I Love a Broad Margin to My Life - Maxine Hong Kingston [1]
I don’t want to look like Grandmother,
Ah Po. Her likeness is the mask of tragedy.
“An ape weeps when another ape weeps.”
She is Ancestress; she is prayed to. She
sits, the queen, center of the family in China,
center of the family portrait (my mother in it too,
generations of in-laws around her)—all
is black and white but for a dot of jade-green
at Po’s ears, and a curve of jade-green
at her wrist. Lotus lily feet show
from the hem of her gown. She wanted to be
a beauty. She lived to be 100.
My mother lived to be 100. “One
hundred and three,” she said. Chinese
lie about their age, making themselves older.
Or maybe she was 97 when the lady official
from Social Security visited her, as the government visits
everyone who claims a 100th birthday.
MaMa showed off; she pedaled her exercise
bike, hammer-curled hot pink barbells.
Suddenly stopped—what if So-so Security
won’t believe she’s a century old?
Here’s a way for calculating age: Subtract
from her age of death my age now.
100 − 65 = 35
I am 35 years-to-go.
Lately, I’ve been
writing a book a decade; I have time
to write 3 more books. Jane Austen
wrote 6 books. I’ve written 6 books.
Hers are 6 big ones, mine
4 big ones and 2 small ones.
I take refuge in numbers. I
waste my time with sudoku.
Day dawns, I am greedy, helpless
to begin 6-star difficulty
sudoku. Sun goes
down; I’m still stuck for that square
that will let the numbers fly into place.
What good am I getting out
of this? I’m not stopping time. Nothing
to show for my expenditures. Pure nothing.
8 days before my birthday, I went
to John Mulligan’s funeral. He was 10
years younger than me. He died without
finishing his book, MIAmerica.
(I have a superstition that as long as I,
any writer, have things to write, I keep living.)
I joined in singing again and again
a refrain, “Send thou his soul to God.” Earll,
though, did not sing, did not
say any of the Latin, any of the prayers.
He muttered that the Catholic Church divides you
against yourself, against your sexy body.
“The Church is a gyp.” John Mulligan should’ve
been given a pagan ceremony; Woman Warrior,
Robert Louis Stevenson, and Cuchulain
had come to him in Viet Nam. John
carried them, tied to him by silver cords,
to the U.S. The priest, who came from the Philippines,
kept reminding one and all that the benefits
he was offering were for “Christians” only. But
he did memorialize John being born and raised
in Scotland, and coming to America at 17.
Summarily drafted to Viet Nam. You
didn’t have to be a citizen to be drafted.
The war count, as of today:
Almost 2,000 killed in Iraq. G.I.s.
Not counting Afghanis,
Iraqis,
civilians,
mercenaries,
children, babies,
journalists.
7 days before my birthday, I had breakfast with
Mary Gordon, who’s always saying things
I never thought before: “It’s capitalistic
of us to expect any good from peace demonstrations,
as if ritual has to have use, gain, profit.”
I agreed, “Yes, it’s Buddhist to go parading
for the sake of parading.” “Can you think of a writer
(besides Chekhov) who is holy and an artist?”
“Grace Paley.” She smiled. “Well, yes.”
Obviously. “Thoreau.” “Oh, no. Thoreau’s
too Protestant, tidy, nonsexual. He goes
home to Mom for hot chocolate. No
sex, no tragedy, no humor.”
Come to think of it, Thoreau doesn’t make
me laugh. A line from Walden hangs over one
of my desks:
I love a broad margin to my life.
Sitting here at this sidewalk café with Mary,
deliberately taking time off from writing
and teaching duties, I am making a broad margin
to my life. The margin will be broader when we part,
and I am alone. Thoreau swam, then sat in the doorway
of his “Shelter,” “large box,” “dwelling-house,”
alone all the summer morning, rapt
in the sunlight and the trees and the stillness.
Birds flitted through the house. “… Until
by the sun falling in at my west window,
or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant
highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.”
I have a casita of my own, built instead of
a