by Amy Tan
Once I stole a mah jong tile from the set. The next time Wen Fu’s mother and her friends sat down to play, they soon discovered they could not continue until they found the missing piece. I heard Wen Fu’s mother shouting, “Are you sure? Stack them again! Count them again!” I had to hold my stomach in, trying not to laugh.
Another time I was so angry because Wen Fu refused to spend money to fix the broken windows all over the house. “Insects and diseases are coming in the house,” I told him. He didn’t care. So one day I took a little box and went into the garden and poked under rocks. And later, I went into Wen Fu’s room, the one he had taken over from my father. I sprinkled little bugs in his dresser and under the padding of his bed. This was when I had my own room across from his, and at night I could hear him chasing those bugs with shouts, slapping them with his slippers. Of course, he still did not fix those windows.
Later I even found a way to get back my mother’s room for my own. When Wen Fu’s mother moved in, she picked this room for herself, and I was always angry to see her there. So I found my chance when I heard her complain, “Last night was so cold, as if a wind were blowing right through the walls.” Right away I said, “Ai, I heard that a woman died in that room.” I turned to San Ma. “Isn’t this true?” And San Ma was glad to help.
“Murder or suicide,” San Ma said, “nobody knew, the circumstances were never clear. Of course, that was a long time ago, nothing to worry about now.” That day Wen Fu’s mother forced me to change rooms with her.
But even my mother’s ghost could not prevent Wen Fu from coming into my room late at night, smelling of nightclubs: cigarettes, whiskey, and perfume. He would roll me over, unbend my arms, unbend my legs, as if I were a folding chair. And when he was done satisfying himself, he would get up and go to his room, not one word spoken between us.
I would get up too. I always kept a basin of water in my room for just this reason. I would wet a rough cloth, then wash myself, rubbing hard wherever he had touched my skin, over and over again. And when I was done, I would throw this dirty water out the window. Pwah!
20
FOUR DAUGHTERS ON THE TABLE
Do you remember Edna Fong? She goes to our church, three daughters, two sons, one became a doctor. She was at Bao-bao’s engagement party in a red dress.
Helen said Edna just found out that one of her sons has a mental problem. Edna’s son has a problem, not Helen’s. Although Helen was saying how she always worried about Frank, no secure future. But when she heard about Edna’s son, she became grateful. About Frank, that is, not about Edna’s son. She said, “At least I should be grateful I don’t have this kind of worry in my family.”
I thought to myself, This is not being grateful, this is an excuse! The same kind of reasoning people used in China. Looking at someone else’s misery so you would no longer have to think about your own problems.
Why should you compare your life that way? This kind of thinking only makes you feel afraid. You are only thinking about what more you can lose, not hoping for something better.
If I had thought this way in China, then I would still be there. Because I saw many, many people with lives worse than my own.
In Shanghai, for example, after the war, you could see all kinds of beggars, many of them women, sitting on the side of the street. Some had signs printed with their story, like advertisements: This one’s husband left her. This one had her whole family wiped out during the war. This one’s husband became an opium addict and sold everything, including the children.
Maybe some of these stories were exaggerations. But you can imagine what I was thinking. I had once told myself I would rather leave my marriage and become a beggar!
I was scared. If I had known I was running away to something better, that would have been different. But I had no such hope to run to.
I thought about this for a long time. And then you know what I decided? I still wanted to leave! It’s true. I was lying in my bed one night and I vowed this to myself, with the full moon as my witness.
I don’t know what this was, stubbornness maybe. I only knew I could not survive living with Wen Fu that way. So you see, my mind was made up long before I found something to hope for.
I was going to leave after I paid a visit to Old Aunt and New Aunt on Tsungming Island. That was only proper.
But before I could go to the island, Danru got sick with a high fever, then turned yellow with jaundice. And then I became sick with the same thing. I think it was a disease we picked up from that time we were on the road with Hulan and Jiaguo—after we left Kunming. I know this, because Jiaguo wrote us a letter, told us about their apartment and all the progress he was making in his new job. At the bottom, Hulan wrote a few words in her childish handwriting. She talked about Jiaguo’s parents, very nice people, about a new table she had bought, beautiful beyond words. And at the end, she said her health was good, although recently she had been sick. Jiaguo added that she had turned as yellow as a field of wheat and as skinny as the blade that cut the wheat down.
So you see, I think it was some little river crabs Hulan wanted to eat in Changsha. That’s what made us sick. It stayed in our bodies and broke out one day.
Anyway, after Danru became sick, I had to send a messenger to the island to tell Old Aunt why we were not coming. After the war, there still were no telephones connecting Shanghai to the island.
One week later, I received a letter back from Old Aunt, written in her bad Chinese. Like Hulan, Old Aunt had never gone to school.
She learned to write only after she was already grown up. So her Chinese was not the formal kind you learned for writing. She did not know the proper expressions to use to show you are from a refined background. Instead, she put down whatever popped into her mind.
“This old aunt of yours,” she wrote, “nearly tore the letter in half, I was so anxious when I saw the man standing at my door. How can you say it is only a little illness, nothing important? Health is always the most important thing, everybody healthy, not like Miao Tai-tai. You remember her, made your wedding with the Wen family? Only last week this happened. One minute she was standing, complaining about a fly chasing her, next minute, lying on the floor. What a calamity. So then, the Miao husband ran down the street to telephone the local doctor. He was calling, calling, calling, couldn’t get through! All the lines were being used! So then he tried calling, calling, calling again. No use. So then he ran outside, shouted to a boy, Hey, go get the doctor, hurry, here’s some money. So then that boy ran off, fast as a racehorse, that’s what a neighbor woman said. So who knows why the doctor took so long? Who knows who he was treating, not me. Two three hours later, the doctor went to the Miao house, guess what he found? The Miao wife crying over the Miao husband, cold as the floor he was lying on. Dead. Let your heart think about this. Scared himself to death just thinking she was dead. She didn’t die, he died, died for nothing. I told your uncle, Now do you believe me, we should fix the telephone. During the war, it stopped working, this was when I was trying to call Uncle at the factory and could not get through. Now your uncle says, Who needs a telephone? My health is not good, he knows this. If I fall on the floor, then what happens? Weiwei, do not worry too much about me, but when you come here, you must tell your uncle, Auntie is right, fix the telephone. You must ask him, What is most important, no telephone or no wife? As I said, health is important. You get well fast. Drink lots of hot things if the sickness runs cold, cold things if the sickness runs hot. You write and tell me when you can come. Now I have to stop writing and go to the Miao husband’s funeral. Give greetings to everybody.”
When Danru and I finally went to Tsungming Island, it was already past the New Year, 1946.
I have already told you how my aunties treated me when I was a child. So I had always thought they did not care about me very much, that they saw me as a nuisance, a burden. And I always thought I had no strong feelings for them in return. Why should I?
So you can imagine how surprised I w
as to find my eyes stinging with tears as our flatboat drew close to the island. I tried to tell myself it was only the sharp cold wind, hurting my eyes. But then I saw them—Uncle, Old Aunt, New Aunt—waving to me from the harbor, screaming and shouting, “There she is!” And I knew it was not the wind.
They all looked old and worn, Old Aunt especially. She had lost the sharpness of her features. Even her eyes, which had once been a very dark black-brown, had faded in color. New Aunt had sprouted many white hairs, and fine wrinkles lined each smiling cheek, just like a spider’s web. And Uncle was a man walking in his dreams, waking up only when someone shouted at him, “Be careful! Come this way!”
In fact, it was seeing Uncle this way that made me realize: He and my father were alike. They shared the same lost mind, the same weak spirit. Their eyes moved slowly back and forth, as they took in everyone else’s opinions, unable to make up their own minds. And this made me think how both had always been this way. All those years, they only pretended to lead, shouted when they did not know how to speak, frightened people when they were afraid themselves.
Old Aunt stroked my cheek many times, telling me, “Ai! Ai! Look at you, pale and thin! And this little boy, it can’t be—your son, so big already?”
Danru stepped forward and gave Old Aunt the present I had bought, a few ounces of precious ginseng root. “For you,” Danru said. He frowned, then remembered what he was supposed to say: “So you will live forever.” He frowned again. “Always in good health,” he added. He frowned again, turned to me: “Is that all?” I nodded.
Old Aunt and New Aunt patted his head and laughed. “In your last letter, it seems you were saying he was only six years old this new year. Can this be? He’s so smart. Look at his eyes, the same as Little Gong’s.”
I did not know if the years in between had softened her into someone more kind, or if I was only seeing this for the first time because I had been through so much hardness in my life.
“Where are Little Gong and Little Gao?” I asked. “They must be—how old—fifteen, sixteen?”
“Nineteen and twenty!” said New Aunt.
“That old already! And what are they doing? Are they in a good university?”
Old Aunt and New Aunt looked at each other, as if to decide what to say. “They work at the dockyard now, just down the road,” said New Aunt at last.
“Fixing ships,” added Old Aunt. “Although soon they will be returning to their studies, going to college.”
“Actually, they do not fix the ships themselves,” said New Aunt. “They bring the metal to the other workers. One loads, the other pushes the wheelbarrow, terrible work.”
I tried to imagine this, those two spoiled boys now grown up and working so bitterly hard.
“Ai, Weiwei, you see how it is,” New Aunt tried to explain. “Your uncle’s business did very poorly during the war. Many of the machines rusted. There was no money to fix them and keep the factory going strong. So you see what has also happened to the house and our family,” she said. “When the tree dies, the grass underneath withers.”
“Ai,” I said. “This is very sad to hear.”
“Even sadder than you can imagine,” Old Aunt said. And they walked with me and Danru around the house, to Old East and New West, to show me what they meant.
The big house had grown shabby. Paint was peeling everywhere, tiles on the floor were cracked, so that dirt underneath showed. And the beds all sagged deeply in the middle, not even enough money to tighten the rope lattice frames. But what saddened me most was the greenhouse.
All the little windows were cracked or broken, and the paint on the wooden frame was raised up in splintery leaves. And after many seasons of rain and heat, everything inside had turned black with decay or mold. So many changes.
Seeing all this, hearing what had happened to them, how could I accuse Old Aunt and New Aunt of giving me a bad marriage? How could I ask them to help me out of my miserable life? No, I could not ask them.
We were still standing outside the greenhouse when I asked them about Peanut. “And what about your daughter?” I said to New Aunt. “Is she still living at the house on He De Road? The last letter I had from her was maybe two years ago. Every letter, she apologized for not writing sooner, then said nothing after that. Peanut! What a silly girl!”
Hearing Peanut’s name, Uncle seemed to wake up. He huffed in a disgusted tone, then stood up and walked away, back toward the house. “Peanut is already dead!” he shouted back to us. Danru and I both jumped a little.
“What! Is this true?” I cried. “Peanut—dead?”
“Uncle is still very angry with her,” explained New Aunt.
“Danru,” Old Aunt said. “Are you hungry?”
Danru shook his head.
“Go follow Grand Uncle back to the house,” said Old Aunt. “Go ask Old Cook to give you a bowl of noodles.”
Danru looked at me. “Listen to Grand Auntie,” I said.
After Danru left, New Aunt said, “Peanut ran away from her marriage. She went to a bad group of people who claimed they helped women escape feudal marriages.”
“Hnh! She didn’t have a feudal marriage!” said Old Aunt. “She agreed! She wanted to marry! And those people who helped her, they didn’t tell her the truth, at least not in the beginning. I should have slapped her more often when she was a child.”
“They deceived her,” said New Aunt. “They didn’t tell her the truth until it was too late. They’re Communists, that’s what we think. Yes, can you imagine?”
“Of course, her husband divorced her. Hnh! Why would he want her back?” said Old Aunt. “And then he put an announcement in all the big and little newspapers in Shanghai. It said: ‘I am divorcing from Jiang Huazheng, deserter wife.’ Your poor uncle, he read this while eating his midday meal—almost choked to death on a piece of radish.”
“So now Uncle thinks she did this on purpose to kill all of us as well,” said New Aunt. “This is not true, she has a good heart. It’s only her mind that is rotten. But still, now we are all in danger. You see how things are. All this talk about unity among all the parties—nonsense. If the Kuomintang find out we have a daughter who is a Communist—ssst!—all of our heads could be rolling down the street.”
“What a stupid girl!” said Old Aunt. “What happened to all the things I taught her? No firm ideas in her head. I should have beat her harder.”
“She lost her marriage?” I said. “I’m sorry to hear this.”
That’s what I said, but guess what I was thinking? Of course! I was wondering how Peanut had done this—left her marriage. I was wondering when I could ask her how I could do the same.
To be polite, Danru and I stayed two weeks at my uncle’s house. Less time and they would have thought I did not consider them important enough. Before coming to the island, I had gone to the bank and withdrawn the last of my dowry money. As I already told you, Chinese money was not worth too much after the war. By my memory, I had maybe two thousand left. By then, it was worth only a couple hundred dollars American. And I used some of that money to treat my relatives well.
Every day I walked to the market with New Aunt and Old Aunt. Every day I would pick out the vegetables and meat, expensive things I knew they had not tasted in a long time. Every day New Aunt and I got into loud arguments in front of the shopkeepers over who would pay. Every day I would pay.
During one of those walks to the market I finally told my aunties I wanted to see Peanut.
“Impossible,” New Aunt said right away. “Too dangerous.”
“I would not allow you,” said Old Aunt. “That girl does not deserve to see anyone.”
On the morning when Danru and I were supposed to leave, New Aunt came into our room early. She ordered Danru to go say good-bye to his grand-uncle.
When we were alone, she started to give me a long lecture on Peanut, as if I still wanted to see her, as if all her faults were mine.
“Maybe no one knows she is a Communist,” New Aunt ex
plained. “But she is still a bad influence, like a diseased person.
She should not be allowed to contaminate anyone else. That’s why you cannot see her.”
I listened, not saying anything. At the end of her speech, New Aunt sighed and said, “I can see there’s no use arguing with you. Well then, if I cannot stop you, at least you cannot hold me responsible!” She threw a piece of paper down on the bed and left. It was an address, as well as instructions on what bus to take, what alleys to look for.
Suddenly, New Aunt appeared again at the door. “You should not let Old Aunt know I gave you this,” she whispered, then left again. And in that way, I knew that she had secretly visited Peanut herself.
A few minutes later, it was Old Aunt who walked into my room. “And now I must ask you for a favor,” she said. She set a small wrapped package on the bed. “This is something I borrowed from a friend long time ago. I feel so ashamed I never returned it. When you find time, maybe you can take it to her.” On top of the package was the same address New Aunt had given me and the name “Mrs. Li.”
“I feel so ashamed,” said Old Aunt, tears now coming to her eyes. “Don’t tell anyone.”
After I returned to Shanghai, I waited a week before I went to see Peanut. I did not tell anyone about this, however. I walked out the door in everyday clothes, as if I might be going to the market to shop for food, or maybe to take a little walk in the park. When I was two blocks away, I jumped onto a bus.
I have already told you a little bit about Peanut. She was a girl who loved every kind of comfort. She cared only about pretty clothes and powder on her face. She always followed what was fashionable but had no ideas of her own. So you can imagine what I was thinking as that bus took me farther and farther into a bad part of the city.
I got off at San Ying Road, and from there I had to walk down streets too narrow for cars but filled with bicycles and pedicabs and carts. She lived in the Japanese section, where buildings curved around corners just like the long body of a dragon. The buildings all looked alike, two-story brick buildings with steep tiled roofs.
