The Kitchen God's Wife

by Amy Tan

  I remember when we finally arrived in a bigger city, Kweiyang. We were going to stay there for a few days, so the air force could fix the truck and get more gasoline before the long, hard drive into Kunming. Wen Fu knew a saying about Kweiyang, something like this: “The sky doesn’t last three good days, the land isn’t level for even three inches.” That was because it rained all the time. And the city was very bumpy. The buildings and streets went up and down like the back of a dragon. And behind the city stood sharp rocky hills, looking like ancient men, too stiff to move.

  Everyone got out of the truck, very tired from the day’s drive. Old Mr. Ma pointed to a restaurant across the street and said we should eat there while he went to find us a hotel. So we walked across the street. And in front of the restaurant we saw a giant wooden tub. And when we looked inside the tub we saw many white eels—alive and still swimming! In Shanghai, this was a rare treat, very special. Here we learned the white eels were so plentiful you could order them as an everyday dish—morning, noon, and night.

  The cook dipped a net into the tub and drew out the slippery eels, calling to us, “Fresh, see?” That night we ate plenty, big platters piled high with eels cooked whole, as thick as our fingers. We all agreed the meal was the best we had eaten. So when Old Mr. Ma said he had found us a hotel, the finest in town, first-class, we expected a palace!

  Let me tell you, it was terrible—primitive, dirty. When I asked where the bathroom was, they said, “Outside.” I went outside and there was no bathroom, no toilet, not even a curtain. When they said outside, that’s what it was, outside!—a dirty spot on the ground where everybody’s business was right in front of your eyes. I can laugh about this now, but back then, I said to myself, I’d rather not go. I went back to my room. I stayed there until I was about to burst, tears and sweat dropping from my face. It’s true. I waited that long before I forced myself to go outside again.

  The inside part of the hotel was just as bad. They used any kind of thing for a mattress—dirty straw with little rocks still clinging to it, old feathers and things you did not want to imagine. The cloth holding all this in was thin, had never had hot water poured over it to tighten the threads. So it was easy for bugs to hide inside the mattress—just walked right in as if the door were open. During the nighttime, they crawled back out to eat our blood while we were sleeping. This is true, I saw them on Wen Fu’s back.

  I said, “Hey, what’s this? Here, there—like little red dots.”

  He reached around to touch them, then yelled, “Ai! Ai!” He was jumping up and down, slapping his back, trying to shake them off. And I was trying not to laugh. When he finally calmed down, I helped him pluck them off, and where that bug’s mouth had been, there was now a bigger red spot underneath. And then Wen Fu shouted that I had one too—on the back of my neck! I started jumping and screaming too. He laughed, showed me what he pulled off, then crushed it in half with his fingernail. Stinkbugs! What an awful smell!

  The next day, I heard everybody had the same stinkbug problem. Over breakfast we complained to Old Mr. Ma in a joking way. And then Jiaguo came into the room and told us the news. The Japanese army had invaded the capital city: Nanking was cut off completely. He could not tell us whether people there did not resist, whether good treatment was given as promised. Nobody knew yet what had happened.

  I thought about Wan Betty, her strong words. Did she bow down to the Japanese? I was sure other people had the same kind of thoughts, although we did not discuss our feelings with one another. We were quiet. We no longer complained about our conditions in Kweiyang, not even in a joking manner.

  After we left Kweiyang, we drove higher and higher into the hills, then into the mountains. Hulan and I were staring over the side of the truck, very quiet. Just to see that steep cliff made us feel as if we were already tumbling down. The road became skinnier and skinnier. And every time we hit a little bump or hole, we cried out—“Wah!”—and then laughed a little and covered our mouths. We were all sitting in the back, bouncing up and down on our suitcases, trying to hold onto something so we did not slide too much and rub our bottoms raw.

  Sometimes Old Mr. Ma let me sit up front with him because I was pregnant. He didn’t say that was the reason. He never gave anyone any kind of reason. He would look at all of us every morning when it was time to leave, and then he would nod at someone and that meant the person could sit up front.

  On the road, Old Mr. Ma had become the most powerful man in our group, like an emperor. Our lives depended on him. And we all knew a seat up front was the same as a throne. The seat had a cushion, and if you were tired, you could stretch your legs forward, lean your head back and fall asleep. It was not like the back of the truck, where everyone was always fighting over two inches and someone else’s rough knees. On that mountain road, we didn’t own anything more than our own lives and a chance for the front seat, and everything else, even the things we had in our suitcases, was worthless out there.

  Of course, we all had reasons why we should sit on the seat. We talked about those reasons during mealtimes, when we knew Old Mr. Ma was listening. One man was old and complained of arthritis. Another man had caught a bad sickness in Kweiyang, not contagious, but he was still very weak. Another mentioned many times what an important official he was. Jiaguo admitted he was the top-ranking pilot, a captain, recently promoted. Hulan paid many compliments to Old Mr. Ma for his quick thinking while driving. And Wen Fu gave him packets of cigarettes or challenged him to card games which Old Mr. Ma always happened to win.

  During the daytime the mountain road was very busy, but not with motorcars. There were no cars out there, only children carrying heavy bags of rice on their backs, or a man walking next to his ox-drawn cart, or people with stands set up for trade. When they saw us coming, they would squeeze up against the side of the mountain to let us pass, staring at us the whole time, then looking back down the road from where we had come.

  “The Japanese will be here soon,” Wen Fu joked to them. And those poor villagers became frightened.

  “How far behind?” an old man asked.

  “Nothing to worry about!” Jiaguo shouted back. “He’s only joking. No one is coming.” But the villagers acted as if they did not hear him. They were still looking down the road.

  And then one night Old Mr. Ma stopped the truck on the side of the road, jumped out, and told us no villages were coming up for many, many hours. “We’ll sleep here,” he said. And then he lay down on his front seat, no more discussion.

  It was so black at night, you could not tell where the road ended and the cliff and sky began. Nobody dared walk too far from the truck. Soon the men had made a little table out of suitcases piled on top of each other, and they began to play cards by the light of a glass candle lamp.

  The baby was now so heavy in my womb I often ached to let my bladder go. “I have to do some business,” I said to Hulan. “How about you?” She nodded. And then I thought up a very smart plan. I took Hulan’s hand and told her to follow me. I put my other hand against the side of the mountain, the part that stood away from the cliff. And as I moved my hand against the rocky side, we walked away from the men to a place just around a curve. And that’s where we both did our business. I had changed so much since Hulan and I first met—I was no longer embarrassed over matters like this, not the way I was in the bathhouse in Hangchow.

  Afterward, I realized I was very, very tired. I was not yet ready to walk back. So we both leaned against the mountain and looked up at the sky. We did not speak for several minutes, no need with a skyful of stars like that.

  And then Hulan said, “My mother once showed me the patterns of gods and goddesses of the night sky. She said they look different, depending on what part of the cycle it is. Sometimes you can see the front of the face, sometimes the back of the head.”

  I had never heard of such a thing. But I was not sure whether this was true in her family’s province, so I only asked, “What patterns?”

  “Oh, I’ve
already forgotten,” she said sadly, and was quiet again. But after a few more minutes’ silence, she spoke up. “I think maybe one was called the Snakegirl. Look there, doesn’t that one seem like a snake with two pretty eyes at the top? And that one there with the big cloudy part going across, I think that’s the Heavenly Cowherd Maiden.”

  Oh, I had heard of that old story before. “He was the cowherd, she was the weaving girl,” I corrected her. “One of the seven daughters of Kitchen God.”

  “Perhaps, or perhaps I am thinking of the cowherd’s sister,” she said. I did not argue. It did not matter what Hulan remembered or forgot or was making up. I was so tired I let my mind wander away, and I too was looking for make-believe patterns in the sky. I found one that I called the Separated Goose Lovers, and then another that I named the Drowned Woman with Her Hair Unbound. And then we both made up stories to go along with them, and they always began, “Long time ago,” followed by some made-up place from our childhoods: “in the Kingdom of the Lady with the Horse’s Head,” or “in the Eye of Heaven Mountain.”

  I don’t remember the stories exactly. They were very silly, Hu-lan’s more so than mine. Her stories always ended with some sort of hero popping up and marrying an ugly animal who then turned out to be a kind and beautiful princess. I think mine had to do with lessons learned too late—not to eat too much, not to talk too loud, not to wander out at night by yourself—in any case, always about people who fell off the earth and into the sky because of their willful ways. And although I can no longer see those bright patterns in my mind, I still remember that feeling of friendship as we looked at the whole sky.

  We all clung to little things like that—a make-believe story, a faraway star that became something closer to our hearts. Along our journey, we looked for signs of contentment in the world, a peace that would never change. Nothing else to watch for. Once we saw a bird sitting on the back of a grazing cow. We imagined they had been little and big friends forever. Once we saw a skinny boy in a village who waved to us with a genuine smile, not at all like the boy at the lake outside Nanking. We talked about that good boy all day, how handsome he was, smart too—how much he reminded us of our boy cousins, who now, in our memories, were very well behaved.

  And one day we felt something in our hearts that made us forget for the rest of the journey all the miseries we had already gone through, all the unknown troubles that still lay ahead.

  We had stayed overnight in a village called the Twenty-four Turnarounds. That was the start of a winding pass in the mountains. Someone in the village said it was best to cross the pass that day, because the next day an army truck was going to come from the other direction, starting from a village at the very top of the pass, called Heaven’s Breath. If we met them going up—what trouble! There was no room for two army-style trucks to squeeze by each other. Our truck, the downside one, would have to go backward a long ways until we found a wide spot. This was dangerous: if our driver lost control or made even a small mistake—over the cliff, gone!

  “How many li before we are finished with these twenty-four turnarounds?” I asked a local man.

  The villager laughed. “It is not twenty-four all together, young miss,” he said. “Maybe twenty-four each li. Oh! A person must go forty-eight li before his head and stomach stop spinning. But watch out for Lady White Ghost up there. She likes to pull people off the road, make them stay longer and drink ten thousand rounds of tea with her. The tea of immortality, we call it. You drink one sip, you never want to leave her cloudy house. Maybe you forget to come back!”

  What a terrible sense of humor this man had! Jokes that could attract disaster! I did not know why everyone was laughing, Hulan too.

  When we started that day you could see the clouds blowing above. The wind cried in little gusts, “Hoo! Hoo!” and then got quiet again. We wrapped blankets tight around us. And then our truck began to climb. After the first twenty-four turns, we were inside the bottom of those thin clouds and the wind was blowing even stronger. After another twenty-four turns, we were in the middle of the clouds. It was growing much thicker. Suddenly our whole world turned white, and our driver shouted he could not see very far in front. The truck stopped. Everyone except me jumped out, murmuring, “How strange! How strange!”

  I heard Wen Fu’s voice shouting, “Why are we stopping? Didn’t you hear what that man said? We have to keep going!”

  I looked at Wen Fu, the dark hole of his mouth shouting into the wind. I looked at the others. Their faces wore swirling veils of mist, like ghosts, so beautiful yet frightening. Ai! I wondered if we had already died and only I knew this. I looked down and saw no road beneath us.

  “What will become of us?” I called out. But my voice seemed to vanish as soon as the words came out. And again, I had this feeling we were dead. I imagined my voice soaking into a cloud filled with other ghosts’ laments, until the clouds became so heavy they turned into tears and rained.

  But then Hulan climbed back in the truck, stumbling over suitcases. And I decided we could not be dead, because a real ghost would never be this clumsy.

  “It is just like that story I told you about,” she said, “the Heavenly Cowherd Maiden. This is heavenly cow’s milk spilled from the sky.” And I told myself, A real ghost would not have said such a silly thought.

  She opened her suitcase, dipped her hands inside until she pulled out what looked like an old-fashioned red wedding skirt. What was she thinking? She threw this to Jiaguo, and he was very calm. He ordered everyone to hurry and get back into the truck.

  And now I could see that Hulan had taken my idea from several nights before. Jiaguo ran one hand against the side of the mountain, the roughness letting him know he was still in touch with the world. In his other hand he held the red skirt so it flapped in the wind, a marker the driver could follow as Jiaguo walked forward. The truck began to move, very slowly, but at least we were moving again. After a half-hour, Jiaguo climbed back into the truck, completely wet with exhaustion from his uphill walk. Wen Fu took over, and after him another pilot, until, inch by inch, the sky above us became brighter, the clouds turned thin, light blue in color, and we no longer needed the red wedding skirt to see the dangers of the road.

  We continued to turn and climb, turn and climb—so many curves you could not tell what lay ahead beyond yet another bend. Until finally we came out of the wind and the clouds entirely. And we all gasped out loud—the surprise of it—then sighed. Because where we now were was like a place you read about only in a story—the blue heavens above, the white clouds beneath, all the problems of the world forgotten.

  For the rest of the afternoon we traveled along the tops of those mountains, above the clouds. We were so happy. We were like people who had truly died and come back as gods: happy, healthy, wise, and kind.

  The man who had become sick in Kweiyang, now he said he felt strong. The old man with arthritis, he held up his wrists and claimed he too felt much better.

  “This place is like a magic spring I once saw,” said Hulan, “able to cure anything. It releases a power inside that you didn’t know you had.” It was that same silly story she had told me in Hangchow, but now everyone was agreeing with her, even I.

  And just as Hulan described it, I found Wen Fu talking from a place in his heart I never knew he had.

  “This is what it is like to fly,” he told me. “This kind of joy. To look down and see the clouds beneath—that is the best. Sometimes I dip like this, up and down, into the tops of the clouds, then back up into the sunshine, like swimming in waves.”

  “Is that true? It’s always like this?” I asked with an excited voice.

  “Truly. Always,” he said. “Sometimes I’m so happy, I sing out loud. ”

  I laughed, and then he began to sing—it was the funny opera song he had sung when I first met him almost a year before at the village play. I was surprised how good his voice was to listen to. And now the whole world was hearing him sing, and he was singing for me.

 
That day on the mountain, I think you can guess what I was feeling. So lucky to be there. So lucky to have these friends. So lucky to have my husband. My heart filled up until it ached from having too much. And I forgot that I would ever have to leave this place.

  We reached the village at the top, the one called Heaven’s Breath. There we all agreed to stop early and stay the night. Why not make the scenery last longer?

  And then we saw the army truck that had driven up from the other side. It was still there, ready to go down the same road we had taken. Why not brag to them about the magical sights we had just seen? We could give them something to look forward to!

  We hurried to get out of the truck. Wen Fu lifted me off and joked that I was as big as two wives. And I didn’t mind.

  We found the soldiers sitting outside on the ground, quiet and still. And right away we saw by their faces: Those men had no ears for our happy talk. They told us they were on their way to Chungking—to help set up a new capital city—because of what had happened to the old. And then we learned what we did not know in Kweiyang, the news about Nanking.

  Who knows why the Japanese changed their minds about their paper promises? Maybe someone threw a rock, maybe someone refused to bow down. Maybe an old woman tried to stop her neighbor, scolding him, “Behave! You want to get us all in trouble?”

  “They lied,” said one of the soldiers sitting on the ground. “Raped old women, married women, and little girls, taking turns with them, over and over again. Sliced them open with a sword when they were all used up. Cut off their fingers to take their rings. Shot all the little sons, no more generations. Raped ten thousand, chopped down twenty or thirty thousand, a number that is no longer a number, no longer people.”

  I was seeing this in my mind. The old woman who was our cook, Wan Betty, the little boy throwing rocks in the lake. I was thinking, This happened when we were having good times and bad times, while I was complaining as we traveled from there to here. I was hearing this with no danger to myself, yet I had so much terror in my heart I did not want to believe it.