The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [52]
Brave Orchid’s husband and children brought everything into the dining room, provisions for a lifetime move heaped all over the floor and furniture. Brave Orchid wanted to have a luck ceremony and then to put things away where they belonged, but Moon Orchid said, “I’ve got presents for everybody. Let me get them.” She opened her boxes again. Her suitcase lids gaped like mouths; Brave Orchid had better hurry with the luck.
“First I’ve got shoes for all of you from Lovely Orchid,” Moon Orchid said, handing them out to her nieces and nephews, who grimaced at one another. Lovely Orchid, the youngest aunt, owned either a shoe store or a shoe factory in Hong Kong. That was why every Christmas she sent a dozen pairs, glittering with yellow and pink plastic beads, sequins, and turquoise blue flowers. “She must give us the leftovers,” Brave Orchid’s children were saying in English. As Brave Orchid ran back and forth turning on all the lights, every lamp and bulb, she glared sideways at her children. They would be sorry when they had to walk barefoot through snow and rocks because they didn’t take what shoes they could, even if the wrong size. She would put the slippers next to the bathtub on the linoleum floors in winter and trick her lazy children into wearing them.
“May I have some scissors? Oh, where are my scissors?” said Moon Orchid. She slit the heel of a black embroidered slipper and pulled out the cotton—which was entangled with jewels. “You’ll have to let me pierce your ears,” she told her nieces, rubbing their earlobes. “Then you can wear these.” There were earrings with skewers like gold krisses. There was a jade heart and an opal. Brave Orchid interrupted her dashing about to rub the stones against her skin.
Moon Orchid laughed softly in delight. “And look here. Look here,” she said. She was holding up a paper warrior-saint, and he was all intricacies and light. A Communist had cut a wisp of black paper into a hero with sleeves like butterflies’ wings and with tassels and flags, which fluttered when you breathed on him. “Did someone really cut this out by hand?” the children kept asking. “Really?” The eyebrows and mustache, the fierce wrinkles between the eyes, the face, all were the merest black webs. His open hand had been cut out finger by finger. Through the spaces you could see light and the room and each other. “Oh, there’s more. There’s more,” said Moon Orchid happily. She picked up another paper cutout and blew on it. It was the scholar who always carries a fan; her breath shook its blue feathers. His brush and quill and scrolls tied with ribbon jutted out of lace vases. “And more”—an orange warrior-poet with sword and scroll; a purple knight with doily armor, holes for scales; a wonderful archer on a red horse with a mane like fire; a modern Communist worker with a proud gold hammer; a girl Communist soldier with pink pigtails and pink rifle. “And this is Fa Mu Lan,” she said. “She was a woman warrior, and really existed.” Fa Mu Lan was green and beautiful, and her robes whirled out as she drew her sword.
“Paper dolls,” said Brave Orchid to her children. “I’d have thought you were too old to be playing with dolls.” How greedy to play with presents in front of the giver. How impolite (“untraditional” in Chinese) her children were. With a slam of her cleaver, she cracked rock candy into jagged pieces. “Take some,” she urged. “Take more.” She brought the yellow crystals on a red paper plate to her family, one by one. It was very important that the beginning be sweet. Her children acted as if this eating were a bother. “Oh, all right,” they said, and took the smallest slivers. Who would think that children could dislike candy? It was abnormal, not in the nature of children, not human. “Take a big piece,