The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [33]
When my mother led us out of nightmares and horror movies, I felt loved. I felt safe hearing my name sung with hers and my father’s, my brothers’ and sisters’, her anger at children who hurt themselves surprisingly gone. An old-fashioned woman would have called in the streets for her sick child. She’d hold its little empty coat unbuttoned, “Come put on your coat, you naughty child.” When the coat puffed up, she’d quickly button up the spirit inside and hurry it home to the child’s body in bed. But my mother, a modern woman, said our spells in private. “The old ladies in China had many silly superstitions,” she said. “I know you’ll come back without my making a fool of myself in the streets.”
Not when we were afraid, but when we were wide awake and lucid, my mother funneled China into our ears: Kwangtung Province, New Society Village, the river Kwoo, which runs past the village. “Go the way we came so that you will be able to find our house. Don’t forget. Just give your father’s name, and any villager can point out our house.” I am to return to China where I have never been.
After two years of study—the graduates of three-week and six-week courses were more admired by the peasants for learning at such wondrous speeds—my mother returned to her home village a doctor. She was welcomed with garlands and cymbals the way people welcome the “barefoot doctors” today. But the Communists wear a blue plainness dotted with one red Mao button. My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair. She had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains.
“When I stepped out of my sedan chair, the villagers said, ‘Ahhh,’ at my good shoes and my long gown. I always dressed well when I made calls. Some villages brought out their lion and danced ahead of me. You have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America.” Until my father sent for her to live in the Bronx, my mother delivered babies in beds and pigsties. She stayed awake keeping watch nightly in an epidemic and chanted during air raids. She yanked bones straight that had been crooked for years while relatives held the cripples down, and she did all this never dressed less elegantly than when she stepped out of the sedan chair.
Nor did she change her name: Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies.
Walking behind the palanquin so that the crowd took her for one of themselves following the new doctor came a quiet girl. She carried a white puppy and a rice sack knotted at the mouth. Her pigtails and the puppy’s tail ended in red yarn. She may have been either a daughter or a slave.
When my mother had gone to Canton market to shop, her wallet had unfolded like wings. She had received her diploma, and it was time to celebrate. She had hunted out the seed shops to taste their lichees, various as wines, and bought a sack that was taller than a child to bedazzle the nieces and nephews. A merchant had given her one nut fresh on its sprig of narrow leaves. My mother popped the thin wood shell in her curled palm. The white fruit, an eye without an iris, ran juices like spring rivers inside my mother’s mouth. She spit out the brown seed, iris after all.
She had bought a turtle for my grandfather because it would lengthen