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By Root 253 0

I want you to meet my daughters.” She introduced Brave Orchid to each inmate in the ward—her daughters. She was especially proud of the pregnant ones. “My dear pregnant daughters.” She touched the women on the head, straightened collars, tucked blankets. “How are you today, dear daughter?” “And, you know,” she said to Brave Orchid, “we understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I understand them.” Sure enough, the women smiled back at her and reached out to touch her as she went by. She had a new story, and yet she slipped entirely away, not waking up one morning.

Brave Orchid told her children they must help her keep their father from marrying another woman because she didn’t think she could take it any better than her sister had. If he brought another woman into the house, they were to gang up on her and play tricks on her, hit her, and trip her when she was carrying hot oil until she ran away. “I am almost seventy years old,” said the father, “and haven’t taken a second wife, and don’t plan to now.” Brave Orchid’s daughters decided fiercely that they would never let men be unfaithful to them. All her children made up their minds to major in science or mathematics.

A Song

for a

Barbarian

Reed Pipe

What my brother actually said was, “I drove Mom and Second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt’s husband who’s got the other wife.”

“Did she hit him? What did she say? What did he say?”

“Nothing much. Mom did all the talking.”

“What did she say?”

“She said he’d better take them to lunch at least.”

“Which wife did he sit next to? What did they eat?”

“I didn’t go. The other wife didn’t either. He motioned us not to tell.”

“I would’ve told. If I was his wife, I would’ve told. I would’ve gone to lunch and kept my ears open.”

“Ah, you know they don’t talk when they eat.”

“What else did Mom say?”

“I don’t remember. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would come.”

“There must’ve been more. Didn’t Aunt get in one nasty word? She must’ve said something.”

“No, I don’t think she said anything. I don’t remember her saying one thing.”

In fact, it wasn’t me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he’d told her. His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs. The hearer can carry it tucked away without it taking up much room. Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.

Maybe that’s why my mother cut my tongue. She pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum. Or maybe she snipped it with a pair of nail scissors. I don’t remember her doing it, only her telling me about it, but all during childhood I felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry—and then, when its mouth was wide open like a baby bird’s, cut. The Chinese say “a ready tongue is an evil.”

I used to curl up my tongue in front of the mirror and tauten my frenum into a white line, itself as thin as a razor blade. I saw no scars in my mouth. I thought perhaps I had had two frena, and she had cut one. I made other children open their mouths so I could compare theirs to mine. I saw perfect pink membranes stretching into precise edges that looked easy enough to cut. Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me. At other times I was terrified—the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue.

“Why did you do that to me, Mother?”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again.”

“I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another. You’ll be able to pronounce anything. Your frenum looked too tight to do those things, so I cut it.”

“But isn’t ‘a ready tongue