by Amy Tan
“Now I have to tell you something,” she said suddenly, then sighed and was quiet.
“You are a good person,” she began again, then stopped, thought again.
“You really are too trusting.” She stopped herself once more.
And then she moaned, “Ai-ya!” She shook her finger at me. “Look at you, so naive, naive to the point of being stupid. Do you know what your husband is doing with that girl Min?”
How could I admit that I knew this? I emptied my face of answers.
Auntie Du sighed again. “I see I have to tell you more clearly. So naive. Then listen, syau ning. They have been fooling around for a long, long time. You go outside, he goes to her bed. You go to sleep, he goes to her bed. You close your eyes, she opens her arms and legs. And now that girl is pregnant and you cannot even see this. She thinks he will make her a concubine. She says he has already made this promise. She’s announced it to everyone except you. And what will you do, accept this when it is too late? Will you take care of your baby, as well as the baby of your husband’s concubine? Don’t be so foolish anymore. Syau ning, open your eyes.”
“You tell me this,” I said, “but what can I do? I can’t stop my husband. You know the way he is.”
“If you cannot stop your husband, you can stop that girl.” She put her teacup on the table, stood up to leave. “And now I am sorry I told you this. But I am an old woman, so some things cannot wait until after I’m dead.”
After Auntie Du left, I thought about this, how everyone knew. They would be expecting me to say something, do something, shout and tell Min, “This is a disgrace! Take your shame and leave my house!”
And then I thought, Maybe this is good, Min having a baby. Now I have an excuse to tell Wen Fu that I must leave him, leave this marriage. If he wants Min for his concubine, I will tell him, You can have her for your wife! Everyone can be happy that way.
That day I planned how I would tell Wen Fu. I would make no argument, no accusation. I would ask him to divorce me, to sign a paper in front of two witnesses that said we were finished as husband and wife. Then I would take Danru, and the rest of my dowry money. I would take the train south, catch a boat in Haiphong, then go home to Shanghai as soon as it was safe. Maybe that would not be such a terrible disgrace. The war had changed people’s morals. No one questioned too closely why a woman who left one year with a husband now came back home without him. How lucky I was that Min had given me an excuse!
As soon as Wen Fu came home, I told him, “I must show you something on the other side of the lake.” This was a phrase we used with one another when too many ears were listening.
We sat on a bench by the lake and I showed him the paper I had written, the document announcing he was divorcing me. I said right away, no explanation, “I will go. You stay here and marry her. Hulan and Jiaguo can sign the paper and be our two witnesses.” That’s all I said, no shouts, no fight.
I thought he would be grateful. I was giving him my permission to marry her. You know what he did? He sat down and looked at the divorce paper. “I did not write this,” he said quietly. “I am not asking for a divorce.” He tore the paper up and threw the pieces into the lake behind him. And I knew he did not do this to say that he loved me, that he was so sorry for what he had done. He did this to show me who was the boss. Because after he tore up my chance, he pointed his finger at me and said in a hoarse voice, “When I want to divorce you, I will tell you. You don’t tell me what to do.”
The next morning, Auntie Du congratulated me. She told me Min was already gone. She had heard her leave early that morning. I was so sorry to hear this! I wanted to run out and tell Min this was not my doing. I did not ask her to leave. I did not hate her. I sat in my room, so lonely, sad that she was gone, also sad for selfish reasons, that I had lost my chance.
In the afternoon, Hulan told me about the pattern for a dress she was making. Auntie Du talked about the cholera epidemic, how refugees were afraid to get the required vaccination, how a man died getting paid to take twenty people’s shots. I sat in my chair, knitting, pretending to listen. But I had no ears for this kind of talk. I was looking at the phonograph, then at Min’s record. Finally I said aloud, “That girl Min, she left some belongings behind. Too bad I don’t know where she went.”
And immediately Hulan let me know how fast gossip travels. “Zhang’s wife at the market said that she went to that place near the railway station, Nine Dragon Guest House.”
And that’s where I found her the next day, in a boardinghouse, a very cheap place, with only a narrow hemp bed and a plank for a table. She was quiet, maybe a little embarrassed to see me. She apologized for the trouble she had caused, thanked me for bringing her record. And then she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Sometimes you think the situation might work out one way, but it goes the other.”
I asked her how many months before her baby would come. She looked embarrassed. “In this matter, you should not trouble yourself anymore for my sake.”
“I taught you those words,” I said. “You don’t have to use them on me.”
I held some money out to her, and she said, “The problem is already gone. I did it this morning. It went well, no bleeding, everything clean.” I still held the money out. She smiled, then took it, thanked me, and put it in a box right away. Before I left, I told her I had always liked her singing and dancing.
One week later, Hulan said to me, “You know that Min person? She’s already left with another man, telling people they are brother and sister. That fast! What kind of girl is she? How many people does she think she’s related to?”
When I heard that, I did not look down on Min. Of course, her morals were different from mine. But I was thinking, Good, now I don’t have to worry about her anymore. Her heart heals fast.
So really, she was the lucky one. She left. And I was the one who stayed with Wen Fu. And sometimes I would dream it was the other way around. I was Min, and I had gone back to Shanghai to work at the Great World. It was the same life, the same kind of torture, pulling me apart, inch by inch, until I no longer recognized myself.
17
THE FOUR GATES
Over the next year, Wen Fu did not change. But I did, little by little. To Hulan and the others, I probably seemed the same. But that was because I covered up my feelings. I pretended to be busy with my baby, no time to worry about anything else.
During the summertime in 1941, I liked to sit in the backyard with Danru in my lap, both of us waiting for the thunder and lightning to come. I would say to him, “Listen—boom—noise. Now wait, look, look there—wah! Pretty!” Only ten months old and he already knew how to clap his hands.
That summer it was always warm in the morning, but before it became too hot, thunder came, then rain fell, always in the afternoon, raising up the good smells of the earth, and sending the servant girl out to hurry and pluck the laundry off the line.
Maybe this sounds as if my life had become easy, everything quiet and lazy, nothing to do, like a happy summer vacation. But that was really the only kind of good time I had, playing with Danru. And I used that good feeling to help me forget about everything else.
Danru was so good, so smart. Maybe every mother claims this about her baby. But imagine this: When Danru was not even one year old, I could ask him, “Where’s Mama?” And he would point to me and smile. “Where’s Danru?” And he would pat his stomach and smile. “Where’s Baba?” And he would point to Wen Fu, but he would not smile.
Danru trusted me, too, everything I said. If he woke up hungry and crying, I would come into his room and say, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. I’m going downstairs to get you something to eat.” And when I came back into his room, he would be standing in his crib, still not crying.
So you see, I knew Danru would grow up to be a good person, someone kind, trusting, concerned for others. He was nothing like Wen Fu, nothing at all. It didn’t matter that Wen Fu was his father.
After Wen Fu chased Min away, he cam
e back to my bed. By then he was sleeping also with many different kinds of women: native girls, prostitutes, even a schoolteacher. I think we were all the same to him, like a piece of furniture to sit on, or a pair of chopsticks for everyday use. If I said one word against any of this—or against anything else he liked—a big fight would come, always during dinnertime. I tried to keep my mouth closed so our house would stay peaceful. But inside I would be fighting myself, no peace there. So finally I would say something.
One time it was only one little word. Wen Fu had asked the cook to prepare a dish he liked, pork with a kind of sweet cabbage. I liked this dish, too. But that summer the cabbage was bad, the flavor of the bad water it drank. When Wen Fu asked me how I liked the dish, I was honest. “Bitter,” I said. The next night, he ordered the cook to make that same dish for me, nothing else.
He smiled and asked me again, “Now how do you like it?” I answered the same way as before. Night after night, it was the same question, the same answer, the same dish the next day. I had to eat that bitter cabbage or nothing. But I didn’t give up. I waited for Wen Fu to grow tired of this cabbage game. And after two weeks’ time, my stomach proved stronger than his temper.
Maybe this seems like a foolish thing, to be so stubborn over a bad-tasting cabbage. I could have lied and said, “Tonight the food is delicious.” But if I didn’t fight, wouldn’t that be like admitting my life was finished?
So our marriage was becoming worse. But the way I remember it, everything was growing worse—all over the country. I heard the talk, during dinnertime, or when the pilots played their mah jong games late into the night. They talked about the war as if there were an epidemic, spreading around a sickness that made people lie and cheat and hate one another.
To my way of thinking, it had started the year before, when the Burma Road was suddenly cut off, so no more trucks could come through with war supplies. People were shouting, How can the air force fly planes without gasoline? How can the army protect us without guns? Everyone felt so helpless. And we were angry, too, because the Japanese didn’t close that road—it was the British. They controlled it. They shut it off when they couldn’t make up their minds which government to support—Chinese or Japanese, Japanese or Chinese. They took three months to decide. And when they finally said, We support you, China, who believed them? Of course we pretended to welcome them back. What choice did we have? We didn’t want them to close that road again.
And the Americans were just as bad. One day they were bragging how they were our good friends—Our Chinese pals, they said. Chennault even came back in the summertime, saying he was going to bring in more airplanes to protect us. But the next day we heard the American companies were doing a big business with the Japanese, selling them gasoline and metal for airplanes—the same ones that were dropping bombs all over China. How would you feel hearing this? So many of our pilots were dying, so many of them were our friends. Half the third class was gone, almost everyone in the classes that came later was also dead—the sixth and the seventh class, all young men. At night the pilots told stories of each new death, every one a hero. Oh, how we cried, sadness and anger together.
But even that was not the worst. The worst came when our own Chinese leaders bowed to the Japanese. The number-two leader of the Kuomintang—he did that. He said China should give up and support the new Japanese government. This was like telling us to dig up our ancestors’ graves and throw the bones to the dogs. Who could say such a thing? But many did. And each time it happened, we would lose a little hope, wonder if we had fought only for this kind of humiliation.
Of course, oftentimes big rallies were held in the market square, to curse the traitors, to keep everyone’s spirits strong. I was in the square one day when a rally was held. An army captain was shouting over the loudspeaker that Chinese people should never give up. “We must be willing to fight the Japanese,” he said, “even if we must sacrifice every last drop of our Han blood.”
And this was a strange thing to say, because, except for me and Hulan, there was probably not one drop of Han blood in the crowd that was listening. They were all tribal people—Miao, Bai, Yi, Hui, as well as Burmese and other kinds of poor mountain people and refugees. They had been forced to come down from the mountains and the outskirts of the city to help with the war, to hand over their sons as soldiers and laborers. They had been treated like the lowest kind of person, just like animals made only to carry things. And yet they stood in the square, listening to patriotic words about Han Chinese, in a language that was not theirs—and they clapped and cheered.
I think those people must have had a very bad life up in the mountains. And this made me remember that common saying everyone in China was raised with: “If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.” Maybe that’s what those people did, no longer blaming bad fate, no longer looking at the bad things in their life, believing they had become Han too and now had something to fight for. I told myself, Look at these people. Learn from them.
After that day in the square, I changed my attitude little by little. I did not think I was ready to die, not yet. But I thought about it this way: If I have to die soon, then maybe I won’t have to suffer too much longer in this marriage. And if I do not die soon, then maybe I can find a way to escape.
Around that time, Hulan started to change her attitude too. Or maybe it was not her attitude, only her appetite. She began to eat more and more every day.
At first I thought Hulan was going to have a baby and was keeping this a secret. I knew she was eager to have children. She did not hide this fact. Whenever I complained to her about Wen Fu, or the war, or my homesickness, she would say, “If I had a son like yours, I would be able to swallow anything, I would be that grateful.”
No son came, but still she was swallowing everything, always hungry. I don’t mean that she had a special hunger for a pungent tofu, or a delicious fatty pork, telling herself, “That’s what I want to eat.” Instead, she would see beggars, hundreds and thousands coming into the city every day. She saw how they were starving, how their mouths hung open ready to catch anything that flew in, how their skin clung to their bones. And I think she imagined she would soon look the same way if she didn’t have something to eat.
I remember especially how she stared at a young beggar girl leaning against a wall that led into the old part of the city. Hulan looked at that girl, and the girl looked back, so strong and fierce. Hulan said, “Why is she staring at me? She looks like a starved animal hoping to eat me and save herself.”
Each time we passed her after that, Hulan claimed that the girl’s shadow against the wall was growing thinner and thinner. I think what Hulan was seeing was her old self back in her country village. I’m sure of it, because one time she told me about her family, how they almost starved to death when she was a young girl.
“Every year the river overflowed,” Hulan had said. “Sometimes it spilled only a little, but one year, it was like a giant kettle overturned. And when all that muddy water covered our fields, we had nothing to eat, except dried kaoliang cakes. We didn’t even have enough clean water to steam them soft. We ate them hard and dry, wetting them only with our saliva. My mother was the one who divided everything up, gave a little to the boys, then half that to the girls. One day, I was so hungry I stole a whole cake and ate it myself. And when my mother found out, she beat me, shouting, ‘That selfish! Eating a cake all by herself.’ And then she gave me nothing to eat for three days. I cried so hard, my stomach hurt so much—for a little kaoliang cake hard enough to break my teeth.”
You would think Hulan would remember those hard little cakes, and then put a few coins, or maybe some food, into the beggar girl’s bowl, which is what I did. I’m not saying I did this all the time. But Hulan did not do this even once. Instead she put more food into her own mouth. She added fat onto her body the same way a person saves gold or puts money into a bank account, something she could use if worse came to worst. So that’s what I meant when I said tha
t Hulan changed her attitude. She had once acted so generous. But now, when she looked at the misery in other people, she saw what she once was—and what she still might become.
During that summer, Wen Fu and Jiaguo both left for Chungking. Jiaguo said they were training military people who had arrived to defend the new capital city. He did not know when they would return, perhaps in two or three months.
Before he left, my husband had bragged that his job was especially important, developing radio communications so the air force and army would know in advance when Japanese planes were coming. When he said that, I thought, How can the air force trust him to do all their important communications, a man who lies all the time? I was glad he was gone.
Right after they left, Hulan became worried, listening to every kind of rumor. “I heard the Japanese are going to do another big bombing raid on Chungking soon, maybe even Kunming,” she said one day, and then she started to cook herself a big noontime meal. When she heard thunder sounds, she ran outside and looked up at the sky, waiting to see planes drop from the dark rainclouds.
I told her, “You have to use your ears before you use your eyes. The thunder always comes from the big Burma mountains to the west. If bombers come, that would be from the north or east.”
“You cannot tell these things with the Japanese,” she said in a smart voice. “They don’t follow Chinese ways of thinking.” And then she would run out and look at the sky as if she could find the proof that I was wrong.
I remember one time when she did this again. I was in the kitchen giving Danru a bath. And I heard her scream, “They’re coming! We’re dead people already!”
I picked up Danru, water splashing all over the front of my dress. And then I ran outside and looked to where she was pointing. It was a flock of black birds, soaring in the same arrow pattern as fighter planes.
