrible a life. I am not worked or drowned to death. I have not keeled over at the end of a lane. I have come to enjoy my husband’s caresses though it would be shameful to say so. A woman is never able to tell a man, “send for me tonight, I want you.” You must wait until he calls.

I should not speak such confidences to a child, but there is no one else to share my stories or my shame.

Even before I was blessed with your birth, the man who holds my freedom always brought me to his bed though I had not conceived after seven seasons. I prepared for him the way my mother would for my father. I made myself naked, wrapped in a blanket and squatted over a slow burning fire of sweet wood and frankincense. When the fragrant smoke saturated my skin, I rubbed myself with a heavy oil to seal in the musk.

When you were born, I heard the wife and concubines wondering aloud if their husband would now be raising Kunluns, as if you and I are seed stock for a flock of guineafowl or a herd of water buffalo. Even the Formosan concubine is happy to have someone darker to look down upon.

Maybe you are tempted to join in the jeering. Perhaps you too will come to call me, Kunlun. Do not be deceived when the others crowd around to stroke your skin or pet your hair. It is how they indulge the household pets, the Shih Tzu and Shar Pei.

Now that you are here with me, I no longer wander about. Though I am still drawn to the out-of-doors, I cannot take you along. There are dangers lurking outside these gates that I may not be able to protect you from. And I would never leave you here alone to the mercy of this house.

I may be a concubine, but once I was part of a family. I am the fifth child of Nala and Ibrahim, grandchild of Xirsi and Sagal, of Olol and Mulki, born into the clan of Isaaq. These may seem empty words to you, but it is part of who you are.

I still carry the birthmark on my right hip, though it has faded with time. I know now that it is neither a dalmareen sailing vessel nor an open-mouthed crocodile. It is the Indian Ocean that carried me to this place.

Li is your family name, conferred by your father and your father’s father’s fathers. Your given name, Donghai means “child of the eastern ocean,” but you do not wear this as a sign upon your body. The birthmark at the base of your spine looks like a mass of mulberries. Perhaps this is why you crave them so, and pick them before they are ripe.

You give a triumphant cry when you finally dislodge a clump of berries. You cram a fistful into your mouth. Then howling with disappointment at their bitterness, you sputter them onto the ground.

I hear a snort of derisive laughter. Already it is beginning.

“Retching in the courtyard?” the wife crows in malicious glee. “This is just what one expects of a Kunlun devil.”

Acknowledgments From the Author

This work is inspired by, and partially excerpted from a chapter in Black Rice, a novel-in-progress that explores centuries-long connections between China and people of African descent. I worked on versions of “Mulberry Season” at the Bright Angel Retreat and Creative Center, MacDowell Foundation, Bethany Arts Community, and the Vermont Studio Center. I’d like to express gratitude to readers who gave feedback on various drafts: Tina Jenkins Bell, Janice Tuck Lively, Nana-Ama Danquah, and Deqa Aden. I also offer my deepest appreciation to the editors and judges of the Globe Soup Open Story Contest, who saw fit to recognize the work with this award.

About our winner…

Sandra Jackson-Opoku is author of the American Library Association Black Caucus award-winning novel; The River Where Blood is Born was listed in Best Novels of the Nineties: A Readers Guide. Hot Johnny (and the Women Who Loved Him) was an Essence Magazine Hardcover Fiction Bestseller in 2001.

Her fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, travel articles and dramatic works are widely published and produced. They appear in eMerge Magazine, Both Sides: Stories from the Border, story South, Another Chicago Magazine, New Daughters of Africa, Novus Literary Journal, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Taint Taint Taint Literary Journal, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and other outlets. She also coedited Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, a finalist in the Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Award.

Jackson-Opoku’s work has earned a US National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, Newcity Lit50: Who Really Books in Chicago, an Esteemed Literary Artist Award from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the Lifeline Theatre BIPOC Adaptation Showcase, a Pushcart Prize nomination in fiction, and other awards and honors.

Sandra Jackson-Opoku has taught literature and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago, the University of Chicago Writers Studio, the University of Miami, and Chicago State University. She presents workshops, readings, and literary presentations in bookstores, schools, libraries, museums and arts organizations throughout the country and around the world.

Follow Sandra on Twitter: @jacksonopoku

2022 OPEN SHORT STORY COMPETITION WINNER

Prize: £1,500

and the winner is…

Mulberry Season

About our winner…

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