Are these things ever past? Kids saw.
Can you ever get over it? Sex, bad.
Birthing, bad. Woman, bad. So,
lifetimes later, a strange old lady
brings to me and my husband a bowl
of water. She holds it in her 2 hands.
Chinese will serve ordinary tea
with the attention of both hands. I hope
she means to be making ceremony; I shall
take it to be shriving. The bad we did
be over. Punishment be over. Suffering be over.
Is that it then? Wet my hands in the well
water—the bowl like the well, and my wet face
like my sinful aunt’s. Perhaps the well water
had been offered innocently, I the only one
who remembers the past, and believes in history’s
influence. And believes ritual settles scores.
My husband by my side blessing himself as if
with the holy water of his youth was stand-in
for the rapist / lover. Forgiven. Curse lifted.
War over.
MOTHER’S VILLAGE
Let us be on our way.
“We drive to your mother’s village, la.”
Elder Brother climbed into the van, easily;
he’s ridden cars often. He has a TV
set, a watch, cell phone, camera.
He farms with a buffalo. I hope
he doesn’t feel poor, doesn’t want
a tractor, a car. Maybe he’s Green.
The nearest town, Gujing, calls
itself “Guangdong’s First Green City.”
And “China’s First Green City.”
May my family choose to farm with buffalo
rather than machinery, fully aware of bettering
the health of Planet Earth. Is Gujing
the same as Gwoo Jeng? Place names
on the map of China, if the way “home”
that MaMa taught us is on maps at all,
are nearly the sounds she had us memorize.
Gujing. Gwoo Jeng. We speak
a peculiar dialect. And language revolutions
have changed the spellings of cities and towns,
provinces, mountains and rivers. Villages never
on maps. Translating Chinese words
with other Chinese words, Mother
said that Gwoo Jeng means Ancient Well.
Or many Ancient Wells. We got to Mother’s
village in 5 minutes away. In her day,
it was so far that her bridesmaids
teased her. “Marry a man from Tail End …”
We arrived at a third temple, adorned
and open as if for holiday. People, nicely
dressed, city style, with a television
crew, greeted us on its steps. “You missed
the festival. The ninth month, ninth day
festival. Just yesterday. Ten thousand
old people came. We fed
ten thousand old people.” I was
late for Old People’s Day; we in
the United States don’t celebrate it, maybe
a Communist invention. And maybe only 100
or 1,000 came. In China, numbers are
mystical. 10,000 means many, many.
Multitudes. A countless number of old,
venerably old, lucky old people
came to my mother’s village temple,
and were fed. But I was here before;
this place had not been a temple.
It had been the music building. I loved
the dichotomy: Father’s ground was sacred,
Mother’s, profane. 23 years ago,
I stood in front of a cement bunker-like
structure shut, it seemed, since my mother
left for America. In there, MaMa
and her villagers banged drums and blew horns,
banged and blew all night of the eclipse,
until the frog let go of the moon. They made
musical offerings night after night when
the witch’s broom, Halley’s comet, swept heaven.
But the broom would not leave the sky.
So, kingdoms rose, kingdoms fell.
So, world wars. I stood in front
of the wood door, which no one thought to open
for me, and I did not think to ask. Children
played on the paved entranceway, and in
the stream that flowed beside the music building.
Chinese and Vietnamese make music
on the water for that amplitude of sound.
The kids, likely kin to me many
times removed, paid me no mind.
Backing up, I read the name of Mother’s
village above the door: 5 Contentments
Earthfield. And backing up farther,
I saw in green cursive: Music Meeting.
The words seemed green jade embossed
on white jade. The tablet was set in the fret-
work of a balcony. My father wrote beneath
the photo I took:
5 Contentments Earthfield Music Meeting Ting
A ting is a pavilion. A ting is the vessel for cooking
offerings at altars and at banquets. Ting Ting,
my name, like pearls falling into a jade bowl
bell, like worlds spinning in the palm of the hand.
Warm evenings when the Music Meeting was dark,
my mother’s father had sat right here
where I’m sitting now, on the dirt ground
of this very patio, and talked story.
“Your grandfather talked stories so good
to hear, he made old ladies cry.”
I’m an old lady myself now, come
to China, where old ladies live long,
see everything. Too tough to die.
What could make a hard old lady cry?
“Orphans. Mother dying, father dying
sing advice to their lone child how to
live without them: ‘You’ll never see me again,
not in this form. And I’ll not see you,
nor look after you, nor feed you anymore.
Only notice now and then: When you walk
out the door, and a breeze touches you,
it’s me touching you. Flowers I was wont
to plant will pop up in spring; they’re me,
happy to be with you. And the flowers that come
out in fall—chrysanthemums—me, again!
And once a month, look for your father,
Jack Rabbit cooking medicine in the full moon.
See him? See his tall ears, slanting
to the right? See his cauldron? Father! Joy kin!’ ”
Joy kin is our village way of saying
zaijian, see again, au revoir.
The orphan, grown, sings: “I feel
the breeze at the open door, I feel
the breeze at the gate. Mother? I feel
a tap on the back of my neck. Ghost Mother?
A snow pea, a green finger, bounding
on its vine, touched me. Joy kin. Joy kin.”
Sit very still, and you will feel
the ancestors pull you to earth by a bell rope
that ties you—through you—from underground to sky.
They pull downward, and pull heavenly energy
down into you, all your spirited self.
They let up, and life force geysers out
from your thinking head and your hardworking hands.
My first visit to my mother’s village, my mother
still living then, I looked for her house
among the gray-with-mildew houses, walked
through the mazy lanes saying her name.
Brave Orchid. No flowers, no color
but in girls’ names. Do you know the family
of Brave Orchid? Doctor Brave Orchid,
who gave shots against smallpox.
A woman and a boy, far cousins, were waiting
for me at the raised threshold of a wide-
open door. She said, Good to see you.
I said, Good to see you. “Ho kin.”
“Ho kin.” She did not give her name.
I did not give my name. We
had to talk about how we were related;
we would find kin names to call
each other. She is married to my mother’s
brother’s son. I am the oldest daughter
of her father-in-law’s oldest daughter.
I wanted to call her Sister, but Elder Sister?
Younger Sister? I couldn’t tell whether
she were older or younger than me. Her hair
was black, her skin dark and lined, some teeth
gone. Besides, her father-in-law was not
really my mother’s brother. He was son
of the third wife; my mother was daughter
of the first wife. My grandfather, the one
who sat in the square and told the stories
that made old ladies cry, the grandfather
who could do anything, make wine, make
tofu, make cheesy fu ngoy
that stunk up the house, the grandfather
who was judge of the village, that grandfather
sailed the world, and brought home wives.
The third wife, whose skin was black, whose
jabber no one understood, he brought
from Nicaragua. The boy cousin-how-
many-times-removed standing before me,
looking at me, did seem very dark-skinned,
but he plays out in the tropical sun all day.
The dark woman living in my mother’s house
did not invite me inside. I peeked
behind her, and saw a courtyard that looked
like a roofless work and storage room. Most
of it was taken up by piles of straw. MaMa
said that she spent most of her day
foraging the hills for straw. They use it to kindle
the stove, which was in a corner, gray bricks
blackened with cooking smoke. Laundry—blue
pants, blue shirts, one white shirt—
hung on bamboo poles eave to eave.
It’s clothing that gives the gray village color.
Partway across and up a roofline,
atop clay tiles, shaped on their makers’
thighs, were a row of jade-like figures—
dogs? lions? faeries? kachinas?—maybe
broken, maybe never finished. Extra
bamboo of various lengths stood
against a wall. A wooden stick, milled,
no nodes, no knots, was fastened
across a shut door, high enough
for a person to walk under upright.
On the heavy wood door were posted 2 words:
Family Something. Family Living Room?
Family Forbidden? News had come to us
that this uncle could not pay taxes,
so the government forbade the use of a room.
Don’t let up sending money.
My grandfather had no business being
a trigamist. Poverty for generations. I
looked as far as I could see into
the house, and saw a doorway beyond a doorway
beyond a doorway. A little boy in red
was looking at me from a faraway dimension.
The men of my mother’s family were hiding. They
were afraid that I, eldest daughter of eldest
daughter of First Wife, had come to take possession
of house and land. As I handed the dark woman
and the dark boy many red envelopes
of money (may she distribute it fairly), I said,
“All the turmoil, the not-good, that MaMa
tells me about you—it’s over. No more.
I’ll send money. I won’t forget. I shall
send you money forever.”
But I do forget. Years
go by when I don’t send money, enough
money. I forget China; I forget my family there.
China is too far away. I need
to think it up. I need a time machine.
To imagine hard to make real the people
who appear in letters, stories, dreams, how
to get to them. They forget me too;
I am forgotten. They rarely write
reminding me, Send money. We, all of us,
fall into forgetfulness. Sammosa.
I should’ve said to my Nicaraguan relatives:
You take the house. You keep the land.
House and land, yours. I give you this house.
I give you this property. But I didn’t think
it was mine to give. Who knows who owns
the estate. The collective farm? The Communist
government? Maybe it already belongs
to my enate people. It would’ve done my Nicaraguan
sister good to hear me say, Here,
it’s all yours.
Now, when I arrived
again in my mother’s village, the day after
Old People’s Day, 9/9,
no one of that side of my family was there at
the music temple to welcome me. Not the dark woman,
not any relative with the same grandfather
as me, not one of the men descended
from my step-step-grandmother from Nicaragua.
Who greeted me and shook my hand was the mayoress,
skirt-suited like a woman politician in the West.
She’d be the one in charge if invaders came.
Not the headman, like the president of the seniors,
not the storyteller, like my grandfather.
The mayoress led me, and her assistants, and Earll,
and a couple of Roots officials, and some teachers
and translators, and a TV crew with camera
and mike up the stairs and through the thrown-
open doors. The inside of the temple
was adazzle with light. Impossible brightness that was not
coming from windows or lightbulbs. All
shining, squares and diamonds of fresh red
paper on walls and tabletops shining,
black writing on the red, shining. The villages
grew out of old dark earth;
mold and dust, motes and motes of time,
blacken the adobe and gray the air. Air
pollution hazed the sun; this day
will not count as a blue-sky day.
And yet, the music temple was a surround of light.
The templekeepers had not cleaned up
after the feast of Old People’s Day.
The small chairs, some on their sides,
had not been put away. 10,000
people couldn’t’ve fit. The old folks
ate, were honored in shifts. They’d come
walking, riding on the backs of their children,
riding bicycles, rowing boats, come
here from all over Pearl River
delta. Someone handed me a lit stick
of incense. I, followed by the crowd curious
to see whether this daughter who’d been gone
so long knew and kept the ways—li—
walked step by mindful step toward
the altar, which was the entire back wall.
Holding the stick of incense between palms,
I bowed thrice. 1 goak goong.
2 goak goong. 3 goak goong.
Learned in childhood in Stockton, California.
Maybe means: First, nourish grandfather.
Second, nourish grandfather. Third,
nourish grandfather. Big downbeat
bow on 3. I bowed and bowed and bowed
to ancestors arraying the back wall and
side walls. 18 ancestors,
eac
h dated with years consecutively
from 960 to 1279.
They wore the high headdresses of high
rank. They had my mother’s name: Chew.
Next to Chew was a simple word that I
had asked my mother to draw, giving me
the name of the kings in the stories she told.
Almost blind, she’d written that word.
I asked the mayoress, “Please say this word.”
“Sung.” She touched both words.
“Chew Sung.” She swept her arm right to
left across the altar. “The Chew Sung
huang dai.” Kings. Emperors. Gods.
“Ten thousand old people bowed to them.”
From the last (1271–1279)
emperor’s picture, the genealogy tree
continued along the left wall to the door.
“Your names are here,” said the mayoress, pointing
to branches nearest the door. A fear
went through me, that fear when I am about
to learn something. I asked carefully,
“Were we soldiers? Were we servants?”
I would’ve asked, “Were we courtiers?”
but didn’t know courtier. Most likely,
we were courtiers. “No! No! You emperor!
You emperor!” You who left for America,
became American, you forget everything.
You forget who you are. Emperor!
Chew Sung Emperor. Emperor of the Northern Sung.
Emperor of the Southern Sung. A teacher of English
took my hand, bowed over it, and said,
laughing, “Your majesty.” So, the stories
about mighty sea battles, gunpowder bombs,
lost wars, 100,000
refugees, the boy emperor falling
off the typhoon-broken ship,
the other boy emperor tied to the back
of the prime minister, the Lum woman who hid
the princes, passed the young dragons off
as “Big Lum” and “Little Lum”—“Forever,
you meet a Lum, you carry her shoes”—
the mass suicide of queens and princesses
at the river, the stone you can see today
to remember the last, lost battle, “Sung”
carved on one side, “Yuan” the other,
and more stones, the Empress’s Dressing Table
Stone and the Throne Stone—all that history,
us. We were the carriers of the Traveling Palace;
wherever we settle, that’s the Center.
Kuan Fu, the long-lost capital,
is here. Found. The Traveling Palace was built
of mud and straw, rocks for furniture. My father
teased my mother, “You lived like Injuns.”
Their stories of the Sung were always about its fall,
the trauma of war, the running as refugees.
The conqueror was Yuan. (I’d thought, Juan in Cuba.
I Love a Broad Margin to My Life Page 12
