The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [81]
I was wrong about nobody taking care of her. Her sister became a clerk-typist and stayed unmarried. They lived with their mother and father. She did not have to leave the house except to go to the movies. She was supported. She was protected by her family, as they would normally have done in China if they could have afforded it, not sent off to school with strangers, ghosts, boys.
We have so many secrets to hold in. Our sixth grade teacher, who liked to explain things to children, let us read our files. My record shows that I flunked kindergarten and in first grade had no IQ—a zero IQ. I did remember the first grade teacher calling out during a test, while students marked X’s on a girl or a boy or a dog, which I covered with black. First grade was when I discovered eye control; with my seeing I could shrink the teacher down to a height of one inch, gesticulating and mouthing on the horizon. I lost this power in sixth grade for lack of practice, the teacher a generous man. “Look at your family’s old addresses and think about how you’ve moved,” he said. I looked at my parents’ aliases and their birthdays, which variants I knew. But when I saw Father’s occupations I exclaimed, “Hey, he wasn’t a farmer, he was a…” He had been a gambler. My throat cut off the word—silence in front of the most understanding teacher. There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China.
Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese. “Don’t tell,” said my parents, though we couldn’t tell if we wanted to because we didn’t know. Are there really secret trials with our own judges and penalties? Are there really flags in Chinatown signaling what stowaways have arrived in San Francisco Bay, their names, and which ships they came on? “Mother, I heard some kids say there are flags like that. Are there? What colors are they? Which buildings do they fly from?”
“No. No, there aren’t any flags like that. They’re just talking-story. You’re always believing talk-story.”
“I won’t tell anybody, Mother. I promise. Which buildings are the flags on? Who flies them? The benevolent associations?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the San Francisco villagers do that; our villagers don’t do that.”
“What do our villagers do?”
They would not tell us children because we had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts, and were ourselves ghost-like. They called us a kind of ghost. Ghosts are noisy and full of air; they talk during meals. They talk about anything.
“Do we send up signal kites? That would be a good idea, huh? We could fly them from the school balcony.” Instead of cheaply stringing dragonflies by the tail, we could fly expensive kites, the sky splendid in Chinese colors, distracting ghost eyes while the new people sneak in. Don’t tell. “Never tell.”
Occasionally the rumor went about that the United States immigration authorities had set up headquarters in the San Francisco or Sacramento Chinatown to urge wetbacks and stowaways, anybody here on fake papers, to come to the city and get their files straightened out. The immigrants discussed whether or not to turn themselves in. “We might as well,” somebody would say. “Then we’d have our citizenship for real.”
“Don’t be a fool,” somebody else would say. “It’s a trap. You go in there saying you want to straighten out your papers, they’ll deport you.”
“No, they won’t. They’re promising that nobody is going to go to jail or get deported. They’ll give you citizenship as a reward for turning yourself in, for your honesty.”
“Don’t you believe it. So-and-so trusted them, and he was deported. They deported his children too.”
“Where can they send