I Love a Broad Margin to My Life - Maxine Hong Kingston [44]
of the fields before me, and the hills I see and the hills
beyond my sight, and the river and the connecting rivers
to the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean, and more
oceans, and lands the waters touch. I own
and am responsible for all of it. My kuleana.
My duty. My business. Up to me. I walk
my land and territory, and see how, what
my people are doing. I’ve felt this majesty before—
at Cal Berkeley, my university, where I studied
and taught. I walk that campus of groves and daylight
creeks, and hills, whence I watch the sun
set into the horizon and compassing sea.
Mine: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
the Radiation Laboratories, the ones in Livermore
and Los Alamos. And the cyclotron and the stadium,
both sitting on the Hayward Fault, on the North
American Plate crunching past the Pacific Plate.
My failure: U.C. Berkeley sawed down
and wood-chipped the oak grove and Grandmother Tree.
The next task: Prevent British Petroleum,
which endowed 50 million dollars to Cal, from
building labs along—over—Strawberry
Creek and up and across Strawberry Canyon.
Jingyi, the English teacher who recognized
me—“your majesty”—teaches at Jinan
University. MaMa had a friend
who taught there, visited us in California;
I couldn’t find her at Jinan, moved to Australia.
I took Jingyi’s hand. Holding hands,
laughing, we walked from the music temple, walked
along the river, walked with our village.
(Ours, though she’s from Xinjiang, where Uighurs live.)
I joined, a day late, the 10,000
old people. And the crowd walking
jam-packed along the Red River in Viet Nam
(Red River too in Minnesota) and the Perfume
River through Huế. And the lines of mourners reading
the names on the Vietnam Memorial, and seeing
ourselves, like a platoon, like a peace march, reflected
in the black granite. Crowdstream everywhere
always walking, moving, moving, migrating,
connecting, separating, losing the others, off
on one’s own, finding them, losing them again,
finding again. We are a curl of the scroll,
“Along the River during Ching Ming Festival.”
People dressed in holiday clothes are leaving
their huts and villas, crossing bridges on foot
and on horses and camels, rowing little boats
along the banks and around islands and shoals.
Ladies are riding sedan chairs from out
the city gates. Men work the festival,
selling food and tree branches, juggling
balls and plates, staging a play, staging
a puppet show. Men carry loads.
Men drive wide teams of mules,
10 mules wide. Poor men beg;
monks beg. Mid-river, mid-scroll,
the Rainbow Bridge carries people and animals
up and over the river. Oh. Oh.
A ship is blowing sideways into the bridge;
sailors are lowering the sails as fast as they can.
Teams of men on the shore and under the bridge
are pulling on tow ropes. A few people
at the railings watch for the ship to slide beneath them.
I remember: I was one of many tiny people—
the grown-ups tiny as well as the children—
walking through blue space, nothing
above and below but sky. We were refugees
fleeing war, carrying babies, carrying
bundles of all we own, herding and leading
work animals and pets, yet we were
happy and gay, dressed in layers and layers
of our prettiest clothes, out for a walk
on a bright and sunny day. Warm sun
lit scarves and blankets red and turquoise,
colors everywhere. I looked down
at my feet; I was wearing high-ankle shoes
of white light. I was walking on a floor
that was gold-brown skin, the back of a giant,
who had made a bridge of himself. His hands held
on to an edge of a mountain crevice, and his toes
dug into the opposite edge. My father
walked alongside me. I was safe;
I was not scared. I have a sure memory
of this scene of my life, but could it be
memory of a dream, a former incarnation, a movie?
I have searched high and low through archives
of movies, and cannot find the Rainbow Bridge
Giant helping people like my family and tribe
walk across the sky. I found proof
of happenings which I have no bodily nor
mental memory of—snapshots