The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (16 page)

“Paper dolls,” said Brave Orchid to her children. “I’d have thought you were too old to be playing with dolls.” How greedy to play with presents in front of the giver. How impolite (“untraditional” in Chinese) her children were. With a slam of her cleaver, she cracked rock candy into jagged pieces. “Take some,” she urged. “Take more.” She brought the yellow crystals on a red paper plate to her family, one by one. It was very important that the beginning be sweet. Her children acted as if this eating were a bother. “Oh, all right,” they said, and took the smallest slivers. Who would think that children could dislike candy? It was abnormal, not in the nature of children, not human. “Take a big piece,” she scolded. She’d make them eat it like medicine if necessary. They were so stupid, surely they weren’t adults yet. They’d put the bad mouth on their aunt’s first American day; you had to sweeten their noisy barbarous mouths. She opened the front door and mumbled something. She opened the back door and mumbled something.

“What do you say when you open the door like that?” her children used to ask when they were younger.

“Nothing. Nothing,” she would answer.

“Is it spirits, Mother? Do you talk to spirits? Are you asking them in or asking them out?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. She never explained anything that was really important. They no longer asked.

When she came back from talking to the invisibilities, Brave Orchid saw that her sister was strewing the room. The paper people clung flat against the lampshades, the chairs, the tablecloths. Moon Orchid left fans unfolded and dragons with accordion bodies dangling from doorknobs. She was unrolling white silk. “Men are good at stitching roosters,” she was pointing out bird embroidery. It was amazing how a person could grow old without learning to put things away.

“Let’s put these things away,” Brave Orchid said.

“Oh, Sister,” said Moon Orchid. “Look what I have for you,” and she held up a pale green silk dress lined in wool. “In winter you can look like summer and be warm like summer.” She unbuttoned the frogs to show the lining, thick and plaid like a blanket.

“Now where would I wear such a fancy dress?” said Brave Orchid. “Give it to one of the children.”

“I have bracelets and earrings for them.”

“They’re too young for jewelry. They’ll lose it.”

“They seem very big for children.”

“The girls broke six jade bracelets playing baseball. And they can’t endure pain. They scream when I squeeze their hands into the jade. Then that very day, they’ll break it. We’ll put the jewelry in the bank, and we’ll buy glass and black wood frames for the silk scrolls.” She bundled up the sticks that opened into flowers. “What were you doing carrying these scraps across the ocean?”

Brave Orchid took what was useful and solid into the back bedroom, where Moon Orchid would stay until they decided what she would do permanently. Moon Orchid picked up pieces of string, but bright colors and movements distracted her. “Oh, look at this,” she’d say. “Just look at this. You have carp.” She was turning the light off and on in the goldfish tank, which sat in the rolltop desk that Brave Orchid’s husband had taken from the gambling house when it shut down during World War II. Moon Orchid looked up at the grandparents’ photographs that hung on the wall above the desk. Then she turned around and looked at the opposite wall; there, equally large, were pictures of Brave Orchid and her husband. They had put up their own pictures because later the children would not have the sense to do it.

“Oh, look,” said Moon Orchid. “Your pictures are up too. Why is that?”

“No reason. Nothing,” said Brave Orchid. “In America you can put up anybody’s picture you like.”

On the shelf of the rolltop desk, like a mantel under
the grandparents’ photos, there were bowls of plastic tangerines and oranges, crepe-paper flowers, plastic vases, porcelain vases filled with sand and incense sticks. A clock sat on a white runner crocheted with red phoenixes and red words about how lucky and bright life is. Moon Orchid lifted the ruffles to look inside the pigeon holes. There were also pen trays and little drawers, enough so that the children could each have one or two for their very own. The fish tank took up half the desk space, and there was still room for writing. The rolltop was gone; the children had broken it slat by slat when they hid inside the desk, pulling the top over themselves. The knee hole had boxes of toys that the married children’s children played with now. Brave Orchid’s husband had padlocked one large bottom cabinet and one drawer.

“Why do you keep it locked?” Moon Orchid asked. “What’s in here?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“If you want to poke around,” said Brave Orchid, “why don’t you find out what’s in the kitchen drawers so you can help me cook?”

They cooked enough food to cover the dining room and kitchen tables. “Eat!” Brave Orchid ordered. “Eat!” She would not allow anybody to talk while eating. In some families the children worked out a sign language, but here the children spoke English, which their parents didn’t seem to hear.

After they ate and cleaned up, Brave Orchid said, “Now! We have to get down to business.”

“What do you mean?” said her sister. She and her daughter held one another’s hands.

“Oh, no. I don’t want to listen to this,” said Brave Orchid’s husband, and left to read in bed.

The three women sat in the enormous kitchen with the butcher’s block and two refrigerators. Brave Orchid had an inside stove in the kitchen and a stove outside on the back porch. All day long the outside stove cooked peelings and
gristle into chicken feed. It horrified the children when they caught her throwing scraps of chicken into the chicken feed. Both stoves had been turned off for the night now, and the air was cooling.

“Wait until morning, Aunt,” said Moon Orchid’s daughter. “Let her get some sleep.”

“Yes, I do need rest after travelling all the way from China,” she said. “I’m here. You’ve done it and brought me here.” Moon Orchid meant that they should be satisfied with what they had already accomplished. Indeed, she stretched happily and appeared quite satisfied to be sitting in that kitchen at that moment. “I want to go to sleep early because of jet lag,” she said, but Brave Orchid, who had never been on an airplane, did not let her.

“What are we going to do about your husband?” Brave Orchid asked quickly. That ought to wake her up.

“I don’t know. Do we have to do something?”

“He does not know you’re here.”

Moon Orchid did not say anything. For thirty years she had been receiving money from him from America. But she had never told him that she wanted to come to the United States. She waited for him to suggest it, but he never did. Nor did she tell him that her sister had been working for years to transport her here. First Brave Orchid had found a Chinese-American husband for her daughter. Then the daughter had come and had been able to sign the papers to bring Moon Orchid over.

“We have to tell him you’ve arrived,” said Brave Orchid.

Moon Orchid’s eyes got big like a child’s. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“Nonsense. I want you here, and your daughter wants you here.”

“But that’s all.”

“Your husband is going to have to see you. We’ll make him recognize you. Ha. Won’t it be fun to see his face? You’ll go to his house. And when his second wife answers
the door, you say, ‘I want to speak to my husband,’ and you name his personal name. ‘Tell him I’ll be sitting in the family room.’ Walk past her as if she were a servant. She’ll scold him when he comes home from work, and it’ll serve him right. You yell at him too.”

“I’m scared,” said Moon Orchid. “I want to go back to Hong Kong.”

“You can’t. It’s too late. You’ve sold your apartment. See here. We know his address. He’s living in Los Angeles with his second wife, and they have three children. Claim your rights. Those are
your
children. He’s got two sons.
You
have two sons. You take them away from her. You become their mother.”

“Do you really think I can be a mother of sons? Don’t you think they’ll be loyal to her, since she gave birth to them?”

“The children will go to their true mother—you,” said Brave Orchid. “That’s the way it is with mothers and children.”

“Do you think he’ll get angry at me because I came without telling him?”

“He deserves your getting angry with him. For abandoning you and for abandoning your daughter.”

“He didn’t abandon me. He’s given me so much money. I’ve had all the food and clothes and servants I’ve ever wanted. And he’s supported our daughter too, even though she’s only a girl. He sent her to college. I can’t bother him. I mustn’t bother him.”

“How can you let him get away with this? Bother him. He deserves to be bothered. How dare he marry somebody else when he has you? How can you sit there so calmly? He would’ve let you stay in China forever. I had to send for your daughter, and I had to send for you. Urge her,” she turned to her niece. “Urge her to go look for him.”

“I think you should go look for my father,” she said. “I’d like to meet him. I’d like to see what my father looks like.”

“What does it matter what he’s like?” said her mother. “You’re a grown woman with a husband and children of your own. You don’t need a father—or a mother either. You’re only curious.”

“In this country,” said Brave Orchid, “many people make their daughters their heirs. If you don’t go see him, he’ll give everything to the second wife’s children.”

“But he gives us everything anyway. What more do I have to ask for? If I see him face to face, what is there to say?”

“I can think of hundreds of things,” said Brave Orchid. “Oh, how I’d love to be in your place. I could tell him so many things. What scenes I could make. You’re so wishy-washy.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You have to ask him why he didn’t come home. Why he turned into a barbarian. Make him feel bad about leaving his mother and father. Scare him. Walk right into his house with your suitcases and boxes. Move right into the bedroom. Throw her stuff out of the drawers and put yours in. Say, ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.’”

“Oh, no, I can’t do that. I can’t do that at all. That’s terrible.”

“Of course you can. I’ll teach you. ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.’ And you teach the little boys to call you Mother.”

“I don’t think I’d be very good with little boys. Little American boys. Our brother is the only boy I’ve known. Aren’t they very rough and unfeeling?”

“Yes, but they’re yours. Another thing I’d do if I were you, I’d get a job and help him out. Show him I could make his life easier; how I didn’t need his money.”

“He has a great deal of money, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he can do some job the barbarians value greatly.”

“Could I find a job like that? I’ve never had a job.”

“You could be a maid in a hotel,” Brave Orchid advised. “A lot of immigrants start that way nowadays. And the
maids get to bring home all the leftover soap and the clothes people leave behind.”

“I would clean up after people, then?”

Brave Orchid looked at this delicate sister. She was such a little old lady. She had long fingers and thin, soft hands. And she had a high-class city accent from living in Hong Kong. Not a trace of village accent remained; she had been away from the village for that long. But Brave Orchid would not relent; her dainty sister would just have to toughen up. “Immigrants also work in the canneries, where it’s so noisy it doesn’t matter if they speak Chinese or what. The easiest way to find a job, though, is to work in Chinatown. You get twenty-five cents an hour and all your meals if you’re working in a restaurant.”

If she were in her sister’s place, Brave Orchid would have been on the phone immediately, demanding one of those Chinatown jobs. She would make the boss agree that she start work as soon as he opened his doors the next morning. Immigrants nowadays were bandits, beating up store owners and stealing from them rather than working. It must’ve been the Communuists who taught them those habits.

Moon Orchid rubbed her forehead. The kitchen light shined warmly on the gold and jade rings that gave her hands a completeness. One of the rings was a wedding ring. Brave Orchid, who had been married for almost fifty years, did not wear any rings. They got in the way of all the work. She did not want the gold to wash away in the dishwater and the laundry water and the field water. She looked at her younger sister whose very wrinkles were fine. “Forget about a job,” she said, which was very lenient of her. “You won’t have to work. You just go to your husband’s house and demand your rights as First Wife. When you see him, you can say, ‘Do you remember me?’”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Then start telling him details about your life together in China. Act like a fortuneteller. He’ll be so impressed.”

“Do you think he’ll be glad to see me?”

“He better be glad to see you.”

As midnight came, twenty-two hours after she left Hong Kong, Moon Orchid began to tell her sister that she really was going to face her husband. “He won’t like me,” she said.

“Maybe you should dye your hair black, so he won’t think you’re old. Or I have a wig you can borrow. On the other hand, he should see how you’ve suffered. Yes, let him see how he’s made your hair turn white.”

These many hours, her daughter held Moon Orchid’s hand. The two of them had been separated for five years. Brave Orchid had mailed the daughter’s young photograph to a rich and angry man with citizenship papers. He was a tyrant. Mother and daughter were sorry for one another. “Let’s not talk about this anymore,” said Moon Orchid. “We can plan tomorrow. I want to hear about my grandchildren. Tell me about them. I have three grandchildren, don’t I?” she asked her daughter.

Brave Orchid thought that her niece was like her mother, the lovely, useless type. She had spent so much time trying to toughen up these two. “The children are very smart, Mother,” her niece was saying. “The teachers say they are brilliant. They can speak Chinese and English. They’ll be able to talk to you.”

“My children can talk to you too,” said Brave Orchid. “Come. Talk to your aunt,” she ordered.