The Hundred Secret Senses
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Hundred Secret Senses
A
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©
1995
by
Amy Tan
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Electronic edition: September, 2003
Also by Amy Tan
THE JOY LUCK CLUB
THE KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE
for children
THE MOON LADY
THE CHINESE SIAMESE CAT
FOR FAITH
To write this story, I depended on the indulgence, advice, conversations, and sustenance of many: Babalu, Ronald Bass, Linden and Logan Berry, Dr. Thomas Brady, Sheri Byrne, Joan Chen, Mary Clemmey, Dr. Asa DeMatteo, Bram and Sandra Dijkstra, Terry Doxey, Tina Eng, Dr. Joseph Esherick, Audrey Ferber, Robert Foothorap, Laura Gaines, Ann and Gordon Getty, Molly Giles, Amy Hempel, Anna Jardine, Peter Lee Kenfield, Dr. Eric Kim, Gus Lee, Cora Miao, Susanne Pari, the residents of Pei Sa Bao village, Robin and Annie Renwick, Gregory Atsuro Riley, the Rock Bottom Remainders, Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale, Orville Schell, Gretchen Schields, the staff of Shelburne House Library, Kelly Simon, Dr. Michael Strong, Daisy Tan, John Tan, Dr. Steven Vandervort, Lijun Wang, Wayne Wang, Yuhang Wang, Russell Wong, the people of Yaddo, and Zo.
I thank them, but do not hold them accountable for the felicitous and sometimes unwitting ways in which they contributed to the truth of this fiction.
M
y sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.
“Libby-ah,” she’ll say to me. “Guess who I see yesterday, you guess.” And I don’t have to guess that she’s talking about someone dead.
Actually, Kwan is my half sister, but I’m not supposed to mention that publicly. That would be an insult, as if she deserved only fifty percent of the love from our family. But just to set the genetic record straight, Kwan and I share a father, only that. She was born in China. My brothers, Kevin and Tommy, and I were born in San Francisco after my father, Jack Yee, immigrated here and married our mother, Louise Kenfield.
Mom calls herself “American mixed grill, a bit of everything white, fatty, and fried.” She was born in Moscow, Idaho, where she was a champion baton twirler and once won a county fair prize for growing a deformed potato that had the profile of Jimmy Durante. She told me she dreamed she’d one day grow up to be different—thin, exotic, and noble like Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar playing O-lan in
The Good Earth.
When Mom moved to San Francisco and became a Kelly girl instead, she did the next-best thing. She married our father. Mom thinks that her marrying out of the Anglo race makes her a liberal. “When Jack and I met,” she still tells people, “there were laws against mixed marriages. We broke the law for love.” She neglects to mention that those laws didn’t apply in California.
None of us, including my mom, met Kwan until she was eighteen. In fact, Mom didn’t even know Kwan
existed
until shortly before my father died of renal failure. I was not quite four when he passed away. But I still remember moments with him. Falling down a curly slide into his arms. Dredging the wading pool for pennies he had tossed in. And the last day I saw him in the hospital, hearing what he said that scared me for years.
Kevin, who was five, was there. Tommy was just a baby, so he was in the waiting room with my mom’s cousin, Betty Dupree—we had to call her Aunt Betty—who had moved out from Idaho as well. I was sitting on a sticky vinyl chair, eating a bowl of strawberry Jell-O cubes that my father had given me from his lunch tray. He was propped up in bed, breathing hard. Mom would cry one minute, then act cheerful. I tried to figure out what was wrong. The next thing I remember, my father was whispering and Mom leaned in close to listen. Her mouth opened wider and wider. Then her head turned sharply toward me, all twisted with horror. And I was terror-struck. How did he know? How did Daddy find out I flushed my turtles, Slowpoke and Fastpoke, down the toilet that morning? I had wanted to see what they looked like without their coats on, and ended up pulling off their heads.
“Your daughter?” I heard my mom say. “Bring her back?” And I was sure that he had just told her to bring me to the pound, which is what he did to our dog Buttons after she chewed up the sofa. What I recall after that is a jumble: the bowl of Jell-O crashing to the floor, Mom staring at a photo, Kevin grabbing it and laughing, then me seeing this tiny black-and-white snapshot of a skinny baby with patchy hair. At some point, I heard my mother shouting: “Olivia, don’t argue, you have to leave now.” And I was crying, “But I’ll be good.”
Soon after that, my mother announced: “Daddy’s left us.” She also told us she was going to bring Daddy’s other little girl from China to live in our house. She didn’t say she was sending me to the pound, but I still cried, believing everything was vaguely connected—the headless turtles whirling down the toilet, my father abandoning us, the other girl who was coming soon to take my place. I was scared of Kwan before I ever met her.
When I was ten, I learned that my father’s kidneys had killed him. Mom said he was born with four instead of the usual two, and all of them were defective. Aunt Betty had a theory about why this happened. She
always
had a theory, usually obtained from a source like the
Weekly World News.
She said he was supposed to be a Siamese twin. But in the womb, my father, the stronger twin, gobbled up the weaker one and grafted on the two extra kidneys. “Maybe he also had two hearts, two stomachs, who knows.” Aunt Betty came up with this scenario around the time that
Life
magazine ran a pictorial about Siamese twins from Russia. I saw the same story: two girls, Tasha and Sasha, conjoined at the hip, too heartbreakingly beautiful to be freaks of nature. This must have been in the mid-sixties, around the time I learned fractions. I remember wishing we could exchange Kwan for those Siamese twins. Then I’d have two half sisters, which equaled a whole, and I figured all the kids on the block would try to be our friends, hoping we’d let them watch as we jumped rope or played hopscotch.
Aunt Betty also passed along the story of Kwan’s birth, which was not heartbreaking, just embarrassing. During the war, she said, my father had been a university student in Guilin. He used to buy live frogs for his supper at the outdoor market from a young woman named Li Chen. He later married her, and in 1944 she gave birth to their daughter, the skinny baby in the picture, Kwan.
Aunt Betty had a theory about the marriage as well. “Your dad was good-looking, for a Chinese man. He was college-educated. And he spoke English like me and your mom. Now why would he marry a little peasant girl? Because he
had to,
that’s why.” By then, I was old enough to know what
had to
meant.
Whatever the case, in 1948, my father’s first wife died of a lung disease, perhaps TB. My father went to Hong Kong to search for work. He left Kwan in the care of his wife’s younger sister, Li Bin-bin, who lived in a small mountain village called Changmian. Of course, he sent money for their support—what father would not? But in 1949, the Communists took over China, and it was impossible for my father to return for his five-year-old daughter. So what else could he do? With a heavy heart, he left for America to start a new life and forget about the sadness he left behind. Eleven years later, while he was dying in the hospital, the ghost of his first wife appeared at the foot of his bed. “Claim back your daughter,” she warned, “or suffer the consequences after death!” That’s the story my father gave just before he died—that is, as told by Aunt Betty years later.
Looking back, I can imagine how my mom must have felt when she first heard this. Another wife? A daughter in China? We were a modern American family. We spoke English. Sure, we ate Chinese food, but take-out, like everyone else. And we lived in a ranch-style house in Daly City. My father worked for the Government Accounting Office. My mother went to PTA meetings. She had never heard my father talk about Chinese superstitions before; they attended church and bought life insurance instead.
After my father died, my mother kept telling everyone how he had treated her “just like a Chinese empress.” She made all sorts of grief-stricken promises to God and my father’s grave. According to Aunt Betty, at the funeral, my mother vowed never to remarry. She vowed to teach us children to do honor to the Yee family name. She vowed to find my father’s firstborn child, Kwan, and bring her to the United States.
The last promise was the only one she kept.
MY MOTHER
has always suffered from a kind heart, compounded by seasonal rashes of volunteerism. One summer, she was a foster mother for Yorkie Rescue; the house still stinks of dog pee. For two Christmases, she dished out food to the homeless at St. Anthony’s Dining Room; now she goes away to Hawaii with whoever is her current boyfriend. She’s circulated petitions, done fund-raising, served on boards of alternative-health groups. While her enthusiasm is genuine, eventually, always, it runs out and then she’s on to something new. I suspect she thought of Kwan as a foreign exchange student she would host for a year, a Chinese Cinderella, who would become self-sufficient and go on to have a wonderful American life.
During the time before Kwan came, Mom was a cheerleader, rallying my brothers and me to welcome a big sister into our lives. Tommy was too little to do anything except nod whenever Mom said, “Aren’t you excited about having another big sister?” Kevin just shrugged and acted bored. I was the only one who did jumping jacks like a gung-ho recruit, in part because I was ecstatic to learn Kwan would be
in addition
to me, not
instead of.
Although I was a lonely kid, I would have preferred a new turtle or even a doll, not someone who would compete for my mother’s already divided attention and force me to share the meager souvenirs of her love. In recalling this, I know that my mother loved me—but not absolutely. When I compared the amount of time she spent with others—even total strangers—I felt myself sliding further down the ranks of favorites, getting bumped and bruised. She always had plenty of room in her life for dates with men or lunch with her so-called gal pals. With me, she was unreliable. Promises to take me to the movies or the public pool were easily erased with excuses or forgetfulness, or worse, sneaky variations of what was said and what was meant: “I hate it when you pout, Olivia,” she once told me. “I didn’t guarantee I’d
go
to the swim club with you. I said I would
like to.
” How could I argue my need against her intention?
I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional reservoir?
So of course, I didn’t want Kwan as my sister. Just the opposite. Which is why I made great efforts in front of my mother to appear enthusiastic. It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don’t want.
Mom had said that a big sister was a bigger version of myself, sweet and beautiful, only more Chinese, and able to help me do all kinds of fun things. So I imagined not a sister but another me, an older self who danced and wore slinky clothes, who had a sad but fascinating life, like a slant-eyed version of Natalie Wood in
West Side Story,
which I saw when I was five. It occurs to me only now that my mother and I both modeled our hopes after actresses who spoke in accents that weren’t their own.
One night, before my mother tucked me in bed, she asked me if I wanted to pray. I knew that praying meant saying the nice things that other people wanted to hear, which is what my mom did. So I prayed to God and Jesus to help me be good. And then I added that I hoped my big sister would come soon, since my mother had just been talking about that. When I said, “Amen,” I saw she was crying and smiling proudly. Under my mother’s eye I began to collect welcome presents for Kwan. The scarf my aunt Betty gave me for my birthday, the orange blossom cologne I received at Christmas, the gooey Halloween candy—I lovingly placed all these scratchy, stinky, stale items into a box my mother had marked “For Olivia’s big sister.” I convinced myself I had become so good that soon Mom would realize we didn’t need another sister.
My mother later told my brothers and me how difficult it was to find Kwan. “In those days,” she said, “you couldn’t just write a letter, stick a stamp on it, and send it to Changmian. I had to cut through
mounds
of red tape and fill out dozens of forms. And there weren’t too many people who’d go out of their way to help someone from a communist country. Aunt Betty thought I was crazy! She said to me, ‘How can you take in a nearly grown girl who can’t speak a word of English? She won’t know right from wrong or left from right.’ ”
Paperwork wasn’t the only obstacle Kwan had to unknowingly surmount. Two years after my father died, Mom married Bob Laguni, whom Kevin today calls “the fluke in our mother’s history of dating foreign imports—and that’s only because she thought Laguni was Mexican instead of Italian.” Mom took Bob’s name, and that’s how my brothers and I also ended up with Laguni, which I gladly changed to Bishop when I married Simon. The point is, Bob never wanted Kwan to come in the first place. And my mom usually put his wishes above everyone else’s. After they divorced—I was in college by then—Mom told me how Bob pressured her, just before they were married, to cancel the paperwork for Kwan. I think she intended to and forgot. But this is what she told me: “I watched you pray. You looked so sweet and sad, asking God, ‘Please send me my big sister from China.’ ”
I WAS NEARLY SIX
by the time Kwan came to this country. We were waiting for her at the customs area of San Francisco Airport. Aunt Betty was also there. My mother was nervous and excited, talking nonstop: “Now listen, kids, she’ll probably be shy, so don’t jump all over her. . . . And she’ll be skinny as a beanpole, so I don’t want any of you making fun of her. . . .”
When the customs official finally escorted Kwan into the lobby where we were waiting, Aunt Betty pointed and said, “That’s her. I’m telling you that’s her.” Mom was shaking her head. This person looked like a strange old lady, short and chubby, not exactly the starving waif Mom pictured or the glamorous teenage sister I had in mind. She was dressed in drab gray pajamas, and her broad brown face was flanked by two thick braids.
Kwan was anything but shy. She dropped her bag, fluttered her arms, and bellowed, “Hall-oo! Hall-oo!” Still hooting and laughing, she jumped and squealed the way our new dog did whenever we let him out of the garage. This total stranger tumbled into Mom’s arms, then Daddy Bob’s. She grabbed Kevin and Tommy by the shoulders and shook them. When she saw me, she grew quiet, squatted on the lobby floor, and held out her arms. I tugged on my mother’s skirt. “Is
that
my big sister?”
Mom said, “See, she has your father’s same thick, black hair.”