“Me and Lao Lu. You remember him.”
“George’s cousin.” Kwan’s husband seemed to be related to just about every Chinese person in San Francisco.
“No-no! Lao Lu not cousin. How you can forget? Lots times I already tell you about him. Old man, bald head. Strong arm, strong leg, strong temper. One time loose temper, loose head too! Chopped off. Lao Lu say—”
“Wait a minute. Someone without a head is now telling
me
what to do about my marriage?”
“Tst! Chopped head off over one hundred year ago. Now look fine, no problem. Lao Lu think you, me, Simon, we three go China, everything okay. Okay, Libby-ah?”
I sighed. “Kwan, I really don’t have time to talk about this now. I’m in the middle of something.”
“Lao Lu say cannot just balance checkbook, see how much you got left. Must balance life too.”
How the hell did Kwan know I was balancing my checkbook?
That’s how it’s been with Kwan and me. The minute I discount her, she tosses in a zinger that keeps me scared, makes me her captive once again. With her around, I’ll never have a life of my own. She’ll always claim a major interest.
Why do I remain her treasured little sister? Why does she feel that I’m the most important person in her life?—the most! Why does she say over and over again that even if we were not sisters, she would feel this way? “Libby-ah,” she tells me, “I never leave you.”
No! I want to shout, I’ve done nothing, don’t say that anymore. Because each time she does, she turns all my betrayals into love that needs to be repaid. Forever we’ll know: She’s been loyal, someday I’ll have to be.
But even if I cut off both my hands, it’d be no use. As Kwan has already said, she’ll never release me. One day the wind will howl and she’ll be clutching a tuft of the straw roof, about to fly off to the World of Yin.
“Let’s go! Hurry come!” she’ll be whispering above the storm. “But don’t tell anyone. Promise me, Libby-ah.”
B
efore seven in the morning, the phone rings. Kwan is the only one who would call at such an ungodly hour. I let the answering machine pick up.
“Libby-ah?” she whispers. “Libby-ah, you there? This you big sister . . . Kwan. I have something important tell you. . . . You want hear? . . . Last night I dream you and Simon. Strange dream. You gone to bank, check you savings. All a sudden, bank robber run through door. Quick! You hide you purse. So bank robber, he steal everybody money but yours. Later, you gone home, stick you hand in purse—ah!—where is?—gone! Not money but you heart. Stolened! Now you have no heart, how can live? No energy, no color in cheek, pale, sad, tired. Bank president where you got all you savings, he say, ‘I loan you my heart. No interest. You pay back whenever.’ You look up, see his face—you know who, Libby-ah? Youguess. . . . Simon! Yes-yes, giveyouhisheart. Yousee!Still love you. Libby-ah, do you believe? Not just dream . . . Libby-ah, you listening me?”
BECAUSE OF KWAN
, I have a talent for remembering dreams. Even today, I can recall eight, ten, sometimes a dozen dreams. I learned how when Kwan came home from Mary’s Help. As soon as I started to wake, she would ask: “Last night, Libby-ah, who you meet? What you see?”
With my half-awake mind, I’d grab on to the wisps of a fading world and pull myself back in. From there I would describe for her the details of the life I’d just left—the scuff marks on my shoes, the rock I had dislodged, the face of my true mother calling to me from underneath. When I stopped, Kwan would ask, “Where you go before that?” Prodded, I would trace my way back to the previous dream, then the one before that, a dozen lives, and sometimes their deaths. Those are the ones I never forget, the moments just before I died.
Through years of dream-life, I’ve tasted cold ash falling on a steamy night. I’ve seen a thousand spears flashing like flames on the crest of a hill. I’ve touched the tiny grains of a stone wall while waiting to be killed. I’ve smelled my own musky fear as the rope tightens around my neck. I’ve felt the heaviness of flying through weightless air. I’ve heard the sucking creak of my voice just before life snaps to an end.
“What you see after die?” Kwan would always ask.
I’d shake my head. “I don’t know. My eyes were closed.”
“Next time, open eyes.”
For most of my childhood, I thought everyone remembered dreams as other lives, other selves. Kwan did. After she came home from the psychiatric ward, she told me bedtime stories about them, yin people: a woman named Banner, a man named Cape, a one-eyed bandit girl, a half-and-half man. She made it seem as if all these ghosts were our friends. I didn’t tell my mother or Daddy Bob what Kwan was saying. Look what happened the last time I did that.
When I went to college and could finally escape from Kwan’s world, it was already too late. She had planted her imagination into mine. Her ghosts refused to be evicted from my dreams.
“Libby-ah,” I can still hear Kwan saying in Chinese, “did I ever tell you what Miss Banner promised before we died?”
I see myself pretending to be asleep.
And she would go on: “Of course, I can’t say exactly how long ago this happened. Time is not the same between one lifetime and the next. But I think it was during the year 1864. Whether this was the Chinese lunar year or the date according to the Western calendar, I’m not sure. . . .”
Eventually I would fall asleep, at what point in her story I always forgot. So which part was her dream, which part was mine? Where did they intersect? Every night, she’d tell me these stories. And I would lie there silently, helplessly, wishing she’d shut up.
Y
es, yes, I’m sure it was 1864. I remember now, because the year sounded very strange. Libby-ah, just listen to it:
Yi-ba-liu-si.
Miss Banner said it was like saying: Lose hope, slide into death. And I said, No, it means: Take hope, the dead remain. Chinese words are good and bad this way, so many meanings, depending on what you hold in your heart.
Anyway, that was the year I gave Miss Banner the tea. And she gave me the music box, the one I once stole from her, then later returned. I remember the night we held that box between us with all those things inside that we didn’t want to forget. It was just the two of us, alone for the moment, in the Ghost Merchant’s House, where we lived with the Jesus Worshippers for six years. We were standing next to the holy bush, the same bush that grew the special leaves, the same leaves I used to make the tea. Only now the bush was chopped down, and Miss Banner was saying she was sorry that she let General Cape kill that bush. Such a sad, hot night, water streaming down our faces, sweat and tears, the cicadas screaming louder and louder, then falling quiet. And later, we stood in this archway, scared to death. But we were also happy. We were happy to learn we were unhappy for the same reason. That was the year that both our heavens burned.
Six years before, that’s when I first met her, when I was fourteen and she was twenty-six, maybe younger or older than that. I could never tell the ages of foreigners. I came from a small place in Thistle Mountain, just south of Changmian. We were not Punti, the Chinese who claimed they had more Yellow River Han blood running through their veins, so everything should belong to them. And we weren’t one of the Zhuang tribes either, always fighting each other, village against village, clan against clan. We were Hakka, Guest People—hnh!—meaning, guests not invited to stay in any good place too long. So we lived in one of many Hakka roundhouses in a poor part of the mountains, where you must farm on cliffs and stand like a goat and unearth two wheelbarrows of rocks before you can grow one handful of rice.
All the women worked as hard as the men, no difference in who carried the rocks, who made the charcoal, who guarded the crops from bandits at night. All Hakka women were this way, strong. We didn’t bind our feet like Han girls, the ones who hopped around on stumps as black and rotten as old bananas. We had to walk all over the mountain to do our work, no binding cloths, no shoes. Our naked feet walked right over those sharp thistles that gave our mountain its famous name.
A suitable Hakka bride from our mountains had thick calluses on her feet and a fine, high-boned face. There were other Hakka families living near the big cities of Yongan, in the mountains, and Jintian, by the river. And the mothers from poorer families liked to match their sons to hardworking pretty girls from Thistle Mountain. During marriage-matching festivals, these boys would climb up to our high villages and our girls would sing the old mountain songs that we had brought from the north a thousand years before. A boy had to sing back to the girl he wanted to marry, finding words to match her song. If his voice was soft, or his words were clumsy, too bad, no marriage. That’s why Hakka people are not only fiercely strong, they have good voices, and clever minds for winning whatever they want.
We had a saying: When you marry a Thistle Mountain girl, you get three oxen for a wife: one that breeds, one that plows, one to carry your old mother around. That’s how tough a Hakka girl was. She never complained, even if a rock tumbled down the side of the mountain and smashed out her eye.
That happened to me when I was seven. I was very proud of my wound, cried only a little. When my grandmother sewed shut the hole that was once my eye, I said the rock had been loosened by a ghost horse. And the horse was ridden by the famous ghost maiden Nunumu—the
nu
that means “girl,” the
numu
that means “a stare as fierce as a dagger.” Nunumu, Girl with the Dagger Eye. She too lost her eye when she was young. She had witnessed a Punti man stealing another man’s salt, and before she could run away, he stabbed his dagger in her face. After that, she pulled one corner of her headscarf over her blind eye. And her other eye became bigger, darker, sharp as a cat-eagle’s. She robbed only Punti people, and when they saw her dagger eye, oh, how they trembled.
All the Hakkas in Thistle Mountain admired her, and not just because she robbed Punti people. She was the first Hakka bandit to join the struggle for Great Peace when the Heavenly King came back to us for help. In the spring, she took an army of Hakka maidens to Guilin, and the Manchus captured her. After they cut off her head, her lips were still moving, cursing that she would return and ruin their families for one hundred generations. That was the summer I lost my eye. And when I told everyone about Nunumu galloping by on her ghost horse, people said this was a sign that Nunumu had chosen me to be her messenger, just as the Christian God had chosen a Hakka man to be the Heavenly King. They began to call me Nunumu. And sometimes, late at night, I thought I could truly see the Bandit Maiden, not too clearly, of course, because at that time I had only one yin eye.
Soon after that, I met my first foreigner. Whenever foreigners arrived in our province, everyone in the countryside—from Nanning to Guilin—talked about them. Many Westerners came to trade in foreign mud, the opium that gave foreigners mad dreams of China. And some came to sell weapons—cannons, gunpowder, rifles, not the fast, new ones, but the slow, old kind you light with a match, leftovers from foreign battles already lost. The missionaries came to our province because they heard that the Hakkas were God Worshippers. They wanted to help more of us go to their heaven. They didn’t know that a God Worshipper was not the same as a Jesus Worshipper. Later we all realized our heavens were not the same.
But the foreigner I met was not a missionary. He was an American general. The Hakka people called him Cape because that’s what he always wore, a large cape, also black gloves, black boots, no hat, and a short gray jacket with buttons—like shiny coins!—running from the waist to his chin. In his hand he carried a long walking stick, rattan, with a silver tip and an ivory handle carved in the shape of a naked woman.
When he came to Thistle Mountain, people from all the villages poured down the mountainsides and met in the wide green bowl. He arrived on a prancing horse, leading fifty Cantonese soldiers, former boatmen and beggars, now riding ponies and wearing colorful army uniforms, which we heard were not Chinese or Manchu but leftovers from wars in French Africa. The soldiers were shouting, “God Worshippers! We are God Worshippers too!”
Some of our people thought Cape was Jesus, or, like the Heavenly King, another one of his younger brothers. He was very tall, had a big mustache, a short beard, and wavy black hair that flowed to his shoulders. Hakka men also wore their long hair this way, no pigtail anymore, because the Heavenly King said our people should no longer obey the laws of the Manchus. I had never seen a foreigner before and had no way of knowing his true age. But to me, he looked old. He had skin the color of a turnip, eyes as murky as shallow water. His face had sunken spots and sharp points, the same as a person with a wasting disease. He seldom smiled, but laughed often. And he spoke harsh words in a donkey bray. A man always stood by his side, serving as his go-between, translating in an elegant voice what Cape said.
The first time I saw the go-between, I thought he looked Chinese. The next minute he seemed foreign, then neither. He was like those lizards that become the colors of sticks and leaves. I learned later this man had the mother blood of a Chinese woman, the father blood of an American trader. He was stained both ways. General Cape called him
yiban ren,
the one-half man.
Yiban told us Cape had just come from Canton, where he became friends with the Heavenly King of the Great Peace Revolution. We were all astounded. The Heavenly King was a holy man who had been born a Hakka, then chosen by God to be his treasured younger son, little brother to Jesus. We listened carefully.
Cape, Yiban said, was an American military leader, a supreme general, the highest rank. People murmured. He had come across the sea to China, to help the God Worshippers, the followers of Great Peace. People shouted, “Good! Good!” He was a God Worshipper himself, and he admired us, our laws against opium, thievery, the pleasures of the dark parts of women’s bodies. People nodded, and I stared with my one eye at the naked lady on the handle of Cape’s walking stick. He said that he had come to help us win our battle against the Manchus, that this was God’s plan, written more than a thousand years before in the Bible he was holding. People pushed forward to see. We knew that same plan. The Heavenly King had already told us that the Hakka people would inherit the earth and rule God’s Chinese kingdom. Cape reported the Great Peace soldiers had already captured many cities, had gathered much money and land. And now, the struggle was ready to move north— if only the rest of the God Worshippers in Thistle Mountain would join him as soldiers. Those who fought, he added, would share in the bounty—warm clothes, plenty to eat, weapons, and later, land of their own, new status and ranks, schools and homes, men and women separate. The Heavenly King would send food to their families left behind. By now, everybody was shouting, “Great Peace! Great Peace!”
Then General Cape tapped his walking stick on the ground. Everyone grew quiet again. He called Yiban to show us the gifts the Heavenly King had asked him to bring. Barrels of gunpowder! Bushels of rifles! Baskets of French African uniforms, some torn and already stained with blood. But everyone agreed they were still very fine. Everybody was saying, “Hey, see these buttons, feel this cloth.” That day, many, many people, men and women, joined the army of the Heavenly King. I could not. I was too young, only seven, so I was very unhappy inside. But then the Cantonese soldiers passed out uniforms—only to the men, none to the women. And when I saw that, I was not as unhappy as before.
The men put on their new clothes. The women examined their new rifles, the matches for lighting them. Then General Cape tapped his walking stick again and asked Yiban to bring out his gift to us. We all pressed forward, eager to see yet another surprise. Yiban brought back a wicker cage, and inside was a pair of white doves. General Cape announced in his curious Chinese that he had asked God for a sign that we would be an ever victorious army. God sent down the doves. The doves, General Cape said, meant we poor Hakkas would have the rewards of Great Peace we had hungered for over the last thousand years. He then opened the cage door and pulled out the birds. He threw them into the air, and the people roared. They ran and pushed, jumping to catch the creatures before they could fly away. One man fell forward onto a rock. His head cracked open and his brains started to pour out. But people jumped right over him and kept chasing those rare and precious birds. One dove was caught, the other flew away. So someone ate a meal that night.