On the third day of the First Moon in the Year of the Rooster, their first and only daughter was born to them. And they would pray to the pale freckled face of the moon floating on the water's surface, pray that the child growing inside my mother's womb would be a boy. So every day for months before I was born, my parents would rise before dawn, carrying offerings of fresh-steamed rice cakes to the stone well behind our home, as the sky brightened and snuff ed out the stars. Only men could carry on the family line women were merely vessels by which to provide society with an uninterrupted supply of men. Of course, every family in those days desired a son over a daughter. A dragon embodied the yang, the masculine principle of life, and it was thought that if a couple expecting a child prayed to the dragon's egg, their offspring would be male. When I was a young child growing up in Korea, it was said that the image of the fading moon at daybreak, reflected in a pond or stream or even a well, resembled the speckled shell of a dragon's egg.
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