by Amy Tan
At the end of the sermon, there was a little show, using the music box that belonged to Miss Banner. Everyone liked this part very much. The singing was not so good, but when the music started, we knew our suffering was almost at an end. Pastor Amen lifted both hands and told us to rise. Mrs. Amen walked to the front of the room. So did the nervous missionary named Lasher, like laoshu, “mouse,” so that was what we called her, Miss Mouse. There was also a foreign doctor named Swan, which sounded like suan-le, “too late”—no wonder sick people were scared to see him. Dr. Too Late was in charge of opening Miss Banner’s music box and winding it with a key. When the music started, the three of them sang. Mrs. Amen had tears pouring from her eyes. Some of the old country people asked out loud if the box contained tiny foreigners.
Miss Banner once told me the music box was a gift from her father, the only memory of her family that she had left. Inside, she kept a little album for writing down her thoughts. The music, she said, was actually a German song about drinking beer, dancing, and kissing pretty girls. But Mrs. Amen had written new words, which I heard a hundred times but only as sounds: “We’re marching with Jesus on two willing feet, when Death turns the corner, our Lord we shall meet.” Something like that. You see, I remember that old song, but this time the words have new meaning. Anyway, that was the song we heard every week, telling everyone to go outside to eat a bowl of rice, a gift from Jesus. We had many beggars who thought Jesus was a landlord with many rice fields.
The second Sunday, Pastor Amen spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner for three. Then Pastor for another five minutes, Miss Banner for one. Everything became shorter and shorter on the Chinese side, and the flies drank from our sweat for only one and a half hours that Sunday. The week after that it was only one hour. Later, Pastor Amen had a long talk with Miss Banner. The following week, Pastor Amen spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner spoke the same amount. Again Pastor spoke for five minutes, Miss Banner the same amount. But now she didn’t talk about rules for going to heaven. She was saying, “Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived a giant and the filial daughter of a poor carpenter who was really a king. . . .” At the end of each five minutes, she would stop at a very exciting part and say something like: “Now I must let Pastor speak for five minutes. But while you wait, ask yourself, Did the tiny princess die, or did she save the giant?” After the sermon and story were over, she told people to shout “Amen” if they were ready to eat their free bowl of rice. Ah, big shouts!
Those Sunday sermons became very popular. Many beggars came to hear Miss Banner’s stories from her childhood. The Jesus Worshippers were happy. The rice-eaters were happy. Miss Banner was happy. I was the only one who worried. What if Pastor Amen learned what she was doing? Would he beat her? Would the God Worshippers pour coals over my body for teaching a foreigner to have a disobedient Chinese tongue? Would Pastor Amen lose face and have to hang himself? Would the people who came for rice and stories and not Jesus go to a foreigners’ hell?
When I told Miss Banner my worries, she laughed and said no such thing would happen. I asked her how she knew this. She said, “If everyone is happy, what harm can follow?” I remembered what the man who returned to Thistle Mountain had said: “Too much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow.”
WE HAD five years of happiness. Miss Banner and I became great and loyal friends. The other missionaries remained strangers to me. But from seeing little changes every day, I knew their secrets very well. Lao Lu told me about shameful things he saw from outside their windows, also strange things he saw when he was inside their rooms. How Miss Mouse cried over a locket holding a dead person’s hair. How Dr. Too Late ate opium pills for his stomachache. How Mrs. Amen hid pieces of Communion bread in her drawer, never eating it, just saving it for the end of the world. How Pastor Amen reported to America that he had made one hundred converts when really it was only one.
In return, I told Lao Lu some of the secrets I had seen myself. That Miss Mouse had feelings for Dr. Too Late, but he didn’t notice. That Dr. Too Late had strong feelings for Miss Banner, and she pretended not to notice. But I did not tell him that Miss Banner still had great feelings for her number-three sweetheart, a man named Waren. Only I knew this.
For five years, everything was the same, except for these small changes. That was our life back then, a little hope, a little change, a little secret.
And yes, I had my secrets too. My first secret was this. One night, I dreamed I saw Jesus, a foreign man with long hair, long beard, many followers. I told Miss Banner, except I forgot to mention the part about the dream. So she told Pastor Amen, and he put me down for a hundred converts—that’s why I knew it was only one. I didn’t tell Miss Banner to correct him. Then he would have been more ashamed that his hundred converts was not even one.
My second secret was much worse.
This happened soon after Miss Banner told me she had lost her family and her hopes. I said I had so much hope I could use my leftovers to wish her sweetheart would change his mind and return. This pleased her very much. So that’s what I prayed for, for at least one hundred days.
One evening, I was sitting on a stool in Miss Banner’s room. We were talking, talking, talking. When we ran out of the usual complaints, I asked if we could play the music box. Yes, yes, she said. I opened the box. No key. It’s in the drawer, she said. Ah! What’s this? I picked up an ivory carving and held it to my eye. It was in the shape of a naked lady. Very unusual. I remembered seeing something like it once. I asked her where the little statue had come from.
“It belonged to my sweetheart,” she said. “The handle of his walking stick. When it broke off, he gave it to me as a remembrance.”
Wah! That’s when I knew Miss Banner’s sweetheart was the traitor, General Cape. All this time, I had been praying for him to come back. Just thinking about it shriveled my scalp.
So that was my second secret: that I knew who he was. And the third was this: I started praying he would stay away.
Let me tell you, Libby-ah, I didn’t know how much she hungered for love, any kind. Sweet love didn’t last, and it was too hard to find. But rotten love!—there was plenty to fill the hollow. So that’s what she grew accustomed to, that’s what she took as soon as it came back.
5
LAUNDRY DAY
Just like clockwork, the phone rings at eight. That makes it the third morning in a row Kwan’s called at the exact moment that I’m buttering toast. Before I can say hello, she blurts out: “Libby-ah, ask Simon— name of stereo fix-it store, what is?”
“What’s wrong with your stereo?”
“Wrong? Ahhhh . . . too much noise. Yes-yes, I play radio, it go ccccchhhhhhhssss.”
“Did you try adjusting the frequency?”
“Yes-yes! I often adjust.”
“How about standing back from the stereo? Maybe you’re conducting a lot of static today. It’s supposed to rain.”
“Okay-okay, maybe try that first. But just case, you call Simon, ask him store name.”
I’m in a good mood. I want to see how far she’ll carry her ruse. “I know the store,” I say, and search for a likely-sounding name. “Yeah, it’s Bogus Boomboxes. On Market Street.” I can practically hear Kwan’s mind whirring and clicking into alternate mode.
Finally she laughs and says, “Hey, you bad girl—lie! No such name.”
“And no such stereo problem,” I add.
“Okay-okay. You call Simon, tell him Kwan say Happy Birthday.”
“Actually, I was going to call him for the same reason.”
“Oh, you so bad! Why you torture me, embarrass this way!” She lets out a wheezy laugh, then gasps and says, “Oh, and Libby-ah, after call Simon, call Ma.”
“Why? Is her stereo broken too?”
“Don’t joke. Her heart feel bad.”
I’m alarmed. “What’s wrong? Is it serious?”
“Mm-hmm. So sad. You remember new boyfriend she have, I May Hopfree?”
“High-may ho-fray,” I pronounce slowly. “Jaime Jofré.”
“I always remember, I May Hopfree. And that’s what he do! Turn out he married already. Chile lady. She show up, pinch his ear, take home.”
“No!” A ripple of glee flows into my cheeks, and I mentally slap myself.
“Yes-yes, Ma so mad! Last week she buy two loveboat cruise ticket. Hopfree say use your Visa, I pay you back. Now no pay, no cruise, no refund. Ah! Poor Ma, always find wrong man. . . . Hey, maybe I do matchmake for her. I choose better for her than she choose herself. I make good match, bring me luck.”
“What if it’s not so good?”
“Then I must fix, make better. My duty.”
After we hang up, I think about Kwan’s duty. No wonder she sees my impending divorce as a personal and professional failure on her part. She still believes she was our spiritual mei-po, our cosmic matchmaker. And I’m hardly in the position to tell her that she wasn’t. I was the one who asked her to convince Simon we were destined to be together, linked by the necessity of fate.
SIMON BISHOP AND I met more than seventeen years ago. At that moment in our lives, we were willing to place all our hopes on the ridiculous—pyramid power, Brazilian figa charms, even the advice of Kwan and her ghosts. We both were terribly in love, I with Simon, he with someone else. The someone else happened to have died before I ever met Simon, although I didn’t know that until three months later.
I spotted Simon in a linguistics class at UC Berkeley, spring quarter 1976. I noticed him right away because like me he had a name that didn’t fit with his Asian features. Eurasian students weren’t as common then as they are now, and as I stared at him, I had the sense I was seeing my male doppelgänger. I started wondering how genes interact, why one set of racial characteristics dominates in one person and not in another with the same background. I once met a girl whose last name was Chan. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and no, she wearily explained, she was not adopted. Her father was Chinese. I figured that her father’s ancestors had engaged in secret dalliances with the British or Portuguese in Hong Kong. I was like that girl, always having to explain about my last name, why I didn’t look like a Laguni. My brothers look almost as Italian as their last name implies. Their faces are more angular than mine. Their hair has a slight curl and is a lighter shade of brown.
Simon didn’t look like any particular race. He was a perfectly balanced blend, half Hawaiian-Chinese, half Anglo, a fusion of different racial genes and not a dilution. When our linguistics class formed study groups, Simon and I drifted toward the same one. We didn’t mention what we so obviously shared.
I remember the first time he brought up his girlfriend, because I had been hoping he didn’t have one. Five of us were cramming for a midterm. I was listing the attributes of Etruscan: a dead language, as well as an isolate, unrelated to other languages . . . In the middle of my summary, Simon blurted: “My girlfriend, Elza, she went on a study tour of Italy and saw these incredible Etruscan tombs.”
We looked at him—like, So? Mind you, Simon didn’t say, “My girlfriend, who, by the way, is as dead as this language.” He talked about her in passing, as if she were alive and well, traveling on Eurail and sending postcards from Tuscany. After a few seconds of awkward silence, he looked sheepish and mumbled the way people do when they’re caught arguing with themselves while walking down the sidewalk. Poor guy, I thought, and at that moment my heartstrings went twing.
After class, Simon and I would often take turns buying each other coffee at the Bear’s Lair. There we added to the drone of hundreds of other life-changing conversations and epiphanies. We discussed primitivism as a Western-biased concept. Mongrelization as the only long-term answer to racism. Irony, satire, and parody as the deepest forms of truth. He told me he wanted to create his own philosophy, one that would guide his life’s work, that would enable him to make substantive changes in the world. I looked up the word substantive in the dictionary that night, then realized I wanted a substantive life too. When I was with him, I felt as if a secret and better part of myself had finally been unleashed. I had dated other guys to whom I felt attracted, but those relationships seldom went beyond the usual good times induced by all-night parties, stoned conversations, and sometimes sex, all of which soon grew as stale as morning breath. With Simon, I laughed harder, thought more deeply, felt more passionately about life beyond my own cubbyhole. We could volley ideas back and forth like tennis pros. We wrestled with each other’s minds. We unearthed each other’s past with psychoanalytic gusto.
I thought it was eerie how much we had in common. Both of us had lost a parent before the age of five, he a mother, I a father. We both had owned pet turtles; his died after he accidentally dropped them into a chlorinated swimming pool. We both had been loners as kids, abandoned to caretakers—he to two unmarried sisters of his mother’s, I to Kwan.
“My mom left me in the hands of someone who talked to ghosts!” I once told him.
“God! I’m amazed you aren’t crazier than you already are.” We laughed, and I felt giddy about our making fun of what had once caused me so much pain.
“Good ol’ Mom,” I added. “She’s the quintessential social worker, totally obsessed with helping strangers and ignoring the homefront. She’d rather keep an appointment with her manicurist than lift a finger to help her kids. Talk about phony! It wasn’t that she was pathological, but, you know—”
And Simon jumped in: “Yeah, even benign neglect can hurt for a lifetime.” Which was exactly what I was feeling but couldn’t put into words. And then he clinched my heart: “Maybe her lack of attention is what made you as strong as you are today.” I nodded eagerly as he went on: “I was thinking that, because my girlfriend—you know, Elza—well, she lost both parents when she was a baby. Talk about strong-willed— whew!”
That’s how we were together, intimate in every way—up to a point. I sensed we were attracted to each other. From my end it was a strong sexual charge. From his it was more like static cling—which he easily shook off: “Hey, Laguni,” he’d say, and put his hand firmly on my shoulder. “I’m bushed, gotta run. But if you want to go over notes this weekend, give me a call.” With this breezy sendoff, I’d trudge back to my apartment, nothing to do on a Friday night, because I had turned down a date hoping that Simon would ask me out. By then I was stupid-in-love with Simon—goo-goo-eyed, giggly-voiced, floaty-headed, infatuated in the worst way. There were so many times when I lay in bed, disgusted that I was twitching with unspent desire. I wondered: Am I crazy? Am I the only one who’s turned on? Sure, he has a girlfriend. So what? As everyone knows, when you’re in college and changing your mind about a million things, a current girlfriend can turn into a former one overnight.
But Simon didn’t seem to know that I was flirting with him. “You know what I like about you?” he asked me. “You treat me like a good buddy. We can talk about anything and we don’t let the other thing get in the way.”
“The other what?”
“The fact that we are . . . Well, you know, the opposite-sex thing.”
“Really?” I said, faking astonishment. “You mean, I’m a girl but you’re a— I had no idea!” And then we both broke into hearty guffaws.
At night I’d cry angrily, telling myself that I was a fool. I vowed many times to give up any hope of romance with Simon—as if it were possible to will myself not to be in love! But at least I knew how to put on a good front. I continued to play the jovial good buddy, listening with a smile on my face and a cramp in my heart. I expected the worst. And sure enough, sooner or later, he would bring up Elza, as though he knew she was on my mind as well.
Through three months of masochistic listening I came to know the minutiae of her life: That she lived in Salt Lake City, where she and Simon had grown up, tussling with each other since the fifth grade. That she had a two-inch scar on the back of her left knee the shape and color of an earthworm, a mysterious legacy from infancy. That she was athletic; she kayaked, backpacke
d, and was an expert cross-country skier. That she was musically gifted, a budding composer, who had studied with Artur Balsam at a famous summer music camp in Blue Hill, Maine. She’d even written her own thematic variation on the Goldberg Variations. “Really?” I said to each praiseworthy thing he said about her. “That’s amazing.”
The strange thing is, he kept speaking about her in the present tense. Naturally I thought she was alive in the present time. Once, Simon pointed out I had smeared lipstick on my teeth, and as I hurriedly rubbed it off, he added, “Elza doesn’t wear makeup, not even lipstick. She doesn’t believe in it.” I wanted to scream, What’s there to believe!? You either wear makeup or you don’t! By then I wanted to smack her, a girl so morally upright she had to be the most odious hominid ever to walk planet Earth, in her non–animal hide shoes. Even if Elza had been sweet and insipid, it wouldn’t have mattered, I still would have despised her. To me, Elza didn’t deserve Simon. Why should she have him as one of her perks of life? She deserved an Olympic gold medal for Amazon discus-throwing. She deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for saving retarded baby whales. She deserved to play organ for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Simon, on the other hand, deserved me, someone who could help him discover the recesses of his soul, the secret passageways that Elza had barricaded with constant criticism and disapproval. If I complimented Simon—told him what he had said was profound, for example— he’d say, “You think so? Elza says one of my biggest faults is going along with whatever’s nice and easy, that I don’t think things through hard enough.”
“You can’t believe everything that Elza says.”
“Yeah, that’s what she says too. She hates it when I just go along with what’s been handed to me as truth. She believes in trusting your own intuitions, sort of like that guy who wrote Walden, what’s his name, Thoreau. Anyway, she thinks it’s important for us to argue, to get to the marrow of what we believe and why.”