The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (17 page)

Her sons and daughters mumbled and disappeared—into the bathroom, the basement, the various hiding places they had dug throughout the house. One of them locked herself in the pantry-storeroom, where she had cleared off a shelf for a desk among the food. Brave Orchid’s children were antisocial and secretive. Ever since they were babies, they had burrowed little nests for themselves in closets and underneath stairs; they made tents under tables and behind doors. “My children are also very bright,” she said. “Let me show you before you go to sleep.” She took her sister to the living room where she had a glass case, a large upside-down fish tank, and inside were her children’s athletic
trophies and scholarship trophies. There was even a beauty contest trophy. She had decorated them with runners about luck.

“Oh my, isn’t that wonderful?” said the aunt. “You must be so proud of them. Your children must be so smart.” The children who were in the living room groaned and left. Brave Orchid did not understand why they were ashamed of the things they could do. It was hard to believe that they could do the things the trophies said they did. Maybe they had stolen them from the real winners. Maybe they had bought cups and medallions and pretended they’d won them. She’d have to accuse them and see how they reacted. Perhaps they fooled the Ghost Teachers and Ghost Coaches, who couldn’t tell smart Chinese from dumb Chinese. Her children certainly didn’t seem like much.

She made some of the children sleep on the floor and put Moon Orchid and her daughter in their room. “Will my mother be living at your house or my house?” her niece asked Brave Orchid.

“She’s going to live with her own husband.” Brave Orchid was firm. She would not forget about this subject in the morning.

The next day, immediately after breakfast, Brave Orchid talked about driving to Los Angeles. They would not take the coast route along mountainsides that dropped into the sea—the way her children, who liked carnival rides, would want to go. She would make them take the inland route, flat and direct.

“The first thing you’ve got to ask your husband,” she said, “is why he never came back to China when he got rich.”

“All right,” said Moon Orchid. She was poking about the house, holding cans up to her ear, trailing after the children.

“He probably has a car,” Brave Orchid persisted. “He can drive you places. Should he tell you to go away, turn around at the door and say, ‘May I come and watch your
television now and then?’ Oh, wouldn’t that be pathetic? But he won’t kick you out. No, he won’t. You walk right into the bedroom, and you open the second wife’s closet. Take whatever clothes you like. That will give you an American wardrobe.”

“Oh, I can’t do that.”

“You can! You can! Take First Sister-in-Law as your example.” Their only brother had had a first wife in the village, but he took a second wife in Singapore, where he had gone to make his gold. Big Wife suffered during the Revolution. “The Communists will kill me,” she wrote to her husband, “and you’re having fun in Singapore.” Little Wife felt so sorry for her, she reminded her husband that he owed it to Big Wife to get her out of China before it was too late. Little Wife saved the passage fare and did the paper work. But when Big Wife came, she chased Little Wife out of the house. There was nothing for their husband to do but build a second house, one for each wife and the children of each wife. They did get together, however, for yearly family portraits. Their sons’ first and second wives were also in the pictures, first wives next to the husbands and second wives standing among the children. “Copy our sister-in-law,” Brave Orchid instructed. “Make life unbearable for the second wife, and she’ll leave. He’ll have to build her a second house.”

“I wouldn’t mind if she stays,” said Moon Orchid. “She can comb my hair and keep house. She can wash the dishes and serve our meals. And she can take care of the little boys.” Moon Orchid laughed. Again it occurred to Brave Orchid that her sister wasn’t very bright, and she had not gotten any smarter in the last thirty years.

“You must make it plain to your husband right at the start what you expect of him. That is what a wife is for—to scold her husband into becoming a good man. Tell him there will be no third wife. Tell him you may go visiting anytime you please. And I, the big sister, may visit your house for as long as I please. Let him know exactly how much money you expect for allowance.”

“Should I ask for more or less money now that I’m here?”

“More, of course. Food costs more here. Tell him that your daughter, who is the oldest, must inherit his property. You have to establish these things at the start. Don’t begin meek.”

Sometimes Moon Orchid seemed to listen too readily—as if her sister were only talking-story. “Have you seen him in all these years?” she asked Brave Orchid.

“No. The last time I saw him was in China—with you. What a terrible, ugly man he must be not to send for you. I’ll bet he’s hoping you’d be satisfied with his money. How evil he is. You’ve had to live like a widow for thirty years. You’re lucky he didn’t have his second wife write you telling you he’s dead.”

“Oh, no, he wouldn’t do that.”

“Of course not. He would be afraid of cursing himself.”

“But if he is so ugly and mean, maybe I shouldn’t bother with him.”

“I remember him,” said her daughter. “He wrote me a nice letter.”

“You can’t remember him,” said her mother. “You were an infant when he left. He never writes letters; he only sends money orders.”

Moon Orchid hoped that the summer would wear away while her sister talked, that Brave Orchid would then find autumn too cold for travel. Brave Orchid did not enjoy travelling. She found it so nauseating that she was still recovering from the trip to San Francisco. Many of the children were home for the summer, and Moon Orchid tried to figure out which one was which. Brave Orchid had written about them in her letters, and Moon Orchid tried to match them up with the descriptions. There was indeed an oldest girl who was absent-minded and messy. She had an American name that sounded like “Ink” in Chinese. “Ink!” Moon Orchid called out; sure enough, a girl smeared with ink said, “Yes?” Then Brave Orchid worried over a daughter who had the mark of an unlucky woman; yes,
there was certainly a girl with an upper lip as curled as Brigitte Bardot’s. Moon Orchid rubbed this niece’s hands and cold feet. There was a boy Brave Orchid said was thick headed. She had written that when he crawled as a baby his head was so heavy he kept dropping it on the floor. Moon Orchid did indeed see a boy whose head was big, his curls enlarging it, his eyebrows thick and slanted like an opera warrior’s. Moon Orchid could not tell whether he was any less quick than the others. None of them were articulate or friendly. Brave Orchid had written about a boy whose oddity it was to stick pencil stubs in his ears. Moon Orchid sneaked up on the boys and lifted their hair to look for pencil stubs. “He hangs upside down from the furniture like a bat,” his mother wrote. “And he doesn’t obey.” Moon Orchid didn’t find a boy who looked like a bat, and no stubs, so decided that that boy must be the one in Vietnam. And the nephew with the round face and round eyes was the “inaccessible cliff.” She immediately recognized the youngest girl, “the raging billows.” “Stop following me around!” she shouted at her aunt. “Quit hanging over my neck!”

“What are you doing?” Moon Orchid would ask. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing!” this girl would yell. “You’re breathing on me. Don’t breathe on me.”

It took Moon Orchid several weeks to figure out just how many children there were because some only visited and did not live at home. Some seemed to be married and had children of their own. The babies that spoke no Chinese at all, she decided, were the grandchildren.

None of Brave Orchid’s children was happy like the two real Chinese babies who died. Maybe what was wrong was that they had no Oldest Son and no Oldest Daughter to guide them. “I don’t see how any of them could support themselves,” Brave Orchid said. “I don’t see how anybody could want to marry them.” Yet, Moon Orchid noticed, some of them seemed to have a husband or a wife who found them bearable.

“They’ll never learn how to work,” Brave Orchid complained.

“Maybe they’re still playing,” said Moon Orchid, although they didn’t act playful.

“Say good morning to your aunt,” Brave Orchid would order, although some of them were adults. “Say good morning to your aunt,” she commanded every morning.

“Good morning, Aunt,” they said, turning to face her, staring directly into her face. Even the girls stared at her—like cat-headed birds. Moon Orchid jumped and squirmed when they did that. They looked directly into her eyes as if they were looking for lies. Rude. Accusing. They never lowered their gaze; they hardly blinked.

“Why didn’t you teach your girls to be demure?” she ventured.

“Demure!” Brave Orchid yelled. “They
are
demure. They’re so demure, they barely talk.”

It was true that the children made no conversation. Moon Orchid would try to draw them out. They must have many interesting savage things to say, raised as they’d been in the wilderness. They made rough movements, and their accents were not American exactly, but peasant like their mother’s, as if they had come from a village deep inside China. She never saw the girls wear the gowns she had given them. The young, raging one, growled in her sleep, “Leave me alone.” Sometimes when the girls were reading or watching television, she crept up behind them with a comb and tried to smooth their hair, but they shook their heads, and they turned and fixed her with those eyes. She wondered what they thought and what they saw when they looked at her like that. She liked coming upon them from the back to avoid being looked at. They were like animals the way they stared.

She hovered over a child who was reading, and she pointed at certain words. “What’s that?” she tapped at a section that somebody had underlined or annotated. If the child was being patient, he said, “That’s an important part.”

“Why is it important?”

“Because it tells the main idea here.”

“What’s the main idea?”

“I don’t know the Chinese words for it.”

“They’re so clever,” Moon Orchid would exclaim. “They’re so smart. Isn’t it wonderful they know things that can’t be said in Chinese?”

“Thank you,” the child said. When she complimented them, they agreed with her! Not once did she hear a child deny a compliment.

“You’re pretty,” she said.

“Thank you, Aunt,” they answered. How vain. She marveled at their vanity.

“You play the radio beautifully,” she teased, and sure enough, they gave one another puzzled looks. She tried all kinds of compliments, and they never said, “Oh, no, you’re too kind. I can’t play it at all. I’m stupid. I’m ugly.” They were capable children; they could do servants’ work. But they were not modest.

“What time is it?” she asked, testing what kinds of minds they had, raised away from civilization. She discovered they could tell time very well. And they knew the Chinese words for “thermometer” and “library.”

She saw them eat undercooked meat, and they smelled like cow’s milk. At first she thought they were so clumsy, they spilled it on their clothes. But soon she decided they themselves smelled of milk. They were big and smelled of milk; they were young and had white hair.

When Brave Orchid screamed at them to dress better, Moon Orchid defended them, sweet wild animals that they were. “But they enjoy looking like furry animals. That’s it, isn’t it? You enjoy looking like wild animals, don’t you?”

“I don’t look like a wild animal!” the child would yell like its mother.

“Like an Indian, then. Right?”

“No!”

Moon Orchid stroked their poor white hair. She tugged
at their sleeves and poked their shoulders and stomachs. It was as if she were seeing how much it took to provoke a savage.

“Stop poking me!” they would roar, except for the girl with the cold hands and feet.

“Mm,” she mused. “Now the child is saying, ‘Stop poking me.’”

Brave Orchid put her sister to work cleaning and sewing and cooking. Moon Orchid was eager to work, roughing it in the wilderness. But Brave Orchid scolded her, “Can’t you go any faster than that?” It infuriated Brave Orchid that her sister held up each dish between thumb and forefinger, squirted detergent on the back and front, and ran water without plugging up the drain. Moon Orchid only laughed when Brave Orchid scolded, “Oh, stop that with the dishes. Here. Take this dress and hem it.” But Moon Orchid immediately got the thread tangled and laughed about that.

In the mornings Brave Orchid and her husband arose at 6 a.m. He drank a cup of coffee and walked downtown to open up the laundry. Brave Orchid made breakfast for the children who would take the first laundry shift; the ones going to summer school would take the afternoon and night shifts. She put her husband’s breakfast into the food container that she had bought in Chinatown, one dish in each tier of the stack. Some mornings Brave Orchid brought the food to the laundry, and other days she sent it with one of the children, but the children let the soup slosh out when they rode over bumps on their bikes. They dangled the tiers from one handlebar and the rice kettle from the other. They were too lazy to walk. Now that her sister and niece were visiting, Brave Orchid went to the laundry later. “Be sure you heat everything up before serving it to your father,” she yelled after her son. “And make him coffee after breakfast. And wash the dishes.” He would eat with his father and start work.

She walked her sister and niece to the laundry by way of Chinatown. Brave Orchid pointed out the red, green, and
gold Chinese school. From the street they could hear children’s voices singing the lesson “I Am a Person of the Middle Nation.” In front of one of the benevolent associations, a literate man was chanting the
Gold Mountain News
, which was taped to the window. The listening crowd looked at the pictures and said, “Aiaa.”

“So this is the United States,” Moon Orchid said. “It certainly looks different from China. I’m glad to see the Americans talk like us.”

Brave Orchid was again startled at her sister’s denseness. “These aren’t the Americans. These are the overseas Chinese.”