The Hundred Secret Senses

  “Did you?”

  “Before not. Now letter say this, we invite. Otherwise she loose face. Next week, she come.”

  Even with constant exposure to Kwan, I don’t think I will ever understand the dynamics of a Chinese family, all the subterranean intricacies of who’s connected to whom, who’s responsible, who’s to blame, all that crap about losing face. I’m glad my life isn’t as complicated.

  At the end of the night, Kwan hands me a video. It’s of her birthday party, the same day Simon and I had our major blowout, the one that led to our end.

  I remember that I had raced upstairs, where Simon was getting dressed. I opened a dormer window and held up his diskette and shouted, “Here’s your fucking novel! Here’s what’s important to you!” And then I let go of the diskette.

  We shouted at each other for an hour, and then I said in a calm and detached voice the words that were more terrible than any curse: “I want a divorce.” Simon shocked me by saying, “Fine,” then stomped down the stairs, banged the door, and was gone. Not five minutes later, the phone rang. I made myself as unemotional as I could. No hurt, no anger, no forgiveness. Let him beg. On the fifth ring, I picked it up.

  “Libby-ah?” It was Kwan, her voice shy and girlish. “Ma call you? You coming? Everyone already here. Lots food . . .”

  I mumbled some sort of excuse.

  “Simon sick? Just now? . . . Oh, food poison. Okay, you take care him. No-no. He more important than birthday.” And when she said that, I was determined that Simon would no longer be more important than anything in my life, not even Kwan. I went to the party alone.

  “Very funny video,” Kwan is now saying, as she sees me to the door. “Maybe no time watch. Take anyway.” And so the evening ends, without one mention of Simon.

  Once home, I am forlorn. I try watching television. I try to read. I look at the clock. It’s too late to call anyone. For the first time in six months, my life seems hollow and I’m desperately lonely. I see Kwan’s video lying on the dresser. Why not? Let’s go to a party.

  I’ve always thought home videos are boring, because they’re never edited. You see moments from your life that never should be replayed. You see the past happening as the present, yet you already know what’s coming.

  This one opens with blinking holiday lights, then pans out to show we are at the Mediterranean doorway of Kwan and George’s house on Balboa Street. With the blurry sweep of the camera, we enter. Even though it’s the end of January, Kwan always keeps the holiday decorations up until after her birthday. The video captures it all: plastic wreaths hung over aluminum-frame windows, the indoor-outdoor green-and-blue carpeting, the fake-wood-grain paneling, and a mish-mash of furniture bought at warehouse discount centers and Saturday tag sales.

  The back of Kwan’s permed hair looms into the frame. She calls out in her too loud voice: “Ma! Mr. Shirazi! Welcome-welcome, come inside.” My mother and her boyfriend of the moment bounce into view. She’s wearing a leopard-print blouse, leggings, and a black velour jacket with gold braid trim. Her bifocals have a purple gradient tint. Ever since her facelift, my mother has been wearing progressively more outrageous clothes. She met Sharam Shirazi at an advanced salsa dance class. She told me she liked him better than her last beau, a Samoan, because he knows how to hold a lady’s hand, “not like a drumstick.” Also, by my mother’s estimation, Mr. Shirazi is quite the lover boy. She once whispered to me: “He does things maybe even you young people don’t do.” I didn’t ask what she meant.

  Kwan stares back at the camera to make sure George has recorded our mother’s arrival properly. And then more people arrive. The video swerves toward them: Kwan’s two stepsons, my brothers, their wives, their cumulative four children. Kwan greets them all, shouting out each child’s name—“Melissa! Patty! Eric! Jena!”—then motions to George to get a shot of the kids grouped together.

  Finally, there’s my arrival. “Why so late!” Kwan complains happily. She grabs my arm and escorts me to the camera so that our faces fill the screen. I look tired, embarrassed, red-eyed. It’s obvious I want to escape.

  “This my sister, Libby-ah,” Kwan is saying to the camera. “My favorite best sister. Which one older? You guess. Which?”

  In the next few scenes, Kwan acts as if she were on amphetamines, bouncing off the walls. There she is, standing next to her fake Christmas tree. She points to ornaments, gestures like the gracious hostess of a game show. There she is, picking up her presents. She exaggerates their heaviness, then shakes, tilts, smells each one before reading the name tag of the lucky recipient. Her mouth rounds in fake astonishment: “For me?” And then she laughs gruffly and holds up all ten fingers, closing and opening them like a flashing signal: “Fifty years!” she shouts. “Can you believe? No? How ’bout forty?” She comes closer to the camera and nods. “Okay-okay, forty.”

  The camera ricochets from one ten-second scene to the next. There they are, my mother sitting on Mr. Shirazi’s lap: someone yells for them to kiss and they gladly oblige. Next are my brothers in the bedroom, watching ESPN; they wave to the camera with sloshing cans of beer. Now my sisters-in-law, Tabby and Barbara, are helping Kwan in the kitchen; Kwan holds up a coin-shaped slice of pork and cries, “Taste! Come close, taste!” In another bedroom, kids are huddled around a computer game; they cheer each time a monster has been killed. And now the whole family and I are standing in the buffet line, finding our way to a dining table which has been enlarged by the addition of a mah jong table at one end and a card table at the other.

  I see a close-up of myself: I wave, toast Kwan, then go back to stabbing at my plate with a plastic fork, all the usual party behavior. But the camera is heartlessly objective. Anyone can see it in my face: my expressions are bland, my words are listless. It’s so obvious how depressed I am, entirely resistant to what life has to offer. My sister-in-law Tabby is talking to me, but I’m staring vacantly at my plate. The cake arrives and everyone breaks into the Happy Birthday song. The camera pans the room and finds me on the sofa, setting into motion a tabletop toy of steel balls that make a perpetual and annoying clack-clack sound. I look like a zombie.

  Kwan opens her presents. The Hummel knockoff of skating children is from her coworkers at the drugstore. “Oh, so cute-cute,” she croons, putting it next to her other figurines. The coffee maker is from my mother. “Ah, Ma! How you know my other coffee machine broken?” The silk blouse in her favorite color, red, is from her younger stepson, Teddy. “Too good to wear,” Kwan laments with joy. The silver-plated candlestick holders are from her other stepson, Timmy; she puts candles in them, then sets them on the table he helped her refinish last year. “Just like First Lady in White House!” she gloats. The clay-blob sculpture of a sleeping unicorn is from our niece Patty; Kwan puts this carefully on the mantel, promising: “I never sell it, even when Patty become famous artist and this worth one million dollar.” The daisy-patterned bathrobe is from her husband. She looks at the designer-soundalike label: “Ohhhh. Giorgio Laurentis. Too expensive. Why you spend so much?” She shakes her finger at her husband, who smiles, bashfully proud.

  Another pile is set in front of Kwan. I fast-forward through the unveiling of placemats, a clothes steamer, a monogrammed tote bag. Finally I see her picking up my present. I press the Stop button, then hit Play.

  “. . . Always save best for last,” she’s proclaiming. “Must be very-very special, because Libby-ah my favorite sister.” She unties the ribbon, puts it aside for safekeeping. The wrapping paper falls away. She purses her lips, staring at the tortoiseshell box. She turns it slowly from top to bottom, then lifts off the top and looks inside. She touches her hand to one cheek and says, “Beautiful, so useful too.” She holds up the box for video-recorded history: “See?” she says, grinning. “Travel soap dish!”

  In the background, you can hear my strained voice. “Actually, it’s not for soap. It’s for, you know, jewels and stuff.”

  Kwan looks at the box again. “Not for soap? For jews? Ohh
h!” She holds up the box again, giving it more respect. Suddenly she brightens. “George, you hear? My sister Libby-ah say I deserve good jews. Buy me diamond, big diamond put in travel soap dish!”

  George grunts and the camera swings wildly as he calls out: “The two sisters, stand by the fireplace.” I’m protesting, explaining that I have to go home, that I have work to do. But Kwan is pulling me up from the sofa, laughing and calling to me, “Come-come, lazy girl. Never too busy for big sister.”

  The video camera whirs. Kwan’s face freezes into a grin, as if she’s waiting for a flash to go off. She squeezes me tight, forcing me to be even closer to her, then murmurs in a voice full of wonder, “Libby-ah, my sister, so special, so good to me.”

  And I’m on the verge of tears, both in the video and now watching my life happen over again. Because I can’t deny it any longer. Any second, my heart is going to break.

  10

  KWAN'S KITCHEN

  Kwan says to come over at six-thirty, which is what time she always says to come over, only usually we don’t start eating until closer to eight. So I ask if dinner will really be ready at six-thirty, otherwise I’ll come later, because I am really busy. Six-thirty for sure, she says.

  At six-thirty, George answers the door, bleary-eyed. He isn’t wearing his glasses, and his thin patch of hair looks like an advertisement for anti–static cling products. He’s just been promoted to manager at a Food-4-Less store in the East Bay. When he first started working there, Kwan didn’t notice the 4 in the store’s name, and even with reminders she still calls it Foodless.

  I find her in the kitchen, cutting off the stems of black mushrooms. The rice hasn’t been washed, the prawns haven’t been deveined. Dinner is two hours away. I thump my purse down on the table, but Kwan is oblivious to my irritation. She pats a chair.

  “Libby-ah, sit down, I have something must tell you.” She slices mushrooms for fully half a minute more before dropping her bombshell. “I was talking to a yin person.” She’s now speaking in Chinese.

  I sigh deeply, letting her know I am not in the mood for this line of conversation.

  “Lao Lu, you also know him, but not in this lifetime. Lao Lu said that you must stay together with Simon. This is your yinyuan, the fate that brings lovers together.”

  “And why is this my fate?” I say unpleasantly.

  “Because in your last lifetime together, you loved someone else before Simon. Later, Simon trusted you with his whole life that you loved him too.”

  I almost fall off my chair. I have never told Kwan or anyone else the real reason we are getting divorced. I’ve said simply that we’ve grown apart. And now here’s Kwan talking about it—as if the whole damn universe, dead and alive, knows.

  “Libby-ah, you must believe,” she says in English. “This yin friend, he say Simon telling you true. You think he love you less, she more— no!—why you think like this, always compare love? Love not like money. . . .”

  I am livid to hear her defending him. “Come on, Kwan! Do you realize how crazy-stupid you sound? If anyone else heard you talking like this, they’d think you were nuts! If there really are ghosts, why don’t I ever see them? Tell me that, huh.”

  She’s now slicing open the backs of the prawns, pulling out their black intestines, leaving on their shells. “One time you can see,” she says calmly. “Little-girl time.”

  “I was pretending. Ghosts come from the imagination, not the World of Yin.”

  “Don’t say ‘ghost.’ To them this like racist word. Only bad yin person you call ghost.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. Even dead people have become politically correct. Okay, so what do these yin people look like? Tell me. How many of them are here tonight? Who’s sitting in this chair? Mao Tse-tung? Chou En-lai? How about the Dowager Empress?”

  “No-no, they not here.”

  “Well, tell them to drop by! Tell them I want to see them. I want to ask them if they have degrees in marriage counseling.”

  Kwan spreads newspapers on the floor to catch the grease from the stove. She slides the prawns into a hot pan and instantly the roar of blistering oil fills the kitchen. “Yin people want come, that’s when come,” she says above the din. “They never saying when, because treat me just like close family—come by no invitation, ‘Surprise, we here.’ But most times, come for dinner, when maybe one two dish not cook right. They say, ‘Ah! This sea bass, too firm, not flaky, maybe cook one minute too much. And these pickle-turnips, not crunchy enough, should make sound like walk in snow, crunch-crunch, then you know ready eat. And this sauce—tst!—too much sugar, only foreigner want eat it.’ ”

  Blah, blah, blah. It’s so ludicrous! She’s describing precisely what she, George, and his side of the family do all the time, the kind of talk I find boring as hell. It makes me want to laugh and scream at the same time, hearing her version of the pleasures of the afterlife described as amateur restaurant reviewing.

  Kwan dumps the glistening prawns into a bowl. “Most yin people very busy, working hard. They want relax, come to me, for good conversation, also because say I’m excellent cook.” She looks smug.

  I try to trap Kwan in her own faulty logic: “If you’re such an excellent cook, why do they come so often and criticize your cooking?”

  Kwan frowns and sticks out her lower lip—as if I could be stupid enough to ask such a question! “Not real criticize, just friendly way open-talk, be frank like close friend. And don’t really come eat. How can eat? They already dead! Only pretend eat. Anyway, most times they praise my cooking, yes, saying they never so lucky enough eat such good dish. Ai-ya, if only can eat my green-onion pancake, then can die oh so happy. But—too late—already dead.”

  “Maybe they should try take-out,” I grumble.

  Kwan pauses for a moment. “Ah-ha-ha, funny! You make joke.” She pokes my arm. “Naughty girl. Anyway, yin people like come visit me, talk about life already gone, like banquet, many-many flavors. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘now I remember. This part I enjoy, this I not enjoy enough. This I eat up too fast. Why I don’t taste that one? Why I let this piece my life gone spoiled, complete wasted?’ ”

  Kwan pops a prawn into her mouth, slides it around from cheek to cheek, until she has extricated the shell intact minus every bit of flesh. I’m always amazed that she can do this. To me, it looks like a circus stunt. She smacks her lips approvingly. “Libby-ah,” she says, holding up a small plate of golden shreds, “you like dried scallop?” I nod. “Georgie cousin Virgie send me from Vancouver. Sixty dollar one pound. Some people think too good for everyday. Should save best for later on.” She throws the scallops into a pan of sliced celery. “To me, best time now. You wait, everything change. Yin people know this. Always ask me, ‘Kwan, where best part my life gone? Why best part slip through my fingers like fast little fish? Why I save for last, find out later last already come before?’ . . . Libby-ah, here, taste. Tell me, too salty, not salty enough?”

  “It’s fine.”

  She continues: “ ‘Kwan,’ they telling me, ‘you still alive. You can still make memory. You can make good one. Teach us how make good one so next time we remember what not suppose forget.’ ”

  “Remember what?” I ask.

  “Why they want come back, of course.”

  “And you help them remember.”

  “I already help many yin people this way,” she brags.

  “Just like Dear Abby.”

  She considers this. “Yes-yes, like Dear Abby.” She’s visibly pleased with the comparison. “Many-many yin people in China. America too, plenty.” And then she starts to tally them on her fingers: “That young police officer—come my house time my car get stolened?—last lifetime he missionary in China, always saying ‘Amen, Amen.’ That pretty girl, work at bank now watch over my money so good, she another—bandit girl, long time ago rob greedy people. And Sarge, Hoover, Kirby, now Bubba, doggies, all them so loyal. Last lifetime they same one person. You guess who.”

  I shrug. I hate
this game, the way she always inveigles me into her delusions.

  “You guess.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess.”

  I throw my hands up. “Miss Banner.”

  “Ha! You guess wrong!”

  “All right, tell me. Who, then?”

  “General Cape!”

  I slap my forehead. “Of course.” I have to admit the whole idea of my dog’s being General Cape is rather amusing.

  “Now you know reason why first dog name Captain,” Kwan adds.

  “I named him that.”

  She wags her finger. “Demote him lower rank. You smart, teach him lesson.”

  “Teach him! Pff. That dog was so dumb. He wouldn’t sit, wouldn’t come, all he could do was beg for food. And then he ran away.”

  Kwan shakes her head. “Not run away. Run over.”

  “What?”

  “Mm-hm. I see, didn’t want tell you, you so little. So I say, Oh, Libby-ah, doggie gone, run away. I not lying. He run away to street before run over. Also, my English then not so good. Run away, run over, sound same to me. . . .” As Kwan belatedly speaks of Captain’s death, I feel a twinge of childlike sadness, of wanting things back, of believing I can change the fact that I was less than kind to Captain if only I could see him one more time.

  “General Cape, last lifetime no loyalty. That’s why come back doggie so many times. He choose himself do this. Good choice. Last lifetime he so bad—so bad! I know because his one-half man told me. Also I can see . . . Here, Libby-ah, huang do-zi, big bean sprout, see how yellow? Bought fresh today. Break off tails. You see any rotten spot, throw away. . . .”

  General Cape, he was rotten too. He threw away other people. Nunumu, I told myself, you pretend General Cape is not here. I had to pretend for a long time. For two months, General Cape lived in the Ghost Merchant’s House. For two months, Miss Banner opened her door every night to let him in. For those same two months, she didn’t speak to me, not as her loyal friend. She treated me as if I were her servant. She pointed to spots on the bosom part of her white clothes, spots she claimed I had not washed out, spots I knew were the dirty fingerprints of General Cape. On Sundays, she preached exactly what Pastor Amen said, no more good stories. And there were other great changes during that time.