The White Rabbit Candies

by Huina Zheng

While looking for the household registration booklet, I found a White Rabbit candy tucked into the deepest corner of a drawer. The wrapper was yellowed, oil seeping through the paper until it turned greasy and half transparent. Thirty years later, my wife still had not forgotten our youngest daughter, the one who died before we had time to give her a name. My wife had carried her for nine months. I understood why. Making enough money to feed the family was the only thing I knew how to do.

I picked up the candy. It stuck to my fingers. I did not know when my wife had hidden it there. She never spoke about that year. Neither did I. Our four children only knew they had a sister who died a week after she was born. When I delivered her, my wife warned me that the umbilical cord was wet. I said it was nothing. I do not know how much longer she plans to remember. I never thought of a name for the girl.

I tried talking to my wife about our youngest daughter. But every time I had barely opened my mouth, she would stand up and walk into the bathroom. The faucet would turn on, water rushing loudly. Once, our second daughter bought a dress, bright blue, with a white rabbit printed on it. It looked like the rabbit on the White Rabbit wrapper. She spun once in the living room and asked if it looked nice. My wife stared at the rabbit without speaking. Later, the dress disappeared. Our daughter said she had put it away. Not because she did not want to wear it. She did not dare wear it.

One Spring Festival, a friend came to visit and brought a large tin of White Rabbit candies. My wife glanced at it and said nothing. I thought she had finally let it go. But as soon as the guest left, she picked up the tin and placed it on the top shelf of the cupboard. Thirty years earlier, my brother had returned from Hong Kong with a tin of White Rabbit candies. He said children all liked them. Our eldest and second daughter stared at the tin eagerly. My wife said to save them until New Year. After that, the tin remained on the top shelf. The wrappers turned sticky.

In the end, those White Rabbit candies were buried together with our youngest daughter.

I still remember the day we buried her. My wife scattered the candies into the wooden box.

After our daughter was born, she cried constantly. The kind of crying that sounded wrong. My wife told me to take her to see a doctor. But it was lychee harvest season. I had to hurry and pick lychees to sell so there would be rice for the family. A man had to make sure his wife and children were fed and clothed. My wife held the screaming baby in her arms and looked at me with tearful eyes.

On the seventh day, early in the morning, I rode out of the mountains on my bicycle with the baby strapped to my back and went to a clinic recommended by an acquaintance. No one there would report you for violating the one-child policy. The doctor fed her a spoonful of yellow medicine. After swallowing it, she stopped crying. I held her and smiled. She looked peaceful for the first time that week. Before we left, the doctor poured another spoonful of medicine into her mouth. Then she stopped moving. I called to her, but she did not answer.

That afternoon, I stuffed her into a travel bag and brought her home. At dusk, I nailed together a wooden box and dug a hole beside the vegetable patch. Years later, my wife still wakes in the middle of the night crying out for the daughter who never had a name.

She never spoke about those seven days. I don’t know whether she ever hated me for them. Sometimes I think she didn’t. She understood the pressure I was under to provide for the family. Sometimes I think she did, in the coldness of the way she looked at me. Sometimes I wished she would curse me just once. Hit me, even. Later, whenever any of our four children fell sick, she took them to the clinic in town herself, immediately. She never asked me again.

I stared at the sticky White Rabbit candy in my hand. I carried it into the storage room, pulled out the shoebox hidden at the bottom of the cabinet, and opened the tin inside. The tin already held thirty candies. The oldest one had lost its shape, the wrapper fused into itself like a piece of amber. The newest one was barely recognizable. Last year my wife hid it inside a leather shoe in the shoe cabinet. I took it out while she was away. I placed this year’s candy inside the tin and whispered, “This is your birthday present.” Her thirty-first birthday was twelve days away. Since her first birthday, my wife had prepared one White Rabbit candy every year without missing a single one.

I sniffed and took the candy I had just placed inside the tin back out again. I peeled away the wrapper, sticky where it had fused together, and put the candy into my mouth. At first it was hard. Then it melted, sticking to the roof of my mouth. The milky smell spread, like milk boiling somewhere far away. I bit down once. Crunch. Crunch.

The White Rabbit candy grew smaller in my mouth until it disappeared, leaving behind nothing but sweetness. Bits of it lodged themselves between my teeth, and my tongue kept searching for them.

Over the years, I had eaten many White Rabbit candies. One after another. Where my wife could not see me. My hair had turned white. My teeth had started to loosen. But White Rabbit candies were still sweet, as sweet as the first one. I closed my mouth. The sweetness was still there.

I remembered holding her in the clinic courtyard that afternoon. Sunlight filtered through the leaves and flickered across her face. Her face was tiny. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth stretched open as if she were smiling. I do not know whether it was really a smile. But I have chosen to believe it was.

But all my wife got in the end was me, coming back alone.