I Love a Broad Margin to My Life - Maxine Hong Kingston [41]
against a wall. A wooden stick, milled,
no nodes, no knots, was fastened
across a shut door, high enough
for a person to walk under upright.
On the heavy wood door were posted 2 words:
Family Something. Family Living Room?
Family Forbidden? News had come to us
that this uncle could not pay taxes,
so the government forbade the use of a room.
Don’t let up sending money.
My grandfather had no business being
a trigamist. Poverty for generations. I
looked as far as I could see into
the house, and saw a doorway beyond a doorway
beyond a doorway. A little boy in red
was looking at me from a faraway dimension.
The men of my mother’s family were hiding. They
were afraid that I, eldest daughter of eldest
daughter of First Wife, had come to take possession
of house and land. As I handed the dark woman
and the dark boy many red envelopes
of money (may she distribute it fairly), I said,
“All the turmoil, the not-good, that MaMa
tells me about you—it’s over. No more.
I’ll send money. I won’t forget. I shall
send you money forever.”
But I do forget. Years
go by when I don’t send money, enough
money. I forget China; I forget my family there.
China is too far away. I need
to think it up. I need a time machine.
To imagine hard to make real the people
who appear in letters, stories, dreams, how
to get to them. They forget me too;
I am forgotten. They rarely write
reminding me, Send money. We, all of us,
fall into forgetfulness. Sammosa.
I should’ve said to my Nicaraguan relatives:
You take the house. You keep the land.
House and land, yours. I give you this house.
I give you this property. But I didn’t think
it was mine to give. Who knows who owns
the estate. The collective farm? The Communist
government? Maybe it already belongs
to my enate people. It would’ve done my Nicaraguan
sister good to hear me say, Here,
it’s all yours.
Now, when I arrived
again in my mother’s village, the day after
Old People’s Day, 9/9,
no one of that side of my family was there at
the music temple to welcome me. Not the dark woman,
not any relative with the same grandfather
as me, not one of the men descended
from my step-step-grandmother from Nicaragua.
Who greeted me and shook my hand was the mayoress,
skirt-suited like a woman politician in the West.
She’d be the one in charge if invaders came.
Not the headman, like the president of the seniors,
not the storyteller, like my grandfather.
The mayoress led me, and her assistants, and Earll,
and a couple of Roots officials, and some teachers
and translators, and a TV crew with camera
and mike up the stairs and through the thrown-
open doors. The inside of the temple
was adazzle with light. Impossible brightness that was not
coming from windows or lightbulbs. All
shining, squares and diamonds of fresh red
paper on walls and tabletops shining,
black writing on the red, shining. The villages
grew out of old dark earth;
mold and dust, motes and motes of time,
blacken the adobe and gray the air. Air
pollution hazed the sun; this day
will not count as a blue-sky day.
And yet, the music temple was a surround of light.
The templekeepers had not cleaned up
after the feast of Old People’s Day.
The small chairs, some on their sides,
had not been put away. 10,000
people couldn’t’ve fit. The old folks
ate, were honored in shifts. They’d come
walking, riding on the backs of their children,
riding bicycles, rowing boats, come
here from all over Pearl River
delta. Someone handed me a lit stick
of incense. I, followed by the crowd curious
to see whether this daughter who’d been gone
so long knew and kept the ways—li—
walked step by mindful step toward
the altar, which was the entire back wall.
Holding the stick of incense between palms,
I bowed thrice. 1 goak goong.
2 goak goong. 3 goak goong.
Learned in childhood in Stockton, California.
Maybe means: First, nourish grandfather.
Second, nourish grandfather. Third,
nourish grandfather. Big downbeat
bow on 3. I bowed and bowed and bowed
to ancestors arraying the back wall