The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

  That morning, Peanut was pulling her quilt over her head to find where her sleep had gone. But then we heard New Aunt calling, “Peanut, you lazy girl, where are you?”

  You see how she called for only Peanut, not me? Her mother was not being nice to me, letting me sleep. She wanted her daughter to get up and learn how to put a house in order, so that one day Peanut would know how to be a proper wife. New Aunt did not consider these were skills I should learn too. But I watched. I learned without anyone telling me what to do.

  I saw how the cotton batting of quilts had to be pulled out and beaten just so, the covers washed fresh, no dirty spots left. Table legs had to be wiped down with oil until the wood shined back lustrous bright, not greasy-looking. And everything had to be pulled back from the walls—cabinets and armoires—so you could see where all the dust, spiders’ nests, and mouse droppings were hiding. And I too heard the right way to scold a servant, the way New Aunt said: “Why is this dirty when you say it is clean?”

  And later I watched Old Aunt in the kitchen. She was ordering the cooks to chop more meat and vegetables. And then she checked all her supplies. She lifted the lids on jars of peanut oil, soy sauce, and vinegar, smelled each one. She counted the number of fish swimming in a wooden bucket, the number of ducks and chickens pecking in the courtyard. She poked the sticky rice cakes filled with date paste to see if they had steamed long enough. She scolded a cook’s helper for letting too many clouds of fat float in the chicken broth, scolded another one for cutting strips of squid the wrong way: “Stupid girl! They must curl up into a lucky ball when cooked. The way you’ve done it, they’ll look like leftover strips of cloth. Bad luck.”

  I learned all those lessons for my future. Oh, I tried to teach you these same things when you were growing up. But you never listened. You said, “It’s boring. Too much trouble. I’d rather eat McDonald hamburgers instead.” Yes you did, you said those things! You see how eager I was to learn? When I was young, I already knew everything must look good, taste good, mean good things. That way it lasts longer, satisfies your appetite, also satisfies your memory for a long, long time.

  What else happened that day? Oh, I remember, everyone had a task to do, not just the servants. As for me, I had to finish sorting through the family’s clothes. For one week I had been doing this, mending anything that showed unlucky signs of prosperity coming apart—a loose thread, a little hole, a torn spot, a missing clasp or button. That morning I was in a big hurry to finish, so Peanut and I could later go shopping in the marketplace.

  The night before, New Aunt had given us enough money to buy New Year’s gifts at the special stalls set up at the marketplace. I was one year older than Peanut, but New Aunt did not hand me the money. She counted it into her daughter’s hand. Of course, Peanut was supposed to share. Without New Aunt’s saying so, Peanut was supposed to do that. But I knew what would happen. Peanut would spend that money fast on her own desires, or hold it tight in her hand until I had to embarrass myself and throw big hints her way.

  “Both of you, finish your tasks early, then you can go,” New Aunt had said. “But don’t forget, even with luxuries, be frugal.” That meant we were supposed to bargain down the shopkeepers. “And do not let your brothers eat too many sweets.” That meant we were supposed to take Little Gong and Little Gao, who were ten and eleven.

  I took my mending outside, thinking I could sit on a quiet bench at the front of the house and dream about my secret desires. But Lao Gu, the servant who was head of the household, was already out on the lawn, showing hired workmen what needed repair. He pointed to the dark wicker-woven fence that surrounded our house like a large fish steamer. One workman was shaking his head. He stuck his hand through a big hole that Little Gong had made two weeks before while riding his new bicycle.

  And then Lao Gu pointed to different parts of the house, saying, “For Old East, fix this. For New West, fix that.” He was talking about the styles of the two halves of the house.

  Old East was the part where everyone lived, slept, and cooked, where babies were born, where old people died. It was a big Chinese house, only one story, with a square courtyard bordered by walkways and living quarters, all the doors and windows facing in. The most important rooms faced east: the kitchen at one end, Uncle’s room and the sitting rooms at the other.

  New West had been added later, maybe fifty years before, when our family first became rich on foreign money, selling silk thread for velvet, curtains, and carpets. True to its name, New West faced the west and stood two stories high, with three chimneys sticking out of the roof. It was fashioned after a fine English manor, that’s what Old Aunt once said. But over the years, everyone kept building something else onto the front of the house, and after a while all the good parts were covered up. So now it looked just like the back of an old farmhouse.

  That’s where I went, up the front wooden steps of old New West and into the porch area, thinking I would do my mending there. Uncle had added this porch maybe ten years before. The summer after that, Old Aunt enclosed it top to bottom with wire-mesh screens to keep insects out. But a few always managed to sneak in, and Old Aunt promptly squashed them with the bottom of her slipper. So here and there I still could see the broken remains of mosquitoes and dragonflies stuck to the mesh, their wings flying in the breeze like torn rice paper. Everything was rusted, the porch door sang with the wind—yee-yee! yee-yee! I felt I was stuck inside a cricket cage. This was not a good place to dream about my future.

  So I left the porch, and that’s why I finally ended up in the greenhouse, the secret hiding place of my childhood. I looked in to see if it was empty. I wiped a windowpane as carefully as if it were the eye of a waking child. Empty, so many years empty.

  When he first came to the island, Uncle had added the greenhouse to the south side of New West, the side facing the sun. It looked like a drawer pulled out, left out. He used to boast that this was what English gentlemen did for a “hobby”—grow roses, grow orchids, grow luxuries that had no lasting value. He always called it “hobby,” just like the English, no Chinese word for doing something only to waste time, waste money. I don’t know why he thought this was good, to imitate what foreigners did, as if everything Western were good, everything Chinese not so good. Every year, Uncle found a new hobby. And Old Aunt would shout at him, calling his new hobby ha pi, “breathing out farts,” which meant his ideas were worthless.

  After Uncle tired of the greenhouse, he became interested in English dog-racing, greyhounds, animals he could starve on purpose to make them run faster. And when the dogs died, he bought rifles and shot pigeons, real pigeons because the clay ones were too expensive. And after that, it was smoking pipes that made him sick, then English books wrapped in leather that he never read, then insects stuck on pins. He could have sat in the porch for that one.

  But the greenhouse was the first hobby. And after he abandoned it, the greenhouse was used only as a strange storage place. When New Aunt sat down one day and broke a chair—into the greenhouse. When Uncle tired of his hobby of shooting rifles or sticking insects—into the greenhouse. When Old Aunt complained that Uncle kept too many paintings of unknown ancestors, too many memorial scrolls—into the greenhouse. That place was where things went when someone decided they belonged nowhere else. When I was little I used to sit on the broken chairs. I would touch the rifles, imagining their noise. I would have pretend-tea with my unknown ancestors. Every year more things were thrown in there that nobody wanted, and I saw them all.

  One day, when I was nine or ten, I found a painting of a pretty woman, wearing a plain blue dress, her hair pulled back, looking straight ahead, so somber I almost did not recognize her. “Mama?” I called, and I truly thought she would look at me. I imagined her climbing out of her picture frame, looking as flat as her painting, asking me, “Weiwei treasure, what is this place with so many tiny windows?” And I realized that was the kind of place my mother and I belonged to, only that kind of place, where things are thrown
away. Even when I was older, I still felt that. Anyway, that’s where I did my New Year’s mending.

  I was working on my cousins’ clothes—the boys who always fell down on purpose. Big holes at the knees and elbows! So many stains! I decided most of those clothes were too bad to fix. Maybe I could give them to the servants, not to fix, but for their children to wear. If Old Aunt scolded me later, I would tell her I was thinking only of my cousins, how they would be destined to roam the streets as beggars if they wore clothes as poor as these. And then I smiled, remembering how I had secretly left a little hole in one of Old Aunt’s jacket pockets. Maybe some of her powers would drain away.

  Why are you laughing? You thought your mother was always well behaved? You thought I did not know how to be naughty in a secret way? How else did I know you were being naughty? Like that time you hid that dirty book, Catch Her in the Ride. I knew you were not reading the Bible.

  I did the same thing at that age, hid a book in my mending basket. It was a romance story called Chin Ping Mei, a forbidden book. Sister Momo at our boarding school told us many times that we were not allowed to read it. So I borrowed it from a girl named Little Yu, a naughty student who always did what she was told not to do. She said it was a book about sex things: what a husband likes, what a wife likes, what a husband likes more than a wife, how often a husband needed to perform his duties, how often for a wife. She told me it had many secret words too—“jade pavilion,” “playing the flute,” “clouds and rain”—but she would not tell me the meanings. Read it yourself, she said.

  So that morning, I was reading that book myself, searching for those secret meanings. But after ten pages, I had read nothing wrong, only the usual things I had been taught to obey—how many gifts to give people depending on their importance, how to keep all your relations happy, why you should never think only of yourself and matters of this brief world. And then I thought, Maybe this book is like a riddle and I am too innocent to see what it means. Perhaps this description of beautiful pine trees was really one of those secret words, hidden inside some other kind of knowledge. What about this man receiving two tea cakes from someone else’s wife? This certainly did not sound proper. And why two tea cakes? Why not just one? What if she had given him two oranges?

  Before I could think about this more, I heard Peanut calling my name in her complaining voice: “Weiwei-ah! Where are you, silly girl?” And I almost did not answer her, same as when I was little. But then, of course, I remembered about the marketplace. I hid my book behind two stacks of pots and hurried out with my basket of clothes.

  As we went to our room to get ready, Peanut was again rehearsing which stalls we should visit first, what kinds of things we should buy. Perhaps paper puppets or lanterns in the shape of animals for her brothers. Good tea for the grownups. And little money purses for our other cousins, Old Aunt’s daughters, who would come visit with their families sometime during the New Year period. And then we both agreed to flower-shaped hair ornaments for ourselves. And of course, a reading by the fortune-teller to determine what good things lay ahead for the next year.

  “We shouldn’t go to that woman with the crooked teeth,” Peanut said. “Last year she gave me the worst fortune, all warnings, how the bad parts of my character mixed with the bad parts of the new year.”

  And I remembered what that fortune-teller told her last year. How she was a sheep, always trying to hide behind her thick skin. During the Rat year, the fortune-teller had said to Peanut, someone could chew through her wool coat and expose her faults if she was not careful. Peanut had asked for her money back, she was so mad. The woman refused. Then Peanut raised her voice, letting everyone around her hear: “This woman cheated me, gave me bad advice. No luck to be found here. Better stay away!” I was embarrassed, but I was also thinking, How does this fortune-teller know so much about my cousin?

  “This year,” said Peanut, “I want to know only about my future husband and his family.”

  And then Peanut began to think about her appearance, how she should look when walking around the marketplace. She twisted her curled hair off to the side. “I saw this in a foreign beauty magazine,” she explained. And I pinched up my mouth to let her know this was not a good style for her, but as usual she did not pay attention to me. And then she spent a lot of her worries on which dress to wear, which coat to put on top.

  As the family favorite, she owned many fine clothes, most of them French- or English-made, bought in expensive shops in Shanghai. One coat was a black curly lamb with a stiff rolled collar and shawl of padded brocade. When fastened with tiny clasps down the middle, the coat tapered down to her ankles, making it impossible to walk, except in tiny steps. Ridiculous! That was the coat Peanut decided to wear, along with a pair of new high heels. They were sure to be eyesore luxuries to the local villagers—those people considered themselves lucky if they had one piece of cloth for making a new pair of pants! But this was the New Year, a time to show off wealth.

  We were the richest family in our village. Of course, richest only by the standards of that small part of the island, the little village called the Mouth of the River, only a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide, not counting the road from the port and the small stores scattered in between. A village that small could produce only one top-class house, maybe a few middle-class people. Almost everyone else who lived there was poor.

  I am not saying this was right, to have only one rich family, to have so many poor. That was the kind of life everyone had back then, no questions asked, the fate people were born with. That was China.

  Many of those poor people worked for my family’s textile factory, so they didn’t starve. They lived in small houses made out of clay, rented from our family. They owned no land, only the dirt that gathered on their floors. But once a year they could look forward to the big party our family gave, the New Year’s celebration at the Jiang family house by the Mouth of the River. At least that, a big feast three days after the New Year.

  Of course, I did not think about these matters when I was getting ready to go to the marketplace. I was like Peanut, putting on pretty clothes: a festive long skirt with bright red bands, my best padded jacket on top. I wound my braid into a grown-up knot at the back of my head. And then I saw Peanut tiptoeing out into the covered walkway. She listened for sounds coming through the courtyard, heard her mother’s voice across the way, still shouting instructions. She came back, opened a drawer, then took out a package wrapped in thin white paper and tied with a red ribbon. From this she removed three round boxes of different sizes. She sat down in front of her mirror. Face powder! In a few minutes, she had covered her plump cheeks and small nose with a fine rice-white coating.

  “You look like a foreign ghost,” I said quietly, and bit my lips. I was scared for her, for myself. I was one year older, and New Aunt might blame me for not guiding Peanut properly. But if I scolded Peanut, Old Aunt would say, “Who are you to criticize? Criticize yourself first.”

  So I said nothing. I watched as Peanut took out another box, this one smaller, with a pearl-colored top. She painted her lips cinnabar red.

  “Wah, your mouth looks like a monkey’s bottom,” I teased, thinking this might discourage her.

  She twisted open the last box, the smallest, then opened up her foreign beauty magazine. And with a smiling movie star as her guide, she quickly dabbed two dark smudges above and below each eye, then drew a thick line on her eyebrows so that they resembled two dark cricket legs about to leap. Really she looked quite frightening, not pretty at all. When she looked down, the dark smudges looked just like a pair of evil eyes staring back at me.

  Lucky for Peanut, she was able to hide behind the stiff collar of her coat and flee down the dark walkway and out the back door before anyone noticed her new face. I fetched Little Gong and Little Gao and brought them to the road. And when they saw their older sister, they laughed in whispers, then out loud, until Peanut walked over and slapped both their heads. They shrieked and ran off, carryin
g their laughter farther up the road, then turned around to dance and point once again.

  The walk to the marketplace usually took us ten minutes. But that day it required nearly forty. Peanut walked with three high-heeled steps to each one of mine. And as villagers on the road walked past her, they stopped to stare and bow, then laughed as they went on their way. Oyo! You should have seen Peanut! She huffed like this—hnh! hnh! hnh!—looking as mad as a queen whose servants had run off with her sedan. If she was blushing under her white powder, I could not tell.

  Look at my skin, how smooth it still is. When I was young, I wore no makeup. I had no need—no dark spots, no little dots, no scars or marks. Many people told me I had a lucky face, so why would I have to cover this up?

  Now let’s go in the kitchen and make some tea. And then I will tell you how Peanut changed my luck for the new year.

  The marketplace was already crowded at eleven o’clock that morning, and everyone was doing a good business. And all this busyness raised my excitement even more. That day even the woman who sold soup from the front of her house did not have to cry out, “Wonton! Try some, best wonton!” Both tables were full of people with cold red cheeks poised over steaming bowls, and a dozen more were squatting on the ground, bowls balanced between their legs.

  We passed the usual stalls that sold fruit and vegetables, eggs and live chickens. But that day, the fruit looked bigger, the chickens more lively. Red banners hung everywhere. Firecrackers exploded at every step, and babies were screaming as their mothers reached for pears and oranges, pomelos and persimmons. Little Gong and Little Gao were watching a monkey dancing. At the end of the show, they threw two coppers on the ground. The monkey picked them up, bit them to see if they were true, tipped his hat to the boys, then handed the money to his owner, who gave him two dried lizards that he crunched on right away. We all clapped.

  And then Peanut found a fortune-teller she liked, a fat woman with a big smile who promised she knew everything—love, marriage, wealth. A sign in front of her stall bragged that she had the luckiest fortune sticks, knew all the lucky numbers, the right lucky marriage combinations, the best days for making lucky business decisions, remedies for changing bad luck into fantastic luck. Everything guaranteed.