I watched our parents buy a sofa, then a rug, curtains, chairs to replace the orange and apple crates one by one, now to be used for storage. Good. At the beginning of the second Communist five-year plan, our parents bought a car. But you could see the relatives and the villagers getting more worried about what to do with the girls. We had three girl second cousins, no boys; their great-grandfather and our grandfather were brothers. The great-grandfather was the old man who lived with them, as the river-pirate great-uncle was the old man who lived with us. When my sisters and I ate at their house, there we would be-six girls eating. The old man opened his eyes wide at us and turned in a circle, surrounded. His neck tendons stretched out. "Maggots!" he shouted. "Maggots! Where are my grandsons? I want grandsons! Give me grandsons! Maggots!" He pointed at each one of us, "Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot!" Then he dived into his food, eating fast and getting seconds. "Eat, maggots," he said. "Look at the maggots chew."
"He does that at every meal," the girls told us in English.
"Yeah," we said. "Our old man hates us too. What a.s.sholes."
Third Grand-Uncle finally did get a boy, though, his only great-grandson. The boy"s parents and the old man bought him toys, bought him everything-new diapers, new plastic pants-not homemade diapers, not bread bags. They gave him a full-month party inviting all the emigrant villagers; they deliberately hadn"t given the girls parties, so that no one would notice another girl. Their brother got toy trucks that were big enough to climb inside. When he grew older, he got a bicycle and let the girls play with his old tricycle and wagon. My mother bought his sisters a typewriter. "They can be clerk-typists," their father kept saying, but he would not buy them a typewriter.
"What an a.s.shole," I said, muttering the way my father muttered "Dog vomit" when the customers nagged him about missing socks.
Maybe my mother was afraid that I"d say things like that out loud and so had cut my tongue. Now again plans were urgently afoot to fix me up, to improve my voice. The wealthiest villager wife came to the laundry one day to have a listen. "You better do something with this one," she told my mother. "She has an ugly voice. She quacks like a pressed duck." Then she looked at me unnecessarily hard; Chinese do not have to address children directly. "You have what we call a pressed-duck voice," she said. This woman was the giver of American names, a powerful namer, though it was American names; my parents gave the Chinese names. And she was right: if you squeezed the duck hung up to dry in the east window, the sound that was my voice would come out of it. She was a woman of such power that all we immigrants and descendants of immigrants were obliged to her family forever for bringing us here and for finding us jobs, and she had named my voice.
"No," I quacked. "No, I don"t."
"Don"t talk back," my mother scolded. Maybe this lady was powerful enough to send us back.
I went to the front of the laundry and worked so hard that I impolitely did not take notice of her leaving.
"Improve that voice," she had instructed my mother, "or else you"ll never marry her off. Even the fool half ghosts won"t have her." So I discovered the next plan to get rid of us: marry us off here without waiting until China. The villagers" peasant minds converged on marriage. Late at night when we walked home from the laundry, they should have been sleeping behind locked doors, not overflowing into the streets in front of the benevolent a.s.sociations, all alit. We stood on tiptoes and on one another"s shoulders, and through the door we saw spotlights open on tall singers afire with sequins. An opera from San Francisco! An opera from Hong Kong! Usually I did not understand the words in operas, whether because of our obscure dialect or theirs I didn"t know, but I heard one line sung out into the night air in a woman"s voice high and clear as ice. She was standing on a chair, and she sang, "Beat me, then, beat me." The crowd laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks while the cymbals clashed-the dragon"s copper laugh-and the drums banged like firecrackers. "She is playing the part of a new daughter-in-law," my mother explained. "Beat me, then, beat me," she sang again and again. It must have been a refrain; each time she sang it, the audience broke up laughing. Men laughed; women laughed. They were having a great time.
"Chinese smeared bad daughters-in-law with honey and tied them naked on top of ant nests," my father said. "A husband may kill a wife who disobeys him. Confucius said that." Confucius, the rational man.
The singer, I thought, sounded like me talking, yet everyone said, "Oh, beautiful. Beautiful," when she sang high.
Walking home, the noisy women shook their old heads and sang a folk song that made them laugh uproariously: Marry a rooster, follow a rooster.
Marry a dog, follow a dog.
Married to a cudgel, married to a pestle, Be faithful to it. Follow it.
I learned that young men were placing ads in the Gold Mountain News Gold Mountain News to find wives when my mother and father started answering them. Suddenly a series of new workers showed up at the laundry; they each worked for a week before they disappeared. They ate with us. They talked Chinese with my parents. They did not talk to us. We were to call them "Elder Brother," although they were not related to us. They were all funny-looking FOB"s, Fresh-off-the-Boat"s, as the Chinese-American kids at school called the young immigrants. FOB"s wear high-riding gray slacks and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Their eyes do not focus correctly-shifty-eyed-and they hold their mouths slack, not tight-jawed masculine. They shave off their sideburns. The girls said to find wives when my mother and father started answering them. Suddenly a series of new workers showed up at the laundry; they each worked for a week before they disappeared. They ate with us. They talked Chinese with my parents. They did not talk to us. We were to call them "Elder Brother," although they were not related to us. They were all funny-looking FOB"s, Fresh-off-the-Boat"s, as the Chinese-American kids at school called the young immigrants. FOB"s wear high-riding gray slacks and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Their eyes do not focus correctly-shifty-eyed-and they hold their mouths slack, not tight-jawed masculine. They shave off their sideburns. The girls said they"d they"d never date an FOB. My mother took one home from the laundry, and I saw him looking over our photographs. "This one," he said, picking up my sister"s picture. never date an FOB. My mother took one home from the laundry, and I saw him looking over our photographs. "This one," he said, picking up my sister"s picture.
"No. No," said my mother. "This one," my picture. "The oldest first," she said. Good. I was an obstacle. I would protect my sister and myself at the same time. As my parents and the FOB sat talking at the kitchen table, I dropped two dishes. I found my walking stick and limped across the floor. I twisted my mouth and caught my hand in the knots of my hair. I spilled soup on the FOB when I handed him his bowl. "She can sew, though," I heard my mother say, "and sweep." I raised dust swirls sweeping around and under the FOB"s chair-very bad luck because spirits live inside the broom. I put on my shoes with the open flaps and flapped about like a Wino Ghost. From then on, I wore those shoes to parties, whenever the mothers gathered to talk about marriages. The FOB and my parents paid me no attention, half ghosts half invisible, but when he left, my mother yelled at me about the dried-duck voice, the bad temper, the laziness, the clumsiness, the stupidity that comes from reading too much. The young men stopped visiting; not one came back. "Couldn"t you just stop rubbing your nose?" she scolded. "All the village ladies are talking about your nose. They"re afraid to eat our pastries because you might have kneaded the dough." But I couldn"t stop at will anymore, and a crease developed across the bridge. My parents would not give up, though. "Though you can"t see it," my mother said, "a red string around your ankle ties you to the person you"ll marry. He"s already been born, and he"s on the other end of the string."
At Chinese school there was a mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind. He had an enormous face, and he growled. He laughed from so far within his thick body that his face got confused about what the sounds coming up into his mouth might be, laughs or cries. He barked unhappily. He didn"t go to cla.s.ses but hung around the playgrounds. We suspected he was not a boy but an adult. He wore baggy khaki trousers like a man"s. He carried bags of toys for giving to certain children. Whatever you wanted, he"d get it for you-brand-new toys, as many as you could think up in your poverty, all the toys you never had when you were younger. We wrote lists, discussed our lists, compared them. Those kids not in his favor gave lists to those who were. "Where do you get the toys?" I asked. "I... own ... stores," he roared, one word at a time, thick tongued. At recess the day after ordering, we got handed out to us coloring books, paint sets, model kits. But sometimes he chased us-his fat arms out to the side; his fat fingers opening and closing; his legs stiff like Frankenstein"s monster, like the mummy dragging its foot; growling; laughing-crying. Then we"d have to run, following the old rule, running away from our house.
But suddenly he knew where we worked. He found us; maybe he had followed us in his wanderings. He started sitting at our laundry. Many of the storekeepers invited sitting in their stores, but we did not have sitting because the laundry was hot and because it was outside Chinatown. He sweated; he panted, the stubble rising and falling on his fat neck and chin. He sat on two large cartons that he brought with him and stacked one on top of the other. He said h.e.l.lo to my mother and father, and then, balancing his heavy head, he lowered himself carefully onto his cartons and sat. My parents allowed this. They did not chase him out or comment about how strange he was. I stopped placing orders for toys. I didn"t limp anymore; my parents would only figure that this zombie and I were a match.
I studied hard, got straight A"s, but n.o.body seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect. At school there were dating and dances, but not for good Chinese girls. "You ought to develop yourself socially as well as mentally," the American teachers, who took me aside, said.
I told n.o.body about the monster. And n.o.body else was talking either; no mention about the laundry workers who appeared and disappeared; no mention about the sitter. Maybe I was making it all up, and queer marriage notions did not occur to other people. I had better not say a word, then. Don"t give them ideas. Keep quiet.
I pressed clothes-baskets of giants" BVD"s, long underwear even in summertime, T-shirts, sweat shirts. Laundry work is men"s clothes, unmarried-men"s clothes. My back felt sick because it was toward the monster who gave away toys. His lumpishness was sending out germs that would lower my IQ. His leechiness was drawing IQ points out of the back of my head. I maneuvered my work shifts so that my brothers would work the afternoons, when he usually came lumbering into the laundry, but he caught on and began coming during the evening, the cool shift. Then I would switch back to the afternoon or to the early mornings on weekends and in summer, dodging him. I kept my sister with me, protecting her without telling her why. If she hadn"t noticed, then I mustn"t scare her. "Let"s clean house this morning," I"d say. Our other sister was a baby, and the brothers were not in danger. But the were-person would stalk down our street; his thick face smiled between the lettering on the laundry window, and when he saw me working, he shouldered inside. At night I thought I heard his feet dragging around the house, sc.r.a.ping gravel. I sat up to listen to our watchdog prowl the yard, pulling her long chain after her, and that worried me too. I had to do something about that chain, the weight of it sc.r.a.ping her neck fur short. And if she was walking about, why wasn"t she barking? Maybe somebody was out there taming her with raw meat. I could not ask for help.
Every day the hulk took one drink from the watercooler and went once to the bathroom, stumbling between the presses into the back of the laundry, big shoes clumping. Then my parents would talk about what could be inside his boxes. Were they filled with toys? With money? When the toilet flushed, they stopped talking about it. But one day he either stayed in the bathroom for a long time or went for a walk and left the boxes unguarded. "Let"s open them up," said my mother, and she did. I looked over her shoulder. The two cartons were stuffed with p.o.r.nography-naked magazines, nudie postcards and photographs.
You would think she"d have thrown him out right then, but my mother said, "My goodness, he"s not too stupid to want to find out about women." I heard the old women talk about how he was stupid but very rich.
Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat. When I first started counting, I had had only thirty-six items: how I had prayed for a white horse of my own-white, the bad, mournful color-and prayer bringing me to the attention of the G.o.d of the black-and-white nuns who gave us "holy cards" in the park. How I wanted the horse to start the movies in my mind coming true. How I had picked on a girl and made her cry. How I had stolen from the cash register and bought candy for everybody I knew, not just brothers and sisters, but strangers too and ghost children. How it was me who pulled up the onions in the garden out of anger. How I had jumped head-first off the dresser, not accidentally, but so I could fly. Then there were my fights at Chinese school. And the nuns who kept stopping us in the park, which was across the street from Chinese school, to tell us that if we didn"t get baptized we"d go to a h.e.l.l like one of the nine Taoist h.e.l.ls forever. And the obscene caller that phoned us at home when the adults were at the laundry. And the Mexican and Filipino girls at school who went to "confession," and how I envied them their white dresses and their chance each Sat.u.r.day to tell even thoughts that were sinful. If only I could let my mother know the list, she-and the world-would become more like me, and I would never be alone again. I would pick a time of day when my mother was alone and tell her one item a day; I"d be finished in less than a year. If the telling got excruciating and her anger too bad, I"d tell five items once a week like the Catholic girls, and I"d still be through in a year, maybe ten months. My mother"s most peaceful time was in the evenings when she starched the white shirts. The laundry would be clean, the gray wood floors sprinkled and swept with water and wet sawdust. She would be wringing shirts at the starch tub and not running about. My father and sisters and brothers would be at their own jobs mending, folding, packaging. Steam would be rising from the starch, the air cool at last. Yes, that would be the time and place for the telling.
And I wanted to ask again why the women in our family have a split nail on our left little toe. Whenever we asked our parents about it, they would glance at each other, embarra.s.sed. I think I"ve heard one of them say, "She didn"t get away." I made up that we are descended from an ancestress who stubbed her toe and fell when running from a rapist. I wanted to ask my mother if I had guessed right.
I hunkered down between the wall and the wicker basket of shirts. I had decided to start with the earliest item-when I had smashed a spider against the white side of the house: it was the first thing I killed. I said, clearly, "I killed a spider," and it was nothing; she did not hit me or throw hot starch at me. It sounded like nothing to me too. How strange when I had had such feelings of death shoot through my hand and into my body so that I would surely die. So I had to continue, of course, and let her know how important it had been. "I returned every day to look at its smear on the side of the house," I said. "It was our old house, the one we lived in until I was five. I went to the wall every day to look. I studied the stain." Relieved because she said nothing but only continued squeezing the starch, I went away feeling pretty good. Just two hundred and six more items to go. I moved carefully all the next day so as not to do anything or have anything happen to me that would make me go back to two hundred and seven again. I"d tell a couple of easy ones and work up to how I had pulled the quiet girl"s hair and how I had enjoyed the year being sick. If it was going to be this easy, maybe I could blurt out several a day, maybe an easy one and a hard one. I could go chronologically, or I could work from easy to hard or hard to easy, depending on my mood. On the second night I talked about how I had hinted to a ghost girl that I wished I had a doll of my own until she gave me a head and body to glue together-that she hadn"t given it to me of her own generosity but because I had hinted. But on the fifth night (I skipped two to reward myself) I decided it was time to do a really hard one and tell her about the white horse. And suddenly the duck voice came out, which I did not use with the family. "What"s it called, Mother"-the duck voice coming out talking to my own mother-"when a person whispers to the head of the sages-no, not the sages, more like the buddhas but not real people like the buddhas (they"ve always lived in the sky and never turned into people like the buddhas)-and you whisper to them, the boss of them, and ask for things? They"re like magicians? What do you call it when you talk to the boss magician?"
""Talking-to-the-top-magician," I guess."
"I did that. Yes. That"s it. That"s what I did. I talked-to-the-top-magician and asked for a white horse." There. Said.
"Mm," she said, squeezing the starch out of the collar and cuffs. But I had talked, and she acted as if she hadn"t heard.
Perhaps she hadn"t understood. I had to be more explicit. I hated this. "I kneeled on the bed in there, in the laundry bedroom, and put my arms up like I saw in a comic book"-one night I heard monsters coming through the kitchen, and I had promised the G.o.d in the movies, the one the Mexicans and Filipinos have, as in "G.o.d Bless America," that I would not read comic books anymore if he would save me just this once; I had broken that promise, and I needed to tell all this to my mother too-"and in that ludicrous position asked for a horse."
"Mm," she said, nodded, and kept dipping and squeezing.
On my two nights off, I had sat on the floor too but had not said a word.
"Mother," I whispered and quacked.
"I can"t stand this whispering," she said looking right at me, stopping her squeezing. "Senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop. Go away and work. Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don"t feel like hearing your craziness."
So I had to stop, relieved in some ways. I shut my mouth, but I felt something alive tearing at my throat, bite by bite, from the inside. Soon there would be three hundred things, and too late to get them out before my mother grew old and died.
I had probably interrupted her in the middle of her own quiet time when the boiler and presses were off and the cool night flew against the windows in moths and crickets. Very few customers came in. Starching the shirts for the next day"s pressing was probably my mother"s time to ride off with the people in her own mind. That would explain why she was so far away and did not want to listen to me. "Leave me alone," she said.
The hulk, the hunching sitter, brought a third box now, to rest his feet on. He patted his boxes. He sat in wait, hunching on his pile of dirt. My throat hurt constantly, vocal cords taut to snapping. One night when the laundry was so busy that the whole family was eating dinner there, crowded around the little round table, my throat burst open. I stood up, talking and burbling. I looked directly at my mother and at my father and screamed, "I want you to tell that hulk, that gorilla-ape, to go away and never bother us again. I know what you"re up to. You"re thinking he"s rich, and we"re poor. You think we"re odd and not pretty and we"re not bright. You think you can give us away to freaks. You better not do that, Mother. I don"t want to see him or his dirty boxes here tomorrow. If I see him here one more time, I"m going away. I"m going away anyway. I am. Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I"m not, I"m not r.e.t.a.r.ded. There"s nothing wrong with my brain. Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I"m smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I"ve already applied. I"m smart. I can do all kinds of things. I know how to get A"s, and they say I could be a scientist or a mathematician if I want. I can make a living and take care of myself. So you don"t have to find me a keeper who"s too dumb to know a bad bargain. I"m so smart, if they say write ten pages, I can write fifteen. I can do ghost things even better than ghosts can. Not everybody thinks I"m nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife. Even if I am stupid and talk funny and get sick, I won"t let you turn me into a slave or a wife. I"m getting out of here. I can"t stand living here anymore. It"s your fault I talk weird. The only reason I flunked kindergarten was because you couldn"t teach me English, and you gave me a zero IQ. I"ve brought my IQ up, though. They say I"m smart now. Things follow in lines at school. They take stories and teach us to turn them into essays. I don"t need anybody to p.r.o.nounce English words for me. I can figure them out by myself. I"m going to get scholarships, and I"m going away. And at college I"ll have the people I like for friends. I don"t care if their great-greatgrandfather died of TB. I don"t care if they were our enemies in China four thousand years ago. So get that ape out of here. I"m going to college. And I"m not going to Chinese school anymore. I"m going to run for office at American school, and I"m going to join clubs. I"m going to get enough offices and clubs on my record to get into college. And I can"t stand Chinese school anyway; the kids are rowdy and mean, fighting all night. And I don"t want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won"t tell me a story and then say, "This is a true story," or, "This is just a story." I can"t tell the difference. I don"t even know what your real names are. I can"t tell what"s real and what you make up. Ha! You can"t stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn"t work." So I told the hardest ten or twelve things on my list all in one outburst.
My mother, who is champion talker, was, of course, shouting at the same time. "I cut it to make you talk more, not less, you dummy. You"re still stupid. You can"t listen right. I didn"t say I was going to marry you off. Did I ever say that? Did I ever mention that? Those newspaper people were for your sister, not you. Who would want you? Who said we could sell you? We can"t sell people. Can"t you take a joke? You can"t even tell a joke from real life. You"re not so smart. Can"t even tell real from false."
"I"m never getting married, never!"
"Who"d want to marry you anyway? Noisy. Talking like a duck. Disobedient. Messy. And I know about college. What makes you think you"re the first one to think about college? I was a doctor. I went to medical school. I don"t see why you have to be a mathematician. I don"t see why you can"t be a doctor like me."
"I can"t stand fever and delirium or listening to people coming out of anesthesia. But I didn"t say I wanted to be a mathematician either. That"s what the ghosts say. I want to be a lumberjack and a newspaper reporter." Might as well tell her some of the other items on my list. "I"m going to chop down trees in the daytime and write about timber at night."
"I don"t see why you need to go to college at all to become either one of those things. Everybody else is sending their girls to typing school. "Learn to type if you want to be an American girl." Why don"t you go to typing school? The cousins and village girls are going to typing school."
"And you leave my sister alone. You try that with the advertising again, and I"ll take her with me." My telling list was scrambled out of order. When I said them out loud I saw that some of the items were ten years old already, and I had outgrown them. But they kept pouring out anyway in the voice like Chinese opera. I could hear the drums and the cymbals and the gongs and bra.s.s horns.
"You"re the one to leave your little sisters alone," my mother was saying. "You"re always leading them off somewhere. I"ve had to call the police twice because of you." She herself was shouting out things I had meant to tell her-that I took my brothers and sisters to explore strange people"s houses, ghost children"s houses, and haunted houses blackened by fire. We explored a Mexican house and a redheaded family"s house, but not the gypsies" house; I had only seen the inside of the gypsies" house in mind-movies. We explored the sloughs, where we found hobo nests. My mother must have followed us.
"You turned out so unusual. I fixed your tongue so you could say charming things. You don"t even say h.e.l.lo to the villagers."
"They don"t say h.e.l.lo to me."
"They don"t have to answer children. When you get old, people will say h.e.l.lo to you."
"When I get to college, it won"t matter if I"m not charming. And it doesn"t matter if a person is ugly; she can still do schoolwork."
"I didn"t say you were ugly."
"You say that all the time."
"That"s what we"re supposed to say. That"s what Chinese say. We like to say the opposite."
It seemed to hurt her to tell me that-another guilt for my list to tell my mother, I thought. And suddenly I got very confused and lonely because I was at that moment telling her my list, and in the telling, it grew. No higher listener. No listener but myself.
"Ho Chi Kuei," she shouted. "Ho Chi Kuei. Leave then. Get out, you Ho Chi Kuei. Get out. I knew you were going to turn out bad. Ho Chi Kuei." My brothers and sisters had left the table, and my father would not look at me anymore, ignoring me.
Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, t.v. dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.
I"ve been looking up "Ho Chi Kuei," which is what the immigrants call us-Ho Chi Ghosts. "Well, Ho Chi Kuei," they say, "what silliness have you been up to now?" "That"s a Ho Chi Kuei for you," they say, no matter what we"ve done. It was more complicated (and therefore worse) than "dog," which they say affectionately, mostly to boys. They use "pig" and "stink pig" for girls, and only in an angry voice. The river-pirate great-uncle called even my middle brother Ho Chi Kuei, and he seemed to like him best. The maggot third great-uncle even shouted "Ho Chi Kuei!" at the boy. I don"t know any Chinese I can ask without getting myself scolded or teased, so I"ve been looking in books. So far I have the following translations for ho ho and/or and/or chi: chi: "centipede," "grub," "b.a.s.t.a.r.d carp," "chirping insect," "jujube tree," "pied wagtail," "grain sieve," "casket sacrifice," "water lily," "good frying," "non-eater," "dustpan-and-broom" (but that"s a synonym for "wife"). Or perhaps I"ve romanized the spelling wrong and it is "centipede," "grub," "b.a.s.t.a.r.d carp," "chirping insect," "jujube tree," "pied wagtail," "grain sieve," "casket sacrifice," "water lily," "good frying," "non-eater," "dustpan-and-broom" (but that"s a synonym for "wife"). Or perhaps I"ve romanized the spelling wrong and it is Hao Hao Chi Kuei, which could mean they are calling us "Good Foundation Ghosts." The immigrants could be saying that we were born on Gold Mountain and have advantages. Sometimes they scorn us for having had it so easy, and sometimes they"re delighted. They also call us "Jook Sing," or "Bamboo Nodes." Bamboo nodes obstruct water. Chi Kuei, which could mean they are calling us "Good Foundation Ghosts." The immigrants could be saying that we were born on Gold Mountain and have advantages. Sometimes they scorn us for having had it so easy, and sometimes they"re delighted. They also call us "Jook Sing," or "Bamboo Nodes." Bamboo nodes obstruct water.
I like to look up a troublesome, shameful thing and then say, "Oh, is that all?" The simple explanation makes it less scary to go home after yelling at your mother and father. It drives the fear away and makes it possible someday to visit China, where I know now they don"t sell girls or kill each other for no reason.
Now colors are gentler and fewer; smells are antiseptic. Now when I peek in the bas.e.m.e.nt window where the villagers say they see a girl dancing like a bottle imp, I can no longer see a spirit in a skirt made of light, but a voiceless girl dancing when she thought no one was looking. The very next day after I talked out the r.e.t.a.r.ded man, the huncher, he disappeared. I never saw him again or heard what became of him. Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle. The throat pain always returns, though, unless I tell what I really think, whether or not I lose my job, or spit out gaucheries all over a party. I"ve stopped checking "bilingual" on job applications. I could not understand any of the dialects the interviewer at China Airlines tried on me, and he didn"t understand me either. I"d like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me. I continue to sort out what"s just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living.
Soon I want to go to China and find out who"s lying-the Communists who say they have food and jobs for everybody or the relatives who write that they have not the money to buy salt. My mother sends money she earns working in the tomato fields to Hong Kong. The relatives there can send it on to the remaining aunts and their children and, after a good harvest, to the children and grandchildren of my grandfather"s two minor wives. "Every woman in the tomato row is sending money home," my mother says, "to Chinese villages and Mexican villages and Filipino villages and, now, Vietnamese villages, where they speak Chinese too. The women come to work whether sick or well. "I "I can"t die," they say, "I"m supporting fifty," or "I"m supporting a hundred."" can"t die," they say, "I"m supporting fifty," or "I"m supporting a hundred.""
What I"ll inherit someday is a green address book full of names. I"ll send the relatives money, and they"ll write me stories about their hunger. My mother has been tearing up the letters from the youngest grandson of her father"s third wife. He has been asking for fifty dollars to buy a bicycle. He says a bicycle will change his life. He could feed his wife and children if he had a bicycle. "We"d have to go hungry ourselves," my mother says. "They don"t understand that we have ourselves to feed too." I"ve been making money; I guess it"s my turn. I"d like to go to China and see those people and find out what"s a cheat story and what"s not. Did my grandmother really live to be ninety-nine? Or did they string us along all those years to get our money? Do the babies wear a Mao b.u.t.ton like a drop of blood on their jumpsuits? When we overseas Chinese send money, do the relatives divide it evenly among the commune? Or do they really pay 2 percent tax and keep the rest? It would be good if the Communists were taking care of themselves; then I could buy a color t.v.
Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine.
In China my grandmother loved the theater (which I would not have been able to understand because of my seventh-grade vocabulary, said my mother). When the actors came to the village and set up their scaffolding, my grandmother bought a large section up front. She bought enough room for our entire family and a bed; she would stay days and nights, not missing even the repeating scenes.
The danger was that the bandits would make raids on households thinned out during performances. Bandits followed the actors.
"But, Grandmother," the family complained, "the bandits will steal the tables while we"re gone." They took the chairs to plays.
"I want every last one of you at that theater," my grandmother raved. "Slavegirls, everybody. I don"t want to watch that play by myself. How can I laugh all by myself? You want me to clap alone, is that it? I want everybody there. Babies, everybody."
"The robbers will ransack the food."
"So let them. Cook up the food and take it to the theater. If you"re so worried about bandits, if you"re not going to concentrate on the play because of a few bandits, leave the doors open. Leave the windows open. Leave the house wide open. I order the doors open. We are going to the theater without worries."
So they left the doors open, and my whole family went to watch the actors. And sure enough, that night the bandits struck-not the house, but the theater itself. "Bandits aa!" the audience screamed. "Bandits aa!" the actors screamed. My family ran in all directions, my grandmother and mother holding on to each other and jumping into a ditch. They crouched there because my grandmother could run no farther on bound feet. They watched a bandit loop a rope around my youngest aunt, Lovely Orchid, and prepare to drag her off. Suddenly he let her go. "A prettier one," he said, grabbing somebody else. By daybreak, when my grandmother and mother made their way home, the entire family was home safe, proof to my grandmother that our family was immune to harm as long as they went to plays. They went to many plays after that.
I like to think that at some of those performances, they heard the songs of Ts"ai Yen, a poetess born in A.D A.D. 175. She was the daughter of Ts"ai Yung, the scholar famous for his library. When she was twenty years old, she was captured by a chieftain during a raid by the Southern Hsiung-nu. He made her sit behind him when the tribe rode like the haunted from one oasis to the next, and she had to put her arms around his waist to keep from falling off the horse. After she became pregnant, he captured a mare as his gift to her. Like other captive soldiers until the time of Mao, whose soldiers volunteered, Ts"ai Yen fought desultorily when the fighting was at a distance, and she cut down anyone in her path during the madness of close combat. The tribe fought from horseback, charging in a ma.s.s into villages and encampments. She gave birth on the sand; the barbarian women were said to be able to birth in the saddle. During her twelve-year stay with the barbarians, she had two children. Her children did not speak Chinese. She spoke it to them when their father was out of the tent, but they imitated her with senseless singsong words and laughed.
The barbarians were primitives. They gathered inedible reeds when they camped along rivers and dried them in the sun. They dried the reeds tied on their flagpoles and horses" manes and tails. Then they cut wedges and holes. They slipped feathers and arrow shafts into the shorter reeds, which became nock-whistles. During battle the arrows whistled, high whirling whistles that suddenly stopped when the arrows. .h.i.t true. Even when the barbarians missed, they terrified their enemies by filling the air with death sounds, which Ts"ai Yen had thought was their only music, until one night she heard music tremble and rise like desert wind. She walked out of her tent and saw hundreds of the barbarians sitting upon the sand, the sand gold under the moon. Their elbows were raised, and they were blowing on flutes. They reached again and again for a high note, yearning toward a high note, which they found at last and held-an icicle in the desert. The music disturbed Ts"ai Yen; its sharpness and its cold made her ache. It disturbed her so that she could not concentrate on her own thoughts. Night after night the songs filled the desert no matter how many dunes away she walked. She hid in her tent but could not sleep through the sound. Then, out of Ts"ai Yen"s tent, which was apart from the others, the barbarians heard a woman"s voice singing, as if to her babies, a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes. Ts"ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch barbarian phrases about forever wandering. Her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter campfires, ringed by barbarians.
After twelve years among the Southern Hsiung-nu, Ts"ai Yen was ransomed and married to Tung Ssu so that her father would have Han descendants. She brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has been pa.s.sed down to us is "Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well.
ALSO BY MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
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