The Hundred Secret Senses

by Amy Tan

  At home, in the bedroom we shared from then on, Kwan hung the cage with the grasshopper, now missing one leg. As soon as night fell, the grasshopper began to chirp as loudly as a bicycle bell warning people to get out of the road.

  After that day, my life was never the same. To Mom, Kwan was a handy baby-sitter, willing, able, and free. Before my mother took off for an afternoon at the beauty parlor or a shopping trip with her gal pals, she’d tell me to stick to Kwan. “Be a good little sister and explain to her anything she doesn’t understand. Promise?” So every day after school, Kwan would latch on to me and tag along wherever I went. By the first grade, I became an expert on public humiliation and shame. Kwan asked so many dumb questions that all the neighborhood kids thought she had come from Mars. She’d say: “What M&M?” “What ching gum?” “Who this Popeye Sailor Man? Why one eye gone? He bandit?” Even Kevin and Tommy laughed.

  With Kwan around, my mother could float guiltlessly through her honeymoon phase with Bob. When my teacher called Mom to say I was running a fever, it was Kwan who showed up at the nurse’s office to take me home. When I fell while roller-skating, Kwan bandaged my elbows. She braided my hair. She packed lunches for Kevin, Tommy, and me. She tried to teach me to sing Chinese nursery songs. She soothed me when I lost a tooth. She ran the washcloth over my neck while I took my bath.

  I should have been grateful to Kwan. I could always depend on her. She liked nothing better than to be by my side. But instead, most of the time, I resented her for taking my mother’s place.

  I remember the day it first occurred to me to get rid of Kwan. It was summer, a few months after she had arrived. Kwan, Kevin, Tommy, and I were sitting on our front lawn, waiting for something to happen. A couple of Kevin’s friends sneaked to the side of our house and turned on the sprinkler system. My brothers and I heard the telltale spit and gurgle of water running into the lines, and we ran off just before a dozen sprinkler heads burst into spray. Kwan, however, simply stood there, getting soaked, marveling that so many springs had erupted out of the earth all at once. Kevin and his friends were howling with laughter. I shouted, “That’s not nice.”

  Then one of Kevin’s friends, a swaggering second-grader whom all the little girls had a crush on, said to me, “Is that dumb Chink your sister? Hey, Olivia, does that mean you’re a dumb Chink too?”

  I was so flustered I yelled, “She’s not my sister! I hate her! I wish she’d go back to China!” Tommy later told Daddy Bob what I had said, and Daddy Bob said, “Louise, you better do something about your daughter.” My mother shook her head, looking sad. “Olivia,” she said, “we don’t ever hate anyone. ‘Hate’ is a terrible word. It hurts you as much as it hurts others.” Of course, this only made me hate Kwan even more.

  The worst part was sharing my bedroom with her. At night, she liked to throw open the curtains so that the glare of the street lamp poured into our room, where we lay side by side in our matching twin beds. Under this “beautiful American moon,” as she called it, Kwan would jabber away in Chinese. She kept on talking while I pretended to be asleep. She’d still be yakking when I woke up. That’s how I became the only one in our family who learned Chinese. Kwan infected me with it. I absorbed her language through my pores while I was sleeping. She pushed her Chinese secrets into my brain and changed how I thought about the world. Soon I was even having nightmares in Chinese.

  In exchange, Kwan learned her English from me—which, now that I think of it, may be the reason she has never spoken it all that well. I was not an enthusiastic teacher. One time, when I was seven, I played a mean trick on her. We were lying in our beds in the dark.

  “Libby-ah,” Kwan said. And then she asked in Chinese, “The delicious pear we ate this evening, what’s its American name?”

  “Barf,” I said, then covered my mouth to keep her from hearing my snickers.

  She stumbled over this new sound—“bar-a-fa, bar-a-fa”—before she said, “Wah! What a clumsy word for such a delicate taste. I never ate such good fruit. Libby-ah, you are a lucky girl. If only my mother did not die.” She could segue from just about any topic to the tragedies of her former life, all of which she conveyed to me in our secret language of Chinese.

  Another time, she watched me sort through Valentine’s Day cards I had spilled onto my bed. She came over and picked up a card. “What’s this shape?”

  “It’s a heart. It means love. See, all the cards have them. I have to give one to each kid in my class. But it doesn’t really mean I love everyone.”

  She went back to her own bed and lay down. “Libby-ah,” she said. “If only my mother didn’t die of heartsickness.” I sighed, but didn’t look at her. This again. She was quiet for a few moments, then went on. “Do you know what heartsickness is?”

  “What?”

  “It’s warming your body next to your family, then having the straw roof blow off and carry you away.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see, she didn’t die of lung sickness, no such thing.”

  And then Kwan told me how our father caught a disease of too many good dreams. He could not stop thinking about riches and an easier life, so he became lost, floated out of their lives, and washed away his memories of the wife and baby he left behind.

  “I’m not saying our father was a bad man,” Kwan whispered hoarsely. “Not so. But his loyalty was not strong. Libby-ah, do you know what loyalty is?”

  “What?”

  “It’s like this. If you ask someone to cut off his hand to save you from flying off with the roof, he immediately cuts off both hands to show he is more than glad to do so.”

  “Oh.”

  “But our father didn’t do this. He left us when my mother was about to have another baby. I’m not telling you lies, Libby-ah, this is true. When this happened, I was four years old by my Chinese age. I can never forget lying against my mother, rubbing her swollen belly. Like a watermelon, she was this big.”

  She reached out her arms as far as she could. “Then all the water in her belly poured out as tears from her eyes, she was so sad.” Kwan’s arms fell suddenly to her sides. “That poor starving baby in her belly ate a hole in my mother’s heart, and they both died.”

  I’m sure Kwan meant some of this figuratively. But as a child, I saw everything Kwan talked about as literal truth: chopped-off hands flying out of a roofless house, my father floating on the China Sea, the little baby sucking on his mother’s heart. The images became phantoms. I was like a kid watching a horror movie, with my hands clapped to my eyes, peering anxiously through the cracks. I was Kwan’s willing captive, and she was my protector.

  At the end of her stories, Kwan would always say: “You’re the only one who knows. Don’t tell anyone. Never. Promise, Libby-ah?”

  And I would always shake my head, then nod, drawn to allegiance through both privilege and fear.

  One night, when my eyelids were already heavy with sleep, she started droning again in Chinese: “Libby-ah, I must tell you something, a forbidden secret. It’s too much of a burden to keep inside me any longer.”

  I yawned, hoping she’d take the hint.

  “I have yin eyes.”

  “What eyes?”

  “It’s true. I have yin eyes. I can see yin people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. But first you must promise never to tell anyone. Never. Promise, ah?”

  “Okay. Promise.”

  “Yin people, they are those who have already died.”

  My eyes popped open. “What? You see dead people? . . . You mean, ghosts?”

  “Don’t tell anyone. Never. Promise, Libby-ah?”

  I stopped breathing. “Are there ghosts here now?” I whispered.

  “Oh yes, many. Many, many good friends.”

  I threw the covers over my head. “Tell them to go away,” I pleaded.

  “Don’t be afraid. Libby-ah, come out. They’re your friends too. Oh see, now they’re laughing at you for being so scared.�
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  I began to cry. After a while, Kwan sighed and said in a disappointed voice, “All right, don’t cry anymore. They’re gone.”

  So that’s how the business of ghosts got started. When I finally came out from under the covers, I saw Kwan sitting straight up, illuminated by the artificial glow of her American moon, staring out the window as if watching her visitors recede into the night.

  The next morning, I went to my mother and did what I promised I’d never do: I told her about Kwan’s yin eyes.

  NOW THAT I’m an adult, I realize it wasn’t my fault that Kwan went to the mental hospital. In a way, she brought it on herself. After all, I was just a little kid then, seven years old. I was scared out of my mind. I had to tell my mother what Kwan was saying. I thought Mom would just ask her to stop. Then Daddy Bob found out about Kwan’s ghosts and blew his stack. Mom suggested taking her to Old St. Mary’s for a talk with the priest. But Daddy Bob said no, confession wouldn’t be enough. He booked Kwan into the psychiatric ward at Mary’s Help instead.

  When I visited her there the following week, Kwan whispered to me: “Libby-ah, listen, I have secret. Don’t tell anyone, ah?” And then she switched to Chinese. “When the doctors and nurses ask me questions, I treat them like American ghosts—I don’t see them, don’t hear them, don’t speak to them. Soon they’ll know they can’t change me, why they must let me go.” I remember the way she looked, as immovable as a stone palace dog.

  Unfortunately, her Chinese silent treatment backfired. The doctors thought Kwan had gone catatonic. Things being what they were back in the early 1960s, the doctors diagnosed Kwan’s Chinese ghosts as a serious mental disorder. They gave her electroshock treatments, once, she said, then twice, she cried, then over and over again. Even today it hurts my teeth to think about that.

  The next time I saw her at the hospital, she again confided in me. “All that electricity loosened my tongue so I could no longer stay silent as a fish. I became a country duck, crying gwa-gwa-gwa!—bragging about the World of Yin. Then four bad ghosts shouted, ‘How can you tell our secrets?’ They gave me a yin-yang tou—forced me to tear out half my hair. That’s why the nurses shaved everything off. I couldn’t stop pulling, until one side of my head was bald like a melon, the other side hairy like a coconut. The ghosts branded me for having two faces: one loyal, one traitor. But I’m not a traitor! Look at me, Libby-ah. Is my face loyal? What do you see?”

  What I saw paralyzed me with fear. She looked as if she’d been given a crew cut with a hand-push lawn mower. It was as bad as seeing an animal run over on the street, wondering what it once had been. Except I knew how Kwan’s hair used to be. Before, it flowed past her waist. Before, my fingers swam through its satin-black waves. Before, I’d grab her mane and yank it like the reins of a mule, shouting, “Giddyap, Kwan, say hee-haw!”

  She took my hand and rubbed it across her sandpapery scalp, whispering about friends and enemies in China. On and on she went, as if the shock treatments had blown off the hinges of her jaw and she could not stop. I was terrified I’d catch her crazy talking disease.

  To this day, I don’t know why Kwan never blamed me for what happened. I’m sure she knew I was the one who got her in trouble. After she came back from Mary’s Help, she gave me her plastic ID bracelet as a souvenir. She talked about the Sunday-school children who came to the hospital to sing “Silent Night,” how they screamed when an old man yelled, “Shut up!” She reported that some patients there were possessed by ghosts, how they were not like the nice yin people she knew, and this was a real pity. Not once did she ever say, “Libby-ah, why did you tell my secret?”

  Yet the way I remember it is the way I have always felt—that I betrayed her and that’s what made her insane. The shock treatments, I believed, were my fault as well. They released all her ghosts.

  THAT WAS more than thirty years ago, and Kwan still mourns, “My hair sooo bea-you-tiful, shiny-smooth like waterfall, slippery-cool like swimming eel. Now look. All that shock treatment, like got me bad home permanent, leave on cheap stuff too long. All my rich color—burnt out. All my softness—crinkle up. My hairs now just stiff wires, pierce message to my brain: No more yin-talking! They do this to me, hah, still I don’t change. See? I stay strong.”

  Kwan was right. When her hair grew back, it was bristly, wiry as a terrier’s. And when she brushed it, whole strands would crackle and rise with angry static, popping like the filaments of light bulbs burning out. Kwan explained, “All that electricity doctor force into my brain, now run through my body like horse go ’round racetrack.” She claims that’s the reason she now can’t stand within three feet of a television set without its hissing back. She doesn’t use the Walkman her husband, George, gave her; she has to ground the radio by placing it against her thigh, otherwise no matter what station she tunes it to, all she hears is “awful music, boom-pah-pah, boom-pah-pah.” She can’t wear any kind of watch. She received a digital one as a bingo prize, and after she strapped it on, the numbers started mutating like the fruits on a casino slot machine. Two hours later the watch stopped. “I gotta jackpot,” she reported. “Eight-eight-eight-eight-eight. Lucky numbers, bad watch.”

  Although Kwan is not technically trained, she can pinpoint in a second the source of a fault in a circuit, whether it’s in a wall outlet or a photo strobe. She’s done that with some of my equipment. Here I am, the commercial photographer, and she can barely operate a point-and-shoot. Yet she’s been able to find the specific part of the camera or cable or battery pack that was defective, and later, when I ship the camera to Cal Precision in Sacramento for troubleshooting, I’ll find she was exactly right. I’ve also seen her temporarily activate a dead cordless phone just by pressing her fingers on the back recharger nodes. She can’t explain any of this, and neither can I. All I can say is, I’ve seen her do these things.

  The weirdest of her abilities, I think, has to do with diagnosing ailments. She can tell when she shakes hands with strangers whether they’ve ever suffered a broken bone, even if it healed many years before. She knows in an instant whether a person has arthritis, tendinitis, bursitis, sciatica—she’s really good with all the musculoskeletal stuff— maladies that she calls “burning bones,” “fever arms,” “sour joints,” “snaky leg,” and all of which, she says, are caused by eating hot and cold things together, counting disappointments on your fingers, shaking your head too often with regret, or storing worries between your jaw and your fists. She can’t cure anybody on the spot; she’s no walking Grotto of Lourdes. But a lot of people say she has the healing touch. Like her customers at Spencer’s, the drugstore in the Castro neighborhood where she works. Most of the people who pick up their prescriptions there are gay men—“bachelors,” she calls them. And because she’s worked there for more than twenty years, she’s seen some of her longtime customers grow sick with AIDS. When they come in, she gives them quickie shoulder rubs, while offering medical advice: “You still drink beer, eat spicy food? Together, same time? Wah! What I tell you? Tst! Tst! How you get well do this? Ah?”—as if they were little kids fussing to be spoiled. Some of her customers drop by every day, even though they can receive home delivery free. I know why. When she puts her hands on the place where you hurt, you feel a tingling sensation, a thousand fairies dancing up and down, and then it’s like warm water rolling through your veins. You’re not cured, but you feel released from worry, becalmed, floating on a tranquil sea.

  Kwan once told me, “After they die, the yin bachelors still come visit me. They call me Doctor Kwan. Joking, of course.” And then she added shyly in English: “Maybe also for respect. What you think, Libby-ah?” She always asks me that: “What you think?”

  No one in our family talks about Kwan’s unusual abilities. That would call attention to what we already know, that Kwan is wacky, even by Chinese standards—even by San Francisco standards. A lot of the stuff she says and does would strain the credulity of most people who are not on antipsychotic drugs or living on cult farm
s.

  But I no longer think my sister is crazy. Or if she is, she’s fairly harmless, that is, if people don’t take her seriously. She doesn’t chant on the sidewalk like that guy on Market Street who screams that California is doomed to slide into the ocean like a plate of clams. And she’s not into New Age profiteering; you don’t have to pay her a hundred fifty an hour just to hear her reveal what’s wrong with your past life. She’ll tell you for free, even if you don’t ask.

  Most of the time, Kwan is like anyone else, standing in line, shopping for bargains, counting success in small change: “Libby-ah,” she said during this morning’s phone call, “yesterday, I buy two-for-one shoes on sale, Emporium Capwell. Guess how much I don’t pay. You guess.”

  But Kwan is odd, no getting around that. Occasionally it amuses me. Sometimes it irritates me. More often I become upset, even angry—not with Kwan but with how things never turn out the way you hope. Why did I get Kwan for a sister? Why did she get me?

  Every once in a while, I wonder how things might have been between Kwan and me if she’d been more normal. Then again, who’s to say what’s normal? Maybe in another country Kwan would be considered ordinary. Maybe in some parts of China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan she’d be revered. Maybe there’s a place in the world where everyone has a sister with yin eyes.

  KWAN’S NOW NEARLY FIFTY, whereas I’m a whole twelve years younger, a point she proudly mentions whenever anyone politely asks which of us is older. In front of other people, she likes to pinch my cheek and remind me that my skin is getting “wrinkle up” because I smoke cigarettes and drink too much wine and coffee—bad habits she does not have. “Don’t hook on, don’t need stop,” she’s fond of saying. Kwan is neither deep nor subtle; everything’s right on the surface, for anybody to see. The point is, no one would ever guess we are sisters.

  Kevin once joked that maybe the Communists sent us the wrong kid, figuring we Americans thought all Chinese people looked alike anyway. After hearing that, I fantasized that one day we’d get a letter from China saying, “Sorry, folks. We made a mistake.” In so many ways, Kwan never fit into our family. Our annual Christmas photo looked like those children’s puzzles, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” Each year, front and center, there was Kwan—wearing brightly colored summer clothes, plastic bow-tie barrettes on both sides of her head, and a loony grin big enough to burst her cheeks. Eventually, Mom found her a job as a bus-girl at a Chinese-American restaurant. It took Kwan a month to realize that the food they served there was supposed to be Chinese. Time did nothing to either Americanize her or bring out her resemblance to our father.