The Woman Warrior — A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe

A Song

for a

Barbarian

Reed Pipe

What my brother actually said was, “I drove Mom and Second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt’s husband who’s got the other wife.”

“Did she hit him? What did she say? What did he say?”

“Nothing much. Mom did all the talking.”

“What did she say?”

“She said he’d better take them to lunch at least.”

“Which wife did he sit next to? What did they eat?”

“I didn’t go. The other wife didn’t either. He motioned us not to tell.”

“I would’ve told. If I was his wife, I would’ve told. I would’ve gone to lunch and kept my ears open.”

“Ah, you know they don’t talk when they eat.”

“What else did Mom say?”

“I don’t remember. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would come.”

“There must’ve been more. Didn’t Aunt get in one nasty word?

She must’ve said something.”

“No, I don’t think she said anything. I don’t remember her saying one thing.”

In fact, it wasn’t me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he’d told her. His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs. The hearer can carry it tucked away without it taking up much room. Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore.

If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.

Maybe that’s why my mother cut my tongue. She pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum. Or maybe she snipped it with a pair of nail scissors. I don’t remember her doing it, only her telling me about it, but all during childhood I felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry—and then, when its mouth was wide open like a baby bird’s, cut. The Chinese say “a ready tongue is an evil.”

I used to curl up my tongue in front of the mirror and tauten my frenum into a white line, itself as thin as a razor blade. I saw no scars in my mouth. I thought perhaps I had had two frena, and she had cut one. I made other children open their mouths so I could compare theirs to mine. I saw perfect pink membranes stretching into precise edges that looked easy enough to cut. Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me.

At other times I was terried—the rst thing my mother did when

she saw me was to cut my tongue.

“Why did you do that to me, Mother?”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again.”

“I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely dierent from one another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything. Your frenum looked too tight to do those

things, so I cut it.”

“But isn’t ‘a ready tongue an evil’?”

“Things are dierent in this ghost country.”

“Did it hurt me? Did I cry and bleed?”

“I don’t remember. Probably.”

She didn’t cut the other children’s. When I asked cousins and other Chinese children whether their mothers had cut their tongues loose, they said, “What?”

“Why didn’t you cut my brothers’ and sisters’ tongues?”

“They didn’t need it.”

“Why not? Were theirs longer than mine?”

“Why don’t you quit blabbering and get to work?”

If my mother was not lying she should have cut more, scraped away the rest of the frenum skin, because I have a terrible time talking. Or she should not have cut at all, tampering with my speech. When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the rst time, I became silent. A dumbness—a shame—still cracks my voice in two, even when I want to say “hello” casually, or ask an easy question in front of the check-out counter, or ask directions of a bus driver. I stand frozen, or I hold up the line with the complete, grammatical sentence that comes squeaking out at impossible length. “What did you say?” says the cab driver, or “Speak up,” so I have to perform again, only weaker the second time. A telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day’s courage. It spoils my day with self-disgust when I hear my broken voice come skittering out into the open. It makes people wince to hear it. I’m getting better, though. Recently I asked the postman for special- issue stamps; I’ve waited since childhood for postmen to give me some of their own accord. I am making progress, a little every day.

My silence was thickest—total—during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint. I painted layers of black over houses and owers and suns, and when I drew on the blackboard, I put a layer of chalk on top. I was making a stage curtain, and it was the moment before the curtain parted or rose.

The teachers called my parents to school, and I saw they had been saving my pictures, curling and cracking, all alike and black. The teachers pointed to the pictures and looked serious, talked seriously too, but my parents did not understand English. (“The parents and teachers of criminals were executed,” said my father.) My parents took the pictures home. I spread them out (so black and full of possibilities) and pretended the curtains were swinging open, ying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas.

During the rst silent year I spoke to no one at school, did not ask before going to the lavatory, and unked kindergarten. My sister also said nothing for three years, silent in the playground and silent

at lunch. There were other quiet Chinese girls not of our family, but most of them got over it sooner than we did. I enjoyed the silence.

At rst it did not occur to me I was supposed to talk or to pass kindergarten. I talked at home and to one or two of the Chinese kids in class. I made motions and even made some jokes. I drank out of a toy saucer when the water spilled out of the cup, and everybody laughed, pointing at me, so I did it some more. I didn’t know that Americans don’t drink out of saucers.

I liked the Negro students (Black Ghosts) best because they laughed the loudest and talked to me as if I were a daring talker too.

One of the Negro girls had her mother coil braids over her ears Shanghai-style like mine; we were Shanghai twins except that she was covered with black like my paintings. Two Negro kids enrolled in Chinese school, and the teachers gave them Chinese names. Some Negro kids walked me to school and home, protecting me from the Japanese kids, who hit me and chased me and stuck gum in my ears. The Japanese kids were noisy and tough. They appeared one day in kindergarten, released from concentration camp, which was a tic-tac-toe mark, like barbed wire, on the map.

It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery. I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak. I read aloud in rst grade, though, and heard the barest whisper with little squeaks come out of my throat.

“Louder,” said the teacher, who scared the voice away again. The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.

Reading out loud was easier than speaking because we did not have to make up what to say, but I stopped often, and the teacher would think I’d gone quiet again. I could not understand “I.” The Chinese “I” has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American “I,” assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left o strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; “I” is a capital and “you” is lower-case. I stared at that middle line and waited so long

for its black center to resolve into tight strokes and dots that I forgot to pronounce it. The other troublesome word was “here,” no strong consonant to hang on to, and so at, when “here” is two mountainous ideographs. The teacher, who had already told me every day how to read “I” and “here,” put me in the low corner under the stairs again, where the noisy boys usually sat.

When my second grade class did a play, the whole class went to the auditorium except the Chinese girls. The teacher, lovely and Hawaiian, should have understood about us, but instead left us behind in the classroom. Our voices were too soft or nonexistent, and our parents never signed the permission slips anyway. They never signed anything unnecessary. We opened the door a crack and peeked out, but closed it again quickly. One of us (not me) won every spelling bee, though.

I remember telling the Hawaiian teacher, “We Chinese can’t sing ‘land where our fathers died.’” She argued with me about politics, while I meant because of curses. But how can I have that memory when I couldn’t talk? My mother says that we, like the ghosts, have no memories.

After American school, we picked up our cigar boxes, in which we had arranged books, brushes, and an inkbox neatly, and went to Chinese school, from 5:00 to 7:30 P.M. There we chanted together, voices rising and falling, loud and soft, some boys shouting, everybody reading together, reciting together and not alone with one voice. When we had a memorization test, the teacher let each of us come to his desk and say the lesson to him privately, while the rest of the class practiced copying or tracing. Most of the teachers were men. The boys who were so well behaved in the American school played tricks on them and talked back to them. The girls were not mute. They screamed and yelled during recess, when there were no rules; they had st-ghts. Nobody was afraid of children hurting themselves or of children hurting school property. The glass doors to the red and green balconies with the gold joy symbols were left wide open so that we could run out and climb the re escapes.

We played capture-the-ag in the auditorium, where Sun Yat-sen

and Chiang Kai-shek’s pictures hung at the back of the stage, the Chinese ag on their left and the American ag on their right. We climbed the teak ceremonial chairs and made ying leaps o the stage. One ag headquarters was behind the glass door and the other on stage right. Our feet drummed on the hollow stage. During recess the teachers locked themselves up in their oce with the shelves of books, copybooks, inks from China. They drank tea and warmed their hands at a stove. There was no play supervision. At recess we had the school to ourselves, and also we could roam as far as we could go—downtown, Chinatown stores, home—as long as we returned before the bell rang.

At exactly 7:30 the teacher again picked up the brass bell that sat on his desk and swung it over our heads, while we charged down the stairs, our cheering magnied in the stairwell. Nobody had to line up.

Not all of the children who were silent at American school found voice at Chinese school. One new teacher said each of us had to get up and recite in front of the class, who was to listen. My sister and I had memorized the lesson perfectly. We said it to each other at home, one chanting, one listening. The teacher called on my sister to recite rst. It was the rst time a teacher had called on the second-born to go rst. My sister was scared. She glanced at me and looked away; I looked down at my desk. I hoped that she could do it because if she could, then I would have to. She opened her mouth and a voice came out that wasn’t a whisper, but it wasn’t a proper voice either. I hoped that she would not cry, fear breaking up her voice like twigs underfoot. She sounded as if she were trying to sing though weeping and strangling. She did not pause or stop to end the embarrassment. She kept going until she said the last word, and then she sat down. When it was my turn, the same voice came out, a crippled animal running on broken legs. You could hear splinters in my voice, bones rubbing jagged against one another. I was loud, though. I was glad I didn’t whisper. There was one little girl who whispered.

You can’t entrust your voice to the Chinese, either; they want to capture your voice for their own use. They want to x up your tongue to speak for them. “How much less can you sell it for?” we have to say. Talk the Sales Ghosts down. Make them take a loss.

We were working at the laundry when a delivery boy came from the Rexall drugstore around the corner. He had a pale blue box of pills, but nobody was sick. Reading the label we saw that it belonged to another Chinese family, Crazy Mary’s family. “Not ours,” said my father. He pointed out the name to the Delivery Ghost, who took the pills back. My mother muttered for an hour, and then her anger boiled over. “That ghost! That dead ghost! How dare he come to the wrong house?” She could not concentrate on her marking and pressing. “A mistake! Huh!” I was getting angry myself. She fumed. She made her press crash and hiss. “Revenge.

We’ve got to avenge this wrong on our future, on our health, and on our lives. Nobody’s going to sicken my children and get away with it.” We brothers and sisters did not look at one another. She would do something awful, something embarrassing. She’d already been hinting that during the next eclipse we slam pot lids together to scare the frog from swallowing the moon. (The word for “eclipse” is frog-swallowing-the-moon.) When we had not banged lids at the last eclipse and the shadow kept receding anyway, she’d said, “The villagers must be banging and clanging very loudly back home in China.” (“On the other side of the world, they aren’t having an eclipse, Mama. That’s just a shadow the earth makes when it comes between the moon and the sun.”

“You’re always believing what those Ghost Teachers tell you.

Look at the size of the jaws!”) “Aha!” she yelled. “You! The biggest.” She was pointing at me.

“You go to the drugstore.”

“What do you want me to buy, Mother?” I said.

“Buy nothing. Don’t bring one cent. Go and make them stop the curse.”

“I don’t want to go. I don’t know how to do that. There are no such things as curses. They’ll think I’m crazy.”

“If you don’t go, I’m holding you responsible for bringing a plague on this family.”

“What am I supposed to do when I get there?” I said, sullen, trapped. “Do I say, ‘Your delivery boy made a wrong delivery’?”

“They know he made a wrong delivery. I want you to make them rectify their crime.”

I felt sick already. She’d make me swing stinky censers around the counter, at the druggist, at the customers. Throw dog blood on the druggist. I couldn’t stand her plans.

“You get reparation candy,” she said. “You say, ‘You have tainted my house with sick medicine and must remove the curse with sweetness.’ He’ll understand.”

“He didn’t do it on purpose. And no, he won’t, Mother. They don’t understand stu like that. I won’t be able to say it right. He’ll call us beggars.”

“You just translate.” She searched me to make sure I wasn’t hiding any money. I was sneaky and bad enough to buy the candy and come back pretending it was a free gift.

“Mymotherseztagimmesomecandy,” I said to the druggist. Be cute and small. No one hurts the cute and small.

“What? Speak up. Speak English,” he said, big in his white

druggist coat.

“Tatatagimme somecandy.”

The druggist leaned way over the counter and frowned. “Some free candy,” I said. “Sample candy.”

“We don’t give sample candy, young lady,” he said.

“My mother said you have to give us candy. She said that is the

way the Chinese do it.”

“What?”

“That is the way the Chinese do it.”

“Do what?”

“Do things.” I felt the weight and immensity of things impossible

to explain to the druggist.

“Can I give you some money?” he asked.

“No, we want candy.”

He reached into a jar and gave me a handful of lollipops. He gave us candy all year round, year after year, every time we went into the drugstore. When dierent druggists or clerks waited on us, they also gave us candy. They had talked us over. They gave us Halloween candy in December, Christmas candy around Valentine’s day, candy hearts at Easter, and Easter eggs at Halloween. “See?” said our mother. “They understand. You kids just aren’t very brave.”

But I knew they did not understand. They thought we were beggars without a home who lived in back of the laundry. They felt sorry for us. I did not eat their candy. I did not go inside the drugstore or walk past it unless my parents forced me to. Whenever we had a prescription lled, the druggist put candy in the medicine bag. This is what Chinese druggists normally do, except they give raisins. My mother thought she taught the Druggist Ghosts a lesson in good manners (which is the same word as “traditions”).

My mouth went permanently crooked with eort, turned down on the left side and straight on the right. How strange that the emigrant villagers are shouters, hollering face to face. My father asks, “Why is it I can hear Chinese from blocks away? Is it that I understand the language? Or is it they talk loud?” They turn the radio up full blast to hear the operas, which do not seem to hurt their ears. And they yell over the singers that wail over the drums, everybody talking at once, big arm gestures, spit ying. You can see the disgust on American faces looking at women like that. It isn’t just the loudness.

It is the way Chinese sounds, chingchong ugly, to American ears, not beautiful like Japanese sayonara words with the consonants and vowels as regular as Italian. We make guttural peasant noise and have Ton Due Thang names you can’t remember. And the Chinese can’t hear Americans at all; the language is too soft and western

music unhearable. I’ve watched a Chinese audience laugh, visit, talk-story, and holler during a piano recital, as if the musician could not hear them. A Chinese-American, somebody’s son, was playing Chopin, which has no punctuation, no cymbals, no gongs. Chinese piano music is ve black keys. Normal Chinese women’s voices are strong and bossy. We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than the Americans. Once a year the teachers referred my sister and me to speech therapy, but our voices would straighten out, unpredictably normal, for the therapists. Some of us gave up, shook our heads, and said nothing, not one word. Some of us could not even shake our heads. At times shaking my head no is more self- assertion than I can manage. Most of us eventually found some voice, however faltering. We invented an American-feminine speaking personality, except for that one girl who could not speak up even in Chinese school.

She was a year older than I and was in my class for twelve years.

During all those years she read aloud but would not talk. Her older sister was usually beside her; their parents kept the older daughter back to protect the younger one. They were six and seven years old when they began school. Although I had unked kindergarten, I was the same age as most other students in our class; my parents had probably lied about my age, so I had had a head start and came out even. My younger sister was in the class below me; we were normal ages and normally separated. The parents of the quiet girl, on the other hand, protected both daughters. When it sprinkled, they kept them home from school. The girls did not work for a living the way we did. But in other ways we were the same.

We were similar in sports. We held the bat on our shoulders until we walked to rst base. (You got a strike only when you actually struck at the ball.) Sometimes the pitcher wouldn’t bother to throw to us. “Automatic walk,” the other children would call, sending us on our way. By fourth or fth grade, though, some of us would try to hit the ball. “Easy out,” the other kids would say. I hit the ball a couple of times. Baseball was nice in that there was a denite spot

to run to after hitting the ball. Basketball confused me because when I caught the ball I didn’t know whom to throw it to. “Me. Me,” the kids would be yelling. “Over here.” Suddenly it would occur to me I hadn’t memorized which ghosts were on my team and which were on the other. When the kids said, “Automatic walk,” the girl who was quieter than I kneeled with one end of the bat in each hand and placed it carefully on the plate. Then she dusted her hands as she walked to rst base, where she rubbed her hands softly, ngers spread. She always got tagged out before second base. She would whisper-read but not talk. Her whisper was as soft as if she had no muscles. She seemed to be breathing from a distance. I heard no anger or tension.

I joined in at lunchtime when the other students, the Chinese too, talked about whether or not she was mute, although obviously she was not if she could read aloud. People told how they had tried their best to be friendly. They said hello, but if she refused to answer, well, they didn’t see why they had to say hello anymore. She had no friends of her own but followed her sister everywhere, although people and she herself probably thought I was her friend. I also followed her sister about, who was fairly normal. She was almost two years older and read more than anyone else.

I hated the younger sister, the quiet one. I hated her when she was the last chosen for her team and I, the last chosen for my team.

I hated her for her China doll hair cut. I hated her at music time for the wheezes that came out of her plastic ute.

One afternoon in the sixth grade (that year I was arrogant with talk, not knowing there were going to be high school dances and college seminars to set me back), I and my little sister and the quiet girl and her big sister stayed late after school for some reason. The cement was cooling, and the tetherball poles made shadows across the gravel. The hooks at the rope ends were clinking against the poles. We shouldn’t have been so late; there was laundry work to do and Chinese school to get to by 5:00. The last time we had stayed late, my mother had phoned the police and told them we had been kidnapped by bandits. The radio stations broadcast our descriptions.

I had to get home before she did that again. But sometimes if you loitered long enough in the schoolyard, the other children would have gone home and you could play with the equipment before the oce took it away. We were chasing one another through the playground and in and out of the basement, where the playroom and lavatory were. During air raid drills (it was during the Korean War, which you knew about because every day the front page of the newspaper printed a map of Korea with the top part red and going up and down like a window shade), we curled up in this basement.

Now everyone was gone. The playroom was army green and had nothing in it but a long trough with drinking spigots in rows. Pipes across the ceiling led to the drinking fountains and to the toilets in the next room. When someone ushed you could hear the water and other matter, which the children named, running inside the big pipe above the drinking spigots. There was one playroom for girls next to the girls’ lavatory and one playroom for boys next to the boys’ lavatory. The stalls were open and the toilets had no lids, by which we knew that ghosts have no sense of shame or privacy.

Inside the playroom the lightbulbs in cages had already been turned o. Daylight came in x-patterns through the caging at the windows. I looked out and, seeing no one in the schoolyard, ran outside to climb the re escape upside down, hanging on to the metal stairs with ngers and toes.

I did a ip o the re escape and ran across the schoolyard. The day was a great eye, and it was not paying much attention to me now. I could disappear with the sun; I could turn quickly sideways and slip into a dierent world. It seemed I could run faster at this time, and by evening I would be able to y. As the afternoon wore on we could run into the forbidden places—the boys’ big yard, the boys’ playroom. We could go into the boys’ lavatory and look at the urinals. The only time during school hours I had crossed the boys’ yard was when a atbed truck with a giant thing covered with canvas and tied down with ropes had parked across the street. The children had told one another that it was a gorilla in captivity; we couldn’t decide whether the sign said “Trail of the Gorilla” or “Trial

of the Gorilla.” The thing was as big as a house. The teachers couldn’t stop us from hysterically rushing to the fence and clinging to the wire mesh. Now I ran across the boys’ yard clear to the Cyclone fence and thought about the hair that I had seen sticking out of the canvas. It was going to be summer soon, so you could feel that freedom coming on too.

I ran back into the girls’ yard, and there was the quiet sister all by herself. I ran past her, and she followed me into the girls’ lavatory.

My footsteps rang hard against cement and tile because of the taps I had nailed into my shoes. Her footsteps were soft, padding after me.

There was no one in the lavatory but the two of us. I ran all around the rows of twenty-ve open stalls to make sure of that. No sisters. I think we must have been playing hide-and-go-seek. She was not good at hiding by herself and usually followed her sister; they’d hide in the same place. They must have gotten separated. In this growing twilight, a child could hide and never be found.

I stopped abruptly in front of the sinks, and she came running toward me before she could stop herself, so that she almost collided with me. I walked closer. She backed away, puzzlement, then alarm in her eyes.

“You’re going to talk,” I said, my voice steady and normal, as it is when talking to the familiar, the weak, and the small. “I am going to make you talk, you sissy-girl.” She stopped backing away and stood xed.

I looked into her face so I could hate it close up. She wore black bangs, and her cheeks were pink and white. She was baby soft. I thought that I could put my thumb on her nose and push it bonelessly in, indent her face. I could poke dimples into her cheeks.

I could work her face around like dough. She stood still, and I did not want to look at her face anymore; I hated fragility. I walked around her, looked her up and down the way the Mexican and Negro girls did when they fought, so tough. I hated her weak neck, the way it did not support her head but let it droop; her head would fall backward. I stared at the curve of her nape. I wished I was able to see what my own neck looked like from the back and sides. I

hoped it did not look like hers; I wanted a stout neck. I grew my hair long to hide it in case it was a ower-stem neck. I walked around to the front of her to hate her face some more.

I reached up and took the fatty part of her cheek, not dough, but meat, between my thumb and nger. This close, and I saw no pores.

“Talk,” I said. “Are you going to talk?” Her skin was eshy, like squid out of which the glassy blades of bones had been pulled. I wanted tough skin, hard brown skin. I had callused my hands; I had scratched dirt to blacken the nails, which I cut straight across to make stubby ngers. I gave her face a squeeze. “Talk.” When I let go, the pink rushed back into my white thumbprint on her skin. I walked around to her side. “Talk!” I shouted into the side of her head. Her straight hair hung, the same all these years, no ringlets or braids or permanents. I squeezed her other cheek. “Are you? Huh?

Are you going to talk?” She tried to shake her head, but I had hold of her face. She had no muscles to jerk away. Her skin seemed to stretch. I let go in horror. What if it came away in my hand? “No, huh?” I said, rubbing the touch of her o my ngers. “Say ‘No,’ then,” I said. I gave her another pinch and a twist. “Say ‘No.’” She shook her head, her straight hair turning with her head, not swinging side to side like the pretty girls’. She was so neat. Her neatness bothered me. I hated the way she folded the wax paper from her lunch; she did not wad her brown paper bag and her school papers. I hated her clothes—the blue pastel cardigan, the white blouse with the collar that lay at over the cardigan, the homemade at, cotton skirt she wore when everybody else was wearing ared skirts. I hated pastels; I would wear black always. I squeezed again, harder, even though her cheek had a weak rubbery feeling I did not like. I squeezed one cheek, then the other, back and forth until the tears ran out of her eyes as if I had pulled them out.

“Stop crying,” I said, but although she habitually followed me around, she did not obey. Her eyes dripped; her nose dripped. She wiped her eyes with her papery ngers. The skin on her hands and arms seemed powdery-dry, like tracing paper, onion skin. I hated her ngers. I could snap them like breadsticks. I pushed her hands

down. “Say ‘Hi,’” I said. “‘Hi.’ Like that. Say your name. Go ahead.

Say it. Or are you stupid? You’re so stupid, you don’t know your own name, is that it? When I say, ‘What’s your name?’ you just blurt it out, o.k.? What’s your name?” Last year the whole class had laughed at a boy who couldn’t ll out a form because he didn’t know his father’s name. The teacher sighed, exasperated, and was very sarcastic, “Don’t you notice things? What does your mother call him?” she said. The class laughed at how dumb he was not to notice things. “She calls him father of me,” he said. Even we laughed, although we knew that his mother did not call his father by name, and a son does not know his father’s name. We laughed and were relieved that our parents had had the foresight to tell us some names we could give the teachers. “If you’re not stupid,” I said to the quiet girl, “what’s your name?” She shook her head, and some hair caught in the tears; wet black hair stuck to the side of the pink and white face. I reached up (she was taller than I) and took a strand of hair. I pulled it. “Well, then, let’s honk your hair,” I said.

“Honk. Honk.” Then I pulled the other side—“ho-o-n-nk”—a long pull; “ho-o-n-n-nk”—a longer pull. I could see her little white ears, like white cutworms curled underneath the hair. “Talk!” I yelled into each cutworm.

I looked right at her. “I know you talk,” I said. “I’ve heard you.”

Her eyebrows ew up. Something in those black eyes was startled, and I pursued it. “I was walking past your house when you didn’t know I was there. I heard you yell in English and in Chinese. You weren’t just talking. You were shouting. I heard you shout. You were saying, ‘Where are you?’ Say that again. Go ahead, just the way you did at home.” I yanked harder on the hair, but steadily, not jerking. I did not want to pull it out. “Go ahead. Say, ‘Where are you?’ Say it loud enough for your sister to come. Call her. Make her come help you. Call her name. I’ll stop if she comes. So call. Go ahead.”

She shook her head, her mouth curved down, crying. I could see her tiny white teeth, baby teeth. I wanted to grow big strong yellow teeth. “You do have a tongue,” I said. “So use it.” I pulled the hair at

her temples, pulled the tears out of her eyes. “Say, ‘Ow,’” I said.

“Just ‘Ow.’ Say, ‘Let go.’ Go ahead. Say it. I’ll honk you again if you don’t say, ‘Let me alone.’ Say, ‘Leave me alone,’ and I’ll let you go. I will. I’ll let go if you say it. You can stop this anytime you want to, you know. All you have to do is tell me to stop. Just say, ‘Stop.’ You’re just asking for it, aren’t you? You’re just asking for another honk. Well then, I’ll have to give you another honk. Say, ‘Stop.’” But she didn’t. I had to pull again and again.

Sounds did come out of her mouth, sobs, chokes, noises that were almost words. Snot ran out of her nose. She tried to wipe it on her hands, but there was too much of it. She used her sleeve. “You’re disgusting,” I told her. “Look at you, snot streaming down your nose, and you won’t say a word to stop it. You’re such a nothing.” I moved behind her and pulled the hair growing out of her weak neck. I let go. I stood silent for a long time. Then I screamed, “Talk!”

I would scare the words out of her. If she had had little bound feet, the toes twisted under the balls, I would have jumped up and landed on them—crunch!—stomped on them with my iron shoes. She cried hard, sobbing aloud. “Cry, ‘Mama,’” I said. “Come on. Cry, ‘Mama.’ Say, ‘Stop it.’”

I put my nger on her pointed chin. “I don’t like you. I don’t like the weak little toots you make on your ute. Wheeze. Wheeze. I don’t like the way you don’t swing at the ball. I don’t like the way you’re the last one chosen. I don’t like the way you can’t make a st for tetherball. Why don’t you make a st? Come on. Get tough.

Come on. Throw sts.” I pushed at her long hands; they swung limply at her sides. Her ngers were so long, I thought maybe they had an extra joint. They couldn’t possibly make sts like other people’s. “Make a st,” I said. “Come on. Just fold those ngers up; ngers on the inside, thumbs on the outside. Say something. Honk me back. You’re so tall, and you let me pick on you.

“Would you like a hanky? I can’t get you one with embroidery on it or crocheting along the edges, but I’ll get you some toilet paper if you tell me to. Go ahead. Ask me. I’ll get it for you if you ask.” She did not stop crying. “Why don’t you scream, ‘Help’?” I suggested.

“Say, ‘Help.’ Go ahead.” She cried on. “O.K. O.K. Don’t talk. Just scream, and I’ll let you go. Won’t that feel good? Go ahead. Like this.” I screamed, not too loudly. My voice hit the tile and rang it as if I had thrown a rock at it. The stalls opened wider and the toilets wider and darker. Shadows leaned at angles I had not seen before. It was very late. Maybe a janitor had locked me in with this girl for the night. Her black eyes blinked and stared, blinked and stared. I felt dizzy from hunger. We had been in this lavatory together forever. My mother would call the police again if I didn’t bring my sister home soon. “I’ll let you go if you say just one word,” I said.

“You can even say, ‘a’ or ‘the,’ and I’ll let you go. Come on. Please.”

She didn’t shake her head anymore, only cried steadily, so much water coming out of her. I could see the two duct holes where the tears welled out. Quarts of tears but no words. I grabbed her by the shoulder. I could feel bones. The light was coming in queerly through the frosted glass with the chicken wire embedded in it. Her crying was like an animal’s—a seal’s—and it echoed around the basement. “Do you want to stay here all night?” I asked. “Your mother is wondering what happened to her baby. You wouldn’t want to have her mad at you. You’d better say something.” I shook her shoulder. I pulled her hair again. I squeezed her face. “Come on!

Talk! Talk! Talk!” She didn’t seem to feel it anymore when I pulled her hair. “There’s nobody here but you and me. This isn’t a classroom or a playground or a crowd. I’m just one person. You can talk in front of one person. Don’t make me pull harder and harder until you talk.” But her hair seemed to stretch; she did not say a word. “I’m going to pull harder. Don’t make me pull anymore, or your hair will come out and you’re going to be bald. Do you want to be bald? You don’t want to be bald, do you?”

Far away, coming from the edge of town, I heard whistles blow.

The cannery was changing shifts, letting out the afternoon people, and still we were here at school. It was a sad sound—work done.

The air was lonelier after the sound died.

“Why won’t you talk?” I started to cry. What if I couldn’t stop, and everyone would want to know what happened? “Now look what

you’ve done,” I scolded. “You’re going to pay for this. I want to know why. And you’re going to tell me why. You don’t see I’m trying to help you out, do you? Do you want to be like this, dumb (do you know what dumb means?), your whole life? Don’t you ever want to be a cheerleader? Or a pompon girl? What are you going to do for a living? Yeah, you’re going to have to work because you can’t be a housewife. Somebody has to marry you before you can be a housewife. And you, you are a plant. Do you know that? That’s all you are if you don’t talk. If you don’t talk, you can’t have a personality. You’ll have no personality and no hair. You’ve got to let people know you have a personality and a brain. You think somebody is going to take care of you all your stupid life? You think you’ll always have your big sister? You think somebody’s going to marry you, is that it? Well, you’re not the type that gets dates, let alone gets married. Nobody’s going to notice you. And you have to talk for interviews, speak right up in front of the boss. Don’t you know that? You’re so dumb. Why do I waste my time on you?”

Sniing and snorting, I couldn’t stop crying and talking at the same time. I kept wiping my nose on my arm, my sweater lost somewhere (probably not worn because my mother said to wear a sweater). It seemed as if I had spent my life in that basement, doing the worst thing I had yet done to another person. “I’m doing this for your own good,” I said. “Don’t you dare tell anyone I’ve been bad to you. Talk.

Please talk.”

I was getting dizzy from the air I was gulping. Her sobs and my sobs were bouncing wildly o the tile, sometimes together, sometimes alternating. “I don’t understand why you won’t say just one word,” I cried, clenching my teeth. My knees were shaking, and I hung on to her hair to stand up. Another time I’d stayed too late, I had had to walk around two Negro kids who were bonking each other’s head on the concrete. I went back later to see if the concrete had cracks in it. “Look. I’ll give you something if you talk. I’ll give you my pencil box. I’ll buy you some candy. O.K.? What do you want? Tell me. Just say it, and I’ll give it to you. Just say, ‘yes,’ or, ‘O.K.,’ or, ‘Baby Ruth.’” But she didn’t want anything.

I had stopped pinching her cheek because I did not like the feel of her skin. I would go crazy if it came away in my hands. “I skinned her,” I would have to confess.

Suddenly I heard footsteps hurrying through the basement, and her sister ran into the lavatory calling her name. “Oh, there you are,” I said. “We’ve been waiting for you. I was only trying to teach her to talk. She wouldn’t cooperate, though.” Her sister went into one of the stalls and got handfuls of toilet paper and wiped her o.

Then we found my sister, and we walked home together. “Your family really ought to force her to speak,” I advised all the way home. “You mustn’t pamper her.”

The world is sometimes just, and I spent the next eighteen months sick in bed with a mysterious illness. There was no pain and no symptoms, though the middle line in my left palm broke in two.

Instead of starting junior high school, I lived like the Victorian recluses I read about. I had a rented hospital bed in the living room, where I watched soap operas on t.v., and my family cranked me up and down. I saw no one but my family, who took good care of me. I could have no visitors, no other relatives, no villagers. My bed was against the west window, and I watched the seasons change the peach tree. I had a bell to ring for help. I used a bedpan. It was the best year and a half of my life. Nothing happened.

But one day my mother, the doctor, said, “You’re ready to get up today. It’s time to get up and go to school.” I walked about outside to get my legs working, leaning on a sta I cut from the peach tree.

The sky and trees, the sun were immense—no longer framed by a window, no longer grayed with a y screen. I sat down on the sidewalk in amazement—the night, the stars. But at school I had to gure out again how to talk. I met again the poor girl I had tormented. She had not changed. She wore the same clothes, hair cut, and manner as when we were in elementary school, no make-up on the pink and white face, while the other Asian girls were starting to tape their eyelids. She continued to be able to read aloud. But there was hardly any reading aloud anymore, less and less as we got into high school.

I was wrong about nobody taking care of her. Her sister became a clerk-typist and stayed unmarried. They lived with their mother and father. She did not have to leave the house except to go to the movies. She was supported. She was protected by her family, as they would normally have done in China if they could have aorded it, not sent o to school with strangers, ghosts, boys.

We have so many secrets to hold in. Our sixth grade teacher, who liked to explain things to children, let us read our les. My record shows that I unked kindergarten and in rst grade had no IQ—a zero IQ. I did remember the rst grade teacher calling out during a test, while students marked X’s on a girl or a boy or a dog, which I covered with black. First grade was when I discovered eye control; with my seeing I could shrink the teacher down to a height of one inch, gesticulating and mouthing on the horizon. I lost this power in sixth grade for lack of practice, the teacher a generous man. “Look at your family’s old addresses and think about how you’ve moved,” he said. I looked at my parents’ aliases and their birthdays, which variants I knew. But when I saw Father’s occupations I exclaimed, “Hey, he wasn’t a farmer, he was a…” He had been a gambler. My throat cut o the word—silence in front of the most understanding teacher. There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China.

Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese. “Don’t tell,” said my parents, though we couldn’t tell if we wanted to because we didn’t know.

Are there really secret trials with our own judges and penalties? Are there really ags in Chinatown signaling what stowaways have arrived in San Francisco Bay, their names, and which ships they came on? “Mother, I heard some kids say there are ags like that.

Are there? What colors are they? Which buildings do they y from?”

“No. No, there aren’t any ags like that. They’re just talking-story.

You’re always believing talk-story.”

“I won’t tell anybody, Mother. I promise. Which buildings are the ags on? Who ies them? The benevolent associations?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the San Francisco villagers do that; our

villagers don’t do that.”

“What do our villagers do?”

They would not tell us children because we had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts, and were ourselves ghost-like. They called us a kind of ghost. Ghosts are noisy and full of air; they talk during meals. They talk about anything.

“Do we send up signal kites? That would be a good idea, huh? We could y them from the school balcony.” Instead of cheaply stringing dragonies by the tail, we could y expensive kites, the sky splendid in Chinese colors, distracting ghost eyes while the new people sneak in. Don’t tell. “Never tell.”

Occasionally the rumor went about that the United States immigration authorities had set up headquarters in the San Francisco or Sacramento Chinatown to urge wetbacks and stowaways, anybody here on fake papers, to come to the city and get their les straightened out. The immigrants discussed whether or not to turn themselves in. “We might as well,” somebody would say. “Then we’d have our citizenship for real.”

“Don’t be a fool,” somebody else would say. “It’s a trap. You go in there saying you want to straighten out your papers, they’ll deport you.”

“No, they won’t. They’re promising that nobody is going to go to jail or get deported. They’ll give you citizenship as a reward for turning yourself in, for your honesty.”

“Don’t you believe it. So-and-so trusted them, and he was deported. They deported his children too.”

“Where can they send us now? Hong Kong? Taiwan? I’ve never been to Hong Kong or Taiwan. The Big Six? Where?” We don’t belong anywhere since the Revolution. The old China has disappeared while we’ve been away.

“Don’t tell,” advised my parents. “Don’t go to San Francisco until they leave.”

Lie to Americans. Tell them you were born during the San Francisco earthquake. Tell them your birth certicate and your parents were burned up in the re. Don’t report crimes; tell them we have no crimes and no poverty. Give a new name every time you get arrested; the ghosts won’t recognize you. Pay the new immigrants twenty-ve cents an hour and say we have no unemployment. And, of course, tell them we’re against Communism. Ghosts have no memory anyway and poor eyesight. And the Han people won’t be pinned down.

Even the good things are unspeakable, so how could I ask about deformities? From the congurations of food my mother set out, we kids had to infer the holidays. She did not whip us up with holiday anticipation or explain. You only remembered that perhaps a year ago you had eaten monk’s food, or that there was meat, and it was a meat holiday; or you had eaten moon cakes or long noodles for long life (which is a pun). In front of the whole chicken with its slit throat toward the ceiling, she’d lay out just so many pairs of chopsticks alternating with wine cups, which were not for us because there were a dierent number from the number in our family, and they were set too close together for us to sit at. To sit at one of those place settings a being would have to be about two inches wide, a tall wisp of an invisibility. Mother would pour Seagram’s 7 into the cups and, after a while, pour it back into the bottle. Never explaining. How can Chinese keep any traditions at all? They don’t even make you pay attention, slipping in a ceremony and clearing the table before the children notice specialness. The adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask. You get no warning that you shouldn’t wear a white ribbon in your hair until they hit you and give you the sideways glare for the rest of the day.

They hit you if you wave brooms around or drop chopsticks or drum them. They hit you if you wash your hair on certain days, or tap somebody with a ruler, or step over a brother whether it’s during your menses or not. You gure out what you got hit for and don’t do it again if you gured correctly. But I think that if you don’t gure it out, it’s all right. Then you can grow up bothered by “neither ghosts

nor deities.” “Gods you avoid won’t hurt you.” I don’t see how they kept up a continuous culture for ve thousand years. Maybe they didn’t; maybe everyone makes it up as they go along. If we had to depend on being told, we’d have no religion, no babies, no menstruation (sex, of course, unspeakable), no death.

I thought talking and not talking made the dierence between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain themselves. There were many crazy girls and women.

Perhaps the sane people stayed in China to build the new, sane society. Or perhaps our little village had become odd in its isolation.

No other Chinese, neither the ones in Sacramento, nor the ones in San Francisco, nor Hawaii speak like us. Within a few blocks of our house were half a dozen crazy women and girls, all belonging to village families.

There was the woman next door who was chatty one moment— inviting us children to our rst “sky movie”—and shut up the next.

Then we would see silver heat rise from her body; it solidied before our eyes. She made us afraid, though she said nothing, did nothing. Her husband threw the loudspeaker out the window and drove home fast in the middle of the show. She sat like stone in the front seat; he had to open the door for her and help her out. She slammed the door. After they went inside, we could hear doors slamming throughout their house. They did not have children, so it was not children slamming doors. The next day, she disappeared, and people would say she had been taken to Napa or Agnew. When a woman disappeared or reappeared after an absence, people whispered, “Napa.” “Agnew.” She had been locked up before. Her husband rented out the house and also went away. The last time he had left town, he had been single. He had gone back to China, where he had bought her and married her. Now while she was locked up in the asylum, he went, people said, to the Midwest. A year or two passed. He returned to Napa to drive her home. As a present, he had brought with him from the Midwest a child, half Chinese and half white. People said it was his illegitimate son. She was very happy to have a son to raise in her old age, although I saw

that the boy hit her to get candy and toys. She was the one who died happy, sitting on the steps after cooking dinner.

There was Crazy Mary, whose family were Christian converts. Her mother and father had come to the Gold Mountain leaving Mary, a toddler, in China. By the time they made enough money to send for her, having replaced the horse and vegetable wagon with a truck, she was almost twenty and crazy. Her parents often said, “We thought she’d be grown but young enough to learn English and translate for us.” Their other children, who were born in the U.S., were normal and could translate. I was glad that I was born nine months after my mother emigrated. Crazy Mary was a large girl and had a big black mole on her face, which is a sign of fortune. The black mole pulls you forward with its power; a mole at the back of the head pulls you back. She seemed cheerful, but pointed at things that were not there. I disliked looking at her; you never knew what you were going to see, what rictus would shape her face. Or what you would hear—growls, laughs. Her head hung like a bull’s, and her eyes peeked at you out of her hair. Her face was a white blur because she was indoors so much and also because I tried not to look at her directly. She often had rice on her face and in her hair.

Her mother cut her hair neatly around her ears, stubble at the back of her neck. She wore pajamas, a rough brown sweater buttoned crooked, and a big apron, not a work apron but a bib. She wore slippers, and you could see her thick ankles naked, her naked heels and tendons. When you went to her house, you had to keep alert because you didn’t want her to come at you from around a corner, her hands loose. She would lurch out of dark corners; houses with crazy girls have locked rooms and drawn curtains. A smell came from her which would not have been unpleasant had it belonged to someone else. The house smelled of her, camphoraceous. Maybe they tied camphor on her pulse to cure her. Our mother used to tie dried prunes stued with camphor to our wrists. We got very embarrassed at school when the rags came loose and their contents fell out in clumps and grains. Crazy Mary did not improve, and so

she too was locked up in the crazyhouse. She was never released.

Her family said she liked it there.

There was a slough where our mother took us to pick orange berries. We carried them home in pots and bags to cook in an egg soup. It was not a wild slough, although tules, cattails and foxtails still grew, also dill, and yellow chamomile, fat and fuzzy as bees.

People had been known to have followed the hobo paths and parted the tall stalks to nd dead bodies—hobos, Chinese suicides, children. Red-winged blackbirds, whose shoulders were the same color as the berries, perched on a wood bridge, really a train trestle.

When a train heaved across it, the black steam engine swollen to bursting like the boiler at the laundry, the birds ew up like Halloween.

We were not the only people who picked in the slough; a witch woman also went there. One of my brothers named her Pee-A-Nah, which does not have a meaning. Of all the crazy ladies, she was the one who was the village idiot, the public one. When our mother was with us, she would chase the witchwoman away. We’d stand beside and behind our mother, who would say to her, “Leave us alone now” or “Good morning,” and Pee-A-Nah would go away. But when we were by ourselves, she chased us. “Pee-A-Nah!” we’d scream.

We’d run, terried, along the hobo paths, over the trestle, and through the streets. Kids said she was a witch capable of witch deeds, unspeakable boilings and tearings apart and transformations if she caught us. “She’ll touch you on the shoulder, and you’ll not be you anymore. You’d be a piece of glass winking and blinking to people on the sidewalk.” She came riding to the slough with a broom between her legs, and she had powdered one cheek red and one white. Her hair stood up and out to the sides in dry masses, black even though she was old. She wore a pointed hat and layers of capes, shawls, sweaters buttoned at the throat like capes, the sleeves ying behind like sausage skins. She came to the slough not to harvest the useful herbs and berries the way we did, but to collect armfuls of cattails and tall grasses and tuber owers. Sometimes she carried her broomstick horse like a sta. In the fall (she would be

such a sight in the fall) she ran “faster than a swallow,” her cattails popping seed, white seed pus blowing after her, clouds of fairies dancing over her head. She streamed color and apped in layers.

She was an angry witch, not a happy one. She was erce; not a fairy, after all, but a demon. She did run fast, as fast as a child, although she was a wrinkled woman, an outburst that jumped at us from bushes, between cars, between buildings. We children vowed that we would never run home if she came after one of us. No matter what she did to us, we had to run in the opposite direction from home. We didn’t want her to know where we lived. If we couldn’t outrun her and lose her, we’d die alone. Once she spotted my sister in our yard, opened the gate, and chased her up the stairs.

My sister screamed and cried, banging on the door. Our mother let her in quickly, looking frightened as she fumbled at the latches to lock out Pee-A-Nah. My sister had to be chanted out of her screaming. It was a good thing Pee-A-Nah had a short memory because she did not nd our house again. Sometimes when a bunch of tules and reeds and grasses mixed and blew and waved, I was terried that it was she, that she was carrying them or parting them.

One day we realized that we had not seen her for a while. We forgot her, never seeing her again. She had probably been locked up in the crazyhouse too.

I had invented a quill pen out of a peacock feather, but stopped writing with it when I saw that it waved like a one-eyed slough plant.

I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be It at our house? Probably me.

My sister did not start talking among nonfamily until a year after I started, but she was neat while I was messy, my hair tangled and dusty. My dirty hands broke things. Also I had had the mysterious illness. And there were adventurous people inside my head to whom I talked. With them I was frivolous and violent, orphaned. I was white and had red hair, and I rode a white horse. Once when I realized how often I went away to see these free movies, I asked my sister, just checking to see if hearing voices in motors and seeing

cowboy movies on blank walls was normal, I asked, “Uh,” trying to be casual, “do you talk to people that aren’t real inside your mind?”

“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 aected 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 ve-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 nally 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 x 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 nding 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 o. Even the fool half ghosts won’t have her.” So I discovered the next plan to get rid of us: marry us o 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 overowing 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 are 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 recrackers. “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 nd 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-o-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 o 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 rst,” 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 oor. 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 aps and apped 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 ngers opening and closing; his legs sti 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 gure 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 lled with toys?

With money? When the toilet ushed, 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 stued 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 nd out about women.” I heard the old women talk about how he was stupid but very rich.

Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat. When I rst started counting, I had had only thirty-six items: how I had prayed for a white horse of my own —white, the bad, mournful color—and prayer bringing me to the attention of the god of the black-and-white nuns who gave us “holy cards” in the park. How I wanted the horse to start the movies in my mind coming true. How I had picked on a girl and made her cry.

How I had stolen from the cash register and bought candy for everybody I knew, not just brothers and sisters, but strangers too and ghost children. How it was me who pulled up the onions in the garden out of anger. How I had jumped head-rst o the dresser, not accidentally, but so I could y. Then there were my ghts at Chinese school. And the nuns who kept stopping us in the park, which was across the street from Chinese school, to tell us that if we didn’t get baptized we’d go to a hell like one of the nine Taoist hells forever. And the obscene caller that phoned us at home when the adults were at the laundry. And the Mexican and Filipino girls at school who went to “confession,” and how I envied them their white dresses and their chance each Saturday to tell even thoughts that were sinful. If only I could let my mother know the list, she—and the world—would become more like me, and I would never be alone again. I would pick a time of day when my mother was alone and tell her one item a day; I’d be nished in less than a year. If the telling got excruciating and her anger too bad, I’d tell ve items once a week like the Catholic girls, and I’d still be through in a year, maybe ten months. My mother’s most peaceful time was in the evenings when she starched the white shirts. The laundry would be clean, the gray wood oors sprinkled and swept with water and wet sawdust. She would be wringing shirts at the starch tub and not running about. My father and sisters and brothers would be at their own jobs mending, folding, packaging. Steam would be rising from the starch, the air cool at last. Yes, that would be the time and place for the telling.

And I wanted to ask again why the women in our family have a split nail on our left little toe. Whenever we asked our parents about it, they would glance at each other, embarrassed. I think I’ve heard one of them say, “She didn’t get away.” I made up that we are descended from an ancestress who stubbed her toe and fell when running from a rapist. I wanted to ask my mother if I had guessed right.

I hunkered down between the wall and the wicker basket of shirts. I had decided to start with the earliest item—when I had smashed a spider against the white side of the house: it was the rst thing I killed. I said, clearly, “I killed a spider,” and it was nothing; she did not hit me or throw hot starch at me. It sounded like nothing to me too. How strange when I had had such feelings of death shoot through my hand and into my body so that I would surely die. So I had to continue, of course, and let her know how important it had been. “I returned every day to look at its smear on the side of the house,” I said. “It was our old house, the one we lived in until I was ve. I went to the wall every day to look. I studied the stain.” Relieved because she said nothing but only continued squeezing the starch, I went away feeling pretty good.

Just two hundred and six more items to go. I moved carefully all the next day so as not to do anything or have anything happen to me that would make me go back to two hundred and seven again. I’d tell a couple of easy ones and work up to how I had pulled the quiet girl’s hair and how I had enjoyed the year being sick. If it was going to be this easy, maybe I could blurt out several a day, maybe an easy one and a hard one. I could go chronologically, or I could work from easy to hard or hard to easy, depending on my mood. On the second night I talked about how I had hinted to a ghost girl that I wished I had a doll of my own until she gave me a head and body to glue together—that she hadn’t given it to me of her own generosity but because I had hinted. But on the fth night (I skipped two to reward myself) I decided it was time to do a really hard one and tell her about the white horse. And suddenly the duck voice came out, which I did not use with the family. “What’s it called, Mother”—the

duck voice coming out talking to my own mother—“when a person whispers to the head of the sages—no, not the sages, more like the buddhas but not real people like the buddhas (they’ve always lived in the sky and never turned into people like the buddhas)—and you whisper to them, the boss of them, and ask for things? They’re like magicians? What do you call it when you talk to the boss magician?”

“‘Talking-to-the-top-magician,’ I guess.”

“I did that. Yes. That’s it. That’s what I did. I talked-to-the-top- magician and asked for a white horse.” There. Said.

“Mm,” she said, squeezing the starch out of the collar and cus.

But I had talked, and she acted as if she hadn’t heard.

Perhaps she hadn’t understood. I had to be more explicit. I hated this. “I kneeled on the bed in there, in the laundry bedroom, and put my arms up like I saw in a comic book”—one night I heard monsters coming through the kitchen, and I had promised the god in the movies, the one the Mexicans and Filipinos have, as in “God Bless America,” that I would not read comic books anymore if he would save me just this once; I had broken that promise, and I needed to tell all this to my mother too—“and in that ludicrous position asked for a horse.”

“Mm,” she said, nodded, and kept dipping and squeezing.

On my two nights o, I had sat on the oor too but had not said a

word.

“Mother,” I whispered and quacked.

“I can’t stand this whispering,” she said looking right at me, stopping her squeezing. “Senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop. Go away and work. Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don’t feel like hearing your craziness.”

So I had to stop, relieved in some ways. I shut my mouth, but I felt something alive tearing at my throat, bite by bite, from the inside. Soon there would be three hundred things, and too late to get them out before my mother grew old and died.

I had probably interrupted her in the middle of her own quiet time when the boiler and presses were o and the cool night ew against the windows in moths and crickets. Very few customers came in. Starching the shirts for the next day’s pressing was probably my mother’s time to ride o with the people in her own mind. That would explain why she was so far away and did not want to listen to me. “Leave me alone,” she said.

The hulk, the hunching sitter, brought a third box now, to rest his feet on. He patted his boxes. He sat in wait, hunching on his pile of dirt. My throat hurt constantly, vocal cords taut to snapping. One night when the laundry was so busy that the whole family was eating dinner there, crowded around the little round table, my throat burst open. I stood up, talking and burbling. I looked directly at my mother and at my father and screamed, “I want you to tell that hulk, that gorilla-ape, to go away and never bother us again. I know what you’re up to. You’re thinking he’s rich, and we’re poor.

You think we’re odd and not pretty and we’re not bright. You think you can give us away to freaks. You better not do that, Mother. I don’t want to see him or his dirty boxes here tomorrow. If I see him here one more time, I’m going away. I’m going away anyway. I am.

Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I’m not, I’m not retarded. There’s nothing wrong with my brain. Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I’m smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I’ve already applied. I’m smart. I can do all kinds of things. I know how to get A’s, and they say I could be a scientist or a mathematician if I want. I can make a living and take care of myself. So you don’t have to nd me a keeper who’s too dumb to know a bad bargain. I’m so smart, if they say write ten pages, I can write fteen. I can do ghost things even better than ghosts can. Not everybody thinks I’m nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife. Even if I am stupid and talk funny and get sick, I won’t let you turn me into a slave or a wife. I’m getting out of here. I can’t stand living here anymore. It’s

your fault I talk weird. The only reason I unked kindergarten was because you couldn’t teach me English, and you gave me a zero IQ.

I’ve brought my IQ up, though. They say I’m smart now. Things follow in lines at school. They take stories and teach us to turn them into essays. I don’t need anybody to pronounce English words for me. I can gure them out by myself. I’m going to get scholarships, and I’m going away. And at college I’ll have the people I like for friends. I don’t care if their great-greatgrandfather died of TB. I don’t care if they were our enemies in China four thousand years ago. So get that ape out of here. I’m going to college. And I’m not going to Chinese school anymore. I’m going to run for oce at American school, and I’m going to join clubs. I’m going to get enough oces and clubs on my record to get into college. And I can’t stand Chinese school anyway; the kids are rowdy and mean, ghting all night. And I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won’t tell me a story and then say, ‘This is a true story,’ or, ‘This is just a story.’ I can’t tell the dierence. I don’t even know what your real names are. I can’t tell what’s real and what you make up. Ha! You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut o my tongue, but it didn’t work.” So I told the hardest ten or twelve things on my list all in one outburst.

My mother, who is champion talker, was, of course, shouting at the same time. “I cut it to make you talk more, not less, you dummy. You’re still stupid. You can’t listen right. I didn’t say I was going to marry you o. Did I ever say that? Did I ever mention that?

Those newspaper people were for your sister, not you. Who would want you? Who said we could sell you? We can’t sell people. Can’t you take a joke? You can’t even tell a joke from real life. You’re not so smart. Can’t even tell real from false.”

“I’m never getting married, never!”

“Who’d want to marry you anyway? Noisy. Talking like a duck.

Disobedient. Messy. And I know about college. What makes you think you’re the rst one to think about college? I was a doctor. I

went to medical school. I don’t see why you have to be a mathematician. I don’t see why you can’t be a doctor like me.”

“I can’t stand fever and delirium or listening to people coming out of anesthesia. But I didn’t say I wanted to be a mathematician either. That’s what the ghosts say. I want to be a lumberjack and a newspaper reporter.” Might as well tell her some of the other items on my list. “I’m going to chop down trees in the daytime and write about timber at night.”

“I don’t see why you need to go to college at all to become either one of those things. Everybody else is sending their girls to typing school. ‘Learn to type if you want to be an American girl.’ Why don’t you go to typing school? The cousins and village girls are going to typing school.”

“And you leave my sister alone. You try that with the advertising again, and I’ll take her with me.” My telling list was scrambled out of order. When I said them out loud I saw that some of the items were ten years old already, and I had outgrown them. But they kept pouring out anyway in the voice like Chinese opera. I could hear the drums and the cymbals and the gongs and brass horns.

“You’re the one to leave your little sisters alone,” my mother was saying. “You’re always leading them o somewhere. I’ve had to call the police twice because of you.” She herself was shouting out things I had meant to tell her—that I took my brothers and sisters to explore strange people’s houses, ghost children’s houses, and haunted houses blackened by re. We explored a Mexican house and a redheaded family’s house, but not the gypsies’ house; I had only seen the inside of the gypsies’ house in mind-movies. We explored the sloughs, where we found hobo nests. My mother must have followed us.

“You turned out so unusual. I xed your tongue so you could say charming things. You don’t even say hello to the villagers.”

“They don’t say hello to me.”

“They don’t have to answer children. When you get old, people will say hello to you.”

“When I get to college, it won’t matter if I’m not charming. And it doesn’t matter if a person is ugly; she can still do schoolwork.”

“I didn’t say you were ugly.”

“You say that all the time.”

“That’s what we’re supposed to say. That’s what Chinese say. We like to say the opposite.”

It seemed to hurt her to tell me that—another guilt for my list to tell my mother, I thought. And suddenly I got very confused and lonely because I was at that moment telling her my list, and in the telling, it grew. No higher listener. No listener but myself.

“Ho Chi Kuei,” she shouted. “Ho Chi Kuei. Leave then. Get out, you Ho Chi Kuei. Get out. I knew you were going to turn out bad.

Ho Chi Kuei.” My brothers and sisters had left the table, and my father would not look at me anymore, ignoring me.

Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, t.v. dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine oodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

I’ve been looking up “Ho Chi Kuei,” which is what the immigrants call us—Ho Chi Ghosts. “Well, Ho Chi Kuei,” they say, “what silliness have you been up to now?” “That’s a Ho Chi Kuei for you,” they say, no matter what we’ve done. It was more complicated (and therefore worse) than “dog,” which they say aectionately, mostly to boys. They use “pig” and “stink pig” for girls, and only in an angry voice. The river-pirate great-uncle called even my middle brother Ho Chi Kuei, and he seemed to like him best. The maggot third great-uncle even shouted “Ho Chi Kuei!” at the boy. I don’t know any Chinese I can ask without getting myself scolded or teased, so I’ve been looking in books. So far I have the following translations for ho and/or chi: “centipede,” “grub,” “bastard carp,”

“chirping insect,” “jujube tree,” “pied wagtail,” “grain sieve,”

“casket sacrice,” “water lily,” “good frying,” “non-eater,” “dustpan- and-broom” (but that’s a synonym for “wife”). Or perhaps I’ve romanized the spelling wrong and it is Hao Chi Kuei, which could mean they are calling us “Good Foundation Ghosts.” The immigrants could be saying that we were born on Gold Mountain and have advantages. Sometimes they scorn us for having had it so easy, and sometimes they’re delighted. They also call us “Jook Sing,” or “Bamboo Nodes.” Bamboo nodes obstruct water.

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 nd 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 nd 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 elds 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 fty,’ 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 fty 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 nd 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.

Here 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 scaolding, 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 o. 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 o 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 ghting 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 agpoles 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 terried their enemies by lling 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 utes. 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 lled 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 utes. 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 campres, 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.