The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [47]
In the midnight unsteadiness we were back at the laundry, and my mother was sitting on an orange crate sorting dirty clothes into mountains—a sheet mountain, a white shirt mountain, a dark shirt mountain, a work-pants mountain, a long underwear mountain, a short underwear mountain, a little hill of socks pinned together in pairs, a little hill of handkerchiefs pinned to tags. Surrounding her were candles she burned in daylight, clean yellow diamonds, footlights that ringed her, mysterious masked mother, nose and mouth veiled with a cowboy handkerchief. Before undoing the bundles, my mother would light a tall new candle, which was a luxury, and the pie pans full of old wax and wicks that sometimes sputtered blue, a noise I thought was the germs getting seared.
“No tickee, no washee, mama-san?” a ghost would say, so embarrassing.
“Noisy Red-Mouth Ghost,” she’d write on its package, naming it, marking its clothes with its name.
Back in the bedroom I said, “The candles must have helped. It was a good idea of yours to use candles.”
“They didn’t do much good. All I have to do is think about dust sifting out of clothes or peat dirt blowing across a field or chick mash falling from a scoop, and I start coughing.” She coughed deeply. “See what I mean? I have worked too much. Human beings don’t work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we’re too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She has to find them fast because in a few hours she will forget how to count or that she had any kittens at all. I can’t sleep in this country because it doesn’t shut down for the night. Factories, canneries, restaurants—always somebody somewhere working through the night. It never gets done all at once here. Time was different in China. One year lasted as long as my total time here; one evening so long, you could visit your women friends, drink tea, and play cards at each house, and it would still be twilight. It even got boring, nothing to do but fan ourselves. Here midnight comes and the floor’s not swept, the ironing’s not ready, the money’s not made. I would still be young if we lived in China.”
“Time is the same from place to place,” I said unfeelingly. “There is only the eternal present, and biology. The reason you feel time pushing is that you had six children after you were forty-five and you worried about raising us. You shouldn’t worry anymore, though, Mama. You should feel good you had so many babies around you in middle age. Not many mothers have that. Wasn’t it like prolonging youth? Now wasn’t it? You mustn’t worry now. All of us have grown up. And you can stop working.”
“I can’t stop working. When I stop working, I hurt. My head, my back, my legs hurt. I get dizzy. I can’t stop.”
“I’m like that too, Mama. I work all the time. Don’t worry about me starving. I won’t starve. I know how to work. I work all the time. I know how to kill food, how to skin and pluck it. I know how to keep warm by sweeping and mopping. I know how to work when things get bad.”
“It’s a good thing I taught you children to look after yourselves. We’re not going back to China for sure now.”
“You’ve been saying that since nineteen forty-nine.”
“Now it’s final. We got a letter from the villagers yesterday. They asked if it was all right with us that they took over the land. The last uncles have been killed so your father is the only person left to say it is all right, you see. He has written saying they can have it. So. We have no more China to go home to.”
It must be all over then. My mother and father have stoked each other’s indignation for almost forty years telling stories about land quarrels among the uncles, the in-laws, the grandparents. Episodes from