Several months went by with no letter from Moon Orchid. When she had lived in China and in Hong Kong, she had written every other week. At last Brave Orchid telephoned long distance to find out what was happening. “I can’t talk now,” Moon Orchid whispered. “They’re listening. Hang up quickly before they trace you.” Moon Orchid hung up on Brave Orchid before the minutes she had paid for expired.
That week a letter came from the niece saying that Moon Orchid had become afraid. Moon Orchid said that she had overheard Mexican ghosts plotting on her life. She had been creeping along the baseboards and peeping out windows. Then she had asked her daughter to help her find an apartment at the other end of Los Angeles, where she was now hiding. Her daughter visited her every day, but Moon Orchid kept telling her, “Don’t come see me because the Mexican ghosts will follow you to my new hiding place. They’re watching your house.”
Brave Orchid phoned her niece and told her to send her mother north immediately, where there were no Mexicans, she said. “This fear is an illness,” she told her niece. “I will cure her.” (“Long ago,” she explained to her children, “when the emperors had four wives, the wife who lost in battle was sent to the Northern Palace. Her feet would sink little prints into the snow.”)
Brave Orchid sat on a bench at the Greyhound station to wait for her sister. Her children had not come with her because the bus station was only a five-block walk from the house. Her brown paper shopping bag against her, she dozed under the fluorescent lights until her sister’s bus pulled into the terminal. Moon Orchid stood blinking on the stairs, hanging tightly to the railing for old people. Brave Orchid felt the tears break inside her chest for the old feet that stepped one at a time onto the cold Greyhound cement. Her sister’s skin hung loose, like a hollowed frog’s, as if she had shrunken inside it. Her clothes bagged, not fitting sharply anymore. “I’m in disguise,” she said. Brave Orchid put her arms around her sister to give her body warmth. She held her hand along the walk home, just as they had held hands when they were girls.
The house was more crowded than ever, though some of the children had gone away to school; the jade trees were inside for the winter. Along walls and on top of tables, jade trees, whose trunks were as thick as ankles, stood stoutly, green now and without the pink skin the sun gave them in the spring.
“I am so afraid,” said Moon Orchid.
“There is no one after you,” said Brave Orchid. “No Mexicans.”
“I saw some in the Greyhound station,” said Moon Orchid.
“No. No, those were Filipinos.” She held her sister’s earlobes and began the healing chant for being unafraid. “There are no Mexicans after you,” she said.
“I know. I got away from them by escaping on the bus.”
“Yes, you escaped on the bus with the mark of the dog on it.”
In the evening, when Moon Orchid seemed quieter, her sister probed into the cause of this trouble.
“What made you think anyone was after you?”
“I heard them talking about me. I snuck up on them and heard them.”
“But you don’t understand Mexican words.”
“They were speaking English.”
“You don’t understand English words.”
“This time, miraculously, I understood. I decoded their speech. I penetrated the words and understood what was happening inside.”
Brave Orchid tweaked her sister’s ears for hours, chanting her new address to her, telling her how much she loved her and how much her daughter and nephews and nieces loved her, and her brother-in-law loved her. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I won’t let you travel again. You’re home. Stay home. Don’t be afraid.” Tears fell from Brave Orchid’s eyes. She had whisked her sister across the ocean by jet and then made her scurry up and down the Pacific coast, back and forth across Los Angeles. Moon Orchid had misplaced herself, her spirit (her “attention,” Brave Orchid called it) scattered all over the world. Brave Orchid held her sister’s head as she pulled on her earlobe. She would make it up to her. For moments an attentiveness would return to Moon Orchid’s face. Brave Orchid rubbed the slender hands, blew on the fingers, tried to stoke up the flickerings. She stayed home from the laundry day after day. She threw out the Thorazine and vitamin? that a doctor in Los Angeles had prescribed. She made Moon Orchid sit in the kitchen sun while she picked over the herbs in cupboards and basement and the fresh plants that grew in the winter garden. Brave Orchid chose the gentlest plants and made medicines and foods like those they had eaten in their village.
At night she moved from her own bedroom and slept beside Moon Orchid. “Don’t be afraid to sleep,” she said. “Rest. I’ll be here beside you. I’ll help your spirit find the place to come back to. I’ll call it for you; you go to sleep.” Brave Orchid stayed awake watching until dawn.
Moon Orchid still described aloud her nieces’ and nephews’ doings, but now in a monotone, and she no longer interrupted herself to ask questions. She would not go outside, even into the yard. “Why, she’s mad,” Brave Orchid’s husband said when she was asleep.
Brave Orchid held her hand when she appeared vague. “Don’t go away, Little Sister. Don’t go any further. Come back to us.” If Moon Orchid fell asleep on the sofa, Brave Orchid sat up through the night, sometimes dozing in a chair. When Moon Orchid fell asleep in the middle of the bed, Brave Orchid made a place for herself at the foot. She would anchor her sister to this earth.
But each day Moon Orchid slipped further away. She said that the Mexicans had traced her to this house. That was the day she shut the drapes and blinds and locked the doors. She sidled along the walls to peep outside. Brave Orchid told her husband that he must humor his sister-in-law. It was right to shut the windows; it kept her spirit from leaking away. Then Moon Orchid went about the house turning off the lights like during air raids. The house became gloomy; no air, no light. This was very tricky, the darkness a wide way for going as well as coming back. Sometimes Brave Orchid would switch on the lights, calling her sister’s name all the while. Brave Orchid’s husband installed an air conditioner.
The children locked themselves up in their bedrooms, in the storeroom and basement, where they turned on the lights. Their aunt would come knocking on the doors and say, “Are you all right in there?”
“Yes, Aunt, we’re all right.”
“Beware,” she’d warn. “Beware. Turn off your lights so you won’t be found. Turn off the lights before they come for us.”
The children hung blankets over the cracks in the door-jambs; they stuffed clothes along the bottoms of doors. “Chinese people are very weird,” they told one another.
Next Moon Orchid removed all the photographs, except for those of the grandmother and grandfather, from the shelves, dressers, and walls. She gathered up the family albums. “Hide these,” she whispered to Brave Orchid. “Hide these. When they find me, I don’t want them to trace the rest of the family. They use photographs to trace you.” Brave Orchid wrapped the pictures and the albums in flannel. “I’ll carry these far away where no one will find us,” she said. When Moon Orchid wasn’t looking, she put them at the bottom of a storage box in the basement. She piled old clothes and old shoes on top. “If they come for me,” Moon Orchid said, “everyone will be safe.”
“We’re all safe,” said Brave Orchid.
The next odd thing Moon Orchid did was to cry whenever anyone left the house. She held on to them, pulled at their clothes, begged them not to go. The children and Brave Orchid’s husband had to sneak out. “Don’t let them go,” pleaded Moon Orchid. “They will never come back.”
“They will come back. Wait and see. I promise you. Watch for them. Don’t watch for Mexicans. This one will be home at 3:30. This one at 5:00. Remember who left now. You’ll see.”
“We’ll never see that one again,” Moon Orchid wept.
At 3:30 Brave Orchid would remind her, “See? It’s 3:30; sure enough, here he comes.” (“You children come home right after school. Don
’t you dare stop for a moment. No candy store. No comic book store. Do you hear?”)
But Moon Orchid did not remember. “Who is this?” she’d ask. “Are you going to stay with us? Don’t go out tonight. Don’t leave in the morning.”
She whispered to Brave Orchid that the reason the family must not go out was that “they” would take us in airplanes and fly us to Washington, D.C., where they’d turn us into ashes. Then they’d drop the ashes in the wind, leaving no evidence.
Brave Orchid saw that all variety had gone from her sister. She was indeed mad. “The difference between mad people and sane people,” Brave Orchid explained to the children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.”
Every morning Moon Orchid stood by the front door whispering, whispering. “Don’t go. The planes. Ashes. Washington, D.C. Ashes.” Then, when a child managed to leave, she said, “That’s the last time we’ll see him again. They’ll get him. They’ll turn him into ashes.”
And so Brave Orchid gave up. She was housing a mad sister who cursed the mornings for her children, the one in Vietnam too. Their aunt was saying terrible things when they needed blessing. Perhaps Moon Orchid had already left this mad old body, and it was a ghost bad-mouthing her children. Brave Orchid finally called her niece, who put Moon Orchid in a California state mental asylum. Then Brave Orchid opened up the windows and let the air and light come into the house again. She moved back into the bedroom with her husband. The children took the blankets and sheets down from the doorjambs and came back into the living room.
Brave Orchid visited her sister twice. Moon Orchid was thinner each time, shrunken to bone. But, surprisingly, she was happy and had made up a new story. She pranced like a child. “Oh, Sister, I am so happy here. No one ever leaves. Isn’t that wonderful? We are all women here. Come. I want you to meet my daughters.” She introduced Brave Orchid to each inmate in the ward—her daughters. She was especially proud of the pregnant ones. “My dear pregnant daughters.” She touched the women on the head, straightened collars, tucked blankets. “How are you today, dear daughter?” “And, you know,” she said to Brave Orchid, “we understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I understand them.” Sure enough, the women smiled back at her and reached out to touch her as she went by. She had a new story, and yet she slipped entirely away, not waking up one morning.
Brave Orchid told her children they must help her keep their father from marrying another woman because she didn’t think she could take it any better than her sister had. If he brought another woman into the house, they were to gang up on her and play tricks on her, hit her, and trip her when she was carrying hot oil until she ran away. “I am almost seventy years old,” said the father, “and haven’t taken a second wife, and don’t plan to now.” Brave Orchid’s daughters decided fiercely that they would never let men be unfaithful to them. All her children made up their minds to major in science or mathematics.
A Song
for a
Barbarian
Reed Pipe
What my brother actually said was, “I drove Mom and Second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt’s husband who’s got the other wife.”
“Did she hit him? What did she say? What did he say?”
“Nothing much. Mom did all the talking.”
“What did she say?”
“She said he’d better take them to lunch at least.”
“Which wife did he sit next to? What did they eat?”
“I didn’t go. The other wife didn’t either. He motioned us not to tell.”
“I would’ve told. If I was his wife, I would’ve told. I would’ve gone to lunch and kept my ears open.”
“Ah, you know they don’t talk when they eat.”
“What else did Mom say?”
“I don’t remember. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would come.”
“There must’ve been more. Didn’t Aunt get in one nasty word? She must’ve said something.”
“No, I don’t think she said anything. I don’t remember her saying one thing.”
In fact, it wasn’t me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he’d told her. His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs. The hearer can carry it tucked away without it taking up much room. Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.
Maybe that’s why my mother cut my tongue. She pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum. Or maybe she snipped it with a pair of nail scissors. I don’t remember her doing it, only her telling me about it, but all during childhood I felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry—and then, when its mouth was wide open like a baby bird’s, cut. The Chinese say “a ready tongue is an evil.”
I used to curl up my tongue in front of the mirror and tauten my frenum into a white line, itself as thin as a razor blade. I saw no scars in my mouth. I thought perhaps I had had two frena, and she had cut one. I made other children open their mouths so I could compare theirs to mine. I saw perfect pink membranes stretching into precise edges that looked easy enough to cut. Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other times I was terrified—the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue.
“Why did you do that to me, Mother?”
“I told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything. Your frenum looked too tight to do those things, so I cut it.”
“But isn’t ‘a ready tongue an evil’?”
“Things are different in this ghost country.”
“Did it hurt me? Did I cry and bleed?”
“I don’t remember. Probably.”
She didn’t cut the other children’s. When I asked cousins and other Chinese children whether their mothers had cut their tongues loose, they said, “What?”
“Why didn’t you cut my brothers’ and sisters’ tongues?”
“They didn’t need it.”
“Why not? Were theirs longer than mine?”
“Why don’t you quit blabbering and get to work?”
If my mother was not lying she should have cut more, scraped away the rest of the frenum skin, because I have a terrible time talking. Or she should not have cut at all, tampering with my speech. When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent. A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say “hello” casually, or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver. I stand frozen, or I hold up the line with the complete, grammatical sentence that comes squeaking out at impossible length. “What did you say?” says the cab driver, or “Speak up,” so I have to perform again, only weaker the second time. A telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day’s courage. It spoils my day with self-disgust when I hear my broken voice come skittering out into the open. It makes people wince to hear it. I’m getting better, though. Recently I asked the postman for special-issue stamps; I’ve waited since childhood for postmen to give me some of their own accord. I am making progress, a little every day.
My silence was thickest—total—during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint. I painted layers of black over houses and flowers and suns, and when I drew on the blackboard, I put a layer of chalk on top. I was making a stage curtain, and it was the moment before the curtain parted or rose. The teachers
called my parents to school, and I saw they had been saving my pictures, curling and cracking, all alike and black. The teachers pointed to the pictures and looked serious, talked seriously too, but my parents did not understand English. (“The parents and teachers of criminals were executed,” said my father.) My parents took the pictures home. I spread them out (so black and full of possibilities) and pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas.
During the first silent year I spoke to no one at school, did not ask before going to the lavatory, and flunked kindergarten. My sister also said nothing for three years, silent in the playground and silent at lunch. There were other quiet Chinese girls not of our family, but most of them got over it sooner than we did. I enjoyed the silence. At first it did not occur to me I was supposed to talk or to pass kindergarten. I talked at home and to one or two of the Chinese kids in class. I made motions and even made some jokes. I drank out of a toy saucer when the water spilled out of the cup, and everybody laughed, pointing at me, so I did it some more. I didn’t know that Americans don’t drink out of saucers.
I liked the Negro students (Black Ghosts) best because they laughed the loudest and talked to me as if I were a daring talker too. One of the Negro girls had her mother coil braids over her ears Shanghai-style like mine; we were Shanghai twins except that she was covered with black like my paintings. Two Negro kids enrolled in Chinese school, and the teachers gave them Chinese names. Some Negro kids walked me to school and home, protecting me from the Japanese kids, who hit me and chased me and stuck gum in my ears. The Japanese kids were noisy and tough. They appeared one day in kindergarten, released from concentration camp, which was a tic-tac-toe mark, like barbed wire, on the map.