The Woman Warrior

by Maxine Hong Kingston

Now the villagers were watching for Japanese airplanes that strafed the mountainsides every day. “If you see a single plane, you needn’t be afraid,” my mother taught us. “But watch for planes in threes. When they spread apart, you know they’re going to drop bombs. Sometimes airplanes covered the sky, and we could not see and we could not hear.” She warned us because it was the same war still going on years after she crossed the ocean and had us. I huddled under my blankets when Pan Am and United Air Lines planes flew overhead, the engines sounding like insects at first and getting louder and louder.

  In the mountains my mother set up a hospital in a cave, and she carried the wounded there. Some villagers had never seen an airplane before. Mothers stopped up their babies’ mouths so their crying would not attract the planes. The bombing drove people insane. They rolled on the ground, pushed themselves against it, as if the earth could open a door for them. The ones who could not stop shaking after the danger passed would sleep in the cave. My mother explained airplanes to them as she wiggled their ears.

  One afternoon peace and summer rested on the mountains. Babies napped in the tall grass, their blankets covering the wildflowers with embroidered flowers. It was so quiet; the bees hummed and the river water played the pebbles, the rocks, and the hollows. Cows under the trees whisked their tails; goats and ducks followed the children here and there; and the chickens scratched in the dirt. The villagers stood about in the sunshine. They smiled at one another. Here they all were together, idle above their fields, nobody hoeing, godlike; nobody weeding, New Year’s in summer. My mother and the women her age talked about how similar this day was to the orderly days long ago when they walked up the mountain to collect firewood, only now they could dally without the mothers-in-law scolding.

  The village crazy lady put on her headdress with the small mirrors, some of them waving quickly on red stalks. In her crazy lady clothes of reds and greens, she greeted the animals and the moving branches as she carried her porcelain cup to the river. Although her bindings had come loose, her tiny feet made her body sway pleasantly, her shoes like little bridges. She knelt singing at the river and filled her cup. Carrying the brimming water in two careful hands, she undulated toward a clearing where the light of the afternoon seemed to be concentrated. The villagers turned to look at her. She dipped her fingertips into the water and flung droplets into grass and air. Then she set the cup down and pulled out the long white undersleeves of her old-fashioned dress. She began to move in fanning circles, now flying the sleeves in the air, now trailing them on the grass, dancing in the middle of the light. The little mirrors in her headdress shot rainbows into the green, glinted off the water cup, caught water drops. My mother felt as if she were peering into Li T’ieh-kuai’s magic gourd to check the fate of an impish mortal.

  One villager whispered away the spell, “She’s signaling the planes.” The whisper carried. “She’s signaling the planes,” the people repeated. “Stop her. Stop her.”

  “No, she’s only crazy,” said my mother. “She’s a harmless crazy lady.”

  “She’s a spy. A spy for the Japanese.”

  Villagers picked up rocks and moved down the hill.

  “Just take away the mirrors,” my mother called. “Just take her headdress.”

  But the tentative first stones were already falling around the crazy lady. She dodged them; she tried to catch them, laughing, at last, people to play with.

  The rocks hit harder as the villagers came within stoning range. “Here. Here. I’ll get her mirrors,” said my mother, who had come running down the mountain into the clearing. “Give me your headdress,” she ordered, but the woman only shook her head coquettishly.

  “See? She’s a spy. Get out of the way, Doctor. You saw the way she flashed the signals. She comes to the river every day before the planes come.”

  “She’s only getting drinking water,” said my mother. “Crazy people drink water too.”

  Someone took the crazy lady’s cup and threw it at her. It broke at her feet. “Are you a spy? Are you?” they asked her.

  A cunning look narrowed her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I have great powers. I can make the sky rain fire. Me. I did that. Leave me alone or I will do it again.” She edged toward the river as if she were about to run, but she wouldn’t have been able to get away on her tiny feet.

  A large stone rammed her head, and she fell in a flutter of sleeves, the ornaments jumping about her broken head. The villagers closed in. Somebody held a fragment of glass under her nostrils. When it clouded, they pounded her temples with the rocks in their fists until she was dead. Some villagers remained at the body beating her head and face, smashing the little mirrors into silver splinters.

  My mother, who had turned her back and walked up the mountain (she never treated those about to die), looked down at the mass of flesh and rocks, the sleeves, the blood flecks. The planes came again that very afternoon. The villagers buried the crazy lady along with the rest of the dead.

  My mother left China in the winter of 1939, almost six months after the stoning, and arrived in New York Harbor in January, 1940. She carried the same suitcase she had taken to Canton, this time filled with seeds and bulbs. On Ellis Island the officials asked her, “What year did your husband cut off his pigtail?” and it terrified her when she could not remember. But later she told us perhaps this lapse was for the best: what if they were trying to trap him politically? The men had cut their pigtails to defy the Manchus and to help Sun Yat-sen, fellow Cantonese.

  I was born in the middle of World War II. From earliest awareness, my mother’s stories always timely, I watched for three airplanes parting. Much as I dream recurringly about shrinking babies, I dream that the sky is covered from horizon to horizon with rows of airplanes, dirigibles, rocket ships, flying bombs, their formations as even as stitches. When the sky seems clear in my dreams and I would fly, if I look too closely, there so silent, far away, and faint in the daylight that people who do not know about them do not see them, are shiny silver machines, some not yet invented, being moved, fleets always being moved from one continent to another, one planet to another. I must figure out a way to fly between them.

  But America has been full of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts. Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars. There were Black Ghosts too, but they were open eyed and full of laughter, more distinct than White Ghosts.

  What frightened me most was the Newsboy Ghost, who came out from between the cars parked in the evening light. Carrying a newspaper pouch instead of a baby brother, he walked right out in the middle of the street without his parents. He shouted ghost words to the empty streets. His voice reached children inside the houses, reached inside the children’s chests. They would come running out of their yards with their dimes. They would follow him just a corner too far. And when they went to the nearest house to ask directions home, the Gypsy Ghosts would lure them inside with gold rings and then boil them alive and bottle them. The ointment thus made was good for rubbing on children’s bruises.

  We used to pretend we were Newsboy Ghosts. We collected old Chinese newspapers (the Newsboy Ghost not giving us his ghost newspapers) and trekked about the house and yard. We waved them over our heads, chanting a chant: “Newspapers for sale. Buy a newspaper.” But those who could hear the insides of words heard that we were selling a miracle salve made from boiled children. The newspapers covered up green medicine bottles. We made up our own English, which I wrote down and now looks like “eeeeeeeeee.” When we heard the real newsboy calling, we hid, dragging our newspapers under the stairs or into the cellar, where the Well Ghost lived in the black water under a lid. We crouched on our newspapers, the San Francisco Gold Mountain News, and plugged up our ears with our knuckles until he went away.

  For our very food we had to traffic with the Grocer
y Ghosts, the supermarket aisles full of ghost customers. The Milk Ghost drove his white truck from house to house every other day. We hid watching until his truck turned the corner, bottles rattling in their frames. Then we unlocked the front door and the screen door and reached for the milk. We were regularly visited by the Mail Ghost, Meter Reader Ghost, Garbage Ghost. Staying off the streets did no good. They came nosing at windows—Social Worker Ghosts; Public Health Nurse Ghosts; Factory Ghosts recruiting workers during the war (they promised free child care, which our mother turned down); two Jesus Ghosts who had formerly worked in China. We hid directly under the windows, pressed against the baseboard until the ghost, calling us in the ghost language so that we’d almost answer to stop its voice, gave up. They did not try to break in, except for a few Burglar Ghosts. The Hobo Ghosts and Wino Ghosts took peaches off our trees and drank from the hose when nobody answered their knocks.

  It seemed as if ghosts could not hear or see very well. Momentarily lulled by the useful chores they did for whatever ghostly purpose, we did not bother to lower the windows one morning when the Garbage Ghost came. We talked loudly about him through the fly screen, pointed at his hairy arms, and laughed at how he pulled up his dirty pants before swinging his hoard onto his shoulders. “Come see the Garbage Ghost get its food,” we children called. “The Garbage Ghost,” we told each other, nodding our heads. The ghost looked directly at us. Steadying the load on his back with one hand, the Garbage Ghost walked up to the window. He had cavernous nostrils with yellow and brown hair. Slowly he opened his red mouth, “The… Gar … bage … Ghost,” he said, copying human language. “Gar … bage … Ghost?” We ran, screaming to our mother, who efficiently shut the window. “Now we know,” she told us, “the White Ghosts can hear Chinese. They have learned it. You mustn’t talk in front of them again. Someday, very soon, we’re going home, where there are Han people everywhere. We’ll buy furniture then, real tables and chairs. You children will smell flowers for the first time.”

  “Mother! Mother! It’s happening again. I taste something in my mouth, but I’m not eating anything.”

  “Me too, Mother. Me too. There’s nothing there. Just my spit. My spit tastes like sugar.”

  “Your grandmother in China is sending you candy again,” said my mother. Human beings do not need Mail Ghosts to send messages.

  I must have tinkered too much wondering how my invisible grandmother, illiterate and dependent on letter writers, could give us candy free. When I got older and more scientific, I received no more gifts from her. She died, and I did not get “home” to ask her how she did it. Whenever my parents said “home,” they suspended America. They suspended enjoyment, but I did not want to go to China. In China my parents would sell my sisters and me. My father would marry two or three more wives, who would spatter cooking oil on our bare toes and lie that we were crying for naughtiness. They would give food to their own children and rocks to us. I did not want to go where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own.

  As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me.

  When I last visited my parents, I had trouble falling asleep, too big for the hills and valleys scooped in the mattress by child-bodies. I heard my mother come in. I stopped moving. What did she want? Eyes shut, I pictured my mother, her white hair frizzy in the dark-and-light doorway, my hair white now too, Mother. I could hear her move furniture about. Then she dragged a third quilt, the thick, homemade Chinese kind, across me. After that I lost track of her location. I spied from beneath my eyelids and had to hold back a jump. She had pulled up a chair and was sitting by the bed next to my head. I could see her strong hands in her lap, not working fourteen pairs of needles. She is very proud of her hands, which can make anything and stay pink and soft while my father’s became like carved wood. Her palm lines do not branch into head, heart, and life lines like other people’s but crease with just one atavistic fold. That night she was a sad bear; a great sheep in a wool shawl. She recently took to wearing shawls and granny glasses, American fashions. What did she want, sitting there so large next to my head? I could feel her stare—her eyes two lights warm on my graying hair, then on the creases at the sides of my mouth, my thin neck, my thin cheeks, my thin arms. I felt her sight warm each of my bony elbows, and I flopped about in my fake sleep to hide them from her criticism. She sent light at full brightness beaming through my eyelids, her eyes at my eyes, and I had to open them.

  “What’s the matter, Mama? Why are you sitting there?”

  She reached over and switched on a lamp she had placed on the floor beside her. “I swallowed that LSD pill you left on the kitchen counter,” she announced.

  “That wasn’t LSD, Mama. It was just a cold pill. I have a cold.”

  “You’re always catching colds when you come home. You must be eating too much yin. Let me get you another quilt.”

  “No, no more quilts. You shouldn’t take pills that aren’t prescribed for you. ‘Don’t eat pills you find on the curb,’ you always told us.”

  “You children never tell me what you’re really up to. How else am I going to find out what you’re really up to?” As if her head hurt, she closed her eyes behind the gold wire rims. “Aiaa,” she sighed, “how can I bear to have you leave me again?”

  How can I bear to leave her again? She would close up this room, open temporarily for me, and wander about cleaning and cleaning the shrunken house, so tidy since our leaving. Each chair has its place now. And the sinks in the bedrooms work, their alcoves no longer stuffed with laundry right up to the ceiling. My mother has put the clothes and shoes into boxes, stored against hard times. The sinks had been built of gray marble for the old Chinese men who boarded here before we came. I used to picture modest little old men washing in the mornings and dressing before they shuffled out of these bedrooms. I would have to leave and go again into the world out there which has no marble ledges for my clothes, no quilts made from our own ducks and turkeys, no ghosts of neat little old men.

  The lamp gave off the sort of light that comes from a television, which made the high ceiling disappear and then suddenly drop back into place. I could feel that clamping down and see how my mother had pulled the blinds down so low that the bare rollers were showing. No passer-by would detect a daughter in this house. My mother would sometimes be a large animal, barely real in the dark; then she would become a mother again. I could see the wrinkles around her big eyes, and I could see her cheeks sunken without her top teeth.

  “I’ll be back again soon,” I said. “You know that I come back. I think of you when I’m not here.”

  “Yes, I know you. I know you now. I’ve always known you. You’re the one with the charming words. You have never come back. ‘I’ll be back on Turkeyday,’ you said. Huh.”

  I shut my teeth together, vocal cords cut, they hurt so. I would not speak words to give her pain. All her children gnash their teeth.

  “The last time I saw you, you were still young,” she said. “Now you’re old.”

  “It’s only been a year since I visited you.”

  “That’s the year you turned old. Look at you, hair gone gray, and you haven’t even fattened up yet. I know how the Chinese talk about us. ‘They’re so poor,’ they say, ‘they can’t afford to fatten up any of their daughters.’ ‘Years in America,’ they say, ‘and they don’t eat.’ Oh, the shame of it—a whole family of skinny children. And your father—he’s so skinny, he’s disappearing.”

  “Don’t worry about him, Mama. Doctors are saying that skinny people live longer. Papa’s going to live a long time.”

  “So! I knew I didn’t have too many years left. Do you know how I got a
ll this fat? Eating your leftovers. Aiaa, I’m getting so old. Soon you will have no more mother.”

  “Mama, you’ve been saying that all my life.”

  “This time it’s true. I’m almost eighty.”

  “I thought you were only seventy-six.”

  “My papers are wrong. I’m eighty.”

  “But I thought your papers are wrong, and you’re seventy-two, seventy-three in Chinese years.”

  “My papers are wrong, and I’m eighty, eighty-one in Chinese years. Seventy. Eighty. What do numbers matter? I’m dropping dead any day now. The aunt down the street was resting on her porch steps, dinner all cooked, waiting for her husband and son to come home and eat it. She closed her eyes for a moment and died. Isn’t that a wonderful way to go?”

  “But our family lives to be ninety-nine.”

  “That’s your father’s family. My mother and father died very young. My youngest sister was an orphan at ten. Our parents were not even fifty.”

  “Then you should feel grateful you’ve lived so many extra years.”

  “I was so sure you were going to be an orphan too. In fact, I’m amazed you’ve lived to have white hair. Why don’t you dye it?”

  “Hair color doesn’t measure age, Mother. White is just another pigment, like black and brown.”

  “You’re always listening to Teacher Ghosts, those Scientist Ghosts, Doctor Ghosts.”

  “I have to make a living.”

  “I never do call you Oldest Daughter. Have you noticed that? I always tell people, ‘This is my Biggest Daughter.’”

  “Is it true then that Oldest Daughter and Oldest Son died in China? Didn’t you tell me when I was ten that she’d have been twenty; when I was twenty, she’d be thirty?” Is that why you’ve denied me my title?

  “No, you must have been dreaming. You must have been making up stories. You are all the children there are.”

  (Who was that story about—the one where the parents are throwing money at the children, but the children don’t pick it up because they’re crying too hard? They’re writhing on the floor covered with coins. Their parents are going out the door for America, hurling handfuls of change behind them.)