The Kitchen God's Wife

  I told the soldier, “This cannot be true. Only rumor.” “Believe what you want,” the soldier said, and then spit on the ground.

  I found out later I was right. What the soldier had said—that was only rumor. Because the real number of people who died was much, much worse. An official later told me it was maybe one hundred thousand, although how did he know? Who could ever count so many people all at once? Did they count the bodies they buried, each one they burned, those dumped into the river? What about all those poor people who never counted in anybody’s mind even when they were alive?

  I tried to imagine it. And then I fought to push it out of my thoughts. What happened in Nanking, I couldn’t claim that as my tragedy. I was not affected. I was not killed.

  And yet for many months afterward I had dreams, very bad dreams. I dreamt we returned to Nanking and we were telling the cook and Wan Betty about the beautiful scenery at Heaven’s Breath, bragging about the good dishes we ate in Kweiyang. And the cook said to me, “You didn’t have to leave Nanking to see such things, to taste such good food. We have the same, right here.”

  In front of me, she set down a dish, piled with white eels, thick as fingers. And they were still alive, struggling to swim off my plate.

  Helen told me there’s a restaurant—just opened—and they have this same kind of eels, cooked with chives in very hot oil. She wanted us to go try them, to see if that restaurant is any good. But I said no. I don’t have an appetite anymore for that kind of eels.

  My tongue doesn’t taste things the same way anymore. Like celery, I can’t eat celery anymore. All my life I loved celery. Now, as soon as I smell it, I tell myself no. And I don’t even remember what made me not like it anymore. But with the eels, I know.

  Do you know why that is? Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?

  14

  BAD EYE

  And now I will tell you when all my luck changed, from bad to worse. You tell me if this was my fault.

  By the time we arrived in Kunming, I was almost eight months pregnant, so big with my baby I thought it would pop out with every bounce of the truck. Now that we were out of the mountain, our driver seemed to be in a big hurry. He was driving fast along the straight road, and I had to hold onto the sides of my stomach as we hit one bump after another.

  “Eh!” Jiaguo shouted to him. “You drive any faster, you’ll send us straight to the devil.” Old Mr. Ma turned around. “Faster?” he shouted above the noise, then smiled. And before Jiaguo could answer, the truck roared ahead with more strength.

  It didn’t matter. We were all eager to get to our new homes. No more climbing into the truck every morning. No more small villages and bad food.

  It was still wintertime. Yet the air blowing on our faces was not cold. It seemed to all of us that we had traveled to a land with a completely different kind of season, an eternal spring.

  Hulan turned to me. “Look over there. Kunming is just like that expression about picturesque places—green hills and clear waters. And the sky is good too.”

  Of course, at the time we didn’t know that we were only on the outskirts of the city. And as we continued to drive, we saw this good scenery disappear.

  The truck slowed down, the driver was honking, and then we were passing hundreds of people, carrying sacks, looking tired. Wen Fu shouted at them, “Move to the side! Get over!” And when they did not jump to his orders, he cursed them—“Louyi!”—which was a very mean thing to say, calling those poor people crickets and ants, little nobodies.

  Here and there we saw workers digging up rocks from the road and throwing them into wheelbarrows. And farther along, we passed another army truck, then another and another. Wen Fu waved to them each time, pointing to himself and shouting, “Air force, Hangchow, second class.”

  And then we entered the city itself. It was crowded and busy, a big city, bigger than I had imagined. We drove past a railway station, down a wide street with gray buildings, not too old, not too modem either. And then the streets became more narrow, more crooked, more congested with people, carts, and bicycles. The driver was honking his horn every few seconds. The air felt thick with bad smells. My head hurt. I saw mud-brick houses crowded together, some clean and whitewashed, others so rough and crumbly you didn’t know why the building was still standing. And many of the faces looking back at us were not Chinese. They were tribal people, recently come down from the mountains. You could tell they were not local people. They did not wear the drab top and pants of poor-class Yunnanese, or the long gown of the merchant, or the Western shirt and pants of the educated. They wore colorful skirts, bright bands on their sleeves, turban scarves wrapped around their heads or hats that looked like tight-fitting straw bowls.

  Chinese or not, the people we passed on the streets would stare at us with dark faces. They watched us so carefully, so quietly—all those signs of war now driving by their doorsteps. This city, which had been quiet for so many centuries, was now turning noisy from top to bottom.

  We moved into a hotel for a few days, while some air force workers went to find proper housing for us. And then we finally moved to a two-story house halfway between the north and east gate. Jiaguo and Hulan lived there too, as well as another couple, people we met the day we moved in.

  The woman was older than Hulan and I. She was very bossy. And her husband was also connected with the air force, although he was not a pilot, but an inspector of all sorts of transportation matters, bridges, roads, railways.

  The first time we saw the house, Hulan said, “Look at its long wooden face. And those two big windows—like eyes looking out.” All the houses on that street looked the same, two- or three-story wooden houses—yangfang, we called them, foreign-style houses.

  There was no courtyard in front, nothing to separate the house from the street. You walked down three steps—boomp!—there you were, with everybody else on the sidewalk. But we did have a backyard, and this was closed off by a fence. It was not a pleasant place for visiting with friends, not that kind of yard. It was just concrete and dirt, a few bushes scattered about in no particular design. On one side of the fence was a water pump and long tub for washing clothes. Above that were ropes for hanging the wet laundry. Next to that, a large stone gourd for grinding rice and sesame seeds, that sort of thing.

  The back fence had a gate that led into an alley, and this was wide enough for night-soil collectors to push their wheelbarrows through. Down this alley and one turn to the left was a pathway with bushes that led to a small city lake. I was told this lake was very pretty to see, and perhaps it had once been that way. But when I saw it, the poorest people of the city were doing their bathing, their washing, and other things too awful to talk about.

  As I said, the house was foreign-looking on the outside. But inside, it was still Chinese in feeling and thinking. We had two large common rooms downstairs. One was a big kitchen with two coal-burning stoves made out of thick clay, with many burners for cooking. We also had a sink with a drain, but no running water, only running servants. That was the Chinese way. The cook and the servant had to go to the pump in the backyard and carry in the big, heavy buckets. Maybe they had to carry these upstairs as well. I don’t remember now. When you have never had to do these things yourself, you do not think about what someone else has to do instead.

  In any case, someone must have brought the water upstairs. Because every morning, every evening, I always had enough boiled-clean water for washing my face and taking a small half-bath to clean my upper body in the morning, my lower body at night. I was too big with the baby to do everything all at once. And every day, the servant had to empty the basins and tubs, as well as the chamber pots, so that they could be taken to the alleyway and cleaned.

  The other common room was a large eating and sitting area. There we had a big table, lots of chairs, two cheap sofas, and an old windup phonograph Wen Fu had found soon after we arrived in the city. This windup machin
e did not mean we lacked electricity to run a newer phonograph. This was wartime. Where could you find a new phonograph? Of course, it is true that most people there did not have electricity; they lived in old-style mud or straw buildings. But in our house, on our street, everyone had electricity, upstairs and downstairs. And when the rest of the city turned dark and quiet at night, we turned on our radio, our fan, our lamps, and played mah jong late into the night.

  We were always ready to squeeze out one more moment of fun. We liked to think we were just like those people in Berlin. We had heard it was a crazy kind of place, where people did not think about the war, only what pleasure they might find each day—gambling, eating, nightclubs. That’s how we were, wanting to lead the same kind of crazy life. Of course, that was Berlin. We were in Kunming. And so, when we tired of listening to the scratchy music on the phonograph, when the radio ran out of music, when we had no more people to gossip about, when our hands were too tired to lift another mah jong tile, what else was there to do? We could not go to a nightclub. We went to bed.

  Since Jiaguo was a captain, he and Hulan had the best part of the house, the two large rooms downstairs. The rest of us had rooms upstairs, which was very hard on me. I could not see my feet beyond my stomach. So once I went upstairs, I could come down only by thinking carefully how to place each foot on each stair, one at a time.

  When we first moved there, Wen Fu and I received the worst rooms, both of them facing a bad-luck direction. The only way to make the bed face the right way would have been to push it against the closet door and block the door for going in and out. How could we do that?

  So those were our rooms—but only because the wife of the inspector had already chosen the best upstairs rooms for herself, claiming her husband was higher-ranking than mine. This was true, but she didn’t have to say it that way. She could have said, “Here, you choose first.” I would have picked those unfortunate rooms, making it my generosity and not her punishment. I would have picked at least one.

  So the first week in that house was very bad. I did not like those rooms. I did not like the inspector’s wife. I especially did not like the way she played mah jong, the way she raised her eyebrows and said “Hnh!” every time I threw down a tile. On top of that, every night we had to listen to the inspector and his wife arguing through the walls.

  At first it would be the husband’s low voice, then her sharp one. The woman would begin to wail, and Wen Fu would pick up his shoes and throw them against the wall. But the couple would stay quiet for only five minutes before starting to fight again.

  After three or four nights like this, Wen Fu complained to the woman, and then Hulan complained about the shoes thrown against the wall—“Like a bomb,” she said, “almost scared us to death!” And soon everybody was arguing, all kinds of bad feelings coming out at once, until no one would speak to anyone, not one word. At night, when the radio programs went off the air, we did not choose to stay up late and socialize. We all went to our rooms, and it was quiet enough to hear a fly landing on the roof.

  This problem lasted only a few more days. Because then the inspector went to look at the progress on the Burma Road. We were told later that the mosquitoes in that area were more dangerous than the Japanese. We heard the malaria ate up his brain in only three or four days, so he died in an awful kind of way. And then we had to listen to his wife moaning and crying for many days after that. Of course, this time we did not complain. Wen Fu did not throw his shoes. We were all very kind to her. And by the time she was ready to leave, we all agreed we had become friends for a lifetime. Although now I cannot remember her name, Liu or Low, something like that.

  In any case, after she was gone, I took over their rooms, paid extra money of course, money from my dowry. Peanut sent me the money from my bank account, and that’s how I found out she had also sent the other four hundred Chinese dollars to Nanking, the money I never received.

  Actually, by then lots of things cost me extra. The air force could not afford to give us servants anymore. Even Hulan, a captain’s wife, had none. So I had to pay for my own cook, who was an old widow, and I hired my own cleaning servant, who was a young girl. And I also had to pay for the small room just off the kitchen where they lived.

  You should have seen Hulan’s face when my servant girl did our laundry or cleaned our chamber pots. Hulan had changed lots by then, no longer a simple country girl, grateful to be married to an air force captain. You know what I think? When Jiaguo got his promotion, Hulan gave herself a promotion too! In her mind, she was more important than I was. And she was mad that I could afford servants and she had none.

  Of course, my servant and cook did many tasks that helped Hulan too. They cleaned the common rooms. They brought water in from the well for making tea or washing—for everybody to use.

  But Hulan was not grateful. She went looking for spots of grease on the floor, found them, then said, “Ayo! Look here.” And when I invited her and Jiaguo to dinner, she would eat lots, then say, “Very good, but maybe the meat stayed in the pan too long.” The next time, she would say, “Very good, but maybe the meat was not cooked long enough.”

  So it did not matter what I did, what favors I gave her. She was always unhappy until I was the same level of unhappy as she was.

  By the ninth month, the baby inside me grew until it was the size of two babies. But still it would not come. I was not too worried, because I could feel it swimming inside of me, turning its body around, pushing with its feet, rolling its head. It moved when I sang. It moved as I walked in my dreams. It moved when I saw a vegetable at the market I wanted to eat. That baby had my same mind.

  Every day I sewed baby blankets or knitted sweaters and clapped together their tiny sleeves. I remember one day, when I was sewing, the baby was kicking me harder than ever. I imagined this strong baby would soon be running up and down the stairs in the same way it ran up and down my womb.

  “Come out, little treasure,” I called. “Mama calls you to come out.” And as I said this, the baby kicked me again and I dropped my scissors on the floor.They landed with their points stuck in the floor, just like a little soldier, waiting to take orders. At first I laughed, but then—eh!—I felt something very strange. The baby stopped moving inside me. I don’t think I was only imagining this. That’s how it happened: The scissors fell, the baby became very still.

  I tried to pluck those scissors out of the floor, but I was too big to bend over. And then I remembered what Old Aunt had once said about the bad luck of dropping scissors. I could not remember the reasoning, only the stories: a woman who lost the sharpness of her mind, a woman whose hair fell out of her head overnight, a woman whose only son poked his eye out with a little twig, and she was so sorry she blinded her own eyes with the same stick.

  What a terrible thing I had done, dropping my scissors. I called my servant right away and told her to throw those scissors into the lake.

  That night the baby did not move even once. I sang. I walked up and down the hallway. It did not answer. The next day I went to the hospital, and the doctor did something to make the baby come out fast. But of course, it was already too late.

  Hulan was there. After the doctor left, she was the one who said the baby was big, perhaps over ten pounds. What good was it to tell me how much the baby weighed, as if she were talking about so many pounds of fish taken from the sea? That baby girl never cried, never even took one breath of air.

  Wen Fu patted my hand. “At least it was not a boy.”

  I don’t know why, but right away, I told the nurse to bring me the baby. Hulan and Wen Fu stared at me.

  “I want to see her so I can give her a proper name,” I said in a firm voice. Hulan and Wen Fu looked at each other.

  I sighed. “This is only being practical,” I said, “to send a baby to the next world with a name. The baby will grow up there. And when we go to the next world ourselves, we can call her, maybe ask her to take care of us in our new life.”

  “This is bei
ng practical,” Hulan agreed. And then she and Wen Fu both left. I’m sure they thought I would cry over that baby, and they did not want to be embarrassed watching me do this.

  After the nurse brought her in, I did not get up to look at her. I lay in my bed without even turning my head. I wanted some memory of her, and I was thinking of those times we danced together, how she was so lively when I talked to her. And then finally I pulled myself up and went to look.

  A big baby. So much hair. Ears that looked just like mine. A tiny mouth. But her skin—so sad!—it was the color of a stone. Her two hands were squeezed into tight little fists. I tried to uncurl one, and that’s when I started to cry. If this baby had been born in Shanghai. If this baby had been born when it was not wartime. If I had not dropped those scissors.

  But I quickly chased away those sad thoughts and made myself strong. People in the countryside were starving. People in the war were being killed. People died for any sort of reason, for no reason at all. So when a baby died, at least you could tell yourself it had no chance to suffer.

  The next afternoon we drove to the western foothills, the place everyone called the Sleeping Beauties. The hills there look like sleeping maidens, resting on their sides. That’s where we buried her. I said only a few words in her honor: “She was a good baby. She never cried.” And that’s when I named her after the lake in Nanking: Mochou, Sorrowfree, because she had never known even one sorrow.

  I did not use any scissors for a long time. I waited more than one hundred days. And it was hard not sewing or knitting for so long. As I have already said, in Kunming there were not too many fun things to do, nothing to see, especially in the daytime. You could not say, I’m bored, let’s go see a movie this afternoon. You could only stay bored. So after many days of doing nothing, I decided to buy a new pair of scissors and start sewing again.