The Woman Warrior

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  At Chinese school there was a mentally retarded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind. He had an enormous face, and he growled. He laughed from so far within his thick body that his face got confused about what the sounds coming up into his mouth might be, laughs or cries. He barked unhappily. He didn’t go to classes but hung around the playgrounds. We suspected he was not a boy but an adult. He wore baggy khaki trousers like a man’s. He carried bags of toys for giving to certain children. Whatever you wanted, he’d get it for you—brand-new toys, as many as you could think up in your poverty, all the toys you never had when you were younger. We wrote lists, discussed our lists, compared them. Those kids not in his favor gave lists to those who were. “Where do you get the toys?” I asked. “I… own … stores,” he roared, one word at a time, thick tongued. At recess the day after ordering, we got handed out to us coloring books, paint sets, model kits. But sometimes he chased us—his fat arms out to the side; his fat fingers opening and closing; his legs stiff like Frankenstein’s monster, like the mummy dragging its foot; growling; laughing-crying. Then we’d have to run, following the old rule, running away from our house.

  But suddenly he knew where we worked. He found us; maybe he had followed us in his wanderings. He started sitting at our laundry. Many of the storekeepers invited sitting in their stores, but we did not have sitting because the laundry was hot and because it was outside Chinatown. He sweated; he panted, the stubble rising and falling on his fat neck and chin. He sat on two large cartons that he brought with him and stacked one on top of the other. He said hello to my mother and father, and then, balancing his heavy head, he lowered himself carefully onto his cartons and sat. My parents allowed this. They did not chase him out or comment about how strange he was. I stopped placing orders for toys. I didn’t limp anymore; my parents would only figure that this zombie and I were a match.

  I studied hard, got straight A’s, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect. At school there were dating and dances, but not for good Chinese girls. “You ought to develop yourself socially as well as mentally,” the American teachers, who took me aside, said.

  I told nobody about the monster. And nobody else was talking either; no mention about the laundry workers who appeared and disappeared; no mention about the sitter. Maybe I was making it all up, and queer marriage notions did not occur to other people. I had better not say a word, then. Don’t give them ideas. Keep quiet.

  I pressed clothes—baskets of giants’ BVD’s, long underwear even in summertime, T-shirts, sweat shirts. Laundry work is men’s clothes, unmarried-men’s clothes. My back felt sick because it was toward the monster who gave away toys. His lumpishness was sending out germs that would lower my IQ. His leechiness was drawing IQ points out of the back of my head. I maneuvered my work shifts so that my brothers would work the afternoons, when he usually came lumbering into the laundry, but he caught on and began coming during the evening, the cool shift. Then I would switch back to the afternoon or to the early mornings on weekends and in summer, dodging him. I kept my sister with me, protecting her without telling her why. If she hadn’t noticed, then I mustn’t scare her. “Let’s clean house this morning,” I’d say. Our other sister was a baby, and the brothers were not in danger. But the were-person would stalk down our street; his thick face smiled between the lettering on the laundry window, and when he saw me working, he shouldered inside. At night I thought I heard his feet dragging around the house, scraping gravel. I sat up to listen to our watchdog prowl the yard, pulling her long chain after her, and that worried me too. I had to do something about that chain, the weight of it scraping her neck fur short. And if she was walking about, why wasn’t she barking? Maybe somebody was out there taming her with raw meat. I could not ask for help.

  Every day the hulk took one drink from the watercooler and went once to the bathroom, stumbling between the presses into the back of the laundry, big shoes clumping. Then my parents would talk about what could be inside his boxes. Were they filled with toys? With money? When the toilet flushed, they stopped talking about it. But one day he either stayed in the bathroom for a long time or went for a walk and left the boxes unguarded. “Let’s open them up,” said my mother, and she did. I looked over her shoulder. The two cartons were stuffed with pornography—naked magazines, nudie postcards and photographs.

  You would think she’d have thrown him out right then, but my mother said, “My goodness, he’s not too stupid to want to find out about women.” I heard the old women talk about how he was stupid but very rich.

  Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat. When I first started counting, I had had only thirty-six items: how I had prayed for a white horse of my own—white, the bad, mournful color—and prayer bringing me to the attention of the god of the black-and-white nuns who gave us “holy cards” in the park. How I wanted the horse to start the movies in my mind coming true. How I had picked on a girl and made her cry. How I had stolen from the cash register and bought candy for everybody I knew, not just brothers and sisters, but strangers too and ghost children. How it was me who pulled up the onions in the garden out of anger. How I had jumped head-first off the dresser, not accidentally, but so I could fly. Then there were my fights at Chinese school. And the nuns who kept stopping us in the park, which was across the street from Chinese school, to tell us that if we didn’t get baptized we’d go to a hell like one of the nine Taoist hells forever. And the obscene caller that phoned us at home when the adults were at the laundry. And the Mexican and Filipino girls at school who went to “confession,” and how I envied them their white dresses and their chance each Saturday to tell even thoughts that were sinful. If only I could let my mother know the list, she—and the world—would become more like me, and I would never be alone again. I would pick a time of day when my mother was alone and tell her one item a day; I’d be finished in less than a year. If the telling got excruciating and her anger too bad, I’d tell five items once a week like the Catholic girls, and I’d still be through in a year, maybe ten months. My mother’s most peaceful time was in the evenings when she starched the white shirts. The laundry would be clean, the gray wood floors sprinkled and swept with water and wet sawdust. She would be wringing shirts at the starch tub and not running about. My father and sisters and brothers would be at their own jobs mending, folding, packaging. Steam would be rising from the starch, the air cool at last. Yes, that would be the time and place for the telling.

  And I wanted to ask again why the women in our family have a split nail on our left little toe. Whenever we asked our parents about it, they would glance at each other, embarrassed. I think I’ve heard one of them say, “She didn’t get away.” I made up that we are descended from an ancestress who stubbed her toe and fell when running from a rapist. I wanted to ask my mother if I had guessed right.

  I hunkered down between the wall and the wicker basket of shirts. I had decided to start with the earliest item—when I had smashed a spider against the white side of the house: it was the first thing I killed. I said, clearly, “I killed a spider,” and it was nothing; she did not hit me or throw hot starch at me. It sounded like nothing to me too. How strange when I had had such feelings of death shoot through my hand and into my body so that I would surely die. So I had to continue, of course, and let her know how important it had been. “I returned every day to look at its smear on the side of the house,” I said. “It was our old house, the one we lived in until I was five. I went to the wall every day to look. I studied the stain.” Relieved because she said nothing but only continued squeezing the starch, I went away feeling pretty good. Just two hundred and six more items to go. I moved carefully all the next day so as not to do anything or have anything happen to me that would make me go back to two hundre
d and seven again. I’d tell a couple of easy ones and work up to how I had pulled the quiet girl’s hair and how I had enjoyed the year being sick. If it was going to be this easy, maybe I could blurt out several a day, maybe an easy one and a hard one. I could go chronologically, or I could work from easy to hard or hard to easy, depending on my mood. On the second night I talked about how I had hinted to a ghost girl that I wished I had a doll of my own until she gave me a head and body to glue together—that she hadn’t given it to me of her own generosity but because I had hinted. But on the fifth night (I skipped two to reward myself) I decided it was time to do a really hard one and tell her about the white horse. And suddenly the duck voice came out, which I did not use with the family. “What’s it called, Mother”—the duck voice coming out talking to my own mother—“when a person whispers to the head of the sages—no, not the sages, more like the buddhas but not real people like the buddhas (they’ve always lived in the sky and never turned into people like the buddhas)—and you whisper to them, the boss of them, and ask for things? They’re like magicians? What do you call it when you talk to the boss magician?”

  “‘Talking-to-the-top-magician,’ I guess.”

  “I did that. Yes. That’s it. That’s what I did. I talked-to-the-top-magician and asked for a white horse.” There. Said.

  “Mm,” she said, squeezing the starch out of the collar and cuffs. But I had talked, and she acted as if she hadn’t heard.

  Perhaps she hadn’t understood. I had to be more explicit. I hated this. “I kneeled on the bed in there, in the laundry bedroom, and put my arms up like I saw in a comic book”—one night I heard monsters coming through the kitchen, and I had promised the god in the movies, the one the Mexicans and Filipinos have, as in “God Bless America,” that I would not read comic books anymore if he would save me just this once; I had broken that promise, and I needed to tell all this to my mother too—“and in that ludicrous position asked for a horse.”

  “Mm,” she said, nodded, and kept dipping and squeezing.

  On my two nights off, I had sat on the floor too but had not said a word.

  “Mother,” I whispered and quacked.

  “I can’t stand this whispering,” she said looking right at me, stopping her squeezing. “Senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop. Go away and work. Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don’t feel like hearing your craziness.”

  So I had to stop, relieved in some ways. I shut my mouth, but I felt something alive tearing at my throat, bite by bite, from the inside. Soon there would be three hundred things, and too late to get them out before my mother grew old and died.

  I had probably interrupted her in the middle of her own quiet time when the boiler and presses were off and the cool night flew against the windows in moths and crickets. Very few customers came in. Starching the shirts for the next day’s pressing was probably my mother’s time to ride off with the people in her own mind. That would explain why she was so far away and did not want to listen to me. “Leave me alone,” she said.

  The hulk, the hunching sitter, brought a third box now, to rest his feet on. He patted his boxes. He sat in wait, hunching on his pile of dirt. My throat hurt constantly, vocal cords taut to snapping. One night when the laundry was so busy that the whole family was eating dinner there, crowded around the little round table, my throat burst open. I stood up, talking and burbling. I looked directly at my mother and at my father and screamed, “I want you to tell that hulk, that gorilla-ape, to go away and never bother us again. I know what you’re up to. You’re thinking he’s rich, and we’re poor. You think we’re odd and not pretty and we’re not bright. You think you can give us away to freaks. You better not do that, Mother. I don’t want to see him or his dirty boxes here tomorrow. If I see him here one more time, I’m going away. I’m going away anyway. I am. Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I’m not, I’m not retarded. There’s nothing wrong with my brain. Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I’m smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I’ve already applied. I’m smart. I can do all kinds of things. I know how to get A’s, and they say I could be a scientist or a mathematician if I want. I can make a living and take care of myself. So you don’t have to find me a keeper who’s too dumb to know a bad bargain. I’m so smart, if they say write ten pages, I can write fifteen. I can do ghost things even better than ghosts can. Not everybody thinks I’m nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife. Even if I am stupid and talk funny and get sick, I won’t let you turn me into a slave or a wife. I’m getting out of here. I can’t stand living here anymore. It’s your fault I talk weird. The only reason I flunked kindergarten was because you couldn’t teach me English, and you gave me a zero IQ. I’ve brought my IQ up, though. They say I’m smart now. Things follow in lines at school. They take stories and teach us to turn them into essays. I don’t need anybody to pronounce English words for me. I can figure them out by myself. I’m going to get scholarships, and I’m going away. And at college I’ll have the people I like for friends. I don’t care if their great-greatgrandfather died of TB. I don’t care if they were our enemies in China four thousand years ago. So get that ape out of here. I’m going to college. And I’m not going to Chinese school anymore. I’m going to run for office at American school, and I’m going to join clubs. I’m going to get enough offices and clubs on my record to get into college. And I can’t stand Chinese school anyway; the kids are rowdy and mean, fighting all night. And I don’t want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won’t tell me a story and then say, ‘This is a true story,’ or, ‘This is just a story.’ I can’t tell the difference. I don’t even know what your real names are. I can’t tell what’s real and what you make up. Ha! You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn’t work.” So I told the hardest ten or twelve things on my list all in one outburst.

  My mother, who is champion talker, was, of course, shouting at the same time. “I cut it to make you talk more, not less, you dummy. You’re still stupid. You can’t listen right. I didn’t say I was going to marry you off. Did I ever say that? Did I ever mention that? Those newspaper people were for your sister, not you. Who would want you? Who said we could sell you? We can’t sell people. Can’t you take a joke? You can’t even tell a joke from real life. You’re not so smart. Can’t even tell real from false.”

  “I’m never getting married, never!”

  “Who’d want to marry you anyway? Noisy. Talking like a duck. Disobedient. Messy. And I know about college. What makes you think you’re the first one to think about college? I was a doctor. I went to medical school. I don’t see why you have to be a mathematician. I don’t see why you can’t be a doctor like me.”

  “I can’t stand fever and delirium or listening to people coming out of anesthesia. But I didn’t say I wanted to be a mathematician either. That’s what the ghosts say. I want to be a lumberjack and a newspaper reporter.” Might as well tell her some of the other items on my list. “I’m going to chop down trees in the daytime and write about timber at night.”

  “I don’t see why you need to go to college at all to become either one of those things. Everybody else is sending their girls to typing school. ‘Learn to type if you want to be an American girl.’ Why don’t you go to typing school? The cousins and village girls are going to typing school.”

  “And you leave my sister alone. You try that with the advertising again, and I’ll take her with me.” My telling list was scrambled out of order. When I said them out loud I saw that some of the items were ten years old already, and I had outgrown them. But they kept pouring out anyway in the voice like Chinese opera. I could hear the drums and the cymbals and the gongs and brass horns.

  “You’re the one to leave your little sisters alone,” my mother was saying. “You’re always leading them off somewhere. I’ve had to call the police
twice because of you.” She herself was shouting out things I had meant to tell her—that I took my brothers and sisters to explore strange people’s houses, ghost children’s houses, and haunted houses blackened by fire. We explored a Mexican house and a redheaded family’s house, but not the gypsies’ house; I had only seen the inside of the gypsies’ house in mind-movies. We explored the sloughs, where we found hobo nests. My mother must have followed us.

  “You turned out so unusual. I fixed your tongue so you could say charming things. You don’t even say hello to the villagers.”

  “They don’t say hello to me.”

  “They don’t have to answer children. When you get old, people will say hello to you.”

  “When I get to college, it won’t matter if I’m not charming. And it doesn’t matter if a person is ugly; she can still do schoolwork.”

  “I didn’t say you were ugly.”

  “You say that all the time.”