The Joy Luck Club (34 page)

But I still see almost everything clearly. When I want to remember, it is like looking into a bowl and finding the last grains of rice you did not finish.

 

There was an afternoon on Tai Lake soon after this man and I married. I remember this is when I came to love him. This man had turned my face toward the late-afternoon sun. He held my chin and stroked my cheek and said, “Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.”

I did not laugh, even though this was a poem he said very badly. I cried with honest joy. I had a swimming feeling in my heart like a creature thrashing to get out and wanting to stay in at the same time. That is how much I came to love this man. This is how it is when a person joins your body and there is a part of your mind that swims to join that person against your will.

I became a stranger to myself. I was pretty for him. If I put slippers on my feet, it was to choose a pair that I knew would please him. I brushed my hair ninety-nine times a night to bring luck to our marital bed, in hopes of conceiving a son.

The night he planted the baby, I again knew a thing before it happened. I knew it was a boy. I could see this little boy in my womb. He had my husband's eyes, large and wide apart. He had long tapered fingers, fat earlobes, and slick hair that rose high to reveal a large forehead.

It is because I had so much joy then that I came to have so much hate. But even when I was my happiest, I had a worry that started right above my brow, where you know a thing. This worry later trickled down to my heart, where you feel a thing and it becomes true.

My husband started to take many business trips to the north. These trips began soon after we married, but they became longer after the baby was put in my womb. I remembered that the north wind had blown luck and my husband my way, so at night when he was away, I opened wide my bedroom windows, even on cold nights, to blow his spirit and heart back my way.

What I did not know is that the north wind is the coldest. It penetrates the heart and takes the warmth away. The wind gathered such a force that it blew my husband past my bedroom and out the back door. I found out from my youngest aunt that he had left me to live with an opera singer.

Later still, when I overcame my grief and came to have nothing in my heart but loathing despair, my youngest aunt told me of others. Dancers and American ladies. Prostitutes. A girl cousin younger even than I was. She left mysteriously for Hong Kong soon after my husband disappeared.

So I will tell Lena of my shame. That I was rich and pretty. I was too good for any one man. That I became abandoned goods. I will tell her that at eighteen the prettiness drained from my cheeks. That I thought of throwing myself in the lake like the other ladies of shame. And I will tell her of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much.

I took this baby from my womb before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born. But even then, I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this man's firstborn son poured from me.

When the nurses asked what they should do with the lifeless baby, I hurled a newspaper at them and said to wrap it like a fish and throw it in the lake. My daughter thinks I do not know what it means to not want a baby.

When my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she sees only with her outside eyes. She has no
chuming,
no inside knowing of things. If she had
chuming,
she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.

 

I was born in the year of the Tiger. It was a very bad year to be born, a very good year to be a Tiger. That was the year a very bad spirit entered the world. People in the countryside died like chickens on a hot summer day. People in the city became shadows, went into their homes and disappeared. Babies were born and did not get fatter. The flesh fell off their bones in days and they died.

The bad spirit stayed in the world for four years. But I came from a spirit even stronger, and I lived. This is what my mother told me when I was old enough to know why I was so heartstrong in my ways.

Then she told me why a tiger is gold and black. It has two ways. The gold side leaps with its fierce heart. The black side stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come. I did not learn to use my black side until after the bad man left me.

I became like the ladies of the lake. I threw white clothes over the mirrors in my bedroom so I did not have to see my grief. I lost my strength, so I could not even lift my hands to place pins in my hair. And then I floated like a dead leaf on the water until I drifted out of my mother-in-law's house and back to my family home.

I went to the country outside of Shanghai to live with a second cousin's family. I stayed in this country home for ten years. If you ask me what I did during these long years, I can only say I waited between the trees. I had one eye asleep, the other open and watching.

I did not work. My cousin's family treated me well because I was the daughter of the family who supported them. The house was shabby, crowded with three families. It was not a comfort to be there, and that is what I wanted. Babies crawled on the floor with the mice. Chickens came in and out like my relatives' graceless peasant guests. We all ate in the kitchen amidst the hot frying grease. And the flies! If you left a bowl with even a few grains of rice, you would find it covered with hungry flies so thick it looked like a living bowl of black bean soup. This is how poor the country was.

After ten years, I was ready. I was no longer a girl but a strange woman. A still-married woman with no husband. I went to the city with both eyes open. It was as if the bowl of black flies had been poured out onto the streets. Everywhere there were people moving, unknown men pushing against unknown women and no one caring.

With the money from my family, I bought fresh clothes, modern straight suits. I cut off my long hair in the manner that was stylish, like a young boy. I was so tired of doing nothing for so many years I decided to work. I became a shopgirl.

I did not need to learn to flatter women. I knew the words they wanted to hear. A tiger can make a soft prrrn-prrn noise deep within its chest and make even rabbits feel safe and content.

Even though I was a grown woman, I became pretty again. This was a gift. I wore clothes far better and more expensive than what was sold in the store. And this made women buy the cheap clothes, because they thought they could look as pretty as I.

It was at this shop, working like a peasant, that I met Clifford St. Clair. He was a large, pale American man who bought the store's cheap-style clothes and sent them overseas. It was his name that made me know I would marry him.

“Mistah Saint Clair,” he said in English when he introduced himself to me.

And then he added in his thick, flat Chinese, “Like the angel of light.”

I neither liked him nor disliked him. I thought him neither attractive nor unattractive. But this I knew. I knew he was the sign that the black side of me would soon go away.

Saint courted me for four years in his strange way. Even though I was not the owner of the shop, he always greeted me, shaking hands, holding them too long. From his palms water always poured, even after we married. He was clean and pleasant. But he smelled like a foreigner, a lamb-smell stink that can never be washed away.

I was not unkind. But he was
kechi,
too polite. He bought me cheap gifts: a glass figurine, a prickly brooch of cut glass, a silvercolored cigarette lighter. Saint acted as if these gifts were nothing, as if he were a rich man treating a poor country girl to things we had never seen in China.

But I saw his look as he watched me open the boxes. Anxious and eager to please. He did not know that such things were nothing to me, that I was raised with riches he could not even imagine.

I always accepted these gifts graciously, always protesting just enough, not too little, not too much. I did not encourage him. But because I knew this man would someday be my husband, I put these worthless trinkets carefully into a box, wrapping each with tissue. I knew that someday he would ask to see them again.

Lena thinks Saint saved me from the poor country village that I said I was from. She is right. She is wrong. My daughter does not know that Saint had to wait patiently for four years like a dog in front of a butcher shop.

How is it that I finally came out and let him marry me? I was waiting for the sign I knew would come. I had to wait until 1946.

A letter came from Tientsin, not from my family, who thought I was dead. It was from my youngest aunt. Even before I opened the letter I knew. My husband was dead. He had long since left his opera singer. He was with some worthless girl, a young servant. But she had a strong spirit and was reckless, more so than even he. When he tried to leave her, she had already sharpened her longest kitchen knife.

I thought this man had long ago drained everything from my heart. But now something strong and bitter flowed and made me feel another emptiness in a place I didn't know was there. I cursed this man aloud so he could hear. You had dog eyes. You jumped and followed whoever called you. Now you chase your own tail.

So I decided. I decided to let Saint marry me. So easy for me. I was the daughter of my father's wife. I spoke in a trembly voice. I became pale, ill, and more thin. I let myself become a wounded animal. I let the hunter come to me and turn me into a tiger ghost. I willingly gave up my
chi
, the spirit that caused me so much pain.

Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.

 

Saint took me to America, where I lived in houses smaller than the one in the country. I wore large American clothes. I did servant's tasks. I learned the Western ways. I tried to speak with a thick tongue. I raised a daughter, watching her from another shore. I accepted her American ways.

With all these things, I did not care. I had no spirit.

Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was a man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out the trinkets I had saved for the right day, the day he gave me my daughter, a tiger girl.

How could I not love this man? But it was the love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness.

Now Saint is a ghost. He and I can now love equally. He knows the things I have been hiding all these years. Now I must tell my daughter everything. That she is the daughter of a ghost. She has no
chi
. This is my greatest shame. How can I leave this world without leaving her my spirit?

So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. The pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter.

I hear my daughter speaking to her husband downstairs. They say words that mean nothing. They sit in a room with no life in it.

I know a thing before it happens. She will hear the vase and table crashing to the floor. She will come up the stairs and into my room. Her eyes will see nothing in the darkness, where I am waiting between the trees.

My daughter wanted to go to China for her second honeymoon, but now she is afraid.

“What if I blend in so well they think I'm one of them?” Waverly asked me. “What if they don't let me come back to the United States?”

“When you go to China,” I told her, “you don't even need to open your mouth. They already know you are an outsider.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. My daughter likes to speak back. She likes to question what I say.

“Aii-ya,” I said. “Even if you put on their clothes, even if you take off your makeup and hide your fancy jewelry, they know. They know just watching the way you walk, the way you carry your face. They know you do not belong.”

My daughter did not look pleased when I told her this, that she didn't look Chinese. She had a sour American look on her face. Oh, maybe ten years ago, she would have clapped her hands—hurray!—as if this were good news. But now she wants to be Chinese, it is so fashionable. And I know it is too late. All those years I tried to teach her! She followed my Chinese ways only until she learned how to walk out the door by herself and go to school. So now the only Chinese words she can say are
shsh, houche, chr fan,
and
gwan deng shweijyau.
How can she talk to people in China with these words? Pee-pee, choo-choo train, eat, close light sleep. How can she think she can blend in? Only her skin and her hair are Chinese. Inside—she is all Americanmade.

It's my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?

I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. You can buy an umbrella. Or go inside a Catholic church. In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.