Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  MAXINE HONG KINGSTON (1940- )

  Born in Stockton, California, Maxine Hong Kingston was the oldest child of educated Chinese-immigrant parents; they owned a laundry.

  Kingston attended the University of California in Berkeley. She taught English at high schools in California and Hawaii. In 1976, her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction. China Men (1980) received the American Book Award for general nonfiction. Kingston considers the two companion works “one big book.” Her novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book appeared in 1988.

  In this comic selection from Part Four of The Woman Warrior, Brave Orchid, Kingston’s mother, has persuaded her older sister Moon Orchid to leave China and come to California in order to confront the husband who left her in China thirty years earlier.

  from THE WOMAN WARRIOR

  Wait until morning, Aunt,” said Moon Orchid’s daughter. “Let her get some sleep.”

  “Yes, I do need rest after travelling all the way from China,” she said. “I’m here. You’ve done it and brought me here.” Moon Orchid meant that they should be satisfied with what they had already accomplished. Indeed, she stretched happily and appeared quite satisfied to be sitting in that kitchen at that moment. “I want to go to sleep early because of jet lag,” she said, but Brave Orchid, who had never been on an airplane, did not let her.

  “What are we going to do about your husband?” Brave Orchid asked quickly. That ought to wake her up.

  “I don’t know. Do we have to do something?”

  “He does not know you’re here.”

  Moon Orchid did not say anything. For thirty years she had been receiving money from him from America. But she had never told him that she wanted to come to the United States. She waited for him to suggest it, but he never did. Nor did she tell him that her sister had been working for years to transport her here. First Brave Orchid had found a Chinese-American husband for her daughter. Then the daughter had come and had been able to sign the papers to bring Moon Orchid over.

  “We have to tell him you’ve arrived,” said Brave Orchid.

  Moon Orchid’s eyes got big like a child’s. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “Nonsense. I want you here, and your daughter wants you here.”

  “But that’s all.”

  “Your husband is going to have to see you. We’ll make him recognize you. Ha. Won’t it be fun to see his face? You’ll go to his house. And when his second wife answers the door, you say, ‘I want to speak to my husband,’ and you name his personal name. ‘Tell him I’ll be sitting in the family room.’ Walk past her as if she were a servant. She’ll scold him when he comes home from work, and it’ll serve him right. You yell at him too.”

  “I’m scared,” said Moon Orchid. “I want to go back to Hong Kong.”

  “You can’t. It’s too late. You’ve sold your apartment. See here. We know his address. He’s living in Los Angeles with his second wife, and they have three children. Claim your rights. Those are your children. He’s got two sons. You have two sons. You take them away from her. You become their mother.”

  “Do you really think I can be a mother of sons? Don’t you think they’ll be loyal to her, since she gave birth to them?”

  “The children will go to their true mother—you,” said Brave Orchid. “That’s the way it is with mothers and children.”

  “Do you think he’ll get angry at me because I came without telling him?”

  “He deserves your getting angry with him. For abandoning you and for abandoning your daughter.”

  “He didn’t abandon me. He’s given me so much money. I’ve had all the food and clothes and servants I’ve ever wanted. And he’s supported our daughter too, even though she’s only a girl. He sent her to college. I can’t bother him. I mustn’t bother him.”

  “How can you let him get away with this? Bother him. He deserves to be bothered. How dare he marry somebody else when he has you? How can you sit there so calmly? He would’ve let you stay in China forever. I had to send for your daughter, and I had to send for you. Urge her,” she turned to her niece. “Urge her to go look for him.”

  “I think you should go look for my father,” she said. “I’d like to meet him. I’d like to see what my father looks like.”

  “What does it matter what he’s like?” said her mother. “You’re a grown woman with a husband and children of your own. You don’t need a father—or a mother either. You’re only curious.”

  “In this country,” said Brave Orchid, “many people make their daughters their heirs. If you don’t go see him, he’ll give everything to the second wife’s children.”

  “But he gives us everything anyway. What more do I have to ask for? If I see him face to face, what is there to say?”

  “I can think of hundreds of things,” said Brave Orchid. “Oh, how I’d love to be in your place. I could tell him so many things. What scenes I could make. You’re so wishy-washy.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You have to ask him why he didn’t come home. Why he turned into a barbarian. Make him feel bad about leaving his mother and father. Scare him. Walk right into his house with your suitcases and boxes. Move right into the bedroom. Throw her stuff out of the drawers and put yours in. Say, ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.’”

  “Oh, no, I can’t do that. I can’t do that at all. That’s terrible.”

  “Of course you can. I’ll teach you. ‘I am the first wife, and she is our servant.’ And you teach the little boys to call you Mother.”

  “I don’t think I’d be very good with little boys. Little American boys. Our brother is the only boy I’ve known. Aren’t they very rough and unfeeling?”

  “Yes, but they’re yours. Another thing I’d do if I were you, I’d get a job and help him out. Show him I could make his life easier; how I didn’t need his money.”

  “He has a great deal of money, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, he can do some job the barbarians value greatly.”

  “Could I find a job like that? I’ve never had a job.”

  “You could be a maid in a hotel,” Brave Orchid advised. “A lot of immigrants start that way nowadays. And the maids get to bring home all the leftover soap and the clothes people leave behind.”

  “I would clean up after people, then?”

  Brave Orchid looked at this delicate sister. She was such a little old lady. She had long fingers and thin, soft hands. And she had a high-class city accent from living in Hong Kong. Not a trace of village accent remained; she had been away from the village for that long. But Brave Orchid would not relent; her dainty sister would just have to toughen up. “Immigrants also work in the canneries, where it’s so noisy it doesn’t matter if they speak Chinese or what. The easiest way to find a job, though, is to work in Chinatown. You get twenty-five cents an hour and all your meals if you’re working in a restaurant.”

  If she were in her sister’s place, Brave Orchid would have been on the phone immediately, demanding one of those Chinatown jobs. She would make the boss agree that she start work as soon as he opened his doors the next morning. Immigrants nowadays were bandits, beating up store owners and stealing from them rather than working. It must’ve been the Communists who taught them those habits.

  Moon Orchid rubbed her forehead. The kitchen light shined warmly on the gold and jade rings that gave her hands completeness. One of the rings was a wedding ring. Brave Orchid, who had been married for almost fifty years, did not wear any rings. They got in the way of all the work. She did not want the gold to wash away in the dishwater and the laundry water and the field water. She looked at her younger sister whose very wrinkles were fine. “Forget about a job,” she said, which was very lenient of her. “You won’t have to work. You just go to your husband’s house and demand your rights as First Wife. When you see him, you can say, ‘Do you remember me?’”

  “What if he doesn’t?”


  “Then start telling him details about your life together in China. Act like a fortuneteller. He’ll be so impressed.”

  “Do you think he’ll be glad to see me?”

  “He better be glad to see you.”

  As midnight came, twenty-two hours after she left Hong Kong, Moon Orchid began to tell her sister that she really was going to face her husband. “He won’t like me,” she said.

  “Maybe you should dye your hair black, so he won’t think you’re old. Or I have a wig you can borrow. On the other hand, he should see how you’ve suffered. Yes, let him see how he’s made your hair turn white…”

  The summer days passed while they talked about going to find Moon Orchid’s husband…She spent the evening observing the children. She liked to figure them out. She described them aloud. “Now they’re studying again. They read so much. Is it because they have enormous quantities to learn, and they’re trying not to be savages? He is picking up his pencil and tapping it on the desk. Then he opens his book to. His eyes begin to read. His eyes go back and forth. They go from left to right, from left to right.” This makes her laugh. “How wondrous—eyes reading back and forth. Now he’s writing his thoughts down. What’s that thought?” she asked, pointing.

  She followed her nieces and nephews about. She bent over them. “Now she is taking a machine off the shelf. She attaches two metal spiders to it. She plugs in the cord. She cracks an egg against the rim and pours the yolk and white out of the shell into the bowl. She presses a button, and the spiders spin the eggs. What are you making?”

  “Aunt, please take your finger out of the batter.”

  “She says, ‘Aunt, please take your finger out of the batter,’” Moon Orchid repeated as she turned to follow another niece walking through the kitchen. “Now what’s this one doing? Why, she’s sewing a dress. She’s going to try it on.” Moon Orchid would walk right into the children’s rooms while they were dressing. “Now she must be looking over her costumes to see which one to wear.” Moon Orchid pulled out a dress. “This is nice,” she suggested. “Look at all the colors.”

  “No, Aunt. That’s the kind of dress for a party. I’m going to school now.”

  “Oh, she’s going to school now. She’s choosing a plain blue dress. She’s picking up her comb and brush and shoes, and she’s going to lock herself up in the bathroom. They dress in bathrooms here.” She pressed her ear against the door. “She’s brushing her teeth. Now she’s coming out of the bathroom. She’s wearing the blue dress and a white sweater. She’s combed her hair and washed her face. She looks in the refrigerator and is arranging things between slices of bread. She’s putting an orange and cookies in a bag. Today she’s taking her green book and her blue book. And tablets and pencils. Do you take a dictionary?” Moon Orchid asked.

  “No,” said the child, rolling her eyeballs up and exhaling loudly. “We have dictionaries at school,” she added before going out the door.

  “They have dictionaries at school,” said Moon Orchid, thinking this over. “She knows ‘dictionary.’” Moon Orchid stood at the window peeping. “Now she’s shutting the gate. She strides along like an Englishman.”

  The child married to a husband who did not speak Chinese translated for him, “Now she’s saying that I’m taking a machine off the shelf and that I’m attaching two metal spiders to it. And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically. Now she says I’m hunting for something in the refrigerator and—ha!—I’ve found it. I’m taking out butter—‘cow oil.’ ‘They eat a lot of cow oil,’ she’s saying.”

  “She’s driving me nuts!” the children told each other in English.

  At the laundry Moon Orchid hovered so close that there was barely room between her and the hot presses. “Now the index fingers of both hands press the buttons, and—kalump—the press comes down. But one finger on a button will release it—ssssss—the steam lets loose. Sssst—the water squirts.” She could describe it so well, you would think she could do it. She wasn’t as hard to take at the laundry as at home, though. She could not endure the heat, and after a while she had to go out on the sidewalk and sit on her apple crate. When they were younger the children used to sit out there too during their breaks. They played house and store and library, their orange and apple crates in a row. Passers-by and customers gave them money. But now they were older, they stayed inside or went for walks. They were ashamed of sitting on the sidewalk, people mistaking them for beggars. “Dance for me,” the ghosts would say before handing them a nickel. “Sing a Chinese song.” And before they got old enough to know better, they’d dance and they’d sing. Moon Orchid sat out there by herself.

  Whenever Brave Orchid thought of it, which was everyday, she said, “Are you ready to go see your husband and claim what is yours?”

  “Not today, but soon,” Moon Orchid would reply.

  But one day in the middle of summer, Moon Orchid’s daughter said, “I have to return to my family. I promised my husband and children I’d only be gone a few weeks. I should return this week.” Moon Orchid’s daughter lived in Los Angeles.

  “Good!” Brave Orchid exclaimed. “We’ll all go to Los Angeles. You return to your husband, and your mother returns to hers. We only have to make one trip.”

  “You ought to leave the poor man alone,” said Brave Orchid’s husband. “Leave him out of women’s business.”

  “When your father lived in China,” Brave Orchid told the children, “he refused to eat pastries because he didn’t want to eat the dirt the women kneaded from between their fingers.”

  “But I’m happy here with you and all your children,” Moon Orchid said. “I want to see how this girl’s sewing turns out. I want to see your son come back from Vietnam. I want to see if this one gets good grades. There’s so much to do.”

  “We’re leaving on Friday,” said Brave Orchid. “I’m going to escort you, and you will arrive safely.”

  On Friday Brave Orchid put on her dress-up clothes, which she wore only a few times during the year. Moon Orchid wore the same kind of clothes she wore every day and was dressed up. Brave Orchid told her oldest son he had to drive. He drove, and the two old ladies and the niece sat in the back seat.

  They set out at gray dawn, driving between the grape trees, which hunched like dwarfs in the fields. Gnomes in serrated outfits that blew in the morning wind came out of the earth, came up in rows and columns. Everybody was only half awake. “A long time ago,” began Brave Orchid, “the emperors had four wives, one at each point of the compass, and they lived in four palaces. The Empress of the West would connive for power, but the Empress of the East was good and kind and full of light. You are the Empress of the East, and the Empress of the West has imprisoned the Earth’s Emperor in the Western Palace. And you, the good Empress of the East, come out of the dawn to invade her land and free the Emperor. You must break the strong spell she has cast on him that has lost him the East.”

  Brave Orchid gave her sister last-minute advice for five hundred miles. All her possessions had been packed into the trunk.

  “Shall we go into your house together,” asked Brave Orchid, “or do you want to go by yourself?”

  “You’ve got to come with me. I don’t know what I would say.”

  “I think it would be dramatic for you to go by yourself. He opens the door. And there you are—alive and standing on the porch with all your luggage. ‘Remember me?’ you say. Call him by his own name. He’ll faint with shock. Maybe he’ll say, ‘No. Go away.’ But you march right in. You push him aside and go in. Then you sit down in the most important chair, and you take off your shoes because you belong.”

  “Don’t you think he’ll welcome me?”

  “She certainly wasn’t very imaginative,” thought Brave Orchid.

  “It’s against the law to have two wives in this country,” said Moon Orchid. “I read that in the newspaper.”

  “But it’s probably against the law in Singapore too. Ye
t our brother has two, and his sons have two each. The law doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m scared. Oh, let’s turn back. I don’t want to see him. Suppose he throws me out? Oh, he will. He’ll throw me out. And he’ll have a right to throw me out, coming here, disturbing him, not waiting for him to invite me. Don’t leave me by myself. You can talk louder than I can.”

  “Yes, coming with you would be exciting. I can charge through the door and say, ‘Where is your wife?’ And he’ll answer, ‘Why, she’s right here.’ And I’ll say, ‘This isn’t your wife. Where is Moon Orchid? I’ve come to see her. I’m her first sister, and I’ve come to see that she is being well taken care of.’ Then I accuse him of murderous things; I’d have him arrested—and you pop up to his rescue. Or I can take a look at his wife, and I say, ‘Moon Orchid, how young you’ve gotten.’ And he’ll say, ‘This isn’t Moon Orchid.’ And you come in and say, ‘No. I am.’ If nobody’s home, we’ll climb in a window. When they get back we’ll be at home; you the hostess, and I your guest. You’ll be serving me cookies and coffee. And when he comes in I’ll say, ‘Well, I see your husband is home. Thank you so much for the visit.’ And you say, ‘Come again anytime.’ Don’t make violence. Be routine.”

  Sometimes Moon Orchid got into the mood. “Maybe I could be folding towels when he comes in. He’ll think I’m so clever. I’ll get to them before his wife does.” But the further they came down the great central valley—green fields changing to fields of cotton on dry, brown stalks, first a stray bush here and there, then thick—the more Moon Orchid wanted to turn back. “No. I can’t go through with this.” She tapped her nephew on the shoulder. “Please turn back. Oh, you must turn the car around. I should be returning to China. I shouldn’t be here at all. Let’s go back. Do you understand me?”