The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [87]
At Chinese school there was a mentally retarded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind. He had an enormous face, and he growled. He laughed from so far within his thick body that his face got confused about what the sounds coming up into his mouth might be, laughs or cries. He barked unhappily. He didn’t go to classes but hung around the playgrounds. We suspected he was not a boy but an adult. He wore baggy khaki trousers like a man’s. He carried bags of toys for giving to certain children. Whatever you wanted, he’d get it for you—brand-new toys, as many as you could think up in your poverty, all the toys you never had when you were younger. We wrote lists, discussed our lists, compared them. Those kids not in his favor gave lists to those who were. “Where do you get the toys?” I asked. “I… own … stores,” he roared, one word at a time, thick tongued. At recess the day after ordering, we got handed out to us coloring books, paint sets, model kits. But sometimes he chased us—his fat arms out to the side; his fat fingers opening and closing; his legs stiff like Frankenstein’s monster, like the mummy dragging its foot; growling; laughing-crying. Then we’d have to run, following the old rule, running away from our house.
But suddenly he knew where we worked. He found us; maybe he had followed us in his wanderings. He started sitting at our laundry. Many of the storekeepers invited sitting in their stores, but we did not have sitting because the laundry was hot and because it was outside Chinatown. He sweated; he panted, the stubble rising and falling on his fat neck and chin. He sat on two large cartons that he brought with him and stacked one on top of the other. He said hello to my mother and father, and then, balancing his heavy head, he lowered himself carefully onto his cartons and sat. My parents allowed this. They did not chase him out or comment about how strange he was. I stopped placing orders for toys. I didn’t limp anymore; my parents would only figure that this zombie and I were a match.
I studied hard, got straight A’s, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect. At school there were dating and dances, but not for good Chinese girls. “You ought to develop yourself socially as well as mentally,” the American teachers, who took me aside, said.
I told nobody about the monster. And nobody else was talking either; no mention about the laundry workers who appeared and disappeared; no mention about the sitter. Maybe I was making it all up, and queer marriage notions did not occur to other people. I had better not say a word, then. Don’t give them ideas. Keep quiet.
I pressed clothes—baskets of giants’ BVD’s, long underwear even in summertime, T-shirts, sweat shirts. Laundry work is men’s clothes, unmarried-men’s clothes. My back felt sick because it was toward the monster who gave away toys. His lumpishness was sending out germs that would lower my IQ. His leechiness was drawing IQ points out of the back of my head. I maneuvered my work shifts so that my brothers would work the afternoons, when he usually came lumbering into the laundry, but he caught on and began coming during the evening, the cool shift. Then I would switch back to the afternoon or to the early mornings on weekends and in summer, dodging him. I kept my sister with me, protecting her without telling her why. If she hadn’t noticed, then I mustn’t scare her. “Let’s clean house this morning,” I’d