by Amy Tan
“Why are we talking about these old matters? From now on, you can say I’m surprising, but don’t tell me you love me, because I know where on my body you want to put that love.”
“After all these years, you still don’t know how to accept kindness and love when it’s offered.”
Loyalty and I succumbed to our old intimacy within four months of my starting my position at his company. I had to admit to myself that he made me laugh more than he wounded me. He appreciated me. And I enjoyed his attentions in bed. He knew me well in so many ways. But our relationship had become different as well. I did not tie his affections to the number of gifts he gave me, nor did I have the same fears and uncertainty in waiting for him to decide whether he would see me. He did not decide any of it. He was not my customer and I was not his courtesan. I lived in my own apartment and saw him daily at the office, and at other times two or three times a week. I called him “my friend” and not “lover,” as he suggested.
“A friend is someone who is not as special as a lover,” he complained.
“Magic Gourd is a friend, and we are very close. A lover could be a man who is close to your body.” I told him that I wanted a lover who was dependable and faithful, and not someone who made me wonder what he was up to when he was away from my side for even thirty minutes, which was all it took for him to flirt with a woman and suggest further flirtation elsewhere. He had done that. And he continued to go to courtesan houses.
“What man does not look at a pretty woman without imagining more? That’s not being unfaithful, just curious. If you found a man like the one you describe, I would say there is something unnatural about him. Would you really go off with someone like that?”
“Don’t you want honesty and trust in business? If you suspected a partner or employee had cheated you, wouldn’t you be reluctant to do further business? Maybe you think I should expect less from you because I was a courtesan, and customers could never be expected to be faithful, not even with a contract. Even when I worked in that world, I still wanted love so strong that the man would have no interest in another woman. Maybe you will always be incapable of giving that kind of love. You tell me I want too much. And maybe I do, but like you and your imagination, I can’t help but be that way.”
I ended our relationship many times, shouting he was an unfaithful bastard who gave me fake love—and sometimes with accusations that particularly tender moments had been false, which wounded him.
“You’re the one who wants to quit,” he would say to my reason for ending our affair. “So who is trustworthy and steadfast?” His logic was maddening. He said my feelings were illogical.
He continued to philander behind my back, visiting courtesan houses at least once or twice a week. One day I spotted a gift in a red silk bag sticking out of his pocket. He admitted he was going to a courtesan house, but the gift was not for anyone in particular. He was carrying it in case someone sang or told a good story. My feelings for him vanished all at once. It was strange how quickly it happened. Instead of being infuriated by his lies, I felt free. That’s when I knew I could end our relationship for good. I was calm when I told him. I explained that we were two different people who were not compatible in what we wanted. He started to argue about the gift—that it didn’t even cost that much. He pulled out a hairpin. I told him it wouldn’t have mattered if he didn’t go to courtesan houses at all. I simply didn’t love him anymore.
He was shocked and gradually his face fell into sadness. “I see it in your eyes. It’s finally happened. I’ve lost you. How stupid that I didn’t treat you better. I’m sorry.” He fell quiet. His eyes looked lost. “All my weaknesses didn’t mean my love for you was weak. I treated you badly and felt I could count on you to forgive me. After all, you didn’t forgive your mother, yet you forgave me many times. It’s too late to take back the suffering I caused you. But I can’t bear the thought that I may have caused you to distrust love even more. You have to believe I’ve always loved you. From the beginning, I felt you knew me. When we were apart, I felt something was missing. No matter how many friends were with me, I felt alone. I felt dissatisfied no matter how much success I had. I never wanted to admit this, Violet, but with you, I could be a child again, innocent and good. Imagine that! Loyalty, who is so successful—-just a naughty little boy, who would wake in the middle of the night, so scared by how much he loves you, he needed to touch your face to make sure you were there. It was as if you protected a hidden part of me. And when you were not there, I felt I was going to die alone. I wish I told you many years ago.” He had tears in his eyes.
I took back the little boy and I stopped breaking up with him. I moved into his house, and we still fought, not as much, and we always conceded that we loved each other. We did not declare we loved each other. We did not profess it with the giddiness of a secret finally revealed. We admitted it.
One afternoon, after we returned from a cousin’s funeral, he said, “Promise me, Violet, you won’t die before I do. I couldn’t stand it. I’d lose my mind without you.”
“How can I promise that? And how can you be so selfish in hoping you’ll die first when that would leave me to be the one who suffers?”
”You’re right. You should die first.”
We settled into the routine of a married couple, knowledgeable about our habits, likes, and dislikes. We noted how our bodies had softened with age, and how the atmosphere of Shanghai had gone crazy with decadence competing with decadence, which we did not find attractive. How odd that we had become the old-fashioned ones. We agreed on more things than we disagreed and could let go of most annoyances, and only a few of his faults reignited the same arguments that had once torn us apart.
We had been together around three years when Loyalty told me that he had been finding it harder and harder to empty his bladder. It had been going on for a while, but he did not want to tell me, lest I think he was worried, which he was. He downplayed his fear by saying it was probably something like constipation of the penis. A few days later, he saw blood in his urine, and he came to me white-faced. I made an appointment to see a doctor.
We sat holding hands when the doctor told us he had cancer of the prostate. He would need radiation. The doctor said this would give him the best chance, and if it did not have the desired result, they would try another treatment. Loyalty feared the radiation would shrink his penis and testicles, and that the second treatment would involve cutting off both, leaving him a eunuch. He had always acted like a strong man, and would never show any kind of weakness. It made me ache to see the unmasked despair and fear in his eyes.
“I refuse to let you go,” I said. “We’ve been fighting so much over unimportant matters. Now I’ll fight to keep you. You know how strong I am.”
“My dear Violet girl, if a strong temper can cure, I will soon be well.”
While he underwent the Western treatment, I went to the Chinese doctors for medicines. I bought large amounts of the immortality mushrooms, once taken by emperors.
Loyalty laughed weakly when I told him that. “Immortality? Where are those emperors now?”
“They were murdered by their wives.”
The Chinese doctor came with his acupuncture needles every day. I made Loyalty do chi gong. I fed him the freshest foods that were balanced for yin and yang. I hired a feng shui master to rid the house of disturbed spirits. It did not matter whether I believed that spirits existed. It was my declaration that I loved him and would do everything possible.
“Even though I’ve treated you so badly,” he murmured, “you still love me. You are still here. You are always surprising, Violet. Everything I thought was important is not. The business, the flower houses, none of it is lasting. Only you are important. My sweet girl. I want only you with me to the end of my days, whether they are few or many.”
“Ah, but if I cure you, my boy, will you claim the disease affected your brain and you do not remember the part about no longer visiting flower houses?”
All at
once, pain and fear left his face. He seemed healthy again. He took my hand. “Please marry me, Violet. I’m not asking you now because I may be dying. I’ve wanted to ask you many times in the past. But you were always mad at me. There was never the right moment to declare we should be together for the rest of our lives when you were yelling at me that you would never sleep in the same bed with me again.”
We married in 1929. His family objected. He was marrying a woman who did not appear to be entirely Chinese, and who had no family history except a murky one. I shed a flood of tears that he had stood up to them. When I was fourteen, I had dreamed of marrying him. When I was twenty-five, I lost Flora because I was not married. I had married Perpetual out of desperation and fear for my future. And now I had married Loyalty for love. Eighteen months after we married, the doctors told us Loyalty no longer had the cancer. Both the Western doctors and Chinese doctors took the credit. Loyalty said he was alive because of me.
“All those foul-tasting soups you made and your constant nagging to drink them,” Loyalty said, “even the cancer could not stand it and left.” Over breakfast each day, Loyalty kissed my forehead and thanked me for letting him see the new morning. He served me tea. That one act was an astonishing show of appreciation and love. Loyalty was used to others taking care of all the comforts of his daily life. He had never had to think of mine or anyone else’s.
We still fought on occasion, always over petty things. I found it maddening when he gave women the long gaze. Most of the time, it did not lead to any interest on the woman’s part. But when they smiled, he smiled back. If it happened at a party, he would find some reason to move in the woman’s direction and let his eyes linger even longer. When I accused him of lusting after other women, he denied doing anything of the kind. The way he looked at people was the way his eyes worked, he claimed. I asked him why they didn’t work that way with men. Whatever his eyes were doing, he said, at least he wasn’t going off with other women. So why wouldn’t I be happy with him for that? We would then break into the same argument about his dishonesty and my illogic, which ended with my sleeping in my own bedroom, and him knocking on the locked door, sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes two nights in a row.
Our best times were the mundane evenings when we ate our dinner together at home and he kissed me for cooking a dish he particularly liked. We listened to the radio and talked about the news or about Flora or my mother. Sometimes I reminisced about Hidden Jade Path. I took him back to those times when I overheard the courtesans talking about their misfortunes, what I noticed about nervous men at the parties, and what I saw and heard when I hid behind the French doors between Boulevard and my mother’s office. And we recalled at least a hundred times the evening we first met, both of us adding made-up details to exaggerate how big Carlotta was or how scared Loyalty was, until I was reduced to gasps of laughter when Loyalty said he pissed in his pants when he heard me say I would have to amputate his arm right there and then.
He often ended by saying: “You told me to wait for you to grow up, and that one day we would join our fates together. I was too stupid to do it sooner, but now, you see, here we are.” And then, he took me to bed, as he always did when we talked about our intertwined fate.
There were many moments when he would see me cry silently and he would drop whatever he was doing and come to me and wrap his arms around me, without asking me why I was sad. He knew it was about Flora, or about Edward, or about how I felt the day my mother left. He simply rocked me, as if I were a little girl. Those were the reasons we both knew how deep love was, the shared pain that would outlast any pain we caused each other.
MAGIC GOURD LIVED a few blocks away. Her big plans to open a courtesan house were quickly forgotten when she ran into an old client, Harmony Chen, who had once been rich and now owned a modest business selling typewriters and “modern office supplies for modern businesses.” Harmony had been her patron and remembered her well. He said the wiggle in her hips was still memorable, and he didn’t mind her personality. So he married her, she said, so he could see that wiggle every day. Harmony told me she made him laugh all the time.
“He’s a good man,” she said. “Considerate. The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few worries when you go to bed at night. A good husband is extra and can vary whether the number of worries you have is more or less. Mine are less.”
Whenever she came over to visit, she liked to recall the difficulties she endured on my behalf. Her eyes would light up when she recalled something new. “Hey, remember that man who drove the cart—what was that scoundrel’s name? Old Fart? Did I ever tell you he hinted that I should have sex with him? The bastard said we should go into the field and see how big the corn was.”
“That’s terrible.”
She huffed. “I told him we didn’t need to go in the field. I knew the corn was only this big.” She held up her pinkie. “He was snorting mad the whole day.”
She often brought up Perpetual. “Hey, remember when that bastard was beating the life out of you? I didn’t tell you that I tried to pull him off. That’s why he punched me in the eye. I almost went blind.” I thanked her. She waved her hand dismissively. “No, no. There’s no need to thank me.” She waited until I thanked her once more before starting up again. “Hey, remember that night when we thought the whole village might burn down? I just got a letter from Pomelo and she said it was just her room and a shed. She got the news from tradesmen who go back and forth between Mountain View and Moon Pond. The path that went past Buddha’s Hand is like a highway now. Someone was smart enough to turn that white rock into a shrine and now the place is crawling with pilgrims who buy sugared corn cakes and walking sticks. One of the pilgrims found Perpetual’s body a year after he died, just some of his bones and scraps of clothes, also a leather pouch holding a poem. And listen to this! Nine months after Perpetual died, Azure had another son. She claimed it was Perpetual’s, but one rumor has it that the father was her maid’s lover, the manservant. There was another rumor: the mother of the baby was the maid and the father was Perpetual. In any case, Azure claimed it was hers.”
WHEN MOTHER AND I started discussions about her coming to Shanghai to see me, Magic Gourd pretended to be enthusiastic. “You’ll be so happy to have your real mother back.” I had to reassure her many times that she had been more a mother to me than my real mother. She had risked her life. She had suffered for me.
“You worried about me,” I said. “Constantly.”
“That’s true. More times than you know.”
“I worried over you as well.”
She gave me a doubtful look.
“When you got influenza. I thought you might die, and I sat by your bedside and held your hand. I begged you to open your eyes and come back to us.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“That’s because you were dying. I think my words might have made a difference.”
Whether they had or not, Magic Gourd was deeply touched. “You worried?” she said over and over again. “No one in my life ever worried over me. Not before you.”
She worried whenever I threatened to divorce Loyalty. I didn’t mean I really wanted a divorce. I was just saying how angry I was. It was always the same reason: He had been flirting with a woman. She came over and listened to me, agreeing with everything I said. He was so bad, so thoughtless, so stupid. “But you don’t need to divorce,” she said. “There’s an herb you can put in his tea. I heard it shrivels desire and other things. You just don’t want to do it too often, otherwise it’s permanent, and that would be too bad for you as well.” Then she gently cajoled me into seeing that Loyalty was not that bad compared to some husbands. “Loyalty may be naughty but he is never mean. He’s handsome, too, and a good lover. And he often makes you laugh. Four things. Most women don’t even get one.”
Shanghai
1929
Mother and I finally agreed that she should come to Sh
anghai. We did not write the exact words before it’s too late, but that was what we were both saying in various ways. I told her that I did not think we should attempt to undo the past by talking about what might have changed the course of our histories. We had forged a relationship of confidantes between two adults, which was more than friendship but not that of a mother and daughter. We had intimate written conversations, yet they were faceless exchanges, separated by distance. Our confessions and remembrances required trust, and while our words flowed freely most of the time, we knew we could retreat behind the safety of a sheet of paper, and we did not need to explain why. We did not worry about offending each other when we were more measured and doled out sparingly the selected words that stood for an unresolved mix of feelings. A face-to-face meeting in Shanghai might expose us to the damaging past and undo what we had forged and was important to us. We both decided it was worth the risk. I warned her that I might not want to embrace her any more than I would a piece of paper. I didn’t know what I would feel seeing her in the flesh. It might raise emotions I had forgotten I had, and thus she would have to be prepared, and not wounded, if I did not throw myself into her arms as a mother and daughter might when happily reunited. She agreed it would likely be awkward and unpredictable, and that she was prepared for distance between us. I thought about that reunion the entire month before she arrived, feeling the gamut of emotions, from being the child who had felt betrayed, to the woman who knew that I had been more important to her than Lu Shing and her son. I would see her, knowing she had been tormented and had grieved for me, as I did for Flora.
As we waited for the boat to arrive, I warned Loyalty to not give her one of his long flirtatious looks.
“How can you even think I would do that?” he said with mock offense.
“You would give an old woman in a coffin that look.”
He laughed and kissed me. “I will be right here with you. Squeeze my hand if it is unbearable and I will find excuses to take you away.”