The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (14 page)

“Don’t worry about him, Mama. Doctors are saying that skinny people live longer. Papa’s going to live a long time.”

“So! I knew I didn’t have too many years left. Do you know how I got all this fat? Eating your leftovers. Aiaa, I’m getting so old. Soon you will have no more mother.”

“Mama, you’ve been saying that all my life.”

“This time it’s true. I’m almost eighty.”

“I thought you were only seventy-six.”

“My papers are wrong. I’m eighty.”

“But I thought your papers are wrong, and you’re seventy-two, seventy-three in Chinese years.”

“My papers are wrong, and I’m eighty, eighty-one in Chinese years. Seventy. Eighty. What do numbers matter? I’m dropping dead any day now. The aunt down the street was resting on her porch steps, dinner all cooked, waiting for her husband and son to come home and eat it. She closed her eyes for a moment and died. Isn’t that a wonderful way to go?”

“But our family lives to be ninety-nine.”

“That’s your father’s family. My mother and father died very young. My youngest sister was an orphan at ten. Our parents were not even fifty.”

“Then you should feel grateful you’ve lived so many extra years.”

“I was so sure you were going to be an orphan too. In fact, I’m amazed you’ve lived to have white hair. Why don’t you dye it?”

“Hair color doesn’t measure age, Mother. White is just another pigment, like black and brown.”

“You’re always listening to Teacher Ghosts, those Scientist Ghosts, Doctor Ghosts.”

“I have to make a living.”

“I never do call you Oldest Daughter. Have you noticed that? I always tell people, ‘This is my Biggest Daughter.’”

“Is it true then that Oldest Daughter and Oldest Son died in China? Didn’t you tell me when I was ten that she’d have been twenty; when I was twenty, she’d be thirty?” Is that why you’ve denied me my title?

“No, you must have been dreaming. You must have been making up stories. You are all the children there are.”

(Who was that story about—the one where the parents are throwing money at the children, but the children don’t pick it up because they’re crying too hard? They’re writhing on the floor covered with coins. Their parents are going out the door for America, hurling handfuls of change behind them.)

She leaned forward, eyes brimming with what she was about to say: “I work so hard,” she said. She was doing her stare—at what? My feet began rubbing together as if to tear each other’s skin off. She started talking again, “The tomato vines prickle my hands; I can feel their little stubble hairs right through my gloves. My feet squish-squish in the rotten tomatoes, squish-squish in the tomato mud the feet ahead of me have sucked. And do you know the best way to stop the itch from the tomato hairs? You break open a fresh tomato and wash yourself with it. You cool your face in tomato juice. Oh, but it’s the potatoes that will ruin my hands. I’ll get rheumatism washing potatoes, squatting over potatoes.”

She had taken off the Ace bandages around her legs for the night. The varicose veins stood out.

“Mama, why don’t you stop working? You don’t have to work anymore. Do you? Do you really have to work like that? Scabbing in the tomato fields?” Her black hair seems filleted with the band of white at its roots. She dyed her hair so that the farmers would hire her. She would walk to Skid Row and stand in line with the hobos, the winos, the junkies, and the Mexicans until the farm buses came and the farmers picked out the workers they wanted. “You have the house,” I said. “For food you have Social Security. And urban renewal must have given you something. It was good
in a way when they tore down the laundry. Really, Mama, it was. Otherwise Papa would never have retired. You ought to retire too.”

“Do you think your father wanted to stop work? Look at his eyes; the brown is going out of his eyes. He has stopped talking. When I go to work, he eats leftovers. He doesn’t cook new food,” she said, confessing, me maddened at confessions. “Those Urban Renewal Ghosts gave us moving money. It took us seventeen years to get our customers. How could we start all over on moving money, as if we two old people had another seventeen years in us? Aa”—she flipped something aside with her hand—“White Ghosts can’t tell Chinese age.”

I closed my eyes and breathed evenly, but she could tell I wasn’t asleep.

“This is terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away,” she said. “Even the ghosts work, no time for acrobatics. I have not stopped working since the day the ship landed. I was on my feet the moment the babies were out. In China I never even had to hang up my own clothes. I shouldn’t have left, but your father couldn’t have supported you without me. I’m the one with the big muscles.”

“If you hadn’t left, there wouldn’t have been a me for you two to support. Mama, I’m really sleepy. Do you mind letting me sleep?” I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.

“I didn’t need muscles in China. I was small in China.” She was. The silk dresses she gave me are tiny. You would not think the same person wore them. This mother can carry a hundred pounds of Texas rice up- and downstairs. She could work at the laundry from 6:30 a.m. until midnight, shifting a baby from an ironing table to a shelf between packages, to the display window, where the ghosts tapped on the glass. “I put you babies in the clean places at the laundry, as far away from the germs that fumed out of the ghosts’ clothes as I could. Aa, their socks and handkerchiefs
choked me. I cough now because of those seventeen years of breathing dust. Tubercular handkerchiefs. Lepers’ socks.” I thought she had wanted to show off my baby sister in the display window.

In the midnight unsteadiness we were back at the laundry, and my mother was sitting on an orange crate sorting dirty clothes into mountains—a sheet mountain, a white shirt mountain, a dark shirt mountain, a work-pants mountain, a long underwear mountain, a short underwear mountain, a little hill of socks pinned together in pairs, a little hill of handkerchiefs pinned to tags. Surrounding her were candles she burned in daylight, clean yellow diamonds, footlights that ringed her, mysterious masked mother, nose and mouth veiled with a cowboy handkerchief. Before undoing the bundles, my mother would light a tall new candle, which was a luxury, and the pie pans full of old wax and wicks that sometimes sputtered blue, a noise I thought was the germs getting seared.

“No tickee, no washee, mama-san?” a ghost would say, so embarrassing.

“Noisy Red-Mouth Ghost,” she’d write on its package, naming it, marking its clothes with its name.

Back in the bedroom I said, “The candles must have helped. It was a good idea of yours to use candles.”

“They didn’t do much good. All I have to do is think about dust sifting out of clothes or peat dirt blowing across a field or chick mash falling from a scoop, and I start coughing.” She coughed deeply. “See what I mean? I have worked too much. Human beings don’t work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we’re too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can’t sleep in this country because it doesn’t shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants—always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time
was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor’s not swept, the ironing’s not ready, the money’s not made. I would still be young if we lived in China.”

“Time is the same from place to place,” I said unfeelingly. “There is only the eternal present, and biology. The reason you feel time pushing is that you had six children after you were forty-five and you worried about raising us. You shouldn’t worry anymore, though, Mama. You should feel good you had so many babies around you in middle age. Not many mothers have that. Wasn’t it like prolonging youth? Now wasn’t it? You mustn’t worry now. All of us have grown up. And you can stop working.”

“I can’t stop working. When I stop working, I hurt. My head, my back, my legs hurt. I get dizzy. I can’t stop.”

“I’m like that too, Mama. I work all the time. Don’t worry about me starving. I won’t starve. I know how to work. I work all the time. I know how to kill food, how to skin and pluck it. I know how to keep warm by sweeping and mopping. I know how to work when things get bad.”

“It’s a good thing I taught you children to look after yourselves. We’re not going back to China for sure now.”

“You’ve been saying that since nineteen forty-nine.”

“Now it’s final. We got a letter from the villagers yesterday. They asked if it was all right with us that they took over the land. The last uncles have been killed so your father is the only person left to say it is all right, you see. He has written saying they can have it. So. We have no more China to go home to.”

It must be all over then. My mother and father have stoked each other’s indignation for almost forty years telling stories about land quarrels among the uncles, the in-laws, the grandparents. Episodes from their various points of view came weekly in the mail, until the uncles were executed
kneeling on broken glass by people who had still other plans for the land. How simply it ended—my father writing his permission. Permission asked, permission given twenty-five years after the Revolution.

“We belong to the planet now, Mama. Does it make sense to you that if we’re no longer attached to one piece of land, we belong to the planet? Wherever we happen to be standing, why, that spot belongs to us as much as any other spot.” Can we spend the fare money on furniture and cars? Will American flowers smell good now?

“I don’t want to go back anyway,” she said. “I’ve gotten used to eating. And the Communists are much too mischievous. You should see the ones I meet in the fields. They bring sacks under their clothes to steal grapes and tomatoes from the growers. They come with trucks on Sundays. And they’re killing each other in San Francisco.” One of the old men caught his visitor, another old fellow, stealing his bantam; the owner spotted its black feet sticking out of his guest’s sweater. We woke up one morning to find a hole in the ground where our loquat tree had stood. Later we saw a new loquat tree most similar to ours in a Chinese neighbor’s yard. We knew a family who had a sign in their vegetable patch: “Since this is not a Communist garden but cabbages grown by private enterprise, please do not steal from my garden.” It was dated and signed in good handwriting.

“The new immigrants aren’t Communists, Mother. They’re fugitives from the real Communists.”

“They’re Chinese, and Chinese are mischievous. No, I’m too old to keep up with them. They’d be too clever for me. I’ve lost my cunning, having grown accustomed to food, you see. There’s only one thing that I really want anymore. I want you here, not wandering like a ghost from Romany. I want every one of you living here together. When you’re all home, all six of you with your children and husbands and wives, there are twenty or thirty people in this house. Then I’m happy. And your father is happy. Which
ever room I walk into overflows with my relatives, grandsons, sons-in-law. I can’t turn around without touching somebody. That’s the way a house should be.” Her eyes are big, inconsolable. A spider headache spreads out in fine branches over my skull. She is etching spider legs into the icy bone. She pries open my head and my fists and crams into them responsibility for time, responsibility for intervening oceans.

The gods pay her and my father back for leaving their parents. My grandmother wrote letters pleading for them to come home, and they ignored her. Now they know how she felt.

“When I’m away from here,” I had to tell her, “I don’t get sick. I don’t go to the hospital every holiday. I don’t get pneumonia, no dark spots on my x-rays. My chest doesn’t hurt when I breathe. I can breathe. And I don’t get headaches at 3:00. I don’t have to take medicines or go to doctors. Elsewhere I don’t have to lock my doors and keep checking the locks. I don’t stand at the windows and watch for movements and see them in the dark.”

“What do you mean you don’t lock your doors?”

“I do. I do. But not the way I do here. I don’t hear ghost sounds. I don’t stay awake listening to walking in the kitchen. I don’t hear the doors and windows unhinging.”

“It was probably just a Wino Ghost or a Hobo Ghost looking for a place to sleep.”

“I don’t want to hear Wino Ghosts and Hobo Ghosts. I’ve found some places in this country that are ghost-free. And I think I belong there, where I don’t catch colds or use my hospitalization insurance. Here I’m sick so often, I can barely work. I can’t help it, Mama.”

She yawned. “It’s better, then, for you to stay away. The weather in California must not agree with you. You can come for visits.” She got up and turned off the light. “Of course, you must go, Little Dog.”

A weight lifted from me. The quilts must be filling with air. The world is somehow lighter. She has not called me
that endearment for years—a name to fool the gods. I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter.

“Good night, Little Dog.”

“Good night, Mother.”

She sends me on my way, working always and now old, dreaming the dreams about shrinking babies and the sky covered with airplanes and a Chinatown bigger than the ones here.

At
the
Western
Palace