The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [48]
“We belong to the planet now, Mama. Does it make sense to you that if we’re no longer attached to one piece of land, we belong to the planet? Wherever we happen to be standing, why, that spot belongs to us as much as any other spot.” Can we spend the fare money on furniture and cars? Will American flowers smell good now?
“I don’t want to go back anyway,” she said. “I’ve gotten used to eating. And the Communists are much too mischievous. You should see the ones I meet in the fields. They bring sacks under their clothes to steal grapes and tomatoes from the growers. They come with trucks on Sundays. And they’re killing each other in San Francisco.” One of the old men caught his visitor, another old fellow, stealing his bantam; the owner spotted its black feet sticking out of his guest’s sweater. We woke up one morning to find a hole in the ground where our loquat tree had stood. Later we saw a new loquat tree most similar to ours in a Chinese neighbor’s yard. We knew a family who had a sign in their vegetable patch: “Since this is not a Communist garden but cabbages grown by private enterprise, please do not steal from my garden.” It was dated and signed in good handwriting.
“The new immigrants aren’t Communists, Mother. They’re fugitives from the real Communists.”
“They’re Chinese, and Chinese are mischievous. No, I’m too old to keep up with them. They’d be too clever for me. I’ve lost my cunning, having grown accustomed to food, you see. There’s only one thing that I really want anymore. I want you here, not wandering like a ghost from Romany. I want every one of you living here together. When you’re all home, all six of you with your children and husbands and wives, there are twenty or thirty people in this house. Then I’m happy. And your father is happy. Which ever room I walk into overflows with my relatives, grandsons, sons-in-law. I can’t turn around without touching somebody. That’s the way a house should be.” Her eyes are big, inconsolable. A spider headache spreads out in fine branches over my skull. She is etching spider legs into the icy bone. She pries open my head and my fists and crams into them responsibility for time, responsibility for intervening oceans.
The gods pay her and my father back for leaving their parents. My grandmother wrote letters pleading for them to come home, and they ignored her. Now they know how she felt.
“When I’m away from here,” I had to tell her, “I don’t get sick. I don’t go to the hospital every holiday. I don’t get pneumonia, no dark spots on my x-rays. My chest doesn’t hurt when I breathe. I can breathe. And I don’t get headaches at 3:00. I don’t have to take medicines or go to doctors. Elsewhere I don’t have to lock my doors and keep checking the locks. I don’t stand at the windows and watch for movements and see them in the dark.”
“What do you mean you don’t lock your doors?”
“I do. I do. But not the way I do here. I don’t hear ghost sounds. I don’t stay awake listening to walking in the kitchen. I don’t hear the doors and windows unhinging.”
“It was probably just a Wino Ghost or a Hobo Ghost looking for a place to sleep.”
“I don’t want to hear Wino Ghosts and Hobo Ghosts. I’ve found some places in this country that are ghost-free. And I think I belong there, where I don’t catch colds or use my hospitalization insurance. Here I’m sick so often, I can barely work. I can’t help it, Mama.”
She yawned. “It’s better, then, for you to stay away. The weather in California must not agree with you. You can come for visits.” She got up and turned off the light. “Of course, you must go, Little Dog.”
A weight lifted from me. The quilts must be filling with air. The world is somehow lighter. She has not called me that endearment for years—a name to fool the gods. I am really a Dragon, as she