The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [55]
“I think you should go look for my father,” she said. “I’d like to meet him. I’d like to see what my father looks like.”
“What does it matter what he’s like?” said her mother. “You’re a grown woman with a husband and children of your own. You don’t need a father—or a mother either. You’re only curious.”
“In this country,” said Brave Orchid, “many people make their daughters their heirs. If you don’t go see him, he’ll give everything to the second wife’s children.”
“But he gives us everything anyway. What more do I have to ask for? If I see him face to face, what is there to say?”
“I can think of hundreds of things,” said Brave Orchid. “Oh, how I’d love to be in your place. I could tell him so many things. What scenes I could make. You’re so wishy-washy.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You have to ask him why he didn’t come home. Why he turned into a barbarian. Make him feel bad about leaving his mother and father. Scare him. Walk right into his house with your suitcases and boxes. Move right into the bedroom. Throw her stuff out of the drawers and put yours in. Say, ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.’”
“Oh, no, I can’t do that. I can’t do that at all. That’s terrible.”
“Of course you can. I’ll teach you. ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.’ And you teach the little boys to call you Mother.”
“I don’t think I’d be very good with little boys. Little American boys. Our brother is the only boy I’ve known. Aren’t they very rough and unfeeling?”
“Yes, but they’re yours. Another thing I’d do if I were you, I’d get a job and help him out. Show him I could make his life easier; how I didn’t need his money.”
“He has a great deal of money, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he can do some job the barbarians value greatly.”
“Could I find a job like that? I’ve never had a job.”
“You could be a maid in a hotel,” Brave Orchid advised. “A lot of immigrants start that way nowadays. And the maids get to bring home all the leftover soap and the clothes people leave behind.”
“I would clean up after people, then?”
Brave Orchid looked at this delicate sister. She was such a little old lady. She had long fingers and thin, soft hands. And she had a high-class city accent from living in Hong Kong. Not a trace of village accent remained; she had been away from the village for that long. But Brave Orchid would not relent; her dainty sister would just have to toughen up. “Immigrants also work in the canneries, where it’s so noisy it doesn’t matter if they speak Chinese or what. The easiest way to find a job, though, is to work in Chinatown. You get twenty-five cents an hour and all your meals if you’re working in a restaurant.”
If she were in her sister’s place, Brave Orchid would have been on the phone immediately, demanding one of those Chinatown jobs. She would make the boss agree that she start work as soon as he opened his doors the next morning. Immigrants nowadays were bandits, beating up store owners and stealing from them rather than working. It must’ve been the Communuists who taught them those habits.
Moon Orchid rubbed her forehead. The kitchen light shined warmly on the gold and jade rings that gave her hands a completeness. One of the rings was a wedding ring. Brave Orchid, who had been married for almost fifty years, did not wear any rings. They got in the way of all the work. She did not want the gold to wash away in the dishwater and the laundry water and the field water. She looked at her younger sister whose very wrinkles were fine. “Forget about a job,” she said, which was very lenient of her. “You won’t have to work. You just go to your husband’s house and demand your rights as First Wife. When you see him, you can say, ‘Do you remember me?’”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Then start telling him details about your life together in China. Act like a fortuneteller. He’ll be so impressed.”
“Do you think he’ll be glad to see me?”
“He better be glad to see you.”
As midnight