The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (6 page)

“I’ve looked for you too,” I said, the tent now snug around us like a secret house when we were kids. “Whenever I heard about a good fighter, I went to see if it were you,” I said. “I saw you marry me. I’m so glad you married me.”

He wept when he took off my shirt and saw the scar-words on my back. He loosened my hair and covered the words with it. I turned around and touched his face, loving the familiar first.

So for a time I had a partner—my husband and I, soldiers together just as when we were little soldiers playing in the village. We rode side by side into battle. When I became pregnant, during the last four months, I wore my armor altered so that I looked like a powerful, big man. As a fat man, I walked with the foot soldiers so as not to jounce the gestation. Now when I was naked, I was a strange
human being indeed—words carved on my back and the baby large in front.

I hid from battle only once, when I gave birth to our baby. In dark and silver dreams I had seen him falling from the sky, each night closer to the earth, his soul a star. Just before labor began, the last star rays sank into my belly. My husband would talk to me and not go, though I said for him to return to the battlefield. He caught the baby, a boy, and put it on my breast. “What are we going to do with this?” he asked, holding up the piece of umbilical cord that had been closest to the baby.

“Let’s tie it to a flagpole until it dries,” I said. We had both seen the boxes in which our parents kept the dried cords of all their children. “This one was yours, and this yours,” my mother would say to us brothers and sisters, and fill us with awe that she could remember.

We made a sling for the baby inside my big armor, and rode back into the thickest part of the fighting. The umbilical cord flew with the red flag and made us laugh. At night inside our own tent, I let the baby ride on my back. The sling was made of red satin and purple silk; the four paisley straps that tied across my breasts and around my waist ended in housewife’s pockets lined with a coin, a seed, a nut, and a juniper leaf. At the back of the sling I had sewn a tiny quilted triangle, red at its center against two shades of green; it marked the baby’s nape for luck. I walked bowed, and the baby warmed himself against me, his breathing in rhythm with mine, his heart beating like my heart.

When the baby was a month old, we gave him a name and shaved his head. For the full-month ceremony my husband had found two eggs, which we dyed red by boiling them with a flag. I peeled one and rolled it all over the baby’s head, his eyes, his lips, off his bump of a nose, his cheeks, his dear bald head and fontanel. I had brought dried grapefruit peel in my saddlebag, and we also boiled that. We washed our heads and hands in the grapefruit water, dabbing it on the baby’s forehead and hands. Then I gave my
husband the baby and told him to take it to his family, and I gave him all the money we had taken on raids to take to my family. “Go now,” I said, “before he is old enough to recognize me.” While the blur is still in his eyes and the little fists shut tight like buds, I’ll send my baby away from me. I altered my clothes and became again the slim young man. Only now I would get so lonely with the tent so empty that I slept outside.

My white horse overturned buckets and danced on them; it lifted full wine cups with its teeth. The strong soldiers lifted the horse in a wooden tub, while it danced to the stone drums and flute music. I played with the soldiers, throwing arrows into a bronze jar. But I found none of these antics as amusing as when I first set out on the road.

It was during this lonely time, when any high cry made the milk spill from my breasts, that I got careless. Wildflowers distracted me so that I followed them, picking one, then another, until I was alone in the woods. Out from behind trees, springing off branches came the enemy, their leader looming like a genie out of the water gourd. I threw fists and feet at them, but they were so many, they pinned me to the earth while their leader drew his sword. My fear shot forth—a quick, jabbing sword that slashed fiercely, silver flashes, quick cuts wherever my attention drove it. The leader stared at the palpable sword swishing unclutched at his men, then laughed aloud. As if signaled by his laughter, two more swords appeared in midair. They clanged against mine, and I felt metal vibrate inside my brain. I willed my sword to hit back and to go after the head that controlled the other swords. But the man fought well, hurting my brain. The swords opened and closed, scissoring madly, metal zinging along metal. Unable to leave my sky-sword to work itself, I would be watching the swords move like puppets when the genie yanked my hair back and held a dagger against my throat. “Aha!” he said. “What have we here?” He lifted the bead pouch out of my shirt and cut the string. I grabbed his arm, but one of his swords dived toward me, and I rolled out of the way. A horse galloped up,
and he leapt on it, escaping into the forest, the beads in his fist. His swords fought behind him until I heard him shout, “I am here!” and they flew to his side. So I had done battle with the prince who had mixed the blood of his two sons with the metal he had used for casting his swords.

I ran back to my soldiers and gathered the fastest horsemen for pursuit. Our horses ran like the little white water horses in the surf. Across a plain we could see the enemy, a dustdevil rushing toward the horizon. Wanting to see, I focused my eyes as the eagles had taught me, and there the genie would be—shaking one bead out of the pouch and casting it at us. Nothing happened. No thunder, no earthquake that split open the ground, no hailstones big as heads.

“Stop!” I ordered my riders. “Our horses are exhausted, and I don’t want to chase any farther south.” The rest of the victories would be won on my own, slow and without shortcuts.

I stood on top of the last hill before Peiping and saw the roads below me flow like living rivers. Between roads the woods and plains moved too; the land was peopled—the Han people, the People of One Hundred Surnames, marching with one heart, our tatters flying. The depth and width of Joy were exactly known to me: the Chinese population. After much hardship a few of our millions had arrived together at the capital. We faced our emperor personally. We beheaded him, cleaned out the palace, and inaugurated the peasant who would begin the new order. In his rags he sat on the throne facing south, and we, a great red crowd, bowed to him three times. He commended some of us who were his first generals.

I told the people who had come with me that they were free to go home now, but since the Long Wall was so close, I would go see it. They could come along if they liked. So, loath to disband after such high adventures, we reached the northern boundary of the world, chasing Mongols en route.

I touched the Long Wall with my own fingers, running the edge of my hand between the stones, tracing the grooves
the builders’ hands had made. We lay our foreheads and our cheeks against the Long Wall and cried like the women who had come here looking for their men so long building the wall. In my travels north, I had not found my brother.

Carrying the news about the new emperor, I went home, where one more battle awaited me. The baron who had drafted my brother would still be bearing sway over our village. Having dropped my soldiers off at crossroads and bridges, I attacked the baron’s stronghold alone. I jumped over the double walls and landed with swords drawn and knees bent, ready to spring. When no one accosted me, I sheathed the swords and walked about like a guest until I found the baron. He was counting his money, his fat ringed fingers playing over the abacus.

“Who are you? What do you want?” he said, encircling his profits with his arms. He sat square and fat like a god.

“I want your life in payment for your crimes against the villagers.”

“I haven’t done anything to you. All this is mine. I earned it. I didn’t steal it from you. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Who are you?”

“I am a female avenger.”

Then—heaven help him—he tried to be charming, to appeal to me man to man. “Oh, come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them. ‘Girls are maggots in the rice.’ ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’” He quoted to me the sayings I hated.

“Regret what you’ve done before I kill you,” I said.

“I haven’t done anything other men—even you—wouldn’t have done in my place.”

“You took away my brother.”

“I free my apprentices.”

“He was not an apprentice.”

“China needs soldiers in wartime.”

“You took away my childhood.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve never met before. I’ve done nothing to you.”

“You’ve done this,” I said, and ripped off my shirt to show him my back. “You are responsible for this.” When I saw his startled eyes at my breasts, I slashed him across the face and on the second stroke cut off his head.

I pulled my shirt back on and opened the house to the villagers. The baron’s family and servants hid in closets and under beds. The villagers dragged them out into the courtyard, where they tried them next to the beheading machine. “Did you take my harvest so that my children had to eat grass?” a weeping farmer asked.

“I saw him steal seed grain,” another testified.

“My family was hiding under the thatch on the roof when the bandits robbed our house, and we saw this one take off his mask.” They spared those who proved they could be reformed. They beheaded the others. Their necks were collared in the beheading machine, which slowly clamped shut. There was one last-minute reprieve of a bodyguard when a witness shouted testimony just as the vise was pinching blood. The guard had but recently joined the household in exchange for a child hostage. A slow killing gives a criminal time to regret his crimes and think of the right words to prove he can change.

I searched the house, hunting out people for trial. I came upon a locked room. When I broke down the door, I found women, cowering, whimpering women. I heard shrill insect noises and scurrying. They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet. Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. I called the villagers to come identify any daughters they wanted to take home, but no one claimed any. I gave each woman a bagful of rice, which they sat on. They rolled the bags to the road. They wandered away like ghosts. Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. They did not wear men’s clothes like me, but rode as women in black and red
dresses. They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons. They killed men and boys. I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality.

After the trials we tore down the ancestral tablets. “We’ll use this great hall for village meetings,” I announced. “Here we’ll put on operas; we’ll sing together and talk-story.” We washed the courtyard; we exorcised the house with smoke and red paper. “This is a new year,” I told the people, “the year one.”

I went home to my parents-in-law and husband and son. My son stared, very impressed by the general he had seen in the parade, but his father said, “It’s your mother. Go to your mother.” My son was delighted that the shiny general was his mother too. She gave him her helmet to wear and her swords to hold.

Wearing my black embroidered wedding coat, I knelt at my parents-in-law’s feet, as I would have done as a bride. “Now my public duties are finished,” I said. “I will stay with you, doing farmwork and housework, and giving you more sons.”

“Go visit your mother and father first,” my mother-in-law said, a generous woman. “They want to welcome you.”

My mother and father and the entire clan would be living happily on the money I had sent them. My parents had bought their coffins. They would sacrifice a pig to the gods that I had returned. From the words on my back, and how they were fulfilled, the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality.

M
y American life has been such a disappointment.

“I got straight A’s, Mama.”

“Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village.”

I could not figure out what was my village. And it was
important that I do something big and fine, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums. You can’t eat straight A’s.

When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, “‘Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,’” I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stop.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. ‘There’s no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls.’”

“I would hit her if she were mine. But then there’s no use wasting all that discipline on a girl. ‘When you raise girls, you’re raising children for strangers.’”

“Stop that crying!” my mother would yell. “I’m going to hit you if you don’t stop. Bad girl! Stop!” I’m going to remember never to hit or to scold my children for crying, I thought, because then they will only cry more.

“I’m not a bad girl,” I would scream. “I’m not a bad girl. I’m not a bad girl.” I might as well have said, “I’m not a girl.”

“When you were little, all you had to say was ‘I’m not a bad girl,’ and you could make yourself cry,” my mother says, talking-story about my childhood.

I minded that the emigrant villagers shook their heads at my sister and me. “One girl—and another girl,” they said, and made our parents ashamed to take us out together. The good part about my brothers being born was that people stopped saying, “All girls,” but I learned new grievances. “Did you roll an egg on
my
face like that when I was born?” “Did you have a full-month party for me?” “Did you turn on all the lights?” “Did you send
my
picture to Grandmother?” “Why not? Because I’m a girl? Is that why not?” “Why didn’t you teach me English?” “You like having me beaten up at school, don’t you?”