The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (15 page)

W
hen she was about sixty-eight years old, Brave Orchid took a day off to wait at San Francisco International Airport for the plane that was bringing her sister to the United States. She had not seen Moon Orchid for thirty years. She had begun this waiting at home, getting up a half-hour before Moon Orchid’s plane took off in Hong Kong. Brave Orchid would add her will power to the forces that keep an airplane up. Her head hurt with the concentration. The plane had to be light, so no matter how tired she felt, she dared not rest her spirit on a wing but continuously and gently pushed up on the plane’s belly. She had already been waiting at the airport for nine hours. She was wakeful.

Next to Brave Orchid sat Moon Orchid’s only daughter, who was helping her aunt wait. Brave Orchid had made two of her own children come too because they could drive, but they had been lured away by the magazine racks and the gift shops and coffee shops. Her American children could not sit for very long. They did not understand sitting; they had wandering feet. She hoped they would get back from the pay t.v.’s or the pay toilets or wherever they were spending their money before the plane arrived. If they did not come back soon, she would go look for them. If her son thought he could hide in the men’s room, he was wrong.

“Are you all right, Aunt?” asked her niece.

“No, this chair hurts me. Help me pull some chairs together so I can put my feet up.”

She unbundled a blanket and spread it out to make a bed for herself. On the floor she had two shopping bags full of canned peaches, real peaches, beans wrapped in taro leaves, cookies, Thermos bottles, enough food for everybody,
though only her niece would eat with her. Her bad boy and bad girl were probably sneaking hamburgers, wasting their money. She would scold them.

Many soldiers and sailors sat about, oddly calm, like little boys in cowboy uniforms. (She thought “cowboy” was what you would call a Boy Scout.) They should have been crying hysterically on their way to Vietnam. “If I see one that looks Chinese,” she thought, “I’ll go over and give him some advice.” She sat up suddenly; she had forgotten about her own son, who was even now in Vietnam. Carefully she split her attention, beaming half of it to the ocean, into the water to keep him afloat. He was on a ship. He was in Vietnamese waters. She was sure of it. He and the other children were lying to her. They had said he was in Japan, and then they said he was in the Philippines. But when she sent him her help, she could feel that he was on a ship in Da Nang. Also she had seen the children hide the envelopes that his letters came in.

“Do you think my son is in Vietnam?” she asked her niece, who was dutifully eating.

“No. Didn’t your children say he was in the Philippines?”

“Have you ever seen any of his letters with Philippine stamps on them?”

“Oh, yes. Your children showed me one.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them to send the letters to some Filipino they know. He puts Manila postmarks on them to fool me.”

“Yes, I can imagine them doing that. But don’t worry. Your son can take care of himself. All your children can take care of themselves.”

“Not him. He’s not like other people. Not normal at all. He sticks erasers in his ears, and the erasers are still attached to the pencil stubs. The captain will say, ‘Abandon ship,’ or, ‘Watch out for bombs,’ and he won’t hear. He doesn’t listen to orders. I told him to flee to Canada, but he wouldn’t go.”

She closed her eyes. After a short while, plane and ship under control, she looked again at the children in uniforms. Some of the blond ones looked like baby chicks, their crew cuts like the downy yellow on baby chicks. You had to feel sorry for them even though they were Army and Navy Ghosts.

Suddenly her son and daughter came running. “Come, Mother. The plane’s landed early. She’s here already.” They hurried, folding up their mother’s encampment. She was glad her children were not useless. They must have known what this trip to San Francisco was about then. “It’s a good thing I made you come early,” she said.

Brave Orchid pushed to the front of the crowd. She had to be in front. The passengers were separated from the people waiting for them by glass doors and walls. Immigration Ghosts were stamping papers. The travellers crowded along some conveyor belts to have their luggage searched. Brave Orchid did not see her sister anywhere. She stood watching for four hours. Her children left and came back. “Why don’t you sit down?” they asked.

“The chairs are too far away,” she said.

“Why don’t you sit on the floor then?”

No, she would stand, as her sister was probably standing in a line she could not see from here. Her American children had no feelings and no memory.

To while away time, she and her niece talked about the Chinese passengers. These new immigrants had it easy. On Ellis Island the people were thin after forty days at sea and had no fancy luggage.

“That one looks like her,” Brave Orchid would say.

“No, that’s not her.”

Ellis Island had been made out of wood and iron. Here everything was new plastic, a ghost trick to lure immigrants into feeling safe and spilling their secrets. Then the Alien Office could send them right back. Otherwise, why did they lock her out, not letting her help her sister answer questions and spell her name? At Ellis Island when the ghost
asked Brave Orchid what year her husband had cut off his pigtail, a Chinese who was crouching on the floor motioned her not to talk. “I don’t know,” she had said. If it weren’t for that Chinese man, she might not be here today, or her husband either. She hoped some Chinese, a janitor or a clerk, would look out for Moon Orchid. Luggage conveyors fooled immigrants into thinking the Gold Mountain was going to be easy.

Brave Orchid felt her heart jump—Moon Orchid. “There she is,” she shouted. But her niece saw it was not her mother at all. And it shocked her to discover the woman her aunt was pointing out. This was a young woman, younger than herself, no older than Moon Orchid the day the sisters parted. “Moon Orchid will have changed a little, of course,” Brave Orchid was saying. “She will have learned to wear western clothes.” The woman wore a navy blue suit with a bunch of dark cherries at the shoulder.

“No, Aunt,” said the niece. “That’s not my mother.”

“Perhaps not. It’s been so many years. Yes, it is your mother. It must be. Let her come closer, and we can tell. Do you think she’s too far away for me to tell, or is it my eyes getting bad?”

“It’s too many years gone by,” said the niece.

Brave Orchid turned suddenly—another Moon Orchid, this one a neat little woman with a bun. She was laughing at something the person ahead of her in line said. Moon Orchid was just like that, laughing at nothing. “I would be able to tell the difference if one of them would only come closer,” Brave Orchid said with tears, which she did not wipe. Two children met the woman with the cherries, and she shook their hands. The other woman was met by a young man. They looked at each other gladly, then walked away side by side.

Up close neither one of those women looked like Moon Orchid at all. “Don’t worry, Aunt,” said the niece. “I’ll know her.”

“I’ll know her too. I knew her before you did.”

The niece said nothing, although she had seen her mother only five years ago. Her aunt liked having the last word.

Finally Brave Orchid’s children quit wandering and drooped on a railing. Who knew what they were thinking? At last the niece called out, “I see her! I see her! Mother! Mother!” Whenever the doors parted, she shouted, probably embarrassing the American cousins, but she didn’t care. She called out, “Mama! Mama!” until the crack in the sliding doors became too small to let in her voice. “Mama!” What a strange word in an adult voice. Many people turned to see what adult was calling, “Mama!” like a child. Brave Orchid saw an old, old woman jerk her head up, her little eyes blinking confusedly, a woman whose nerves leapt toward the sound anytime she heard “Mama!” Then she relaxed to her own business again. She was a tiny, tiny lady, very thin, with little fluttering hands, and her hair was in a gray knot. She was dressed in a gray wool suit; she wore pearls around her neck and in her earlobes. Moon Orchid
would
travel with her jewels showing. Brave Orchid momentarily saw, like a larger, younger outline around this old woman, the sister she had been waiting for. The familiar dim halo faded, leaving the woman so old, so gray. So old. Brave Orchid pressed against the glass.
That
old lady? Yes, that old lady facing the ghost who stamped her papers without questioning her was her sister. Then, without noticing her family, Moon Orchid walked smiling over to the Suitcase Inspector Ghost, who took her boxes apart, pulling out puffs of tissue. From where she was, Brave Orchid could not see what her sister had chosen to carry across the ocean. She wished her sister would look her way. Brave Orchid thought that if
she
were entering a new country, she would be at the windows. Instead Moon Orchid hovered over the unwrapping, surprised at each reappearance as if she were opening presents after a birthday party.

“Mama!” Moon Orchid’s daughter kept calling. Brave Orchid said to her children, “Why don’t you call your aunt
too? Maybe she’ll hear us if all of you call out together.” But her children slunk away. Maybe that shame-face they so often wore was American politeness.

“Mama!” Moon Orchid’s daughter called again, and this time her mother looked right at her. She left her bundles in a heap and came running. “Hey!” the Customs Ghost yelled at her. She went back to clear up her mess, talking inaudibly to her daughter all the while. Her daughter pointed toward Brave Orchid. And at last Moon Orchid looked at her—two old women with faces like mirrors.

Their hands reached out as if to touch the other’s face, then returned to their own, the fingers checking the grooves in the forehead and along the sides of the mouth. Moon Orchid, who never understood the gravity of things, started smiling and laughing, pointing at Brave Orchid. Finally Moon Orchid gathered up her stuff, strings hanging and papers loose, and met her sister at the door, where they shook hands, oblivious to blocking the way.

“You’re an old woman,” said Brave Orchid.

“Aiaa.
You’re
an old woman.”

“But you are really old. Surely, you can’t say that about me. I’m not old the way you’re old.”

“But
you
really are old. You’re one year older than I am.”

“Your hair is white and your face all wrinkled.”

“You’re so skinny.”

“You’re so fat.”

“Fat women are more beautiful than skinny women.”

The children pulled them out of the doorway. One of Brave Orchid’s children brought the car from the parking lot, and the other heaved the luggage into the trunk. They put the two old ladies and the niece in the back seat. All the way home—across the Bay Bridge, over the Diablo hills, across the San Joaquin River to the valley, the valley moon so white at dusk—all the way home, the two sisters exclaimed every time they turned to look at each other, “Aiaa! How old!”

Brave Orchid forgot that she got sick in cars, that all vehicles but palanquins made her dizzy. “You’re so old,” she kept saying. “How did you get so old?”

Brave Orchid had tears in her eyes. But Moon Orchid said, “You look older than I. You
are
older than I,” and again she’d laugh. “You’re wearing an old mask to tease me.” It surprised Brave Orchid that after thirty years she could still get annoyed at her sister’s silliness.

Brave Orchid’s husband was waiting under the tangerine tree. Moon Orchid recognized him as the brother-in-law in photographs, not as the young man who left on a ship. Her sister had married the ideal in masculine beauty, the thin scholar with the hollow cheeks and the long fingers. And here he was, an old man, opening the gate he had built with his own hands, his hair blowing silver in twilight. “Hello,” he said like an Englishman in Hong Kong. “Hello,” she said like an English telephone operator. He went to help his children unload the car, gripping the suitcase handles in his bony fingers, his bony wrists locked.

Brave Orchid’s husband and children brought everything into the dining room, provisions for a lifetime move heaped all over the floor and furniture. Brave Orchid wanted to have a luck ceremony and then to put things away where they belonged, but Moon Orchid said, “I’ve got presents for everybody. Let me get them.” She opened her boxes again. Her suitcase lids gaped like mouths; Brave Orchid had better hurry with the luck.

“First I’ve got shoes for all of you from Lovely Orchid,” Moon Orchid said, handing them out to her nieces and nephews, who grimaced at one another. Lovely Orchid, the youngest aunt, owned either a shoe store or a shoe factory in Hong Kong. That was why every Christmas she sent a dozen pairs, glittering with yellow and pink plastic beads, sequins, and turquoise blue flowers. “She must give us the leftovers,” Brave Orchid’s children were saying in English.
As Brave Orchid ran back and forth turning on all the lights, every lamp and bulb, she glared sideways at her children. They would be sorry when they had to walk barefoot through snow and rocks because they didn’t take what shoes they could, even if the wrong size. She would put the slippers next to the bathtub on the linoleum floors in winter and trick her lazy children into wearing them.

“May I have some scissors? Oh, where are my scissors?” said Moon Orchid. She slit the heel of a black embroidered slipper and pulled out the cotton—which was entangled with jewels. “You’ll have to let me pierce your ears,” she told her nieces, rubbing their earlobes. “Then you can wear these.” There were earrings with skewers like gold krisses. There was a jade heart and an opal. Brave Orchid interrupted her dashing about to rub the stones against her skin.

Moon Orchid laughed softly in delight. “And look here. Look here,” she said. She was holding up a paper warrior-saint, and he was all intricacies and light. A Communist had cut a wisp of black paper into a hero with sleeves like butterflies’ wings and with tassels and flags, which fluttered when you breathed on him. “Did someone really cut this out by hand?” the children kept asking. “Really?” The eyebrows and mustache, the fierce wrinkles between the eyes, the face, all were the merest black webs. His open hand had been cut out finger by finger. Through the spaces you could see light and the room and each other. “Oh, there’s more. There’s more,” said Moon Orchid happily. She picked up another paper cutout and blew on it. It was the scholar who always carries a fan; her breath shook its blue feathers. His brush and quill and scrolls tied with ribbon jutted out of lace vases. “And more”—an orange warrior-poet with sword and scroll; a purple knight with doily armor, holes for scales; a wonderful archer on a red horse with a mane like fire; a modern Communist worker with a proud gold hammer; a girl Communist soldier with pink pigtails and pink rifle. “And this is Fa Mu Lan,” she said. “She was a woman warrior, and really existed.” Fa Mu Lan was green
and beautiful, and her robes whirled out as she drew her sword.