by Amy Tan
Hulan told me, “I heard that Yunnan people make the best scissors, very sharp and sturdy. And it is true, I found some a few weeks ago.”
She said there were many vendors who sold scissors, but the best could be found at a local shop on one of the side streets in the marketplace in the old part of the city. The scissors were the highest quality, also very cheap. There was no sign for the streets or shop, she said. But it was easy to find.
And then she gave me directions: “Take the northeast footbridge across the lake. On the other side, look for the old man with the soup stand. Then turn toward another place that sells dried fish. Keep walking and walking, until you see the girl who sells baskets filled with old foreigner shoes. Then turn again—only one way to turn—and keep going until you see a curve in the road. The houses become better here, whitewashed, sometimes a sign or two. Look for a place selling big rocks of brine. Go the opposite way. You’ll see the marketplace after five more minutes of fast walking. The, girl with the scissors is sitting outside at a table.”
Of course, I got lost. What kind of directions were those? That part of the city was thousands of years old. And to walk through those streets you would think it had not changed one bit in all those years. The roads turned in and out and met up with one another here or ended there for no reason. They were crooked, paved with rough stones worn smooth down the middle by people’s feet. Little houses were crowded in on both sides, and the streets were very narrow. No motorcar had ever driven through here, that was certain.
I was lost for more than an hour, wandering through a very bad part of town. Even though I was in a simple dress, other women stared at me, up and down, pointing at my shoes. Little children followed me, crying, “Hungry! Hungry” while holding out their palms. I looked for someone who could help me, but there was no one. Faces looked back at me, empty, no friendliness to be found there.
And so I walked and walked, with little children dancing at my heels, past windows with bad cooking smells. I saw a woman come to the door, naked to the waist, nursing her baby. An old man sitting on a plank looked up. He saw me and laughed a little, then started to cough in a choking kind of way, coughing so hard I thought he was going to die right there. My throat was tight from trying not to cry.
Finally I came into a larger street filled with people, the marketplace. The children crowded around me so I could not move. I dug into my purse and threw a few coins over their heads. And they shrieked, then fell to the ground, fighting over this small amount of luck.
I decided to ask someone right away how I could find a pedicab to take me home. I walked over to a young barefoot woman with a dirty face and messy thick braids. She was seated at a bamboo table. Before I could even ask my question, I saw the scissors lying on her table. This is true! Wouldn’t that also make you feel someone was playing a big joke on you? Wouldn’t that make you feel you only got things in life you didn’t want?
The scissors were arranged in neat rows on a faded red cloth, smallest to largest with two styles. One was a plain kind, with sharp blades but no decoration on the handles. The other style was quite fancy, shaped like a crane bird, like something you would expect to find in a good Shanghai store. I was surprised to see them here. The blades were thin and tapered to look like a long beak. Where the blades connected with a metal pin, that was the eye. And the two holes for putting your fingers through, those were the wings.
I wondered how they made them, each one looking exactly the same, different only in size. I picked up one, opened the beak and closed it. It looked as if the crane were talking and flying at the same time. Wonderful, so clever!
“Who made these scissors?” I asked the young woman. “Only members of our clan,” she said, and when she smiled, I saw all her top-row teeth were missing. She instantly turned from young to old. I picked up a larger pair of scissors. She pulled out a dirty rag, inviting me to test the sharpness of the blades.
A naked little boy came to the doorway behind her. “Ma!” he cried. “Wait,” she scolded him. “Can’t you see, I have an important guest.” The little boy went back inside.
“This is not just a boast,” she said, now chattering in her toothless speech. “You try scissors anywhere else in the city and you can see they are not as sharp as ours, not nearly as sharp. That’s because our family people have been scissors makers for many, many thousands of years, ten thousand years maybe. Here, you try this pair, best-made quality.” She gave me the rag for cutting. The scissors felt very good the way they bit into the cloth.
The woman wiggled her fingers. “This skill runs through everyone in our family. We pass it on from generation to generation, in the blood, also through training. We teach the youngest ones to make big-eyed needles first, later smaller and smaller ones, then scissors.”
“How much?” I asked, holding up a pair of the fancy scissors.
“How much do you think they are worth?” she said, pinching her mouth, staring at me directly. “How much for such fine scissors? —the best, a good strong metal, American steel.”
This woman must have thought I was a fool. “How can this be American steel?” I said. “There are no American factories here.”
“West of the city, that’s where we get the metal, at the bottom of the Burma Road,” she said. “Every once in a while, a foreign truck goes over—wah, a thousand feet down—they just leave it there at the bottom. Boys from different families climb down with ropes, bring back the bodies, also supplies if they’re not broken to worthless pieces. The rest they let us keep. Ten families share. Two families take any wooden things. Another two take the seats and rubber parts. We share the metal with the others. With our portion, we cook the metal down and make scissors.” She was smiling, very proud.
How bad to hear!—making scissors from a foreigner ghost truck. I was about to put the scissors down when she said, “Four yuan. How about it? This is my best price.”
I shook my head. Oh, in American money that would be like two dollars. And I was thinking, Why should I pay so much for such bad-luck scissors?
“Three yuan, then. Don’t tell my husband. Three is my best price.” I shook my head. But now the woman thought I was only trying to bargain her down.
The woman sighed. “If you like them, you only have to tell me how much, what price. Two and fifty, then. Don’t tell anyone else. It is too cheap to believe. Two yuan fifty.”
And that’s when I thought to myself, What harm would it do? Two yuan fifty was a very good price. Where else could I find scissors like these? So I opened my purse and put the money in her hand.
“Next time you come I can’t promise you the same price,” she said, and then laughed.
I leaned over to pick up those wonderful scissors. And I was secretly congratulating myself for my bargaining skills, when my purse slipped down my arm and banged into the corner of the flimsy table. All of a sudden, the end of the table flew up, then crashed down, and forty pairs of scissors fell to the ground!
I stared at them, all their bird mouths flung open, all that bad luck pouring out.
“Ai! How terrible!” I cried. “How could I let this happen?”
“No problem, no damage,” the woman said. She stooped to pick up the fallen scissors. But I was already hurrying away.
“Wait! Wait!” I heard her call after me. “Your scissors, you forgot them.”
I was walking fast, and without thinking, I turned back into those crooked streets. And now every place looked the same, yet nothing was familiar. It was like wandering in a bad dream, not knowing where I was, or where I wanted to go, worried that if I stopped, something bad would catch me.
So you see, I made a bad deal, like a deal with the devil. And for what? I found out later you could buy those bird scissors from anybody, for even cheaper. Lots of people made them, and not just in China. Just the other day I saw them—at Standard Five and Ten. Yes, can you imagine? Of course, I did not buy them.
If you think I am only being superstitious saying this,
then why did I drop all those scissors that day? Why did something terrible happen right after that?
Hulan was the one who told me. She was waiting for me at the house. She jumped up, put her hands to her mouth, and told me to hurry and go to the hospital. “Accident!” she cried. “Wen Fu is hurt very bad, maybe dying.”
I gave a little shout of fear. “How can this be?” And then we were both running out the door to an air force car waiting to take us to the hospital.
On the way, Hulan told me what had happened. “He was driving an army jeep, heading toward the Sleeping Beauties Hills. But a wheel fell off, and the jeep turned over and threw him out.”
“Ai-ya, this is my fault,” I cried. “I made this happen.”
“Don’t say this,” scolded Hulan. “How can this be your fault?”
And then she told me Jiaguo had ordered Wen Fu to be taken to the French Christian hospital run by Chinese and foreign nuns. Hulan said it was not the local hospital, which was very poor, filled with people who could give you more problems than what you already had. What a good man Jiaguo was!
As I walked down the hallway of the hospital, I could already hear Wen Fu moaning and screaming. It was the sound of a man being tortured, of someone who had already lost his mind. And then I saw him. His head was bandaged all around the top. His face was swollen and purple. This is terrible to admit, but if no one had told me this was Wen Fu, I would not have recognized him. I was staring at his face, trying to find his same eyes, nose, and chin. And then I thought, Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe this is not my husband.
“Wen Fu?” I said.
“He can’t hear you,” the doctor said. “He has a very bad injury to his brain. He was already dead from shock when they brought him here. But I gave him a shot of adrenaline, and his heartbeat came back.” Of course, I thanked the doctor for saving my husband’s life.
I turned to look at Wen Fu again, calling his name softly. And suddenly, one eye popped open! I gasped. I could not help myself. His eye was big and dark in the middle, yellow and bloody all around. It seemed to be looking out with so much anger, no good feelings behind it. He looked like a monster.
A few days later, when it was certain that Wen Fu would live, Jiaguo came to the hospital and said, “Weiwei-ah, now I have to give you bad news.”
I listened to everything, never changing my expression, never crying out. That afternoon, Jiaguo told me he might have to dismiss Wen Fu from the air force, maybe even send him to jail. He told me my husband had not had permission to take the jeep. Instead he had bribed an army driver, who was now being punished. And he did not crash because of a bad wheel. He was driving too fast and when he almost ran into a truck coming the opposite way, he turned too fast and threw the jeep upside down. And then I heard Jiaguo talking about a girl. Who knows how that girl came to be in the jeep with him? In any case, she was killed, crushed underneath.
That was the first time I heard about my husband seeing other women, although I later found out she was not the first. But back then I didn’t want to believe this. Maybe Wen Fu was going to the Sleeping Beauties Hills to visit Mochou’s grave. Maybe the girl got in the jeep to give him directions. Maybe he was only being kind, because he saw she was poor. Maybe she had never been with him at all. Maybe she was standing on the hill where he crashed, that’s how she came to be killed.
Of course, none of those excuses could find a place to rest in my head. And instead, I could see Wen Fu driving along the winding road, kissing someone who looked like Peanut. He was singing the opera song to her. And they were both laughing, as he drove up and down, up and down, swimming in the clouds.
I was still thinking this when I visited Wen Fu the next time. His face was not as swollen as before. He was sleeping and I wanted to shake him awake. I wanted to ask him, “Why did you do this? Now you are going to go to jail, disaster on all of us.” But as soon as I thought that, he moaned, making that terrible sound that hurt my heart. And so I wiped his brow and forgave him before he even had a chance to say he was sorry.
When he finally woke up, Wen Fu was fussy and weak. He complained about everything: the pain, his bad eye, the food, the manners of the nurses, the delays of the doctor, the hardness of the bed. Everyone tried to comfort him. At that time, I did not think the accident had changed him, only that he was still suffering. That’s why he was being so troublesome.
But then his strength came back, and he became angry and wild. He threw his food at the nurses and called them whores of the devil. He accused the doctors of being so stupid they should not even work on a dead dog. He threw a bedpan at the doctor who saved his life. He would not take his medicine, and when four nurses tried to hold him down to force him, all the strength they didn’t know he had flew through his arm and he punched one of the nurses and knocked her teeth loose.
One night, he reached out and grabbed a nurse’s breast. The next night, they assigned an old woman nurse. He grabbed her breast too, didn’t matter.
Soon nobody wanted to take care of him. This was my shame too. He was getting better, but he was also getting worse. The doctor said he was still too weak to leave. His one eye was still blinded. They tied his arms and legs to the bed and told me I had to urge my husband to behave.
Every day I had to listen to him beg me to untie him. He begged me to climb into bed with him. He begged me to take off my clothes. And when I would not do any of these things, he cursed me at the top of his voice. He accused me of sleeping with other pilots. He said this loud enough for everyone in the hallway to hear.
I tried so hard to keep my sympathy for him. I tried to remember that it was the pain that made him act this way. But secretly, I was thinking how Wen Fu would soon go to jail. I was already planning a quiet life when I would no longer have to care for him.
But he did not go to jail. Jiaguo ended up not charging him with any kind of crime. I found out: Hulan was the one who persuaded him not to. She did this for my sake, she told me later.
“If you punish the husband, you punish the wife,” she explained. “That’s all I said.”
I thanked her with many words. I told her I was ashamed she had to go to so much trouble to help my husband and me.
“I did nothing, Jiaguo did nothing,” she said. “Now you should forget this ever happened.” Even when she told me that, I knew she would never forget. I could never forget. I now had a big debt to pay.
Of course, Hulan did not know what she had really done, how sorry I was that she had done me this favor. I felt so bad, and yet I had to act grateful. It reminded me of that time when I was a little girl and Old Aunt had asked me on my birthday which chicken in the yard I liked best. I picked the one that let me feed her out of my hand. And that night, Old Aunt cooked her up.
Anyway, I showed Hulan my thanks over and over again. I had my cook make the dishes she liked, the way that she liked them, vegetables steamed until they were soft and tasteless. Hulan said nothing, and this was proper, not to call attention to my thanks. I told the servant girl to give Hulan and Jiaguo’s rooms a thorough cleaning. Hulan said nothing. And several days later, I gave her many yards of very good cloth, telling her the color was not right for me.
This was not true, of course. I picked that cloth especially because it looked so nice against my skin. It was a very pretty fabric, peach-colored, hard to get during wartime and very expensive.
“This color does not suit me any better,” Hulan said frowning, her fingers already stroking the cloth.
“Take it, take it,” I said. “I have no time to sew anyway, now that I have to take care of my husband.”
So Hulan took my gift without any more protest. She knew what kind of bad marriage I had, and she let me cover it up with a beautiful piece of cloth.
When my husband came home, I already had a special bedroom made up for him. He was still too weak to leave his bed, so I hired a special nurse servant to take care of him, to change his bandages, to bring him food, to listen to his complaints. That nur
se stayed only one day. The next one lasted maybe two days. Finally I had to take care of him myself.
Jiaguo and Hulan visited him every day, of course, since they lived in the same house. And one day three pilots came over. I took them to Wen Fu’s room and they treated him as if he were a hero. They said that as soon as Wen Fu could fly again, China would be certain to win the war very fast, polite lies like that.
But everyone already knew he would never fly again. How could he fly with only one eye? Still, the pilots were very generous to say that, and Wen Fu was glad to hear it.
They were so nice I invited them to stay afterward for dinner, thinking this was what Wen Fu would want me to say. He always liked to show his generosity to the other pilots that way. And in fact, Wen Fu did say, “Stay, please stay. My wife is an excellent cook.” I think he was remembering those good dinners in Yangchow when I made a thousand dumplings. The pilots agreed immediately. And I went downstairs to tell the cook to go out and bring back a fresh-killed chicken.
After our dinner, the pilots, Hulan, Jiaguo, and I continued talking at the table, while the servant cleaned up. At first we were quiet, so we would not wake Wen Fu up. I remember we talked a little about the war in solemn voices, and yes, we were still certain we would win as soon as China could bring in more supplies.
One pilot said he had heard about a contract to buy American-made planes flown in from India, maybe a thousand, enough to fight evenly with the Japanese. Another said that airplane-making factories were being built in different parts of China. Maybe there would soon be one in Kunming. And we all agreed that would be best: to make the planes in China, so we knew they were properly built, not full of problems like the old Russian planes or the new Italian ones. Chinese-made was best, bombers and fighters, all very fast and able to fly at night.
