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The Hundred Secret Senses
Amy Tan


The international bestseller from the author of ‘The Joy Luck Club’ and ‘The Bonesetter’s Daughter’.Olivia Yee is only five years old when Kwan, her older sister from China, comes to live with the family and turns her life upside down, bombarding her day and night with ghostly stories of strange ancestors from the world of Yin. Olivia just wants to lead a normal American life.For the next thirty years, Olivia endures visits from Kwan and her ghosts, who appear in the living world to offer advice on everything from restaurants to Olivia’s failed marriage. But just when she cannot bear it any more, the revelations of a tragic family secret finally open her mind to the startling truths hidden in Kwan’s unorthodox vision of the world.










The Hundred Secret Senses

AMY TAN







For Faith


To write this story, I depended on the indulgence, advice, conversations, and sustenance of many: Babalu, Ronald Bass, Linden and Logan Berry, Dr. Thomas Brady, Sheri Byrne, Joan Chen, Mary Clemmey, Dr. Asa DeMatteo, Bram and Sandra Dijkstra, Terry Doxey, Tina Eng, Dr. Joseph Esherick, Audrey Ferber, Robert Foothorap, Laura Gaines, Ann and Gordon Getty, Molly Giles, Amy Hempel, Anna Jardine, Peter Lee Kenfield, Dr. Eric Kim, Gus Lee, Cora Miao, Susanne Pari, the residents of Pei Sa Bao village, Robin and Annie Renwick, Gregory Asturo Riley, the Rock Bottom Remainders, Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale, Orville Schell, Gretchen Schields, the staff of Shelburne House Library, Kelly Simon, Dr. Michael Strong, Daisy Tan, John Tan, Dr. Steven Vandervort, Lijun Wang, Wayne Wang, Yuhang Wang, Russell Wong, the people of Yaddo, and Zo.

I thank them, but do not hold them accountable for the felicitous and sometimes unwitting ways in which they contributed to the truth of this fiction.




Table of Contents


Cover (#u5e940b4c-4f5a-5c77-9941-d8524afd5409)

Title Page (#u3807d0c5-f928-50c8-8324-c15494cd495c)

I (#u8c430986-085c-54ac-a6c5-07d859fc05f3)

1 - THE GIRL WITH YIN EYES (#u18c7f1e3-8d54-54b9-a843-eee03c75c3de)

2 - FISHER OF MEN (#uf467798c-a9f9-5a11-b94b-fa4cff92137a)

3 - THE DOG AND THE BOA (#uc5bd6e2b-9f87-5973-ae0e-34166cde9327)

4 - THE GHOST MERCHANT’S HOUSE (#u8558bc86-3aee-5da2-aa5a-a0893256c056)

5 - LAUNDRY DAY (#u2f72c446-6d8a-53e0-afb0-199cfea42393)

II (#ue2fca0f1-feac-5501-985a-c35a7a67d830)

6 - FIREFLIES (#uc73063e0-bb6b-543b-bb8a-57c7d30b6a57)

7 - THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES (#litres_trial_promo)

8 - THE CATCHER OF GHOSTS (#litres_trial_promo)

9 - KWAN’S FIFTIETH (#litres_trial_promo)

III (#litres_trial_promo)

10 - KWAN’S KITCHEN (#litres_trial_promo)

11 - NAME CHANGE (#litres_trial_promo)

12 - THE BEST TIME TO EAT DUCK EGGS (#litres_trial_promo)

13 - YOUNG GIRL’S WISH (#litres_trial_promo)

14 - HELLO GOOD-BYE (#litres_trial_promo)

15 - THE SEVENTH DAY (#litres_trial_promo)

16 - BIG MA’S PORTRAIT (#litres_trial_promo)

17 - THE YEAR OF NO FLOOD (#litres_trial_promo)

18 - SIX-ROLL SPRING CHICKEN (#litres_trial_promo)

19 - THE ARCHWAY (#litres_trial_promo)

20 - THE VALLEY OF STATUES (#litres_trial_promo)

21 - WHEN HEAVEN BURNED (#litres_trial_promo)

22 - WHEN LIGHT BALANCES WITH DARK (#litres_trial_promo)

IV (#litres_trial_promo)

23 - THE FUNERAL (#litres_trial_promo)

24 - ENDLESS SONGS (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise for The Hundred Secret Senses (#litres_trial_promo)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features… (#litres_trial_promo)

About the author (#litres_trial_promo)

Profile of Amy Tan

Q&A (#litres_trial_promo)

Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)

MY FAVOURITE BOOKS (#litres_trial_promo)

About the book (#litres_trial_promo)

A Critical Eye

Extract from The Opposite of Fate (#litres_trial_promo)

Read on (#litres_trial_promo)

If You Liked This, Try…

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




I (#ulink_ce831438-a9a8-55e0-b992-39f94af8d861)










1 THE GIRL WITH YIN EYES (#ulink_bd09ea97-9a86-5bc6-b492-66545d0d0f24)


My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.

‘Libby-ah,’ she’ll say to me. ‘Guess who I see yesterday, you guess.’ And I don’t have to guess that she’s talking about someone dead.

Actually, Kwan is my half sister, but I’m not supposed to mention that publicly. That would be an insult, as if she deserved only fifty percent of the love from our family. But just to set the genetic record straight, Kwan and I share a father, only that. She was born in China. My brothers, Kevin and Tommy, and I were born in San Francisco after my father, Jack Yee, immigrated here and married our mother, Louise Kenfield.

Mom calls herself ‘American mixed grill, a bit of everything white, fatty, and fried.’ She was born in Moscow, Idaho, where she was a champion baton twirler and once won a county fair prize for growing a deformed potato that had the profile of Jimmy Durante. She told me she dreamed she’d one day grow up to be different – thin, exotic, and noble like Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar playing O-lan in The Good Earth. When Mom moved to San Francisco and became a Kelly girl instead, she did the next-best thing. She married our father. Mom thinks that her marrying out of the Anglo race makes her a liberal. ‘When Jack and I met,’ she still tells people, ‘there were laws against mixed marriages. We broke the law for love.’ She neglects to mention that those laws didn’t apply in California.

None of us, including my mom, met Kwan until she was eighteen. In fact, Mom didn’t even know Kwan existed until shortly before my father died of renal failure. I was not quite four when he passed away. But I still remember moments with him. Falling down a curly slide into his arms. Dredging the wading pool for pennies he had tossed in. And the last day I saw him in the hospital, hearing what he said that scared me for years.

Kevin, who was five, was there. Tommy was just a baby, so he was in the waiting room with my mom’s cousin, Betty Dupree – we had to call her Aunt Betty – who had moved out from Idaho as well. I was sitting on a sticky vinyl chair, eating a bowl of strawberry Jell-O cubes that my father had given me from his lunch tray. He was propped up in bed, breathing hard. Mom would cry one minute, then act cheerful. I tried to figure out what was wrong. The next thing I remember, my father was whispering and Mom leaned in close to listen. Her mouth opened wider and wider. Then her head turned sharply toward me, all twisted with horror. And I was terror-struck. How did he know? How did Daddy find out I flushed my turtles, Slowpoke and Fastpoke, down the toilet that morning? I had wanted to see what they looked like without their coats on, and ended up pulling off their heads.

‘Your daughter?’ I heard my mom say. ‘Bring her back?’ And I was sure that he had just told her to bring me to the pound, which is what he did to our dog Buttons after she chewed up the sofa. What I recall after that is a jumble: the bowl of Jell-O crashing to the floor, Mom staring at a photo, Kevin grabbing it and laughing, then me seeing this tiny black-and-white snapshot of a skinny baby with patchy hair. At some point, I heard my mother shouting: ‘Olivia, don’t argue, you have to leave now.’ And I was crying, ‘But I’ll be good.’

Soon after that, my mother announced: ‘Daddy’s left us.’ She also told us she was going to bring Daddy’s other little girl from China to live in our house. She didn’t say she was sending me to the pound, but I still cried, believing everything was vaguely connected – the headless turtles whirling down the toilet, my father abandoning us, the other girl who was coming soon to take my place. I was scared of Kwan before I ever met her.

When I was ten, I learned that my father’s kidneys had killed him. Mom said he was born with four instead of the usual two, and all of them were defective. Aunt Betty had a theory about why this happened. She always had a theory, usually obtained from a source like the Weekly World News. She said he was supposed to be a Siamese twin. But in the womb, my father, the stronger twin, gobbled up the weaker one and grafted on the two extra kidneys. ‘Maybe he also had two hearts, two stomachs, who knows.’ Aunt Betty came up with this scenario around the time that Life magazine ran a pictorial about Siamese twins from Russia. I saw the same story: two girls, Tasha and Sasha, conjoined at the hip, too heart-breakingly beautiful to be freaks of nature. This must have been in the mid-sixties, around the time I learned fractions. I remember wishing we could exchange Kwan for those Siamese twins. Then I’d have two half sisters, which equaled a whole, and I figured all the kids on the block would try to be our friends, hoping we’d let them watch as we jumped rope or played hopscotch.

Aunt Betty also passed along the story of Kwan’s birth, which was not heartbreaking, just embarrassing. During the war, she said, my father had been a university student in Guilin. He used to buy live frogs for his supper at the outdoor market from a young woman named Li Chen. He later married her, and in 1944 she gave birth to their daughter, the skinny baby in the picture, Kwan.

Aunt Betty had a theory about the marriage as well. ‘Your dad was good-looking, for a Chinese man. He was college-educated. And he spoke English like me and your mom. Now why would he marry a little peasant girl? Because he had to, that’s why.’ By then, I was old enough to know what had to meant.

Whatever the case, in 1948, my father’s first wife died of a lung disease, perhaps TB. My father went to Hong Kong to search for work. He left Kwan in the care of his wife’s younger sister, Li Bin-bin, who lived in a small mountain village called Changmian. Of course, he sent money for their support – what father would not? But in 1949, the Communists took over China, and it was impossible for my father to return for his five-year-old daughter. So what else could he do? With a heavy heart, he left for America to start a new life and forget about the sadness he left behind. Eleven years later, while he was dying in the hospital, the ghost of his first wife appeared at the foot of his bed. ‘Claim back your daughter,’ she warned, ‘or suffer the consequences after death!’ That’s the story my father gave just before he died – that is, as told by Aunt Betty years later.

Looking back, I can imagine how my mom must have felt when she first heard this. Another wife? A daughter in China? We were a modern American family. We spoke English. Sure, we ate Chinese food, but take-out, like everyone else. And we lived in a ranch-style house in Daly City. My father worked for the Government Accounting Office. My mother went to PTA meetings. She had never heard my father talk about Chinese superstitions before; they attended church and bought life insurance instead.

After my father died, my mother kept telling everyone how he had treated her ‘just like a Chinese empress.’ She made all sorts of grief-stricken promises to God and my father’s grave. According to Aunt Betty, at the funeral, my mother vowed never to remarry. She vowed to teach us children to do honor to the Yee family name. She vowed to find my father’s firstborn child, Kwan, and bring her to the United States.

The last promise was the only one she kept.

My mother has always suffered from a kind heart, compounded by seasonal rashes of volunteerism. One summer, she was a foster mother for Yorkie Rescue; the house still stinks of dog pee. For two Christmases, she dished out food to the homeless at St. Anthony’s Dining Room; now she goes away to Hawaii with whoever is her current boyfriend. She’s circulated petitions, done fund-raising, served on boards of alternative-health groups. While her enthusiasm is genuine, eventually, always, it runs out and then she’s on to something new. I suspect she thought of Kwan as a foreign exchange student she would host for a year, a Chinese Cinderella, who would become self-sufficient and go on to have a wonderful American life.

During the time before Kwan came, Mom was a cheerleader, rallying my brothers and me to welcome a big sister into our lives. Tommy was too little to do anything except nod whenever Mom said, ‘Aren’t you excited about having another big sister?’ Kevin just shrugged and acted bored. I was the only one who did jumping jacks like a gung-ho recruit, in part because I was ecstatic to learn Kwan would be in addition to me, not instead of.

Although I was a lonely kid, I would have preferred a new turtle or even a doll, not someone who would compete for my mother’s already divided attention and force me to share the meager souvenirs of her love. In recalling this, I know that my mother loved me – but not absolutely. When I compared the amount of time she spent with others – even total strangers – I felt myself sliding further down the ranks of favorites, getting bumped and bruised. She always had plenty of room in her life for dates with men or lunch with her so-called gal pals. With me, she was unreliable. Promises to take me to the movies or the public pool were easily erased with excuses or forgetfulness, or worse, sneaky variations of what was said and what was meant: ‘I hate it when you pout, Olivia,’ she once told me. ‘I didn’t guarantee I’d go to the swim club with you. I said I would like to.’ How could I argue my need against her intention?

I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional reservoir?

So of course, I didn’t want Kwan as my sister. Just the opposite. Which is why I made great efforts in front of my mother to appear enthusiastic. It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don’t want.

Mom had said that a big sister was a bigger version of myself, sweet and beautiful, only more Chinese, and able to help me do all kinds of fun things. So I imagined not a sister but another me, an older self who danced and wore slinky clothes, who had a sad but fascinating life, like a slant-eyed version of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, which I saw when I was five. It occurs to me only now that my mother and I both modeled our hopes after actresses who spoke in accents that weren’t their own.

One night, before my mother tucked me in bed, she asked me if I wanted to pray. I knew that praying meant saying the nice things that other people wanted to hear, which is what my mom did. So I prayed to God and Jesus to help me be good. And then I added that I hoped my big sister would come soon, since my mother had just been talking about that. When I said, ‘Amen,’ I saw she was crying and smiling proudly. Under my mother’s eye I began to collect welcome presents for Kwan. The scarf my aunt Betty gave me for my birthday, the orange blossom cologne I received at Christmas, the gooey Halloween candy – I lovingly placed all these scratchy, stinky, stale items into a box my mother had marked ‘For Olivia’s big sister.’ I convinced myself I had become so good that soon Mom would realize we didn’t need another sister.

My mother later told my brothers and me how difficult it was to find Kwan. ‘In those days,’ she said, ‘you couldn’t just write a letter, stick a stamp on it, and send it to Changmian. I had to cut through mounds of red tape and fill out dozens of forms. And there weren’t too many people who’d go out of their way to help someone from a communist country. Aunt Betty thought I was crazy! She said to me, “How can you take in a nearly grown girl who can’t speak a word of English? She won’t know right from wrong or left from right.”’

Paperwork wasn’t the only obstacle Kwan had to unknowingly surmount. Two years after my father died, Mom married Bob Laguni, whom Kevin today calls ‘the fluke in our mother’s history of dating foreign imports – and that’s only because she thought Laguni was Mexican instead of Italian.’ Mom took Bob’s name, and that’s how my brothers and I also ended up with Laguni, which I gladly changed to Bishop when I married Simon. The point is, Bob never wanted Kwan to come in the first place. And my mom usually put his wishes above everyone else’s. After they divorced – I was in college by then – Mom told me how Bob pressured her, just before they were married, to cancel the paperwork for Kwan. I think she intended to and forgot. But this is what she told me: ‘I watched you pray. You looked so sweet and sad, asking God, “Please send me my big sister from China.”’

I was nearly six by the time Kwan came to this country. We were waiting for her at the customs area of San Francisco Airport. Aunt Betty was also there. My mother was nervous and excited, talking non-stop: ‘Now listen, kids, she’ll probably be shy, so don’t jump all over her. … And she’ll be skinny as a beanpole, so I don’t want any of you making fun of her. …’

When the customs official finally escorted Kwan into the lobby where we were waiting, Aunt Betty pointed and said, ‘That’s her. I’m telling you that’s her.’ Mom was shaking her head. This person looked like a strange old lady, short and chubby, not exactly the starving waif Mom pictured or the glamorous teenage sister I had in mind. She was dressed in drab gray pajamas, and her broad brown face was flanked by two thick braids.

Kwan was anything but shy. She dropped her bag, fluttered her arms, and bellowed, ‘Hall-oo! Hall-oo!’ Still hooting and laughing, she jumped and squealed the way our new dog did whenever we let him out of the garage. This total stranger tumbled into Mom’s arms, then Daddy Bob’s. She grabbed Kevin and Tommy by the shoulders and shook them. When she saw me, she grew quiet, squatted on the lobby floor, and held out her arms. I tugged on my mother’s skirt. ‘Is that my big sister?’

Mom said, ‘See, she has your father’s same thick, black hair.’

I still have the picture Aunt Betty took: curly-haired Mom in a mohair suit, flashing a quirky smile; our Italo-American stepfather, Bob, appearing stunned; Kevin and Tommy mugging in cowboy hats; a grinning Kwan with her hand on my shoulder; and me in a frothy party dress, my finger stuck in my bawling mouth.

I was crying because just moments before the photo was taken, Kwan had given me a present. It was a small cage of woven straw, which she pulled out of the wide sleeve of her coat and handed to me proudly. When I held it up to my eyes and peered between the webbing, I saw a six-legged monster, fresh-grass green, with saw-blade jaws, bulging eyes, and whips for eyebrows. I screamed and flung the cage away.

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 Popeys 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.’

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 electro-shock 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! 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 farms.

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.

On the other hand, people tell me I’m the one who takes after him most, in both appearance and personality. ‘Look how much Olivia can eat without gaining an ounce,’ Aunt Betty is forever saying. ‘Just like Jack.’ My mother once said, ‘Olivia analyzes every single detail to death. She has her father’s accountant mentality. No wonder she became a photographer.’ Those kinds of comments make me wonder what else has been passed along to me through my father’s genes. Did I inherit from him my dark moods, my fondness for putting salt on my fruit, my phobia about germs?

Kwan, in contrast, is a tiny dynamo, barely five feet tall, a miniature bull in a china shop. Everything about her is loud and clashing. She’ll wear a purple checked jacket over turquoise pants. She whispers loudly in a husky voice, sounding as if she had chronic laryngitis, when in fact she’s never sick. She dispenses health warnings, herbal recommendations, and opinions on how to fix just about anything, from broken cups to broken marriages. She bounces from topic to topic, interspersing tips on where to find bargains. Tommy once said that Kwan believes in free speech, free association, free car-wash with fill’er-up. The only change in Kwan’s English over the last thirty years is in the speed with which she talks. Meanwhile, she thinks her English is great. She often corrects her husband. ‘Not stealed,’ she’ll tell George. ‘Stolened.’

In spite of all our obvious differences, Kwan thinks she and I are exactly alike. As she sees it, we’re connected by a cosmic Chinese umbilical cord that’s given us the same inborn traits, personal motives, fate, and luck. ‘Me and Libby-ah,’ she tells new acquaintances, ‘we same in here.’ And she’ll tap the side of my head. ‘Both born Year the Monkey. Which one older? You guess. Which one?’ And then she’ll squash her cheek against mine.

Kwan has never been able to correctly pronounce my name, Olivia. To her, I will always be Libby-ah, not plain Libby, like the tomato juice, but Libby-ah, like the nation of Muammar Qaddafi. As a consequence, her husband, George Lew, his two sons from a first marriage, and that whole side of the family all call me Libby-ah too. The ‘ah’ part especially annoys me. It’s the Chinese equivalent of saying ‘hey,’ as in ‘Hey, Libby, come here.’ I asked Kwan once how she’d like it if I introduced her to everyone as ‘Hey, Kwan.’ She slapped my arm, went breathless with laughter, then said hoarsely, ‘I like, I like.’ So much for cultural parallels, Libby-ah it is, forever and ever.

I’m not saying I don’t love Kwan. How can I not love my own sister? In many respects, she’s been more like a mother to me than my real one. But I often feel bad that I don’t want to be close to her. What I mean is, we’re close in a manner of speaking. We know things about each other, mostly through history, from sharing the same closet, the same toothpaste, the same cereal every morning for twelve years, all the routines and habits of being in the same family. I really think Kwan is sweet, also loyal, extremely loyal. She’d tear off the ear of anyone who said an unkind word about me. That counts for a lot. It’s just that I wouldn’t want to be closer to her, not the way some sisters are who consider themselves best friends. As it is, I don’t share everything with her the way she does with me, telling me the most private details of her life – like what she told me last week about her husband:

‘Libby-ah,’ she said, ‘I found mole, big as my nostril, found on – what you call this thing between man legs, in Chinese we say yinnang, round and wrinkly like two walnut?’

‘Scrotum.’

‘Yes-yes, found big mole on scrotum! Now every day – every day, must examine Georgie-ah, his scrotum, make sure this mole don’t start grow.’

To Kwan, there are no boundaries among family. Everything is open for gruesome and exhaustive dissection – how much you spent on your vacation, what’s wrong with your complexion, the reason you look as doomed as a fish in a restaurant tank. And then she wonders why I don’t make her a regular part of my social life. She, however, invites me to dinner once a week, as well as to every boring family gathering – last week, a party for George’s aunt, celebrating the fact that she received her U.S. citizenship after fifty years, that sort of thing. Kwan thinks only a major catastrophe would keep me away. She’ll worry aloud: ‘Why you don’t come last night? Something the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter.’

‘Feel sick?’

‘No.’

‘You want me come over, bring you orange? I have extra, good price, six for one dollar.’

‘Really, I’m fine.’

She’s like an orphan cat, kneading on my heart. She’s been this way all my life, peeling me oranges, buying me candy, admiring my report cards and telling me how smart I was, smarter than she could ever be. Yet I’ve done nothing to endear myself to her. As a child, I often refused to play with her. Over the years, I’ve yelled at her, told her she embarrassed me. I can’t remember how many times I’ve lied to get out of seeing her.

Meanwhile, she has always interpreted my outbursts as helpful advice, my feeble excuses as good intentions, my pallid gestures of affection as loyal sisterhood. And when I can’t bear it any longer, I lash out and tell her she’s crazy. Before I can retract the sharp words, she pats my arm, smiles and laughs. And the wound she bears heals itself instantly. Whereas I feel guilty forever.

In recent months, Kwan has become even more troublesome. Usually after the third time I say no to something, she quits. Now it’s as though her mind is stuck on automatic rewind. When I’m not irritated by her, I worry that maybe she’s about to have a nervous breakdown again. Kevin said she’s probably going through menopause. But I can tell it’s more than that. She’s more obsessed than usual. The ghost talk is becoming more frequent. She mentions China in almost every conversation with me, how she must go back before everything changes and it’s too late. Too late for what? She doesn’t know.

And then there’s my marriage. She simply won’t accept the fact that Simon and I have split up. In fact, she’s purposely trying to sabotage the divorce. Last week, I gave a birthday party for Kevin and invited this guy I was seeing, Ben Apfelbaum. When he told Kwan he worked as a voice talent for radio commercials, she said, ‘Ah, Libby-ah and me too, both talent for get out of tricky situation, also big talent for get own way. Is true, Libby-ah?’ Her eyebrows twitched. ‘You husband, Simon, I think he agree with me, ah?’

‘My soon-to-be ex-husband.’ I then had to explain to Ben: ‘Our divorce will be final five months from now, December fifteenth.’

‘Maybe not, maybe not,’ Kwan said, then laughed and pinched my arm. She turned to Ben: ‘You meet Simon?’

Ben shook his head and started to say, ‘Olivia and I met at the – ’

‘Oh, very handsome,’ Kwan chirped. She cupped her hand to the side of her mouth and confided: ‘Simon look like Olivia twin brother. Half Chinese.’

‘Half Hawaiian,’ I said. ‘And we don’t look alike at all.’

‘What you mother father do?’ Kwan scrutinized Ben’s cashmere jacket.

‘They’re both retired and live in Missouri,’ said Ben.

‘Misery! Tst! Tst!’ She looked at me. ‘This too sad.’

Every time Kwan mentions Simon, I think my brain is going to implode from my trying not to scream in exasperation. She thinks that because I initiated the divorce I can take it back.

‘Why not forgive?’ she said after the party. She was plucking at the dead blooms of an orchid plant. ‘Stubborn and anger together, very bad for you.’ When I didn’t say anything, she tried another tack: ‘I think you still have strong feeling for him – mm-hm! Very, very strong. Ah – see! – look you face. So red! This love feeling rushing from you heart. I right? Answer. I right?’

And I kept flipping through the mail, scrawling MOVED across any envelope with Simon Bishop’s name on it. I’ve never discussed with Kwan why Simon and I broke up. She wouldn’t understand. It’s too complex. There’s no one event or fight I can put my finger on to say, ‘That was the reason.’ Our breakup was the result of many things: a wrong beginning, bad timing, years and years of thinking habit and silence were the same as intimacy. After seventeen years together, when I finally realized I needed more in my life, Simon seemed to want less. Sure, I loved him – too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I’m number one in his life. I’m not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.

But Kwan wouldn’t understand that. She doesn’t know how people can hurt you beyond repair. She believes people who say they’re sorry. She’s the naive, trusting type who believes everything said in television commercials is certifiable truth. Look at her house: it’s packed to the gills with gadgets – Ginsu knives, slicers and dicers, juicers and french-fry makers, you name it, she’s bought it, for ‘only nineteen ninety-five, order now, offer good until midnight.’

‘Libby-ah,’ Kwan said on the phone today, ‘I have something must tell you, very important news. This morning I talk to Lao Lu. We decide: You and Simon shouldn’t get divorce.’

‘How nice,’ I said. ‘You decided.’ I was balancing my checkbook, adding and subtracting as I pretended to listen.

‘Me and Lao Lu. You remember him.’

‘George’s cousin.’ Kwan’s husband seemed to be related to just about every Chinese person in San Francisco.

‘No-no! Lao Lu not cousin. How you can forget? Lots times I already tell you about him. Old man, bald head. Strong arm, strong leg, strong temper. One time loose temper, loose head too! Chopped off. Lao Lu say – ’

‘Wait a minute. Someone without a head is now telling me what to do about my marriage?’

‘Tst! Chopped head off over one hundred year ago. Now look fine, no problem. Lao Lu think you, me, Simon, we three go China, everything okay. Okay, Libby-ah?’

I sighed. ‘Kwan, I really don’t have time to talk about this now. I’m in the middle of something.’

‘Lao Lu say cannot just balance checkbook, see how much you got left. Must balance life too.’

How the hell did Kwan know I was balancing my checkbook?

That’s how it’s been with Kwan and me. The minute I discount her, she tosses in a zinger that keeps me scared, makes me her captive once again. With her around, I’ll never have a life of my own. She’ll always claim a major interest.

Why do I remain her treasured little sister? Why does she feel that I’m the most important person in her life? – the most! Why does she say over and over again that even if we were not sisters, she would feel this way? ‘Libby-ah,’ she tells me, ‘I never leave you.’

No! I want to shout, I’ve done nothing, don’t say that anymore. Because each time she does, she turns all my betrayals into love that needs to be repaid. Forever we’ll know: She’s been loyal, someday I’ll have to be.

But even if I cut off both my hands, it’d be no use. As Kwan has already said, she’ll never release me. One day the wind will howl and she’ll be clutching a tuft of the straw roof, about to fly off to the World of Yin.

‘Let’s go! Hurry come!’ she’ll be whispering above the storm. ‘But don’t tell anyone. Promise me, Libby-ah.’




2 FISHER OF MEN (#ulink_dc982b97-fcbd-5d82-8643-0f7e72084a11)


Before seven in the morning, the phone rings. Kwan is the only one who would call at such an ungodly hour. I let the answering machine pick up.

‘Libby-ah?’ she whispers. ‘Libby-ah, you there? This you big sister … Kwan. I have something important tell you. … You want hear? … Last night I dream you and Simon. Strange dream. You gone to bank, check you savings. All a sudden, bank robber run through door. Quick! You hide you purse. So bank robber, he steal everybody money but yours. Later, you gone home, stick you hand in purse – ah! – where is? – gone! Not money but you heart. Stolened! Now you have no heart, how can live? No energy, no color in cheek, pale, sad, tired. Bank president where you got all you savings, he say, “I loan you my heart. No interest. You pay back whenever.” You look up, see his face – you know who, Libby-ah? You guess. … Simon! Yes-yes, give you his heart. You see! Still love you. Libby-ah, do you believe? Not just dream … Libby-ah, you listening me?’

Because of Kwan, I have a talent for remembering dreams. Even today, I can recall eight, ten, sometimes a dozen dreams. I learned how when Kwan came home from Mary’s Help. As soon as I started to wake, she would ask: ‘Last night, Libby-ah, who you meet? What you see?’

With my half-awake mind, I’d grab on to the wisps of a fading world and pull myself back in. From there I would describe for her the details of the life I’d just left – the scuff marks on my shoes, the rock I had dislodged, the face of my true mother calling to me from underneath. When I stopped, Kwan would ask, ‘Where you go before that?’ Prodded, I would trace my way back to the previous dream, then the one before that, a dozen lives, and sometimes their deaths. Those are the ones I never forget, the moments just before I died.

Through years of dream-life, I’ve tasted cold ash falling on a steamy night. I’ve seen a thousand spears flashing like flames on the crest of a hill. I’ve touched the tiny grains of a stone wall while waiting to be killed. I’ve smelled my own musky fear as the rope tightens around my neck. I’ve felt the heaviness of flying through weightless air. I’ve heard the sucking creak of my voice just before life snaps to an end.

‘What you see after die?’ Kwan would always ask.

I’d shake my head, ‘I don’t know. My eyes were closed.’

‘Next time, open eyes.’

For most of my childhood, I thought everyone remembered dreams as other lives, other selves. Kwan did. After she came home from the psychiatric ward, she told me bedtime stories about them, yin people: a woman named Banner, a man named Cape, a one-eyed bandit girl, a half-and-half man. She made it seem as if all these ghosts were our friends. I didn’t tell my mother or Daddy Bob what Kwan was saying. Look what happened the last time I did that.

When I went to college and could finally escape from Kwan’s world, it was already too late. She had planted her imagination into mine. Her ghosts refused to be evicted from my dreams.

‘Libby-ah,’ I can still hear Kwan saying in Chinese, ‘did I ever tell you what Miss Banner promised before we died?’

I see myself pretending to be asleep.

And she would go on: ‘Of course, I can’t say exactly how long ago this happened. Time is not the same between one lifetime and the next. But I think it was during the year 1864. Whether this was the Chinese lunar year or the date according to the Western calendar, I’m not sure …’

Eventually I would fall asleep, at what point in her story I always forgot. So which part was her dream, which part was mine? Where did they intersect? Every night, she’d tell me these stories. And I would lie there silently, helplessly, wishing she’d shut up.






Yes, yes, I’m sure it was 1864. I remember now, because the year sounded very strange. Libby-ah, just listen to it: Yi-ba-liu-si Miss Banner said it was like saying: Lose hope, slide into death. And I said, No, it means: Take hope, the dead remain. Chinese words are good and bad this way, so many meanings, depending on what you hold in your heart.

Anyway, that was the year I gave Miss Banner the tea. And she gave me the music box, the one I once stole from her, then later returned. I remember the night we held that box between us with all those things inside that we didn’t want to forget. It was just the two of us, alone for the moment, in the Ghost Merchant’s House, where we lived with the Jesus Worshippers for six years. We were standing next to the holy bush, the same bush that grew the special leaves, the same leaves I used to make the tea. Only now the bush was chopped down, and Miss Banner was saying she was sorry that she let General Cape kill that bush. Such a sad, hot night, water streaming down our faces, sweat and tears, the cicadas screaming louder and louder, then falling quiet. And later, we stood in this archway, scared to death. But we were also happy. We were happy to learn we were unhappy for the same reason. That was the year that both our heavens burned.

Six years before, that’s when I first met her, when I was fourteen and she was twenty-six, maybe younger or older than that. I could never tell the ages of foreigners. I came from a small place in Thistle Mountain, just south of Changmian. We were not Punti, the Chinese who claimed they had more Yellow River Han blood running through their veins, so everything should belong to them. And we weren’t one of the Zhuang tribes either, always fighting each other, village against village, clan against clan. We were Hakka, Guest People – hnh! – meaning, guests not invited to stay in any good place too long. So we lived in one of many Hakka roundhouses in a poor part of the mountains, where you must farm on cliffs and stand like a goat and unearth two wheelbarrows of rocks before you can grow one handful of rice.

All the women worked as hard as the men, no difference in who carried the rocks, who made the charcoal, who guarded the crops from bandits at night. All Hakka women were this way, strong. We didn’t bind our feet like Han girls, the ones who hopped around on stumps as black and rotten as old bananas. We had to walk all over the mountain to do our work, no binding cloths, no shoes. Our naked feet walked right over those sharp thistles that gave our mountain its famous name.

A suitable Hakka bride from our mountains had thick calluses on her feet and a fine, high-boned face. There were other Hakka families living near the big cities of Yongan, in the mountains, and Jintian, by the river. And the mothers from poorer families liked to match their sons to hardworking pretty girls from Thistle Mountain. During marriage-matching festivals, these boys would climb up to our high villages and our girls would sing the old mountain songs that we had brought from the north a thousand years before. A boy had to sing back to the girl he wanted to marry, finding words to match her song. If his voice was soft, or his words were clumsy, too bad, no marriage. That’s why Hakka people are not only fiercely strong, they have good voices, and clever minds for winning whatever they want.

We had a saying: When you marry a Thistle Mountain girl, you get three oxen for a wife: one that breeds, one that plows, one to carry your old mother around. That’s how tough a Hakka girl was. She never complained, even if a rock tumbled down the side of the mountain and smashed out her eye.

That happened to me when I was seven. I was very proud of my wound, cried only a little. When my grandmother sewed shut the hole that was once my eye, I said the rock had been loosened by a ghost horse. And the horse was ridden by the famous ghost maiden Nunumu – the nu that means ‘girl,’ the numu that means ‘a stare as fierce as a dagger.’ Nunumu, Girl with the Dagger Eye. She too lost her eye when she was young. She had witnessed a Punti man stealing another man’s salt, and before she could run away, he stabbed his dagger in her face. After that, she pulled one corner of her headscarf over her blind eye. And her other eye became bigger, darker, sharp as a cat-eagle’s. She robbed only Punti people, and when they saw her dagger eye, oh, how they trembled.

All the Hakkas in Thistle Mountain admired her, and not just because she robbed Punti people. She was the first Hakka bandit to join the struggle for Great Peace when the Heavenly King came back to us for help. In the spring, she took an army of Hakka maidens to Guilin, and the Manchus captured her. After they cut off her head, her lips were still moving, cursing that she would return and ruin their families for one hundred generations. That was the summer I lost my eye. And when I told everyone about Nunumu galloping by on her ghost horse, people said this was a sign that Nunumu had chosen me to be her messenger, just as the Christian God had chosen a Hakka man to be the Heavenly King. They began to call me Nunumu. And sometimes, late at night, I thought I could truly see the Bandit Maiden, not too clearly, of course, because at that time I had only one yin eye.

Soon after that, I met my first foreigner. Whenever foreigners arrived in our province, everyone in the countryside – from Nanning to Guilin – talked about them. Many Westerners came to trade in foreign mud, the opium that gave foreigners mad dreams of China. And some came to sell weapons – cannons, gunpowder, rifles, not the fast, new ones, but the slow, old kind you light with a match, leftovers from foreign battles already lost. The missionaries came to our province because they heard that the Hakkas were God Worshippers. They wanted to help more of us go to their heaven. They didn’t know that a God Worshipper was not the same as a Jesus Worshipper. Later we all realized our heavens were not the same.

But the foreigner I met was not a missionary. He was an American general. The Hakka people called him Cape because that’s what he always wore, a large cape, also black gloves, black boots, no hat, and a short gray jacket with buttons – like shiny coins! – running from the waist to his chin. In his hand he carried a long walking stick, rattan, with a silver tip and an ivory handle carved in the shape of a naked woman.

When he came to Thistle Mountain, people from all the villages poured down the mountainsides and met in the wide green bowl. He arrived on a prancing horse, leading fifty Cantonese soldiers, former boatmen and beggars, now riding ponies and wearing colorful army uniforms, which we heard were not Chinese or Manchu but leftovers from wars in French Africa. The soldiers were shouting, ‘God Worshippers! We are God Worshippers too!’

Some of our people thought Cape was Jesus, or, like the Heavenly King, another one of his younger brothers. He was very tall, had a big mustache, a short beard, and wavy black hair that flowed to his shoulders. Hakka men also wore their long hair this way, no pigtail anymore, because the Heavenly King said our people should no longer obey the laws of the Manchus. I had never seen a foreigner before and had no way of knowing his true age. But to me, he looked old. He had skin the color of a turnip, eyes as murky as shallow water. His face had sunken spots and sharp points, the same as a person with a wasting disease. He seldom smiled, but laughed often. And he spoke harsh words in a donkey bray. A man always stood by his side, serving as his go-between, translating in an elegant voice what Cape said.

The first time I saw the go-between, I thought he looked Chinese. The next minute he seemed foreign, then neither. He was like those lizards that become the colors of sticks and leaves. I learned later this man had the mother blood of a Chinese woman, the father blood of an American trader. He was stained both ways. General Cape called him yiban ren, the one-half man.

Yiban told us Cape had just come from Canton, where he became friends with the Heavenly King of the Great Peace Revolution. We were all astounded. The Heavenly King was a holy man who had been born a Hakka, then chosen by God to be his treasured younger son, little brother to Jesus. We listened carefully.

Cape, Yiban said, was an American military leader, a supreme general, the highest rank. People murmured. He had come across the sea to China, to help the God Worshippers, the followers of Great Peace. People shouted, ‘Good! Good!’ He was a God Worshipper himself, and he admired us, our laws against opium, thievery, the pleasures of the dark parts of women’s bodies. People nodded, and I stared with my one eye at the naked lady on the handle of Cape’s walking stick. He said that he had come to help us win our battle against the Manchus, that this was God’s plan, written more than a thousand years before in the Bible he was holding. People pushed forward to see. We knew that same plan. The Heavenly King had already told us that the Hakka people would inherit the earth and rule God’s Chinese kingdom. Cape reported the Great Peace soldiers had already captured many cities, had gathered much money and land. And now, the struggle was ready to move north – if only the rest of the God Worshippers in Thistle Mountain would join him as soldiers. Those who fought, he added, would share in the bounty – warm clothes, plenty to eat, weapons, and later, land of their own, new status and ranks, schools and homes, men and women separate. The Heavenly King would send food to their families left behind. By now, everybody was shouting, ‘Great Peace! Great Peace!’

Then General Cape tapped his walking stick on the ground. Everyone grew quiet again. He called Yiban to show us the gifts the Heavenly King had asked him to bring. Barrels of gunpowder! Bushels of rifles! Baskets of French African uniforms, some torn and already stained with blood. But everyone agreed they were still very fine. Everybody was saying, ‘Hey, see these buttons, feel this cloth.’ That day, many, many people, men and women, joined the army of the Heavenly King. I could not. I was too young, only seven, so I was very unhappy inside. But then the Cantonese soldiers passed out uniforms – only to the men, none to the women. And when I saw that, I was not as unhappy as before.

The men put on their new clothes. The women examined their new rifles, the matches for lighting them. Then General Cape tapped his walking stick again and asked Yiban to bring out his gift to us. We all pressed forward, eager to see yet another surprise. Yiban brought back a wicker cage, and inside was a pair of white doves. General Cape announced in his curious Chinese that he had asked God for a sign that we would be an ever victorious army. God sent down the doves. The doves, General Cape said, meant we poor Hakkas would have the rewards of Great Peace we had hungered for over the last thousand years. He then opened the cage door and pulled out the birds. He threw them into the air, and the people roared. They ran and pushed, jumping to catch the creatures before they could fly away. One man fell forward onto a rock. His head cracked open and his brains started to pour out. But people jumped right over him and kept chasing those rare and precious birds. One dove was caught, the other flew away. So someone ate a meal that night.

My mother and father joined the struggle. My uncles, my aunts, my older brothers, nearly everyone over thirteen in Thistle Mountain and from the cities down below. Fifty or sixty thousand people. Peasants and landowners, soup peddlers and teachers, bandits and beggars, and not just Hakkas, but Yaos and Miaos, Zhuang tribes, and even the Puntis who were poor. It was a great moment for Chinese people, all of us coming together like that.

I was left behind in Thistle Mountain to live with my grandmother. We were a pitiful village of scraps, babies and children, the old and the lame, cowards and idiots. Yet we were happy, because just as he had promised, the Heavenly King sent his soldiers to bring us food, more kinds than we could have ever imagined in a hundred years. And the soldiers also brought us stories of great victories: How the Heavenly King had set up his new kingdom in Nanjing. How taels of silver were more plentiful than rice. What fine houses everyone lived in, men in one compound, women in another. What a peaceful life – church on Sunday, no work, only rest and happiness. We were glad to hear that we now lived in a time of Great Peace.

The following year, the soldiers came with rice and salt-cured fish. The next year, it was only rice. More years passed. One day, a man who had once lived in our village returned from Nanjing. He said he was sick to death of Great Peace. When there is great suffering, he said, everyone struggles the same. But when there is peace, no one wants to be the same. The rich no longer share. The less rich envy and steal. In Nanjing, he said, everyone was seeking luxuries, pleasures, the dark places of women. He said the Heavenly King now lived in a fine palace and had many concubines. He allowed his kingdom to be ruled by a man possessed with the Holy Ghost. And General Cape, the man who rallied all the Hakkas to fight, had joined the Manchus and was now a traitor, bound by a Chinese banker’s gold and marriage to his daughter. Too much happiness, said the man who returned, always overflows into tears of sorrow.

We could feel in our stomachs the truth of what this man said. We were hungry. The Heavenly King had forgotten us. Our Western friends had betrayed us. We no longer received food or stories of victory. We were poor. We had no mothers, no fathers, no singing maidens and boys. We were bitter cold in the wintertime.

The next morning, I left my village and went down the mountain. I was fourteen, old enough to make my own way in life. My grandmother had died the year before, but her ghost didn’t stop me. It was the ninth day of the ninth month, I remember this, a day when Chinese people were supposed to climb the heights, not descend from them, a day for honoring ancestors, a day that the God Worshippers ignored to prove they abided by a Western calendar of fifty-two Sundays and not the sacred days of the Chinese almanac. So I walked down the mountain, then through the valleys between the mountains. I no longer knew what I should believe, whom I could trust. I decided I would wait for a sign, see what happened.

I arrived at the city by the river, the one called Jintian. To those Hakka people I met, I said I was Nunumu. But they didn’t know who the Bandit Maiden was. She was not famous in Jintian. The Hakkas there didn’t admire my eye that a ghost horse had knocked out. They pitied me. They put an old rice ball into my palm and tried to make me a half-blind beggar. But I refused to become what people thought I should be.

So I wandered around the city again, thinking about what work I might do to earn my own food. I saw Cantonese people who cut the horns off toes, Yaos who pulled teeth, Puntis who pierced needles into swollen legs. I knew nothing about drawing money out of the rotten parts of other people’s bodies. I continued walking until I was beside the low bank of a wide river. I saw Hakka fishermen tossing big nets into the water from little boats. But I had no nets, no little boat. I did not know how to think like a fast, sly fish.

Before I could decide what to do, I heard people along the riverbank shouting. Foreigners had arrived! I ran to the dock and watched two Chinese kuli boatmen, one young, one old, walking down a narrow plank, carrying boxes and crates and trunks from a large boat. And then I saw the foreigners themselves, standing on the deck – three, four, five of them, all in dull black clothes, except for the smallest one, who had clothing and hair the shiny brown of a tree-eating beetle. That was Miss Banner, but of course I didn’t know it at the time. My one eye watched them all. Their five pairs of foreign eyes were on the young and old boatmen balancing their way down the long, thin gangplank. On the shoulders of the boatmen were two poles, and in the saggy middle a large trunk hung from twisted ropes. Suddenly, the shiny brown foreigner ran down the plank – who knew why? – to warn the men, to ask them to be more careful. And just as suddenly, the plank began to bounce, the trunk began to swing, the men began to sway, and the five foreigners on the boat began to shout. Back and forth, up and down – our eyes leapt as we watched those boatmen clenching their muscles and the shiny foreigner flapping her arms like a baby bird. In the next moment, the older man, at the bottom of the plank, gave one sharp cry – I heard the crack, saw his shoulder bone sticking out. Then two kulis, one trunk, and a shiny-clothed foreigner fell with great splashes into the water below.

I ran to the river edge. The younger kuli had already swum to shore. Two fishermen in a small boat were chasing the contents that had spilled out of the trunk, bright clothing that billowed like sails, feathered hats that floated like ducks, long gloves that raked the water like the fingers of a ghost. But nobody was trying to help the injured boatman or the shiny foreigner. The other foreigners would not; they were afraid to walk down the plank. The Punti people on the shore would not; if they interfered with fate, they would be responsible for those two people’s undrowned lives. But I didn’t think this way. I was a Hakka. The Hakkas were God Worshippers. And the God Worshippers were fishers of men. So I grabbed one of the bamboo poles that had fallen in the water. I ran along the bank and stuck this out, letting the ropes dangle downstream. The kuli and the foreigner grabbed them with their eager hands. And with all my strength, I pulled them in.

Right after that the Punti people pushed me aside. They left the injured boatman on the ground, gasping and cursing. That was Lao Lu, who later became the gatekeeper, since with a broken shoulder he could no longer work as a kuli. As for Miss Banner, the Puntis dragged her higher onto the shore, where she vomited, then cried. When the foreigners finally came down from the boat, the Puntis crowded around them, shouting, ‘Give us money.’ One of the foreigners threw small coins on the ground, and the Puntis flocked like birds to devour them, then scattered away.

The foreigners loaded Miss Banner in one cart, the broken boatman in another. They loaded three more carts with their boxes and crates and trunks. And as they made their way to the mission house in Changmian, I ran behind. So that’s how all three of us went to live in the same house. Our three different fates had flowed together in that river, and became as tangled and twisted as a drowned woman’s hair.

It was like this: If Miss Banner had not bounced on the plank, Lao Lu never would have broken his shoulder. If his shoulder had not broken, Miss Banner never would have almost drowned. If I hadn’t saved Miss Banner from drowning, she never would have been sorry for breaking Lao Lu’s shoulder. If I hadn’t saved Lao Lu, he never would have told Miss Banner what I had done. If Miss Banner hadn’t known this, she never would have asked me to be her companion. If I hadn’t become her companion, she wouldn’t have lost the man she loved.

The Ghost Merchant’s House was in Changmian, and Changmian was also in Thistle Mountain, but north of my village. From Jintian it was a half-day’s journey. But with so many trunks and moaning people in carts, we took twice as long. I learned later that Changmian means ‘never-ending songs.’ Behind the village, higher into the mountains, were many caves, hundreds. And when the wind blew, the mouths of the caves would sing wu! wu! – just like the voices of sad ladies who have lost sons.

That’s where I stayed for the last six years of my life – in that house. I lived with Miss Banner, Lao Lu, and the missionaries – two ladies, two gentlemen, Jesus Worshippers from England. I didn’t know this at the time. Miss Banner told me many months later, when we could speak to each other in a common tongue. She said the missionaries had sailed to Macao, preached there a little while, then sailed to Canton, preached there another little while. That’s also where they met Miss Banner. Around this time, a new treaty came out saying the foreigners could live anywhere in China they pleased. So the missionaries floated inland to Jintian, using West River. And Miss Banner was with them.

The mission was a large compound, with one big courtyard in the middle, then four smaller ones, one big fancy main house, then three smaller ones. In between were covered passageways to connect everything together. And all around was a high wall, cutting off the inside from the outside. No one had lived in that place for more than a hundred years. Only foreigners would stay in a house that was cursed. They said they didn’t believe in Chinese ghosts.

Local people told Lao Lu, ‘Don’t live there. It’s haunted by fox-spirits.’ But Lao Lu said he was not afraid of anything. He was a Cantonese kuli descended from ten generations of kulis! He was strong enough to work himself to death, smart enough to find the answer to whatever he wanted to know. For instance, if you asked him how many pieces of clothing did the foreign ladies own, he wouldn’t guess and say maybe two dozen each. He would go into the ladies’ rooms when they were eating, and he would count each piece, never stealing any, of course. Miss Banner, he told me, had two pairs of shoes, six pairs of gloves, five hats, three long costumes, two pairs of black stockings, two pairs of white stockings, two pairs of white undertrousers, one umbrella, and seven other things that may have been clothing, but he could not determine which parts of the body they were supposed to cover.

Through Lao Lu, I quickly learned many things about the foreigners. Only later did he tell me why local people thought the house was cursed. Many years before, it had been a summer mansion, owned by a merchant who died in a mysterious and awful way. Then his wives died, four of them, one by one, also in mysterious and awful ways, youngest first, oldest last, all of this happening from one full moon to the next.

Like Lao Lu, I was not easily scared. But I must tell you, Libby-ah, what happened there five years later made me believe the Ghost Merchant had come back.




3 THE DOG AND THE BOA (#ulink_86dbc789-873c-5dc9-8a3c-9984a79bcbf1)


Ever since we separated, Simon and I have been having a custody spat over Bubba, my dog. Simon wants visitation rights, weekend walks. I don’t want to deny him the privilege of picking up Bubba’s poop. But I hate his cavalier attitude about dogs. Simon likes to walk Bubba off leash. He lets him romp through the trails of the Presidio, along the sandy dog run by Crissy Field, where the jaws of a pit bull, a rottweiler, even a mad cocker spaniel could readily bite a three-pound Yorkie-chihuahua in half.

This evening, we were at Simon’s apartment, sorting through a year’s worth of receipts for the free-lance business we haven’t yet divided. For the sake of tax deductions, we decided ‘married filing joint return’ should still apply.

‘Bubba’s a dog,’ Simon said. ‘He has the right to run free once in a while.’

‘Yeah, and get himself killed. Remember what happened to Sarge?’

Simon rolled his eyes, his look of ‘Not that again.’ Sarge had been Kwan’s dog, a scrappy Pekingese-Maltese that challenged any male dog on the street. About five years ago, Simon took him for a walk – off leash – and Sarge tore open the nose of a boxer. The owner of the boxer presented Kwan with an eight-hundred-dollar veterinary bill. I insisted Simon should pay. Simon said the boxer’s owner should, since his dog had provoked the attack. Kwan squabbled with the animal hospital over each itemized charge.

‘What if Bubba runs into a dog like Sarge?’ I said.

‘The boxer started it,’ Simon said flatly.

‘Sarge was a vicious dog! You were the one who let him off leash, and Kwan ended up paying the vet bill!’

‘What do you mean? The boxer’s owner paid.’

‘Oh no, he didn’t. Kwan just said that so you wouldn’t feel bad. I told you that, remember?’

Simon twisted his mouth to the side, a grimace of his that always preceded a statement of doubt. ‘I don’t remember that,’ he said.

‘Of course you don’t! You remember what you want to remember.’

Simon sneered. ‘Oh, and I suppose you don’t?’ Before I could respond, he held up his hand, palm out, to stop me. ‘I know, I know. You have an indelible memory! You can never forget a thing! Well, let me tell you, your recollection of every last detail has nothing to do with memory. It’s called holding a goddamn grudge.’

What Simon said has annoyed me all night long. Am I really the kind of person who hangs on to resentments? No, Simon was being defensive, throwing back barbs. Can I help it if I was born with a knack for remembering all sorts of things?

Aunt Betty was the first person to tell me I had a photographic memory; her comment made me believe I would grow up to be a photographer. She said this because I once corrected her in front of a bunch of people on her account of a movie we had all seen together. Now that I’ve been making my living behind the camera lens for the last fifteen years, I don’t know what people mean by photographic memory. How I remember the past isn’t like flipping through an indiscriminate pile of snapshots. It’s more selective than that.

If someone asked me what my address was when I was seven years old, the numbers wouldn’t flash before my eyes. I’d have to relive a specific moment: the heat of the day, the smell of the cut lawn, the slap-slap-slap of rubber thongs against my heels. Then once again I’d be walking up the two steps of the poured-concrete porch, reaching into the black mailbox, heart pounding, fingers grasping – Where is it? Where’s that stupid letter from Art Linkletter, inviting me to be on his show? But I wouldn’t give up hope. I’d think to myself, Maybe I’m at the wrong address. But no, there they are, the brass numbers above, 3–6–2–4, complete with tarnish and rust around the screws.

That’s what I remember most, not addresses but pain – that old lump-in-the-throat conviction that the world had fingered me for abuse and neglect. Is that the same as a grudge? I wanted so much to be a guest on ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things.’ It was the kiddie route to fame, and I wanted once again to prove to my mother that I was special, in spite of Kwan. I wanted to snub the neighborhood kids, to make them mad that I was having more fun than they would ever know. While riding my bicycle around and around the block, I’d plot what I’d say when I was finally invited to be on the show. I’d tell Mr. Linkletter about Kwan, just the funny stuff – like the time she said she loved the movie Southern Pacific. Mr. Linkletter would raise his eyebrows and round his mouth. ‘Olivia,’ he’d say, ‘doesn’t your sister mean South Pacific?’ Then people in the audience would slap their knees and roar with laughter, and I’d glow with childish wonder and a cute expression.

Old Art always figured kids were so sweet and naive they didn’t know they were saying embarrassing things. But all those kids on the show knew precisely what they were doing. Why else didn’t they ever mention the real secrets – how they played night-night nurse and dickie doctor, how they stole gum, gunpowder caps, and muscle magazines from the corner Mexican store. I knew kids who did those things. They were the same ones who once pinned down my arms and peed on me, laughing and shouting, ‘Olivia’s sister is a retard.’ They sat on me until I started crying, hating Kwan, hating myself.

To soothe me, Kwan took me to the Sweet Dreams Shoppe. We were sitting outside, licking cones of rocky road ice cream. Captain, the latest mutt my mother had rescued from the pound, whom Kwan had named, was lying at our feet, vigilantly waiting for drips.

‘Libby-ah,’ Kwan said, ‘what this word, lee-tahd?’

‘Reee-tard,’ I corrected, lingering over the word. I was still angry with Kwan and the neighbor kids. I took another tongue stab of ice cream, thinking of retarded things Kwan had done. ‘Retard means fantou,’ I said. ‘You know, a stupid person who doesn’t understand anything.’ She nodded. ‘Like saying the wrong things at the wrong time,’ I added. She nodded again. ‘When kids laugh at you and you don’t know why.’

Kwan was quiet for the longest time, and the inside of my chest began to feel tickly and uncomfortable. Finally she said in Chinese: ‘Libby-ah, you think this word is me, retard? Be honest.’

I kept licking the drips running down the side of my cone, avoiding her stare. I noticed that Captain was also watching me attentively. The tickly feeling grew, until I let out a huge sigh and grumbled, ‘Not really.’ Kwan grinned and patted my arm, which just about drove me crazy. ‘Captain,’ I shouted. ‘Bad dog! Stop begging!’ The dog cowered.

‘Oh, he not begging,’ Kwan said in a happy voice. ‘Only hoping.’ She petted his rump, then held her cone above the dog’s head. ‘Talk English!’ Captain sneezed a couple of times, then let go with a low wuff. She allowed him a lick. ‘Jang Zhongwen! Talk Chinese!’ Two highpitched yips followed. She gave him another lick, then another, sweet-talking him in Chinese. And it annoyed me to see this, how any dumb thing could make her and the dog instantly happy.

Later that same night Kwan asked me again about what those kids had said. She pestered me so much I thought she really was retarded.






Libby-ah, are you sleeping? Okay, sorry, sorry, go back to sleep, it’s not important … I only wanted to ask you again about this word, retard. Ah, but you’re sleeping now, maybe tomorrow, after you come home from school. …

Funny, I was thinking how I once thought Miss Banner was this way, retard. She didn’t understand anything. … Libby-ah, did you know I taught Miss Banner to talk? Libby-ah? Sorry, sorry, go back to sleep, then.

It’s true, though. I was her teacher. When I first met her, her speech was like a baby’s! Sometimes I laughed, I couldn’t help it. But she did not mind. The two of us had a good time saying the wrong things all the time. We were like two actors at a temple fair, using our hands, our eyebrows, the fast twist of our feet to show each other what we meant. That’s how she told me about her life before she came to China. What I thought she said was this:

She was born to a family who lived in a village far, far west of Thistle Mountain, across a tumbling sea. It was past the country where black people live, beyond the land of English soldiers and Portuguese sailors. Her family village was bigger than all these lands put together. Her father owned many ships that crossed this sea to other lands. In these lands, he gathered money that grew like flowers, and the smell of this money made many people happy.

When Miss Banner was five, her two little brothers chased a chicken into a dark hole. They fell all the way to the other side of the world. Naturally, the mother wanted to find them. Before the sun came up and after the sun came down, she puffed out her neck like a rooster and called for her lost sons. After many years, the mother found the same hole in the earth, climbed in, and then she too fell all the way to the other side of the world.

The father told Miss Banner, We must search for our lost family. So they sailed across the tumbling sea. First they stopped at a noisy island. Her father took her to live in a large palace ruled by tiny people who looked like Jesus. While her father was in the fields picking more flower-money, the little Jesuses threw stones at her and cut off her long hair. Two years later, when her father returned, he and Miss Banner sailed to another island, this one ruled by mad dogs. Again he put Miss Banner in a large palace and went off to pick more flower-money. While he was gone, the dogs chased Miss Banner and tore at her dress. She ran around the island, searching for her father. She met an uncle instead. She and this uncle sailed to a place in China where many foreigners lived. She did not find her family there. One day, as she and the uncle lay in bed, the uncle became hot and cold at the same time, rose up in the air, then fell into the sea. Lucky for her, Miss Banner met another uncle, a man with many guns. He took her to Canton, where foreigners also lived. Every night, the uncle laid his guns on the bed and made her polish them before she could sleep. One day, this man cut off a piece of China, one with many fine temples. He sailed home on this floating island, gave the temples to his wife, the island to his king. Miss Banner met a third uncle, a Yankee, also with many guns. But this one combed her hair. He fed her peaches. She loved this uncle very much. One night, many Hakka men burst into their room and took her uncle away. Miss Banner ran to the Jesus Worshippers for help. They said, Fall on your knees. So she fell on her knees. They said, Pray. So she prayed. Then they took her inland to Jintian, where she fell in the water and prayed to be saved. That’s when I saved her.

Later on, as Miss Banner learned more Chinese words, she told me about her life again, and because what I heard was now different, what I saw in my mind was different too. She was born in America, a country beyond Africa, beyond England and Portugal. Her family village was near a big city called Nu Ye, sounds like Cow Moon. Maybe this was New York. A company called Russia or Russo owned those ships, not her father. He was a clerk. The shipping company bought opium in India – those were the flowers – then sold it in China, spreading a dreaming sickness among Chinese people.

When Miss Banner was five, her little brothers did not chase chickens into a hole, they died of chicken pox and were buried in their backyard. And her mother did not puff her neck out like a rooster. Her throat swelled up and she died of a goiter disease and was buried next to her sons. After this tragedy, Miss Banner’s father took her to India, which was not ruled by little Jesuses. She went to a school for Jesusworshipping children from England, and they were not holy but naughty and wild. Later, her father took her to Malacca, which was not ruled by dogs. She was talking about another school, where the children were also English and even more disobedient than the ones in India. Her father sailed off to buy more opium in India but never returned – why, she did not know, so she grew many kinds of sadness in her heart. Now she had no father, no money, no home. When she was still a young maiden, she met a man who took her to Macao. Lots of mosquitoes in Macao; he died of malaria there and was buried at sea. Then she lived with another man, this one an English captain. He helped the Manchus, fought the God Worshippers, earned big money for each city he captured. Later, he sailed home, bearing many looted temple treasures for England and his wife. Miss Banner then went to live with another soldier, a Yankee. This one, she said, helped the God Worshippers, fought against the Manchus, also earned money by looting the cities he and the God Worshippers burned to the ground. These three men, Miss Banner told me, were not her uncles.

I said to her, ‘Miss Banner-ah, this is good news. Sleeping in the same bed with your uncles is not good for your aunts.’ She laughed. So you see, by this time, we could laugh together because we understood each other very well. By this time, the calluses on my feet had been exchanged for an old pair of Miss Banner’s tight leather shoes. But before this happened, I had to teach her how to talk.

To begin, I told her my name was Nunumu. She called me Miss Moo. We used to sit in the courtyard and I would teach her the names of things, as if she were a small child. And just like a small child, she learned eagerly, quickly. Her mind wasn’t rusted shut to new ideas. She wasn’t like the Jesus Worshippers, whose tongues were creaky old wheels following the same grooves. She had an unusual memory, extraordinarily good. Whatever I said, it went in her ear then out her mouth.

I taught her to point to and call out the five elements that make up the physical world: metal, wood, water, fire, earth.

I taught her what makes the world a living place: sunrise and sunset, heat and cold, dust and heat, dust and wind, dust and rain.

I taught her what is worth listening to in this world: wind, thunder, horses galloping in the dust, pebbles falling in water. I taught her what is frightening to hear: fast footsteps at night, soft cloth slowly ripping, dogs barking, the silence of crickets.

I taught her how two things mixed together produce another: water and dirt make mud, heat and water make tea, foreigners and opium make trouble.

I taught her the five tastes that give us the memories of life: sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty.

One day, Miss Banner touched her palm on the front of her body and asked me how to say this in Chinese. After I told her, she said to me in Chinese: ‘Miss Moo, I wish to know many words for talking about my breasts!’ And only then did I realize she wanted to talk about the feelings in her heart. The next day, I took her wandering around the city. We saw people arguing. Anger, I said. We saw a woman placing food on an altar. Respect, I said. We saw a thief with his head locked in a wooden yoke. Shame, I said. We saw a young girl sitting by the river, throwing an old net with holes into the shallow part of the water. Hope, I said.

Later, Miss Banner pointed to a man trying to squeeze a barrel that was too large through a doorway that was too small. ‘Hope,’ Miss Banner said. But to me, this was not hope, this was stupidity, rice for brains. And I wondered what Miss Banner had been seeing when I was naming those other feelings for her. I wondered whether foreigners had feelings that were entirely different from those of Chinese people. Did they think all our hopes were stupid?

In time, however, I taught Miss Banner to see the world almost exactly like a Chinese person. Of cicadas, she would say they looked like dead leaves fluttering, felt like paper crackling, sounded like fire roaring, smelled like dust rising, and tasted like the devil frying in oil. She hated them, decided they had no purpose in this world. You see, in five ways she could sense the world like a Chinese person. But it was always this sixth way, her American sense of importance, that later caused troubles between us. Because her senses led to opinions, and her opinions led to conclusions, and sometimes they were different from mine.






For most of my childhood, I had to struggle not to see the world the way Kwan described it. Like her talk about ghosts. After she had the shock treatments, I told her she had to pretend she didn’t see ghosts, otherwise the doctors wouldn’t let her out of the hospital.

‘Ah, keep secret,’ she said, nodding. ‘Just you me know.’

When she came home, I then had to pretend the ghosts were there, as part of our secret of pretending they weren’t. I tried so hard to hold these two contradictory views that soon I started to see what I wasn’t supposed to. How could I not? Most kids, without sisters like Kwan, imagine that ghosts are lurking beneath their beds, ready to grab their feet. Kwan’s ghosts, on the other hand, sat on the bed, propped against her headboard. I saw them.

I’m not talking about filmy white sheets that howled ‘Oooooohh.’ Her ghosts weren’t invisible like the affable TV apparitions in Topper who moved pens and cups through the air. Her ghosts looked alive. They chatted about the good old days. They worried and complained. I even saw one scratching our dog’s neck, and Captain thumped his leg and wagged his tail. Apart from Kwan, I never told anyone what I saw. I thought I’d be sent to the hospital for shock treatments. What I saw seemed so real, not at all like dreaming. It was as though someone else’s feelings had escaped, and my eyes had become the movie projector beaming them into life.

I remember a particular day – I must have been eight – when I was sitting alone on my bed, dressing my Barbie doll in her best clothes. I heard a girl’s voice say: ‘Gei wo kan.’ I looked up, and there on Kwan’s bed was a somber Chinese girl around my age, demanding to see my doll. I wasn’t scared. That was the other thing about seeing ghosts: I always felt perfectly calm, as if my whole body had been soaked in a mild tranquilizer. I politely asked this little girl in Chinese who she was. And she said, ‘Lili-lili, lili-lili,’ in a high squeal.

When I threw my Barbie doll onto Kwan’s bed, this lili-lili girl picked it up. She took off Barbie’s pink feather boa, peered under the matching satin sheath dress. She violently twisted the arms and legs. ‘Don’t break her,’ I warned. The whole time I could feel her curiosity, her wonder, her fear that the doll was dead. Yet I never questioned why we had this emotional symbiosis. I was too worried that she’d take Barbie home with her. I said, ‘That’s enough. Give her back.’ And this little girl pretended she didn’t hear me. So I went over and yanked the doll out of her hands, then returned to my bed.

Right away I noticed the feather boa was missing. ‘Give it back!’ I shouted. But the girl was gone, which alarmed me, because only then did my normal senses return, and I knew she was a ghost. I searched for the feather boa – under the covers, between the mattress and the wall, beneath both twin beds. I couldn’t believe that a ghost could take something real and make it disappear. I hunted all week for that feather boa, combing through every drawer, pocket, and corner. I never found it. I decided that the girl ghost really had stolen it.

Now I can think of more logical explanations. Maybe Captain took it and buried it in the backyard. Or my mom sucked it up into the vacuum cleaner. It was probably something like that. But when I was a kid, I didn’t have strong enough boundaries between imagination and reality. Kwan saw what she believed. I saw what I didn’t want to believe.

When I was a little older, Kwan’s ghosts went the way of other childish beliefs, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny. I did not tell Kwan that. What if she went over the edge again? Privately I replaced her notions of ghosts and the World of Yin with Vatican-endorsed saints and a hereafter that ran on the merit system. I gladly subscribed to the concept of collecting goody points, like those S&H green stamps that could be pasted into booklets and redeemed for toasters and scales. Only instead of getting appliances, you received a one-way ticket to heaven, hell, or purgatory, depending on how many good and bad deeds you’d done and what other people said about you. Once you made it to heaven, though, you didn’t come back to earth as a ghost, unless you were a saint. This would probably not be the case with me.

I once asked my mom what heaven was, and she said it was a permanent vacation spot, where all humans were now equal – kings, queens, hoboes, teachers, little kids. ‘Movie stars?’ I asked. Mom said I could meet all kinds of people, as long as they had been nice enough to get into heaven. At night, while Kwan rattled on with her Chinese ghosts, I would list on my fingers the people I wanted to meet, trying to put them in some sort of order of preference, if I was limited to meeting, say, five a week. There was God, Jesus, and Mary – I knew I was supposed to mention them first. And then I’d ask for my father and any other close family members who might have passed on – although not Daddy Bob. I’d wait a hundred years before I put him on my dance card. So that took care of the first week, sort of boring but necessary. The next week was when the good stuff would begin. I’d meet famous people, if they were already dead – the Beatles, Hayley Mills, Shirley Temple, Dwayne Hickman – and maybe Art Linkletter, the creep, who’d finally realize why he should have had me on his dumb show.

By junior high, my version of the afterlife was a bit more somber. I pictured it as a place of infinite knowledge, where all things would be revealed – sort of like our downtown library, only bigger, where pious voices enumerating what thou shall and shall not do echoed through loudspeakers. Also, if you were slightly but not hopelessly bad, you didn’t go to hell, but you had to pay a huge fine. Or maybe if you did something worse, you went to a place similar to continuation school, which was where all the bad kids ended up, the ones who smoked, ran away from home, shoplifted, or had babies out of wedlock. But if you had followed the rules, and didn’t wind up a burden on society, you could advance right away to heaven. And there you’d learn the answers to all the stuff your catechism teachers kept asking you, like:

What should we learn as human beings?

Why should we help others less fortunate than ourselves?

How can we prevent wars?

I also figured I’d learn what happened to certain things that were lost, such as Barbie’s feather boa and, more recently, my rhinestone necklace, which I suspected my brother Tommy had filched, even though he said, ‘I didn’t take it, swear to God.’ What’s more, I wanted to look up the answers to a few unsolved mysteries, like: Did Lizzie Borden kill her parents? Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? What really happened to Amelia Earhart? And out of all the people on death row who had been executed, who was actually guilty and who was innocent? For that matter, which felt worst, being hanged, gassed, or electrocuted? In between all these questions, I’d find the proof that it was my father who told the truth about how Kwan’s mother died, not Kwan.

By the time I went to college, I didn’t believe in heaven and hell anymore, none of those metaphors for reward and punishment based on absolute good and evil. I had met Simon by then. He and I would get stoned with our friends and talk about the afterlife: ‘It just doesn’t make sense, man – I mean, you live for less than a hundred years, then everything’s added up and, boom, you go on for billions of years after that, either lying on the proverbial beach or roasting on a spit like a hot dog.’ And we couldn’t buy the logic that Jesus was the only way. That meant that Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Africans who had never even heard of Christ Almighty were doomed to hell, while Ku Klux Klan members were not. Between tokes, we’d speak while trying not to exhale: ‘Wow, what’s the point in that kind of justice? Like, what does the universe learn after that?’

Most of our friends believed there was nothing after death – lights out, no pain, no reward, no punishment. One guy, Dave, said immortality lasted only as long as people remembered you. Plato, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus – they were immortal, he said. He said this after Simon and I attended a memorial service for a friend, Eric, whose number came up in the draft and who was killed in Vietnam.

‘Even if they weren’t really the way they’re now remembered?’ Simon asked.

Dave paused, then said, ‘Yeah.’

‘What about Eric?’ I asked. ‘If people remember Hitler longer than Eric, does that mean Hitler is immortal but Eric isn’t?’

Dave paused again. But before he could answer, Simon said firmly, ‘Eric was great. Nobody will ever forget Eric. And if there’s a paradise, that’s where he is right now.’ I remember I loved Simon for saying that. Because that’s what I felt too.

How did those feelings disappear? Did they vanish like the feather boa, disappear when I wasn’t looking? Should I have tried harder to find them again?

It’s not just grudges that I hang on to. I remember a girl on my bed. I remember Eric. I remember the power of inviolable love. In my memory, I still have a place where I keep all those ghosts.




4 THE GHOST MERCHANT’S HOUSE (#ulink_6976cbd8-8278-5519-b44d-69ee5c4bd1ea)


My mother has another new boyfriend, Jaime Jofré. I don’t have to meet him to know he’ll have charm, dark hair, and a green card. He’ll speak with an accent and my mother will later ask me, ‘Isn’t he passionate?’ To her, words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them, if he says ‘amor’ with a trill rather than ordinary ‘love.’

Romantic though she is, my mother is a practical woman. She wants proof of love: Give and you should receive. A bouquet, ballroom dancing lessons, a promise of eternal fidelity it must be up to the man to decide. And there’s also Louise’s corollary of sacrificial love: Give up smoking for him and receive a week at a health spa. She prefers the Calistoga Mud Baths or the Sonoma Mission Inn. She thinks men who understand this kind of exchange are from emerging nations – she would never say ‘the third world.’ A colony under foreign dictatorship is excellent. When emerging nation isn’t available, she’ll settle for Ireland, India, Iran. She firmly believes that men who have suffered from oppression and a black-market economy know there’s more at stake. They try harder to win you over. They’re willing to deal. Through these guiding thoughts, my mother has found true love as many times as she’s quit smoking for good.

Hell yes, I’m furious with my mother. This morning she asked if she could drop by to cheer me up. And then she spent two hours comparing my failed marriage with hers to Bob. A lack of commitment, an unwillingness to make sacrifices, no give, all take – those are the common faults she’s noticed in Simon and Bob. And she and I both ‘gave, gave, gave from the bottom of our hearts.’ She bummed a cigarette from me, then a match.

‘I saw it coming,’ she said, and inhaled deeply. ‘Ten years ago. Remember that time Simon went to Hawaii and left you home when you had the flu?’

‘I told him to go. We had nonrefundable airline tickets and he could sell only one.’ Why was I defending him?

‘You were sick. He should have been giving you chicken soup rather than cavorting on the beach.’

‘He was cavorting with his grandmother. She’d had a stroke.’ I was starting to sound as whiny as a kid.

She gave me a sympathetic smile. ‘Sweetie, you don’t have to be in denial anymore. I know what you’re feeling. I’m your mother, remember?’ She stubbed out her cigarette before assuming her matter-of-fact, social worker manner: ‘Simon didn’t love you enough, because he was lacking, not you. You are abundantly lovable. There is nothing wrong with you.’

I gave a stiff nod. ‘Mom, I really should get to work now.’

‘You go right ahead. I’ll just have another cup of coffee.’ She looked at her watch and said, ‘The exterminators flea-bombed my apartment at ten. Just to be safe, I’d like to wait another hour before I go back.’

And now I’m sitting at my desk, unable to work, completely drained. What the hell does she know about my capacity for love? Does she have any idea how many times she’s hurt me without knowing it? She complains that all that time she spent with Bob was a big waste. What about me? What about the time she didn’t spend with me? Wasn’t that a waste too? And why am I now devoting any energy to thinking about this? I’ve been reduced to a snivelly little kid again. There I am, twelve years old, facedown on my twin bed, a corner of the pillow stuffed into my mouth so that Kwan can’t hear my mangled sobs.

‘Libby-ah,’ Kwan whispers, ‘something matter? You sick? Eat too much Christmas cookie? Next time I don’t make so sweet. … Libby-ah, you like my present? You don’t like, tell me, okay? I make you another sweater. You tell me what color. Knit it take me only one week. I finish, wrap up, like surprise all over again. … Libby-ah? I think Daddy Mommy come back from Yosemite Park bring you beautiful present, pictures too. Pretty snow, mountaintop … Don’t cry! No! No! You not mean this. How you can hate you own mother? … Oh? Daddy Bob too? Ah, zemma zaogao. …‘






Libby-ah, Libby-ah? Can I turn on the light? I want to show you something. …

Okay, okay! Don’t get mad! I’m sorry. I’m turning it off. See? It’s dark again. Go back to sleep. … I was going to show you the pen that fell out of Daddy Bob’s trouser pocket. … You tilt it one way, you see a lady in a blue dress. You tilt it the other way, wah! – the dress falls down. I’m not lying. See for yourself. I’ll turn on the light. Are you ready? … Oh, Libby-ah, your eyes are swollen big as plums! Put the wet towel back over them. Tomorrow they won’t itch as much. … The pen? I saw it sneaking out of his pocket when we were at Sunday mass. He didn’t notice because he was pretending to pray. I know it was just pretend, mm-hmm, because his head went this way – booomp! – and he was snoring. Nnnnnnnhhh! It’s true! I gave him a little push. He didn’t wake up, but his nose stopped making those sounds. Ah, you think that’s funny? Then why are you laughing?



So anyway, after a while I looked at the Christmas flowers, the candles, the colored glass. I watched the priest waving the smoky lantern. Suddenly I saw Jesus walking through the smoke! Yes, Jesus! I thought he had come to blow out his birthday candles. I told myself, Finally I can see him – now I am a Catholic! Oh, I was so excited. That’s why Daddy Bob woke up and pushed me down.

I kept smiling at Jesus, but then I realized – ah? – that man was not Jesus but my old friend Lao Lu! He was pointing and laughing at me. ‘Fooled you,’ he said, ‘I’m not Jesus! Hey, you think he has a bald head like mine?’ Lao Lu walked over to me. He waved his hand in front of Daddy Bob. Nothing happened. He touched his little finger light as a fly on Daddy Bob’s forehead. Daddy Bob slapped himself. He slowly pulled the nasty pen from Daddy Bob’s pocket and rolled it into a fold of my skirt.

‘Hey,’ Lao Lu said. ‘Why are you still going to a foreigners’ church? You think a callus on your butt will help you see Jesus?’

Don’t laugh, Libby-ah. What Lao Lu said was not polite. I think he was remembering our last lifetime together, when he and I had to sit on the hard bench for two hours every Sunday. Every Sunday! Miss Banner too. We went to church for so many years and never saw God or Jesus, not Mary either, although back then it was not so important to see her. In those days, she was also mother to baby Jesus but only concubine to his father. Now everything is Mary this and that! – Old St. Mary’s, Mary’s Help, Mary Mother of God, forgiving me my sins. I’m glad she got a promotion. But as I said, in those days, the Jesus Worshippers did not talk about her so much. So I had to worry only about seeing God and Jesus. Every Sunday, the Jesus Worshippers asked me, ‘Do you believe?’ I had to say not yet. I wanted to say yes to be polite. But then I would have been lying, and when I died maybe they would come after me and make me pay two kinds of penalty to the foreign devil, one for not believing, another for pretending that I did. I thought I couldn’t see Jesus because I had Chinese eyes. Later I found out that Miss Banner never saw God or Jesus either. She told me she wasn’t a religious kind of person.

I said, ‘Why is that, Miss Banner?’

And she said, ‘I prayed to God to save my brothers. I prayed for him to spare my mother. I prayed that my father would come back to me. Religion teaches you that faith takes care of hope. All my hopes are gone, so why do I need faith anymore?’

‘Ai!’ I said. ‘This is too sad! You have no hopes?’

‘Very few,’ she answered. ‘And none that are worth a prayer.’

‘What about your sweetheart?’

She sighed. ‘I’ve decided he’s not worth a prayer either. He deserted me, you know. I wrote letters to an American navy officer in Shanghai. My sweetheart’s been there. He’s been in Canton. He’s even been in Guilin. He knows where I am. So why hasn’t he come?’

I was sad to hear that. At the time, I didn’t know her sweetheart was General Cape. ‘I still have many hopes of finding my family again,’ I said. ‘Maybe I should become a Jesus Worshipper.’

‘To be a true worshipper,’ she said, ‘you must give your whole body to Jesus.’

‘How much do you give?’

She held up her thumb. I was astonished, because every Sunday she preached the sermon. I thought this should be worth two legs at least. Of course, she had no choice about preaching. No one understood the other foreigners, and they couldn’t understand us. Their Chinese was so bad it sounded just like their English. Miss Banner had to serve as Pastor Amen’s go-between. Pastor Amen didn’t ask. He said she must do this, otherwise no room for her in the Ghost Merchant’s House.

So every Sunday morning, she and Pastor stood by the doorway to the church. He would cry in English, ‘Welcome, welcome!’ Miss Banner would translate into Chinese: ‘Hurry-come into God’s House! Eat rice after the meeting!’ God’s House was actually the Ghost Merchant’s family temple. It belonged to his dead ancestors and their gods. Lao Lu thought the foreigners showed very bad manners picking this place for God’s House. ‘Like a slap in the face,’ he said. ‘The God of War will drop horse manure from the sky, you wait and see.’ Lao Lu was that way – you make him mad, he’ll pay you back.

The missionaries always walked in first, Miss Banner second, then Lao Lu and I, as well as the other Chinese people who worked in the Ghost Merchant’s House – the cook, the two maids, the stableman, the carpenter, I forget who else. The visitors entered God’s House last. They were mostly beggars, a few Hakka God Worshippers, also an old woman who pressed her hands together and bowed three times to the altar, even though she was told over and over again not to do that anymore. The newcomers sat on the back benches – I’m guessing this was in case the Ghost Merchant came back and they needed to run away. Lao Lu and I had to sit up front with the missionaries, shouting ‘Amen!’ whenever the pastor raised his eyebrows. That’s why we called him Pastor Amen – also because his name sounded like ‘Amen,’ Hammond or Halliman, something like that.

As soon as we flattened our bottoms on those benches, we were not supposed to move. Mrs. Amen often jumped up, but only to wag her finger at those who made too much noise. That’s how we learned what was forbidden. No scratching your head for lice. No blowing your nose into your palm. No saying ‘Shit’ when clouds of mosquitoes sang in your ear – Lao Lu said that whenever anything disturbed his sleep.

That was another rule: No sleeping except when Pastor Amen prayed to God, long, boring prayers that made Lao Lu very happy. Because when the Jesus Worshippers closed their eyes, he could do the same and take a long nap. I kept my eye open. I would stare at Pastor Amen to see if God or Jesus was coming down from the heavens. I had seen this happen to a God Worshipper at a temple fair. God entered an ordinary man’s body and threw him to the ground. When he stood up again, he had great powers. Swords thrust against his stomach bent in half. But no such thing ever happened to Pastor Amen. Although one time when Pastor was praying, I saw a beggar standing at the door. I remembered that the Chinese gods sometimes did this, came disguised as beggars to see what was going on, who was being loyal, who was paying them respect. I wondered if the beggar was a god, now angry to see foreigners standing at the altar where he used to be. When I looked back a few minutes later, the beggar had disappeared. So who knows if he was the reason for the disasters that came five years later.

At the end of the prayer time, the sermon would begin. The first Sunday, Pastor Amen spoke for five minutes – talk, talk, talk! – a lot of sounds that only the other missionaries could understand. Then Miss Banner translated for five minutes. Warnings about the devil. Amen! Rules for going to heaven. Amen! Bring your friends with you. Amen! Back and forth they went, as if they were arguing. So boring! For two hours, we had to sit still, letting our bottoms and our brains grow numb.

At the end of the sermon, there was a little show, using the music box that belonged to Miss Banner. Everyone liked this part very much. The singing was not so good, but when the music started, we knew our suffering was almost at an end. Pastor Amen lifted both hands and told us to rise. Mrs. Amen walked to the front of the room. So did the nervous missionary named Lasher, like laoshu, ‘mouse,’ so that was what we called her, Miss Mouse. There was also a foreign doctor named Swan, which sounded like suan-le, ‘too late’ – no wonder sick people were scared to see him. Dr. Too Late was in charge of opening Miss Banner’s music box and winding it with a key. When the music started, the three of them sang. Mrs. Amen had tears pouring from her eyes. Some of the old country people asked out loud if the box contained tiny foreigners.

Miss Banner once told me the music box was a gift from her father, the only memory of her family that she had left. Inside, she kept a little album for writing down her thoughts. The music, she said, was actually a German song about drinking beer, dancing, and kissing pretty girls. But Mrs. Amen had written new words, which I heard a hundred times but only as sounds: ‘We’re marching with Jesus on two willing feet, when Death turns the corner, our Lord we shall meet.’ Something like that. You see, I remember that old song, but this time the words have new meaning. Anyway, that was the song we heard every week, telling everyone to go outside to eat a bowl of rice, a gift from Jesus. We had many beggars who thought Jesus was a landlord with many rice fields.

The second Sunday, Pastor Amen spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner for three. Then Pastor for another five minutes, Miss Banner for one. Everything became shorter and shorter on the Chinese side, and the flies drank from our sweat for only one and a half hours that Sunday. The week after that it was only one hour. Later, Pastor Amen had a long talk with Miss Banner. The following week, Pastor Amen spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner spoke the same amount. Again Pastor spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner the same amount. But now she didn’t talk about rules for going to heaven. She was saying, ‘Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived a giant and the filial daughter of a poor carpenter who was really a king. …’ At the end of each five minutes, she would stop at a very exciting part and say something like: ‘Now I must let Pastor speak for five minutes. But while you wait, ask yourself, Did the tiny princess die, or did she save the giant?’ After the sermon and story were over, she told people to shout ‘Amen’ if they were ready to eat their free bowl of rice. Ah, big shouts!

Those Sunday sermons became very popular. Many beggars came to hear Miss Banner’s stories from her childhood. The Jesus Worshippers were happy. The rice-eaters were happy. Miss Banner was happy. I was the only one who worried. What if Pastor Amen learned what she was doing? Would he beat her? Would the God Worshippers pour coals over my body for teaching a foreigner to have a disobedient Chinese tongue? Would Pastor Amen lose face and have to hang himself? Would the people who came for rice and stories and not Jesus go to a foreigners’ hell?

When I told Miss Banner my worries, she laughed and said no such thing would happen. I asked her how she knew this. She said, ‘If everyone is happy, what harm can follow?’ I remembered what the man who returned to Thistle Mountain had said: ‘Too much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow.’

We had five years of happiness. Miss Banner and I became great and loyal friends. The other missionaries remained strangers to me. But from seeing little changes every day, I knew their secrets very well. Lao Lu told me about shameful things he saw from outside their windows, also strange things he saw when he was inside their rooms. How Miss Mouse cried over a locket holding a dead person’s hair. How Dr. Too Late ate opium pills for his stomachache. How Mrs. Amen hid pieces of Communion bread in her drawer, never eating it, just saving it for the end of the world. How Pastor Amen reported to America that he had made one hundred converts when really it was only one.

In return, I told Lao Lu some of the secrets I had seen myself. That Miss Mouse had feelings for Dr. Too Late, but he didn’t notice. That Dr. Too Late had strong feelings for Miss Banner, and she pretended not to notice. But I did not tell him that Miss Banner still had great feelings for her number-three sweetheart, a man named Wa-ren. Only I knew this.

For five years, everything was the same, except for these small changes. That was our life back then, a little hope, a little change, a little secret.

And yes, I had my secrets too. My first secret was this. One night, I dreamed I saw Jesus, a foreign man with long hair, long beard, many followers. I told Miss Banner, except I forgot to mention the part about the dream. So she told Pastor Amen, and he put me down for a hundred converts – that’s why I knew it was only one. I didn’t tell Miss Banner to correct him. Then he would have been more ashamed that his hundred converts was not even one.

My second secret was much worse.

This happened soon after Miss Banner told me she had lost her family and her hopes. I said I had so much hope I could use my leftovers to wish her sweetheart would change his mind and return. This pleased her very much. So that’s what I prayed for, for at least one hundred days.

One evening, I was sitting on a stool in Miss Banner’s room. We were talking, talking, talking. When we ran out of the usual complaints, I asked if we could play the music box. Yes, yes, she said. I opened the box. No key. It’s in the drawer, she said. Ah! What’s this? I picked up an ivory carving and held it to my eye. It was in the shape of a naked lady. Very unusual. I remembered seeing something like it once. I asked her where the little statue had come from.

‘It belonged to my sweetheart,’ she said. ‘The handle of his walking stick. When it broke off, he gave it to me as a remembrance. ‘

Wah! That’s when I knew Miss Banner’s sweetheart was the traitor. General Cape. All this time, I had been praying for him to come back. Just thinking about it shriveled my scalp.

So that was my second secret: that I knew who he was. And the third was this: I started praying he would stay away.

Let me tell you, Libby-ah, I didn’t know how much she hungered for love, any kind. Sweet love didn’t last, and it was too hard to find. But rotten love! – there was plenty to fill the hollow. So that’s what she grew accustomed to, that’s what she took as soon as it came back.




5 LAUNDRY DAY (#ulink_14eb942e-e20d-5552-8e07-ba36725dd299)


Just like clockwork, the phone rings at eight. That makes it the third morning in a row Kwan’s called at the exact moment that I’m buttering toast. Before I can say hello, she blurts out: ‘Libby-ah, ask Simon – name of stereo fix-it store, what is?’

‘What’s wrong with your stereo?’

‘Wrong? Ahhhh … too much noise. Yes-yes, I play radio, it go cccahhhhhhhssss.’

‘Did you try adjusting the frequency?’

‘Yes-yes! I often adjust.’

‘How about standing back from the stereo? Maybe you’re conducting a lot of static today. It’s supposed to rain.’

‘Okay-okay, maybe try that first. But just case, you call Simon, ask him store name.’

I’m in a good mood. I want to see how far she’ll carry her ruse. ‘I know the store,’ I say, and search for a likely-sounding name. ‘Yeah, it’s Bogus Boomboxes. On Market Street.’ I can practically hear Kwan’s mind whirring and clicking into alternate mode.

Finally she laughs and says, ‘Hey, you bad girl – lie! No such name.’

‘And no such stereo problem,’ I add.

‘Okay-okay. You call Simon, tell him Kwan say Happy Birthday.’

‘Actually, I was going to call him for the same reason.’

‘Oh, you so bad! Why you torture me, embarrass this way!’ She lets out a wheezy laugh, then gasps and says, ‘Oh, and Libby-ah, after call Simon, call Ma.’

‘Why? Is her stereo broken too?’

‘Don’t joke. Her heart feel bad.’

I’m alarmed. ‘What’s wrong? Is it serious?’

‘Mm-hmm. So sad. You remember new boyfriend she have, I May Hopfree?’

‘High-may ho-fray,’ I pronounce slowly. ‘Jaime Jofré.’

‘I always remember, I May Hopfree. And that’s what he do! Turn out he married already. Chile lady. She show up, pinch his ear, take home.’

‘No!’ A ripple of glee flows into my cheeks, and I mentally slap myself.

‘Yes-yes, Ma so mad! Last week she buy two loveboat cruise ticket. Hopfree say use your Visa, I pay you back. Now no pay, no cruise, no refund. Ah! Poor Ma, always find wrong man. … Hey, maybe I do matchmake for her. I choose better for her than she choose herself. I make good match, bring me luck.’

‘What if it’s not so good?’

‘Then I must fix, make better. My duty.’

After we hang up, I think about Kwan’s duty. No wonder she sees my impending divorce as a personal and professional failure on her part. She still believes she was our spiritual mei-po, our cosmic matchmaker. And I’m hardly in the position to tell her that she wasn’t. I was the one who asked her to convince Simon we were destined to be together, linked by the necessity of fate.

Simon Bishop and I met more than seventeen years ago. At that moment in our lives, we were willing to place all our hopes on the ridiculous – pyramid power, Brazilian figa charms, even the advice of Kwan and her ghosts. We both were terribly in love, I with Simon, he with someone else. The someone else happened to have died before I ever met Simon, although I didn’t know that until three months later.

I spotted Simon in a linguistics class at UC Berkeley, spring quarter 1976. I noticed him right away because like me he had a name that didn’t fit with his Asian features. Eurasian students weren’t as common then as they are now, and as I stared at him, I had the sense I was seeing my male doppelgänger. I started wondering how genes interact, why one set of racial characteristics dominates in one person and not in another with the same background. I once met a girl whose last name was Chan. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and no, she wearily explained, she was not adopted. Her father was Chinese. I figured that her father’s ancestors had engaged in secret dalliances with the British or Portuguese in Hong Kong. I was like that girl, always having to explain about my last name, why I didn’t look like a Laguni. My brothers look almost as Italian as their last name implies. Their faces are more angular than mine. Their hair has a slight curl and is a lighter shade of brown.

Simon didn’t look like any particular race. He was a perfectly balanced blend, half Hawaiian-Chinese, half Anglo, a fusion of different racial genes and not a dilution. When our linguistics class formed study groups, Simon and I drifted toward the same one. We didn’t mention what we so obviously shared.

I remember the first time he brought up his girlfriend, because I had been hoping he didn’t have one. Five of us were cramming for a midterm. I was listing the attributes of Etruscan: a dead language, as well as an isolate, unrelated to other languages … In the middle of my summary, Simon blurted: ‘My girlfriend, Elza, she went on a study tour of Italy and saw these incredible Etruscan tombs.’

We looked at him – like, So? Mind you, Simon didn’t say, ‘My girlfriend, who, by the way, is as dead as this language.’ He talked about her in passing, as if she were alive and well, traveling on Eurail and sending postcards from Tuscany. After a few seconds of awkward silence, he looked sheepish and mumbled the way people do when they’re caught arguing with themselves while walking down the sidewalk. Poor guy, I thought, and at that moment my heartstrings went twing.

After class, Simon and I would often take turns buying each other coffee at the Bear’s Lair. There we added to the drone of hundreds of other life-changing conversations and epiphanies. We discussed primitivism as a Western-biased concept. Mongrelization as the only longterm answer to racism. Irony, satire, and parody as the deepest forms of truth. He told me he wanted to create his own philosophy, one that would guide his life’s work, that would enable him to make substantive changes in the world. I looked up the word substantive in the dictionary that night, then realized I wanted a Substantive life too. When I was with him, I felt as if a secret and better part of myself had finally been unleashed. I had dated other guys to whom I felt attracted, but those relationships seldom went beyond the usual good times induced by all-night parties, stoned conversations, and sometimes sex, all of which soon grew as stale as morning breath. With Simon, I laughed harder, thought more deeply, felt more passionately about life beyond my own cubbyhole. We could volley ideas back and forth like tennis pros. We wrestled with each other’s minds. We unearthed each other’s past with psychoanalytic gusto.

I thought it was eerie how much we had in common. Both of us had lost a parent before the age of five, he a mother, I a father. We both had owned pet turtles; his died after he accidentally dropped them into a chlorinated swimming pool. We both had been loners as kids, abandoned to caretakers – he to two unmarried sisters of his mother’s, I to Kwan.

‘My mom left me in the hands of someone who talked to ghosts!’ I once told him.

‘God! I’m amazed you aren’t crazier than you already are.’ We laughed, and I felt giddy about our making fun of what had once caused me so much pain.

‘Good ol’ Mom,’ I added. ‘She’s the quintessential social worker, totally obsessed with helping strangers and ignoring the homefront. She’d rather keep an appointment with her manicurist than lift a finger to help her kids. Talk about phony! It wasn’t that she was pathological, but, you know – ’

And Simon jumped in: ‘Yeah, even benign neglect can hurt for a lifetime.’ Which was exactly what I was feeling but couldn’t put into words. And then he clinched my heart: ‘Maybe her lack of attention is what made you as strong as you are today.’ I nodded eagerly as he went on: ‘I was thinking that, because my girlfriend – you know, Elza – well, she lost both parents when she was a baby. Talk about strong-willed – whew!’

That’s how we were together, intimate in every way – up to a point. I sensed we were attracted to each other. From my end it was a strong sexual charge. From his it was more like static cling – which he easily shook off: ‘Hey, Laguni,’ he’d say, and put his hand firmly on my shoulder. ‘I’m bushed, gotta run. But if you want to go over notes this weekend, give me a call.’ With this breezy sendoff, I’d trudge back to my apartment, nothing to do on a Friday night, because I had turned down a date hoping that Simon would ask me out. By then I was stupid-in-love with Simon – goo-goo-eyed, giggly-voiced, floaty-headed, infatuated in the worst way. There were so many times when I lay in bed, disgusted that I was twitching with unspent desire. I wondered: Am I crazy? Am I the only one who’s turned on? Sure, he has a girlfriend. So what? As everyone knows, when you’re in college and changing your mind about a million things, a current girlfriend can turn into a former one overnight.

But Simon didn’t seem to know that I was flirting with him. ‘You know what I like about you?’ he asked me. ‘You treat me like a good buddy. We can talk about anything and we don’t let the other thing get in the way.’

‘The other what?’

‘The fact that we are … Well, you know, the opposite-sex thing.’

‘Really?’ I said, faking astonishment. ‘You mean, I’m a girl but you’re a – I had no idea!’ And then we both broke into hearty guffaws.

At night I’d cry angrily, telling myself that I was a fool. I vowed many times to give up any hope of romance with Simon – as if it were possible to will myself not to be in love! But at least I knew how to put on a good front. I continued to play the jovial good buddy, listening with a smile on my face and a cramp in my heart. I expected the worst. And sure enough, sooner or later, he would bring up Elza, as though he knew she was on my mind as well.

Through three months of masochistic listening I came to know the minutiae of her life: That she lived in Salt Lake City, where she and Simon had grown up, tussling with each other since the fifth grade. That she had a two-inch scar on the back of her left knee the shape and color of an earthworm, a mysterious legacy from infancy. That she was athletic; she kayaked, backpacked, and was an expert cross-country skier. That she was musically gifted, a budding composer, who had studied with Artur Balsam at a famous summer music camp in Blue Hill, Maine. She’d even written her own thematic variation on the Goldberg Variations. ‘Really?’ I said to each praiseworthy thing he said about her. ‘That’s amazing.’

The strange thing is, he kept speaking about her in the present tense. Naturally I thought she was alive in the present time. Once, Simon pointed out I had smeared lipstick on my teeth, and as I hurriedly rubbed it off, he added, ‘Elza doesn’t wear makeup, not even lipstick. She doesn’t believe in it.’ I wanted to scream, What’s there to believe!? You either wear makeup or you don’t! By then I wanted to smack her, a girl so morally upright she had to be the most odious hominid ever to walk planet Earth, in her non-animal hide shoes. Even if Elza had been sweet and insipid, it wouldn’t have mattered, I still would have despised her. To me, Elza didn’t deserve Simon. Why should she have him as one of her perks of life? She deserved an Olympic gold medal for Amazon discus-throwing. She deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for saving retarded baby whales. She deserved to play organ for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Simon, on the other hand, deserved me, someone who could help him discover the recesses of his soul, the secret passageways that Elza had barricaded with constant criticism and disapproval. If I complimented Simon – told him what he had said was profound, for example – he’d say, ‘You think so? Elza says one of my biggest faults is going along with whatever’s nice and easy, that I don’t think things through hard enough.’

‘You can’t believe everything that Elza says.’

‘Yeah, that’s what she says too. She hates it when I just go along with what’s been handed to me as truth. She believes in trusting your own intuitions, sort of like that guy who wrote Walden, what’s his name, Thoreau. Anyway, she thinks it’s important for us to argue, to get to the marrow of what we believe and why.’

‘I hate to argue.’

‘I don’t mean argue in the sense of a fight. More of a debate, like what you and I do.’

I hated being compared and falling short. I tried to sound playful. ‘Oh? So what do you two debate?’

‘Like whether celebrities have a responsibility as symbols and not just as people. Remember when Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted?’

‘Sure,’ I lied.

‘Elza and I both thought he was great, taking a personal stand like that against the war. But then he wins back the heavyweight title and later President Ford invites him to the White House. Elza said, “Can you believe it?” I said, “Hell, if I were invited, I’d go to the White House too.” And she said, “By a Republican president? During an election year?” She wrote him a letter.’

‘The president?’

‘No, Muhammad Ali.’

‘Oh, right. Of course.’

‘Elza says you can’t just talk politics or watch it happen on television. You have to do something, otherwise you’re part of it.’

‘Part of what?’

‘You know, hypocrisy. It’s the same as corruption.’

I imagined Elza looking like Patty Hearst, wearing a beret and combat fatigues, an automatic rifle perched on her hip.

‘She believes all people should take an active moral position on life. Otherwise the world’s going to end in thirty years or less. A lot of our friends say she’s a pessimist. But she thinks she’s the real optimist, because she wants to do something to change the world in a positive way. If you think about it, she’s right.’

While Simon grew more expansive about Elza’s ridiculous opinions, I’d be dreamily analyzing his features, how chameleon-like they were. His face would change – from Hawaiian to Aztecan, Persian to Sioux, Bengali to Balinese.

‘What kind of name is Bishop?’ I asked one day.

‘On my father’s side, missionary eccentrics. I’m descended from the Bishops – you know? – the family of Oahu Island fame. They went to Hawaii in the eighteen hundreds to convert lepers and heathens, then ended up marrying royalty and owning half the island.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Unfortunately, I’m also from the side of the family that didn’t inherit any of the wealth, not a single pineapple orchard or golf course. On my mother’s side, we’re Hawaiian-Chinese, with a couple of royal princesses swimming in the gene pool. But again, no direct access to beachfront property.’ And then he laughed. ‘Elza once said I inherited from the missionary side of my family the laziness of blind faith, and from my royal Hawaiian side a tendency to use others to take care of my needs rather than working to fulfill them myself.’

‘I don’t think that’s true, that stuff about inherited nature, as if we’re destined to develop into a certain kind of person without choice. I mean, hasn’t Elza ever heard of determinism?’

Simon looked stumped. ‘Hmmm,’ he said, thinking. For a moment, I felt the satisfaction of having vanquished a competitor with a subtle and deft move.

But then he remarked: ‘Doesn’t the doctrine of determinism say that all events and even human choices follow natural laws, meaning it kind of goes along with what Elza was saying?’

‘What I mean is,’ and I began to stammer as I tried to recall what I’d skimmed over in philosophy class, ‘I mean, how do we define natural? Who’s to say what’s natural and what’s not?’ I was flailing, trying to keep my pathetic self above water. ‘Besides, what’s her background?’

‘Her folks are Mormon, but they adopted her when she was a year old and named her Elsie, Elsie Marie Vandervort. She doesn’t know who her biological parents were. But ever since she was six, before she knew how to read music, she could hear a song just once, then play it exactly, note for note. And she especially loved music by Chopin, Paderewski, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Copland – I forget the others. Later she discovered every single one of them was either Polish or Jewish. Isn’t that weird? So that made her think she was probably a Polish Jew. She started calling herself Elza instead of Elsie.’

‘I like Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann,’ I said smartly, ‘but that doesn’t make me a German.’

‘It wasn’t just that. When she was ten, something happened which will sound really bizarre, but I swear it’s true, because I saw part of it. She was in the school library, flipping through an encyclopedia, and she saw a photo of some crying kid and his family being rounded up by soldiers. The caption said they were Jews being taken to Auschwitz. She didn’t know where Auschwitz was or even that it was a concentration camp. But she literally smelled something horrible that made her shake and gag. And then she fell to her knees and started chanting: “Osh-vee-en-shim, osh-vee-en-shim,” something like that. The librarian shook her, but Elza wouldn’t stop – she couldn’t. So the librarian dragged her to the school nurse, Mrs. Schneebaum. And Mrs. Schneebaum, who was Polish, heard Elza chanting “Osh-vee-en-shim” and freaked. She thought Elza was saying this to make fun of her. Well, get this: It turned out “Oświeçim” is the way you say “Auschwitz” in Polish. After Elza came out of her trance, she knew her parents were Polish Jews who had survived Auschwitz.’

‘What do you mean, she knew?’

‘She just knew – like the way hawks know to hover on a stream of air, the way rabbits freeze with fear. It’s knowledge that can’t be taught. She said her mother’s memories passed from heart to womb, and they’re now indelibly printed on the walls of her brain.’



‘Come on!’ I said dismissively. ‘She sounds like my sister Kwan.’

‘How so?’

‘Oh, she just makes up any old theory to suit whatever she believes. Anyway, biological instinct and emotional memories aren’t the same thing. Maybe Elza read or heard about Auschwitz before and didn’t remember. You know how people see old photos or movies and later think they were personal memories. Or they have a déjà vu experience – and it’s just a bad synapse feeding immediate sensory perception into longterm memory. I mean, does she even look Polish or Jewish?’ And right after I said that I had a dangerous thought. ‘You have a picture of her?’ I asked as casually as possible.

While Simon dug out his wallet, I could feel my heart revving like a race car, about to confront my competition. I feared she would look devastatingly beautiful – a cross between Ingrid Bergman illuminated by airport runway lights and Lauren Bacall sulking in a smoke-filled bar.

The photo showed an outdoorsy girl, backlit by a dusk-hour glow, frizzy hair haloing a sullen face. Her nose was long, her chin childishly small, her lower lip curled out in mid-utterance, so that she looked like a bulldog. She was standing next to a camping tent, arms akimbo, hands perched on chunky hips. Her cutoff jeans were too tight, sharply creased at the crotch. There was also her ridiculous T-shirt, with its ‘Question Authority’ in lumpy letters stretched over the mounds of her fatty breasts.

I thought to myself, Why, she isn’t gorgeous. She isn’t even button-nose cute. She’s as plain as a Polish dog without mustard. I was trying to restrain a smile, but I could have danced the polka I was so happy. I knew that comparing myself with her that way was superficial and irrelevant. But I couldn’t help feeling happily superior, believing I was prettier, taller, slimmer, more stylish. You didn’t have to like Chopin or Paderewski to recognize that Elza was descended from Slavic peasant stock. The more I looked, the more I rejoiced. To finally see the demons of my insecurity, and they were no more threatening than her cherub-faced kneecaps.

What the hell did Simon see in her? I tried to be objective, look at her from a male point of view. She was athletic, there was that. And she certainly gave the impression of being smart, but in an intimidating, obnoxious way. Her breasts were far bigger than mine; they might be in her favor – if Simon was stupid enough to like fleshy globules that would someday sag to her navel. You might say that her eyes were interesting, slanted and catlike. Although on second glance, they were disturbing, smudged with dark hollows. She stared straight into the camera and her look was both penetrating and vacant. Her expression suggested that she knew the secrets of the past and future and they were all sad.

I concluded Simon had confused loyalty with love. After all, he had known Elza since childhood. In a way, you had to admire him for that. I handed the picture back to him, trying not to appear smug. ‘She seems awfully serious. Is that something you inherit being a Polish Jew?’

Simon studied the photo. ‘She can be funny when she wants. She can do impersonations of anyone – gestures, speech patterns, foreign accents. She’s hilarious. She can be. Sometimes. But.’ He paused, struggling. ‘But you’re right. She broods a lot about how things can be better, why they should be, until she goes into a funk. She’s always been that way, moody, serious, I guess you might even say depressed. I don’t know where that comes from. Sometimes she can be so, you know, unreasonable,’ and he trailed off, seemingly troubled, as if he were now viewing her from a new light and her features were glaringly unattractive.

I hoarded these observational tidbits as weapons to use in the future. Unlike Elza, I would become a true optimist. I would take action. In contrast to her lugubriousness, I would be buoyant. Instead of being a critical mirror, I would admire Simon’s insights. I too would take active political stands. But I’d laugh often and show Simon that life with a spiritual soul mate didn’t have to be all doom and gloom. I was determined to do whatever was necessary to unseat her from Simon’s heart.

After seeing Elza’s picture, I thought she would be easy to displace. Foolish me, I didn’t know I would have to pry Simon from the clutches of a ghost. But that day, I was so happy I even accepted an invitation from Kwan to come to dinner. I brought my laundry, and just to be pleasant, I pretended to listen to her advice.






Libby-ah, let me do this. You don’t know how to use my washing machine. Not too much soap, not too much hot, always turn the pockets inside out …

Libby-ah, ai-ya, why do you have so many black clothes? You should wear pretty colors! Little flowers, polka dots, purple is a good color for you. White, I don’t like. Not because of superstition. Some people think that white means death. No such thing. In the World of Yin, there are many, many colors you don’t even know because you can’t see them with your eyes. You have to use your secret senses, imagine them when you are full of genuine feelings and memories, both happy and sad. Happy and sad sometimes come from the same thing, did you know this?

Anyway, white I don’t like because it’s too easy to get dirty, too hard to clean. It’s not practical. I know, because in my last lifetime, I had to wash lots of white laundry – lots, lots, lots. That was one of the ways I earned my room in the Ghost Merchant’s House.

On the First Day of each week I had to wash. On the Second Day, I ironed what I had washed. The Third Day was for polishing shoes and mending clothes. The Fourth Day was for sweeping the courtyard and passageways, the Fifth Day for mopping the floors and wiping the furniture in God’s House. The Sixth Day was for important business.

I liked the Sixth Day the most. Together Miss Banner and I walked around the village, handing out pamphlets called ‘The Good News.’ Even though the paper contained English words turned into Chinese, I couldn’t read them. Since I couldn’t read, I couldn’t teach Miss Banner to read. And in the poor parts of the village that we walked through, nobody knew how to read either. But people were glad to take those pamphlets. They used them to stuff inside their winter clothes. They put them over rice bowls to keep out flies. They pasted them over cracks in walls. Every few months, a boat from Canton came and brought more boxes of these pamphlets. So every week, on the Sixth Day, we had plenty to hand out. We didn’t know that what we really were giving those people was plenty of future trouble.

When we returned to the Ghost Merchant’s House, happy and empty-handed, Lao Lu would put on a little show for us. He would climb up a column, then walk quickly along the edge of the roof, while we gasped and cried, ‘Don’t fall!’ Then he would turn around and pick up a brick and place this on his head, then a teacup on top of that, then a bowl, a plate, all sorts of things of different sizes and weights. Again he would walk along that skinny edge, while we screamed and laughed. I think he was always trying to recover face from that time he fell into the water with Miss Banner and her trunk.

The Seventh Day, of course, was for going to God’s House, then resting in the afternoon, talking in the courtyard, watching the sunset, the stars, or a lightning storm. Sometimes I plucked leaves from a bush that grew in the courtyard. Lao Lu always corrected me: ‘That’s not a bush. It’s a holy tree. See here.’ He would stand with his arms straight out, like a ghost walking in the night, claiming that the spirit of nature now flowed from the tree’s limbs into his. ‘You eat the leaves,’ he said, ‘and you find peace, balance in yourself, piss on everyone else.’ So every Sunday, I used those leaves to make a tea, like a thank-you gift to Lao Lu for his show. Miss Banner always drank some too. Each week, I would say, ‘Hey, Lao Lu, you are right, the tea from this bush makes a person feel peaceful.’ Then he would say, ‘That’s not just any dogpissing bush, it’s a holy tree.’ So you see, those leaves did nothing to cure him of cursing, too bad.

After the Seventh Day, it was the First Day all over again, the one I’m now going to talk about. And as I said, I had to wash the dirty clothes.

I did my washing in the large walled passageway just outside the kitchen. The passageway had a stone-paved floor and was open to the sky but shaded by a big tree. All morning long, I kept big pots of water and lime boiling, two pots because the missionaries didn’t allow me to have men and ladies swimming together in the same hot water. One pot I scented with camphor, the other with cassia bark, which smells like cinnamon. Both were good for keeping away cloth-eating moths. In the camphor water, I boiled white shirts and the secret underclothes of Pastor Amen and Dr. Too Late. I boiled their bedding, the cloths they used to wipe their noses and brows. In the pot with cassia bark, I boiled the blouses, the secret underclothes of the ladies, their bedding, the cloths they used to wipe their lady noses.

I laid the wet clothes on the wheel of an old stone mill, then rolled the stone to squeeze out the water. I put the squeezed clothes into two baskets, men and ladies still separate. I poured the leftover cassia water over the kitchen floor. I poured the leftover camphor water over the passageway floor. And then I carried the baskets through the gateway, into the back area, where there were two sheds along the wall, one for a mule, one for a buffalo cow. Between these two sheds was a rope stretched very tight. And this is where I hung the laundry to dry.

On my left side was another wall, and a gateway that led into a large strolling garden, bounded by high stone walls. It was a beautiful place, once tamed by the hands of many gardeners, now neglected and wild. The stone bridges and ornamental rocks still stood, but the ponds underneath were dried up, no fish only weeds. Everything was tangled together – the flowering bushes, the branches of trees, weeds and vines. The pathways were thick with the leaves and blossoms of twenty seasons, so soft and cool on my feet. The paths rolled up and down in surprising ways, letting me dream I was climbing back up Thistle Mountain. The top of one of these hills was just big enough for a small pavilion. Inside the pavilion were stone benches covered with moss. In the middle of the stone floor was a burnt spot. From this pavilion, I could look over the wall, see the village, the limestone peaks, the archway going into the next mountain valley. Every week, after I washed the clothes, I soaked duck eggs in leftover lime and buried them in the garden to let them cure. And when I was done with that, I stood in the pavilion, pretending the world I saw beyond the wall was mine. I did this for several years, until one day Lao Lu saw me standing there. He said, ‘Ai, Nunumu, don’t go up there anymore, that’s where the Punti merchant died, in the pavilion.’

Lao Lu said the merchant was standing there one evening, with his four wives down below. He gazed at the sky and saw a cloud of black birds. The merchant cursed them, then burst into flames. Wah! The fire roared, the merchant’s fat hissed and spattered. Below, his terrified wives yowled, smelling the pungent odor of fried chili and garlic. All at once, the fire went out, and smoke in the shape of the merchant rose and blew away. When his wives crept up to the pavilion, they found no ash, only his feet and shoes remained. Also, the smell, terrible and delicious at the same time.

After Lao Lu told me that, I worried about that smell every time I hung the laundry, every time I went into the garden to bury my eggs. I smelled camphor, cassia, dead leaves, and flowering bushes. But the day that I’m now talking about, I thought I smelled the Ghost Merchant, his fear of death, very strong, chili and garlic, maybe a little vinegar too. It was a day of great heat, during the month when the cicadas unbury themselves after lying four years in the ground. They were singing, the males shrieking for females, each one trying to be the loudest. I kept my one eye aimed toward the gateway, just in case the Ghost Merchant was in there, looking for his feet. I heard a rustling sound, dry leaves crackling, twigs snapping, and black birds rushed up out of the bushes and scattered in the sky. The cicadas fell silent.

My bones were trembling. I wanted to run away. But I heard the Ghost Bandit Maiden inside me say, ‘Scared? How can you be scared of a Punti merchant with no feet? Go inside and see where he is.’ I was now both scared and ashamed to be scared. I carefully went to the gateway, peeked in. When the cicadas began to buzz, I ran into the garden, my feet crunching dead leaves. I darted onto the stone bridge, past the dry pond, over the hills rolling up and down. When the buzzing turned into clacks, I stopped, knowing the cicadas would soon exhaust themselves and fall quiet. Using their song, I ran and stopped, ran and stopped, until I was standing at the bottom of the hill big enough for a small pavilion. I circled its bottom when the clacking stopped, and stared at a man sitting on a stone bench, eating a tiny banana. I had never heard of a ghost eating a banana. Of course, since then, other ghosts have told me that they sometimes pretend to eat bananas, although never ones with lots of black bruises, which is what this man’s banana had.

When the man saw me, he leapt to his feet. He had a peculiar but elegant face, not Chinese, not foreign. He wore gentleman’s clothes. I had seen this man before, I was sure of it. Then I heard sounds coming from the other side of the hill, a loud stream of water splashing on rocks, a man sighing, feet crunching twenty seasons of leaves. I saw the flash of a silver-tipped walking stick, the hollowed face of the man who owned it. His hands were busy closing the many buttons of his trousers. This was General Cape, and the elegant man with the banana was the one-half man called Yiban.

Wah! Here was the man I had prayed would return to Miss Banner. I later prayed that he would stay away, but I must not have asked God that as many times.

Cape barked to Yiban, and then Yiban said to me, ‘Little Miss, this gentleman is a famous Yankee general. Is this the house where the Godworshipping foreigners live?’

I didn’t answer. I was remembering what the man who came back to Thistle Mountain had said: that General Cape had turned traitor against the Hakkas. I saw General Cape looking at my shoes. He spoke again, and Yiban translated: ‘The lady who gave you those leather shoes is a great friend of the general. She is anxious to see him.’

So the shoes with my feet inside led the two men to Miss Banner. And Yiban was right. She was anxious to see General Cape. She threw her arms around him and let him lift her in the air. She did this in front of Pastor Amen and Mrs. Amen, who although they were husband and wife never touched each other, not even in their own room – that’s what Lao Lu told me. Late at night, when everyone was supposed to be asleep but was not, Miss Banner opened her door and General Cape quickly walked from his room into hers. Everyone heard this; we had no windows, only wooden screens.

I knew Miss Banner would call the general into her room. Earlier that evening, I had told her Cape was a traitor to Hakka people, that he would be a traitor to her as well. She became very angry with me, as if I were saying these things to curse her. She said General Cape was a hero, that he had left her in Canton only to help the God Worshippers. So then I told her what the man who returned to Thistle Mountain had said: that General Cape had married a Chinese banker’s daughter for gold. She said my heart was rotten meat and my words were maggots feeding on gossip. She said if I believed these things about General Cape, then I would no longer be her loyal friend.

I said to her, ‘When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?’ She didn’t answer.

Late at night, I heard the music box play, the one her father had given her when she was a young girl. I heard the music that made tears pour from Mrs. Amen’s eyes, but now the music was making a man kiss a girl. I heard Miss Banner sigh, again and again. And her happiness was so great it spilled over, leaked into my room, and turned into tears of sorrow.






I’ve started doing my laundry at Kwan’s house again. Simon used to take care of the wash – that was one of the nice things about being married to him. He liked to tidy up the house, snap fresh sheets and smooth them onto the bed. Since he left, I’ve had to wash my own clothes. The coin-op machines are in the basement of my building, and the mustiness and dim light give me the willies. The atmosphere preys on my imagination. But then, so does Kwan.

I always wait until I run out of clean underwear. And then I throw three bagfuls of laundry into the car and head for Balboa Street. Even now, as I stuff my clothes into Kwan’s dryer, I think about that story she told me the day I was so hopeful with love. When she got to the part about joy turning into sorrow, I said, ‘Kwan, I don’t want to hear this anymore.’

‘Ah? Why?’

‘It bums me out. And right now, I want to stay in a good mood.’

‘Maybe I tell you more, don’t become bum. You see mistake Miss Banner do – ’

‘Kwan,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about Miss Banner. Ever.’

What power! What relief! I was amazed how strong Simon made me feel. I could stand up to Kwan. I could decide whom I should listen to and why. I could be with someone like Simon, who was down-to-earth, logical, and sane.

I never thought that he too would fill my life with ghosts.




II (#ulink_fc0c976a-cd8e-5688-bcaf-f974b2d5a05a)










6 FIREFLIES (#ulink_9f88526b-6ce6-50d2-989a-edc16321e55e)


The night Simon kissed me for the first time was when I finally learned the truth about Elza. The spring quarter had ended and we were walking in the hills behind the Berkeley campus, smoking a joint. It was a warm June night, and we came upon an area where tiny white lights were twinkling in the oak trees as if it were Christmas.

‘Am I hallucinating?’ I asked.

‘Fireflies,’ Simon answered. ‘Aren’t they amazing?’

‘Are you sure? I don’t think they exist in California. I’ve never seen them before.’

‘Maybe some student bred them for a work-study experiment and let them go.’

We sat on the scabby trunk of a fallen tree. Two flickering bugs were zigzagging their way toward each other, their attraction looking haphazard yet predestined. They flashed on and off like airplanes headed for the same runway, closer and closer, until they sparked for an instant as one, then extinguished themselves and flitted darkly away.

‘That’s romance for you,’ I said.

Simon smiled and looked right at me. He awkwardly put his arm around my waist. Ten seconds passed, twenty seconds, and we hadn’t moved. My face grew hot, my heart was beating fast, as I realized we were crossing the confines of friendship, about to leap over the fence and run for the wilds. And sure enough, our mouths, like those fireflies, bobbed and weaved toward each other. I closed my eyes when his lips reached mine, both of us trembly and tentative. Just as I pressed in closer to let him take me into a more passionate embrace, he released me, practically pushed me. He started talking in an apologetic tone.

‘Oh God, I’m sorry. I really like you, Olivia. A lot. It’s complicated, though, because of – well, you know.’

I flicked a bug off the trunk, stared at it dumbly as it twirled on its back.

‘You see, the last time I saw her, we had a terrible fight. She got very angry with me, and I haven’t seen her since. That was six months ago. The thing is, I still love her. But – ’

‘Simon, you don’t have to explain.’ I stood up on shaky legs. ‘Let’s just forget it, okay?’

‘Olivia, sit down. Please. I have to tell you. I want you to understand. This is important.’

‘Let go of me. Forget it, okay? Oh, shit! Just pretend it never happened!’

‘Wait. Come back. Sit down, please sit down. Olivia, I have to tell you this.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘Because I think I love you too.’

I caught my breath. Of course, I would have preferred if he hadn’t qualified his declaration with ‘I think’ and ‘too,’ as if I could be part of an emotional harem. But infatuated as I was, ‘love’ was enough to act as both balm and bait. I sat down.




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