In Chapter 15, Winnie's first living child is born. It is a girl, whom Winnie names Yiku. Yiku clearly loves her mother more than her father. This draws Wen Fu's wrath to baby Yiku as well as Winnie. When Yiku was about 6 months old, a servant girl left the family because she had been raped multiple times by Wen Fu and eventually committed suicide because she was pregnant. Winnie is outraged that this poor girl is dead because of her husgand's actions, and for the first time ever, she stands up to Wen Fu and confronts him about his actions. This doesn't go as well as Winnie had hoped. Wen Fu explodes, not just at Winnie, but also at their sobbing six month old baby. The abuses that Wen Fu inflicts upon his family are no longer just verbal or emotional; they are physical. He hits baby Yiku until she stops crying. Less than one year later, Winnie and Wen Fu are again childless.
Yiku was never the same, happy baby after that first night of abuse. Since Wen Fu hit her over and over again on the head, it is possible that she expierenced some sort of brain damage. When babies are born, their brains are still developing and growing as they rapidly grow during the early stages of their lives. I'm not sure when this brain growth starts to slow down, but it could be that Yiku's brain was still developing when it expierenced the severe trauma of Wen Fu's repeated beatings. The could have led to Yiku developing something that would be classified today as part of the autistic spectrum. This would help to try and explain some of Yiku's unusual behaviors. She is practically mute, she walks very quietly on her toes, and she seems to have a seizure the night that she died. These first two things, as well as her lack of crying, could be because she is terrified of doing anything that would draw her father's anger and abuse by making any noise of her own. It is possible that Yiku was born with some sort of disability that caused her death, but from the story that Winnie tells us, it is more probable that Wen Fu's abuse caused his daughter's death both that night when Winnie confronted him about the servant and the night Yiku died.
I loved reading your commentary! In the side margin of my book when we learn of Yiku unusual behaviors, I also wrote "autism?". After doing more research regarding trauma in infants and especially brain injurires, I disovered that abuse in infants (particularly SBS) can result in "intellectual disability, speech and learning disabilities, paralysis, seizures, hearing loss and even death" (TheArc.com). I presume (though I am not a trained professional pediatrician) that Yiku may have suffered from SBS, or shaken baby syndrome, which can explain her "normallcy" in the begining of her life and after the abuse her declining health.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your comment that Yiku may have developed some sort of autism due to the brain trauma that Wen Fu cause when he slapped her, and that Wen Fu caused Yiku's death.
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