The Woman Warrior — Shaman

Shaman

Once in a long while, four times so far for me, my mother brings out the metal tube that holds her medical diploma. On the tube are gold circles crossed with seven red lines each—“joy” ideographs in abstract. There are also little owers that look like gears for a gold machine. According to the scraps of labels with Chinese and American addresses, stamps, and postmarks, the family airmailed the can from Hong Kong in 1950. It got crushed in the middle, and whoever tried to peel the labels o stopped because the red and gold paint came o too, leaving silver scratches that rust. Somebody tried to pry the end o before discovering that the tube pulls apart.

When I open it, the smell of China ies out, a thousand-year-old bat ying heavy-headed out of the Chinese caverns where bats are as white as dust, a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain. Crates from Canton, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have that smell too, only stronger because they are more recently come from the Chinese.

Inside the can are three scrolls, one inside another. The largest says that in the twenty-third year of the National Republic, the To Keung School of Midwifery, where she has had two years of instruction and Hospital Practice, awards its Diploma to my mother, who has shown through oral and written examination her Prociency in Midwifery, Pediatrics, Gynecology, “Medecine,”

“Surgary,” Therapeutics, Ophthalmology, Bacteriology, Dermatology, Nursing, and Bandage. This document has eight stamps on it: one, the school’s English and Chinese names embossed together in a circle; one, as the Chinese enumerate, a stork and a big baby in lavender ink; one, the school’s Chinese seal; one, an orangish paper stamp pasted in the border design; one, the red seal of Dr. Wu Pak-liang, M.D., Lyon, Berlin, president and “Ex-assistant étranger à la clinique chirugicale et d’accouchement de l’université de Lyon”; one, the red seal of Dean Woo Yin-kam, M.D.; one, my mother’s seal, her chop mark larger than the president’s and the

dean’s; and one, the number 1279 on the back. Dean Woo’s signature is followed by “(Hackett).” I read in a history book that Hackett Medical College for Women at Canton was founded in the nineteenth century by European women doctors.

The school seal has been pressed over a photograph of my mother at the age of thirty-seven. The diploma gives her age as twenty- seven. She looks younger than I do, her eyebrows are thicker, her lips fuller. Her naturally curly hair is parted on the left, one wavy wisp tendrilling o to the right. She wears a scholar’s white gown, and she is not thinking about her appearance. She stares straight ahead as if she could see me and past me to her grandchildren and grandchildren’s grandchildren. She has spacy eyes, as all people recently from Asia have. Her eyes do not focus on the camera. My mother is not smiling; Chinese do not smile for photographs. Their faces command relatives in foreign lands—“Send money”—and posterity forever—“Put food in front of this picture.” My mother does not understand Chinese-American snapshots. “What are you laughing at?” she asks.

The second scroll is a long narrow photograph of the graduating class with the school ocials seated in front. I picked out my mother immediately. Her face is exactly her own, though forty years younger. She is so familiar, I can only tell whether or not she is pretty or happy or smart by comparing her to the other women. For this formal group picture she straightened her hair with oil to make a chin-length bob like the others’. On the other women, strangers, I can recognize a curled lip, a sidelong glance, pinched shoulders. My mother is not soft; the girl with the small nose and dimpled underlip is soft. My mother is not humorous, not like the girl at the end who lifts her mocking chin to pose like Girl Graduate. My mother does not have smiling eyes; the old woman teacher (Dean Woo?) in front crinkles happily, and the one faculty member in the western suit smiles westernly. Most of the graduates are girls whose faces have not yet formed; my mother’s face will not change anymore, except to age. She is intelligent, alert, pretty. I can’t tell if she’s happy.

The graduates seem to have been looking elsewhere when they pinned the rose, zinnia, or chrysanthemum on their precise black dresses. One thin girl wears hers in the middle of her chest. A few have a ower over a left or a right nipple. My mother put hers, a chrysanthemum, below her left breast. Chinese dresses at that time were dartless, cut as if women did not have breasts; these young doctors, unaccustomed to decorations, may have seen their chests as black expanses with no reference points for owers. Perhaps they couldn’t shorten that far gaze that lasts only a few years after a Chinese emigrates. In this picture too my mother’s eyes are big with what they held—reaches of oceans beyond China, land beyond oceans. Most emigrants learn the barbarians’ directness—how to gather themselves and stare rudely into talking faces as if trying to catch lies. In America my mother has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering o a face, but she has not learned to place decorations and phonograph needles, nor has she stopped seeing land on the other side of the oceans. Now her eyes include the relatives in China, as they once included my father smiling and smiling in his many western outts, a dierent one for each photograph that he sent from America.

He and his friends took pictures of one another in bathing suits at Coney Island beach, the salt wind from the Atlantic blowing their hair. He’s the one in the middle with his arms about the necks of his buddies. They pose in the cockpit of a biplane, on a motorcycle, and on a lawn beside the “Keep O the Grass” sign. They are always laughing. My father, white shirt sleeves rolled up, smiles in front of a wall of clean laundry. In the spring he wears a new straw hat, cocked at a Fred Astaire angle. He steps out, dancing down the stairs, one foot forward, one back, a hand in his pocket. He wrote to her about the American custom of stomping on straw hats come fall.

“If you want to save your hat for next year,” he said, “you have to put it away early, or else when you’re riding the subway or walking along Fifth Avenue, any stranger can snatch it o your head and put his foot through it. That’s the way they celebrate the change of seasons here.” In the winter he wears a gray felt hat with his gray

overcoat. He is sitting on a rock in Central Park. In one snapshot he is not smiling; someone took it when he was studying, blurred in the glare of the desk lamp.

There are no snapshots of my mother. In two small portraits, however, there is a black thumbprint on her forehead, as if someone had inked in bangs, as if someone had marked her.

“Mother, did bangs come into fashion after you had the picture taken?” One time she said yes. Another time when I asked, “Why do you have ngerprints on your forehead?” she said, “Your First Uncle did that.” I disliked the unsureness in her voice.

The last scroll has columns of Chinese words. The only English is “Department of Health, Canton,” imprinted on my mother’s face, the same photograph as on the diploma. I keep looking to see whether she was afraid. Year after year my father did not come home or send for her. Their two children had been dead for ten years. If he did not return soon, there would be no more children. (“They were three and two years old, a boy and a girl. They could talk already.”) My father did send money regularly, though, and she had nobody to spend it on but herself. She bought good clothes and shoes. Then she decided to use the money for becoming a doctor. She did not leave for Canton immediately after the children died. In China there was time to complete feelings. As my father had done, my mother left the village by ship. There was a sea bird painted on the ship to protect it against shipwreck and winds. She was in luck. The following ship was boarded by river pirates, who kidnapped every passenger, even old ladies. “Sixty dollars for an old lady” was what the bandits used to say. “I sailed alone,” she says, “to the capital of the entire province.” She took a brown leather suitcase and a seabag stued with two quilts.

At the dormitory the school ocial assigned her to a room with ve other women, who were unpacking when she came in. They greeted her and she greeted them. But no one wanted to start friendships until the unpacking was done, each item placed precisely to section o the room. My mother spotted the name she had written on her application pinned to a headboard, and the

annoyance she felt at not arriving early enough for rst choice disappeared. The locks on her suitcase opened with two satisfying clicks; she enjoyed again how neatly her belongings tted together, clean against the green lining. She refolded the clothes before putting them in the one drawer that was hers. Then she took out her pens and inkbox, an atlas of the world, a tea set and tea cannister, sewing box, her ruler with the real gold markings, writing paper, envelopes with the thick red stripe to signify no bad news, her bowl and silver chopsticks. These things she arranged one by one on her shelf. She spread the two quilts on top of the bed and put her slippers side by side underneath. She owned more—furniture, wedding jewelry, cloth, photographs—but she had left such troublesome valuables behind in the family’s care. She never did get all of it back.

The women who had arrived early did not oer to help unpack, not wanting to interfere with the pleasure and the privacy of it. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself. The book would stay open at the very page she had pressed at with her hand, and no one would complain about the eld not being plowed or the leak in the roof. She would clean her own bowl and a small, limited area; she would have one drawer to sort, one bed to make.

To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening. To throw away books after reading them so they don’t have to be dusted. To go through boxes on New Year’s Eve and throw out half of what is inside. Sometimes for extravagance to pick a bunch of owers for the one table. Other women besides me must have this daydream about a carefree life. I’ve seen Communist pictures showing a contented woman sitting on her bunk sewing.

Above her head is her one box on a shelf. The words stenciled on the box mean “Fragile,” but literally say, “Use a little heart.” The woman looks very pleased. The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own.

Free from families, my mother would live for two years without servitude. She would not have to run errands for my father’s tyrant mother with the bound feet or thread needles for the old ladies, but neither would there be slaves and nieces to wait on her. Now she would get hot water only if she bribed the concierge. When I went away to school my mother said, “Give the concierge oranges.”

Two of my mother’s roommates, who had organized their corners to their satisfaction, made tea and set a small table with their leftover travel food. “Have you eaten, Lady Scholar?” they invited my mother. “Lady Scholar, come drink tea,” they said to each of the others. “Bring your own cup.” This largess moved my mother—tea, an act of humility. She brought out meats and gs she had preserved on the farm. Everyone complimented her on their tastiness. The women told which villages they came from and the names they would go by. My mother did not let it be known that she had already had two children and that some of these girls were young enough to be her daughters.

Then everyone went to the auditorium for two hours of speeches by the faculty. They told the students that they would begin with a text as old as the Han empire, when the prescription for immortality had not yet been lost. Chang Chung-ching, father of medicine, had told how the two great winds, yang and yin, blew through the human body. The diligent students would do well to begin tonight memorizing his book on colds and fevers. After they had mastered the ancient cures that worked, they would be taught the most up-to- date western discoveries. By the time the students graduated—those of them who persevered—their range of knowledge would be wider than that of any other doctor in history. Women have now been practicing medicine for about fty years, said one of the teachers, a woman, who complimented them for adding to their growing number and also for coming to a school that taught modern medicine. “You will bring science to the villages.” At the end of the program, the faculty turned their backs to the students, and everyone bowed the three bows toward the picture of Doctor Sun Yat-sen, who was a western surgeon before he became a

revolutionary. Then they went to the dining hall to eat. My mother began memorizing her books immediately after supper.

There were two places where a student could study: the dining hall with its tables cleared for work, everyone chanting during the common memorization sessions; or the table in her own room. Most students went to the dining hall for the company there. My mother usually stayed in her room or, when a roommate wanted the privacy of it also, went to a secret hiding place she had hunted out during the rst week of school. Once in a while she dropped by the dining hall, chanted for a short while with the most advanced group, not missing a syllable, yawned early, and said good-night. She quickly built a reputation for being brilliant, a natural scholar who could glance at a book and know it.

“The other students fought over who could sit next to me at exams,” says my mother. “One glimpse at my paper when they got stuck, and they could keep going.”

“Did you ever try to stop them from copying your paper?”

“Of course not. They only needed to pick up a word or two, and they could remember the rest. That’s not copying. You get a lot more clues in actual diagnosis. Patients talk endlessly about their ailments. I’d feel their pulses knocking away under my very ngertips—so much clearer than the paperdolls in the textbooks. I’d chant the symptoms, and those few words would start a whole chapter of cures tumbling out. Most people don’t have the kind of brains that can do that.” She pointed at the photograph of the thirty-seven graduates. “One hundred and twelve students began the course at the same time I did.”

She suspected she did not have the right kind of brains either, my father the one who can recite whole poems. To make up the lack, she did secret studying. She also gave herself twenty years’ headstart over the young girls, although she admitted to only ten, which already forced her to push. Older people were expected to be smarter; they are closer to the gods. She did not want to overhear students or teachers say, “She must be exceedingly stupid, doing no

better than anyone else when she is a generation older. She’s so dumb, she has to study day and night.”

“I studied far in advance,” says my mother. “I studied when the breathing coming from the beds and coming through the wood walls was deep and even. The night before exams, when the other students stayed up, I went to bed early. They would say, ‘Aren’t you going to study?’ and I’d say, ‘No, I’m going to do some mending,’ or, ‘I want to write letters tonight.’ I let them take turns sitting next to me at the tests.” The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.

Maybe my mother’s secret place was the room in the dormitory which was haunted. Even though they had to crowd the other rooms, none of the young women would sleep in it. Accustomed to nestling with a bedful of siblings and grannies, they tted their privacy tighter rather than claim the haunted room as human territory. No one had lived in it for at least ve years, not since a series of hauntings had made its inhabitants come down with ghost fear that shattered their brains for studying. The haunted ones would give high, startled cries, pointing at the air, which sure enough was becoming hazy. They would suddenly turn and go back the way they had come. When they rounded a corner, they attened themselves fast against the building to catch what followed unawares moving steadily forward. One girl tore up the photographs she had taken of friends in that room. The stranger with arms hanging at its sides who stood beside the wall in the background of the photograph was a ghost. The girl would insist there had been nobody there when she took the picture. “That was a Photo Ghost,” said my mother when the students talked-story. “She needn’t have been afraid. Most ghosts are only nightmares. Somebody should have held her and wiggled her ears to wake her up.”

My mother relished these scare orgies. She was good at naming— Wall Ghost, Frog Spirit (frogs are “heavenly chickens”), Eating Partner. She could nd descriptions of phenomena in ancient writings—the Green Phoenix stories, “The Seven Strange Tales of

the Golden Bottle,” “What Confucius Did Not Talk About.” She could validate ghost sightings.

“But ghosts can’t be just nightmares,” a storyteller protested.

“They come right out into the room. Once our whole family saw wine cups spinning and incense sticks waving through the air. We got the magic monk to watch all night. He also saw the incense tips tracing orange gures in the dark—ideographs, he said. He followed the glow patterns with his inkbrush on red paper. And there it was, a message from our great-grandfather. We needed to put bigger helpings and a Ford in front of his plaque. And when we did, the haunting stopped immediately.”

“I like to think the ancestors are busier than that,” my mother said, “or more at rest. Yes, they’re probably more at rest. Perhaps it was an animal spirit that was bothering your house, and your grandfather had something to do with chasing it o.” After what she thought was a suitably tactful pause, she said, “How do we know that ghosts are the continuance of dead people? Couldn’t ghosts be an entirely dierent species of creature? Perhaps human beings just die, and that’s the end. I don’t think I’d mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed?

Or nothing?”

If the other storytellers had been reassuring one another with science, then my mother would have own stories as factual as bats into the listening night. A practical woman, she could not invent stories and told only true ones. But tonight the younger women were huddling together under the quilts, the ghost room with its door open steps away.

“Did you hear that?” someone would whisper. And sure enough, whenever their voices stilled simultaneously, a thump or a creak would unmistakably sound somewhere inside the building. The girls would jump closer together giggling.

“That was the wind,” my mother would say. “That was somebody who fell asleep reading in bed; she dropped her book.” She neither jumped nor giggled.

“If you’re so sure,” said an impertinent girl, perhaps the one with the disdainful chin, “why don’t you go out there and take a look?”

“Of course,” said my mother. “I was just thinking about doing that,” and she took a lamp and left her friends, impressed, in a dimmer room. She advanced steadily, waking the angular shadows up and down the corridor. She walked to both ends of the hallway, then explored another wing for good measure. At the ghost room, door open like a mouth, she stopped and, stepping inside, swung light into its corners. She saw cloth bags in knobby mounds; they looked like gnomes but were not gnomes. Suitcases and boxes threw shadow stairs up the walls and across the oor. Nothing unusual loomed at her or scurried away. No temperature change, no smell.

She turned her back on the room and slowly walked through one more wing. She did not want to get back too soon. Her friends, although one owes nothing to friends, must be satised that she searched thoroughly. After a suciently brave time, she returned to the storytellers. “I saw nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the whole dormitory, including the ghost room. I checked there too. I went inside just now.”

“The haunting begins at midnight,” said the girl with the adamantine chin. “It’s not quite eleven.”

My mother may have been afraid, but she would be a dragoness (“my totem, your totem”). She could make herself not weak. During danger she fanned out her dragon claws and ried her red sequin scales and unfolded her coiling green stripes. Danger was a good time for showing o. Like the dragons living in temple eaves, my mother looked down on plain people who were lonely and afraid.

“I’m so sleepy,” my mother said. “I don’t want to wait up until midnight. I’ll go sleep in the ghost room. Then if anything happens, I won’t miss it. I hope I’ll be able to recognize the ghost when I see it. Sometimes ghosts put on such mundane disguises, they aren’t particularly interesting.”

“Aiaa. Aiaa,” the storytellers exclaimed. My mother laughed with satisfaction at their cries.

“I’ll call out if something bad happens to me,” she said. “If you come running all together, you will probably be able to scare any ghost away.”

Some of them promised to come; some oered their talismans—a branch from a peach tree, a Christian cross, a red paper with good words written on it. But my mother refused them all. “If I take charms, then the ghost will hide from me. I won’t learn what kind of ghost it is, or whether or not a ghost lives in there at all. I’ll only bring a knife to defend myself and a novel in case I get bored and can’t sleep. You keep the charms; should I call for help, bring them with you.” She went to her own room and got weapon and book, though not a novel but a textbook.

Two of her roommates walked her to the ghost room. “Aren’t you afraid?” they asked.

“What is there to be afraid of?” she asked. “What could a ghost do to me?” But my mother did pause at the door. “Listen,” she said, “if I am very afraid when you nd me, don’t forget to tweak my ears.

Call my name and tell me how to get home.” She told them her personal name.

She walked directly to the back of the room, where the boxes formed a windowseat. She sat with the lamp beside her and stared at her yellow and black reection in the night glass. “I am very pretty,” she thought. She cupped her hands to the window to see out. A thin moon pricked through the clouds, and the long grass waved. “That is the same moon that they see in New Society Village,” she thought, “the same stars.” (“That is the same moon that they see in China, the same stars though shifted a little.”) When she set the lamp next to the bed, the room seemed darker, the uncurtained window letting in the bare night. She wrapped herself well in her quilt, which her mother had made before dying young. In the middle of one border my grandmother had sewn a tiny satin triangle, a red heart to protect my mother at the neck, as if she were her baby yet.

My mother read aloud; perhaps the others could hear how calmly.

The ghost might hear her too; she did not know whether her voice would evoke it or disperse it. Soon the ideographs lifted their feet, stretched out their wings, and ew like blackbirds; the dots were their eyes. Her own eyes drooped. She closed her book and turned o the lamp.

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out esh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She became sharply herself—bone, wire, antenna—but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow—alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.

She did not know whether she had fallen asleep or not when she heard a rushing coming out from under the bed. Cringes of fear seized her soles as something alive, rumbling, climbed the foot of the bed. It rolled over her and landed bodily on her chest. There it sat. It breathed airlessly, pressing her, sapping her. “Oh, no. A Sitting Ghost,” she thought. She pushed against the creature to lever herself out from underneath it, but it absorbed this energy and got heavier. Her ngers and palms became damp, shrinking at the ghost’s thick short hair like an animal’s coat, which slides against warm solidity as human esh slides against muscles and bones. She grabbed clutches of fur and pulled. She pinched the skin the hair grew out of and gouged into it with her ngernails. She forced her hands to hunt out eyes, furtive somewhere in the hair, but could not nd any. She lifted her head to bite but fell back exhausted. The mass thickened.

She could see the knife, which was catching the moonlight, near the lamp. Her arm had become an immensity, though, too burdensome to lift. If she could only move it to the edge of the bed, perhaps it would fall o and reach the knife. As if feeding on her very thoughts, the ghost spread itself over her arm.

A high ringing sound somewhere had grown loud enough so that she heard it, and she understood that it had started humming at the edge of her brain before the ghost appeared. She breathed

shallowly, panting as in childbirth, and could not shout out. The room sang, its air electric with the ringing; surely someone would hear and come help.

Earlier in the night, on the other side of the ringing, she could hear women’s voices talking. But soon their conversations had ceased. The school slept. She could feel that the souls had gone travelling; there was a lightness not in the dormitory during the day.

Without looking at the babies on her back or in their cribs, she had always been able to tell—after the rocking and singing and bedtime stories and keeping still not to startle them—the moment when they fell asleep. A tensing goes out of their bodies, out of the house.

Beyond the horror in the ghost room, she felt this release throughout the dormitory. No one would come to see how she was doing.

“You will not win, Boulder,” she spoke to the ghost. “You do not belong here. And I will see to it that you leave. When morning comes, only one of us will control this room, Ghost, and that one will be me. I will be marching its length and width; I will be dancing, not sliding and creeping like you. I will go right out that door, but I’ll come back. Do you know what gift I will bring you? I’ll get re, Ghost. You made a mistake haunting a medical school. We have cabinets full of alcohol, laboratories full. We have a communal kitchen with human-sized jars of oil and cooking fat, enough to burn for a month without our skipping a single fried meal. I will pour alcohol into my washbucket, and I’ll set re to it. Ghost, I will burn you out. I will swing the bucket across the ceiling. Then from the kitchen my friends will come with the lard; when we re it, the smoke will ll every crack and corner. Where will you hide, Ghost?

I will make this room so clean, no ghost will ever visit here again.

“I do not give in,” she said. “There is no pain you can inict that I cannot endure. You’re wrong if you think I’m afraid of you. You’re no mystery to me. I’ve heard of you Sitting Ghosts before. Yes, people have lived to tell about you. You kill babies, you cowards.

You have no power over a strong woman. You are no more dangerous than a nesting cat. My dog sits on my feet more heavily

than you can. You think this is suering? I can make my ears ring louder by taking aspirin. Are these all the tricks you have, Ghost?

Sitting and ringing? That is nothing. A Broom Ghost can do better.

You cannot even assume an interesting shape. Merely a boulder. A hairy butt boulder. You must not be a ghost at all. Of course. There are no such things as ghosts.

“Let me instruct you, Boulder. When Yen, the teacher, was grading the provincial exams one year, a thing with hair as ugly as yours plopped itself on his desk. (That one had glaring eyes, though, so it wasn’t blind and stupid like you.) Yen picked up his ferule and hit it like a student. He chased it around the room. (It wasn’t lame and lazy.) And it vanished. Later Yen taught us, ‘After life, the rational soul ascends the dragon; the sentient soul descends the dragon. So in the world there can be no ghosts. This thing must have been a Fox Spirit.’ That must be just what you are—a Fox Spirit. You are so hairy, you must be a fox that doesn’t even know how to transform itself. You’re not clever for a Fox Spirit, I must say. No tricks. No blood. Where are your hanged man’s rotting noose and icy breath? No throwing shoes into the rafters? No metamorphosis into a beautiful sad lady? No disguises in my dead relatives’ shapes? No drowned woman with seaweed hair? No riddles or penalty games? You are a puny little boulder indeed. Yes, when I get my oil, I will fry you for breakfast.”

She then ignored the ghost on her chest and chanted her lessons for the next day’s classes. The moon moved from one window to the other, and as dawn came, the thing scurried o, climbing quickly down the foot of the bed.

She fell asleep until time for school. She had said she was going to sleep in that room, and so she did.

She awoke when the students came tumbling into the room.

“What happened?” they asked, getting under the quilt to keep warm. “Did anything happen?”

“Take my earlobes, please,” said my mother, “and pull them back and forth. In case I lost any of my self, I want you to call me back. I

was afraid, and fear may have driven me out of my body and mind.

Then I will tell you the story.” Two friends clasped her hands while a third held her head and took each earlobe between thumb and forenger, wiggling them and chanting, “Come home, come home, Brave Orchid, who has fought the ghosts and won. Return to To Keung School, Kwangtung City, Kwangtung Province. Your classmates are here waiting for you, scholarly Brave Orchid. Come home. Come home. Come back and help us with our lessons. School is starting soon. Come for breakfast. Return, daughter of New Society Village, Kwangtung Province. Your brother and sisters call you. Your friends call you. We need you. Return to us. Return to us at the To Keung School. There’s work to do. Come back, Doctor Brave Orchid, be unafraid. Be unafraid. You are safe now in the To Keung School. All is safe. Return.”

Abundant comfort in long restoring waves warmed my mother.

Her soul returned fully to her and nestled happily inside her skin, for this moment not travelling in the past where her children were nor to America to be with my father. She was back among many people. She rested after battle. She let friends watch out for her.

“There,” said the roommate, giving her ear a last hearty tug, “you are cured. Now tell us what happened.”

“I had nished reading my novel,” said my mother, “and still nothing happened. I was listening to the dogs bark far away.

Suddenly a full-grown Sitting Ghost loomed up to the ceiling and pounced on top of me. Mounds of hair hid its claws and teeth. No true head, no eyes, no face, so low in its level of incarnation it did not have the shape of a recognizable animal. It knocked me down and began to strangle me. It was bigger than a wolf, bigger than an ape, and growing. I would have stabbed it. I would have cut it up, and we would be mopping blood this morning, but—a Sitting Ghost mutation—it had an extra arm that wrested my hand away from the knife.

“At about 3 A.M. I died for a while. I was wandering, and the world I touched turned into sand. I could hear wind, but the sand did not

y. For ten years I lost my way. I almost forgot about you; there was so much work leading to other work and another life—like picking up coins in a dream. But I returned. I walked from the Gobi Desert to this room in the To. Keung School. That took another two years, outwitting Wall Ghosts en route. (The way to do that is to go straight ahead; do not play their side-to-side games. In confusion they will instantly revert to their real state—weak and sad humanity. No matter what, don’t commit suicide, or you will have to trade places with the Wall Ghost. If you are not put o by the foot-long lolling tongues and the popped-out eyes of the hanged ones or the open veins or the drowned skin and seaweed hair—and you shouldn’t be because you’re doctors—you can chant these poor souls on to light.) “No white bats and no black bats ew ahead to guide me to my natural death. Either I would die without my whole life or I would not die. I did not die. I am brave and good. Also I have bodily strength and control. Good people do not lose to ghosts.

“Altogether I was gone for twelve years, but in this room only an hour had passed. The moon barely moved. By silver light I saw the black thing pulling shadows into itself, setting up magnetic whorls.

Soon it would suck in the room and begin on the rest of the dormitory. It would eat us up. It threw boulders at me. And there was a sound like mountain wind, a sound so high it could drive you crazy. Didn’t you hear it?”

Yes, they had. Wasn’t it like the electric wires that one sometimes heard in the city? Yes, it was the sound of energy amassing.

“You were lucky you slept because the sound tears the heart. I could hear babies crying in it. I could hear tortured people screaming, and the cries of their relatives who had to watch.”

“Yes, yes, I recognize that. That must have been the singing I heard in my dream.”

“It may be sounding even now, though too strangely for our daytime ears. You cannot hit the ghost if you sweep under the bed.

The ghost fattens at night, its dark sacs empty by daylight. It’s a

good thing I stopped it feeding on me; blood and meat would have given it strength to feed on you. I made my will an eggshell encasing the monster’s fur so that the hollow hairs could not draw. I never let up willing its size smaller, its hairs to retract, until by dawn the Sitting Ghost temporarily disappeared.

“The danger is not over. The ghost is listening to us right now, and tonight it will walk again but stronger. We may not be able to control it if you do not help me nish it o before sundown. This Sitting Ghost has many wide black mouths. It is dangerous. It is real.

Most ghosts make such brief and gauzy appearances that eyewitnesses doubt their own sightings. This one can conjure up enough substance to sit solidly throughout a night. It is a serious ghost, not at all playful. It does not twirl incense sticks or throw shoes and dishes. It does not play peekaboo or wear fright masks. It does not bother with tricks. It wants lives. I am sure it is surfeited with babies and is now coming after adults. It grows. It is mysterious, not merely a copy of ourselves as, after all, the hanged men and seaweed women are. It could be hiding right now in a piece of wood or inside one of your dolls. Perhaps in daylight we accept that bag to be just a bag”—she pointed with the at of her palm as if it balanced a top—“when in reality it is a Bag Ghost.” The students moved away from the bag in which they collected their quilting scraps and pulled up their feet that were dangling over the edge of the bed.

“You have to help me rid the world of this disease, as invisible and deadly as bacteria. After classes, come back here with your buckets, alcohol, and oil. If you can nd dog’s blood too, our work will go fast. Act unafraid. Ghost chasers have to be brave. If the ghost comes after you, though I would not expect an attack during the day, spit at it. Scorn it. The hero in a ghost story laughs a nimble laugh, his life so full it splatters red and gold on all the creatures around him.”

These young women, who would have to back up their science with magical spells should their patients be disappointed and not get well, now hurried to get to classes on time. The story about the

ghost’s appearance and the coming ghost chase grew, and students snatched alcohol and matches from the laboratories.

My mother directed the arrangement of the buckets and burners into orderly rows and divided the fuel. “Let’s re the oil all at once,” she said. “Now.”

“Whup. Whup.” My mother told the sound of new re so that I remember it. “Whup. Whup.”

The alcohol burned a oating blue. The tarry oil, which someone had bought from her village witch, fumed in black clouds. My mother swung a big bucket overhead. The smoke curled in black boas around the women in their scholars’ black gowns. They walked the ghost room, this circle of little black women, lifting smoke and re up to the ceiling corners, down to the oor corners, moving clouds across the walls and oors, under the bed, around one another.

“I told you, Ghost,” my mother chanted, “that we would come after you.” “We told you, Ghost, that we would come after you,” sang the women. “Daylight has come yellow and red,” sang my mother, “and we are winning. Run, Ghost, run from this school.

Only good medical people belong here. Go back, dark creature, to your native country. Go home. Go home.” “Go home,” sang the women.

When the smoke cleared, I think my mother said that under the foot of the bed the students found a piece of wood dripping with blood. They burned it in one of the pots, and the stench was like a corpse exhumed for its bones too soon. They laughed at the smell.

The students at the To Keung School of Midwifery were new women, scientists who changed the rituals. When she got scared as a child, one of my mother’s three mothers had held her and chanted their descent line, reeling the frighted spirit back from the farthest deserts. A relative would know personal names and secrets about husbands, babies, renegades and decide which ones were lucky in a

chant, but these outside women had to build a path from scraps. No blood bonded friend to friend (though there were things owed beggars and monks), and they had to gure out how to help my mother’s spirit locate the To Keung School as “home.” The calling out of her real descent line would have led her to the wrong place, the village. These strangers had to make her come back to them.

They called out their own names, women’s pretty names, haphazard names, horizontal names of one generation. They pieced together new directions, and my mother’s spirit followed them instead of the old footprints. Maybe that is why she lost her home village and did not reach her husband for fteen years.

When my mother led us out of nightmares and horror movies, I felt loved. I felt safe hearing my name sung with hers and my father’s, my brothers’ and sisters’, her anger at children who hurt themselves surprisingly gone. An old-fashioned woman would have called in the streets for her sick child. She’d hold its little empty coat unbuttoned, “Come put on your coat, you naughty child.”

When the coat pued up, she’d quickly button up the spirit inside and hurry it home to the child’s body in bed. But my mother, a modern woman, said our spells in private. “The old ladies in China had many silly superstitions,” she said. “I know you’ll come back without my making a fool of myself in the streets.”

Not when we were afraid, but when we were wide awake and lucid, my mother funneled China into our ears: Kwangtung Province, New Society Village, the river Kwoo, which runs past the village. “Go the way we came so that you will be able to nd our house. Don’t forget. Just give your father’s name, and any villager can point out our house.” I am to return to China where I have never been.

After two years of study—the graduates of three-week and six- week courses were more admired by the peasants for learning at such wondrous speeds—my mother returned to her home village a doctor. She was welcomed with garlands and cymbals the way people welcome the “barefoot doctors” today. But the Communists wear a blue plainness dotted with one red Mao button. My mother

wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair. She had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains.

“When I stepped out of my sedan chair, the villagers said, ‘Ahhh,’ at my good shoes and my long gown. I always dressed well when I made calls. Some villages brought out their lion and danced ahead of me. You have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America.” Until my father sent for her to live in the Bronx, my mother delivered babies in beds and pigsties. She stayed awake keeping watch nightly in an epidemic and chanted during air raids.

She yanked bones straight that had been crooked for years while relatives held the cripples down, and she did all this never dressed less elegantly than when she stepped out of the sedan chair.

Nor did she change her name: Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies.

Walking behind the palanquin so that the crowd took her for one of themselves following the new doctor came a quiet girl. She carried a white puppy and a rice sack knotted at the mouth. Her pigtails and the puppy’s tail ended in red yarn. She may have been either a daughter or a slave.

When my mother had gone to Canton market to shop, her wallet had unfolded like wings. She had received her diploma, and it was time to celebrate. She had hunted out the seed shops to taste their lichees, various as wines, and bought a sack that was taller than a child to bedazzle the nieces and nephews. A merchant had given her one nut fresh on its sprig of narrow leaves. My mother popped the thin wood shell in her curled palm. The white fruit, an eye without an iris, ran juices like spring rivers inside my mother’s mouth. She spit out the brown seed, iris after all.

She had bought a turtle for my grandfather because it would lengthen his life. She had dug to the bottom of fabric piles and

explored the shadows underneath awnings. She gave beggars rice and letter-writers coins so that they would talk-story. (“Sometimes what I gave was all they had, and stories.”) She let a fortuneteller read the whorls on her ngerprints; he predicted that she would leave China and have six more children. “Six,” he said, “is the number of everything. You are such a lucky woman. Six is the universe’s number. The four compass points plus the zenith and the nadir are six. There are six low phoenix notes and six high, six worldly environments, six senses, six virtues, six obligations, six classes of ideograph, six domestic animals, six arts, and six paths of metempsychosis. More than two thousand years ago, six states combined to overthrow Ch’in. And, of course, there are the hexagrams that are the I Ching, and there is the Big Six, which is China.” As interesting as his list of sixes was, my mother hurried on her way; she had come to market to buy herself a slave.

Between the booths and stores, whoever could squeeze a space—a magician who could turn dirt into gold, twenty-ve acrobats on one unicycle, a man who could swim—displayed his or her newest feat for money. From the country the villagers brought strange purple textiles, dolls with big feet, geese with brown tufts on their heads, chickens with white feathers and black skin, gambling games and puppet shows, intricate ways to fold pastry and ancestors’ money, a new boxing stance.

Herders roped o alleys to pen their goats, which stared out of the dimness with rectangular pupils. Whisking a handful of grass, my mother coaxed them into the light and watched the tiny yellow windows close and open again as the goats skipped backward into the shade. Two farmers, each leading this year’s cow, passed each other, shouting prices. Usually my mother would have given herself up to the pleasure of being in a crowd, delighting in the money game the people would play with the rival herders, who were now describing each other’s cows—“skinny shoulder blades,” “lame legs,” “patchy hair,” “ogre face.” But today she hurried even when looking over the monkey cages stacked higher than her head. She paused only a while in front of the ducks, which honked madly, the

down ying as some passer-by bumped into their cages. My mother liked to look at the ducks and plan how she would dig a pond for them near the sweet potato eld and arrange straw for their eggs.

She decided that the drake with the green head would be the best buy, the noblest, although she would not buy him unless she had money left over; she was already raising a nobler duck on the farm.

Among the sellers with their ropes, cages, and water tanks were the sellers of little girls. Sometimes just one man would be standing by the side of the road selling one girl. There were fathers and mothers selling their daughters, whom they pushed forward and then pulled back again. My mother turned her face to look at pottery or embroidery rather than at these miserable families who did not have the sense to leave the favored brothers and sisters home. All the children bore still faces. My mother would not buy from parents, crying and clutching. They would try to keep you talking to nd out what kind of mistress you were to your slaves. If they could just hear from the buyer’s own mouth about a chair in the kitchen, they could tell each other in the years to come that their daughter was even now resting in the kitchen chair. It was merciful to give these parents a few details about the garden, a sweet feeble grandmother, food.

My mother would buy her slave from a professional whose little girls stood neatly in a row and bowed together when a customer looked them over. “How do you do, Sir?” they would sing. “How do you do, Madam?” “Let a little slave do your shopping for you,” the older girls chorused. “We’ve been taught to bargain. We’ve been taught to sew. We can cook, and we can knit.” Some of the dealers merely had the children bow quietly. Others had them sing a happy song about owers.

Unless a group of little girls chanted some especially clever riddle, my mother, who distrusts people with public concerns, braggarts, went over to the quiet older girls with the dignied bows. “Any merchant who advertises ‘Honest Scales’ must have been thinking about weighting them,” she says. Many sellers displayed the sign “Children and Old Men Not Cheated.”

There were girls barely able to toddle carrying infant slaves tied in slings to their backs. In the undisciplined groups the babies crawled into gutters and the older girls each acted as if she were alone, a daughter among slaves. The one- to two-year-old babies cost nothing.

“Greet the lady,” the dealer commanded, just as the nice little

girls’ mothers had when visitors came.

“How do you do, Lady,” said the girls.

My mother did not need to bow back, and she did not. She overlooked the infants and toddlers and talked to the oldest girls.

“Open your mouth,” she said, and examined teeth. She pulled down eyelids to check for anemia. She picked up the girls’ wrists to sound their pulses, which tell everything.

She stopped at a girl whose strong heart sounded like thunder within the earth, sending its power into her ngertips. “I would not have sold a daughter such as that one,” she told us. My mother could nd no aw in the beat; it matched her own, the real rhythm.

There were people jumpy with silly rhythms; broken rhythms; sly, secretive rhythms. They did not follow the sounds of earth-sea-sky and the Chinese language.

My mother brought out the green notebook my father had given her when he left. It had a map of each hemisphere on the inside covers and a clasp that shut it like a pocketbook. “Watch carefully,” she said. With an American pencil, she wrote a word, a felicitous word such as “longevity” or “double joy,” which is symmetrical.

“Look carefully,” she said into the girl’s face. “If you can write this word from memory, I will take you with me. Concentrate now.”

She wrote in a plain style and folded the page a moment afterward.

The girl took the pencil and wrote surely; she did not leave out a single stroke.

“What would you do,” my mother asked, “if you lost a gold watch in a eld?”

“I know a chant on the nger bones,” said the girl. “But even if I landed on the bone that says to look no more, I would go to the middle of the eld and search in a spiral going outward until I reached the eld’s edge. Then I would believe the chant and look no more.” She drew in my mother’s notebook the eld and her

spiraling path.

“How do you cast on yarn?”

The girl pantomimed her method with her large hands.

“How much water do you put in the rice pot for a family of ve?

How do you nish o weaving so that it doesn’t unravel?”

Now it was time to act as if she were very dissatised with the slave’s answers so that the dealer would not charge her extra for a skillful worker.

“You tie the loose ends into tassles,” said the girl.

My mother frowned. “But suppose I like a nished border?”

The girl hesitated. “I could, uh, press the bers under and sew them down. Or how about cutting the bers o?”

My mother oered the dealer half the price he named. “My mother-in-law asked me to nd a weaver for her, and obviously she and I will have to waste many months training this girl.”

“But she can knit and cook,” said the dealer, “and she can nd lost watches.” He asked for a price higher than her suggestion but lower than his rst.

“I knit and cook and nd things,” said my mother. “How else do you suppose I think of such ingenious questions? Do you think I would buy a slave who could outwork me in front of my mother-in- law?” My mother walked o to look at a group of hungry slaves across the street. When she returned, the dealer sold her the girl with the nding chant at my mother’s price.

“I am a doctor,” she told her new slave, when they were out of the dealer’s hearing, “and I shall train you to be my nurse.”

“Doctor,” said the slave, “do you understand that I do know how to nish o my weaving?”

“Yes, we fooled him very well,” said my mother.

The unsold slaves must have watched them with envy. I watch them with envy. My mother’s enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl; nor did I replace the older brother and sister who died while they were still cuddly. Throughout childhood my younger sister said, “When I grow up, I want to be a slave,” and my parents laughed, encouraging her. At department stores I angered my mother when I could not bargain without shame, poor people’s shame. She stood in back of me and prodded and pinched, forcing me to translate her bargaining, word for word.

On that same day she bought at the dog dealer’s a white puppy to train as her bodyguard when she made night calls. She tied pretty red yarn around its tail to neutralize the bad luck. There was no use docking the tail. No matter at what point she cut, the tip would have been white, the mourning color.

The puppy waved its red yarn at the nurse girl, and she picked it up. She followed my mother back to the village, where she always got enough to eat because my mother became a good doctor. She could cure the most spectacular diseases. When a sick person was about to die, my mother could read the fact of it a year ahead of time on the daughters-in-law’s faces. A black veil seemed to hover over their skin. And though they laughed, this blackness rose and fell with their breath. My mother would take one look at the daughter-in-law who answered the door at the sick house and she’d say, “Find another doctor.” She would not touch death; therefore, untainted, she brought only health from house to house. “She must be a Jesus convert,” the people from the far villages said. “All her patients get well.” The bigger the talk, the farther the distances she travelled. She had customers everywhere.

Sometimes she went to her patients by foot. Her nurse-slave carried an umbrella when my mother predicted rain and a parasol when she predicted sun. “My white dog would be standing at the door waiting for me whenever I came home,” she said. When she felt like it, my mother would leave the nurse-slave to watch the oce and would take the white dog with her.

“What happened to your dog when you came to America,

Mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to the slave?”

“I found her a husband.”

“How much money did you pay to buy her?”

“One hundred and eighty dollars.”

“How much money did you pay the doctor and the hospital when

I was born?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Oh.”

“That’s two hundred dollars American money.”

“Was the one hundred and eighty dollars American money?”

“No.”

“How much was it American money?”

“Fifty dollars. That’s because she was sixteen years old. Eight- year-olds were about twenty dollars. Five-year-olds were ten dollars and up. Two-year-olds were about ve dollars. Babies were free.

During the war, though, when you were born, many people gave older girls away for free. And here I was in the United States paying two hundred dollars for you.”

When my mother went doctoring in the villages, the ghosts, the were-people, the apes dropped out of trees. They rose out of bridge water. My mother saw them come out of cervixes. Medical science does not seal the earth, whose nether creatures seep out, hair by hair, disguised like the smoke that dispels them. She had apparently won against the one ghost, but ghost forms are various and many.

Some can occupy the same space at the same moment. They permeate the grain in wood, metal, and stone. Animalcules somersault about our faces when we breathe. We have to build horns on our roofs so that the nagging once-people can slide up them and perhaps ascend to the stars, the source of pardon and love.

On a ne spring day the villagers at a place my mother had never visited before would wave peach branches and fans, which are emblems of Chung-li Ch’uan, the chief of the Eight Sages and keeper of the elixir of life. The pink petals would fall on my mother’s black hair and gown. The villagers would set o recrackers as on New Year’s Day. If it had really been New Year’s, she would have had to shut herself up in her own house. Nobody wanted a doctor’s visit in the rst days of the year.

But at night my mother walked quickly. She and bandits were the only human beings out, no palanquins available for midwives. For a time the roads were endangered by a fantastic creature, half man and half ape, that a traveller to the West had captured and brought back to China in a cage. With his new money, the man had built the fourth wing to his house, and in the courtyard he grew a stand of bamboo. The ape-man could reach out and touch the thin leaves that shaded its cage.

This creature had gnawed through the bars. Or it had tricked its owner into letting it play in the courtyard, and then leapt over the roof of the new wing. Now it was at large in the forests, living o squirrels, mice, and an occasional duck or piglet. My mother saw in the dark a denser dark, and she knew she was being followed. She carried a club, and the white dog was beside her. The ape-man was known to have attacked people. She had treated their bites and claw wounds. With hardly a rustle of leaves, the ape-man leapt live out of the trees and blocked her way. The white dog yelped. As big as a human being, the ape-thing jumped up and down on one foot. Its two hands were holding the other foot, hurt in the jump. It had long orange hair and beard. Its owner had clothed it in a brown burlap rice sack with holes for neck and arms. It blinked at my mother with human eyes, moving its head from shoulder to shoulder as if guring things out. “Go home,” she shouted, waving her club. It copied her waving with one raised arm and made complex motions with its other hand. But when she rushed at it, it turned and ran limping into the forest. “Don’t you scare me again,” she yelled after its retreating buttocks, tailless and hairless under the shirt. It was

denitely not a gorilla; she has since seen some of those at the Bronx Zoo, and this ape-man was nothing like them. If her father had not brought Third Wife, who was not Chinese, back from his travels, my mother might have thought this orange creature with the great nose was a barbarian from the West. But my grandfather’s Third Wife was black with hair so soft that it would not hang, instead blowing up into a great brown puball. (At rst she talked constantly, but who could understand her? After a while she never talked anymore. She had one son.) The owner of the ape-man nally recaptured it by luring it back into its cage with cooked pork and wine. Occasionally my mother went to the rich man’s house to look at the ape-man. It seemed to recognize her and smiled when she gave it candy. Perhaps it had not been an ape-man at all, but one of the Tigermen, a savage northern race.

My mother was midwife to whatever spewed forth, not being able to choose as with the old and sick. She was not squeamish, though, and deftly caught spewings that were sometimes babies, sometimes monsters. When she helped the country women who insisted on birthing in the pigpen, she could not tell by starlight and moonlight what manner of creature had made its arrival on the earth until she carried it inside the house. “Pretty pigbaby, pretty piglet,” she and the mother would croon, fooling the ghosts on the lookout for a new birth. “Ugly pig, dirty pig,” fooling the gods jealous of human joy.

They counted ngers and toes by touch, felt for penis or no penis, but not until later would they know for sure whether the gods let them get away with something good.

One boy appeared perfect, so round in the cool opal dawn. But when my mother examined him indoors, he opened up blue eyes at her. Perhaps he had looked without protection at the sky, and it had lled him. His mother said that a ghost had entered him, but my mother said the baby looked pretty.

Not all defects could be explained so congenially. One child born without an anus was left in the outhouse so that the family would not have to hear it cry. They kept going back to see whether it was dead yet, but it lived for a long time. Whenever they went to look at

it, it was sobbing, heaving as if it were trying to defecate. For days the family either walked to the elds or used the night soil buckets.

As a child, I pictured a naked child sitting on a modern toilet desperately trying to perform until it died of congestion. I had to ick on the bathroom lights fast so that no small shadow would take a baby shape, sometimes seated on the edge of the bathtub, its hopes for a bowel movement so exaggerated. When I woke at night I sometimes heard an infant’s grunting and weeping coming from the bathroom. I did not go to its rescue but waited for it to stop.

I hope this holeless baby proves that my mother did not prepare a box of clean ashes beside the birth bed in case of a girl. “The midwife or a relative would take the back of a girl baby’s head in her hand and turn her face into the ashes,” said my mother. “It was very easy.” She never said she herself killed babies, but perhaps the holeless baby was a boy.

Even here on Gold Mountain grateful couples bring gifts to my mother, who had cooked them a soup that not only ended their infertility but gave them a boy.

My mother has given me pictures to dream—nightmare babies that recur, shrinking again and again to t in my palm. I curl my ngers to make a cradle for the baby, my other hand an awning. I would protect the dream baby, not let it suer, not let it out of my sight. But in a blink of inattention, I would mislay the baby. I would have to stop moving, afraid of stepping on it. Or before my very eyes, it slips between my ngers because my ngers cannot grow webs fast enough. Or bathing it, I carefully turn the right-hand faucet, but it spouts hot water, scalding the baby until its skin tautens and its face becomes nothing but a red hole of a scream. The hole turns into a pinprick as the baby recedes from me.

To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stu our

heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

When the thermometer in our laundry reached one hundred and eleven degrees on summer afternoons, either my mother or my father would say that it was time to tell another ghost story so that we could get some good chills up our backs. My parents, my brothers, sisters, great-uncle, and “Third Aunt,” who wasn’t really our aunt but a fellow villager, someone else’s third aunt, kept the presses crashing and hissing and shouted out the stories. Those were our successful days, when so much laundry came in, my mother did not have to pick tomatoes. For breaks we changed from pressing to sorting.

“One twilight,” my mother began, and already the chills travelled my back and crossed my shoulders; the hair rose at the nape and the back of the legs, “I was walking home after doctoring a sick family.

To get home I had to cross a footbridge. In China the bridges are nothing like the ones in Brooklyn and San Francisco. This one was made from rope, laced and knotted as if by magpies. Actually it had been built by men who had returned after harvesting sea swallow nests in Malaya. They had had to swing over the faces of the Malayan clis in baskets they had woven themselves. Though this bridge pitched and swayed in the up-draft, no one had ever fallen into the river, which looked like a bright scratch at the bottom of the canyon, as if the Queen of Heaven had swept her great silver hairpin across the earth as well as the sky.”

One twilight, just as my mother stepped on the bridge, two smoky columns spiraled up taller than she. Their swaying tops hovered over her head like white cobras, one at either handrail. From stillness came a wind rushing between the smoke spindles. A high sound entered her temple bones. Through the twin whirlwinds she could see the sun and the river, the river twisting in circles, the trees upside down. The bridge moved like a ship, sickening. The earth dipped. She collapsed to the wooden slats, a ladder up the sky, her

ngers so weak she could not grip the rungs. The wind dragged her hair behind her, then whipped it forward across her face. Suddenly the smoke spindles disappeared. The world righted itself, and she crossed to the other side. She looked back, but there was nothing there. She used the bridge often, but she did not encounter those ghosts again.

“They were Sit Dom Kuei,” said Great-Uncle. “Sit Dom Kuei.”

“Yes, of course,” said my mother. “Sit Dom Kuei.”

I keep looking in dictionaries under those syllables. “Kuei” means “ghost,” but I don’t nd any other words that make sense. I only hear my great-uncle’s river-pirate voice, the voice of a big man who had killed someone in New York or Cuba, make the sounds—“Sit Dom Kuei.” How do they translate?

When the Communists issued their papers on techniques for combating ghosts, I looked for “Sit Dom Kuei.” I have not found them described anywhere, although now I see that my mother won in ghost battle because she can eat anything—quick, pluck out the carp’s eyes, one for Mother and one for Father. All heroes are bold toward food. In the research against ghost fear published by the Chinese Academy of Science is the story of a magistrate’s servant, Kao Chung, a capable eater who in 1683 ate ve cooked chickens and drank ten bottles of wine that belonged to the sea monster with branching teeth. The monster had arranged its food around a re on the beach and started to feed when Kao Chung attacked. The swan- feather sword he wrested from this monster can be seen in the Wentung County Armory in Shantung today.

Another big eater was Chou Yi-han of Changchow, who fried a ghost. It was a meaty stick when he cut it up and cooked it. But before that it had been a woman out at night.

Chen Luan-feng, during the Yuan Ho era of the T’ang dynasty (A.D.

806–820), ate yellow croaker and pork together, which the thunder god had forbidden. But Chen wanted to incur thunderbolts during drought. The rst time he ate, the thunder god jumped out of the sky, its legs like old trees. Chen chopped o the left one. The

thunder god fell to the earth, and the villagers could see that it was a blue pig or bear with horns and eshy wings. Chen leapt on it, prepared to chop its neck and bite its throat, but the villagers stopped him. After that, Chen lived apart as a rainmaker, neither relatives nor the monks willing to bring lightning upon themselves.

He lived in a cave, and for years whenever there was drought the villagers asked him to eat yellow croaker and pork together, and he did.

The most fantastic eater of them all was Wei Pang, a scholar- hunter of the Ta Li era of the T’ang dynasty (A.D. 766–779). He shot and cooked rabbits and birds, but he could also eat scorpions, snakes, cockroaches, worms, slugs, beetles, and crickets. Once he spent the night in a house that had been abandoned because its inhabitants feared contamination from the dead man next door. A shining, twinkling sphere came ying through the darkness at Wei.

He felled it with three true arrows—the rst making the thing crackle and ame; the second dimming it; and the third putting out its lights, sputter. When his servant came running in with a lamp, Wei saw his arrows sticking in a ball of esh entirely covered with eyes, some rolled back to show the dulling whites. He and the servant pulled out the arrows and cut up the ball into little pieces.

The servant cooked the morsels in sesame oil, and the wonderful aroma made Wei laugh. They ate half, saving half to show the household, which would return now.

Big eaters win. When other passers-by stepped around the bundle wrapped in white silk, the anonymous scholar of Hanchow took it home. Inside were three silver ingots and a froglike evil, which sat on the ingots. The scholar laughed at it and chased it o. That night two frogs the size of year-old babies appeared in his room. He clubbed them to death, cooked them, and ate them with white wine.

The next night a dozen frogs, together the size of a pair of year-old babies, jumped from the ceiling. He ate all twelve for dinner. The third night thirty small frogs were sitting on his mat and staring at him with their frog eyes. He ate them too. Every night for a month smaller but more numerous frogs came so that he always had the

same amount to eat. Soon his oor was like the healthy banks of a pond in spring when the tadpoles, having just turned, sprang in the wet grass. “Get a hedgehog to help eat,” cried his family. “I’m as good as a hedgehog,” the scholar said, laughing. And at the end of the month the frogs stopped coming, leaving the scholar with the white silk and silver ingots.

My mother has cooked for us: raccoons, skunks, hawks, city pigeons, wild ducks, wild geese, black-skinned bantams, snakes, garden snails, turtles that crawled about the pantry oor and sometimes escaped under refrigerator or stove, catsh that swam in the bathtub. “The emperors used to eat the peaked hump of purple dromedaries,” she would say. “They used chopsticks made from rhinoceros horn, and they ate ducks’ tongues and monkeys’ lips.”

She boiled the weeds we pulled up in the yard. There was a tender plant with owers like white stars hiding under the leaves, which were like the ower petals but green. I’ve not been able to nd it since growing up. It had no taste. When I was as tall as the washing machine, I stepped out on the back porch one night, and some heavy, ruing, windy, clawed thing dived at me. Even after getting chanted back to sensibility, I shook when I recalled that perched everywhere there were owls with great hunched shoulders and yellow scowls. They were a surprise for my mother from my father.

We children used to hide under the beds with our ngers in our ears to shut out the bird screams and the thud, thud of the turtles swimming in the boiling water, their shells hitting the sides of the pot. Once the third aunt who worked at the laundry ran out and bought us bags of candy to hold over our noses; my mother was dismembering skunk on the chopping block. I could smell the rubbery odor through the candy.

In a glass jar on a shelf my mother kept a big brown hand with pointed claws stewing in alcohol and herbs. She must have brought it from China because I do not remember a time when I did not have the hand to look at. She said it was a bear’s claw, and for many years I thought bears were hairless. My mother used the tobacco,

leeks, and grasses swimming about the hand to rub our sprains and bruises.

Just as I would climb up to the shelf to take one look after another at the hand, I would hear my mother’s monkey story. I’d take my ngers out of my ears and let her monkey words enter my brain. I did not always listen voluntarily, though. She would begin telling the story, perhaps repeating it to a homesick villager, and I’d overhear before I had a chance to protect myself. Then the monkey words would unsettle me; a curtain apped loose inside my brain. I have wanted to say, “Stop it. Stop it,” but not once did I say, “Stop it.”

“Do you know what people in China eat when they have the money?” my mother began. “They buy into a monkey feast. The eaters sit around a thick wood table with a hole in the middle. Boys bring in the monkey at the end of a pole. Its neck is in a collar at the end of the pole, and it is screaming. Its hands are tied behind it.

They clamp the monkey into the table; the whole table ts like another collar around its neck. Using a surgeon’s saw, the cooks cut a clean line in a circle at the top of its head. To loosen the bone, they tap with a tiny hammer and wedge here and there with a silver pick. Then an old woman reaches out her hand to the monkey’s face and up to its scalp, where she tufts some hairs and lifts o the lid of the skull. The eaters spoon out the brains.”

Did she say, “You should have seen the faces the monkey made”?

Did she say, “The people laughed at the monkey screaming”? It was alive? The curtain aps closed like merciful black wings.

“Eat! Eat!” my mother would shout at our heads bent over bowls, the blood pudding awobble in the middle of the table.

She had one rule to keep us safe from toadstools and such: “If it tastes good, it’s bad for you,” she said. “If it tastes bad, it’s good for you.”

We’d have to face four- and ve-day-old leftovers until we ate it all. The squid eye would keep appearing at breakfast and dinner

until eaten. Sometimes brown masses sat on every dish. I have seen revulsion on the faces of visitors who’ve caught us at meals.

“Have you eaten yet?” the Chinese greet one another.

“Yes, I have,” they answer whether they have or not. “And you?”

I would live on plastic.

My mother could contend against the hairy beasts whether esh or ghost because she could eat them, and she could not-eat them on the days when good people fast. My mother was not crazy for seeing ghosts nor was she one of those the women teased for “longing” after men. She was a capable exorcist; she did not “long” (“mong” in Cantonese). The village crazy lady was somebody else, an inappropriate woman whom the people stoned.

It was just after this stoning that my mother left China. My father had made the money for the fare at last, but he sent for her instead of returning, one more postponement of home, this time because of the Japanese. By 1939 the Japanese had taken much of the land along the Kwoo River, and my mother was living in the mountains with other refugees. (I used to watch my mother and father play refugees, sleeping sitting up, huddled together with their heads on each other’s shoulder, their arms about each other, holding up the blanket like a little tent. “Aiaa,” they’d sigh. “Aiaa.” “Mother, what’s a refugee? Father, what’s a refugee?”) The Japanese, though “little,” were not ghosts, the only foreigners considered not ghosts by the Chinese. They may have been descended from the Chinese explorers that the First Emperor of Ch’in (221–210 B.C.) had deployed to nd longevity medicine. They were to look for an island beyond the Eastern Ocean, beyond the impassable wind and mist. On this island lived phoenixes, unicorns, black apes, and white stags. Magic orchids, strange trees, and plants of jasper grew on Penglai, a fairy mountain, which may have been Mount Fuji. The emperor would saw o the explorers’ heads if they returned without the herbs of immortality. Another ancestor of the Japanese is said to be an ape that raped a Chinese princess, who then ed to the eastern islands

to have the rst Japanese child. Whichever the case, they were not a totally alien species, connected as they were even to royalty.

Chinese without sons stole the boy babies of Japanese settlers who left them bundled up at the ends of the potato rows.

Now the villagers were watching for Japanese airplanes that strafed the mountainsides every day. “If you see a single plane, you needn’t be afraid,” my mother taught us. “But watch for planes in threes. When they spread apart, you know they’re going to drop bombs. Sometimes airplanes covered the sky, and we could not see and we could not hear.” She warned us because it was the same war still going on years after she crossed the ocean and had us. I huddled under my blankets when Pan Am and United Air Lines planes ew overhead, the engines sounding like insects at rst and getting louder and louder.

In the mountains my mother set up a hospital in a cave, and she carried the wounded there. Some villagers had never seen an airplane before. Mothers stopped up their babies’ mouths so their crying would not attract the planes. The bombing drove people insane. They rolled on the ground, pushed themselves against it, as if the earth could open a door for them. The ones who could not stop shaking after the danger passed would sleep in the cave. My mother explained airplanes to them as she wiggled their ears.

One afternoon peace and summer rested on the mountains. Babies napped in the tall grass, their blankets covering the wildowers with embroidered owers. It was so quiet; the bees hummed and the river water played the pebbles, the rocks, and the hollows. Cows under the trees whisked their tails; goats and ducks followed the children here and there; and the chickens scratched in the dirt. The villagers stood about in the sunshine. They smiled at one another.

Here they all were together, idle above their elds, nobody hoeing, godlike; nobody weeding, New Year’s in summer. My mother and the women her age talked about how similar this day was to the orderly days long ago when they walked up the mountain to collect rewood, only now they could dally without the mothers-in-law scolding.

The village crazy lady put on her headdress with the small mirrors, some of them waving quickly on red stalks. In her crazy lady clothes of reds and greens, she greeted the animals and the moving branches as she carried her porcelain cup to the river.

Although her bindings had come loose, her tiny feet made her body sway pleasantly, her shoes like little bridges. She knelt singing at the river and lled her cup. Carrying the brimming water in two careful hands, she undulated toward a clearing where the light of the afternoon seemed to be concentrated. The villagers turned to look at her. She dipped her ngertips into the water and ung droplets into grass and air. Then she set the cup down and pulled out the long white undersleeves of her old-fashioned dress. She began to move in fanning circles, now ying the sleeves in the air, now trailing them on the grass, dancing in the middle of the light. The little mirrors in her headdress shot rainbows into the green, glinted o the water cup, caught water drops. My mother felt as if she were peering into Li T’ieh-kuai’s magic gourd to check the fate of an impish mortal.

One villager whispered away the spell, “She’s signaling the planes.” The whisper carried. “She’s signaling the planes,” the people repeated. “Stop her. Stop her.”

“No, she’s only crazy,” said my mother. “She’s a harmless crazy

lady.”

“She’s a spy. A spy for the Japanese.”

Villagers picked up rocks and moved down the hill.

“Just take away the mirrors,” my mother called. “Just take her headdress.”

But the tentative rst stones were already falling around the crazy lady. She dodged them; she tried to catch them, laughing, at last, people to play with.

The rocks hit harder as the villagers came within stoning range.

“Here. Here. I’ll get her mirrors,” said my mother, who had come running down the mountain into the clearing. “Give me your headdress,” she ordered, but the woman only shook her head coquettishly.

“See? She’s a spy. Get out of the way, Doctor. You saw the way she ashed the signals. She comes to the river every day before the planes come.”

“She’s only getting drinking water,” said my mother. “Crazy people drink water too.”

Someone took the crazy lady’s cup and threw it at her. It broke at her feet. “Are you a spy? Are you?” they asked her.

A cunning look narrowed her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I have great powers. I can make the sky rain re. Me. I did that. Leave me alone or I will do it again.” She edged toward the river as if she were about to run, but she wouldn’t have been able to get away on her tiny feet.

A large stone rammed her head, and she fell in a utter of sleeves, the ornaments jumping about her broken head. The villagers closed in. Somebody held a fragment of glass under her nostrils. When it clouded, they pounded her temples with the rocks in their sts until she was dead. Some villagers remained at the body beating her head and face, smashing the little mirrors into silver splinters.

My mother, who had turned her back and walked up the mountain (she never treated those about to die), looked down at the mass of esh and rocks, the sleeves, the blood ecks. The planes came again that very afternoon. The villagers buried the crazy lady along with the rest of the dead.

My mother left China in the winter of 1939, almost six months after the stoning, and arrived in New York Harbor in January, 1940.

She carried the same suitcase she had taken to Canton, this time lled with seeds and bulbs. On Ellis Island the ocials asked her, “What year did your husband cut o his pigtail?” and it terried her when she could not remember. But later she told us perhaps this lapse was for the best: what if they were trying to trap him politically? The men had cut their pigtails to defy the Manchus and to help Sun Yat-sen, fellow Cantonese.

I was born in the middle of World War II. From earliest awareness, my mother’s stories always timely, I watched for three airplanes parting. Much as I dream recurringly about shrinking babies, I dream that the sky is covered from horizon to horizon with rows of airplanes, dirigibles, rocket ships, ying bombs, their formations as even as stitches. When the sky seems clear in my dreams and I would y, if I look too closely, there so silent, far away, and faint in the daylight that people who do not know about them do not see them, are shiny silver machines, some not yet invented, being moved, eets always being moved from one continent to another, one planet to another. I must gure out a way to y between them.

But America has been full of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts. Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars. There were Black Ghosts too, but they were open eyed and full of laughter, more distinct than White Ghosts.

What frightened me most was the Newsboy Ghost, who came out from between the cars parked in the evening light. Carrying a newspaper pouch instead of a baby brother, he walked right out in the middle of the street without his parents. He shouted ghost words to the empty streets. His voice reached children inside the houses, reached inside the children’s chests. They would come running out of their yards with their dimes. They would follow him just a corner too far. And when they went to the nearest house to ask directions home, the Gypsy Ghosts would lure them inside with gold rings and then boil them alive and bottle them. The ointment thus made was good for rubbing on children’s bruises.

We used to pretend we were Newsboy Ghosts. We collected old Chinese newspapers (the Newsboy Ghost not giving us his ghost newspapers) and trekked about the house and yard. We waved them over our heads, chanting a chant: “Newspapers for sale. Buy a newspaper.” But those who could hear the insides of words heard

that we were selling a miracle salve made from boiled children. The newspapers covered up green medicine bottles. We made up our own English, which I wrote down and now looks like “eeeeeeeeee.”

When we heard the real newsboy calling, we hid, dragging our newspapers under the stairs or into the cellar, where the Well Ghost lived in the black water under a lid. We crouched on our newspapers, the San Francisco Gold Mountain News, and plugged up our ears with our knuckles until he went away.

For our very food we had to trac with the Grocery Ghosts, the supermarket aisles full of ghost customers. The Milk Ghost drove his white truck from house to house every other day. We hid watching until his truck turned the corner, bottles rattling in their frames.

Then we unlocked the front door and the screen door and reached for the milk. We were regularly visited by the Mail Ghost, Meter Reader Ghost, Garbage Ghost. Staying o the streets did no good.

They came nosing at windows—Social Worker Ghosts; Public Health Nurse Ghosts; Factory Ghosts recruiting workers during the war (they promised free child care, which our mother turned down); two Jesus Ghosts who had formerly worked in China. We hid directly under the windows, pressed against the baseboard until the ghost, calling us in the ghost language so that we’d almost answer to stop its voice, gave up. They did not try to break in, except for a few Burglar Ghosts. The Hobo Ghosts and Wino Ghosts took peaches o our trees and drank from the hose when nobody answered their knocks.

It seemed as if ghosts could not hear or see very well.

Momentarily lulled by the useful chores they did for whatever ghostly purpose, we did not bother to lower the windows one morning when the Garbage Ghost came. We talked loudly about him through the y screen, pointed at his hairy arms, and laughed at how he pulled up his dirty pants before swinging his hoard onto his shoulders. “Come see the Garbage Ghost get its food,” we children called. “The Garbage Ghost,” we told each other, nodding our heads.

The ghost looked directly at us. Steadying the load on his back with one hand, the Garbage Ghost walked up to the window. He had

cavernous nostrils with yellow and brown hair. Slowly he opened his red mouth, “The… Gar … bage … Ghost,” he said, copying human language. “Gar … bage … Ghost?” We ran, screaming to our mother, who eciently shut the window. “Now we know,” she told us, “the White Ghosts can hear Chinese. They have learned it. You mustn’t talk in front of them again. Someday, very soon, we’re going home, where there are Han people everywhere. We’ll buy furniture then, real tables and chairs. You children will smell owers for the rst time.”

“Mother! Mother! It’s happening again. I taste something in my mouth, but I’m not eating anything.”

“Me too, Mother. Me too. There’s nothing there. Just my spit. My spit tastes like sugar.”

“Your grandmother in China is sending you candy again,” said my mother. Human beings do not need Mail Ghosts to send messages.

I must have tinkered too much wondering how my invisible grandmother, illiterate and dependent on letter writers, could give us candy free. When I got older and more scientic, I received no more gifts from her. She died, and I did not get “home” to ask her how she did it. Whenever my parents said “home,” they suspended America. They suspended enjoyment, but I did not want to go to China. In China my parents would sell my sisters and me. My father would marry two or three more wives, who would spatter cooking oil on our bare toes and lie that we were crying for naughtiness.

They would give food to their own children and rocks to us. I did not want to go where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own.

As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me.

When I last visited my parents, I had trouble falling asleep, too big for the hills and valleys scooped in the mattress by child-bodies.

I heard my mother come in. I stopped moving. What did she want?

Eyes shut, I pictured my mother, her white hair frizzy in the dark- and-light doorway, my hair white now too, Mother. I could hear her move furniture about. Then she dragged a third quilt, the thick, homemade Chinese kind, across me. After that I lost track of her location. I spied from beneath my eyelids and had to hold back a jump. She had pulled up a chair and was sitting by the bed next to my head. I could see her strong hands in her lap, not working fourteen pairs of needles. She is very proud of her hands, which can make anything and stay pink and soft while my father’s became like carved wood. Her palm lines do not branch into head, heart, and life lines like other people’s but crease with just one atavistic fold. That night she was a sad bear; a great sheep in a wool shawl. She recently took to wearing shawls and granny glasses, American fashions. What did she want, sitting there so large next to my head?

I could feel her stare—her eyes two lights warm on my graying hair, then on the creases at the sides of my mouth, my thin neck, my thin cheeks, my thin arms. I felt her sight warm each of my bony elbows, and I opped about in my fake sleep to hide them from her criticism. She sent light at full brightness beaming through my eyelids, her eyes at my eyes, and I had to open them.

“What’s the matter, Mama? Why are you sitting there?”

She reached over and switched on a lamp she had placed on the oor beside her. “I swallowed that LSD pill you left on the kitchen counter,” she announced.

“That wasn’t LSD, Mama. It was just a cold pill. I have a cold.”

“You’re always catching colds when you come home. You must be eating too much yin. Let me get you another quilt.”

“No, no more quilts. You shouldn’t take pills that aren’t prescribed for you. ‘Don’t eat pills you nd on the curb,’ you always told us.”

“You children never tell me what you’re really up to. How else am I going to nd out what you’re really up to?” As if her head hurt,

she closed her eyes behind the gold wire rims. “Aiaa,” she sighed, “how can I bear to have you leave me again?”

How can I bear to leave her again? She would close up this room, open temporarily for me, and wander about cleaning and cleaning the shrunken house, so tidy since our leaving. Each chair has its place now. And the sinks in the bedrooms work, their alcoves no longer stued with laundry right up to the ceiling. My mother has put the clothes and shoes into boxes, stored against hard times. The sinks had been built of gray marble for the old Chinese men who boarded here before we came. I used to picture modest little old men washing in the mornings and dressing before they shued out of these bedrooms. I would have to leave and go again into the world out there which has no marble ledges for my clothes, no quilts made from our own ducks and turkeys, no ghosts of neat little old men.

The lamp gave o the sort of light that comes from a television, which made the high ceiling disappear and then suddenly drop back into place. I could feel that clamping down and see how my mother had pulled the blinds down so low that the bare rollers were showing. No passer-by would detect a daughter in this house. My mother would sometimes be a large animal, barely real in the dark; then she would become a mother again. I could see the wrinkles around her big eyes, and I could see her cheeks sunken without her top teeth.

“I’ll be back again soon,” I said. “You know that I come back. I think of you when I’m not here.”

“Yes, I know you. I know you now. I’ve always known you. You’re the one with the charming words. You have never come back. ‘I’ll be back on Turkeyday,’ you said. Huh.”

I shut my teeth together, vocal cords cut, they hurt so. I would not speak words to give her pain. All her children gnash their teeth.

“The last time I saw you, you were still young,” she said. “Now you’re old.”

“It’s only been a year since I visited you.”

“That’s the year you turned old. Look at you, hair gone gray, and you haven’t even fattened up yet. I know how the Chinese talk about us. ‘They’re so poor,’ they say, ‘they can’t aord to fatten up any of their daughters.’ ‘Years in America,’ they say, ‘and they don’t eat.’ Oh, the shame of it—a whole family of skinny children. And your father—he’s so skinny, he’s disappearing.”

“Don’t worry about him, Mama. Doctors are saying that skinny people live longer. Papa’s going to live a long time.”

“So! I knew I didn’t have too many years left. Do you know how I got all this fat? Eating your leftovers. Aiaa, I’m getting so old. Soon you will have no more mother.”

“Mama, you’ve been saying that all my life.”

“This time it’s true. I’m almost eighty.”

“I thought you were only seventy-six.”

“My papers are wrong. I’m eighty.”

“But I thought your papers are wrong, and you’re seventy-two, seventy-three in Chinese years.”

“My papers are wrong, and I’m eighty, eighty-one in Chinese years. Seventy. Eighty. What do numbers matter? I’m dropping dead any day now. The aunt down the street was resting on her porch steps, dinner all cooked, waiting for her husband and son to come home and eat it. She closed her eyes for a moment and died. Isn’t that a wonderful way to go?”

“But our family lives to be ninety-nine.”

“That’s your father’s family. My mother and father died very young. My youngest sister was an orphan at ten. Our parents were not even fty.”

“Then you should feel grateful you’ve lived so many extra years.”

“I was so sure you were going to be an orphan too. In fact, I’m amazed you’ve lived to have white hair. Why don’t you dye it?”

“Hair color doesn’t measure age, Mother. White is just another pigment, like black and brown.”

“You’re always listening to Teacher Ghosts, those Scientist Ghosts,

Doctor Ghosts.”

“I have to make a living.”

“I never do call you Oldest Daughter. Have you noticed that? I always tell people, ‘This is my Biggest Daughter.’”

“Is it true then that Oldest Daughter and Oldest Son died in China? Didn’t you tell me when I was ten that she’d have been twenty; when I was twenty, she’d be thirty?” Is that why you’ve denied me my title?

“No, you must have been dreaming. You must have been making up stories. You are all the children there are.” (Who was that story about—the one where the parents are throwing money at the children, but the children don’t pick it up because they’re crying too hard? They’re writhing on the oor covered with coins. Their parents are going out the door for America, hurling handfuls of change behind them.) She leaned forward, eyes brimming with what she was about to say: “I work so hard,” she said. She was doing her stare—at what?

My feet began rubbing together as if to tear each other’s skin o.

She started talking again, “The tomato vines prickle my hands; I can feel their little stubble hairs right through my gloves. My feet squish-squish in the rotten tomatoes, squish-squish in the tomato mud the feet ahead of me have sucked. And do you know the best way to stop the itch from the tomato hairs? You break open a fresh tomato and wash yourself with it. You cool your face in tomato juice. Oh, but it’s the potatoes that will ruin my hands. I’ll get rheumatism washing potatoes, squatting over potatoes.”

She had taken o the Ace bandages around her legs for the night.

The varicose veins stood out.

“Mama, why don’t you stop working? You don’t have to work anymore. Do you? Do you really have to work like that? Scabbing in the tomato elds?” Her black hair seems lleted with the band of white at its roots. She dyed her hair so that the farmers would hire her. She would walk to Skid Row and stand in line with the hobos,

the winos, the junkies, and the Mexicans until the farm buses came and the farmers picked out the workers they wanted. “You have the house,” I said. “For food you have Social Security. And urban renewal must have given you something. It was good in a way when they tore down the laundry. Really, Mama, it was. Otherwise Papa would never have retired. You ought to retire too.”

“Do you think your father wanted to stop work? Look at his eyes; the brown is going out of his eyes. He has stopped talking. When I go to work, he eats leftovers. He doesn’t cook new food,” she said, confessing, me maddened at confessions. “Those Urban Renewal Ghosts gave us moving money. It took us seventeen years to get our customers. How could we start all over on moving money, as if we two old people had another seventeen years in us? Aa”—she ipped something aside with her hand—“White Ghosts can’t tell Chinese age.”

I closed my eyes and breathed evenly, but she could tell I wasn’t asleep.

“This is terrible ghost country, where a human being works her life away,” she said. “Even the ghosts work, no time for acrobatics. I have not stopped working since the day the ship landed. I was on my feet the moment the babies were out. In China I never even had to hang up my own clothes. I shouldn’t have left, but your father couldn’t have supported you without me. I’m the one with the big muscles.”

“If you hadn’t left, there wouldn’t have been a me for you two to support. Mama, I’m really sleepy. Do you mind letting me sleep?” I do not believe in old age. I do not believe in getting tired.

“I didn’t need muscles in China. I was small in China.” She was.

The silk dresses she gave me are tiny. You would not think the same person wore them. This mother can carry a hundred pounds of Texas rice up- and downstairs. She could work at the laundry from 6:30 a.m. until midnight, shifting a baby from an ironing table to a shelf between packages, to the display window, where the ghosts tapped on the glass. “I put you babies in the clean places at the

laundry, as far away from the germs that fumed out of the ghosts’ clothes as I could. Aa, their socks and handkerchiefs choked me. I cough now because of those seventeen years of breathing dust.

Tubercular handkerchiefs. Lepers’ socks.” I thought she had wanted to show o my baby sister in the display window.

In the midnight unsteadiness we were back at the laundry, and my mother was sitting on an orange crate sorting dirty clothes into mountains—a sheet mountain, a white shirt mountain, a dark shirt mountain, a work-pants mountain, a long underwear mountain, a short underwear mountain, a little hill of socks pinned together in pairs, a little hill of handkerchiefs pinned to tags. Surrounding her were candles she burned in daylight, clean yellow diamonds, footlights that ringed her, mysterious masked mother, nose and mouth veiled with a cowboy handkerchief. Before undoing the bundles, my mother would light a tall new candle, which was a luxury, and the pie pans full of old wax and wicks that sometimes sputtered blue, a noise I thought was the germs getting seared.

“No tickee, no washee, mama-san?” a ghost would say, so embarrassing.

“Noisy Red-Mouth Ghost,” she’d write on its package, naming it, marking its clothes with its name.

Back in the bedroom I said, “The candles must have helped. It was a good idea of yours to use candles.”

“They didn’t do much good. All I have to do is think about dust sifting out of clothes or peat dirt blowing across a eld or chick mash falling from a scoop, and I start coughing.” She coughed deeply. “See what I mean? I have worked too much. Human beings don’t work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we’re too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to nd them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can’t sleep in this country because it doesn’t shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants—always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done

all at once here. Time was dierent in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the oor’s not swept, the ironing’s not ready, the money’s not made. I would still be young if we lived in China.”

“Time is the same from place to place,” I said unfeelingly. “There is only the eternal present, and biology. The reason you feel time pushing is that you had six children after you were forty-ve and you worried about raising us. You shouldn’t worry anymore, though, Mama. You should feel good you had so many babies around you in middle age. Not many mothers have that. Wasn’t it like prolonging youth? Now wasn’t it? You mustn’t worry now. All of us have grown up. And you can stop working.”

“I can’t stop working. When I stop working, I hurt. My head, my back, my legs hurt. I get dizzy. I can’t stop.”

“I’m like that too, Mama. I work all the time. Don’t worry about me starving. I won’t starve. I know how to work. I work all the time.

I know how to kill food, how to skin and pluck it. I know how to keep warm by sweeping and mopping. I know how to work when things get bad.”

“It’s a good thing I taught you children to look after yourselves.

We’re not going back to China for sure now.”

“You’ve been saying that since nineteen forty-nine.”

“Now it’s nal. We got a letter from the villagers yesterday. They asked if it was all right with us that they took over the land. The last uncles have been killed so your father is the only person left to say it is all right, you see. He has written saying they can have it. So.

We have no more China to go home to.”

It must be all over then. My mother and father have stoked each other’s indignation for almost forty years telling stories about land quarrels among the uncles, the in-laws, the grandparents. Episodes from their various points of view came weekly in the mail, until the

uncles were executed kneeling on broken glass by people who had still other plans for the land. How simply it ended—my father writing his permission. Permission asked, permission given twenty- ve years after the Revolution.

“We belong to the planet now, Mama. Does it make sense to you that if we’re no longer attached to one piece of land, we belong to the planet? Wherever we happen to be standing, why, that spot belongs to us as much as any other spot.” Can we spend the fare money on furniture and cars? Will American owers smell good now?

“I don’t want to go back anyway,” she said. “I’ve gotten used to eating. And the Communists are much too mischievous. You should see the ones I meet in the elds. They bring sacks under their clothes to steal grapes and tomatoes from the growers. They come with trucks on Sundays. And they’re killing each other in San Francisco.” One of the old men caught his visitor, another old fellow, stealing his bantam; the owner spotted its black feet sticking out of his guest’s sweater. We woke up one morning to nd a hole in the ground where our loquat tree had stood. Later we saw a new loquat tree most similar to ours in a Chinese neighbor’s yard. We knew a family who had a sign in their vegetable patch: “Since this is not a Communist garden but cabbages grown by private enterprise, please do not steal from my garden.” It was dated and signed in good handwriting.

“The new immigrants aren’t Communists, Mother. They’re fugitives from the real Communists.”

“They’re Chinese, and Chinese are mischievous. No, I’m too old to keep up with them. They’d be too clever for me. I’ve lost my cunning, having grown accustomed to food, you see. There’s only one thing that I really want anymore. I want you here, not wandering like a ghost from Romany. I want every one of you living here together. When you’re all home, all six of you with your children and husbands and wives, there are twenty or thirty people in this house. Then I’m happy. And your father is happy. Which ever room I walk into overows with my relatives, grandsons, sons-in-

law. I can’t turn around without touching somebody. That’s the way a house should be.” Her eyes are big, inconsolable. A spider headache spreads out in ne branches over my skull. She is etching spider legs into the icy bone. She pries open my head and my sts and crams into them responsibility for time, responsibility for intervening oceans.

The gods pay her and my father back for leaving their parents. My grandmother wrote letters pleading for them to come home, and they ignored her. Now they know how she felt.

“When I’m away from here,” I had to tell her, “I don’t get sick. I don’t go to the hospital every holiday. I don’t get pneumonia, no dark spots on my x-rays. My chest doesn’t hurt when I breathe. I can breathe. And I don’t get headaches at 3:00. I don’t have to take medicines or go to doctors. Elsewhere I don’t have to lock my doors and keep checking the locks. I don’t stand at the windows and watch for movements and see them in the dark.”

“What do you mean you don’t lock your doors?”

“I do. I do. But not the way I do here. I don’t hear ghost sounds. I don’t stay awake listening to walking in the kitchen. I don’t hear the doors and windows unhinging.”

“It was probably just a Wino Ghost or a Hobo Ghost looking for a place to sleep.”

“I don’t want to hear Wino Ghosts and Hobo Ghosts. I’ve found some places in this country that are ghost-free. And I think I belong there, where I don’t catch colds or use my hospitalization insurance.

Here I’m sick so often, I can barely work. I can’t help it, Mama.”

She yawned. “It’s better, then, for you to stay away. The weather in California must not agree with you. You can come for visits.” She got up and turned o the light. “Of course, you must go, Little Dog.”

A weight lifted from me. The quilts must be lling with air. The world is somehow lighter. She has not called me that endearment for years—a name to fool the gods. I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years. I am practically a rst daughter of a rst daughter.

“Good night, Little Dog.”

“Good night, Mother.”

She sends me on my way, working always and now old, dreaming the dreams about shrinking babies and the sky covered with airplanes and a Chinatown bigger than the ones here.