I stood on top of the last hill before Peiping and saw the roads below me flow like living rivers. Between roads the woods and plains moved too; the land was peopled—the Han people, the People of One Hundred Surnames, marching with one heart, our tatters flying. The depth and width of Joy were exactly known to me: the Chinese population. After much hardship a few of our millions had arrived together at the capital. We faced our emperor personally. We beheaded him, cleaned out the palace, and inaugurated the peasant who would begin the new order. In his rags he sat on the throne facing south, and we, a great red crowd, bowed to him three times. He commended some of us who were his first generals.
I told the people who had come with me that they were free to go home now, but since the Long Wall was so close, I would go see it. They could come along if they liked. So, loath to disband after such high adventures, we reached the northern boundary of the world, chasing Mongols en route.
I touched the Long Wall with my own fingers, running the edge of my hand between the stones, tracing the grooves the builders’ hands had made. We lay our foreheads and our cheeks against the Long Wall and cried like the women who had come here looking for their men so long building the wall. In my travels north, I had not found my brother.
Carrying the news about the new emperor, I went home, where one more battle awaited me. The baron who had drafted my brother would still be bearing sway over our village. Having dropped my soldiers off at crossroads and bridges, I attacked the baron’s stronghold alone. I jumped over the double walls and landed with swords drawn and knees bent, ready to spring. When no one accosted me, I sheathed the swords and walked about like a guest until I found the baron. He was counting his money, his fat ringed fingers playing over the abacus.
“Who are you? What do you want?” he said, encircling his profits with his arms. He sat square and fat like a god.
“I want your life in payment for your crimes against the villagers.”
“I haven’t done anything to you. All this is mine. I earned it. I didn’t steal it from you. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Who are you?”
“I am a female avenger.”
Then—heaven help him—he tried to be charming, to appeal to me man to man. “Oh, come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them. ‘Girls are maggots in the rice.’ ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’” He quoted to me the sayings I hated.
“Regret what you’ve done before I kill you,” I said.
“I haven’t done anything other men—even you—wouldn’t have done in my place.”
“You took away my brother.”
“I free my apprentices.”
“He was not an apprentice.”
“China needs soldiers in wartime.”
“You took away my childhood.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve never met before. I’ve done nothing to you.”
“You’ve done this,” I said, and ripped off my shirt to show him my back. “You are responsible for this.” When I saw his startled eyes at my breasts, I slashed him across the face and on the second stroke cut off his head.
I pulled my shirt back on and opened the house to the villagers. The baron’s family and servants hid in closets and under beds. The villagers dragged them out into the courtyard, where they tried them next to the beheading machine. “Did you take my harvest so that my children had to eat grass?” a weeping farmer asked.
“I saw him steal seed grain,” another testified.
“My family was hiding under the thatch on the roof when the bandits robbed our house, and we saw this one take off his mask.” They spared those who proved they could be reformed. They beheaded the others. Their necks were collared in the beheading machine, which slowly clamped shut. There was one last-minute reprieve of a bodyguard when a witness shouted testimony just as the vise was pinching blood. The guard had but recently joined the household in exchange for a child hostage. A slow killing gives a criminal time to regret his crimes and think of the right words to prove he can change.
I searched the house, hunting out people for trial. I came upon a locked room. When I broke down the door, I found women, cowering, whimpering women. I heard shrill insect noises and scurrying. They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet. Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. I called the villagers to come identify any daughters they wanted to take home, but no one claimed any. I gave each woman a bagful of rice, which they sat on. They rolled the bags to the road. They wandered away like ghosts. Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. They did not wear men’s clothes like me, but rode as women in black and red dresses. They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons. They killed men and boys. I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality.
After the trials we tore down the ancestral tablets. “We’ll use this great hall for village meetings,” I announced. “Here we’ll put on operas; we’ll sing together and talk-story.” We washed the courtyard; we exorcised the house with smoke and red paper. “This is a new year,” I told the people, “the year one.”
I went home to my parents-in-law and husband and son. My son stared, very impressed by the general he had seen in the parade, but his father said, “It’s your mother. Go to your mother.” My son was delighted that the shiny general was his mother too. She gave him her helmet to wear and her swords to hold.
Wearing my black embroidered wedding coat, I knelt at my parents-in-law’s feet, as I would have done as a bride. “Now my public duties are finished,” I said. “I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework, and giving you more sons.”
“Go visit your mother and father first,” my mother-in-law said, a generous woman. “They want to welcome you.”
My mother and father and the entire clan would be living happily on the money I had sent them. My parents had bought their coffins. They would sacrifice a pig to the gods that I had returned. From the words on my back, and how they were fulfilled, the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality.
My American life has been such a disappointment.
“I got straight A’s, Mama.”
“Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village.”
I could not figure out what was my village. And it was important that I do something big and fine, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums. You can’t eat straight A’s.
When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, “‘Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,’” I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stop.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t know. Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. ‘There’s no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls.’”
“I would hit her if she were mine. But then there’s no use wasting all that discipline on a girl. ‘When you raise girls, you’re raising children for strangers.’”
“Stop that crying!” my mother would yell. “I’m going to hit you if you don’t stop. Bad girl! Stop!” I’m going to remember never to hit or to scold my children for crying, I thought, because then they will only cry more.
“I’m not a bad girl,” I would scream. “I’m not a bad girl. I’m not a bad girl.” I might as well have said, “I’m not a girl.”
“When you were little, all you had to say was ‘I’m not a bad girl,’ and you could make yourself cry,” my mother says, talking-story about my childhood.
I minded that
the emigrant villagers shook their heads at my sister and me. “One girl—and another girl,” they said, and made our parents ashamed to take us out together. The good part about my brothers being born was that people stopped saying, “All girls,” but I learned new grievances. “Did you roll an egg on my face like that when I was born?” “Did you have a full-month party for me?” “Did you turn on all the lights?” “Did you send my picture to Grandmother?” “Why not? Because I’m a girl? Is that why not?” “Why didn’t you teach me English?” “You like having me beaten up at school, don’t you?”
“She is very mean, isn’t she?” the emigrant villagers would say.
“Come, children. Hurry. Hurry. Who wants to go out with Great-Uncle?” On Saturday mornings my great-uncle, the ex-river pirate, did the shopping. “Get your coats, whoever’s coming.”
“I’m coming. I’m coming. Wait for me.”
When he heard girls’ voices, he turned on us and roared, “No girls!” and left my sisters and me hanging our coats back up, not looking at one another. The boys came back with candy and new toys. When they walked through Chinatown, the people must have said, “A boy—and another boy—and another boy!” At my great-uncle’s funeral I secretly tested out feeling glad that he was dead—the six-foot bearish masculinity of him.
I went away to college—Berkeley in the sixties—and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam.
If I went to Vietnam, I would not come back; females desert families. It was said, “There is an outward tendency in females,” which meant that I was getting straight A’s for the good of my future husband’s family, not my own. I did not plan ever to have a husband. I would show my mother and father and the nosey emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency. I stopped getting straight A’s.
And all the time I was having to turn myself American-feminine, or no dates.
There is a Chinese word for the female I—which is “slave.” Break the women with their own tongues!
I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. “Bad girl,” my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?
“What do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?”
“A lumberjack in Oregon.”
Even now, unless I’m happy, I burn the food when I cook. I do not feed people. I let the dirty dishes rot. I eat at other people’s tables but won’t invite them to mine, where the dishes are rotting.
If I could not-eat, perhaps I could make myself a warrior like the swords woman who drives me. I will—I must—rise and plow the fields as soon as the baby comes out.
Once I get outside the house, what bird might call me; on what horse could I ride away? Marriage and childbirth strengthen the swordswoman, who is not a maid like Joan of Arc. Do the women’s work; then do more work, which will become ours too. No husband of mine will say, “I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is.” Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.
When urban renewal tore down my parents’ laundry and paved over our slum for a parking lot, I only made up gun and knife fantasies and did nothing useful.
From the fairy tales, I’ve learned exactly who the enemy are. I easily recognize them—business-suited in their modern American executive guise, each boss two feet taller than I am and impossible to meet eye to eye.
I once worked at an art supply house that sold paints to artists. “Order more of that nigger yellow, willya?” the boss told me. “Bright, isn’t it? Nigger yellow.”
“I don’t like that word,” I had to say in my bad, small-person’s voice that makes no impact. The boss never deigned to answer.
I also worked at a land developers’ association. The building industry was planning a banquet for contractors, real estate dealers, and real estate editors. “Did you know the restaurant you chose for the banquet is being picketed by CORE and the NAACP?” I squeaked.
“Of course I know.” The boss laughed. “That’s why I chose it.”
“I refuse to type these invitations,” I whispered, voice unreliable.
He leaned back in his leather chair, his bossy stomach opulent. He picked up his calendar and slowly circled a date. “You will be paid up to here,” he said. “We’ll mail you the check.”
If I took the sword, which my hate must surely have forged out of the air, and gutted him, I would put color and wrinkles into his shirt.
It’s not just the stupid racists that I have to do something about, but the tyrants who for whatever reason can deny my family food and work. My job is my own only land.
To avenge my family, I’d have to storm across China to take back our farm from the Communists; I’d have to rage across the United States to take back the laundry in New York and the one in California. Nobody in history has conquered and united both North America and Asia. A descendant of eighty pole fighters, I ought to be able to set out confidently, march straight down our street, get going right now. There’s work to do, ground to cover. Surely, the eighty pole fighters, though unseen, would follow me and lead me and protect me, as is the wont of ancestors.
Or it may well be that they’re resting happily in China, their spirits dispersed among the real Chinese, and not nudging me at all with their poles. I mustn’t feel bad that I haven’t done as well as the swordswoman did; after all, no bird called me, no wise old people tutored me. I have no magic beads, no water gourd sight, no rabbit that will jump in the fire when I’m hungry. I dislike armies.
I’ve looked for the bird. I’ve seen clouds make pointed angel wings that stream past the sunset, but they shred into clouds. Once at a beach after a long hike I saw a seagull, tiny as an insect. But when I jumped up to tell what miracle I saw, before I could get the words out I understood that the bird was insect-size because it was far away. My brain had momentarily lost its depth perception. I was that eager to find an unusual bird.
The news from China has been confusing. It also had something to do with birds. I was nine years old when the letters made my parents, who are rocks, cry. My father screamed in his sleep. My mother wept and crumpled up the letters. She set fire to them page by page in the ashtray, but new letters came almost every day. The only letters they opened without fear were the ones with red borders, the holiday letters that mustn’t carry bad news. The other letters said that my uncles were made to kneel on broken glass during their trials and had confessed to being landowners. They were all executed, and the aunt whose thumbs were twisted off drowned herself. Other aunts, mothers-in-law, and cousins disappeared; some suddenly began writing to us again from communes or from Hong Kong. They kept asking for money. The ones in communes got four ounces of fat and one cup of oil a week, they said, and had to work from 4 A.M. to 9 P.M. They had to learn to do dances waving red kerchiefs; they had to sing nonsense syllables. The Communists gave axes to the old ladies and said, “Go and kill yourself. You’re useless.” If we overseas Chinese would just send money to the Communist bank, our relatives said, they might get a percentage of it for themselves. The aunts in Hong Kong said to send money quickly; their children were begging on the sidewalks, and mean people put dirt in their bowls.
When I dream that I am wire without flesh, there is a letter on blue airmail paper that floats above the night ocean between here and China. It must arrive safely or else my grandmother and I will lose each other.
My parents felt bad whether or not they sent money. Sometimes they got angry at their brothers and sisters for asking. And they would not simply ask but have to talk-story too. The revolutionaries had ta
ken Fourth Aunt and Uncle’s store, house, and lands. They attacked the house and killed the grandfather and oldest daughter. The grandmother escaped with the loose cash and did not return to help. Fourth Aunt picked up her sons, one under each arm, and hid in the pig house, where they slept that night in cotton clothes. The next day she found her husband, who had also miraculously escaped. The two of them collected twigs and yams to sell while their children begged. Each morning they tied the faggots on each other’s back. Nobody bought from them. They ate the yams and some of the children’s rice. Finally Fourth Aunt saw what was wrong. “We have to shout ‘Fuel for sale’ and ‘Yams for sale,’” she said. “We can’t just walk unobtrusively up and down the street.” “You’re right,” said my uncle, but he was shy and walked in back of her. “Shout,” my aunt ordered, but he could not. “They think we’re carrying these sticks home for our own fire,” she said. “Shout.” They walked about miserably, silently, until sundown, neither of them able to advertise themselves. Fourth Aunt, an orphan since the age of ten, mean as my mother, threw her bundle down at his feet and scolded Fourth Uncle, “Starving to death, his wife and children starving to death, and he’s too damned shy to raise his voice.” She left him standing by himself and afraid to return empty-handed to her. He sat under a tree to think, when he spotted a pair of nesting doves. Dumping his bag of yams, he climbed up and caught the birds. That was where the Communists trapped him, in the tree. They criticized him for selfishly taking food for his own family and killed him, leaving his body in the tree as an example. They took the birds to a commune kitchen to be shared.
It is confusing that my family was not the poor to be championed. They were executed like the barons in the stories, when they were not barons. It is confusing that birds tricked us.
What fighting and killing I have seen have not been glorious but slum grubby. I fought the most during junior high school and always cried. Fights are confusing as to who has won. The corpses I’ve seen had been rolled and dumped, sad little dirty bodies covered with a police khaki blanket. My mother locked her children in the house so we couldn’t look at dead slum people. But at news of a body, I would find a way to get out; I had to learn about dying if I wanted to become a swordswoman. Once there was an Asian man stabbed next door, words on cloth pinned to his corpse. When the police came around asking questions, my father said, “No read Japanese. Japanese words. Me Chinese.”