The Kitchen God's Wife Part 18

I laughed, and then he began to sing-it was the funny opera song he had sung when I first met him almost a year before at the village play. I was surprised how good his voice was to listen to. And now the whole world was hearing him sing, and he was singing for me.

That day on the mountain, I think you can guess what I was feeling. So lucky to be there. So lucky to have these friends. So lucky to have my husband. My heart filled up until it ached from having too much. And I forgot that I would ever have to leave this place.

We reached the village at the top, the one called Heaven's Breath. There we all agreed to stop early and stay the night. Why not make the scenery last longer?

And then we saw the army truck that had driven up from the other side. It was still there, ready to go down the same road we had taken. Why not brag to them about the magical sights we had just seen? We could give them something to look forward to!

We hurried to get out of the truck. Wen Fu lifted me off and joked that I was as big as two wives. And I didn't mind.

We found the soldiers sitting outside on the ground, quiet and still. And right away we saw by their faces: Those men had no ears for our happy talk. They told us they were on their way to Chungking-to help set up a new capital city-because of what had happened to the old. And then we learned what we did not know in Kweiyang, the news about Nanking.

Who knows why the j.a.panese changed their minds about their paper promises? Maybe someone threw a rock, maybe someone refused to bow down. Maybe an old woman tried to stop her neighbor, scolding him, "Behave! You want to get us all in trouble?"

"They lied," said one of the soldiers sitting on the ground. "Raped old women, married women, and little girls, taking turns with them, over and over again. Sliced them open with a sword when they were all used up. Cut off their fingers to take their rings. Shot all the little sons, no more generations. Raped ten thousand, chopped down twenty or thirty thousand, a number that is no longer a number, no longer people."

I was seeing this in my mind. The old woman who was our cook, Wan Betty, the little boy throwing rocks in the lake. I was thinking, This happened when we were having good times and bad times, while I was complaining as we traveled from there to here. I was hearing this with no danger to myself, yet I had so much terror in my heart I did not want to believe it.

I told the soldier, "This cannot be true. Only rumor." "Believe what you want," the soldier said, and then spit on the ground.

I found out later I was right. What the soldier had said-that was only rumor. Because the real number of people who died was much, much worse. An official later told me it was maybe one hundred thousand, although how did he know? Who could ever count so many people all at once? Did they count the bodies they buried, each one they burned, those dumped into the river? What about all those poor people who never counted in anybody's mind even when they were alive?

I tried to imagine it. And then I fought to push it out of my thoughts. What happened in Nanking, I couldn't claim that as my tragedy. I was not affected. I was not killed.

And yet for many months afterward I had dreams, very bad dreams. I dreamt we returned to Nanking and we were telling the cook and Wan Betty about the beautiful scenery at Heaven's Breath, bragging about the good dishes we ate in Kweiyang. And the cook said to me, "You didn't have to leave Nanking to see such things, to taste such good food. We have the same, right here."

In front of me, she set down a dish, piled with white eels, thick as fingers. And they were still alive, struggling to swim off my plate.

Helen told me there's a restaurant-just opened-and they have this same kind of eels, cooked with chives in very hot oil. She wanted us to go try them, to see if that restaurant is any good. But I said no. I don't have an appet.i.te anymore for that kind of eels.

My tongue doesn't taste things the same way anymore. Like celery, I can't eat celery anymore. All my life I loved celery. Now, as soon as I smell it, I tell myself no. And I don't even remember what made me not like it anymore. But with the eels, I know.

Do you know why that is? Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?

14.

BAD EYE.

And now I will tell you when all my luck changed, from bad to worse. You tell me if this was my fault.

By the time we arrived in Kunming, I was almost eight months pregnant, so big with my baby I thought it would pop out with every bounce of the truck. Now that we were out of the mountain, our driver seemed to be in a big hurry. He was driving fast along the straight road, and I had to hold onto the sides of my stomach as we hit one b.u.mp after another.

"Eh!" Jiaguo shouted to him. "You drive any faster, you'll send us straight to the devil." Old Mr. Ma turned around. "Faster?" he shouted above the noise, then smiled. And before Jiaguo could answer, the truck roared ahead with more strength.

It didn't matter. We were all eager to get to our new homes. No more climbing into the truck every morning. No more small villages and bad food.

It was still wintertime. Yet the air blowing on our faces was not cold. It seemed to all of us that we had traveled to a land with a completely different kind of season, an eternal spring.

Hulan turned to me. "Look over there. Kunming is just like that expression about picturesque places-green hills and clear waters. And the sky is good too."

Of course, at the time we didn't know that we were only on the outskirts of the city. And as we continued to drive, we saw this good scenery disappear.

The truck slowed down, the driver was honking, and then we were pa.s.sing hundreds of people, carrying sacks, looking tired. Wen Fu shouted at them, "Move to the side! Get over!" And when they did not jump to his orders, he cursed them-"Louyi!"-which was a very mean thing to say, calling those poor people crickets and ants, little n.o.bodies.

Here and there we saw workers digging up rocks from the road and throwing them into wheelbarrows. And farther along, we pa.s.sed another army truck, then another and another. Wen Fu waved to them each time, pointing to himself and shouting, "Air force, Hangchow, second cla.s.s."

And then we entered the city itself. It was crowded and busy, a big city, bigger than I had imagined. We drove past a railway station, down a wide street with gray buildings, not too old, not too modem either. And then the streets became more narrow, more crooked, more congested with people, carts, and bicycles. The driver was honking his horn every few seconds. The air felt thick with bad smells. My head hurt. I saw mud-brick houses crowded together, some clean and whitewashed, others so rough and crumbly you didn't know why the building was still standing. And many of the faces looking back at us were not Chinese. They were tribal people, recently come down from the mountains. You could tell they were not local people. They did not wear the drab top and pants of poor-cla.s.s Yunnanese, or the long gown of the merchant, or the Western shirt and pants of the educated. They wore colorful skirts, bright bands on their sleeves, turban scarves wrapped around their heads or hats that looked like tight-fitting straw bowls.

Chinese or not, the people we pa.s.sed on the streets would stare at us with dark faces. They watched us so carefully, so quietly-all those signs of war now driving by their doorsteps. This city, which had been quiet for so many centuries, was now turning noisy from top to bottom.

We moved into a hotel for a few days, while some air force workers went to find proper housing for us. And then we finally moved to a two-story house halfway between the north and east gate. Jiaguo and Hulan lived there too, as well as another couple, people we met the day we moved in.

The woman was older than Hulan and I. She was very bossy. And her husband was also connected with the air force, although he was not a pilot, but an inspector of all sorts of transportation matters, bridges, roads, railways.

The first time we saw the house, Hulan said, "Look at its long wooden face. And those two big windows-like eyes looking out." All the houses on that street looked the same, two- or three-story wooden houses-yangfang, we called them, foreign-style houses.

There was no courtyard in front, nothing to separate the house from the street. You walked down three steps-boomp!-there you were, with everybody else on the sidewalk. But we did have a backyard, and this was closed off by a fence. It was not a pleasant place for visiting with friends, not that kind of yard. It was just concrete and dirt, a few bushes scattered about in no particular design. On one side of the fence was a water pump and long tub for washing clothes. Above that were ropes for hanging the wet laundry. Next to that, a large stone gourd for grinding rice and sesame seeds, that sort of thing.

The back fence had a gate that led into an alley, and this was wide enough for night-soil collectors to push their wheelbarrows through. Down this alley and one turn to the left was a pathway with bushes that led to a small city lake. I was told this lake was very pretty to see, and perhaps it had once been that way. But when I saw it, the poorest people of the city were doing their bathing, their washing, and other things too awful to talk about.

As I said, the house was foreign-looking on the outside. But inside, it was still Chinese in feeling and thinking. We had two large common rooms downstairs. One was a big kitchen with two coal-burning stoves made out of thick clay, with many burners for cooking. We also had a sink with a drain, but no running water, only running servants. That was the Chinese way. The cook and the servant had to go to the pump in the backyard and carry in the big, heavy buckets. Maybe they had to carry these upstairs as well. I don't remember now. When you have never had to do these things yourself, you do not think about what someone else has to do instead.

In any case, someone must have brought the water upstairs. Because every morning, every evening, I always had enough boiled-clean water for washing my face and taking a small half-bath to clean my upper body in the morning, my lower body at night. I was too big with the baby to do everything all at once. And every day, the servant had to empty the basins and tubs, as well as the chamber pots, so that they could be taken to the alleyway and cleaned.

The other common room was a large eating and sitting area. There we had a big table, lots of chairs, two cheap sofas, and an old windup phonograph Wen Fu had found soon after we arrived in the city. This windup machine did not mean we lacked electricity to run a newer phonograph. This was wartime. Where could you find a new phonograph? Of course, it is true that most people there did not have electricity; they lived in old-style mud or straw buildings. But in our house, on our street, everyone had electricity, upstairs and downstairs. And when the rest of the city turned dark and quiet at night, we turned on our radio, our fan, our lamps, and played mah jong late into the night.

We were always ready to squeeze out one more moment of fun. We liked to think we were just like those people in Berlin. We had heard it was a crazy kind of place, where people did not think about the war, only what pleasure they might find each day-gambling, eating, nightclubs. That's how we were, wanting to lead the same kind of crazy life. Of course, that was Berlin. We were in Kunming. And so, when we tired of listening to the scratchy music on the phonograph, when the radio ran out of music, when we had no more people to gossip about, when our hands were too tired to lift another mah jong tile, what else was there to do? We could not go to a nightclub. We went to bed.

Since Jiaguo was a captain, he and Hulan had the best part of the house, the two large rooms downstairs. The rest of us had rooms upstairs, which was very hard on me. I could not see my feet beyond my stomach. So once I went upstairs, I could come down only by thinking carefully how to place each foot on each stair, one at a time.

When we first moved there, Wen Fu and I received the worst rooms, both of them facing a bad-luck direction. The only way to make the bed face the right way would have been to push it against the closet door and block the door for going in and out. How could we do that?

So those were our rooms-but only because the wife of the inspector had already chosen the best upstairs rooms for herself, claiming her husband was higher-ranking than mine. This was true, but she didn't have to say it that way. She could have said, "Here, you choose first." I would have picked those unfortunate rooms, making it my generosity and not her punishment. I would have picked at least one.

So the first week in that house was very bad. I did not like those rooms. I did not like the inspector's wife. I especially did not like the way she played mah jong, the way she raised her eyebrows and said "Hnh!" every time I threw down a tile. On top of that, every night we had to listen to the inspector and his wife arguing through the walls.

At first it would be the husband's low voice, then her sharp one. The woman would begin to wail, and Wen Fu would pick up his shoes and throw them against the wall. But the couple would stay quiet for only five minutes before starting to fight again.

After three or four nights like this, Wen Fu complained to the woman, and then Hulan complained about the shoes thrown against the wall-"Like a bomb," she said, "almost scared us to death!" And soon everybody was arguing, all kinds of bad feelings coming out at once, until no one would speak to anyone, not one word. At night, when the radio programs went off the air, we did not choose to stay up late and socialize. We all went to our rooms, and it was quiet enough to hear a fly landing on the roof.

This problem lasted only a few more days. Because then the inspector went to look at the progress on the Burma Road. We were told later that the mosquitoes in that area were more dangerous than the j.a.panese. We heard the malaria ate up his brain in only three or four days, so he died in an awful kind of way. And then we had to listen to his wife moaning and crying for many days after that. Of course, this time we did not complain. Wen Fu did not throw his shoes. We were all very kind to her. And by the time she was ready to leave, we all agreed we had become friends for a lifetime. Although now I cannot remember her name, Liu or Low, something like that.

In any case, after she was gone, I took over their rooms, paid extra money of course, money from my dowry. Peanut sent me the money from my bank account, and that's how I found out she had also sent the other four hundred Chinese dollars to Nanking, the money I never received.

Actually, by then lots of things cost me extra. The air force could not afford to give us servants anymore. Even Hulan, a captain's wife, had none. So I had to pay for my own cook, who was an old widow, and I hired my own cleaning servant, who was a young girl. And I also had to pay for the small room just off the kitchen where they lived.

You should have seen Hulan's face when my servant girl did our laundry or cleaned our chamber pots. Hulan had changed lots by then, no longer a simple country girl, grateful to be married to an air force captain. You know what I think? When Jiaguo got his promotion, Hulan gave herself a promotion too! In her mind, she was more important than I was. And she was mad that I could afford servants and she had none.

Of course, my servant and cook did many tasks that helped Hulan too. They cleaned the common rooms. They brought water in from the well for making tea or washing-for everybody to use.

But Hulan was not grateful. She went looking for spots of grease on the floor, found them, then said, "Ayo! Look here." And when I invited her and Jiaguo to dinner, she would eat lots, then say, "Very good, but maybe the meat stayed in the pan too long." The next time, she would say, "Very good, but maybe the meat was not cooked long enough."

So it did not matter what I did, what favors I gave her. She was always unhappy until I was the same level of unhappy as she was.

By the ninth month, the baby inside me grew until it was the size of two babies. But still it would not come. I was not too worried, because I could feel it swimming inside of me, turning its body around, pushing with its feet, rolling its head. It moved when I sang. It moved as I walked in my dreams. It moved when I saw a vegetable at the market I wanted to eat. That baby had my same mind.

Every day I sewed baby blankets or knitted sweaters and clapped together their tiny sleeves. I remember one day, when I was sewing, the baby was kicking me harder than ever. I imagined this strong baby would soon be running up and down the stairs in the same way it ran up and down my womb.

"Come out, little treasure," I called. "Mama calls you to come out." And as I said this, the baby kicked me again and I dropped my scissors on the floor.They landed with their points stuck in the floor, just like a little soldier, waiting to take orders. At first I laughed, but then-eh!-I felt something very strange. The baby stopped moving inside me. I don't think I was only imagining this. That's how it happened: The scissors fell, the baby became very still.

I tried to pluck those scissors out of the floor, but I was too big to bend over. And then I remembered what Old Aunt had once said about the bad luck of dropping scissors. I could not remember the reasoning, only the stories: a woman who lost the sharpness of her mind, a woman whose hair fell out of her head overnight, a woman whose only son poked his eye out with a little twig, and she was so sorry she blinded her own eyes with the same stick.

What a terrible thing I had done, dropping my scissors. I called my servant right away and told her to throw those scissors into the lake.

That night the baby did not move even once. I sang. I walked up and down the hallway. It did not answer. The next day I went to the hospital, and the doctor did something to make the baby come out fast. But of course, it was already too late.

Hulan was there. After the doctor left, she was the one who said the baby was big, perhaps over ten pounds. What good was it to tell me how much the baby weighed, as if she were talking about so many pounds of fish taken from the sea? That baby girl never cried, never even took one breath of air.

Wen Fu patted my hand. "At least it was not a boy."

I don't know why, but right away, I told the nurse to bring me the baby. Hulan and Wen Fu stared at me.

"I want to see her so I can give her a proper name," I said in a firm voice. Hulan and Wen Fu looked at each other.

I sighed. "This is only being practical," I said, "to send a baby to the next world with a name. The baby will grow up there. And when we go to the next world ourselves, we can call her, maybe ask her to take care of us in our new life."

"This is being practical," Hulan agreed. And then she and Wen Fu both left. I'm sure they thought I would cry over that baby, and they did not want to be embarra.s.sed watching me do this.

After the nurse brought her in, I did not get up to look at her. I lay in my bed without even turning my head. I wanted some memory of her, and I was thinking of those times we danced together, how she was so lively when I talked to her. And then finally I pulled myself up and went to look.

A big baby. So much hair. Ears that looked just like mine. A tiny mouth. But her skin-so sad!-it was the color of a stone. Her two hands were squeezed into tight little fists. I tried to uncurl one, and that's when I started to cry. If this baby had been born in Shanghai. If this baby had been born when it was not wartime. If I had not dropped those scissors.

But I quickly chased away those sad thoughts and made myself strong. People in the countryside were starving. People in the war were being killed. People died for any sort of reason, for no reason at all. So when a baby died, at least you could tell yourself it had no chance to suffer.

The next afternoon we drove to the western foothills, the place everyone called the Sleeping Beauties. The hills there look like sleeping maidens, resting on their sides. That's where we buried her. I said only a few words in her honor: "She was a good baby. She never cried." And that's when I named her after the lake in Nanking: Mochou, Sorrowfree, because she had never known even one sorrow.

I did not use any scissors for a long time. I waited more than one hundred days. And it was hard not sewing or knitting for so long. As I have already said, in Kunming there were not too many fun things to do, nothing to see, especially in the daytime. You could not say, I'm bored, let's go see a movie this afternoon. You could only stay bored. So after many days of doing nothing, I decided to buy a new pair of scissors and start sewing again.

Hulan told me, "I heard that Yunnan people make the best scissors, very sharp and st.u.r.dy. And it is true, I found some a few weeks ago."

She said there were many vendors who sold scissors, but the best could be found at a local shop on one of the side streets in the marketplace in the old part of the city. The scissors were the highest quality, also very cheap. There was no sign for the streets or shop, she said. But it was easy to find.

And then she gave me directions: "Take the northeast footbridge across the lake. On the other side, look for the old man with the soup stand. Then turn toward another place that sells dried fish. Keep walking and walking, until you see the girl who sells baskets filled with old foreigner shoes. Then turn again-only one way to turn-and keep going until you see a curve in the road. The houses become better here, whitewashed, sometimes a sign or two. Look for a place selling big rocks of brine. Go the opposite way. You'll see the marketplace after five more minutes of fast walking. The, girl with the scissors is sitting outside at a table."

Of course, I got lost. What kind of directions were those? That part of the city was thousands of years old. And to walk through those streets you would think it had not changed one bit in all those years. The roads turned in and out and met up with one another here or ended there for no reason. They were crooked, paved with rough stones worn smooth down the middle by people's feet. Little houses were crowded in on both sides, and the streets were very narrow. No motorcar had ever driven through here, that was certain.

I was lost for more than an hour, wandering through a very bad part of town. Even though I was in a simple dress, other women stared at me, up and down, pointing at my shoes. Little children followed me, crying, "Hungry! Hungry" while holding out their palms. I looked for someone who could help me, but there was no one. Faces looked back at me, empty, no friendliness to be found there.

And so I walked and walked, with little children dancing at my heels, past windows with bad cooking smells. I saw a woman come to the door, naked to the waist, nursing her baby. An old man sitting on a plank looked up. He saw me and laughed a little, then started to cough in a choking kind of way, coughing so hard I thought he was going to die right there. My throat was tight from trying not to cry.

Finally I came into a larger street filled with people, the marketplace. The children crowded around me so I could not move. I dug into my purse and threw a few coins over their heads. And they shrieked, then fell to the ground, fighting over this small amount of luck.

I decided to ask someone right away how I could find a pedicab to take me home. I walked over to a young barefoot woman with a dirty face and messy thick braids. She was seated at a bamboo table. Before I could even ask my question, I saw the scissors lying on her table. This is true! Wouldn't that also make you feel someone was playing a big joke on you? Wouldn't that make you feel you only got things in life you didn't want?

The scissors were arranged in neat rows on a faded red cloth, smallest to largest with two styles. One was a plain kind, with sharp blades but no decoration on the handles. The other style was quite fancy, shaped like a crane bird, like something you would expect to find in a good Shanghai store. I was surprised to see them here. The blades were thin and tapered to look like a long beak. Where the blades connected with a metal pin, that was the eye. And the two holes for putting your fingers through, those were the wings.

I wondered how they made them, each one looking exactly the same, different only in size. I picked up one, opened the beak and closed it. It looked as if the crane were talking and flying at the same time. Wonderful, so clever!

"Who made these scissors?" I asked the young woman. "Only members of our clan," she said, and when she smiled, I saw all her top-row teeth were missing. She instantly turned from young to old. I picked up a larger pair of scissors. She pulled out a dirty rag, inviting me to test the sharpness of the blades.

A naked little boy came to the doorway behind her. "Ma!" he cried. "Wait," she scolded him. "Can't you see, I have an important guest." The little boy went back inside.

"This is not just a boast," she said, now chattering in her toothless speech. "You try scissors anywhere else in the city and you can see they are not as sharp as ours, not nearly as sharp. That's because our family people have been scissors makers for many, many thousands of years, ten thousand years maybe. Here, you try this pair, best-made quality." She gave me the rag for cutting. The scissors felt very good the way they bit into the cloth.

The woman wiggled her fingers. "This skill runs through everyone in our family. We pa.s.s it on from generation to generation, in the blood, also through training. We teach the youngest ones to make big-eyed needles first, later smaller and smaller ones, then scissors."

"How much?" I asked, holding up a pair of the fancy scissors.

"How much do you think they are worth?" she said, pinching her mouth, staring at me directly. "How much for such fine scissors? -the best, a good strong metal, American steel."

This woman must have thought I was a fool. "How can this be American steel?" I said. "There are no American factories here."

"West of the city, that's where we get the metal, at the bottom of the Burma Road," she said. "Every once in a while, a foreign truck goes over-wah, a thousand feet down-they just leave it there at the bottom. Boys from different families climb down with ropes, bring back the bodies, also supplies if they're not broken to worthless pieces. The rest they let us keep. Ten families share. Two families take any wooden things. Another two take the seats and rubber parts. We share the metal with the others. With our portion, we cook the metal down and make scissors." She was smiling, very proud.

How bad to hear!-making scissors from a foreigner ghost truck. I was about to put the scissors down when she said, "Four yuan. How about it? This is my best price."

I shook my head. Oh, in American money that would be like two dollars. And I was thinking, Why should I pay so much for such bad-luck scissors?

"Three yuan, then. Don't tell my husband. Three is my best price." I shook my head. But now the woman thought I was only trying to bargain her down.

The woman sighed. "If you like them, you only have to tell me how much, what price. Two and fifty, then. Don't tell anyone else. It is too cheap to believe. Two yuan fifty."

And that's when I thought to myself, What harm would it do? Two yuan fifty was a very good price. Where else could I find scissors like these? So I opened my purse and put the money in her hand.

"Next time you come I can't promise you the same price," she said, and then laughed.

I leaned over to pick up those wonderful scissors. And I was secretly congratulating myself for my bargaining skills, when my purse slipped down my arm and banged into the corner of the flimsy table. All of a sudden, the end of the table flew up, then crashed down, and forty pairs of scissors fell to the ground!

I stared at them, all their bird mouths flung open, all that bad luck pouring out.

"Ai! How terrible!" I cried. "How could I let this happen?"

"No problem, no damage," the woman said. She stooped to pick up the fallen scissors. But I was already hurrying away.