“You have to help me rid the world of this disease, as invisible and deadly as bacteria. After classes, come back here with your buckets, alcohol, and oil. If you can find dog’s blood too, our work will go fast. Act unafraid. Ghost chasers have to be brave. If the ghost comes after you, though I would not expect an attack during the day, spit at it. Scorn it. The hero in a ghost story laughs a nimble laugh, his life so full it splatters red and gold on all the creatures around him.”
These young women, who would have to back up their science with magical spells should their patients be disappointed and not get well, now hurried to get to classes on time. The story about the ghost’s appearance and the coming ghost chase grew, and students snatched alcohol and matches from the laboratories.
My mother directed the arrangement of the buckets and burners into orderly rows and divided the fuel. “Let’s fire the oil all at once,” she said. “Now.”
“Whup. Whup.” My mother told the sound of new fire so that I remember it. “Whup. Whup.”
The alcohol burned a floating blue. The tarry oil, which someone had bought from her village witch, fumed in black clouds. My mother swung a big bucket overhead. The smoke curled in black boas around the women in their scholars’ black gowns. They walked the ghost room, this circle of little black women, lifting smoke and fire up to the ceiling corners, down to the floor corners, moving clouds across the walls and floors, under the bed, around one another.
“I told you, Ghost,” my mother chanted, “that we would come after you.” “We told you, Ghost, that we would come after you,” sang the women. “Daylight has come yellow and red,” sang my mother, “and we are winning. Run, Ghost, run from this school. Only good medical people belong here. Go back, dark creature, to your native country. Go home. Go home.” “Go home,” sang the women.
When the smoke cleared, I think my mother said that under the foot of the bed the students found a piece of wood dripping with blood. They burned it in one of the pots, and the stench was like a corpse exhumed for its bones too soon. They laughed at the smell.
The students at the To Keung School of Midwifery were new women, scientists who changed the rituals. When she got scared as a child, one of my mother’s three mothers had held her and chanted their descent line, reeling the frighted spirit back from the farthest deserts. A relative would know personal names and secrets about husbands, babies, renegades and decide which ones were lucky in a chant, but these outside women had to build a path from scraps. No blood bonded friend to friend (though there were things owed beggars and monks), and they had to figure out how to help my mother’s spirit locate the To Keung School as “home.” The calling out of her real descent line would have led her to the wrong place, the village. These strangers had to make her come back to them. They called out their own names, women’s pretty names, haphazard names, horizontal names of one generation. They pieced together new directions, and my mother’s spirit followed them instead of the old footprints. Maybe that is why she lost her home village and did not reach her husband for fifteen years.
When my mother led us out of nightmares and horror movies, I felt loved. I felt safe hearing my name sung with hers and my father’s, my brothers’ and sisters’, her anger at children who hurt themselves surprisingly gone. An old-fashioned woman would have called in the streets for her sick child. She’d hold its little empty coat unbuttoned, “Come put on your coat, you naughty child.” When the coat puffed up, she’d quickly button up the spirit inside and hurry it home to the child’s body in bed. But my mother, a modern woman, said our spells in private. “The old ladies in China had many silly superstitions,” she said. “I know you’ll come back without my making a fool of myself in the streets.”
Not when we were afraid, but when we were wide awake and lucid, my mother funneled China into our ears: Kwangtung Province, New Society Village, the river Kwoo, which runs past the village. “Go the way we came so that you will be able to find our house. Don’t forget. Just give your father’s name, and any villager can point out our house.” I am to return to China where I have never been.
After two years of study—the graduates of three-week and six-week courses were more admired by the peasants for learning at such wondrous speeds—my mother returned to her home village a doctor. She was welcomed with garlands and cymbals the way people welcome the “barefoot doctors” today. But the Communists wear a blue plainness dotted with one red Mao button. My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair. She had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains.
“When I stepped out of my sedan chair, the villagers said, ‘Ahhh,’ at my good shoes and my long gown. I always dressed well when I made calls. Some villages brought out their lion and danced ahead of me. You have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America.” Until my father sent for her to live in the Bronx, my mother delivered babies in beds and pigsties. She stayed awake keeping watch nightly in an epidemic and chanted during air raids. She yanked bones straight that had been crooked for years while relatives held the cripples down, and she did all this never dressed less elegantly than when she stepped out of the sedan chair.
Nor did she change her name: Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies.
Walking behind the palanquin so that the crowd took her for one of themselves following the new doctor came a quiet girl. She carried a white puppy and a rice sack knotted at the mouth. Her pigtails and the puppy’s tail ended in red yarn. She may have been either a daughter or a slave.
When my mother had gone to Canton market to shop, her wallet had unfolded like wings. She had received her diploma, and it was time to celebrate. She had hunted out the seed shops to taste their lichees, various as wines, and bought a sack that was taller than a child to bedazzle the nieces and nephews. A merchant had given her one nut fresh on its sprig of narrow leaves. My mother popped the thin wood shell in her curled palm. The white fruit, an eye without an iris, ran juices like spring rivers inside my mother’s mouth. She spit out the brown seed, iris after all.
She had bought a turtle for my grandfather because it would lengthen his life. She had dug to the bottom of fabric piles and explored the shadows underneath awnings. She gave beggars rice and letter-writers coins so that they would talk-story. (“Sometimes what I gave was all they had, and stories.”) She let a fortuneteller read the whorls on her fingerprints; he predicted that she would leave China and have six more children. “Six,” he said, “is the number of everything. You are such a lucky woman. Six is the universe’s number. The four compass points plus the zenith and the nadir are six. There are six low phoenix notes and six high, six worldly environments, six senses, six virtues, six obligations, six classes of ideograph, six domestic animals, six arts, and six paths of metempsychosis. More than two thousand years ago, six states combined to overthrow Ch’in. And, of course, there are the hexagrams that are the I Ching, and there is the Big Six, which is China.” As interesting as his list of sixes was, my mother hurried on her way; she had come to market to buy herself a slave.
Between the booths and stores, whoever could squeeze a space—a magician who could turn dirt into gold, twenty-five acrobats on one unicycle, a man who could swim—displayed his or her newest feat for money. From the country the villagers brought strange purple textiles, dolls with big feet, geese with brown tufts on their heads, chickens with white feathers and black skin, gambling games and puppet shows, intricate ways to fold pastry and ancestors’ money, a new boxing stance.
Herders roped off alleys to pen their goats, which stared out of the dimness with rectangular pupils. Whisking a handful of grass, my mother coaxed them into the light and watched the tiny yellow windows close and open again as the goats skipped backward into the shade. Two farmers, eac
h leading this year’s cow, passed each other, shouting prices. Usually my mother would have given herself up to the pleasure of being in a crowd, delighting in the money game the people would play with the rival herders, who were now describing each other’s cows—“skinny shoulder blades,” “lame legs,” “patchy hair,” “ogre face.” But today she hurried even when looking over the monkey cages stacked higher than her head. She paused only a while in front of the ducks, which honked madly, the down flying as some passer-by bumped into their cages. My mother liked to look at the ducks and plan how she would dig a pond for them near the sweet potato field and arrange straw for their eggs. She decided that the drake with the green head would be the best buy, the noblest, although she would not buy him unless she had money left over; she was already raising a nobler duck on the farm.
Among the sellers with their ropes, cages, and water tanks were the sellers of little girls. Sometimes just one man would be standing by the side of the road selling one girl. There were fathers and mothers selling their daughters, whom they pushed forward and then pulled back again. My mother turned her face to look at pottery or embroidery rather than at these miserable families who did not have the sense to leave the favored brothers and sisters home. All the children bore still faces. My mother would not buy from parents, crying and clutching. They would try to keep you talking to find out what kind of mistress you were to your slaves. If they could just hear from the buyer’s own mouth about a chair in the kitchen, they could tell each other in the years to come that their daughter was even now resting in the kitchen chair. It was merciful to give these parents a few details about the garden, a sweet feeble grandmother, food.
My mother would buy her slave from a professional whose little girls stood neatly in a row and bowed together when a customer looked them over. “How do you do, Sir?” they would sing. “How do you do, Madam?” “Let a little slave do your shopping for you,” the older girls chorused. “We’ve been taught to bargain. We’ve been taught to sew. We can cook, and we can knit.” Some of the dealers merely had the children bow quietly. Others had them sing a happy song about flowers.
Unless a group of little girls chanted some especially clever riddle, my mother, who distrusts people with public concerns, braggarts, went over to the quiet older girls with the dignified bows. “Any merchant who advertises ‘Honest Scales’ must have been thinking about weighting them,” she says. Many sellers displayed the sign “Children and Old Men Not Cheated.”
There were girls barely able to toddle carrying infant slaves tied in slings to their backs. In the undisciplined groups the babies crawled into gutters and the older girls each acted as if she were alone, a daughter among slaves. The one- to two-year-old babies cost nothing.
“Greet the lady,” the dealer commanded, just as the nice little girls’ mothers had when visitors came.
“How do you do, Lady,” said the girls.
My mother did not need to bow back, and she did not. She overlooked the infants and toddlers and talked to the oldest girls.
“Open your mouth,” she said, and examined teeth. She pulled down eyelids to check for anemia. She picked up the girls’ wrists to sound their pulses, which tell everything.
She stopped at a girl whose strong heart sounded like thunder within the earth, sending its power into her fingertips. “I would not have sold a daughter such as that one,” she told us. My mother could find no flaw in the beat; it matched her own, the real rhythm. There were people jumpy with silly rhythms; broken rhythms; sly, secretive rhythms. They did not follow the sounds of earth-sea-sky and the Chinese language.
My mother brought out the green notebook my father had given her when he left. It had a map of each hemisphere on the inside covers and a clasp that shut it like a pocketbook. “Watch carefully,” she said. With an American pencil, she wrote a word, a felicitous word such as “longevity” or “double joy,” which is symmetrical.
“Look carefully,” she said into the girl’s face. “If you can write this word from memory, I will take you with me. Concentrate now.” She wrote in a plain style and folded the page a moment afterward. The girl took the pencil and wrote surely; she did not leave out a single stroke.
“What would you do,” my mother asked, “if you lost a gold watch in a field?”
“I know a chant on the finger bones,” said the girl. “But even if I landed on the bone that says to look no more, I would go to the middle of the field and search in a spiral going outward until I reached the field’s edge. Then I would believe the chant and look no more.” She drew in my mother’s notebook the field and her spiraling path.
“How do you cast on yarn?”
The girl pantomimed her method with her large hands.
“How much water do you put in the rice pot for a family of five? How do you finish off weaving so that it doesn’t unravel?”
Now it was time to act as if she were very dissatisfied with the slave’s answers so that the dealer would not charge her extra for a skillful worker.
“You tie the loose ends into tassles,” said the girl.
My mother frowned. “But suppose I like a finished border?”
The girl hesitated. “I could, uh, press the fibers under and sew them down. Or how about cutting the fibers off?”
My mother offered the dealer half the price he named. “My mother-in-law asked me to find a weaver for her, and obviously she and I will have to waste many months training this girl.”
“But she can knit and cook,” said the dealer, “and she can find lost watches.” He asked for a price higher than her suggestion but lower than his first.
“I knit and cook and find things,” said my mother. “How else do you suppose I think of such ingenious questions? Do you think I would buy a slave who could outwork me in front of my mother-in-law?” My mother walked off to look at a group of hungry slaves across the street. When she returned, the dealer sold her the girl with the finding chant at my mother’s price.
“I am a doctor,” she told her new slave, when they were out of the dealer’s hearing, “and I shall train you to be my nurse.”
“Doctor,” said the slave, “do you understand that I do know how to finish off my weaving?”
“Yes, we fooled him very well,” said my mother.
The unsold slaves must have watched them with envy. I watch them with envy. My mother’s enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl; nor did I replace the older brother and sister who died while they were still cuddly. Throughout childhood my younger sister said, “When I grow up, I want to be a slave,” and my parents laughed, encouraging her. At department stores I angered my mother when I could not bargain without shame, poor people’s shame. She stood in back of me and prodded and pinched, forcing me to translate her bargaining, word for word.
On that same day she bought at the dog dealer’s a white puppy to train as her bodyguard when she made night calls. She tied pretty red yarn around its tail to neutralize the bad luck. There was no use docking the tail. No matter at what point she cut, the tip would have been white, the mourning color.
The puppy waved its red yarn at the nurse girl, and she picked it up. She followed my mother back to the village, where she always got enough to eat because my mother became a good doctor. She could cure the most spectacular diseases. When a sick person was about to die, my mother could read the fact of it a year ahead of time on the daughters-in-law’s faces. A black veil seemed to hover over their skin. And though they laughed, this blackness rose and fell with their breath. My mother would take one look at the daughter-in-law who answered the door at the sick house and she’d say, “Find another doctor.” She would not touch death; therefore, untainted, she brought only health from house to house. “She must be a Jesus convert,” the people from the far villages said. “All her patients get well.” The bigger the talk, the farther the distances she travelled. She had customers everywhere.
Sometimes she went to her patients by foot. Her nurse-slave carried an umbrella
when my mother predicted rain and a parasol when she predicted sun. “My white dog would be standing at the door waiting for me whenever I came home,” she said. When she felt like it, my mother would leave the nurse-slave to watch the office and would take the white dog with her.
“What happened to your dog when you came to America, Mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened to the slave?”
“I found her a husband.”
“How much money did you pay to buy her?”
“One hundred and eighty dollars.”
“How much money did you pay the doctor and the hospital when I was born?”
“Two hundred dollars.”
“Oh.”
“That’s two hundred dollars American money.”
“Was the one hundred and eighty dollars American money?”
“No.”
“How much was it American money?”
“Fifty dollars. That’s because she was sixteen years old. Eight-year-olds were about twenty dollars. Five-year-olds were ten dollars and up. Two-year-olds were about five dollars. Babies were free. During the war, though, when you were born, many people gave older girls away for free. And here I was in the United States paying two hundred dollars for you.”
When my mother went doctoring in the villages, the ghosts, the were-people, the apes dropped out of trees. They rose out of bridge water. My mother saw them come out of cervixes. Medical science does not seal the earth, whose nether creatures seep out, hair by hair, disguised like the smoke that dispels them. She had apparently won against the one ghost, but ghost forms are various and many. Some can occupy the same space at the same moment. They permeate the grain in wood, metal, and stone. Animalcules somersault about our faces when we breathe. We have to build horns on our roofs so that the nagging once-people can slide up them and perhaps ascend to the stars, the source of pardon and love.
On a fine spring day the villagers at a place my mother had never visited before would wave peach branches and fans, which are emblems of Chung-li Ch’uan, the chief of the Eight Sages and keeper of the elixir of life. The pink petals would fall on my mother’s black hair and gown. The villagers would set off firecrackers as on New Year’s Day. If it had really been New Year’s, she would have had to shut herself up in her own house. Nobody wanted a doctor’s visit in the first days of the year.