The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (25 page)

“Do I
what?”
she said.

“Never mind,” I said fast. “Never mind. Nothing.”

My sister, my almost-twin, the person most like me in all the world, had said,
“What?”

I had vampire nightmares; every night the fangs grew longer, and my angel wings turned pointed and black. I hunted humans down in the long woods and shadowed them with my blackness. Tears dripped from my eyes, but blood dripped from my fangs, blood of the people I was supposed to love.

I did not want to be our crazy one. Quite often the big loud women came shouting into the house, “Now when you sell this one, I’d like to buy her to be my maid.” Then they laughed. They always said that about my sister, not me because I dropped dishes at them. I picked my nose while I was cooking and serving. My clothes were wrinkled even though we owned a laundry. Indeed I was getting stranger every day. I affected a limp. And, of course, the mysterious disease I had had might have been dormant and contagious.

But if I made myself unsellable here, my parents need only wait until China, and there, where anything happens, they would be able to unload us, even me—sellable, marriageable. So while the adults wept over the letters about the neighbors gone berserk turning Communist (“They do funny dances; they sing weird songs, just syllables. They make us dance; they make us sing”), I was secretly glad. As long as the aunts kept disappearing and the uncles dying after unspeakable tortures, my parents would prolong their Gold Mountain stay. We could start spending our fare money on a car and chairs, a stereo. Nobody wrote to tell us that Mao himself had been matched to an older girl when he was a child and that he was freeing women from prisons, where they had been put for refusing the businessmen their parents had picked as husbands. Nobody told us that the
Revolution (the Liberation) was against girl slavery and girl infanticide (a village-wide party if it’s a boy). Girls would no longer have to kill themselves rather than get married. May the Communists light up the house on a girl’s birthday.

I watched our parents buy a sofa, then a rug, curtains, chairs to replace the orange and apple crates one by one, now to be used for storage. Good. At the beginning of the second Communist five-year plan, our parents bought a car. But you could see the relatives and the villagers getting more worried about what to do with the girls. We had three girl second cousins, no boys; their great-grandfather and our grandfather were brothers. The great-grandfather was the old man who lived with them, as the river-pirate great-uncle was the old man who lived with us. When my sisters and I ate at their house, there we would be—six girls eating. The old man opened his eyes wide at us and turned in a circle, surrounded. His neck tendons stretched out. “Maggots!” he shouted. “Maggots! Where are my grandsons? I want grandsons! Give me grandsons! Maggots!” He pointed at each one of us, “Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot! Maggot!” Then he dived into his food, eating fast and getting seconds. “Eat, maggots,” he said. “Look at the maggots chew.”

“He does that at every meal,” the girls told us in English.

“Yeah,” we said. “Our old man hates us too. What assholes.”

Third Grand-Uncle finally did get a boy, though, his only great-grandson. The boy’s parents and the old man bought him toys, bought him everything—new diapers, new plastic pants—not homemade diapers, not bread bags. They gave him a full-month party inviting all the emigrant villagers; they deliberately hadn’t given the girls parties, so that no one would notice another girl. Their brother got toy trucks that were big enough to climb inside. When he grew older, he got a bicycle and let the girls play with his old tricycle and wagon. My mother bought his sisters a typewriter.
“They can be clerk-typists,” their father kept saying, but he would not buy them a typewriter.

“What an asshole,” I said, muttering the way my father muttered “Dog vomit” when the customers nagged him about missing socks.

Maybe my mother was afraid that I’d say things like that out loud and so had cut my tongue. Now again plans were urgently afoot to fix me up, to improve my voice. The wealthiest villager wife came to the laundry one day to have a listen. “You better do something with this one,” she told my mother. “She has an ugly voice. She quacks like a pressed duck.” Then she looked at me unnecessarily hard; Chinese do not have to address children directly. “You have what we call a pressed-duck voice,” she said. This woman was the giver of American names, a powerful namer, though it was American names; my parents gave the Chinese names. And she was right: if you squeezed the duck hung up to dry in the east window, the sound that was my voice would come out of it. She was a woman of such power that all we immigrants and descendants of immigrants were obliged to her family forever for bringing us here and for finding us jobs, and she had named my voice.

“No,” I quacked. “No, I don’t.”

“Don’t talk back,” my mother scolded. Maybe this lady was powerful enough to send us back.

I went to the front of the laundry and worked so hard that I impolitely did not take notice of her leaving.

“Improve that voice,” she had instructed my mother, “or else you’ll never marry her off. Even the fool half ghosts won’t have her.” So I discovered the next plan to get rid of us: marry us off here without waiting until China. The villagers’ peasant minds converged on marriage. Late at night when we walked home from the laundry, they should have been sleeping behind locked doors, not overflowing into the streets in front of the benevolent associations, all alit. We stood on tiptoes and on one another’s shoulders, and through the door we saw spotlights open on tall singers afire with sequins. An opera from San Francisco! An opera
from Hong Kong! Usually I did not understand the words in operas, whether because of our obscure dialect or theirs I didn’t know, but I heard one line sung out into the night air in a woman’s voice high and clear as ice. She was standing on a chair, and she sang, “Beat me, then, beat me.” The crowd laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks while the cymbals clashed—the dragon’s copper laugh—and the drums banged like firecrackers. “She is playing the part of a new daughter-in-law,” my mother explained. “Beat me, then, beat me,” she sang again and again. It must have been a refrain; each time she sang it, the audience broke up laughing. Men laughed; women laughed. They were having a great time.

“Chinese smeared bad daughters-in-law with honey and tied them naked on top of ant nests,” my father said. “A husband may kill a wife who disobeys him. Confucius said that.” Confucius, the rational man.

The singer, I thought, sounded like me talking, yet everyone said, “Oh, beautiful. Beautiful,” when she sang high.

Walking home, the noisy women shook their old heads and sang a folk song that made them laugh uproariously:

Marry a rooster, follow a rooster.
Marry a dog, follow a dog.
Married to a cudgel, married to a pestle,
Be faithful to it. Follow it.

I learned that young men were placing ads in the
Gold Mountain News
to find wives when my mother and father started answering them. Suddenly a series of new workers showed up at the laundry; they each worked for a week before they disappeared. They ate with us. They talked Chinese with my parents. They did not talk to us. We were to call them “Elder Brother,” although they were not related to us. They were all funny-looking FOB’s, Fresh-off-the-Boat’s, as the Chinese-American kids at school called the young immigrants. FOB’s wear high-riding gray slacks
and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Their eyes do not focus correctly—shifty-eyed—and they hold their mouths slack, not tight-jawed masculine. They shave off their sideburns. The girls said
they’d
never date an FOB. My mother took one home from the laundry, and I saw him looking over our photographs. “This one,” he said, picking up my sister’s picture.

“No. No,” said my mother. “This one,” my picture. “The oldest first,” she said. Good. I was an obstacle. I would protect my sister and myself at the same time. As my parents and the FOB sat talking at the kitchen table, I dropped two dishes. I found my walking stick and limped across the floor. I twisted my mouth and caught my hand in the knots of my hair. I spilled soup on the FOB when I handed him his bowl. “She can sew, though,” I heard my mother say, “and sweep.” I raised dust swirls sweeping around and under the FOB’s chair—very bad luck because spirits live inside the broom. I put on my shoes with the open flaps and flapped about like a Wino Ghost. From then on, I wore those shoes to parties, whenever the mothers gathered to talk about marriages. The FOB and my parents paid me no attention, half ghosts half invisible, but when he left, my mother yelled at me about the dried-duck voice, the bad temper, the laziness, the clumsiness, the stupidity that comes from reading too much. The young men stopped visiting; not one came back. “Couldn’t you just stop rubbing your nose?” she scolded. “All the village ladies are talking about your nose. They’re afraid to eat our pastries because you might have kneaded the dough.” But I couldn’t stop at will anymore, and a crease developed across the bridge. My parents would not give up, though. “Though you can’t see it,” my mother said, “a red string around your ankle ties you to the person you’ll marry. He’s already been born, and he’s on the other end of the string.”

At Chinese school there was a mentally retarded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind. He had an enormous face, and he growled.
He laughed from so far within his thick body that his face got confused about what the sounds coming up into his mouth might be, laughs or cries. He barked unhappily. He didn’t go to classes but hung around the playgrounds. We suspected he was not a boy but an adult. He wore baggy khaki trousers like a man’s. He carried bags of toys for giving to certain children. Whatever you wanted, he’d get it for you—brand-new toys, as many as you could think up in your poverty, all the toys you never had when you were younger. We wrote lists, discussed our lists, compared them. Those kids not in his favor gave lists to those who were. “Where do you get the toys?” I asked. “I… own … stores,” he roared, one word at a time, thick tongued. At recess the day after ordering, we got handed out to us coloring books, paint sets, model kits. But sometimes he chased us—his fat arms out to the side; his fat fingers opening and closing; his legs stiff like Frankenstein’s monster, like the mummy dragging its foot; growling; laughing-crying. Then we’d have to run, following the old rule, running away from our house.

But suddenly he knew where we worked. He found us; maybe he had followed us in his wanderings. He started sitting at our laundry. Many of the storekeepers invited sitting in their stores, but we did not have sitting because the laundry was hot and because it was outside Chinatown. He sweated; he panted, the stubble rising and falling on his fat neck and chin. He sat on two large cartons that he brought with him and stacked one on top of the other. He said hello to my mother and father, and then, balancing his heavy head, he lowered himself carefully onto his cartons and sat. My parents allowed this. They did not chase him out or comment about how strange he was. I stopped placing orders for toys. I didn’t limp anymore; my parents would only figure that this zombie and I were a match.

I studied hard, got straight A’s, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect. At school there were dating and
dances, but not for good Chinese girls. “You ought to develop yourself socially as well as mentally,” the American teachers, who took me aside, said.

I told nobody about the monster. And nobody else was talking either; no mention about the laundry workers who appeared and disappeared; no mention about the sitter. Maybe I was making it all up, and queer marriage notions did not occur to other people. I had better not say a word, then. Don’t give them ideas. Keep quiet.

I pressed clothes—baskets of giants’ BVD’s, long underwear even in summertime, T-shirts, sweat shirts. Laundry work is men’s clothes, unmarried-men’s clothes. My back felt sick because it was toward the monster who gave away toys. His lumpishness was sending out germs that would lower my IQ. His leechiness was drawing IQ points out of the back of my head. I maneuvered my work shifts so that my brothers would work the afternoons, when he usually came lumbering into the laundry, but he caught on and began coming during the evening, the cool shift. Then I would switch back to the afternoon or to the early mornings on weekends and in summer, dodging him. I kept my sister with me, protecting her without telling her why. If she hadn’t noticed, then I mustn’t scare her. “Let’s clean house this morning,” I’d say. Our other sister was a baby, and the brothers were not in danger. But the were-person would stalk down our street; his thick face smiled between the lettering on the laundry window, and when he saw me working, he shouldered inside. At night I thought I heard his feet dragging around the house, scraping gravel. I sat up to listen to our watchdog prowl the yard, pulling her long chain after her, and that worried me too. I had to do something about that chain, the weight of it scraping her neck fur short. And if she was walking about, why wasn’t she barking? Maybe somebody was out there taming her with raw meat. I could not ask for help.

Every day the hulk took one drink from the watercooler and went once to the bathroom, stumbling between the
presses into the back of the laundry, big shoes clumping. Then my parents would talk about what could be inside his boxes. Were they filled with toys? With money? When the toilet flushed, they stopped talking about it. But one day he either stayed in the bathroom for a long time or went for a walk and left the boxes unguarded. “Let’s open them up,” said my mother, and she did. I looked over her shoulder. The two cartons were stuffed with pornography—naked magazines, nudie postcards and photographs.

You would think she’d have thrown him out right then, but my mother said, “My goodness, he’s not too stupid to want to find out about women.” I heard the old women talk about how he was stupid but very rich.