by Amy Tan
Fifteen minutes after leaving my mother’s home, the girls fall asleep. Phil has chosen to take the 280 freeway, which has less traffic and longer stretches between speed traps. We are still thirty-five miles from home.
“We’re not really keeping that altar thing?” Phil says. It is more a statement than a question.
“Um.”
“It sure is ugly,” he adds. “Although I suppose we could let the girls play with it for a while, until they get tired of it.”
“Um.” I look out the car window, thinking about my mother, what kind of good-luck god she will get for me. We rush past freeway signs and Sunday drivers in the slow lane. I look at the speedometer. We’re going nearly eighty miles an hour.
“What’s the rush?” I say.
Phil slows down, then asks, “Do we have anything to snack on?”
And now I remember the care package my mother gave us. It is stowed at my feet. I look in the bag. Inside are a few tangerines, a roll of toilet paper, a canister of Grand Auntie’s tea, and the picture of my father that I accidentally knocked over last month. The glass has been replaced.
I quickly hand Phil a tangerine, then turn back toward the window so he does not see my tears. I watch the landscape we are drifting by: the reservoir, the rolling foothills, the same houses I’ve passed a hundred times without ever wondering who lives inside. Mile after mile, all of it familiar, yet not, this distance that separates us, me from my mother.
3
WHEN FISH ARE THREE DAYS OLD
Helen thinks all her decisions are always right, but really, she is only lucky. For over fifty years I have seen this happen, how her foolish thinking turns into good fortune. It was like that at lunch yesterday. “Winnie-ah,” she said, “have more chicken.” I told Helen I did not want to eat any more funeral leftovers—five days was enough. So we went shopping at Happy Super, deciding what new things to eat for last night’s dinner.
Helen picked out a flat fish, pom-pom fish, she called it, only a dollar sixty-nine a pound, bargain bin.
And I said, “This kind of bargain you don’t want. Look at his eye, shrunken in and cloudy-looking. That fish is already three days old.”
But Helen stared at that fish eye and said she saw nothing wrong. So I picked up that fish and felt its body slide between my fingers, a fish that had slipped away from life long time ago. Helen said it was a good sign—a juicy, tender fish!
So I smelled that fish for her. I told her how all the sweetness of its meat had risen to the skin and turned stinky-sour in the air. She put that fish to her nose and said, “That’s a good pom-pom smell.”
She bought that three-day-old fish, the dinner I ate at her house last night. And when she served it, her husband poked out a fish cheek, popped it in his mouth, and praised its taste; then their son Frank swallowed the other cheek right away. And Helen took a piece near the tail, the thinnest section, and after smacking her lips, she said she had steamed it just right, not too long. Then she saw my bowl, how it held nothing but rice. She dipped her chopsticks once again, this time near the stomach, took the fattest part of the fish, and laid this on top of my rice.
“Winnie-ah, don’t be polite,” she scolded. So I had to be polite and eat her fish.
I tell you, that fish made me so mad. It was sweet. It was tender. Only one dollar sixty-nine a pound. I started to think, Maybe Helen went back to Happy Super and exchanged that fish. But then I thought, Helen is not that clever. And that’s when I remembered something. Even though Helen is not smart, even though she was born poor, even though she has never been pretty, she has always had luck pour onto her plate, even spill from the mouth of a three-day-old fish.
I am not the same way. I was born with good luck. But over the years, my luck—just like my prettiness—dried out, then carved lines on my face so I would not forget.
I cannot explain exactly how this happened, these changes in my life. If I try to say what happened, my story would not flow forward like a river from the beginning to the end, everything connected, the lake to the sea. If my life had been that way, one thing leading to another, then I could look back and I would know the lessons of my life: the fate that was given me, the choices I took, the mistakes that are mine. And perhaps I would still have time to change my luck.
Helen always tells me, “Why do you think about those old things? Useless to regret. You cannot change the past.” She doesn’t remember. She and I have changed the past many times, for many reasons. And sometimes she changes it for me and does not even know what she has done.
It is like that pom-pom fish Helen bought. Now it is swimming backward into my memory. Because once, many years ago, I bought a special fish for my husband, for Jimmy Louie. Oh, how I loved him! The fish was swimming in a tank when I saw it, caught from the ocean just that morning, so it was still angry. Its body was gleaming with red-orange scales, and when it flashed its tail to turn around in that small tank, the scales swimming now the other way looked pale golden. I told the butcher to wrap that fish live, not in newspaper but in clean, white paper. And as I carried that fish home on the bus, I was so proud, feeling it thrash and knock its head, then its tail. I imagined how sweet this fish would taste in Jimmy’s mouth, how my husband would know this was a special fish, a lucky fish, and that I had good news to give him.
Let me tell you, that fish never stopped fighting me. Before I killed it, it puffed its gills out, spouted bubbles from its mouth to make me think it was poisonous. And even after I gutted it, it jumped up and down in the pan and threw itself on the floor, flopping all around as I chased it with a hammer. And after I cooked it, it still found a way to fight me. Jimmy ate only one bite before a little bone swam down his throat and got stuck, so that each time he swallowed he thought that fish was biting him from the inside out, all night long.
Later, in the hospital, the doctors operated to remove the fish bone. And even though Jimmy could not talk, I knew by his worried face that he was thinking about the cost of the fish-bone operation, the cost of the bed, the cost of the medicines that made him sleep. That’s when I remembered my good news, the reason why I had bought that expensive fish. I had found a job, I told him, making noodles for Hang Ah Bakery. My extra money would now be enough, more than enough, to pay off the hospital in less than one year. And after I told him this, Jimmy squeezed his eyes and tears came out. He moved his mouth; no words came out of his wounded throat. But I could see what he was saying, what he wanted to shout: “Lucky for us! How lucky for us!”
So my luck is not like Helen’s. It is not like other people’s, people who brag how their bad luck turned good. No, I’ll tell you how it is with other people, how it is with me. It is like that girl I once knew in Shanghai, the schoolmate who went to the same Christian school as me. She came from a rich family like mine. She was almost as pretty as me. Around the same time I married my first husband, she had a wedding contract to a rich banking family. But after the summer, her face became marked forever with smallpox, and that contract disappeared. I pitied that girl because she had lost her face two ways.
Many years later I met her again, when Jimmy and I moved to Fresno. She was married to an American Chinese man who owned a grocery store, selling soda pop, potato chips, cigarettes, everything at high prices. That’s how I met her again, at the checkout counter. I was buying ice cream on a stick. She cried, “Sister, sister, remember me!” But she didn’t give me a discount. After I paid her, she told me how her husband was honest, very kind, very nice, and as she said this, she pushed her many jade bracelets up her arm so they would fall back down and clink together like rich music. She was smiling so big all her pock marks looked like the happy dimples she now wore.
But later she dropped her smile and whispered to me, “You remember that son from the banking family in Shanghai?” And she told me, with sincere sadness, not bitter at all—that’s how good life had been to her—that the family had lost all its banks when the Communists took over. Then later, their son, the same wh
o had refused to marry her, jumped off the tower of a building the family once owned along the Huangpu River, and even his wife, the pretty one that he did marry, was too scared to go and claim his body. “Lucky he didn’t marry me,” said my friend.
I have never had luck like that. I refused to marry a good man, a man named Lin, for my first husband. I married the wrong one instead, a man named Wen. Both of them came from the same island where I had lived ever since I was six years old. This was in the old-fashioned countryside, in a little place surrounded by water, the river and the sea, so no new ideas could easily come in.
The man I should have married was from a family with not very much money, but educated and with good manners. When I was sixteen by my Chinese age, I refused his family’s offer without ever meeting their son. This was because I listened to Old Aunt, the way she announced the family’s offer at the dinner table, in front of New Aunt and Uncle, my cousins, and visiting family friends.
“That family, Lin,” she began, and then sniffed her nose, “hnh! Wants to climb into our family on Weili’s wedding skirt.” With those words, I could see this boy, a boy I had never met, looking like a big ugly lizard, crawling up my leg at night. And then Old Aunt turned to me at the dinner table and asked, “Weiwei-ah, do you want to make a marriage with this family?”
She said this in a way that sounded as if she were asking, “Do you want to jump in the river?” which is what Old Aunt always threatened to do when she was unhappy with her husband. “I’d rather use these two feet to jump in the river!” she would shout. “I’d rather use these two hands to hang myself!” And then she would turn to Uncle and her voice would be even more shrill. “Which would you rather I do? Come on, you decide!”
My uncle was the one who later used his two feet and his two hands to kill himself. When the Communists came in 1949, he was too scared to run away, too scared to stay. He became so confused he walked with his own two feet all the way to the port at the north edge of the island, and there he sat down to think about his choices. Two fishermen later said that when a truck loaded with little crabs drove down the dark road to the port, they saw my uncle stand up, run in front of the truck, waving both hands: Go back, go back.
So peculiar, the fishermen said, as if he were now in command of the whole world, as if he really could have stopped that truck before it ran him over. After he was killed, Old Aunt started to believe that the dead tree in our courtyard was her husband, still too lazy to move and help get her out of one bad situation after another.
So that was the kind of family I had. What advice could they give me? If I had not lost my mother so young, I would not have listened to Old Aunt. And maybe I would have married that boy Lin when I was young. Maybe I would have learned to love him after we married. And maybe we would have had difficulties in life, just like everyone, but not the kind that would make me hate myself and think that my own heart was my worst enemy.
I met this same man Lin for the first time twenty years later, when I had already been living in the United States for five years. I was a grown woman then, now called Winnie Louie, married to Jimmy Louie. Pearl was more than four, Samuel almost three. And even though we were poor, I believed my life was full, just as a Christian lady once explained it for me. “A full bowl of rice is as much as you can ask for,” she said.
I believed that was true. How could I not? Jimmy was the minister of our church in Fresno, the same one that paid him fifty dollars a week and gave us a little house to live in. So I believed I should not ask for more. I believed this until the day a man named Lin showed up at our same church and saved my life.
Of course, there were many Lins in China, even many Lins in our church, so I thought nothing of this at first, that he might be that boy I refused to marry. He had just moved into the area, and people were whispering: “He’s a doctor, lives in Tulare, with a big swimming pool. Married to a former general’s daughter who speaks beautiful Chinese, Peking accent, just like an opera star.”
That Sunday, when he and his wife visited our church, we were all standing in the hot morning sun. Everyone was curious about them, the doctor, his high-class wife. Jimmy and I were at the bottom of the church steps, greeting everybody. My husband was speaking in English, the common language among all the different Chinese dialects of our church: “Pleased to see you, pleased to meet you, please come again.” Over and over he said those words, all those phrases I practiced at night but still could not say. So I would only nod and smile, pretending to be shy. Every Sunday was the same way. Only, that Sunday turned out to be very hot, and I could not take off my sweater because a little moth had eaten a hole in the right shoulder of my dress.
I nodded to the doctor and his wife. And after they stepped away, I saw other church people moving over to the Lins and introducing themselves: “Gladys Wong,” “Mavis Chew,” “George Po,” “Murray Yang,” “Irene Wing”—all of them saying just their names, too shy, I thought, to say more than two words to a big, important doctor.
I was thinking about these little things, not really thinking, just letting words float in and out of my mind, because I was sleepy. My mouth felt heavy, my face hot and itchy. As I scratched at my cheek, the doctor saw me and scratched his neck, nodded and laughed, then said to me, “Ding-ngin. Itchy.
When he said that word, ding-ngin, I felt as if I were dreaming. How strange, I thought, he knows that same local island expression from my childhood. And then I was remembering that time when I first heard that expression.
I was six and it was the first summer after my father had sent me to live on the island. Day and night, little invisible fleas bit me all over my tender thighs. And soon I was in terrible misery: scratching, scratching, not able to stop even one second. Both hands moved quickly up and down my legs, and I cried in front of everyone, “Yangsele!” which in common Mandarin means “itching to death!”
Everyone roared with laughter, and Old Aunt quickly slapped my hands to make me stop. “How can you say this!” The next day an older cousin told me that local island people say ding-ngin when they want to talk about itching, and that yangsele means something completely different. I did not know how different until more than ten years later, on the night before my wedding to the wrong man. That’s when I heard my boy cousins whispering to one another: “Yangsele! She’s itching for sex. Her bottom can’t wait to be stung by a man.”
That hot day at the church in Fresno, when I heard this word ding-ngin again, I remembered how innocent I once was. And then I came out of that memory, and I felt my face burning, from anger, from shame, I didn’t know which. The more I thought about that memory, the more feverish my mind and body became.
And then Dr. Lin was touching my elbow, asking me, “Are you ill?”
I could not answer him, only watch his face: the way he squeezed his eyebrows up, then jerked his chin twice, letting me know he was anxious to hear my answer. His face!—that squeezing-jerking expression on Lin’s face was the same one that the Lin father had, that everybody in that family had, an expression Old Aunt once described as “that Lin long-face look, like a horse nudging you for sweets in your pocket.”
Seeing that same face on Lin made me think everything had melted together—my past, my life today, my first husband, my second husband, Lin. That’s how confused I was. So I did not know who was shouting, “Heat stroke! Poisoned by too much sun.” I did not know why they were taking off my sweater, lifting me up, and carrying me inside the church.
My husband later told me, as I lay wet in his arms, that he had once baptized me to save my soul. And now, he said, both laughing and crying, the doctor had baptized me to save my life. I was still confused, so I could only murmur a bad excuse, “I thought I saw a ghost.”
And then I realized we were not alone. Lin was there, his wife, other people from the church—everyone watching me! Right away my senses came back. I was embarrassed, knowing everyone had seen me in that dress with a big hole eaten away by a moth.
I never tol
d Jimmy, That man Lin was the one I could have married instead of marrying that other man first, then you second.
I only told him about that “itchy” word, the language Lin and I shared from long time ago. So of course, Jimmy was proud to inform Lin the next Sunday that I was from the same place in China, the one on Tsungming Island, the place we called the Mouth of the River. I wanted to claim back my husband’s words, to explain that I was perhaps mistaken, that it was another island. Because I thought Lin would say in front of everyone, “Hey, aren’t you that girl who refused my family?”
But Lin only smiled and said, “We’re both from a long time ago, eh, little sister?”
Maybe he was being polite. He had very good manners. Or maybe he never wanted to marry me either. His wife was very beautiful. Or maybe he was not the Lin boy I was supposed to marry. After all, I had heard there were other sons in that family. I never found out. I was scared to find out. What would I gain by knowing this?
So I did not ask further questions. Still, from that day on, I began to look at everything in my life two ways, the way it happened, the way it did not.
Late at night, when my husband and children were sleeping, I would think to myself, Of course, I do not regret marrying Jimmy Louie. I love my husband. I waited five years to marry him. I came to this country to live with him. I was willing, more than willing. It was a true love, not just the devotion that comes from feeding a husband and raising his children. I was not thinking about Lin, his wife’s pretty clothes, or their swimming pool. Who wants those things? I said to myself.
But then later and later at night, I thought about it this way: How I was sorry I did not marry Lin. Because if I had, I would not have married that other man. I would not have become the kind of wife who prayed the Japanese would kill her husband. I would not have become the kind of mother who could not grieve when her children died. I would not have poisoned my mind thinking of ways to escape my marriage, only to bite my flesh every day that I did not. And I would not have regretted that I had so little left to give my second husband and that I could be only grateful, never completely happy.