The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (27 page)

I like to look up a troublesome, shameful thing and then say, “Oh, is that all?” The simple explanation makes it less scary to go home after yelling at your mother and father. It drives the fear away and makes it possible someday to visit China, where I know now they don’t sell girls or kill each other for no reason.

Now colors are gentler and fewer; smells are antiseptic. Now when I peek in the basement window where the villagers say they see a girl dancing like a bottle imp, I can no longer see a spirit in a skirt made of light, but a voiceless girl dancing when she thought no one was looking. The very next day after I talked out the retarded man, the huncher, he disappeared. I never saw him again or heard what became of him. Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle. The throat pain always returns, though, unless I tell what I really think, whether or not I lose my job, or spit out gaucheries all over a party. I’ve stopped checking “bilingual” on job applications. I could not understand any of the dialects the interviewer at China Airlines tried on me, and he didn’t understand me either. I’d like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me. I continue to sort out what’s just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living.

Soon I want to go to China and find out who’s lying—the Communists who say they have food and jobs for everybody or the relatives who write that they have not the money to buy salt. My mother sends money she earns working in the tomato fields to Hong Kong. The relatives there can send it on to the remaining aunts and their children and, after a good harvest, to the children and grandchildren
of my grandfather’s two minor wives. “Every woman in the tomato row is sending money home,” my mother says, “to Chinese villages and Mexican villages and Filipino villages and, now, Vietnamese villages, where they speak Chinese too. The women come to work whether sick or well.
‘I
can’t die,’ they say, ‘I’m supporting fifty,’ or ‘I’m supporting a hundred.’”

What I’ll inherit someday is a green address book full of names. I’ll send the relatives money, and they’ll write me stories about their hunger. My mother has been tearing up the letters from the youngest grandson of her father’s third wife. He has been asking for fifty dollars to buy a bicycle. He says a bicycle will change his life. He could feed his wife and children if he had a bicycle. “We’d have to go hungry ourselves,” my mother says. “They don’t understand that we have ourselves to feed too.” I’ve been making money; I guess it’s my turn. I’d like to go to China and see those people and find out what’s a cheat story and what’s not. Did my grandmother really live to be ninety-nine? Or did they string us along all those years to get our money? Do the babies wear a Mao button like a drop of blood on their jumpsuits? When we overseas Chinese send money, do the relatives divide it evenly among the commune? Or do they really pay 2 percent tax and keep the rest? It would be good if the Communists were taking care of themselves; then I could buy a color t.v.

H
ere is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine.

In China my grandmother loved the theater (which I would not have been able to understand because of my seventh-grade vocabulary, said my mother). When the actors came to the village and set up their scaffolding, my grandmother bought a large section up front. She bought enough room for our entire family and a bed; she would stay days and nights, not missing even the repeating scenes.

The danger was that the bandits would make raids on households thinned out during performances. Bandits followed the actors.

“But, Grandmother,” the family complained, “the bandits will steal the tables while we’re gone.” They took the chairs to plays.

“I want every last one of you at that theater,” my grandmother raved. “Slavegirls, everybody. I don’t want to watch that play by myself. How can I laugh all by myself? You want me to clap alone, is that it? I want everybody there. Babies, everybody.”

“The robbers will ransack the food.”

“So let them. Cook up the food and take it to the theater. If you’re so worried about bandits, if you’re not going to concentrate on the play because of a few bandits, leave the doors open. Leave the windows open. Leave the house wide open. I order the doors open. We are going to the theater without worries.”

So they left the doors open, and my whole family went to watch the actors. And sure enough, that night the bandits struck—not the house, but the theater itself. “Bandits aa!” the audience screamed. “Bandits aa!” the actors screamed. My family ran in all directions, my grandmother and mother holding on to each other and jumping into a ditch. They crouched there because my grandmother could run no farther on bound feet. They watched a bandit loop a rope around my youngest aunt, Lovely Orchid, and prepare to drag her off. Suddenly he let her go. “A prettier one,” he said, grabbing somebody else. By daybreak, when my grandmother and mother made their way home, the entire family was home safe, proof to my grandmother that our family was immune to harm as long as they went to plays. They went to many plays after that.

I like to think that at some of those performances, they heard the songs of Ts’ai Yen, a poetess born in
A.D
. 175. She was the daughter of Ts’ai Yung, the scholar famous for his library. When she was twenty years old, she was captured by a chieftain during a raid by the Southern
Hsiung-nu. He made her sit behind him when the tribe rode like the haunted from one oasis to the next, and she had to put her arms around his waist to keep from falling off the horse. After she became pregnant, he captured a mare as his gift to her. Like other captive soldiers until the time of Mao, whose soldiers volunteered, Ts’ai Yen fought desultorily when the fighting was at a distance, and she cut down anyone in her path during the madness of close combat. The tribe fought from horseback, charging in a mass into villages and encampments. She gave birth on the sand; the barbarian women were said to be able to birth in the saddle. During her twelve-year stay with the barbarians, she had two children. Her children did not speak Chinese. She spoke it to them when their father was out of the tent, but they imitated her with senseless singsong words and laughed.

The barbarians were primitives. They gathered inedible reeds when they camped along rivers and dried them in the sun. They dried the reeds tied on their flagpoles and horses’ manes and tails. Then they cut wedges and holes. They slipped feathers and arrow shafts into the shorter reeds, which became nock-whistles. During battle the arrows whistled, high whirling whistles that suddenly stopped when the arrows hit true. Even when the barbarians missed, they terrified their enemies by filling the air with death sounds, which Ts’ai Yen had thought was their only music, until one night she heard music tremble and rise like desert wind. She walked out of her tent and saw hundreds of the barbarians sitting upon the sand, the sand gold under the moon. Their elbows were raised, and they were blowing on flutes. They reached again and again for a high note, yearning toward a high note, which they found at last and held—an icicle in the desert. The music disturbed Ts’ai Yen; its sharpness and its cold made her ache. It disturbed her so that she could not concentrate on her own thoughts. Night after night the songs filled the desert no matter how many dunes away she walked. She hid in her tent but could not
sleep through the sound. Then, out of Ts’ai Yen’s tent, which was apart from the others, the barbarians heard a woman’s voice singing, as if to her babies, a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes. Ts’ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch barbarian phrases about forever wandering. Her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter campfires, ringed by barbarians.

After twelve years among the Southern Hsiung-nu, Ts’ai Yen was ransomed and married to Tung Ssu so that her father would have Han descendants. She brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has been passed down to us is “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well.

Vintage International Edition, April 1989

Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Maxine Hong Kingston

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1976.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kingston, Maxine Hong.
The woman warrior.
1. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 2. United States—
Biography. I. Title.

[CT275.K5764A33    1977]    979.4’61’050924

[B]    77-3246
eISBN: 978-0-307-75933-7

“No Name Woman” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the January 1975 issue of
Viva
.

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