• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Go visit your mother and father first,” my mother-in-law said, a generous woman. “They want to welcome you.”

My mother and father and the entire clan would be living happily on the money I had sent them. My parents had bought their coffins. They would sacrifice a pig to the gods that I had returned. From the words on my back, and how they were fulfilled, the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality.

My American life has been such a disappointment.

“I got straight A’s, Mama.”

“Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village.”

I could not figure out what was my village. And it was important that I do something big and fine, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums. You can’t eat straight A’s.

When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, “‘Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,’” I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stop.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. ‘There’s no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls.’”

“I would hit her if she were mine. But then there’s no use wasting all that discipline on a girl. ‘When you raise girls, you’re raising children for strangers.’”

“Stop that crying!” my mother would yell. “I’m going to hit you if you don’t stop. Bad girl! Stop!” I’m going to remember never to hit or to scold my children for crying, I thought, because then they will only cry more.

“I’m not a bad girl,” I would scream. “I’m not a bad girl. I’m not a bad girl.” I might as well have said, “I’m not a girl.”

“When you were little, all you had to say was ‘I’m not a bad girl,’ and you could make yourself cry,” my mother says, talking-story about my childhood.

I minded that the emigrant villagers shook their heads at my sister and me. “One girl—and another girl,” they said, and made our parents ashamed to take us out together. The good part about my brothers being born was that people stopped saying, “All girls,” but I learned new grievances. “Did you roll an egg on my face like that when I was born?” “Did you have a full-month party for me?” “Did you turn on all the lights?” “Did you send my picture to Grandmother?” “Why not? Because I’m a girl? Is that why not?” “Why didn’t you teach me English?” “You like having me beaten up at school, don’t you?”

“She is very mean, isn’t she?” the emigrant villagers would say.

“Come, children. Hurry. Hurry. Who wants to go out with Great-Uncle?” On Saturday mornings my great-uncle, the ex-river pirate, did the shopping. “Get your coats, whoever’s coming.”

“I’m coming. I’m coming. Wait for me.”

When he heard girls’ voices, he turned on us and roared, “No girls!” and left my sisters and me hanging our coats back up, not looking at one another. The boys came back with candy and new toys. When they walked through Chinatown, the people must have said, “A boy—and another boy—and another boy!” At my great-uncle’s funeral I secretly tested out feeling glad that he was dead—the six-foot bearish masculinity of him.

I went away to college—Berkeley in the sixties—and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam.

If I went to Vietnam, I would not come back; females desert families. It was said, “There is an outward tendency in females,” which meant that I was getting straight A’s for the good of my future husband’s family, not my own. I did not plan ever to have a husband. I would show my mother and father and the nosey emigrant villagers that girls have no outward tendency. I stopped getting straight A’s.

And all the time I was having to turn myself American-feminine, or no dates.

There is a Chinese word for the female I—which is “slave.” Break the women with their own tongues!

I refused to cook. When I