The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [29]
Two of her roommates walked her to the ghost room. “Aren’t you afraid?” they asked.
“What is there to be afraid of?” she asked. “What could a ghost do to me?” But my mother did pause at the door. “Listen,” she said, “if I am very afraid when you find me, don’t forget to tweak my ears. Call my name and tell me how to get home.” She told them her personal name.
She walked directly to the back of the room, where the boxes formed a windowseat. She sat with the lamp beside her and stared at her yellow and black reflection in the night glass. “I am very pretty,” she thought. She cupped her hands to the window to see out. A thin moon pricked through the clouds, and the long grass waved. “That is the same moon that they see in New Society Village,” she thought, “the same stars.” (“That is the same moon that they see in China, the same stars though shifted a little.”)
When she set the lamp next to the bed, the room seemed darker, the uncurtained window letting in the bare night. She wrapped herself well in her quilt, which her mother had made before dying young. In the middle of one border my grandmother had sewn a tiny satin triangle, a red heart to protect my mother at the neck, as if she were her baby yet.
My mother read aloud; perhaps the others could hear how calmly. The ghost might hear her too; she did not know whether her voice would evoke it or disperse it. Soon the ideographs lifted their feet, stretched out their wings, and flew like blackbirds; the dots were their eyes. Her own eyes drooped. She closed her book and turned off the lamp.
A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She became sharply herself—bone, wire, antenna—but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow—alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.
She did not know whether she had fallen asleep or not when she heard a rushing coming out from under the bed. Cringes of fear seized her soles as something alive, rumbling, climbed the foot of the bed. It rolled over her and landed bodily on her chest. There it sat. It breathed airlessly, pressing her, sapping her. “Oh, no. A Sitting Ghost,” she thought. She pushed against the creature to lever herself out from underneath it, but it absorbed this energy and got heavier. Her fingers and palms became damp, shrinking at the ghost’s thick short hair like an animal’s coat, which slides against warm solidity as human flesh slides against muscles and bones. She grabbed clutches of fur and pulled. She pinched the skin the hair grew out of and gouged into it with her fingernails. She forced her hands to hunt out eyes, furtive somewhere in the hair, but could not find any. She lifted her head to bite but fell back exhausted. The mass thickened.
She could see the knife, which was catching the moonlight, near the lamp. Her arm had become an immensity, though, too burdensome to lift. If she could only move it to the edge of the bed, perhaps it would fall off and reach the knife. As if feeding on her very thoughts, the ghost spread itself over her arm.
A high ringing sound somewhere had grown loud enough so that she heard it, and she understood that it had started humming at the edge of her brain before the ghost appeared. She breathed shallowly, panting as in childbirth, and could not shout out. The room sang, its air electric with the ringing; surely someone would hear and come help.
Earlier in the night, on the other side of the ringing, she could hear women’s voices talking. But soon their conversations had ceased. The school slept. She could feel