I Love a Broad Margin to My Life - Maxine Hong Kingston [16]
breakfast or lunch or dinner or suey yeah.
Life is easier on a woman. Your abilities,
my good Old Rooster, were to swim and to farm.
In the city, you had to sell your lick.
Ladies and gentlemen fellow travelers, he
sold his kung.” His strength, his labor. “You
rode a water-soldier boat out
to one of the warships from all over
the world. I watched you be lifted and lowered
by ropes. You hung from ropes down the side
of the ship’s mountainface. Using rags,
you painted the gray ship gray,
ashes, ashes, gray on top of gray.
Fields of gray above you and behind you, you
and the cadre of painters—many women—women,
who adore flowers—oozed gray everywhere
you touched. Metal doubled the sun’s heat,
and baked you, baked lead paint into
your skin. You could’ve let yourself
fall backward into air and water. But you,
everyday you went to Pun Shan Shek
and toiled for me. For me, you caught yang
fever. You breathed poison. Skin and lungs
breathed poison, sweated poison. We
could not wash the gray paint out of you.
It was painting warships killed you. That work
so dangerous, the foreign nations don’t order
their own water soldiers to do it. Old One,
I thank you for your care of me. You are / were
a good hardworking husband to me.
I’m sorry / I can’t face you, my gray
Old Rooster, we never had a son.
Okay. We’re each other’s child.
I take care of you, and you take care of me.
I bring you home. I’m sorry / I can’t
face you, I have taken too long
to bring you home. Stacks and stacks of caskets
and urns wait to get out of Hong Kong.
I pulled you out of the pile-up. We’re on
our way home. You’re a good man.
You worked hard. Jeah jeah jeah.
Daw jeah. Thanks thanks thanks.
Big thanks.” No verb tenses,
what is still happening? What is over?
Yet refugee camps? Yet piles
of unburied dead? Yet coolies painting
ships with lead? All that’s happened always
happening? “I too am walking mountain,”
said a man dressed Hong Kong styly,
expensive suit, expensive shoes, expensive
luggage. “I’ll sweep the graves, I mean, fix them.
Find my people’s bones, and bury them again.”
(Oh, to say “my people.”) “Cousin
was mad; he dug up Po and Goong.”
Mr. Walking Mountain laughed—heh
heh heh heh. Chinese laugh
when telling awfulness. “Cousin dug and cried,
dug and cried, ‘Out the Olds! Out
the Olds! Out! Out, old family.
Out, old thoughts. Out! Out!’
He dug up our grandparents and scattered
their bones—ha ha ha—because
I was rich in Hong Kong and did not
send money—heh heh heh—
did not feed him, did not make good,
did not make good him.” Chinese
laugh when pained. “I return. I shall
walk mountain, and follow li. I’ll
make good the ancestors.” Jing ho.
Make good. Fix. “Dui dui,”
said the Big Family. “Dui dui dui.”
Oh, to hear dui dui dui
to whatever I have to say.
The listening world gives approval, dui
dui dui dui. The train stops
at stations in built-up places. Where’s
open country? The planted fields, water
and rice, rice and water, are but green
belts around factory-villages. Those are
50-gallon drums of something rusting
into the paddy. That apartment and that
factory is a village. Legs of Robotron
stomp through the remains of the old pueblo.
Gray pearlescence—marshes and lakes,
mists and skies mirroring mirroring. Beautiful,
and alive. Or dead with oil slick? Mist
or smoke? Why are Wittman and I
on journey with the dead, and escorts of the dead?
Toward sunset, there swung past
a series of pretty villages, yellow adobe
houses, almost gold in the last light,
almost houseboats, wood railings
on the river for laundry and fishing. Half
the homes hung on either bank. Make
up your mind, Monkey, get off the train,
see the rivertown, enter its symmetry.
Paddle the river straight down the valley;
stream with the sun’s long rays. Walk
the right bank and the left bank. Get
yourself invited into those homes. Sit
on the balcony facing the river and the neighbors
on the other side, everyone’s backs to mountains.
Upon Good Earth, lay the body down,
open the mouth wide, let song