The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

  Of course, I still thought she was very nice. I remember one day, when she and I were alone, she told me about her life. That’s how I found out she was married to a Chinese man from the United States. The husband had deserted her, left the dog behind too. He went back to America and married someone else, didn’t even bother to divorce the landlady first. But he still sent her money. So she didn’t care.

  “That’s fate,” she said. I thought she didn’t feel anything, just accepted her life that way, very old-fashioned. But then she told me, “You be careful. Don’t you get my same fate.” So you see.

  This next picture looks like springtime. See the flowers on the trees in back. And now my hair is shorter, more stylish. Oh, I remember this picture. I look happy, but only because your father said, “Smile.”

  Actually, in this picture I am worried. I had already used two of my gold ingots to hire a good lawyer, a famous lawyer on Nanking Road, known for being smart and clever. He put an advertisement in the newspaper, saying I was already divorced, divorced since that time Wen Fu had put a gun to my head in Kunming and made me write, “My husband is divorcing me.” The day after this came out in the newspaper, two men went to the lawyer’s office and smashed everything to pieces and tore up my divorce papers. The lawyer was scared, mad too. “Is your husband some kind of gangster?” he asked. He wouldn’t help me after that.

  I started thinking, Maybe my husband is a gangster. Auntie Du thought this, too. I don’t know why. Now it is too late to ask her.

  This is a funny picture. See the apron I wore. I am at our new place, a two-room flat in Chiao Chow Road. Your father and I registered ourselves as husband and wife. That was like signing “Mr. and Mrs. James Louie.” But I still used my real name seal, the one that said “Jiang Weili,” my legal name.

  Your father took that picture in the morning, just before he went to work. I probably went to the movie theater later with Danru. We went almost every day because I did not want to be in the house all day, just in case. Meaning just in case Wen Fu found us.

  Actually, in this picture I am not really cooking anything, only pretending. Your father liked to take natural pictures, not just posed. “Baby-ah,” your father said to me—he always called me by that American nickname. “Baby-ah, smile but don’t look at the camera.” So you see, this picture is natural.

  Here is another picture with me and Danru. And another, and another. See how many? See how happy he looks? His face is fuzzy, because he started to move when your father took the picture. You cannot keep a six-year-old boy still when he wants to throw rocks in a pond.

  In this one we were in a temple garden. In this one we were at a park with a small merry-go-round with animals shaped like cartoon figures. In this one we were leaning against a tree near a lake. You can’t see the lake. But I remember it was there.

  I also remember we took these pictures before we sent Danru up north—to Harbin, to stay with Jiaguo, Hulan, and Auntie Du. This was after the landlady told us two men had come by, looking for Danru and me. I wanted to go with him. Jimmy would have gone too. But I decided to stay a few extra weeks, because I had found another lawyer, the one who took my last gold ingot. He said I was very close to getting my divorce, but I had to be in Shanghai when it happened. So I stayed. I told Danru I would follow soon. Of course, he believed me. And I too believed I was doing the right thing. I was saving him.

  Late at night, when Danru was already asleep, we took him to the train station with the landlady. She had agreed to take Danru up north, where she had a cousin she could visit. But just before they got on the train, Danru woke up. He began to shout. “Where’s my mother? I changed my mind! Now I don’t want to go!” He cried loud, in a pitiful way.

  I rushed over. “How can you do this?” I said. “Embarrassing your mother in front of so many people?” Still he cried, his little heart breaking to pieces, piercing mine. I scolded him, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. I am coming to get you as soon as I am free.”

  Of course, I did this in a gentle way. But I still regret it. I should have held him. I should have praised him for shouting that he never wanted to leave me. I should have never let him go.

  But look: In this picture, and this one, and this one, he is happy. You can see this, even in a fuzzy picture. Most of the time, I made him happy.

  Here is a picture of me with Auntie Du. This was taken a few weeks after she came to see me in Shanghai. Whenever I look at this picture, I become very sad. Because I remember that day she arrived, how she waited patiently in the hallway until we came home.

  I saw an old woman stand up slowly. “Syau ning”—little person—she said. I was so surprised, so happy. Auntie Du—all the way from Harbin! I ran to greet her, to scold her for not writing so we could pick her up at the train station. And then I saw her face, her mouth pushed tight, water at the edges of her eyes. When you see a face like that, you know, you know.

  I tried to push her away. I was screaming, “Go back! Go back!” Jimmy had to hold his arms around me to keep me from pushing her away. And when she told me why she had come, I shouted, “How can you say this? Do you think this is some kind of joke? How can you ever tell a mother her little son is dead? He’s not dead. I saved him! I sent him to Harbin!”

  But she never blamed me. She made that long journey, knowing I would hate her. And she told me how the Japanese had raised thousands of rats with a bad disease. And after the war, they didn’t kill the rats, they let them go. More than one year later, disaster—lots of people sick, no chance to escape, then dead from a fast-moving epidemic carried by rats and fleas. Poor little Danru, gone in one day.

  Oh, and it was even worse than that. Jiaguo was dead too.

  I wanted to rush to Harbin to hold my little son one more time, to make sure they had not made a mistake. After all, he never cried much. He did not wake easily from sleep. They didn’t know these things about Danru, how much he trusted me.

  But Auntie Du said they put Danru and Jiaguo in the ground the same day they died, before a person could even think, How did this happen? She said they had to burn everything in the house, Danru’s clothes, his toys, everything, in case a flea was still hiding. So you see, I didn’t have one thing left to hold for a hope or a memory. He was gone forever.

  It was not until the next day that I asked Auntie Du about Hulan. “Where is she? Why didn’t she come, too?”

  And Auntie Du said Hulan was in Harbin, tending the graves. She brought food every day, telling Jiaguo and Danru that she hoped they were growing fat on the other side. “She insists on doing this,” said Auntie Du. “She says she’ll come to Shanghai later and meet me here. She has no reasons to live in Harbin anymore. At least she is making sense now. But right after they died—it was terrible. For two days she could not cry, she was so confused. She kept arguing, ‘How can they be dead? The war is already over.’ For two days she could not stop saying this. And then she became very busy cleaning her house, washing the walls and the floors with turpentine. And when she was done with that, she sat down to write you a letter, telling you as gently as she could what had happened to Danru.

  “But she got stuck on an expression she did not know how to write, ‘your beloved son.’ She went to ask Jiaguo. She could not find him. She called for him. I found her standing in her bedroom, shouting for him, angry tears running down her face. ‘Jiaguo! Jiaguo!’ she was screaming. ‘Don’t die now. What will I do without you? How will I know how to write ”your beloved son“?’”

  Now you see how skinny I’ve become in this picture. See how the sweater droops on my shoulders. You cannot tell, but the sweater is a dark red color, and the curly pattern on the chest and pocket was embroidered with threads twisted with real gold. Your father asked me to put that on for the picture. He bought it for me when I turned twenty-nine, so this was early spring 1947. I had never received a birthday present before. Americans give gifts on birthdays, Chinese do not. I should have been happy, but I was still very sad, because of Danru. I was s
till blaming myself. So your father did not ask me to smile. And I didn’t. This picture is natural.

  And now you see there are no more pictures of me here. Because soon after that, someone saw me walk into a beauty parlor, and when I came out, two policemen took me to jail.

  Nobody would tell me why I had been arrested. They took me to a women’s prison with a thick wooden gate and a big high wall. As soon as they brought me inside, I became sick. Such a terrible smell—just like sticking your nose into a toilet! A woman guard walked me down a long dark hallway, past long wooden tables and benches. On the other side were rooms, one after the other. And in each room were five women, people you would be afraid to look at on the street, a sad story on each face. And that’s where they put me, in one of those stinky rooms with four other women.

  I think those women knew I was there by mistake. They looked at me not with pity but with curiosity. Four pairs of eyes stared quietly at my chipao, the ordinary summer dress of a lady. They stared at my hair, the shiny curls, just fixed by the beauty parlor.

  Most of the women there had on dirty long pants and tops. They had rough faces and oily hair.

  And then one woman with a hoarse voice said, “Eh, little sister, sit down, sit down, stay and visit us awhile!” And everybody laughed, although not in a mean way. I think they thought a little joke would make me feel more comfortable. And then another young woman jumped up from her wooden stool and said, “Sit here,” and everyone laughed again as she quickly pulled up her pants. And then I saw her seat was a wooden toilet in a comer of the room. That toilet was used for everything, no privacy at all! And you could not flush the toilet, you could not put a top over it, no such thing. Everybody’s business just sat there, like one big ugly soup.

  In another corner of the room was a thin padding on the floor, big enough for three people squeezed together. We were supposed to take turns sleeping, three people on the mattress, the two leftover people sitting on the concrete floor.

  All night long I stood up. All night long I worried, not about myself but about Jimmy. I imagined him looking for me, running through the park, looking in the movie theaters. He was a good man, considerate and kind, but he was not strong. He had never been through any kind of bad hardship before. So I worried. I was hoping Auntie Du would help him find me.

  By morning, my legs were shaky with exhaustion. A prison guard came to get me. She shouted my name: “Jiang Weili!” I shouted back, “Here! Here!” I thought they were releasing me. But instead, the guard put handcuffs on me, as if I were a dangerous criminal. And then I was put in the back of a truck with other handcuffed women, all rough-looking, like people who steal things. Maybe they were driving us to the countryside to be shot, we didn’t know. We were just like tied-up animals being driven to market, bumping into each other whenever the truck made a turn.

  But then the truck stopped at a place that turned out to be a provincial court building. When I walked into the courtroom, I saw him right away: Wen Fu, smiling like a victor, so glad to see me humiliated. My hair was messy. My dress was wrinkled. My skin was covered with the smells of the night before.

  And then I heard someone whisper loudly, “There she is!” And I saw Auntie Du, Peanut, then Jimmy, his happy, painful face. I found out later it was just as I had hoped. Auntie Du was the one who went to my father’s house, demanding to know where I was. That’s how she learned what Wen Fu had done.

  The judge told me what my crime was. I was being sued for stealing my husband’s son and letting him die, for stealing valuables from my husband’s family, for deserting my Chinese husband to run off with an American soldier I had met during the war.

  I was so shaky with anger I almost could not speak. “These are all lies,” I said in a quiet voice. I told the judge, “My husband divorced me a long time ago, during the war, when he put a gun to my head and forced me to sign a divorce paper.” I said I did not steal anything from my own father’s house, I took only what was mine to take. I said, How could I be accused of deserting my husband for another man, when my husband had divorced me and was now living with another woman? I said the other man was now my husband. We had already registered as husband and wife.

  I saw Jimmy nodding, and someone took his picture. And then I heard whispering in the room. I saw there were other people there—just like an audience in a movie theater, people who came to watch because they had nothing better to do. And they were pointing to me, then Jimmy, whispering back and forth. Auntie Du later told me they were saying, “Look how beautiful she is, just like a movie actress.” “Listen to the way she talks, you can tell by her character she’s a nice girl.” “That man she ran away with, he’s no foreigner, anyone can tell he’s Chinese.”

  But now Wen Fu was smiling and speaking to the judge. “There was no divorce. My wife is confused. Maybe we had a fight long ago and I said I might divorce her if she didn’t behave.”

  He was making me sound like a silly woman, someone who could not remember if she was really divorced or not!

  “If we are truly divorced,” Wen Fu said, “where is the paper? Where are the witnesses?”

  Right away, Auntie Du jumped up. “Here! I was a witness. And my niece, now living up north, she was another witness.” What a good woman Auntie Du was! And so quick to think of this. This was not a lie, not really. She heard our fight, she saw the paper. The people in the room were excited to hear Auntie Du say this. They were talking in a happy way.

  Wen Fu threw Auntie Du an ugly face. He turned back to the judge. “This woman is not telling the truth. How could she be a witness and sign papers? I know this woman, and she cannot even read or write.” And the judge could see by Auntie Du’s unhappy face that this was true.

  “Do you still have this divorce paper?” the judge asked me.

  “I gave it to a lawyer last year,” I said. “But after we made an announcement in the newspaper, this man, Wen Fu, destroyed the lawyer’s office, tore up all his papers, mine too.”

  “This is a lie!” Wen Fu roared. And everyone started talking at once. I insisted again that Wen Fu had forced me to sign the paper. Auntie Du claimed that even though she could not read the paper, she knew what it said. “I marked it with my name seal!”

  But now the judge was telling everyone to be quiet. “In matters like these,” he said, “where everyone disagrees, I must go by the evidence. No one can show me a divorce paper. So there is no divorce. And with no divorce, a husband has the right to sue a wife for taking his property and his son. The wife does not deny she took both. Therefore, I sentence Jiang Weili to two years in jail.”

  The judge began to write this down on a document. People started shouting. Wen Fu was smiling. Auntie Du was wailing. And Jimmy and I were looking at each other, numb. I was dizzy, unable to think clearly. I had never considered I might go back to jail for Wen Fu’s lies. I thought he only wanted to humiliate me, to send me to jail for one night to make me mad. I thought I was dreaming everything: the guard putting handcuffs on me, someone running up to take my picture, the judge marking his paper with a red seal.

  All of a sudden, Wen Fu walked up to the judge and said in a loud voice, “Maybe my wife has now learned her lesson. If she says she is sorry, I will forgive everything, and she can come home with me.” He smiled at me like a generous man.

  All eyes were watching me, to see what I would say. I think they were waiting for me to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness. I think even Jimmy and Auntie Du were hoping this. But I had so much hate in my heart I had no room for their hopes. I was blind to everything except Wen Fu’s smiling face, waiting for my answer. And I could imagine how he would laugh at me, how he would later force his way into my bed, how he would make me miserable every day until my mind was completely broken.

  “I would rather sleep on the concrete floor of a jail,” I heard myself say in a loud voice, “than go to that man’s house!” And the room roared with surprise and laughter. So you see, in the end, Wen Fu was the one who was humil
iated. And when they took me away, I was smiling.

  Three days later, Auntie Du came to visit me in the jail. We were sitting in a small visitors’ room, with a woman guard in a corner, listening to everything.

  Auntie Du put a package wrapped in cloth on the table. Inside I found two pairs of underpants, a wrapper to put over my dress and keep it clean, a comb, soap, a toothbrush, chopsticks, and a little Goddess of Mercy charm.

  “Put the cloth down,” Auntie Du explained, “to make a clean place on the bed. Put the charm on to make a clean place in your heart.”

  And then she reached into the sleeve of her shirt and pulled out a page of the newspaper, folded into a square. “Look what they did,” she whispered. “It is in all the big newspapers. Jimmy Louie says it is very, very bad, what they wrote.”

  I opened up the newspaper and began to read. What Jimmy said was true. It was terrible, written just like some kind of cheap scandal. My face was burning with anger.

  “American Romance Ends in Death and Tragedy,” I read. I saw a picture of myself, looking strong, like a revolutionary. “ ‘I would rather go to jail!’ lovesick wife shouts.”

  Next to that was a picture of Wen Fu, and his eyes were turned to the side, as if he were looking at my picture, angry and victorious at the same time. “ ‘Her selfishness killed my son!’ claims Kuomintang hero.”

  And at the bottom was a small picture of Jimmy Louie, his face turned down, as if he were ashamed. “American GI says, ‘I still want her back.’ ”

  I read more, all lies from Wen Fu, saying I had given up a respectable life, turned my back on my own father, let my own son die—all because I was crazy for American sex. Wen Fu knew what the newspapers wanted to hear.