by Amy Tan
“Tell me you don’t love me so I won’t ever hope you might. Tell me you would willingly let my soul curdle and die so you can bed a girl you don’t even know. I will never trust love. I will feel only self-hatred because I let a weakling destroy my heart.”
Finally, I saw anguish on his face. He looked as if he might cry. He embraced me. “I won’t abandon you, Lucia,” he said. “I have never loved anyone more. I simply don’t know yet what we can do.”
His words gave me great courage and expectations, and I inflated them. I took them with me when my family convened in the parlor after I told them I had urgent news. They sat stiffly, wearing expressions of worry. Lu Shing and I stood, he to the side and behind me.
“I’m pregnant,” I said simply. Before I could say more about my plans, Mother leapt up and shouted at Lu Shing that he had violated “our hospitality, our trust, our honor, and goodwill …” Lu Shing said repeatedly that he was regretful and remorseful, deeply ashamed. Yet he seemed too calm for those feelings to be true.
“What good is your damn Chinese remorse?” Mother said in a sarcastic tone. “It’s not sincere. You’ll board a boat soon and leave this mess behind!”
Both Father and Mother turned on me and hurled words about my defects: that I was “ungrateful,” “stupid,” “prideful,” “promiscuous.” You said you wanted to choose your own interests, hobbies, and passions. So this is what you chose? Passionate sex with a man who is about to abandon you?
I felt the turmoil of a child who was ridiculed for who she was. But my face did not grow splotches of humiliation. I was angry.
“Passion and hobbies with a Chinese man,” my mother said with a sneer. “A Chinese man with a pigtail. People will laugh at us for having taken him in as a guest! What fools we were to be generous.” Those last remarks sent me into uncontrollable rage. She always thought only of herself. What about the harm she had done to me as a child?
I could not keep from crying, and I was angry at the same time that I was showing them the tears of a child.
“What do you care what happens to me?” I said. “I’ve always been nothing more than a shadow in this house. You never talked to me about what I wanted to do with my life, or what my feelings were. You never noticed when I was sad or happy. Have I ever heard you say that you love me? You made no effort. You simply neglected me. If love were nourishment, I would have been dead long ago. What kind of mother were you? Is it any wonder I went to someone who cared for me. Without love, I would have gone mad. I didn’t want to become like you. But I had to remain here as a child and endure being humiliated for my ideas, ridiculed for having emotions. I was overwrought, you said. You wanted to quash any emotion I had so I would become like you. Loveless, selfish, angry, and alone.”
My mother looked crestfallen, disappointed in me. I wanted her to feel so miserable, she would cry like me. The more I said, the more destructive I wanted to be. I could not stop. I was crazed and grabbed any weapon I could fling.
“What do you know about love?” I said. “You devoted more attention to bugs that have been dead for millions of years than you ever did to me. I was alive. Didn’t you notice? Are you happy with your marriage? All you do is lock yourself in your room and wallow in misery. And when you come out, the greatest emotion you show is anger.”
My voice became more mocking, more wounding: “No wonder everyone said Father was a saint for putting up with you. All your dear friends who you criticized laughed at your science experiments and said they could have saved you the time and told you the answer you sought: The bugs were dead. You were the mad scientist, deluded into thinking you would discover something useful. You wasted your life instead.”
Mr. Minturn was too senile to understand what I was saying. “Why is she angry? Perhaps we should take her on another boat ride to cheer her up.”
Mrs. Minturn gave my mother a superior look. “This is what comes of poor child-rearing practices. You should have locked her in a closet when she misbehaved. You wouldn’t follow my advice. No wonder she has loose morals.”
“Shut up! You’re a stupid wicked woman, an evil presence who poisons this house. All your life, you’ve left rot behind you. Everyone hates you. Couldn’t you feel it? And don’t accuse me of loose morals. You used sleepwalking as your method for seducing Mr. Minturn into marriage. Why don’t you suffer from sleepwalking now?”
“Calm yourself, Lucia,” my father said. “You are saying things you don’t mean and you may regret later. When you’re less excited, we can talk rationally and you’ll see that what you’re saying is not true.”
“You don’t get to preside over this matter like you do at the dinner table with your boring conversations and pompous questions about art. You want me to hide my feelings just like you hide your lovers. Mother, do you know how many women Father has had sex with behind your back?”
He groaned. “No, no … stop.”
“I read the letters from your lovers, praising your instrument of love and your skills, the positions you used, letters of gratitude from women and men alike. Men! Yes, Mother, he has had dalliances with men. Does any of this shock you? He’s been servicing Miss Pond, too. Did you know she came to the house an hour before dinner the other night and asked to see his collection? His collection! Didn’t you see her at the dining table, ogling him with postorgasmic affection? You call me promiscuous for having sex with Lu Shing. You’re my model, Father. Lu Shing is not the first man I’ve had sex with. I’ve had students of yours. I used your books with the disgusting photographs of men and women inserting themselves in different positions. I used Professor Minturn’s lesson book. It’s a wonder I did not also become a sexual deviant like you, collecting nasty objects used for sex and masturbation. Am I wrong to want to keep this baby? Wasn’t it your baby Miss Pond gave birth to? You gave up your own child! Whatever became of that baby? Don’t you care if it’s now languishing in a crib or if he one day works in a shoelace factory?”
I could not stop, and I did not know why I could not. I took all the secrets a family should keep from each other and made sure I had thoroughly destroyed them. All along I knew I was destroying myself as well.
Mother left, and I believe she may have been crying. Father had said nothing the entire time. But when he looked up, I saw in his eyes grief and terror. It was only then that I realized how cruel I had been. I had damaged the father I had once loved, and had severed him from me, as well as from my mother. I had become a monster.
I could not remain in the house another day. Lu Shing and I would stay in a boardinghouse. When I left the house, no one was downstairs to see me leave.
DURING THE LAST two weeks before we left for China, Lu Shing never questioned what I had said to my family. I told him that I had greatly exaggerated my experiences with other young men. I also admitted that I had lost control of my mind, and that while these were my feelings, and that everything I had said was true, I knew I had said too much. I wondered if I had scared him by showing him this turbulent side of my personality. I may have jarred him into thinking I would expect more than what he could give me. That was what I feared—that I would want more because my needs were bottomless.
Doubt crept in. I had made him feel contrite and forced him to say he loved me. He said he was thoughtless, that he did not deserve me and would never abandon me. A man being tortured would say anything. I did not remember how I had led him to say those words, but I knew he had not said them spontaneously or in a single confession of love. Yet I hoped that his piecemeal declarations were whole and strong.
At the last minute, I sent a note to Miss Huffard, the opera singer. She had passions, and only she would understand. I told her where I was going and that Lu Shing and I would marry once we overcame a few problems that could be expected between the races. I said I would write from Shanghai and asked her to wish me luck. I dropped my letter at the post office, and when they took it away, I felt that had been the final declaration that I was leaving my life behind and start
ing afresh. It gave me a boost of confidence.
When we reached the boat, I kissed him on the cheek. I did not care who saw. We were leaving each other for the next month. Lu Shing took one gangplank, and I another. His would lead him to a deck for Orientals. Mine would deliever to the decks reserved for whites. Earlier, when I had realized we would be separated by race, I had dismissed the rules as ridiculous. We could sneak into each other’s room, just as we had in the house.
“If I’m caught in your cabin, or you in mine,” Lu Shing said, “I would wind up in the jail at the bottom of this ship. They’ll drop you off in Honolulu before you ever reach China.”
He assured me he had a comfortable berth in a private cabin, and on a deck with other well-to-do Chinese. We would reunite when we disembarked. His family knew I was coming. He had written—at my insistence. He did not know what their reaction would be, but they sent a cable that they would be waiting.
On the second day out at sea, I unpacked the rest of my bags. At the bottom of one were two things I had not placed there. One was a red velvet bag. Inside was my father’s spyglass. When I was a little girl, we used to look through the spyglass from the turret and watch the boats come in. I remember him naming the countries where the boats hailed from.
I then found a bag of purple chamois. It contained three pieces of amber with wasps. I wept all night, because I did not understand what the objects meant. I guessed that my father was rebuking me for spying on him. Maybe my mother was asserting that she did indeed love those insects more. I allowed a small chance that they were small tokens of love, which they must have shown me at one time. Otherwise how could I feel so palpably, so painfully that it might be love?
On top of the nausea from pregnancy, I was seasick the first three days. I used seasickness as my excuse for the sudden rise of a greenish complexion when I was with my dinner mates. I had been seated with five women traveling alone. The wives of diplomats and businessmen, they were rejoining their husbands in Shanghai. When they asked why I was going to China, I gave them the lie I had told the clerk at the passport office: I had an uncle who ran a school, and I would be a teacher of English.
“A school to teach the Chinese?” the eldest woman asked.
I nodded. “It is for the sons of diplomats.” Lu Shing had been tutored among children of that standing.
“Then I know your uncle quite well!” she said. “Dr. Thomas Wolcott. We should arrange for all of us to have tea when you’re settled.”
I mumbled that it must be a different school, because my uncle was someone else, Dr. Claude Maubert. No one had heard of him. “It’s a new school,” I said. “He may not be taking students yet. My uncle has been in Shanghai for a short amount of time …”
“Here I thought I knew everyone,” the woman said. “It’s a very small circle of us foreigners in Shanghai. But everyone says that Shanghai is growing faster by the day.” They encouraged me to join the societies there, a church, a ladies’ circle to help orphans, another to rescue slave girls.
After we had been on board a week, I ventured to tell them an interesting tale I had heard.
“My uncle said he met a couple in Shanghai, an American woman and a Chinese man. They were married and living with his family. They even had a child. I thought that was a very modern arrangement.”
The diplomat’s wife scowled. “That cannot be true. There is no legal marriage between a Chinese man and an American woman.”
I tried to hide my alarm. “Is that a Chinese law or an American one?” I asked. “I’m sure my uncle said they were married.”
“Both. My husband works for the American Consulate, and he’s told me about a few cases like this. Either a Chinese girl and an American man, or an American girl and a Chinese man. In either case, it never ends well for the woman.”
I listened to their tales of terror. The American women were scorned. They had no legal status and were never accepted into Chinese families as wives because of the importance of lineage and the family’s generations of ancestor worship. They recalled only two cases in which an American woman had lived in a Chinese family, but only briefly. In one case, the American girl was made a concubine—part of a harem, so to speak, treated like a scullery maid, and mistreated by the other concubines and the mother-in-law. Chinese mothers-in-law were generally a vicious bunch, they said in agreement, based on the tales. And that proved sadly true with this poor girl. She was beaten to death.
“The jurisdiction was in the Chinese section of the city,” the diplomat’s wife said, “and was handled by a Chinese court. There was no one to come forward on the girl’s behalf. Who knows what the mother-in-law did or said, but the girl’s death was deemed justifiable.”
The other American woman ran away from her husband’s family and became a prostitute. She had no money, and her family in the United States would not take her back. She went to work on one of the boats in the harbor, taking on sailors.
“If you are in touch with this young woman, you might suggest she go to the American Consulate and have them contact her family so they can send for her as soon as possible,” the diplomat’s wife said. I wondered if she knew that I was the woman in the lie I told. I was frightened by what they had said. I had argued against the warnings of my parents, against Lu Shing’s as well.
I soon recovered from these waves of fear, just as I did from the nausea of pregnancy. I could win over Lu Shing’s parents. I was clever and persistent. Lu Shing had written his father, as I had asked him to do. They had had time to absorb the news. And he had told them I was soon to be the mother of his child, perhaps the firstborn son of the next generation. I reasoned that his father was educated, an important official in the Ministry of Foreign Relations. They must be modern in how they viewed Americans. All would eventually sort itself out.
A MONTH AFTER we left San Francisco, I stood on the dock and waited for Lu Shing to disembark from the Chinese gangplank. I was faint with nervousness, exhaustion, and the heat. I had not been able to eat since the night before. To my regret, I wore a dress suited to the foggy summers of San Francisco and not the Chinese bathhouse that was Shanghai. Coolies ran up to me to take my bags and I shooed them away. I was anxious for Lu Shing to arrive so that he could take care of these matters.
I finally caught sight of him. I was stunned. He was wearing Chinese clothes. He looked as he did when I first saw him in our doorway. There he had looked like an emperor from a fairy-tale book, the one I fell in love with. Here, amid a dock bustling with Chinese people, and passengers, he looked simply Chinese. A coolie in short pants stood behind him with bags clutched under his arms, dangling from his hands, and slung over his back. Lu Shing saw me, but he did not walk toward me. I waved. He still did not come. I walked quickly to him.
Instead of embracing me, he said, “Hello, Lucia.” He sounded like a stranger. “I’m sorry I’m not able to embrace you, as I would like to.” He wore his solemn look.
He had already warned me we had to be circumspect until his family had grown accustomed to the idea of our marriage.
“You look different,” I said. “Your clothes.”
He smiled. “Different only to you.” His eyes looked at me kindly, like a stranger. “Lucia, have you thought carefully about this over the past month? Are you certain you want to stay in Shanghai? We may not succeed. You must be prepared.”
He was supposed to soothe me, not frighten me. “Did you change your mind?” I said in a breaking voice. “Are you telling me to go back?” My voice must have been louder than I thought. Curious faces turned to watch.
Lu Shing remained implacable. “I simply want you to be certain. Our separation on the boat is just a hint of what lies ahead. It will be difficult.”
“I’ve known that all along,” I said. “I have not changed my mind.” Secretly, I was frightened. But during that month, I had accumulated a different kind of courage—for the baby. The baby was no longer a problem but a part of me, and I would protect us both.
&
nbsp; Lu Shing and the coolie conversed quickly. They sounded as if they were arguing. I was struck by the fact that Lu Shing was speaking fluently in Chinese. How odd he sounded. I had never heard him speak to another Chinese person. What happened to my English gentleman with a Chinese face? What happened to my handsome lover in his impeccably tailored clothes with his shaved pate and queue under a bowler? Where was his desire for me?
The coolie gave me a quizzical expression. He and Lu Shing exchanged more words and the coolie nodded. What had transpired? We walked toward the road, and when we reached the broad sidewalk, Lu Shing said: “My family is waiting across the road. All of them. My father, my brothers, my ailing grandfather, the girl I am contracted to marry, and her father and brothers.”
“Why is that girl here?” I said. “Are you going from dock to chapel? Shall I be her bridesmaid?”
“I can’t keep her from coming. This is not a welcome party, Lucia. It is the way things are done here to enforce family order. They have come here to shame me into adhering to my responsibility to family. They are my peers and elders.”
His face was covered with perspiration, and I knew it was not simply the heat. He was nervous, and I had never seen him this way. He would soon have to stand up to his family, just as I had done with mine. I would be by his side to support his decision. The only question that remained: Would they allow us to live in their house?
“Where are they?” I looked around. Lu Shing indicated to an area about thirty feet away where two hansom cabs and ten covered rickshaws were waiting. It resembled a funeral procession. The coolie was placing Lu Shing’s trunk in one of the rickshaws toward the back. Lu Shing walked toward his family. I followed.
