The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

  19

  WEAK AND STRONG

  I have told you about the early days of my marriage so you can understand why I became weak and strong at the same time. Maybe, according to your American mind, you cannot be both, that would be a contradiction. But according to my life, I had to be both, that was the only way I could live.

  It was like this: For the rest of the war, I lived a life without hope. But without hope, I no longer despaired. I no longer fought against my marriage. Yet I did not accept it either. That was my life, everything always in between—without hope, yet without despair; without resistance, but without acceptance. So you see, weak and strong.

  I am not asking you to admire me. This was not harmony with nature, no such thing. I am saying this only so you will know how it is to become like a chicken in a cage, mindless, never dreaming of freedom, but never worrying when your neck might be chopped off.

  But of course, even the stupidest chicken will fly away when the cage breaks open. And now I will tell you when that finally happened.

  I had to wait until 1945, the middle of summer. I still remember that day, what I ate, what Auntie Du said, what Hulan was wearing. I wonder why that is, to remember the details of the moment right before everything changes. In any case, we were crowded around our little square table—Hulan and Jiaguo, Wen Fu and Auntie Du, and Danru, sitting on a little stool next to me. We were eating our morning meal—a very ordinary meat—a porridge made out of a tiny rice grain, a pickled vegetable that looks like a small snail, cold lettuce hearts, which were leftovers from dinner the night before, a stinky bean curd, and sweet boiled red beans, the kind that are as small as baby teeth. Our meal was so ordinary we did not even waste words criticizing or praising the dishes, which is what we always did when the meal was interesting, what was prepared well, what was not.

  Of course, now that I am thinking of it, I would praise those dishes today—all those tastes you cannot get in America, what a pity. The lettuce heart, for example, it was thick like a turnip, crunchy but sweet, easy to cook. And the bean curd, we could buy that from a man who rolled his cart by our house every morning, calling, “Cho tofu! Cho tofu!” It was fried on the outside, and when you broke it open, inside you’d find a creamy-soft middle with such a good, stinky smell for waking up your nose.

  But as I said, back then all those tastes were just everyday foods, like the cereal you buy at the store. Anyway, because it was summer—August by your calendar—we did not have an appetite to eat very much.

  I remember something else about that breakfast. Hulan was eating one red bean at a time, very slowly, like this. She would pluck one from the plate, then wave it in the air as if it were the body of a fly, zigzagging into her mouth. By then she had grown quite fat, and the dress she was wearing, made from the peach-colored cloth I had given her, was too small across her chest.

  “When I was a young girl,” she said, “I was the only one in my village who could pick up one hundred of these beans, one at a time, never dropping any.” She dropped another bean into her mouth.

  Of course, I knew what she was talking about, the old silly custom of showing in front of prospective mothers-in-law how delicate, how elegant your manners. You were supposed to use your most slippery chopsticks to pick up the smallest bits of food—without making a big mess. “In your village,” I teased her, “women had no other work than to count how many beans went into their mouth?”

  “You don’t believe this?” she said. She picked up another bean, swallowed it.

  “I am not saying I don’t believe you,” I said. “Only that maybe there was no time to count how many you actually ate. Maybe it was only fifty—”

  “I tell you, it was one hundred!” She ate another bean, then another and another, as if this would prove her right.

  Auntie Du scolded us both. “What kind of nonsense are you two arguing about now? Maybe it was two hundred. In any case, why measure a girl’s value by how many beans she can balance between her chopsticks?”

  At that moment we heard a quick knock at our door. And then before we could even put our chopsticks down, the knock came again, this time harder and faster. A man burst into our house, a pilot, from the third class. He was grinning big, shouting, “It’s over! It’s over!” And even with this, we did not imagine—because we were told so many times not to expect this news for at least another year—we could not believe our ears when he said China had won the war, pushed the Japanese imperialists out forever!

  Everyone was crying with joy—Hulan, Auntie Du, the cook, even our husbands. You should have seen the happy tears and heard the shouts. We could not sit down, we could not stand still. We were stamping our feet, jumping up and down. Hulan threw her arms in the air to thank the gods above, and of course, that’s when she tore her dress, under both arms, although she didn’t know it at the time. In a few moments, another pilot came into our house, and after him, another, and then another. Each time someone ran in the door, we made the first pilot repeat how he heard the news—who told him, how he couldn’t believe it was true, how he finally came to believe it was true.

  So you see, everyone was talking at once—except for me. I was laughing and crying as well, pretending to listen to all this good talk. But really, my heart was beating fast, my mind was dizzy, my feet were ready to run. Because I was remembering what it was like to dream again. I was thinking, Now I have a choice. I can go back to Shanghai. I would write a letter right away to my father. I would ask my uncle or Old Aunt or Peanut. Someone would help me, I was sure. And soon I could leave this marriage and start a new life.

  By the afternoon everything was decided. We would leave Kunming immediately, the next morning. We would not spend even one extra day trying to sell our furniture. Better to dump everything! You see how excited we were? For seven years we had been stuck in Kunming. For eight years I had been stuck in my marriage.

  And so that day we began to pack our things, sorting out belongings, what would stay, what would go, as quickly as saying, “This, not that.” Danru was already five years old. Oh, how he cried when I said we could not take the little woven-hemp bed he had grown up with.

  “Stop crying!” Wen Fu shouted. And Danru, so scared of his father, became quiet immediately. But Wen Fu was in such a good mood. This time he did not scold Danru anymore. He said, “In Shanghai, I will buy you a better bed, and not just a bed, but a little car made out of wood. Now smile.” And Danru stretched his lips as wide as he could. Poor little Danru!

  The next morning we left Kunming. This time we did not have to sit in the back of a truck. We got into a bus with Hulan and Jiaguo, along with other pilots. By then, only a few pilots were left in Kunming, so the bus was not too crowded. Wen Fu and I had our own bench to sit on. I sat by the window with Danru on my lap. And this time, we had brought with us many suitcases and boxes, not just the one trunk allowed us when we first arrived. We even had our own quilts with oilcloth bottoms, just in case we needed to spend the night in a place without proper bedding.

  As the bus moved down the road, everyone but me looked back at our house one last time. Why would I want to see the place where I had lost my hopes? I was twenty-seven years old and I already wanted to forget everything that had happened in my life. I looked only ahead.

  I saw that the streets were very crowded, filled with buses and trucks and people carrying their loads balanced on a stick. And then we were at the outskirts of the city, beyond the city wall, going past little villages, then climbing into the mountains. My heart was pounding, filled with a hurry-up anxiousness. It was the same kind of feeling I had when I thought the Japanese would catch up with us. Only this time I was scared that if we did not leave fast enough, someone would suddenly say, “This is a mistake. The war is not over. We must go back.”

  And then one of the pilots did shout, “Stop!” and ran down the aisle to give further instructions to the driver, pointing to the side of the road. Sure enough, the bus gave a big groan and stopped. I bit my hand to s
top myself from crying out loud. Three pilots rushed out the door. I thought we were being attacked. I stood up and looked out the window. And I let out such a big laugh when I saw what they were really doing—taking pictures with a camera!

  One of them was standing in a rather silly pose, proudly pointing to the sky—as if the sky here were different from everywhere else. I wanted to laugh. And then I too looked at that sky. And I remember I had a very strange feeling, the way you feel when you are coming out of a confusing dream. It was as if I had never seen Kunming before. Because what I saw was not just an ordinary sky, ordinary clouds. The color of the sky was shocking to the eye, such a bright blue, like a sapphire. And the clouds—three of them, one right after the other—were shaped just so, like gigantic cushions for the gods of the heavens. And then I saw a bird, a large bird, the color of its wings underneath like a rainbow. I saw green hills covered with trees, their arms sweeping down, brushing the ground. And running along the ground were flowers, so many different kinds, bursting wild from the earth. And beyond that I could see the old city itself, the peaceful winding streets, the whitewashed walls, now looking clean-bright from a distance.

  I saw all this for the first time, and I was not happy to see it. I was bitter—that I had never felt this kind of beauty until now, too late.

  Along the way to Wuchang, I saw what the war had done. In almost every village, it seemed, were rows of one-story clay houses, with their middles crushed in, or their roofs torn off, or the walls on one side all fallen down. Some houses were already fixed, holes patched here and there with the broken top of a table, or straw matting from a bed, or the door of a wrecked car. I once looked down into the mouth of a green valley. And scattered here and there in the tall wild grass were black clumps, a dozen or so. From that distance they looked like broken rounds of coal carelessly tossed away. I did not realize until after we had almost passed by that this had once been a village, and those black lumps had been small houses, burned down several years ago with no one left to build them back.

  But mostly what I saw were poor and hungry faces, so many, many faces along the road, young and old, all wearing the same dry look of too much grief. They were poking through rubble, placing scraps in thin bags. And when their ears caught the sound of our bus, they dropped their bags, and their hands formed meager begging bowls. “Little Miss, look at our misery! Give us your pity!” their voices wailed, and then faded, as our bus kept driving, pushing all that misery to the side of the road. My stomach ached to see them.

  Those of us in the bus had our own worries as well. We had heard that many poor people had become bandits and now roamed wild throughout China, especially in the mountain regions. And when we had to take a boat across Tungting Lake, we were warned that pirates had already seized many boats and would not hesitate to slice our throats. The Kuomintang insisted it was the Communists who were doing these crimes. And Auntie Du secretly told us this was not true. Her daughter had written her and told her Communists were now blamed for everything bad in China. So you see, the end of the war did not stop all the fights.

  It was not until we safely reached Wuchang—where we would stay in a hotel only one night—that Hulan and I realized we would not see each other anymore. From here she and Auntie Du would go far north to Harbin, where Jiaguo was being sent to make sure Japanese troops and officials surrendered to the Kuomintang and not to the Communists. And Wen Fu, Danru, and I would go east by train to Nanking, where we would take a boat to Shanghai.

  It’s true that Hulan and I had had many fights, many disagreements those past eight years. But now we were sad to let each other go. That last night at the hotel, we talked for many hours, until our eyes could not stay open. The next morning we ate our breakfast slowly, the same kind of simple meal as I have described before: the same rice porridge, the small red beans. And after we ate, we exchanged addresses. I wrote down my father’s, as well as Uncle’s on the island. She copied the address in Harbin that Jiaguo had written for her. And then we both went to our rooms to search in our trunks so we could give each other a farewell gift.

  Hulan handed me two good pairs of knitting needles, one for big stitches, one for small. I gave her my best sweater, a blue one with a clever design I had knitted myself. And we both laughed to think we had given each other the same thought, one the tools to knit, the other the result of the same tools. Jiaguo gave Wen Fu a fountain pen. Wen Fu gave him a bottle of American whiskey.

  And then I saw Auntie Du playing with Danru. She had been like a grandmother to my son. I went back to my trunk, trying to find something special for her as well. And I remembered how much she admired the blue perfume bottle I sometimes let Danru play with. I held that bottle up once more to the light, and then I walked back and gave it to her. Auntie Du protested very loudly, saying, “Why would I want such a thing?” So I pressed it into her hand and she began to cry, telling me how much it embarrassed her to take it. “I have nothing to give you in return,” she said.

  So I told her, “What I give you is nothing also, just a color to look at, so you can remember a foolish woman and her son.”

  Before we left, Hulan and I held hands. I wanted to apologize for all our fights, but I did not know how. So I said, “I think it must have been one hundred red beans exactly.” And right away, she knew I was talking about the last argument we had had, just before we left Kunming.

  Hulan shook her head, crying and laughing at the same time. “No, you were probably right. Only fifty, no more.”

  “One hundred,” I insisted.

  “Fifty, maybe even less,” she said firmly. And then she added, shyly now, “Our family was so very poor back then. I had to count that small mound of beans every morning, dividing them between my sister and me, one for her, one for me, one for her, one for me. So you see, I only wished there had been one hundred.”

  When we reached the Shanghai harbor, we did not go to see Wen Fu’s parents right away. That would have been proper. But when the Japanese first occupied Shanghai, his parents had moved inland, and now it would take us another day by train to reach them. So Wen Fu insisted we should go to my father’s house first. I think he was also dreaming we could live in that fancy house. And he had big ideas that he could do a better business in Shanghai than on the island or in little inland villages. What kind of business, he didn’t say and I didn’t ask.

  “Of course, your father will want you to live with him, his own daughter,” he said. He was wearing his air force uniform, and I suppose he thought everyone would be glad to see him, one of the great victors of the war.

  I did not argue with him. I also wanted to see my father first. And I was not just thinking of his help. I was hoping my father would be glad to see me.

  From the harbor, we hired a car to take us directly. Along the way, Wen Fu was humming a happy little song to himself. Danru was busy looking out the car window, his head turning in different directions to catch the sights of this strange, big city.

  “Mama, look!” he cried, and I saw him pointing at an Indian man in a red turban, waving for cars to stop and go. When I was a child, I used to cry seeing these Indian traffic policemen. This was because one of my father’s wives had told me that if I was disobedient, she would hand me over to the “red hats” and they would poke me with their sharp beards.

  “Don’t be scared,” I told Danru. “You see that hat on top of his head? That’s only laundry piled up to dry.” Danru tried to get up on the car seat to see better.

  “Don’t feed the boy nonsense,” said Wen Fu. And Danru sat back down.

  The city was noisy and crowded in a wonderful way, as if nothing had been damaged, nothing had changed—at least not on the main roads. Cars and taxis honked, bicycles darted in between, and all along the sidewalks was every combination of life: rich merchants in their tailored suits, peasants pushing vegetable carts, schoolgirls walking arm in arm, and modern women wearing the latest hats, the highest shoes. They knew everyone was watching them, envying them. A
nd of course, the foreigners were still there, although not as many as I remembered, very few, in fact. And those I saw seemed less proud, less sure in their walk, more cautious when they crossed the road, knowing now the world would not stop for them.

  As we drove closer to my father’s house, I tried to think how I would tell him about my marriage, why I needed to leave.

  I forced myself to remember once again what happened to Yiku. “Father,” I would cry, “he said that if she died, he wouldn’t care. He let her die!” I thought about how Wen Fu had gambled away almost all my dowry money: “When there was no more money to steal from me, he used my own body like a gambling chip, laughing and telling the men they could sleep with me if he lost!” I remembered the many nights he used my body after he had already been with another woman: “He even brought a woman right to our bed and forced me to watch. Of course, I did not, but I could not shut my ears.”

  The more I thought about those things, the faster my breath came, filling my lungs with so much hate. How could my father refuse to help me? Of course he would help! What family would want such a terrible son-in-law?—no feelings, no morals, no shame. Those were my thoughts as we drove up to my father’s house, the place on Julu Road. But I had not considered this: If my life had changed so much in eight years, then perhaps so had my father’s.

  As I passed through the archway of the gate, I saw immediately how strangely quiet the house looked. The outside shutters were closed on every window, as if the house had been shut down for the winter. But this was only September, and the weather that day was still quite warm.

  “What a big house,” Danru said. “Who lives here?”

  “Quiet,” Wen Fu said.

  Because I did not know my father’s house that well, I did not notice any other changes, the ones that were later pointed out to me: that the front gate had been smashed in and repaired in a clumsy way. That statues in the courtyard had been knocked down, then hauled away. That the walls on the lower part of the house had been quickly repainted in a color that did not match the rest of the house. That all the lower windows behind those shutters had been broken and not yet replaced.