by Tan, Amy
We were in that wedge of time that seemed peaceful one moment, and ominous the next. The sun kept sinking and the fingers of the Buddha’s Hand turned a corpselike gray. Everything around us grew hazy and faded in color, and, in an instant, the sun was gone, and we were left with our thoughts. The town had to be close. We had come so far.
Pomelo asked for a rest. She allowed exhaustion to take over. The half moon replaced the sun. Faint stars appeared. By the time Pomelo was able to stand, the sky was a bowl of blackness and the stars that punctured it were sharp and bright. We lifted Pomelo, and she whimpered as she put her weight on her feet. We took small careful steps along the uneven ridge. It curved to the left, taking us closer to Buddha’s Hand. How odd that the stars gleamed so far below, I thought. They seemed to be closer, not sharp and colored, but glowing. We could feel the warmth of them rising to us.
We shouted at the same time. “Mountain View!”
Charm was right. At Buddha’s Hand, all we had to do was look down from the ridge.
It was too dark to see anything but the faraway lights of Mountain View. In our minds, we were nearly there. It might take us hours to reach it, or maybe a day, and even longer, if the path was covered with rocks and the trails became treacherous. None of that was a concern right now. We could not wait until morning. We had to start now.
We put Pomelo in the middle, and she threw her arms over our shoulders. I was surprised at how light she was, how light I felt. Together, we took our first steps and began our new life.
CHAPTER 12
THE VALLEY OF AMAZEMENT
San Francisco
1897
Lucia Minturn
I was sixteen when I saw what appeared to be a Chinese emperor standing in our doorway, looking as if he had just stepped off the page of a fairy-tale book. He wore a long gown of dark blue silk and a vest embroidered with symbols. His face was smooth and gently sloped, from chin to cheeks to the top of his head. He had a Chinaman’s pigtail that ran from his crown to halfway down his spine.
“Good evening, Mrs. Minturn, Professor Minturn, Miss Minturn.” He gave me only a glance. His English was unmarred and beautifully embellished with a British accent, his manners were formal, yet at ease. With my eyes closed, his voice sounded like an English gentleman’s. When I opened them, the fairy-tale illustration reappeared.
Of course, I knew from the start that he wasn’t an emperor, although I did hope for something illustrious like a Manchu Mandarin. Father introduced him as “Mr. Lu Shing, a Chinese student of American landscape painting, who comes to us by way of the Hudson Valley, New York, and originally from China.”
“Shanghai,” he said. “Those of us from Shanghai like the distinction.” He wore a pleased look and radiated confidence, and I could tell he was proud that he was different from others. I was different, too, so right away we had that in common. I had been waiting for my spiritual twin to arrive, and while I hadn’t imagined he would be Chinese, I was still eager to know everything about him. Before I could say to him one word more, he walked with my parents into the parlor to meet the other guests, and I was left standing in the foyer alone. They always took the best for themselves.
Right then, I wanted to possess him: his Chinese heart, mind, and soul, everything that was different, including what lay beneath that blue silk gown—a shocking thought, I know—but I had been promiscuous for nearly a year, so the leap was short between urge and frolic.
AT THE AGE of eight, I was determined to be true to My Self. Of course, that made it essential to know what My Self consisted of. My manifesto began the day I discovered that I had once possessed an extra finger on each hand, twins to my pinkies. My grandmother had recommended that the surplus be amputated before leaving the hospital, lest people think there was a familial tendency toward giving birth to octopuses. Mother and Father were Freethinkers, whose opinions were based on reason, logic, deduction, and their own opinions. Mother, who disagreed with any advice my grandmother had to give, said: “Should the extra fingers be removed simply to enable her to wear gloves from a dry goods store?” They took me home with all my fingers in place. But then an old family friend of my father’s, Mr. Maubert, who was also my piano teacher, convinced them to turn my unusual hands into ordinary ones. He was a former concert pianist, who, early in his promising career, lost his right arm during the siege of Paris by the Prussians. “There are only a few piano compositions for one hand,” he said to my parents, “and none for six fingers. If you intend for her to have musical training, it would be a pity if she had to take up the tambourine due to lack of suitable instruments.” Mr. Maubert was the one who proudly informed me when I was eight that he had influenced the decision.
Few can understand the shock of a little girl learning that part of her was considered undesirable and thus needed to be violently removed. It made me fearful that people could change parts of me, without my knowledge and permission. And thus began my quest to know which of my many attributes I needed to protect, the whole of which I named scientifically “My Pure Self-Being.”
In the beginning, the complete list comprised my preferences and dislikes, my strong feelings for animals, my animosity toward anyone who laughed at me, my aversion to stickiness, and several more things I have now forgotten. I also collected secrets about myself, mostly what had wounded my heart, and the very fact that they needed to be kept private was proof that they were part of My Pure Self-Being. I later added to the list my intelligence, opinions of others, fears and revulsions, and certain nagging discomforts, which I later knew as worries. A few years later, after I stained my undergarments, Mother explained to me “the biology that led to your existence”—the gist of which was my beginning as an egg slipping down a fallopian tube. She made it sound as if I had been a mindless blob and that upon entry into the world I took on a personality shaped through my parents’ guidance.
In appearance, I could not avoid biology completely. I inherited a composite of them both, green eyes, dark wavy hair, small ears, and so forth. But the worst was my mother’s flushed face when she was indignant, which on me showed as warm splotches that bloomed over my neck and breasts, and not a lovely pink blush either, but more like painful scorch marks. The splotches betrayed me at my most flustered, and at its worst, my entire face was enflamed, which caused me to flee to my room. My mother had learned to control her emotions so well she seldom showed anything beyond the sudden emergence of a healthy glow. I tried hard to control mine, but that proved as hard as holding my breath, especially when they humiliated me in front of people, saying things like “Lucia has peaks of emotion over stray cats.” “Lucia has an unnatural aversion to flowers with thorns.” “Lucia has whims. Wait an hour, and she’ll forget what the latest was.” They were hurtful and did not seem to know it. But that should not excuse them.
Mother and Father were eccentric, and that was not just my opinion. My father, John Minturn, had a respectable enough job as a professor of history and a scholar of art, renowned for his connoisseurship in figure painting. But the figures he liked best were those of nudes, “goddesses,” he said, “whose diaphanous gowns had slipped to their classical ivory ankles.” Father was also a collector of fetish objects from the Far East—and in his study he prominently displayed on one wall an erotic painting from Japan of a twisted couple with a look of insanity on their faces. In a glass case, you could view the thin ivory and horsehair whips that Chinese scholars used to chase away flies. And in that same case were the shoes of Manchu women who had lived in the imperial palaces of the Garden of Clear Ripples. The name itself made me long to be there until Father told me it had been burned and was ransacked. The shoes had been part of the loot. They sat on a tall blade of wood and resembled unmoored boats balanced on their fins. This impractical design, my father said, gave Manchu women the same mincing gait of Chinese women who bound their feet into hooves to give them greater sexual appeal.
My mother was the daughter of a botanical artist and amateur naturalis
t, Asa Grimke, who traveled for three years with the great botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker to Darjeeling, Gujarat, Sikkim, and Assam, where he made illustrations of newly discovered rare species of flowering plants. He had a minor reputation based on those illustrations, and that led to moving his wife, Mary, and daughter, Harriet—my mother—to San Francisco. He had received a large commission to illustrate the flora of the Pacific Coast. Unfortunately, he stepped in front of a spooked horse belonging to the very man who had come to fetch him, Herbert Minturn, a wealthy man who had made his fortune in the opium trade in China and the purchase of land in San Francisco. At the funeral, Mr. Minturn, who had recently lost his wife, said to my grandmother that he understood her grief. He invited our family to stay in his mansion until we found our bearings. My grandmother never found her bearings. She found herself in Mr. Minturn’s bedroom due to numerous episodes of sleepwalking, a condition that she said could not be controlled, either by will or medicine. Since Mr. Minturn took full advantage of her malady, he married her. That was the story Mother gave in deriding her mother’s disloyalty to the memory of her father.
As fate would have it, Mr. Minturn had a son, John, who was twelve years my mother’s senior. Mother was six when they came to live in the house. He was away at college most of the time. But when Mother turned eighteen, the young man who had treated her as his baby sister made her his wife, and within a year, she gave birth to me. So that was the house I was born into.
Those were the people who raised me, and none of them were like-minded. We all lived separate lives under the same roof. Grandfather had once been an important man who seemed to lose more of his intelligence every year. He dispensed outdated business advice at dinner parties, but people were kind and said he was well meaning. My grandmother was not well meaning. She managed to insult people while acting as if she were nice. She was sneaky and started arguments with my mother, and once my mother had overheated like a boiler about to blow, and splotches had spread over her neck and face, my grandmother would say calmly that she saw no reason to argue and would walk away. We all called my grandmother Mrs. Minturn, even her husband did. Mother was often livid that Father was never as angry as she was. He said his mother-in-law didn’t bother him because she was laughable, and that Mother should take the same attitude. Mother was further infuriated that their friends praised Father for his good nature, which my mother said was nothing more than ignoring problems as a way of solving them. In earlier years, I liked my father in some ways. He was social, chatty, witty; people enjoyed being with him and he paid special attention to me. He indulged me. He sometimes gave me rarities I longed for, or some version of them, like a garter snake, instead of a poisonous one. In later years, he seemed to be as aware of me as the stray cat that wandered in one day and never left.
Mother had two moods. She was either temperamental, meaning short-tempered and unhappy, or she was melancholy, meaning listless and unhappy. For the most part, she was a recluse. She spent warm days in the garden, planting flowers or cutting off their heads. She allowed me to choose only one flower, which I could plant in a sunny spot of bare ground near the cabbage roses. I chose violets, many species of them, purple and yellow, white and purple, pink and purple. The violets were unmanageable and invaded any bare spot under a tree or bush. My mother called them Johnny-jump-up weeds, and she would have pulled them out if I had not reminded her that she had allowed me to plant them, and so they were mine.
If it were not for that garden, I think Mother might have pushed harder for my father to leave the comforts of the family home and buy one of the row houses sprouting up on just about every hill, six or seven to a block. During melancholy times, she spent most of her days in her study, where she examined dead insects found in dollops of amber her father had given her—twenty-two pieces that he had found in an abandoned mine in Gujarat, which he had stuffed in his pockets like a thief. Her golden world contained flies, ants, gnats, termites, and other pests. She held a magnifying glass to them every day for hours. If I had allowed her to guide my interests, I would have wound up in an asylum.
She intended that I become an angry little suffragette from the day I was born. She named me Lucretia after Lucretia Mott, the orator. As I grew older, I disliked the name Lucretia more and more because the syllables reminded me of words with like sounds: ludicrous, secretions, and cretin. I went back and forth between the names Lucia and Lulu as alternatives. Mother said Lulu was ordinary, so that was the name I used more often around her, unless I wanted to be less ordinary, and that depended on whom I was speaking to.
As I already mentioned, my mother and father were Freethinkers. That extended to their freely talking about any subject in front of me. That lack of censorship might seem admirable, but I took it as neglect. They had no regard for my mental well-being, never stopping to think that perhaps they should not mention that Mr. Beekins had been found in the men’s dormitory with his trousers around his ankles. He said this right before Mr. Beekins came to dinner. On numerous occasions, Father would tote out his collection of fetish objects to show other collectors, and I could tell by the glances that these people made toward me and their hushed tones that I should not have been there. When I was younger, I played with some of the objects in Father’s study, not knowing what they were, one being a set of three-inch carved ivory manikins, whose details included penises and breasts, which I later discovered were manikins that women had used during masturbation. Despite all this frank talk about sexual matters, Mother and Father appeared to have no sexual urges for each other. They maintained separate bedrooms, and in all my years in the house I never heard the door of one opening and closing and then the door of the other opening and closing, sealing the sexual pact. Their relationship was more the former one they had as brother and sister.
I did not discover until I was fifteen that Father’s urges were plentiful and he took them elsewhere. By then I was in the habit of stealing into Father’s study to peruse his pornographic books, especially one with fifty-two photographs between blue cloth covers, showing muscular men and plump women engaged in a variety of coital contortions. Classical Anatomy of Calisthenics it said. I also found a large box made of burl wood with a top that slid off sideways. It contained love letters to him, many of them and in different handwriting, written by both men and women, which described lusty acts, memories of old or recent or soon-to-be consummated ones.
The more I read, the more upset I became. He gave many people his love, whereas it had been years since I had received any special attention from him. His lovers called him “the God of the Vortex of Love,” “Thunderous Zeus,” “Colossus of Cocks,” “Grinding Goliath.” They described themselves as his “Awakening Volupta,” or “Voracious Vulva,” or “Vibrating Vagina.” They were factual about length, width, turgidity, timeliness, and durability. They talked about sex as if they were gluttons eating certain foods, which I would never be able to eat again: pudding, gravy, cream, and sausages. They praised my father for his effectiveness in causing geologic disaster and bad weather—fissures and earthquakes, floods and tornados, the upheaval of new islands out of ocean depths. And all I had wanted was simple affection. He had given it away, so freely to so many, and in an unfathomable variety of ways.
I was furious. I did not need his affection anymore. I had urges, too.
FOR MY FIRST sexual adventure, I selected the location before I did the boy. The grove was at the far corner of the grounds of the university where Father taught. The fall weather was warm, and the hydrangea bushes were softly lush with pendulous blooms. The grove reminded me of the settings of the paintings of nude gods and goddesses, an opportunity for divine fornication.
Only young men attended the university, and I gathered a lot of attention simply by sitting on a bench under an oak tree. The faculty knew me as Dr. Minturn’s daughter, and thus, it was not unusual that I would be there, lolling on the lawn, studying up on calisthenics. The pictorial book lay in my lap, and to any young man walking by, I appe
ared to be both reading and waiting for someone. A number of boys who took the path near where I was seated paused to ask what I was reading. To the first six young men, I replied that it was a book on the principles of sewing. To the seventh, I said teasingly, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” This young man was worthy of an audition. He had the requisite virile broad-shouldered torso and godlike features: thick dark hair and sky-blue eyes, beautiful strong hands, a sensuous pouty upper lip, and a deep furrowed philtrum, which, according to one letter to my father, was an erotic groove between lip and nosetip, which, like other grooves, should be thoroughly licked. I remember also that he had a confident attitude and was at ease flirting with me and let his language become quickly lurid—”I would very much like to see what’s in your lap”—the sign of a man with coital expertise. He offered me his hand and pulled me up with such grace I felt like a ballerina.
Among the hydrangeas, he kissed me with earnestness, banging his lips against my teeth and covering me with saliva from nose to chin. I turned my face upward so that he could kiss my neck instead, and this sent ticklish chills of pleasure down my spine. He placed his beautiful hands, now rather shaky, around my adolescent breasts and kissed them through the cotton blouse. As my blouse grew damper with his kisses and with no sign that anything further would happen, I considered cutting short the audition. But then he unbuttoned my blouse and licked my nipples. I again felt chills of excitement. They soon died down as he fumbled with more of my buttons. I gave him a peek of just one page of the calisthenics book and told him to hurry. I waited as he struggled like a hare in a trap to unbutton his trousers with his beautiful but clumsy hands. At the very moment his penis sprang loose, we heard voices, and he pulled on his trousers and stuffed his cock back in with apparent pain. The image of his cock remained—how different it looked from the photographs, not smooth and still as white marble, but beefy, veined, and oddly helpless, like a blind hairless rodent seeking a milk-filled breast. I buttoned my blouse, smoothed my hair, and retied the bow. The voices passed. I stood up. I gave the young man my address and said to wait for me by the oak tree at ten o’clock that night.
