My mother looked at me and smiled. "Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everybody else want best quality. You thinking different."
She said it in a way as if this were proof—proof of something good. She always said things that didn't make any sense, that sounded both good and bad at the same time.
I was putting away the last of the chipped plates and then I remembered something else. "Ma, why don't you ever use those new dishes I bought you? If you didn't like them, you should have told me. I could have changed the pattern."
"Of course, I like," she said, irritated. "Sometime I think something is so good, I want to save it. Then I forget I save it."
And then, as if she had just now remembered, she unhooked the clasp of her gold necklace and took it off, wadding the chain and the jade pendant in her palm. She grabbed my hand and put the necklace in my palm, then shut my fingers around it.
"No, Ma," I protested. "I can't take this."
"Nala, nala"—Take it, take it—she said, as if she were scolding me. And then she continued in Chinese. "For a long time, I wanted to give you this necklace. See, I wore this on my skin, so when you put it on your skin, then you know my meaning. This is your life's importance."
I looked at the necklace, the pendant with the light green jade. I wanted to give it back. I didn't want to accept it. And yet I also felt as if I had already swallowed it.
"You're giving this to me only because of what happened tonight," I finally said.
"What happen?"
"What Waverly said. What everybody said."
"Tss! Why you listen to her? Why you want to follow behind her, chasing her words? She is like this crab." My mother poked a shell in the garbage can. "Always walking sideways, moving crooked. You can make your legs go the other way."
I put the necklace on. It felt cool.
"Not so good, this jade," she said matter-of-factly, touching the pendant, and then she added in Chinese: "This is young jade. It is a very light color now, but if you wear it every day it will become more green."
My father hasn't eaten well since my mother died. So I am here, in the kitchen, to cook him dinner. I'm slicing tofu. I've decided to make him a spicy bean-curd dish. My mother used to tell me how hot things restore the spirit and health. But I'm making this mostly because I know my father loves this dish and I know how to cook it. I like the smell of it: ginger, scallions, and a red chili sauce that tickles my nose the minute I open the jar.
Above me, I hear the old pipes shake into action with a thunk! and then the water running in my sink dwindles to a trickle. One of the tenants upstairs must be taking a shower. I remember my mother complaining: "Even you don't want them, you stuck." And now I know what she meant.
As I rinse the tofu in the sink, I am startled by a dark mass that appears suddenly at the window. It's the one-eared tomcat from upstairs. He's balancing on the sill, rubbing his flank against the window.
My mother didn't kill that damn cat after all, and I'm relieved. And then I see this cat rubbing more vigorously on the window and he starts to raise his tail.
"Get away from there!" I shout, and slap my hand on the window three times. But the cat just narrows his eyes, flattens his one ear, and hisses back at me.
Queen Mother of the Western Skies
* * *
"O! Hwai dungsyi"—You bad little thing—said the woman, teasing her baby granddaughter. "Is Buddha teaching you to laugh for no reason?" As the baby continued to gurgle, the woman felt a deep wish stirring in her heart.
"Even if I could live forever," she said to the baby, "I still don't know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason.
"But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I taught my daughter, your mother, to shed her innocence so she would not be hurt as well.
"Hwai dungsyi, was this kind of thinking wrong? If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too? If I see someone has a suspicious nose, have I not smelled the same bad things?"
The baby laughed, listening to her grandmother's laments.
"O! O! You say you are laughing because you have already lived forever, over and over again? You say you are Syi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the Western Skies, now come back to give me the answer! Good, good, I am listening….
"Thank you, Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."
Up | Waiting Between the Trees
* * *
Magpies
An-Mei Hsu
* * *
Yesterday my daughter said to me, "My marriage is falling apart."
And now all she can do is watch it falling. She lies down on a psychiatrist couch, squeezing tears out about this shame. And, I think, she will lie there until there is nothing more to fall, nothing left to cry about, everything dry.
She cried, "No choice! No choice!" She doesn't know. If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever.
I know this, because I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness.
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.
I know how it is to be quiet, to listen and watch, as if your life were a dream. You can close your eyes when you no longer want to watch. But when you no longer want to listen, what can you do? I can still hear what happened more than sixty years ago.
My mother was a stranger to me when she first arrived at my uncle's house in Ningpo. I was nine years old and had not seen her for many years. But I knew she was my mother, because I could feel her pain.
"Do not look at that woman," warned my aunt. "She has thrown her face into the eastward-flowing stream. Her ancestral spirit is lost forever. The person you see is just decayed flesh, evil, rotted to the bone."
And I would stare at my mother. She did not look evil. I wanted to touch her face, the one that looked like mine.
It is true, she wore strange foreign clothes. But she did not speak back when my aunt cursed her. Her head bowed even lower when my uncle slapped her for calling him Brother. She cried from her heart when Popo died, even though Popo, her mother, had sent her away so many years before. And after Popo's funeral, she obeyed my uncle. She prepared herself to return to Tientsin, where she had dishonored her widowhood by becoming the third concubine to a rich man.
How could she leave without me? This was a question I could not ask. I was a child. I could only watch and listen.
The night before she was to leave, she held my head against her body, as if to protect me from a danger I could not see. I was crying to bring her back before she was even gone. And as I lay in her lap, she told me a story.
"An-mei," she whispered, "have you seen the little turtle that lives in the pond?" I nodded. This was a pond in our courtyard and I often poked a stick in the still water to make the turtle swim out from underneath the rocks.
"I also knew that turtle when I was a small child," said my mother. "I used to sit by the pond and watch him swimming to the surface, biting the air with his little beak. He is a very old turtle."
I could see that turtle in my mind and I knew my mother was seeing the same one.
"This turtle feeds on our thoughts," said my mother. "I learned this one day, when I was your age, and Popo said I could no longer be a child. She said I could not shout, or run, or sit on the ground to catch crickets. I could not cry if I was disappointed. I had to be silent and listen to my elders. And if I did not do this, Popo said she would cut off my hair and send me to a place where Buddhist nuns lived.
"That night, after Popo told me this, I sat by the po
nd, looking into the water. And because I was weak, I began to cry. Then I saw this turtle swimming to the top and his beak was eating my tears as soon as they touched the water. He ate them quickly, five, six, seven tears, then climbed out of the pond, crawled onto a smooth rock and began to speak.
"The turtle said, 'I have eaten your tears, and this is why I know your misery. But I must warn you. If you cry, your life will always be sad.'
"Then the turtle opened his beak and out poured five, six, seven pearly eggs. The eggs broke open and from them emerged seven birds, who immediately began to chatter and sing. I knew from their snow-white bellies and pretty voices that they were magpies, birds of joy. These birds bent their beaks to the pond and began to drink greedily. And when I reached out my hand to capture one, they all rose up, beat their black wings in my face, and flew up into the air, laughing.
"'Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.' "
But after my mother finished her story, I looked at her and saw she was crying. And I also began to cry again, that this was our fate, to live like two turtles seeing the watery world together from the bottom of the little pond.
In the morning, I awoke to hear—not the bird of joy—but angry sounds in the distance. I jumped out of my bed and ran quietly to my window.
Out in the front courtyard, I saw my mother kneeling, scratching the stone pathway with her fingers, as if she had lost something and knew she could not find it again. In front of her stood Uncle, my mother's brother, and he was shouting.
"You want to take your daughter and ruin her life as well!" Uncle stamped his foot at this impertinent thought. "You should already be gone."
My mother did not say anything. She remained bent on the ground, her back as rounded as the turtle in the pond. She was crying with her mouth closed. And I began to cry in the same way, swallowing those bitter tears.
I hurried to get dressed. And by the time I ran down the stairs and into the front room, my mother was about to leave. A servant was taking her trunk outside. My auntie was holding onto my little brother's hand. Before I could remember to close my mouth, I shouted, "Ma!"
"See how your evil influence has already spread to your daughter!" exclaimed my uncle.
And my mother, her head still bowed, looked up at me and saw my face. I could not stop my tears from running down. And I think, seeing my face like this, my mother changed. She stood up tall, with her back straight, so that now she was almost taller than my uncle. She held her hand out to me and I ran to her. She said in a quiet, calm voice: "An-mei, I am not asking you. But I am going back to Tientsin now and you can follow me."
My auntie heard this and immediately hissed. "A girl is no better than what she follows! An-mei, you think you can see something new, riding on top of a new cart. But in front of you, it is just the ass of the same old mule. Your life is what you see in front of you."
And hearing this made me more determined to leave. Because the life in front of me was my uncle's house. And it was full of dark riddles and suffering that I could not understand. So I turned my head away from my auntie's strange words and looked at my mother.
Now my uncle picked up a porcelain vase. "Is this what you want to do?" said my uncle. "Throw your life away? If you follow this woman, you can never lift your head again." He threw that vase on the ground, where it smashed into many pieces. I jumped, and my mother took my hand.
Her hand was warm. "Come, An-mei. We must hurry," she said, as if observing a rainy sky.
"An-mei!" I heard my aunt call piteously from behind, but then my uncle said, "Swanle!"—Finished!—"She is already changed."
As I walked away from my old life, I wondered if it were true, what my uncle had said, that I was changed and could never lift my head again. So I tried. I lifted it.
And I saw my little brother, crying so hard as my auntie held onto his hand. My mother did not dare take my brother. A son can never go to somebody else's house to live. If he went, he would lose any hope for a future. But I knew he was not thinking this. He was crying, angry and scared, because my mother had not asked him to follow.
What my uncle had said was true. After I saw my brother this way, I could not keep my head lifted.
In the rickshaw on our way to the railway station, my mother murmured, "Poor An-mei, only you know. Only you know what I have suffered." When she said this, I felt proud, that only I could see these delicate and rare thoughts.
But on the train, I realized how far behind I was leaving my life. And I became scared. We traveled for seven days, one day by rail, six days by steamer boat. At first, my mother was very lively. She told me stories of Tientsin whenever my face looked back at where we had just been.
She talked of clever peddlers who served every kind of simple food: steamed dumplings, boiled peanuts, and my mother's favorite, a thin pancake with an egg dropped in the middle, brushed with black bean paste, then rolled up—still finger-hot off the griddle!—and handed to the hungry buyer.
She described the port and its seafood and claimed it was even better than what we ate in Ningpo. Big clams, prawns, crab, all kinds of fish, salty and freshwater, the best—otherwise why would so many foreigners come to this port?
She told me about narrow streets with crowded bazaars. In the early morning peasants sold vegetables I had never seen or eaten before in my life—and my mother assured me I would find them so sweet, so tender, so fresh. And there were sections of the city where different foreigners lived—Japanese, White Russians, Americans, and Germans—but never together, all with their own separate habits, some dirty, some clean. And they had houses of all shapes and colors, one painted in pink, another with rooms that jutted out at every angle like the backs and fronts of Victorian dresses, others with roofs like pointed hats and wood carvings painted white to look like ivory.
And in the wintertime I would see snow, she said. My mother said, In just a few months, the period of the Cold Dew would come, then it would start to rain, and then the rain would fall more softly, more slowly until it became white and dry as the petals of quince blossoms in the spring. She would wrap me up in fur-lined coats and pants, so if it was bitter cold, no matter!
She told me many stories until my face was turned forward, looking toward my new home in Tientsin. But when the fifth day came, as we sailed closer toward the Tientsin gulf, the waters changed from muddy yellow to black and the boat began to rock and groan. I became fearful and sick. And at night I dreamed of the eastward-flowing stream my aunt had warned me about, the dark waters that changed a person forever. And watching those dark waters from my sickbed on the boat, I was scared that my aunt's words had come true. I saw how my mother was already beginning to change, how dark and angry her face had become, looking out over the sea, thinking her own thoughts. And my thoughts, too, became cloudy and confused.
On the morning of the day we were supposed to arrive in Tientsin, she went into our sleeping cabin wearing her white Chinese mourning dress. And when she returned to the sitting room on the top deck, she looked like a stranger. Her eyebrows were painted thick at the center, then long and sharp at the corners. Her eyes had dark smudges around them and her face was pale white, her lips dark red. On top of her head, she wore a small brown felt hat with one large brown-speckled feather swept across the front. Her short hair was tucked into this hat, except for two perfect curls on her forehead that faced each other like black lacquer carvings. She had on a long brown dress with a white lace collar that fell all the way to her waist and was fastened down with a silk rose.
This was a shocking sight. We were in mourning. But I could not say anything. I was a child. How could I scold my own mother? I could only feel shame seeing my mother wear her shame so boldly.
In her gloved hands she held a large cream-colored box with foreign words written on top: "Fine English-Tailored Apparel, Tientsin."
I remember she had put the box down between us and told me: "Open it! Quickly!" She was breathless and smiling. I was so surprised by my mother's new strange manner, it was not until many years later, when I was using this box to store letters and photographs, that I wondered how my mother had known. Even though she had not seen me for many years, she had known that I would someday follow her and that I should wear a new dress when I did.
And when I opened that box, all my shame, my fears, they fell away. Inside was a new starch-white dress. It had ruffles at the collar and along the sleeves and six tiers of ruffles for a skirt. The box also contained white stockings, white leather shoes, and an enormous white hair bow, already shaped and ready to be fastened on with two loose ties.
Everything was too big. My shoulders kept slipping out of the large neck hole. The waist was big enough to fit two of me. But I did not mind. She did not mind. I raised my arms and stood perfectly still. She drew out pins and thread and with little tucks here and there stuffed in the loose materials, then filled the toes of the shoes with tissue paper, until everything fit. Wearing those clothes, I felt as if I had grown new hands and feet and I would now have to learn to walk in a new way.
And then my mother became somber again. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching as our boat drew closer and closer to the dock.
"An-mei, now you are ready to start your new life. You will live in a new house. You will have a new father. Many sisters. Another little brother. Dresses and good things to eat. Do you think all this will be enough to be happy?"
I nodded quietly, thinking about the unhappiness of my brother in Ningpo. My mother did not say anything more about the house, or my new family, or my happiness. And I did not ask any questions, because now a bell was sounding and a ship's steward was calling our arrival in Tientsin. My mother gave quick instructions to our porter, pointed to our two small trunks and handed him money, as if she had done this every day of her life. And then she carefully opened another box and pulled out what looked to be five or six dead foxes with open beady eyes, limp paws, and fluffy tails. She put this scary sight around her neck and shoulders, then grabbed my hand tight as we moved down the aisle with the crowd of people.