by Amy Tan
Auntie Du laughed big, as if I had told a joke. “Not days or even months—over seven years, starting in Jehol Province, just north of Peiping.” Her face became soft and sad. She patted Hulan’s hand. “Ai! That’s when your father’s brother died. What a good husband he was to me. I am only glad he died before he could see how changed our village has become.”
Hulan nodded, and Auntie Du turned back to me. “He died before the Japanese came down from Manchukuo and controlled everything—what crops were planted, prices in the marketplace, what was printed in the newspapers, even how many eggs the scrawniest chicken should lay—everything! You cannot imagine how bad it was. Of course, my daughter and I left before this happened. I only heard about this recently. That’s also when I found out I have a niece in Kunming!” She smiled at Hulan. Hulan poured more tea.
When Auntie Du mentioned her daughter, I suddenly realized who the girl sleeping upstairs in my bed was. I was so relieved, able to let go of my anger. “What luck that you left when there was still time,” I said.
“That’s because when I lost my husband I lost my will to hold onto things,” said Auntie Du. “I sold everything. Why hold onto our land and let the Japanese steal it later for nothing? I changed all our money into four small sheets of gold. I used them all up on four kinds of transportation, train, boat, truck, and now look—shoes!”
She had on thick black shoes, the kind missionary teachers always wore. “You should see the roads!” she said. “Some places, they are building them very fast, using only their bare hands to make them wider. Other places, they use dynamite to blow them up so the Japanese can’t get in. And the roads are like cities themselves, very crowded, rich and poor alike, all trying to leave one place and go to another.”
As she said this, I thought again about the young woman sleeping in my bed. She must be tired from her long journey. Of course, I was also wondering why Hulan let her sleep in my bed. Why not Hulan’s? But I could not ask this. That would have been impolite.
After a few more minutes of polite talk, I excused myself to go look after my baby.
“The little baby!” Hulan said, suddenly remembering. She turned to Auntie Du. “Looks just like his father.”
“Not too much,” I said.
“His same eyes and nose, same kind of head shape,” Hulan insisted.
I invited Auntie Du to come see for herself. And as we walked upstairs I told her his name, how much he weighed, how strong his neck already was, how he urinated on the doctor’s hands the minute he was born, that’s what the nurses told me. So we were both laughing when we reached the top, and that’s how we must have awakened the girl in my room. She opened the door and looked out with a sleepy face that quickly turned red with embarrassment. She closed the door again. I hoped for one second more that Auntie Du would say, “Oh, that’s my daughter.”
But instead Hulan said, “Who’s that?” And Auntie Du asked, “Is she sick, sleeping so late in the day?”
I tell you, I almost fell down the stairs right then! Auntie Du and Hulan looked at me, still waiting for my answer.
“A guest,” I said. That was all I could think to say.
I found out later that Auntie Du’s daughter had joined the Communists in Yenan. Auntie Du did not agree or disagree with her daughter’s choice. “As for myself,” she said, “I was too accustomed to my old clothes, I could not change anymore and wear somebody else’s new ideas.”
When my husband came home that afternoon, I immediately asked him about the girl upstairs. I did not say this in an angry voice. I did not accuse him of sneaking a woman into my house while I was having a baby. I turned my face down toward Danru so Wen Fu could not see my expression.
And without even hesitating, Wen Fu said, “Oh, that person? A pilot in my class, that’s his sister. Couldn’t stay at his dormitory, so he asked if I would let her stay here a few days. Naturally, I could not refuse.” Wen Fu was so calm saying this.
“Why is she in our bed?” I said.
And Wen Fu answered, “I don’t know. Maybe she became tired.” Right away I knew he was lying. If she had been a real guest, he would have jumped to his feet and roared, “Wah! In my bed? Kick her out!”
At first I was mad—the way he put his dirty business right under my nose. He was treating me like a stupid country woman! He let his woman use my nightgown!
But then I thought about it this way: Why should I let him see me angry, as if I were fighting for him? Why should I care if he sleeps with her? Better for me! Then perhaps he will leave me alone.
So when I finally spoke again, my voice sounded friendly. “Tell our guest she can sleep on the sofa in the other room.” And I did not even turn around to see the surprise on his face.
That night, I went upstairs early and closed the door. When Wen Fu came to bed later, I pretended to be asleep. And in the morning I kept my eyes closed, pretended I was still asleep when he crawled off to the other room. Every night and morning I did that. And I slept so well! I did not have to worry, wondering when his hand would reach over to open up my legs.
So that was how I let a concubine come into our house. Of course, I did not introduce her that way to Hulan and Jiaguo. I said she was a guest, the sister of a pilot, the same lie Wen Fu told. And that girl, Min, treated herself as if she really were an honored guest! She stayed up late, slept in late, went downstairs and ate a lot of food, always taking seconds, never waiting to be invited to eat more. She was not educated. She could not read a newspaper, could not even write her name. She talked in a loud, too friendly way.
Soon enough Wen Fu began treating her just as badly as he treated me, no respect. He ignored her when she talked. He threw her ugly faces when she made mistakes in her manners. So that although I never intended it to be this way, I began to feel sorry for her.
I thought to myself, What kind of woman would be so desperate she would want to be a mistress to my husband? He was not sweet and tender. With his droopy eye and mean face, he could not be called handsome. He showed his bad temper all the time. And he was not so important, a former pilot from the second class, important enough, but now he was not even a real pilot. So what could he give her?—not even a bad marriage!
I decided the reason she stayed with him was not love, couldn’t be that. It was something else: perhaps a way to give up her life slowly rather than all at once. Here she would have a place to sleep, food to eat. Everything else did not matter so much. The war had made many people that way, full of fear, desperate to live without knowing why.
In many ways Min and I were the same: pretty skin, foolish heart, strong will, scared bones. Of course, our backgrounds were different, not the same at all, but really, I was no better than she was.
We both dreamt the future would come, perhaps the next day, or the day after that. And when it did, we could then reclaim our happy past—one that never really existed.
So I can honestly say, I did not dislike her. Maybe I even liked her, because this was certain: She was good company.
Even though her manners were rough, you could tell she was sincere in a foolish way. She heaped great amounts of food in her bowl, praising its flavor to the skies. She admired my ring and my necklace, asking me if they were made out of real gold. She said my clothes were so pretty—how much did they cost? She did not ask these questions the way some people would, hoping you would then offer to give them what they admired so much.
And she never complained, never ordered the servants around, not like Hulan. She thanked them for the smallest favor. She offered to hold Danru when he was crying. She talked to him in her native dialect, which was northern-sounding. And when Wen Fu was away, she told me all kinds of things that no respectable girl would talk about—about old boyfriends, dance parties, and Shanghai nightclubs she had been to, some she had worked in. I can admit, I liked to hear her talk. I liked to watch the way she rolled her eyes and waved her hands, very dramatic to see.
“I’m a singer, a dancer, too,” she told me o
ne day when she had been with us for perhaps two weeks. “Someday, though, I’m going to be a movie actress.”
I thought she was dreaming. “What name will you give yourself?” I asked, to be polite. I knew that many actresses took on new names, like Butterfly Hu and Songbird Lien, the ones I admired.
“Don’t know yet,” she said, and then she laughed. “Not that name they gave me in Shanghai, though. When I worked at the Great World—everyone called me the Rubber Fairy. The Great World, you know the place?”
I nodded. Peanut and I had once overheard Uncle and his friends in the porch talking about this place. It was an amusement arcade in the French concession, catering to foreign customers, a very wicked and dangerous place for women. Uncle said it was filled with all kinds of strange things: men with deformities playing games with beautiful girls, animals and acrobats tossing each other in the air, and every kind of old-fashioned superstition turned into a show.
No respectable Chinese person went there, and Uncle blamed the place for giving foreigners a peculiar idea about China, as if all Chinese men smoked opium and talked to the devil, as if all girls ran around their family households half naked, singing and dancing as they served tea. And now, to meet a person who had actually worked there!
Min stood up and walked to the other side of the room. “My show was very popular. I came out in a heavy headdress, a long robe, very classic, like a fairy queen, everything covering my limbs.” She walked across the room.
“And then a Frenchman, my boss, would come out. He wore a round scholar’s cap and gown, his eyes were taped in that manner that foreigners use to imitate Chinese, like this, very ugly. And glued to his face were whiskers that ran down to his knees like rat tails.”
Min walked in the other direction, very slowly, stroking her imaginary whiskers. “Ah, little sister,” she said in an old man’s voice. “Where is the secret potion for immortality? Come on, talk now, tell me. Not talking? Then maybe I will have to torture this information out of you.”
Min slowly slipped out of her imaginary robe, one arm at a time. “I had on a small blouse and short pants, cut off here, above the knees. My legs and arms were powdered to make them look white as ashes. And I had on bright red slippers and black gloves.” She twirled her hands.
This was shocking, even to imagine it. What kind of girl would stand in front of foreigners in her underwear?
“And then the Frenchman took me behind a torture box, a wooden device, special-made, like a prison stockade, big as this room. Everyone saw him put my head in a hole, and my hands and feet in slits, slits that ran to the corners of the box.” She pointed to the corners of the wall.
Min sat down on a chair to show me more. “From the audience, that’s all you could see, my head, hands, and feet sticking out. I was shaking my head, wiggling my hands and feet, crying in a pitiful voice, ‘Please, I beg for mercy, don’t torture me.’ And then I looked at the audience and begged them, ‘Help me! Help me!’ I was very good. I knew how to say this in French, German, English, and Japanese. Sometimes the customers got very excited and would tell the Frenchman to let me go. But lots of times men would call out, ‘Come on, come on, hurry up and make her scream.’
“Then a man with a violin would start to play nervous music, the audience would lean forward, and the Frenchman would pull on a rope next to the torture box. And my hands and feet would be pulled farther and farther apart through the slits.”
Here, Min started to move her hands apart. She moved her legs farther and farther apart, so that now only her bottom anchored her to the chair. Her eyes grew big and scared. I was scared, too.
“I would be screaming louder and louder,” she whispered. “The violin sounds rose higher and higher, until my hands and feet were stretched up into each corner of the box—twelve feet apart from my head, still waving and struggling in pain! Finally, I cried to him in a hoarse whisper: ‘I will tell you! I will tell!’ And the Frenchman stroked his beard and said, ‘What is it? What is the secret to immortality?’
Min’s eyes were pinched closed, her head tossing back and forth. “Finally,” she said in a slow, pained voice, “I let the word bubble out of my mouth. ‘Kindness!’ I shouted, ‘something you will never possess!’ And then I collapsed and died.”
Min’s eyes were closed, her mouth hung wide open, just like a dead person. I stared at her, her twisted face. “Ai-ya!” I said. “How terrible. Every night you had to do this?”
Suddenly she opened her eyes, jumped up from the chair and was laughing, laughing hard. “It’s just a trick, don’t you see? Those weren’t really my red-slippered feet, not my hands in those gloves. There were four other girls behind the box, and each had a hand or foot in there and had to move it along the slit as I screamed. Do you understand? I was only the actress, the face, the mouth with the screaming voice.”
I nodded, still trying to make sense of this.
“Of course, I was a very good actress. At least once a week, someone fainted in the audience. But after a while, it was very boring work. And I didn’t like it too much, so many people clapping and cheering when I finally died.”
She sighed. “I quit when I got a better job. I went to sing at Sincere—you know, the department store on Nanking Road. I was one of the girls who sang to entertain the crowds in the open restaurants. But of course, that job ended right away, two months after I started. That’s when the war started, when bombs fell on the store. I went and saw what happened.”
When Min said this, I knew she was talking about those same bombs the air force dropped by mistake.
“Oh, you should have seen it,” said Min. “I was standing across the street, in front of that other department store, with a big crowd. And from where we stood, it looked like hundreds of people had been killed, a terrible sight. And then some officials were telling the crowd to leave. ‘Everything is under control!’ they shouted. ‘No one was killed! Those bodies? Not bodies at all—only men’s and ladies’ clothing.’ That’s what they said. Only clothes scattered by the bombs.”
Min turned to me. “I saw one thing. I heard another. And I thought, Which should I believe, my eyes or my ears? In the end, I let my heart decide. I didn’t want to think I had seen so many bodies. Better to think it was just an illusion, same as my acting at the Great World.”
I was thinking, This girl Min is so much like me. Seeing one thing, hearing another, both of us following our foolish hearts.
“Wait a moment,” Min said. “I know something your ears won’t believe.” And then she ran quickly up the stairs.
When she came back, she held a record in her hand. She wound up the old phonograph, wound it so hard that when she put the needle on, the music flew out very fast. She immediately started to swing her hips and click her fingers. “This is what I used to sing and dance,” she said. “I sang this at Sincere before it was destroyed.”
And then she began to sing and dance as if I were one hundred people in an audience. It was an American song about love, and I heard right away that she had a very sweet voice, the kind of voice that sounded as if her heart had been broken many times. Chinese people liked that kind of singing. Her arms swayed like branches blown by a soft wind, moving more and more slowly as the music came to an end. Really, she was quite good.
“Get up, lazy,” she said suddenly. She wound the phonograph again and turned the record over. She pulled me up from my chair. “Now I’m going to show you how to dance tango.”
“I can’t do this!” I protested. But in truth, I was eager to learn. I had seen Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie pictures. I liked the way Ginger twirled her body, landed into trouble, then danced away. I liked to watch the way she tapped her feet fast, like the wings of a bird.
But we didn’t dance like that. She moved forward, I moved backward, quickly, then slowly. She dipped my head back one way, then another, and I screamed and laughed. That afternoon we played the record over and over again. And on other afternoons, she taught me other kinds of
dances: waltz one-two-three, foxtrot, lindy hop-hop. The cook and the servant watched us both and clapped hands.
I taught her things too. How to write her name. How to make a stitch for a hole so it wouldn’t show. How to say things in a proper sort of way. Actually, she was the one who asked me to instruct her on lady manners. This was after she got into a fight with Hulan.
Hulan had asked Min where she would live after she was through visiting us. And right away Min had said, “Not your business!” The whole evening Hulan would not look at Min, pretended her chair was empty. She made sniffing sounds with her nose so often I finally had to ask her, “Hulan, are you smelling something rotten?”
Later I told Min, “If someone asks you a question, you cannot say, ‘Not your business.’ This is not good manners, doesn’t sound good.”
“Why should I answer her? She’s the one with bad manners to ask,” she said.
“Even so, next time she asks, you smile and say, ‘In this matter, you should not trouble yourself for my sake.’ This is the same meaning as ‘Not your business,’ maybe even stronger.”
She repeated the phrase several times. “Oh, this sounds good,” she said, laughing big. “I sound like a lady.”
“And when you laugh,” I said, “put your hand over your mouth like this, so your teeth don’t show. Laughing like a monkey doesn’t look good, everything on the inside of your mouth showing.”
She laughed again, this time covering her mouth. “And your name, when you become an actress—I think it should be Miss Golden Throat. It has a nice sound, very cultivated.” She nodded. And I then showed her how to write her new name.
One day, after Min had been with us for maybe three or four weeks, Auntie Du passed by my room and stood too long by my doorway. She asked about my health, my husband’s health, Danru’s health. So finally I had to invite her in to have tea with me.
We sat at the table for a very long time. At first we made polite talk about Auntie Du’s health, Hulan’s health, Jiaguo’s health. And then she was quiet, although she sipped her tea very noisily.