“O! Hwai dungsyi”—You bad little thing—said the woman, teasing her baby granddaughter. “Is Buddha teaching you to laugh for no reason?” As the baby continued to gurgle, the woman felt a deep wish stirring in her heart.
“Even if I could live forever,” she said to the baby, “I still don’t know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason. “But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well. “Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious
nose, have I not smelled the same bad things?“
The baby laughed, listening to her grandmother’s laments.
“O! O! You say you are laughing because you have already lived forever, over and over again? You say you are Syi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the Western Skies, now come back to give me the answer! Good, good, I am listening….
“Thank you, Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.”
An-Mei Hsu
Yesterday my daughter said to me, “My marriage is falling apart.”
And now all she can do is watch it falling. She lies down on a psychiatrist couch, squeezing tears out about this shame. And, I think, she will lie there until there is nothing more to fall, nothing left to cry about, everything dry.
She cried, “No choice! No choice!” She doesn’t know. If she doesn’t speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn’t try, she can lose her chance forever.
I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people’s misery, to eat my own bitterness.
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.
I know how it is to be quiet, to listen and watch, as if your life were a dream. You can close your eyes when you no longer want to watch. But when you no longer want to listen, what can you do? I can still hear what happened more than sixty years ago.
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My mother was a stranger to me when she first arrived at my uncle’s house in Ningpo. I was nine years old and had not seen her for many years. But I knew she was my mother, because I could feel her pain.
“Do not look at that woman,” warned my aunt. “She has thrown her face into the eastward-flowing stream. Her ancestral spirit is lost forever. The person you see is just decayed flesh, evil, rotted to the bone.”
And I would stare at my mother. She did not look evil. I wanted to touch her face, the one that looked like mine.
It is true, she wore strange foreign clothes. But she did not speak back when my aunt cursed her. Her head bowed even lower when my uncle slapped her for calling him Brother. She cried from her heart when Popo died, even though Popo, her mother, had sent her away so many years before. And after Popo’s funeral, she obeyed my uncle. She prepared herself to return to Tientsin, where she had dishonored her widowhood by becoming the third concubine to a rich man.
How could she leave without me? This was a question I could not ask. I was a child.
I could only watch and listen.
The night before she was to leave, she held my head against her body, as if to protect me from a danger I could not see. I was crying to bring her back before she was even gone. And as I lay in her lap, she told me a story.
“An-mei,” she whispered, “have you seen the little turtle that lives in the pond?” I nodded. This was a pond in our courtyard and I often poked a stick in the still water to make the turtle swim out from underneath the rocks.
“I also knew that turtle when I was a small child,” said my mother. “I used to sit by the pond and watch him swimming to the surface, biting the air with his little beak. He is a very old turtle.”
I could see that turtle in my mind and I knew my mother was seeing the same one.
“This turtle feeds on our thoughts,” said my mother. “I learned this one day, when I was your age, and Popo said I could no longer be a child. She said I could not shout, or run, or sit on the ground to catch crickets. I could not cry if I was disappointed. I had to be silent and listen to my elders. And if I did not do this, Popo said she would cut off my hair and send me to a place where Buddhist nuns lived.
“That night, after Popo told me this, I sat by the pond, looking into the water. And because I was weak, I began to cry. Then I saw this turtle swimming to the top and his beak was eating my tears as soon as they touched the water. He ate them quickly, five, six, seven tears, then climbed out of the pond, crawled onto a smooth rock and began to speak.
“The turtle said, ‘I have eaten your tears, and this is why I know your misery.
But I must warn you. If you cry, your life will always be sad.’
“Then the turtle opened his beak and out poured five, six, seven pearly eggs. The eggs broke open and from them emerged seven birds, who immediately began to chatter and sing. I knew from their snow-white bellies and pretty voices that they were magpies, birds of joy. These birds bent their beaks to the pond and began to drink greedily. And when I reached out my hand to capture one, they all rose up, beat their black wings in my face, and flew up into the air, laughing.
“‘Now you see,’ said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, ‘why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.’ ”
But after my mother finished her story, I looked at her and saw she was crying. And I also began to cry again, that this was our fate, to live like two turtles seeing the watery world together from the bottom of the little pond.
In the morning, I awoke to hear—not the bird of joy—but angry sounds in the distance. I jumped out of my bed and ran quietly to my window.
Out in the front courtyard, I saw my mother kneeling, scratching the stone pathway with her fingers, as if she had lost something and knew she could not find it again. In front of her stood Uncle, my mother’s brother, and he was shouting.
“You want to take your daughter and ruin her life as well!” Uncle stamped his foot at this impertinent thought. “You should already be gone.”
My mother did not say anything. She remained bent on the ground, her back as rounded as the turtle in the pond. She was crying with her mouth closed. And I began to cry in the same way, swallowing those bitter tears.
I hurried to get dressed. And by the time I ran down the stairs and into the front room, my mother was about to leave. A servant was taking her trunk outside. My auntie was holding onto my little brother’s hand. Before I could remember to close my mouth, I shouted, “Ma!”
“See how your evil influence has already spread to your daughter!” exclaimed my uncle.
And my mother, her head still bowed, looked up at me and saw my face. I could not stop my tears from running down. And I think, seeing my face like this, my mother changed. She stood up tall, with her back straight, so that now she was almost taller than my uncle. She held her hand out to me and I ran to her. She said in a quiet, calm voice: “An-mei, I am not asking you. But I am going back to Tientsin now and you can follow me.”
My auntie heard this and immediately hissed. “A girl is no better than what she follows! An-mei, you think you can see something new, riding on top of a new cart. But in front of you, it is just the ass of the same old mule. Your life is what you see in front of you.”
And hearing this made me more determined to leave. Because the life in front of me was my uncle’s house. And it was full of dark riddles and suffering that I could not understand. So I turned my head away from my auntie’s strange words and looked at my mother.
Now my uncle picked up a porcelain vase. “Is this what you want to do?” said my uncle. “Throw your life away? If you follow this woman, you can never lift your head again.” He threw that vase on the ground, where it smashed into many pieces. I jumped, and my mother took my hand.
Her hand was warm. “Come, An-mei. We must hurry,” she said, as if observing a rainy sky.
“An-mei!” I heard my aunt call piteously from behind, but then my uncle said, “Swanle!“—Finished!—”She is already changed.”
As I walked away from my old life, I wondered if it were true, what my uncle had said, that I was changed and could never lift my head again. So I tried. I lifted it.
And I saw my little brother, crying so hard as my auntie held onto his hand. My mother did not dare take my brother. A son can never go to somebody else’s house to live. If he went, he would lose any hope for a future. But I knew he was not thinking this. He was crying, angry and scared, because my mother had not asked him to follow.
What my uncle had said was true. After I saw my brother this way, I could not keep my head lifted.
In the rickshaw on our way to the railway station, my mother murmured, “Poor An-mei, only you know. Only you know what I have suffered.” When she said this, I felt proud, that only I could see these delicate and rare thoughts.
But on the train, I realized how far behind I was leaving my life. And I became scared. We traveled for seven days, one day by rail, six days by steamer boat. At first, my mother was very lively. She told me stories of Tientsin whenever my face looked back at where we had just been.
She talked of clever peddlers who served every kind of simple food: steamed dumplings, boiled peanuts, and my mother’s favorite, a thin pancake with an egg dropped in the middle, brushed with black bean paste, then rolled up—still finger-hot off the griddle!—and handed to the hungry buyer.
She described the port and its seafood and claimed it was even better than what we ate in Ningpo. Big clams, prawns, crab, all kinds of fish, salty and freshwater, the best—otherwise why would so many foreigners come to this port?
She told me about narrow streets with crowded bazaars. In the early morning peasants sold vegetables I had never seen or eaten before in my life—and my mother assured me I would find them so sweet, so tender, so fresh. And there were sections of the city where different foreigners lived—Japanese, White Russians, Americans, and Germans—but never together, all with their own separate habits, some dirty, some clean. And they had houses of all shapes and colors, one painted in pink, another with rooms that jutted out at every angle like the backs and fronts of Victorian
dresses, others with roofs like pointed hats and wood carvings painted white to look like ivory.
And in the wintertime I would see snow, she said. My mother said, In just a few months, the period of the Cold Dew would come, then it would start to rain, and then the rain would fall more softly, more slowly until it became white and dry as the petals of quince blossoms in the spring. She would wrap me up in fur-lined coats and pants, so if it was bitter cold, no matter!
She told me many stories until my face was turned forward, looking toward my new home in Tientsin. But when the fifth day came, as we sailed closer toward the Tientsin gulf, the waters changed from muddy yellow to black and the boat began to rock and groan. I became fearful and sick. And at night I dreamed of the eastward-flowing stream my aunt had warned me about, the dark waters that changed a person forever. And watching those dark waters from my sickbed on the boat, I was scared that my aunt’s words had come true. I saw how my mother was already beginning to change, how dark and angry her face had become, looking out over the sea, thinking her own thoughts. And my thoughts, too, became cloudy and confused.
On the morning of the day we were supposed to arrive in Tientsin, she went into our sleeping cabin wearing her white Chinese mourning dress. And when she returned to the sitting room on the top deck, she looked like a stranger. Her eyebrows were painted thick at the center, then long and sharp at the corners. Her eyes had dark smudges around them and her face was pale white, her lips dark red. On top of her head, she wore a small brown felt hat with one large brown-speckled feather swept across the front. Her short hair was tucked into this hat, except for two perfect curls on her forehead that faced each other like black lacquer carvings. She had on a long brown dress with a white lace collar that fell all the way to her waist and was fastened down with a silk rose.
This was a shocking sight. We were in mourning. But I could not say anything. I was a child. How could I scold my own mother? I could only feel shame seeing my mother wear her shame so boldly.
In her gloved hands she held a large cream-colored box with foreign words written on top: “Fine English-Tailored Apparel, Tientsin.” I remember she had put the box down between us and told me: “Open it! Quickly!” She was breathless and smiling. I was so surprised by my mother’s new strange manner, it was not until many years later, when I was using this box to store letters and photographs, that I wondered how my mother had known. Even though she had not seen me for many years, she had known that I would someday follow her and that I should wear a new dress when I did.
And when I opened that box, all my shame, my fears, they fell away. Inside was a new starch-white dress. It had ruffles at the collar and along the sleeves and six tiers of ruffles for a skirt. The box also contained white stockings, white leather shoes, and an enormous white hair bow, already shaped and ready to be fastened on with two loose ties.
Everything was too big. My shoulders kept slipping out of the large neck hole. The waist was big enough to fit two of me. But I did not mind. She did not mind. I raised my arms and stood perfectly still. She drew out pins and thread and with little tucks here and there stuffed in the loose materials, then filled the toes of the shoes with tissue paper, until everything fit. Wearing those clothes, I felt as if I had grown new hands and feet and I would now have to learn to walk in a new way.
And then my mother became somber again. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching as our boat drew closer and closer to the dock.
“An-mei, now you are ready to start your new life. You will live in a new house. You will have a new father. Many sisters. Another little brother. Dresses and good things to eat. Do you think all this will be enough to be happy?”
I nodded quietly, thinking about the unhappiness of my brother in Ningpo. My mother did not say anything more about the house, or my new family, or my happiness. And I did not ask any questions, because now a bell was sounding and a ship’s steward was calling our arrival in Tientsin. My mother gave quick instructions to our porter, pointed to our two small trunks and handed him money, as if she had done this every day of her life. And then she carefully opened another box and pulled out what looked to be five or six dead foxes with open beady eyes, limp paws, and fluffy tails. She put this scary sight around her neck and shoulders, then grabbed my hand tight as we moved down the aisle with the crowd of people.
There was no one at the harbor to meet us. My mother walked slowly down the rampway, through the baggage platform, looking nervously from side to side.
“An-mei, come! Why are you so slow!” she said, her voice filled with fear. I was dragging my feet, trying to stay in those too-large shoes as the ground beneath me swayed. And when I was not watching which way my feet were moving, I looked up and saw everybody was in a hurry, everybody seemed unhappy: families with old mothers and fathers, all wearing dark, somber colors, pushing and pulling bags and crates of their life’s possessions; pale foreign ladies dressed like my mother, walking with foreign men in hats; rich wives scolding maids and servants following behind carrying trunks and babies and baskets of food.
We stood near the street, where rickshaws and trucks came and went. We held hands, thinking our own thoughts, watching people arriving at the station, watching others hurrying away. It was late morning, and although it seemed warm outside, the sky was gray and clouding over.
After a long time of standing and seeing no one, my mother sighed and finally shouted for a rickshaw.
During this ride, my mother argued with the rickshaw puller, who wanted extra cash to carry the two of us and our luggage. Then she complained about the dust from the ride, the smell of the street, the bumpiness of the road, the lateness of the day, the ache in her stomach. And when she had finished with these laments, she turned her complaints to me: a spot on my new dress, a tangle in my hair, my twisted stockings. I tried to win back my mother, pointing to ask her about a small park, a bird flying above us, a long electric streetcar that passed us sounding its horn.
But she became only more cross and said: “An-mei, sit still. Do not look so eager.
We are only going home.”
And when we finally arrived home, we were both exhausted.
I knew from the beginning our new home would not be an ordinary house. My mother had told me we would live in the household of Wu Tsing, who was a very rich merchant. She said this man owned many carpet factories and lived in a mansion located in the British Concession of Tientsin, the best section of the city where Chinese people could live. We lived not too far from Paima Di, Racehorse Street, where only Westerners could live. And we were also close to little shops that sold only one kind of thing: only tea, or only fabric, or only soap.
The house, she said, was foreign-built; Wu Tsing liked foreign things because foreigners had made him rich. And I concluded that was why my mother had to wear foreign-style clothes, in the manner of newly rich Chinese people who liked to display their wealth on the outside.
And even though I knew all this before I arrived, I was still amazed at what I saw.
The front of the house had a Chinese stone gate, rounded at the top, with big black lacquer doors and a threshold you had to step over. Within the gates I saw the courtyard and I was surprised. There were no willows or sweet-smelling cassia trees, no garden pavilions, no benches sitting by a pond, no tubs of fish. Instead, there were long rows of bushes on both sides of a wide brick walkway and to each side of those bushes was a big lawn area with fountains. And as we walked down the walkway and got closer to the house, I saw this house had been built in the Western style. It was three stories high, of mortar and stone, with long metal balconies on each floor and chimneys at every corner.
When we arrived, a young servant woman ran out and greeted my mother with cries of joy. She had a high scratchy voice: “Oh Taitai, you’ve already arrived! How can this be?” This was Yan Chang, my mother’s personal maid, and she knew how to fuss over my mother just the right amount. She had called my mother Taitai, the simple honorable title of Wife, as if my mother were the first wife, the only wife.
Yan Chang called loudly to other servants to take our luggage, called another servant to bring tea and draw a hot bath. And then she hastily explained that Second Wife had told everyone not to expect us for another week at least. “What a shame! No one to greet you! Second Wife, the others, gone to Peking to visit her relatives. Your daughter, so pretty, your same look. She’s so shy, eh? First Wife, her daughters…gone on a pilgrimage to another Buddhist temple…Last week, a cousin’s uncle, just a little crazy, came to visit, turned out not to be a cousin, not an uncle, who knows who he was….”
As soon as we walked into that big house, I became lost with too many things to see: a curved staircase that wound up and up, a ceiling with faces in every corner, then hallways twisting and turning into one room then another. To my right was a large room, larger than I had ever seen, and it was filled with stiff teakwood furniture: sofas and tables and chairs. And at the other end of this long, long room, I could see doors leading into more rooms, more furniture, then more doors. To my left was a darker room, another sitting room, this one filled with foreign furniture: dark green leather sofas, paintings with hunting dogs, armchairs, and mahogany desks. And as I glanced in these rooms I would see different people, and Yan Chang would explain: “This young lady, she is Second Wife’s servant. That one, she is nobody, just the daughter of cook’s helper. This man takes care of the garden.”
And then we were walking up the staircase. We came to the top of the stairs and I found myself in another large sitting room. We walked to the left, down a hall, past one room, and then stepped into another. “This is your mother’s room,” Yan Chang told me proudly. “This is where you will sleep.”
And the first thing I saw, the only thing I could see at first, was a magnificent bed. It was heavy and light at the same time: soft rose silk and heavy, dark shiny wood carved all around with dragons. Four posts held up a silk canopy and at each post dangled large silk ties holding back curtains. The bed sat on four squat lion’s
paws, as if the weight of it had crushed the lion underneath. Yan Chang showed me how to use a small step stool to climb onto the bed. And when I tumbled onto the silk coverings, I laughed to discover a soft mattress that was ten times the thickness of my bed in Ningpo.
Sitting in this bed, I admired everything as if I were a princess. This room had a glass door that led to a balcony. In front of the window door was a round table of the same wood as the bed. It too sat on carved lion’s legs and was surrounded by four chairs. A servant had already put tea and sweet cakes on the table and was now lighting the houlu, a small stove for burning coal.
It was not that my uncle’s house in Ningpo had been poor. He was actually quite well-to-do. But this house in Tientsin was amazing. And I thought to myself, My uncle was wrong. There was no shame in my mother’s marrying Wu Tsing.
While thinking this, I was startled by a sudden clang! clang! clang! followed by music. On the wall opposite the bed was a big wooden clock with a forest and bears carved into it. The door on the clock had burst open and a tiny room full of people was coming out. There was a bearded man in a pointed cap seated at a table. He was bending his head over and over again to drink soup, but his beard would dip in the bowl first and stop him. A girl in a white scarf and blue dress was standing next to the table and she was bending over and over again to give the man more of this soup. And next to the man and girl was another girl with a skirt and short jacket. She was swinging her arm back and forth, playing violin music. She always played the same dark song. I can still hear it in my head after these many years—ni-ah! nah! nah! nah! nah-ni-nah!
This was a wonderful clock to see, but after I heard it that first hour, then the next, and then always, this clock became an extravagant nuisance. I could not sleep for many nights. And later, I found I had an ability: to not listen to something meaningless calling to me.
I was so happy those first few nights, in this amusing house, sleeping in the big soft bed with my mother. I would lie in this comfortable bed, thinking about my uncle’s house in Ningpo, realizing how unhappy I had been, feeling sorry for my little brother. But most of my thoughts flew to all the new things to see and do in this house.
I watched hot water pouring out of pipes not just in the kitchen but also into washbasins and bathtubs on all three floors of the house. I saw chamber pots that flushed clean without servants having to empty them. I saw rooms as fancy as my mother’s. Yan Chang explained which ones belonged to First Wife and the other concubines, who were called Second Wife and Third Wife. And some rooms belonged to no one. “They are for guests,” said Yan Chang.
On the third floor were rooms for only the men servants, said Yan Chang, and one of the rooms even had a door to a cabinet that was really a secret hiding place from sea pirates.
Thinking back, I find it hard to remember everything that was in that house; too many good things all seem the same after a while. I tired of anything that was not a novelty. “Oh, this,” I said when Yan Chang brought me the same sweet meats as the day before. “I’ve tasted this already.”
My mother seemed to regain her pleasant nature. She put her old clothes back on, long Chinese gowns and skirts now with white mourning bands sewn at the bottoms. During the day, she pointed to strange and funny things, naming them for me: bidet, Brownie
camera, salad fork, napkin. In the evening, when there was nothing to do, we talked about the servants: who was clever, who was diligent, who was loyal. We gossiped as we cooked small eggs and sweet potatoes on top of the houlu just to enjoy their smell. And at night, my mother would again tell me stories as I lay in her arms falling asleep.
If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk. But I remember clearly when all that comfort became no longer comfortable.
It was perhaps two weeks after we had arrived. I was in the large garden in back, kicking a ball and watching two dogs chase it. My mother sat at a table watching me play. And then I heard a horn off in the distance, shouts, and those two dogs forgot the ball and ran off barking in high happy voices.
My mother had the same fearful look she wore in the harbor station. She walked quickly into the house. I walked around the side of the house toward the front. Two shiny black rickshaws had arrived and behind them a large black motorcar. A manservant was taking luggage out of one rickshaw. From another rickshaw, a young maid jumped out.
All the servants crowded around the motorcar, looking at their faces in the polished metal, admiring the curtained windows, the velvet seats. Then the driver opened the back door and out stepped a young girl. She had short hair with rows of waves. She looked to be only a few years older than I, but she had on a woman’s dress, stockings, and high heels. I looked down at my own white dress covered with grass stains and I felt ashamed.
And then I saw the servants reaching into the backseat of the motorcar and a man was slowly being lifted by both arms. This was Wu Tsing. He was a big man, not tall, but puffed out like a bird. He was much older than my mother, with a high shiny forehead and a large black mole on one nostril. He wore a Western suit jacket with a vest that closed too tightly around his stomach, but his pants were very loose. He groaned and grunted as he heaved himself out and into view. And as soon as his shoes touched the ground, he began to walk toward the house, acting as though he saw no one, even though people greeted him and were busy opening doors, carrying his bags, taking his long coat. He walked into the house like that, with this young girl following him. She was looking behind at everyone with a simpering smile, as if they were there to honor her. And when she was hardly in the door, I heard one servant remark to another, “Fifth Wife is so young she did not bring any of her own servants, only a wet nurse.”
I looked up at the house and saw my mother looking down from her window, watching everything. So in this clumsy way, my mother found out that Wu Tsing had taken his fourth concubine, who was actually just an afterthought, a foolish bit of decoration for his new motorcar.
My mother was not jealous of this young girl who would now be called Fifth Wife. Why should she be? My mother did not love Wu Tsing. A girl in China did not marry for love. She married for position, and my mother’s position, I later learned, was the worst.
After Wu Tsing and Fifth Wife arrived home, my mother often stayed in her room working on her embroidery. In the afternoon, she and I would go on long silent rides in the city, searching for a bolt of silk in a color she could not seem to name. Her unhappiness was this same way. She could not name it.
And so, while everything seemed peaceful, I knew it was not. You may wonder how a small child, only nine years old, can know these things. Now I wonder about it myself. I can remember only how uncomfortable I felt, how I could feel the truth with my stomach, knowing something terrible was going to happen. And I can tell you, it was almost as bad as how I felt some fifteen years later when the Japanese bombs started to fall and, listening in the distance, I could hear soft rumbles and knew that what was coming was unstoppable.
A few days after Wu Tsing had arrived home, I awoke in the middle of the night.
My mother was rocking my shoulder gently.
“An-mei, be a good girl,” she said in a tired voice. “Go to Yan Chang’s room now.” I rubbed my eyes and as I awoke I saw a dark shadow and began to cry. It was Wu
Tsing.
“Be quiet. Nothing is the matter. Go to Yan Chang,” my mother whispered.
And then she lifted me down slowly to the cold floor. I heard the wooden clock begin to sing and Wu Tsing’s deep voice complaining of the chill. And when I went to Yan Chang, it was as though she had expected me and knew I would be crying.
The next morning I could not look at my mother. But I saw that Fifth Wife had a swollen face like mine. And at breakfast that morning, in front of everybody, her anger finally erupted when she shouted rudely to a servant for serving her so slowly. Everyone, even my mother, stared at her for her bad manners, criticizing a servant that way. I saw Wu Tsing throw her a sharp look, like a father, and she began to cry. But later that morning, Fifth Wife was smiling again, prancing around in a new dress and new shoes.
In the afternoon, my mother spoke of her unhappiness for the first time. We were in a rickshaw going to a store to find embroidery thread. “Do you see how shameful my life is?” she cried. “Do you see how I have no position? He brought home a new wife, a low-class girl, dark-skinned, no manners! Bought her for a few dollars from a poor village family that makes mudbrick tiles. And at night when he can no longer use her, he comes to me, smelling of her mud.”
She was crying now, rambling like a crazy woman: “You can see now, a fourth wife is less than a fifth wife. An-mei, you must not forget. I was a first wife, yi tai, the wife of a scholar. Your mother was not always Fourth Wife, Sz Tai!”
She said this word, sz, so hatefully I shuddered. It sounded like the sz that means “die.” And I remembered Popo once telling me four is a very unlucky number because if you say it in an angry way, it always comes out wrong.
The Cold Dew came. It became chilly, and Second Wife and Third Wife, their children and servants returned home to Tientsin. There was a big commotion when they arrived. Wu Tsing had allowed the new motorcar to be sent to the railway station, but of course that was not enough to carry them all back. So behind the motorcar came a dozen or so rickshaws, bouncing up and down like crickets following a large shiny beetle. Women began to pour out of the motorcar.
My mother was standing behind me, ready to greet everybody. A woman wearing a plain foreign dress and large, ugly shoes walked toward us. Three girls, one of whom was my age, followed behind.
“This is Third Wife and her three daughters,” said my mother.
Those three girls were even more shy than I. They crowded around their mother with bowed heads and did not speak. But I continued to stare. They were as plain as their
mother, with big teeth, thick lips, and eyebrows as bushy as a caterpillar. Third Wife welcomed me warmly and allowed me to carry one of her packages.
I felt my mother’s hand stiffen on my shoulder. “And there is Second Wife. She will want you to call her Big Mother,” she whispered.
I saw a woman wearing a long black fur coat and dark Western clothes, very fancy. And in her arms she held a little boy with fat rosy cheeks who looked to be two years old.
“He is Syaudi, your littlest brother,” my mother whispered. He wore a cap made out of the same dark fur and was winding his little finger around Second Wife’s long pearl necklace. I wondered how she could have a baby this young. Second Wife was handsome enough and seemed healthy, but she was quite old, perhaps forty-five. She handed the baby to a servant and then began to give instructions to the many people who still crowded around her.
And then Second Wife walked toward me, smiling, her fur coat gleaming with every step. She stared, as if she were examining me, as if she recognized me. Finally she smiled and patted my head. And then with a swift, graceful movement of her small hands, she removed her long pearly strand and put it around my neck.
This was the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever touched. It was designed in the Western style, a long strand, each bead the same size and of an identical pinkish tone, with a heavy brooch of ornate silver to clasp the ends together.
My mother immediately protested: “This is too much for a small child. She will break it. She will lose it.”
But Second Wife simply said to me: “Such a pretty girl needs something to put the light on her face.”
I could see by the way my mother shrank back and became quiet that she was angry. She did not like Second Wife. I had to be careful how I showed my feelings: not to let my mother think Second Wife had won me over. Yet I had this reckless feeling. I was overjoyed that Second Wife had shown me this special favor.
“Thank you, Big Mother,” I said to Second Wife. And I was looking down to avoid showing her my face, but still I could not help smiling.
When my mother and I had tea in her room later that afternoon, I knew she was angry. “Be careful, An-mei,” she said. “What you hear is not genuine. She makes clouds with one hand, rain with the other. She is trying to trick you, so you will do anything
for her.”
I sat quietly, trying not to listen to my mother. I was thinking how much my mother complained, that perhaps all of her unhappiness sprang from her complaints. I was thinking how I should not listen to her.
“Give the necklace to me,” she said suddenly. I looked at her without moving.
“You do not believe me, so you must give me the necklace. I will not let her buy you for such a cheap price.”
And when I still did not move, she stood up and walked over, and lifted that necklace off. And before I could cry to stop her, she put the necklace under her shoe and stepped on it. When she put it on the table, I saw what she had done. This necklace that had almost bought my heart and mind now had one bead of crushed glass.
Later she removed that broken bead and knotted the space together so the necklace looked whole again. She told me to wear the necklace every day for one week so I would
remember how easy it is to lose myself to something false. And after I wore those fake pearls long enough to learn this lesson, she let me take them off. Then she opened a box, and turned to me: “Now can you recognize what is true?” And I nodded.
She put something in my hand. It was a heavy ring of watery blue sapphire, with a star in its center so pure that I never ceased to look at that ring with wonder. Before the second cold month began, First Wife returned from Peking, where she kept a house and lived with her two unmarried daughters. I remember thinking that First Wife would make Second Wife bow to her ways. First Wife was the head wife, by
law and by custom.
But First Wife turned out to be a living ghost, no threat to Second Wife, who had her strong spirit intact. First Wife looked quite ancient and frail with her rounded body, bound feet, her old-style padded jacket and pants, and plain, lined face. But now that I remember her, she must not have been too old, maybe Wu Tsing’s age, so she was perhaps fifty.
When I met First Wife, I thought she was blind. She acted as if she did not see me. She did not see Wu Tsing. She did not see my mother. And yet she could see her two daughters, two spinsters beyond the marriageable age; they were at least twenty-five. And she always regained her sight in time to scold the two dogs for sniffing in her room, digging in the garden outside her window, or wetting on a table leg.
“Why does First Wife sometimes see and sometimes not see?” I asked Yan Chang one night as she helped me bathe.
“First Wife says she sees only what is Buddha perfection,” said Yan Chang. “She says she is blind to most faults.”
Yan Chang said that First Wife chose to be blind to the unhappiness of her marriage. She and Wu Tsing had been joined in tyandi, heaven and earth, so theirs was a spiritual marriage arranged by a matchmaker, ordered by his parents, and protected by the spirits of their ancestors. But after the first year of marriage, First Wife had given birth to a girl with one leg too short. And this misfortune led First Wife to begin a trek to Buddhist temples, to offer alms and tailored silk gowns in honor of Buddha’s image, to burn incense and pray to Buddha to lengthen her daughter’s leg. As it happened, Buddha chose instead to bless First Wife with another daughter, this one with two perfect legs, but—alas!—with a brown tea stain splashed over half her face. With this second misfortune, First Wife began to go on so many pilgrimages to Tsinan, just a half-day’s train ride to the south, that Wu Tsing bought her a house near the Thousand Buddha Cliff and Bubbling Springs Bamboo Grove. And every year he increased the allowance she needed to manage her own household there. So twice a year, during the coldest and hottest months of the year, she returned to Tientsin to pay her respects and suffer sight unseen in her husband’s household. And each time she returned, she remained in her bedroom, sitting all day like a Buddha, smoking her opium, talking softly to herself. She did not come downstairs for meals. Instead she fasted or ate vegetarian meals in her room. And Wu Tsing would make a mid-morning visit in her bedroom once a week, drinking tea for half an hour, inquiring about her health. He did not bother her at night.
This ghost of a woman should have caused no suffering to my mother, but in fact she put ideas into her head. My mother believed she too had suffered enough to deserve her own household, perhaps not in Tsinan, but one to the east, in little Petaiho,
which was a beautiful seaside resort filled with terraces and gardens and wealthy widows.
“We are going to live in a house of our own,” she told me happily the day snow fell on the ground all around our house. She was wearing a new silk fur-lined gown the bright turquoise color of kingfisher feathers. “The house will not be as big as this one. It will be very small. But we can live by ourselves, with Yan Chang and a few other servants. Wu Tsing has promised this already.”
During the coldest winter month, we were all bored, adults and children alike. We did not dare go outside. Yan Chang warned me that my skin would freeze and crack into a thousand pieces. And the other servants always gossiped about everyday sights they had seen in town: the back stoops of stores always blocked with the frozen bodies of beggars. Man or woman, you couldn’t tell, they were so dusty with a thick cover of snow.
So every day we stayed in the house, thinking of ways to amuse ourselves. My mother looked at foreign magazines and clipped out pictures of dresses she liked, and then she went downstairs to discuss with the tailor how such a dress could be made using the materials available.
I did not like to play with Third Wife’s daughters, who were as docile and dull as their mother. Those girls were content looking out the window all day, watching the sun come up and go down. So instead, Yan Chang and I roasted chestnuts on top of the little coal stove. And burning our fingers while eating these sweet nuggets, we naturally started to giggle and gossip. Then I heard the clock clang and the same song began to play. Yan Chang pretended to sing badly in the classic opera style and we both laughed out loud, remembering how Second Wife had sung yesterday evening, accompanying her quavering voice on a three-stringed lute and making many mistakes. She had caused everyone to suffer through this evening’s entertainment, until Wu Tsing declared it was enough suffering by falling asleep in his chair. And laughing about this, Yan Chang told me a story about Second Wife.
“Twenty years ago, she had been a famous Shantung sing-song girl, a woman of some respect, especially among married men who frequented teahouses. While she had never been pretty, she was clever, an enchantress. She could play several musical instruments, sing ancient tales with heartbreaking clarity, and touch her finger to her cheek and cross her tiny feet in just the right manner.
“Wu Tsing had asked her to be his concubine, not for love, but because of the prestige of owning what so many other men wanted. And this sing-song girl, after she had seen his enormous wealth and his feebleminded first wife, consented to become his concubine.
“From the start, Second Wife knew how to control Wu Tsing’s money. She knew by the way his face paled at the sound of the wind that he was fearful of ghosts. And everybody knows that suicide is the only way a woman can escape a marriage and gain revenge, to come back as a ghost and scatter tea leaves and good fortune. So when he refused her a bigger allowance, she did pretend-suicide. She ate a piece of raw opium, enough to make her sick, and then sent her maid to tell Wu Tsing she was dying. Three days later, Second Wife had an allowance even bigger than what she had asked.
“She did so many pretend-suicides, we servants began to suspect she no longer bothered to eat the opium. Her acting was potent enough. Soon she had a better room
in the house, her own private rickshaw, a house for her elderly parents, a sum for buying blessings at temples.
“But one thing she could not have: children. And she knew Wu Tsing would soon become anxious to have a son who could perform the ancestral rites and therefore guarantee his own spiritual eternity. So before Wu Tsing could complain about Second Wife’s lack of sons, she said: ‘I have already found her, a concubine suitable to bear your sons. By her very nature, you can see she is a virgin.’ And this was quite true. As you can see, Third Wife is quite ugly. She does not even have small feet.
“Third Wife was of course indebted to Second Wife for arranging this, so there was no argument over management of the household. And even though Second Wife did not need to lift a finger, she oversaw the purchase of food and supplies, she approved the hiring of servants, she invited relatives on festival days. She found wet nurses for each of the three daughters Third Wife bore for Wu Tsing. And later, when Wu Tsing was again impatient for a son and began to spend too much money in teahouses in other cities, Second Wife arranged it so that your mother became Wu Tsing’s third concubine and fourth wife!”
Yan Chang revealed this story in such a natural and lively way that I applauded her clever ending. We continued to crack chestnuts open, until I could no longer remain quiet.
“What did Second Wife do so my mother would marry Wu Tsing?” I asked timidly. “A little child cannot understand such things!” she scolded.
I immediately looked down and remained silent, until Yan Chang became restless again to hear her own voice speak on this quiet afternoon.
“Your mother,” said Yan Chang, as if talking to herself, “is too good for this family.”
“Five years ago—your father had died only one year before—she and I went to Hangchow to visit the Six Harmonies Pagoda on the far side of West Lake. Your father had been a respected scholar and also devoted to the six virtues of Buddhism enshrined in this pagoda. So your mother kowtowed in the pagoda, pledging to observe the right harmony of body, thoughts, and speech, to refrain from giving opinions, and to shun wealth. And when we boarded the boat to cross the lake again, we sat opposite a man and a woman. This was Wu Tsing and Second Wife.
“Wu Tsing must have seen her beauty immediately. Back then your mother had hair down to her waist, which she tied high up on her head. And she had unusual skin, a lustrous pink color. Even in her white widow’s clothes she was beautiful! But because she was a widow, she was worthless in many respects. She could not remarry.
“But this did not stop Second Wife from thinking of a way. She was tired of watching her household’s money being washed away in so many different teahouses. The money he spent was enough to support five more wives! She was anxious to quiet Wu Tsing’s outside appetite. So she conspired with Wu Tsing to lure your mother to his bed. “She chatted with your mother, discovered that she planned to go to the Monastery of the Spirits’ Retreat the next day. And Second Wife showed up at that place as well. And after more friendly talk, she invited your mother to dinner. Your mother was so lonely for good conversation she gladly accepted. And after the dinner, Second Wife said to your mother, ‘Do you play mah jong? Oh, it doesn’t matter if you play badly.
We are only three people now and cannot play at all unless you would be kind enough to join us tomorrow night.’
“The next night, after a long evening of mah jong, Second Wife yawned and insisted my mother spend the night. ‘Stay! Stay! Don’t be so polite. No, your politeness is really more inconvenient. Why wake the rickshaw boy?’ said Second Wife. ‘Look here, my bed is certainly big enough for two.’
“As your mother slept soundly in Second Wife’s bed, Second Wife got up in the middle of the night and left the dark room, and Wu Tsing took her place. When your mother awoke to find him touching her beneath her undergarments, she jumped out of bed. He grabbed her by her hair and threw her on the floor, then put his foot on her throat and told her to undress. Your mother did not scream or cry when he fell on her.
“In the early morning, she left in a rickshaw, her hair undone and with tears streaming down her face. She told no one but me what had happened. But Second Wife complained to many people about the shameless widow who had enchanted Wu Tsing into bed. How could a worthless widow accuse a rich woman of lying?
“So when Wu Tsing asked your mother to be his third concubine, to bear him a son, what choice did she have? She was already as low as a prostitute. And when she returned to her brother’s house and kowtowed three times to say good-bye, her brother kicked her, and her own mother banned her from the family house forever. That is why you did not see your mother again until your grandmother died. Your mother went to live in Tientsin, to hide her shame with Wu Tsing’s wealth. And three years later, she gave birth to a son, which Second Wife claimed as her own.
“And that is how I came to live in Wu Tsing’s house,” concluded Yan Chang proudly.
And that was how I learned that the baby Syaudi was really my mother’s son, my littlest brother.
In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother’s story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
After Yan Chang told me this story, I saw everything. I heard things I had never understood before.
I saw Second Wife’s true nature.
I saw how she often gave Fifth Wife money to go visit her poor village, encouraging this silly girl to “show your friends and family how rich you’ve become!” And of course, her visits always reminded Wu Tsing of Fifth Wife’s low-class background and how foolish he had been to be lured by her earthy flesh.
I saw Second Wife koutou to First Wife, bowing with deep respect while offering her more opium. And I knew why First Wife’s power had been drained away.
I saw how fearful Third Wife became when Second Wife told her stories of old concubines who were kicked out into the streets. And I knew why Third Wife watched over Second Wife’s health and happiness.
And I saw my mother’s terrible pain as Second Wife bounced Syaudi on her lap, kissing my mother’s son and telling this baby, “As long as I am your mother, you will never be poor. You will never be unhappy. You will grow up to own this household and care for me in my old age.”
And I knew why my mother cried in her room so often. Wu Tsing’s promise of a house—for becoming the mother of his only son—had disappeared the day Second Wife collapsed from another bout of pretend-suicide. And my mother knew she could do nothing to bring the promise back.
I suffered so much after Yan Chang told me my mother’s story. I wanted my mother to shout at Wu Tsing, to shout at Second Wife, to shout at Yan Chang and say she was wrong to tell me these stories. But my mother did not even have the right to do this. She had no choice.
Two days before the lunar new year, Yan Chang woke me when it was still black outside.
“Quickly!” she cried, pulling me along before my mind and eyes could work together. My mother’s room was brightly lit. As soon as I walked in I could see her. I ran to her bed and stood on the footstool. Her arms and legs were moving back and forth as she lay on her back. She was like a soldier, marching to nowhere, her head looking right then left. And now her whole body became straight and stiff as if to stretch herself out of her body. Her jaw was pulled down and I saw her tongue was swollen
and she was coughing to try to make it fall out.
“Wake up!” I whispered, and then I turned and saw everybody standing there: Wu Tsing, Yan Chang, Second Wife, Third Wife, Fifth Wife, the doctor.
“She has taken too much opium,” cried Yan Chang. “The doctor says he can do nothing.
She has poisoned herself.”
So they were doing nothing, only waiting. I also waited those many hours.
The only sounds were that of the girl in the clock playing the violin. And I wanted to shout to the clock and make its meaningless noise be silent, but I did not.
I watched my mother march in her bed. I wanted to say the words that would quiet her body and spirit. But I stood there like the others, waiting and saying nothing. And then I recalled her story about the little turtle, his warning not to cry.
And I wanted to shout to her that it was no use. There were already too many tears. And I tried to swallow them one by one, but they came too fast, until finally my closed lips burst open and I cried and cried, then cried all over again, letting everybody in the room feed on my tears.
I fainted with all this grief and they carried me back to Yan Chang’s bed. So that morning, while my mother was dying, I was dreaming.
I was falling from the sky down to the ground, into a pond. And I became a little turtle lying at the bottom of this watery place. Above me I could see the beaks of a thousand magpies drinking from the pond, drinking and singing happily and filling their snow-white bellies. I was crying hard, so many tears, but they drank and drank, so many of them, until I had no more tears left and the pond was empty, everything as dry as sand.
Yan Chang later told me my mother had listened to Second Wife and tried to do pretend-suicide. False words! Lies! She would never listen to this woman who caused her so much suffering.
I know my mother listened to her own heart, to no longer pretend. I know this because why else did she die two days before the lunar new year? Why else did she plan her death so carefully that it became a weapon?
Three days before the lunar new year, she had eaten ywansyau, the sticky sweet dumpling that everybody eats to celebrate. She ate one after the other. And I remember her strange remark. “You see how this life is. You cannot eat enough of this bitterness.” And what she had done was eat ywansyau filled with a kind of bitter poison, not candied seeds or the dull happiness of opium as Yan Chang and the others had thought.
When the poison broke into her body, she whispered to me that she would rather kill her own weak spirit so she could give me a stronger one.
The stickiness clung to her body. They could not remove the poison and so she died, two days before the new year. They laid her on a wooden board in the hallway. She wore funeral clothes far richer than those she had worn in life. Silk undergarments to keep her warm without the heavy burden of a fur coat. A silk gown, sewn with gold thread. A headdress of gold and lapis and jade. And two delicate slippers with the softest leather soles and two giant pearls on each toe, to light her way to nirvana. Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So I shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I can see the truth, too.
I am strong, too.
Because we both knew this: that on the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother’s case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.
So on that day, Wu Tsing, fearful of my mother’s vengeful spirit, wore the coarsest of white cotton mourning clothes. He promised her visiting ghost that he would raise Syaudi and me as his honored children. He promised to revere her as if she had been First Wife, his only wife.
And on that day, I showed Second Wife the fake pearl necklace she had given me and crushed it under my foot.
And on that day, Second Wife’s hair began to turn white. And on that day, I learned to shout.
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I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened.
You do not need a psychiatrist to do this. A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he is just another bird drinking from your misery.
My mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hide it. She found only greater misery and finally could not hide that. There is nothing more to understand. That was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. They could not speak up. They could not run away. That was their fate.
But now they can do something else. Now they no longer have to swallow their own tears or suffer the taunts of magpies. I know this because I read this news in a magazine from China.
It said that for thousands of years birds had been tormenting the peasants. They flocked to watch peasants bent over in the fields, digging the hard dirt, crying into the furrows to water the seeds. And when the people stood up, the birds would fly down and drink the tears and eat the seeds. So children starved.
But one day, all these tired peasants—from all over China—they gathered in fields everywhere. They watched the birds eating and drinking. And they said, “Enough of this suffering and silence!” They began to clap their hands, and bang sticks on pots and pans and shout, “Sz! Sz! Sz!“—Die! Die! Die!
And all these birds rose in the air, alarmed and confused by this new anger, beating their black wings, flying just above, waiting for the noise to stop. But the people’s
shouts only grew stronger, angrier. The birds became more exhausted, unable to land, unable to eat. And this continued for many hours, for many days, until all those birds—hundreds, thousands, and then millions!—fluttered to the ground, dead and still, until not one bird remained in the sky.
What would your psychiatrist say if I told him that I shouted for joy when I read that this had happened?
Ying-Ying St. Clair
My daughter has put me in the tiniest of rooms in her new house. “This is the guest bedroom,” Lena said in her proud American way.
I smiled. But to Chinese ways of thinking, the guest bedroom is the best bedroom, where she and her husband sleep. I do not tell her this. Her wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into the darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything.
I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore. And now I must tell her everything about my past. It is the only way to penetrate her skin and pull her to where she can be saved.
This room has ceilings that slope downward toward the pillow of my bed. Its walls close in like a coffin. I should remind my daughter not to put any babies in this room. But I know she will not listen. She has already said she does not want any babies. She and her husband are too busy drawing places that someone else will build and someone else will live in. I cannot say the American word that she and her husband are. It is an ugly word.
“Arty-tecky,” I once pronounced it to my sister-in-law.
My daughter had laughed when she heard this. When she was a child, I should have slapped her more often for disrespect. But now it is too late. Now she and her husband give me money to add to my so-so security. So the burning feeling I have in my hand sometimes, I must pull it back into my heart and keep it inside.
What good does it do to draw fancy buildings and then live in one that is useless? My daughter has money, but everything in her house is for looking, not even for good-looking. Look at this end table. It is heavy white marble on skinny black legs. A person must always think not to put a heavy bag on this table or it will break. The only thing that can sit on the table is a tall black vase. The vase is like a spider leg, so thin only one flower can be put in. If you shake the table, the vase and flower will fall down.
All around this house I see the signs. My daughter looks but does not see. This is a house that will break into pieces. How do I know? I have always known a thing before it happens.
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When I was a young girl in Wushi, I was lihai. Wild and stubborn. I wore a smirk on my face. Too good to listen. I was small and pretty. I had tiny feet which made me very vain. If a pair of silk slippers became dusty, I threw them away. I wore costly imported calfskin shoes with little heels. I broke many pairs and ruined many stockings running across the cobblestone courtyard.
I often unraveled my hair and wore it loose. My mother would look at my wild tangles and scold me: “Aii-ya, Ying-ying, you are like the lady ghosts at the bottom of the lake.”
These were the ladies who drowned their shame and floated in living people’s houses with their hair undone to show their everlasting despair. My mother said I would bring shame into the house, but I only giggled as she tried to tuck my hair up with long pins. She loved me too much to get angry. I was like her. That was why she named me Ying-ying, Clear Reflection.
We were one of the richest families in Wushi. We had many rooms, each filled with big, heavy tables. On each table was a jade jar sealed airtight with a jade lid. Each jar held unfiltered British cigarettes, always the right amount. Not too much, not too little. The jars were made just for these cigarettes. I thought nothing of these jars. They were junk in my mind. Once my brothers and I stole a jar and poured the cigarettes out onto the streets. We ran down to a large hole that had opened up in the street, where underneath water flowed. There we squatted along with the children who lived by the gutter. We scooped up cups of dirty water, hoping to find a fish or unknown treasure. We found nothing, and soon our clothes were washed over with mud and we were unrecognizable from the children who lived on the streets.
We had many riches in that house. Silk rugs and jewels. Rare bowls and carved ivory. But when I think back on that house, and it is not often, I think of that jade jar, the muddied treasure I did not know I was holding in my hand.
There is another thing I remember clearly about that house.
I was sixteen. It was the night my youngest aunt got married. She and her new husband had already retired to the room they would share in the big house with her new mother-in-law and the rest of her new family.
Many of the visiting family members lingered at our house, sitting around the big table in the main room, everybody laughing and eating peanuts, peeling oranges, and laughing more. A man from another town was seated with us, a friend of my aunt’s new husband. He was older than my oldest brother, so I called him Uncle. His face was reddened from drinking whiskey.
“Ying-ying,” he called hoarsely to me as he rose from his chair. “Maybe you are still hungry, isn’t it so?”
I looked around the table, smiling at everyone because of this special attention given to me. I thought he would pull a special treat from a large sack he was reaching into. I hoped for some sweetened cookies. But he pulled out a watermelon and put it on the table with a loud pung.
“Kai gwa?“—Open the watermelon—he said, poising a large knife over the perfect fruit.
Then he sank the knife in with a mighty push and his huge mouth roared a laugh so big I could see all the way back to his gold teeth. Everyone at the table laughed loudly. My face burned from embarrassment, because at that time I did not understand. Yes, it is true I was a wild girl, but I was innocent. I did not know what an evil thing he did when he cut open that watermelon. I did not understand until six months later when I was married to this man and he hissed drunkenly to me that he was ready
to kai gwa.
This was a man so bad that even today I cannot speak his name. Why did I marry this man? It was because the night after my youngest aunt’s wedding, I began to know a thing before it happened.
Most of the relatives had left the next morning. And by the evening, my half-sisters and I were bored. We were sitting at the same large table, drinking tea and eating
roasted watermelon seeds. My half-sisters gossiped loudly, while I sat cracking seeds and laying their flesh in a pile.
My half-sisters were all dreaming of being married to worthless young boys from families not as good as ours. My half-sisters did not know how to reach very high for a good thing. They were the daughters of my father’s concubines. I was the daughter of my father’s wife.
“His mother will treat you like a servant…” chided one half-sister upon hearing the other’s choice.
“A madness on his uncle’s side…” retorted the other half-sister.
When they tired of teasing one another, they asked me whom I wanted to marry. “I know of no one,” I told them haughtily.
It was not that boys did not interest me. I knew how to attract attention and be admired. But I was too vain to think any one boy was good enough for me.
Those were the thoughts in my head. But thoughts are of two kinds. Some are seeds that are planted when you are born, placed there by your father and mother and their ancestors before them. And some thoughts are planted by others. Maybe it was the watermelon seeds I was eating: I thought of that laughing man from the night before. And just then, a large wind blew in from the north and the flower on the table split from its stem and fell at my feet.
This is the truth. It was as if a knife had cut the flower’s head off as a sign. Right then, I knew I would marry this man. It was not with joy that I thought this, but wonderment that I could know it.
And soon I began to hear this man mentioned by my father and uncle and aunt’s new husband. At dinner his name was spooned into my bowl along with my soup. I found him staring at me across from my uncle’s courtyard, hu-huing, “See, she cannot turn away. She is already mine.”
True enough, I did not turn away. I fought his eyes with mine. I listened to him with my nose held high, sniffing the stink of his words when he told me my father would not likely give the dowry he required. I pushed so hard to keep him from my thoughts that I fell into a marriage bed with him.
My daughter does not know that I was married to this man so long ago, twenty years before she was even born.
She does not know how beautiful I was when I married this man. I was far more pretty than my daughter, who has country feet and a large nose like her father’s.
Even today, my skin is still smooth, my figure like a girl’s. But there are deep lines in my mouth where I used to wear smiles. And my poor feet, once so small and pretty! Now they are swollen, callused, and cracked at the heels. My eyes, so bright and flashy at sixteen, are now yellow-stained, clouded.
But I still see almost everything clearly. When I want to remember, it is like looking into a bowl and finding the last grains of rice you did not finish.
There was an afternoon on Tai Lake soon after this man and I married. I remember this is when I came to love him. This man had turned my face toward the late-afternoon sun. He held my chin and stroked my cheek and said, “Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.”
I did not laugh, even though this was a poem he said very badly. I cried with honest joy. I had a swimming feeling in my heart like a creature thrashing to get out and wanting to stay in at the same time. That is how much I came to love this man. This
is how it is when a person joins your body and there is a part of your mind that swims to join that person against your will.
I became a stranger to myself. I was pretty for him. If I put slippers on my feet, it was to choose a pair that I knew would please him. I brushed my hair ninety-nine times a night to bring luck to our marital bed, in hopes of conceiving a son.
The night he planted the baby, I again knew a thing before it happened. I knew it was a boy. I could see this little boy in my womb. He had my husband’s eyes, large and wide apart. He had long tapered fingers, fat earlobes, and slick hair that rose high to reveal a large forehead.
It is because I had so much joy then that I came to have so much hate. But even when I was my happiest, I had a worry that started right above my brow, where you know a thing. This worry later trickled down to my heart, where you feel a thing and it becomes true.
My husband started to take many business trips to the north. These trips began soon after we married, but they became longer after the baby was put in my womb. I remembered that the north wind had blown luck and my husband my way, so at night when he was away, I opened wide my bedroom windows, even on cold nights, to blow his spirit and heart back my way.
What I did not know is that the north wind is the coldest. It penetrates the heart and takes the warmth away. The wind gathered such a force that it blew my husband past my bedroom and out the back door. I found out from my youngest aunt that he had left me to live with an opera singer.
Later still, when I overcame my grief and came to have nothing in my heart but loathing despair, my youngest aunt told me of others. Dancers and American ladies. Prostitutes. A girl cousin younger even than I was. She left mysteriously for Hong Kong soon after my husband disappeared.
So I will tell Lena of my shame. That I was rich and pretty. I was too good for any one man. That I became abandoned goods. I will tell her that at eighteen the prettiness drained from my cheeks. That I thought of throwing myself in the lake like the other ladies of shame. And I will tell her of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much.
I took this baby from my womb before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born. But even then, I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this man’s firstborn son poured from me.
When the nurses asked what they should do with the lifeless baby, I hurled a newspaper at them and said to wrap it like a fish and throw it in the lake. My daughter thinks I do not know what it means to not want a baby.
When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming, she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.
I was born in the year of the Tiger. It was a very bad year to be born, a very good year to be a Tiger. That was the year a very bad spirit entered the world. People in the countryside died like chickens on a hot summer day. People in the city became shadows, went into their homes and disappeared. Babies were born and did not get fatter. The flesh fell off their bones in days and they died.
The bad spirit stayed in the world for four years. But I came from a spirit even stronger, and I lived. This is what my mother told me when I was old enough to know why I was so heartstrong in my ways.
Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me.
I became like the ladies of the lake. I threw white clothes over the mirrors in my bedroom so I did not have to see my grief. I lost my strength, so I could not even lift my hands to place pins in my hair. And then I floated like a dead leaf on the water until I drifted out of my mother-in-law’s house and back to my family home. I went to the country outside of Shanghai to live with a second cousin’s family.
I stayed in this country home for ten years. If you ask me what I did during these long years, I can only say I waited between the trees. I had one eye asleep, the other open and watching.
I did not work. My cousin’s family treated me well because I was the daughter of the family who supported them. The house was shabby, crowded with three families. It was not a comfort to be there, and that is what I wanted. Babies crawled on the floor with the mice. Chickens came in and out like my relatives’ graceless peasant guests. We all ate in the kitchen amidst the hot frying grease. And the flies! If you left a bowl with even a few grains of rice, you would find it covered with hungry flies so thick it looked like a living bowl of black bean soup. This is how poor the country was.
After ten years, I was ready. I was no longer a girl but a strange woman. A still-married woman with no husband. I went to the city with both eyes open. It was as if the bowl of black flies had been poured out onto the streets. Everywhere there were people moving, unknown men pushing against unknown women and no one caring.
With the money from my family, I bought fresh clothes, modern straight suits. I cut off my long hair in the manner that was stylish, like a young boy. I was so tired of doing nothing for so many years I decided to work. I became a shopgirl.
I did not need to learn to flatter women. I knew the words they wanted to hear. A tiger can make a soft prrrn-prrn noise deep within its chest and make even rabbits feel safe and content.
Even though I was a grown woman, I became pretty again. This was a gift. I wore clothes far better and more expensive than what was sold in the store. And this made women buy the cheap clothes, because they thought they could look as pretty as I. It was at this shop, working like a peasant, that I met Clifford St. Clair. He was a large, pale American man who bought the store’s cheap-style clothes and sent
them overseas. It was his name that made me know I would marry him.
“Mistah Saint Clair,” he said in English when he introduced himself to me. And then he added in his thick, flat Chinese, “Like the angel of light.”
I neither liked him nor disliked him. I thought him neither attractive nor unattractive. But this I knew. I knew he was the sign that the black side of me would soon go away.
Saint courted me for four years in his strange way. Even though I was not the owner of the shop, he always greeted me, shaking hands, holding them too long. From his
palms water always poured, even after we married. He was clean and pleasant. But he smelled like a foreigner, a lamb-smell stink that can never be washed away.
I was not unkind. But he was kechi, too polite. He bought me cheap gifts: a glass figurine, a prickly brooch of cut glass, a silver-colored cigarette lighter. Saint acted as if these gifts were nothing, as if he were a rich man treating a poor country girl to things we had never seen in China.
But I saw his look as he watched me open the boxes. Anxious and eager to please. He did not know that such things were nothing to me, that I was raised with riches he could not even imagine.
I always accepted these gifts graciously, always protesting just enough, not too little, not too much. I did not encourage him. But because I knew this man would someday be my husband, I put these worthless trinkets carefully into a box, wrapping each with tissue. I knew that someday he would ask to see them again.
Lena thinks Saint saved me from the poor country village that I said I was from. She is right. She is wrong. My daughter does not know that Saint had to wait patiently for four years like a dog in front of a butcher shop.
How is it that I finally came out and let him marry me? I was waiting for the sign I knew would come. I had to wait until 1946.
A letter came from Tientsin, not from my family, who thought I was dead. It was from my youngest aunt. Even before I opened the letter I knew. My husband was dead. He had long since left his opera singer. He was with some worthless girl, a young servant. But she had a strong spirit and was reckless, more so than even he. When he tried to leave her, she had already sharpened her longest kitchen knife.
I thought this man had long ago drained everything from my heart. But now something strong and bitter flowed and made me feel another emptiness in a place I didn’t know was there. I cursed this man aloud so he could hear. You had dog eyes. You jumped and followed whoever called you. Now you chase your own tail.
So I decided. I decided to let Saint marry me. So easy for me. I was the daughter of my father’s wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin. I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my chi, the spirit that caused me so much pain.
Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
Saint took me to America, where I lived in houses smaller than the one in the country. I wore large American clothes. I did servant’s tasks. I learned the Western ways. I tried to speak with a thick tongue. I raised a daughter, watching her from another shore. I accepted her American ways.
With all these things, I did not care. I had no spirit.
Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was a man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out the trinkets I had saved for the right day, the day he gave me my daughter, a tiger girl.
How could I not love this man? But it was the love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness.
Now Saint is a ghost. He and I can now love equally. He knows the things I have been hiding all these years. Now I must tell my daughter everything. That she is the
daughter of a ghost. She has no chi. This is my greatest shame. How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?
So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter’s tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.
I hear my daughter speaking to her husband downstairs. They say words that mean nothing. They sit in a room with no life in it.
I know a thing before it happens. She will hear the vase and table crashing to the floor. She will come up the stairs and into my room. Her eyes will see nothing in the darkness, where I am waiting between the trees.
Lindo Jong
My daughter wanted to go to China for her second honeymoon, but now she is afraid. “What if I blend in so well they think I’m one of them?” Waverly asked me. “What
if they don’t let me come back to the United States?”
“When you go to China,” I told her, “you don’t even need to open your mouth. They already know you are an outsider.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. My daughter likes to speak back. She likes to question what I say.
“Aii-ya,” I said. “Even if you put on their clothes, even if you take off your makeup and hide your fancy jewelry, they know. They know just watching the way you walk, the way you carry your face. They know you do not belong.”
My daughter did not look pleased when I told her this, that she didn’t look Chinese. She had a sour American look on her face. Oh, maybe ten years ago, she would have clapped her hands—hurray!—as if this were good news. But now she wants to be Chinese, it is so fashionable. And I know it is too late. All those years I tried to teach her! She followed my Chinese ways only until she learned how to walk out the door by herself and go to school. So now the only Chinese words she can say are sh-sh, houche, chr fan, and gwan deng shweijyau. How can she talk to people in China with these words? Pee-pee, choo-choo train, eat, close light sleep. How can she think she can blend in? Only her skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside—she is all American-made. It’s my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination:
American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?
I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it’s no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. You can buy an umbrella. Or go inside a Catholic church. In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. She learned these things, but I couldn’t teach her about Chinese character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother’s mind. How not to show your own thoughts,
to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.
No, this kind of thinking didn’t stick to her. She was too busy chewing gum, blowing bubbles bigger than her cheeks. Only that kind of thinking stuck.
“Finish your coffee,” I told her yesterday. “Don’t throw your blessings away.” “Don’t be so old-fashioned, Ma,” she told me, finishing her coffee down the sink.
“I’m my own person.”
And I think, How can she be her own person? When did I give her up?
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My daughter is getting married a second time. So she asked me to go to her beauty parlor, her famous Mr. Rory. I know her meaning. She is ashamed of my looks. What
will her husband’s parents and his important lawyer friends think of this backward old Chinese woman?
“Auntie An-mei can cut me,” I say.
“Rory is famous,” says my daughter, as if she had no ears. “He does fabulous work.” So I sit in Mr. Rory’s chair. He pumps me up and down until I am the right height. Then my daughter criticizes me as if I were not there. “See how it’s flat on one side,” she accuses my head. “She needs a cut and a perm. And this purple tint in her hair,
she’s been doing it at home. She’s never had anything professionally done.”
She is looking at Mr. Rory in the mirror. He is looking at me in the mirror. I have seen this professional look before. Americans don’t really look at one another when talking. They talk to their reflections. They look at others or themselves only when they think nobody is watching. So they never see how they really look. They see themselves smiling without their mouth open, or turned to the side where they cannot see their faults.
“How does she want it?” asked Mr. Rory. He thinks I do not understand English. He is floating his fingers through my hair. He is showing how his magic can make my hair thicker and longer.
“Ma, how do you want it?” Why does my daughter think she is translating English for me? Before I can even speak, she explains my thoughts: “She wants a soft wave. We probably shouldn’t cut it too short. Otherwise it’ll be too tight for the wedding. She doesn’t want it to look kinky or weird.”
And now she says to me in a loud voice, as if I had lost my hearing, “Isn’t that right, Ma? Not too tight?”
I smile. I use my American face. That’s the face Americans think is Chinese, the one they cannot understand. But inside I am becoming ashamed. I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me.
Mr. Rory pats my hair more. He looks at me. He looks at my daughter. Then he says something to my daughter that really displeases her: “It’s uncanny how much you two look alike!”
I smile, this time with my Chinese face. But my daughter’s eyes and her smile become very narrow, the way a cat pulls itself small just before it bites. Now Mr. Rory goes away so we can think about this. I hear him snap his fingers, “Wash! Mrs. Jong is next!”
So my daughter and I are alone in this crowded beauty parlor. She is frowning at herself in the mirror. She sees me looking at her.
“The same cheeks,” she says, She points to mine and then pokes her cheeks. She sucks them outside in to look like a starved person. She puts her face next to mine, side by side, and we look at each other in the mirror.
“You can see your character in your face,” I say to my daughter without thinking. “You can see your future.”
“What do you mean?” she says.
And now I have to fight back my feelings. These two faces, I think, so much the same! The same happiness, the same sadness, the same good fortune, the same faults.
I am seeing myself and my mother, back in China, when I was a young girl.
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My mother—your grandmother—once told me my fortune, how my character could lead to good and bad circumstances. She was sitting at her table with the big mirror. I was standing behind her, my chin resting on her shoulder. The next day was the start of the new year. I would be ten years by my Chinese age, so it was an important birthday for me. For this reason maybe she did not criticize me too much. She was looking at my face.
She touched my ear. “You are lucky,” she said. “You have my ears, a big thick lobe, lots of meat at the bottom, full of blessings. Some people are born so poor. Their ears are so thin, so close to their head, they can never hear luck calling to them. You have the right ears, but you must listen to your opportunities.”
She ran her thin finger down my nose. “You have my nose. The hole is not too big, so your money will not be running out. The nose is straight and smooth, a good sign. A girl with a crooked nose is bound for misfortune. She is always following the wrong things, the wrong people, the worst luck.”
She tapped my chin and then hers. “Not too short, not too long. Our longevity will be adequate, not cut off too soon, not so long we become a burden.”
She pushed my hair away from my forehead. “We are the same,” concluded my mother. “Perhaps your forehead is wider, so you will be even more clever. And your hair is thick, the hairline is low on your forehead. This means you will have some hardships in your early life. This happened to me. But look at my hairline now. High! Such a blessing for my old age. Later you will learn to worry and lose your hair, too.” She took my chin in her hand. She turned my face toward her, eyes facing eyes.
She moved my face to one side, then the other. “The eyes are honest, eager,” she said. “They follow me and show respect. They do not look down in shame. They do not resist and turn the opposite way. You will be a good wife, mother, and daughter-in-law.” When my mother told me these things, I was still so young. And even though she said we looked the same, I wanted to look more the same. If her eye went up and looked surprised, I wanted my eye to do the same. If her mouth fell down and was unhappy,
I too wanted to feel unhappy.
I was so much like my mother. This was before our circumstances separated us: a flood that caused my family to leave me behind, my first marriage to a family that did not want me, a war from all sides, and later, an ocean that took me to a new country. She did not see how my face changed over the years. How my mouth began to droop. How I began to worry but still did not lose my hair. How my eyes began to follow the American way. She did not see that I twisted my nose bouncing forward on a crowded bus in San Francisco. Your father and I, we were on our way to church to give many thanks to God for all our blessings, but I had to subtract some for my nose.
It’s hard to keep your Chinese face in America. At the beginning, before I even arrived, I had to hide my true self. I paid an American-raised Chinese girl in Peking to show me how.
“In America,” she said, “you cannot say you want to live there forever. If you are Chinese, you must say you admire their schools, their ways of thinking. You must say you want to be a scholar and come back to teach Chinese people what you have learned.”
“What should I say I want to learn?” I asked. “If they ask me questions, if I cannot answer…”
“Religion, you must say you want to study religion,” said this smart girl. “Americans all have different ideas about religion, so there are no right and wrong answers. Say to them, I’m going for God’s sake, and they will respect you.”
For another sum of money, this girl gave me a form filled out with English words. I had to copy these words over and over again as if they were English words formed from my own head. Next to the word NAME, I wrote Lindo Sun. Next to the word BIRTHDATE, I wrote May 11, 1918, which this girl insisted was the same as three months after the Chinese lunar new year. Next to the word BIRTHPLACE, I put down Taiyuan, China. And next to the word OCCUPATION, I wrote student of theology.
I gave the girl even more money for a list of addresses in San Francisco, people with big connections. And finally, this girl gave me, free of charge, instructions for changing my circumstances. “First,” she said, “you must find a husband. An American citizen is best.”
She saw my surprise and quickly added, “Chinese! Of course, he must be Chinese. ‘Citizen’ does not mean Caucasian. But if he is not a citizen, you should immediately do number two. See here, you should have a baby. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter in the United States. Neither will take care of you in your old age, isn’t that true?” And we both laughed.
“Be careful, though,” she said. “The authorities there will ask you if you have children now or if you are thinking of having some. You must say no. You should look sincere and say you are not married, you are religious, you know it is wrong to have a baby.”
I must have looked puzzled, because she explained further: “Look here now, how can an unborn baby know what it is not supposed to do? And once it has arrived, it is an American citizen and can do anything it wants. It can ask its mother to stay. Isn’t that true?”
But that is not the reason I was puzzled. I wondered why she said I should look sincere. How could I look any other way when telling the truth?
See how truthful my face still looks. Why didn’t I give this look to you? Why do you always tell your friends that I arrived in the United States on a slow boat from China? This is not true. I was not that poor. I took a plane. I had saved the money my first husband’s family gave me when they sent me away. And I had saved money from my twelve years’ work as a telephone operator. But it is true I did not take the fastest plane. The plane took three weeks. It stopped everywhere: Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hawaii. So by the time I arrived, I did not look sincerely glad to be here.
Why do you always tell people that I met your father in the Cathay House, that I broke open a fortune cookie and it said I would marry a dark, handsome stranger, and that when I looked up, there he was, the waiter, your father. Why do you make this joke? This is not sincere. This was not true! Your father was not a waiter, I never ate in that restaurant. The Cathay House had a sign that said “Chinese Food,” so only Americans went there before it was torn down. Now it is a McDonald’s restaurant with a big Chinese sign that says mai dong lou—”wheat,” “east,” “building.” All nonsense. Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense? You must understand my real circumstances, how I arrived, how I married, how I lost my Chinese face, why you are the way you are.
When I arrived, nobody asked me questions. The authorities looked at my papers and stamped me in. I decided to go first to a San Francisco address given to me by this girl in Peking. The bus put me down on a wide street with cable cars. This was California Street. I walked up this hill and then I saw a tall building. This was Old St. Mary’s. Under the church sign, in handwritten Chinese characters, someone had added: “A Chinese Ceremony to Save Ghosts from Spiritual Unrest 7 A.M. and 8:30 A.M.” I memorized this information in case the authorities asked me where I worshipped my religion. And then I saw another sign across the street. It was painted on the outside of a short building: “Save Today for Tomorrow, at Bank of America.” And I thought to myself, This is where American people worship. See, even then I was not so dumb! Today that church is the same size, but where that short bank used to be, now there is a tall building, fifty stories high, where you and your husband-to-be work and look down on everybody.
My daughter laughed when I said this. Her mother can make a good joke.
So I kept walking up this hill. I saw two pagodas, one on each side of the street, as though they were the entrance to a great Buddha temple. But when I looked carefully, I saw the pagoda was really just a building topped with stacks of tile roofs, no walls, nothing else under its head. I was surprised how they tried to make everything look like an old imperial city or an emperor’s tomb. But if you looked on either side of these pretend-pagodas, you could see the streets became narrow and crowded, dark, and dirty. I thought to myself, Why did they choose only the worst Chinese parts for the inside? Why didn’t they build gardens and ponds instead? Oh, here and there was the look of a famous ancient cave or a Chinese opera. But inside it was always the same cheap stuff.
So by the time I found the address the girl in Peking gave me, I knew not to expect too much. The address was a large green building, so noisy, children running up and down the outside stairs and hallways. Inside number 402, I found an old woman who told me right away she had wasted her time waiting for me all week. She quickly wrote down some addresses and gave them to me, keeping her hand out after I took the paper. So I gave her an American dollar and she looked at it and said, “Syaujye“—Miss—”we are in America now. Even a beggar can starve on this dollar.” So I gave her another dollar and she said, “Aii, you think it is so easy getting this information?” So I gave her another and she closed her hand and her mouth.
With the addresses this old woman gave me, I found a cheap apartment on Washington Street. It was like all the other places, sitting on top of a little store. And through this three-dollar list, I found a terrible job paying me seventy-five cents an hour. Oh, I tried to get a job as a salesgirl, but you had to know English for that. I tried for another job as a Chinese hostess, but they also wanted me to rub my hands up and down foreign men, and I knew right away this was as bad as fourth-class prostitutes in China! So I rubbed that address out with black ink. And some of the other jobs required you to have a special relationship. They were jobs held by families from Canton and Toishan and the Four Districts, southern people who had come many years ago to make their fortune and were still holding onto them with the hands of their great-grandchildren.
So my mother was right about my hardships. This job in the cookie factory was one of the worst. Big black machines worked all day and night pouring little pancakes onto moving round griddles. The other women and I sat on high stools, and as the little
pancakes went by, we had to grab them off the hot griddle just as they turned golden. We would put a strip of paper in the center, then fold the cookie in half and bend its arms back just as it turned hard. If you grabbed the pancake too soon, you would burn your fingers on the hot, wet dough. But if you grabbed too late, the cookie would harden before you could even complete the first bend. And then you had to throw these mistakes in a barrel, which counted against you because the owner could sell those only as scraps.
After the first day, I suffered ten red fingers. This was not a job for a stupid person. You had to learn fast or your fingers would turn into fried sausages. So the next day only my eyes burned, from never taking them off the pancakes. And the day after that, my arms ached from holding them out ready to catch the pancakes at just the right moment. But by the end of my first week, it became mindless work and I could relax enough to notice who else was working on each side of me. One was an older woman who never smiled and spoke to herself in Cantonese when she was angry. She talked like a crazy person. On my other side was a woman around my age. Her barrel contained very few mistakes. But I suspected she ate them. She was quite plump.
“Eh, Syaujye,” she called to me over the loud noise of the machines. I was grateful to hear her voice, to discover we both spoke Mandarin, although her dialect was coarse-sounding. “Did you ever think you would be so powerful you could determine someone else’s fortune?” she asked.
I didn’t understand what she meant. So she picked up one of the strips of paper and read it aloud, first in English: “Do not fight and air your dirty laundry in public. To the victor go the soils.” Then she translated in Chinese: “You shouldn’t fight and do your laundry at the same time. If you win, your clothes will get dirty.”
I still did not know what she meant. So she picked up another one and read in English: “Money is the root of all evil. Look around you and dig deep.” And then in Chinese: “Money is a bad influence. You become restless and rob graves.”
“What is this nonsense?” I asked her, putting the strips of paper in my pocket, thinking I should study these classical American sayings.
“They are fortunes,” she explained. “American people think Chinese people write these sayings.”
“But we never say such things!” I said. “These things don’t make sense. These are not fortunes, they are bad instructions.”
“No, Miss,” she said, laughing, “it is our bad fortune to be here making these and somebody else’s bad fortune to pay to get them.”
So that is how I met An-mei Hsu. Yes, yes, Auntie An-mei, now so old-fashioned. An-mei and I still laugh over those bad fortunes and how they later became quite useful in helping me catch a husband.
“Eh, Lindo,” An-mei said to me one day at our workplace. “Come to my church this Sunday. My husband has a friend who is looking for a good Chinese wife. He is not a citizen, but I’m sure he knows how to make one.” So that is how I first heard about Tin Jong, your father. It was not like my first marriage, where everything was arranged. I had a choice. I could choose to marry your father, or I could choose not to marry him and go back to China.
I knew something was not right when I saw him: He was Cantonese! How could An-mei think I could marry such a person? But she just said: “We are not in China anymore. You don’t have to marry the village boy. Here everybody is now from the same village
even if they come from different parts of China.” See how changed Auntie An-mei is from those old days.
So we were shy at first, your father and I, neither of us able to speak to each other in our Chinese dialects. We went to English class together, speaking to each other in those new words and sometimes taking out a piece of paper to write a Chinese character to show what we meant. At least we had that, a piece of paper to hold us together. But it’s hard to tell someone’s marriage intentions when you can’t say things aloud. All those little signs—the teasing, the bossy, scolding words—that’s how you know if it is serious. But we could talk only in the manner of our English teacher. I see cat. I see rat. I see hat.
But I saw soon enough how much your father liked me. He would pretend he was in a Chinese play to show me what he meant. He ran back and forth, jumped up and down, pulling his fingers through his hair, so I knew—mangjile!—what a busy, exciting place this Pacific Telephone was, this place where he worked. You didn’t know this about your father—that he could be such a good actor? You didn’t know your father had so much hair?
Oh, I found out later his job was not the way he decribed it. It was not so good. Even today, now that I can speak Cantonese to your father, I always ask him why he doesn’t find a better situation. But he acts as if we were in those old days, when he couldn’t understand anything I said.
Sometimes I wonder why I wanted to catch a marriage with your father. I think An-mei put the thought in my mind. She said, “In the movies, boys and girls are always passing notes in class. That’s how they fall into trouble. You need to start trouble to get this man to realize his intentions. Otherwise, you will be an old lady before it comes to his mind.”
That evening An-mei and I went to work and searched through strips of fortune cookie papers, trying to find the right instructions to give to your father. An-mei read them aloud, putting aside ones that might work: “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Don’t ever settle for a pal.” “If such thoughts are in your head, it’s time to be wed.” “Confucius say a woman is worth a thousand words. Tell your wife she’s used up her total.”
We laughed over those. But I knew the right one when I read it. It said: “A house is not home when a spouse is not at home.” I did not laugh. I wrapped up this saying in a pancake, bending the cookie with all my heart.
After school the next afternoon, I put my hand in my purse and then made a look, as if a mouse had bitten my hand. “What’s this?” I cried. Then I pulled out the cookie and handed it to your father. “Eh! So many cookies, just to see them makes me sick. You take this cookie.”
I knew even then he had a nature that did not waste anything. He opened the cookie and he crunched it in his mouth, and then read the piece of paper.
“What does it say?” I asked. I tried to act as if it did not matter. And when he still did not speak, I said, “Translate, please.”
We were walking in Portsmouth Square and already the fog had blown in and I was very cold in my thin coat. So I hoped your father would hurry and ask me to marry him. But instead, he kept his serious look and said, “I don’t know this word ‘spouse.’ Tonight I will look in my dictionary. Then I can tell you the meaning tomorrow.”
The next day he asked me in English, “Lindo, can you spouse me?” And I laughed at him and said he used that word incorrectly. So he came back and made a Confucius joke, that if the words were wrong, then his intentions must also be wrong. We scolded and joked with each other all day long like this, and that how we decided to get married.
One month later we had a ceremony in the First Chinese Baptist Church, where we met. And nine months later your father and I had our proof of citizenship, a baby boy, your big brother Winston. I named him Winston because I liked the meaning of those two words “wins ton.” I wanted to raise a son who would win many things, praise, money, a good life. Back then, I thought to myself, At last I have everything I wanted. I was so happy, I didn’t see we were poor. I saw only what we had. How did I know Winston would die later in a car accident? So young! Only sixteen!
Two years after Winston was born, I had your other brother, Vincent. I named him Vincent, which sounds like “win cent,” the sound of making money, because I was beginning to think we did not have enough. And then I bumped my nose riding on the bus. Soon after that you were born.
I don’t know what caused me to change. Maybe it was my crooked nose that damaged my thinking. Maybe it was seeing you as a baby, how you looked so much like me, and this made me dissatisfied with my life. I wanted everything for you to be better. I wanted you to have the best circumstances, the best character. I didn’t want you to regret anything. And that’s why I named you Waverly. It was the name of the street we lived on. And I wanted you to think, This is where I belong. But I also knew if I named you after this street, soon you would grow up, leave this place, and take a piece of me with you.
|
Mr. Rory is brushing my hair. Everything is soft. Everything is black.
“You look great, Ma,” says my daughter. “Everyone at the wedding will think you’re my sister.”
I look at my face in the beauty parlor mirror. I see my reflection. I cannot see my faults, but I know they are there. I gave my daughter these faults. The same eyes, the same cheeks, the same chin. Her character, it came from my circumstances. I look at my daughter and now it is the first time I have seen it.
“Ai-ya! What happened to your nose?”
She looks in the mirror. She sees nothing wrong. “What do you mean? Nothing happened,” she says. “It’s just the same nose.”
“But how did you get it crooked?” I ask. One side of her nose is bending lower, dragging her cheek with it.
“What do you mean?” she asks. “It’s your nose. You gave me this nose.”
“How can that be? It’s drooping. You must get plastic surgery and correct it.” But my daughter has no ears for my words. She puts her smiling face next to my worried one. “Don’t be silly. Our nose isn’t so bad,” she says. “It makes us look
devious.” She looks pleased.
“What is this word, ‘devious,’ ” I ask.
“It means we’re looking one way, while following another. We’re for one side and also the other. We mean what we say, but our intentions are different.”
“People can see this in our face?”
My daughter laughs. “Well, not everything that we’re thinking. They just know we’re two-faced.”
“This is good?”
“This is good if you get what you want.”
I think about our two faces. I think about my intentions. Which one is American? Which one is Chinese? Which one is better? If you show one, you must always sacrifice the other.
It is like what happened when I went back to China last year, after I had not been there for almost forty years. I had taken off my fancy jewelry. I did not wear loud colors. I spoke their language. I used their local money. But still, they knew. They knew my face was not one hundred percent Chinese. They still charged me high foreign prices.
So now I think, What did I lose? What did I get back in return? I will ask my daughter what she thinks.
Jing-Mei Woo
The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think, My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese.
“Cannot be helped,” my mother said when I was fifteen and had vigorously denied that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin. I was a sophomore at Galileo High in San Francisco, and all my Caucasian friends agreed: I was about as Chinese as they were. But my mother had studied at a famous nursing school in Shanghai, and she said she knew all about genetics. So there was no doubt in her mind, whether I agreed or not: Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.
“Someday you will see,” said my mother. “It is in your blood, waiting to be let go.”
And when she said this, I saw myself transforming like a werewolf, a mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating itself insidiously into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother did to embarrass me—haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes.
But today I realize I’ve never really known what it means to be Chinese. I am thirty-six years old. My mother is dead and I am on a train, carrying with me her dreams of coming home. I am going to China.
We are first going to Guangzhou, my seventy-two-year-old father, Canning Woo, and I, where we will visit his aunt, whom he has not seen since he was ten years old. And I don’t know whether it’s the prospect of seeing his aunt or if it’s because he’s back in China, but now he looks like he’s a young boy, so innocent and happy I want to button his sweater and pat his head. We are sitting across from each other, separated by a little table with two cold cups of tea. For the first time I can ever remember, my father has tears in his eyes, and all he is seeing out the train window is a sectioned field of yellow, green, and brown, a narrow canal flanking the tracks, low rising hills, and three people in blue jackets riding an ox-driven cart on this early October morning. And I can’t help myself. I also have misty eyes, as if I had seen this a long, long time ago, and had almost forgotten.
In less than three hours, we will be in Guangzhou, which my guidebook tells me is how one properly refers to Canton these days. It seems all the cities I have heard of, except Shanghai, have changed their spellings. I think they are saying China has changed in other ways as well. Chungking is Chongqing. And Kweilin is Guilin. I have looked these names up, because after we see my father’s aunt in Guangzhou, we will catch a plane to Shanghai, where I will meet my two half-sisters for the first time. They are my mother’s twin daughters from her first marriage, little babies she was forced to abandon on a road as she was fleeing Kweilin for Chungking in 1944. That was all my mother had told me about these daughters, so they had remained babies in my mind, all these years, sitting on the side of a road, listening to bombs whistling
in the distance while sucking their patient red thumbs.
And it was only this year that someone found them and wrote with this joyful news. A letter came from Shanghai, addressed to my mother. When I first heard about this, that they were alive, I imagined my identical sisters transforming from little babies into six-year-old girls. In my mind, they were seated next to each other at a table, taking turns with the fountain pen. One would write a neat row of characters:Dearest Mama. We are alive. She would brush back her wispy bangs and hand the other sister the pen, and she would write:Come get us. Please hurry.
Of course they could not know that my mother had died three months before, suddenly, when a blood vessel in her brain burst. One minute she was talking to my father, complaining about the tenants upstairs, scheming how to evict them under the pretense that relatives from China were moving in. The next minute she was holding her head, her eyes squeezed shut, groping for the sofa, and then crumpling softly to the floor with fluttering hands.
So my father had been the first one to open the letter, a long letter it turned out. And they did call her Mama. They said they always revered her as their true mother. They kept a framed picture of her. They told her about their life, from the time my mother last saw them on the road leaving Kweilin to when they were finally found. And the letter had broken my father’s heart so much—these daughters calling my mother from another life he never knew—that he gave the letter to my mother’s old friend Auntie Lindo and asked her to write back and tell my sisters, in the gentlest
way possible, that my mother was dead.
But instead Auntie Lindo took the letter to the Joy Luck Club and discussed with Auntie Ying and Auntie An-mei what should be done, because they had known for many years about my mother’s search for her twin daughters, her endless hope. Auntie Lindo and the others cried over this double tragedy, of losing my mother three months before, and now again. And so they couldn’t help but think of some miracle, some possible way of reviving her from the dead, so my mother could fulfill her dream.
So this is what they wrote to my sisters in Shanghai: “Dearest Daughters, I too have never forgotten you in my memory or in my heart. I never gave up hope that we would see each other again in a joyous reunion. I am only sorry it has been too long. I want to tell you everything about my life since I last saw you. I want to tell you this when our family comes to see you in China….” They signed it with my mother’s name.
It wasn’t until all this had been done that they first told me about my sisters, the letter they received, the one they wrote back.
“They’ll think she’s coming, then,” I murmured. And I had imagined my sisters now being ten or eleven, jumping up and down, holding hands, their pigtails bouncing, excited that their mother—their mother—was coming, whereas my mother was dead. “How can you say she is not coming in a letter?” said Auntie Lindo. “She is their mother. She is your mother. You must be the one to tell them. All these years, they
have been dreaming of her.” And I thought she was right.
But then I started dreaming, too, of my mother and my sisters and how it would be if I arrived in Shanghai. All these years, while they waited to be found, I had lived with my mother and then had lost her. I imagined seeing my sisters at the airport. They would be standing on their tiptoes, looking anxiously, scanning from one dark head to another as we got off the plane. And I would recognize them instantly, their faces with the identical worried look.
“Jyejye, Jyejye. Sister, Sister. We are here,” I saw myself saying in my poor version of Chinese.
“Where is Mama?” they would say, and look around, still smiling, two flushed and eager faces. “Is she hiding?” And this would have been like my mother, to stand behind just a bit, to tease a little and make people’s patience pull a little on their hearts. I would shake my head and tell my sisters she was not hiding.
“Oh, that must be Mama, no?” one of my sisters would whisper excitedly, pointing to another small woman completely engulfed in a tower of presents. And that, too, would have been like my mother, to bring mountains of gifts, food, and toys for children—all bought on sale—shunning thanks, saying the gifts were nothing, and later turning the labels over to show my sisters, “Calvin Klein, 100% wool.”
I imagined myself starting to say, “Sisters, I am sorry, I have come alone…” and before I could tell them—they could see it in my face—they were wailing, pulling their hair, their lips twisted in pain, as they ran away from me. And then I saw myself getting back on the plane and coming home.
After I had dreamed this scene many times—watching their despair turn from horror into anger—I begged Auntie Lindo to write another letter. And at first she refused. “How can I say she is dead? I cannot write this,” said Auntie Lindo with a stubborn
look.
“But it’s cruel to have them believe she’s coming on the plane,” I said. “When they see it’s just me, they’ll hate me.”
“Hate you? Cannot be.” She was scowling. “You are their own sister, their only family.”
“You don’t understand,” I protested. “What I don’t understand?” she said.
And I whispered, “They’ll think I’m responsible, that she died because I didn’t appreciate her.”
And Auntie Lindo looked satisfied and sad at the same time, as if this were true and I had finally realized it. She sat down for an hour, and when she stood up she handed me a two-page letter. She had tears in her eyes. I realized that the very thing I had feared, she had done. So even if she had written the news of my mother’s death in English, I wouldn’t have had the heart to read it.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
The landscape has become gray, filled with low flat cement buildings, old factories, and then tracks and more tracks filled with trains like ours passing by in the opposite direction. I see platforms crowded with people wearing drab Western clothes, with spots of bright colors: little children wearing pink and yellow, red and peach. And there are soldiers in olive green and red, and old ladies in gray tops and pants that stop mid-calf. We are in Guangzhou.
Before the train even comes to a stop, people are bringing down their belongings from above their seats. For a moment there is a dangerous shower of heavy suitcases laden with gifts to relatives, half-broken boxes wrapped in miles of string to keep the contents from spilling out, plastic bags filled with yarn and vegetables and packages of dried mushrooms, and camera cases. And then we are caught in a stream of people rushing, shoving, pushing us along, until we find ourselves in one of a dozen lines waiting to go through customs. I feel as if I were getting on the number
30 Stockton bus in San Francisco. I am in China, I remind myself. And somehow the crowds don’t bother me. It feels right. I start pushing too.
I take out the declaration forms and my passport. “Woo,” it says at the top, and below that, “June May,” who was born in “California, U.S.A.,” in 1951. I wonder if the customs people will question whether I’m the same person as in the passport photo. In this picture, my chin-length hair is swept back and artfully styled. I am wearing false eyelashes, eye shadow, and lip liner. My cheeks are hollowed out by bronze blusher. But I had not expected the heat in October. And now my hair hangs limp with the humidity. I wear no makeup; in Hong Kong my mascara had melted into dark circles and everything else had felt like layers of grease. So today my face is plain, unadorned except for a thin mist of shiny sweat on my forehead and nose.
Even without makeup, I could never pass for true Chinese. I stand five-foot-six, and my head pokes above the crowd so that I am eye level only with other tourists. My mother once told me my height came from my grandfather, who was a northerner, and may have even had some Mongol blood. “This is what your grandmother once told me,” explained my mother. “But now it is too late to ask her. They are all dead, your grandparents, your uncles, and their wives and children, all killed in the war, when a bomb fell on our house. So many generations in one instant.”
She had said this so matter-of-factly that I thought she had long since gotten over any grief she had. And then I wondered how she knew they were all dead.
“Maybe they left the house before the bomb fell,” I suggested.
“No,” said my mother. “Our whole family is gone. It is just you and I.” “But how do you know? Some of them could have escaped.”
“Cannot be,” said my mother, this time almost angrily. And then her frown was washed over by a puzzled blank look, and she began to talk as if she were trying to remember where she had misplaced something. “I went back to that house. I kept looking up to where the house used to be. And it wasn’t a house, just the sky. And below, underneath my feet, were four stories of burnt bricks and wood, all the life of our house. Then off to the side I saw things blown into the yard, nothing valuable. There was a bed someone used to sleep in, really just a metal frame twisted up at one corner. And a book, I don’t know what kind, because every page had turned black. And I saw a teacup which was unbroken but filled with ashes. And then I found my doll, with her hands and legs broken, her hair burned off….When I was a little girl, I had cried for that doll, seeing it all alone in the store window, and my mother had bought it for me. It was an American doll with yellow hair. It could turn its legs and arms. The eyes moved up and down. And when I married and left my family home, I gave the doll to my youngest niece, because she was like me. She cried if that doll was not with her always. Do you see? If she was in the house with that doll, her parents were there, and so everybody was there, waiting together, because that’s how our family was.” The woman in the customs booth stares at my documents, then glances at me briefly, and with two quick movements stamps everything and sternly nods me along. And soon my father and I find ourselves in a large area filled with thousands of people and
suitcases. I feel lost and my father looks helpless.
“Excuse me,” I say to a man who looks like an American. “Can you tell me where I can get a taxi?” He mumbles something that sounds Swedish or Dutch.
“Syau Yen! Syau Yen!” I hear a piercing voice shout from behind me. An old woman in a yellow knit beret is holding up a pink plastic bag filled with wrapped trinkets.
I guess she is trying to sell us something. But my father is staring down at this tiny sparrow of a woman, squinting into her eyes. And then his eyes widen, his face opens up and he smiles like a pleased little boy.
“Aiyi! Aiyi!“—Auntie Auntie!—he says softly.
“Syau Yen!” coos my great-aunt. I think it’s funny she has just called my father “Little Wild Goose.” It must be his baby milk name, the name used to discourage ghosts from stealing children.
They clasp each other’s hands—they do not hug—and hold on like this, taking turns saying, “Look at you! You are so old. Look how old you’ve become!” They are both crying openly, laughing at the same time, and I bite my lip, trying not to cry. I’m afraid to feel their joy. Because I am thinking how different our arrival in Shanghai will be tomorrow, how awkward it will feel.
Now Aiyi beams and points to a Polaroid picture of my father. My father had wisely sent pictures when he wrote and said we were coming. See how smart she was, she seems to intone as she compares the picture to my father. In the letter, my father had said we would call her from the hotel once we arrived, so this is a surprise, that they’ve come to meet us. I wonder if my sisters will be at the airport.
It is only then that I remember the camera. I had meant to take a picture of my father and his aunt the moment they met. It’s not too late.
“Here, stand together over here,” I say, holding up the Polaroid. The camera flashes and I hand them the snapshot. Aiyi and my father still stand close together, each of them holding a corner of the picture, watching as their images begin to form. They are almost reverentially quiet. Aiyi is only five years older than my father, which makes her around seventy-seven. But she looks ancient, shrunken, a mummified relic. Her thin hair is pure white, her teeth are brown with decay. So much for stories of Chinese women looking young forever, I think to myself.
Now Aiyi is crooning to me: “Jandale.” So big already. She looks up at me, at my full height, and then peers into her pink plastic bag—her gifts to us, I have figured out—as if she is wondering what she will give to me, now that I am so old and big. And then she grabs my elbow with her sharp pincerlike grasp and turns me around. A man and woman in their fifties are shaking hands with my father, everybody smiling and saying, “Ah! Ah!” They are Aiyi’s oldest son and his wife, and standing next to them are four other people, around my age, and a little girl who’s around ten. The introductions go by so fast, all I know is that one of them is Aiyi’s grandson, with his wife, and the other is her granddaughter, with her husband. And the little girl is Lili, Aiyi’s great-granddaughter.
Aiyi and my father speak the Mandarin dialect from their childhood, but the rest of the family speaks only the Cantonese of their village. I understand only Mandarin but can’t speak it that well. So Aiyi and my father gossip unrestrained in Mandarin, exchanging news about people from their old village. And they stop only occasionally to talk to the rest of us, sometimes in Cantonese, sometimes in English.
“Oh, it is as I suspected,” says my father, turning to me. “He died last summer.” And I already understood this. I just don’t know who this person, Li Gong, is. I feel as if I were in the United Nations and the translators had run amok.
“Hello,” I say to the little girl. “My name is Jing-mei.” But the little girl squirms to look away, causing her parents to laugh with embarrassment. I try to think of Cantonese words I can say to her, stuff I learned from friends in Chinatown, but all
I can think of are swear words, terms for bodily functions, and short phrases like “tastes good,” “tastes like garbage,” and “she’s really ugly.” And then I have another plan: I hold up the Polaroid camera, beckoning Lili with my finger. She immediately jumps forward, places one hand on her hip in the manner of a fashion model, juts out her chest, and flashes me a toothy smile. As soon as I take the picture she is standing next to me, jumping and giggling every few seconds as she watches herself appear on the greenish film.
By the time we hail taxis for the ride to the hotel, Lili is holding tight onto my hand, pulling me along.
In the taxi, Aiyi talks nonstop, so I have no chance to ask her about the different sights we are passing by.
“You wrote and said you would come only for one day,” says Aiyi to my father in an agitated tone. “One day! How can you see your family in one day! Toishan is many hours’ drive from Guangzhou. And this idea to call us when you arrive. This is nonsense. We have no telephone.”
My heart races a little. I wonder if Auntie Lindo told my sisters we would call from the hotel in Shanghai?
Aiyi continues to scold my father. “I was so beside myself, ask my son, almost turned heaven and earth upside down trying to think of a way! So we decided the best was for us to take the bus from Toishan and come into Guangzhou—meet you right from the start.”
And now I am holding my breath as the taxi driver dodges between trucks and buses, honking his horn constantly. We seem to be on some sort of long freeway overpass, like a bridge above the city. I can see row after row of apartments, each floor cluttered with laundry hanging out to dry on the balcony. We pass a public bus, with people jammed in so tight their faces are nearly wedged against the window. Then I see the skyline of what must be downtown Guangzhou. From a distance, it looks like a major American city, with highrises and construction going on everywhere. As we slow down in the more congested part of the city, I see scores of little shops, dark inside, lined with counters and shelves. And then there is a building, its front laced with scaffolding made of bamboo poles held together with plastic strips. Men and women are standing on narrow platforms, scraping the sides, working without safety straps or helmets. Oh, would OSHA have a field day here, I think.
Aiyi’s shrill voice rises up again: “So it is a shame you can’t see our village, our house. My sons have been quite successful, selling our vegetables in the free market. We had enough these last few years to build a big house, three stories, all of new brick, big enough for our whole family and then some. And every year, the money is even better. You Americans aren’t the only ones who know how to get rich!”
The taxi stops and I assume we’ve arrived, but then I peer out at what looks like a grander version of the Hyatt Regency. “This is communist China?” I wonder out loud. And then I shake my head toward my father. “This must be the wrong hotel.” I quickly pull out our itinerary, travel tickets, and reservations. I had explicitly instructed my travel agent to choose something inexpensive, in the thirty-to-forty-dollar range. I’m sure of this. And there it says on our itinerary: Garden Hotel, Huanshi Dong Lu. Well, our travel agent had better be prepared to eat the extra, that’s all I have to say.
The hotel is magnificent. A bellboy complete with uniform and sharp-creased cap jumps forward and begins to carry our bags into the lobby. Inside, the hotel looks like an orgy of shopping arcades and restaurants all encased in granite and glass. And rather than be impressed, I am worried about the expense, as well as the appearance it must give Aiyi, that we rich Americans cannot be without our luxuries even for one night.
But when I step up to the reservation desk, ready to haggle over this booking mistake, it is confirmed. Our rooms are prepaid, thirty-four dollars each. I feel sheepish, and Aiyi and the others seem delighted by our temporary surroundings. Lili is looking wide-eyed at an arcade filled with video games.
Our whole family crowds into one elevator, and the bellboy waves, saying he will meet us on the eighteenth floor. As soon as the elevator door shuts, everybody becomes very quiet, and when the door finally opens again, everybody talks at once in what sounds like relieved voices. I have the feeling Aiyi and the others have never been on such a long elevator ride.
Our rooms are next to each other and are identical. The rugs, drapes, bedspreads are all in shades of taupe. There’s a color television with remote-control panels built into the lamp table between the two twin beds. The bathroom has marble walls and floors. I find a built-in wet bar with a small refrigerator stocked with Heineken beer, Coke Classic, and Seven-Up, mini-bottles of Johnnie Walker Red, Bacardi rum, and Smirnoff vodka, and packets of M & M’s, honey-roasted cashews, and Cadbury chocolate bars. And again I say out loud, “This is communist China?”
My father comes into my room. “They decided we should just stay here and visit,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “They say, Less trouble that way. More time to talk.” “What about dinner?” I ask. I have been envisioning my first real Chinese feast for many days already, a big banquet with one of those soups steaming out of a carved
winter melon, chicken wrapped in clay, Peking duck, the works.
My father walks over and picks up a room service book next to a Travel & Leisure magazine. He flips through the pages quickly and then points to the menu. “This is what they want,” says my father.
So it’s decided. We are going to dine tonight in our rooms, with our family, sharing hamburgers, french fries, and apple pie ?la mode.
Aiyi and her family are browsing the shops while we clean up. After a hot ride on the train, I’m eager for a shower and cooler clothes.
The hotel has provided little packets of shampoo which, upon opening, I discover is the consistency and color of hoisin sauce. This is more like it, I think. This is China. And I rub some in my damp hair.
Standing in the shower, I realize this is the first time I’ve been by myself in what seems like days. But instead of feeling relieved, I feel forlorn. I think about what my mother said, about activating my genes and becoming Chinese. And I wonder what she meant.
Right after my mother died, I asked myself a lot of things, things that couldn’t be answered, to force myself to grieve more. It seemed as if I wanted to sustain my grief, to assure myself that I had cared deeply enough.
But now I ask the questions mostly because I want to know the answers. What was that pork stuff she used to make that had the texture of sawdust? What were the names of the uncles who died in Shanghai? What had she dreamt all these years about her
other daughters? All the times when she got mad at me, was she really thinking about them? Did she wish I were they? Did she regret that I wasn’t?
|
At one o’clock in the morning, I awake to tapping sounds on the window. I must have dozed off and now I feel my body uncramping itself. I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against one of the twin beds. Lili is lying next to me. The others are asleep, too, sprawled out on the beds and floor. Aiyi is seated at a little table, looking very sleepy. And my father is staring out the window, tapping his fingers on the glass. The last time I listened my father was telling Aiyi about his life since he last saw her. How he had gone to Yenching University, later got a post with a newspaper in Chungking, met my mother there, a young widow. How they later fled together to Shanghai to try to find my mother’s family house, but there was nothing there. And then they traveled eventually to Canton and then to Hong Kong, then Haiphong and finally to San Francisco….
“Suyuan didn’t tell me she was trying all these years to find her daughters,” he is now saying in a quiet voice. “Naturally, I did not discuss her daughters with her. I thought she was ashamed she had left them behind.”
“Where did she leave them?” asks Aiyi. “How were they found?”
I am wide awake now. Although I have heard parts of this story from my mother’s friends.
“It happened when the Japanese took over Kweilin,” says my father.
“Japanese in Kweilin?” says Aiyi. “That was never the case. Couldn’t be. The Japanese never came to Kweilin.”
“Yes, that is what the newspapers reported. I know this because I was working for the news bureau at the time. The Kuomintang often told us what we could say and could not say. But we knew the Japanese had come into Kwangsi Province. We had sources who told us how they had captured the Wuchang-Canton railway. How they were coming overland, making very fast progress, marching toward the provincial capital.”
Aiyi looks astonished. “If people did not know this, how could Suyuan know the Japanese were coming?”
“An officer of the Kuomintang secretly warned her,” explains my father. “Suyuan’s husband also was an officer and everybody knew that officers and their families would be the first to be killed. So she gathered a few possessions and, in the middle of the night, she picked up her daughters and fled on foot. The babies were not even one year old.”
“How could she give up those babies!” sighs Aiyi. “Twin girls. We have never had such luck in our family.” And then she yawns again.
“What were they named?” she asks. I listen carefully. I had been planning on using just the familiar “Sister” to address them both. But now I want to know how to pronounce their names.
“They have their father’s surname, Wang,” says my father. “And their given names are Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa.”
“What do the names mean?” I ask.
“Ah.” My father draws imaginary characters on the window. “One means ‘Spring Rain,’ the other ‘Spring Flower,’ ” he explains in English, “because they born in the spring, and of course rain come before flower, same order these girls are born. Your mother like a poet, don’t you think?”
I nod my head. I see Aiyi nod her head forward, too. But it falls forward and stays there. She is breathing deeply, noisily. She is asleep.
“And what does Ma’s name mean?” I whisper.
” ‘Suyuan,’ ” he says, writing more invisible characters on the glass. “The way she write it in Chinese, it mean ‘Long-Cherished Wish.’ Quite a fancy name, not so ordinary like flower name. See this first character, it mean something like ‘Forever Never Forgotten.’ But there is another way to write ‘Suyuan.’ Sound exactly the same, but the meaning is opposite.” His finger creates the brushstrokes of another character. “The first part look the same: ‘Never Forgotten.’ But the last part add to first part make the whole word mean ‘Long-Held Grudge.’ Your mother get angry with me, I tell her her name should be Grudge.”
My father is looking at me, moist-eyed. “See, I pretty clever, too, hah?”
I nod, wishing I could find some way to comfort him. “And what about my name,” I ask, “what does ‘Jing-mei’ mean?”
“Your name also special,” he says. I wonder if any name in Chinese is not something special. “‘Jing’ like excellent jing. Not just good, it’s something pure, essential, the best quality. Jing is good leftover stuff when you take impurities out of something like gold, or rice, or salt. So what is left—just pure essence. And ‘Mei,’ this is common mei, as in meimei, ‘younger sister.’ ”
I think about this. My mother’s long-cherished wish. Me, the younger sister who was supposed to be the essence of the others. I feed myself with the old grief, wondering how disappointed my mother must have been. Tiny Aiyi stirs suddenly, her head rolls and then falls back, her mouth opens as if to answer my question. She grunts in her sleep, tucking her body more closely into the chair.
“So why did she abandon those babies on the road?” I need to know, because now I feel abandoned too.
“Long time I wondered this myself,” says my father. “But then I read that letter from her daughters in Shanghai now, and I talk to Auntie Lindo, all the others. And then I knew. No shame in what she done. None.”
“What happened?”
“Your mother running away—” begins my father.
“No, tell me in Chinese,” I interrupt. “Really, I can understand.”
He begins to talk, still standing at the window, looking into the night.
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After fleeing Kweilin, your mother walked for several days trying to find a main road. Her thought was to catch a ride on a truck or wagon, to catch enough rides until she reached Chungking, where her husband was stationed.
She had sewn money and jewelry into the lining of her dress, enough, she thought, to barter rides all the way. If I am lucky, she thought, I will not have to trade the heavy gold bracelet and jade ring. These were things from her mother, your grandmother.
By the third day, she had traded nothing. The roads were filled with people, everybody running and begging for rides from passing trucks. The trucks rushed by, afraid to stop. So your mother found no rides, only the start of dysentery pains in her stomach.
Her shoulders ached from the two babies swinging from scarf slings. Blisters grew on her palms from holding two leather suitcases. And then the blisters burst and began
to bleed. After a while, she left the suitcases behind, keeping only the food and a few clothes. And later she also dropped the bags of wheat flour and rice and kept walking like this for many miles, singing songs to her little girls, until she was delirious with pain and fever.
Finally, there was not one more step left in her body. She didn’t have the strength to carry those babies any farther. She slumped to the ground. She knew she would die of her sickness, or perhaps from thirst, from starvation, or from the Japanese, who she was sure were marching right behind her.
She took the babies out of the slings and sat them on the side of the road, then lay down next to them. You babies are so good, she said, so quiet. They smiled back, reaching their chubby hands for her, wanting to be picked up again. And then she knew she could not bear to watch her babies die with her.
She saw a family with three young children in a cart going by. “Take my babies, I beg you,” she cried to them. But they stared back with empty eyes and never stopped. She saw another person pass and called out again. This time a man turned around,
and he had such a terrible expression—your mother said it looked like death itself—she shivered and looked away.
When the road grew quiet, she tore open the lining of her dress, and stuffed jewelry under the shirt of one baby and money under the other. She reached into her pocket and drew out the photos of her family, the picture of her father and mother, the picture of herself and her husband on their wedding day. And she wrote on the back of each the names of the babies and this same message: “Please care for these babies with the money and valuables provided. When it is safe to come, if you bring them to Shanghai, 9 Weichang Lu, the Li family will be glad to give you a generous reward. Li Suyuan and Wang Fuchi.”
And then she touched each baby’s cheek and told her not to cry. She would go down the road to find them some food and would be back. And without looking back, she walked down the road, stumbling and crying, thinking only of this one last hope, that her daughters would be found by a kindhearted person who would care for them. She would not allow herself to imagine anything else.
She did not remember how far she walked, which direction she went, when she fainted, or how she was found. When she awoke, she was in the back of a bouncing truck with several other sick people, all moaning. And she began to scream, thinking she was now on a journey to Buddhist hell. But the fact of an American missionary lady bent over her and smiled, talking to her in a soothing language she did not understand. And yet she could somehow understand. She had been saved for no good reason, and it was now too late to go back and save her babies.
When she arrived in Chungking, she learned her husband had died two weeks before. She told me later she laughed when the officers told her this news, she was so delirious with madness and disease. To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing.
I met her in a hospital. She was lying on a cot, hardly able to move, her dysentery had drained her so thin. I had come in for my foot, my missing toe, which was cut off by a piece of falling rubble. She was talking to herself, mumbling.
“Look at these clothes,” she said, and I saw she had on a rather unusual dress for wartime. It was silk satin, quite dirty, but there was no doubt it was a beautiful dress.
“Look at this face,” she said, and I saw her dusty face and hollow cheeks, her eyes shining back. “Do you see my foolish hope?”
“I thought I had lost everything, except these two things,” she murmured. “And I wondered which I would lose next. Clothes or hope? Hope or clothes?”
“But now, see here, look what is happening,” she said, laughing, as if all her prayers had been answered. And she was pulling hair out of her head as easily as one lifts new wheat from wet soil.
It was an old peasant woman who found them. “How could I resist?” the peasant woman later told your sisters when they were older. They were still sitting obediently near where your mother had left them, looking like little fairy queens waiting for their sedan to arrive.
The woman, Mei Ching, and her husband, Mei Han, lived in a stone cave. There were thousands of hidden caves like that in and around Kweilin so secret that the people remained hidden even after the war ended. The Meis would come out of their cave every few days and forage for food supplies left on the road, and sometimes they would see something that they both agreed was a tragedy to leave behind. So one day they took back to their cave a delicately painted set of rice bowls, another day a little footstool with a velvet cushion and two new wedding blankets. And once, it was your sisters.
They were pious people, Muslims, who believed the twin babies were a sign of double luck, and they were sure of this when, later in the evening, they discovered how valuable the babies were. She and her husband had never seen rings and bracelets like those. And while they admired the pictures, knowing the babies came from a good family, neither of them could read or write. It was not until many months later that Mei Ching found someone who could read the writing on the back. By then, she loved these baby girls like her own.
In 1952 Mei Han, the husband, died. The twins were already eight years old, and Mei Ching now decided it was time to find your sisters’ true family.
She showed the girls the picture of their mother and told them they had been born into a great family and she would take them back to see their true mother and grandparents. Mei Chang told them about the reward, but she swore she would refuse it. She loved these girls so much, she only wanted them to have what they were entitled to—a better life, a fine house, educated ways. Maybe the family would let her stay on as the girls’ amah. Yes, she was certain they would insist.
Of course, when she found the place at 9 Weichang Lu, in the old French Concession, it was something completely different. It was the site of a factory building, recently constructed, and none of the workers knew what had become of the family whose house had burned down on that spot.
Mei Ching could not have known, of course, that your mother and I, her new husband, had already returned to that same place in 1945 in hopes of finding both her family and her daughters.
Your mother and I stayed in China until 1947. We went to many different cities—back to Kweilin, to Changsha, as far south as Kunming. She was always looking out of one corner of her eye for twin babies, then little girls. Later we went to Hong Kong, and when we finally left in 1949 for the United States, I think she was even looking for them on the boat. But when we arrived, she no longer talked about them. I thought, At last, they have died in her heart.
When letters could be openly exchanged between China and the United States, she wrote immediately to old friends in Shanghai and Kweilin. I did not know she did this. Auntie Lindo told me. But of course, by then, all the street names had changed. Some people had died, others had moved away. So it took many years to find a contact. And when she did find an old schoolmate’s address and wrote asking her to look for her daughters, her friend wrote back and said this was impossible, like looking for a needle on the bottom of the ocean. How did she know her daughters were in Shanghai and not somewhere else in China? The friend, of course, did not ask, How do you know your daughters are still alive?
So her schoolmate did not look. Finding babies lost during the war was a matter of foolish imagination, and she had no time for that.
But every year, your mother wrote to different people. And this last year, I think she got a big idea in her head, to go to China and find them herself. I remember she told me, “Canning, we should go, before it is too late, before we are too old.” And I told her we were already too old, it was already too late.
I just thought she wanted to be a tourist! I didn’t know she wanted to go and look for her daughters. So when I said it was too late, that must have put a terrible thought in her head that her daughters might be dead. And I think this possibility grew bigger and bigger in her head, until it killed her.
Maybe it was your mother’s dead spirit who guided her Shanghai schoolmate to find her daughters. Because after your mother died, the schoolmate saw your sisters, by chance, while shopping for shoes at the Number One Department Store on Nanjing Dong Road. She said it was like a dream, seeing these two women who looked so much alike, moving down the stairs together. There was something about their facial expressions that reminded the schoolmate of your mother.
She quickly walked over to them and called their names, which of course, they did not recognize at first, because Mei Ching had changed their names. But your mother’s friend was so sure, she persisted. “Are you not Wang Chwun Yu and Wang Chwun Hwa?” she asked them. And then these double-image women became very excited, because they remembered the names written on the back of an old photo, a photo of a young man and woman they still honored, as their much-loved first parents, who had died and become spirit ghosts still roaming the earth looking for them.
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At the airport, I am exhausted. I could not sleep last night. Aiyi had followed me into my room at three in the morning, and she instantly fell asleep on one of the twin beds, snoring with the might of a lumberjack. I lay awake thinking about my mother’s story, realizing how much I have never known about her, grieving that my sisters and I had both lost her.
And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we’ll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father’s story and saying good-bye before I have a chance to know her better.
Aiyi smiles at me as we wait for our gate to be called. She is so old. I put one arm around her and one arm around Lili. They are the same size, it seems. And then it’s time. As we wave good-bye one more time and enter the waiting area, I get the
sense I am going from one funeral to another. In my hand I’m clutching a pair of tickets to Shanghai. In two hours we’ll be there.
The plane takes off. I close my eyes. How can I describe to them in my broken Chinese about our mother’s life? Where should I begin?
“Wake up, we’re here,” says my father. And I awake with my heart pounding in my throat. I look out the window and we’re already on the runway. It’s gray outside. And now I’m walking down the steps of the plane, onto the tarmac and toward the building. If only, I think, if only my mother had lived long enough to be the one walking toward them. I am so nervous I cannot even feel my feet. I am just moving
somehow.
Somebody shouts, “She’s arrived!” And then I see her. Her short hair. Her small body. And that same look on her face. She has the back of her hand pressed hard against her mouth. She is crying as though she had gone through a terrible ordeal and were happy it is over.
And I know it’s not my mother, yet it is the same look she had when I was five and had disappeared all afternoon, for such a long time, that she was convinced I was dead. And when I miraculously appeared, sleepy-eyed, crawling from underneath my bed, she wept and laughed, biting the back of her hand to make sure it was true. And now I see her again, two of her, waving, and in one hand there is a photo, the Polaroid I sent them. As soon as I get beyond the gate, we run toward each other,
all three of us embracing, all hesitations and expectations forgotten. “Mama, Mama,” we all murmur, as if she is among us.
My sisters look at me, proudly. “Meimei jandale,” says one sister proudly to the other. “Little Sister has grown up.” I look at their faces again and I see no trace of my mother in them. Yet they still look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go.
My sisters and I stand, arms around each other, laughing and wiping the tears from each other’s eyes. The flash of the Polaroid goes off and my father hands me the snapshot. My sisters and I watch quietly together, eager to see what develops.
The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at last, her long-cherished wish.
