The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [92]
I like to look up a troublesome, shameful thing and then say, “Oh, is that all?” The simple explanation makes it less scary to go home after yelling at your mother and father. It drives the fear away and makes it possible someday to visit China, where I know now they don’t sell girls or kill each other for no reason.
Now colors are gentler and fewer; smells are antiseptic. Now when I peek in the basement window where the villagers say they see a girl dancing like a bottle imp, I can no longer see a spirit in a skirt made of light, but a voiceless girl dancing when she thought no one was looking. The very next day after I talked out the retarded man, the huncher, he disappeared. I never saw him again or heard what became of him. Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle. The throat pain always returns, though, unless I tell what I really think, whether or not I lose my job, or spit out gaucheries all over a party. I’ve stopped checking “bilingual” on job applications. I could not understand any of the dialects the interviewer at China Airlines tried on me, and he didn’t understand me either. I’d like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me. I continue to sort out what’s just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living.
Soon I want to go to China and find out who’s lying—the Communists who say they have food and jobs for everybody or the relatives who write that they have not the money to buy salt. My mother sends money she earns working in the tomato fields to Hong Kong. The relatives there can send it on to the remaining aunts and their children and, after a good harvest, to the children and grandchildren of my grandfather’s two minor wives. “Every woman in the tomato row is sending money home,” my mother says, “to Chinese villages and Mexican villages and Filipino villages and, now, Vietnamese villages, where they speak Chinese too. The women come to work whether sick or well. ‘I can’t die,’ they say, ‘I’m supporting fifty,’ or ‘I’m supporting a hundred.’”
What I’ll inherit someday is a green address book full of names. I’ll send the relatives money, and they’ll write me stories about their hunger. My mother has been tearing up the letters from the youngest grandson of her father’s third wife. He has been asking for fifty dollars to buy a bicycle. He says a bicycle will change his life. He could feed his wife and children if he had a bicycle. “We’d have to go hungry ourselves,” my mother says. “They don’t understand that we have ourselves to feed too.” I’ve been making money; I guess it’s my turn. I’d like to go to China and see those people and find out what’s a cheat story and what’s not. Did my grandmother really live to be ninety-nine? Or did they string us along all those years to get our money? Do the babies wear a Mao button like a drop of blood on their jumpsuits? When we overseas Chinese send money, do the relatives divide it evenly among the commune? Or do they really pay 2 percent tax and keep the rest? It would be good if the Communists were taking care of themselves; then I could buy a color t.v.
Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine.
In China my grandmother loved the theater (which I would not have been able to understand because of my seventh-grade vocabulary, said my mother). When the actors came to the