by Amy Tan
I laughed with relief. “Birds,” I told her. “The only thing they can drop on our heads is dirty stuff.”
Hulan acted insulted. “Why are you laughing at me?” she said.
“Not at you.”
“I saw you laughing.”
“Of course I was laughing. You tell me I’m dead already. I run out and see I’m not dead. I see birds. I’m laughing at that.”
“They look just like planes, even now. You look. Anyone could make the same mistake.”
To me, those birds looked like birds. That’s when I started thinking Hulan’s eyesight was getting worse. Now she was blaming me for seeing things wrong. In the beginning, she used to make a joke about it.
One time she put her knitting needles down and the next minute she lost them. When I found them for her, she laughed and said a ghost must have swallowed them, then spit them back up again. But the next time she lost her needles, she frowned and said, “It must be your son picked them up and put them in the wrong place.”
I wondered how it was to live your life never seeing clearly enough, never seeing your own faults. And then I thought, Why should she blame my son for her own absentmindedness? Why should I be criticized when she was the one who confused birds with bombers? The next time Hulan, Danru, and I went to market, I took her to a place that sold glasses.
It was a small shop in the newer portion of the marketplace, the business section that sprang up after the war started. The shopkeeper had a few pairs of glasses on a small table, and many more were piled in different baskets. The glasses on the table, the shopkeeper told us, were only for demonstration, to test the eyes, to see which strength was best.
Hulan put the first pair on, looked at me and Danru, then laughed right away: “Oh, it’s like that time in the clouds on the mountain road. This pair makes me very dizzy.”
Danru was watching Hulan, quiet and worried. “Are you wondering where Auntie went?” I said. He smiled at me, then grabbed the glasses from Hulan’s face.
We all laughed the same way, as Hulan tried on three more pairs of glasses. But after she put on the fourth pair, she was quiet. She did not let Danru pull them off. She looked up, then down, with the glasses on, then off. She walked to the doorway of the shop and looked out at the different vendors across the street. “I see a beautiful scarf,” she announced. “I see some beans I want to buy.”
The shopkeeper was very pleased. He showed Hulan which basket of glasses she should now choose from. Some had gold-colored frames. Others looked like they were made of cheap tin. And then I saw that with some of them, the legs were missing from the frames, or the gold had worn off and I could see the gray metal underneath.
“These glasses are old,” I said to the shopkeeper.
“Of course they’re old,” he said. “Where can you get new glasses nowadays? All the metal is being used for the war, not things like this.” He turned to Hulan. “Here, Miss, this pair is especially good, British-made. Those you have on, they’re cheaper, but I must be honest, they’re Japanese.”
This news did not seem to bother Hulan and Danru, who were now busy pulling out different pairs of glasses. But those baskets of dead people’s glasses looked very bad to me. Hulan decided on a round pair, no frame, just a piece at the nose holding them together and gold legs to wrap around the ears. They were very old-fashioned, not attractive at all. I told her she looked like a scholar, and she seemed pleased to hear that.
As we walked through the streets, she kept taking her glasses off, looking at something or another, then putting her glasses on.
“Can you see that?” she said.
“Basket of red peppers,” I said.
“Can you see that?” she asked, pointing farther down the road.
“A man selling charcoal.”
“And beyond that?” She was acting as if she were giving me an eye exam!
“An army truck with soldiers standing outside.”
She continued looking at all of the things in the marketplace, looking at them two different ways, with glasses, without. But now, as we walked closer, I saw Danru was staring at those soldiers standing by the truck. I wondered what a little baby could see.
They were young boys, just recruited, it seemed, by the way their new uniforms hung on them. Many of them looked proud and excited, eagerly inspecting their new shoes, the truck they would soon ride in, taking them to places they couldn’t even imagine. They had Danru’s same kind of young trust.
An older man shouted sharp orders, and the young soldiers all stood up straight, tried to look serious. In two seconds they all jumped into the back of the truck, and stood against the wooden rail, looking out as the truck engine started.
And now I saw the mothers, grandmothers, and sisters, crying and waving to them from across the road. They wore turbans, bright-colored patterns on their skirts, their best clothes. They had come down from the mountains to say good-bye. Some of those new soldiers were smiling and waving, still excited. But I also saw one soldier looking scared, his bottom lip trembling, trying not to cry, just like the little boy he still was. I was watching him as the truck moved away, wondering where he was going, what would happen to him. I think he was wondering the same thing.
“Can you see that?” Hulan asked again. She was pointing to a basket of mushrooms, my favorite. And soon, I too forgot about those soldiers.
That morning Hulan became a big expert on mushrooms. Now that she could see everything clearly, she was quick to find all the flaws: a bruise, a soggy part, a broken stem. But fortunately, there were plenty of mushrooms, many different kinds, all fresh. In Kunming they grew all year round, up in the shady creases of the wet hills surrounding the city. I picked out some with long stems and big caps. I don’t remember what they were called, but I can still taste them, salted and cooked in hot oil, so tender and light you could eat the whole thing, cap and stem, nothing wasted. That day in the marketplace, I was hungry for them. I was thinking of cooking them that night with some hot peppers, the kind soaked a long, long time in oil until they turn black. I was still dreaming of those spicy fried mushrooms, reaching for a jar of peppers, when the sirens and loudspeakers cried out. Dang! Dang! Dang! Attention! Attention! It didn’t stop.
Everyone acted the same as when Hulan and I were in Nanking, when the paper warnings fell from the sky. I held onto Danru, but dropped everything else—the mushrooms, the jar of peppers. And other people were doing the same, dumping their belongings on the ground. And then we were pushing and shouting, running in every direction, toward one of the city gates, because that’s what the loudspeakers were telling us to do: Run to the nearest gate and go outside the city!
“The nearest! the nearest!—where is it?” people were crying.
Hulan pushed her glasses closer to her face. “This way!” she shouted, pointing to the south.
“This way is closest,” I shouted back, pointing to the north.
“There’s no time to argue.”
“That’s why I’m saying go north. If we hurry, there’s still time.”
And then I started running toward the north gate, not waiting to argue anymore.
A few minutes later, I saw Hulan was running next to me. We were still running when the Japanese planes arrived, bombers and fighters, both kinds. From the ground, we could see them coming. And we knew that those planes so high in the air could see us running. They could see how scared we were. They could decide which part of the city to bomb, which people to shoot.
I could see those planes coming closer. And if I had not been using up all my breath to keep running, I would have shouted to Hulan, “You see, they’re coming from the east, just as I told you.”
And then we both saw the planes turn, all at once. They flew off in another direction, and we stopped running. After a few seconds we heard a bomb explode, then another. The ground shook a little. And then—that was all. We didn’t die. I saw smoke and dust rising up in the southeast part of the city. Danru was clapping his hands.
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When the sirens stopped, we started to walk back. All around us, people were talking in excited voices, congratulating each other, “Lucky, lucky, lucky.” Soon we were back at the market, which was busier than ever. Because now, all those people who didn’t die had made up their minds—to buy an extra piece of meat, or a pair of shoes, or something they thought was no longer a luxury for a life that might end with the next siren.
Hulan and I went back to the same vendor to buy the mushrooms we had been dreaming about. The vendor told us he had lost nothing. All his goods were still there, nothing stolen, nothing destroyed. We congratulated him, and he offered us a special price. Everyone felt generous.
“Her son is so smart,” Hulan said, pointing to Danru. “Not even one year old, but when the siren went off, he knew not to cry. And when the bombs fell, he thought this was just thunder. He turned his head, waited for the lightning to come, and when everyone shouted, he clapped his hands.”
I was very proud to hear Hulan talking about Danru that way. I tossed him up in the air to hear his little laugh. “What a good little pilot you are.”
“What a good baby!” said Hulan.
“So smart!”
“So smart!”
We walked home, agreeing all the way about Danru, how lucky we were to escape, what a good bargain we got at the marketplace after the bombing.
That night, we celebrated the first bombing with a big meal and lots of rich-smelling tea. Auntie Du and the servants all laughed loudly, recounting at least ten times where they were sitting or standing when the sirens came. By the tenth time, the stories had become ridiculous and we all laughed with tears in our eyes.
“I was carrying the chamber pot down the stairs,” the servant said. “Dang! dang! dang!—then bamp! bamp! bamp! The whole floor, bombed with this smelly disaster!”
“You think you were scared?” Auntie Du exclaimed. “I was chasing a chicken with my cleaver—the next moment that chicken was chasing me!”
And Hulan said, “There we stood, Weiwei and I, arguing over which direction to run. I tell you, with a bomb over your head, your feet do not want to argue!”
Two days later, the planes with their bombs came again. And once again we ran to the gate. Once again we returned home unhurt, feeling lucky, but a different kind of lucky. And at night we celebrated, only this time not so loudly. Our stories were funny, but we did not laugh with tears in our eyes.
A few days after that, the bombs fell again. This time we had no jokes, no laughter. We talked quietly. Auntie Du heard that the wife of someone we knew had been hurt very badly. Hulan wondered why our own air force did not attack back. She hoped our husbands would return from Chungking soon. I mentioned how the Japanese planes always seemed to come from the east. And Auntie Du agreed: “Always from the east.”
So that’s how it was. The planes kept coming, maybe three times a week, always in the morning. I don’t know why the Japanese chose the morning, no reason maybe. It was just a job for them: bomb Kunming in the morning, Chungking in the afternoon. And for us, the bombing became part of our lives, too.
Of course, we were still scared when we heard the sirens. But now we knew to let go of our things gently, remembering where we put them so we could find them later. Auntie Du would make sure no pots were left burning on the stove.
“No sense saving your life only to come back to a burnt-down house,” she said.
Hulan would grab a bag filled with food, which she kept close to the door. Danru would lift his arms toward me, ready to go. And then we would walk fast, very serious, as if we were going to a funeral, hoping along the way it would not be ours when we arrived.
Sometimes we went toward the north gate, sometimes to the east gate. Sometimes we walked past places already destroyed from the week before: a few buildings smashed down, and all the other houses around them still standing, only their straw roofs gone, like hats blown off in a big wind.
After we reached the gate, we jumped into a pit, or stood behind a tree. We chatted with the same people we saw every few days, exchanging advice on where to find the best noodles, the best yarn, the best tonic for a cough.
I always chose the right gate. This is true. Three mornings a week we could have died. Yet all those times we never had bombs fall on us, not even close. I started to think I had a natural kind of luck for avoiding bombs. I always chose the right streets, the right gate to run to, the right place to hide.
And in that careless way, I stopped worrying.
One day, after our lunchtime nap, Hulan said we should go to the marketplace. Danru was still napping, so I left him with Auntie Du. We went first to the vegetable stands, searching for fresh maodo, sweet-tasting greens, very hard to find. They were expensive, but I bought some anyway.
I was lucky, of course, to have money to buy such things. So many people were poor and could not afford even the most ordinary kind of food. But during wartime, if you were lucky to have money, you didn’t think about saving your luck. A chance to taste something rare or new was like your saying “Eat, drink, be married.” You could still have something to look forward to, even if life ended tomorrow.
So I was using up my dowry money fast. Sometimes I did not even bother to bargain down the vendors too much. And they were always glad to see me. “Miss, Miss!” they called as soon as they saw me. “Look here, the freshest bean sprouts, the tastiest duck eggs.”
As we walked to the section that sold fish, Hulan told me she had finally gotten a letter from Jiaguo. She pulled it out and showed me the envelope.
Although Jiaguo had been teaching her how to read and write, she did not study very hard. So that even after four years of marriage and reading lessons, she could make sense of nothing more than prices in the market, characters that stood for “fish” or “pork” or “noodles,” all the foods she loved.
Of course, she had been careful to hide this from Jiaguo. She pretended she could read everything! If I was reading a notice pinned up in the marketplace, she would ask me what it said. Later in the evening, I would hear her say to Jiaguo, “Eh, what about this matter of the railway I read about in the marketplace today?”
So Jiaguo must have assumed he was a much better teacher than Hulan was a student. Because now he had written his wife a long letter, certain she would be able to read it by herself.
But of course, she could not. Hulan handed me the letter, excusing herself by saying her glasses today were not strong enough to read such small characters. This was nonsense. Jiaguo had written everything with big careful strokes, the way a child is taught in school, the way he had taught Hulan.
“ ‘Dear Wife,’ ” I read out loud. “ ‘Such a long time has passed between my intentions to write and my doing so now. Today I was thinking about our talk at Green Lake, the painful words we had just before I left.’ ”
“Wah!” Hulan pulled the letter from my hand. “He doesn’t say that!” She laughed as if the letter were a joke. She was looking at it, trying to see if her glasses helped her make out any of the meaning herself.
“You want me to read it or not?” I said.
She was slow to hand it back.
I glanced at the letter quickly, then started again, this time reading more slowly: “ ‘I hope your tears have long since dried. My heart and liver have been burning with misery, although it must seem less than the misery I have caused you as your worthless husband.’ ”
“No more! No more!” Hulan cried, one hand covering her mouth, the other reaching for the letter. I slowly handed the letter to her, and she turned her back to me, then quietly stuck the letter in her purse. When she turned around, her face was stern.
We walked a few minutes in silence. And now I could think of nothing natural to say. I was embarrassed—because I already knew what she did not want me to know. Before giving back the letter, I had quickly read those next few sentences. And now what secrets I knew: How Jiaguo regretted that he had not yet fulfilled his vow as husband to wife. How he now vowed to
become a true husband to her, if he lived. By next year, he hoped, she would be the mother of his offspring.
I was shocked, of course, to know this about their marriage. I wondered what this meant. Was theirs a marriage like that of brother and sister, monk and nun? What else could it mean? Why else did Hulan have no children? Did this mean Jiaguo had no desire for her? Was he being faithful to the ghost of her sister? Or was he like Wen Fu, seeing other women?
At that moment, I understood her better. The time she scolded me for complaining about Wen Fu’s appetite for sex. The times she looked at me jealously as I was bouncing Danru on my lap. I immediately forgave her and felt sorry for my mean thoughts about her.
But I also envied her, her sexless marriage over my loveless one. And now I wondered about her—this woman who had become a mystery to me, so many things kept hidden.
“You must not think Jiaguo did something wrong,” Hulan was now saying in a firm voice. “It was only a little fight, over the most ordinary thing, so small now I’ve forgotten what it even was.”
“Of course I was not thinking anything like that,” I started to say. “I have always thought Jiaguo is too kind, too good—”
Right then the sirens went off.
Hulan frowned. “How can this be?” she said. “This is not the morning, it is already too late in the day.” And then she started to walk in the direction of our house.
I called her back. “Don’t be foolish! The others won’t be home. They are already running out the door, hurrying to one of the gates.”
I decided what we should do. Hulan would go to the north gate. I would go to the east. And later, we would all return home, looking for each other the whole time. And practical-thinking that I was, I said that if it was not too late, we would come back to the marketplace and buy the fish, still in time for our evening meal. We parted with smiles.
I was hurrying along, still making good decisions. I turned down an alley, because that was faster. I kept one eye looking for Auntie Du and Danru, just in case. And then I was thinking about what I should buy when I returned to the marketplace: of course, some tofu skins to cook with the greens.
