by Amy Tan
“Writing Chinese characters,” her mother told her, “is entirely different from writing English words. You think differently. You feel differently.” And it was true: LuLing was different when she was writing and painting. She was calm, organized, and decisive.
“Bao Bomu taught me how to write,” LuLing said one evening. “She taught me how to think. When you write, she said, you must gather the free-flowing of your heart.” To demonstrate, LuLing wrote the character for “heart.” “See? Each stroke has its own rhythm, its balance, its proper place. Bao Bomu said everything in life should be the same way.”
“Who’s Bao Bomu again?” Ruth asked.
“She took care of me when I was a girl. She loved me very much, just like a mother. Bao, well, this means ‘precious,’ and together with bomu, this means ‘Precious Auntie.’” Oh, that Bao Bomu, the crazy ghost. LuLing started to write a simple horizontal line. But the movements were not simple. She rested the tip of the brush on the paper, so it was like a dancer sur les pointes. The tip bent slightly downward, curtsied, and then, as if blown by capricious winds, swept to the right, paused, turned a half-step to the left and rose. Ruth blew out a sigh. Why even try? Her mother would just get upset that she could not do it right.
Some nights LuLing found ways to help Ruth remember the characters. “Each radical comes from an old picture from a long time ago.” She made a horizontal stroke and asked Ruth if she could see what the picture was. Ruth squinted and shook her head. LuLing made the identical stroke. Then again and again, asking each time if Ruth knew what it was. Finally, her mother let out a snort, the compressed form of her disappointment and disgust.
“This line is like a beam of light. Look, can you see it or not?”
To Ruth, the line looked like a sparerib picked clean of meat.
LuLing went on: “Each character is a thought, a feeling, meanings, history, all mixed into one.” She drew more lines—dots and dashes, downstrokes and upstrokes, bends and hooks. “Do you see this?” she said over and over, tink-tink-tink. “This line, and this and this—the shape of a heavenly temple.” And when Ruth shrugged in response, LuLing added, “In the old style of temples,” as if this word old would bump the Chinese gears of her daughter’s mind into action. Ping-ping! Oh, I see.
Later LuLing had Ruth try her hand at the same character, the whole time stuffing Chinese logic into her resistant brain. “Hold your wrist this way, firm but still loose, like a young willow branch—ai-ya, not collapsed like a beggar lying on the road… . Draw the stroke with grace, like a bird landing on a branch, not an executioner chopping off a devil’s head. The way you drew it—well, look, the whole thing is falling down. Do it like this… light first, then temple. See? Together, it means ‘news from the gods.’ See how this knowledge always comes from above? See how Chinese words make sense?”
With Chinese words, her mother did make sense, Ruth now reasoned to herself. Or did she?
She called the doctor and got the nurse. “This is Ruth Young, LuLing Young’s daughter. We ‘re coming to see Dr. Huey for a checkup at four, but I just wanted to mention a few things… .” She felt like a collaborator, a traitor and a spy.
When Ruth returned to the living room, she found her mother searching for her purse.
“We don’t need any money,” Ruth said. “And if we do, I can pay.”
“No, no pay! Nobody pay!” LuLing cried. “Inside purse put my health card. I don’t show card, doctor charge me extra. Everything suppose be free.”
“I’m sure they have your records there. They won’t need to see the card.”
LuLing kept searching. Abruptly she straightened herself and said, “I know. Leave my purse at GaoLing house. Must be she forget tell me.”
“What day did you go?”
“Three days go. Monday.”
“Today’s Monday.”
“How can be Monday? I go three days go, not today!”
“You took BART?” Since the car accident, LuLing had been taking public transportation when Ruth wasn’t able to act as chauffeur.
“Yes, and GaoLing late pick me up! I wait two hour. Fin’y she come. And then she accuse me, say, Why you come early, you suppose come here eleven. I tell her, No, I never say come eleven. Why I say coming eleven when I already know I coming nine o’clock? She pretend I crazy, make me so mad.”
“Do you think you might have left it on the BART train?”
“Left what?”
“Your purse.”
“Why you always take her side?”
“I’m not taking sides… .”
“Maybe she keep my purse, don’t tell me. She always want my things. Jealous of me. Little-girl time, she want my chipao dress, want my melon fruit, want everybody attention.”
The dramas her mother and Auntie had gone through over the years resembled those off-Broadway plays in which two characters perform all the roles: best friends and worst enemies, archrivals and gleeful conspirators. They were only a year apart, seventy-seven and seventy-six, and that closeness seemed to have made them competitive with each other.
The two sisters came to America separately, and married a pair of brothers, sons of a grocer and his wife. LuLing’s husband, Edwin Young, was in medical school, and as the elder, he was “destined” as LuLing put it, to be smarter and more successful. Most of the family’s attention and privileges had been showered on him. GaoLing’s husband, Edmund, the little brother, was in dental school. He was known as the lazy one, the careless boy who would always need a big brother to watch over him. But then big brother Edwin was killed in a hit-and-run car accident while leaving the UCSF library one night. Ruth had been two years old at the time. Her uncle Edmund went on to become the leader of the family, a well-respected dentist, and an even more savvy real estate investor in low-income rental units.
When the grocer and then his wife died, in the 1960s, most of the inheritance—money, the house, the store, gold and jade, family photos— went to Edmund, with only a small cash gift given to LuLing in consideration of her brief marriage to Edwin. “Only give me this much” LuLing often described, pinching her fingers as if holding a flea. “Just because you not a boy.”
With the death money, along with her years of savings, LuLing bought a two-unit building on Cabrillo and Forty-seventh, where she and Ruth lived in the top flat. GaoLing and Edmund moved to Saratoga, a town of vast-lawned ranch-style homes and kidney-shaped pools. Occasionally they would offer LuLing furniture they were going to replace with something better. “Why I should take?” she would fume. “So they can pity for me? Feel so good for themself, give me things they don’t want? “
Throughout the years, LuLing lamented in Chinese, “Ai-ya, if only your father had lived, he would be even more successful than your uncle. And still we wouldn’t spend so carelessly like them!” She also noted what should have been Ruth’s rightful property: Grandmother Young’s jade ring, money for a college fund. It shouldn’t have mattered that Ruth was a girl or that Edwin had died. That was old Chinese thinking! LuLing said this so often Ruth could not help fantasizing what her life might have been like had her father lived. She could have bought patent-leather shoes, rhinestone-covered barrettes, and baby roses. Sometimes she stared at a photo of her father and felt angry he was dead. Then she felt guilty and scared. She tried to convince herself that she deeply loved this father she could not even remember. She picked the flowerlike weeds that grew in the cracks of sidewalks and put them in front of his framed picture.
Ruth now watched as LuLing searched in the closet for her purse. She was still pointing out GaoLing’s transgressions. “Later grown-up time, want my things too. Want your daddy marry her. Yes, you don’t know this. Edwin not Edmund, because he oldest, more success. Every day smile for him, show off her teeth, like monkey.” LuLing turned around and demonstrated. “But he not interest in her, only me. She so mad. Later she marry Edmund, and when you daddy die, she say, Ooooh, so lucky I not marry Edwin! So stupid she saying that. To my fa
ce! Don’t consider me, only concerning herself. I say nothing. I never complaining. Do I ever complaining?”
Ruth joined in the search, sticking her hands under seat cushions.
LuLing straightened herself to all four feet, eleven inches of indignity. “And now you see! Why GaoLing still want my money? She crazy, you know. She always think I got more, hiding somewhere. That’s why I think she take my purse.”
The dining room table, which LuLing never used, was a raft of junk mail. Ruth pushed aside the Chinese-language newspapers and magazines. Her mother had always been sanitary, but never neat. She hated grease but didn’t mind chaos. She kept junk mail and coupons, as if they were personal greeting cards.
“Here it is!” Ruth cried. What a relief. She pulled out a green pocket-book from underneath a mound of magazines. As LuLing checked that her money and credit cards were still inside, Ruth noticed what had obscured the purse in the first place: new issues of Woodworking Today, Seventeen, Home Audio and Video, Runner’s World, Cosmopolitan, Dog Fancy, Ski, Country Living—magazines her mother would never read in a million years.
“Why do you have all these?”
LuLing smiled shyly. “First I thinking, Get money, then tell you. Now you ask, so now I show you.” She went to the kitchen drawer where she kept years of expired coupons and pulled out an oversized envelope.
“News from the gods, “ LuLing murmured. “I won ten million dollar! Open and see.”
Sure enough, inside were a sweepstakes promotion coupon that resembled a check, and a sheet of peel-off miniature magazine covers. Half the covers were missing. LuLing must have ordered three dozen magazines. Ruth could picture the mail carrier dragging over a sackful of them every day, spilling them onto the driveway, her mother’s hopes and logic jumbled into the same pile.
“You surprise?” LuLing wore a look of absolute joy.
“You should tell the doctor your good news.”
LuLing beamed, then added, “I win all for you.”
Ruth felt a twinge in her chest. It quickly grew into an ache. She wanted to embrace her mother, shield her, and at the same time wanted her mother to cradle her, to assure her that she was okay, that she had not had a stroke or worse. That was how her mother had always been, difficult, oppressive, and odd. And in exactly that way, LuLing had loved her. Ruth knew that, felt it. No one could have loved her more. Better perhaps, but not more.
“Thanks, Ma. It’s wonderful. We’ll talk about it later, what to do with the money. But now we have to go. The doctor said we could still come at four, and we shouldn’t be late.”
LuLing turned crabby again. “You fault we late.”
Ruth had to remind her to take her newly found purse, then her coat, finally her keys. She felt ten years old again, translating for her mother how the world worked, explaining the rules, the restrictions, the time limits on money-back guarantees. Back then she had been resentful. Now she was terrified.
THREE
In the hospital waiting room, Ruth saw that all the patients, except one pale balding man, were Asian. She read the blackboard listing of doctors’ names: Fong, Wong, Wang, Tang, Chin, Pon, Kwak, Koo. The receptionist looked Chinese; so did the nurses.
In the sixties, mused Ruth, people railed against race-differentiated services as ghettoization. Now they demanded them as culturally sensitive. Then again, San Francisco was about a third Asian, so Chinese-targeted medicine could also be a marketing strategy. The balding man was glancing about, as if seeking an escape route. Did he have a last name like Young that had been mistakenly identified as Chinese by a race-blind computer? Did he also get calls from Chinese-speaking telemarketers trying to sign him up for long-distance calling plans for Hong Kong and Taiwan? Ruth knew what it meant to feel like an outsider, because she had often been one as a child. Moving to a new home eight times made her aware of how she didn’t fit in.
“Fia start six grade?” LuLing was now asking.
“You’re thinking of Dory,” Ruth answered. Dory had been held back a year because of attention deficit disorder. She now received special tutoring.
“How can be Dory?”
“Fia’s the older one, she’s going into tenth. Dory’s thirteen. She’ll be in seventh.”
“I know who who!” LuLing grumbled. She counted, flipping her fingers down as she listed: “Dory, Fia, oldest one Fu-Fu, seventeen.” Ruth used to joke that Fu-Fu, her feral cat, born with a nasty disposition, was the grandchild LuLing never had. “How Fu-Fu do?” LuLing asked.
Hadn’t she told her mother Fu-Fu had died? She must have. Or Art had. Everyone knew that Ruth had been depressed for weeks after it happened.
“Fu-Fu’s dead,” she reminded her mother.
“Ai-ya!” LuLing’s face twisted with agony. “How this can be! What happen?”
“I told you—”
“No, you never!”
“Oh… Well, a few months ago, she went over the fence. A dog chased her. She couldn’t climb back up fast enough.”
“Why you have dog?”
“It was a neighbor’s dog.”
“Then why you let neighbor’s dog come your backyard? Now see what happen! Ai-ya, die no reason!”
Her mother was speaking far too loudly. People were looking up from their knitting and reading, even the balding man. Ruth was pained. That cat had been her baby. She had held her the day she was born, a tiny wild ball of fur, found in Wendy’s garage on a rainy day. Ruth had also held her as the vet gave the lethal shot to end her misery. Thinking about this nearly put Ruth over the edge, and she did not want to burst into tears in a waiting room full of strangers.
At that moment, luckily, the receptionist called out, “LuLing Young!” As Ruth helped her mother gather her purse and coat, she saw the balding man leap up and walk quickly toward an elderly Chinese woman. “Hey, Mom,” Ruth heard him say. “How’d everything check out? Ready to go home?” The woman gruffly handed him a prescription note. He must be her son-in-law, Ruth surmised. Would Art ever take her mother to the doctor’s? She doubted it. How about in the case of an emergency, a heart attack, a stroke?
The nurse spoke to LuLing in Cantonese and she answered in Mandarin. They settled on accented English as their common ground. LuLing quietly submitted to the preliminaries. Step on the scale. Eighty-five pounds. Blood pressure. One hundred over seventy. Roll up your sleeve and make a fist. LuLing did not flinch. She had taught Ruth to do the same, to look straight at the needle and not cry out. In the examination room, Ruth turned away as her mother slipped out of her cotton camisole and stood in her waist-high flowered panties.
LuLing put on a paper gown, climbed onto the examining table, and dangled her feet. She looked childlike and breakable. Ruth sank into a nearby chair. When the doctor arrived, they both sat up straight. LuLing had always had great respect for doctors.
“Mrs. Young!” the doctor greeted her jovially. “I’m Dr. Huey.” He glanced at Ruth.
“I’m her daughter. I called your office earlier.”
He nodded knowingly. Dr. Huey was a pleasant-looking man, younger than Ruth. He started asking LuLing questions in Cantonese, and her mother pretended to understand, until Ruth explained, “She speaks Mandarin, not Cantonese.”
The doctor looked at her mother. “Guoyu?”
LuLing nodded, and Dr. Huey shrugged apologetically. “My Mandarin is pretty terrible. How’s your English?”
“Good. No problem.”
At the end of the examination, Dr. Huey smiled and announced, “Well, you are one very strong lady. Heart and lungs are great. Blood pressure excellent. Especially for someone your age. Let’s see, what year were you born?” He scanned the chart, then looked up at LuLing. “Can you tell me?”
“Year?” LuLing’s eyes darted upward as if the answer were on the ceiling. “This not so easy say.”
“I want the truth, now,” the doctor joked. “Not what you tell your friends.”
“Truth is 1916,” LuLing said.
Ruth
interrupted. “What she means is—” and she was about to say 1921, but the doctor put up his hand to stop her from speaking. He glanced at the medical chart again, then said to LuLing, “So that makes you… how old?”
“Eighty-two this month!” she said.
Ruth bit her lip and looked at the doctor.
“Eighty-two.” He wrote this down. “So tell me, were you born in China? Yes? What city?”
“Ah, this also not so easy say,” LuLing began shyly. “Not really city, more like little place we call so many different name. Forty-six kilometer from bridge to Peking.”
“Ah, Beijing,” the doctor said. “I went there on a tour a couple of years ago. My wife and I saw the Forbidden City.”
LuLing warmed up. “In those day, so many thing forbidden, can’t see. Now everyone pay money see forbidden thing. You say this forbidden that forbidden, charge extra.”
Ruth was about to burst. Her mother must sound garbled to Dr. Huey. She had had concerns about her, but she didn’t want her concerns to be fully justified. Her worries were supposed to preclude any real problem. They always had.
“Did you go to school there as well?” Dr. Huey asked.
LuLing nodded. “Also my nursemaid teach me many things. Painting, reading, writing—”
“Very good. I was wondering if you could do a little math for me. I want you to count down from a hundred, subtracting seven each time.”
LuLing went blank.
“Start at a hundred.”
“Hundred!” LuLing said confidently, then nothing more.
Dr. Huey waited, and finally said, “Now count down by seven.”