The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked Peanut. I did not think this kind of business talk was worthy of a greenhouse secret.

  “I’m not finished,” said Peanut. “I only told you the first part, because then another uncle mentioned that at least that kind of garbage business was not as bad as another kind, at least not dishonorable.”

  “What kind of dishonorable business?” I said, and I was imagining Peanut was going to tell me about “missionary wives.” That’s what desperate beggar girls said to foreigners: “Be your missionary wife tonight. You save me. Please save me.”

  But Peanut said instead, “He was talking about the Wen family business. He said they sell Chinese garbage to the foreigners, especially people from America and England.”

  I immediately felt weak. “What kind of garbage?”

  “They sell anything that is broken, or strange, or forbidden,” said Peanut. “The broken things they call Ming Dynasty. The strange things they say are Ching Dynasty. And the forbidden things—they say they are forbidden, no need to hide that.”

  “What kind of forbidden things?”

  “Uncle said the Wen father travels to small villages, countrysides plagued by drought or flood or locusts. And he quickly finds out which families cannot pay their rent, which ones need to sell off their last piece of land to keep from starving. And for a few coppers, he buys paintings of dead ancestors. It’s the truth! I am not lying. Those people are so desperate they would part with their own relatives’ shrines. Can you imagine? All those ancestors immigrating to America against their will. Then one day they wake up, and—ai-ya!—they are hanging on Western walls, listening to people arguing in a language they can’t understand!” Peanut was laughing hard.

  This was a terrible thought. I was thinking about the painting of my poor mother. Where was it?

  “This can’t be true,” I said. “The Wen family ships only good-quality merchandise, the best. Auntie Miao said so.”

  “Miao-miao’s husband was there too,” said Peanut. “And even he thought the Wens ran a bad business. True, they make a lot of money, he said. Foreigners love those paintings. But it is riches made from someone else’s tragedy. The reason why they had to sell, that’s one kind of tragedy. But the worst tragedy is still to come. Auntie Miao’s husband said that when the Wens die and try to go to the next world, you can be sure all those people’s ancestors will be standing at the front gate, ready to kick them out.”

  I jumped up and brushed the dust off the bottom of my dress. “I don’t believe it. Those other people are only envious. You know how Miao-miao’s husband is, the others. Always lying.”

  “I am only telling you what I heard. Why are you mad at me? Maybe it isn’t true. What does it matter? It’s still a good business. They aren’t doing anything illegal. That’s how they do a modem business with foreigners.”

  “People shouldn’t say this about my husband’s family,” I said. “You must never repeat this lie to anyone else.” I shook my finger at her.

  I thought about what Peanut said all day, all night. I kept telling myself, This is not true. But my stomach fought me, and made me feel the truth another way. I got sick.

  Of course, I had other reasons to be nervous, just thinking about my wedding, all the people who would be there, my father, his important friends, my half sisters, their husbands and children. When I told Old Aunt I felt ill, she said, “Of course, you should feel ill. You are about to leave your family, start a new life.” She put me to bed and fed me a hot, bitter soup, and I felt I had never known her to be so kind.

  Peanut came to see me the next afternoon while I was lying in bed. She said she had been to the porch again, and she had overheard another story.

  “I don’t want to hear any more stories,” I said.

  “This isn’t about the Wen family,” she insisted. “Nothing about business. It’s a good story.” And then she leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “A sex story.”

  When I heard Peanut say those words, “sex story,” I opened my ears. We both giggled and I sat up to listen.

  I was very naive back then, more so than most Chinese girls. I was not like you, watching movies in school about your body, dating at sixteen, falling in love with someone your first year of college, that Randy boy. You were naughty with him, weren’t you? See, even today you can’t admit this. I saw your face when you were with him. I see your face now, embarrassed. Your mother is not so naive. Of course, just before I was married, that was different.

  I thought of sex as something mysterious, like going to a remote place in China. Sometimes it was a cold, dark forest. Sometimes it was a temple in the sky. That was my feeling about sex.

  And I also knew some facts—through gossip Peanut told me, or stories we heard or imagined together. I knew that sex was another kind of forbidden thing, not the same as selling ancestor paintings, of course. I knew that a man touched a woman in secret places, her feet for instance. I knew that a woman sometimes had to take off all her clothes. And that a man had a male-thing—nobody had ever taught me the proper word, only the little-boy word, because I had seen the ji-jis of my little boy cousins. So I knew what a male-thing looked like: a little lump of pink, soft flesh, as small and round as one of my toes. And if a man did not want to get up and use the chamber pot in the middle of the night, he could just ask his wife if he could put his ji-ji between her legs.

  This was all I knew about sex from stories I had heard. I remember Peanut and I used to laugh until tears fell from our eyes. Oh, this was terrible. A man goes shu-shu in a woman, flooding her like a chamber pot! You see how innocent I was?

  We thought it was so funny back then—that this was what happened to Old Aunt and New Aunt. But right before my marriage, I started thinking about it a different way. And I was worried that now this would happen to me. I would become my husband’s chamber pot! That’s why I had bought three for my dowry, one extra to put close to our bed.

  So you can understand how eager I must have been to hear Peanut’s sex story, especially since I would be married in another two days.

  “This afternoon,” Peanut said, giggling already, “one of our uncles told a sex story about newlyweds.”

  “Which uncle was this?”

  “Old Aunt’s cousin from Ningpo. You know who I am talking about.”

  “Turtle Uncle!” I exclaimed. We always called him that, after Little Gong put a live turtle in his soup, and he complained to Old Aunt that the soup had not been cooked long enough. This was a very bad name to call a man, “turtle.” That’s what you said if a man was too stupid to know his wife was fooling around right in front of his face.

  In any case, that’s what we called him. And Peanut was telling me what Turtle Uncle had said in the porch.

  “He was telling everyone how he ran into an old schoolmate friend recently,” Peanut said. “And the schoolmate said, ‘You remember Yau, my cousin on my mother’s side?’ And Turtle Uncle answered, ‘Of course, the thin young man who was at the horse races with us maybe three years ago. He bet on that nag who couldn’t even cross the finish line. How is he? Not betting on horses anymore, I hope.’

  “Then the schoolmate became very serious and reported that last year Yau had married a girl his family did not like. Her family was not very respected, some kind of middle-class merchant doing a small trade in Japanese soy sauce, in any case, much lower than Yau’s family position. And she was not a great beauty. So she must have seduced Yau, body and mind, convinced him he should stand up to his family and say, Sorry, Mother and Father, but I must marry this girl, no matter what.”

  At this point, Peanut leaned toward me. “Then Turtle Uncle whispered to everyone on the porch what he thought the girl had done to seduce Yau.” She sat back again. “But everyone was roaring with laughter, so I could not hear exactly, except for the words ‘chicken love,’ and ‘cow-milking hands,’ and ‘night garden tricks.’ ”

  “What do those words mean?” I asked.

&nbs
p; Peanut frowned, thinking about this. “It’s some kind of magical tricks a girl can do with her body. I think it means she learned this from a foreigner. In any case, Yau’s mother and father resisted his marriage choice, threatened him. They said the girl had very bad manners and was too fierce, too strong. If he married the girl, the family said, they would cut him off.

  “But by then, Yau was so drawn to the girl he didn’t know how to stop himself. Finally the family gave in, because he was their only son—what could they do? So Yau married her and they lived in his parents’ house. For a while it seemed as if all would work out. The girl and her in-laws were having fewer and fewer fights. And Yau grew more and more dazed with love for this girl, even though she was already his wife.”

  Peanut took a deep breath, sat up, and breathed out in a big smile, as if that were all to her story, this happy ending. But suddenly, she took a big breath and said, “Then guess what happened?”

  I shook my head, leaned forward.

  “When Yau and his bride had been married only three months—disaster! Late at night, the mother woke up and heard her son and daughter-in-law fighting. Yau was cursing and the girl was crying and begging. And the mother thought, Good, now he is teaching her to be more obedient. But then—funny!—her son’s cursing stopped, but the girl was still begging. And after a few minutes, the girl began to scream, just like an animal. She screamed and screamed and wouldn’t stop.

  “The mother and the rest of the family ran into the son’s room. Ai, guess what they saw? The naked couple, Yau lying on top, his bride screaming below, trying to push her husband off. But Yau did not roll off. He was not moving. He seemed as wooden as a carved statue. And the girl was screaming, ‘We’re stuck together. Help me! Help me!’ It’s true, they were stuck, just like dogs.”

  “This can’t be!” I exclaimed.

  “It’s true, it’s true! The mother tried to pull them apart, slapped her son’s back and told him to wake up. She pushed and pushed, until her son and the girl rolled to the side. That’s when she saw her son’s gray face, his eyes pressed together in pain, his mouth wide open. And the mother started crying and slapping her daughter-in-law. ‘Let him go! Let him go, you fox-devil!’ she screamed.

  “Now it was the father’s turn to save his son. He pushed the mother out of the room. He called to a servant to hurry and bring in buckets of cold water. And the father splashed the water on top of the couple, because he had seen this work with dogs. One bucket, two buckets, another and another—he nearly drowned the poor girl. Then he too gave up and called the herb doctor.

  “The doctor arrived, went to the son first and found he was already cold and stiff. But rather than alarm the family, who were already talking about killing the girl to make her release their son, he quietly instructed the servants to bring a pallet. Then he quickly mixed together a concoction of moxa leaves, dried alum, and warm vinegar. He tried rubbing this down where Yau and the girl were stuck. And when they still did not become unglued, he made the girl drink a lot of maotai, until she was a senseless drunk. And as she lay on the pallet, laughing and crying, the servants carried her out of the house with her dead husband still on top of her.

  “Turtle Uncle said that at the hospital they finally got the husband and wife apart. And all the other uncles began to murmur among themselves, guessing what had finally worked: ‘They put her on a bed of ice until she sneezed him out.’ ‘They applied hot oil to make them slide apart.’ Then I heard Turtle Uncle tell them he truly didn’t want to explain—but wasn’t it terrible that his old friend Yau had to go to the next world as a eunuch? Wah! And then everyone laughed and spit on the porch floor.

  “Can you imagine? They laughed, no compassion at all for that poor man and his bride. And then Turtle Uncle was telling them to be quiet. He said it was a true story. His schoolmate had gone to the funeral, that’s how he found out what had happened. And even though the family tried to keep the scandal a secret, by the time they put Yau in the ground, it was common knowledge that the parents had been right all along. That girl had been too strong. She had too much yin, the woman essence. She had grown to love her husband with so much will that when he connected his body to hers, she locked him in there, wouldn’t let go. She began to drain him of all his semen. And all his semen kept pouring out, wouldn’t stop, until there was nothing left and he died.”

  “What is this word ‘semen’?” I asked.

  “Anh! You don’t even know this!” Peanut exclaimed. “It is a male essence, his yang. A man stores it like a potion inside his body—in here.” Peanut used her finger to draw a line from the top of her head to the spot between her legs. “It’s a man’s ten thousand generations passed on from his male ancestors, father to son. That’s why a man is a man, because of this yang potion.”

  “Then why would a woman want his yang?”

  “This is because—” and then Peanut frowned.

  “Be frank,” I said.

  “It’s this way. If a woman can get enough yang inside her, she can make sons. Not enough, then she only has daughters. So you can see, if a woman has too much yin, she draws a lot more yang from her husband. That girl took all her husband’s potion, his current life and all his future generations.”

  “What happened to that girl?”

  “Of course, the parents now hate her so much. But they didn’t kick her out. And she didn’t leave. Where could she go? She could never remarry—who would want such a wife? So today she is still living in her dead husband’s house. The mother-in-law treats her as bad as she can. They tell her they are only keeping her there so that when she finally dies, which they hope is very soon, they can bury her with their son. That way, he can once again be rejoined with all the yang she took away from him, now swimming in her body.”

  Peanut slapped my leg. “Don’t look at me that way. It’s a true story. Turtle Uncle knows that family. Maybe he even knows where that girl lives, somewhere in Shanghai. Maybe we can find out. Maybe we can go by someday and see her in a window. I wonder what she looks like, a girl who loved her husband so much she squeezed all the life out of him. Why are you looking at me that way?”

  “This is a true story?” I whispered.

  “This is a true story,” Peanut said.

  Two nights later, on my wedding night, I was scared. When my husband took off his clothes, I screamed. Wouldn’t you scream if you saw that your husband’s ji-ji looked nothing like that of your little boy cousins? Wouldn’t you think all his yang was bursting to pour out?

  I have confessed this. I was afraid to love my husband right from the beginning. Of course, I was a foolish young girl then. I believed Peanut, a girl who had a lot of silly pride. But if I was foolish, then Peanut was foolish too. Because she believed Turtle Uncle, a man who was as slow-minded as the creature he found swimming in his soup. And Turtle Uncle was foolish because he believed his schoolmate, who later turned him in during the Cultural Revolution. And who knows who that schoolmate believed?

  Why do people say these things? How does anyone know who you are supposed to believe? And why do we always believe the bad things first?

  Lately I have been dreaming of that girl, imagining what happened to her. I am dreaming of writing Peanut a letter.

  Peanut, I will say, do you remember that girl from more than fifty years ago, the one you said drained her husband? Yesterday I saw her. Yes, that’s right, in America I saw her. Her in-laws died during the war, typhoid fever. And then she came to this country and married someone new, Chinese of course.

  She is now much older, but you can still tell, when she was young she was pretty, much prettier than the way Turtle Uncle described her. And she and her second husband are still very happy together—that’s right, after forty years of marriage.

  They live in a big house in San Francisco, California, two stories high, low mortgage payment, three bedrooms, two baths, big enough for all her grandchildren when they come to visit. And the grandchildren visit all the time—four of them�
�two granddaughters made by her daughter, two grandsons made by her son. Yes, can you imagine—both daughters and sons from a woman with too much yin!

  Of course it’s a true story. I saw her myself. I found out where she lives. I walked by her house. And she waved to me from her window.

  9

  BEST TIME OF YEAR

  After I married, that’s when I met Helen. And I can tell you, we are not the same people we were in 1937. She was foolish and I was innocent. And after that year, she still had her foolishness, and became more stubborn about it. And I lost my innocence, and always regretted what I lost. And because I lost so much, I remember so much. As for Helen—she only thinks she remembers.

  Whenever Helen talks about the past, she says, “We were both so young and pretty, remember? Now look how thick my body has become!” She laughs and sighs, as if she is letting go of her prettiness just now, for the first time. And then she goes back to her knitting, shaking her head and smiling, thinking to herself, How good it is to remember!

  But that’s not the way it was. Because I remember what Helen looked like when I first met her.

  This was in the spring of 1937 in Hangchow, where Helen and I both lived for maybe five months, while our husbands finished their training at an American-style air force school just outside the old city. I was only nineteen back then, still thinking I could find an answer to every wish. And because I had been married to Wen Fu for only one month, I was still thinking I was lucky too, proud to be married to a future hero. Back then, before the war, everyone thought we were the lucky ones, married to air force pilots, only three or four hundred in all of China.

  At the time of my wedding, I did not know I was marrying someone who had just joined the military. I was not a stupid person. Nobody thought to tell me this. Anyway, two or three weeks afterward, I knew. Wen Fu told me he was going to be a pilot. The pilots, he said, had been chosen from the best families, from the best schools. And now the announcement had come: They would be sent to Hangchow for special training, with congratulations from Madame Chiang on behalf of her husband, the General. Wen Fu said he had to leave in only a few days. What could I say? I went too.