The Kitchen God's Wife

  When we arrived in Hangchow, all the pilots were honored at a big banquet given by that famous American general with a lady’s name, Claire Chennault. Of course, he was not famous then, not in the beginning. He was not even a general. But I remember the pilots gave him a good-sounding Chinese name, Shan Nao, which sounded like “Chennault”: shan as in “lightning,” nao as in “noisy.” Noisy lightning was like the sound of airplanes racing across the sky—zah! And that was why Shan Nao came, to teach the pilots how to fly.

  I was there at that dinner, when old Noisy Lightning told the pilots something that made all the American instructors scream and shout like cowboys, and throw their caps in the air. But all the Chinese pilots remained seated, only smiled and clapped, waiting until it was quiet enough for the translator to tell them: “Shan Nao says we should give the Japanese a new kingdom.”

  Then all the pilots were talking among themselves, disagreeing, saying Shan Nao could not have meant to give the Japanese new territory. Whose kingdom did he mean? And finally, after much discussion, more arguments, many translations, we learned what Shan Nao had really said: “With your help, we won’t be sending the Japanese back to Japan, but to kingdom come. ” And everybody was laughing and saying, “It means we will kill them all! Kingdom Come is hell!”

  I remember many arguments like that: the Americans said one thing, we understood another, everybody fighting someone else. It was like this at the very beginning, when we arrived at the training camp just outside Hangchow, when we learned we had no place to live. The first class of pilots and their families were still living in the bungalows, walking around in circles, talking angrily among themselves. And later we heard why: The Americans were telling their leaders that the Chinese pilots were still not qualified to fly, that they had failed the test.

  And this made the first class of pilots feel they had failed not just a test but all of China! Lost face, big faces. Many of them came from very important Chinese families and they complained to their leaders: It was only because the Americans concentrated on all the wrong things—shiny shoes and ties and hats put on straight the same way. And the foreign-built airplanes were bad, broken down—of course no one could fly them properly. And then my husband’s class, the second class, was shouting, “No more wasting time. We need to be trained too—to save China.” Until finally the Americans agreed to give the first class more training. And the second class would also begin training. But the complaining didn’t stop right away, because we still had no place to live.

  That’s how everything was in China then. Too busy fighting each other to fight together. And not just the Americans and the Chinese. The old revolutionaries, the new revolutionaries, the Kuomintang and the Communists, the warlords, the bandits, and the students—gwah! gwah! gwah!—everybody squabbling, like old roosters claiming the same sunrise. And the rest of us—women and children, old people and poor people—we were like scared hens, letting everyone chase us from one corner to another. So of course the Japanese saw an opportunity to sneak in like a fox and steal everything.

  The second class of pilots and their wives ended up living in a place in Hangchow that had once been a monastery, halfway up in the mountain where the monks grew dragon-well tea, the best tea in all of China. The monks had donated this place temporarily to the air force, because they believed the air force was going to save China. Every Chinese person believed the same: that we were about to push the Japanese out of China forever.

  Most of the pilots slept in a big common room. But if you had a wife or were an American, you had your own room with a narrow bed. Everyone shared the kitchen located at the end of the building, as well as an unheated bathhouse, which had five small wooden tubs. That bathhouse was also used by some Americans, but fortunately, they took baths only once a week, on Saturday nights.

  So our housing was not comfortable. Yet we did not complain too much, perhaps because of the clever way the monks had greeted us. We had arrived in the late springtime. The hills were already fragrant with tea. And we were also told that we had come at just the right time. This exact week in spring was the best time of the best season, they said—when the sweetest leaves of the most fragrant tea in the world could be harvested. When the most beautiful lake under all the heavens was at its loveliest. When the weather seemed like a daily blessing. And this news that welcomed the pilots at their new home made them feel immediately pleased with themselves, victors already.

  Oftentimes at dusk, a group of us would walk along the lake and someone would say, “This is when the lake is clearest, this time of the year.” And someone else would add, “Look, the sun, over the lake, and in the water—two, no, three suns setting at once.” And another person would sigh and murmur, “A sunset like this, I can watch it all day.”

  You can see how none of us was thinking that this small bit of luck—of arriving at just the right time—would soon pass, and perhaps something less kind would take its place.

  All that beauty was almost enough even for me. I would often walk around the lake by myself, and I would not be thinking about my past unhappiness, or my future life with my husband. I was only watching the birds who floated above the lake, then landed so lightly on the water that no ripples appeared. Just that moment. Or I would be admiring the web a spider had woven on a bush, perfectly formed and sparkling with pearls of dew. And I was wondering if I could later knit a sweater in the same design, using only this memory as a pattern.

  But then the birds would suddenly call to one another, and they sounded just like a woman crying. Or the spider would feel my breath and clench its body small and tight before scurrying away. And I would be thinking about my fears, the questions I already had in my marriage.

  I had known Wen Fu only a short time before we were married. And after the wedding, we lived one month with his parents, in their family house on the island. So in truth, I knew Wen Fu’s mother’s nature better than I knew his. She was the one who taught me how to be a good wife to her youngest son. This mother who spoiled him—she was the one who taught me how to be dutiful to a terrible person. And I listened, because I had no mother of my own, only Old Aunt and New Aunt, who each raised me to be afraid in different ways.

  So this is what my mother-in-law taught me: To protect my husband so he would protect me. To fear him and think this was respect. To make him a proper hot soup, which was ready to serve only when I had scalded my little finger testing it.

  “Doesn’t hurt!” my mother-in-law would exclaim if I shouted in pain. “That kind of sacrifice for a husband never hurts.”

  And I believed she was also saying that this kind of pain for a husband was true love, the kind that grew between husband and wife. I had also learned this in the movies, both Chinese and American. A woman always had to feel pain, suffer and cry, before she could feel love. And now that I was living with Wen Fu in a little monastery room in Hangchow, I suffered a lot. I thought my love was growing bigger and bigger. I thought I was becoming a better wife.

  And now I have come to the part where I must be frank. I was thinking I should not talk about these things with you, sex things. But if I didn’t tell you, then you would not understand why I changed, how he changed. So I will tell you what happened, although maybe not everything. Maybe I’ll come to a part where I cannot say any more. And when that happens, you just have to imagine what happened. And then you should imagine it again—and make it ten times worse.

  Every night Wen Fu wanted me. But it was not the same way as when we were at his parents’ house. I had been shy then, and he had been gentle, always coaxing me, soothing me, stopping when I became too afraid, before I screamed too much. But in Hangchow, he said it was time I learned how to be a proper wife.

  I thought I was going to learn something that would make me less afraid. I was still nervous, of course. But I was ready to learn.

  The first night in the little monastery room, we were lying on that narrow bed. I wore my nightgown, Wen Fu had only his pants on. He was kissing my
nose, my cheeks and shoulders, telling me how beautiful I was, how happy I made him. And then he whispered to me to say dirty words, words for a woman’s body parts—not any woman’s parts, a saltwater whore’s, the kind who would give her body to foreign sailors. My ears hurt just to hear them. I pulled away.

  “I cannot say those words,” I finally told him.

  “Why is this?” he asked me, and he looked gentle, very concerned.

  “A woman cannot say these things,” I said, searching for a reason. And then I laughed, just a little, to show him I was embarrassed even thinking about it.

  Suddenly his smile went away, and he was a different person. He sat up quickly. His face was ugly, mad, and I became scared. I sat up too and stroked his shoulder, eager to win him back.

  “Say them!” he shouted suddenly. He repeated the words, three or four dirty words. “Say them!” he shouted again.

  I shook my head and began to cry. And then he became tender again, wiping my eyes and saying how much he cared for me, rubbing my back and my neck, until I thought I would faint with relief and joy. He was only teasing, I thought happily. How stupid of me! And then he was helping me to stand up. He lifted my nightgown off, and when I was naked, he took my two hands and looked at me sincerely.

  “Say them,” he said in a quiet voice. And hearing this once again, I started to collapse to the floor. But before I could do so, he pulled me back up, dragged me toward the door like a bag of rice. He opened the door, then pushed me outside into the corridor of the monastery, where anyone passing by could have seen me, naked like that.

  What could I do? I could not shout. Someone would awaken, look out, and see me. So I was whispering to him through the door, pleading, “Open the door! Open!” And he said nothing, did nothing, until several minutes had passed and I finally said, “I will say them.”

  After that, it was the same way every night. Here is where you should imagine more, here is where you should make it worse.

  Sometimes he made me take off my clothes, get on my hands and knees, then act as if I were begging him for a good “stuck-together” time, so desperate I would do anything for this favor. And he would pretend to refuse, saying that he was tired, or that I was not pretty enough, or that I had been a bad wife that day. I had to beg and beg, my teeth chattering, until I truly was begging so I could get off the cold floor. Other nights he made me stand in the room naked, shivering in the night chill, and when he named a body part, I was supposed to say the same coarse word, then put my fingers there, touch myself—here, there, everywhere—while he watched and laughed.

  And often in the morning he would complain, telling me I was not a good wife, that I had no passion, not like other women he knew. And my head and body would hurt as he told me about this woman and that woman, how good she was, how willing, how beautiful. I was not angry. I did not know I was supposed to be angry. This was China. A woman had no right to be angry. But I was unhappy, knowing my husband was still dissatisfied with me, and that I would have to go through more suffering to show him I was a good wife.

  I discovered another thing about my husband during that first month. All the other pilots always called him Wen Chen. And this was strange to me, because I knew my husband’s name was Wen Fu. Oh, he did have two older brothers, and one of them had been named Wen Chen. But that brother had died two years before, in 1935—of tuberculosis, I think. The family used to talk about him: a smart son, devoted, but always sick, always coughing blood. I thought the pilots were only confused, that maybe Wen Fu had mentioned this dead brother and now they thought it was Wen Fu’s name. My husband was just being polite in not correcting them.

  But then one day I heard him introduce himself, and—strange!—he said his name was Wen Chen. Why was this, I asked him later. And he told me I was hearing things wrong. Why should he say his name was something else? And then later I heard him say it again, that his name was Wen Chen. And that time he told me that the air force had written his name down wrong. How could he correct the whole air force? He said he would have to tell them Wen Fu was his little-boy name, just a nickname.

  I accepted what he said. This made sense. But later, when I was sorting through boxes, putting away some things, I found a diploma and an application for the air force. They were papers for Wen Chen, my husband’s dead brother, who had graduated with top honors from a merchant seaman school. And then I knew: My husband was not smart enough to get into the air force, but was clever enough to use his dead brother’s name.

  I now felt as if my husband were two people. One dead, one alive. One true, one false. I began to see him in a different way, watching the way he lied. So smooth, so calm. He was just like those birds who land on top of the water without making a ripple.

  So you see, I tried to be a proper wife. I tried to love the half of him that was not so bad.

  I met Helen maybe two weeks after we arrived in Hangchow. She was also very young, maybe eighteen, and I heard she was also newly married—no, not to my brother. But I will get to that later.

  I had noticed her many times before—in the dining hall, or around the monastery grounds, where we both walked, or in the city below, shopping for meat and vegetables at the open stands. All the women in the monastery noticed one another, because there were only six of us. Most of the pilots were very young, really just boys, so only a few had wives. And the American advisors did not have their wives or girlfriends with them, although sometimes they brought a bad local girl to their rooms. It was always the same girl, I heard later, because five of the Americans caught her same disease, a type of invisible body lice that everybody said now lived in the bathhouse.

  In fact, it was because of that girl and her lice that I met Helen. None of the wives wanted to use the bathhouse anymore, even after the monks claimed it had been disinfected. We had heard that it was impossible to kill this lice. And if a woman caught it, no one could tell the difference between her and a prostitute. Because then she would be constantly scratching between her legs, and the only relief she could get was if a man scratched her further between her legs.

  I was thinking how I would then have to truly beg my husband. And of course, I was also remembering that time on Tsungming Island when I was bitten by fleas, how I had scratched myself, shouting “Yangsele!” How this kind of behavior was just like that of an unfaithful wife, one who itched for sex so much she would allow herself to become just like a prostitute—to Chinese, Americans, lepers, it didn’t matter. This was common knowledge among young women about to be married. Of course, we believed these things. Who else could tell us otherwise? You think I was the only stupid one?

  So all of us—the five women and myself—decided not to use the bathhouse anymore. Instead, one of the wives—a stuck-up girl who complained about every little thing—found an extra room that had once been used to store the dragon-welt tea leaves brought down from the mountainside. The floor was still covered with old leaves from many harvests ago. And there was a woodstove in one comer that had been used to dry the leaves. We decided immediately to use this stove to heat the room and make it better than the bathhouse. Using the drying lines already stretched across the room, we draped sheets to make a partition.

  And then we took turns, one of us boiling water, two of us running back and forth between the tea-drying room and the kitchen at the other end of the building, carrying buckets of hot water and boiled cloths. The other three would sit on stools behind the sheets, dipping the cloths into the washbasins, wiping their bodies down. The water would trickle down to the floor and onto the leaves. The steam would rise from the buckets on the floor. And soon the air was the scent of dragon-well tea. We would all breathe and sigh, breathe and sigh, letting this fragrant dew fall on our faces.

  So we did not mind about the bathhouse. Even the stuck-up girl laughed and said she was glad the Americans had caught this disease. And every evening I now felt I had an important job, as I carried those buckets of hot water to and from the kitchen with a girl named Hulan.


  That’s what Helen used to be called: Hulan.

  So you see, Helen is not my sister-in-law. She is not your real auntie. How could I tell you this, that I met her during the war in China? When you were little, you didn’t even know there was a war in China! You thought World War Two started at a place in Hawaii with your same name, Pearl Harbor. I tried to tell you, but you were always correcting me. You said, “Oh, Mommy, that’s Chinese history. This is American history.” It’s true, it’s true. You told me that once. If I told you Auntie Helen was not your auntie, maybe you would have corrected me about that too! See, you’re still trying to correct me.

  Anyway, this is the truth. I met Helen in that bathhouse. And she was called Hulan. And the first few evenings I did not say very much to her, perhaps only to ask her every now and then, “Is the water already hot enough?”

  She was the wife of a vice-captain, Wen Fu’s boss. So I thought I should be careful what I said to her, not complain about our living conditions or say that I wished I could stay in Hangchow forever. She might think I didn’t want our pilots to pass their training.

  But from the beginning she was very friendly, even announced out loud to me that the monks were not very clean, that they were actually very dirty, because she had found toenails and bits of hair behind her bed. I did not agree or disagree, although I too had found dirty things behind my bed, also on the walls.

  And then she told me that her husband, whose name was Long Jiaguo, had complained that the training was still not going well. She said the Americans had many disagreements with the Chinese leaders. And now there was talk of sending everyone to an Italian training camp in Loyang. She said that would be terrible, because Loyang was a sad place to live, a city of only two seasons: floods and dust storms. And while it had once been famous for its hundred thousand Buddha statues, in recent years most of the Buddhas had had their heads cut off. So going to a place filled with wounded Buddhas could only bring the air force the worst kind of luck.