The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Part 3

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 forefinger, wiggling them and chanting, "Come home, come home, Brave Orchid, who has fought the ghosts and won. Return to To Keung School, Kw.a.n.gtung City, Kw.a.n.gtung Province. Your cla.s.smates 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, Kw.a.n.gtung 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 finished 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 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 fly. 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 off 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 flew 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 pa.s.sed. 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 ama.s.sing.

"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 eggsh.e.l.l 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 finish it off 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 flat 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 cla.s.ses, come back here with your buckets, alcohol, and oil. If you can find 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 cla.s.ses on time. The story about the ghost's appearance and the coming ghost chase grew, and students s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 fire the oil all at once," she said. "Now."

"Whup. Whup." My mother told the sound of new fire so that I remember it. "Whup. Whup."

The alcohol burned a floating 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 fire up to the ceiling corners, down to the floor corners, moving clouds across the walls and floors, 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 sc.r.a.ps. No blood bonded friend to friend (though there were things owed beggars and monks), and they had to figure 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 fifteen 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 unb.u.t.toned, "Come put on your coat, you naughty child." When the coat puffed up, she'd quickly b.u.t.ton 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 superst.i.tions," 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: Kw.a.n.gtung Province, New Society Village, the river Kwoo, which runs past the village. "Go the way we came so that you will be able to find 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 b.u.t.ton. 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 sh.e.l.l 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 fingerprints; 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 compa.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 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 s.p.a.ce-a magician who could turn dirt into gold, twenty-five 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 off alleys to pen their goats, which stared out of the dimness with rectangular pupils. Whisking a handful of gra.s.s, 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, pa.s.sed 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 flying as some pa.s.ser-by b.u.mped 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 field and arrange straw for their eggs. She decided that the drake with the green head would be the best buy, the n.o.blest, although she would not buy him unless she had money left over; she was already raising a n.o.bler 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 find 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 flowers.

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 dignified 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 fingertips. "I would not have sold a daughter such as that one," she told us. My mother could find no flaw 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 field?"

"I know a chant on the finger 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 field and search in a spiral going outward until I reached the field's edge. Then I would believe the chant and look no more." She drew in my mother's notebook the field 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 five? How do you finish off weaving so that it doesn't unravel?"

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

"You tie the loose ends into ta.s.sles," said the girl.

My mother frowned. "But suppose I like a finished border?"

The girl hesitated. "I could, uh, press the fibers under and sew them down. Or how about cutting the fibers off?"

My mother offered the dealer half the price he named. "My mother-in-law asked me to find 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 find lost watches." He asked for a price higher than her suggestion but lower than his first.

"I knit and cook and find 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 off to look at a group of hungry slaves across the street. When she returned, the dealer sold her the girl with the finding 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 finish off 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 office 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 five 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 s.p.a.ce 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 fine 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 off firecrackers 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. n.o.body wanted a doctor's visit in the first 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 off 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 figuring 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 b.u.t.tocks, tailless and hairless under the shirt. It was definitely 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 puffball. (At first 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 finally 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 G.o.ds jealous of human joy. They counted fingers and toes by touch, felt for p.e.n.i.s or no p.e.n.i.s, but not until later would they know for sure whether the G.o.ds 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 filled 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 a.n.u.s 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 fields 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 flick 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 fit in my palm. I curl my fingers to make a cradle for the baby, my other hand an awning. I would protect the dream baby, not let it suffer, 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 fingers because my fingers 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 pinp.r.i.c.k 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 stuff 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 cliffs 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 fingers 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 find 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 five 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 fire 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. 806820), ate yellow croaker and pork together, which the thunder G.o.d had forbidden. But Chen wanted to incur thunderbolts during drought. The first time he ate, the thunder G.o.d jumped out of the sky, its legs like old trees. Chen chopped off the left one. The thunder G.o.d fell to the earth, and the villagers could see that it was a blue pig or bear with horns and fleshy 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. 766779). He shot and cooked rabbits and birds, but he could also eat scorpions, snakes, c.o.c.kroaches, 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 flying through the darkness at Wei. He felled it with three true arrows-the first making the thing crackle and flame; 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 flesh 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. 766779). He shot and cooked rabbits and birds, but he could also eat scorpions, snakes, c.o.c.kroaches, 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 flying through the darkness at Wei. He felled it with three true arrows-the first making the thing crackle and flame; 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 flesh 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 pa.s.sers-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 off. 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 floor was like the healthy banks of a pond in spring when the tadpoles, having just turned, sprang in the wet gra.s.s. "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: racc.o.o.ns, skunks, hawks, city pigeons, wild ducks, wild geese, black-skinned bantams, snakes, garden snails, turtles that crawled about the pantry floor and sometimes escaped under refrigerator or stove, catfish 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 flowers like white stars hiding under the leaves, which were like the flower petals but green. I've not been able to find 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, ruffling, 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 fingers in our ears to shut out the bird screams and the thud, thud of the turtles swimming in the boiling water, their sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.tting 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 gla.s.s 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 gra.s.ses 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 fingers 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 flapped loose inside my brain. I have wanted to say, "Stop it. Stop it," but not once did I say, "Stop it."