My mother's room was brightly lit. As soon as I walked in I could see her. I ran to her bed and stood on the footstool. Her arms and legs were moving back and forth as she lay on her back. She was like a soldier, marching to nowhere, her head looking right then left. And now her whole body became straight and stiff as if to stretch herself out of her body. Her jaw was pulled down and I saw her tongue was swollen and she was coughing to try to make it fall out.
"Wake up!" I whispered, and then I turned and saw everybody standing there: Wu Tsing, Yan Chang, Second Wife, Third Wife, Fifth Wife, the doctor.
"She has taken too much opium," cried Yan Chang. "The doctor says he can do nothing. She has poisoned herself."
So they were doing nothing, only waiting. I also waited those many hours.
The only sounds were that of the girl in the clock playing the violin. And I wanted to shout to the clock and make its meaningless noise be silent, but I did not.
I watched my mother march in her bed. I wanted to say the words that would quiet her body and spirit. But I stood there like the others, waiting and saying nothing.
And then I recalled her story about the little turtle, his warning not to cry. And I wanted to shout to her that it was no use. There were already too many tears. And I tried to swallow them one by one, but they came too fast, until finally my closed lips burst open and I cried and cried, then cried all over again, letting everybody in the room feed on my tears.
I fainted with all this grief and they carried me back to Yan Chang's bed. So that morning, while my mother was dying, I was dreaming.
I was falling from the sky down to the ground, into a pond. And I became a little turtle lying at the bottom of this watery place. Above me I could see the beaks of a thousand magpies drinking from the pond, drinking and singing happily and filling their snow-white bellies. I was crying hard, so many tears, but they drank and drank, so many of them, until I had no more tears left and the pond was empty, everything as dry as sand.
Yan Chang later told me my mother had listened to Second Wife and tried to do pretend-suicide. False words! Lies! She would never listen to this woman who caused her so much suffering.
I know my mother listened to her own heart, to no longer pretend. I know this because why else did she die two days before the lunar new year? Why else did she plan her death so carefully that it became a weapon?
Three days before the lunar new year, she had eaten ywansyau, the sticky sweet dumpling that everybody eats to celebrate. She ate one after the other. And I remember her strange remark. "You see how this life is. You cannot eat enough of this bitterness." And what she had done was eat ywansyau filled with a kind of bitter poison, not candied seeds or the dull happiness of opium as Yan Chang and the others had thought. When the poison broke into her body, she whispered to me that she would rather kill her own weak spirit so she could give me a stronger one.
The stickiness clung to her body. They could not remove the poison and so she died, two days before the new year. They laid her on a wooden board in the hallway. She wore funeral clothes far richer than those she had worn in life. Silk undergarments to keep her warm without the heavy burden of a fur coat. A silk gown, sewn with gold thread. A headdress of gold and lapis and jade. And two delicate slippers with the softest leather soles and two giant pearls on each toe, to light her way to nirvana.
Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So I shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I can see the truth, too. I am strong, too.
Because we both knew this: that on the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.
So on that day, Wu Tsing, fearful of my mother's vengeful spirit, wore the coarsest of white cotton mourning clothes. He promised her visiting ghost that he would raise Syaudi and me as his honored children. He promised to revere her as if she had been First Wife, his only wife.
And on that day, I showed Second Wife the fake pearl necklace she had given me and crushed it under my foot.
And on that day, Second Wife's hair began to turn white.
And on that day, I learned to shout.
I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened.
You do not need a psychiatrist to do this. A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he is just another bird drinking from your misery.
My mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hide it. She found only greater misery and finally could not hide that. There is nothing more to understand. That was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. They could not speak up. They could not run away. That was their fate.
But now they can do something else. Now they no longer have to swallow their own tears or suffer the taunts of magpies. I know this because I read this news in a magazine from China.
It said that for thousands of years birds had been tormenting the peasants. They flocked to watch peasants bent over in the fields, digging the hard dirt, crying into the furrows to water the seeds. And when the people stood up, the birds would fly down and drink the tears and eat the seeds. So children starved.
But one day, all these tired peasants—from all over China—they gathered in fields everywhere. They watched the birds eating and drinking. And they said, "Enough of this suffering and silence!" They began to clap their hands, and bang sticks on pots and pans and shout, "Sz! Sz! Sz!"—Die! Die! Die!
And all these birds rose in the air, alarmed and confused by this new anger, beating their black wings, flying just above, waiting for the noise to stop. But the people's shouts only grew stronger, angrier. The birds became more exhausted, unable to land, unable to eat. And this continued for many hours, for many days, until all those birds—hundreds, thousands, and then millions!—fluttered to the ground, dead and still, until not one bird remained in the sky.
What would your psychiatrist say if I told him that I shouted for joy when I read that this had happened?
Magpies | Up | Double face
* * *
Waiting Between the Trees
Ying-Ying St. Clair
* * *
My daughter has put me in the tiniest of rooms in her new house.
"This is the guest bedroom," Lena said in her proud American way.
I smiled. But to Chinese ways of thinking, the guest bedroom is the best bedroom, where she and her husband sleep. I do not tell her this. Her wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into the darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything.
I think this to myself even though I love my daughter. She and I have shared the same body. There is a part of her mind that is part of mine. But when she was born, she sprang from me like a slippery fish, and has been swimming away ever since. All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore. And now I must tell her everything about my past. It is the only way to penetrate her skin and pull her to where she can be saved.
This room has ceilings that slope downward toward the pillow of my bed. Its walls close in like a coffin. I should remind my daughter not to put any babies in this room. But I know she will not listen. She has already said she does not want any babies. She and her husband are too busy drawing places that someone else will build and someone else will live in. I cannot say the American word that she and her husband are. It is an ugly word.
"Arty-tecky," I once pronounced it to my sister-in-law.
My daughter had laughed when she heard this. When she was a child, I should have slapped her more often for disrespect. But now it is too late. Now she and her husband give me money to add to my so-so security. So the burnin
g feeling I have in my hand sometimes, I must pull it back into my heart and keep it inside.
What good does it do to draw fancy buildings and then live in one that is useless? My daughter has money, but everything in her house is for looking, not even for good-looking. Look at this end table. It is heavy white marble on skinny black legs. A person must always think not to put a heavy bag on this table or it will break. The only thing that can sit on the table is a tall black vase. The vase is like a spider leg, so thin only one flower can be put in. If you shake the table, the vase and flower will fall down.
All around this house I see the signs. My daughter looks but does not see. This is a house that will break into pieces. How do I know? I have always known a thing before it happens.
When I was a young girl in Wushi, I was lihai. Wild and stubborn. I wore a smirk on my face. Too good to listen. I was small and pretty. I had tiny feet which made me very vain. If a pair of silk slippers became dusty, I threw them away. I wore costly imported calfskin shoes with little heels. I broke many pairs and ruined many stockings running across the cobblestone courtyard.
I often unraveled my hair and wore it loose. My mother would look at my wild tangles and scold me: "Aii-ya, Ying-ying, you are like the lady ghosts at the bottom of the lake."
These were the ladies who drowned their shame and floated in living people's houses with their hair undone to show their everlasting despair. My mother said I would bring shame into the house, but I only giggled as she tried to tuck my hair up with long pins. She loved me too much to get angry. I was like her. That was why she named me Ying-ying, Clear Reflection.
We were one of the richest families in Wushi. We had many rooms, each filled with big, heavy tables. On each table was a jade jar sealed airtight with a jade lid. Each jar held unfiltered British cigarettes, always the right amount. Not too much, not too little. The jars were made just for these cigarettes. I thought nothing of these jars. They were junk in my mind. Once my brothers and I stole a jar and poured the cigarettes out onto the streets. We ran down to a large hole that had opened up in the street, where underneath water flowed. There we squatted along with the children who lived by the gutter. We scooped up cups of dirty water, hoping to find a fish or unknown treasure. We found nothing, and soon our clothes were washed over with mud and we were unrecognizable from the children who lived on the streets.
We had many riches in that house. Silk rugs and jewels. Rare bowls and carved ivory. But when I think back on that house, and it is not often, I think of that jade jar, the muddied treasure I did not know I was holding in my hand.
There is another thing I remember clearly about that house.
I was sixteen. It was the night my youngest aunt got married. She and her new husband had already retired to the room they would share in the big house with her new mother-in-law and the rest of her new family.
Many of the visiting family members lingered at our house, sitting around the big table in the main room, everybody laughing and eating peanuts, peeling oranges, and laughing more. A man from another town was seated with us, a friend of my aunt's new husband. He was older than my oldest brother, so I called him Uncle. His face was reddened from drinking whiskey.
"Ying-ying," he called hoarsely to me as he rose from his chair. "Maybe you are still hungry, isn't it so?"
I looked around the table, smiling at everyone because of this special attention given to me. I thought he would pull a special treat from a large sack he was reaching into. I hoped for some sweetened cookies. But he pulled out a watermelon and put it on the table with a loud pung.
"Kai gwa?"—Open the watermelon—he said, poising a large knife over the perfect fruit.
Then he sank the knife in with a mighty push and his huge mouth roared a laugh so big I could see all the way back to his gold teeth. Everyone at the table laughed loudly. My face burned from embarrassment, because at that time I did not understand.
Yes, it is true I was a wild girl, but I was innocent. I did not know what an evil thing he did when he cut open that watermelon. I did not understand until six months later when I was married to this man and he hissed drunkenly to me that he was ready to kai gwa.
This was a man so bad that even today I cannot speak his name. Why did I marry this man? It was because the night after my youngest aunt's wedding, I began to know a thing before it happened.
Most of the relatives had left the next morning. And by the evening, my half-sisters and I were bored. We were sitting at the same large table, drinking tea and eating roasted watermelon seeds. My half-sisters gossiped loudly, while I sat cracking seeds and laying their flesh in a pile.
My half-sisters were all dreaming of being married to worthless young boys from families not as good as ours. My half-sisters did not know how to reach very high for a good thing. They were the daughters of my father's concubines. I was the daughter of my father's wife.
"His mother will treat you like a servant…" chided one half-sister upon hearing the other's choice.
"A madness on his uncle's side…" retorted the other half-sister.
When they tired of teasing one another, they asked me whom I wanted to marry.
"I know of no one," I told them haughtily.
It was not that boys did not interest me. I knew how to attract attention and be admired. But I was too vain to think any one boy was good enough for me.
Those were the thoughts in my head. But thoughts are of two kinds. Some are seeds that are planted when you are born, placed there by your father and mother and their ancestors before them. And some thoughts are planted by others. Maybe it was the watermelon seeds I was eating: I thought of that laughing man from the night before. And just then, a large wind blew in from the north and the flower on the table split from its stem and fell at my feet.
This is the truth. It was as if a knife had cut the flower's head off as a sign. Right then, I knew I would marry this man. It was not with joy that I thought this, but wonderment that I could know it.
And soon I began to hear this man mentioned by my father and uncle and aunt's new husband. At dinner his name was spooned into my bowl along with my soup. I found him staring at me across from my uncle's courtyard, hu-huing, "See, she cannot turn away. She is already mine."
True enough, I did not turn away. I fought his eyes with mine. I listened to him with my nose held high, sniffing the stink of his words when he told me my father would not likely give the dowry he required. I pushed so hard to keep him from my thoughts that I fell into a marriage bed with him.
My daughter does not know that I was married to this man so long ago, twenty years before she was even born.
She does not know how beautiful I was when I married this man. I was far more pretty than my daughter, who has country feet and a large nose like her father's.
Even today, my skin is still smooth, my figure like a girl's. But there are deep lines in my mouth where I used to wear smiles. And my poor feet, once so small and pretty! Now they are swollen, callused, and cracked at the heels. My eyes, so bright and flashy at sixteen, are now yellow-stained, clouded.
But I still see almost everything clearly. When I want to remember, it is like looking into a bowl and finding the last grains of rice you did not finish.
There was an afternoon on Tai Lake soon after this man and I married. I remember this is when I came to love him. This man had turned my face toward the late-afternoon sun. He held my chin and stroked my cheek and said, "Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden."
I did not laugh, even though this was a poem he said very badly. I cried with honest joy. I had a swimming feeling in my heart like a creature thrashing to get out and wanting to stay in at the same time. That is how much I came to love this man. This is how it is when a person joins your body and there is a part of your mind that swims to join that person against your will.
I became a stranger to myself. I was pretty for him. If I put slippers on my feet, it was to choose a p
air that I knew would please him. I brushed my hair ninety-nine times a night to bring luck to our marital bed, in hopes of conceiving a son.
The night he planted the baby, I again knew a thing before it happened. I knew it was a boy. I could see this little boy in my womb. He had my husband's eyes, large and wide apart. He had long tapered fingers, fat earlobes, and slick hair that rose high to reveal a large forehead.
It is because I had so much joy then that I came to have so much hate. But even when I was my happiest, I had a worry that started right above my brow, where you know a thing. This worry later trickled down to my heart, where you feel a thing and it becomes true.
My husband started to take many business trips to the north. These trips began soon after we married, but they became longer after the baby was put in my womb. I remembered that the north wind had blown luck and my husband my way, so at night when he was away, I opened wide my bedroom windows, even on cold nights, to blow his spirit and heart back my way.
What I did not know is that the north wind is the coldest. It penetrates the heart and takes the warmth away. The wind gathered such a force that it blew my husband past my bedroom and out the back door. I found out from my youngest aunt that he had left me to live with an opera singer.
Later still, when I overcame my grief and came to have nothing in my heart but loathing despair, my youngest aunt told me of others. Dancers and American ladies. Prostitutes. A girl cousin younger even than I was. She left mysteriously for Hong Kong soon after my husband disappeared.
So I will tell Lena of my shame. That I was rich and pretty. I was too good for any one man. That I became abandoned goods. I will tell her that at eighteen the prettiness drained from my cheeks. That I thought of throwing myself in the lake like the other ladies of shame. And I will tell her of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much.
I took this baby from my womb before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born. But even then, I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this man's firstborn son poured from me.