The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!—it is too beautiful to eat.
Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: “In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan—a creature that became more than what was hoped for.” But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come
and what she had left behind.
Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, “This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.
Jing-Mei Woo
My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father thinks she was killed by her own thoughts.
“She had a new idea inside her head,” said my father. “But before it could come out of her mouth, the thought grew too big and burst. It must have been a very bad idea.”
The doctor said she died of a cerebral aneurysm. And her friends at the Joy Luck Club said she died just like a rabbit: quickly and with unfinished business left behind. My mother was supposed to host the next meeting of the Joy Luck Club.
The week before she died, she called me, full of pride, full of life: “Auntie Lin cooked red bean soup for Joy Luck. I’m going to cook black sesame-seed soup.”
“Don’t show off,” I said.
“It’s not showoff.” She said the two soups were almost the same, chabudwo. Or maybe she said butong, not the same thing at all. It was one of those Chinese expressions that means the better half of mixed intentions. I can never remember things I didn’t understand in the first place.
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My mother started the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club in 1949, two years before I was born. This was the year my mother and father left China with one stiff leather trunk filled only with fancy silk dresses. There was no time to pack anything else, my mother had explained to my father after they boarded the boat. Still his hands swam frantically between the slippery silks, looking for his cotton shirts and wool pants.
When they arrived in San Francisco, my father made her hide those shiny clothes. She wore the same brown-checked Chinese dress until the Refugee Welcome Society gave her two hand-me-down dresses, all too large in sizes for American women. The society was composed of a group of white-haired American missionary ladies from the First Chinese Baptist Church. And because of their gifts, my parents could not refuse their invitation to join the church. Nor could they ignore the old ladies’ practical advice to improve their English through Bible study class on Wednesday nights and, later, through choir practice on Saturday mornings. This was how my parents met the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs. My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English. Or at least, my mother recognized the numbness in these women’s faces. And she saw how quickly their eyes moved when she told them her idea for the Joy Luck Club.
Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That’s why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story. It was the story she would always tell me when she was bored, when there was nothing to do, when every bowl had been washed and the Formica table had been wiped down twice, when my father sat reading the newspaper and smoking one Pall Mall cigarette after another, a warning not to disturb him. This is when my mother would take out a box of old ski sweaters sent to us by unseen relatives from Vancouver. She would snip
the bottom of a sweater and pull out a kinky thread of yarn, anchoring it to a piece of cardboard. And as she began to roll with one sweeping rhythm, she would start her story. Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.
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“I dreamed about Kweilin before I ever saw it,” my mother began, speaking Chinese. “I dreamed of jagged peaks lining a curving river, with magic moss greening the banks. At the tops of these peaks were white mists. And if you could float down this river and eat the moss for food, you would be strong enough to climb the peak. If you slipped, you would only fall into a bed of soft moss and laugh. And once you reached the top, you would be able to see everything and feel such happiness it would be enough to never have worries in your life ever again.
“In China, everybody dreamed about Kweilin. And when I arrived, I realized how shabby my dreams were, how poor my thoughts. When I saw the hills, I laughed and shuddered at the same time. The peaks looked like giant fried fish heads trying to jump out of a vat of oil. Behind each hill, I could see shadows of another fish, and then another and another. And then the clouds would move just a little and the hills would suddenly become monstrous elephants marching slowly toward me! Can you see this? And at the root of the hill were secret caves. Inside grew hanging rock gardens in the shapes and colors of cabbage, winter melons, turnips, and onions. These were things so strange and beautiful you can’t ever imagine them.
“But I didn’t come to Kweilin to see how beautiful it was. The man who was my husband brought me and our two babies to Kweilin because he thought we would be safe. He was an officer with the Kuomintang, and after he put us down in a small room in a two-story house, he went off to the northwest, to Chungking.
“We knew the Japanese were winning, even when the newspapers said they were not.
Every day, every hour, thousands of people poured into the city, crowding the sidewalks, looking for places to live. They came from the East, West, North, and South. They were rich and poor, Shanghainese, Cantonese, northerners, and not just Chinese, but foreigners and missionaries of every religion. And there was, of course, the Kuomintang and their army officers who thought they were top level to everyone else.
“We were a city of leftovers mixed together. If it hadn’t been for the Japanese, there would have been plenty of reason for fighting to break out among these different people. Can you see it? Shanghai people with north-water peasants, bankers with barbers, rickshaw pullers with Burma refugees. Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn’t matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst. Me? Oh, I hated the American air force officers who said habba-habba sounds to make my face turn red. But the worst were the northern peasants who emptied their noses into their hands and pushed people around and gave everybody their dirty diseases.
“So you can see how quickly Kweilin lost its beauty for me. I no longer climbed the peaks to say, How lovely are these hills! I only wondered which hills the Japanese had reached. I sat in the dark corners of my house with a baby under each arm, waiting with nervous feet. When the sirens cried out to warn us of bombers, my neighbors and I jumped to our feet and scurried to the deep caves to hide like wild animals. But you can’t stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and
you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light. Outside I could hear the bombing. Boom! Boom! And then the sound of raining rocks. And inside I was no longer hungry for the cabbage or the turnips of the hanging rock garden. I could only see the dripping bowels of an ancient hill that might collapse on top of me. Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
“So when the bombing sounds grew farther away, we would come back out like newborn kittens scratching our way back to the city. And always, I would be amazed to find the hills against the burning sky had not been torn apart.
“I thought up Joy Luck on a summer night that was so hot even the moths fainted to the ground, their wings were so heavy with the damp heat. Every place was so crowded there was no room for fresh air. Unbearable smells from the sewers rose up to my second-story window and the stink had nowhere else to go but into my nose. At all hours of the night and day, I heard screaming sounds. I didn’t know if it was a peasant slitting the throat of a runaway pig or an officer beating a half-dead peasant for lying in his way on the sidewalk. I didn’t go to the window to find out. What use would it have been? And that’s when I thought I needed something to do to help me move.
“My idea was to have a gathering of four women, one for each corner of my mah jong table. I knew which women I wanted to ask. They were all young like me, with wishful faces. One was an army officer’s wife, like myself. Another was a girl with very fine manners from a rich family in Shanghai. She had escaped with only a little money. And there was a girl from Nanking who had the blackest hair I have ever seen. She came from a low-class family, but she was pretty and pleasant and had married well, to an old man who died and left her with a better life.
“Each week one of us would host a party to raise money and to raise our spirits.
The hostess had to serve special dyansyin foods to bring good fortune of all kinds—dumplings shaped like silver money ingots, long rice noodles for long life, boiled peanuts for conceiving sons, and of course, many good-luck oranges for a plentiful, sweet life.
“What fine food we treated ourselves to with our meager allowances! We didn’t notice that the dumplings were stuffed mostly with stringy squash and that the oranges were spotted with wormy holes. We ate sparingly, not as if we didn’t have enough, but to protest how we could not eat another bite, we had already bloated ourselves from earlier in the day. We knew we had luxuries few people could afford. We were the lucky ones.
“After filling our stomachs, we would then fill a bowl with money and put it where everyone could see. Then we would sit down at the mah jong table. My table was from my family and was of a very fragrant red wood, not what you call rosewood, but hong mu, which is so fine there’s no English word for it. The table had a very thick pad, so that when the mah jong pai were spilled onto the table the only sound was of ivory tiles washing against one another.
“Once we started to play, nobody could speak, except to say ‘Pung!‘ or ‘Chr!‘ when taking a tile. We had to play with seriousness and think of nothing else but adding to our happiness through winning. But after sixteen rounds, we would again feast, this time to celebrate our good fortune. And then we would talk into the night until the morning, saying stories about good times in the past and good times yet to come.
“Oh, what good stories! Stories spilling out all over the place! We almost laughed to death. A rooster that ran into the house screeching on top of dinner bowls, the same bowls that held him quietly in pieces the next day! And one about a girl who wrote love letters for two friends who loved the same man. And a silly foreign lady who fainted on a toilet when firecrackers went off next to her.
“People thought we were wrong to serve banquets every week while many people in the city were starving, eating rats and, later, the garbage that the poorest rats used to feed on. Others thought we were possessed by demons—to celebrate when even within our own families we had lost generations, had lost homes and fortunes, and were separated, husband from wife, brother from sister, daughter from mother. Hnnnh! How could we laugh, people asked.
“It’s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. How much can you wish for a favorite warm coat that hangs in the closet of a house that burned down with your mother and father inside of it? How long can you see in your mind arms and legs hanging from telephone wires and starving dogs running down the streets with half-chewed hands dangling from their jaws? What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?
“So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren’t allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.”
My mother used to end the story on a happy note, bragging about her skill at the game. “I won many times and was so lucky the others teased that I had learned the trick of a clever thief,” she said. “I won tens of thousands of yuan. But I wasn’t rich. No. By then paper money had become worthless. Even toilet paper was worth more. And that made us laugh harder, to think a thousand-yuan note wasn’t even good enough to rub on our bottoms.”
I never thought my mother’s Kweilin story was anything but a Chinese fairy tale. The endings always changed. Sometimes she said she used that worthless thousand-yuan note to buy a half-cup of rice. She turned that rice into a pot of porridge. She traded that gruel for two feet from a pig. Those two feet became six eggs, those eggs six chickens. The story always grew and grew.
And then one evening, after I had begged her to buy me a transistor radio, after she refused and I had sulked in silence for an hour, she said, “Why do you think you are missing something you never had?” And then she told me a completely different ending to the story.
“An army officer came to my house early one morning,” she said, “and told me to go quickly to my husband in Chungking. And I knew he was telling me to run away from Kweilin. I knew what happened to officers and their families when the Japanese arrived. How could I go? There were no trains leaving Kweilin. My friend from Nanking, she was so good to me. She bribed a man to steal a wheelbarrow used to haul coal. She promised to warn our other friends.
“I packed my things and my two babies into this wheelbarrow and began pushing to Chungking four days before the Japanese marched into Kweilin. On the road I heard
news of the slaughter from people running past me. It was terrible. Up to the last day, the Kuomintang insisted that Kweilin was safe, protected by the Chinese army. But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people—men, women, and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead. When I heard this news, I walked faster and faster, asking myself at each step, Were they foolish? Were they brave?
“I pushed toward Chungking, until my wheel broke. I abandoned my beautiful mah jong table of hong mu. By then I didn’t have enough feeling left in my body to cry. I tied scarves into slings and put a baby on each side of my shoulder. I carried a bag in each hand, one with clothes, the other with food. I carried these things until deep grooves grew in my hands. And I finally dropped one bag after the other when my hands began to bleed and became too slippery to hold onto anything.
“Along the way, I saw others had done the same, gradually given up hope. It was like a pathway inlaid with treasures that grew in value along the way. Bolts of fine fabric and books. Paintings of ancestors and carpenter tools. Until one could see cages of ducklings now quiet with thirst and, later still, silver urns lying in the road, where people had been too tired to carry them for any kind of future hope. By the time I arrived in Chungking I had lost everything except for three fancy silk dresses which I wore one on top of the other.”
“What do you mean by ‘everything’?” I gasped at the end. I was stunned to realize the story had been true all along. “What happened to the babies?”
She didn’t even pause to think. She simply said in a way that made it clear there was no more to the story: “Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.”
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When I arrive at the Hsus’ house, where the Joy Luck Club is meeting tonight, the first person I see is my father. “There she is! Never on time!” he announces. And it’s true. Everybody’s already here, seven family friends in their sixties and seventies. They look up and laugh at me, always tardy, a child still at thirty-six.
I’m shaking, trying to hold something inside. The last time I saw them, at the funeral, I had broken down and cried big gulping sobs. They must wonder now how someone like me can take my mother’s place. A friend once told me that my mother and I were alike, that we had the same wispy hand gestures, the same girlish laugh and sideways look. When I shyly told my mother this, she seemed insulted and said, “You don’t even know little percent of me! How can you be me?” And she’s right. How can I be my mother at Joy Luck?
“Auntie, Uncle,” I say repeatedly, nodding to each person there. I have always called these old family friends Auntie and Uncle. And then I walk over and stand next to my father.
He’s looking at the Jongs’ pictures from their recent China trip. “Look at that,” he says politely, pointing to a photo of the Jongs’ tour group standing on wide slab steps. There is nothing in this picture that shows it was taken in China rather than San Francisco, or any other city for that matter. But my father doesn’t seem to be looking at the picture anyway. It’s as though everything were the same to him, nothing stands out. He has always been politely indifferent. But what’s the Chinese word that
means indifferent because you can’t see any differences? That’s how troubled I think he is by my mother’s death.
“Will you look at that,” he says, pointing to another nondescript picture.
The Hsus’ house feels heavy with greasy odors. Too many Chinese meals cooked in a too small kitchen, too many once fragrant smells compressed onto a thin layer of invisible grease. I remember how my mother used to go into other people’s houses and restaurants and wrinkle her nose, then whisper very loudly: “I can see and feel the stickiness with my nose.”
I have not been to the Hsus’ house in many years, but the living room is exactly the same as I remember it. When Auntie An-mei and Uncle George moved to the Sunset district from Chinatown twenty-five years ago, they bought new furniture. It’s all there, still looking mostly new under yellowed plastic. The same turquoise couch shaped in a semicircle of nubby tweed. The colonial end tables made out of heavy maple. A lamp of fake cracked porcelain. Only the scroll-length calendar, free from the Bank of Canton, changes every year.
I remember this stuff, because when we were children, Auntie An-mei didn’t let us touch any of her new furniture except through the clear plastic coverings. On Joy Luck nights, my parents brought me to the Hsus’. Since I was the guest, I had to take care of all the younger children, so many children it seemed as if there were always one baby who was crying from having bumped its head on a table leg.
“You are responsible,” said my mother, which meant I was in trouble if anything was spilled, burned, lost, broken, or dirty. I was responsible, no matter who did it. She and Auntie An-mei were dressed up in funny Chinese dresses with stiff stand-up collars and blooming branches of embroidered silk sewn over their breasts. These clothes were too fancy for real Chinese people, I thought, and too strange for American parties. In those days, before my mother told me her Kweilin story, I imagined Joy Luck was a shameful Chinese custom, like the secret gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or the tom-tom dances of TV Indians preparing for war.
But tonight, there’s no mystery. The Joy Luck aunties are all wearing slacks, bright print blouses, and different versions of sturdy walking shoes. We are all seated around the dining room table under a lamp that looks like a Spanish candelabra. Uncle George puts on his bifocals and starts the meeting by reading the minutes:
“Our capital account is $24,825, or about $6,206 a couple, $3,103 per person. We sold Subaru for a loss at six and three-quarters. We bought a hundred shares of Smith International at seven. Our thanks to Lindo and Tin Jong for the goodies. The red bean soup was especially delicious. The March meeting had to be canceled until further notice. We were sorry to have to bid a fond farewell to our dear friend Suyuan and extended our sympathy to the Canning Woo family. Respectfully submitted, George Hsu, president and secretary.”
That’s it. I keep thinking the others will start talking about my mother, the wonderful friendship they shared, and why I am here in her spirit, to be the fourth corner and carry on the idea my mother came up with on a hot day in Kweilin.
But everybody just nods to approve the minutes. Even my father’s head bobs up and down routinely. And it seems to me my mother’s life has been shelved for new business. Auntie An-mei heaves herself up from the table and moves slowly to the kitchen to prepare the food. And Auntie Lin, my mother’s best friend, moves to the turquoise sofa, crosses her arms, and watches the men still seated at the table. Auntie Ying,
who seems to shrink even more every time I see her, reaches into her knitting bag and pulls out the start of a tiny blue sweater.
The Joy Luck uncles begin to talk about stocks they are interested in buying. Uncle Jack, who is Auntie Ying’s younger brother, is very keen on a company that mines gold in Canada.
“It’s a great hedge on inflation,” he says with authority. He speaks the best English, almost accentless. I think my mother’s English was the worst, but she always thought her Chinese was the best. She spoke Mandarin slightly blurred with a Shanghai dialect.
“Weren’t we going to play mah jong tonight?” I whisper loudly to Auntie Ying, who’s slightly deaf.
“Later,” she says, “after midnight.”
“Ladies, are you at this meeting or not?” says Uncle George. After everybody votes unanimously for the Canada gold stock, I go into the kitchen to ask Auntie An-mei why the Joy Luck Club started investing in stocks.
“We used to play mah jong, winner take all. But the same people were always winning, the same people always losing,” she says. She is stuffing wonton, one chopstick jab of gingery meat dabbed onto a thin skin and then a single fluid turn with her hand that seals the skin into the shape of a tiny nurse’s cap. “You can’t have luck when someone else has skill. So long time ago, we decided to invest in the stock market. There’s no skill in that. Even your mother agreed.”
Auntie An-mei takes count of the tray in front of her. She’s already made five rows of eight wonton each. “Forty wonton, eight people, ten each, five row more,” she says aloud to herself, and then continues stuffing. “We got smart. Now we can all win and lose equally. We can have stock market luck. And we can play mah jong for fun, just for a few dollars, winner take all. Losers take home leftovers! So everyone can have some joy. Smart-hanh?”
I watch Auntie An-mei make more wonton. She has quick, expert fingers. She doesn’t have to think about what she is doing. That’s what my mother used to complain about, that Auntie An-mei never thought about what she was doing.
“She’s not stupid,” said my mother on one occasion, “but she has no spine. Last week, I had a good idea for her. I said to her, Let’s go to the consulate and ask for papers for your brother. And she almost wanted to drop her things and go right then. But later she talked to someone. Who knows who? And that person told her she can get her brother in bad trouble in China. That person said FBI will put her on a list and give her trouble in the U.S. the rest of her life. That person said, You ask for a house loan and they say no loan, because your brother is a communist. I said, You already have a house! But still she was scared.
“Aunti An-mei runs this way and that,” said my mother, “and she doesn’t know why.” As I watch Auntie An-mei, I see a short bent woman in her seventies, with a heavy bosom and thin, shapeless legs. She has the flattened soft fingertips of an old woman. I wonder what Auntie An-mei did to inspire a lifelong stream of criticism from my mother. Then again, it seemed my mother was always displeased with all her friends, with me, and even with my father. Something was always missing. Something always needed improving. Something was not in balance. This one or that had too much of one
element, not enough of another.
The elements were from my mother’s own version of organic chemistry. Each person is made of five elements, she told me.
Too much fire and you had a bad temper. That was like my father, whom my mother always criticized for his cigarette habit and who always shouted back that she should keep her thoughts to herself. I think he now feels guilty that he didn’t let my mother speak her mind.
Too little wood and you bent too quickly to listen to other people’s ideas, unable to stand on your own. This was like my Auntie An-mei.
Too much water and you flowed in too many directions, like myself, for having started half a degree in biology, then half a degree in art, and then finishing neither when I went off to work for a small ad agency as a secretary, later becoming a copywriter.
I used to dismiss her criticisms as just more of her Chinese superstitions, beliefs that conveniently fit the circumstances. In my twenties, while taking Introduction to Psychology, I tried to tell her why she shouldn’t criticize so much, why it didn’t lead to a healthy learning environment.
“There’s a school of thought,” I said, “that parents shouldn’t criticize children. They should encourage instead. You know, people rise to other people’s expectations. And when you criticize, it just means you’re expecting failure.”
“That’s the trouble,” my mother said. “You never rise. Lazy to get up. Lazy to rise to expectations.”
“Time to eat,” Auntie An-mei happily announces, bringing out a steaming pot of the wonton she was just wrapping. There are piles of food on the table, served buffet style, just like at the Kweilin feasts. My father is digging into the chow mein, which still sits in an oversize aluminum pan surrounded by little plastic packets of soy sauce. Auntie An-mei must have bought this on Clement Street. The wonton soup smells wonderful with delicate sprigs of cilantro floating on top. I’m drawn first to a large platter of chaswei, sweet barbecued pork cut into coin-sized slices, and then to a whole assortment of what I’ve always called finger goodies—thin-skinned pastries filled with chopped pork, beef, shrimp, and unknown stuffings that my mother used to describe as “nutritious things.”
Eating is not a gracious event here. It’s as though everybody had been starving. They push large forkfuls into their mouths, jab at more pieces of pork, one right after the other. They are not like the ladies of Kweilin, who I always imagined savored their food with a certain detached delicacy.
And then, almost as quickly as they started, the men get up and leave the table. As if on cue, the women peck at last morsels and then carry plates and bowls to the kitchen and dump them in the sink. The women take turns washing their hands, scrubbing them vigorously. Who started this ritual? I too put my plate in the sink and wash my hands. The women are talking about the Jongs’ China trip, then they move toward a room in the back of the apartment. We pass another room, what used to be the bedroom shared by the four Hsu sons. The bunk beds with their scuffed, splintery ladders are still there. The Joy Luck uncles are already seated at the card table. Uncle George is dealing out cards, fast, as though he learned this technique in a casino. My father is passing out Pall Mall cigarettes, with one already dangling from his lips.
And then we get to the room in the back, which was once shared by the three Hsu girls. We were all childhood friends. And now they’ve all grown and married and I’m
here to play in their room again. Except for the smell of camphor, it feels the same—as if Rose, Ruth, and Janice might soon walk in with their hair rolled up in big orange-juice cans and plop down on their identical narrow beds. The white chenille bedspreads are so worn they are almost translucent. Rose and I used to pluck the nubs out while talking about our boy problems. Everything is the same, except now a mahogany-colored mah jong table sits in the center. And next to it is a floor lamp, a long black pole with three oval spotlights attached like the broad leaves of a rubber plant.
Nobody says to me, “Sit here, this is where your mother used to sit.” But I can tell even before everyone sits down. The chair closest to the door has an emptiness to it. But the feeling doesn’t really have to do with the chair. It’s her place on the table. Without having anyone tell me, I know her corner on the table was the East.
The East is where things begin, my mother once told me, the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from.
Auntie An-mei, who is sitting on my left, spills the tiles onto the green felt tabletop and then says to me, “Now we wash tiles.” We swirl them with our hands in a circular motion. They make a cool swishing sound as they bump into one another. “Do you win like your mother?” asks Auntie Lin across from me. She is not smiling.
“I only played a little in college with some Jewish friends.”
“Annh! Jewish mah jong,” she says in disgusted tones. “Not the same thing.” This is what my mother used to say, although she could never explain exactly why.
“Maybe I shouldn’t play tonight. I’ll just watch,” I offer.
Auntie Lin looks exasperated, as though I were a simple child: “How can we play with just three people? Like a table with three legs, no balance. When Auntie Ying’s husband died, she asked her brother to join. Your father asked you. So it’s decided.” “What’s the difference between Jewish and Chinese mah jong?” I once asked my mother.
I couldn’t tell by her answer if the games were different or just her attitude toward Chinese and Jewish people.
“Entirely different kind of playing,” she said in her English explanation voice. “Jewish mah jong, they watch only for their own tile, play only with their eyes.” Then she switched to Chinese: “Chinese mah jong, you must play using your head, very tricky. You must watch what everybody else throws away and keep that in your head as well. And if nobody plays well, then the game becomes like Jewish mah jong.
Why play? There’s no strategy. You’re just watching people make mistakes.”
These kinds of explanations made me feel my mother and I spoke two different languages, which we did. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese.
“So what’s the difference between Chinese and Jewish mah jong?” I ask Auntie Lin. “Aii-ya,” she exclaims in a mock scolding voice. “Your mother did not teach you
anything?”
Auntie Ying pats my hand. “You a smart girl. You watch us, do the same. Help us stack the tiles and make four walls.”
I follow Auntie Ying, but mostly I watch Auntie Lin. She is the fastest, which means I can almost keep up with the others by watching what she does first. Auntie Ying throws the dice and I’m told that Auntie Lin has become the East wind. I’ve become the North wind, the last hand to play. Auntie Ying is the South and Auntie An-mei is the West. And then we start taking tiles, throwing the dice, counting back on the wall to the right number of spots where our chosen tiles lie. I rearrange my tiles,
sequences of bamboo and balls, doubles of colored number tiles, odd tiles that do not fit anywhere.
“Your mother was the best, like a pro,” says Auntie An-mei while slowly sorting her tiles, considering each piece carefully.
Now we begin to play, looking at our hands, casting tiles, picking up others at an easy, comfortable pace. The Joy Luck aunties begin to make small talk, not really listening to each other. They speak in their special language, half in broken English, half in their own Chinese dialect. Auntie Ying mentions she bought yarn at half price, somewhere out in the avenues. Auntie An-mei brags about a sweater she made for her daughter Ruth’s new baby. “She thought it was store-bought,” she says proudly.
Auntie Lin explains how mad she got at a store clerk who refused to let her return a skirt with a broken zipper. “I was chiszle,” she says, still fuming, “mad to death.” “But Lindo, you are still with us. You didn’t die,” teases Auntie Ying, and then as she laughs Auntie Lin says ‘Pung!‘ and ‘Mah jong!‘ and then spreads her tiles out, laughing back at Auntie Ying while counting up her points. We start washing tiles
again and it grows quiet. I’m getting bored and sleepy.
“Oh, I have a story,” says Auntie Ying loudly, startling everybody. Auntie Ying has always been the weird auntie, someone lost in her own world. My mother used to say, “Auntie Ying is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.”
“Police arrested Mrs. Emerson’s son last weekend,” Auntie Ying says in a way that sounds as if she were proud to be the first with this big news. “Mrs. Chan told me at church. Too many TV set found in his car.”
Auntie Lin quickly says, “Aii-ya, Mrs. Emerson good lady,” meaning Mrs. Emerson didn’t deserve such a terrible son. But now I see this is also said for the benefit of Auntie An-mei, whose own youngest son was arrested two years ago for selling stolen car stereos. Auntie An-mei is rubbing her tile carefully before discarding it. She looks pained.
“Everybody has TVs in China now,” says Auntie Lin, changing the subject. “Our family there all has TV sets—not just black-and-white, but color and remote! They have everything. So when we asked them what we should buy them, they said nothing, it was enough that we would come to visit them. But we bought them different things anyway, VCR and Sony Walkman for the kids. They said, No, don’t give it to us, but I think they liked it.”
Poor Auntie An-mei rubs her tiles ever harder. I remember my mother telling me about the Hsus’ trip to China three years ago. Auntie An-mei had saved two thousand dollars, all to spend on her brother’s family. She had shown my mother the insides of her heavy suitcases. One was crammed with See’s Nuts & Chews, M & M’s, candy-coated cashews, instant hot chocolate with miniature marshmallows. My mother told me the other bag contained the most ridiculous clothes, all new: bright California-style beachwear, baseball caps, cotton pants with elastic waists, bomber jackets, Stanford sweatshirts, crew socks.
My mother had told her, “Who wants those useless things? They just want money.” But Auntie An-mei said her brother was so poor and they were so rich by comparison. So she ignored my mother’s advice and took the heavy bags and their two thousand dollars to China. And when their China tour finally arrived in Hangzhou, the whole family from Ningbo was there to meet them. It wasn’t just Auntie An-mei’s little brother, but also his wife’s stepbrothers and stepsisters, and a distant cousin, and
that cousin’s husband and that husband’s uncle. They had all brought their mothers-in-law and children, and even their village friends who were not lucky enough to have overseas Chinese relatives to show off.
As my mother told it, “Auntie An-mei had cried before she left for China, thinking she would make her brother very rich and happy by communist standards. But when she got home, she cried to me that everyone had a palm out and she was the only one who left with an empty hand.”
My mother confirmed her suspicions. Nobody wanted the sweatshirts, those useless clothes. The M & M’s were thrown in the air, gone. And when the suitcases were emptied, the relatives asked what else the Hsus had brought.
Auntie An-mei and Uncle George were shaken down, not just for two thousand dollars’ worth of TVs and refrigerators but also for a night’s lodging for twenty-six people in the Overlooking the Lake Hotel, for three banquet tables at a restaurant that catered to rich foreigners, for three special gifts for each relative, and finally, for a loan of five thousand yuan in foreign exchange to a cousin’s so-called uncle who wanted to buy a motorcycle but who later disappeared for good along with the money. When the train pulled out of Hangzhou the next day, the Hsus found themselves depleted of some nine thousand dollars’ worth of goodwill. Months later, after an inspiring Christmastime service at the First Chinese Baptist Church, Auntie An-mei tried to recoup her loss by saying it truly was more blessed to give than to receive, and my mother agreed, her longtime friend had blessings for at least several lifetimes. Listening now to Auntie Lin bragging about the virtues of her family in China,
I realize that Auntie Lin is oblivious to Auntie An-mei’s pain. Is Auntie Lin being mean, or is it that my mother never told anybody but me the shameful story of Auntie An-mei’s greedy family?
“So, Jing-mei, you go to school now?” says Auntie Lin.
“Her name is June. They all go by their American names,” says Auntie Ying. “That’s okay,” I say, and I really mean it. In fact, it’s even becoming fashionable
for American-born Chinese to use their Chinese names.
“I’m not in school anymore, though,” I say. “That was more than ten years ago.” Auntie Lin’s eyebrows arch. “Maybe I’m thinking of someone else daughter,” she says, but I know right away she’s lying. I know my mother probably told her I was going back to school to finish my degree, because somewhere back, maybe just six months ago, we were again having this argument about my being a failure, a “college drop-off,”
about my going back to finish.
Once again I had told my mother what she wanted to hear: “You’re right. I’ll look into it.”
I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn’t really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once again: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.
Auntie Lin and my mother were both best friends and arch enemies who spent a lifetime comparing their children. I was one month older than Waverly Jong, Auntie Lin’s prized daughter. From the time we were babies, our mothers compared the creases in our belly buttons, how shapely our earlobes were, how fast we healed when we scraped our knees,
how thick and dark our hair, how many shoes we wore out in one year, and later, how smart Waverly was at playing chess, how many trophies she had won last month, how many newspapers had printed her name, how many cities she had visited.
I know my mother resented listening to Auntie Lin talk about Waverly when she had nothing to come back with. At first my mother tried to cultivate some hidden genius in me. She did housework for an old retired piano teacher down the hall who gave me lessons and free use of a piano to practice on in exchange. When I failed to become a concert pianist, or even an accompanist for the church youth choir, she finally explained that I was late-blooming, like Einstein, who everyone thought was retarded until he discovered a bomb.
Now it is Auntie Ying who wins this hand of mah jong, so we count points and begin again.
“Did you know Lena move to Woodside?” asks Auntie Ying with obvious pride, looking down at the tiles, talking to no one in particular. She quickly erases her smile and tries for some modesty. “Of course, it’s not best house in neighborhood, not million-dollar house, not yet. But it’s good investment. Better than paying rent. Better than somebody putting you under their thumb to rub you out.”
So now I know Auntie Ying’s daughter, Lena, told her about my being evicted from my apartment on lower Russian Hill. Even though Lena and I are still friends, we have grown naturally cautious about telling each other too much. Still, what little we say to one another often comes back in another guise. It’s the same old game, everybody talking in circles.
“It’s getting late,” I say after we finish the round. I start to stand up, but Auntie Lin pushes me back down into the chair.
“Stay, stay. We talk awhile, get to know you again,” she says. “Been a long time.”
I know this is a polite gesture on the Joy Luck aunties’ part—a protest when actually they are just as eager to see me go as I am to leave. “No, I really must go now, thank you, thank you,” I say, glad I remembered how the pretense goes.
“But you must stay! We have something important to tell you, from your mother,” Auntie Ying blurts out in her too-loud voice. The others look uncomfortable, as if this were not how they intended to break some sort of bad news to me.
I sit down. Auntie An-mei leaves the room quickly and returns with a bowl of peanuts, then quietly shuts the door. Everybody is quiet, as if nobody knew where to begin. It is Auntie Ying who finally speaks. “I think your mother die with an important thought on her mind,” she says in halting English. And then she begins to speak in
Chinese, calmly, softly.
“Your mother was a very strong woman, a good mother. She loved you very much, more than her own life. And that’s why you can understand why a mother like this could never forget her other daughters. She knew they were alive, and before she died she wanted to find her daughters in China.”
The babies in Kweilin, I think. I was not those babies. The babies in a sling on her shoulder. Her other daughters. And now I feel as if I were in Kweilin amidst the bombing and I can see these babies lying on the side of the road, their red thumbs popped out of their mouths, screaming to be reclaimed. Somebody took them away. They’re safe. And now my mother’s left me forever, gone back to China to get these babies. I can barely hear Auntie Ying’s voice.
“She had searched for years, written letters back and forth,” says Auntie Ying. “And last year she got an address. She was going to tell your father soon. Aii-ya, what a shame. A lifetime of waiting.”
Auntie An-mei interrupts with an excited voice: “So your aunties and I, we wrote to this address,” she says. “We say that a certain party, your mother, want to meet another certain party. And this party write back to us. They are your sisters, Jing-mei.”
My sisters, I repeat to myself, saying these two words together for the first time. Auntie An-mei is holding a sheet of paper as thin as wrapping tissue. In perfectly straight vertical rows I see Chinese characters written in blue fountain-pen ink.
A word is smudged. A tear? I take the letter with shaking hands, marveling at how smart my sisters must be to be able to read and write Chinese.
The aunties are all smiling at me, as though I had been a dying person who has now miraculously recovered. Auntie Ying is handing me another envelope. Inside is a check made out to June Woo for $1,200. I can’t believe it.
“My sisters are sending me money?” I ask.
“No, no,” says Auntie Lin with her mock exasperated voice. “Every year we save our mah jong winnings for big banquet at fancy restaurant. Most times your mother win, so most is her money. We add just a little, so you can go Hong Kong, take a train to Shanghai, see your sisters. Besides, we all getting too rich, too fat.” she pats her stomach for proof.
“See my sisters,” I say numbly. I am awed by this prospect, trying to imagine what I would see. And I am embarrassed by the end-of-the-year-banquet lie my aunties have told to mask their generosity. I am crying now, sobbing and laughing at the same time, seeing but not understanding this loyalty to my mother.
“You must see your sisters and tell them about your mother’s death,” says Auntie Ying. “But most important, you must tell them about her life. The mother they did not know, they must now know.”
“See my sisters, tell them about my mother,” I say, nodding. “What will I say? What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. She was my mother.” The aunties are looking at me as if I had become crazy right before their eyes. “Not know your own mother?” cries Auntie An-mei with disbelief. “How can you say?
Your mother is in your bones!”
“Tell them stories of your family here. How she became success,” offers Auntie Lin.
“Tell them stories she told you, lessons she taught, what you know about her mind that has become your mind,” says Auntie Ying. “You mother very smart lady.”
I hear more choruses of “Tell them, tell them” as each Auntie frantically tries to think what should be passed on.
“Her kindness.” “Her smartness.”
“Her dutiful nature to family.”
“Her hopes, things that matter to her.” “The excellent dishes she cooked.”
“Imagine, a daughter not knowing her own mother!”
And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds “joy luck” is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.
“I will tell them everything,” I say simply, and the aunties look at me with doubtful faces.
“I will remember everything about her and tell them,” I say more firmly. And gradually, one by one, they smile and pat my hand. They still look troubled, as if something were out of balance. But they also look hopeful that what I say will become true. What more can they ask? What more can I promise?
They go back to eating their soft boiled peanuts, saying stories among themselves. They are young girls again, dreaming of good times in the past and good times yet to come. A brother from Ningbo who makes his sister cry with joy when he returns nine thousand dollars plus interest. A youngest son whose stereo and TV repair business is so good he sends leftovers to China. A daughter whose babies are able to swim like fish in a fancy pool in Woodside. Such good stories. The best. They are the lucky ones.
And I am sitting at my mother’s place at the mah jong table, on the East, where things begin.
An-Mei Hsu
When I was a young girl in China, my grandmother told me my mother was a ghost. This did not mean my mother was dead. In those days, a ghost was anything we were forbidden to talk about. So I knew Popo wanted me to forget my mother on purpose, and this is how I came to remember nothing of her. The life that I knew began in the large house in Ningpo with the cold hallways and tall stairs. This was my uncle and auntie’s family house, where I lived with Popo and my little brother.
But I often heard stories of a ghost who tried to take children away, especially strong-willed little girls who were disobedient. Many times Popo said aloud to all who could hear that my brother and I had fallen out of the bowels of a stupid goose, two eggs that nobody wanted, not even good enough to crack over rice porridge. She said this so that the ghosts would not steal us away. So you see, to Popo we were also very precious.
All my life, Popo scared me. I became even more scared when she grew sick. This was in 1923, when I was nine years old. Popo had swollen up like an overripe squash, so full her flesh had gone soft and rotten with a bad smell. She would call me into her room with the terrible stink and tell me stories. “An-mei,” she said, calling me by my school name. “Listen carefully.” She told me stories I could not understand. One was about a greedy girl whose belly grew fatter and fatter. This girl poisoned herself after refusing to say whose child she carried. When the monks cut open her
body, they found inside a large white winter melon.
“If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry,” said Popo. Another time, Popo told me about a girl who refused to listen to her elders. One day this bad girl shook her head so vigorously to refuse her auntie’s simple request that a little white ball fell from her ear and out poured all her brains, as clear
as chicken broth.
“Your own thoughts are so busy swimming inside that everything else gets pushed out,” Popo told me.
Right before Popo became so sick she could no longer speak, she pulled me close and talked to me about my mother. “Never say her name,” she warned. “To say her name is to spit on your father’s grave.”
The only father I knew was a big painting that hung in the main hall. He was a large, unsmiling man, unhappy to be so still on the wall. His restless eyes followed me around the house. Even from my room at the end of the hall, I could see my father’s watching eyes. Popo said he watched me for any signs of disrespect. So sometimes, when I had thrown pebbles at other children at school, or had lost a book through carelessness, I would quickly walk by my father with a know-nothing look and hide in a corner of my room where he could not see my face.
I felt our house was so unhappy, but my little brother did not seem to think so. He rode his bicycle through the courtyard, chasing chickens and other children, laughing over which ones shrieked the loudest. Inside the quiet house, he jumped up and down on Uncle and Auntie’s best feather sofas when they were away visiting village friends.
But even my brother’s happiness went away. One hot summer day when Popo was already very sick, we stood outside watching a village funeral procession marching by our courtyard. Just as it passed our gate, the heavy framed picture of the dead man toppled from its stand and fell to the dusty ground. An old lady screamed and fainted. My brother laughed and Auntie slapped him.
My auntie, who had a very bad temper with children, told him he had no shou, no respect for ancestors or family, just like our mother. Auntie had a tongue like hungry scissors eating silk cloth. So when my brother gave her a sour look, Auntie said our mother was so thoughtless she had fled north in a big hurry, without taking the dowry furniture from her marriage to my father, without bringing her ten pairs of silver chopsticks, without paying respect to my father’s grave and those of our ancestors. When my brother accused Auntie of frightening our mother away, Auntie shouted that our mother had married a man named Wu Tsing who already had a wife, two concubines, and other bad children.
And when my brother shouted that Auntie was a talking chicken without a head, she pushed my brother against the gate and spat on his face.
“You throw strong words at me, but you are nothing,” Auntie said. “You are the son of a mother who has so little respect she has become ni, a traitor to our ancestors. She is so beneath others that even the devil must look down to see her.”
That is when I began to understand the stories Popo taught me, the lessons I had to learn for my mother. “When you lose your face, An-mei,” Popo often said, “it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.”
Now I could imagine my mother, a thoughtless woman who laughed and shook her head, who dipped her chopsticks many times to eat another piece of sweet fruit, happy to be free of Popo, her unhappy husband on the wall, and her two disobedient children. I felt unlucky that she was my mother and unlucky that she had left us. These were the thoughts I had while hiding in the corner of my room where my father could not watch me.
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I was sitting at the top of the stairs when she arrived. I knew it was my mother even though I had seen her in all my memory. She stood just inside the doorway so that her face became a dark shadow. She was much taller than my auntie, almost as tall as my uncle. She looked strange, too, like the missionary ladies at our school who were insolent and bossy in their too-tall shoes, foreign clothes, and short hair. My auntie quickly looked away and did not call her by name or offer her tea. An old servant hurried away with a displeased look. I tried to keep very still, but my heart felt like crickets scratching to get out of a cage. My mother must have heard, because she looked up. And when she did, I saw my own face looking back at me. Eyes
that stayed wide open and saw too much.
In Popo’s room my auntie protested, “Too late, too late,” as my mother approached the bed. But this did not stop my mother.
“Come back, stay here,” murmured my mother to Popo. “Nuyer is here. Your daughter is back.” Popo’s eyes were open, but now her mind ran in many different directions, not staying long enough to see anything. If Popo’s mind had been clear she would have raised her two arms and flung my mother out of the room.
I watched my mother, seeing her for the first time, this pretty woman with her white skin and oval face, not too round like Auntie’s or sharp like Popo’s. I saw that she had a long white neck, just like the goose that had laid me. That she seemed to float back and forth like a ghost, dipping cool cloths to lay on Popo’s bloated face. As she peered into Popo’s eyes, she clucked soft worried sounds. I watched her carefully, yet it was her voice that confused me, a familiar sound from a forgotten dream.
When I returned to my room later that afternoon, she was there, standing tall. And because I remember Popo told me not to speak her name, I stood there, mute. She took my hand and led me to the settee. And then she also sat down as though we had done this every day.
My mother began to loosen my braids and brush my hair with long sweeping strokes. “An-mei, you have been a good daughter?” she asked, smiling a secret look.
I looked at her with my know-nothing face, but inside I was trembling. I was the girl whose belly held a colorless winter melon.
“An-mei, you know who I am,” she said with a small scold in her voice. This time I did not look for fear my head would burst and my brains would dribble out of my ears.
She stopped brushing. And then I could feel her long smooth fingers rubbing and searching under my chin, finding the spot that was my smooth-neck scar. As she rubbed this spot, I became very still. It was as though she were rubbing the memory back into my skin. And then her hand dropped and she began to cry, wrapping her hands around her own neck. She cried with a wailing voice that was so sad. And then I remembered the dream with my mother’s voice.
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I was four years old. My chin was just above the dinner table, and I could see my baby brother sitting on Popo’s lap, crying with an angry face. I could hear voices praising a steaming dark soup brought to the table, voices murmuring politely, “Ching! Ching!“—Please, eat!
And then the talking stopped. My uncle rose from his chair. Everyone turned to look at the door, where a tall woman stood. I was the only one who spoke.
“Ma,” I had cried, rushing off my chair, but my auntie slapped my face and pushed me back down. Now everyone was standing up and shouting, and I heard my mother’s voice crying, “An-mei! An-mei!” Above this noise, Popo’s shrill voice spoke.
“Who is this ghost? Not an honored widow. Just a numberthree concubine. If you take your daughter, she will become like you. No face. Never able to lift up her head.” Still my mother shouted for me to come. I remember her voice so clearly now. An-mei!
An-mei! I could see my mother’s face across the table. Between us stood the soup pot on its heavy chimney-pot stand—rocking slowly, back and forth. And then with one shout this dark boiling soup spilled forward and fell all over my neck. It was as though everyone’s anger were pouring all over me.
This was the kind of pain so terrible that a little child should never remember it. But it is still in my skin’s memory. I cried out loud only a little, because soon my flesh began to burst inside and out and cut off my breathing air.
I could not speak because of this terrible choking feeling. I could not see because of all the tears that poured out to wash away the pain. But I could hear my mother’s crying voice. Popo and Auntie were shouting. And then my mother’s voice went away.
Later that night Popo’s voice came to me.
“An-mei, listen carefully.” Her voice had the same scolding tone she used when I ran up and down the hallway. “An-mei, we have made your dying clothes and shoes for you. They are all white cotton.”
I listened, scared.
“An-mei,” she murmured, now more gently. “Your dying clothes are very plain. They are not fancy, because you are still a child. If you die, you will have a short life and you will still owe your family a debt. Your funeral will be very small. Our mourning time for you will be very short.”
And then Popo said something that was worse than the burning on my neck. “Even your mother has used up her tears and left. If you do not get well soon,
she will forget you.”
Popo was very smart. I came hurrying back from the other world to find my mother. Every night I cried so that both my eyes and my neck burned. Next to my bed sat
Popo. She would pour cool water over my neck from the hollowed cup of a large grapefruit. She would pour and pour until my breathing became soft and I could fall asleep. In the morning, Popo would use her sharp fingernails like tweezers and peel off the dead membranes.
In two years’ time, my scar became pale and shiny and I had no memory of my mother. That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.
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I worshipped this mother from my dream. But the woman standing by Popo’s bed was not the mother of my memory. Yet I came to love this mother as well. Not because she came to me and begged me to forgive her. She did not. She did not need to explain that Popo chased her out of the house when I was dying. This I knew. She did not need to tell me she married Wu Tsing to exchange one unhappiness for another. I knew this as well.
Here is how I came to love my mother. How I saw in her my own true nature. What was beneath my skin. Inside my bones.
It was late at night when I went to Popo’s room. My auntie said it was Popo’s dying time and I must show respect. I put on a clean dress and stood between my auntie and uncle at the foot of Popo’s bed. I cried a little, not too loud.
I saw my mother on the other side of the room. Quiet and sad. She was cooking a soup, pouring herbs and medicines into the steaming pot. And then I saw her pull up her sleeve and pull out a sharp knife. She put this knife on the softest part of her arm. I tried to close my eyes, but could not.
And then my mother cut a piece of meat from her arm. Tears poured from her face and blood spilled to the floor.
My mother took her flesh and put it in the soup. She cooked magic in the ancient tradition to try to cure her mother this one last time. She opened Popo’s mouth, already too tight from trying to keep her spirit in. She fed her this soup, but that night Popo flew away with her illness.
Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.
Lindo Jong
I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents’ promise. This means nothing to you, because to you promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, if she has a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on TV, she no longer has a promise.
I watched this same movie when you did not come. The American soldier promises to come back and marry the girl. She is crying with a genuine feeling and he says, “Promise! Promise! Honey-sweetheart, my promise is as good as gold.” Then he pushes her onto the bed. But he doesn’t come back. His gold is like yours, it is only fourteen carats.
To Chinese people, fourteen carats isn’t real gold. Feel my bracelets. They must be twenty-four carats, pure inside and out.
It’s too late to change you, but I’m telling you this because I worry about your baby. I worry that someday she will say, “Thank you, Grandmother, for the gold bracelet. I’ll never forget you.” But later, she will forget her promise. She will forget she had a grandmother.
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In this same war movie, the American soldier goes home and he falls to his knees asking another girl to marry him. And the girl’s eyes run back and forth, so shy, as if she had never considered this before. And suddenly!—her eyes look straight down and she knows now she loves him, so much she wants to cry. “Yes,” she says at last, and they marry forever.
This was not my case. Instead, the village matchmaker came to my family when I was just two years old. No, nobody told me this, I remember it all. It was summertime, very hot and dusty outside, and I could hear cicadas crying in the yard. We were under some trees in our orchard. The servants and my brothers were picking pears high above me. And I was sitting in my mother’s hot sticky arms. I was waving my hand this way and that, because in front of me floated a small bird with horns and colorful paper-thin wings. And then the paper bird flew away and in front of me were two ladies. I remember them because one lady made watery “shrrhh, shrrhh” sounds. When I was older, I came to recognize this as a Peking accent, which sounds quite strange to Taiyuan people’s ears.
The two ladies were looking at my face without talking. The lady with the watery voice had a painted face that was melting. The other lady had the dry face of an old tree trunk. She looked first at me, then at the painted lady.
Of course, now I know the tree-trunk lady was the old village matchmaker, and the other was Huang Taitai, the mother of the boy I would be forced to marry. No, it’s not true what some Chinese say about girl babies being worthless. It depends on what kind of girl baby you are. In my case, people could see my value. I looked and smelled like a precious buncake, sweet with a good clean color.
The matchmaker bragged about me: “An earth horse for an earth sheep. This is the best marriage combination.” She patted my arm and I pushed her hand away. Huang Taitai whispered in her shrrhh-shrrhh voice that perhaps I had an unusually bad pichi, a
bad temper. But the matchmaker laughed and said, “Not so, not so. She is a strong horse. She will grow up to be a hard worker who serves you well in your old age.” And this is when Huang Taitai looked down at me with a cloudy face as though she could penetrate my thoughts and see my future intentions. I will never forget her look. Her eyes opened wide, she searched my face carefully and then she smiled. I could see a large gold tooth staring at me like the blinding sun and then the rest
of her teeth opened wide as if she were going to swallow me down in one piece.
This is how I became betrothed to Huang Taitai’s son, who I later discovered was just a baby, one year younger than I. His name was Tyan-yu—tyan for “sky,” because he was so important, and yu, meaning “leftovers,” because when he was born his father was very sick and his family thought he might die. Tyan-yu would be the leftover of his father’s spirit. But his father lived and his grandmother was scared the ghosts would turn their attention to this baby boy and take him instead. So they watched him carefully, made all his decisions, and he became very spoiled.
But even if I had known I was getting such a bad husband, I had no choice, now or later. That was how backward families in the country were. We were always the last to give up stupid old-fashioned customs. In other cities already, a man could choose his own wife, with his parents’ permission of course. But we were cut off from this type of new thought. You never heard if ideas were better in another city, only if they were worse. We were told stories of sons who were so influenced by bad wives that they threw their old, crying parents out into the street. So, Taiyuanese mothers continued to choose their daughters-in-law, ones who would raise proper sons, care for the old people, and faithfully sweep the family burial grounds long after the old ladies had gone to their graves.
Because I was promised to the Huangs’ son for marriage, my own family began treating me as if I belonged to somebody else. My mother would say to me when the rice bowl went up to my face too many times, “Look how much Huang Taitai’s daughter can eat.” My mother did not treat me this way because she didn’t love me. She would say this biting back her tongue, so she wouldn’t wish for something that was no longer hers.
I was actually a very obedient child, but sometimes I had a sour look on my face—only because I was hot or tired or very ill. This is when my mother would say, “Such an ugly face. The Huangs won’t want you and our whole family will be disgraced.” And I would cry more to make my face uglier.
“It’s no use,” my mother would say. “We have made a contract. It cannot be broken.” And I would cry even harder.
I didn’t see my future husband until I was eight or nine. The world that I knew was our family compound in the village outside of Taiyuan. My family lived in a modest two-story house with a smaller house in the same compound, which was really just two side-by-side rooms for our cook, an everyday servant, and their families. Our house sat on a little hill. We called this hill Three Steps to Heaven, but it was really just centuries of hardened layers of mud washed up by the Fen River. On the east wall of our compound was the river, which my father said liked to swallow little children. He said it had once swallowed the whole town of Taiyuan. The river ran brown in the summer. In the winter, the river was blue-green in the narrow fast-moving spots. In the wider places, it was frozen still, white with cold.
Oh, I can remember the new year when my family went to the river and caught many fish—giant slippery creatures plucked while they were still sleeping in their frozen
riverbeds—so fresh that even after they were gutted they would dance on their tails when thrown into the hot pan.
That was also the year I first saw my husband as a little boy. When the firecrackers went off, he cried loud—wah!—with a big open mouth even though he was not a baby. Later I would see him at red-egg ceremonies when one-month-old boy babies were given their real names. He would sit on his grandmother’s old knees, almost cracking them with his weight. And he would refuse to eat everything offered to him, always turning his nose away as though someone were offering him a stinky pickle and not
a sweet cake.
So I didn’t have instant love for my future husband the way you see on television today. I thought of this boy more like a troublesome cousin. I learned to be polite to the Huangs and especially to Huang Taitai. My mother would push me toward Huang Taitai and say, “What do you say to your mother?” And I would be confused, not knowing which mother she meant. So I would turn to my real mother and say, “Excuse me, Ma,” and then I would turn to Huang Taitai and present her with a little goodie to eat, saying, “For you, Mother.” I remember it was once a lump of syaumei, a little dumpling I loved to eat. My mother told Huang Taitai I had made this dumpling especially for her, even though I had only poked its steamy sides with my finger when the cook poured it onto the serving plate.
My life changed completely when I was twelve, the summer the heavy rains came. The Fen River which ran through the middle of my family’s land flooded the plains. It destroyed all the wheat my family had planted that year and made the land useless for years to come. Even our house on top of the little hill became unlivable. When we came down from the second story, we saw the floors and furniture were covered with sticky mud. The courtyards were littered with uprooted trees, broken bits of walls, and dead chickens. We were so poor in all this mess.
You couldn’t go to an insurance company back then and say, Somebody did this damage, pay me a million dollars. In those days, you were unlucky if you had exhausted your own possibilities. My father said we had no choice but to move the family to Wushi, to the south near Shanghai, where my mother’s brother owned a small flour mill. My father explained that the whole family, except for me, would leave immediately. I was twelve years old, old enough to separate from my family and live with the Huangs. The roads were so muddy and filled with giant potholes that no truck was willing to come to the house. All the heavy furniture and bedding had to be left behind, and
these were promised to the Huangs as my dowry. In this way, my family was quite practical. The dowry was enough, more than enough, said my father. But he could not stop my mother from giving me her chang, a necklace made out of a tablet of red jade. When she put it around my neck, she acted very stern, so I knew she was very sad. “Obey your family. Do not disgrace us,” she said. “Act happy when you arrive. Really, you’re very lucky.”
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The Huangs’ house also sat next to the river. While our house had been flooded, their house was untouched. This is because their house sat higher up in the valley. And this was the first time I realized the Huangs had a much better position than my family. They looked down on us, which made me understand why Huang Taitai and Tyan-yu had such long noses.
When I passed under the Huangs’ stone-and-wood gateway arch, I saw a large courtyard with three or four rows of small, low buildings. Some were for storing supplies, others for servants and their families. Behind these modest buildings stood the main house. I walked closer and stared at the house that would be my home for the rest of my life. The house had been in the family for many generations. It was not really so old or remarkable, but I could see it had grown up along with the family. There were four stories, one for each generation: great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children. The house had a confused look. It had been hastily built and then rooms
and floors and wings and decorations had been added on in every which manner, reflecting too many opinions. The first level was built of river rocks held together by straw-filled mud. The second and third levels were made of smooth bricks with an exposed walkway to give it the look of a palace tower. And the top level had gray slab walls topped with a red tile roof. To make the house seem important, there were two large round pillars holding up a veranda entrance to the front door. These pillars were painted red, as were the wooden window borders. Someone, probably Huang Taitai, had added imperial dragon heads at the corners of the roof.
Inside, the house held a different kind of pretense. The only nice room was a parlor on the first floor, which the Huangs used to receive guests. This room contained tables and chairs carved out of red lacquer, fine pillows embroidered with the Huang family name in the ancient style, and many precious things that gave the look of wealth and old prestige. The rest of the house was plain and uncomfortable and noisy with the complaints of twenty relatives. I think with each generation the house had grown smaller inside, more crowded. Each room had been cut in half to make two.
No big celebration was held when I arrived. Huang Taitai didn’t have red banners greeting me in the fancy room on the first floor. Tyan-yu was not there to greet me. Instead, Huang Taitai hurried me upstairs to the second floor and into the kitchen, which was a place where family children didn’t usually go. This was a place for cooks and servants. So I knew my standing.
That first day, I stood in my best padded dress at the low wooden table and began to chop vegetables. I could not keep my hands steady. I missed my family and my stomach felt bad, knowing I had finally arrived where my life said I belonged. But I was also determined to honor my parents’ words, so Huang Taitai could never accuse my mother of losing face. She would not win that from our family.
As I was thinking this I saw an old servant woman stooping over the same low table gutting a fish, looking at me from the corner of her eye. I was crying and I was afraid she would tell Huang Taitai. So I gave a big smile and shouted, “What a lucky girl I am. I’m going to have the best life.” And in this quick-thinking way I must have waved my knife too close to her nose because she cried angrily, “Shemma bende ren!“—What kind of fool are you? And I knew right away this was a warning, because when I shouted that declaration of happiness, I almost tricked myself into thinking it might come true.
I saw Tyan-yu at the evening meal. I was still a few inches taller than he, but he acted like a big warlord. I knew what kind of husband he would be, because he made special efforts to make me cry. He complained the soup was not hot enough and then spilled the bowl as if it were an accident. He waited until I had sat down to eat and then would demand another bowl of rice. He asked why I had such an unpleasant face when looking at him.
Over the next few years, Huang Taitai instructed the other servants to teach me how to sew sharp corners on pillowcases and to embroider my future family’s name. How can a wife keep her husband’s household in order if she has never dirtied her own hands, Huang Taitai used to say as she introduced me to a new task. I don’t think Huang Taitai ever soiled her hands, but she was very good at calling out orders and criticism.
“Teach her to wash rice properly so that the water runs clear. Her husband cannot eat muddy rice,” she’d say to a cook servant.
Another time, she told a servant to show me how to clean a chamber pot: “Make her put her own nose to the barrel to make sure it’s clean.” That was how I learned to be an obedient wife. I learned to cook so well that I could smell if the meat stuffing was too salty before I even tasted it. I could sew such small stitches it looked as if the embroidery had been painted on. And even Huang Taitai complained in a pretend manner that she could scarcely throw a dirty blouse on the floor before it was cleaned and on her back once again, causing her to wear the same clothes every day.
After a while I didn’t think it was a terrible life, no, not really. After a while, I hurt so much I didn’t feel any difference. What was happier than seeing everybody gobble down the shiny mushrooms and bamboo shoots I had helped to prepare that day? What was more satisfying than having Huang Taitai nod and pat my head when I had finished combing her hair one hundred strokes? How much happier could I be after seeing Tyan-yu eat a whole bowl of noodles without once complaining about its taste or my looks? It’s like those ladies you see on American TV these days, the ones who are so happy they have washed out a stain so the clothes look better than new.
Can you see how the Huangs almost washed their thinking into my skin? I came to think of Tyan-yu as a god, someone whose opinions were worth much more than my own life. I came to think of Huang Taitai as my real mother, someone I wanted to please, someone I should follow and obey without question.
When I turned sixteen on the lunar new year, Huang Taitai told me she was ready to welcome a grandson by next spring. Even if I had not wanted to marry, where would I go live instead? Even though I was strong as a horse, how could I run away? The Japanese were in every corner of China.
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“The Japanese showed up as uninvited guests,” said Tyan-yu’s grandmother, “and that’s why nobody else came.” Huang Taitai had made elaborate plans, but our wedding was very small.
She had asked the entire village and friends and family from other cities as well. In those days, you didn’t do RSVP. It was not polite not to come. Huang Taitai didn’t think the war would change people’s good manners. So the cook and her helpers prepared hundreds of dishes. My family’s old furniture had been shined up into an impressive dowry and placed in the front parlor. Huang Taitai had taken care to remove all the water and mud marks. She had even commissioned someone to write felicitous messages on red banners, as if my parents themselves had draped these decorations to congratulate me on my good luck. And she had arranged to rent a red palanquin to carry me from her neighbor’s house to the wedding ceremony.
A lot of bad luck fell on our wedding day, even though the matchmaker had chosen a lucky day, the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, when the moon is perfectly round and bigger than any other time of the year. But the week before the moon arrived,
the Japanese came. They invaded Shansi province, as well as the provinces bordering us. People were nervous. And the morning of the fifteenth, on the day of the wedding celebration, it began to rain, a very bad sign. When the thunder and lightning began, people confused it with Japanese bombs and would not leave their houses.
I heard later that poor Huang Taitai waited many hours for more people to come, and finally, when she could not wring any more guests out of her hands, she decided to start the ceremony. What could she do? She could not change the war.
I was at the neighbor’s house. When they called me to come down and ride the red palanquin, I was sitting at a small dressing table by an open window. I began to cry and thought bitterly about my parents’ promise. I wondered why my destiny had been decided, why I should have an unhappy life so someone else could have a happy one. From my seat by the window I could see the Fen River with its muddy brown waters. I thought about throwing my body into this river that had destroyed my family’s happiness. A person has very strange thoughts when it seems that life is about to end.
It started to rain again, just a light rain. The people from downstairs called up to me once again to hurry. And my thoughts became more urgent, more strange.
I asked myself, What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person? And then I saw the curtains blowing wildly, and outside rain was falling harder, causing everyone to scurry and shout. I smiled. And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn’t see the wind itself, but I could see it carried the water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. It caused men to yelp and dance.
I wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at what I saw. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind.
I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered these thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.
When I arrived at the wedding, I had the red scarf over my face and couldn’t see anything in front of me. But when I bent my head forward, I could see out the sides. Very few people had come. I saw the Huangs, the same old complaining relatives now embarrassed by this poor showing, the entertainers with their violins and flutes. And there were a few village people who had been brave enough to come out for a free meal. I even saw servants and their children, who must have been added to make the party look bigger.
Someone took my hands and guided me down a path. I was like a blind person walking to my fate. But I was no longer scared. I could see what was inside me.
A high official conducted the ceremony and he talked too long about philosophers and models of virtue. Then I heard the matchmaker speak about our birthdates and harmony and fertility. I tipped my veiled head forward and I could see her hands unfolding a red silk scarf and holding up a red candle for everyone to see.
The candle had two ends for lighting. One length had carved gold characters with Tyan-yu’s name, the other with mine. The matchmaker lighted both ends and announced, “The marriage has begun.” Tyan yanked the scarf off my face and smiled at his friends
and family, never even looking at me. He reminded me of a young peacock I once saw that acted as if he had just claimed the entire courtyard by fanning his still-short tail.
I saw the matchmaker place the lighted red candle in a gold holder and then hand it to a nervous-looking servant. This servant was supposed to watch the candle during the banquet and all night to make sure neither end went out. In the morning the matchmaker was supposed to show the result, a little piece of black ash, and then declare, “This candle burned continuously at both ends without going out. This is a marriage that can never be broken.”
I still can remember. That candle was a marriage bond that was worth more than a Catholic promise not to divorce. It meant I couldn’t divorce and I couldn’t ever remarry, even if Tyan-yu died. That red candle was supposed to seal me forever with my husband and his family, no excuses afterward.
And sure enough, the matchmaker made her declaration the next morning and showed she had done her job. But I know what really happened, because I stayed up all night crying about my marriage.
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After the banquet, our small wedding party pushed us and half carried us up to the third floor to our small bedroom. People were shouting jokes and pulling boys from underneath the bed. The matchmaker helped small children pull red eggs that had been hidden between the blankets. The boys who were about Tyan-yu’s age made us sit on the bed side by side and everybody made us kiss so our faces would turn red with passion. Firecrackers exploded on the walkway outside our open window and someone said this was a good excuse for me to jump into my husband’s arms.
After everyone left, we sat there side by side without words for many minutes, still listening to the laughing outside. When it grew quiet, Tyan-yu said, “This is my bed. You sleep on the sofa.” He threw a pillow and a thin blanket to me. I was so glad! I waited until he fell asleep and then I got up quietly and went outside, down the stairs and into the dark courtyard.
Outside it smelled as if it would soon rain again. I was crying, walking in my bare feet and feeling the wet heat still inside the bricks. Across the courtyard I could see the matchmaker’s servant through a yellow-lit open window. She was sitting at a table, looking very sleepy as the red candle burned in its special gold holder. I sat down by a tree to watch my fate being decided for me.
I must have fallen asleep because I remember being startled awake by the sound of loud cracking thunder. That’s when I saw the matchmaker’s servant running from the room, scared as a chicken about to lose its head. Oh, she was asleep too, I thought, and now she thinks it’s the Japanese. I laughed. The whole sky became light and then more thunder came, and she ran out of the courtyard and down the road, going so fast and hard I could see pebbles kicking up behind her. Where does she think she’s running to, I wondered, still laughing. And then I saw the red candle flickering just a little with the breeze.
I was not thinking when my legs lifted me up and my feet ran me across the courtyard to the yellow-lit room. But I was hoping—I was praying to Buddha, the goddess of mercy, and the full moon—to make that candle go out. It fluttered a little and the flame bent down low, but still both ends burned strong. My throat filled with so much hope that it finally burst and blew out my husband’s end of the candle.
I immediately shivered with fear. I thought a knife would appear and cut me down dead. Or the sky would open up and blow me away. But nothing happened, and when my senses came back, I walked back to my room with fast guilty steps.
The next morning the matchmaker made her proud declaration in front of Tyan-yu, his parents, and myself. “My job is done,” she announced, pouring the remaining black ash onto the red cloth. I saw her servant’s shame-faced, mournful look.
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I learned to love Tyan-yu, but it is not how you think. From the beginning, I would always become sick thinking he would someday climb on top of me and do his business. Every time I went into our bedroom, my hair would already be standing up. But during the first months, he never touched me. He slept in his bed, I slept on my sofa.
In front of his parents, I was an obedient wife, just as they taught me. I instructed the cook to kill a fresh young chicken every morning and cook it until pure juice came out. I would strain this juice myself into a bowl, never adding any water. I gave this to him for breakfast, murmuring good wishes about his health. And every night I would cook a special tonic soup called tounau, which was not only very delicious but has eight ingredients that guarantee long life for mothers. This pleased my mother-in-law very much.
But it was not enough to keep her happy. One morning, Huang Taitai and I were sitting in the same room, working on our embroidery. I was dreaming about my childhood, about a pet frog I once kept named Big Wind. Huang Taitai seemed restless, as if she had an itch in the bottom of her shoe. I heard her huffing and then all of a sudden she stood up from her chair, walked over to me, and slapped my face.
“Bad wife!” she cried. “If you refuse to sleep with my son, I refuse to feed you or clothe you.” So that’s how I knew what my husband had said to avoid his mother’s anger. I was also boiling with anger, but I said nothing, remembering my promise to my parents to be an obedient wife.
That night I sat on Tyan-yu’s bed and waited for him to touch me. But he didn’t. I was relieved. The next night, I lay straight down on the bed next to him. And still he didn’t touch me. So the next night, I took off my gown.
That’s when I could see what was underneath Tyan-yu. He was scared and turned his face. He had no desire for me, but it was his fear that made me think he had no desire for any woman. He was like a little boy who had never grown up. After a while I was no longer afraid. I even began to think differently toward Tyan-yu. It was not like the way a wife loves a husband, but more like the way a sister protects a younger brother. I put my gown back on and lay down next to him and rubbed his back. I knew I no longer had to be afraid. I was sleeping with Tyanyu. He would never touch me and I had a comfortable bed to sleep on.
After more months had passed and my stomach and breasts remained small and flat, Huang Taitai flew into another kind of rage. “My son says he’s planted enough seeds for thousands of grandchildren. Where are they? It must be you are doing something wrong.” And after that she confined me to the bed so that her grandchildren’s seeds would not spill out so easily.
Oh, you think it is so much fun to lie in bed all day, never getting up. But I tell you it was worse than a prison. I think Huang Taitai became a little crazy. She told the servants to take all sharp things out of the room, thinking scissors and knives were cutting off her next generation. She forbade me from sewing. She said
I must concentrate and think of nothing but having babies. And four times a day, a very nice servant girl would come into my room, apologizing the whole time while making me drink a terrible-tasting medicine.
I envied this girl, the way she could walk out the door. Sometimes as I watched her from my window, I would imagine I was that girl, standing in the courtyard, bargaining with the traveling shoe mender, gossiping with other servant girls, scolding a handsome delivery man in her high teasing voice.
One day, after two months had gone by without any results, Huang Taitai called the old matchmaker to the house. The matchmaker examined me closely, looked up my birthdate and the hour of my birth, and then asked Huang Taitai about my nature. Finally, the matchmaker gave her conclusions: “It’s clear what has happened. A woman can have sons only if she is deficient in one of the elements. Your daughter-in-law was born with enough wood, fire, water, and earth, and she was deficient in metal, which was a good sign. But when she was married, you loaded her down with gold bracelets and decorations and now she has all the elements, including metal. She’s too balanced to have babies.”
This turned out to be joyous news for Huang Taitai, for she liked nothing better than to reclaim all her gold and jewelry to help me become fertile. And it was good news for me too. Because after the gold was removed from my body, I felt lighter, more free. They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person. That day I started to think about how I would escape this marriage without breaking my promise to my family.
It was really quite simple. I made the Huangs think it was their idea to get rid of me, that they would be the ones to say the marriage contract was not valid.
I thought about my plan for many days. I observed everyone around me, the thoughts they showed in their faces, and then I was ready. I chose an auspicious day, the third day of the third month. That’s the day of the Festival of Pure Brightness. On this day, your thoughts must be clear as you prepare to think about your ancestors. That’s the day when everyone goes to the family graves. They bring hoes to clear the weeds and brooms to sweep the stones and they offer dumplings and oranges as spiritual food. Oh, it’s not a somber day, more like a picnic, but it has special meaning to someone looking for grandsons.
On the morning of that day, I woke up Tyan-yu and the entire house with my wailing. It took Huang Taitai a long time to come into my room. “What’s wrong with her now,” she cried from her room. “Go make her be quiet.” But finally, after my wailing didn’t stop, she rushed into my room, scolding me at the top of her voice.
I was clutching my mouth with one hand and my eyes with another. My body was writhing as if I were seized by a terrible pain. I was quite convincing, because Huang Taitai drew back and grew small like a scared animal.
“What’s wrong, little daughter? Tell me quickly,” she cried.
“Oh, it’s too terrible to think, too terrible to say,” I said between gasps and more wailing.
After enough wailing, I said what was so unthinkable. “I had a dream,” I reported. “Our ancestors came to me and said they wanted to see our wedding. So Tyan-yu and I held the same ceremony for our ancestors. We saw the matchmaker light the candle and give it to the servant to watch. Our ancestors were so pleased, so pleased….”
Huang Taitai looked impatient as I began to cry softly again. “But then the servant left the room with our candle and a big wind came and blew the candle out. And our ancestors became very angry. They shouted that the marriage was doomed! They said that Tyan-yu’s end of the candle had blown out! Our ancestors said Tyan-yu would die if he stayed in this marriage!”
Tyan-yu’s face turned white. But Huang Taitai only frowned. “What a stupid girl to have such bad dreams!” And then she scolded everybody to go back to bed.
“Mother,” I called to her in a hoarse whisper. “Please don’t leave me! I am afraid!
Our ancestors said if the matter is not settled, they would begin the cycle of destruction.”
“What is this nonsense!” cried Huang Taitai, turning back toward me. Tyan-yu followed her, wearing his mother’s same frowning face. And I knew they were almost caught, two ducks leaning into the pot.
“They knew you would not believe me,” I said in a remorseful tone, “because they know I do not want to leave the comforts of my marriage. So our ancestors said they would plant the signs, to show our marriage is now rotting.”
“What nonsense from your stupid head,” said Huang Taitai, sighing. But she could not resist. “What signs?”
“In my dream, I saw a man with a long beard and a mole on his cheek.”
“Tyan-yu’s grandfather?” asked Huang Taitai. I nodded, remembering the painting I had observed on the wall.
“He said there are three signs. First, he has drawn a black spot on Tyan-yu’s back, and this spot will grow and eat away Tyan-yu’s flesh just as it ate away our ancestor’s face before he died.”
Huang Taitai quickly turned to Tyan-yu and pulled his shirt up. “Ai-ya!” she cried, because there it was, the same black mole, the size of a fingertip, just as I had always seen it these past five months of sleeping as sister and brother.
“And then our ancestor touched my mouth,” and I patted my cheek as if it already hurt. “He said my teeth would start to fall out one by one, until I could no longer protest leaving this marriage.”
Huang Taitai pried open my mouth and gasped upon seeing the open spot in the back of my mouth where a rotted tooth fell out four years ago.
“And finally, I saw him plant a seed in a servant girl’s womb. He said this girl only pretends to come from a bad family. But she is really from imperial blood, and…”
I lay my head down on the pillow as if too tired to go on. Huang Taitai pushed my shoulder, “What does he say?”
“He said the servant girl is Tyan-yu’s true spiritual wife. And the seed he has planted will grow into Tyan-yu’s child.”
By mid-morning they had dragged the matchmaker’s servant over to our house and extracted her terrible confession.
And after much searching they found the servant girl I liked so much, the one I had watched from my window every day. I had seen her eyes grow bigger and her teasing voice become smaller whenever the handsome delivery man arrived. And later, I had watched her stomach grow rounder and her face become longer with fear and worry. So you can imagine how happy she was when they forced her to tell the truth about her imperial ancestry. I heard later she was so struck with this miracle of marrying
Tyan-yu she became a very religious person who ordered servants to sweep the ancestors’ graves not just once a year, but once a day.
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There’s no more to the story. They didn’t blame me so much. Huang Taitai got her grandson. I got my clothes, a rail ticket to Peking, and enough money to go to America. The Huangs asked only that I never tell anybody of any importance about the story of my doomed marriage.
It’s a true story, how I kept my promise, how I sacrificed my life. See the gold metal I can now wear. I gave birth to your brothers and then your father gave me these two bracelets. Then I had you. And every few years, when I have a little extra money, I buy another bracelet. I know what I’m worth. They’re always twenty-four carats, all genuine.
But I’ll never forget. On the day of the Festival of Pure Brightness, I take off all my bracelets. I remember the day when I finally knew a genuine thought and could follow where it went. That was the day I was a young girl with my face under a red marriage scarf. I promised not to forget myself.
How nice it is to be that girl again, to take off my scarf, to see what is underneath and feel the lightness come back into my body!
Ying-Ying St. Clair
For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid.
All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me. She sees a list of things to buy, her checkbook out of balance, her ashtray sitting crooked on a straight table.
And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Yet today I can remember a time when I ran and shouted, when I could not stand still. It is my earliest recollection: telling the Moon Lady my secret wish. And because I forgot what I wished for, that memory remained hidden from me all these many years.
But now I remember the wish, and I can recall the details of that entire day, as clearly as I see my daughter and the foolishness of her life.
In 1918, the year that I was four, the Moon Festival arrived during an autumn in Wushi that was unusually hot, terribly hot. When I awoke that morning, the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, the straw mat covering my bed was already sticky. Everything in the room smelled of wet grass simmering in the heat.
Earlier in the summer, the servants had covered all the windows with bamboo curtains to drive out the sun. Every bed was covered with a woven mat, our only bedding during the months of constant wet heat. And the hot bricks of the courtyard were crisscrossed with bamboo paths. Autumn had come, but without its cool mornings and evenings. And so the stale heat still remained in the shadows behind the curtains, heating up the acrid smells of my chamber pot, seeping into my pillow, chafing the back of my neck and puffing up my cheeks, so that I awoke that morning with a restless complaint. There was another smell, outside, something burning, a pungent fragrance that was half sweet and half bitter. “What’s that stinky smell?” I asked my amah, who always managed to appear next to my bed the instant I was awake. She slept on a cot in a
little room next to mine.
“It is the same as I explained yesterday,” she said, lifting me out of my bed and setting me on her knee. And my sleepy mind tried to remember what she had told me upon waking the morning before.
“We are burning the Five Evils,” I said drowsily, then squirmed out of her warm lap. I climbed on top of a little stool and looked out the window into the courtyard below. I saw a green coil curled in the shape of a snake, with a tail that billowed yellow smoke. The other day, Amah had shown me that the snake had come out of a colorful box decorated with five evil creatures: a swimming snake, a jumping scorpion, a flying centipede, a dropping-down spider, and a springing lizard. The bite of any one of
these creatures could kill a child, explained Amah. So I was relieved to think we had caught the Five Evils and were burning their corpses. I didn’t know the green coil was merely incense used to chase away mosquitoes and small flies.
That day, instead of dressing me in a light cotton jacket and loose trousers, Amah brought out a heavy yellow silk jacket and skirt outlined with black bands.
“No time to play today,” said Amah, opening the lined jacket. “Your mother has made you new tiger clothes for the Moon Festival….” She lifted me into the pants. “Very important day, and now you are a big girl, so you can go to the ceremony.”
“What is a ceremony?” I asked as Amah slipped the jacket over my cotton undergarments.
“It is a proper way to behave. You do this and that, so the gods do not punish you,” said Amah as she fastened my frog clasps.
“What kind of punishment?” I asked boldly.
“Too many questions!” cried Amah. “You do not need to understand. Just behave, follow your mother’s example. Light the incense, make an offering to the moon, bow your head. Do not shame me, Ying-ying.”
I bowed my head with a pout. I noticed the black bands on my sleeves, the tiny embroidered peonies growing from curlicues of gold thread. I remembered watching my mother pushing a silver needle in and out, gently nudging flowers and leaves and vines to bloom on the cloth.
And then I heard voices in the courtyard. Standing on my stool, I strained to find them. Somebody was complaining about the heat: “…feel my arm, steamed soft clear to the bone.” Many relatives from the north had arrived for the Moon Festival and were staying for the week.
Amah tried to pull a wide comb through my hair and I pretended to tumble off the stool as soon as she reached a knot.
“Stand still, Ying-ying!” she cried, her usual lament, while I giggled and wobbled on the stool. And then she yanked the full length of my hair like the reins of a horse and before I could fall off the stool again, she quickly twisted my hair into a single braid off to the side, weaving into it five strands of colorful silk. She wound my braid into a tight ball, then arranged and snipped the loose silk strands until they fell into a neat tassel.
She spun me around to inspect her handiwork. I was roasting in the lined silk jacket and pants obviously made with a cooler day in mind. My scalp was burning with the pain of Amah’s attentions. What kind of day could be worth so much suffering?
“Pretty,” pronounced Amah, even though I wore a scowl on my face. “Who is coming today?” I asked.
“Dajya“—All the family—she said happily. “We are all going to Tai Lake. The family has rented a boat with a famous chef. And tonight at the ceremony you will see the Moon Lady.”
“The Moon Lady! The Moon Lady!” I said, jumping up and down with great delight. And then, after I ceased to be amazed with the pleasant sounds of my voice saying new words, I tugged Amah’s sleeve and asked: “Who is the Moon Lady?”
“Chang-o. She lives on the moon and today is the only day you can see her and have a secret wish fulfilled.”
“What is a secret wish?”
“It is what you want but cannot ask,” said Amah.
“Why can’t I ask?”
“This is because…because if you ask it…it is no longer a wish but a selfish desire,” said Amah. “Haven’t I taught you—that it is wrong to think of your own needs? A girl can never ask, only listen.”
“Then how will the Moon Lady know my wish?”
“Ai! You ask too much already! You can ask her because she is not an ordinary person.”
Satisfied at last, I immediately said: “Then I will tell her I don’t want to wear these clothes anymore.”
“Ah! Did I not just explain?” said Amah. “Now that you have mentioned this to me, it is not a secret wish anymore.”
During the morning meal nobody seemed in a hurry to go to the lake; this person and that always eating one more thing. And after breakfast everybody kept talking about things of little consequence. I grew more worried and unhappy by the minute. “…Autumn moon warms. O! Geese shadows return.” Baba was reciting a long poem he
had deciphered from ancient stone inscriptions.
“The third word in the next line,” explained Baba, “was worn off the slab, its meaning washed away by centuries of rain, almost lost to posterity forever.”
“Ah, but fortunately,” said my uncle, his eyes twinkling, “you are a dedicated scholar of ancient history and literature. You were able to solve it, I think.”
My father responded with the line: “Mist flowers radiant. O!…”
Mama was telling my aunt and the old ladies how to mix various herbs and insects to produce a balm: “This you rub here, between these two spots. Rub it vigorously until your skin heats and the achiness is burned out.”
“Ai! But how can I rub a swollen foot?” lamented the old lady. “Both inside and outside have a sour painful feeling. Too tender to even touch!”
“It is the heat,” complained another old auntie. “Cooking all your flesh dry and brittle.”
“And burning your eyes!” exclaimed my great-aunt.
I sighed over and over again every time they started a new topic. Amah finally noticed me and gave me a mooncake in the shape of a rabbit. She said I could sit in the courtyard and eat it with my two little half-sisters, Number Two and Number Three. It is easy to forget about a boat when you have a rabbit mooncake in your hand.
The three of us walked quickly out of the room, and as soon as we passed through the moongate that led to the inner courtyard, we tumbled and shrieked, running to see who could get to the stone bench first. I was the biggest, so I sat in the shady part, where the stone slab was cool. My half-sisters sat in the sun. I broke off a rabbit ear for each of them. The ears were just dough, no sweet filling or egg yolk inside, but my half-sisters were too little to know any better.
“Sister likes me better,” said Number Two to Number Three. “Me better,” said Number Three to Number Two.
“Don’t make trouble,” I said to them both. I ate the rabbit’s body, rolling my tongue over my lips to lick off the sticky bean paste.
We picked crumbs off one another, and after we finished our treat it grew quiet and once again I became restless. Suddenly I saw a dragonfly with a large crimson body and transparent wings. I leapt off the bench and ran to chase it, and my half-sisters followed me, jumping and thrusting their hands upward as it flew away.
“Ying-ying!” I heard Amah call, and Number Two and Number Three ran off. Amah was standing in the courtyard and my mother and the other ladies were now coming through the moongate. Amah rushed over and bent down to smooth my yellow jacket. “Syin yifu! Yidafadwo!“—Your new clothes! Everything, all over the place!—she cried in a show of distress.
My mother smiled and walked over to me. She smoothed some of my wayward hairs back in place and tucked them into my coiled braid. “A boy can run and chase dragonflies, because that is his nature,” she said. “But a girl should stand still. If you are still for a very long time, a dragonfly will no longer see you. Then it will come to you and hide in the comfort of your shadow.” The old ladies clucked in agreement and then they all left me in the middle of the hot courtyard.
Standing perfectly still like that, I discovered my shadow. At first it was just a dark spot on the bamboo mats that covered the courtyard bricks. It had short legs and long arms, a dark coiled braid just like mine. When I shook my head, it shook its head. We flapped our arms. We raised one leg. I turned to walk away and it followed me. I turned back around quickly and it faced me. I lifted the bamboo mat to see if I could peel off my shadow, but it was under the mat, on the brick. I shrieked with delight at my shadow’s own cleverness. I ran to the shade under the tree, watching my shadow chase me. It disappeared. I loved my shadow, this dark side of me that had my same restless nature.
And then I heard Amah calling me again. “Ying-ying! It is time. Are you ready to go to the lake?” I nodded my head and began to run toward her, my self running ahead. “Slowly, go slowly,” admonished Amah.
Our entire family was already standing outside, chatting excitedly. Everybody was dressed in important-looking clothes. Baba was in a new brown-colored gown, which while plain was of an obviously fine-quality silk weave and workmanship. Mama had on a jacket and skirt with colors that were the reverse of mine: black silk with yellow bands. My half-sisters wore rose-colored tunics and so did their mothers, my father’s concubines. My older brother had on a blue jacket embroidered with shapes resembling Buddha scepters for long life. Even the old ladies had put on their best clothes to celebrate: Mama’s aunt, Baba’s mother and her cousin, and Great-uncle’s fat wife, who still plucked her forehead bald and always walked as if she were crossing a slippery stream, two tiny steps and then a scared look.
The servants had already packed and loaded a rickshaw with the day’s basic provisions: a woven hamper filled with zong zi—the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, some filled with roasted ham, some with sweet lotus seeds; a small stove for boiling water for hot tea; another hamper containing cups and bowls and chopsticks; a cotton sack of apples, pomegranates, and pears; sweaty earthen jars of preserved meats and vegetables; stacks of red boxes lined with four mooncakes each; and of course, sleeping mats for our afternoon nap.
Then everybody climbed into rickshaws, the younger children sitting next to their amahs. At the last moment, before we all set off, I wriggled out of Amah’s grasp and jumped out of the rickshaw. I climbed into the rickshaw with my mother in it, which displeased Amah, because this was presumptuous behavior on my part and also because Amah loved me better than her own. She had given up her own child, a baby son, when her husband had died and she had come to our house to be my nursemaid. But I was very spoiled because of her; she had never taught me to think about her feelings. So I
thought of Amah only as someone for my comfort, the way you might think of a fan in the summer or a heater in the winter, a blessing you appreciate and love only when it is no longer there.
When we arrived at the lake, I was disappointed to feel no cooling breezes. Our rickshaw pullers were soaked with sweat and their mouths were open and panting like horses. At the dock, I watched as the old ladies and men started climbing aboard a large boat our family had rented. The boat looked like a floating teahouse, with an open-air pavilion larger than the one in our courtyard. It had many red columns and a peaked tile roof, and behind that what looked like a garden house with round windows. When it was our turn, Amah grasped my hand tightly and we bounced across the plank.
But as soon as my feet touched the deck, I sprang free and, together with Number Two and Number Three, I pushed my way past people’s legs enclosed in billows of dark and bright silk clothes—trying to see who would be the first to run the length of the boat.
I loved the unsteady feeling of almost falling one way then another. Red lanterns hanging from the roof and railings swayed, as if pushed by a breeze. My half-sisters and I ran our fingers over benches and small tables in the pavilion. We traced our fingers over the patterns of the ornamental wood railings and poked our faces through openings to see the water below. And then there were more things to find!
I opened a heavy door leading into the garden house and ran past a room that looked like a large sitting area. My sisters followed behind laughing. Through another door, I saw people in a kitchen. A man holding a big cleaver turned and saw us, then called to us, as we shyly smiled and backed away.
At the rear of the boat we saw poor-looking people: a man feeding sticks into a tall chimney stove, a woman chopping vegetables, and two rough-looking boys squatting close to the edge of the boat, holding what looked to be a piece of string attached to a wire-mesh cage lying just below the surface of the water. They gave us not even a glance.
We returned to the front of the boat, just in time to see the dock moving away from us. Mama and the other ladies were already seated on benches around the pavilion, fanning themselves furiously and slapping the sides of each other’s heads when mosquitoes lighted. Baba and Uncle were leaning over a rail, talking in deep, serious voices. My brother and some of his boy cousins had found a long bamboo stick and were poking the water as if they could make the boat go faster. The servants were seated in a cluster at the front, heating water for tea, shelling roasted gingko nuts, and emptying out hampers of food for a noonday meal of cold dishes.
Even though Tai Lake is one of the largest in all of China, that day it seemed crowded with boats: rowboats, pedal boats, sailboats, fishing boats, and floating pavilions like ours. So we often passed other people leaning out to trail their hands in the cool water, some drifting by asleep beneath a cloth canopy or oil-coated umbrella.
Suddenly I heard people crying, “Ahh! Ahh! Ahh!” and I thought, At last, the day has begun! I raced to the pavilion and found aunts and uncles laughing as they used chopsticks to pick up dancing shrimp, still squirming in their shells, their tiny legs bristling. So this was what the mesh cage beneath the water had contained, freshwater shrimp, which my father was now dipping into a spicy bean-curd sauce and popping into his mouth with two bites and a swallow.
But the excitement soon waned, and the afternoon seemed to pass like any other at home. The same listlessness after the meal. A little drowsy gossip with hot tea. Amah telling me to lie down on my mat. The quiet as everyone slept through the hottest part of the day.
I sat up and saw Amah was still asleep, lying askew on her sleeping mat. I wandered to the back of the boat. The rough-looking boys were removing a large, squawking long-necked bird from a bamboo cage. The bird had a metal ring around its neck. One boy held onto the bird, wrapping his arms around the bird’s wings. The other tied a thick rope to a loop on the metal neck ring. Then they released the bird and it swooped with a flurry of white wings, hovered over the edge of the boat, then sat on top of the shiny water. I walked over to the edge and looked at the bird. He looked back at me warily with one eye. Then the bird dove under the water and disappeared. One of the boys threw a raft made of hollow reed flutes into the water and then dove in and emerged on top of the raft. In a few seconds, the bird also emerged, its head struggling to hold onto a large fish. The bird jumped onto the raft and then tried to swallow the fish, but of course, with the ring around its neck, it could not. In one motion, the boy on the raft snatched the fish from the bird’s mouth and threw it to the other boy on the boat. I clapped my hands and the bird dove under
water again.
For the next hour, while Amah and everybody else slept, I watched like a hungry cat waiting its turn, as fish after fish appeared in the bird’s beak only to land in a wooden pail on the boat. Then the boy in the water cried to the other, “Enough!” and the boy on the boat shouted to someone high atop the part of the boat I could not see. And loud clanks and hissing sounds erupted as once again the boat began to move. Then the boy next to me dove into the water. Both boys got on the raft and crouched in the middle like two birds perched on a branch. I waved to them, envying their carefree ways, and soon they were far away, a little yellow spot bobbing on the water. It would have been enough to see this one adventure. But I stayed, as if caught in a good dream. And sure enough, I turned around and a sullen woman was now squatting in front of the bucket of fish. I watched as she took out a sharp, thin knife and began to slice open the fish bellies, pulling out the red slippery insides and throwing them over her shoulder into the lake. I saw her scrape off the fish scales, which flew in the air like shards of glass. And then there were two chickens that no longer gurgled after their heads were chopped off. And a big snapping turtle that stretched out its neck to bite a stick, and—whuck!—off fell its head. And dark masses of thin freshwater eels, swimming furiously in a pot. Then the woman carried everything,
without a word, into the kitchen. And there was nothing else to see.
It was not until then, too late, that I saw my new clothes—and the spots of bloods, flecks of fish scales, bits of feather and mud. What a strange mind I had! In my panic, in hearing waking voices toward the front of the boat, I quickly dipped my hands in the bowl of turtle’s blood and smeared this on my sleeves, and on the front of my pants and jacket. And this is what I truly thought: that I could cover these spots by painting all my clothes crimson red, and that if I stood perfectly still no one would notice this change.
That is how Amah found me: an apparition covered with blood. I can still hear her voice, screaming in terror, running over to see what pieces of my body were missing, what leaky holes had appeared. And when she found nothing, after inspecting my ears
and my nose and counting my fingers, she called me names, using words I had never heard before. But they sounded evil, the way she hurled and spat the words out. She yanked off my jacket, pulled off my pants. She said I smelled like “something evil this” and I looked like “something evil that.” Her voice was trembling not so much with anger as with fear. “Your mother, now she will be glad to wash her hands of you,” Amah said with great remorse. “She will banish us both to Kunming.” And then I was truly frightened, because I had heard that Kunming was so far away nobody ever came to visit, and that it was a wild place surrounded by a stone forest ruled by monkeys. Amah left me crying on the back of the boat, standing in my white cotton undergarments and tiger slippers.
I had truly expected my mother to come soon. I imagined her seeing my soiled clothes, the little flowers she had worked so hard to make. I thought she would come to the back of the boat and scold me in her gentle way. But she did not come. Oh, once I heard some footsteps, but I saw only the faces of my half-sisters pressed to the door window. They looked at me wide-eyed, pointed to me, and then laughed and scampered off.
The water had turned a deep golden color, and then red, purple, and finally black. The sky had darkened and red lantern lights started to glow all over the lake. I could hear people talking and laughing, some voices from the front of our boat, some from other boats next to us. And then I heard the wooden kitchen door banging open and shut and the air filled with good rich smells. The voices from the pavilion cried in happy disbelief, “Ai! Look at this! And this!” I was hungry to be there.
I listened to their banquet while dangling my legs over the back. And although it was night, it was bright outside. I could see my reflection, my legs, my hands leaning on the edge, and my face. And above my head, I saw why it was so bright. In the dark water, I could see the full moon, a moon so warm and big it looked like the sun. And I turned around so I could find the Moon Lady and tell her my secret wish. But right at that moment, everybody else must have seen her too. Because firecrackers exploded, and I fell into the water not even hearing my own splash.
I was surprised by the cool comfort of the water, so that at first I was not frightened. It was like weightless sleep. And I expected Amah to come immediately and pick me up. But in the instant that I began to choke, I knew she would not come. I thrashed my arms and legs under the water. The sharp water had swum up my nose, into my throat and eyes, and this made me thrash even harder. “Amah!” I tried to cry and I was so angry at her for abandoning me, for making me wait and suffer unnecessarily. And then a dark shape brushed by me and I knew it was one of the Five Evils, a swimming snake.
It wrapped around me and squeezed my body like a sponge, then tossed me into the choking air—and I fell headlong into a rope net filled with writhing fish. Water gushed out of my throat, so that now I was choking and wailing.
When I turned my head, I saw four shadows, with the moon in back of them. A dripping figure was climbing into the boat. “Is it too small? Should we throw it back? Or is it worth some money?” said the dripping man, panting. And the others laughed. I became quiet. I knew who these people were. When Amah and I passed people like these in the streets, she would put her hands over my eyes and ears.
“Stop now,” scolded the woman in the boat, “you’ve frightened her. She thinks we’re brigands who are going to sell her for a slave.” And then she said in a gentle voice, “Where are you from, little sister?”
The dripping man bent down and looked at me. “Oh, a little girl. Not a fish!” “Not a fish! Not a fish!” murmured the others, chuckling.
I began to shiver, too scared to cry. The air smelled dangerous, the sharp odors of gunpowder and fish.
“Do not pay any attention to them,” said the woman. “Are you from another fishing boat? Which one? Do not be afraid. Point.”
Out on the water I saw rowboats and pedal boats and sailboats, and fishing boats like this one, with a long bow and small house in the middle. I looked hard, my heart beating fast.
“There!” I said, and pointed to a floating pavilion filled with laughing people and lanterns. “There! There!” And I began to cry, desperate to reach my family and be comforted. The fishing boat glided swiftly over, toward the good cooking smells. “E!” called the woman up to the boat. “Have you lost a little girl, a girl who
fell in the water?”
There were some shouts from the floating pavilion, and I strained to see faces of Amah, Baba, Mama. People were crowded on one side of the pavilion, leaning over, pointing, looking into our boat. All strangers, laughing red faces, loud voices. Where was Amah? Why did my mother not come? A little girl pushed her way through some legs. “That’s not me!” she cried. “I’m here. I didn’t fall in the water.” The people
in the boat roared with laughter and turned away.
“Little sister, you were mistaken,” said the woman as the fishing boat glided away. I said nothing. I began to shiver again. I had seen nobody who cared that I was missing. I looked out over the water at the hundreds of dancing lanterns. Firecrackers were exploding and I could hear more people laughing. The farther we glided, the bigger the world became. And I now felt I was lost forever.
The woman continued to stare at me. My braid was unfurled. My undergarments were wet and gray. I had lost my slippers and was barefoot.
“What shall we do?” said one of the men quietly. “Nobody to claim her.” “Maybe she is a beggar girl,” said one of the men. “Look at her clothes. She is
one of those children who ride the flimsy rafts to beg for money.”
I was filled with terror. Maybe this was true. I had turned into a beggar girl, lost without my family.
“Anh! Don’t you have eyes?” said the woman crossly. “Look at her skin, too pale.
And her feet, the bottoms are soft.”
“Put her on the shore, then,” said the man. “If she truly has a family, they will look for her there.”
“Such a night!” sighed another man. “Always someone falling in on holiday nights. Drunken poets and little children. Lucky she didn’t drown.” They chatted like this, back and forth, moving slowly toward shore. One man pushed the boat with a long bamboo pole and we glided between other boats. When we reached the dock, the man who had fished me out of the water lifted me out of the boat with his fishy-smelling hands. “Be careful next time, little sister,” called the woman as their boat glided away.
On the dock, with the bright moon behind me, I once again saw my shadow. It was shorter this time, shrunken and wild-looking. We ran together over to some bushes
along a walkway and hid. In this hiding place I could hear people talking as they walked by. I could hear frogs and crickets. And then—flutes and tinkling cymbals, a sounding gong and drums!
I looked through the branches of the bushes and in front I could see a crowd of people and, above them, a stage holding up the moon. A young man burst out from the side of a stage and told the crowd, “And now the Moon Lady will come and tell her sad tale to you, in a shadow play, classically sung.”
The Moon Lady! I thought, and the very sound of those magic words made me forget my troubles. I heard more cymbals and gongs and then a shadow of a woman appeared against the moon. Her hair was undone and she was combing it. She began to speak. Such a sweet, wailing voice!
“My fate and my penance,” she began to lament, pulling her long fingers through her hair, “to live here on the moon, while my husband lives on the sun. So that each day and each night, we pass each other, never seeing one another, except this one evening, the night of the mid-autumn moon.”
The crowd moved closer. The Moon Lady plucked her lute and began her singing tale. On the other side of the moon I saw the silhouette of a man appear. The Moon Lady held her arms out to embrace him—”O! Hou Yi, my husband, Master Archer of the Skies!” she sang. But her husband did not seem to notice her. He was gazing at the sky. And as the sky grew brighter, his mouth began to open wide—in horror or delight, I could
not tell.
The Moon Lady clutched her throat and fell into a heap, crying, “The drought of ten suns in the eastern sky!” And just as she sang this, the Master Archer pointed his magic arrows and shot down nine suns which burst open with blood. “Sinking into a simmering sea!” she sang happily, and I could hear these suns sizzling and crackling in death.
And now a fairy—the Queen Mother of the Western Skies!—was flying toward the Master Archer. She opened a box and held up a glowing ball—no, not a baby sun but a magic peach, the peach of everlasting life! I could see the Moon Lady pretending to be busy with her embroidery, but she was watching her husband. She saw him hide the peach in a box. And then the Master Archer raised his bow and vowed to fast for one year to show he had the patience to live forever. And after he ran off, the Moon Lady wasted not one moment to find the peach and eat it!
As soon as she tasted it, she began to rise, then fly—not like the Queen Mother—but like a dragonfly with broken wings. “Flung from this earth by my own wantonness!” she cried just as her husband dashed back home, shouting, “Thief! Life-stealing wife!” He picked up his bow, aimed an arrow at his wife and—with the rumblings of a gong, the sky went black.
Wyah! Wyah! The sad lute music began again as the sky on the stage lightened. And there stood the poor lady against a moon as bright as the sun. Her hair was now so long it swept the floor, wiping up her tears. An eternity had passed since she last saw her husband, for this was her fate: to stay lost on the moon, forever seeking her own selfish wishes.
“For woman is yin,” she cried sadly, “the darkness within, where untempered passions lie. And man is yang, bright truth lighting our minds.”
At the end of her singing tale, I was crying, shaking with despair. Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief. In one small moment, we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back.
A gong sounded, and the Moon Lady bowed her head and looked serenely to the side. The crowd clapped vigorously. And now the same young man as before came out on the stage and announced, “Wait, everybody! The Moon Lady has consented to grant one secret wish to each person here….” The crowd stirred with excitement, people murmuring in high voices. “For a small monetary donation…” continued the young man. And the crowd laughed and groaned, then began to disperse. The young man shouted, “A once-a-year opportunity!” But nobody was listening to him, except my shadow and me in the bushes. “I have a wish! I have one!” I shouted as I ran forward in my bare feet. But the young man paid no attention to me and walked off the stage. I kept running toward the moon to tell the Moon Lady what I wanted, because now I knew what my wish was.
I darted fast as a lizard behind the stage, to the other side of the moon.
I saw her, standing still for just a moment. She was beautiful, ablaze with the light from a dozen kerosene lamps. And then she shook her long shadowy tresses and began to walk down the steps.
“I have a wish,” I said in a whisper, and still she did not hear me. So I walked closer yet, until I could see the face of the Moon Lady: shrunken cheeks, a broad oily nose, large glaring teeth, and red-stained eyes. A face so tired that she wearily pulled off her hair, her long gown fell from her shoulders. And as the secret wish fell from my lips, the Moon Lady looked at me and became a man.
|
For many years, I could not remember what I wanted that night from the Moon Lady, or how it was that I was found again by my family. Both of these things seemed an illusion to me, a wish granted that could not be trusted. And so even though I was found—later that night after Amah, Baba, Uncle, and the others shouted for me along the waterway—I never believed my family found the same girl.
And then, over the years, I forgot the rest of what happened that day: the pitiful story the Moon Lady sang, the pavilion boat, the bird with the ring on its neck, the tiny flowers blooming on my sleeve, the burning of the Five Evils.
But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day because it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness, the wonder, fear, and loneliness. How I lost myself.
I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.
