The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [27]
“The other students fought over who could sit next to me at exams,” says my mother. “One glimpse at my paper when they got stuck, and they could keep going.”
“Did you ever try to stop them from copying your paper?”
“Of course not. They only needed to pick up a word or two, and they could remember the rest. That’s not copying. You get a lot more clues in actual diagnosis. Patients talk endlessly about their ailments. I’d feel their pulses knocking away under my very fingertips—so much clearer than the paperdolls in the textbooks. I’d chant the symptoms, and those few words would start a whole chapter of cures tumbling out. Most people don’t have the kind of brains that can do that.” She pointed at the photograph of the thirty-seven graduates. “One hundred and twelve students began the course at the same time I did.”
She suspected she did not have the right kind of brains either, my father the one who can recite whole poems. To make up the lack, she did secret studying. She also gave herself twenty years’ headstart over the young girls, although she admitted to only ten, which already forced her to push. Older people were expected to be smarter; they are closer to the gods. She did not want to overhear students or teachers say, “She must be exceedingly stupid, doing no better than anyone else when she is a generation older. She’s so dumb, she has to study day and night.”
“I studied far in advance,” says my mother. “I studied when the breathing coming from the beds and coming through the wood walls was deep and even. The night before exams, when the other students stayed up, I went to bed early. They would say, ‘Aren’t you going to study?’ and I’d say, ‘No, I’m going to do some mending,’ or, ‘I want to write letters tonight.’ I let them take turns sitting next to me at the tests.” The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods.
Maybe my mother’s secret place was the room in the dormitory which was haunted. Even though they had to crowd the other rooms, none of the young women would sleep in it. Accustomed to nestling with a bedful of siblings and grannies, they fitted their privacy tighter rather than claim the haunted room as human territory. No one had lived in it for at least five years, not since a series of hauntings had made its inhabitants come down with ghost fear that shattered their brains for studying. The haunted ones would give high, startled cries, pointing at the air, which sure enough was becoming hazy. They would suddenly turn and go back the way they had come. When they rounded a corner, they flattened themselves fast against the building to catch what followed unawares moving steadily forward. One girl tore up the photographs she had taken of friends in that room. The stranger with arms hanging at its sides who stood beside the wall in the background of the photograph was a ghost. The girl would insist there had been nobody there when she took the picture. “That was a Photo Ghost,” said my mother when the students talked-story. “She needn’t have been afraid. Most ghosts are only nightmares. Somebody should have held her and wiggled her ears to wake her up.”
My mother relished these scare orgies. She was good at naming—Wall Ghost, Frog Spirit (frogs are “heavenly chickens”), Eating Partner. She could find descriptions of phenomena in ancient writings—the Green Phoenix stories, “The Seven Strange Tales of the Golden Bottle,” “What Confucius Did Not Talk About.” She could validate ghost sightings.
“But ghosts can’t be just nightmares,” a storyteller protested. “They come right out into the room. Once our whole family saw wine cups spinning and incense sticks waving through the air. We got the magic monk to watch all night.