Modern American Memoirs (29 page)

As a rule I rode the tractor all day, and he rode it at night. He slept until early afternoon, then he did what needed doing around the place. Agnes raised chickens for the eggs we lived on, and the one she stewed or fried on Sunday. By afternoon the sun would heat up the house, but the way the wind blew around and beneath it, it would soon cool off in the evening. After supper we would sit around the range in the kitchen, with the oven door open. Agnes always had her mending to do, or washing, or the baking of bread she did on Mondays, and she was not a person who liked to talk while she worked. Nor had I ever before lived with a woman who didn't seem to like me. Not that she
dis
liked me, but at most she felt neutral. In the house she liked me to keep in my place. The year he made a lot of money Dwight had bought a big console radio in
Kansas City that required a lot of batteries to run it. He got tired of trying to keep the batteries charged, so all it did was sit there with her sewing on it. In the space on the floor beneath there were two big cartons of Haldemann-Julius Little Blue Books. They sold for five cents each, and my uncle had bought two or three hundred of them. He was a great reader, over the winter, and read the books that he liked several times. Most of the books exposed religious hypocrisy and fakery. There were also books on geology, history and travel, so I didn't lack for something to read. I often carried one of these books in my pocket and read it when I stopped for lunch. What surprised me was how much my uncle loved to talk. On the day I had off we might sit up till almost midnight doing nothing but talking. A lot of what I said got him to laughing so hard his sides ached, and he could hardly stop. He loved to hear me talk about Pacific Union College, and the stuff they believed. I liked the way his eyes watered when he laughed, and the way they twinkled when he looked at me. The good talk we often had was no reason, however, I shouldn't be on the tractor at dawn the next morning.

That morning I heard the dawn crack like a whip. A little later I could peer out and see the wind where there was neither dust, lines of wash, nor even grass to blow. The yard was like a table, with a dull, flat gloss where the shoes buffed it toward the privy. Scoured by the wind, the cracks had been picked clean by the chickens. Out there, as nowhere else, I could see the wind. The five minutes in the morning I lay in a stupor listening to Agnes build the fire, I would face the window, the dawn like a slit at the base of a door. In the kitchen Agnes would put fresh cobs on the banked fire. Was it the sparks in the chimney, the crackle in the stove? The cats would hear it, five or six of them. With the first draw of the fire they would start from the grain sheds toward the house, a distance of about one hundred yards. Was that so far? It can be if you crawl. In the dawn light I would see only the white cats, or those that were spotted, moving toward the house like primitive or crippled reptiles. How explain it? The invisible thrust of the wind. The hard peltless yard gave them no hold. Even the chickens, a witless bird, had learned never to leave the shelter of the house at the risk of blowing away, like paper bags. A strip of chicken wire, like a net, had been stretched to the windward of the yard to catch them. They would stick like rags, or wads of cotton, till my Aunt would go out and pick them off. The cats and hens were quick to learn that the wind
would prevail. My Aunt Agnes knew, but she preferred not to admit it. The last to learn was my Uncle Dwight
.
^*

The way Agnes looked after my Uncle Dwight helped me to see why it was she seemed so neutral toward me. Dwight was hers. She liked him so much she didn't want to share him with anybody. The way he could talk pleased her, but the pleasure he showed when I talked made her frown and turn to her mending. She was not a pretty woman, her skin darkened by the weather, her hands like those of a man and chapped at the wrists, but I knew that she was a woman my uncle could take pride in. He had found her in Kansas, put her in a buggy and driven southwest till they came to the Pecos River in New Mexico. There he homesteaded a claim and raised sheep. Why didn't they have children? She would have liked kids of her own better than she liked me. Dwight was so independent in all of his thinking, he might not have wanted to share Agnes with them. He talked to her the way he did to me, but he considered me a better listener. I would come back at him. And he liked that. He said a lot of things just to rile me. I had also read some books that he hadn't, and that both pleased and shamed him. Sometimes he would put his hands to his face and just think about it for a moment, in silence.

My Uncle Dwight had not had, as he said, much schooling, preferring to educate himself by reading, but he talked in the assured manner of a man who could give a sermon. Words came to him easily, and quickly. His accent was like none I had heard, as if he had lived with strange people. I would hear nothing like it until I heard ballad singers on records. When he listened to me, his head tilted as if for a portrait, I felt in his gaze his admiration for his own kind. Was that what I was? Were we both pieces chipped from the same block? It pleased me to think that we might be, because I felt for him a secret admiration. He was strong. His mind was sharp as the glint of his eye. If the great men I had heard of were gathered together around a stalled tractor on the Texas panhandle, my uncle would prove to be the equal or the superior to most of them. They would listen in silence and admiration as he cursed.

Born in Stockton, California, Maxine Hong Kingston was the oldest child of educated Chinese-immigrant parents; they owned a laundry.

Kingston attended the University of California in Berkeley. She taught English at high schools in California and Hawaii. In 1976, her first book
, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,
won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction
. China Men
(1980) received the American Book Award for general nonfiction. Kingston considers the two companion works “one big book.” Her novel
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
appeared in 1988
.

In this comic selection from Part Four of
The Woman Warrior,
Brave Orchid, Kingston's mother, has persuaded her older sister Moon Orchid to leave China and come to California in order to confront the husband who left her in China thirty years earlier.

 

from T
HE
W
OMAN
W
ARRIOR

W
ait until morning, Aunt,” said Moon Orchid's daughter. “Let her get some sleep.”

“Yes, I do need rest after travelling all the way from China,” she said. “I'm here. You've done it and brought me here.” Moon Orchid meant that they should be satisfied with what they had already accomplished. Indeed, she stretched happily and appeared quite satisfied to be sitting in that kitchen at that moment. “I want to go to sleep early because of jet lag,” she said, but Brave Orchid, who had never been on an airplane, did not let her.

“What are we going to do about your husband?” Brave Orchid asked quickly. That ought to wake her up.

“I don't know. Do we have to do something?”

“He does not know you're here.”

Moon Orchid did not say anything. For thirty years she had been receiving money from him from America. But she had never told him that she wanted to come to the United States. She waited
for him to suggest it, but he never did. Nor did she tell him that her sister had been working for years to transport her here. First Brave Orchid had found a Chinese-American husband for her daughter. Then the daughter had come and had been able to sign the papers to bring Moon Orchid over.

“We have to tell him you've arrived,” said Brave Orchid.

Moon Orchid's eyes got big like a child's. “I shouldn't be here,” she said.

“Nonsense. I want you here, and your daughter wants you here.”

“But that's all.”

“Your husband is going to have to see you. We'll make him recognize you. Ha. Won't it be fun to see his face? You'll go to his house. And when his second wife answers the door, you say, ‘I want to speak to my husband,' and you name his personal name. ‘Tell him I'll be sitting in the family room.' Walk past her as if she were a servant. She'll scold him when he comes home from work, and it'll serve him right. You yell at him too.”

“I'm scared,” said Moon Orchid. “I want to go back to Hong Kong.”

“You can't. It's too late. You've sold your apartment. See here. We know his address. He's living in Los Angeles with his second wife, and they have three children. Claim your rights. Those are
your
children. He's got two sons.
You
have two sons. You take them away from her. You become their mother.”

“Do you really think I can be a mother of sons? Don't you think they'll be loyal to her, since she gave birth to them?”

“The children will go to their true mother—you,” said Brave Orchid. “That's the way it is with mothers and children.”

“Do you think he'll get angry at me because I came without telling him?”

“He deserves your getting angry with him. For abandoning you and for abandoning your daughter.”

“He didn't abandon me. He's given me so much money. I've had all the food and clothes and servants I've ever wanted. And he's supported our daughter too, even though she's only a girl. He sent her to college. I can't bother him. I mustn't bother him.”

“How can you let him get away with this? Bother him. He deserves to be bothered. How dare he marry somebody else when he
has you? How can you sit there so calmly? He would've let you stay in China forever.
I
had to send for your daughter, and
I
had to send for you. Urge her,” she turned to her niece. “Urge her to go look for him.”

“I think you should go look for my father,” she said. “I'd like to meet him. I'd like to see what my father looks like.”

“What does it matter what he's like?” said her mother. “You're a grown woman with a husband and children of your own. You don't need a father—or a mother either. You're only curious.”

“In this country,” said Brave Orchid, “many people make their daughters their heirs. If you don't go see him, he'll give everything to the second wife's children.”

“But he gives us everything anyway. What more do I have to ask for? If I see him face to face, what is there to say?”

“I can think of hundreds of things,” said Brave Orchid. “Oh, how I'd love to be in your place. I could tell him so many things. What scenes I could make. You're so wishy-washy.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You have to ask him why he didn't come home. Why he turned into a barbarian. Make him feel bad about leaving his mother and father. Scare him. Walk right into his house with your suitcases and boxes. Move right into the bedroom. Throw her stuff out of the drawers and put yours in. Say, ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.'”

“Oh, no, I can't do that. I can't do that at all. That's terrible.”

“Of course you can. I'll teach you. ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.' And you teach the little boys to call you Mother.”

“I don't think I'd be very good with little boys. Little American boys. Our brother is the only boy I've known. Aren't they very rough and unfeeling?”

“Yes, but they're yours. Another thing I'd do if I were you, I'd get a job and help him out. Show him I could make his life easier; how I didn't need his money.”

“He has a great deal of money, doesn't he?”

“Yes, he can do some job the barbarians value greatly.”

“Could I find a job like that? I've never had a job.”

“You could be a maid in a hotel,” Brave Orchid advised. “A lot of immigrants start that way nowadays. And the maids get to bring home all the leftover soap and the clothes people leave behind.”

“I would clean up after people, then?”

Brave Orchid looked at this delicate sister. She was such a little old lady. She had long fingers and thin, soft hands. And she had a high-class city accent from living in Hong Kong. Not a trace of village accent remained; she had been away from the village for that long. But Brave Orchid would not relent; her dainty sister would just have to toughen up. “Immigrants also work in the canneries, where it's so noisy it doesn't matter if they speak Chinese or what. The easiest way to find a job, though, is to work in Chinatown. You get twenty-five cents an hour and all your meals if you're working in a restaurant.”

If she were in her sister's place, Brave Orchid would have been on the phone immediately, demanding one of those Chinatown jobs. She would make the boss agree that she start work as soon as he opened his doors the next morning. Immigrants nowadays were bandits, beating up store owners and stealing from them rather than working. It must've been the Communists who taught them those habits.

Moon Orchid rubbed her forehead. The kitchen light shined warmly on the gold and jade rings that gave her hands completeness. One of the rings was a wedding ring. Brave Orchid, who had been married for almost fifty years, did not wear any rings. They got in the way of all the work. She did not want the gold to wash away in the dishwater and the laundry water and the field water. She looked at her younger sister whose very wrinkles were fine. “Forget about a job,” she said, which was very lenient of her. “You won't have to work. You just go to your husband's house and demand your rights as First Wife. When you see him, you can say, ‘Do you remember me?'”

“What if he doesn't?”

“Then start telling him details about your life together in China. Act like a fortuneteller. He'll be so impressed.”

“Do you think he'll be glad to see me?”

“He better be glad to see you.”

As midnight came, twenty-two hours after she left Hong Kong, Moon Orchid began to tell her sister that she really was going to face her husband. “He won't like me,” she said.

“Maybe you should dye your hair black, so he won't think you're old. Or I have a wig you can borrow. On the other hand, he should see how you've suffered. Yes, let him see how he's made your hair turn white…”

 

The summer days passed while they talked about going to find Moon Orchid's husband…She spent the evening observing the children. She liked to figure them out. She described them aloud. “Now they're studying again. They read so much. Is it because they have enormous quantities to learn, and they're trying not to be savages? He is picking up his pencil and tapping it on the desk. Then he opens his book to. His eyes begin to read. His eyes go back and forth. They go from left to right, from left to right.” This makes her laugh. “How wondrous—eyes reading back and forth. Now he's writing his thoughts down. What's
that
thought?” she asked, pointing.

She followed her nieces and nephews about. She bent over them. “Now she is taking a machine off the shelf. She attaches two metal spiders to it. She plugs in the cord. She cracks an egg against the rim and pours the yolk and white out of the shell into the bowl. She presses a button, and the spiders spin the eggs. What are you making?”

“Aunt, please take your finger out of the batter.”

“She says, ‘Aunt, please take your finger out of the batter,'” Moon Orchid repeated as she turned to follow another niece walking through the kitchen. “Now what's this one doing? Why, she's sewing a dress. She's going to try it on.” Moon Orchid would walk right into the children's rooms while they were dressing. “Now she must be looking over her costumes to see which one to wear.” Moon Orchid pulled out a dress. “This is nice,” she suggested. “Look at all the colors.”

“No, Aunt. That's the kind of dress for a party. I'm going to school now.”

“Oh, she's going to school now. She's choosing a plain blue dress. She's picking up her comb and brush and shoes, and she's going to lock herself up in the bathroom. They dress in bathrooms here.” She pressed her ear against the door. “She's brushing her teeth. Now she's coming out of the bathroom. She's wearing the blue dress and a white sweater. She's combed her hair and washed her face. She looks in the refrigerator and is arranging things between slices of bread. She's putting an orange and cookies in a bag. Today she's taking her green book and her blue book. And tablets and pencils. Do you take a dictionary?” Moon Orchid asked.

“No,” said the child, rolling her eyeballs up and exhaling loudly. “We have dictionaries at school,” she added before going out the door.

“They have dictionaries at school,” said Moon Orchid, thinking this over. “She knows ‘dictionary.'” Moon Orchid stood at the window peeping. “Now she's shutting the gate. She strides along like an Englishman.”

The child married to a husband who did not speak Chinese translated for him, “Now she's saying that I'm taking a machine off the shelf and that I'm attaching two metal spiders to it. And she's saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically. Now she says I'm hunting for something in the refrigerator and—ha!—I've found it. I'm taking out butter—‘cow oil.' ‘They eat a lot of cow oil,' she's saying.”

“She's driving me nuts!” the children told each other in English.

At the laundry Moon Orchid hovered so close that there was barely room between her and the hot presses. “Now the index fingers of both hands press the buttons, and—kalump—the press comes down. But one finger on a button will release it—ssssss—the steam lets loose. Sssst—the water squirts.” She could describe it so well, you would think she could do it. She wasn't as hard to take at the laundry as at home, though. She could not endure the heat, and after a while she had to go out on the sidewalk and sit on her apple crate. When they were younger the children used to sit out there too during their breaks. They played house and store and library, their orange and apple crates in a row. Passers-by and customers gave them money. But now they were older, they stayed inside or went for walks. They were ashamed of sitting on the sidewalk, people mistaking them for beggars. “Dance for me,” the ghosts would say before handing them a nickel. “Sing a Chinese song.” And before they got old enough to know better, they'd dance and they'd sing. Moon Orchid sat out there by herself.

Whenever Brave Orchid thought of it, which was everyday, she said, “Are you ready to go see your husband and claim what is yours?”

“Not today, but soon,” Moon Orchid would reply.

But one day in the middle of summer, Moon Orchid's daughter said, “I have to return to my family. I promised my husband and
children I'd only be gone a few weeks. I should return this week.” Moon Orchid's daughter lived in Los Angeles.

“Good!” Brave Orchid exclaimed. “We'll all go to Los Angeles. You return to your husband, and your mother returns to hers. We only have to make one trip.”

“You ought to leave the poor man alone,” said Brave Orchid's husband. “Leave him out of women's business.”

“When your father lived in China,” Brave Orchid told the children, “he refused to eat pastries because he didn't want to eat the dirt the women kneaded from between their fingers.”