The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

  And then I thought, No, this is only my own unhappiness, always wanting something more, never happy with the life given me. Old Aunt had told me once that my mother had been this same way before she died: “Too strong inside here,” and she had pointed to her stomach. “Never content, always looking for a pear when she already had ten plums to choose from.”

  “It is only a sour stomach,” I said to Hulan. “All this waiting for something bad to happen.”

  “I’m telling you, it is a baby,” said Hulan.

  I shook my head.

  “A baby,” she said, nodding.

  “Ai, you think I do not know my own body!”

  “Tell me, then,” she said. “When was your last bleeding?”

  My face instantly became hot! She said that word aloud, the same as if talking about a cough, a headache, a bit of dust in the eye.

  “What does this have to do with a baby!” I said, and Hulan folded her bottom lip into her mouth, trying not to laugh.

  “Your mother, what did she tell you?” she asked.

  And I was struggling to remember what Old Aunt had told me that morning I saw my first blood.

  I had woken up, felt the stickiness, then pushed up my gown and looked at my legs. “Somebody chopped me off!” I murmured to Peanut, thinking this was a dream.

  And Peanut saw the same blood and screamed. She leapt out of our bed and ran into the courtyard. “Hurry!” she cried. “Weiwei’s been killed, same as her mother. She’s already dead! Help me, help me!”

  Old Aunt came running into the room, then New Aunt, two servants, my boy cousins, and after them the cook’s helper, waving a cleaver in his hand. Old Aunt stepped close, took one look at me, but did not look concerned. She told everyone to leave, waving them out.

  “Stop this crying,” Old Aunt scolded when we were alone. New Aunt came back into the room with Peanut, who stared at me with big eyes.

  “See, she’s not dead,” New Aunt said. She handed me some cloths.

  “Listen carefully, both of you,” said Old Aunt. “The bleeding is a sign. When a girl starts having unclean thoughts, her body must purge itself. That is why so much blood is coming out. Later, if a girl marries into the proper family chosen for her, if she becomes a good wife and loves her husband, this will stop.” That’s exactly what Old Aunt told me. And just as she predicted, once I became a good wife, the bleeding stopped.

  “Pah!” Hulan said when I told her this, and then she spit on the ground. “Worthless words.”

  The rain kept pouring down around the pavilion. And that afternoon Hulan told me strange things that I did not believe. Why should I. She was the one who believed the most ridiculous ideas. She said that a woman-body built its own nest once a month. Impossible! She said that a baby came out from the same place a man-thing went in, not through the opening of the stomach. Nonsense talk!

  And then she told me how she knew this. She said she had once helped a girl give birth to a baby. “I am telling you the truth,” Hulan said. “I saw where the baby came out. Last year I saw this.”

  The girl, she said, had fallen in love with one of the pilots in Loyang, near the village where Hulan and her family lived.

  “This poor girl was only looking for a chance to change her luck,” said Hulan. “Lots of girls did that, hoping to catch a husband who would take them away. She was like every girl in that village, not very pretty, destined to marry an old farmer or the one-eyed pot-mender down the road, a life guaranteed with hard work, no hope for any kind of happiness. So when this girl met a pilot, of course she gave him her own body—for a chance, even a small chance, something to hold onto.”

  Hulan could tell I did not believe her. “Hard for you to imagine, I know,” she said. “Your situation is so different. You always knew you would marry someone good, no worries like that.” She said this as if she were accusing me. And that made me think, Maybe she did the same as that girl, gave her body to Jiaguo for a chance. Lucky for her, that chance turned into a husband.

  “When the girl was about to have her baby,” Hulan continued, “she asked me to walk with her to the pilot’s house. She was hurting so much we had to stop often along the way. And then we arrived at the housing quarters. The pilot looked very angry to see her. He yelled at all the other men and told them to leave. I stood outside, but I heard everything.

  “She begged the pilot to marry her. He would not. She promised his baby would be a son. He said he did not care. She said he could take her as a concubine, marry a real wife later. He refused again. Then she cried and became angry—had no shame left to hide. She shouted and told him she had no chances left in life. She had used them all up on him. She said she could never marry now. Everyone in the village knew she was bad merchandise. Her family would turn her out. And her baby would never have any chances in life, a future with no future.

  “And then she became like a madwoman, screaming and wailing. I ran inside the house. She was hugging herself, cursing him. ‘You might as well kill us both now. Better than letting us slowly starve. But after we die, we’ll see you soon enough. We’ll both pull you down from the sky!’

  “That pilot got so angry hearing her death-curse. He slapped her hard, and she fell, hit her stomach against the arm of a chair, and rolled to the floor. That slap did not kill her. The arm of the chair did not kill her. But while she lay on the floor, her baby started to come. She screamed and groaned, tried to crawl backward like a crab. She was crying to the baby, ‘Don’t come out! No reason to come out!’

  “The pilot and I ran to her. I pulled back her skirt and saw the top of the baby’s head. And then the whole head popped out, with a rope wrapped around its neck. It looked as if it were covered with rice dust. The face was blue, the eyes squeezed shut. I tried to pull the baby out, to pull off the rope. I tried so hard. But the girl was moving too much. ‘Lie still!’ the pilot shouted to her. And she grabbed his hair, would not let go.

  “Now all three of us were shouting and screaming, sharing so much misery. That baby was pulling her insides out. I was pulling that baby out. She was pulling the pilot’s hair out. And after it seemed none of us could endure this any longer, she fell back and began to twitch. She rolled back and forth. Her whole body shook. She took a deep breath, sucking deep as if she could not drink enough of the air. She let her breath go. She breathed deeply once again, and then—nothing, no breath came out. How bad! Before one life could begin, the other ended. And that baby with his blue head sticking out of her body turned darker and then died.”

  Hulan stopped talking. She was squeezing the hem of her dress, biting her lips. I thought her story was over.

  “Very sad,” I said. “You’re right, we are lucky.”

  But Hulan was not finished. She began to cry. “Boy or girl, I don’t know which it was,” she said. “My mother would not cut her open to find out. She refused to send her daughter to the next world with her womb cut open. She would not send her firstborn grandchild without a head. So that’s how my parents buried her, with the baby half in, half out.”

  Hulan looked at my face. “That’s right,” she said, still crying. “My sister. And that pilot was Jiaguo, so scared of my sister’s curse that he married me.”

  I watched her, not able to say anything. Finally, Hulan spoke again, this time more calmly. “I knew he was marrying me only to ease his fear, so she wouldn’t come back and pull his plane down. But I married him anyway, thinking I could get some revenge for my sister. Of course, my parents were angry beyond belief. I kept telling them I was marrying him only to make him miserable every last day of his life, to always remind him of my sister and the tragedy he had caused.

  “But how did I know Jiaguo would turn out to be a good man, such a good man? You know this, you see his character. He was so sorry, so sad. And he was kind to me, bought me nice clothes, corrected my manners, never laughing at me. How did I know he would be so kind?”

  Hulan looked out at the rain still coming down. “Sometimes I’m still
angry at him,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I think about it another way. After all, he didn’t kill her. She would have died anyway, giving birth, married or not. And sometimes I think my sister is angry at me, her baby hanging down from her limbs, cursing me for marrying the man who was supposed to be her husband.”

  So that’s how Hulan and I started this telling and keeping of secrets. I told her the first, my ignorance about my own body. And she told me how she wished for revenge, and got happiness in return. And later that afternoon I told her about Peanut, how she was the one who should have married Wen Fu.

  “So we both had our fate changed just in time! Lucky for us,” cried Hulan. And I said nothing. I told her only half my secret, because I no longer knew whether I was lucky.

  I waited until nighttime before I told Wen Fu about the baby. We were getting ready for bed. He reached for me.

  “Now we have to be careful,” I said. “I am going to have a baby.”

  He frowned. And just like me, he did not believe this news at first. So I told him about my appetite, my recent sickness, how these were all the signs of new life. Still he did not say anything.

  Perhaps Wen Fu knew no words for the feeling he had. In any case, he did not show me what he was thinking. Maybe most men would have walked around like roosters, crowing to everyone. But Wen Fu only said, “It’s true, eh?” and then he began to undress.

  Suddenly he leaned forward and embraced me, pressed his mouth to my forehead, breathed in my ear. At that moment I thought he was telling me he really was happy, pleased about the baby. At that moment I truly felt I had finally pleased him, and I was content to be the nest of his future children.

  But that feeling lasted only one more moment. Wen Fu was touching the back of my leg, pulling up my dress. How can he be thinking this? I protested softly, but this only made him hurry more. He was trying to part my legs.

  I said, “I have a baby growing inside me now. We can’t do this anymore.”

  Of course, I was ignorant saying this. But he had no understanding or sympathy for me. He only laughed and called me a silly country girl.

  “I’m only making sure it comes out a boy,” he said. And then he pushed me down on the bed and fell on top of me.

  “Stop!” I said. And then I said it louder and louder. “Stop!” Stop!“ Wen Fu stopped and frowned at me. I had never shouted at my husband that way. Maybe it was because of the baby inside me. Maybe that’s what made me want to protect myself. But he kept looking at me with such a terrible eye that I finally said to him, “Sorry.” And without another word, he finished what I had begged him to stop.

  The next day, I confided in Hulan once again. I thought she would listen with a sisterly ear. So I told her that my husband had “unnatural desires,” an “overabundance of maleness.” He was this way every night, even after I told him I was carrying a baby. And I was worried, so unhappy—that was my pitiful excuse for burdening her again with my problems.

  Hulan looked at me without any expression. Maybe she was shocked by my frank words. Finally she said, “Hnh! This is not a problem. You should be glad. That’s how you got your baby, isn’t it?” Her voice sounded mocking. “This kind of desire doesn’t hurt a baby. It is only a small inconvenience to you. Why shouldn’t you do this for your husband? You should be grateful he still wants you! And when he does lose interest in you, he’ll just go somewhere else. And then you’ll know what it truly means to be unhappy with a husband.”

  Now it was my turn to look shocked. I thought she would give me her sympathy. She gave me a scolding instead. And she wouldn’t stop. “Why do you think something good is bad?” she said. “Eh, if you think a dish won’t be cooked right, then of course, when you taste it, it won’t be right.”

  You never saw this side in Auntie Helen? Now you know, she can be mean too! She saves it up only for me, I don’t know why. Or maybe I’m the only one she can show this side to.

  You know what I think? I think she does this when something else is bothering her and she can’t say. She tries to hide this by becoming bossy. That day, when she said this to me, I was very hurt of course. She made me feel so small that I became nothing. And I did not find out until several years later why she really said that. I did not know she was holding a secret inside, and only letting her anger come out. But L will tell you about that later.

  It was in that little pavilion, about a week later, that I knew for sure that the war had begun.

  Hulan had fallen asleep after lunch. A rainstorm started and I decided to go to the pavilion alone to write Peanut a letter. I was writing about pleasant things: the interesting sights I had seen, the boats on the lake, the temples I had visited. I said maybe we would come home soon, perhaps in a few months. I said I hoped we were back in Shanghai by the new year, when I hoped to show everyone a little son.

  And then I saw Hulan running toward the pavilion, her wet clothes pressed against her plump body in an immodest way.

  “They’re flying away! Already leaving!” she shouted even before she reached me. Chennault was at the air force base, other Chinese leaders from the north and south had come. All the pilots were already gathered. And everyone was saying the same thing: No more time to get ready. It’s already time to go.

  Soon Hulan and I were back at the monastery, still in our wet clothes, packing for our husbands. I carefully put Wen Fu’s clean shirts and pants, his socks, and a good new blanket into a trunk.

  My hands were shaking. My heart was pounding. China at war. Wen Fu could die. I might not see him again. I wondered whether I really did love Wen Fu and only now realized it.

  A truck began sounding its horn, telling us it was time to leave for the air force base. I ran to Hulan’s room to tell her. And I saw she was not ready. She was running her fingers through a bureau drawer, then her hair. She was crying, confused, and saying to herself: “What picture of me as a pretty wife? What good-luck charm? That book he always forgets, where is it?”

  At the airport, nobody would tell us where our husbands were going. And yet we could see above the rain: the blue sky, the white clouds. We were excited, proud. And then someone led us into a damp little room with a small cracked window that made everything outside look small and dangerous. The rain poured down on a narrow runway. Pilots were standing underneath the airplane wings. Someone was pointing to the blade of a propeller. Another man ran by with a box of tools. Jiaguo was going from plane to plane, holding out a large piece of paper, perhaps a map, that flapped with a wind that now seemed to rise up from the ground.

  And then we saw the blades were spinning, the engines roaring louder. And I fought hard not to look at the others, not to say anything, not to let any wrong words leap out of my throat that would bring everyone bad luck. I think everyone was the same way, quiet and still, now uncertain.

  But as the planes moved away from us slowly, Hulan began to wave. Rain, steam, and smoke were swirling all around, so the planes looked as if they were moving forward in an uneasy dream. Hulan waved harder and harder, tears streaming. The planes raced down the runway. And then she was waving furiously, crazily, like a wounded bird, as if this effort and all her wishes and hopes could lift them up safely, one after the other, and send them to victory.

  Of course, the next morning we heard what really happened.

  11

  FOUR SPLITS, FIVE CRACKS

  Do you remember the stuck-up girl, the one Hulan and I took baths with? She was the one who told us what happened in Shanghai, where the air force flew to save all of China.

  She had come into the dining hall, where we were sitting in front of a radio. We had already heard our husbands were alive, and now we were listening to the victory report, our ears open, ready to catch every word of this good news.

  “What you are listening to,” she had said in a bitter voice, “is just empty noise.” We turned to look at her. We saw her eyes, red as a demon’s.

  And then she told us. The man who always saved a chair by the ceiling fan f
or my husband, he died. The young one that my husband shouted at for playing tricks on him, he died too. And the stuck-up girl’s husband, he was also killed.

  “You think you are lucky because your husbands are alive,” she said. “You are not.”

  And then she told us how the planes had flown late at night, toward the Shanghai harbor, swollen with Japanese boats. They were hoping to surprise them. But before they arrived, Japanese planes dropped from the darker sky above—already knew our planes were coming. And it was our pilots who had the surprise, became confused, then hurried to drop their bombs. Such a big hurry! Such a small distance from the sky to the ground. So the bombs fell on Shanghai that night, on the roofs of houses and stores, on streetcars, on hundreds of people, all Chinese. And the Japanese navy—their boats still floated on the water.

  “Your husbands are not heroes. And all those people, those pilots, my husband—died for worse than nothing,” the girl said, and then left the room. We were all quiet.

  Hulan broke the silence. “How does she know what happened, what did not happen?” she said in an angry voice. And then she said she was still happy, because Jiaguo was alive. At least that was true, she said.

  Can you imagine? In front of all of us she let her happiness show, didn’t matter. How could she reveal such a selfish thought?

  But I did not scold Hulan for her bad manners. I tried to correct her in a big-sister way: “If what that girl said is true, we should be thinking about this tragedy. We should be serious and not let our own happiness take over.”

  Hulan quickly took that happy look off her face. Her mouth dropped open to let this thought come in and nourish her brain. I was thinking, Good, even though she is uneducated, she is quick to learn something new.